Live a Little

by Kim Green

  What, you say, Ren’s— gasp!—baby?

  Get your mind out of the gutter, will you? Of course I’m having Ren’s baby. What, you think Phil and I want to go through the corrosive, sanity-eating, soul-stealing fog that is parenting an infant? Fuck no. Excuse me, what I mean to say is, FUCK NO.

  I’ll tell you something in complete confidence: The day I give birth to my and Philly’s child and allow the little Morgoth to annihilate the piss-elegant San Francisco condo we moved into last year is the day I rejoin the Peninsula JCC and ask Rochelle Schitzfelder to be my natural-labor coach.

  Since I know you’re dying for the dirt, here’s the deal: Meet Raquel Rose, surrogate mom.

  Yep, that’s it. Surrogate. Before we got deeply into it, when I was still freaking out at the idea and envisioning myself in vomit-stained caftans, I looked it up: taking the place of somebody or something else.

  After pondering things for a while, I realized how off the mark that definition is. Okay, not off the mark, exactly, but incomplete. A lie by omission. Because one thing I know for sure is that I could never replace Laurie in much of anything. Lend her my uterus, yes. Substitute for her? No. What they should have said is: taking the place of somebody or something in a matter of little cosmic importance that they are unable to address themselves.

  I’ll never forget the day it happened. Well, not happened— that rollicking adventure occurred on a paper-coated table with me on my back, my legs in stirrups, and an embryologist poking around my cervix while a Muzak version of Jimmy Cliff’s “The Harder They Come” chimed in the background— but was conceived.

  Ouch.

  It was the strangest thing: One minute I was standing in front of the magazine rack at Walgreens, sneaking a peek at an article on celebrity baby nurseries, the next I was speeding down the freeway to Laurie and Ren’s.

  I was so excited I left my keys in the convertible MINI Cooper—I traded in the Sienna when we moved to the city— and ran up the walkway to my sister’s Atherton Tudor. It was Sunday evening; I knew my sister and brother-in-law would be home, she knitting or grinding herbs into neatly labeled jars, he reading medical journals or shining his golf shoes.

  “Laurie!” I called as I rapped the door. “Ren!”

  Laurie answered. “I didn’t know you were coming, Quel. Is everything all right?”

  “It’s perfect.” I sat down at the kitchen table. The surface was so polished, I could see Ren’s worry lines when he entered from the living room to see what was going on.

  “I’m going to have your baby,” I said.

  “What?”

  “We’re going to do one of those IVF thingies where they make a baby out of Ren’s sperm and your eggs and plant it in me. I may be old, but my insides still work. And the baby would be all yours—”

  “Embryo,” Ren cut in. He had his arm around Laurie’s shoulders. He often does. When I think of all the years I spent imagining the glorious good fortune that arm around me might confer, I am really impatient to get on with things.

  “Whatever. Just . . . I’ll do it. Ren, you said it yourself to me once, that it would have been a good idea if only I hadn’t had chemo. Well, I haven’t had it, and God willing, I won’t have it. I’m healthy, I’ve had my kids, I won’t want to raise the baby or anything. I’ll do it. Say yes before I change my mind, goddammit!”

  Ren and Laurie regarded each other with that expressive shorthand long-married people use when they need to achieve consensus in a hurry and without speaking because other (rude) people are in the room. They didn’t exchange a word.

  “Yes,” Laurie said simply.

  “Raquel . . .” Ren seemed at a loss for words. “Thank you.”

  I didn’t want them to be too grateful or think I wanted them to grovel, so I shifted their attention to the one potential obstacle to this endeavor.

  “Now who’s going to tell Phil?” I said.

  Ah, the memories.

  Phil took it like a true mensch. He takes a lot of stuff better than I thought he—or any man—could. That doesn’t mean he’s a saint. Far from it. The thing with Philip Atticus Rose is, he doesn’t play fair—he lets his opponents get overconfident. Just when you think you’re home free, whammo!, he hits you with the big one. Frankly, I admire his cruelty. Plus, if I were married to a saint, it would probably last about as long as my relationship with Duke Dunne, and that’s not counting the ride on the motorcycle.

  It took exactly forty-two days after we got back together on Living with Lauren! for Phil to ask about Duke Dunne. I know this because I marked it off on a wall calendar. I know it’s weird, but nobody ever accused me of being normal, right?

  We were sitting in the hot tub at his apartment complex in Redwood City—or Redwood Shitty, as we had taken to calling it when the windows started leaking and black mold overtook the grout. The hot tub was the one plus that the mostly singles-y nest of units had going for it, as long as we snagged it early, before the nightly contingent of swaybacked divorcées and horny Pakistani engineers dropped beneath the beige foam.

  Phil filled my plastic water bottle with cheap pinot grigio and stretched out, his back against a jet. “Did you sleep with that piece of shit Dunne?” he said.

  I sighed and trotted out the only answer I could reasonably give the man I adored more than any other. “Yeah.”

  He nodded. “I thought so. You seemed different.”

  “Yeah, well, sometimes I wish I hadn’t. Does that help?”

  Phil flicked away a froth of suds. “Yeah, it does, actually. Do me a favor?”

  “Sure.”

  “If I ask you for specifics sometime, don’t tell me.”

  “Okay.”

  “Especially if I’m impotent or something.”

  “Like that’s going to happen, stud.” We laughed. I could tell he wanted to kiss me, but then our neighbor Atiq Somethingorother walked through the gate, skinny legs brown and shivering, and asked whether we minded if he joined us. We said no, and Phil’s long toes with their rough, untended nails scratched my calf underwater, just the way I like it.

  Phil never asked about Duke again. I choose to take it as a sign of great affection.

  Will passenger Raquel Rose please report to the podium?

  The disembodied voice repeats itself several times while I waddle my way to the gate. This is good news: Maybe Philly and I will be able to sit together on the way to Waikiki after all.

  I introduce myself to the woman at the gate, a well-groomed Filipina with ash-blond highlights and airline-approved ruby lips.

  She frowns. “But that’s Raquel Rose.” She points at somebody a few feet away, a petite woman with a brown bob and two young children weaving around her legs. “She showed me her driver’s license. She was waiting for an upgrade, so I put her in business.”

  As my mind charts the logic from point A to point B and puts together what happened, the woman seems to sense my presence, or maybe she just overhears us and turns around. She is pretty is the first (superficial) thing I register. Also: She looks healthy. Then: Where’s the husband?

  “Oh,” the woman says, unfastening one of her kids’ sticky-looking hands from her Bermuda shorts. The boy whines and drops a karate chop in the middle of his sister’s back. The girl erupts. “Oh, damn,” the woman says, then, absently, “Kids, there’s Daddy, run and get him.” They charge off, leaving only us, two Raquel Roses in orbit around each other at the United counter.

  “Are you . . . well?” I ask. There is no need to explain; we both know what’s going on. Just seeing her solid and actual in front of me—she, the intangible, elusive manifestation of my blunders—is sweet relief.

  “Yes. Yes, I am.” Her smooth, clear face is serene. “And you?”

  I point to my burgeoning stomach. “Pretty good, considering.”

  “Yes, well.” She gestures toward her incoming family, a study in hibiscus patterns and ice-cream stains. “I’d better go.”

  “Right. Well, have a good time.”


  “You, too.”

  I walk ten steps before something turns me around. “Is your name really Raquel?” I call.

  She smiles. “Yeah. My mom thought it sounded racy. I’ve always wanted something classier. Rachel would have been nice.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  I was born in Hollywood in 1969. That sounds fancy, but all it really means is I played in public parks alongside the children of grips and the occasional transsexual hooker. Throughout the 1970s, I followed the zeitgeist, enjoying Star Wars, Judy Blume, Madeleine L’Engle, and recreational soccer under the leadership of various well-intentioned but misinformed dads. For a brief period, I developed an unhealthy interest in the Bermuda Triangle. I read a lot of grown-up books I “borrowed” from my friends’ mothers that turned out to be soft-core porn. It was all very Boogie Nights, very Southern California!

  Then my parents loaded up the station wagon with three kids, a basset hound, and a hillbilly pile of stuff and moved us up to northern California. It was about the same, minus the tans, plus the mullets. The ’80s were filled with new-wave music, Boone’s Farm wine, and a succession of ill-advised fashion choices. I wrote angry journal entries and a love paean to Duran Duran.

  After high school, I left for the big city and U.C. Berkeley, eventually earning my B.A. in political science at U.C. Davis. Flirting with working for an NGO or the diplomatic corps, I got an M.A. in international relations at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, which qualifies me to create exotic settings for my books and little else.

  Around this time, I began a successful career in. . . underemployment. Researching mechanics liens, copyediting reviews of pet-worship Web sites, spoon-feeding psychotropic medication to a clinically psychotic boss . . . no job was too soul-killing or weird for the likes of me. That’s when I decided to take a stab at this writing thing. Really, there was nothing left to fear.

  Along the way, I met my wondrous husband, Gabe. (My grandmothers, who never agreed on anything, both deemed him a mensch.) We live in San Francisco with our perpetually curious daughter Lucca and our son Zev, who, at eight months, already smiles like he means it.

  FIVE THINGS YOU NEVER THOUGHT YOU’D SAY TO YOUR KIDS:

  1. “That’s why they call it medical marijuana, honey.”

  2. “Of course surfing is a valid career choice.”

  3. “You’re sitting on my wig.”

  4. “Staying together for the children? Who told you that?”

  5. “What I did is perfectly legal . . . in Sweden.”