Arts & Entertainments: A Novel (5 page)

“So you admit we have a problem?”

In this way their life had changed. The day after their doctor’s visit, Susan bought a basal body thermometer. She bought ovulation predictor kits. She bought a watch she wore to bed each night that measured the levels of salt in her sweat. She bought a two-hundred-dollar pillow that she placed under her hips after they had sex, when she would lie for half an hour unmoving and silent, with a look of great concentration on her face, as though willing his sperm safely to their destination. The sex itself was always in the missionary position, and it occurred every other day from day ten to day twenty of her cycle. They could have had sex in other manners, at other times. But they didn’t. Neither felt much up to it while these command performances loomed.

Susan came to think of the year they had to pass before going to the clinic as a kind of waiting period. The Clomid the doctor put her on after a few months exacerbated her feelings of despair. Being taken off the Clomid after another few months when it had failed to get them anywhere didn’t help, either. She no longer had any hope that they would conceive without serious intervention, but they had to keep trying, since the intervention would only come once the trying had failed. Sex went from being merely functional to grim and hopeless. Once in a while Eddie still joked, “At least it’s fun trying.” But it had stopped being fun a long time ago.

During this waiting period, Susan had found something online about traditional Chinese medicine. For a period she spoke about “qi” and “meridians.” She took herbal supplements and went to an acupuncturist. Eddie didn’t think they needed any new expenses that insurance wouldn’t cover, but he didn’t say anything. After the gynecologist suggested that the herbals might be counterproductive, there was no more talk of the matter. At this point, Susan decided she wasn’t
going to wait for her doctor to acquiesce. She would find a specialist herself.

HOPE SPRINGS FERTILITY CENTER
was located on Sixth Avenue in midtown, and its offices might have belonged to one of the white-shoe law firms that occupied the rest of the building. The couches were leather. Expensive paintings covered the walls, by artists Susan recognized. Their doctor, a bald, bearded man named Walter Regnant, exuded a carefully titrated mixture of sensitivity and confidence.

“I have a very good success rate,” he said. “Nearly a dozen children have been named after me.”

After the first series of tests, he diagnosed Susan with endometriosis. She had scarring on her fallopian tubes, Regnant explained, and he believed this was the source of the problem. The scars were minor and could be removed with outpatient surgery. And so they were, after which it was back to the thermometer and the pillow, this time with a new optimism. Two months later they returned to Hope Springs.

“Now,” Regnant said, pointing his finger—literally, pointing his finger—at Eddie, “we need to see how
your
guys are doing.”

Their next appointment was at another midtown building, this one farther west, in a neighborhood to which the trains didn’t travel. The waiting room inspired less confidence than the one at Hope Springs. The couch had a tear in its upholstery, and the art on the walls didn’t even seek to look expensive. Susan sat outside while a lab technician led Eddie to a door marked “Specimen Collection Room 3.” The room was the size of a large walk-in closet. There was an armchair and a sidetable on which were spread five-year-old issues of
Playboy
and
Hustler.
These struck Eddie as almost quaint, pornography having
long ago evolved past Hefner and Flynt to hidden cameras and point-of-view shots. For the less imaginative there was also a small television with a VHS player and a pile of videos, most of them still plastic-wrapped with pink stickers that read “3 for $20.” There was a small sink in the corner. While Eddie washed his hands he noted a sign on the wall: “Do NOT use LUBRICANT of any kind!!”

He set his specimen cup on the floor beside a roll of paper towels, wondering how much time he’d been allotted. In the pile of magazines, he spotted a copy of
CelebNation,
one of the more popular weekly tabloids. Not only was it a different genre than the other materials, it was also of more recent vintage. Eddie guessed that a patient had brought it with him and left it behind. When he picked it up, the magazine fell open to a page that read “Dr. Drake as you’ve never seen her!” Beneath these words was a series of photos showing Martha in a bikini, making out on the beach somewhere with Rex Gilbert. The page was crumpled and stuck to the one behind it. Eddie closed it to look at the cover. The newsstand date was from the previous week. Within the past few days—perhaps that very morning—another man had been in this room with that magazine open. In nine months a child would be born owing existence to the firmness of Martha Martin’s beach body.

“We’ve found our problem,” Dr. Regnant announced enthusiastically at Hope Springs the next week.

Simply put, the problem was Eddie’s substandard semen. It was lacking by every metric—concentration, volume, motility, morphology. Regnant seemed pleased by the discovery.

“Where does this leave our chances of natural conception?” Susan asked.

“Not good,” Regnant said.

“What does that mean, exactly?” she pressed. “One in a hundred, or one in a million?”

Regnant sighed.

“It’s not something I can quantify. What I can tell you is that I’ve been in the business for twenty years and no couple that has come to me with these numbers has ever conceived naturally. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.”

He watched them react to this.

“There’s good news here,” he said. “Lots of people who come into my office I have to tell them, ‘Sorry, I can’t help you.’ They’ve got to start talking about surrogates or adoption. There isn’t anything I can offer them. That’s not what I’m telling you. I can help you. There’s nothing here to suggest that you two are chemically incompatible. Your chances with IVF are actually quite high.”

The procedure would cost fifteen thousand dollars. Insurance would cover one-third, leaving them a ten-thousand-dollar tab. The number made Eddie queasy. It might have seemed manageable except for the obvious fact that it was far from the final cost. A child was a machine for creating expenses.

All it took in the end was a credit card. Two of them, actually. Eddie was surprised, in an abstract way, that he was allowed to spend money he didn’t have on a process that was designed to bring countless new costs into his life. Nobody stopped to ask how he was going to afford it. When it didn’t work out, he joked about asking for their money back. Susan had not found this joke funny. Neither had he, really. On some level he’d meant it. At the very least, for the amount they’d paid, they ought to let them try again, if they wanted.

They couldn’t put another try on a credit card, because their cards were maxed out. This too had been a surprise. He thought there would always be a way to get more credit, but apparently not. Eddie started to think about all the years he’d wasted. He had never regretted them before, but now he could
see that time for what it was. It wasn’t just that he had nothing to show for a decade of his life. He had less than nothing. Those years had amounted to a debit on his account.

When told of the situation, Susan’s parents had expressed a religious objection to in vitro, though Eddie suspected that this was mostly to cover the fact that they didn’t have the money to help. Eddie’s parents were blunt: they’d put more than they could afford into their house in Florida and were now in danger of losing it. By the time Eddie had arrived at the reunion, he and Susan were out of options, so Blakeman’s offer to help had seemed like an act of God. Instead it had been an offer to sell a sex tape. Sitting next to Susan in bed after dinner, Eddie wanted to join her in tears.

“On Monday I’ll start looking for a summer job,” he told her. “We can save some money.”

“That’s not going to be enough,” Susan told him. “It will be years before it’s enough.”

She was right. In the absence of decent credit, it wouldn’t suffice to pay off their bills; they would need the money to pay for the procedure itself. A few months of working a second job would hardly make a dent in all that.

“It will be a start,” he said. “We’ll go from there.”

ON MONDAY MORNING, EDDIE
brought his laptop into the living room to look up job listings. He didn’t have high expectations for his search, which he’d actually begun weeks before. He’d hoped to line up something he could start as soon as the school year ended so he could surprise Susan with the news. But he hadn’t found anything. If he’d taught a subject that showed up on the SAT or one of the AP tests, he could have spent the summer tutoring his own students, but any St. Albert’s parents willing to support their children’s acting ambitions sent them to arts camp for the summer. Every time he thought of waiting tables or bartending—the kind of work he’d done on and off throughout his twenties—he imagined a student or parent coming into the restaurant where he worked. What he wanted was an office job that no one would know he was doing. Every temp agency he called began by asking whether he had a degree. When he asked why that was neces
sary to fill in for a vacationing receptionist, he was told that there were more than enough college graduates eager to do the work.

He’d spent the previous five summers taking classes, in a halfhearted effort to meet the qualifications for his job at St. Albert’s, which had been temporarily waived in his case. The effort cost him thousands of dollars a year, but he was still hardly halfway to a degree. After six years of teaching without incident, he couldn’t imagine getting fired for abandoning these classes, so he’d given them up. He told the temp agencies that he was a few credits short. He hadn’t heard back from any of them, and he didn’t expect to do any better on his own.

Eddie closed the job board and searched for “Jay Rolling.” Morgan’s site wasn’t the first thing that came up, but it was on the first page, which seemed vaguely impressive, given the term’s more obvious meaning. It was exactly as he’d described it—photos of disabled people crossing streets in wheelchairs. The discovery was at once baffling and strangely reassuring. Not that Eddie had doubted Morgan’s veracity. He’d just assumed that there was something about the project he hadn’t understood, that it couldn’t possibly be as empty as it sounded. But it was exactly that empty. Based on the various comments and “likes” littered throughout the page, it seemed to have some kind of following, so perhaps on some level Morgan knew what he was doing. At the very least, he’d been right to guess that Eddie had something people would want to see.

Around the time Eddie became serious with Susan, he’d transferred the videos to discs and erased them from his hard drive so she wouldn’t come across them while using his laptop. That would have been the time to get rid of them entirely, and
he’d considered it. As it was, he had not kept everything, but he hadn’t been particularly selective, either. He hadn’t wanted to look through them carefully enough to decide what was worth saving, or to consider what it meant to say that some part of his past was worth saving while some other part should be discarded entirely.

Instead he’d deposited them all at the bottom of a cardboard box filled with various souvenirs from his acting days. He’d been ready to throw the whole box out when he moved in with Susan, but she’d encouraged him to hold on to some things. They’d want to show their kids one day, she’d said. With black marker and weak irony he’d labeled the box “relics” before locking it in the building’s storage space.

The key to that space hung from a magnetic hook on the refrigerator door. Eddie remembered his resolution from the night before, to be rid of these things. He’d bring them straight out to the street, he decided as he collected the key. He’d break them in half and leave them in the trash on the corner. But in the elevator it struck him that there was no harm in getting a last glimpse of his younger self. It might even be cathartic in some way. Catharsis was an idea he held dear and explained carefully to his students, though so far as he knew he had never experienced it personally. He unlocked the storage space and used the key to cut through the packing tape that sealed the box shut.

At the top of the pile was a playbill from an off-off-Broadway show, his first professional job. In the spring of freshman year, a professor named Harold Edmundson had told Eddie about the play, which Edmundson had written. He’d gotten Eddie an audition for a staging on Minetta Lane, where Eddie had earned the part without a head shot or a résumé. The play was called
Midnight with the Lotos-Eaters.
It made no sense to Eddie whatsoever, but it was received well in those quarters
that receive such things at all. The write-up in
Time Out New York
—now paper-clipped to the playbill in the box—named Edward Hartley an “attractive newcomer.” From those two words came various offers of representation. While his old St. Albert’s friends were deciding which major to declare, Eddie was choosing between Talent Management and William Morris. As breaks go, it wasn’t so big, but it felt big enough.

He got a part in another play, which was where he met Martha. He asked her out after their third rehearsal. It was shocking to him now that she’d wanted to be with him, but at the time everything just came as it should. He glowed with confidence. It felt natural to him that this beautiful talent should find him so attractive, and he made it feel natural to her. They began to build a life together around acting. He returned to school in the fall and signed up for his classes, but he couldn’t force himself to go when all these other opportunities existed. He had to take his chance. He told himself he could always go back if things didn’t work out. For a long time it had seemed that things
were
working out. That they finally had not Eddie discovered all at once, after it was too late.

Coming downstairs had been a mistake. Those days were best forgotten. Eddie tried to close the box, but it wouldn’t stay shut without the tape, and half-open it seemed to call to him. So much of his life was in there. He didn’t want to kneel over it, working through everything until he found the discs, so he brought the box up to the apartment, where he extracted the thin black CD case from it. He picked a disc at random.