by Jodi Picoult
I can’t really tell you the moment it went wrong. Maybe it was the first time, or the fifth, or the fiftieth that Zoe counted out the days of her menstrual cycle and crawled into bed and said, “Now!” Our sex life had become like Thanksgiving dinner with a dysfunctional family—something you have to show up for, even though you’re not really having a good time. Maybe it was when we started IVF, when I realized there was nothing Zoe wouldn’t do in her quest to get pregnant; that want had become need and then obsession. Or maybe it was when I began feeling like Zoe and this baby to be were on the same page—and that I had somehow become the outsider. There was no room in my marriage for me anymore, except as genetic material.
A lot of people talk about what women go through, when they can’t have a baby. But no one ever asks about the guys. Well, let me tell you—we feel like losers. We can’t somehow do what other men manage to do without even trying . . . what other men take precautions to not do, most of the time. Whether or not it’s true, and whether or not it’s my fault—society looks at a guy differently, if he doesn’t have kids. There’s a whole book of the Old Testament devoted to who begat whom. Even the sex symbol celebrities who make women swoon, like David Beckham and Brad Pitt and Hugh Jackman, are always in People magazine swinging one of their children onto their shoulders. (I should know; I’ve read nearly every issue in the waiting room of the IVF clinic.) This may be the twenty-first century, but being a real man is still tied to being able to procreate.
I know I didn’t ask for this. I know I shouldn’t feel inadequate. I know it is a medical condition, and that if I suffered a cardiac arrest or a broken ankle I wouldn’t think of myself as a wimp if I needed surgery or a cast—so why should I be embarrassed about this?
Because it’s just one more piece of evidence, in a long, long list, that I’m a failure.
In the fall, landscaping is a hard sell. I do my fair share of leaf blowing and buzz cutting lawns, so that they’re prepped for the winter. I prune deciduous trees and shrubs that flower in the autumn. I’ve managed to talk a couple of clients into planting before the ground freezes—it’s always something you’ll be glad you did come spring—and I’m pretty sold on some red maple varieties that have spectacular color in autumn. But mostly this fall, for me, will be about laying off the guys I hired during the summer. Usually I can keep on one or two, but not this winter—I’m just too far in debt, and there isn’t enough work. My five-man landscaping business is going to morph into a one-man snowplowing service.
I’m pruning a client’s roses when one of my summer help comes loping down the driveway. Todd—a junior in high school—stopped working last week, when classes started up again. “Max?” he says, holding his baseball cap in his hands. “You got a minute?”
“Sure,” I say. I sit back on my heels and squint up at him. The sun is already low, and it’s only three-thirty in the afternoon. “How is school going?”
“It’s going.” Todd hesitates. “I, um, wanted to ask you about getting my job back.”
My knees creak as I stand up. “It’s a little early for me to start hiring for next spring.”
“I meant for the fall and winter. I’ve got my license. I could plow for you—”
“Todd,” I interrupt, “you’re a good kid, but business slows down a lot. I just can’t afford to take you on right now.” I clap him on the shoulder. “Call me in March, okay?”
I start to walk back to my truck. “Max!” he calls out, and I turn. “I really need this.” His Adam’s apple bobs like a cork. “My girlfriend—she’s pregnant.”
I vaguely remember Todd’s girlfriend driving up to the curb of a client’s house this July with a car full of giddy teens. Her long brown legs in her cutoff jean shorts, as she walked up to Todd with a thermos of lemonade. How he blushed when she kissed him and ran back to her car, her flip-flops slapping against the soles of her feet. I remember being his age, and panicking every time I had sex, certain that I’d be in the two percent of cases where Trojans failed.
How come, Zoe used to say, the odds are that, if you’re sixteen years old and desperate to not get pregnant, you will . . . but if you’re forty and you want to get pregnant, you can’t?
I won’t look Todd in the eye. “Sorry,” I mutter, “I can’t help.” I fiddle around with some equipment in the flatbed of my truck until I see him drive away. I still have work to do, but I make the executive decision to call it a day. I’m the boss, after all. I should know when it’s time to quit.
I drive to a bar that I’ve passed fifty times on my way to this job. It’s called Quasimodo’s and sports a bad paint job and metal grilles across the one window, which doubles as a lit Budweiser sign. In other words, it’s the sort of place nobody ever goes in the afternoon.
Sure enough, when I first walk inside and my eyes are adjusting to the light, I think it’s only me and the bartender. Then I notice a woman with bleached blond hair doing a crossword at the bar. Her arms are bare and ropy, with crepe paper skin; she looks strange and familiar all at once, like a T-shirt washed so often that the picture on the front is now just a blotch of color. “Irv,” she says, “what’s a five-letter loamy deposit?”
The bartender shrugs. “Something that calls for Imodium?”
She frowns. “The New York Times crossword’s too classy for that.”
“Loess,” I say, climbing onto a stool.
“Less what?” she asks, turning to me.
“No, loess. L-O-E-S-S. It’s a kind of sediment made by layers of silt that the wind’s blown into ridges or dunes.” I point to her newspaper. “That’s your answer.”
She writes it in, in pen. “You happen to know six across? ‘London streetcars’?”
“Sorry.” I shake my head. “I don’t know trivia. Just a little geology.”
“What can I get you?” the bartender asks, setting a napkin in front of me.
I look at the row of bottles behind him. “Sprite,” I say.
He pours the soft drink from a hose beneath the bar and sets it in front of me. From the corner of my eye, I see the woman’s drink, a martini. My mouth actually starts to water.
There is a television above the bar. Oprah Winfrey is telling everyone about beauty secrets from around the world. Do I want to know how Japanese women keep their skin so smooth?
“You some kind of professor at Brown?” the woman asks.
I laugh. “Yeah,” I say. Why the hell not? I’m never going to see her again.
The truth is, I don’t even have a college degree. I flunked out of URI a hundred years ago, when I was a junior. Unlike Reid, the golden son, who’d graduated with honors and had gone on to work as a financial analyst at Bank of Boston before starting his own investment firm, I had majored in Beer Pong and grain alcohol. At first it was parties on the weekends, and then study breaks midweek, except I wasn’t doing any studying. There is an entire semester I cannot remember, and one morning, I woke up naked on the steps of the library without any recollection of what had led up to that.
When my dad wouldn’t let me move back home, I crashed on Reid’s couch in his Kenmore Square apartment. I got a job as a night watchman at a mall, but lost it when I kept missing work because I was sleeping off that afternoon’s bender. I started stealing cash from Reid so that I could buy bottles of cheap booze and hide them around the apartment. Then one morning, I woke up, hungover, to find a handgun pointed at my forehead.
“Reid! What the fuck?” I yelped, scrambling upright.
“If you’re trying to kill yourself, Max,” he said, “let’s speed it up a bit.”
Together we dumped all the alcohol down the sink. Reid took the day off work to come with me to my first AA meeting. That was seventeen years ago. By the time I met Zoe, when I was twenty-nine, I was sober and had figured out what a guy without a college degree could do with his life. Thinking back to the only classes I’d really liked in college—geology—I figured I’d better stick to the land. I got a small business loan and bought my fi
rst mower, painted the side of my truck, and printed up flyers. I may not be living the lush life, like Reid and Liddy, but I netted $23,000 last year and I could still take days off to surf when the waves were good.
It was enough, with Zoe’s income, to rent a place—a place that she’s now living in. When you are the spouse that wants out of the relationship, you have to be willing to actually leave. Sometimes, even though it has been a whole month, I find myself wondering if she’s remembered to ask the landlord about getting the furnace cleaned. Or whether she’s signed a lease for another year, this time without my name on it. I wonder who carries her heavy drums up the entryway stairs now, or if she just leaves them in the car overnight.
I wonder if I made a mistake.
I look over at the crossword woman’s martini. “Hey,” I say to Irv the bartender, “can I get one of those?”
The woman taps the pen against the bar. “So you teach geology?”
On the television, Oprah is talking about how to make your own salt scrub, like the ones Cleopatra once used.
“No. Egyptian,” I lie.
“Like Indiana Jones?”
“Kind of,” I reply. “Except I’m not afraid of snakes.”
“Have you been there? On the Nile?”
“Oh, yeah,” I say, although I do not even own a passport. “A dozen times.”
She pushes her pen and newspaper toward me. “Can you show me what my name would look like in Egyptian?”
Irv sets the martini down in front of me. I start to sweat. It would be so easy.
“I’m Sally,” the woman says. “S-A-L-L-Y.”
It’s amazing what you’ll do when you want something bad. You are willing to do anything, say anything, be anything. I used to feel that way about drinking—there were things I did to get cash for booze that I am sure I’ve blocked out permanently. And I certainly felt that way, once, about having a baby. Tell a stranger the details of my sex life? Sure. Jab my wife in the ass with a needle? My pleasure. Jerk off in a jar? No problem. If the doctors had told us to walk backward and sing opera to increase the chance of fertility, we would not have batted an eyelash.
When you want something bad, you’ll tell yourself a thousand lies.
Like: The fifth time’s the charm.
Like: Things between Zoe and me will be better once the baby’s born.
Like: One sip isn’t going to kill me.
I once saw a TV documentary about giant squid, and they filmed one shooting its ink into the water to get away from an enemy. The ink was black and beautiful and curled like smoke, a distraction so that the squid could escape. That’s what alcohol feels like, in my blood. It’s the ink of the squid, and it’s going to blind me so that I can get away from everything that hurts.
The only language I know is English. But on the edge of the newspaper, I draw three wavy lines, and then an approximation of a snake, and a sun. “That’s just the sounds of the name, of course,” I say. “There isn’t really a translation for Sally.”
She rips off the corner of the newspaper, folds it, and tucks it into her bra. “I am totally getting a tattoo of this.”
Most likely the tattoo artist will have no idea that these are not real hieroglyphs. For all I know, I might have written: For a good time, call Nefertiti.
Sally hops down from her stool and moves onto the one beside me. “You gonna drink that martini or wait till it becomes an antique?”
“I haven’t decided yet,” I say, the first truth I’ve offered her.
“Well, make up your mind,” Sally replies, “so that I can buy you another one.”
I lift the martini and drain it in one long, fiery, mind-blowing gulp. “Irv,” I say, setting down the empty glass. “You heard the lady.”
The first time I had to leave a semen sample at the clinic, the nurse stepped into the waiting room and called my name. As I stood up I thought: Everyone else here knows exactly what I’m about to do.
The literature Zoe and I had been given said that the wife could “assist” in the sample collection, but the only thing that seemed more awkward than jerking off in a clinic was having my wife in there with me, with doctors and nurses and patients just outside the door. The nurse led me down the hallway. “Here you go,” she said, handing me a brown paper bag. “Just read the instructions.”
“It’s not so bad,” Zoe had told me over breakfast. “Think of it as a visit to Pee-wee’s Playhouse.”
And really, who was I to complain, when she was getting shots twice a day and having constant pelvic exams and taking so many hormones that something as simple as crossing the street could make her burst into tears? By comparison, this seemed like a piece of cake.
The room was freezing cold and consisted of a couch that had been covered by a sheet, a TV-VCR, a sink, and a coffee table. There were some videos—Pussy in Boots, Breast Side Story, On Golden Blonde—various issues of Playboy and Hustler and, weirdly, a copy of Good Housekeeping. A small window that looked like it belonged in a speakeasy was to the right—this would be where I left the sample when I was done. The nurse backed out of the room, and I pushed the lock in the door handle. Then I opened it, and pushed it again. To make sure.
I opened the paper bag. The sample cup was enormous. It was practically a bucket. What were they expecting from me?
What if I spilled?
I started to leaf through one of the magazines. The last time I’d done this, I’d been fifteen and had shoplifted the December issue of Playboy from a newsstand. I became incredibly aware of how loudly I was breathing. Maybe that wasn’t normal. Maybe that meant I was having a heart attack?
Maybe I just needed to get this over with.
I turned on the television. There was already a video playing. I watched for a moment, and then wondered if the person waiting on the other side of the trapdoor for the sample was listening.
It was taking forever.
In the end, I closed my eyes, and I pictured Zoe.
Zoe, before we’d started talking about a family. Like the time we’d gone camping off the grid in the White Mountains, and I woke up to find her sitting on a boulder playing a flute, wearing absolutely nothing.
Afterward, I stared at the sample in the cup. No wonder we couldn’t get pregnant; there was hardly anything there, at least in terms of volume. I wrote my name and the time on the label. I slipped the sample into the drop-off zone and closed the door, wondering if I should knock or yell or somehow let the technician know that it was ready and waiting.
I decided they’d figure it out, and I washed my hands and hurried into the hallway. The receptionist smiled at me as I left. “Thanks for coming,” she said.
Seriously? Shouldn’t that phrase be banned from use at an IVF clinic?
As I walked to my car, I was already thinking of how I’d tell Zoe what the receptionist had said. How we’d laugh.
When I wake up, I am lying on a pillow covered in purple fur, on the floor of a bedroom I do not recognize. Gradually, ignoring the sledgehammer at my temple, I sit up and see a bare foot, flame red polish. My tongue feels like it’s carpeted.
Staggering upright, I look down at the woman. It takes me a full minute to remember her name. I can’t really recall how we got here, but I do have an image of another bar, after Quasimodo’s, and maybe even another after that. I can taste tequila, and shame.
Sally is snoring like a longshoreman—the only saving grace. The last thing I want to do is have a conversation with her. I tiptoe out of the room, holding my pants and my shirt and my shoes in a ball at my groin. Did I drive here last night? I hope like hell I didn’t. But God only knows where I left my car.
Bathroom. I’ll go to the bathroom, and then I’ll sneak out of here. I’ll go home and pretend this never happened.
I pee and then wash up, dunking my head under the faucet and scrubbing my hair dry with a pink hand towel. My gaze falls to the counter, to a foil snake of condoms. Oh, thank God. Thank God I didn’t make that mistake, too.
&
nbsp; Get a grip on yourself, Max, I say silently.
You’ve been here before, and you don’t want to go back.
Everyone messes up from time to time. Maybe I’ve had a few more instances than others, but that doesn’t mean that I’m down for the count. This wasn’t falling off the wagon. It was just . . . a speed bump.
I open the bathroom door to find a toddler sucking his thumb and staring up at me, with his older sister—a teenager—standing just behind him. “Who the fuck are you?” she asks.
I don’t answer. I run past them, out the front door, down the driveway that does not have my car in it. I run all the way out of this suburban cul-de-sac in my boxers. At the juncture of the state highway, I throw on my clothes and dig in my pocket for my cell phone, but the battery’s dead. I keep running, certain that Sally and her children are going to chase me down in the minivan that was in the driveway. I don’t stop until I see a strip mall. All I need is a phone; I’ll call a taxi service to get me back to Quasimodo’s to pick up my car (which is, I hope, where I left it) and then I’ll take refuge at Reid’s house.
It’s not really my fault that the first place I find open is a restaurant whose proprietor is doing inventory on a Saturday morning. That the guy shakes his head when I ask to borrow the phone, and says I look like I’ve had a rough night. That he offers me, on the house, a drink.
Normally, we would have been home. After all, the progesterone shot had to be given between 7:00 and 7:15 each night—and it was easy enough to plan our evenings around that, since we didn’t have any spending money to go to a movie or out to dinner anyway. But Zoe had been invited to the wedding of two seniors who’d met in one of her group therapy classes at a nursing home. “If it wasn’t for me,” she’d said, “there wouldn’t even be a wedding.”