A Necessary End (2 page)

M
ore than anything, I want to be a mother.

No, scratch that. It's too desperate. It reeks of years of trying, of thirty-nine, of a dedicated phone line for birth mothers that has only rung twice in the past eleven months, and one of those was a wrong number. “Hello,” I said on the latter call, out of breath from running across the house, “hello?!!!” And the voice, a startling baritone: “Is Lisa home?” I'm ashamed to admit this, I never even told Gabe, but I answered, “Are you sure you're not looking for Adrienne? Gabe and Adrienne?” Because the man could very well have been a birth father, a possibility that I hadn't even considered until just that moment. The birth mother could have assigned him to the vetting process, thinking he should make himself useful since he got her into this mess to begin with. One woman's multiplying mess of cells is another woman's greatest desire. “No,” the man said, slowly, like I might be cognitively impaired, “I'm looking for
Lisa
.” I told him that there was no Lisa here, and it was all I could do not to add, “But if you find Lisa and she happens to be facing an unplanned pregnancy . . .”

The other call was worse. A lot worse. But I've never been someone to dwell on the past. There's so much future to be had.

More than anything, though, I
do
want to be a mother.

Still, humid desperation aside, the sentence should obviously read
More than anything, we want to be parents,
only that's not exactly true. Gabe will come around, though. He's just feeling a little threatened, because once upon a time, I wanted him more than anything, was willing to do anything . . . But that was a long time ago, another life, and now, I'm going to be a mother. Parenthood makes you your best self. You're going to be in the spotlight of that adorable new person's gaze, and you have to be worthy of it.

I will be worthy.

And I
will
be a mother. Because I want it more than those other women on the adoption websites with all their money and loving extended families and better hair (I've been straightening my dark frizzy hair since I was fifteen years old, since before Gabe, since crimping irons reigned supreme). I've got more—what do they call it in the Sissy Spacek movies my grandmother used to watch?—grit. I also come fully equipped with stamina and perseverance and a good body (“big tits and little everything else,” a guy in my high school once famously said, and it's still the case). I know that last bit might seem extraneous and I won't say it in the adoption profile, but I made sure to include a full-length photo because appearances matter to a birth mother, especially a teenage one who undoubtedly wants to go back to being hot herself once it's all over. Sure, I'm thirty-nine, but I'm well moisturized and I could run a marathon tomorrow if I cared enough to, if I set my mind to it.

“Can we just get on with this?” Gabe sighs, interrupting my reverie.

“I'm thinking. Are you?”

“Yeah,” he mutters, but he isn't. Or rather, he isn't thinking about writing our prospective-parent profile. I can read him like a book. Fortunately for me, he's always been
Choose Your Own Adventure,
sexually speaking, that is.

That won't go in our profile either. But birth mothers will see that he's tall and handsome, with dark hair and dark eyes, like John Stamos when he was on
General Hospital,
that's what I thought when we first met, which shows how long we've been together. How enduring our love is, that's what I should say.

I begin to type. “Our
enduring love
?” he says over my shoulder.

I overlook the tinge of mockery. That's one of the skills you pick up in order to have an enduring love. “Longevity is a selling point. The birth mother wants to know her child will be in a stable home.” It's actually our primary selling point. Gabe is a car salesman, which can seem oily, and I teach second grade, which might seem homey but not lucrative or ambitious. They're not aspirational professions, is what I mean. We're not pilots or entrepreneurs or doctors. Our home is a tiny three-bedroom, in a subdivision inside a suburb forty minutes from San Francisco. An expensive suburb—we bought this house for $650,000, probably three times what it would have cost in Dubuque or Tallahassee—but the birth mother isn't going to compare real estate markets. She's going to want bling. Everything she never had, she'll want for that baby.

Best not to think in terms of money or scale, but rather, personality. Yes, the dining room is barely large enough to hold the four-person table where Gabe and I are currently sitting, but it's an awesome table: wrought iron legs, a top made of wavy black and gray onyx. The wrought iron chandelier is shaped like a candelabra, with multicolored gemstones dangling (amethyst, rose quartz, garnet). So there's your bling. And on the wall is a huge canvas—colorful and abstract—and no one has ever guessed that it was the result of Gabe and me, writhing naked and covered in paint. Nothing brings a couple together like a shared secret.

In Realtor speak, our living room is “cozy” (or better yet, “charming”). We had the floors redone in this incredibly rich, dark wood (almost black), and the furniture is all red velvet.

On the wall, sandwiched between windows, is art that we bought
at a DIY show at Fort Mason in San Francisco, one of our favorite spots in the city. The piece has rounded double doors made of rough-hewn wood, and inside, a carved quote from Henry David Thoreau: “There is no remedy for love but to love more.”

This is the home I built with Gabe, and my default position is to love it. (While overlooking the flat-screen TV positioned above the fireplace, at Gabe's insistence. He says that only invalids watch sports in bed. Does poker qualify as a sport?) Yet as I try to rewrite our adoption profile, all I can see is the inferiority of size.

I never used to feel crappy about where we were in life, about our jobs or our home. I certainly never compared Gabe and myself unfavorably to other couples.

“Do you think the adoption process is turning me into someone else?” I ask Gabe.

He considers for a long minute. He doesn't look happy. “No,” he finally says. “You're just you.”

Just me? What's that supposed to mean?

No point in going down that road. If we do, we'll never finish this profile today, and we can't afford any detours. Two calls in eleven months is pitiful. Clearly, we need a new marketing strategy.

“If we were a car,” I say, “how would you sell us?”

His lips hoist at the corners. “Depends on what they're looking for. You get a read on people and you know whether to push the power of the engine or the safety features. Sometimes the wife is all about safety, and you can tell that the way to make the sale is to talk right to the husband about power, talk like she's not even there. Sometimes people don't have a fucking clue what they're really into.”

Gabe can play like he's a tough guy, but really, he's good at selling to people because he likes them. He wants them to feel happy with what they've bought; he doesn't up-sell to people who can't afford it. He's got principles, contrary to what some might assume when they hear his job title.

“Our problem,” I say, my thoughts crystallizing as the words leave my mouth—I can practically see them hanging in the air like stalactites—“is that we can't hook everybody. What lures in one person is going to turn another off, on a subconscious level.

“So what we need,” I continue, focusing on the laptop screen, “is to stop trying to attract everybody, like I did in the last profile, and write like it's to the one person we want to attract.”

“We only need one,” he says. I like that he's saying “we,” though we both know this is my project more than his. It's like, he plays poker in his free time and I look for our baby. Sometimes I get the feeling he doesn't believe I can really pull this off, and he wouldn't mind if I didn't.

“You don't care if we get the baby,” I say, “because you feel like we're enough just as we are.” He shifts in his chair, and I can tell that he expects me to be upset, but I'm the opposite. The light's gone on. “That's it!”

“What?” He looks confused but intrigued. For a guy who's so good at reading people, he can't always read me. I've always thought that's another reason for our longevity, and our great sex. The mystery has never leached out of our relationship.

I start typing—it never hurts to make him wait—but fast, screw any mistakes, there's spell-check. My fingers on the keyboard sound like a downpour, like it's raining words that will connect us to the birth mother, a deluge that will deliver our baby. Gabe's leaning forward, more engaged than he's been the whole hour we've been sitting here. I'm writing as Gabe, but I feel like myself again. We're a team, like we've always been.

The profile is a testament to us. It's about the circle of our love that we hope will encompass a baby, but it doesn't have to. We're complete. “We've spent more than twenty years loving each other,” it begins, “growing from teenagers to full adults together, and we've never wavered in our commitment. Once we're in, we're all in, and that goes for parenthood, too. We're not waiting for a child to complete
us, but we'd love for a child to share in all that we have.” I add a line about “finding the right match.” We're not looking for just anyone; we're looking, I imply, for
you
.

I sit back, satisfied. All those people on the websites, begging to be picked, and here we are, self-contained, ready and willing but not desperate in the least. This is how we're going to stand out in a crowded marketplace: Play hard to get. Make the birth mothers want to be a part of us; be the club they want to join.

“Is this really how you feel?” Gabe asks as he finishes reading the last sentence. He sounds so moved that I wish it were more than advertising. How much easier life would be if I could only mean it, if I could only feel complete right this instant.

“It's how you feel,” I say. I touch his arm. “I'm letting you speak for both of us.”

“You even used poker terminology.” He smiles, and I hurt a little for him, for his naïveté. But when we get the baby, his heart will be fuller than he ever could have imagined. “See, if it happens, great. If it doesn't, we're still us, right?”

“We're always us.” Only it isn't enough anymore. I can't tell him this, but over the past year, I've felt myself loving him just a bit less, like it's leaking out through a very fine sieve. That's not his fault. He can't be any more than my husband, but I need to be more than a wife. I need to be a mother. At a certain point, you have to share what you have, or it diminishes. I don't make the rules. It's biology.

Gabe's the fulfillment of an old dream. The baby is the fulfillment of a new one. How can he compete?

But he doesn't need to. We're going to do this together. We'll love each other even more profoundly through the love we feel for our baby. That's our next incarnation: from sex-crazed teenagers to happily married couple to parents. The shift will be seismic, the increase in feeling exponential. He'll see.

“All-in,” I tell him, and he kisses me, in sweetness and hunger.

S
he straddles me, grinding my back into the hard column of the dining room chair; she bucks and howls. I know it's half performance, but so fucking what? She's paying me back for tolerating a Saturday of writing our adoption profile. She's telling me I've been a good boy. I'll take it.

When we're both done, she's sweaty and beaming. She dismounts in a crackle of kinetic energy. I can picture her crossing a line item off the to-do list: Somewhere between “write adoption profile” and “lesson planning” was “hot sex.”

I've always loved her energy, the way she can vibrate with it, like her life force is on the outside, right on the surface, when for everyone else, it's hidden. Sometimes she bounces in her seat like a kid when we're about to go out somewhere. And I really have seen “hot sex” written on her to-do list.

As my breathing and heart rate start to slow, I can hear that profile, like a voice-over. Only it's not her voice. It's not mine either. It's some other couple, an act of ventriloquism. Because I'm not jonesing to bring a baby into our
circle of love, and she doesn't really think our circle is complete without one, and so even though the love stuff is true, the whole of it feels false.

I want to believe her, that we're enough. Every day I try to show her that we can be, but lately, what comes back . . . I know her too well, is the problem. I know she's capable of deception—of herself, of others. She's sure capable of obsession.

All her clothes are back on, except for her bra. Her breasts swing metronomically under her T-shirt as she moves; it's like hypnosis, watching her. Our house isn't exactly an open floor plan, it's just small, so from the dining room, I look straight into the kitchen, and ninety degrees to the right, I can see her in the living room, fluffing the pillows of the sofa. Sex makes her industrious.

She asked if she's different now. What could I say? It's been more than twenty years. We're both different, like we're supposed to be. People are meant to change. That's why practically no one mates for life anymore. The divorce rate is, what, 50 percent? And that goes for all the second marriages, too. Nobody picks smarter the second time around. They just try to avoid the mistakes they made before, and there are always plenty of mistakes left to make, an infinite number of wrong turns.

I've never asked Adrienne to stay the same, but lately, her different is really different. Unpredictable, and not in the old, good way.

I discovered a high kitchen cabinet overstuffed with baby loot. When I opened it, I was momentarily caught in this monsoon of tiny hats and booties and pacifiers, even a plush blanket with a tiger's head sewn onto it. We're not Jewish, but I definitely get that whole tradition about not filling your home with baby stuff too soon, that it can be a jinx. Didn't she learn anything from the Patty nightmare? Anyone else would have stayed out of the game for years after that one, but not Adrienne.

When she sees a pregnant woman, whatever she's doing, she stops. She goes silent. Everywhere becomes a church. And the look she's giving—it's not normal. It's like she's rapturous and ravenous at
once. She asks to touch the woman's belly, and then she rubs like it's Aladdin's lamp, like a genie might come out and grant her wish.

It's been four years since she went off birth control and two years since we got the results of the fertility tests, when we found out that her egg plus my sperm will never equal baby. I've tried to tell her it might not be in the cards for us, and we can be happy anyway. But I don't think she wants to be happy anyway. It's like she can't be a woman if she can't be a mother, which is nuts. She's the most woman I've ever known, and that's the truth.

I can't totally blame her, coming from a mother like hers. She wants to right the wrongs. She wants to be the mother she never had. It's altruistic, almost. But I like to talk about things other than babies, and she doesn't, and that's becoming a problem.

Last week, she did something truly crazy. I was kissing down her body, and I felt this waxiness on my lips. I wiped at my face, and brown smudged my hand. “What the . . . ?” She got this big smile on her face. “Eyebrow pencil,” she said. I stared at her. “For my
linea nigra,
” she explained, “the line of dark hair that pregnant women get, right down the center of their stomach.” I could only state the obvious: “You're not pregnant.” She replied, unfazed, “That's why it's eyebrow pencil.”

I had this vision of her carefully filling in the sparse hairs that bisected her stomach, so that it looked like a line of ants marching toward her pubic hair. I was sure she was smiling while she did it. For years she talked about being a mom; somehow it had never occurred to me how badly she'd wanted the experience of being pregnant.

I hugged her and told her it's good that she won't have to get hairy and fat and have her hormones in an uproar, but it was the wrong thing to say. She got up and started cleaning.

She has the mood swings of a pregnant woman. I'll be putting bread in the toaster and she'll whirl around with eyes lit up like a Gorgon's and hiss in a voice full of fury, “
Not that bread!
” Not that bread? What other bread is there? And who gives a shit anyway? It's
bread. Adrienne, that's who gives a shit, about all kinds of things she never cared about before.

Meanwhile, she wants us to sit down and write an adoption profile so we can sell ourselves like the perfect couple, the ideal future parents. I know everybody's lying in those things, airbrushing out their flaws, but still. I don't know that it'd be good for her to get her hands on a baby right now.

I'm not baby-proofed either. She asks me what I feel when I imagine being a father. The truth is, I don't imagine, and I feel nothing. I can't see it. If a baby's the sun, like Adrienne thinks, then I'm having my own private solar eclipse. She's got this whole fantasy life—and a kitchen cabinet full of props—and I'm drawing a blank. Adrienne thinks it's sad to feel nothing, but then, she never feels nothing. I tell her nothing's not so bad, she ought to try it sometime. She thinks I'm joking.

I don't tell her that I've been dreaming about Michael, seeing him as a baby. I know those aren't real memories. I was only three years older than him, so there's no way I'm really recalling his crying in his crib. In my dreams, he's been crying for hours. There's no one to pick him up and tell him it's going to be all right. And it wasn't all right, was it?

You know that better than anyone, huh, Adrienne?

I try not to talk about him. Mostly, I keep my guilt to myself, though sometimes when I have too much to drink, it falls out, like loose change from my pocket. Those conversations never go well. Adrienne hears me blaming her.

I don't, though, not exactly. I got caught in her undertow, but that's on me, not her. My problem is, I get acted on, instead of acting. Adrienne's always been the molecule that ignites all the others. You can't complain about people like that; you've just got to admire them, or get out of their way.

There's a list in Adrienne's nightstand of all the things we'll need to buy for the baby. I've got my own list, in my head. It's what we
can't do and where we can't go and what we won't be able to afford anymore:

No more raucous sex in dining room chairs—it'll wake the baby.

We'll never tour Italy.

Weekly poker at the Pyramid will become monthly, if that.

We won't sleep for years.

If Adrienne heard my list, she'd think I was being selfish and negative, and she'd be right. But I do think about what a kid needs, too. I really don't know what we'd be like as parents. She's so sure it'll all work out, we'll feel just what we're supposed to, we'll be this great team. “You have a baby, and you
want
to be selfless,” she says. “Think what a relief it'll be, to finally have something to think about that's not you.”

But what if a baby just destroys what we have and nothing good springs up in its place? Then we'd be unhappy and resentful and faking our way through it, and that baby would be stuck with us, when there are all those great potential parents on the website. We'd have ruined our lives, and an innocent kid's.

Adrienne says don't worry, I'll love the baby as much as I love her.

That's what I'm afraid of.