“Would you be mad if I didn’t go?” I asked.
“I’d be disappointed,” Steven said. “It’s not like we have a lot of fun together anymore.” Touché. “But I’m not taking responsibility for the decision. It’s your body, it’s your choice.”
I thought back to the weightlessness I’d felt at the Oscars, the easy love between us in those days. Being together used to be more than enough for me—it was everything. When had that changed? In weighing all the risks of fertility treatments, I had willfully ignored the risks to our relationship.
“Okay,” I said, “I’ll go. But the doctor said I have to have a wheelchair at the curb at the airport to take me to the gate and one in New York to take me to the taxi. And I’m not leaving the hotel room except to go to the ceremony.” I had chosen my marriage over my obsession. Sort of.
Dr. Franklin handed me a black-and-white picture of the three embryos that had grown in the incubator. Magnified to the size of a quarter, each looked like a cluster of soap bubbles surrounded by a fuzzy gray corona. Was I supposed to think of these as my children? Were they anything more than a lab technician’s sleight of hand? The doctor pointed to the best of the bunch—four symmetrical cells, each containing the biological flotsam to transform it into a person.
Usually the clinic let embryos develop longer, but we’d moved the process up in order to catch our flight to New York. “We only recently started waiting the extra time to do the transfer,” Dr. Franklin assured us. “It’s not clear that it makes a difference.”
I handed the photograph to Steven, who stowed it in his wallet. “If this works give that back,” I said. “Otherwise I never want to see it again.”
I lay on the exam table, and Dr. Franklin slid the embryos inside me. I felt suffused with light. For a single golden moment I knew—I knew—I was pregnant. Then the doubts flooded in.
“How do you feel?” Steven asked, just as he had the last time.
“Maybe,” I replied.
I spent the next thirty-six hours in the Marriott Hotel in Times Square. Although I’d once lived in this city, I told none of my old friends I was here. A few minutes before the awards, I carefully slipped on a floor-length, hip-skimming burgundy dress and strappy, architecturally high sandals. I dusted my collar bone with glitter and twirled, ever so delicately, in front of Steven.
He beamed. “You look beautiful,” he said, as I leaned on his arm like an invalid. “Let’s go.”
The News and Documentary Emmys are not among those given out on the prime-time show. They were presented at a separate ceremony, by newsmakers and politicians, all male and nearly all white—people like George Pataki, Alan Dershowitz, and a commentator from the The NewsHour whom, inexplicably (and erroneously), the evening’s host referred to three times as “a handsome guy.” PBS, go figure. The statuettes themselves were doled out by sequin-sheathed models—apparently, the Television Academy’s idea of equal opportunity. When Steven’s category came up, I played it cool, looking straight ahead while clutching his knee under the table. That night, however, the name they called wasn’t his. We smiled and clapped politely as some network producer thanked his third-grade teacher. Later, everyone from HBO—both the winners and the I’m-honored-just-to-be-nominated—retired to the revolving bar on the hotel’s top floor. I gazed out the window, sipping sparkling water as the skyline slipped by, detached from the conversation around me. What had I done? I wished I hadn’t come; I was glad I did.
Ten days later I would get the results of my blood test. I wasn’t pregnant.
“Have you considered donor eggs?” asked Dan at our postmortem visit. He’d returned from vacation and reclaimed his place as our primary physician. “Our success rates are over sixty percent.”
What was with these guys? They dangled IVF in front of us and after it failed—and we’d shelled out the cash—said I was a bad candidate for it. What’s more, after implying that a genetic link to our baby was so important that it was worth going to physical and financial extremes to attain, they whipped around and implied that the link, at least my link, was no big deal: the key to motherhood was carrying the child, not conceiving it. I wondered whether, if my problem had been a wonky uterus, he’d be insinuating that the vessel didn’t matter—anyone could grow a baby—it was the egg that made the mom. It was as if donor eggs were part of a continuum, another “cure” for infertility rather than a huge psychological leap.
I shook my head. Science and me, we were through. “What about trying on our own?” I asked.
“I’d put your chances at about one in three hundred," he replied in that gentle voice of his. Then after a moment: “Of course, there’s also adoption.”
I felt hollow inside, completely scooped out. I had friends like Margaretta who’d adopted and who, I knew, were eager for me to see the light. But Steven wasn’t sure he could handle the potential challenge—”I’m not saying it never works out, but being given up by your mother is a hard thing. I’m not sure I have the strength and wisdom to deal with it”—and I couldn’t make the case for it. Adoption still seemed compensatory to me, like a last choice rather than the best one. As long as that was true, as long as I held out the dream of bearing our child myself, I couldn’t pursue it.
“We don’t recommend any particular agencies," Dan added, “but there are a number of good ones in the city. If you decide that’s what you want to do, call and we can get you a list.”
That afternoon, leaving the clinic, I felt sprung. No more shots! No more doctors! No more waiting rooms! By now it was October, a full year since I’d started the Clomid. A year of my life gone. I’d hardly noticed the seasons change. The sky as we walked toward the car was gray and stippled. During college, when I’d worked as a lifeguard, I’d learned to read the weather in the clouds; these predicted rain. “Curdled sky, not twenty-four hours dry,” I said, half to myself.
Steven looked at me. “What?” he asked.
“Nothing.” We walked on silently, not touching. My exuberance began to fade. We weren’t having a baby. We might never have a baby. “I blame myself for this,” I said, my voice trembling.
Steven sighed. “You have to accept the choices you made, Peg.”
I whirled on him. “You weren’t supposed toagree! You were supposed to hug me and say it would be all right.”
“I can’t,” he said, irritably. “I’m sorry. I can’t say something just to make you feel better. That would discount how bad I feel. Thisis partly your fault. You made the decision early on in our marriage not to talk about having children. Okay, it’s my fault, too. I could’ve pushed you harder. But that’s the choice I made and I’ll have to live with it.”
“Are you trying to make me feel worse?” I said.
“I’m just saying we have to take responsibility for our actions.”
“But if we’d started earlier, I might have found out that I had cancer while I was pregnant. Pregnancy might have made the cancer worse. I might have had to abort. I might have died.”
“That’s not why we didn’t discuss it.” I knew he was right, that our situation was a confluence of chance and choice. Admitting that, though, would have overwhelmed me with regret, as if I’d lived my whole life wrong. It was easier to be angry with Steven than to confront my own mistakes.
“I can’t believe this,” I said. I leaned against an apartment building, watched a woman roll by with a double-wide stroller. "I don’t know what to do.”
Steven’s voice softened a little, whether out of affection or exhaustion I wasn’t sure. “I don’t think we should do anything right now. I think we should wait awhile and then discuss it. And although I don’t like what it’s doing to us, I guess we should go back to having fertility sex. I don’t care what Dan said—that’s the only thing so far that’s worked.”
“Really?” I said. “You’d do that?”
“Yes, but P, you have to care about something else besides getting pregnant. We have to have a life as well.”
�
��Okay,” I said, sniffling a little. “I will.”
He looked at me sharply.
“Seriously,” I insisted, crossing my heart. “I promise.”
6
SHIKATAGANAI
Perched on the back of a mint green Vespa, I serpentined through Roppongi, Tokyo’s Westerners’ ghetto as well as its nightly wet dream for sexually deprived white males with an Asian fetish. Miniskirted Japanese lovelies trawl clubs with names like Gas Panic for Caucasian boyfriends. Filipinas with a yen for yen cozy up to guys who could never land a date back home.
I had met the man whose waist I clung to—a tall, shaven-headed American—about thirty seconds earlier. He was a friend of a friend, a fellow journalist who’d phoned me for a drink within moments of my arrival from the airport. When he pulled up in front of International House, a residence for visiting scholars where I was spending the next two months, with an extra helmet in tow, I thought, Why not? and hopped on.
I was in Tokyo on a grant, reporting a story on young Japanese women who were rejecting marriage and motherhood. Well into their thirties, they lived at home with their parents, paying no rent, coming and going as they pleased while Mom cooked their meals and did the laundry. With no living expenses, they splurged on Louis Vuitton, Bulgari, Fendi, Prada. Their spending sprees were keeping the economy afloat, but their refusal to buckle down and make babies was causing a crisis. Japan’s birthrate was among the lowest in the world; soon there wouldn’t be enough young workers to support the pensions and health care costs of the rapidly aging population. Everyone—politicians, economists, the media—blamed these women, whom they bluntly referred to as “parasite singles.”
I had been to Japan before, but always with Steven, who sometimes worked with Japanese TV. Although he doesn’t speak the language, he knows his Tokyo. I’d never so much as gone for a walk by myself. Nor did I want to; few of the city’s narrow, twisting streets have names, and the addresses are based on when a building was built rather than where it’s located. So number 3 could be next door to number 165. Locals rarely refer to addresses anyway. When scheduling an interview, they’d faxed me a map and directions based on landmarks: take the number 4 exit from the subway, look for the police kiosk and turn right, walk until you see a 7-Eleven and turn left. It was just as well; since I was illiterate in Japanese, I wouldn’t have been able to read street signs.
Steven was supposed to be with me on this trip, too, but he had just started a new film and couldn’t get away. He told me to go anyway, to have an adventure on my own. It would be the first time in nine years we’d been separated for more than a few days, but a break didn’t seem like a bad idea. We’d been back at “fertility sex" for four months, and whenever the time drew near we would begin to argue. Not just to argue, but to flay one another raw. He accused me of breaking my promise, of treating him like a sperm bank with legs. He threatened to go on strike. “You’re not having a relationship if this is all you care about, Peg,” he said. “I want to have a baby, too, but I want to have a life more.”
That made me frantic; I needed him, or at least needed his semen. I would swear again to stop being obsessive, even offer, theoretically, to skip a month of trying. I’d tell him he was right about whatever had sparked that month’s battle, anything, anything to convince him to come to bed. Rather than mocking Babyfever, I now sympathized with her. Hell, I had become her.
I planned my trip both to ensure we would be together when I ovulated and to keep Steven from realizing I was doing so. My flight to Tokyo took off about a week after February’s try. Claiming I would miss him terribly, I proposed a rendezvous in Hawaii (about halfway between us) three weeks later. I then suggested he join me in Tokyo about a month after that, when my reporting would be largely done, so we could salvage a week or so of sightseeing before I came home. Even I knew I was being pathological. It was insanity to meet in Hawaii. I didn’t even want to. It would jeopardize my research and his production schedule. But what if that was the only month for the rest of my life that I would be able to get pregnant? What if this was the only way we could have a baby? That was ludicrous, I’d tell myself. Wasn’t it?
Inflicting your Western Otherness on Japan’s homogeneity can feel like an act of violence. The culture pushes back, resists the assault, reminds you that you are firmly and forever an outsider. Not American or European or Canadian, but a generic, all-purpose gaijin—a foreigner—free of expectations, divorced from consequence, treated like a capricious child. In that state, time can feel suspended along with the roles and rules of life back home. It’s liberating in a way, perhaps too much so. I was relieved to escape my embattled marriage, to avoid the standoffs over what to do next. Being in Tokyo was like being twenty-five again without the worries, now so quaint, over a fledgling career or a noncommittal boyfriend.
Which brings me back to the man on the Vespa. We zipped under the elevated freeway and sped past Almond, the frothy pink bakery that is Roppongi’s central meeting spot. I pressed my cheek against his back to avoid the biting wind and thought, Is this me? Is this me riding on an Italian scooter with a man I don’t know when my husband is five thousand miles away? Is this me alone in a strange city, in a strange country where I can’t speak the language? Is this really me?
I didn’t have to mention to this man that I was married. I could have played out the fantasy, convinced myself that it didn’t really count since I was so far from home. How easy it would have been to start over, how sweet to be free, just for an evening, of the baggage of my relationship. Although I would soon prove myself capable of any number of self-deceptions, however, being Lost in Translation wasn’t one of them. Despite our troubles, I loved Steven, and I brought his name into the evening’s conversation with almost Tourette-like frequency. Whether it was that or some other disconnect, the tryst sputtered within twenty minutes. The man didn’t object when I offered to walk back alone.
My room at “I-House” was modest, dormlike: a lumpy single bed, a beat-up desk, a chair, a TV, and a sink with a mirror. Toilets and showers were down the hall. A sliding glass door led to a small balcony overlooking a snowy Japanese garden. A sign in the hallway warned against leaving “personal items” outside because “the crows might make mischief with them.” Ignoring that fractured advice, I stowed a three-pound bag of tangerines in the corner nearest the door. An hour later, I saw it sail across the garden clutched in a black bird’s claws.
My routine during those first days was ascetic, sometimes lonely. After my interviews, which because I needed an interpreter took twice as long as usual, I would return to my room with take-out sushi and watch the English-language movie channel on TV. For two weeks Rocky played nightly. I had the Burgess Meredith part down cold. ("Like the guy says, you’re gonna eat lightning and you’re gonna crap thunder.”) Sometimes I would wander down the hall to visit my new colleague, Doug, another homesick journalist. I didn’t have much energy for anything else. I couldn’t seem to shake my jet lag. I remained perpetually, deep-in-my-bones tired. Suspiciously so.
Sometime, just for a laugh, try buying a pregnancy test in a country where you don’t speak the language. I pretended to rock a baby and was offered diapers. I pantomimed a swollen stomach and was given antacid. I considered making a cruder gesture, but figured that would probably get me a pack of condoms. Finally, the pharmacist rustled up an English speaker; by then I was so humiliated that I slunk out of the store without asking her to translate the test’s instructions. No matter—two pink lines are two pink lines in any language. I didn’t even really need to go through the ritual—I knew the signs; I was five weeks pregnant.
I was also jubilant. I’d done it. I had beaten the odds. I danced a victory jig on top of my bed, holding the plastic stick aloft. “Screw those infertility jerks,” I crowed. “They know nothing.”
I tucked away the test as a souvenir for the baby (whom, I was sure, would be thrilled to have Mom’s old, dried-up pee) and called Steven across the Pacific.
&nb
sp; “Are you sure?” he asked, incredulous.
“Of course I am. Do you think I should come home?”
“It’s up to you. I’m sure there are English-speaking doctors there.”
I considered: I’d rather be under Risa’s care, but that would mean more flying during the first trimester, and I wasn’t convinced that was safe. I wanted to be with Steven, but not back in the crossfire of our marriage.
“I suppose people have babies here all the time,” I finally said. “I guess I’ll stay.”
He said he would cancel the Hawaii trip (my pretense of romance hadn’t fooled him) and buy a ticket to Tokyo instead. He could be there by the pregnancy’s ninth week.
Then he changed the subject. Or at least that’s how I remember it. Steven recalls telling me repeatedly to stay on an even keel, not to dwell on either best or worst case scenarios. That could well be right. Maybe it was distance and isolation, an insatiable need for reassurance, or simply his refusal to indulge my ping-ponging moods that made it seem like he expressed neither enthusiasm nor much interest, that, over subsequent weeks he barely mentioned the pregnancy again. Either way I know this much is true: I couldn’t forget it for a minute.
Instead of him, I confided in Doug, who listened as well as he could from the foreign land of a twenty-five-year-old male. He brought me a pot of spring buttercups to celebrate—something that grew and bloomed. When I told him about the power of poultry products, he dropped off meals of teriyaki chicken and sweet omelet sushi, just in case they’d help even after conception. After a while the I-House staff began to gossip about us, even transferred one of Steven’s 7 A.M. calls to Doug’s room when I didn’t answer my phone. (I was in the shower at the time.) They weren’t entirely wrong. Although our relationship was beyond reproach, at that time Doug felt like the closest thing to a husband I had.
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