It's Only Temporary: The Good News and the Bad News of Being Alive (19 page)

“Do I know you from somewhere?”

It’s an odd inquiry, in that it presupposes that I know more about the information stored inside the inquisitor’s brain than they do. And it’s tough to answer. What I’ve learned to do is answer honestly, but without complete candor.

“I don’t know,” I’ll say. “My name is Evan.” And I offer my hand.

I’m fairly certain these people know me from seeing me on film or in a television show. But offering up this possibility is always a mistake. I know, because I used to try.

“Oh. What would I have seen you in?” they ask.

And here’s where we come to the action to be most assiduously avoided: the recitation of the résumé. I have never provided a successful recitation of the résumé. Each attempt has led my examiner to declare, as I cycle through title after title, with mounting pride in each monosyllabic response, “No…No…No…
No
…
No
…
No
…
No
…” Even if I’m right, it’s best not to go there.

A lot of people don’t ask whether or not they know me. They
tell
me they do. And they tell me from where.

“Hey, I know you from CBI. You worked in the cubicle next to me.”

And then it’s my turn to say “no.”

“Greyhound, right?”

“No.”

“Hey…! Hunter High.”

“No.”

“You’re friends with Ken and Sheila, right?”

“No.”

“You used to skate with Uggy in the park.”

“No.”

“Yes, yes…”

“N–”

“Don’t say no, you did!”

“No.”

“
Yes
. Yes, you
did
. You used to skate with Uggy in the park!”

So, the recognition factor can have its less delightful moments. But for the most part (and I mean the 99 and nine -tenths percent part), it’s been a pure pleasure. I’m grateful to the people who have been so gracious toward me, and I’m grateful to the Fates that have bestowed the strange status upon me.

As a private aside, without confirming or denying anything I’ve said so far: Uggy, I just got a rad new board. I’ll meet you in the park Wednesday at noon.

Ten months after the relief of leaving New York City for California, I moved myself, and all my belongings, back to Manhattan. I’d found every bit of the respite I sought in Santa Monica – from overcrowding; from congestion; from rude checkout clerks, bank tellers, and subway token booth attendants who seemed to hate me as much as they hated their jobs. But there were two irresistible lures drawing me back. One was a full year’s employment filming the sixth and final season of
Sex and the City
. The other was Elisa.

The initial bliss of finding each other and falling in love had remained just that. But we’d continued to travel across the country at every opportunity in an attempt to get to know each other. The plan was to take things slow. I would be returning to New York two months before my television work was scheduled to start to rehearse and perform a play in which I’d costar with Cynthia Nixon. The play was called
String Fever
, and it was a beautiful and wickedly funny meditation on the nature of existence as mused upon by a woman who’s just passed forty, and whose life and relationships are spinning out of control. Her ex-boyfriend, whom she still loves, has abandoned her and is spiraling into mental illness. Her father, hospitalized from a suicide attempt, is barely recovering from his own bouts with instability. Her best friend is dying of breast cancer. Another old friend, an Icelandic comedy star, is sending her semi-coherent videotaped messages from his own odyssey of recurrent alcoholism as he travels the world searching for his wife, who’s left him due to one-too-many infidelities.

Meanwhile, the play’s central character meets a string theorist who seduces her into not only an affair, but also a flirtation with belief in a ten-dimensional, vibrating, unifying theory of all matter, while she investigates methods of both natural and artificial insemination.

The play ends with the protagonist pregnant, soaking in the mineral springs of Iceland’s fabled Blue Lagoon. Both the Icelandic comedian and her deteriorating, cancerous friend accompany her, and the three of them speculate on life’s mysteries. Her relationships with both the physicist and the musician have ended, and her father has died. The sire of her child is unknown, though all three of the surviving male characters are revealed as possibilities.

As convoluted as it sounds, the plot and characters nearly mirror the experiences of the playwright, my old friend and ex-fiancée Jackie, who’d been my companion during my illness two decades earlier. The man she’d been with for ten years after we’d split had left her after plunging into drug addiction. Her father had attempted suicide by stabbing himself six times, surviving only due to scar tissue from earlier surgeries that had built up around his heart. Jackie’s best friend had died horribly of cancer the year before at the age of forty-two. The only invention of the play was that Jackie hadn’t gotten pregnant; she’d only dreamed about it.

But my new girlfriend, Elisa, did.

I was living temporarily in an apartment on Forty-ninth Street waiting for my New York home to have its wood floors refinished. A couple of weeks into the run of the play, Elisa – whom I’d been seeing only sporadically on a transcontinental basis for barely three months – started to feel strange.

Pregnancy seemed a ludicrous possibility. In spite of my sterility we’d been mostly consistent in our use of contraceptives. But her symptoms persisted, so she tried a home pregnancy test. I was in the bedroom while she was in the bathroom. I wanted to give my new girlfriend some privacy, as well as attempt to reassure her through my casual behavior. My heart froze when I heard her voice, small and uncertain.

“Evan? Could you come here, please?”

I sped toward the bathroom, hoping she was simply confused by an inconclusive result. She handed the vial to me with hands that were shaking. Appearing to be in shock, she asked me to interpret what couldn’t have been clearer. The test was positive. Elisa started to tremble, and collapsed sobbing into my arms. The Lord (or the strings, if you subscribe to the bridge between the general relativity and quantum theories) does work in mysterious ways.

This was not supposed to be within the realm of possibility. I’d had sperm counts done immediately after and several years post-bone marrow transplantation and was told that I had “severe fertility issues.” This translated into the equivalent of what I was told was all but absolute sterility, with no chance of reversal. When I asked about statistical probabilities – a line of inquiry I’d generally avoided in regard to all aspects of illness – I was told the chances of conceiving a child through intercourse were “one in a million.”

“But don’t count on that,” I was cautioned, lest I depend on past chemotherapy as adequate birth control. “It only takes one.”

And I didn’t. Not usually, anyway. A few times, here or there, I’d been less than vigilant. I somehow managed to defy odds even greater than those that had once lined up against my existence and achieved a successful conception, with a woman I barely knew, but with whom I already suspected I wanted to stay. It was, it seemed, a miracle. It was also a disaster.

Holding Elisa in the bathroom was a surreal experience. We’d become surprisingly attached in just three months, but there was no way to pretend we knew each other well. Each visit had been initiated by our confessing that, upon greeting each other at the airport, we’d had the sensation of embracing a stranger. It consistently took a day or two for us to re-familiarize ourselves with each other. And I’d never seen her so upset. I was shocked by the violence of her reaction. She was clearly terrified, and her terror had a profound effect on me.

Before meeting Elisa I was the guy who, upon seeing a baby or a small child, would unabashedly proclaim, “Oh, I want to have a kid.” As far as I knew, I’d meant it. It also got a hell of a reaction from any woman nearby, and I didn’t mind that at all. Apparently there aren’t so many single men pining aloud for parenthood.

For years, I’d had fantasies of what might happen if one of my girlfriends got pregnant. What if I had wanted to preserve the pregnancy while a girlfriend didn’t? Because of its improbability, it would most likely be my only chance. The semen samples I’d stored in 1985, as well as those stored in 1988, were already older than the oldest I’d ever heard of being used for a successful conception. Those sperm were now high school aged. In spite of my secular tendencies it would have seemed a crime to extinguish such an unlikely potentiality. An unintended pregnancy had the possibility of becoming an explosive situation.

I’d imagined girlfriends becoming pregnant, I’d imagined their reluctance to go forward with the pregnancy, and I’d imagined myself begging them to reconsider. I’d imagined myself explaining to them the miracle that had occurred, and how, due to my reproductively challenged state, it must have been God’s will (God’s will?) that this child be brought into the world. I’d imagined scenarios whereby they relented, and those in which they refused. I’d imagined crushing emotional pain as we fought over the custody of children neither of us was prepared to care for, and over the loss of children they weren’t willing to carry to term. I imagined these scenarios all so intensely, I believe, because they would have been some of the most difficult situations that could have arisen. And because that’s the kind of thing I do.

All those imaginings involved women I knew I wasn’t destined to share my life with. Here I was, with a woman with whom I felt an unprecedented sense of compatibility, and the situation seemed even worse. With previous girlfriends, my desire to meet and love and raise our child would not have posed a threat to the relationship itself because I never expected the relationship to last in the first place. It would have been easier to accept the responsibilities of parenthood with someone ill suited as my long-term partner because, since I’d always expected to split up eventually, there wasn’t so much to lose. With Elisa, the formula was reversed. It felt as if everything was at stake. As it’s turned out, nearly everything was.

Uptown on Eighty-ninth Street, a man named Moti had been hired to refinish the wood floors of my apartment. Elisa had been clear that even though we’d now be in the same city, she thought we should continue to live separately. She was just beginning her life as an independent adult before we’d met. She’d only moved into her own studio apartment in Queens a few months before, after years of living with roommates. She was brand-new in this country, and she was brand-new in her job. We both harbored trepidations about whether our feelings for each other would hold up if we lived together so soon. In the type of incongruity common to modern relationships we both believed that maintaining a certain degree of distance and independence would be crucial to giving us the best chance at coming closer together. Instant parenthood didn’t mesh with any of our definitions of “distance and independence.”

Still, in the kind of contradictory choreography that’s common to budding love, Elisa was helping me choose wood floor finishes and paint colors for the apartment. We intended to take things one step at a time. But the understanding was that we might, someday, be sharing that Manhattan co-op (“might” being the word that allowed all hopes and dreams to be fully expressed).

Moti was a character. He was an Israeli immigrant who told stories of his service in the Israeli army. We spent a fair amount of time together planning the apartment’s renovations, and we spoke of New York City and the post 9/11 world. I expressed astonishment that buses hadn’t yet started blowing up in Manhattan, as they do periodically in Jerusalem.

“It’s going to happen,” Moti answered. “It’s coming here next. And when it does, then America will know.” He said it in a way that made me think he both dreaded its arrival and might be responsible for it, whenever it came to pass.

Moti visited us on Forty-ninth Street, displaying samples of wood stains and complimenting our taste and our commitment to each other. He spoke of his own pregnant wife. Elisa and I glanced at each other each time Moti turned his back, silently acknowledging our secret.

“Leeesten to me,” Moti said at the beginning of every sentence when we talked about the floor. Each expression of my own anxiety, every question designed to elicit some form of reassurance, brought forth a series of Moti’s commands. “Leeesten to me,” he’d say. “It’s going to look beee-yeu-tee-ful. You’re going to be very happy with it, Evan. You leeesten to me.”

Elisa was with me when I opened the door to my Eighty-ninth Street apartment. Moti’s team had finished their work the day before. When I’d stopped in to check on them earlier in the week, Moti hadn’t been there at all. Just a group of young men I’d never met, working away with electric sanders. At first glance it looked as if the floor had been painted with a thick coat of glossy white paint. Upon closer inspection – meaning by taking another quick look around – it became apparent that the floors were dreadfully scarred. Gouged, even. There were deep grooves carved into the entire lengths and widths of every room. The floors of the living room, bedroom, and hallways now curved and sloped like a roller coaster. In several spots, the deepest grooves dug into the floor below the level where the tongues and grooves of each wood plank met – a possible deathblow that might cause the entire floor to buckle. My beautiful New York home looked like a gang of vandals had attacked it, working with hammers and chisels instead of sandpaper. The job was a debacle, performed by amateurs.

“I can feeex it, Evan,” Moti told me when I got him on the phone. “Leeesten to me. I can feeex it.”

I not only told Moti that he wouldn’t be continuing with any more work, but that I wanted back all the money I’d paid him so far.

“Evan, I’m making beeeuteeful floors now for twelve years. You’re going to tell me how to make a beeeuteeful floor? Leeesten to me, you’re going to be very happy. You leeesten to me.”

But when I asked for explanations as to who’d done the work, and how such a thing could happen, all he said was, “I made a meeestake.”

A reputable company eventually restored the floors, albeit with some degree of permanent damage. Elisa and I then started working with samples of paint colors for the walls as we discussed the much more serious issue we were wrestling with. My tactic, in terms of trying to gauge what was right and what was wrong, was to try to listen to Elisa and figure out what might prove best for her. My thinking wasn’t completely unselfish. The thing I was trying to avoid most was that the pregnancy – whether carried to term or terminated – would prove too much for our fledgling relationship to bear.

“What’s most important to me is
us
,” I told Elisa. “I want to do whatever gives
us
the best chance to stay together, because I’ve never felt so good about anyone I’ve been with before.”

Elisa visited her gynecologist to confirm the pregnancy test results. As the limited time within which we had to make a decision ticked away, I found myself concerned for Elisa whichever direction her emotions led her. At first she seemed to feel that having a child at the beginning of her life and career in the United States, not to mention at the very beginning of a relationship, would be a mistake. These thoughts often reversed themselves. I arrived home to find her reading books about pregnancy and childrearing. A good deal of the time Elisa would simply be feeling ill, or exhausted, or both. She spent many days and nights shifting between two activities: sleeping and crying.

Meanwhile, I was trekking through snowstorms to the theater. There I juggled calls with contractors, managed my own aching heart, and did my job – which was to make people laugh. The play I was performing in ended with me sandwiched between two women, one pretending to be pregnant, another pretending to be dying. I’d make my way home to Elisa, where we’d discuss our thoughts and options deep into the night. One result of the crisis was that Elisa and I quickly grew closer. We spent every hour together talking about our lives, dreams, and desires. Instead of living separately and slowly getting to know each other, we spent every night sleeping in each other’s arms.