Beside her on the banquette, Salo was frowning over his own form.
“I don’t see what my choice of underwear has to do with your not becoming pregnant.”
“Really?” Her heart jumped. Underwear? Could this all be solved by … underwear?
“Or how many drinks per week.”
“I have that one, too,” she said.
“Do you have the underwear question?”
Johanna looked. “No. But I have lots of lovely questions about my period and venereal disease.”
“Oh, I’ve got venereal disease here,” Salo said. “You know, I’m sure there’s nothing wrong. We probably need some hormone shot or something.”
The “we” was a nice gesture, and she appreciated it, but she was careful not to look at him. She had been educating herself on these matters for over three years, reading every magazine article and every New York Times Science Section update on the new fertility frontiers, and she highly doubted that a simple hormone shot would be the end or even the beginning of things. She had a strong suspicion that they were—or she was—about to commence a long slide down a steep slope of increasingly uncomfortable and frightening interventions, from the aforementioned hormone shots (hers, not his) all the way to the brave new worlds of surrogacy and test tube babies. She had, in her head, a whole list of possible diagnoses, ranked from least to most fearful: a blockage was preferable to a hormonal dysfunction. Hormonal dysfunction was preferable to absent or unviable eggs, which weren’t as bad as insufficient sperm, which was better than an incompetent uterus. Of all the things she worried might be wrong, the one Johanna feared the most was “unexplained infertility.”
“What if there’s nothing wrong?” she asked, whispering.
“There is nothing wrong,” he answered.
Dr. Lorenz Pritchard was a big guy who seemed to be spilling out everywhere: hair from the sides (but not the top) of his head, flesh at the waist and wrists and neck. He was waiting for them at a long antique desk, covered with files and legal pads and a small plate on which remained the corner of a tuna-fish sandwich on rye and a crumpled napkin.
“Dr. Pritchard,” he said, extending a faintly fishy hand. They both shook it.
“I read about you in New York magazine,” Johanna blurted.
“Okay. Which year? We’re so much further along than we were, even a few years ago.”
“Well, good,” said Johanna, forcing a smile. She knew exactly what he was referencing, of course. The test tube baby, Louise something, was two years old, and that was long enough for an entire genre of TV movies to have been written, produced, aired, and seen by herself. There was a story in Ladies’ Home Journal about a couple who’d paid a woman to be pregnant with the husband’s child, and then the woman had just handed over the baby to the father and his wife after it was born. They all seemed happy about it, but it sounded horrible to Johanna. She wanted to be pregnant with her own baby. And anyway, what if the mother—the other mother—decided she wanted to keep the child after it was born? What then? It wasn’t as if you had King Solomon on hand to settle things.
“I’m afraid there’s something wrong with me,” Johanna said. Then she started to cry.
Dr. Pritchard, to his credit, took this in stride. He’d been a perennial in New York magazine’s “Best Doctors” issue as long as Johanna had been checking. He had seen crying women before.
“Mrs. Oppenheimer,” he said, passing her the Kleenex, “I have treated over five hundred couples, the vast majority of whom are now parents, some several times over. Sometimes nature doesn’t go our way, and that will always be true, but I can promise you that everyone in our office is here to support you on your infertility journey.”
Even in the depths of her embarrassment, our mother found room to despise the term.
Salo reached for another Kleenex and passed it to her.
“So, you got yourselves here, and that’s the first step. Also the hardest.”
A blatant lie, as Johanna would later be the first to say. A ridiculous lie. Getting herself and Salo into an office where his underwear and her menstrual cycles could be scrutinized had certainly not been fun, but it wasn’t by any measure harder than some of what lay ahead. From the hormonal testing to the early-morning sperm analysis to the Clomid prescription she walked out with that very first day (a drug that made her even more weepy, crazy, and scared than before), to the hysterosalpingogram, which Dr. Pritchard’s radiologist herself referred to (just seconds before actually performing the procedure) as “having your tubes blown out.” It was all terrible, fearful, and degrading.
And useless. Another year of months passed, in rage and depression, so much blood through the cervix, so many filaments of hope gone forever. Her brother Bobby’s third child, a boy, was born. Her father had a mild stroke and retired from the Lawrenceville school, shortly after which he and Johanna’s mother sold their house and moved out to live nearer their favorite child and his growing brood.
It was with these first (official) steps of her infertility journey that Johanna felt the strong embrace of her husband’s money for the very first time. In the midst of her great and ambient distress it was at least good to know that they could pay for whatever interventions Dr. Lorenz Pritchard felt like tossing their way, especially since they were both still young, and there were, as he was forever telling them, always new protocols and procedures coming down the pike. “Whatever we need,” Salo had told her, before they even got home from that first appointment. “Whatever it takes.”
What it ended up taking was the next four years of their lives, beginning with the vindication of Salo’s sperm, and moving on to the “blowing out” of Johanna’s fallopian tubes not once but three times (she could not be ignorant of the extreme unpleasantness of this procedure after the first time, sadly), and four rounds of doctor-assisted insemination and six of hormone-assisted egg production, extraction, fertilization, implantation, and ultimate disintegration.
It was in Dr. Pritchard’s office, during the postmortem on this sixth go-round, that the dreaded S-word was first mentioned.
“I don’t want to do that,” said Johanna, between sobs.
“It is my recommendation,” said Dr. Pritchard. “At least that you explore the possibility. You two are not having a problem producing viable embryos, but they are not surviving the transfer. I’ve had many patients who have been able to work around this impasse by means of a surrogate. You might have to ask yourself, do I want to be pregnant or do I want my children to be born so that we can be a family?”
Salo, she noticed, was silent. Was he asking himself the question or was he wondering what his wife actually wanted?
“Oh, of course. The latter. I know, but it’s hard to give up.”
“You’ve done everything, Johanna.” At some point after year two, she had become “Johanna” and Salo “Salo.” “Above and beyond, I would say.”
“Me, too,” said Salo. “I mean…”
“One more,” Joanna said sharply. “Okay?” She blew her nose and attempted some humor. “One more, for the road. And then yes, I promise. I’ll do it.”
And so it was back to the injections and the extractions, and four perfect eggs landed in one of Dr. Pritchard’s petri dishes, the Cradle of Life, as she had privately taken to thinking of them. Those four perfect eggs, fertilized, began to bubble and brew their way into being, as had fully thirteen of their proto-siblings, and when the time came to transfer these precious final quintessences of Oppenheimers, Dr. Pritchard chose three at random to journey on to the dubious destination of their mother’s womb (her much maligned womb) and dispatched the fourth to a freezer in a special facility somewhere in Connecticut, there to wait for the surrogacy they all, even Johanna, expected to ensue.