by Suzy Becker
“ . . . and now you must have some questions for me.” The eyebrows were on Steve. Steve looked at me.
My questions were so unfamilial. Bankerly. “Well, how often can Steve make a, a deposit?”
“We recommend waiting two days in between specimen collections.”
I got out my calendar. “Will we have enough after eight collections? We had been thinking twelve”—a year’s worth of tries—“since he lives in Australia.”
“It all depends how much Stephen produces, and the quality of the specimen.” The two men exchanged looks; Steve’s eyebrows were junior–bushy league. “We recommend at least two collections.” He looked through the folder. “Are we preparing these for intracervical or intrauterine insemination?” He paused. “Never mind, we’ve gotten ahead of ourselves here. Let’s have you meet with the doctor, Suzy, and we’ll have Stephen produce his specimen, then we’ll know exactly what we’re talking about.”
He handed me a folding chair and motioned toward the hallway as he led Steve off to the collection room. I unfolded the chair and set up with my back to the lab, angling for a glimpse into the milky-blue beyond. Ten minutes went by, nothing doing. Then a kindly-looking old man with wispy white hair came out of the office/collection area. I half stood to let him by, he half bowed in my direction, and we nearly banged heads. “I’m Dr. Felton. You’re Suzy?” I nodded. “I’ve just spoken with Stephen. I left him in there to—” his voice trailed off as he glanced up and down the hallway. “Well, this looks pretty private,” he said, unfolding himself a chair.
“Stephen and I went over all of his test results and his medical history. Has he shared any of this?” he held up the questionnaire. I nodded and he went on, “Then you’re aware Stephen”—is gay. Yes, and I—“had an undescended testicle?” And now so is everyone in hearing distance.
Steve had actually mentioned it, under the heading of things he didn’t know until he had to fill out that questionnaire. “It was fixed,” I said, “operated on when he was one.”
My intimate knowledge impressed Dr. Felton enough for him to confide in me, “I have met some women who are so picky about their donors—I’ve been tempted to ask them, ‘Did you bother to ask your husband whether he was fertile before you married him?’” I smiled understandingly. I wasn’t one of those women.
Dr. Felton leafed though the rest of Steve’s packet, making passing reference to some heart and thyroid disease—all very common within an extended family. “I think we’re all set here,” he said when he got to the end. He smiled, rose, did another half bow in closing, then walked back to wherever it was he had come from. The heating system rumbled on in his wake—the HVAC opposite of the whir of a cryogenic cooling system—then rumbled off after he’d disappeared.
I kept my eyes fixed on the opening, willing Steve to reappear. It didn’t take him this long at home! I was studying the plaques above the doorway when Steve walked through, shaking his head. We refrained from further conversation until we were in the privacy of the elevator. “Well”—I couldn’t tell from looking at him—“how was it?”
“A blond Britney Spears type with a caveman—an unattractive caveman—”
“They only had one video?”
“No, it was the newest one. The doctor recommended it.”
“Wait, you don’t think he screens—”
“Mmm. It would seem he does. Well, I hope it went all right. It’s all very odd, really. I’ve never had to fuss about these things before . . . ” He zipped up his coat. “And how was your interview? ‘Stephen, you’ve had sex with men,’” he imitated Dr. Felton halfheartedly. “Does Suzy know?”
“Nope, nothing on that. He asked if I knew about your undescended testicle.”
“Good God.”
The lab didn’t have Steve’s sperm analysis the next morning. The receptionist picked up on my urgency. “Is your husband going in for chemo, Mrs. Dillon?” We were new to the agency family.
“Oh, no, he’s just going back to Australia. We’re trying to get his appointments set up.” She had no further questions. That afternoon she called back. “Ten dense vials with 96% motility fresh, 87% frozen,” I repeated aloud, although Steve had heard through the phone, and threw my arm around his waist.
STUDLY STEVE
The receptionist scheduled appointments, one every three days through the end of December.
We called Lorene with the good news. “So are we celebrating?” she asked.
“Steve’s spending the night at Bruce’s. They’re going porn shopping. You and I were going to decorate the tree . . . ”
It was our first Christmas together but none of it was shaping up the way I had imagined. It was all my imagination’s fault: People in retail (Lorene, for example) don’t celebrate Christmas, they survive it. She had to work late, trying to keep up with the framing orders. And people from Australia (Steve, for instance) don’t care about making cookies or hanging stockings by a fireplace—it’s 95 degrees in Melbourne this time of year.
That night, Lorene and I didn’t get to decorate the tree. We had a quiet dinner and toasted “to Daddy’s sperm.”
“Just think,” Lorene said, “this time next year, you could be pregnant.”
“But we still have one more try while Steve’s here . . . ” This is the kind of thinking that sets someone up for disappointment.
I picked Steve’s head out, bobbing toward me, almost a block away. Funny how you can go years without seeing someone, then miss him when you’re apart for a night. “Porn mission accomplished?” I asked, pointing to the backpack. He nodded.
This time a woman from the lab greeted us at the elevators. There wasn’t a proper reception area or a receptionist. She instructed us to wait while she disappeared back into the lab.
Steve whispered, “Strange characters, this place.” I nodded. She reappeared and led Steve down the hall.
Steve’s second deposit went much faster. In fact, it took him longer to pick a pound of handmade chocolates on the way home.
“You know,” Steve said after we were back in the car, “I think I’m going to take your friend Mako up on her offer, do the apartment-cat-sitting while she’s gone.”
“I thought you were allergic to cats.”
“Actually, I’ve done pretty well with Mark’s cat.” He paused. “I feel like I have so much more energy—I think it’s just that I’m more of a city person.” I had noticed a difference in his walk. “I’ll give you gals a break for a few days.”
“Sure, makes sense. Of course.”
PROBABLE CAUSES FOR SPRING IN STEVE’S STEP
Three weeks is a long time to be a houseguest, or to have a houseguest, for that matter, and we still had three to go.
Steve went into the living room to call Bruce once we were home. He came back into the kitchen to make his pre-dinner tea and hang out while I was cooking. “Bruce invited me to the Cape after Christmas.” The Cape’s not the city. I didn’t say anything.
“You okay, honey?”
“Yeah, I guess I just thought . . . ” Thought what? Thought you’d like living here? You’d want to help get ready for Christmas? You wouldn’t become best friends with my best friend?
“Look, it’s a bit tricky . . . I’m trying to sort things out. I like working on my novel, but it’s not like I have a deadline or anything. This is my vacation. And, you know, if everything works out, I’ve got to figure out how I’m going to do this once a year. I want to feel like something more than a visitor . . . ” He swallowed a sip of tea and the mug amplified his sigh.
“You’re right,” I said. I stopped chopping. “Sorry.”
“What can I do to help?” He had his Enya CD poised above the CD drawer.
“Not that!” I said. He put on Emmylou Harris’s Wrecking Ball and started doing the dishes.
We were late for our third deposit. Steve was packing up for Mako’s. It was the Friday before a Christmas Eve Monday, the height of the holiday ramp-up. “Another strange thing
about this place,” I said in a low voice as we were getting off the elevator. “No holiday decorations.”
Steve shrugged. “Maybe it’s out of respect—you know, the chemo, or the noncelebrants in the ‘family.’”
A new woman in a terry cloth turban and lab coat handled our intake. “Mrs. Baker?” I’m sure you reserve your precision handling for the specimens. “Mr. Dillon, right this way.”
I kissed Steve good-bye. “Call me!”
There was a message from Steve on the home machine. The deposit had gone fine, but they had stuck him with more blood tests on his way out.
Truth was, there was hardly time to notice Steve was gone before it was time to pick him up at the train on Christmas Eve afternoon. I set him up with wrapping supplies in his room.
“Merry Christmas?” Lorene yelled up. I half expected to find her collapsed on the couch. She stood at the bottom of the stairs, draped in pine roping. “They gave me a really good price.” Lorene had the roping wrapped in lights and hanging above the kitchen windows over the table by the time my mother and her dog arrived, followed by my older sister Robin and her dog, and my younger sister Meredith and her husband, Jonathan. Seven of us sat around the table and raised our glasses to a chorus of “Merry Christmas!” Lorene raised hers a second time: “To my new family!” To Steve? Our baby plan? It took several seconds to compute. She meant my family. It felt as if she’d been a part of it forever.
Steve’s third deposit brought our total to thirty vials. I caught Mecke “in” on December 26th. A fourth deposit would kick us up to a higher storage fee. “You may want to consider it,” Mecke suggested. “The values for your IUI specimens are above our minimums, but not by much. Perhaps we should have waited longer between collections, but Stephen is a mature donor and we all knew going into this . . . ”
I was ovulating again. Maybe, by some miracle, we’d never need an intrauterine insemination; maybe we wouldn’t need any of it. “I think we’re done.”
“All set, then. Let’s see, his last deposit was December 21st, 2001. We can release this, provided we have Stephen’s results, after June 21st, 2002.” Steve would need to be retested for hep B, hep C, and HIV, which have a six-month incubation period.
My cycle was off. My period had been late after our first try. I wasted three ovulation predictor kits—I’d either missed my surge or never surged at all. We tried a couple more times before Steve went to the Cape, but I pinned less hope on the whole thing. Maybe that was good . . .
We took Steve to Vermont for his last weekend. We showed him the place where we were going to have our wedding reception. It could have been that the end of the visit was near, or maybe we really had figured out how to live together. We read and wrote in front of the fireplace where Lorene and I would be married. Drank wine, played cards, and talked late into the night. The snow started falling our very last night, and we sent Steve outside.
We watched him from the kitchen windows; he was looking up, big flakes landing on his eyelashes, like a kid who had never seen snow.
I drove Steve to the airport the next day. The ride was quiet, just the two of us. We held hands. I didn’t know how to thank him. I didn’t know when I’d see him again. We entered the mouth of the tunnel that would dump us out at the airport, and Steve said, “This feels really strange. I’m kind of afraid to go home. Afraid I won’t fit back in—not with Mark, I mean—with the life . . . ”
I searched for something to say. “You’ve got the Australian Open coming up.” We both love tennis. “That’ll pull you in . . . You can come back. Anytime.” We were pulling up to the curb. We barely had time to hug before Homeland Security shooed me away; Steve was still adjusting his backpack when I looked back in the rearview mirror.
He called the next day to say he was home. I didn’t bother interrupting his life a week later to tell him I got my period. It was March when we heard from him next; he’d weathered a few severe withdrawal episodes, but he was comfortably reimmersed in his Australian life.
On May 28th, we met with our gynecologist. It was an 8:00 a.m. appointment. All the women in the waiting room were pregnant, shiny, and maternal without their coffee. My breasts shrank just looking at them.
The gynecologist scribbled notes while I updated her on our project: two unsuccessful at-home attempts, sperm in storage, sperm release coming up at the end of the month.
“Next month,” Lorene reminded me. I forgot there were still a few days left in May.
She looked up. “I’m going to set you up for infertility treatment with Benjamin Rankin over at Boston IVF.”
Infertility treatment? IVF? “But I thought everything—I thought you said the labs and everything were okay.”
“They are.” She leaned forward. “You’re thirty-nine. You’ll like Benjamin; I love him. He has been doing this for years. We could start you on Clomid, but I would rather you talk to Ben first.”
“We can still try at home . . . ”
“And we can still do your IUI here. It really doesn’t change anything. We’re trying to get you pregnant, right?” Lorene and I both nodded. “Schedule your appointment with Boston IVF, and call here when your OPK’s positive at the end of—when’s your sperm available?—end of June, and you’ll come in, both of you if you want, for your insemination the next day.”
I spent the next couple of hours vetting Dr. Rankin—a very well-respected older gentleman, but not known for his comfort level working with people in “[♀]ur situati[♀]n.” A friend of mine who’d had twins through IVF canvassed her friends and gave me another name that vetted out. His first available appointment was two months away. Maybe we won’t need it. Lorene and I agreed to put the whole thing on dry ice until we got back from our honeymoon.
We exchanged our vows June 1st in front of the fireplace, our family, and just a few friends. There were little strawberries, champagne, and pictures afterward, and then, just married, we drove to the reception. The two of us walked through the empty restaurant to the terrace overlooking the garden, where all seventy-five guests erupted in applause and cheers. There were toasts and songs, dinner and dancing until after midnight. We have said to each other at least a hundred times since, “We got to have the wedding we always wanted.”
Post-honeymoon, we were back on the insemination train. Timing-wise, everything was lining up: I was due to ovulate around the 28th; Steve’s sperm would be released from quarantine June 22nd. But we ran into a problem. Only the director could authorize the release, and Tom Mecke wasn’t returning my calls.
On July 1st, I took my ovulating self to the sperm bank, armed with Steve’s HIV, hep B, and hep C test results. The Turban informed me that Steve’s lab work was incomplete, and, furthermore, per the agreement I had signed, which she flashed at me, Steve’s frozen sperm would be released only to a licensed physician. And, before I could ask, she announced that Tom Mecke was not on the premises—not behind the milky-blue doors, not watching videos in the collection room.
He returned my “call” nine days later. He was missing results for two tests, tests we’d discussed before Steve left in December. These tests weren’t available in Australia and Tom had agreed to exempt us.
“Tom”—I was too worn down to be angry—“I have already missed one cycle. I would be willing to assume the risk; is there something I can sign? Steve has been tested six ways from Sunday—”
“Suzy, you can assume the risk for yourself, but I must protect the baby.”
Steve’s doctor found an offshore lab where she could overnight his blood, and we had the missing results a couple days before my next ovulation, which was shaping up to fall on the weekend.
Our gynecologist’s practice, however, was not set up to accommodate weekend inseminations. Come September they would be able to refer weekend IUIs to the hospital, but that was neither here nor there, the nurse explained to Lorene. My doctor would not authorize an insemination until I repeated my Day 3 labs.
Lorene had had a few hours to g
et used to the idea by the time she told me. “Maybe it’s all for the best; we go to Boston IVF next week.” We had been so busy not getting pregnant, the appointment had snuck up on us.
The waiting room at Boston IVF was sleek, hushed, empty, actually. The dark carpeting, glossy light-wood furniture, and warm lights confirmed that you had entered the country’s most experienced fertility center. And the fact that nobody else was in it wasn’t the least bit off-putting; it wasn’t a restaurant. Everyone was in their proper place, everything going according to plan. Within minutes we were escorted to our destination, and whoever came after us would find everything just as we had.
Dr. Penzias stood to shake our hands. He had an air of relaxed optimism that I sourced at the slight upturn of his nose and corners of his mouth. I wondered briefly why he (a bachelor somewhere between Lorene’s age and mine) had chosen the field, but in terms of intimate information, these intakes are never an even exchange. The thank-you cards and baby photos on the hallway bulletin board were all I needed.
Within twenty minutes, we had a plan: three in-office inseminations, and if they (not we) were unsuccessful, Dr. Penzias would argue for a diagnosis of infertility (three short of the six inseminations required by most insurance companies) on the basis of a blocked right tube and my estrogen levels, which were good for my age, but my age, face it, was in the toilet. Then we would try hormones—follicle-stimulating hormone injections—and if we hadn’t achieved pregnancy after three cycles with hormones, we agreed to discuss in vitro fertilization. It would have been rude not to agree to discuss IVF; it was Dr. Penzias’s specially, after all. The last point of the plan: We would have Steve’s sperm transferred to the storage facility at Boston IVF ASAP.