Mixed Blessings (30 page)

"I don't know who she is. Okay? She's just a name. I've never met her."

"She sounds like Dial-a-Date," Diana said, imitating the husky voice on the phone again. "Call me. ."

"Okay, okay, I get it." By then he had eaten three pieces of bread, and he was actually looking nervous, which startled Diana.

"So are you going to call her? . . . about the car, I mean."

She was riding him, and he was starting to look really angry.

"Maybe. I'll see."

"You're not." She was starting to look upset, there was something about his story that didn't jell, and she didn't like it.

"Andy, what is this?"

"Look, it's something I'm doing on my own, okay? Am I entitled to a little privacy?"

"Yes." Diana looked at him hesitantly. "Maybe. But not with women."

"I'm not screwing around. Okay? I swear."

"Then what are you doing?" she asked softly. She couldn't understand why he was so secretive about this girl. What in God's name was he hiding?

"She's a friend of a friend of mine. She knows one of the lawyers I work with, and he wants me to talk to her about a project." He didn't want to tell her that she was one of Bill Bennington's old girlfriends, and he had suggested Andy call her.

"Then why did you lie to me and tell me she was a friend of your brother's?"

"Look, Diana, don't. Okay? Just don't push me."

"Why, for chrissake?" She jumped up from the table then, suspicious of him. Maybe he was screwing around and she didn't know it. "What are you doing?"

"Look, dammit . . ." He had done everything he could not to tell her, but now he saw he had to. "I didn't want to talk about this now. I just wanted to talk to her first, and see what I thought of her when I met her."

"Great . . . what is this? Are you dating?"

"She had a child for someone last year. She's a surrogate.

And she'd like to do it again. I thought I'd check it out and talk to her, and then I was going to ask you what you thought about it." He said it very quietly, trying to brace himself for his wife's explosion.

"What? You're going to Miss Rent-a-Womb to check her out, and you weren't even going to tell me? What are you going to do, sleep with her to see if it takes? For God's sake, Andy, how could you do this?"

"I was just going to talk to her, for God's sake. It would be done by artificial insemination if we went ahead with it, and you know that."

"Why? Why are you doing this? I thought we agreed to not even discuss it for the next few months."

"I know. But this thing came up last week, and people like that aren't easy to find. And by the time you're ready to talk, she might be having someone else's baby."

"Who is she?"

"She's an actress of sorts. She doesn't believe in abortion, and she says she gets pregnant very easily, and she thinks she's doing something nice for people by offering this service."

"How kind of her. And how much does she charge?"

"Twenty-five thousand."

"And what if she keeps the baby?"

"She can't. You get an ironclad contract. And she didn't make any trouble for the guy last year. I talked to him myself.

And they're thrilled. They have a little girl, and they're crazy about her. Baby, please . . . at least let me talk to her."

"No. What if she uses drugs, what if she has a disease? What if she doesn't give up the child? What if. . . oh, God . . . don't ask me to do this......She lay her head down on the table and sobbed. She wanted to scream at him. Why was he putting her through this again?

They had just barely made a first step back into their marriage, and she wasn't ready for this now.

"Baby, you're the one who said you wanted my' baby, that it wasn't fair for me not to have my child. I thought this would be better than adoption, at least the baby would be half ours. You didn't want to hear about a donor egg transplant when the doctor suggested it, and this seems like a viable alternative solution."

"What is this? A scientific experiment, for God's sake?" She looked at him then, her eyes filled with hatred. "I hate you, Andrew Douglas. How dare you put me through this?"

"I have a right to a child too. We both do. And I know how badly you want one."

"Not like this. Do you know the stress we'd be under until it would be all over? And I don't want your sperm in some other woman. What if she falls in love with you and the baby?"

"Di, she's married."

"Oh, for heaven's sake. You're all crazy, you, her, and her husband."

"And you're the only sane one among us?" he said angrily.

"Maybe."

"Well, kid, you sure don't look it." She looked deranged and anguished to the point of breaking. "Look, I'm going to go talk to her sometime this week. That's all. I just want to know what the terms are, what she's like, what would happen. I want to know what our options are, if we want to do this now, or anytit. And Diana, I'd like you to come with me."

"I don't want anything to do with this. I can't. It'll push me right over the edge." And she had just barely gotten back on her feet again.

She didn't want to risk it.

"I think you're stronger than that," he said calmly. He wanted to do this. He had thought about it a lot in the last few months. And he wanted a baby. He wanted Diana, but he wanted a family, too, and if he could have a child of his own conception, all the better.

"I think you're a sonofabitch," she spat at him, and then locked herself in the bathroom. And when she came out again Andy had already called Wanda Williams and they had an appointment for the next afternoon at The Ivy. It seemed an odd place to choose, but it was what Wanda wanted.

"Are you coming?" he asked that morning, and she shook her head. And before he left for work, he pressed her again, and she said nothing.

Bill asked him at work that morning how it went, and Andy told him tensely that Diana had gone crazy.

He had no idea if she would even come to meet the surrogate, and Bill wished him luck as he hurried off to an important meeting.

Diana sat in her office at noon that day, thinking of them, and wondering what the girl looked like. And then.finally, she couldn't stand it. She called for a cab, and went downstairs. She got to the restaurant half an hour late, but they were sitting comfortably at a back table, with the woman's husband. Andy looked startled as she walked in, and he introduced her to the Williamses, John and Wanda.

They looked reasonable and sane, decently dressed, and not drugged out or stupid. Wanda was a pretty girl who talked a lot about it being important to her to do something "meaningful" for someone in her life, and John seemed not to care one way or another. As he put it, "money is money." They were to pay for her medical care, a small amount of clothing, and loss of salary for two months, since she really couldn't do much work then. And her "fee," as she put it, was $25,000. She would sign a contract agreeing not to use alcohol or drugs or take undue risks, and in the hospital when the baby was born, she would turn it over to them with no problem.

"What if you decide to keep it?" Diana said bluntly. All she had ordered was a cup of coffee.

"I won't," she said clearly, and said something about not violating her karma. Her husband explained then that she was very involved in Eastern religions.

"She's not that crazy about kids," her husband added after that. "She never wanted to keep the last one."

"And what about you?" Diana asked him. "How do you feel about your wife being pregnant with my husband's sperm?"

"I figure he wouldn't be doing this if he didn't have to," he looked pointedly at her and Diana felt the arrow to her heart instantly, but she never wavered. "I don't know, I figure this is her thing. It's what she wants to do." Diana had an underlying feeling that they were both crazy, but there was certainly nothing visibly "wrong" with them.

It's just that the whole project seemed so awful.

They left it all hanging after lunch, and Andy said he'd call them in the next few days after he and Diana discussed it further. "I do have another candidate to interview," Wanda explained. "I'm seeing him tomorrow."

"She only does this for people she really likes," her husband offered, looking accusingly at Diana. Clearly, she hadn't been "nice" enough, and could well have put the whole project in danger. It made Diana feel hysterical to think she was being "interviewed" by these fruitcakes.

They left before the Douglases did, and Diana sat staring angrily at her husband. "How could you do this to us?"

"Why were you so rude to him, asking how he felt about my sperm? For chrissake, Diana, they may reject us."

"Oh." She leaned back in her chair and rolled her eyes in anger. "I don't believe this. She's sitting here telling you about her karma, and you want her to have your baby. I think the whole thing is sleazy.

And so was her husband."

"I'm going to call Dr. Johnston and see how we'd do this."

"I don't want any part of what you're doing. I just want you to know that," she said clearly.

"That's up to you. I'm not asking you to put a dime into this."

She knew he'd have to borrow the money from his parents, and she wondered how he was going to explain it.

"I think you're sick. And I think it's pathetic, the lengths people like us will go to have a baby." But there was one much simpler solution, and as she sat there she knew she should have done it much sooner. She stood up and looked at him and shook her head and walked out of the restaurant. There was a cab waiting outside and she got into it, and gave him her home address. And by the time Andy got out of the restaurant, after paying the tab, she was gone. And so were all her things when he got home from work that night. She was gone. For good. She had left him a note on the kitchen table.

"Dear Andy . . . I should have done this months ago. I'm sorry. This is all so stupid now. You don't need a surrogate. You need a wife . . . a real one . . . who can have a baby. Good luck. I love you. I'll have my lawyer call you. Love, Diana." He stood staring at the piece of blue paper in his hand, and he felt terrified and numb. He couldn't believe she'd done it.

He called her parents that night, casually, to see if she'd gone home, but his general inquiries told him she hadn't. Her mother suspected instantly that something was wrong, but she didn't want to ask. They hadn't seen Diana since her outburst at Thanksgiving, even though they spoke to her regularly on the phone, and her father had had a long talk with her only that weekend.

In the end, Diana had gone to a hotel. And that weekend, she rented a place to live. There was no point kidding herself anymore. It was insane. The lunch at The Ivy had told her everything she needed to know, how desperate they were, how irrational, how foolish. It was ridiculous for Andy to be thinking of impregnating that girl. What in hell was he doing?

Andy called Diana every day at work, and she wouldn't take his calls.

And when he showed up, she refused to see him. The dream had come to an end, and the nightmare along with it.

For Diana and Andy, it was over.

Okay," Pilar said with a hesitant smile, "here we go again." She flicked on the video, and two women began licking each other's genitals, as Brad looked at her with a sheepish grin, feeling incredibly foolish.

"I'm not so sure about your choice of movies."

"Oh, shut up." She laughed. She was trying hard to be a good sport again, but Dr. Ward had reassured them that it could take as many as ten or twelve tries to get pregnant again, and even then she might lose it. They were going to try progesterone suppositories this time, for three months, if she did get pregnant. But there were no guarantees, she told them. And every minute of every day, Pilar was not getting any younger.

Slowly, she peeled away Brad's clothes, as he watched the film, and stripped off her own, gently rubbing his erection, and in a very short time, they had the desired semen. The nurse took it away and Pilar couldn't help teasing him.

"We'll have to buy that one to watch at home. I think you liked it."

This was not an easy road they had chosen. The artificial insemination went smoothly again this time, and Dr. Ward warned them again that it was highly unlikely it would take on the first try. Pilar was back on chlomiphene again, which made her extremely nervous and seemed to depress her further. It was a hard time for her, and she wondered if she would ever recover from the miscarriage. She thought about it all the time, and even when the pain seemed to ebb, something would inadvertently start it off again, seeing someone carrying a child in their arms, or a pregnant woman, or seeing baby clothes in a window, or if they hadn't heard about the miscarriage, friends congratulating her for being pregnant. She knew now only too well how foolish it had been to tell people so early that she was pregnant. It would take months to tell everyone now that she wasn't. And each time she had to explain, they told her how sorry they were, or asked incredibly unfeeling questions, like whether or not she'd been able to see if it was a boy or a girl, or how big it was when she lost it.

Brad took her shopping that day to cheer her up, and they stayed at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. It was nice being away with him, and he tried to turn it into a festive occasion. The next day was Valentine's Day, and when they got to the hotel, he had sent her two dozen red roses.

To my love, always, Brad, the card said, and she cried when she read it. She had begun wondering lately if she was foolish to want more than this, maybe it was wrong, and just too greedy. Maybe she had been right all along. Maybe having a baby just wasn't all that important.

It was hard to give up the dream of it now, but she was really beginning to think that she was misguided to pursue this. Maybe it just wasn't meant to be, and she had to let go of the idea of having children. She said as much to Brad that night, that she was exploring her own thoughts on the subject.

"Why don't we see what happens for a while? And if it makes you too unhappy, we'll stop. It's up to you."

"You are too good to me," she said and clung to him, still hurting, but grateful for his presence.