Mommy Man (8 page)

She groaned audibly. Clearly, she was familiar.

“Did they give you some paperwork to bring us?”

“No, they never mentioned . . .”

“Of course not,” she sighed. “They never do. Well, you’re going to need to call and have them fax it. I’m sorry.”

I got S’mantha on the phone. “You’re at Westside right now?” she asked, puzzled. “But I have your appointment down for tomorrow. Is that right?”

“Well, no. That’s not right. We’re here.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure we’re here. I’m also pretty sure it’s today. That’s what you told us.”

“Hold on. Lemme check.” She dropped off the phone for a minute. “No, you’re right. It’s today. Is that what I said?”

“Yes. And I think they’re going to take us, so that’s not the problem. But they don’t have our paperwork.”

“Oh, that can’t be right. I’m eighty percent sure I sent it over. Have them look again.”

“Okay.” I put my hand over the receiver for ten seconds and pretended I was having them look again. “No luck. Can you refax it?”

“I guess so. Oh, gosh. Where is it? Gimme a few minutes.”

Drew and I sat in the waiting room, which was roughly the size of a middle school auditorium, with about thirty chairs arranged in rows. It was almost big enough to stage a touring production of
Les Miz
. But instead of head shots of whatever
American Idol
runner-up was playing Marius, the walls were covered with pictures of infants. Hundreds of them, smiling, sleeping, bathing. At the Westside Fertility Center, business—and babies—were booming.

There were single babies, twins, triplets, and quadruplets, but thank God, no Octomom. Some shots were in color, some black and white. There were probably at least a few taken by Annie Leibovitz as a family favor. Some had that slightly creepy smooshed-tush naked sitting shot. New parents and old ladies think this is cute. The rest of us wonder, Why would we want to see half your baby’s ass?

I wondered if our family photo might someday grace this baby museum. Suddenly, Drew poked me and gestured toward the entrance. Two gay men had sauntered in, peering excitedly around the room. They jogged over to a thirty-ish Latina woman with the first stages of a baby bump. They presented her with flowers and cheek kisses. We realized we were looking at our future.

She was their surrogate, pregnant with their child. And she was Latina! It was the first time I’d considered that our surrogate might be a different race than we are, and I couldn’t think of anything more awesome. I started picturing the day when our pasty white baby might emerge from a massively dilated African American vagina in a goopy testament to the miracles of modern science and the United Colors of Benetton.

At last, the receptionist called us over. “Okay, you can give your samples now.”

It was go time. A nurse set me up in a plain, windowless room with a TV, a DVD player, and a little half bed, half couch that was covered in a surgical sheet to guard against mess.

She handed me a plastic cup. “When you’re done,” she said, “mark down the time you finished and circle yes or no to indicate whether you spilled any.”

“Spilled any?”

“You know, your sperm.”

She closed the door, and I locked it behind her.

Ewwwwwwwww.

I dug into my fortress of bags and unsheathed
Freshmen
. It was kind of exciting, like being back in college. I opened it up and saw a flashy new layout but models that looked pretty much the same. The baby-faced innocent, the jock, the ethnic, and the rebel. The only difference was that now the rebel had three tattoos. Ooh, his parents must be so pissed!

But as I flipped through the pages, I didn’t get the same thrill as I did when I was in my early twenties. I wondered if it was all the college imagery, the messy desks, and the generic pennants on the walls that read, simply, “STATE.” Maybe I needed scenarios more geared toward my current life stage. “Okay, I brought over that mortgage paperwork for you to sign . . . and Oops! I forgot my pants!” “I can get you three-point-nine percent APR on that Camry . . . and Oops! I forgot my pants!”

But it wasn’t just the silly pretenses for the nudity. It was the eyes. Sweet, shy, pleading. The Freshmen seemed lost. Those adorable young faces reminded me of the boy I used to be, so innocent, so unsure. Even the rebel seemed like a nice kid, if he would just be a little more careful about what fell through the holes in his torn jeans. I didn’t relate to these guys anymore, and seeing them naked only made me feel creepy. That’s when I had an even spookier realization. This magazine was never intended for college kids just poking out of the closet. It was for dirty old men!

I wanted to talk to these boys, to encourage them to make better life choices, to protect them from the readers of this magazine. While I’d spent the last fifteen years growing up, they hadn’t changed at all. I had morphed from Freshman to Man, and they were still too dumb to put on some fucking pants.

As disturbing as it was, there was something reassuring about my epiphany. Seeing
Freshmen
as a thirty-six-year-old hadn’t been the turn-on I needed at that moment, but it did something even more important for me: It gave me a sneak preview of how it must feel to be a
dad. If my kid ever posed for a magazine like that, I’d kill him.

6

The Womb of Steel

A
mong the many useless topics
discussed in high school algebra that nonetheless stuck with me was the subject of imaginary numbers. An imaginary number is what you get when you try to take the square root of a negative, because such a number couldn’t possibly exist. As Drew and I took our place on the waiting list for a surrogate, I learned a new imaginary number: $109,728. That was the estimated cost of having a baby with Rainbow Extensions. For an estimate, it sounded awfully precise. $109,728—or $109,731.46 if you stop for Starbucks.

There were no financing options, no coupons in the Sunday paper, no deals for free delivery. $109,728 was due in full, in advance—or no baby. Drew and I didn’t have trust funds or stock portfolios or access to a ragtag team of professional thieves who could help us pull off some wicked casino heist. What we had was about $40,000 in the bank and a lot of blind optimism. We had originally earmarked that $40,000 for a down payment on a house, a new car, and a future, none of which we would ever have now.

The only other thing we had on our side was time—one year on the surrogate waiting list to amass the small fortune this baby would cost us. Luckily, our finances had taken a sudden unexpected uptick. Drew found a new job that paid him $1,000 more a week, and I got a promotion that grossed me an additional $500. I did the math, and if we put all that money aside, our imaginary number started to look astonishingly plausible. We still had a long way to go, but
la la la everything’s going to work out la la la!

One of the benefits of working with a surrogacy agency is that, as long as you can produce the money, they’ll handle how to dispense it. We wouldn’t need to fork over any direct payments to doctors, lawyers, or, God forbid, the surrogate. All we had to do was enjoy the wonder of creating life while S’mantha handled the icky financial stuff.

The problem was that we couldn’t get S’mantha on the phone. The results from the sperm analysis were supposed to come in on a Tuesday, and she promised to call us the minute she had them in hand. We waited all day, but we never heard from her. On Wednesday morning, we left her a voice mail. We tried again on Thursday and Friday. We sent emails, but we never heard back. This was the woman we were going to entrust a six-figure sum to?

“Rainbow Extensions. How may I direct your call?”

“Hi, this is Jerry Mahoney. I haven’t heard from my caseworker in a week now, and I’m a bit concerned.”

“Who’s your caseworker?”

“S’mantha.”

“Oh.” The receptionist sounded grim. It was an “oh” as in “Oh, you haven’t heard?” The plot thickened.

She put me on hold. Then, someone else picked up. “Who are you holding for?”

“Well . . . S’mantha, I guess.”

“Oh.” This was an even graver “oh.” It was an “I don’t want to be the one to deal with this” “oh.”

I went back on hold for what seemed like an eternity. I’d been to the Rainbow Extensions offices. It was basically one big room with about ten cubicles. I pictured the entire staff popping up like prairie dogs in a panic. “S’mantha call on line one!”

“I’m not answering it!”

“Not my turn!”

“They’re still holding!”

“Someone needs to deal with this!”

“Anyone picked up line one yet?”

Then, finally. “Oh, Christ! I’ll get it!”

A slightly annoyed voice came on the line. “Hello?”

“Yes, I’m calling about S’mantha.”

“Is there something I can help you with?”

“Can you tell me where she is?”

“She’s fine. What is it you need?”

“I need to know what happened to S’mantha!”

Drew was pacing frantically behind me as I spoke. “Are they not telling you? Give me the phone!” I waved him away.

“She’s no longer with Rainbow Extensions,” the voice said, sighing as if my tortuous interrogation had finally broken him.

“We kind of figured that out. Was she fired?”

“She was presented with a career opportunity she couldn’t turn down.” I laughed until I realized he wasn’t intentionally quoting
The
Godfather
. This seemed to be a legitimate Rainbow Extensions talking point.

“Why weren’t we assigned another caseworker?” I asked. “We feel like we don’t matter to Rainbow Extensions.”

“What are your names again?”

About a week later, we received a call from a new woman, Linda. She sounded like she was about eighty years old, hard of hearing, and easily confused. She informed us she would be our interim caseworker until a permanent replacement could be found. Linda gave us a checklist of paperwork and phone consults we needed to complete. We diligently took care of all the outstanding issues, then called Linda to let her know.

She never called us back. She didn’t return our emails. Her phone was always forwarded to voice mail. It was time to give Rainbow Extensions another call, but this time Drew insisted on doing the talking.

“THIS IS FUCKED UP!” he shouted. “This is the worst service I’ve ever dealt with! Don’t you know how much we’re paying you? We’re entrusting you to help us have a baby, and people keep disappearing under mysterious circumstances.”

“There’s nothing mysterious about Linda’s departure. She retired.”

“Without notice? In the middle of the week? Bullshit!”

“That’s what happened.”

“Then why didn’t she tell us she was retiring?”

“You’d have to ask Linda that.”

“I’d love to . . . but I can’t get her on the FUCKING PHONE!”

“Is there something you need?”

“Yeah, I need a supervisor. You’re an idiot.”

A few days later, a man named Maxwell called and introduced himself as our new caseworker. He seemed like a nice guy, but he had clearly drawn the short straw around the office if he had to deal with us. Our first phone call consisted of Drew lecturing him on the proper way to deal with clients and demanding that, if he decided to leave Rainbow Extensions, he had to let us know in writing, in advance, rather than by forwarding his phone to voice mail and never returning.

Over the next nine months, Drew and I built up our savings to around $80,000. I was finally starting to feel at ease with the price tag. We knew Rainbow Extensions might call any day with a surrogate for us, and $80,000 seemed within a comfortable stalling distance of the total.

One day, an email popped up in our in-boxes. “Great news, guys!” Maxwell began. The email included five attachments containing an encyclopedic summation of a human being named Kristen Lander. There was a psych clearance, a medical clearance, a financial accounting, her surrogate application, and a file marked “Photos.” I opened that one first.

She was Caucasian, damn it.

Other than that, she seemed perfectly suited to carry our children. She was stocky and stern and, from the looks of her, could easily kick our asses. She had big blue eyes and a sarcastic smile that just dared you to mess with her. I imagined her voice being gruff and business-like. “Grrr! Baby goes here!” she’d grunt and point to her belly.

A few of the pictures showed her with her three adorable kids. One shot was of her and the twins she’d delivered in a previous surrogacy. There was also an image of her in a T-shirt that read, “Yes, I’m pregnant. No, they’re not mine.” A surrogate with a sense of humor? I was sold.

There aren’t many instances in which you know everything about a person before you even meet them, but whatever the pictures didn’t tell us, Kristin’s application did. Her entire life unfolded in front of us as we read. She worked part-time as a human resources assistant. She was the bassist in a Bangles tribute band. She had a nose piercing and three butterfly tattoos.

Kristen’s husband Paco was a boxy Latino man with large hoop earrings and a goatee. He worked for a moving company. We even saw how much money they made. Together, Kristin and Paco grossed $3,000 a month. The $25,000 surrogacy check would almost double their annual income.

There was nothing overtly gay-friendly about them on the surface, so it was a relief to see that Kristen’s previous surrogacy had also been for a gay couple. I’d always wondered how our surrogate would cope with explaining the gayby in her belly. She’d constantly be answering questions, defending herself to homophobic family members and clergypeople. Having our kid meant opting into the world of homophobia Drew and I took for granted. As she wrote in her application, though, her previous pregnancy was a breeze. Everyone supported her, even her church. She welcomed the prospect of creating another gay family.

Best of all, Kristen’s lady parts were at the top of their game. Her uterus was easier to get into than the University of Phoenix. All of her children had been conceived without much effort, carried full term, and delivered healthy. Her surrogate twins were born at thirty-seven weeks, impressive for a multiple birth. She was the perfect baby incubator.

She was the Womb of Steel.

Maxwell set up an appointment for us to meet Kristin on February 1. It was the five-year anniversary of the day Drew and I first met. It was kismet. We were building the perfect fairy tale to tell our future kid. We read Kristen’s application about ten thousand times, memorized every bit of trivia. We would have killed on Kristen Lander Jeopardy.

“This was Kristen’s course of study in college before dropping out.”

“What is sign language?”

“This is the only medical condition Kristen checked ‘Yes’ to.”

“What is hemorrhoids? Teehee!”

Maxwell asked us if we’d selected an egg donor yet.

“No.”

“Oh.” He sounded concerned. “You should do that before you meet with the surrogate.”

“We were told we’d have plenty of time to do that after we met the surrogate.”

“Oh no,” he said. “Who told you that?”

“S’mantha.”

“Who? Nobody by that name work
s here.”