“You wanted genetic accountability,” Corrine said. “I’m afraid that’s part of what’s encoded on my side.”
The evening she’d asked Hilary to donate eggs was surely one of the most humbling and difficult of her life. It wasn’t easy for Corrine to put herself so thoroughly in her younger sister’s debt, and she and Russell were both gratified by how readily she’d accepted.
“You should think about it,” Corrine had said over the phone, while Russell listened in on the extension.
“I don’t have to think about it,” she’d said.
“This is a really big commitment,” Corrine had insisted, as if she felt she’d won the point too easily, reverting to a habitual mode of trying to prevent her younger sister from acting rashly.
“No, really, I’m honored,” she’d said. “I really am. And it’s not like anyone else has asked me.”
Six months later, they were all established at base camp in the Hamptons, with weekly trips in to Lenox Hill Hospital for blood tests and hormone levels. By the time Russell arrived on the scene full-time, the elevated hormone levels were already wreaking havoc. When Corrine picked him up in the Cherokee at the jitney stop in Bridgehampton, she was near tears after having had a big fight with Hilary about O. J. Simpson—an acquaintance of Hilary’s—who Hilary insisted was being framed for his wife’s murder.
“She’s probably slept with him,” Corrine said as they inched along the main street of Bridgehampton in the Friday-evening traffic, “All I Want to Do Is Have Some Fun” on the radio—that summer’s anthem.
The fertility doctor had warned Russell to expect mood swings and hormonal surges. Corrine had been on the Pill for the last month, synchronizing her cycle to Hilary’s, and she’d just started estrogen therapy the day before.
Oddly enough, Corrine herself had at first believed that O.J. was innocent, on the basis of a personal encounter: They’d been sitting at Elio’s, a restaurant on the Upper East Side, when the former football star had come in. The midwestern novelist with whom they were dining was a big fan and had called out, midwesternly, and much to Russell’s embarrassment, “Yo, Juice!” at which point O.J. had come over and sat down at their table for five or ten minutes. Corrine, who had no interest in sports, was so entranced by the time he left that she would have followed him into the men’s room or out the door. Although Russell couldn’t recall what they had talked about, he felt dazzled afterward; like most New Yorkers, he liked to think of himself as relatively inured to celebrity and, unlike the novelist, he wasn’t particularly interested in football, but the former running back had a kind of godlike luminescence that left them all stupid with admiration for the rest of the evening. Even so, Russell couldn’t help wondering about the beautiful creature he’d abandoned at the bar in order to bask in their admiration. Six weeks later, as they watched the white Bronco leading a school of police cars down the freeway, some of the stardust still clung to Corrine, who was certain that the beautiful man who’d kissed her hand in parting couldn’t have been capable of carving up his wife. It wasn’t just the personal encounter that inclined her to this view—Corrine was a man’s woman by nature, on top of which, she had a morbid fear of coming to resemble her mother, who had railed against male fecklessness ever since her husband had abandoned the family. This, in conjunction with a contrarian turn of mind, tended to make her suspicious of feminist orthodoxy. But over the course of the next few weeks, in the light of mounting evidence, Corrine had gradually and mournfully come to believe in O.J.’s guilt and to take the whole matter personally, angry at herself for having been fooled, suddenly charged with apostate zeal for justice and retribution.
“Hilary’s entitled to her opinion,” Russell said. “You went to law school. Remember that thing about innocent until proven guilty.”
“It’s just so typical of her,” she said tearfully. “She always sides with the men.”
“So do you.”
“Not blindly.”
“Reasonable people can disagree about this, Corrine.”
“Those poor children,” she said.
In the last couple of years, even as they failed to achieve conception, her notion of herself as an aspiring parent had infused her worldview. She got sentimental over any advertising that featured children and started to volunteer her baby-sitting services to friends.
As he turned off the highway onto Sagg Main Road toward the ocean, Russell felt his spirits soar, in spite of the new houses rising in the distance, driving past a vestigial cornfield under the limpid marine sky. Turning into the driveway, he felt a melancholy pride at the sight of the farmhouse with its weathered shingles and full-frontal porch, which sagged slightly in the middle. It didn’t seem unreasonable to want this simple house by the sea, to have his child spend summers here, playing in the yard and exploring the ramshackle barn and biking to the beach. But it wasn’t his and never would be unless he could somehow come up with a couple million. Someday soon, it would belong to some fucking investment banker who’d bought it in cash with his annual bonus, gutted the place, and tacked on a ten-thousand-foot addition with a six-car garage.
Snoop Dogg’s “Gin and Juice” was thumping from within, spilling out the screen door.
“And that’s another thing,” said Corrine, stepping out of the car. “She’s got this hip-hop thing going. My sister the homey.”
Hilary was standing at the kitchen counter with the phone to her ear, blowing on her nails—undeniably fetching in a bikini top and safari shorts. She blew a kiss at Russell as Corrine snapped off the boom box.
“I’m invited to Ted Field’s for dinner,” she said breathlessly. “I figured you guys might like some time alone.”
“You need to be home by ten for your shot,” Corrine said.
“I don’t see why we can’t adjust the schedule. Otherwise, we’ll be running out of parties in the middle of dinner all month.”
“She’s got a point,” Russell said.
“We’re not here to party.” Corrine turned and walked out of the room.
“Welcome to the egg farm,” Hilary said.
He shrugged and exchanged a look of hapless sympathy with her, his sister-in-law seeming to represent everything he would be sacrificing as a father. He’d be leaving dinner parties early soon enough, and for years to come. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll work on her.”
“I’m just glad you’re here,” Hilary said. “Sis is even more uptight than usual. I mean, I don’t see why we can’t enjoy ourselves a little. We don’t want unhappy eggs.”
“I really can’t tell you how much I appreciate you doing this,” Russell said. “I don’t know if I’ve really had a chance to say so.”
“Too bad we can’t do it the old-fashioned way,” she said, giving him a look that made him blush.
It wasn’t as if the thought hadn’t occurred to him, her points of resemblance to her sister attracting him almost as much as the differences. If you loved Roquefort cheese, it only made sense to crave Stilton. The very nature of the high-tech reproductive enterprise was fraught with erotic and incestuous implications, the taboo attraction that he’d often felt for his wife’s younger sister exacerbated by the thought that a month from now his sperm would be united with her eggs, if only in the confines of a petri dish, and that she would, if the project was successful, forever after be the natural mother of his child, conjured so unnaturally and with such effort and ingenuity out of the ether—all of these thoughts hovering around him in the warm, stuffy closeness of the downstairs bedroom that night, in the dim light of a single bulb from the bedside lobster-buoy lamp, as he prepared the hypodermic, slowly drawing from its ampule the thick, expensive, gelatinous hormonal essence, distilled from the urine of menopausal women, while Corrine and Hilary stood in a sacramental hush beside the bed.
“Okay,” Russell said, holding the big hypo to the light and checking for air bubbles.
“My goodness, what a big needle you have,” Hilary said.
�
��All the better to prick you with.”
“Try not to enjoy this too much,” Corrine said playfully, her eyes bright, her earlier moodiness dispelled by her excitement over the initiation of this crucial phase of her baroque plan for parenthood. “Even though I know Hilary has a nicer ass than I do.”
“I’m only doing it for you, babe,” he said.
“For us, you mean.”
“Bottoms up,” Hilary said, winking at him as she turned away and lowered her shorts, revealing a leopard thong she then tugged down to mid-thigh, lying across the bed, revealing the twin moons that swelled below her tan line. Russell tried to maintain a clinical attitude even as he sneaked a glance below; his hand was suddenly shaking, whether from a sense of the momentousness of the occasion, a fear of inflicting pain, or a sense of guilt at his appreciation of this forbidden vista, Hilary’s ass, seeming perfect and unblemished in the dim light that all three had agreed represented a mean between modesty and his need to see what he was doing. He reached down and pinched the cool flesh between his fingers, raising it as he had been instructed and checking for veins, which were to be avoided, lowering the needle and pressing it, feeling a brief resistance—reminiscent of the moment when a paring knife meets a tomato—until it pierced the skin, wincing involuntarily as he pressed it home, the long needle disappearing into the soft mound beneath his fingers.
“Okay?”
“You’re very good,” she said.
He turned to Corrine, who was looking up at him glassy-eyed, and silently mouthed, I love you, recalling him to the purpose of this strange ritual. She turned away as Russell slowly depressed the plunger, forcing the viscous liquid slowly through the tip as Hilary grunted and flinched, squirming beneath his grasp. “Sorry,” he said.
He looked again at Corrine, who was staring at the needle, mesmerized, before withdrawing it as gently as he could, watching as a glassy pink tear of blood and pergonal formed on the flesh above the puncture.
Suddenly, he felt exhausted.
Corrine leaned over and kissed his cheek, and he realized, to his relief, that he felt close to her again for the first time in weeks, standing there beside her, the prone and exposed younger sister merely instrumental to their quest for a child.
“Well,” Hilary said, reaching down and tugging at the waistband of her shorts. “That wasn’t so bad. I can honestly say my ass has experienced more painful insertions.”
She raised herself and turned, still lifting her shorts, giving Russell a brief glimpse of the narrow dark stripe beneath the white flesh of her belly while Corrine reached over and swept her into their embrace, Russell hugging both of the Makepeace sisters, grateful to be able to express in some measure the complicated emotions of the moment.
The next night, Corrine cried through most of Forrest Gump at the Southampton cinema and paced nervously on the front porch as she waited for Hilary to return home from her dinner party. They had settled on eleven, morning and night, for the shots. At 11:15, the windows of the sitting room were illuminated by headlights.
“Look who I found,” Hilary said, throwing open the screen door, towing Jim Crespi behind her. “A friend of yours.”
Corrine’s fondness for Jim was not on display at that moment. “You’re twenty minutes late.”
“Sorry, Mom.”
“You’ve been drinking,” Corrine said, examining her sister with a cold eye as Russell greeted his friend.
“I had like a glass and a half of ros,” she said.
“Everybody knows ros doesn’t really count,” Jim said. “Especially French ros. Although it may have some bearing on the sex of the child.”
“Let’s do it,” Hilary said. “We’re going dancing after this.”
“I have it on good authority,” Jim said, “that dancing stimulates the ovarian follicles.”
“How are Judy and the baby?” Corrine asked pointedly.
“They’re visiting Judy’s mother in Cohasset, a pleasure I was forced to forgo due to a script conference with a Mr. Alec Baldwin at his stately Amagansett seat.”
Her manners reasserting themselves, Corrine stayed behind to entertain Jim while Russell and Hilary repaired to her bedroom.
“It’s going to be a long month,” Hilary said, stepping out of her thong and lifting her shift, holding it at her waist, fixing him with a haughty, challenging look, before turning her back and sprawling on the bed. “The bitch of it is, these hormones are making me incredibly horny.”
Russell didn’t trust himself to speak. He tried to focus his mind on the holy purpose of this lurid procedure as he fumbled with the ampule, struggling to insert the needle into the rubber cap. “Reproduction without sex does feel like a terrible cheat sometimes,” he finally said.
“Doesn’t it just.”
Two days before the scheduled egg transfer, Hilary disappeared behind the cultivated hedges of the Hamptons for eighteen hours. She turned up at five in the morning, Russell being awakened from a shallow sleep to hear the sisters shouting at each other downstairs.
“That’s it, it’s over,” Corrine declared when Russell found them in the kitchen. “Finished.”
“Don’t be so dramatic,” Hilary said, her eyes like pinwheels, her wrinkled cotton dress showing a cigarette burn just above her right breast.
Corrine was clutching a grapefruit in one hand and a knife in the other. “Dramatic? Two months, twelve thousand dollars down the drain, not to mention our dreams of having a child…. Not to mention that little fantasy. Dramatic would be if I stabbed you right here and now.”
“Look, I’m sorry. A few drinks after a month of clean living, what difference could it really make?”
“A few drinks and an eight ball, by the looks of it.” Corrine didn’t seem to notice when Russell removed the knife from her hand.
“Being cooped up in this house for a month and pumped full of hormones is enough to drive anyone around the bend. Do you have any idea how this is for me? I’ve never felt so sad, so full of despair in my whole life. I really thought about walking down the lane to the beach and just keep walking right out into the water.”
“You and Virginia Woolf, sisters under the skin. Don’t make me laugh.”
“I’m serious, goddamn it.” Tears were welling in Hilary’s bright and unnaturally dilated eyes. “I’ve never felt suicidal in my whole life. Not until the past two weeks.”
“So you’ve told us.”
“I haven’t even told you the half of it. I was trying to be a trouper. I was trying to be the good sister. I tried to help. If I hadn’t had a few lines tonight, I probably would have just driven the car into a tree. It’s not natural, what we’re doing.”
“I don’t know why I thought I could trust you,” Corrine said, collapsing into a kitchen chair. “You’ve always been selfish, always been irresponsible. People don’t change.” She sobbed and buried her face in her hands. “It’s all over now.”
“It’s not over,” Russell said. For the first time in months, he knew what he needed to do. Blind certainty, perhaps—but he was determined to press forward. “We’re all going to calm down. You two are going to get some sleep. And we’re all going to the hospital tomorrow, as scheduled.” He lifted Corrine from the chair. Tears were streaming down her face. “We can’t,” she said, but she offered no resistance as he lifted her and carried her up the stairs and placed her on the bed.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said, curling up and clutching her knees.
“I do,” he replied.
“Do you really?” She looked up at him helplessly, desperate to be persuaded.
“Get some sleep. Everything will be fine.”
It was a formula he would often be called on to repeat in the months that followed; a reassurance that turned out to be premature, as were the twins.
25
The bottom seemed to fall out of her stomach when she spotted him standing near the gate at La Guardia in a polo coat and jeans, pacing. She stopped abruptly in the middle of
the concourse, the man behind her excusing himself after running into her. She resumed her progress toward the gate, trying not to look at him, each step taking her closer to her lover, another step down the path to an irrevocable moment of reckoning.
Recovered from her own surprise, she almost laughed at his startled expression as he caught sight of her and turned away with visible effort, pleased to think that he was not very good at this kind of thing. She didn’t want him to be too worldly, to be a man who was accustomed to meeting lovers at airports, although she realized with the feeling you get when a plane drops through a pocket of turbulent air that it was possible, that he might be one of those men she’d met on Wall Street who were known to the clerks of obscure hotels on the East Side, who had their Visa bill mailed to the office. Did she really know him as well as she believed? What if this was just another fling for him, a short parenthetical passage in the book of his marriage? She wondered irrationally if he’d taken other women to Nantucket, before remembering that Nantucket had been her idea.
She found herself standing at the edge of the departure lounge, watching him perform a pantomime of distracted waiting—running his hand through his dark hair, checking his pockets for his ticket, staring at it and then checking his wristwatch before finally scanning the gate area, until his gaze landed on Corrine, a sheepish expression of relief and gratitude crossing his face before he looked away. Anyone watching him, a private detective, say, would’ve quickly guessed which figure in the waiting area he was pretending not to notice. And she herself had felt what no one else would have—the spark that passed between them like a kiss. Her crisis of doubt was over as soon as it had begun.
Having restored him in her heart and forgiven him for sins he’d never committed, she had more than half an hour to contemplate her own. She had told Russell she needed time to think and had suggested he take the kids to her mother’s house, shamelessly exploiting his guilt and his desire to expiate it. She told him she was going to Nantucket with Casey Reynes, the only truth here being that she was staying in Casey’s house. She had finally confided in her friend, her sense of caution overridden by her need to share this secret. Corrine had intended to withhold Luke’s identity, but finally she revealed all, in response to the combined pressures of Casey’s interrogation and her own desire to share her joy along with her guilt.
The Good Life Page 23