It's Only Temporary: The Good News and the Bad News of Being Alive (20 page)

It became clearer and clearer to me that I had found a woman who possessed the strength and like-mindedness I’d been hoping to locate my entire adult life. “In marriage, choose someone you’re comfortable solving problems with” was an aphorism I’d been acquainted with. I had long ago concocted my own turbocharged version, which better fit my own history and worldview. The blessing to be carefully preserved, I’d concluded, is a partner with whom you’d not only be able to
endure
a crisis, but whose companionship you could continue to enjoy
in spite of
the crisis. It became apparent that I might have found exactly that. Deciding which course of action would prove most likely to protect our union (or least likely to destroy it) would prove tougher to puzzle out.

Eventually I came to the conclusion that the way to best protect our chances for
long-term happiness with each other would be to preserve our brand-new devotion to each
other – and to each other alone. It would be horrific to participate in the destruction of a pregnancy I’d dreamed of and imagined as impossible. But I wanted to have us, even if it meant us alone, more than I wanted to have a child.

My primary concern, though, was still Elisa. I didn’t want my leanings to influence her, should she feel more prepared for parenthood. Nor did I want her to give birth to a child out of concern for my “one in a million” prospects for fatherhood. The more I listened, the more it seemed that she wasn’t ready for, much less fully committed to, parenthood at that moment either. I shared my own reluctance to embark upon such a journey while still in the first stages of getting to know each other. For the moment we seemed to agree.

Then we started to talk to the doctors.

The first thing we learned from our calls to various experts (including the good people at Johns Hopkins Hospital, who’d cared for me during my bone marrow transplant fifteen years earlier) was that the “one in a million” statistic I’d been quoted ten years before had been adjusted. Radically. Instead of the “one in a million” chance of achieving a conception I’d been quoted, about 10 percent of the people who’d received treatment like me had since been known to regenerate fertility. From one in a million to one in ten. That’s an adjustment of one hundred thousand percent. If I’d been an automobile I would have been recalled for safety reasons.

It was extraordinary news, and in almost every way it was wonderful. I felt as if I’d won a prize. I also wished I’d been warned that the prize might be in my possession, so I could have taken better care to keep from getting in trouble as a result of possessing it.

A number of the women on the writing staff of
Sex and the City
used a gynecologist named Dr. Trask, who was also an obstetrician. I didn’t want to broadcast the reason for our visit, so those we asked weren’t able to cater their recommendations to our specific needs. We stated at the time we made an appointment with Dr. Trask’s staff that we were seeking information about appropriate time frames for, and possible risks associated with, pregnancy terminations. We repeated the request in the doctor’s pristine office, sitting side by side in front of his immaculately uncluttered desk. Unfortunately for Elisa and myself, the physician my colleagues had recommended was less than sympathetic toward our position.

“I’m not really crazy about abortion,” was Dr. Trask’s response. It turned out to be an understatement.

“Do you love each other?” he asked. “If you do, then what’s the problem?”

I found his litmus test jarring. I was seeking the information we’d requested
because
I loved Elisa.  But Dr. Trask had just begun.

“Pregnancy and childbirth is the highest calling you have as a woman,” he announced to Elisa. “It’s the purpose of your presence here on Earth. I don’t see what the problem is.”

I knew how delicate Elisa’s emotional state was. I felt extremely protective of her. I didn’t want to stop her from weighing every aspect of the issue. I just didn’t want her to be influenced by a stranger who was expressing views that had nothing to do with us as individuals. I wondered how to best extricate us from this consultation without intruding upon Elisa’s prerogatives. Before I’d found an answer, the doctor instructed Elisa to follow him into an examination room. I had a dreadful suspicion of what was about to occur, but didn’t know how to intervene without being guilty of interfering. I watched as she was led away.

I was invited to join her in an already darkened room where my fears were confirmed. Elisa was lying on her back, draped with sheets, while the doctor performed a sonogram. Elisa, tears running down her cheeks, was staring at the swooshing black and green glow of the monitor. The doctor was pointing out the barely distinguishable shape, curve, and outlines of the
four-week-old embryo. (I’m dispensing with the LNMP, or “Last Normal Menstrual Period,” dating method. Using LNMP, the embryo would commonly be referred to as having reached a gestational age of six weeks, even though conception would actually have occurred only four weeks ago. Don’t ask me to explain how such a system developed.)

The monitor’s volume was turned up high. The barely formed potential being inside Elisa’s belly had no limbs, no discernible spine or brain, and no recognizable human form. But the rapid thwump, thwump, thwump of the heartbeat was immediately apparent, and shockingly vital. I don’t like to admit it, because those who find our inclinations to be amoral will seize on it, but what I saw on that screen was a very clear representation of life. Insentient, preconscious life. But I saw the brute force of life that was determined – indeed, whose sole purpose was – to stay alive. It was a primitive version of an instinct I was well acquainted with.

Elisa was shaken and upset as we left the doctor’s office. I was shaken and enraged. I suspect there will be those (perhaps even a great number of those) who will feel the doctor did exactly what should be done under such circumstances. But he hadn’t done what we’d asked. We came to him as private, paying customers. We explicitly requested medical information about the risks to future pregnancies should we decide to terminate the current one. Instead, he gave us a recitation of his own views about the purpose of a woman’s existence. He performed a medically unnecessary procedure, giving us a wildly magnified glimpse of something it should have been our choice to view or not. Personally, I’d rather not have heard the robust heartbeat of what I regard as a form of life, yes – just as everything from a single skin cell in a petri dish to a tree fungus to an elephant is a form of life. But I see it only as the most meager precursor to the potential for a human being. Or maybe I’d rather not have seen it because I’m aware of how precious and precarious the underlying force behind it is.

We left the office with an indelible image burned into our brains. We also had the name and number of another doctor whose views – and methods and manner – were drastically different from those of the one we’d just left.

Dr. Platt was an elfin, elderly gentleman whose office was as worn and unkempt as Dr. Trask’s had been spare and immaculate. The room had a ramshackle feel similar to the one given off by the doctor himself.  His disorganized desk had cartoon-ish ceramic figures of storks, and of bundled babies on scales. The office walls were jammed with photographs of mothers and children that traveled a path to the present from decades past. Dr. Platt had an obvious devotion to delivering and nurturing healthy children. He also offered immediate understanding of those who might not feel prepared, or equipped, to choose that path.

“You’ve got plenty of time,” the doctor said after hearing Elisa’s age. “The last thing you want to do is to have a child when you’re not ready. It’s a serious undertaking. When you’re ready I’m sure you’ll make fantastic parents.”

Dr. Platt made a sweeping gesture toward the photos on the walls surrounding us. “As you can see, we’ve helped a number of people already. When you’re ready, we’ll be happy to help you join them. When you’re ready.”

The doctor gave us a demonstration of the termination procedure, illustrating his description on a plastic model of the female reproductive organs. His description was as bereft of any connection to its connotations as the prior doctor’s had been overburdened by them. There was something about the man’s pride in his expertise in the procedure that was unnerving. We were glad to have the right to it, but we still viewed it as solemn and sad.

For all his warmth and comfort, Dr. Platt was an odd little man. The office’s whimsical décor and playful demeanor carried over into the tiny, aged surgical suite, which seemed more than strange. Staring down from the ceiling at the gurney upon which his patients lay was a two-foot-by-three-foot poster, mounted behind Plexiglas, of a photograph of Clint Eastwood from
Two Mules for Sister Sarah
. The actor was wrapped in a poncho, and topped by a cowboy hat. His eyes squinted and his teeth clenched a cigarette. Clint’s eyes were positioned to stare directly into those of whoever lay beneath.

“It’s for my patients,” the doctor quipped. “It helps them to relax.”

I thought I saw him wink when he said it.

Even more troubling was his sympathetic and extremely tall Nordic nurse. In a moment of privacy, she tried to comfort Elisa by confiding that she’d had five abortions herself. I’d wanted to find a place where our needs would be met in a respectful, professional manner. I didn’t want a joint where abortion was made fun, or where it had become a hobby.

After a brief period of vacillation and introspection, Elisa and I made our decision to terminate the pregnancy. We wanted the procedure performed as early in the pregnancy as possible, well within the first trimester, and found it impossible to gain appointments with additional physicians within that time. Despite some reservations, we scheduled the procedure with cheery Dr. Platt, who was able to accommodate our haste.

Elisa lay on her back on the table. The strange little man perched on a stool between her legs. The woman who’d had five abortions of her own held one of Elisa’s hands. I sat by Elisa’s other side, holding her other hand. Clint Eastwood, squinting as if at the sun, grimaced down on us all.

I was still torn about the decision. It was hard for me to believe, as the procedure started, that I had let things come to this.

How could I have let this happen? I thought.

But I hadn’t “let it happen.” I’d chosen it.

Meanwhile, Moti had continued to refuse to refund the money I paid him prior to his demolition of my apartment’s floors. When nothing else worked, I went to small claims court for the city of New York and filed a lawsuit against him. Months later, long after Elisa’s termination procedure, I found myself waiting in a hearing room to present my case to one of the volunteer lawyers who act as judges in such cases. Elisa was with me, since she had been a witness to our dealings and to the floor’s condition.

Moti made a dramatic entrance. His wife, who was now seven and a half months pregnant, accompanied him. She had witnessed none of our dealings, and had never entered the apartment in question. Moti held her arm as he escorted her into the room. He helped ease her into her seat. Elisa and I glanced at each other, commenting silently on the irony of our comparative situations, as well as Moti’s blatant attempt to garner sympathy by parading out his pregnant wife. I presented my case to the man who acted as our judge, displaying photographs of the ruined floor and the canceled checks for the money I’d paid.

When it was Moti’s turn to offer evidence, he told a story composed of pure lies. In front of me and Elisa, in front of the man acting as the judge, in front of whoever or whatever powers might look down upon such proceedings, and in front of his very pregnant wife, he denied facts, invented conversations, and offered lists of irrelevant excuses. He insisted that, as the contractor I’d hired, it was his right to repair any damage he’d caused. He stated that he not only didn’t owe me any money back, but that I still owed him for the balance of the job. Eventually the arbitrator seemed to lose patience.

“Mr. Nassirim,” the arbitrator interrupted. “What about these lines in the floor? Do you see these photographs? How did these deep lines get carved into that floor?”

“Those lines were there before I started,” Moti said.

My notice of victory in the lawsuit arrived in the mail the next day. But winners of lawsuits in New York small claims court are required to attempt to collect their judgments on their own. I didn’t have a lot of faith that Moti was suddenly going to pay. But my prediction proved wrong. In a further illustration that morality is defined differently by different people, Moti made plans to meet me at my bank.

“Yes, Evan,” he said. “The court has decided, so I’m going to pay.”

When we met, after he’d handed over an envelope filled with cash, Moti wanted to shake my hand. “I’m sorry it worked out this way,” he said.

Sorry for what? I thought. Was he sorry that he’d ruined my floor? Sorry he’d cost me thousands of dollars, and days and weeks of time while I was wrestling with much more serious issues? Was he sorry while he lied in front of Elisa, the judge, and his pregnant wife? Or was he sorry only now because, as the official loser, he was now expected to be? I didn’t ask, and I’ll never know. Even with an explanation, I don’t believe I’d understand.

I arrived home from the bank to the freshly painted Eighty-ninth Street apartment. The floors had already been repaired and refinished, and all my furniture had arrived from Los Angeles. Elisa and I had been living there together for months already. The result of all the turmoil and sorrow was that we became solidified as a couple. A team. We were no longer individuals investigating each other, but people who’d decided to fuse themselves into something larger than either one of us could have been on our own. I suppose that’s something like what parenthood might have been like. But, for us, it was accomplished by our avoidance of that.

There are moments when I wonder what kind of child might have been living with us, had we made another choice. I’ve wondered whether there’s a soul that was formed upon conception that was never allowed to live and breathe. There are also times when I remind myself that there is no certainty that such an early stage pregnancy would ever have “become” anything. Somewhere between 50 and 75 percent of fertilized human eggs spontaneously abort without anyone knowing a pregnancy had ever existed. A full 15 percent of even confirmed pregnancies end in miscarriage. I’ve got a friend whose thirty-five-year-old wife recently gave birth to twins. She very nearly died from uncontrollable hemorrhaging shortly after giving birth. Surgeons were forced to remove her uterus and cervix after five hours of surgery failed to stop the bleeding. She’d already lost three-fifths of her body’s blood and suffered a mild heart attack during the crisis. The risks of even the most intended pregnancies are real. There are no guarantees of anything, for anyone. Elisa and I chose to make the preservation of our new union our first priority. I believe that choice has allowed us to flourish. When, or if, we do have children, we will have a solid foundation between the two of us, established as a result of years of stability. We’ll have a deeper knowledge of each other than we ever could have had as the near-strangers we were. We’ll be able to set consistent examples for whoever we might come to raise, with trust, and faith, and confidence – in ourselves, and in each other.