T.C. Boyle Stories by T. Coraghessan Boyle
The bad news was that Marie’s ovaries were shot. She was suffering from the Stein-Leventhal syndrome, he said, and was unable to produce viable ova. He put it to us straight: “She’s infertile, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Even if we had the facilities and the know-how, test-tube reproduction would be out of the question.”
Marie was stunned. I stared down at the linoleum for a second and listened to her sniffling, then took her hand.
Dr. Ziss leaned across the desk and pushed back a stray lock of hair. “But there is an alternative.”
We both looked at him.
“Have you considered a surrogate mother? A young woman who’d be willing to impregnate herself artificially with the husband’s semen—for a fee, of course—and then deliver the baby to the wife at the end of the term.” He was smoothing his mustache. “It’s being done all over the country. And if Mrs. Trimpie pads herself during her ‘pregnancy’ and ‘delivers’ in the city, none of your neighbors need ever know that the child isn’t wholly and naturally yours.”
My mind was racing. I was bombarded with selfish, and acquisitive thoughts, seething with scorn for Marie—she was the one, she was defective, not me—bursting to exercise my God-given right to a child and heir. It’s true, it really is—you never want something so much as when somebody tells you you can’t have it. I found myself thinking aloud: “So it would really be half ours, and … and half—”
“That’s right, Mr. Trimpie. And I have already contacted a young woman on your behalf, should you be interested.”
I looked at Marie. Her eyes were watering. She gave me a weak smile and pressed my hand.
“She’s Caucasian, of course, attractive, fit, very bright: a first-year medical student in need of funds to continue her education.”
“Um, uh,” I fumbled for the words, “how much; I mean, if we decide to go along with it, how much would it cost?”
The doctor was ready for this one. “Ten thousand dollars,” he said without hesitation, “plus hospital costs.”
Two days later there was a knock at the door. A girl in peacoat and blue jeans stood there, flanked by a pair of scuffed aquamarine suitcases held shut with masking tape. She looked to be about sixteen, stunted and bony and pale, cheap mother-of-pearl stars for earrings, her red hair short and spiky, as if she were letting a crewcut grow out. I couldn’t help thinking of those World War II movies where they shave the actresses’ heads for consorting with the Germans; I couldn’t help thinking of waifs and wanderers and runaway teen-agers. Dr. Ziss’s gunmetal Mercedes sat at the curb, clouds of exhaust tugging at the tailpipe in the chill morning air; he waved, and then ground away with a crunch of gravel. “Hi,” the girl said, extending her hand, “I’m Wendy.”
It had all been arranged. Dr. Ziss thought it would be a good idea if the mother-to-be came to stay with us two weeks or so before the “procedure,” to give us a chance to get to know one another, and then maybe stay on with us through the first couple of months so we could experience the pregnancy firsthand; when she began to show she’d move into an apartment on the other side of town, so as not to arouse any suspicion among the neighbors. He was delicate about the question of money, figuring a commercial fisherman and a part-time secretary, with no college and driving a beat-up Rambler, might not exactly be rolling in surplus capital. But the money wasn’t a problem really. There was the insurance payoff from Marie’s mother—she’d been blindsided by a semi coming off the ramp on the thruway—and the thirty-five hundred I’d got for delivering spawning stripers to Con Ed so they could hatch fish to replace the ones sucked into the screens at the nuclear plant. It was sitting in the County Trust, collecting five and a quarter percent, against the day some emergency came up. Well, this was it. I closed out the account.
The doctor took his fee and explained that the girl would get five thousand dollars on confirmation of pregnancy, and the balance when she delivered. Hospital costs would run about fifteen hundred dollars, barring complications. We shook hands on it, and Marie and I signed a form. I figured I could work nights at the bottling plant if I was strapped.
Now, with the girl standing there before me, I couldn’t help feeling a stab of disappointment—she was pretty enough, I guess, but I’d expected something a little more, well, substantial. And red hair. It was a letdown. Deep down I’d been hoping for a blonde, one of those Scandinavian types you see in the cigarette ads. Anyway, I told her I was glad to meet her, and then showed her up to the spare room, which I’d cleaned up and outfitted with a chest of drawers, a bed and a Salvation Army desk, and some cheery knickknacks. I asked her if I could get her a bite to eat, Marie being at work and me waiting around for the tide to go out. She was sitting on the bed, looking tired; she hadn’t even bothered to glance out the window at the view of Croton Bay. “Oh yeah,” she said after a minute, as if she’d been asleep or day-dreaming. “Yeah, that would be nice.” Her eyes were gray, the color of drift ice on the river. She called me Nathaniel, soft and formal, like a breathless young schoolteacher taking attendance. Marie never called me anything but Nat, and the guys at the marina settled for Ace. “Have you got a sandwich, maybe? And a cup of hot Nestlé’s? I’d really like that, Nathaniel.”
I went down and fixed her a BLT, her soft syllables tingling in my ears like a kiss. Dr. Ziss had called her an “oh pear” girl, which I guess referred to her shape. When she’d slipped out of her coat I saw that there was more to her than I’d thought—not much across the top, maybe, but sturdy in the hips and thighs. I couldn’t help thinking it was a good sign, but then I had to check myself: I was looking at her like a horse breeder or something.
She was asleep when I stepped in with the sandwich and hot chocolate. I shook her gently and she started up with a gasp, her eyes darting round the room as if she’d forgotten where she was. “Oh yes, yes, thanks,” she said, in that maddening, out-of-breath, little girl’s voice. I sat on the edge of the desk and watched her eat, gratified to see that her teeth were strong and even, and her nose just about right. “So you’re a medical student, Dr. Ziss tells me.”
“Hm-hmm,” she murmured, chewing. “First-year. I’m going to take the spring semester off, I mean for the baby and all—”
This was the first mention of our contract, and it fell over the conversation like a lead balloon. She hesitated, and I turned red. Here I was, alone in the house with a stranger, a pretty girl, and she was going to have my baby.
She went on, skirting the embarrassment, trying to brighten her voice. “I mean, I love it and all—med school—but it’s a grind already and I really don’t see how I can afford the tuition, without, without”—she looked up at me—“without your help.”
I didn’t know what to say. I stared into her eyes for a minute and felt strangely excited, powerful, like a pasha interviewing a new candidate for the harem. Then I picked up the china sturgeon on the desk and turned it over in my hands. “I didn’t go to college,” I said. And then, as if I were apologizing, “I’m a fisherman.”
A cold rain was falling the day the three of us drove down to Dr. Ziss’s for the “procedure.” The maples were turning, the streets splashed with red and gold, slick, glistening, the whole world a cathedral. I felt humbled somehow, respectful in the face of life and the progress of the generations of man: My seed is going to take hold, I kept thinking. In half an hour I’ll be a father. Marie and Wendy, on the other hand, seemed oblivious to the whole thing, chattering away like a sewing circle, talking about shoes and needlepoint and some actor’s divorce. They’d hit it off pretty well, the two of them, sitting in the kitchen over coffee at night, going to movies and thrift shops together, trading gossip, looking up at me and giggling when I stepped into the room. Though Wendy didn’t do much around the house—didn’t do much more than lie in bed and stare at textbooks—I don’t think Marie really minded. She was glad for the company, and there was something more too, of course: Wendy was making a big sacrifice for us. Both of us were deeply grateful.
Dr. Ziss was all smiles that afternoon, pumping my hand, kissing the girls, ushering us into his office like an impresario on opening night. Mrs. Goddard was more restrained. She shot me an icy look, as if I was conspiring to overthrow the Pope or corrupt Girl Scouts or something. Meanwhile, the doctor leaned toward Marie and Wendy and said something I didn’t quite catch, and suddenly they were all three of them laughing like Canada geese. Were they laughing at me, I wondered, all at once feeling self-conscious and vulnerable, the odd man out. Dr. Ziss, I noticed, had his arm around Wendy’s waist.
If I felt left out, I didn’t have time to brood over it. Because Mrs. Goddard had me by the elbow and she was marching me down the hallway to the men’s room, where she handed me a condom sealed in tinfoil and a couple of tattered girlie magazines. I didn’t need the magazines. Just the thought of what was going to happen in the next room—Marie had asked the doctor if she could do the insemination herself—gave me an erection like a tire iron. I pictured Wendy leaning back on the examining table in a little white smock, nothing underneath, and Marie, my big loving wife, with this syringelike thing … that’s all it took. I was out of the bathroom in sixty seconds, the wet condom tucked safely away in a sterilized jar.
Afterward, we shared a bottle of pink champagne and a lasagna dinner at Mama’s Pasta House. My treat.
One morning, about a month later, I was lying in bed next to Marie and I heard Wendy pad down the hallway to the bathroom. The house was still, and a soft gray light clung to the window sill like a blanket. I was thinking of nothing, or maybe I was thinking of striped bass, sleek and silver, how they ride up out of the deep like pieces of a dream. Next thing I heard was the sound of gagging. Morning sickness, I thought, picking up on a phrase from one of the countless baby books scattered round the house, and suddenly, inexplicably, I was doubled over myself. “Aaaaargh,” Wendy gasped, the sound echoing through the house, “aaaargh,” and it felt like somebody was pulling my stomach inside out.
At breakfast, she was pale and haggard, her hair greasy and her eyes puffed out. She tried to eat a piece of dry toast, but wound up spitting it into her hand. I couldn’t eat, either. Same thing the next day, and the next: she was sick, I was sick. I’d pull the cord on the outboard and the first whiff of exhaust would turn my stomach and I’d have to lean over and puke in the river. Or I’d haul the gill nets up off the bottom and the exertion would nearly kill me. I called the doctor.
“Sympathetic pregnancy,” he said, his voice cracking at the far end of a bad connection. “Perfectly normal. The husband identifies with the wife’s symptoms.”
“But I’m not her husband.”
“Husband, father: what difference does it make. You’re it.”
I thought about that. Thought about it when Wendy and I began to eat like the New York Jets at the training table, thought about it nights at the bottling plant, thought about it when Wendy came into the living room in her underwear one evening and showed us the hard white bulge that was already beginning to open her navel up like a flower. Marie was watching some sappy hospital show on TV; I was reading about the dead water between Manhattan and Staten Island—nothing living there, not even eels. “Look,” Wendy said, an angels-in-heaven smile on her face, “it’s starting to show.” Marie got up and embraced her. I grinned like an idiot, thrilled at the way the panties grabbed her thighs—white nylon with dancing pink flowers—and how her little pointed breasts were beginning to strain at the brassiere. I wanted to put my tongue in her navel.
Next day, while Marie was at work, I tapped on Wendy’s door. “Come on in,” she said. She was wearing a housecoat, Japanese-y, with dragons and pagodas on it, propped up against the pillows reading an anatomy text. I told her I didn’t feel like going down to the river and wondered if she wanted anything. She put the book down and looked at me like a pat of butter sinking into a halibut steak. “Yes,” she said, stretching it to two syllables, “as a matter of fact I do.” Then she unbuttoned the robe. Later she smiled at me and said: “So what did we need the doctor for, anyway?”
If Marie suspected anything, she didn’t show it. I think she was too caught up in the whole thing to have an evil thought about either one of us. I mean, she doted on Wendy, hung on her every word, came home from work each night and shut herself up in Wendy’s room for an hour or more. I could hear them giggling. When I asked her what the deal was, Marie just shrugged. “You know,” she said, “the usual—girls’ talk and such.” The shared experience had made them close, closer than sisters, and sometimes I would think of us as one big happy family. But I stopped short of telling Marie what was going on when she was out of the house. Once, years ago, I’d had a fling with a girl we’d known in high school—an arrow-faced little fox with starched hair and raccoon eyes. It had been brief and strictly biological, and then the girl had moved to Ohio. Marie never forgot it. Just the mention of Ohio—even so small a thing as the TV weatherman describing a storm over the Midwest—would set her off.
I’d like to say I was torn, but I wasn’t. I didn’t want to hurt Marie—she was my wife, my best friend, I loved and respected her—and yet there was Wendy, with her breathy voice and gray eyes, bearing my child. The thought of it, of my son floating around in his own little sea just behind the sweet bulge of her belly … well, it inflamed me, got me mad with lust and passion and spiritual love too. Wasn’t Wendy as much my wife as Marie? Wasn’t marriage, at bottom, simply a tool for procreating the species? Hadn’t Sarah told Abraham to go in unto Hagar? Looking back on it, I guess Wendy let me make love to her because maybe she was bored and a little horny, lying around in a negligee day and night and studying all that anatomy. She sure didn’t feel the way I did—if I know anything, I know that now. But at the time I didn’t think of it that way, I didn’t think at all. Surrogate mother, surrogate wife. I couldn’t get enough of her.
Everything changed when Marie taped a feather bolster around her waist and our “boarder” had to move over to Depew Street. (“Don’t know what happened,” I told the guys down at the Flounder, “she just up and moved out. Low on bucks, I guess.” Nobody so much as looked up from their beer until one of the guys mentioned the Knicks game and Alex DeFazio turned to me and said, “So you got a bun in the oven, is what I hear.”) I was at a loss. What with Marie working full-time now, I found myself stuck in the house, alone, with nothing much to do except wear a path in the carpet and eat my heart out. I could walk down to the river, but it was February and nothing was happening, so I’d wind up at the Flounder Inn with my elbows on the bar, watching the mollies and swordtails bump into the sides of the aquarium, hoping somebody would give me a lift across town. Of course Marie and I would drive over to Wendy’s after dinner every couple of days or so, and I could talk to her on the telephone till my throat went dry—but it wasn’t the same. Even the few times I did get over there in the day, I could feel it. We’d make love, but she seemed shy and reluctant, as if she were performing a duty or something. “What’s wrong?” I asked her. “Nothing,” she said. It was as if someone had cut a neat little hole in the center of my life.
One time, a stiff windy day in early March, I couldn’t stand the sight of four walls anymore and I walked the six miles across town and all the way out to De-pew Street. It was an ugly day. Clouds like steel wool, a dirty crust of ice underfoot, dog turds preserved like icons in the receding snowbanks. The whole way over there I kept thinking up various scenarios: Wendy and I would take the bus for California, then write Marie to come join us; we’d fly to the Virgin Islands and raise the kid on the beach; Marie would have an accident. When I got there, Dr. Ziss’s Mercedes was parked out front. I thought that was pretty funny, him being there in the middle of the day, but then I told myself he was her doctor after all. I turned around and walked home.
Nathaniel Jr. was born in New York City at the end of June, nine pounds, one ounce, with a fluff of orange hair and milky gray eyes. Wendy never looked so beautiful. The hospital bed was cranked up,
Dr. Ziss was on the scene, of course, all smiles, as if he’d been responsible for the whole thing. He pecked Marie’s cheek, patted the baby’s head, shook my hand, and bent low to kiss Wendy on the lips. I handed him a cigar. Three days later Wendy had her five thousand dollars, the doctor and the hospital had been paid off, and Marie and I were back in Westchester with our son. Wendy had been dressed in a loose summer gown and sandals when I gave her the check. I remember she was sitting there on a lacquered bench, cradling the baby, the hospital corridor lit up like a clerestory with sunbeams. There were tears—mainly Marie’s—and promises to keep in touch. She handed over Nathaniel as if he was a piece of meat or a sack of potatoes, no regrets. She and Marie embraced, she rubbed her cheek against mine and made a perfunctory little kissing noise, and then she was gone.