Dead Time

by Stephen White

Effing good.

  “The negotiations with Lisa almost broke down. She has a paycheck-to-paycheck life. We knew the going rate for surrogates. We wanted to pay her for carrying our baby. But she only wanted reimbursement for living expenses. I offered to use some of my contacts after the baby was born, introduce her to some people in L.A.—you know, if she wanted to get a foot in the door at one of the local stations. She wasn’t interested. We finally got her to agree to allow us to pay off her student loans. She’d gone to Cal State. In Long Beach. The loan payoff was much less than we thought we should pay her, but…what were we going to do? We had a deal.

  “Then came waiting for the medical and psych evals and a lawyer in California talking to our lawyer in Connecticut. The surrogacy agency here had to coordinate with the surrogacy agency there.”

  I checked Alan’s face to make sure he was still with me. He was. I thought he seemed rapt.

  “After the money, the most difficult part of the negotiation was about travel, and where Lisa would live while she was pregnant. She didn’t want to leave L.A., of course. I didn’t want her to be out of my sight, of course.

  “We compromised. The agencies helped. She agreed to come east for the in vitro procedure from my fertility people here and then stay until we were sure she was pregnant. And stable. Then she would go back home. Later on, I’d take a pregnancy leave from the network and fly out and stay at my place in L.A. for the final couple of months before Lisa’s due date.

  “She would be followed by an OB in Los Angeles, and deliver there, in L.A. At Cedars. In between? We agreed to some restrictions on travel, but what are you going to do? She has to have a life, right?”

  Alan still seemed rapt. “The in vitro procedure went great. Like magic”—I snapped my fingers—“smoother than mine. Dean—Dr. Dunfey, the fertility guy, he’s terrific, and…well, he’s gay. How weird is that? Do you find it odd? A gay fertility guy?”

  Alan didn’t respond. He apparently hadn’t given the whole ob/gyn gender/sexual orientation question much thought. No surprise there, I suppose. Maybe I’d suggest it to one of the producers I know on The View. It would be an effing good topic for them. It would.

  “Dean let me put candles in the procedure room during the implantation and dim all the lights except the one he was using. We had music playing. Eric was there. Not there, exactly, you know, but he sat beside Lisa and he even held her hand when the catheter was in. I thought it was sweet. Me? I was right there. Exactly. It was—this will sound weird—romantic for me. The karma was perfect. I needed it to be perfect. Just in case those baby cells picked up any vibes, I didn’t want them to be able to tell that there was nothing sexual going on. I wanted it to feel romantic, to feel erotic. I wanted the implantation of the fertilized egg to have the same passion and…I don’t know…to be just like if Eric and I…were doing it knowing that I was ovulating and we were about to make our baby. I wanted everything to be right from the start.”

  An in-line skater—a novice, obviously—almost killed herself just then. She came barreling down the path behind us and barely caught herself on the back of the bench.

  Alan made a fuss to be sure she was okay. I waited until she left. “Where was I? I was visiting Lisa at this extended-stay hotel where she was staying uptown when she had her first positive pregnancy test—it was just one of those sticks you pee on. We’d walked over and picked it up at Duane Reade.

  “She was glowing when it turned blue. I was glowing too. I could feel my skin flush. That’s how right everything was. Dean confirmed the pregnancy the next day. For the first few weeks he kept telling us that it couldn’t have been going better.”

  I had my antennae tuned for judgment, but Alan was wearing his therapist’s mask. He has compassionate eyes. They’ve always sucked me in. I didn’t want him to be judgmental about this. I let them suck me in again. I liked that I knew it was a choice on my part.

  I began to feel my energy wane. I had shared all the good news.

  Alan could tell that I was done with all the good news. He said, “And then?”

  “Lisa had less than a week left in New York before she was going back to L.A. I was going to take her out to brunch last Sunday. I try to get together with her a lot. I like her. She doesn’t know many people here. Eric’s gone so much on business. But, yes, yes, I know, I want to make sure she’s okay, too. And that she’s being good.

  “The contract specifies things she can’t do—use caffeine, drink alcohol, extreme sports—but I do want to make absolutely sure she doesn’t stop at Starbucks in the morning for a double shot or that she doesn’t have just one cocktail at the end of the day with some new girlfriend. You know me. I’m the one who has two cell phones just in case one isn’t getting a signal. Come on. This woman is carrying my baby. I have to see her. I have to be sure.” I knew I wasn’t revealing anything Alan didn’t already know about me. I thought he’d be pleased at my insight about it all.

  “Okay,” he said. The word was one note shy of condescending. I wish I had that skill. The ability to couch my condescension. I don’t.

  Now I have the Bitch, though. That’s almost as good.

  “Her hotel, the one we got for her, is in Morningside Heights. That’s not too far from here—it’s near the other end of the park. But she wanted to go to someplace she’d read about downtown. I offered to pick her up, but she said she had errands to run and would meet me there. When she didn’t show up at the restaurant, and then didn’t answer her cell, I went to her place to make sure she was all right. And…she wasn’t home.”

  “She said she had errands,” he asked. “Why would she be home?”

  “She also told me she would meet me for brunch.”

  “Maybe she forgot. Or something came up. People do miss…engagements, Meri.”

  “Cell phone? Text? E-mail? Phone call? She has all my numbers. I put them in her speed-dial myself. If she wanted to find me, she could have found me.”

  “That was Sunday. Today is Tuesday,” he said. “What happened in between?”

  Alan was telling me that he wasn’t going to get infected with my hysteria based on less than forty-eight hours of silence from my surrogate.

  Well, why the hell not?

  The Bitch spoke up just then. My narcissism governess. She said, “Why the hell not, dear? Two reasons: because he isn’t married to you anymore, and because he doesn’t have to.”

  The reality was that Eric wasn’t ready to panic with me either. From my perspective, he was way too calm about Lisa’s “absence.” That was what he called it—as though her disappearing act was akin to missing a couple of days of school. He reminded me that the contract didn’t compel her to stay in constant contact with us.

  Doing nothing to find Lisa wasn’t possible for me. It wasn’t in my genes. If I had to search around in Lisa’s background without Eric finding out about it, so be it. But first, I had to convince Alan to help. I needed him to call Sam Purdy for me.

  Alan had come uptown to meet me in Strawberry Fields. He’d help.

  SIXTEEN

  Her Ex

  It’s not always the easiest thing in the world to get a straight story from Merideth. It certainly wasn’t while we were married.

  The current irony didn’t escape me—revealing the chronology of a recent sequence of events should be the most natural thing in the world for a woman who makes a fine living producing stories for a national network weekly newsmagazine. In her job Merideth is responsible for directing a team that produces—conceptualizes, pitches, develops, researches, writes, and tapes—the long-form pieces that arc between commercials during a prime-time hour. Her stories act as lenses focused on the issues—inane, mundane, and occasionally even profound—of our time. She’s received enough broadcasting awards—including a couple of Peabodys—to fill the insecure cavities in the souls of most people. As well as anyone in her field, and better than ninety-plus percent of her peers, the woman can analyze news, tease out just the right narrative thread f
rom nonlinear factual jumbles, cut through extraneous crap, cajole her recalcitrant talent to present things her way—which is usually the correct way—and end up telling her audience a hell of a story.

  When I happened to watch a show that included a piece that Merideth had produced, I could invariably guess which story was hers. Her signature clarity, organization, and sense of drama were easy for me to spot. There was usually a price to be paid, however, in viewing Merideth’s work. If she were a screenwriter or a novelist, reviewers would accuse her of failing to develop her characters. But she was a news producer, not a screenwriter, and her occasional failing was not allowing the players in the stories she was telling to show themselves to full effect onscreen. Merideth needed to be the one to define the characters, to be the puppet master pulling the strings. Her chosen narrative thrust always took higher billing than the players.

  But put Merideth in the story? Everything changed. Once she was in, it became a different story, and the telling became an entirely different process. She’d stumble out of the gate, her sharp analytical perspective would vaporize, her professional distance would disappear, and her narrative sixth sense would be nowhere to be found.

  My simple question to her that day in Manhattan was: What happened between that Sunday when Lisa skipped brunch, and our Tuesday rendezvous in the afternoon heat in Strawberry Fields in Central Park?

  After much longer than it should have taken I was able to cut through the stops and starts, the tangents and dead ends, and learn that Lisa—the surrogate with Merideth’s and Eric’s embryo nestled in her cushy uterus—had vanished.

  None of her friends or family had seen or heard from her.

  Merideth is nothing if not resourceful. Her ability to corral the most elusive get is legendary in the news and feature business. She finds the most cloistered, cajoles the most shy, and seduces the most press-phobic. She remembers names and faces the way dogs remember smells. Phone numbers stick in her memory as though they’ve been Velcroed there. In her producing life she knows exactly when to send flowers, and exactly when to send veiled blackmail. She’s sucked up more old dirt than all the Hoovers—the vacuums and J. Edgar—combined.

  But Lisa the surrogate had vanished so completely that Merideth couldn’t find her. Or find even a clue that might lead to finding her.

  By late afternoon on the Sunday that Lisa the surrogate stood up Merideth the mother for brunch, Merideth had already assembled a roster of every name and phone number in the voluminous file that she had accumulated about Lisa when she was still a potential surrogate. By early that evening, Merideth had started methodically calling the names on that list.

  I could put on a psychologist’s mask when circumstances required, and I knew well that Merideth could wear a producer’s mask with the same effortlessness. During those initial hours, when her concern would not yet have exploded into panic, and her panic would not yet have devolved into anticipatory grief, her phone calls wouldn’t have alarmed the friends and family members she was calling. Merideth would be as smooth as silk as she asked, “Have you heard from Lisa lately?”

  She would have called everyone she could think of.

  SEVENTEEN

  His Ex

  At my insistence, Eric made a call.

  He had a friend who had a contact in the NYPD who said he could get a guy to check on Lisa at the extended-stay hotel we’d rented for her in Morningside Heights. My word that Lisa had disappeared off the face of the earth apparently wasn’t enough to get the cop to visit her place and look around to see if there were any clues inside that might tell us where she had gone with my baby. In fact, before Eric’s friend’s contact would even consider going over there he had to get confirmation from her sister, who lived across the river in Tenafly, and her mother, who lived in Carlsbad, California, that Lisa’s absence was truly worthy of his time.

  The sister, Stefanie—everyone in the family called her Stevie, apparently—had agreed to drive over the bridge from New Jersey that evening to meet with me and with Eric’s NYPD guy. I’d already talked to Stevie—she hadn’t been able to reach Lisa either. She didn’t, however, share my concern about Lisa’s welfare.

  Eric was away, of course. He was in the District, consulting with somebody. Over the last few months, while he was prepping to be chosen for his dream job, I swear I saw him only when he needed to drop off dirty suits and shirts and get fresh ones. Half the time when I asked whom he was working with, or what he was consulting about, he’d tell me he’d prefer if I didn’t. Ask, that is.

  “Given your job,” he’d point out.

  I’d told him from the beginning that his work was off the record for me. Permanently. He didn’t care. I did understand his caution, but it felt like being involved in a relationship with a spook. Or with a psychologist.

  Before Alan and I left Strawberry Fields—he declined the ride I offered him—I asked him if he’d meet me at Lisa’s apartment that evening.

  He said, “Why?”

  I told him part of the truth. “Because you’ll see something I won’t see. You’ll see something her sister won’t see. You may well see something the cop won’t see.”

  His eyes turned suspicious. I’ve learned that honesty has that effect on men sometimes.

  I said, “I’m good at what I do, Alan. Damn it, you’re good at what you do too. You know as well as I do that we look at the world differently. We look at people differently. When we were together, I wasn’t convinced that was necessarily a good thing. With this? Looking for my baby? I think our views will complement each other’s. I’d be very grateful if you would meet me.”

  “Address?” he said.

  “Where are you staying? I’ll send a car.”

  He said, “Give me a time, and the address, Merideth. I’ll get there on my own.”

  I could tell that he was fighting a sigh.

  EIGHTEEN

  Her Ex

  Merideth and I met Stevie, Lisa’s sister, on the sidewalk outside the extended-stay hotel where Lisa was temporarily living as Merideth’s and Eric’s guest. The hotel was in a bland brick building in Morningside Heights, beyond the northern edge of Central Park, not too far from Columbia University. The three of us made small talk while we waited for the detective to arrive. It was awkward.

  Stevie had arrived before us and somehow finagled a key to Lisa’s unit from the building manager. She was fidgety. Not pathologically so, like Jonas’s uncle Marty. But Stevie was taut, like an overstressed string on a violin. She carried the tension of someone who just realized she’d run out of nicotine gum.

  Merideth had been expecting a uniformed cop. She got a detective. Merideth had been expecting a man. She got a woman. The woman was ten minutes late for the rendezvous. She pulled her sedan into a no-parking zone across the street from the building and sauntered over to join our little huddle. She pantomimed the tip of an imaginary cap and barked a bored “Evenin’,” when she was still five feet away from us. Her cell rang before any of us had a chance to return the greeting. She glanced at the screen, turned her shoulder, and said, “What?”

  We cooled our heels for another five minutes or so as the detective walked away from us to deal with her phone call. It was obviously a personal call, not work. She was not happy with the caller. When she rejoined us, we all introduced ourselves—she said her name was Dewster. If she said her first name, I missed it. She stared intently at each of us as we said our names. I thought she was reflexively finding a way to attach our names to our appearances in her memory so she could pick us out of a crowd, or a lineup, later on.

  I’d seen my friend Sam Purdy do something similar. It was a cop thing.

  She turned to Stevie. “Got a license?” she asked.

  “What?” Stevie said. Stevie hadn’t been confused by Dewster’s question. She was offended by it.

  Merideth turned her head away from Stevie’s view and smiled. Merideth has her issues, but thin skin is not among them.

  In a weary voice t
he detective said, “I need confirmation that the family is reasonably concerned about her before I can go in and do this. The welfare check? There’re rules. Guidelines.”

  Stevie’s lips were parted in disbelief at the inferred insult.

  The detective was losing patience. She looked at her watch. “I can’t just barge in…you know? Got to be a public-safety concern. The Constitution?”

  Stevie sighed and dug in her purse for her wallet. She opened it and held the wallet out so that her license was visible. The detective glanced at it.

  “Jersey?” she said. “And you’re worried about your sister?”

  Stevie rolled her eyes. At the “Jersey” part or the “worried about your sister” part, I couldn’t tell.

  “Let’s do this,” Detective Dewster said. She looked at her watch. “I got to be across town for dinner. Have to pick up my kids and get over to some soccer meeting near Jefferson Park. Always something.”

  The home away from home that Eric and Merideth were providing for Lisa had none of the charm of my Murray Hill sublet. Although her interim flat was about the same size as my Midtown apartment, mine reflected the character and quirkiness of another time, as well as the design sensibilities of my Italian landlord, while Lisa’s corporate abode reflected some interior decorator’s determination not to reflect anything at all. The carpet was the color of dirt. It had a nubby texture, the sheen of cheap panty hose, and a discernible pattern—diamonds, with a mud-colored dot dead center—that I assumed was intended to disguise the wear and tear of previous tenants. The rest of the one-bedroom space was monotonous and intentionally nondenominational. From the front door everything appeared to be beige where it wasn’t white.

  We wandered Lisa’s rooms in single file. The detective was first. I brought up the rear. Two things were clear: Lisa wasn’t home. Neither were most of her things.

  The living room was messy enough to raise eyebrows all around, but the place hadn’t been tossed. Nor had it been the scene of any obvious physical struggle. The bedroom was neat. The unit’s only bathroom looked like a hotel bathroom after the guests had left.