Spoiled Page 5

  “No, I really can’t,” said Alice. And after an annoying internal debate in which there seemed to be two losing sides, she admitted, “I’m pregnant.” Don’s eyes flew, somewhat indignantly, to her left hand, only now of course registering the ring on it.

  “How many months?” He reached for his back pocket to draw out a wallet-size snap.

  “Four,” said Alice. “Seventeen weeks.” She turned her lips up at the photograph of grade-school twin boys; she wasn’t, actually, particularly interested in children.

  “No sushi for you, huh?” Don chuckled, replacing the picture.

  “Or wine or coffee or unpasteurized cheese—it sucks, doesn’t it?” enjoined the banker. Despite the impudence of the remarks, Alice laughed. The truth was she was grateful to be talking with two men, who wouldn’t know the significance of the number of weeks—wouldn’t think to ask her, “Yeah? You gonna get amnio?” as a female colleague of hers had earlier tonight. She had had it—amniocentesis—barely a week ago, after a blood test came back showing increased risk for Down syndrome, and she was so bored and anxious waiting for the results she had actually been glad of her required attendance at this work dinner, any distraction better than none.

  “We’re trying, too,” the banker said warmly.

  “Really.” Alice was afraid she looked at him rather blankly.

  “We should be getting going by the summer.”

  “That’s great,” said Alice, feeling a politically correct prod somewhere in her conscience.

  “We’re excited.”

  “I bet.” It was inane. She had no idea what the man was talking about. She forked some penne.

  “We’ve already gone out to Texas twice to meet our surrogate,” continued the man—-Julian—over the sea bass. A belated-but-not-very-embarrassed exchange of names had come with the main course.

  “Oh!” He seemed to want to talk about it, assumed, evidently, that she—and Don who was listening in—would want to know the details. “So, she …” Alice tried. “I mean, this woman … ?”

  Her companion leaped, however, to the generalizing plural: “These women are the most amazing women in the world,” he said, and his tone, which was quite aggressive, startled Alice. As if she’d been caught out, she put a perky, nonjudgmentally interested look on her face as she studied his: the sardonic brown eyes and long, elegantly tapering nose; the pleasingly aligned cheekbones and defiant shock of blond hair. “They feel it’s their calling to bear children.” There wasn’t the slightest hesitation when he said this—the slightest concession to a possible demurral on her part. Instead, his words to Alice seemed to presume a shared faith.

  “Their calling,” she said slowly. “You mean—religious?”

  He was nodding before she finished the question. “They’re all Catholic—or fundamentalist Christian or whatever. The woman we’re interested in has already done it three times. Experience was important to us,” he added, as if they were discussing—as indeed a pair of analysts across the table had been a moment ago—the latest in LASIK surgery.

  The waiter insinuated himself, proffering a sauce boat. Both Alice and Don pulled their hands up out of the man’s way with alacrity, as if a little too happy to have something to do. “So, have you guys picked out names?” Julian asked cozily, her new best friend.

  “Yes,” said Alice slowly, still trying to absorb what the man was saying. “But I’ve learned not to talk about it. Whatever you say, it turns out the person had a dog named that.”

  Don gave a coughlike bark and Julian beamed—indulging her with the smile, Alice realized with a prick of indignation. He was not truly amused. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “My ex had to do IVF,” Don said hopefully, but the other two had moved on to a safer topic—a subject an earlier generation might have avoided—politics; the upcoming election, in which it was assumed everyone would be for the challenger, the patrician Democratic senator, the thinking man’s candidate. “Anyone but who we’ve got,” Julian said, and Alice said she couldn’t agree more.

  “BREEDERS!” ALICE CRIED when she got home, yelling into the bedroom as she hung up her coat and scarf. “Isn’t that what they used to call us?”

  She jammed the closet door shut and crossed the tiny, book-lined living room to the cramped bedroom. “Isn’t that just too weird, Mark? Isn’t it so Handmaid’s Tale?” she said impatiently. “Screw fifty people in a sex club and now I’d like a child, please!”

  Mark was lying on the bed on his stomach, reading The Economist. “It’s not a lifestyle choice, Mark!” Alice said. “It takes a man and a woman. There’s something actual there—there’s something real. It’s called Nature, you know? As in, eighty million years—hello?”

  Now Mark dragged his eyes up from the magazine, the election coverage; he looked happy, simply, that she was home. Alice shook her head pityingly. She warned him direly, brushing her teeth a little later, “Cloning’ll be next!” She was talking with toothpaste in her mouth and had to stick out her jaw to prevent it from running down her chin. “I’m telling you, Mark! Mark?!” she cried, fearing he had fallen asleep. “Are you gonna care then? When they start cloning people?”

  HURRYING INTO THE elevator the next morning, Alice caught a glimpse of her tired, stricken face in the reflective doors. She was still smarting from Mark’s bemused, even reply: “You’re always the last to know, Alice.”

  In her office, Alice sat down at her desk and clicked on her computer screen. She peeled the lid off her tea and had begun to scroll through the overnight load of e-mails, when the phone rang. Alice picked it up hopefully, eager for a distraction. “Good morning—Alice?” Dr. Rand, her obstetrician. For a second she actually thought he was calling to see how she was holding up during these nerve-racking two weeks that followed the test—some new civility initiative at the hospital in keeping with the movement to demedicalize birth. There was an oddly placed silence and then the doctor asked her, “Do you have a moment to talk?”

  As he went on she read and reread a paragraph in the contract before her:

  The securities offered hereby involve a high degree of risk. See “Risk Factors” beginning on Page 4 … The securities offered hereby

  The moment lengthened endlessly—beyond the call, the day, beyond her thirties—a decade that, she now saw, had been characterized by a profound and blissful naïveté. Beyond the rest of her life, even.

  “Dr. Levien and I have reviewed the results of your amniocentesis, and I am very sorry to have to tell you.”

  It took Alice a second or two, when Dr. Rand had finished, to find the civil reply that would let the man off the hook, release him to his quotidian obligations—calls like this a—what? monthly? biannual?—nuisance … Some women more composed than others—the odd unhinged one who attacked his graceful, practiced phrases, not having any—neither “great disappointment” nor “painful decision.” Alice managed to keep her voice low—her office door was wide open—as she agreed to consider all of her options.

  (If one wanted to be honest, though, wasn’t it better to admit that there was no choice to be made? Wasn’t it the case, not unlike the upcoming election, that you’d always more or less known which way you would vote?)

  She even—the martyr in her sensing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity—thanked the man for taking the time to let her know personally.

  Then the call was over. Alice got up and pushed the door shut. She sat staring at the gray expanse of steel that separated her from the bustle of the corporate corridor, her eyes narrowed, like someone concentrating very hard to remember some fact or sequence of events, gone all of a sudden from one’s memory. After a moment she picked up the phone and dialed the hospital, mindful of how busy her schedule was next week (a new deal starting, with a partner she’d never worked for), and made the appointment for her only available window—election day, when she could use the excuse of having to vote. When that was finished, she dialed Mark. He didn’t pick up at home; his cell phone went
straight to voice mail. He was getting ready for class, probably; he had the big freshman poli sci lecture Wednesday mornings. A little later she could try him at the department. It didn’t really matter when she told him, did it? Conveyance of the fact was not the issue now.

  MAUREEN, TOO, WOULD have to be told. Alice put her head in her hands as the last conversation she’d had with her mother came back to her in sharp, shameful recollection, the hindsight irony of it almost more than she could bear. Maureen, in the confusion of her general daily anxiety, had misunderstood a message Alice had left on her machine earlier that morning. “Increased risk for Down’s, I said! Increased risk!” Alice had stood on the corner of Park and Fifty-third shouting into her cell while the flood of rush-hour pedestrians broke around her. “That’s why I have to have the amnio! Jesus, Mom—you think I’d leave that on a message?”

  Maureen sounded as if she’d been shot. “Well, I was going to say, they are very lovable, you know.”

  “Mom.” Alice struggled against the adolescent impulse—to scream and dash the phone against the pavement. “Why would you say that?” she pleaded, as she walked the last half block to her office building, an eighties homage to chrome and glass. “In what way does pointing that out now … help me? It’s a routine test. People—everyone thinks I’m nuts to be at all worried!”

  Inside the building, Alice had been able to hear the long pause that followed. Maureen seemed to be clearing her throat, but in the distance, as if she was holding the phone away from her. Then she asked Alice, “I hear you’re going to see Brenda and Kev this weekend?” These were Alice’s Long Island cousins; Maureen was the younger sister of Brenda’s mother, Roberta.

  “Mom, you always change the subject.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah … I think so.” Alice tried to feel mollified, tried to end the conversation on a good note so as not to jinx the amnio; she was going in for the appointment tomorrow. That was why she had called Maureen in the first place—she felt she should let her know. “Probably. They invited us out for a barbecue on Sunday.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “What?” Alice said. “What exactly are you saying, Mom?”

  “Nothing, I just—” Her mother hesitated. “I wouldn’t say anything about it, Alice. I wouldn’t mention the—the test to them.”

  “Mom.” She had not felt able, Alice remembered, to put sufficient disgust into her voice.

  Maureen had tried to defend herself. “I’m just saying, if—later on—you had to make a decision—”

  “You mean if I had to abort the hell out of it, Mom? Is that what you’re getting at?”

  SHE AND MARK had gone out to the Healys’ that weekend—to Brenda and Kevin’s. They had taken the train from Penn Station, as they always did, Alice irritated when Mark seemed to jump at the idea of their having concrete plans to help them get through the one weekend before they got the results. It wasn’t that he shared her worry, not at all—the odds were with them—she was the one who was torturing herself for no good reason; Mark took comfort in statistics, as rational people did. He just didn’t want to have to deal with her touchiness, her overactive imagination all by himself.

  The Long Island Rail Road outbound on a Sunday morning was soothing. It was sleepily optimistic, the scene—single men and women, mostly, taking up a whole seat with their duffel bags and the Times. Alice had cast an indulgent eye around the car as she slid into the seat beside Mark. Many a weekend she had been one of them, down to the newspaper and the little paper bag of coffee, before she met Mark. The ace up her sleeve it had been, on slow lonely weekends, to escape to her cousins’ in the burbs. Brenda and Kevin had seemed to take satisfaction in her needing them in that way, seemed gratified that Alice had turned to them—she who might just as easily have gotten on without them. “Whenever you want to get out of the city,” Brenda would make Alice promise at the end of every visit, “you give us a call. We’re here for you, Al.” That they were still getting together, that the Healys’ invitations and her acceptances had continued apace after she got married, was unexpected: Alice acknowledged this in the rare moments of disabusing clarity she allowed herself. She supposed she’d assumed that her cousins were another comforting but indefensible habit that Mark would call a halt to—not directly, of course; he was far too evolved to dictate actual behavior, but that his presence would demand a reckoning of some kind, instead of which, Alice would let herself drift apart from Brenda, with geography’s help. Instead, the frequency of their pilgrimages to the Healys’ had increased slightly, from once a season to every couple of months. There had been the pleasant, unpredicted fact of Mark’s getting along with Kevin, of his approving of Kevin, though the two men had little in common. “We’re here for you,” Brenda still maintained, though perhaps now the subtext had shifted: an established family, she might have meant, on which Alice and Mark going into their child-rearing years could model themselves. Brenda herself was pregnant with her fourth. A mistake, she freely admitted when she called Alice with the news—“Mom said Kevin should get a vasectomy.”

  Once the train had gotten under way, Alice turned to Mark and said casually, “So what did you mean, you ‘can’t argue viability’?” She was referring to a comment he’d made Friday night, among friends of theirs, apropos of an election issue. She posed the question with a careful neutrality of tone, as if it were motivated by intellectual curiosity alone, but Mark asked sardonically, “Do you really want to discuss this now? I mean, like, three days after you have the fucking test?”

  “No time like the present,” Alice said chirpily. It was the fashion, among her old roommates from Yale—tomboyish and cynical, eschewing the maternity shops for as long as they could by passing around a pair of large-waisted Levi’s cords—to belittle one’s pregnancy, to treat it as an absurd moment in their otherwise genderless lives, to define themselves expressly against the women (their secretaries, certain girlish women who had married the guys they knew) who spent hours on websites charting the growth of their unborn children. There was no vocabulary in their witty bitterness—without which they had nothing—for the pure elation Alice felt in odd, solitary moments when she thought about the creature growing inside her and thought she might have it in her to be a good mother.

  “Look, it used to be thirty weeks, now it’s, what, twenty-six?” Mark said wearily. “They keep moving it back. How can you say something’s not immoral at a certain point, when the point itself keeps changing? It’s ridiculous. It’s indefensible.” Mark picked up the section of the newspaper he had been reading, the Week in Review, and proffered the rest to her.

  “You know I can’t,” Alice said huffily, enjoying the melodrama of refusing the paper, taking out a novel instead. “He makes me too mad.”

  As the election neared and her first trimester came and went with no sign of the promised abatement of nausea, Alice had developed an intense personal hatred for the president. Cocksure and charismatic, it was as if he were a young man she had despised in high school, instead of just being like that young man. Helped along perhaps by her physically incapacitated state, Alice had quickly internalized the futility of protest, assuming everyone would do the same. Yet, as if anything could be done about the polls from here, an earnestness had overtaken the city. Toiling up the subway stairs, Alice had been stopped not once, not twice, but four separate times by a clipboard-wielding volunteer for the Democratic National Committee and pegged for a donation. She felt spiritually weak when she gave, as if she were being taken in, as if, as in the aggressive panhandling in the city of a decade before, she were half-knowingly supporting a drug habit.

  When Maureen had visited Alice in the city then, Alice’s mother had always stopped to look through her purse, no matter how offensive the approach (once a homeless man, in what was practically a mugging, had come running toward them on Broadway near Columbia demanding “Real money! Real money! None of that quarter and dime shit!”), take out a dollar, and apologize—through A
lice’s seething disapproval—if she found only change. “I can’t turn my back on someone like that!” Maureen would plead with her as they walked on. “Not when I have so much more!” Poor Maureen had never discovered that a new morality had overtaken the old, and the former was all about maintaining personal boundaries—talk to the hand, dump that addict friend, wash that problem person out of your hair, and congratulate yourself afterward on your inner growth.

  ALICE AND MARK’S friends had all stayed in the city when they got married, moving out to Brooklyn when they had kids, an idea they themselves had recently begun to pursue. Her cousins were the only couple Alice knew who had bought a bona fide starter house in the suburbs: 1960s construction, one level, with a basement they’d half finished by the time John, the second boy, was born, and they sold it and bought their current house.

  The new house, as the Healys still called it, was narrow; the living inside it was very up-and-down. Conversations, usually involving the location of objects, were conducted in an aggrieved shout from floor to floor (“So, is it down there or not?”). No question it was tight for a family of five. Robbie and John slept in bunk beds. The baby, as far as Alice knew, was still in with Brenda and Kev, and she couldn’t imagine what arrangements would be made for the new addition—Brenda was due with Number Four in May, just a month after Alice. But despite the feeling one had, inside, of the house’s being ramshackle and bursting at the seams, there was something classy about it that the starter house had lacked. Simply its age, perhaps—it was a village Victorian, one street over from the train—and in keeping with its age, the proper-feeling configuration of the rooms; the absence of the oversized family room that Brenda coveted. Brenda had decorated it with what Alice thought of—and not bitchily, the way it sounded—as “classy touches”: photographs of Tuscan streetscapes and catboats on Nantucket, with colorful sails, things Alice had once aspired to hang on her walls but that, somewhere between her junior spring in Paris and the Upper East Side walk-up, she had bypassed, but that looked nice, anyway. Alice was always glad to see the pictures again, just as she was always glad to be reminded that Kevin was a scratch golfer and had won the club championship two or three years running. She would feel herself relax a little on seeing them, or on noticing Kevin’s clubs leaning up against the back door, and she would say something that to an outsider might suggest it had been a long time since she had seen her cousin: She would ask, as she did now, withdrawing from Brenda’s bosomy, freckly, strawberry-blond embrace, the surfeit of clunky gold—earrings of crossed nine-irons, the chain with the pendant in the shape of the east end of Long Island—a leading question in order to flatter: “So, does Kevin still have his own parking spot down at the club?” They were only cousins, after all.