The Believers

by Zoe Heller

  This evening, as she stood greenly by the elevators, waiting for Mike to check the mailbox, the elevator doors opened and a middle-aged Filipino woman in knee socks and plastic sandals stepped out. “Hello, Mrs. Mee,” Karla said. “How are you?”

  The woman looked at her with a bloodhound’s expression of jowly suffering. “Terrible,” she said, shaking her head slowly. “Terr-i-bul.”

  “Oh, dear,” Karla cocked her head in concern. “I’m sorry.”

  Mrs. Mee, who lived with her three grown-up children and her husband in the apartment next door to Karla’s, was a woman of baroque sorrows—a martyr not only to her ingrate family and her poorly paid job at a Manhattan nail salon, but also to a host of chronic ailments including back pain, asthma, and angina.

  “At work today, the air-conditioning was off,” Mrs. Mee said, “and the nail polish got in my throat so bad I couldn’t breathe. I said to them—”

  Mike appeared now. He stepped in front of Karla, as if to physically shield her from Mrs. Mee’s complaint. “Hey, Mrs. Mee,” he said, “I’m sorry, but Karla can’t stop to chat. Her dad had a stroke this morning. She’s been at the hospital all afternoon. She needs to get inside and rest.”

  “Oh!” Mrs. Mee said, excited by the bad news, and at the same time a little offended at having her own misery bested. “Sure, sure. Go on then.” She patted Karla on the wrist. “I talk to you tomorrow.”

  Karla and Mike rode the elevator to the fourth floor and walked down the echoing corridor to their apartment in silence. Once they were inside, Mike sat down at the kitchen table to examine the mail, and Karla went into the living room to check the answering machine. There were no messages. She stood for a moment in the darkness, looking idly around the room. Even in soft evening light, there was something off-puttingly austere and hygienic about her apartment. She had made considerable efforts over the years to cozy the place up—to give it, as they said on the home improvement shows, “personality”—but no matter how many times she rearranged the furniture and how many colorful throws she draped, she had never succeeded in banishing its sad dorm-room ambience.

  Mike came in and turned on the lights. He was holding the ovulation test that she had taken that morning. The result had been positive, indicating that at some point in the next twenty-four hours, she was liable to release an egg.

  “You want to try tonight?” he asked. His tone was exquisitely reasonable. “I mean, if you’re too upset and everything, it’s okay. But we probably shouldn’t waste—”

  “No, no,” Karla agreed. “I think we should.”

  Mike nodded approvingly and sat down in an armchair to watch the end of a PBS documentary about Robert Oppenheimer. Karla went into the bathroom to make herself ready.

  Two years ago, Mike had persuaded Karla to see a gynecologist about her incapacitating menstrual pain. Karla had suffered unusually heavy and painful periods since late adolescence, but until Mike had begun nagging, it had never occurred to her to seek medical help. She had simply accepted that it was her lot in life to spend five days of every month in mute agony, medicating herself with handfuls of Advil Extra Strength. To have made a fuss about something as petty as her periods would have struck her as unseemly. But Mike had been insistent. And when Karla wouldn’t make an appointment herself, he went ahead and made one for her.

  The gynecologist was a kind, elderly man with cool hands and a soothing way of discussing baseball scores while he probed. After giving her an internal exam, he ordered a laparoscopy. Within a few days, it was established that Karla was suffering from a combination of uterine cysts, fibroids, and stage-two endometriosis. “You hit the trifecta!” the gynecologist announced cheerfully. He went on to explain that her various conditions were almost certainly responsible for her failure to get pregnant during the three years that she and Mike had been married. Her reproductive health was “impaired,” and if she was serious about wanting a baby, she would need to start on a program of fertility drugs.

  Mike had taken this very badly. He came from a large extended Irish family—there were twenty-three cousins in the New York area alone—and his expectation had been that he would sire four children at least. “I don’t understand,” he had told Karla, “the women in our family have never had this sort of problem.”

  For her part, Karla had responded to the news with curious calm, prompting Mike to accuse her one evening of having known that she was “barren” all along. He later regretted the remark, of course, and apologized profusely. Karla did not hold a grudge. It was natural, she thought, that he should feel angry and cheated. And in a way, he was correct: she had always known—not that her reproductive organs were defective but that her body was, in some mysterious and profound way, against her. She had always been fat. She had never been able to dance or catch a ball. Her hair fell the wrong way, and her skin was the troublesome “combination” sort. When she saw a photograph in a book of what advanced endometriosis looked like—what a gruesome, jungly mess it made of a woman’s ovaries—she found herself nodding, as if in recognition. Of course, she thought to herself, of course: I am as ugly inside as I am out.

  After the initial trauma of the diagnosis, Mike had recovered quickly. One evening, Karla returned from work to find that he had drawn up a plan of action. She would start taking the ovulation drug that her doctor had recommended. If, in two years’ time, they had not conceived, they would adopt. (He had already ruled out the idea of using a surrogate, he said, on the basis that it was exploitative of poor women, and in any case “weird.”)

  Mike quickly became an expert on fertility science and involved himself in every aspect of Karla’s reproductive health. No detail was too mundane or recondite for him to overlook. He bought and prepared fertility-enhancing foods for her. He doled out fish oil supplements and outlawed Diet Coke. He frequented online chat rooms to glean advice from other reproductively challenged couples. He spent hours researching ovulation testers on consumer Web sites and broke with his customary frugality to purchase the most expensive and complex model on the market. Thereafter, he insisted on coming into the bathroom with Karla every month, to hover gravely while she conducted her early-morning ovulation experiments with strips of litmus paper and test tubes of her pee. (Karla had once gently suggested that she might be left to carry out these procedures on her own, but Mike had stared at her with such astonished, uncomprehending hurt that she had immediately let the matter drop.)

  A few months ago, there had been a false alarm when Karla’s period had been a day late. She had kept it to herself, wanting to wait at least forty-eight hours before raising Mike’s hopes, but when she had returned home from work that evening, she found that Mike had already made the calculation himself, and purchased a pregnancy test. She had begun bleeding while he was still studying the test instructions.

  In spite of such episodes, Karla was surprised to find that she enjoyed the baby-making project. She liked the suspense of it. Several of the books about fertility that Mike had borrowed from the library contained warnings about letting the desire to conceive become paramount. “When one or both of you become obsessed with the reproductive ‘goal,’” Selena and Kenneth Daniels wrote in their book Making Love, Making Babies, “difficulties can arise in sustaining the spontaneous, joyful aspects of sex.” But since neither spontaneity nor joy had ever been very prominent features of Karla and Mike’s sex life, they had been spared the demoralizing effects of a slow abatement in these areas. If anything, it seemed to Karla, the quest to make a child had slightly improved things between them, sexually. Now, at least, their terse bedroom encounters had a dignifying purpose.

  But time was running out. Twenty-two months of efficient “trying” had already elapsed. Just the other day, Karla had found a scrap of paper in Mike’s jeans with the address of a Manhattan adoption agency scribbled on it.

  In the shower, Karla sniffed the air suspiciously. Lately, she had begun to detect the smell of Fabuloso infiltrating the apartment. Once or twice,
she had had to get up in the middle of the night and brush her teeth a second time, just to get the ghostly, lavatorial tang out of her mouth. She turned off the shower now and applied a small amount of scented body lotion to her damp body before putting on her nightgown and hurrying out across the hall into the icy bedroom. The heating was very poor in their building. Mike often complained to the landlord, but there was nothing, apparently, short of replacing the entire heating system, that could be done. At night the two of them uttered little cries of anguish as they skittered across the chill floor into their frigid cave of blankets, and in the mornings they awoke to find themselves slippery-skinned and dry-mouthed, stewing in their own tropical biosphere.

  Karla heard the mournful cello solo accompanying the closing credits of Mike’s program, and soon after, the whine of his electric toothbrush from the bathroom. She curled up like a prawn, trying to generate some heat.

  Prior to marrying Mike, Karla’s sexual experience had been limited to three partners and precisely seven acts of intercourse. Compared with the hectic bedroom chronicles of most of her peers, this was a demure record, indeed, but Karla had never considered herself deprived. Her life as a single person had given her a perfectly adequate purview of the erotic fundamentals, she felt. Sometimes, when the conversation among her female colleagues at the hospital grew bawdy, allusions were made to practices or positions with which she was not familiar. But even then her incuriosity was resolute. Whatever specialized pursuits they were talking about, she was quite sure they had nothing to do with real sex. Real sex she knew about. It had a simple, teleological order: kissing, then petting—both of which could be reasonably pleasant—followed by penetration, which rarely was. In some rare and regrettable instances, a tense oral episode might be interpolated somewhere in the routine. (She didn’t mind administering, but she could not bear to be administered to.) And that was it—the universal coital formula.

  Mike came in now and began to undress. After he had folded his dirty clothes in a neat pile and placed them in the laundry basket, he went over to the closet and began to select his outfit for the next day. Karla watched him as he moved about the room, his hard, white body gleaming like a silverfish in the darkness: Jack Sprat could eat no fat. When he was finally done, he climbed into bed, set the alarm, and lay back on his pillow with a sigh.

  Even on nights such as these, when there had been an explicit agreement that intercourse was to take place, Mike always came at Karla tentatively—crabwise—with creeping, uncertain hands. At the beginning of their marriage, Karla had found this hesitancy charming. She had attributed it to a kind of gallantry on Mike’s part—a reluctance to trouble her with his base, male needs. But then one night, a few years ago, when she had turned to receive Mike’s advances a little more readily than usual, she had caught him off guard, wearing a look of such intense unhappiness that she had almost cried out in sympathy. The expression had been equal parts repulsion and resignation—a sort of stoic anguish, like a child squaring up to the task of eating his spinach. It had lasted for only a fraction of a second, and then it had disappeared, replaced by a watery smile. But the import of that fleeting grimace was not to be denied. Her husband, she had understood, performed his connubial duties with as little—possibly less—relish than she did.

  Pressing himself close now, Mike licked the fingers of his right hand and thrust them between her legs. Karla closed her eyes and tried to concentrate on what was happening. (A study that Mike had read about in one of his chat rooms suggested that women were more likely to conceive when they had orgasms.) But her mind refused. She thought about her father’s stroke. She thought about the Danish she had bought at the hospital cafeteria—the soggy weight of it in her hand, the garish yellow ooze that had emerged when she bit into it….

  A memory came to her now of sitting around the kitchen table back in Perry Street with her brother and sister, watching her father make French toast. It had been a tradition, when they were young, for Joel to get up early on Sunday mornings and make them breakfast while Audrey slept in. He considered these occasions a vital opportunity to catch up with his children and to teach them about the philosophical and political ideas that were important to him. Since he was frequently away from home during the week, he had always been very particular about observing this Sunday ritual, and long after the children had all become teenagers, he continued to insist that they come down for Sunday breakfast, no matter how late they had been out the night before.

  On this Sunday, the subject of his lecture was the ethics of armed struggle. It was a topic with special significance for the household because Lenny’s biological parents had both been founding members of an underground revolutionary outfit called the New York Cong. (Lenny’s father had died when Lenny was still an infant, attempting to construct a bomb; his mother was serving a life sentence for killing a police officer during an abortive bank robbery.) Joel strode about the kitchen, messily breaking and beating eggs. He was wearing his standard breakfast attire: a pair of leather slippers, flattened down at the back by his giant gray heels, and a balding terrycloth bathrobe. From time to time, the two sides of the robe would flap open like theater curtains, revealing the proscenium arch of his groin and a terrifying glimpse of pubic froth.

  “In certain situations,” Joel was saying, “some people feel that non-violence is no longer effective and that they must take the next step into violent action.” He was dipping slices of white bread into the bowl of eggs and laying them in a hot frying pan. Lenny was paying only fitful attention, prowling around the table in a bored, feral way, occasionally pausing to stroke Rosa’s hair.

  Rosa and Karla were rapt.

  “Killing people, you mean, Daddy?” Karla asked.

  “Sometimes, yes, even killing people…”

  Lenny began to make machine gun noises, pretending to mow down Joel. “Stop that,” Joel said coldly. Lenny shot him a doleful glance from beneath his long, girlish lashes and desisted.

  “Now,” Joel said, resuming his tone of jovial didacticism, “the idea of armed insurgency is a legitimate idea that has occurred to people many times throughout history and all over the world.” He brought a plate of French toast to the table, and the children began to eat. “In fact, our own country, the United States, came into being through armed struggle. People got tired of living under the yoke of the English king—”

  “Yolk,” Lenny said dreamily.

  Joel ignored him.

  “George III,” Rosa said.

  “That’s right, honey.” Joel smiled. “George III. So they started shooting down British soldiers between Lexington and Concord—”

  Karla, who had been groping for something to contribute, blurted now, “No taxation without representation!”

  But Joel wasn’t listening. He was looking at Lenny, who was pretending to be a wounded British soldier and sinking in theatrical agony to the floor. “For chrissakes!” Joel shouted. “Sit down, Lenny! Try not to act like a moron for ten minutes!”

  The room was silent. Sullenly, Lenny got up and took his place at the table.

  Joel stared at him furiously. “Why do you always have to play the fool?”

  Karla, who dreaded these confrontations between Joel and Lenny, tried to distract her father, by pretending to seek clarification. “So…so…it’s okay sometimes to kill people, Daddy?”

  Joel winced. “No, it’s never ‘okay,’ Karla. It’s always a very terrible and serious thing to do. But in some circumstances, it may be justified. If you look at history, you see that people who fight for their rights are often called terrorists, guerrillas, or whatever. But if they succeed—if they win their fight against oppression—they become national heroes. They become the new government.”

  “Like the Zionists who founded Israel,” Rosa said.

  Joel nodded. “Exactly, sweetie. That’s a very good example.”

  Lenny slipped out of the room. He was going, as he often did on these Sunday mornings, in search of Audrey. Karla
pictured him easing open the door to their parents’ room, clambering onto the tall bed, and nestling in the warm hollow left by Joel’s body. How she envied Lenny’s indifference to Joel: his refusal to participate in the battle for paternal approbation!

  “Karla,” Joel said suddenly. “What’re you doing?” Karla jumped. Joel pointed at her hand, which was reaching out to take the last piece of French toast on the serving platter. He smiled, trying to lighten the admonition. “Don’t you think you’ve had enough, sweetie?” Karla put her fork down and stared at her lap in remorse.

  Mike appeared to be in the final furlong. His teeth were gritted, his nostrils flared. Even as Karla opened her mouth to utter some encouraging groans, he froze and with an angry little “Yuh!” slumped, done. She lay still, registering the familiar aftermath—the sense of warm things growing cold, of tumescence shriveling; the tiny, wet sound as Mike slipped out of her.

  In the days before the fertility drugs, this would have been Karla’s cue to get up and fetch a warm washcloth. (Mike liked to be wiped down and made fresh before he slept.) But for a while now, she had been excused from this duty. Mike went to get his own washcloth, so that Karla might remain recumbent, her legs straight up in the air, for twenty minutes, with the aim of abetting the conception process with gravity. Mike had suggested that they adopt this method, after reading about it in one of the fertility books. Karla was not particularly hopeful of its efficacy, but as the deficient partner in the reproductive process, she did not feel in a position to contest any of her husband’s increasingly desperate ideas.

  In the darkness, she arranged a pillow beneath her haunches and raised her legs. Another technique recommended by Selena and Kenneth Daniels was positive visualization:

  Here’s one for the ladies: try sending out positive thoughts to your mate’s sperm as they set out on the journey to your egg. We have no scientific evidence that this kind of cheerleading works, but hey—it can’t hurt!