The Long Accomplishment Page 9

  At the same time that Stella’s death scarred the Sunday school community, the parents of Trinity, it also catalyzed them. In the aftermath of Stella’s death, it became clear that there were something like a hundred adults using the Sunday day care system at Trinity, and only a small portion of them were going to services regularly. A very enterprising priest who was coming up through the ranks then, Emily Wachner, seized on this, and not long after Stella’s death, a family service was established at St. Paul’s Chapel, which almost instantly gathered together the community of parents and kids who had been through this experience, and made a home for them. That service has persisted, successfully, ever since. It is probably among the more crowded, lively, uproarious, chaotic, and loving family services in Manhattan.

  There is one related question about Stella, and that period of grief: Was the intensity of it just about Stella’s death? Or was it also about the struggle, for Laurel and myself, to bear a child? I think it would be hard to argue with the idea that the two things, the two varieties of grief, were genuine events in our lives, and that there was an accumulation of loss, a loss that like some kind of remainder in chemistry or mathematics was to be carried over into any setting in which we found ourselves. It was about feeling for a child, and feeling an absence of a child. It was about parenting, and thinking about parenting. Laurel was a real advocate for Hazel in this time of grief, even when Hazel insisted that she was okay. All of that was happening, rippling out around us, and then soon it was the first Christmas of our marriage, with all the jockeying for a Christmas tradition, in our new, uncharted, and also divided family. We were trying to keep going forward. And yet: Stella Gates continued to visit us. She was a person and she was also a tumultuous memory. If Stella Gates had a legacy, though, in our household, as with all the households who had known her through her faith community, it was that she created opportunities for getting people together, and to rally as a community. She’s still doing it for Laurel and myself, and for Hazel, and for many others too.

  January 2014

  If it’s the winter of 2014, as the above chapter title indicates, this narrative must move inside for a couple of months. The winters in the Northeast are not like the ones I remember from childhood. Winter in the Northeast has its inevitable seasonal affective disorder, a kind of deep blue despond that sets in around February and doesn’t really budge until the average daily temperature gets above fifty degrees Fahrenheit, but winter doesn’t often feel like it could endanger lives the way, for example, a day in Concord, New Hampshire, did, when I was in high school, and with wind chill we approached fifty below. New York City is cold and damp, and often windy, but it’s not Minneapolis. In New York City, there is light deprivation, a winter of the mind, of bare trees and dog-befouled snow drifts, and deep, dispiriting lakes of slush. And these are the landscapes of the next couple of months. Trying to teach my daughter to sled, on the occasional snow day, and then, when sledding didn’t quite take, going inside for sprees of Dora the Explorer and handicrafts.

  The moving inside of the story implies that there are episodes that are internal some of the time, and the danger for me is that an internal trajectory implies that Laurel and I weren’t outwardly engaged with events unfolding beyond home, and that would be misleading. We were outwardly engaged throughout the year that I’m describing, and here are a couple of examples.

  The calendar year 2013 had its Boston Marathon bombing, to which we were glued on the television, not only because of the epochal, raw facts of the case, the bending of history toward extremism, but because Laurel had lived in a house directly across the street from the spot in Watertown, Massachusetts, where Dzokhar Tsarnaev hid in David Henneberry’s parked boat. Indeed, Laurel’s former boyfriend, who still lived in the house they had shared, was sheltering in place during the lockdown of Watertown, and was multiply interviewed on CNN and other news outlets in the aftermath of Tsarnaev’s surrender. Laurel’s old life in Boston (which began when she went to Tufts, and continued during her time at the MFA program at the Yale School of Art) was brought back into relief, into our living room, likewise the way city life had come to change, perhaps for good, because of what happened in Boston. The coverage was sensational in contrasts, for us, of the bleakest sort.

  And, later, in 2014, I was also completely preoccupied with MH370, the Malaysian airliner that vanished over the Indian Ocean (if indeed that is the correct location), thus far never to be found again. And, in a way, even now, I can’t fully express the extremity of my reaction to this particular story. I too worried about Crimea, I too lived in dread that the upcoming midterm elections were going to doom the legacy of a president I deeply admired, I too worried about the Syrian Civil War, and the use of chemical agents there, I too worried about income inequality and the future of health care in this country, so why did the missing Malaysian airliner have such a lasting impact on me? There was a merciless isolation about MH370. To such a degree did I follow the story that I wrote about it at one point, a sort of a prose poem, about what it must have been like to be on the flight at the moment it turned from its foreordained course.

  Throughout my middle school and teen years I was preoccupied with places like the Roaring Forties, with their violent winds, the Southern Ocean adjacent to Antarctica, undisciplined landscapes where things were especially wild, and where humankind was unwelcome or at risk; I liked all trips to the poles, ships lost at sea or frozen into permafrost, lone mariners drifting out toward the desolation of Oceania, and especially deep portions of the watery underworld that one finds in the Pacific. That the lives of those aboard MH370 were entwined with these dramatic and infrequently traveled parts of the earthly landscape made it impossible for me to look away.

  All of this to say that the world is not in this book to the degree that it might be, but that the backdrop of domesticity is always of the world. The two things interpenetrate, the domestic and the cultural. The world imposes itself on domesticity, on the philosophy of domesticity, on the need for it, and the way we talk about it, and that is not lost on me now, in retrospect, nor was it at the time, in winter, when we were indoors, sometimes watching the news (sometimes reading it in the glare of a smart phone), sometimes watching with my daughter, sometimes fretting.

  In 2014, let it also be said, we procured our health insurance through the Freelancers Union, and in particular we got our health care from Freelancers Medical. Freelancers Medical, may it rest in peace, was one of those great experiments in health care delivery that involved a really nice office (ours was in downtown Brooklyn), really attentive and caring staff, and free tea, free yoga, and acupuncture. The first time I visited the office (which had a $0 co-pay for primary care), I became teary about the whole thing, for the simple reason that I couldn’t remember a time when health care had felt unconflicted, civilized, pleasant, and human. With doctors, you sort of expected to be treated like a cheap cut of meat, brisket, let’s say, and somehow the profession seems to take kind, caring, aspiring doctors and turn them into people who ponder statistical likelihoods instead of listening to human beings. Freelancers Medical was just the opposite. When you went in and met with your “wellness coach,” and ours was exceedingly kind, she had your file at hand, and treated you like an individual, instead of a small interruptive set of symptoms. Frankly, I loved going there.

  Of course, some fissures in the delivery of services began to emerge: for example, the Freelancers people really didn’t want to send you along to a specialist, as the whole point of Freelancers Medical was to manage your primary care so as to expose your insurer (the Freelancers Union itself) to a minimum of high-cost specialists. They were treatment averse, really, or they were interested in extremely low-cost and practical treatment, after which they were uncomfortable. They liked to suggest more acupuncture. They were extremely nice about it.

  At a certain point, despite a number of interactions with Freelancers Medical about our inability to get pregnant that were close to the traditional adv
ice (“Why don’t you relax!”) we finally asked to be referred to a reproductive endocrinologist. A list was produced, mostly untested, as the whole of the Freelancers Medical practice apparently didn’t number that many people getting treatment for infertility. From the list we selected a no-nonsense older lady on the Upper East Side, though I can’t remember why. Was she at the top of the list? She took our insurance (for a while, anyway), and she had a hard-boiled exterior that Laurel and I both liked, from the first, at our consultation. Her initial observation was that we should never have had a chemical abortion to clear out our missed miscarriage, because chemical abortion involved awful drugs that no woman should subject herself to, and her second observation was that Laurel needed surgery to get rid of residual “products of conception,” as these are brutally termed, and that in turn led to the discovery of some cysts and polyps inside that were possibly occluding our ability to get the job of pregnancy done, and thus January 2014 began a year when Laurel had surgery something like five times. There was always some other surgical intervention you could do if things weren’t going your way, and always there was a surgeon who understood the knife to be the safest and most effective way to get quickly where you were supposed to be going. After pronouncing Laurel free of “the products of conception,” having shaved off some bits of her insides, and after Laurel had recovered from that surgery, we were encouraged by the Upper East Side doctor to try the first layer of assisted reproduction, which is IUI, intrauterine insemination. A more grandiose turkey baster approach.

  Laurel had to get pumped up with a drug called Clomid, the gateway drug of fertility treatment. As with all the various drugs associated with assisted reproduction technology, Clomid has plenty of side effects, some of them serious, like ovarian hyperstimulation. Clomid makes the people taking the drug miserable and uncomfortable. Having watched several friends take it, in addition to Laurel, I can give you my anecdotal nonspecialist observation about the medication: it makes people unable to process human emotions in productive ways. And, while no husband or other partner is permitted or encouraged to say this aloud while a loved one is taking Clomid, or indeed afterward (I am violating an understood vow of silence), I am repeating things that women I know have said themselves, and am not characterizing Laurel particularly. It is of course possible that repeated losses and the inability to get pregnant causes these emotional convulsions too. Or maybe repeated loss and Clomid cause these things. Maybe Clomid exacerbates a feeling that is already present. But no matter the cause, one had best prepare.

  And: if you’re the father or donor in a particular IUI cycle, you eventually will come to have your first encounter with the little closet at the practice in which you are meant to produce your sample. At the Upper East Side lady’s practice, it was my first time producing my sample, and I had done nothing to prepare for this new part of my life. I had not taken a single vitamin, nor had I considered, in any rigorous way, exactly when the sample was to be given, with respect to recent episodes of sexual activity, and so on. I believed in my heart that I was plenty fertile (I did have a daughter, and had occasioned unplanned pregnancies in the past), and I believed therefore that I needed no special effort. But as someone who had needed to foreswear the American entertainment pastime known as pornography only two years before, it caused me mild anxiety, the little closet, especially once I was led down the stairs to the closet by a Slavic brunette, slightly truculent, who had seen it all before. I didn’t really want to have anything to do with the American pornographic product line secreted away within, I considered it (in the period of my sexual sobriety) morally unsound, unfair to women, a contaminant bad for the psychic lives of men, but I also didn’t know how to produce the sample otherwise. Apparently, there were couples who did this sample production business at home, and they tried to corral the sample into a handy Tupperware of some kind, after which, bearing the container (by taxi, or subway, or bus, or on foot), they rushed into the office of the reproductive endocrinologist with the sample in their bra or breast pocket, in order to keep the sample warm. But that approach seemed a little uptight, and, besides, you never knew, under the circumstances I’ve just described, how safe the sample would be. What if you got stuck in very bad traffic? What if your breast pocket had a hole in it? How long until the little swimmers began to run out of vital reproductive élan? What if they perished before you got to the office?

  Yes, I was once a consumer of pornography, as many American men are, especially the ones who claim otherwise, and I should have been able to use it without incident, even in this time in my life in which I was no longer interested, at least if the goal was to produce this genetic material, which was then going to be centrifuged, so that the not terribly good sperm were weeded out, and the really good ones were prepared for the inseminator. (It wasn’t really a turkey baster, but not as different as you might imagine either.) And so there I was in the little closet, and you could hear the HVAC, the sound of footfalls on linoleum outside, but otherwise it was pretty quiet. There was a chair to sit on, and, by the sink (there’s always a sink, of course) a big stack of sexually explicit magazines.

  Though it’s out of sequence to mention this, I can tell you that, in the course of the next two years, I think I went into the little closet eight times or thereabouts, and I became incredibly jaded about it, finding the little nuances of providing the sample incredibly funny, when reflected upon. You had better laugh at such a thing, because the only other approach would be convulsive sobbing.

  I flipped through the stack of pornography thinking, of course, of all the guys before me, each of them trying to get it done as quickly as possible. Interestingly, the Upper East Side lady had a wealth of images, some gay pornography, some photo spreads of the cheerleaders of the Big Ten schools (a vintage copy!), enormous breasts, tiny breasts, amateur porn, and a little trans porn, just in case some guy attempting to produce his sample needed that. In fact, whatever he needed would be acceptable, of course, furries, bigfoot, whatever, because all that was important was that the guy provide the sample quickly, so it could be carried to the centrifuge and bumped up with whatever medium they introduce into the sample. If depilated barely-legal cheerleaders of the Big Ten schools were your thing and that was the only image that could guarantee your sample, then hats off to whoever bought the stuff in the first place. Didn’t those magazines get sticky? Maybe the Slavic nurse had to go to the newsstand every couple of weeks, and grab a whole bunch of whatever was most up to date.

  I know that some guys just absolutely cannot produce the sample in a semipublic setting. I saw the before and after of this problem. They go into the little closet and they sit there, trying to get and stay aroused, thinking about their wife down the hall on one of those examining tables that has stirrups affixed. They try to think past the wife and the stirrups and the examining table, and they use, if they must, the amateur photos at the back of the book, or whichever florid depiction is vital to the cause. There are men, even then, who cannot seem to get past the awkwardness, the implicit surveillance (the nurses at the nurse’s station, the techs, the people shepherding them into and out of the various closets involved), and they sit there in the waiting room, while some other guy goes in, and then they look away when he comes out. The shame and intensity of the closet is immense. Imagine, as is not infrequently the case, that you are the infertile one, that you have male factor infertility, and you don’t have enough sperm, or enough motility, or your sperm all have two heads (this is a real problem, especially with older fathers, of whom I am one, and it was sort of my problem), or are too degraded to do their job correctly. The weight upon the guy, the mitigation of his masculinity, if he has an unfortunate conception of his masculinity as potency, is significant. Some guys just can’t do it.

  I can tell you that when a friend of mine referred to the experience of the closet as “grim and joyless,” he was hitting the nail cleanly on the head. One manages to produce the sample, but without any feeling but an acuteness o
f shame. I did it under doctor’s orders. I looked at the stack of pornography under doctor’s orders. And then I wandered out of the closet, leaving behind the sample for someone else to pick up and carry to the centrifuge. A little later on, the first time, the Upper East Side reproductive expert lady said, of my sample, “We can work with this!” Though what she meant was that my seventeen million sperm were at the low end of acceptable, but enough that she should have been able to find a few genuine live ones in there—without two heads.

  When I was a teenager reading Portnoy’s Complaint, a copy of which I took out from the library at St. Paul’s School, I thought my adventure in self-abuse was important, a defining narrative of self-discovery, an adventure of self, whose every new iteration, whose every fantasy, and especially the revelation of various less-routine preoccupations, was somehow thrilling. When I was a teenager doing this, it seemed important, if messy and desperate. But in my fifties, doing it contrary to my wishes, by reason of doctor’s orders, I felt disgusted, and hoped, of course, that I wouldn’t have to do it again.

  But I did. I did eight times, I believe, and at four different medical addresses, and I came to enumerate for myself the differences among the various facilities. For example, the Upper West Side university-affiliated reproductive clinic had a lot of video in their closet, which must have helped to bring off the most hard-to-crack cases. I worried, of course, that the video would be audible from the hall, and that the nurses (and other patients!) had to spend the whole day walking by the XXX video room on the hall listening to the video imprecations of the paid sex workers, like they were going by one of the peep-show booths of the old Times Square, and I therefore managed to confine myself to the magazines. They also, at the university-affiliated clinic, had some kind of sterile pad on the leatherette reclining chair, so that your personal space would never share vital fluids with someone else’s personal space.