Authors: Chase Novak
“I’ll say this for you, Jim. For you to come here and dangle this possibility in front of me and then to make it a precondition that I give you a job here—you’ve got to have some big brass balls to try something like this. Big. Fucking. Brass. Balls.”
“Then, judging by your words and your tone,” Johnson says, “I assume we have a deal. I’m asking for a three-year contract—and if you try to get rid of me for some personal reason or for some Mickey Mouse screwup or for anything short of gross incompetence, I will sue you for breach. And retire.”
After his negotiation with Jim Johnson, Alex called Leslie at her office and said he would be bringing dinner home tonight and there was something he wanted to tell her. He’d thought it was obvious what this conversation was going to be about—after all, she had been standing right there the night before in Central Park when he made his appointment with Johnson—but Leslie had seemed distracted on the phone and didn’t ask for any further elucidation. She simply said, “Oh, all right,” and left it at that.
And now, hours later, Alex is laying out the carry-in sushi and ice-cold dai ginjo sake in their dining room while Leslie watches him, sitting in a tufted leather Queen Anne sofa that Twisdens and their spouses had been sitting in since 1808, her legs drawn up, her arms wrapped around her knees, a distracted look on her face.
“I’ve been looking forward to this conversation all day,” Alex announces as he pours the sake into two small pale green earthenware cups.
“There’s something I need to talk about too,” Leslie says. She brushes her bangs away from her eyes, takes a deep, steadying breath.
“Well, you first,” Alex says.
From the next room, the telephone sounds—their answering machine is programmed to pick up on the first ring, and they hear Alex’s deep voice instructing the caller to wait for the tone. (Alex believes that those who call it “the beep” ought to be thrashed to within an inch of their lives!)
“Remember meeting Mary Gallo?”
“From your office.” Alex doesn’t remember this person at all but he knows how to lead the witness.
“Yes. She’s an editor, cookbooks mainly. I can see by your face you don’t remember her—but you’ve met her.”
“Of course I have,” Alex says. Most of the people with whom Leslie works are interchangeable to him, but nice, awfully nice.
“Well, she and her partner just adopted. A little girl from Russia.”
“Attachment disorder,” Alex says quickly.
“What?”
“A lot of the Russian kids have attachment disorder. They don’t bond.” He takes a sip of sake.
“Alex. I want us to adopt. I’m sick of living this way. I’m tired of doctors, and diets, and I am most of all worried.” She senses Alex is about to say something but she stops him with a gesture. “I am worried about what this is doing to
us
. Our marriage. Our
souls
.”
“There’s nothing wrong with our marriage or our souls,” Alex manages to put in.
But Leslie is being carried by the force of all that she has kept pent up for months and she barely hears him. “I am sick of feeling like this, like a failure. I never want to hold my legs up like a beetle on its back after we have sex—it’s ridiculous.” She holds the sides of her head, as if to prevent an explosion. “I want our sex life to be about us. I want you to touch me because you love me and because you are attracted to me, not because I am ovulating, or am supposed to be ovulating according to the goddamned calendar and that horrible thermometer. I never want to see a calendar or a thermometer again. Ever. No, no.” She puts up her hands as if Alex is about to interrupt, though by now he has decided to sit silently, let her vent, let the steam blow off. “I want a calendar, but full of dinner dates, and theater tickets, and meeting friends for drinks at the Sherry—remember? Remember our life together? What it used to be like? When was the last time we had dinner with people? When was the last time I had an orgasm?” She sees Alex’s eyes widen. “I’m sorry, Alex. I don’t even fake them anymore. At this point I’m like a clump of dirt waiting for the farmer to shove a seed in me.” She reaches for his hand. “I used to be so sexy, Alex. With you. I was just blazing. You turned me on so much. And I want that back. We’re not getting any younger, we’re not going to live forever, and I don’t want to waste any more of our time.”
“May I speak now?” Alex says.
“I want you to,” she says softly.
“Well, first of all, I take it that the remark about our not getting any younger primarily concerns me. Now that my fiftieth birthday is in sight. Though I must say, it feels more as if the fiftieth birthday has me in
its
sights, like in the crosshairs.”
“No one gets younger, Alex. Life is a one-way street.”
“Well… yes. That’s true. But you’re still a very young woman, and in a few years you’re still going to be young, and you’re still going to be beautiful—and young enough to be a mother. You get to my age, the pace quickens. I think you begin to age four years for every actual year, at a certain point. My time is running out.”
“Your time is never going to run out with me.”
“I repeat: my time is running out.”
“Alex…”
“Jim Johnson came to my office today, Leslie.”
Leslie falls silent. She drinks her sake and holds out her cup for Alex to refill.
“And?” she asks in a small voice.
“And now he is an attorney at Bailey, Twisden, Kaufman, and Chang.”
“So he told you the name of their miracle doctor, I gather,” Leslie says.
“Yes, he did. Dr. Kis, and he’s in Ljubljana.”
“Where?”
“Lub. Yan. Na. Ljubljana.”
“Thanks for the lesson, Alex. Now you want to tell me where the hell that is?” Things seem to be moving along without her; she doesn’t care to be a passenger on the SS
Alex
as it steams across the ocean of life.
“Slovenia, beautiful Slovenia.” He cannot escape noticing the dejection showing in Leslie’s face, and he covers his own nervousness by thoughtfully chewing an oily, briny slab of yellowtail. “Every girl’s dream destination,” he adds.
“Next week is sales conference,” Leslie says. “I’m presenting my entire list.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry for everything. I’m sorry I didn’t consult you, I’m sorry about your sales conference, I’m sorry this new doctor is not in Paris, but most of all I’m sorry we don’t have children in our life. We have to do this, Leslie. One last attempt, okay? We just have to.”
“Alex, I’m done, I’m just… done.”
“No, please. We can’t quit now. I just gave this guy a job.”
“You shouldn’t have.”
“
Leslie,
this child—”
“There
is
no child, Alex.”
“I know, I know. But there could be. And I have never wanted anything so much in all my life.”
“You haven’t had a chance to long for things, Alex.” She gestures around her, at the house, the furniture, the artwork, and all it implied: Alex is an heir and has never wanted for anything in his life.
Except this: another heir.
“That’s not fair, Leslie. I want to have a child with
you
.”
“Oh God, Alex. Do you think I don’t want to have a child too? I want us to have that. But there are so many children in the world waiting for someone to take care of them. Wouldn’t we do just as well to adopt?”
“I don’t rule it out, really, I don’t. But let’s just try this. Can’t we? All your kindness and intelligence and beauty—it would be a waste not to pass it along, not to keep it in the world. The gene pool cries out for it!” He smiles and lifts his brows, awaiting his smile’s reciprocation.
“I’m going to assume you’ve already made arrangements.”
Alex shrugs.
“When is the appointment?”
“Next Monday.”
“But Alex, next week? It’s not only sales conference but my sister is going to be in town and I offered her the third floor.”
“So now she can stay anywhere in the house.”
“How much is this going to cost?” Leslie asks.
“A ridiculous amount. And I’ve already paid half, since he insists on a wire transfer before the appointment. Which I know is highly irregular, but irregular might be just what we need right now, since nothing regular has done us the slightest bit of good.”
“I can’t stand seeing you so upset,” Leslie’s older sister, Cynthia, says to her. Cynthia, who co-owns an antique store called Gilty Pleasures in San Francisco with her boyfriend, has come to New York to visit Leslie and to attend a few auctions—she especially hopes to procure a set of twelve Chinese export plates made in 1775 for an English earl, each with his beaver and coronet crest in the center, flanked by a pair of mermaids.
“We’re coming to the end,” Leslie says. They are in the parlor and even though it is still light outside, the room is somber, filled with dark blue shadows and the sad perfume of hothouse roses that were supposed to be cheery. “If this doesn’t work, I think we’ll throw in the towel.”
“The towel of the marriage?” Cynthia asks.
“Never. The towel of parenting.”
“And he still won’t consider adoption?” Cynthia asks. She does her best to keep her gaze fixed on her younger sister, but the parlor—indeed, the entire house!—is so filled with antiques, most of them in Alex’s family for generations, that it’s difficult for Cynthia not to take them all in with her appraising, admiring eyes. Just above the Queen Anne chair with its multicolored floral needlework in which Leslie slouches is a two-hundred-fifty-year-old gilt-wood mirror surmounted by a swan’s-neck crest, which in turn centers a feather-carved finial with a female mask nestled in palm fronds. It would probably sell for twenty thousand dollars, maybe more, in San Francisco. Also distracting Cynthia is the fact that Leslie has placed her teacup directly onto the George III mahogany tripod table next to her chair, a caramel-colored beauty with an exquisite piecrust top and leaf-carved feet.
“Look around you,” Leslie says, indicating with a wave the walls covered in portraits of Alex’s numerous relations, ranging from a British army officer with his scrubbed pink face and bloodred jacket; to a shrewd-looking older woman in an amber dress with Pomeranians on her lap and steel in her eyes; to a fatuous dandy in a royal blue tricorn and shimmering silk waistcoat, holding his cane delicately between two fingers; to some more recently minted Twisdens wearing the uniforms of their hobbies (riding breeches, yachting caps, painter’s smocks) or their professions (Brooks Brothers suits, judge’s robes, Episcopal minister’s purple shirt and turned collar). “Alex wants to continue his family’s line.”
“And what are you?” Cynthia says. “Breed stock?” Childless herself, and living with a man who nearly everyone assumes is gay, Cynthia has never been a cheerleader for the conventional family.
“How about I love him and want to make him happy,” Leslie says.
“And what about your happiness?” Cynthia asks. “All these procedures, your intimate life completely invaded. It’s nuts. And your career!”
“Well, as I said, we’re coming to the end of it.”
“And what the hell is this new treatment that you have to leave the country to get? I mean, come on, Les. I’d be highly dubious. In fact, I’d be scared to death.”
“Who said I’m not?” Leslie says.
Cynthia’s attention is captured momentarily by a pair of Chinese reverse paintings on glass hanging above the fireplace. In one, a maiden kneels on a raft holding an oar and navigating rough waters, and in the other, a seated mother and a standing child are beneath a cypress tree, a pagoda on a hill in the distance. “Are those new?” Cynthia asks.
“Nothing in this house is new,” Leslie says.
The primary home improvement Alex and Leslie have made is to triple-glaze the windows as a way of reducing the hum, honk, roar, shout, and screech of New York. Nevertheless, a piercing scream from the sidewalk one story below comes into the room with all the speed, force, and shock of a flaming arrow. Leslie and Cynthia hurry to the window and part the heavy velvet drapes.
Directly beneath them, a nanny in a white uniform and a blue topcoat holds the side of her face and continues to scream. She is obviously in excruciating pain, and a couple of passersby, frozen by the horror of the moment and the terror and torment of the woman, stand gawking at her as she walks in tight little circles holding her cheek and howling in agony. When she moves her hand away, the pink of her flesh shows through the dark brown of her skin. She looks at her palm, which is red with blood, while still more blood courses down her face, some of it pooling in her ear, most of it cascading onto the collar of her woolen coat, turning the bright blue wool brownish black.
Yet as terrible a sight as that is, what has riveted the attention of the people below on the street and Leslie and Cynthia as well is the nanny’s little charge, a sinewy, long-legged, dark-haired, pale child of two or three, a boy, to judge from his clothes—red sneakers, blue jeans, and a little satin New York Giants jacket. He is sitting calmly in his stroller with his hands folded in his lap, his eyes expressionless, and blood drooling out of his mouth.
“Did that fucking baby just bite his nanny?” Cynthia exclaims.
According to Alex, the most irritating aspect of their appointment with Dr. Kis is that there is no way to fly directly to Slovenia unless they fly private. So he books Lufthansa first class to Munich, with a connecting flight on something called Adria, where first class will probably get you nothing more than a larger bag of pretzels. And so, on the afternoon of November 18, they set off on what Leslie hopes is the very last stop on their quest for a biological heir. The first leg of their flight is reasonably relaxed; they reach the meticulously maintained Munich airport around 7:00 a.m. and find a café in which to kill an hour before their scheduled flight to Ljubljana. They stow their Vuitton carry-ons under a black Formica table; inside of Alex’s suitcase is an envelope with $20,000 in hundred-dollar bills, the second half of the payment to Dr. Kis, who insists on cash—he is gracious enough to accept American dollars, though he prefers euros. As luck would have it, someone has left behind a copy of the
Financial Times;
as they drink their
kaffeemilch
, Alex reads an article about attempts being made to restructure British Petroleum, and Leslie reads about the resurgence of international gangs who target rich families via kidnapping, identity theft, and blackmail.