The Paternity Test (4 page)

The cottage was no longer worth the cost to them, they said, and, even if it were, neither could afford it. Sally, who had a son at Choate and another on the verge of applying, had recently given birth to twin girls (a shock to everyone, considering her complaints, last Thanksgiving, of the burn of an early menopause). And Brenda, the younger, had lost much of her savings when a pet-food business she’d bet on went bankrupt.

The house was admittedly a monster to maintain. Constructed in the pre–global warming, go-go ’50s, it featured a convoluted system of copper pipes that could never quite successfully be drained, which meant we had to run the boiler all winter long. Practically the whole north-facing wall was picture windows, and heat leaked in torrents through the glass.

Now, after four grudging years of bill dividing—the mortgage, the insurance, the property taxes, the heat—my sisters both said they needed out. The only way to keep the cottage would be to buy their shares, which Stu and I could never swing, on top of our other expenses. We just couldn’t. Not if we stayed in New York.

I took him to the cottage for Presidents’ Day weekend. A storm had just tickled the Cape with snow.

The three days were empty in the healthiest of ways. We caught up on
Vanity Fair
s, played endless games of hearts; sometimes we just stared out at the bay. Hour by hour I watched as Stu shed his need for noise—the city’s ceaseless peep show of distractions—and tuned in to the song of his own thoughts.

How I loved the cottage and its ambitious anachronisms, which brought me back to boyhood summers of big and careless dreams. My dad had only come down here as work allowed, on weekends; Sally and Brenda would canter off to horse camps in Maine; and so it was mostly me and Mom. We clammed and played badminton, puttered in the yard; she taught me names of hawks and oaks and blooms. Nights, we’d steam mussels we had plucked from a nearby jetty, or, if we were tuckered out from all our independence, drive to town for Baxter’s fish and chips.

Once, on a foggy afternoon, we went to Plymouth, to see (for maybe the third time) the Rock. Circling for a parking spot, my mom suddenly braked. “Pat, look!” she said. “On that street sign: it’s
you
!” The name of an alley we were passing was Faunce Place; I felt the satisfaction (and the onus) of entitlement.
Faunce Place
. The place where a Faunce belonged.

Nth-degreed, that was how I felt about the cottage—the place on earth where everything seemed unassailably mine, and more than that: just plain unassailable. The sun rose exactly where a sun
should
in the windows; the air was the salty, ageless definition of air.

Stu must have had a hint or two of my intentions, because, when I proposed the plan, he didn’t object in principle. He said, “I’d have to see about a transfer.”

We were down at Sandy Neck, walking along the shore. The winter sky was paler than the sand.

“Logan’s a busy base for us,” he said. “I could commute—you know, take puddle-jumpers from Hyannis? Remember Chuck, my redhead friend from flight school? That’s what he does now. Air-commutes to LGA from Montauk.”

I knew he would have to deal with much more than logistics. Moving to the Cape, for me, would be a kind of homecoming; for him it would mean leaving the only place he’d lived. So maybe this was all just talk, like going back for Mirek.

But Stu wasn’t spieling in the swollen tone he sometimes used; his voice now was flat and straight and small. “And you?” he said. “You’d keep your gig with Educraft? You could?”

Moving was no problem for me, work-wise, I assured him. All I needed? A laptop, an Internet connection, a road up which UPS could drive.

“All right, then,” he said. “Fair enough.”

He looked, as he scuffed along the surf, staid and doleful, squinting at the blankness of the sky. Far from draining my confidence, his look was what encouraged me: despite how much the move might sting, he was preparing to choose this. Choose us.

Life on the Cape wouldn’t “solve” the problems we’d been having, or keep Stu from cruising on the Web, if he reverted. I knew he might still find men in various ports of call. But if we were to stay together, to have a kid together, I would need collateral—assurance of his commitment—and starting a new life out here could provide that.

This place was a calming force, an antidote to frenzy. I’d been struck, this weekend, sharing the empty hours with Stu: the cottage, more than anywhere else, left us
unadulterated
, by which I meant both closest to the essence of our union and farthest from our various infidelities.

“You know,” said Stu, walking beside me, “it actually makes good sense. The condo’s too small to raise a kid in. The city’s too full of filth. Not to mention a hundred times more pricey.” He ticked off the reasons on his fingers. “All of that would be different here.
Everything
would be, right?” He balled his fingers into a fist of conviction.

This was when he might have whooped or pulled me to his breast; a Stu in the movies might have done that. But my Stu, the one I loved— despite, still, regardless—my Stu only held my little finger. He spoke not a word but told me everything he needed to (
sorry, my sweet, so sorry; you’re mine; I adore you
) with tiny, tender pulsings of his hand.

We listened to the landing waves, their message:
Kiss! Kiss!

And now here we were, nearly at the Pancake King, to meet the woman who might bear our baby.

Here was the mall, where Mrs. Rita had etched our grains of rice; here was Filene’s, where I’d faced my old fears. The nine months of Cape Cod life had given us some history, had cured the slurry beneath us into concrete.

I had never mentioned Joseph’s “save the marriage” dig. But Stu was likely mindful—I knew for sure that
I
was—of building ourselves back up in advance of making a baby. I thought of us as sparrows, our happiness as tinsel we collected to adorn the natal nest. Every further episode we wove together spurred in me a silent
Take that, Joseph. See? See?

Idling at a stop light, Stu returned to the topic, God help us, of settling on a restaurant for our meeting: “Honestly, the Yarmouth House? It would’ve been just fine,” he said. “I mean, if this works out, it’s not just
lunch
we’ll pay for. Why pretend we can’t afford some steak?”

I sensed he was pushing me to argue the other side. “Yeah, but we don’t want to flaunt it, right? Or wield it over them. The Pancake King is . . . I think it’s
inspired
.”

Instead of spinning our wheels like this, we could simply have asked Debora and Danny what they liked. Tellingly, perhaps, we hadn’t thought to.

Was it nuts to be jazzed about this woman as a prospect, with only the flimsiest notion of who she was? We’d seen her photo (olive skin, richly dappled eyes, a bright, insurrectionary smile), we’d e-mailed maybe six or seven times (her syntax was a half-step off, which normally would have miffed me, but her particular oddness was alluring). We knew some pointed intimacies: her BMI, her bra size, her menstrual pattern (as regular as clockwork); we’d learned that she’d given birth vaginally to her daughter, without episiotomy or prolapse. But how this Debora Neuman thought, what made her tick or ticked her off—in short, who the hell she was—was guesswork. I could have told you more about the dame down at the Old Village Store who sold me cranberry muffins every Sunday.

So yes, this was nuts.

Which made it also thrilling. A dive into a lake of unknown depth.

Those of us afflicted with the malady of LOW Syndrome—the shorthand I’d devised for “Lack of Womb”—still had lots of ways of making babies. In fact, we’d been stymied by an overload of choice.

Adoption was off the table, as Stu was set on splicing himself into the Nadler family’s fraying rope. To me it mattered less whose genes would tango with the mother’s than who would feed and change the child, rock it through the night—and I, since I worked from home, would mostly take that role. As far as genes went, I was quite content that they be Stu’s. Better for the baby to get his dark, hospitable looks than be saddled with my own WASPish features: nose and chin as sharp as little stingers.

Okay, then, that narrowed things: we’d have to find a surrogate. Even still, the range of choices was daunting. Neither of us ever seriously thought to try our sisters. Eggless Rina could have carried another woman’s embryo for us, but asking her would only just rub salt into her wound. And my sisters? We’d never been that close. (Faunce family dealings were neither a burden nor a joy; they fell into that class of expected transactions that conscientious people made time for—like voting, or donating blood.)

I might have asked Marcie, my best lesbian pal. Ours was an unencumbered homo–dyke dynamic, based on mutually assumed unattraction. My love for her had been sealed when, a few months into our friendship—a May Day party at her and her partner Erin’s—Marcie learned that Stu had never seen a woman’s privates; she hauled him into the bathroom, shimmied out of her jeans, spread her legs, and gave a guided tour. But Marcie, when she and Erin eventually wanted a family, had asked if I would be the sperm donor. No parental rights, no money for support, but I could be a “presence” for the child. In other words, a free ride: reward without the risk. Which proved to be the aspect of the deal that deeply tempted me but later, on reflection, put me off. Dadhood didn’t strike me as a job to go partway on.

“Come on, man,” said Marcie. “It’s nothing. A five-minute wank. You’ve done that for
strangers
, I bet. You’re gay!”

But I’d said no, and having declined to give her five quick minutes, I couldn’t well ask her for nine months.

We thought of using an agency, to make things more official, to limit our list to pre-approved bidders, as it were. Our friends Zack and Glenn had gone that route when they’d made Milo, and that’s what Glenn suggested we do, too.

It was the thick of summer now, four months since we’d moved out to the cottage. We made an appointment with the “intake coordinator” at Certain Surrogacy, a golden-voiced woman named Linda Po, who, to judge by the frequency and near-erotic delight with which she said, “Here at Certain Surrogacy . . . ,” was enthralled by the name’s triple sibilance. CS was in a refurbished Victorian in Jamaica Plain, a quaint, small-townish section of Boston where everyone had a scruffier-than-thou, aggressively placid appearance. The building, said a plaque, had once housed Maloney’s Funeral Home. Maybe the ghosts of funeral directors past still haunted the place, because Linda’s pitch reminded me of someone selling caskets—or, rather, someone trying to “up-sell” a posher model. Practically her every other word was
nontraditional
. If not that, then
nonjudgmental, alternative, accepting
. Christ, the way she slammed us with acceptance!

I knew, of course, we should have breathed relief to be so welcomed; mainstream clinics sometimes stopped queer couples at the door. But still, with Linda’s steel-trap mantra (“Here at Certain Surrogacy . . .”), her inundation of über-PC buzzwords, Stu and I were starting to feel less like hopeful dads, and more like . . . well, a
niche market
.

“Can I ask something?” Stu said to Linda, who sat in an ergonomic chair on the far side of a wide walnut desk.

“By all means! That’s why I’m here,” she said. “Don’t be squeamish. We’re used to”—she winked—“sticky subjects.”

“Okay, then. What’s up with all the alliteration?”

Linda’s grin glittered. “Alliteration?”

“Yeah,” said Stu. “Every single agency we’ve looked into. Certain Surrogacy. Miracle Makers. Growing Generations.”

“I guess it’s just . . . well, no one’s ever asked that.” Linda laughed.

Stu laughed, too, but with an edge. “Wow,” he said. “Why does that not surprise me?”

Oh, Stu. He had a rotten habit of letting his snideness show, especially when he felt pushed past comfort. Actually, though, despite the trouble he could get us into, I was mostly gladdened by his candor: frequently he said the things that I had lacked the guts to.

Linda Po was doing her very best to seem oblivious. She made a fuss of rolling her chair to our side of the desk (“There, that’s better. I
hate
to talk with that big thing between us”), and unfurled a bullet-pointed pamphlet. She told us we could choose from one of six preset plans. “For example, a cost-conscious alternative is the Egg Bank Option. The donors are proven, and we use a new rapid-freeze vitrification process— you save almost twenty thousand bucks over going fresh. Or, though it’s a little more expensive, we have Egg Sharing.”

“Egg sharing?” I said. “I thought only twins could do that.”

“Ha,” she said. “That’s good. Haven’t heard that. No, egg sharing: you choose a variety of donors, as do other clients, and whichever has an egg ready when you are, that’s your woman.”

Linda was most stoked about their Certain Baby Plan, which guaranteed that couples not yet pregnant after four attempts would have their fees (but not expenses) refunded. “We have a cost calculator,” she said, and swiveled her screen to let us see the spreadsheet.

Dizzied by the screen, its steepening heap of figures, I looked away and stared instead at Linda: her graceful neck, her autocratic chin. My hunch was, she’d had a child through surrogacy—she was barren—and working here was part of how she coped. Had life offered lemons? She’d squeeze and squeeze her lemonade, a way of doing well by doing good.

Her list went on: caseworker consults; psychological screenings (of the donor, the surrogate, the parents); a chaperone to be there when potential matches met . . .

“Back up,” said Stu. “Screening of the parents? You mean
us
?”

“Absolutely!” she said, as though this were a bonus. “Intended parents meet with one of our licensed professionals, who—”