Pressure Drop

by Peter Abrahams

“Jason’s in charge.”

  “Good God.” Suze reached up and turned the spotlight a little.

  “Isn’t that skirt a bit short?” Nina asked.

  “I remember things you wore that didn’t even cover your ass.”

  “That was then.”

  “Tell me about it. There. How does that look?”

  Nina followed the blue beam to the exhibit that ran along the far wall. It was a sculptural installation, showing three children in striped Auschwitz clothing standing behind barbed wire. Everything, the children, their clothes, the wire, a hut in the background, was made from parts of a pink 1957 Cadillac Eldorado.

  “I couldn’t tell you,” Nina said. “Maybe the ’64 Chevy would be better. More universal.”

  “Don’t mock. The artist is brilliant. He’s going to be a household name someday.”

  “Like Henry Ford?”

  “And he’s gorgeous to boot.”

  “Yeah?”

  “But from Jason’s side of the tracks.”

  “Of course.”

  Suze climbed down from the ladder. She wore lots of makeup, lots of jewelry and a coiffure that might have been her hairdresser’s take on the barbed wire fence. But only partly hidden in all that were her eyes—amused, alive, sharp—eyes that a stranger might not have found comforting, but that Nina, who had known them for a long time and seen them in every possible mood, did.

  “Let’s eat,” Nina said.

  “Now?”

  “Now.”

  They had hot and sour soup at Wang’s. Suze drank Tsingtao. Nina had a glass of beaujolais, then another.

  “What’s up?” Suze said.

  “What makes you think something’s up?”

  “The air is thick with clues. Must I enumerate them?”

  “No.”

  Nina stirred her soup. “Do you ever think about having a baby, Suze?”

  “You know I don’t.”

  “I know you say you don’t. But do you?”

  “No.”

  “Never?”

  “No.”

  “Not late at night, or when you see a baby in a stroller or something?”

  “No, no, a thousand times no. What do you want from me?”

  “I think about it a lot lately.”

  Suze’s eyes narrowed. “Who’s the lucky fella?”

  “You know there’s no lucky fella.”

  “Then that’s that, absent immaculate conception.”

  “That’s what I’m looking into. Now they call it artificial insemination.” Nina described her visit to Dr. Berry.

  Suze picked up her beer bottle and drained what was left in one swallow. Then she said: “When was the last time you got laid?”

  “What has that got to do with anything?” The bartender turned to look at them.

  “It has a lot to do with it. There’s no man in your bed, you just turned thirty-nine, you read all this retro bullshit about biological clocks and the new conservatism, you deal with a bunch of shallow assholes every day of your life—it’s no surprise that all of a sudden you’re in a panic. I think you should go see Lisa’s therapist. She’s very good.”

  “I don’t need a therapist.” The bartender turned to look again. So did a Chinese man with green hair sitting a few tables away. “The problem’s objective, not subjective.”

  “And a baby will fix it?”

  “Why not? Is it so unnatural to want a baby?”

  “It would be perverse in your case. You’ve worked like a slave building that business, you’ve got a great reputation in certain circles, you’re going to be able to write your own ticket in a few years. Do you want to throw that all away for the pleasure of losing your figure and mopping up shit and puke all day?”

  “I wouldn’t have to give up anything.”

  “That’s twaddle and you know it.”

  “I could cut back a bit. We could build a little nursery on the second floor, where Rosie’s office is. She doesn’t need all that space.”

  “Now you’re going to talk nesting. You’re making me sick.”

  “What’s sick about it? I don’t want to be a teenager forever.”

  Suze went pale. “Let’s change the subject,” she said.

  But there was no other subject. Nina picked up the bill, Suze insisted on paying her half and they left a few minutes later, parting at Wang’s door; Suze headed for the Auschwitz Cadillac, Nina for home.

  She walked all the way. She’d been doing a lot of walking since Monday, but it didn’t seem to tire her. Jules let her in.

  “Nice night,” he said. She hadn’t noticed. There was liquor on his breath. She poured some for herself when she got inside her apartment.

  It was a nice apartment. It had cost her two hundred thousand dollars five years ago. The furnishings and rugs were nice too, and the art was nice as well, thanks to Suze. The Lifecycle was nice. The bed was nice. She lay in it, and pulled up the covers.

  Soon she was crying. She cried for a long time. She had never missed her mother more than she did that night.

  4

  The Human Fertility Institute was a marble-faced palace on the Upper East Side. It sported excrescences from various architectural periods and a sign attesting to its status as a national landmark. It had a leather-padded front door which Nina could barely force open and, in the lobby, an oil painting of a pink-cheeked man who might have been a nineteenth-century robber baron except that his suit was too modern and his chin too weak.

  A Christmas tree stood under the portrait. The people around it had drinks in their hands. The Chipmunks were singing their Christmas song, the one in which Alvin hopes for a hula hoop. It didn’t sound very danceable, but a few couples had rolled back a huge Persian rug and were dancing to it anyway. Nina approached a woman dressed in a nurse’s outfit. The woman turned from a long buffet table, dropping ice cubes into a glass of pink zinfandel.

  “I’ve got an appointment with Dr. Crossman,” Nina said.

  The woman raised her eyebrows. “You do?” Clink.

  Nina nodded. “Can you tell me where to find him?”

  “Did I call you?”

  “Not that I know,” Nina said.

  The woman sighed. “Second floor,” she said, gesturing with the wineglass. “Third door on the left.” Pink zin slopped over the rim and onto her white shoes. “Oopsie-doo,” she said.

  Dr. Crossman’s door said: RUSSELL R. CROSSMAN, M.D., DIRECTOR. It was half-open. Nina tapped on it, stepped inside and found herself alone in an outer office. She glanced at the VDT on the secretary’s desk. “List,” it said. “Mom—stockings. Benny—Prince CD? Jennifer—stockings. Joanne—stockings. Melissa—stockings?”

  “Puts and calls,” said a man’s voice. “That was your big idea, if I remember.” Nina looked through an inner doorway.

  A man sat at the kind of desk a good props department might have furnished for a Mussolini biography. On the wall behind him hung a photograph of the weak-chinned man wearing a white dinner jacket and standing beside a palm tree. The man at the desk had a slightly stronger chin and a neat mustache with a faint red tinge. He wore a chalk-striped banker’s suit, a silk rep tie and a green conical party hat with silver moons. “A big if,” he said into the telephone. He saw Nina. His eyes flickered up and down. “All right, all right,” he said. “I’ll take two. Bye.”

  He hung up the phone and looked at her.

  “Dr. Crossman?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I have an appointment.” She introduced herself.

  Dr. Crossman consulted an appointment book. “Not today,” he said. “All appointments were cancelled for today.”

  “No one told me.”

  “Someone should have. We’re really not open. It’s the Christmas party.”

  “I thought it might be the usual state of affairs.”

  “The usual state of affairs?”

  “At a fertility clinic,” Nina explained. Dr. Crossman’s brow furrowed. “It doesn’t matt
er.” The phone buzzed. Dr. Crossman took a honey-colored pastille from a tin box on the desk and stuck it in his mouth. The phone stopped buzzing. “The appointment was made last week,” Nina said.

  “Yes, I see it here,” said Dr. Crossman, sucking on the pastille. “But it’s been crossed out. The whole day is crossed out.” He turned the book around so she could see. “Moreover,” Dr. Crossman added, “this is not a fertility clinic. It is a research institute that takes human fertility as its subject.”

  “But you do perform artificial insemination.”

  He pointed a finger at her. “On qualified candidates,” he said. His fingers were long, thin and freckled.

  “Dr. Berry referred me.”

  “Yes, I see that too. And I have nothing but respect for Dr. Berry. But he doesn’t decide if you’re qualified. That is solely up to us.”

  “What are the criteria?”

  “They’re extensive. That’s what the preliminary interview is all about.”

  “Can we get started then? Since I’m here anyway.”

  Dr. Crossman felt his mustache with his long forefinger. The sight of the reddish hairs brushing the freckled skin gave Nina an inexplicable queasy feeling, reminding her of a time in early childhood when she had become nauseated while eating a baloney sandwich and listening to a story about a frog on the radio.

  Dr. Crossman looked at his watch, thin and gold, with no numbers. Perhaps that was why he spent such a long time studying it. “All right,” he said. “All right.” He went into the front office, returned with a file folder. Nina saw her name on it. He opened the file, leaned forward slightly in his chair to read it. His eyes moved back and forth. He looked every inch the careful and concerned physician, except for the party hat.

  “You’re thirty-nine,” he said, not looking up.

  “That’s right. Is there an age limit?”

  “Not carved in stone. It’s just one of the factors.” He took a pen from an inside pocket and wrote “39” on a blank sheet of paper. “Five feet eight,” he read aloud. “One hundred and thirty-seven pounds. Pulse sixty-two. Blood pressure one-twenty over ninety. General health excellent. Medical record good. Any major injuries?”

  “I tore ligaments in my knee once. Is that major?”

  Dr. Crossman glanced at her. “How did you do that?”

  “Playing field hockey.”

  “Did you have surgery?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who performed it?”

  “Dr. Hunneycutt.”

  “Walter was a good man,” said Dr. Crossman, rising. “Retired now.” He came around the desk. “Let me see.”

  “See what?”

  “The knee.”

  Nina stared at him. “Does my knee have something to do with my ability to have children?” Dr. Crossman didn’t notice her stare; he missed the edge in her tone too.

  “We have to know all we can about your general health,” he said. “It’s routine.”

  He stood over her. Nina raised the hem of her skirt an inch or two. Dr. Crossman bent over, peered at her scar. “Nice work.” He straightened, but before he did his gaze slid swiftly up her leg. Nina tugged her hem back down.

  Dr. Crossman sat back down at the desk, stuck another honey-colored pastille in his mouth, turned the pages of her medical record. He glanced up. “Both your parents are deceased?” The information seemed to make his tone more lively.

  “Yes.”

  “Any brothers or sisters?”

  “No.”

  Dr. Crossman wrote, “No: P’s, B’s, S’s.” He underlined it. “Who is your closest living relative?”

  “I have some cousins in California.”

  “First cousins?”

  “Distant. I’ve seen only one or two of them, and that was years ago.” Dr. Crossman drew a second line under “No: P’s, B’s, S’s.” “Does this have something to do with my qualifications for raising a child?” Nina asked.

  “It’s just part of our standard interview,” Dr. Crossman replied. “Do you have a will?”

  “No.”

  “Who would your heirs be if you did?”

  “Excuse me Dr. Crossman, but I don’t see the relevance of this.”

  “No?” He leaned toward her across the desk; she expected to smell honey, but detected tooth decay instead. “What if something happened to you, for example. Who would be responsible for the child?”

  Nina hadn’t thought about that. “Is it necessary to decide now?”

  “No. It’s just one of the factors. Are you a college graduate?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s your degree in?”

  “I’ve got a B.A. in French Literature.”

  “From where?”

  “Barnard.”

  “Do you remember your SAT scores?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Approximately?”

  “They were good. I don’t know the numbers.”

  “We can get hold of them, I suppose. Repeat the following in reverse order—five, seventeen, thirty-six, nine, twenty-three.”

  “Why?”

  He looked severe, as severe as a man could in a pointed green hat covered with silver moons. “It’s part of the interview, Ms. Kitchener.”

  “Twenty-three, nine, thirty-six, seventeen, five,” Nina said, before she forgot. “I don’t see that this applies.”

  He opened his desk drawer and took out a sheet of paper showing five different geometric figures. “Which one doesn’t belong?” he said.

  “That one. Are you testing my IQ, Dr. Crossman?”

  “Not exactly, Ms. Kitchener. But perhaps Dr. Berry didn’t explain to you that all HFI sperm is donated by men of exceptional accomplishment in their fields. I’m not giving away any corporate secrets when I tell you that more than a dozen of our donors are Nobel Prize winners—and not just in physics, chemistry and medicine, we’re more broadminded than that. One of our donors won the Nobel Prize for literature.” He paused for Nina to ask who. When she didn’t, he went on. “Naturally, I’m not at liberty to reveal any names.”

  “It wasn’t Henrik Pontoppidan, by any chance?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The winner in 1917.” That was all Nina knew about him. Henrik Pontoppidan had been one of her father’s favorite names, along with Mongo Santamaria and Cotton Mather. He had invoked them to record surprise or disgust, the way other people swear.

  “The technology did not exist at that time,” Dr. Crossman said. “But I assure you that our man is rather more celebrated than the one you refer to. My point is that while we are not really testing you, it is one of the goals of HFI, given the caliber of our donors, that their …” Dr. Crossman searched for the remainder of the subordinate clause.

  “That their seed not be wasted?” Nina asked.

  “Precisely.” Dr. Crossman’s long fingers moved toward the box of pastilles, reconsidered, retreated. “It says here you’re president of something called Kitchener and Best. What is that?”

  “We’re publishing consultants.”

  “Successful ones?”

  “Are you thinking of employing us, Dr. Crossman?”

  He gave her the stern look again, then decided she was making a joke and briefly shaped his lips in the form of a smile. The rest of his face retained the stern look. “What were your personal earnings last year?”

  “No concern of yours, Dr. Crossman.” Nina stood up. “I don’t think this is going to work,” she said.

  To her surprise, Dr. Crossman rose too, anxiously brushing his hair. His hand encountered the party hat. “Christ,” he said, taking it off and dropping it into a wastebasket. “Don’t be hasty, Ms. Kitchener. We have to have some idea of your financial status. First, because our services are not free. Second, because we have to know that any resultant progeny will be properly raised, at least in a material sense.”

  Nina, on her way to the door, paused. “How much do your services cost?”

  “Five hundred dol
lars. Seven-fifty for a laureate.”

  “Do they get royalties?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Are the donors paid too?”

  “That information is confidential.”

  “Does the cost include the birth?”

  “Oh no. Our clients use their own obstetricians. Please sit down, Ms. Kitchener.” Nina sat. So did Dr. Crossman. “We can refer you to an obstetrician if you wish,” he said.

  “I have Dr. Berry.” Nina didn’t want those long, freckled fingers anywhere near her.

  “Jim is good.” Dr. Crossman took a form from his drawer. Printed on it were rectangular boxes in the shape of an inverted pyramid. “Just one more thing,” he said, writing, “Nina Kitchener” in the top box and handing the sheet to her. “Fill in your family tree as far back as you can. Include maiden names, countries of origin, ethnicity, causes of death, if known.”

  Nina filled in the boxes. Mother: Alice Landers. Born: Syracuse, N.Y. Caucasian. Died of pneumonia. It was true: she had caught pneumonia near the end. Father: John Kitchener. Born: Chicago. Caucasian. Died of an accident. That was true too: weakened from chemotherapy, he had fallen down the stairs a few days before his death. Neither “breast cancer” nor “colon cancer” appeared in the rectangular boxes. Nina didn’t want Dr. Crossman to worry about risking his prize-winning sperm on an odds-on cancer carrier.

  She had fewer details for the lower boxes. Her mother’s maiden name: was it Turley or Tolmey? And deeper in the past, Kitchener had been Kupstein or Kapstein or something like that: an upwardly mobile German-Jewish immigrant had picked the grandest English name beginning with K that he knew; not only a status seeker, her father had once said, but a bigamist as well, running from the law in his native land. But Nina didn’t know exactly what the name had been or when the change had been made, so she omitted mention of it, simply putting question marks at the roots of her family tree.

  “Dr. Crossman?” The nurse who liked pink zinfandel was at the door. Her eyes were sparkling. “Sorry to interrupt, but we’re cutting the cake now.”

  “I’ll be down in a minute.” The nurse gave Nina a big, drunken smile and went away. Nina handed Dr. Crossman the form. He glanced at it. “Well then, Ms. Kitchener, is there anything more you’d like to know?”

  It seemed to Nina that he’d been the one doing most of the finding out. “Would I get the donor of my choice?”