But now, bringing the sleeping baby to my shoulder and nuzzling my cheek against hers, it astounds me anew like a tidal wave: the innocence, the miraculous nature of life that eluded me for so long. Tears stream down my cheeks. Anne Elise is the sweetest, most precious being on the planet. How could I have doubted this? So firm is this knowledge, this shock and awe, that I kiss her slender lips, and just like that, her eyes pop open. Her inquisitive eyes are exactly like mine, a rich cobalt blue with fine flecks of copper and gold. Am I staring at a miracle?
I’m crying great tears of joy, thinking of the wretched years James and I experienced, the love that had vanished from our lives and how we flailed our bodies into each other night after blessèd night, all the sex and raw exasperation. And fruitless. I shall never forget our fruitless years.
“Honey, are you okay?” James asks. He’s still in the crinkly green birthing room hospital scrubs. Sentimentalist that he is, I wouldn’t put it past him to sneak the scrubs home and whip them out as a conversation starter between courses at some future dinner party of ours.
The baby starts crying, which James warned me might happen when she awoke, and I’m helpless, for although I rub her swaddled back and rock her gently, Anne Elise wails. No one has told me how to soothe a crying child. Surely, there are techniques to learn, words or incantations that might do the trick, but I stand there, patting her, nuzzling her, praying calm upon poor Anne Elise, who balls her tiny fists up as though she’s about to smack me. She kicks her legs, whipping her feet free of the pink blanket that had wrapped around them. Her toes are small, each no bigger than a fingernail. A strip of elasticized fabric bands her ankle like a bracelet. A white plastic disc about the width and thickness of a half dollar is affixed to the elasticized fabric. Upon entering the maternity ward, I saw the same medallions on other babies. A pair of red lips (not unlike the familiar Rolling Stones logo) appears on each medallion, and as I run my fingers over the disc, the image of Mick Jagger puckering his lips and kissing me pops to mind, filling me with revulsion.
The baby’s cries awaken her mother, James’s mistress, who’s been curled up asleep in the hospital bed. Laurel Bloom. That’s her name. Exhausted from an arduous ten-hour delivery, she fell asleep soon after nurses cut the baby’s umbilical cord. This is the first time James has invited me to meet her face-to-face. She looks at me sharply, her face still splotchy from the strain of labor, her long blonde hair tied back in an unkempt ponytail that fans out on her bed pillow. I don’t begrudge James the baby. But it goes without saying that I begrudge him the mistress.
Chapter Two
TRISH
A year ago, long before Laurel entered James’s life, my father flew back to DC to greet James and me when we returned from our disastrous Chinese fertility treatments. Having recently retired to the Cayman Islands following a mostly distinguished banking career, my father was his usual effervescently cynical self. Although the color of his hair ebbed from jet black to what he preferred to call “the Paul Revere Pewter section of the palette,” his wrinkle-free face up until recently gave the appearance of a man thirty years younger. His jowls had begun to sag in the year since we last saw each other. We were still close, but though we talked on the phone several times a week, I wasn’t prepared to see the extent of his physical decline. His gout had flared up, impeding his mobility. Liver spots splotched the back of his hands, and the scaly skin brought on by geriatric xerosis covered his arms. He was seventy-five years old. He had called in a few favors to arrange our medical evacuation from Beijing. People who hadn’t spoken to him in years had begrudgingly stepped to the plate to help us, and yet now that we were safe, those same people refused to take his calls thanking them for their assistance. Owing to the well-publicized scandals that beset his bank—a bank that bore our family name—official Washington had distanced itself from him. Though he rarely let on how much being persona non grata hurt him, the humiliation had contributed to his decision to leave the city for the balmy Caribbean.
“Grandchildren. It’s the only thing that’ll keep me coming back to this city much longer,” my father said, limping across a crowded restaurant to a corner table where he invited us to dine with him. Though no longer a power player in town, he still preferred power restaurants—steak houses that boasted of grain-fed offerings and the K Street eateries where the food was bland and flagrantly overpriced. Had James or I chosen the place, we’d have picked Obelisk or Nora, a pair of Dupont Circle restaurants that had been around for decades but still offered surprisingly innovative cuisine. This particular restaurant, the Coterie, dated back to the years when three-martini lunches were the norm and Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson would drag colleagues to his table and challenge them to eat Rocky Mountain oysters with him. Glossy signed photographs of the restaurant’s illustrious patrons lined the oak-paneled walls. My father would be mortified if he knew that, this early into his retirement, the restaurant had already removed one of his three photographs.
“I love you two dearly, but I need to be a grandfather,” my father said, laying his walking stick on the unused seat at our table.
“We’re still trying,” James said. He placed his hand on mine. “Lord knows, we try several times a week.”
This talk, especially in public, where anyone might listen in on our intimate woes, irked me. I pretended to distract myself with the intricately folded swan-shaped cloth napkin atop my dinner plate. James, too, was uncomfortable discussing our sex life with my father. He tried to steer the discussion to the cache of Johnny Mercer 78s he had acquired a few months earlier. It was their shared passion—the music of the 1930s and ’40s—but right after we placed our cocktail orders, my father was back on us about children.
“Listen, may I . . . ah-umm . . . throw out a radical solution?” my father asked.
James and I glanced at each other. My father, a straitlaced banker with conservative tendencies, was not a radical man.
“Sure. Let’s hear it, sport,” James said.
“Surrogacy,” my father said.
We’d never discussed it before, James and I.
“It’s the best idea for your particular plight,” my father said. Over the years, I’d kept him abreast of the fertility doctors and outrageous therapies we had tried, but now my father told us in the same reasoned voice he used when delivering congressional testimony that he understood how painful our trials must be. My father isn’t a touchy-feely man, but his eyes became glassy. “I want what’s best for you. You both want a baby. You’ve seen . . . ah-umm . . . what? A dozen or so doctors over the last ten years? You’re angry it’s not happening for you. So I thought I’d throw surrogacy out there for you. As a suggestion. In case you haven’t considered it yet.”
The idea repulsed me. No one but me was going to carry and give birth to my child. I wanted to experience the morning sickness firsthand. I wanted the full breasts and the healthy glow of pregnancy, the minor irritations and weepiness, and the flights of fancy I heard were common in pregnant women. I wanted to wake James at three in the morning and sweetly ask him to drive to the market and buy me a jar of pickled herring to satisfy a sudden craving. More importantly, I wanted the intimate bond that would form in utero between mother and child. Adoption, which we’d discussed once, wasn’t an option for this reason.