For a few minutes they continue to exchange displays of surprise and regret for the fact that they haven’t seen each other in such a long time, though they know perfectly well they could have seen each other earlier at any moment, if they only wanted to; it’s tough to imagine people with more free time and ability to travel. The reality is that for a while now their lives have taken different directions in terms of interests, friends, places of residence: apart from the music they make together, they have very little in common. It’s like with any very close relationship that lasts a long time: everyone knows everyone else’s flaws so well that a single gesture or word, even a change of expression, can suffice to unleash excessive reactions. They avoid seeing each other as a survival strategy: for the band and for each individual member. They probably wouldn’t even play together anymore if they didn’t need the continual infusions of money to maintain their expensive lifestyles; if it weren’t for the fact that only together are they able to fill stadiums and generate tsunamis of public enthusiasm.
“How was the trip?” Nick Cruickshank tries to stick to current events, avoid opening the door to possible territorial conflicts.
“What?” Rodney has gone partially deaf, after decades of savage guitar work with his Les Paul. On several occasions they’ve measured the noise level in front of the stage during a concert, and it came out that depending on the song it ranges from 100 to 120 decibels—more or less the intensity of a jackhammer when you’re holding it in your hands. A few minutes are enough to do damage, to say nothing of an hour and a half or two hours straight, multiplied by thousands of concerts, and all the other hours of rehearsals and listening on headphones, at nothing less than eardrum-busting volume. It is true that eardrum-busting volume is exhilarating, but Nick Cruickshank began wearing earplugs before anyone else was doing it, as soon as he realized how the postconcert whistling and buzzing in his ears was continuing through the night and into the next morning. Now he uses latest-generation in-ear monitors that let him hear perfectly calibrated sounds directly from the mixer, but he’s quite happy he used those construction-site earplugs back then. The ear, nose, and throat doctor who does his regular checkups in London says his hearing isn’t perfect, but it’s not bad either, all things considered. Rodney and Wally, on the other hand, have always made a point of never taking the slightest precaution in their close encounters with the speakers; they must have felt like some sort of mythological heroes, sacrificing their auditory conduits in the great battle of sound. The result being that they now have to use hearing aids both when they’re playing and in everyday life, if they want to avoid playing the wrong notes in songs, or missing one out of every four words around the dinner table; luckily they can afford the most advanced acoustic amplification technology in existence. On the contrary, Todd’s ears aren’t in too bad shape, maybe because nature endowed him with particularly robust eardrums, or maybe because his drum set is always positioned a little farther back from the speaker columns. Anyway, it’s not like a rock musician deteriorates over time solely because of his battle wounds: Wally, for example, has lost part of his ability to invent on the bass not so much because he’s half deaf but because of his general carelessness, his lack of discipline, because the only thing that interests him about music now is the money he can still get out of it. For the band it’s not a problem, since he more than compensates with his legendary thumping constancy on the strings.
“How was the trip?!” Nick Cruickshank mimes for Rodney the gesture of gripping the steering wheel, though he knows quite well he’s provoking.
“Great, but would you mind telling us where the fuck you were? We come all the way here like pilgrims, and the man of the house is nowhere to be found!” Sure enough, Rodney immediately gets offended: there’s authentic bitterness in his show of indignation. Wally’s presence a few steps away certainly doesn’t help; during the last American tour the two of them spit on each other in the dressing room on several occasions, and at the party after the Seattle concert things would have ended badly if the security guys hadn’t stepped in.
“I was fly-ing!” Instead of dropping it, Nick Cruickshank enunciates, miming two wings with outspread arms. He can’t help it: the more he’s aware of the risks of a provocation, the more he feels like provoking.
“Cut it out, you son of a bitch!” Rodney used to have a pretty good sense of humor, but it’s worsened over time, along with the rest of him.
Nick Cruickshank thinks about how close Rodney and Todd and he were, early on: more than friends, more than brothers. Despite diverse personalities and family origins, music brought them together to the point of making them feel and think and speak and move in the same way. When their instruments were in their hands, or when they were packed inside the van going from one concert to the next, or were seated at the table for a press conference, they didn’t need to discuss what to do or say, they just needed to trust in their collective instinct. Before joining forces they had each spent years of self-exclusion from family, school, peers, life in general, locked in their rooms one afternoon after another listening to blues and rock greats and trying to learn their instrument, imitating note by note with single-minded imprecision. Then they met and formed the band, and after a couple of months spent going over the classics they discovered they had a distinctive sound, born of a combination of the qualities and flaws of each of them. It was like digging in your backyard and seeing a jet of oil spurt out: their raw talent dragged them relentlessly toward their first original songs, toward increasingly intense reactions of their audiences, toward concerts in increasingly large venues.
Wally was the last to join, after a series of bassists who either weren’t good enough or didn’t have enough faith in the band. From their very first meeting no one particularly liked him, but he had a Fender Precision bass and a Fender Bassman Silverface amp with two fifteen-inch cones. He was already playing in clubs and making enough to live on, while they were still semi-amateurs. Despite his unpleasant personality, his technique was superb, and as soon as they began playing with him in the group, the miracle repeated itself. In the space of a couple of weeks of rehearsals he and Todd became the backbone of the Bebonkers, the pulsing and driving rhythmic base upon which the other two could blindly depend. More than a band, they became a little gang of punks, united by a bond of blood (literally: one time all four of them pricked their fingers with a pin, ritually mixed the drops, and swore a loyalty oath until death; thinking back on it now, an incredible display of ingenuousness, and ignorance of the consequences of using a whole other type of needle, for a while longer yet). Nick Cruickshank remembers the first two or three years of the Bebonkers as the only period in his life in which he felt he was experiencing the type of friendship that had thrilled him while reading Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers as a boy. “One for all, all for one”: it really was like that, the four of them against the rest of the world. Then came real success and real money and real pressure and real managers and real impresarios and real hordes of adoring fans, and the beginning of personality conflicts, power games, the comparisons to see which of them the girls liked most, who was most musically gifted, who had the authority to tell the others what to do. The original spirit declined as their fame grew; the more their fans saw them as a tightly knit group of great friends joined in a thrilling adventure, the less desire they had to stay together. Yet here they still were, in this living room: the band’s original formation, an authentic exception in the world of rock, flying in the face of every well-founded prediction. Have they stuck it out on account of self-interest? Mental laziness? Because none of them has ever been able to find a true identity outside the Bebonkers (though each of them has tried, at one time or another)? Because it’s simpler to keep up an act in which you don’t get along with the others and yet continue to coexist, like in a marriage where the couple decides to stay together despite everything, for the good of the children? Whatever happened to that original spirit? Did it migrate to other bands? Which ones? Did it diss
olve into nothing? Must they forever measure themselves against the ghost of what they were in the golden years?
“When are the other people coming?” Kimberly looks around the living room, peeks out through the sliding doors at the bustle of the gardeners and workers on the front lawn.
“Baz should be here shortly, he called from Nice an hour ago.” Nick Cruickshank points, though he isn’t 100 percent sure it’s in the direction of Nice.
The others nod, half of them content and half not, but Kimberly couldn’t care less about Baz Bennett: she keeps staring at him like he’s trying to conceal some great secret.
Nick Cruickshank gestures panoramically, to give an idea of the huge range of people on their way between tonight and tomorrow. “There’s going to be a full-scale invasion, Kim, fear not.”
But Kimberly has three or four specific names in her head, which for her make the occasion and justify the trip here. “When’s Kate arriving?” Sure enough: here she is. “Brad and Angelina? George and Amal? The Beckhams?”
“Ask Aileen, she’s the one keeping tabs on the arrivals.” Nick Cruickshank turns his back to her, heads for the sliding doors. Tricia is on to him like a retriever; she follows him out to the lawn.
Aileen is over by the pool, discussing and gesticulating at the center of a small crowd composed of Tom Harlan, the editor in chief, writer, cameraman, and photographer from Star Life, and others whose identity is a complete mystery to him. Meanwhile, the workers and gardeners are dragging wooden structures, digging holes, awaiting instructions. Aldino turns his head this way and that to keep an eye on the various movements, though he seems a little overwhelmed by the task in the midst of this confusion.
“You were looking for me?” Nick Cruickshank comes over to Aileen. It occurs to him how in the beginning he was fascinated by her gestures: it seemed like she was painting in the air with her hands, full of unexpected resources.
“Of course I was looking for you!” Aileen turns around, her face contracted in anger, but it relaxes almost immediately. She smiles; she’s only too aware of all the people around her. “We’re trying to decide on about a thousand different things! Your contribution would be greatly appreciated!”
“At your service.” Nick Cruickshank smiles, too, though he’d rather be off walking in the woods on his own, as far away as possible from here.
FIFTEEN
MILENA MIGLIARI SURE doesn’t like being inspected and probed and measured this way. Even the clinical terms have an ominous ring to them: there’s not a single one that’s remotely associable with a pleasant image. It would be bad enough if she were actually sick, but it seems decidedly ridiculous to be coming here healthy. And it’s even more annoying that to realize this project by and for women there still needs to be some guy poking around inside you down there. She puts her underpants back on, her pants, her shoes: red in the face, extremely irritated. Viviane’s participatory gaze from the chair next to the doctor’s desk only serves to make her more agitated.
Dr. Lapointe has already taken off his latex gloves, he’s already talking about the administration of hormones she’ll have to begin on Monday and that will last for a couple of weeks, to stimulate the ovaries and prepare the endometrial tissue. Viviane is perfectly capable of giving the injections, and they shouldn’t be painful, because the needles are as thin as those used in insulin shots for diabetics. After the first week they’ll need to do an ultrasound every two days, to verify the number of follicles and the thickness of the endometrium; then when the follicles have reached a certain diameter and number, preparation for “pickup” will begin. Does Lapointe use the English term to show how cutting edge his center is? To give the procedure a touch of science fiction?
Viviane has taken lots of detailed notes in the previous meetings, but now she’s completing and correcting them meticulously with a blue pen in her beige-covered notebook. She calmly asks all the right questions, doesn’t let Lapointe be too vague or hide behind obscure jargon, strong in the knowledge that her job qualifies her as a near colleague; and being French like him gives her a further advantage.
Every time Milena Migliari finds herself in an unpleasant or complicated situation like this, on the other hand, she gets the feeling she still doesn’t possess the necessary linguistic tools. Maybe it’s only a question of time, but after three and a half years in France she’s beginning to think she might never be able to express herself with the same command she has in Italian. Considerations like these come back to mind whenever she has to speak to someone at the bank, or to an inspector at the Health Office, or when she gets into conversations about politics or art or her life with Viviane. As things stand, it almost seems like Viviane and Dr. Lapointe are on the same side: two against one. She knows very well that that’s not the case, that Viviane cares for her immensely and is acting for the good of their common dream, et cetera. But the fact remains that she is the one being handled and probed, and that she will be the one undergoing hormonal stimulation and the ova pickup in Barcelona, thirty-six hours after the administration of chorionic gonadotropin. At Viviane’s request, the doctor clarifies that it will be indispensable to keep to the schedule exactly, because being early or late by even a couple of hours could provoke the release of the follicles and the failure of the entire cycle.
“There’ll be an ultrasound at the time of the sampling, correct?” Even if Viviane hasn’t studied medicine she deals with doctors daily: they’re the ones who send her half her clients. She even prescribes ultrasounds when she doesn’t want to risk compromising a joint or damaging a cracked vertebra.
“Certainly. My Spanish colleagues will give her a light sedative.” Lapointe would willingly do without being pestered by this quasi-colleague, but the clinic he works for is a business, which obliges him to a certain dose of patience.
Milena Migliari wonders just how effective a light sedative can be, because she’s read on the Internet that in some cases general anesthesia is used. And what does Lapointe really know about how much pain she might feel? Would he settle for a “light sedative” before having a needle jabbed into his testicles?
“And the sperm selection?” Viviane glances up from her notebook.
“My Spanish colleagues will do it, based on rigorous compatibility criteria.” Lapointe seems quite proud to be part of a binational work environment. “Delivery will take place on the same day as ova retrieval.”
Milena Migliari has many questions she would like to ask, but each time Viviane beats her to the punch; which seems only logical, given her anatomical knowledge and command of the terminology.
“Then the ova and the spermatozoa will be kept in a liquid culture for twenty-four hours.” Viviane reads the notes she’s taken, her pen ready for eventual corrections.
“Exactly.” Lapointe confirms, though he’s starting to look impatient. “After which my Spanish colleagues will evaluate the number and quality of the pre-embryos. The percentage of fertilized ova is on average about 60 percent, if the ova and spermatozoa are of good quality.”
“Meaning?” Viviane is determined to clarify everything beyond all doubt.
Lapointe gives a slightly forced smile but continues to play along. “There’s a classification by degrees. From the first, meaning excellent, to the fourth, meaning insufficient.”
Milena Migliari wonders if her eggs will be of excellent quality, or only good, or insufficient, maybe as a consequence of her previously irregular life or even of some bad habit. During the first visit the doctor explained to her (just to make her feel more comfortable) that it’s definitely better not to wait any longer, as her “ovocitary assets” aren’t limitless, either in number or in quality, and with each passing year she undergoes an “inexorable impoverishment” (his exact words). She wonders how disappointed Viviane would be by an eventual failure of the enterprise due to the insufficient quality of her eggs; she might even go so far as to reproach her for it, turning it into a permanent shadow, ever present in the background of all th
eir exchanges. She gets angry just thinking about it: at Viviane but above all at herself, for getting into this situation without the necessary conviction, letting herself be carried along by this stupid current of inevitability.
“And if the quality of the ova were insufficient?” Viviane adjusts her glasses, looks at the doctor in that insistent way of hers.
The muscles around Lapointe’s mouth contract. “We can use the gametes from an anonymous donor, who has naturally provided written consent for their use.”
“And I could be that donor.” There’s nothing vague about this hypothesis of Viviane’s: it’s the result of long evening and morning discussions, in which they’ve explored all the possible scenarios.
“You could be,” Lapointe confirms.
Milena Migliari doesn’t want to go over this point again, but truthfully, the idea of lending her uterus (and the rest of her body connected to it) to someone else’s egg fertilized by an unknown person’s sperm doesn’t sound good to her at all. She said so clearly to Viviane more than once: the one who provides the egg should provide the uterus. After all, they both have them; and even the law prescribes it. To which Viviane replied (as always) that she is the one who brings more income to the household budget, and that she certainly couldn’t do her massages with a belly out to here.
“All clear so far, right?” Viviane would clearly rather move on, not linger anymore on this particular topic.
“Uh-huh.” This is the best reply Milena Migliari can come up with. Is she some kind of monster, to feel so trapped? To want to run away from this medical center and never be found? There are so many other things she’d prefer to do in the coming months rather than have a child: research new ingredients, hunt for new flavors, invent new recipes, write the book on gelato she’s been thinking about for a while. She has nothing, literally nothing, against children and those who want to have them; all she wants is that they don’t ask them of her, that they leave her in peace.
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