Dating Big Bird (17 page)

This was the line in the sand that separated stage-one thinking from stage-two thinking and beyond—the line that I could not seem to cross.

To give up that chance—to make a decision that would, in fact, remove chance from the equation—seemed monumental, as if I would also have to acknowledge at the same time the removal of a whole host of other possibilities from life as well:

Mystery.

Hope.

Luck.

Romance.

Love.

It was—or seemed to be—the sort of decision a person
without faith makes, a person without a firm belief that their own future will turn out well. And while I had never had much faith in myself, I did have a tiny bit—the bare minimum—enough to make me hesitant about handing it over. And that hesitation left me at a standstill.

Yet time was running out.

It was mid-January, and I was no closer to coming to a decision than I had been three months ago when I’d first started giving the question serious thought.

“The two of you need to get a fucking life,” Renee said the next morning at work. We were, as usual, standing in the kitchen and waiting for the coffee to finish dripping. “I mean, do you and Amy ever talk about anything else besides having kids?”

“No.”

“Sounds like a pretty limited friendship to me.” She looked smug and self-satisfied. “Unlike our friendship.”

“Which is so multilayered, since all we ever do is talk about work.” I squeezed a line of dishwashing liquid into my dirty cup and turned the hot water on full blast.

“We talk about other things besides work.”

“We do?” I said. “Like what?”

“Like—” she started, then stopped to think. “Like about Amy’s loser boyfriend and about my complete lack of boyfriends and about your impoholic boyfriend.” She invoked her nickname for Malcolm, which she’d shortened from the long version—the Impotent Alcoholic—and which she used with frequent disdain in order to make it clear that she thought I could do way better than him.

“He’s a recovering impohol—I mean,
alcoholic
,” I started. “And he’s not impotent. He’s—”

“Frozen. Right. I know. You’ve told me that a thousand times, and I still have no idea what the difference is.”

“There’s a difference. Trust me.”

“Why should I?”

“Because I’m asking you to.”

I reached around her hair for a paper towel. “Like our conversations are so varied.”

“They are varied. Sometimes I yell at you for being obsessed with getting pregnant. Then I yell at you for being obsessed with getting pregnant and not getting pregnant. I mean, if you want to do it so much, why don’t you just fucking do it already?”

“I’m thinking about it.”

“You’re thinking about it.” She looked completely unim-pressed. “And what exactly have you been thinking?”

We poured our coffee, and Renee followed me back to my office. I closed my door, and we sat down at my desk, facing each other.

“I’ve been thinking about doing it,” I said, then told her about the nine-month time line.

“And?”

“And what?”

“
And?
What have you decided?”

“I haven’t decided anything yet. That’s the point of
investigating
something
first
,” I said. “It gives you time to not decide before you decide.”

“What’s there to think about?” she said, her voice rising. “You know you want a kid. You know you don’t want to wait until you’re forty. You’re going to prolong this whole thing even longer with all your fucking peregrinations. Knowing you, at the end of the nine months, you’ll decide you need to think about it for
another
nine months—and then
another
nine months—and before you know it, you’ll
be forty and you won’t want to do it, or you won’t have any viable eggs left.”

“Look, if reality weren’t a consideration, I’d be past the should-I-or-shouldn’t-I part and on to the next stage.”

“Which is what?”

“Which is how. How, out of all the unnatural clinical futuristic scientific petri-dish ways to get pregnant, I would do it.”

“Another reason for you to get rid of that impoholic of yours. So you could possibly get pregnant in a more normal way, like by—”

“Having sex.”

“My point exactly.”

“That’s another conversation.”

“That’s another twenty conversations.”

“Whatever.”

She snorted.

I snorted back.

“Well, to me, the reality question isn’t so complicated,” she said.

“Of course it’s complicated. There’s money. There’s short-term planning and long-term planning. All that stuff.”

Another ten-year-old, this one. She and Amy could form their own life-without-practical-considerations-and-consequences play group without me. I was pragmatic and pessimistic to a fault. I’d learned that from my parents.

“Please. You make plenty of money.”

“But I’d need more money—a lot more—if I had a kid. Clothes and equipment and a bigger place and child care, since I’d have to keep working to pay for it all. Not to mention the cost of artificial insemination itself, if that’s what I end up doing. There’s a lot that would have to be figured out.”

“Okay, fine. So you figure out the money. What else?”

“Well, there’s the whole ethical question. You know, is it right to choose to have a child alone? Is it selfish to condemn a child to having only one parent? To having no father? And if you have a sperm-bank baby, what do you tell it when it gets old enough to want to know who its other parent is? How do you justify the fact that the child will never ever know who the father was, what he looked like, what he sounded or talked like—that there will always be this incomprehensibly huge blank—this missing piece—at the core of its being?” I took a breath and went on. “I mean, there’s no research on this yet,” I continued. “A whole generation of sperm-bank babies hasn’t grown up yet. Who knows what new strains of psychological damage will emerge from this?”

Renee thought a minute before shrugging off my misgivings.

“There are worse things a kid can have to deal with,” she said.

“Oh, really,” I said. “Like what, Dr. Spock?”

“Like abusive parents. Child-beating parents. Alcoholic parents.”

“Infanticidal parents,” I added sarcastically. “Münch-hausen-by-proxy parents. You’re talking about extremes.”

“Okay. Then parents who fight all the time and who make their kids’ lives miserable, like mine did, so that they grow up and never want to get married and never want to have kids because they wouldn’t want their kids to be as miserable as they were.”

“Maybe,” I said. Renee frequently alluded to her own particularly unhappy childhood, only the bare bones of which I knew: an Upper West Side childhood, punctuated by a messy prolonged divorce when she was twelve. Magazine editor father remarries and moves to Princeton,
New Jersey, where he starts a new family by having two more children. Renee, her brother Randy, and high-school teacher mother fall on hard times due to their father’s lack of child support payments and move downtown. “End of story,” Renee would always say at that point, so that was all I knew.

“Or absentee parents, like Karen,” she added.

Okay.

True.

“They should have just taken Marissa straight out of the delivery room and put her into therapy so she could get started already, she’s going to be so unbelievably fucked up.” She lit a cigarette and threw the match into my wastebasket.

I watched her blow smoke rings in silence.

“All I’m saying, Ellen, is that if you want something badly enough, you do it, and you let everything else figure itself out. Otherwise you’ll do nothing. And you’ll have nothing.” She stood up and started for the door, but then turned back to me. “And then I’ll
really
be stuck with you.”

There were only eighty-eight shopping days left before Karen’s shower.

Then eighty-seven.

Then eighty-six.

Then eighty-five.

I knew this constant countdown because Simon E-mailed me every day to ensure I had a gift—the perfect gift—ready and wrapped—by May 1.

It was, however, as Martha Stewart herself would say, “a good thing” that Simon was annoying me every day with his E-mails, otherwise I might never have started looking in earnest, albeit reluctantly, for the baby gift of the century.

After his tenth E-mail, I asked Jennifer to bring in whatever catalogs we received and shelved at the office—Tiffany, Bergdorf Goodman, Saks Fifth Avenue—as well as the other mail-order catalogs that carried everything from bedding and maternity clothes and baby clothes to strollers and cribs and toys. Yet after studying them at my desk one afternoon in early February and not seeing anything that was even remotely suitable for Karen, I realized that the only person who would really know what you were supposed to give someone like Karen was Karen.

Or someone in Karen’s fame-and-financial bracket.

To wit, I asked Jennifer to start calling our famous clients’ assistants to find out what their bosses had been given when they’d had their kids. Two days later we went over the results of her telephone survey together in my office.

I sat back in my chair and gummed the end of my pen.

“So what did Jodie get from her friends when she had Charles?” I asked, figuring I’d start with the Pregnancies of Unknown Origins first.

Jennifer scanned her pad. She looked like a miniature Karen with her fudge-colored bob and her drapey black KLNY separates and that look in her eye—hunger. Sometimes I even thought I’d caught her hiding her ass as she walked through the office, but I was probably just imagining
it. She was young and full of ambition, and for her Karen was the ultimate success story. Jennifer idolized her, wanted to be her, and really believed—on some level, I was certain—that she could be her. When I’d interviewed her for the job a year ago and asked her where she saw herself in five years (stupid question, I know, but I couldn’t resist), she said this: “Being Karen.” I’d had to stop myself from laughing out loud at the egregious entitlement in her voice—from leaning across my desk and cackling that she’d be lucky to still have a job in the business in five years. That people like Karen didn’t become what they were by accident, or by some errant stroke of luck. They became who they were because they had some spark of genius that shot them up into the universe and separated them from the masses down below. Jennifer didn’t have that spark, and neither, I’d realized long ago, did I. And while I had never seen myself as “being Karen,” I had longed desperately to be something more than I was; to do something more than I was doing today, trying to track down what baby gifts famous women had gotten from their famous friends.

“Jodie Foster got … flowers, and … lots of baby clothes,” Jennifer reported. “Some really cute things, her assistant said, from agnès b.”

“What about Rosie O’Donnell?” I asked, moving into the Single Women Who Adopt category.

“Rosie got … the same, basically. Baby clothes, mostly.”

“And Michelle Pfeiffer?” I asked, sticking to adoptive mothers.

“Again, baby clothes. Petit Bateau. Dries Van Noten. Paul Smith. And she also got a lot of skin care items.”

“Skin care items? For her?” She didn’t even give birth, not that that would have had anything to do with a need for skin care items.

“No, for her daughter.”

I was totally confused. “What do you mean? Like foundation and powder and blush?”

Jennifer finally laughed a little, though whenever she did, I always felt like she was laughing
at
me instead of
with
me, since I suspected she thought I was odd in the same ways Karen thought I was odd.

“No. Not makeup.
Skin
stuff. From Kiehl’s. Crabtree & Evelyn. And Bulgari.”

“Shut
up
,” I said. “Bulgari makes
baby lotion?
”

“That’s what Diego said.” She checked her pad once more just to be sure.

I shook my head in disgust and told Jennifer she could leave, and should leave—as in
go home
—since it was well after seven o’clock by then. Except for a few of the most tortured assistants, almost everyone had left—an early night, actually, by KLNY standards.

Once she’d gone, I looked out the window at the cold dark winter sky. Malcolm was teaching and wouldn’t be home till late anyway, so I turned off my office lights and sat down at the computer.

I figured I would surf around on the Internet to see if I could get some new brilliant idea about a gift for Karen, but when the keywords
rocking horse
and
beanbag chairs
yielded nothing interesting, I tried
piggy banks
and then
stuffed animals
.

I started scrolling down the screen.