The Stork Club (21 page)

"Call me from the hospital if you need me, and I'll get over there right after I drop off the baby juice," Mitch said with a last kiss. Lainie was off to see her poor mother, who had been complaining about headaches for weeks. Lainie hoped the fall was unrelated and didn't mean she had some kind of neurological problem. She hadn't told her mother a word about the surrogate. Maybe once Margaret got through whatever this problem was, Lainie would explain it all to her, and she would be happy to learn that soon she would be a grandmother.

Mitch pulled the car into the parking lot of the medical building but kept the engine running so he could hear the end of the news. After he turned the car off, he felt in his shirt pocket for the little slip of paper containing the doctor's suite number, and when he found it he took the paper bag and got out of the car.

"Shit," a woman's voice echoed through the cavernous parking lot. "I'm leaking all over the place, goddammit."

Mitch looked over at where the woman stood next to an old beat-up convertible with the hood open and a red-vested parking-lot attendant, who stared dumbly at the steaming engine. He was about to turn and head for the elevator when he realized the woman was Jackie. When he walked back to where she was standing and Jackie caught sight of him, she shouted a greeting.

"Hey, Mitch, long time no see! I got a busted hose, which is a complaint I sincerely hope
you
don't have, honey!" she said, laughing, then stopped herself. "Listen, no offense. I'm a little punchy here. How's your mother-in-law? Lainie called me this morning to say she
couldn't be here today, and that you were making the drop-off. I hope everything there's all right."

"They're going to run tests on her all afternoon so Lainie's going to stay at the hospital and hold her hand. Thanks for asking." The steam rose in a cloud out of the open-hooded car. "You going to be okay here?"

"Yeah, sure," Jackie said. "I called the auto club. They're on their way. So if you go on up and give that to the doc," she said, nodding toward the paper bag, "I'll be up in a few minutes to collect it."

She smiled. Mitch smiled too.

"I hope it happens," she said.

"Me too. It means a lot to me."

"To me also," she said, putting a hand on his arm.

Lainie had reported to Mitch after each of the previous inseminations how much she liked this pudgy, soft-faced woman, and what an essentially good person she was. When Mitch looked at Jackie now, he believed it. After evaluating her psychological makeup, the lawyer had pointed out to them repeatedly how high she rated when it came to altruism.

This wasn't a moment Mitch had ever expected to have with the surrogate. Except for the initial meeting, which now seemed very far in the past, they'd never spoken. Lainie was in charge of every step of this: making the final decision about which woman they chose, scheduling the doctor's appointments, going along to ensure that everything went well. But now, as he stood in the cavernous underground parking lot of the medical building, looking into Jackie's eyes, knowing who she was about to be to him for the rest of their lives if everything went as planned, Mitch felt overwhelmed. His sisters had encouraged him to do this, to get himself a blood child of his own. But surely they must feel the way he did that there was something about it that interfered with the sanctity of marriage.

"Why are you doing this?" he heard himself asking, then felt surprised that he'd actually asked her that.

"Because it gives some meaning to my life," she answered. "Because I believe it's one of the few things I have to offer. No one's manipulating me, Mitch. I want to have a baby for a couple very much, and if I don't do it for you, I'll do it for someone else. You may not respect me, because you probably have some set idea about how women are supposed to conduct themselves and this isn't it. But make no mistake, you aren't using some lower-class cow's body against her will or because she needs the ten-grand fee. Though the ten grand won't hurt me."

"I never thought—"

"Let me finish. I'm sure you didn't, but just in case it crosses your mind, I want you to know I'm every bit as excited about this as you are."

"I'm glad to hear that," Mitch said, realizing suddenly that she was still holding on to his arm.

"Of course, I'd be lying to you if I said that
this
part was any fun. I mean, the doctor's kind of a horse's ass, like most doctors are, and the inseminations are uncomfortable, but what gets me through it is knowing that I'm going to be pregnant, Mitch. Pregnant. Do you have any idea how glorious that is? Of course you couldn't. But I do, because I remember how I felt when I was carrying my Tommy, and the earth-moving importance of it. I was making another human being deep inside my body. Just knowing I was doing that made every minute of my day, even taking a walk or a nap, feel productive and creative and necessary."

Her hand was holding his arm a little too tightly now, and her pretty blue eyes, eyes that were the same color as Lainie's, were welling with tears.

A white auto club truck came tearing around the parking-lot ramp, and the driver pulled up next to Jackie's
car. Jackie let go of Mitch's arm, found her auto club card in her purse, and handed it to the young man as he got out of the truck.

"Why don't you go on ahead," she said over her shoulder to Mitch. "You can tell the nurse that as soon as I'm finished down here, I'll be up."

"That's okay," Mitch told her coolly, leaning against a nearby green Jaguar. "I've got a couple of minutes. Why don't I just wait for you?"

Two weeks later the lawyer called the store to tell them Jackie was pregnant. Mitch took the call, and when Lainie overheard him say, "Aaaaalriiight! I'm having a kid!" she rushed back to his office. He put an arm around her, nodding the good news as he continued to talk to the lawyer, who was reminding him of the details of their contract with Jackie. The next big medical bill would be for the amniocentesis, which would be performed between week fifteen and week seventeen of the pregnancy.

Lainie could feel Mitch's body trembling with excitement. When he asked, "Is Jackie feeling all right? Should I call her? Is she having any morning sickness? Does she need anything?" she smiled up at him. But at that moment she felt a sick feeling that was envy combined with anger. It crawled up the back of her neck and seemed to hang there and spread to her shoulders like a clammy shawl.

Mitch's concern for Jackie made perfect logical sense. Then why did it feel painful and wrong? She hated the look of ecstasy on his face when he reported to her what the lawyer had just told him, "Her breasts are already two sizes bigger than usual," and then laughed. Jackie's breasts, she thought. I'm listening to my husband and another man talk about some woman's breasts.

She was queasy. Why had she agreed to this? How was she going to survive nine months of this? She gave Mitch a little tap on the arm and mouthed the words
I'm going home
to him when he looked at her. She was hoping that would get him to hang up the phone and say, "No, no, let's celebrate. Let's go have a champagne dinner together somewhere." But instead he nodded and waved to say good-bye and turned his interest back to the lawyer on the phone.

Lainie walked out to the new BMW and got in, not sure what to do or how to get herself to stop feeling this sick anxiety over news that was supposed to be happy. Instead of going home she drove to Santa Monica, parked her car, and sat on the sand at Will Rogers State Beach, watching the waves come in. When she got home it was nearly six o'clock and a vase of two dozen roses was waiting outside the door of the condominium. She took them in and opened the card, which read
Thank you for being my wonderful wife. I love you, baby. M
.

A nausea, worse than the ones she'd faced during her chemotherapy, stayed with her. She was still feeling that way a week later at a family dinner with Mitch's sisters and their families when Betsy raised her glass and said, "To the baby and the health of the woman who's carrying it." It seemed to Lainie as if everyone's eyes were on her. She wished she could get up and walk out on the smug sisters with three kids each, their cocky husbands punching Mitch on the arm with their macho, you-son-of-a-bitch punches that men give one another as congratulations for sexual prowess.

But worse was the way she felt about her envious self. I'll be okay, she thought. It's only nine months. After that, Jackie will be out of our lives forever. For Mitch to have a baby of his own blood, I can survive that. She had no way of knowing that her pain had just begun.

17

W
HEN HARVEY FELDMAN stood to greet Rick Reisman, he could tell by the red face of the secretary who showed the well-known director in that Rick had been flirting with her. Jesus, the man was looking more and more like Orson Welles, Feldman thought.

"So what brings you here?" he asked as Rick sat in the leather chair across from his desk.

"I want to talk about open adoption," Rick said.

"Which aspect of it?"

"The prerequisites."

"Do you mean for the birth mother or the adopting parents?"

"Parents."

"The prerequisites are whatever qualities the birth mother wants for the parents of her baby."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning I've placed babies with single parents,
gay couples, a few couples who otherwise would be considered too old to adopt."

"Which is how old?"

"Forties. You want to hear the stories? I've got scrapbooks filled with them."

"I'm nearly fifty."

"So?"

"Is that impossible?"

"I don't follow."

"Well, what's too old?" Rick asked, leaning forward.

The dawn broke on Harvey Feldman's face. "Are you telling me that you're here to talk to me about you, yourself, wanting to adopt a baby?" There was a mixture of amusement and disappointment in his voice. Rick realized that the young lawyer with show-business fantasies had thought he'd come here to talk about stories that could be made into movies.

"I am," Rick said.

"What brought
this
on?"

"My approaching fiftieth birthday. The relative certainty, however heartbreaking, that 'the right woman' who will love me forever isn't out there somewhere waiting for an overweight, overworked, anxiety-ridden movie director to take advantage of her fertile body. I also have a desperate desire to have some kind of family. I lost my parents in an airplane crash in the fifties. Bobo is my only living relative."

"It'll be difficult," Feldman said after a while. "Ever married?" Rick shook his head no. "They'll ask me that . . . the birth mothers. They'll wonder if you're gay."

"I'll bring them affidavits from women I've plundered."

"Do you have a preference about the gender?"

"I'd probably do better with a boy, but . . ." He
shrugged, and he had the sudden urge to stand, apologize for what was clearly a momentary lapse of sanity, and run back downstairs to the parking lot and his car. But there was something about the fact that the guy wasn't laughing at him or trying to talk him out of it yet that kept him in the chair.

"Here's the bottom line if you're serious," Feldman told him. "I already told you that there are forty-seven possible choices for every birth mother. The only way you can beat the odds is to convince one of them that you're unequivocally the best person to love and raise the baby she's carrying. Do you think you can do that? Win out over couples who have picket fences and puppies, and in some cases other children? More important, do you think you
are
that? When you adopt a baby, you adopt at least twenty years' worth of responsibility for another human being."

"Well," Rick said, and for the first time he looked around the office. On a bookshelf behind him was a picture of Harvey Feldman and his pretty wife, and on their laps, two little girls.

"My family," he heard Feldman say.

"I see that," Rick responded, but when he looked back at Feldman, he realized the young man was gesturing at all the pictures on every wall. Babies. Gurgling, grinning, posing bare assed, in bathtubs, through crib bars, wearing too-big hats and toothless grins. Sometimes alone, frequently held by beaming adults with a kind of light in their eyes Rick knew his own eyes had never had.

He stood to go. This had truly been a lunatic idea. One of those grasping-for-straws moments that sound great in the wee hours of the morning when you're desperate. Now, with the cold gray light of the smoggy L.A. day staring at him, it was nothing more than a lonely fat man's way of admitting the truth, which was
that he'd let his life pass him by. He offered Harvey his hand, but Harvey had turned away and was pulling some files out of a drawer.

"Listen," the lawyer said, "it's a long shot. I doubt if anyone will choose you, but so what? I'll throw you into the mix and see if anyone's interested. Fill out an information form for me and I'll see."

Rick sat down again. Harvey handed him a form.

"Tell me the down side," Rick said as he wrote his vital statistics onto the slots on the form. "The dangers. The part I should worry about. I mean, surely it can't be as easy as one day they pick you and then somebody brings you a little bundle and says, 'He's yours.' "

"Nowhere near as easy as that. The bad news is that the birth mother, who you support for the last few months of her pregnancy, has the right to ask for her baby back until she signs a consent that's been accepted by the department of adoptions, or approved by the L.A. superior court, or the L.A. County department of children's services. It's supposed to take six months, but sometimes it can take closer to a year. So you could possibly support a birth mother, pay all of her hospital bills and doctors' fees, fall in love with a baby, and have that baby snatched away from you and all your money lost. If you want a baby badly enough, you have to be prepared to let this little pregnant girl stomp on your heart."

"How often has that happened?"

"In my practice, once in fifteen years. That's not too bad. The birth mother asked for the baby back after two days. The adopting parents were devastated, but they wanted a baby so much they found another birth mother a few months later, and started again. Now they have a son."