In The Near Dark

At first there’s darkness, and then darkness becoming less dark, then vaguely dark, then just shadows and the glow of sunlight pushing on closed blinds. There’s Melanie’s tangled black hair falling on the pillow inches from my face, a sniffle and the ruffle of sheets as her leg moves. There’s a siren howling closer and closer and then fading. The phone rings, then rings again. “Probably Mike,” Melanie mumbles. “I called and told him you wouldn’t be in.” I roll over and grab the phone from the nightstand and turn the ringer off, then lie on my back and stare at the various shades of darkness on the ceiling. In my mind I see shadows on a monitor, a flashing light in the center. “Maybe I should go in,” she says, her voice flat, tired. There’s a long silence. “I don’t want to go in.”

A few months ago we gave up, surrendered. We accepted a life without kids. After four years and forty-six thousand dollars, after being so single-mindedly focused on procreation that it almost tore us apart, we relinquished hope and, strangely, entered into a second courtship: clinking glasses in French bistros, dancing arm in arm to the tunes of street musicians, going to the theater, the improv, comedy clubs. We did Ecstasy at a party at a rundown house in the Rockaways and then caressed and petted each other on the subway in the middle of the night. We took weekend jaunts to Montauk, Cold Spring. We had sex all over the apartment, in Melanie’s office in Midtown, in my tiny office at Columbia, in public places, without expectation.

And then, sitting on a blanket with a bottle of Mouton Cadet on the Great Hill in Central Park, we watched a performance of King Lear put on by one of those small troupes that pop up around the city in the summer. Old Lear, beaten and battered, betrayed not so much by his daughters as by his need to believe a lie, raged against the storm, and, as if on cue, the sky opened up. Lightning flashed, rain fell, and thunder shook the ground. Lear, broken, his dead child in his arms, howled, “No, no, no life? Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more, Never, never, never, never, never!” And the rain kept falling as the actors bowed and Melanie pulled me off the wet blanket, down the hill, across the street, and into the dark North Woods, in among a stand of oak and ash trees; it kept falling as she pushed me back against the brick wall of the armory, as she kissed my neck, as she unbuttoned my pants, as I spun her around and pulled her skirt up, as I entered her, as I pushed hard and then harder, as she let it out: Never, never, never.

But no. Not never. In surrendering, we prevailed. Suddenly the blood didn’t flow, and that was life.

In a darkened ultrasound room, a light flashed on a monitor full of shadows, and a Russian sonographer named Yeva looked at her screen and said, with a heavy accent, “That’s the heartbeat.” And Melanie and I wondered, How?

We’d gone through years of IUI, IVF, IVM, ICSI; of hormone injections and tests and more tests; of testing my fucking testes. The verdict: for me, abnormal morphology; for her, endometriosis. At one point, after her laparoscopy, my sperm somehow made it through, and she got pregnant, but we lost it within two weeks. Then another year of trying, and another miscarriage. And then we tried again, but even though I cut soy out of my diet, stopped exercising, no longer wore briefs, and took only lukewarm showers, my sperm still floundered around in the dark. And so we picked a sperm donor: a six-foot-two, brown-haired, blue-eyed Princeton undergrad with a nearly perfect SAT score, a volunteer for Habitat for Humanity who enjoyed writing poetry and teaching kids to ride bikes. He was two inches taller than me. And for the week that his sperm was inside my wife, I hated him.

When Princeton didn’t work, we went to a German herbalist in Hoboken, then an acupuncturist in Chinatown. For weeks we ingested only cauliflower, ginseng, guava, and Chinese licorice root. We stopped visiting friends with babies. We bought a box of tissues for the nightstand. And I took up running again, a daily loop in Central Park, training for 5Ks and 10Ks, running until it grew dark and then running under the streetlights so I didn’t have to go home to our apartment.

A few weeks after King Lear, sitting in that semidark room and looking at the screen full of shadows, we thought we had a chance — until Yeva sat back, frowned, and returned the ultrasound wand to its holster. “I be right back.”

A Good Deal. A Great Gift. Give The Sun as a holiday gift and save up to 30%.

PRINT

E-MAIL

SHARE

PDF

WRITE TO THE EDITOR

SUBSCRIBE