Flirting with Danger

by Siobhan Darrow

  “Number 3166?” I asked.

  “Not available,” said the voice on the line. How about 4255 or 8922? Not available on my first five choices. Men were allowed to donate sperm only a finite number of times so as not to flood the gene pool with their sperm. I couldn’t believe I couldn’t even buy the man of my dreams. I was going to have to settle for leftovers even at the sperm bank. The best ones had already been taken. But I was not deterred. Maybe it’s better, I thought, if I use weaker genes and let mine dominate.

  If I let myself, I sometimes got a little sad about resorting to this clinical, sterile approach to creating life. I hoped I could just sleep through the part where my gynecologist would squirt the purchased donor seed inside me. I wanted to be able to blank that part out. But mostly I took pleasure from having conquered my problem with men by reducing them to a vial of semen cooled by liquid nitrogen. Or maybe I was just angry with them because a good one hadn’t shown up in time for me.

  A baby tried to grow once ten years ago but I wasn’t ready. He must have known that, so he lodged himself in my tube and never made the journey to my womb. The doctors told me it was just a bundle of cells caught in my fallopian tube. It was an ectopic pregnancy. There was no real fetus, they said. But I see him sometimes in my dreams. He is mangled, bloody, and crawling away from me. He is very real. He was wise enough to know it wasn’t his time to enter the world. At the time I didn’t want to bring a new life into such a messy life as mine. Now I hoped he would give me another chance.

  I had been in California almost a year when my mother came to visit me. I expected it to be a repetition of the frustrations of hoping for and wanting a connection that rarely came. Of wanting her to ask about my life and love affairs and feelings, and the great emptiness that engulfed me when she didn’t. When she couldn’t. I didn’t know if I would be able to tell her I was considering using a sperm bank to father her grandchild.

  When I saw her tall, white-haired figure emerge from the crowded plane, I sensed it would be different this time. There was no big hug. She accepted my peck on the cheek, and I didn’t feel dejected that she didn’t embrace me; instead, I noticed the warmth in her pale blue eyes.

  She rearranged my cooking utensils and sorted through my pots and pans. She tossed out some I had been carting around since college and bought me fancy new French cookware and linen napkins. She rearranged my furniture and organized my closets. She gave me what she knows how to give: her fine taste and knowledge of how things are supposed to be. We spent hours cutting damask and silk patches to choose a new fabric to cover my sofa, analyzing the merits of each one. I wished we could have had the same intensity in dissecting my life, but the home decorating felt like enough.

  I noticed her hands and feet, slightly more wrinkled versions of my own. I remembered how those hands had lovingly brushed my tangled mop when I was a girl. Painstakingly, for what seemed like hours, she would unravel the knots. Never once, despite the bother, did she consider cutting it off. I was embarrassed by my hair; it was so wild and coarse and curly, nothing like all the other girls’ thin, straight hair. My mother would always tell me it was my crowning glory. It was special, and it was OK to be different. She doesn’t know how to use the words “I love you,” but when she tells me never to cut my hair, or rearranges my closets, I feel her love and the irrelevance of those words and the hunger is gone.

  During her visit she cooked nightly feasts for a parade of prospective suitors, which I considered a last-gasp attempt before I forged ahead at the sperm bank. She charmed them with her shrimp curry. Her pear tart and chiseled beauty were my best advertisement. When each one left on successive nights, she assessed their suitability. She watched closely how they treated Max. She made an effort, using her dog-breeding knowledge, to characterize their attributes. That one wasn’t very well house-trained. This one wasn’t very good breeding stock, not prepared to be a pack animal.

  She tried to push me toward one particular suitor. He was smart, well traveled, and stable, but we were totally different. He liked ikebana flower arranging, a piece of wood with one bloom stuck in the middle. I preferred a big teapot stuffed with wildflowers. My furniture was big, carved, and curvy; his was angular, modern lines in black leather. I felt like a billowing Renaissance painting out of place in his austere modern Japanese living room with a single wall decoration of a bamboo stalk on rice paper; a baroque intruder at his tea party. I told her I felt nothing for him at all.

  “That’s ridiculous,” she said. “You might grow to like him if you could appreciate all his good qualities.”

  “He said he would never let a dog sleep in the bed,” I countered.

  “Forget it. Get rid of him immediately,” she said dismissively God forbid Max’s needs shouldn’t be met. My mother was trying to be more open with me about personal issues, but her priorities weren’t going to change.

  We spent each morning shoveling buttery croissants into our mouths at the bakery, sneering at the more typical California customers who were eating granola. Food snobbery and judging people by what they eat binds us together. I remember all the places we have eaten together: the time she took me to the UN delegates’ dining room in New York as a little girl, or the Russian Tea Room. She wanted us to be comfortable with finer things, even if we didn’t have them. She made it easy for me to sit comfortably at a dinner table with world leaders or in palaces or embassies and never be thrown by a place setting with five different knives and forks.

  Over the years, I had spent so much time mourning what she couldn’t give me that I didn’t always appreciate all the things she could. I love her for all the lore she hands down to me, for all her refinement, for her enormous spirit and steadfastness in bringing us up almost entirely on her own, for her ability to not just survive, but to rise above the fray. I appreciate her emphasis on table manners and fine food and how to live life—always to use teacups with saucers, to set the table even if just for yourself. Her standards helped her survive, and I notice they have taken root in me. Her courage and strength are the greatest gifts she gave. They make up for whatever else is missing.

  It is hard to paint a picture of my father in my mind. It is put together from the memories of a young girl and from fragments I collected later on from others who knew him. He had speckled hazel eyes and wore glasses. He was pale and freckled, except for his left forearm, which was often tanned from leaning it out the car window. I remember his rages. He would come home Sunday evening after a trip to his mother’s, where he went most weekends. He would sit at the table and first eat a bowl of cornflakes, then some scrambled eggs, and then have dinner. It was as if he needed to eat all three meals at once to somehow retrieve the time he hadn’t been at home with us. We were wary when he was at home, never knowing when he might blow up and there would be a fight. I didn’t know how to act around him. It was much easier when he wasn’t there. All that mattered to me was my mother’s happiness, and his presence never brought that. Sometimes he would reach out to me and want to be my friend, want to know what I was working on in school. Part of me wanted that. Most of me recoiled, worried it would offend my mother if I wasn’t one hundred percent on her side. His storms and moods were not all of him. He became weary and bloated from the cells run amok in his lymph glands. Their rampant advance drove him home to know his girls while there was still time. He taught me how to drive in his wreck of a car—one in a long line of jalopies unfit for the road. He wanted to help with our homework, drive us to parties, know our friends, and enter our lives. But he was a stranger by then. He wanted to talk. He was in the ground twenty years before I was ready to listen.

  My father died before I could get to know him. Only years later could I realize how he, like my mother, had enormous courage. How he had the strength to try to break free from the stranglehold of his home. I never knew exactly what happened in his family, but it was bad enough to drive my father’s oldest brother to suicide, and to break Uncle Leon’s spirit. My father tried to escap
e, going to medical school in Northern Ireland, where he met a beautiful woman and had children with her. It did not work out well when he came home, but at least he had tried.

  My father’s presence colored every move I made in life. I looked for him in all the men I met. I looked for him in Russia, and found part of him in Dima. I looked for him in Israel and in the Jewish men to whom I’ve been attracted. I traveled far in my search for him. I finally found him much closer to home, in the place I was most afraid to look, where he had been all along. In me.

  I noticed him now in my green eyes and curly hair and in the way I cock an eyebrow when someone says something idiotic, and in how I sometimes play chicken with the gas tank, letting it run on empty. I welcomed him as part of me, no longer banished, even when I cut up a banana in a bowl of cereal. My mother is with me too. When I iron my tablecloths or linen napkins and refuse to buy paper ones, or gather strays to my dinner table, I feel her presence. Their feud is finally played out. They are no longer at war inside me. I am free to let them both inhabit me in peace.

  I narrowed down my choice of donor sperm to number 3261. I would never know his name or what he looked like, only that he had blue eyes and dark curls. That he loved animals and cared about the planet. I liked his deep, soothing voice on the audiotape and bought a year’s supply lest he sold out, and stored him away until I was ready for insemination. It was going to be my fortieth birthday present to myself.

  A few days after my purchase, I got an e-mail message out of the blue that changed my life. It was from a man I’d never met.

  Dear Siobhan,

  Greetings from China, land of long-lost correspondents. My name is Shep. Even though you don’t know me, I want to tell you a story.

  Many years ago I found myself drawn as if by music to the voice of a CNN correspondent in Europe, your voice. When I bothered to look up from my keyboard and started paying attention, I noticed they were always good stories under your (wonderful) name. Always a strong, intelligent presence. So I allowed myself to become a big fan and only talk about you to whoever else was in the room whenever I saw you on the air.…

  I read the message over and over. It warmed me with its straightforward honesty. Shep sounded gentle and romantic. I had had plenty of admirers write me over the years, but this one felt different. He felt like a fellow traveler, someone who knew a lot about me without even trying, because he had been on the same road. I liked that he wanted to tell me a story. Could it be that what he was telling was the beginning of our story?

  Shep wrote that he was a correspondent for The New York Times in China. It turned out that he knew a friend of mine at CNN, who told him that the two of us would be a good match. He also knew a high school friend of mine, who had also remarked on the similarities of Shep’s and my paths, traveling and working as journalists, him in China, me in Russia. It almost seemed like a cosmic rule of love: as soon as I stopped looking for a man, one came and found me.

  I wrote him back right away. I tried to sound as friendly and warm as he had, and asked a few questions so that he’d be sure to write back. Maybe I was just dreaming to think that he might be my soul mate, but the least I wanted was a second message.

  I woke up to a message from him the next day. It was even warmer than the first. I could feel this man in the writing, thoughtful and sensitive and humorous. I found myself thinking about him all day long, and wanted nothing more than to get the next message from him.

  Within a week we spoke on the phone for the first time. I had been a little nervous about hearing his voice, since my expectations about him were racing ahead fast. But it was not awkward at all. I felt completely natural and at home with him, as though I were talking to an old friend. We talked for three hours. He was very curious about everything: my time off, my moving to California, what my house looked like, and about Max. I felt reluctant to hang up, even though it was the middle of the night by the time we did.

  Within days Shep and I were talking on the phone several times a day. I didn’t care that it meant calling China. I wanted to tell him about everything I did each day. Since we were calling each other on opposite sides of the world, my morning was his evening, and vice versa. Soon he was calling to wake me in my morning, and I was returning the favor. We never ran out of things to say. All the mental lists I had about necessary qualities in a man went out the window. I just wanted to learn about Shep, to accept him the way he was.

  I felt myself growing close to Shep, even though I had not yet met him. He became a feeling within me, one I couldn’t visualize, but that I could feel distinctly. I was afraid to confide in my friends about him, fearing they would say I was crazy to get so excited about a man I had not even seen a picture of. But I realized that Shep reawakened something in me that I had thought might be dead. He taught me that I still held out hope that I could find a soul mate.

  Two weeks after our first message, Shep flew from Shanghai to Los Angeles. We arranged to meet just before sunset, at a beautiful park near my home in Santa Monica that overlooks the ocean. Max and I walked down together at the appointed time. It was one of those perfect southern California evenings, clear and cool. Even though I had no idea what Shep looked like, I didn’t care. I felt as though I already knew him, knew his strength and his grace, his intelligence and his love of life. I felt my heart racing. I told myself that it was possible that things would not turn out as I hoped. But I also knew that I had never been so excited about meeting anyone in my entire life.

  I saw him from a distance in the park. He was holding a sandalwood fan from China. He seemed to recognize me, and started walking toward me. I was surprised by his appearance. He seemed familiar. He was tall, with fair, woolly hair and green eyes. I realized that he and I looked alike. Intuitively, I felt as though he were a long-lost part of me, like my other half. The first thing he did was lean down to stroke Max. And then he laughed, noticing that we were wearing the same shoes, black clogs. We walked and we talked, and sometimes just stared at each other, learning each other’s face. And then, after about half an hour, he took my hand in his as we crossed the street. And the moment he touched me, I knew.

  Uncle Leon, I thought, your most ardent wish is going to come true.

  Epilogue

  Once I had Shep in my life, I felt as if I had everything. But it also created a dilemma: what to do about 3261, my donor sperm. I was so determined to try to have a baby soon, a voice in my head told me not to postpone my plans for insemination just because I had met a new man, no matter how wonderful he was. Lori and other friends warned me not to bring it up with Shep too early in our budding relationship. But I felt I was keeping a big secret from him, and had to get it off my chest even though I didn’t know how he would react. A few days into our romance, I got up my courage and said to Shep, “I need to tell you about the other man in my life.”

  His face fell. I quickly got up out of bed and went into the closet and pulled out 3261 to introduce him to Shep. His hurt look dissolved into a big smile when he saw that his rival was confined to a test tube. I explained to him the plan I had set in motion before our meeting. “But you have me now; you don’t need him,” Shep said.

  “But I haven’t even known you a week,” I said. He smiled again. “You know me better than you know him,” he said as he grabbed me and pulled me back under the covers. Shep moved to California two months later, as soon as he could wrap up his affairs in China and negotiate time off from The New York Times to write his own book. From the day he arrived, I felt like we belonged together. Even our furniture was in harmony, his Chinese treasures easily blending with my Russian antiques. I remained in a state of wonder that Shep and I found each other at all. It seemed such an amazing act of Providence. We had been living on opposite sides of the world, and still found a way to meet. I asked him over and over what it was that had given him the courage to write me out of the blue, but all he could say was that he had good intuition, and that this was our fate. We married within the year.

/>   We started planning a family immediately. I worked for the CNN bureau in Los Angeles for a while as I finished writing this book. But my life had changed. I had often wondered if there could be life after CNN, if anything could ever be as exciting again. Would a tamer life bore me? Who would I be, if not a CNN reporter? Now it felt as though it was time for me to find out, and I stopped working there. I began to discover that a new stage of life was awaiting me, a quieter, more stable life, a life with greater pleasure in small wonders. In my corner of southern California, the flora constantly surprises me with its vivid colors and sweet fragrances, and I hardly pass a single rose or jasmine without pausing to savor the scent. In my new life I treasure long walks by the beach, lazy afternoons reading, and evenings cooking dinner at home with Shep. I have time—and peace of mind—to write. I no longer jump when the phone rings, worrying as I used to that a crisis breaking in some foreign land will mean I have to drop everything and race out the door. I can read the newspaper in bed each morning peacefully, instead of frantically scanning it for a disaster that might disrupt my life. I’ve had enough traveling and adventure to last several lifetimes. Now I am on an entirely different kind of journey: one of love and intimacy and, I hope, impending motherhood.