I suspected she spotted me after she exited the Town Car—the bench I was sitting on was directly in her line of sight—but it took her a few additional seconds to acknowledge my presence across the garden. When she waved it was as though she had just picked me out of a crowd. There was no crowd, of course, just me sitting alone on a bench in the shadow of an old tree.
I stood and returned her wave. She began walking toward me. About halfway to the bench she moved into a high-heeled jog. Near the end of her run her urgency exploded, and she lengthened her stride. Cynically, I wondered if she was trying to make certain that I got a great view of her lovely legs.
I was also thinking that I could have been watching the final few frames of a commercial for a new women’s razor.
FOURTEEN
His Ex
It seems like it’s always something. Home, work, Eric. Lately, Eric a lot. For a successful man, he needs a lot of reassurance. I didn’t see that coming with him. He’s shown he can hold his own on Sunday mornings with Russert, is quick enough to parry Carville’s best, which isn’t easy, and once even got Stephanopoulos to cower.
Women, especially attractive women, flummox him, which is endearing. And not. He’s a decent companion at a formal dinner, but the truth is he requires too much handholding at cocktail parties. Kind of like Alan in that way.
I tell myself that maybe it’s his age.
Whatever. It seemed like it was always something, with someone. You would think at work I could’ve walked from my office to the bathroom, from the bathroom to the elevator, and then get across the building lobby to the sidewalk in the middle of the afternoon without having to have three impromptu meetings about a segment that we weren’t even planning to tape for another two weeks. None of the people who interrupted my march to the door learned anything they didn’t already know.
While I made my escape from the building I had a choice of either looking like a diva—wearing sunglasses in the elevator is not my favorite look—or having to explain my red eyes to everyone I ran into on the way outside. I chose to play diva. I knew my reputation well enough to know that it was an act that required much less explanation. In my business vanity is a forgivable sin.
I’d wasted a few minutes at my desk freshening my makeup after I hung up with Alan. Just some eyeliner and blush. And lip gloss. I had already used a couple of minutes weighing whether to call for a network car to take me to Central Park for our rendezvous. My assistant thought I should just grab a cab uptown.
But with my recent luck, if I took a cab I’d end up in one that hadn’t had the air conditioner turned on since Memorial Day. After the driver had spent half a shift behind the wheel in an oppressively hot taxi I knew damn well what he would smell like. I absolutely did not want to be all sweaty and aggravated when I finally got to the park.
Still, I hesitated about the car choice because I suspected that Alan would make some unnecessary assumptions if he saw me arrive in a Town Car.
Everything has meaning in his world.
Marry a shrink, and try to get away with being mindless. I dare you.
I had my assistant call for the car and reminded her to ask the driver to crank up the AC before I got downstairs. Hell, I’ve earned it. I effing have.
I didn’t used to say “effing.” That’s an accommodation for Eric.
He effing doesn’t like profanity.
Alan had been in New York for a few days and didn’t call me. If I hadn’t phoned him to ask for a favor, I wouldn’t have known he was in town. Would it have killed him to call and ask how the pregnancy was going?
I’m not an idiot. Alan wasn’t eager to see me.
If my shrink had asked, I probably would have given him a list of possible explanations why Alan hadn’t called. But I was already convinced that Alan hadn’t told me he was in town simply because he didn’t want to see me.
The only thing I wouldn’t have been certain of was the reason for his reticence.
Me? For the moment at least, I preferred to dwell on the fact that it was sweet of Alan to offer to meet me at all when he realized I was upset. Although my tears had always been hard for him to ignore, he didn’t have to make the offer to see me. And he didn’t have to agree to my suggestion of Strawberry Fields as a spot for our rendezvous.
He would not have missed the allusion. Alan, as husband or therapist, has always been big on allusion. So I knew he still cared.
And that is precisely why I suspected he hadn’t called.
I shouldn’t have started running when I saw him waiting on the far side of the garden, but I was thrilled that he was in the city and that he’d offered to change his plans and come and hold my hand. But I did start running, and once I’d started—although my new Jimmy Choos were perfect with my outfit, they were far from the right shoes for a jog, however abbreviated, in the park—I had no confidence that I’d be able to stop without catching a heel, or worse, ripping one of the woven gold ropes that had started slicing into the tops of my feet. I just kept running until I could use Alan as a safe way to control my momentum.
FIFTEEN
Our greeting was more awkward than I’d hoped. We sat.
Alan turned forty-five degrees on the bench so he could look at me. I slipped off one of my shoes and crossed my leg so I could massage the red rails that I’d carved into the top of my foot during my ill-considered sprint.
“After this last miscarriage, I said, ‘That’s it.’ My body was telling me no. My brain was saying I couldn’t do it again. As much as I want a baby, I…”
In the old days he would have taken over the massage. The man could give a hell of a foot massage. Not only as foreplay, either—he would rub my feet even if he knew there wasn’t a prayer we’d have sex.
That time? No. No offer to take over the foot massage. I shifted my gaze toward him occasionally as I spoke. Alan was big on eye contact. I wanted to be certain he was paying attention. This was about my baby.
“Eric thought God was telling us something with the miscarriages. That He had other plans. Adoption. He wasn’t sure. ‘We’ll know when we know,’ he said.”
I waited for a judgment from Alan. About Eric, and God. But Alan’s expression didn’t change. With Alan that didn’t mean much—if he wanted his face to be a mask, it would be a mask.
The Eric/God thing was a discussion I didn’t want to have with Alan at that moment. I wasn’t totally sure how I felt about it myself.
“We had fertilized eggs left over from the last conception. It had been an in vitro, not…natural, you know—not intercourse. Most couples do. Have leftover eggs.” I don’t know why I said the part about intercourse. Alan knew about intercourse. He probably knew about leftover eggs, too. I was nervous. “Using a surrogate was Eric’s idea. Indirectly.”
Alan’s eyebrows floated when I said that. Just a few millimeters, but still.
I went on. “He didn’t actually suggest it. Not like that. He said that he had a friend who had done it. ‘Used a surrogate?’ I’d asked him. ‘No,’ he said. ‘My friend was the…surrogate. For her half sister and her husband. Turned out they’d used the surrogate’s half sister’s egg. And donated sperm.”
Alan—finally—entered the conversation. “I did a psych eval for a surrogacy agency as part of an approval process.” He paused before he added, “A lesbian couple.”
“And?” I asked. Point?
“That’s it. My only experience with surrogacy.”
Typical Alan. Where his work was concerned, he wrote headlines. You never got the story. The opposite of my work. The opposite of me.
“A girlfriend had already asked me, ‘Why waste them?’ She meant the fertilized eggs. She said we could donate them to some other couple. Some, you know, infertile couple. But I couldn’t give a stranger my fertilized egg. Nine months later they would have my baby. Can’t do that. After Eric brought up what his friend had done, I started thinking if the problem is that I can’t carry a baby to term, why not try a surrogate? If we used our own fertil
ized eggs, it would still be our baby. Biologically.
“I told Eric I wanted to do what his friend had done. He said he had to…give it some thought. That took a while, but he…came around eventually. I was surprised, to be honest. But he said it sounded fine to him, with some conditions.”
I shouldn’t have been embarrassed to tell Alan the whole story about Eric’s process of coming to terms with the surrogacy, but I was. Eric didn’t have to think about it as much as he had to pray about it. The surrogate thing. Eric was uncomfortable with the anatomy and biology of it all—his values are who he is—but the bigger question for him was whether we were interfering with God’s plan.
I’d argued that for all we knew using a surrogate was God’s plan. He didn’t put us on this earth in the fifteenth century. He put us here in an era of reproductive options. Maybe He wanted us to choose this option.
It took Eric a week to get there. But, much to my delight, he got there.
For the year plus that I’ve known Eric, I’ve been trying very hard to understand his relationship with God. He didn’t seem any more religious than anyone else when we were first introduced, but as I got to know him better, and with every piece of bad news either of us got—and, yes, we’ve had our share—the ferocity of his faith redoubled.
My fragile faith wanes under the exact same forces. I don’t understand that.
Eric’s faith—I admit the secular molecules in me have trouble with the word—provides him great comfort. It certainly gives him strength. Although I can’t understand it, and at times I’m dubious about it, mostly I’m grateful. Sometimes when I’m fighting my own demons and feeling alone, I envy him the solace he finds from his relationship with God.
I should say “gods.” There are definitely distinctive gods in Eric’s universe of faith. The capital-G God is a fearful, wrathful force for him. A heavens-quaking, earth-fracturing power.
But Eric’s relationship with Jesus is different. Eric thinks of Jesus as a friend. If Jesus showed up at our door tomorrow morning, Eric would bring him in for waffles and then ask him to play tennis at the club.
But if God, the capital-G one, pounded on our door, I think Eric would cower beneath the piano and start repenting. He’d confess sins he didn’t even commit. Probably contend I was a virgin and offer to sacrifice me on some altar.
I didn’t know for certain if Eric addressed his prayers about the propriety of us using a surrogate to solve our conception woes to the capital-G God or to Jesus. Eric kept those kinds of details about his faith to himself. Were I to guess, though, I would guess the surrogate question had earned the blessing of the Big Guy. That God seemed to get the serious stuff.
Jesus was there to provide comfort, support, and the kind of quiet guidance that allowed Eric to sleep after he heard the latest reports from Sudan or Iraq, the kind of solace that gets him through crosstown traffic or a slow elevator ride when he’s running late for an appointment, the kind of patience that allows him to endure a fender-bender without wanting to tear the other guy’s head off.
Eric didn’t know that I was thinking of doing a piece on it. Mixed marriages. One half of the couple with casual religiosity. That would be me. And one half of the couple with the more dedicated, brand-name kind.
More and more it seemed, that would be Eric.
I thought I saw Alan nod as I was talking. Alan’s nods weren’t much. Sometimes you’d need a motion detector to be sure he’d actually shifted his head. I’d developed the right radar while we were together. I could tell.
I said, “A couple of years back I produced a piece about modern conception options. I had my assistant pull the file and I tracked down the lawyer we’d used as an expert for background on surrogacy. He…does these things. All the time. Eric and I made an appointment. The lawyer walked us through it. The practical side, the legal side. You’d be surprised, but there’s not much law governing all this. No federal guidelines, and state statutes go from nonexistent to permissive to a few banning surrogacy entirely. He put us in touch with some surrogacy agencies.”
I was getting close to babbling mode. I could feel it starting, but I couldn’t stop it. “It’s not that big a deal anymore. Surrogacy. Lots of women do it. Some Alisters, even.” My girlfriends would have asked me to dish. The lawyer had told us about one actress who’d worn a maternity suit until her surrogate delivered the baby in another city.
But Alan didn’t bite. I didn’t expect him to. My ex could tell me who won the last ten Tours de France. He couldn’t tell me anybody who’d made “Page Six” in the Post in the past year.
“Eric and I went to an agency, dangled our toes in the water, eventually interviewed some girls. Women. They were all right. Nice. Eric got discouraged, though, called them ‘rent-a-wombs.’ A couple of the women intrigued me—we did our due diligence on them, all the way through reading their psych evals. No real red flags emerged in their backgrounds, but neither of them felt right to Eric. He wanted to feel a connection. Does that make sense?”
I knew better than to ask Alan questions like that. He didn’t have to say, “Does it make sense to you?” His eyes would do that for him. So I refused to look at his eyes.
“One night at dinner at home—we were both in the city at the same time, which doesn’t happen very often. I’d cooked.” Alan’s eyebrows jumped when I mentioned cooking. “I’ve learned how to make crêpes. We got this appliance, this thing. And I can roast a chicken. A good chicken, with a lemon inside. And herbs. I do twice-baked potatoes. With good cheese. I buy dessert. Anyway, during dinner, Eric said, ‘What about Lisa? We could use Lisa.’ Lisa was his friend, the one who’d been a surrogate.”
My radar had noted something incoming when Eric said her name the first time. I’m not bashful. I asked Eric what kind of “friend” Lisa had been. Were we talking girlfriend? Lover? One-night stand? What? I needed to know. I’m not sure it would have mattered to me. Jealousy isn’t my thing. If I was convinced they were over, I would have been okay with it. I waited for him to tell me more. The fact that he seemed reluctant to give me details didn’t inspire my confidence.
“She was part of that Grand Canyon thing,” Eric said finally.
“Ah,” I’d said.
That Grand Canyon thing.
He had indeed told me about it. But he hadn’t told me much.
The Grand Canyon thing was a fault buried deeply below the surface of our relationship. The romantic geologist in me knew it had significant potential energy.
At the moment Eric had first alluded to the Grand Canyon thing, I remembered thinking that I had always thought Alan, too, lived above a buried fault. I had never discovered what that was.
Not long after, Eric and I flew to California for a get-acquainted session with Lisa. We stayed at my condo in West Hollywood and met her at a restaurant on Melrose. Had a nice meal. When she left the table to go to the bathroom, I took both of Eric’s hands and I kissed him. I said, “I think she’s lovely, Eric. She could be the one.”
I’d meant it too. If I had been hiring a nanny whom I thought would be at my child’s side for the next ten years, I would have hired Lisa on the spot. She was that warm and that sincere and that maternal.
She was yang to my yin. Or maybe the other way around. Had I paid attention while I was in Boulder I would know which was which.
I was finishing up my explanation to Alan. “After the meeting with Lisa, I knew—I just knew—that she was the right one. Womb. Mother. Surrogate mother.
“Eric wanted to pray on it some more. He wanted to talk to some people at his church. Get ‘guidance.’ That’s one of his things. He’s big on getting ‘guidance.’
“It took a couple more weeks for him to get comfortable with it. Eric had…moral issues…with the whole leftover-eggs question. From the in vitro.” I waited for Alan to nod. He did. “But then…Eric has this dramatic, romantic side, too…this grand-gesture gene that I adore…. He does these…events sometimes.
“I came home fr
om work and Eric greeted me at the door wearing these great silk pajama bottoms I’d gotten for him at Barneys and…no shirt. The lights were low in the apartment; perfect music was playing. He lifted me off the ground and carried me to the bedroom. It was full of candles—dozens and dozens of them—a bucket of ice with some vintage Dom; the bed was covered with gardenia petals and…”
That was where I stopped the story. Alan knew about my penchants for Dom Perignon, and for gardenias. That wasn’t a problem. But Alan didn’t need to know that Eric had a chest for the ages. If pecs were precious metal, Eric’s were platinum. Alan didn’t need to know that when my girlfriends saw Eric in the pool or at the beach I would hear about it for weeks. Literally, weeks. They would be drooling over his chest.
Those pecs.
Alan didn’t need to know that Eric had lowered me to the floor and that he’d undressed me slowly in the dim light of the candles. That he’d lifted me, naked, again and carried me to a bath that was drawn and waiting for me.
Alan didn’t need to know that Eric had washed every inch of me.
Alan didn’t need to know that for the next few hours we squeezed every last drop of semen from Eric’s balls and every last moan from my lungs.
Alan didn’t need to know I’d come once for every finger on my left hand, save my thumb. Alan didn’t need to know that I’d loved Eric more, and better, that night than I’d ever, ever loved Alan during our marriage.
Alan didn’t need to know any of it, but still, I wanted to tell him. To make him jealous? No. But to let him see that I’d grown enough as a woman so that a good man could love me. I needed Alan to know that about me. I needed him to see that the scarlet letters M-e no longer had a place around my neck.
I felt worthy that night with Eric. Eric had wanted me to know that despite the fact that I knew I was incapable of the most natural of womanly acts—giving birth to a child—that to him I was flawless.
Eric’s God had offered him some damn good guidance.
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