The Stork Club (20 page)

Lainie was having a hard time breathing. "Mitch, don't you ever accuse me of being selfish again. I had my insides taken out because they were riddled with cancer. There isn't a day that I don't drive by the park or see a woman pushing a stroller that I don't have to look away with tormented envy that I can't give you a baby!" Those last words choked her and she had to turn away. "If it sounds petty or selfish or small, then that's what I am! But I am telling you I could never look at another woman who had your baby inside her body."

"But it would be
our
baby," he said. "Yours and mine. Don't you want that?"

"More than anything," she said. "But I can't do it the way you're describing. I'm sorry."

"Change your mind."

"No."

"Grow up, Laine. If we adopted a baby it wouldn't come from your body. This way at least we know about
one
of its genetic parents. You say
I'm
narcissistic? Get your own ego out of it."

"The subject is closed."

"No it's not."

"With me it is."

They didn't speak for days. They slept in the same bed, but with their backs to each other. They worked at the store where they were cordial to the employees and
the customers but when the two of them were alone in a room they said nothing to each other. Lainie's fears of abandonment were out of control. Lodged in her brain and in her heart, so that no matter how much makeup she put on, or how pretty an outfit, the woman she saw in the mirror looked like an ugly jealous hag.

She alternately thought about packing her bags, going away somewhere, anywhere, and never coming back, or begging Mitch's forgiveness and doing whatever he asked. The estrangement was unbearable. One night when everyone had gone and they were alone in the store about to lock up, she touched his arm.

"Mitchie."

"Yeah?" He didn't look at her.

"I'm not saying yes. But I'm willing to talk about it some more."

He moved close to her and held her silently. The scent of him so close after even a few days apart made her want to cry with relief. From the day they met, there had always been something irresistible to her about the way Mitch smelled. She loved to snuggle against him and bury her face in his warm neck, tasting and smelling him. This was the best man God ever made. A blessing in this world of too many divorces, and too much cheating, and all those stories about wife-beating she read about in magazines. This was a man who treated her like a queen, romanced her as if they were still courting, never failed to be there for her in ways that amazed their friends.

At his thirty-fifth birthday party so many people had stood to give toasts to Mitch's loyalty, big heart, and generosity that at one point Mitch had stood and said, "Wait a second, this is so good, I think I'd better check to make sure I haven't died."

Lainie remembered all that as she held her husband in her arms. How could she refuse him anything?

16

Y
OUR HUSBAND was right, Mrs. De Nardo." The psychologist at the surrogacy center was an attractive gray-haired man in his late forties. Lainie and Mitch sat with him, and with Chuck Meyer, the surrogacy attorney. Mitch had dressed that morning in his best suit as if, Lainie thought with a stab, he were thinking the better he looked, the better his chance was of getting some surrogate to want to have his baby. "The press loves to blow things out of proportion. The cases that are worrying you are the sensationalized ones, and they're very rare. The truth is that ninety-nine percent of the surrogates don't change their minds. That's a much better statistic than you'd ever have with open adoption where the birth mother is usually a young unstable girl who suddenly finds herself pregnant and is frequently ambivalent about having the baby in the first place.

"The women with whom we work are grown-ups.
They're educated, middle-class women who want to do this for their own reasons. And the reasons aren't financial. In fact, the most recent research proves that the women who are surrogates aren't doing this for the money. As far as the psychological issues are concerned, aside from the tests, which are numerous and demanding, we're here to ask them the tough questions. And believe me we do.

"I don't hesitate to ask if they're willing to give up sexual relations with their husbands from the time they sign the contract. Or what they're going to tell their own parents who will feel that this baby is their grandchild. We give them months to think it over. And during that time we talk to the other people in their families who are going to go through the experience with them. We see their spouses, their children, to find out if there will be anyone who might make it difficult for them, or create a problem.

"We reject eighty-five percent of the women who apply. We tell them we simply cannot have them in our program if there's the least indication that a problem might surface. And still we never lack for applicants. I understand your reluctance, and I'll be glad to ask some of the very happy families who have worked with us to contact you and share their experience. Or to have you meet the surrogates, get to know them, and feel free to come to me at any time and say, 'This isn't for us.' "

Lainie could feel Mitch looking at her. You don't have to decide now, but the sooner you do, the sooner we can have a baby was what his look was saying.

They chose the third surrogate they met. Her name was Jackie. She was blond and blue-eyed, and kind of chunky in a cute round way. Lainie liked her better than the others because she was warm and easy to talk to. When Lainie and Mitch walked in on the day of their
meeting, Jackie stood and hugged her. It was startling, but a very sweet gesture, and an embarrassed Lainie was overwhelmed by the cloud of Jackie's perfume, which she recognized as Shalimar.

The minute they sat down Jackie pulled out pictures to show both Lainie and Mitch of her teenage son from a youthful failed marriage. The son was a tall, handsome, confident-looking young man.

"I'm on Weight Watchers," Jackie assured them when the meeting was winding down. "And I always get a little blubbery before my period, which is now. So I hate to sound like I'm doing a commercial for myself, but if you pick me, we can start right off in two weeks and two days. I run as regular as a clock."

There was nothing threatening about her. The first candidate had been a pretty, redheaded former actress, who said she wanted "to live this and then put it into my work." The second candidate, busty and dark-haired, seemed inappropriately taken with Mitch. Jackie was Irish, funny, looked kind of like a heavy-set version of Lainie, and she said everything she was thinking. Or as Mitch said, "She has no filter between the brain and the mouth."

Their plan was that Lainie would meet Jackie at each doctor's appointment. She would bring them the sperm she'd lovingly coaxed from Mitch less than an hour before. On the morning of the first insemination, at home Lainie realized she'd forgotten to get a specimen jar from the doctor, so in the dishwasher she sterilized a small jar that had once held Cara Mia marinated artichoke hearts.

Mitch laughed so much when she handed him the funny little jar, he was afraid he wouldn't be able to perform. When he finally ejaculated, he grinned, and then in his off-key imitation of Mario Lanza, sang,
"Cara mia, mine. Say those words divine. I'll be your love till the end of time." Lainie was still chuckling about it in the car all the way to the doctor's office.

"Tell me all about Mitch," Jackie asked her while they were waiting for her to be called in by the nurse. Lainie didn't know where to begin, what to tell her.

"Well, he's from an Italian family, his mother died young and he was raised by his sisters—"

"And now he's real close to them. Right? Italian men and their families. They get all hooked in. Italians are like the Irish, you know. They cry at commercials for the telephone company. Right? A few bars of that song about touching someone and they're bawling like idiots. Right?
I'm
like that too. A total sob sister."

The door from the doctor's office opened.

"O'Malley?" the nurse asked.

"Me," Jackie said, standing, then turned to Lainie.

"Hold a fertile thought," Jackie said and followed the nurse.

The doctor's office was in Century City on the eighth floor of the medical building. Lainie looked down from the waiting room window at the bright blue swimming pool across the street at the Century Tower apartments, where a lone swimmer swam laps. Dear God, I'm waiting here for a woman I met two weeks ago to be impregnated with my husband's baby. A baby I'll take from her and raise as if it were his baby with me.

Jackie had passed every test, had health statistics that were enviable to Lainie with her own history of diabetes. Jackie's IQ was high and her scores on the psychological testing had been as high as possible. There was, of course, no way to know what the hormones of pregnancy could do to anyone's mental state, or how she'd react to the sight of the biological baby she'd promised to give away.

"You have to be prepared, Mitch," the psychologist
had said, "in the worst-case scenario to give up the baby. Do you think you can do that?" Lainie had looked over at Mitch. It was during one of the many sessions they'd spent with this man who probed and pushed at difficult issues in a way Lainie was glad to know he used with the surrogates, but uncomfortable with when they were used on her and Mitch.

"First you tell me she's the picture of mental health, then you tell me she could change her mind," Mitch said defensively.

"We all need to be clear that anything can happen, and you have to be prepared for what you plan to do in every eventuality," the psychologist said, turning to Lainie, who noticed that Mitch had never answered the question he'd been asked. "And will you be able to deal with seeing another woman heavy with your husband's child? I don't want to scare you away, and you don't have to answer me right now. But answer that for yourself."

After nearly an hour, Jackie emerged from the gynecologist's office. "He made me lie there with my feet up for a long time to give everything a chance to do its work. And this will kill you: after he inseminated me, I asked him, 'Was it good for
you?'
It cracked him up.'' Then she squeezed Lainie's arm. "Say a prayer, girl," she said.

Later at a table outside of Michel Richard on Robertson Boulevard, Jackie pulled out an envelope full of some new pictures of her son.

"Isn't he a hunk?" she asked proudly. "Sometimes when we're together, people think he's my boyfriend."

"He's darling," Lainie said.

''This
baby will be too," Jackie told her, taking a big swig of her iced tea and putting the glass down. With the cold wet hand that had just held the glass, she took Lainie's hand across the table.

"Don't get nuts about this. It's going to be great for all of us. Meanwhile you and I get to spend some time getting acquainted, which isn't so terrible.
Capiche
? That means—"

"I know what it means." Lainie smiled.

"My second husband was Italian," Jackie said.

Lainie didn't remember any mention of a second husband in the lawyer's office. Jackie saw the surprise on her face.

"It was a short one. Lasted less than a year. I don't even use his name. My Tommy was real little then and this guy had two teenage sons who used to knock my kid around. I didn't like it. We fought about it, and I just figured I'd be better off saying adios. You know?"

Lainie nodded, but now she wondered what else Jackie hadn't told them about herself.

"So you and Mitch have a great marriage, huh?"

Lainie smiled. "We love each other and are very happy."

"Boy," Jackie told her, gesturing to a waiter for coffee, "I envy that. And I'm going to have it someday. Down the road. I tell you, I'm going to have it."

Two weeks later, Jackie got her period.

"Hey, listen, we have all the time in the world," Mitch said when Lainie called him at the shop with the news just after Jackie called her. "These things take months, sometimes they even take years, but let's keep hanging in there, sweetheart. We'll have a baby in our arms before you know it. I love you, Mrs. D.," he added, "and when I get home, I'll show you just how much."

"Me too," Lainie answered, and she
did
love him. More than ever.

It was the morning of the ninth insemination when Margaret Dunn's boss called to tell Lainie that her mother had fallen in the ladies' room at work for no
apparent reason, and had been taken to Century City Hospital.

"I'm on my way," Lainie said, then remembered she had to be at the doctor's office in a few hours with Jackie or risk missing an entire month until the next ovulation. When she went downstairs to tell Mitch about her mother, he was dressed for work, reading the morning paper.

"You know what?" Mitch said. "You go take care of your mother. Me and the Cara Mia jar can handle it, if you get my meaning. We're very intimate. I can just drive into town myself to the doctor's office and drop off the jar. What time does the womb usually get there?"

"Mitchie!" Lainie gave him a little slap on the arm. "She gets there at noon." She hated it when he made jokes about Jackie. The events of the last many months had created a bond between the two women. Lainie always looked forward to their time together. Not just because each doctor's visit could be the one when Jackie might finally conceive, but because their post-insemination lunches had become filled with the intimate chatter of two close girlfriends. The conception would bring an end to those meetings, and the baby's birth an end to the relationship.

It had been agreed from the first that Jackie would never know the De Nardos' last name. And the phone they had installed at their house for her calls would be removed once the baby was in their care. That was the way Mitch told the lawyer it had to be. "I don't want her changing her mind one day and knocking on my door."

"With the success of the store, you realize that you and Lainie have a pretty high profile," the lawyer warned him.

That made Mitch nervous. "Don't even let her glance at the credit card receipt," he told Lainie. "Always pay
for everything with cash." It was odd and uncomfortable for her, this secrecy coupled with intimacy, but soon, God willing, they'd have the desired result.