“I love you too,” he said, but he didn’t look so happy.
With great effort she organized her thoughts, her words. It was like setting a heavy, complicated machine in motion. “How many?”
That was the key question. That much she knew. How many eggs did they retrieve? She was pleased with herself for getting that question up and out.
“Five. Three are clearly mature. The others they’re looking at.”
So his face was dour because of the results. “Looking at?”
“Measuring. Waiting on. They can continue to grow in vitro.”
“Not a village at all.”
“A village?”
“Not at all”—she tried to speak more clearly, more logically—“what you hoped for.”
“It’s definitely something to work with. It only takes one viable egg, remember.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s nobody’s fault. You try one combination of drugs the first time. You change it the next.”
He was already talking about a next time?
“Kiss me.”
He kissed her. A whisper of a kiss.
* * *
The pain was like menstrual cramps. Bad but not incapacitating menstrual cramps. They started in the cab. As soon as she returned to the apartment, she took two Tylenol and went directly to bed.
She felt empty. She was empty. Her ovaries had been stimulated, swollen, and suctioned clean. Human reproduction, this essential act of nature, was happening outside her body, in a petri dish behind closed (indeed locked, and highly monitored) doors on the sixth floor of a hospital on the Upper East Side of the island of Manhattan. There was nothing she could do, yet again, but wait. Wait and sleep.
* * *
The sound of china pinging woke her. China pinging against china, on a tray. A teacup, a teapot, a little pitcher of warmed milk. Fruit, pastries.
With great concentration Andrew was carrying the tray, keeping it level. He lowered it down onto the bed next to her.
“Oh, Andrew. What a nice surprise.”
“How do you feel?”
“Wiped out.”
“Did it go … as you hoped?”
“Not entirely. But we’ll know more in a day. When we hear what—takes.” Her eyes filled up. “I promise not to cry.”
“You can cry.”
So she did. “I had no idea it would all be this intense.”
“It’s a big deal.”
“Thank you for thinking of me.” She pulled herself up, blew her nose.
From the other end of the apartment came the sound of a raised, peeved voice: Henry’s. Amid this distant muttering a few phrases cohered: “where did I put” and “not where it belongs” and “I give up!”
Henry appeared in the doorway. He was carrying a different pastry, on a plain white plate.
“Ah, there it is. I’ve been looking for that tray all over the place.” He glanced at Andrew. “I see you’re all—set.” Then: “How are you doing? Do you have any fever?”
“I don’t think so.”
He placed his palm on her forehead. “Cramping?”
“Less now.”
He nodded. “You’ve been sleeping.”
“I just woke up when Andrew came in.”
“The anesthesia can take some time to work out of your system. And you didn’t sleep so much last night, after all.” He paused. “I’ll let you rest.”
He started to go. When Andrew didn’t show any sign of joining him, Henry added, “We’ll let you rest.”
Andrew said goodbye. Henry waited until he left the room, then closed the door behind them and followed his son into the foyer.
“Were you thinking of staying over this evening, Andrew?”
“It’s Monday, isn’t it?”
“Yes. About that. I’m sure you understand that this is a—a complicated time for Costanza. For both of us. And I think—well, I know—that we could really use a bit of space. Costanza and I. Just until the transfer and the waiting period are over.”
“Are you reducing me further? From once a week to nunce?”
“Nunce?”
“You know what I mean. Gornisht.”
“What’s with the Yiddish?”
“I’ve been having dinner with Grandpa. On the nights I used to be here.”
“I’m speaking about a very temporary arrangement. For a few weeks. I think it would just be simpler for everyone all around.”
“Everyone—or you?”
“This is something I need right now. Something Costanza and I need.”
“You need is more correct.”
“Okay then. Something I need. What do you say?”
“Do I have any choice?”
Henry sighed. “Not really.”
* * *
The embryologist phoned Henry early the following morning. Just three of Costanza’s eggs had turned out to be mature. Two of the three had fertilized. They were at two and three cells in size. Still viable, but slow. The next twenty-four hours would be critical.
Costanza was still half-asleep when she heard Henry answer his cell phone and step into the bathroom. When she finally got up to have dinner the night before, she had had her first real glass of wine (actually two glasses, moderate ones) since she began the treatment. The alcohol, the anesthesia, the painkillers, the enormity of the day—all this combined to send her into an early, deep, and dreamless sleep, but she came out of it quickly enough when she heard Henry’s murmuring.
It was a few moments before he stepped out of the bathroom. By then she was sitting upright in bed. After he imparted the facts, she said, “So it’s bad.”
“I would say it’s average. The results are average.” His voice, like his face, gave away nothing. His whole demeanor was professional, neutral.
“Can you put a number to them? To my chances of success?”
“I’m not a statistician, Costanza.”
“But you are.”
He hesitated. “Thirty percent. Twenty. Somewhere in there. It’s not exact.”
“It’s not exact,” she echoed bitterly.
“Your chances are much higher than they would be if we were having timed intercourse. As I’ve told you, the first round is often about gathering information. We’ll alter the protocol the next time around. There are several options—”
“I wish you would stop talking about the next time so soon. This has been very hard for me. To sit here, to be waiting, preparing my body, my mind…”
“It’s the physician in me. I cannot stop him—it.”
“It?”
He simply looked at her somberly.
“I am too much of a patient now for you to take my hand? Or maybe I’m merely too much of a disappointment. Maybe that’s it.”
“I’m sorry, Costanza.” He sat down on the edge of the bed. “You’re not the disappointment. If anyone is, I am. The process is. Its unpredictability is regrettable.”
He put his hand on hers. She was not comforted. She looked toward the windows. The blackout shades, still drawn, were framed in halos of bright morning sunlight. “There’s something on my mind.”
He waited for her to continue.
“I discovered yesterday, I was surprised to discover yesterday, I should say, that Judith had also undergone IVF. To have the boys.”
He cocked his head.
“Hilda. She made a reference in passing, by accident. She didn’t do anything wrong. It just slipped out.”
He nodded slowly.
“You never thought to mention this to me before?”
“It felt like Judith’s business. Her story.”
“Which you were part of. A big part of. Come on.”
Henry didn’t say anything.
“Are you not going to tell me why Judith had IVF?”
Costanza saw clearly that Henry would have preferred not to have this conversation; but they were going to have it. Boy, were they.
Henry appeared to choose his words more carefu
lly than usual. “We’d been trying to conceive for a while. A year. More. It’s not that we were impatient so much as worried. Maybe we moved on to IVF faster than other people would have, on account of my work, also my bias, my nature. And Judith’s. We were both solution seekers, problem solvers.”
“But what was the problem exactly? Not her age.”
“No. Not her age.”
Henry took a moment to answer Costanza’s question. The moment felt strangely long, and charged.
“It was my problem.”
“It was your problem. What do you mean?”
“The obvious. My sperm count was not high. It was on the low side. Quite low.”
“Your sperm count was not high. It was on the low side. Quite low.” She repeated his words to understand them, to keep her anxiety from spiking. “You tell me this now?”
“Yes, I tell you this now. Now it no longer matters. It did then.” His face reddened. He spoke rapidly. “We didn’t have ICSI in those days. We couldn’t extract a healthy sperm, wash it, and inject it into the mature egg. Today we can.”
“I understand what ICSI is, Henry,” she said sharply.
It was her turn to pause, to try to absorb—parse—the information Henry had just given her. “So plain old IVF worked for Judith?”
“Yes. We were lucky.”
“It worked right away?”
“Two tries with Justin. Just one with Andrew. Judith was quite young.”
“She produced many eggs. Many more than me.”
He nodded.
“Forgive me if I need to review. You’re saying that both boys were conceived through IVF.”
“Yes.”
He looked away from her. What did it mean that he looked away from her? “We were lucky, as I say.”
“I see.” But she didn’t, exactly. “Have you tested your sperm since then? Since we decided to—to put ourselves through all this?”
Ourselves. What she meant was herself. Myself.
“ICSI renders sperm count essentially irrelevant. And anyway, Costanza, you have two fertilized eggs, both reasonably sized. You see that my sperm is viable. You see that what we do works.”
“Thus far.”
“Which is as far as we’ve come.”
Her mind was working, churning. “Do the boys know?”
“What makes you ask that?”
The conversation was beginning to feel like a minefield. But why? “It seems like something they would know—should know.”
“I’ve never told them. Judith may have.”
“Why not?”
“I never thought of it.”
“Just like you never thought to tell me?”
“I wouldn’t put it that way.”
“How would you put it then?”
“I never saw the need. It never came up.”
“Your sons were born because of the science that has been your life’s work, and you’ve never seen the need to tell them?”
“That’s correct.”
“If I’m lucky enough to become pregnant and grow and deliver and raise this baby, would you not tell her, or him?”
“I can see it’s something we’d have to discuss.”
“It is indeed,” she said with a flash of anger.
In his calm—or was it placating?—doctor voice Henry said, “You might try seeing this from my point of view, Costanza. I oversee hundreds of cycles of in vitro a year. Low sperm count no longer registers as an especially concerning factor. Our clinic has one of the highest success rates in the country. Two years ago the ten-thousandth baby to be conceived through us was born. Ten thousand babies. That’s what I think about—not all this.”
She looked at Henry. “You reason your way around everything, don’t you?”
“Reason around?”
“You resolve all possible concerns, all possible fears. You have a way of making me sound illogical, overly worried. Overemotional.”
“I don’t mean to do that.”
“I think you do, as it happens. And I think it’s a very male, a classically male, thing to do too. I don’t know how comfortable you are with the paradox of human—human feeling. My feeling. And with the way that feeling might get to its own truth, by channels other than your logic. In Italy you seemed more—well, of course I did not know you so well then.” She paused. “I’m not crazy, Henry. These drugs may make me more heightened than usual, but they don’t make me crazy.”
“That’s your word. Not mine.”
“Yes, my words, my feelings, my doubts—and my body.” She swung her legs over the edge of the bed. “Did your embryologist say when she thought the transfer would be?”
“Tomorrow, as predicted. A nurse will call with the time. It’s usually in the early afternoon.”
* * *
She had waited through the first two weeks, to see how her body would perform under stimulation. She had waited through the last beastly day, and night, to see how her eggs would fertilize. After the transfer she would be waiting for another two weeks to see if she would become pregnant. On this, her one day free from waiting, Costanza put her conversation with Henry out of her mind—for the moment. Something in it, several things, were unsettling and not easily parsed, but she knew herself. She knew when she had to shut down a certain way of thinking, or else it would threaten to consume her. She knew that if she started to pick apart his responses to her questions about how Justin and Andrew had been conceived, and what they didn’t know about their conception, and why they didn’t know it, she would likely not think of anything else. For her peace of mind—more important, her peace of body—she couldn’t allow that to happen now.
Instead she showered, dressed, made her own coffee and breakfast, and sat down with her translation. What a relief it was to lose herself in someone else’s story, someone else’s language and rhythms. It was one of the great pleasures of translating, for her, to be able to slip outside her brain and into another person’s; to be thinking, actively thinking, but not to be bound by her own worries and obsessions, her own mental kinks. It was like travel; better than travel. For the remainder of the day she remained blessedly elsewhere. She almost forgot what she and her body were going through. Almost.
* * *
A new day, a new disappointment: one of the embryos had not grown beyond four cells and appeared to have a good deal of fragmentation. The other had reached eight cells and had moderate fragmentation. Costanza was to return to the hospital at two o’clock for the transfer of one or both, depending on how they looked as the day unfolded.
* * *
At ten minutes to two Costanza presented herself at the hospital. This time she sat quietly, read through the most recent pages of her translation, and observed the other women. This wasn’t a day for the men. This wasn’t a day with anesthesia in it, or enormous suspense. They were there because they had at least one or two viable embryos to transfer. They were there because, thus far, the in vitro was working to whatever extent. The women sat calmly reading or quietly chatting. Costanza realized this was the first time she had heard any of these women speak to one another.
She was soon sent off to change, then she was led into the same inner waiting room as before, and, after that, the transfer room. Within minutes a doctor came in and introduced herself as Dr. Trager.
“Everything is happening so much faster this time,” Costanza said.
“Well, it’s a lot simpler today.” Dr. Trager tapped a few keys on a nearby computer. “You have a single embryo. Nine cells. You can take a look.”
An image appeared on a screen that was hung on the wall across from Costanza. It looked like a tiny collection of bubbles, something at the end of a child’s wand after it had been dipped in a bottle of soap and glycerin. This was her embryo. Her nine-cell embryo, a union of her egg and Henry’s sperm, combined and fertilized through intracytoplasmic sperm injection and grown these past three days in a warmed broth of fertilization medium, an act of human ingenuity that was utterly m
ysterious. Miraculous, even.
“Can you show me the fragmentation?”
If Dr. Trager was surprised that Costanza knew what fragmentation was, or that her embryo was fragmented, she didn’t show it. Instead she dragged the cursor over to some of the bubbles that seemed imperfect in shape, overlapping and messy. “It’s about twenty percent. It’s not that bad.”
Not that bad. “The embryo looks like it’s breaking down.”
“You might put it that way, but it doesn’t always matter. Very often these embryos turn into—”
“Yes, I know, perfectly healthy babies,” Costanza said brusquely.
The doctor nodded.
“Don’t you people ever give a bad report?”
“Well, we don’t transfer when the embryo is clearly not viable.”
“And unclearly not viable? Ambiguously not viable?”
Dr. Trager looked at her. “Ms. Ansaldo, it’s our job to make life. That means we push for every single opportunity we get.”
* * *
Adapting to the rhythms of his parents’ divorce had been a major challenge for Andrew when he was younger. It wasn’t just the logistical confusion (though there was plenty of that; for years he left things at one apartment when he needed them in the other); it was being expected to check seamlessly out of one world, one sensibility, and into another according to a calendar he could almost never negotiate. There was such a marked difference between waking up as Judith’s son and waking up as Henry’s that he used to linger in bed on a changeover morning, reminding himself whether it was okay to be more outspoken (Judith), or less (Henry); whether his shifts in mood, which spiked unpredictably during his early adolescence, were likely to incite a reaction (Judith, of course) or be overlooked (of course Henry); and where it was wiser to be open or more self-editing about certain aspects of his personal life (mainly of late Charlotte). He had to pay attention even to such basic details as which parent cared whether he hung up his clothes (Judith) and which didn’t (Henry, usually).
All this had settled into a pattern that Andrew didn’t have to think so hard about anymore—until his recent, and presumably temporary, banishment to the West Side. Waking up at the start of a week without the prospect of the pendulum swinging him between Henry and Judith, Upper East and Upper West, Andrew felt an unease that took him a few days to recognize for what it was: he felt, he admitted to himself, a little trapped—with his own mother. (Well, to be fair, also with his stepfather.) Before, when Andrew bristled at Henry’s overbearing nature, Andrew knew that after a few days he would be treated to Judith’s curiosity and concern; likewise, when it began to feel that Judith was asking too many questions, worrying over too many small details, and getting too involved in his schoolwork and social life, there was Henry’s bracing focus on bigger, or anyway different, matters.
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