Flirting with Danger (22 page)

I had assumed that when I quit working, ready to stay still and make room for a man in my life, that he would suddenly, magically appear. I felt so ready—ready to sip coffee together on Sunday morning, to go food shopping as a pair, all that normal kind of stuff. Of course, that’s not the way it happened. Lots of men showed up, but none of them was quite right. Was I just being too fussy? Or not fussy enough? Anyone who showed even remote interest, I considered, although the real possibilities I found a way to discredit.

“No more blind dates,” I announced to Francesca during one of our morning marathon conversations.

“What was wrong with this one?”

“He had to get permission from his parole officer to take me out.”

“Child molester?” asked Francesca, with characteristic nonchalance.

“No, fraud.” This guy was a gambling addict who had stolen, cheated, and lied to feed his habit. Bad checks, embezzling, stealing
from his girlfriend. He had gotten out of jail six weeks previously. I was his first date in three years.

“Poor thing,” said Francesca. She has a soft spot for losers.

Not that he didn’t make an interesting dinner companion. As usual, when in an uncomfortable situation, I shifted into reporter mode and questioned him closely about what life was like in prison, how the food was, all the while keeping a close eye on my handbag.

“Am I asking for too much?” I asked Francesca. I wanted someone who could make me laugh, who could earn a decent living, who wanted to make love with me, and whom I couldn’t keep my hands off. And who didn’t have a prison record. Why was this so hard?

“It only takes one,” Francesca counseled. “You haven’t been really looking that long. Be patient; the right one will come along.”

Easy for her to say, I thought, living in her comfortable world with her new baby and devoted husband. When Hadi was dying, Francesca met a man at work. He came up to her in the hallway at the bank where they worked and asked if she would have dinner with him. She looked at him as if he were insane. “I barely get home to bathe,” she told him. “I go right from work to the hospital every day, where my boyfriend is dying of cancer, and then I get home at eleven every night to feed my cat and fall into bed to get up and get here to work. No, I don’t think I can have dinner with you.” She walked off after her tirade, thinking that must have been the most dramatic rejection that that guy ever got.

The next day she apologized for being so abrupt. He smiled. His name was David. They became friends. David could tell she wasn’t eating, and made her food and brought it in to work. He kept a respectful distance, but took care of her the best he could. After Hadi died, David asked Francesca out again.

A year later they were married and expecting a baby. David was
completely different from the men Francesca had been out with in the past. He was a redhead with freckles, not the swarthy, Middle Eastern type she usually went for. He was all-American. He wanted the same things she did: a life partner, a baby, a dog.

After returning to America, I started speaking to Francesca twice a day on the phone. I told her about every date I went on, recounting the dialogue, analyzing each one in excruciating detail, and assessing each man’s potential as a husband. In return, I heard about her baby’s every new facial expression or utterance. We never tired of the minutiae of each other’s lives. I didn’t care how many times she told me she was fat; I always told her I was fatter. I must have asked her a thousand times if I’d end up alone; she always reassured me that I wouldn’t.

While Francesca listened endlessly to my dating sagas, my older sister, Alexandra, was more pragmatic. Instead of listening to me whine, she hunted around for suitable men for me, sizing up fellow lawyers and scouring her husband’s architectural firm for any interesting, unattached men. When I visited her and her family in Chicago, some stray male would often appear casually, but despite her best intentions, nothing ever took.

I eventually met my cybersurgeon, Larry, in the flesh. He was in the midst of a messy divorce. He was almost perfect-looking, and, I quickly realized, too perfect for my taste. Nips and tucks had rendered him younger-looking than I, even though he was ten years older. And he was way too nice to feel real. But “nice” was not applicable to his eighty-one-year-old Jewish mother. I met her at a party at his house. I said to her that it was strange how so many people looked alike at the party, and she said many of the guests were products of her son’s handiwork.

“My son does the best nose in town,” she announced proudly, pointing across the room at some peaked-looking creature who
looked as though she hadn’t had a meal in weeks. “He fixed half the noses here.”

Once I let her know gently that her son was not the man for me, she gave me the rundown on all the bachelors at the party. She might have been surprised that anyone could pass Larry up, but I’m sure she was relieved that a half-breed like me wasn’t going to steal away her nice Jewish doctor of a son.

“That one is a dentist, cute, and nice as can be, but you should have seen him before Larry worked on him,” she whispered after pointing out a man across the room.

“God knows what the kids might look like,” I whispered back.

She nodded conspiratorially. She had free time on her hands, and knew all the doctors in Beverly Hills, so I figured I should put her to work. Plus she knew the before and after, important information in a town where you can never be sure what you are getting, genetically speaking. Once they’ve had their nose jobs, eye tucks, face-lifts, and laser peels, the original is completely transformed. I did go out a few times with the cybersurgeon, but ultimately I was too busy overhauling my interior to understand his world of exteriors. He was fine for cyberspace, but I wanted the real thing.

Sperm Bank and Beyond

O
n my endless stream of blind dates, I felt like I was just wading through leftovers or defective models. I wondered whether Francesca was right when she said that all the good ones were taken by the time they reached thirty. I still felt pangs of hope and excitement when a friend mentioned that they wanted to introduce me to someone, imagining that this time it would be different, that as soon as I opened the door to him I would feel it, see something in his eyes, in the way he smelled, musky and male. I’d want to brush against him to catch a better whiff. I wouldn’t even remember our conversation, it would flow so easily, but mostly I’d be wishing he would just touch my hand, and when he did I’d picture us in bed together. And later we’d make love for hours and then light candles and soak in my bathtub, and before I knew it, it would be dawn. And waking up to him padding around my apartment would feel as though he had always been there. And then I really opened the door
and felt the inevitable disappointment. A friend suggested I stop looking for a man, and wait for him to find me.

The problem with waiting was that I wanted a baby. In magazines and newspapers I often read about actresses or other celebrities who gave birth into their late forties, so I had managed to block out a sense of urgency. Then I met a woman who told me she decided to have a baby at age thirty-eight, and was told by her doctor that she could not. When I looked into it, I discovered that a woman’s chances of being able to give birth to a child naturally starts to diminish sharply at age thirty-eight, and that after forty her fertile years might as well be counted in canine years.

It was a shock, a real wake-up call. Suddenly I felt compelled to consider having a baby on my own. It seemed like a drastic step. I replayed my recent blind dates in my mind. Would hooking up with any of those men be preferable to being a single mother? The unfortunate answer was: No. Maybe I was just destined to be alone. Or maybe I would meet someone later in life, after I already had a child. But once I turned thirty-nine, I decided that there was no more time to lose.

I got the sperm-bank catalog in the mail. The donors were listed by race, height, coloring, and college major. There was an Irish-Italian one with curly blond hair and hazel eyes who studied religion and music. He was my top choice. And then number 3166, a philosophy major. He was six feet tall and of Portuguese-Hawaiian stock. I liked the idea of a good hybrid. I was avoiding German blood, a prejudice I’ve inherited from my mother. I thought it would depress me to pick out a man from a catalog, but I actually loved perusing the pages. No fuss and no muss. It was easy. We are living in a time when I could buy anything, including a father for
my child. Every spare moment I flipped through the catalog, imagining my baby made practically all by myself, and savoring the freedom of not depending on one of those blind dates to be the man of my dreams. I could give myself a family. I’d have my techno-baby and then adopt a second one from Russia to complete my millennium-style family. I lay on the sofa and listened to the audio-tapes I had ordered of several men who caught my fancy. I listened as they spoke of their goals, hobbies, families, and desire to travel. I listened carefully to the timbre of their voices to see who sounded kind and warm, and whittled the choice down. I called in to order longer profiles with information on their favorite pets, the type of music they liked, and medical histories for my top six choices.

“Number 3166?” I asked.

“Not available,” said the voice on the line. How about 4255 or 8922? Not available on my first five choices. Men were allowed to donate sperm only a finite number of times so as not to flood the gene pool with their sperm. I couldn’t believe I couldn’t even
buy
the man of my dreams. I was going to have to settle for leftovers even at the sperm bank. The best ones had already been taken. But I was not deterred. Maybe it’s better, I thought, if I use weaker genes and let mine dominate.

If I let myself, I sometimes got a little sad about resorting to this clinical, sterile approach to creating life. I hoped I could just sleep through the part where my gynecologist would squirt the purchased donor seed inside me. I wanted to be able to blank that part out. But mostly I took pleasure from having conquered my problem with men by reducing them to a vial of semen cooled by liquid nitrogen. Or maybe I was just angry with them because a good one hadn’t shown up in time for me.

A baby tried to grow once ten years ago but I wasn’t ready. He must have known that, so he lodged himself in my tube and never
made the journey to my womb. The doctors told me it was just a bundle of cells caught in my fallopian tube. It was an ectopic pregnancy. There was no real fetus, they said. But I see him sometimes in my dreams. He is mangled, bloody, and crawling away from me. He is very real. He was wise enough to know it wasn’t his time to enter the world. At the time I didn’t want to bring a new life into such a messy life as mine. Now I hoped he would give me another chance.

I had been in California almost a year when my mother came to visit me. I expected it to be a repetition of the frustrations of hoping for and wanting a connection that rarely came. Of wanting her to ask about my life and love affairs and feelings, and the great emptiness that engulfed me when she didn’t. When she couldn’t. I didn’t know if I would be able to tell her I was considering using a sperm bank to father her grandchild.

When I saw her tall, white-haired figure emerge from the crowded plane, I sensed it would be different this time. There was no big hug. She accepted my peck on the cheek, and I didn’t feel dejected that she didn’t embrace me; instead, I noticed the warmth in her pale blue eyes.

She rearranged my cooking utensils and sorted through my pots and pans. She tossed out some I had been carting around since college and bought me fancy new French cookware and linen napkins. She rearranged my furniture and organized my closets. She gave me what she knows how to give: her fine taste and knowledge of how things are supposed to be. We spent hours cutting damask and silk patches to choose a new fabric to cover my sofa, analyzing the merits of each one. I wished we could have had the same intensity in dissecting my life, but the home decorating felt like enough.

I noticed her hands and feet, slightly more wrinkled versions of my own. I remembered how those hands had lovingly brushed my
tangled mop when I was a girl. Painstakingly, for what seemed like hours, she would unravel the knots. Never once, despite the bother, did she consider cutting it off. I was embarrassed by my hair; it was so wild and coarse and curly, nothing like all the other girls’ thin, straight hair. My mother would always tell me it was my crowning glory. It was special, and it was OK to be different. She doesn’t know how to use the words “I love you,” but when she tells me never to cut my hair, or rearranges my closets, I feel her love and the irrelevance of those words and the hunger is gone.

During her visit she cooked nightly feasts for a parade of prospective suitors, which I considered a last-gasp attempt before I forged ahead at the sperm bank. She charmed them with her shrimp curry. Her pear tart and chiseled beauty were my best advertisement. When each one left on successive nights, she assessed their suitability. She watched closely how they treated Max. She made an effort, using her dog-breeding knowledge, to characterize their attributes. That one wasn’t very well house-trained. This one wasn’t very good breeding stock, not prepared to be a pack animal.