Breed (2 page)

“I have a cousin who ran for Congress in 1998 in Ohio and had his ass handed to him.”

“I know this is hard on you,” Alex says, gathering her closer to him.

They have already tried all the time-tested ways of getting pregnant, and then went on to acupuncture, and from there to herbalists. It has been both their privilege and their misfortune that they have plenty of money to spend on treatments, and whereas many couples finally spend themselves out of the quest for fertility, Alex and Leslie have pressed on—and on and on. They have seen two hypnotists—one in Tribeca, whose breath smelled like rust, and the other in Los Angeles, who looked like a marionette come to life. They have spent time at the Whispering Sage Sanctuary in Clearwater, Florida, a so-called Ayurvedic health center, where a long weekend of Panchakarma therapies, yoga, and meditation was offered, and where all they got was a wrenched back for Alex and a touch of food poisoning for Leslie. They have consulted homeopaths and psychiatrists, and, though neither of them is particularly religious, they also went to a clinic called Answered Prayers, in which words and phrases such as
ectopic, ovarian cysts, endometriosis, polycystic ovarian syndrome, teratozoospermia,
and
oopause
were bandied about but where it basically boiled down to readings of the New Testament and listening to sermons about opening yourself to the blessings of God. They fasted, they ate nothing but fruit, they had the cleanest colons in the world.

And they worried about their marriage. They had seen firsthand how the Baby Hunt doused the flames of romance, turning the joy of sex into the job of sex and making the body a source of failure rather than pleasure. But still they persisted—six different in vitro fertilizations, and a thorough investigation of the legal and psychological dangers of an egg donor or a sperm donor, or even a live person who could impregnate Leslie or whom Alex could impregnate, even though expensive technicians had already tested Leslie’s eggs and Alex’s sperm and as far as anyone could see they were just fine. Yet lightning would not strike; it was out there, but it was dry, distant lightning, just a little quiver of light in the lowering sky, with no rain to follow.

Tonight as they make their way through Central Park after the support-group meeting (what Alex calls the Fertilize-Her Society), with nothing to look forward to except a quiet dinner for two and, depending on Leslie’s basal temperature, some sad copulation, Leslie and Alex see Jim and Jill Johnson walking their little Yorkshire terrier.

They had come to know the Johnsons, however slightly, through the Uptown Infertility Support Group, though it has been months since the Johnsons have been in attendance. The Johnsons are like them in many ways. Like Alex, Jim is significantly older than his wife; Jim, too, is a lawyer, though with a practice far less lucrative than Alex’s. Like Leslie, Jill is from the Midwest; Jill is a high school teacher and seems to envy Leslie, imagining her job as an editor at a publishing company to be full of glamour and excitement. Twice they all had drinks together after their group meeting, and once they even met for dinner. The dinner was not a success. Jill seemed to have some strange grievance against Leslie. She would say things like “Oh, it must feel strange for you being out with a poor little high school teacher.”

“That’s insane,” Leslie had exclaimed, to Alex’s delight.

Tonight, Jim Johnson is dressed in a dark brown leather jacket and a light brown beret. His hair is much too long. To Alex, he looks like one of those lawyers who imagine themselves champions of the underdogs but who are actually vain grandstanders, would-be gadflies, Sandinistas in three-piece suits. But the real sight to behold is Jill. Never particularly slender, she is immense. At first Alex thinks unhappiness and bad genes have made Jill obese, but he realizes she is pregnant, gloriously, radiantly, and, by the looks of it, quintupfully pregnant. New York City, some say, is the schadenfreude capital of the world—but for Alex and Leslie, seeing a formerly infertile couple pregnant gives them hope. The Johnsons have been trying to get pregnant for eleven years.

“So how did this happen?” Alex bursts out, pointing at Jill’s belly.

“Alex,” Leslie says, giving him a little shove.

“It’s a reasonable question,” he says, as if to her but really to them. “After all we’ve been through together? Come on, we’re soldiers in the same battalion. Right? So what is it? A new diet, a new exercise, a new doctor?”

But the Johnsons are playing coy. “You know, the thing is,” Jill says, “we tried so many things, in the end I’m not sure what the heck worked.” Her voice is breathless; she sounds like what she is: a woman carrying fifty extra pounds.

Alex narrows his eyes at Jim, causing the father-to-be to shift his weight and his glance—he is the very definition of
shifty
.

“Well, if you have some great new doctor or something,” Alex says, “I wish you’d tell us. We’re really at the end of our rope. And, honestly, Jim, I think we have a right to know. At the very least—” Alex pokes Jim lightly in the stomach. “Professional courtesy, right?”

“We’re actually not able to do that,” Jim says. “It’s complicated.”

“Complicated?” Alex says, as if the word itself were absurd. “Try us.”

“Oh, come on, Alex, we’re fine,” Leslie says. This is far from her idea of how to get information out of people—she would invite them over, serve them a brilliant meal with wonderful wine.

“I’ll tell you what, old friend,” Jim says to Alex, his smile as cold as a zipper. “With a young’un on the way, the mind turns to practical matters. Make me a partner in your law firm and I’ll tell you exactly what we did to make this happen.” Jim pats his wife’s stomach while their little dog begins to yip impatiently.

The men’s eyes lock. It is just now dawning on Alex that this meeting might not be a total coincidence. The Johnsons might well have known that he and Leslie would be coming out of Fertilize-Her at this time and crossing the park on their way to the Upper East Side. And as these thoughts form themselves in Alex’s mind, Jim seems to be nodding his head as if to say
That’s right, you’re figuring it out.

“I might see my way clear to offering you a position, but I’m certainly not able to offer a partnership,” Alex says, with such seriousness that both of the women turn toward Jim, like people in a stadium watching a tennis match.

“I would need some guarantee that a partnership was at least possible.”

“In the world of business, everything is possible,” Alex says.

“All right, then,” Jim says.

“It’s a deal,” Alex says. He extends his hand. Jim offers his own in return but slowly, suddenly shy. Alex further extends his own reach and seizes Jim’s hand. It looks to Leslie like a big fish eating a small fish. “Come see me at nine o’clock tomorrow.”

“I have an appointment at nine tomorrow,” Jim says.

“Break it,” Alex advises. Though he is ostensibly the supplicant in this matter, he has seized control of the situation nevertheless.

Throughout his career, Alex has always been the first person to the office, generally arriving between six and six thirty in the morning. When he began at the firm, the other young lawyers with whom he was presumably in competition secretly nicknamed him Eager Alex and Alexander Daybreak, but now he is a partner and he continues to arrive before the other partners, the other lawyers, the paralegals, the secretaries, the receptionist, and the mail-room workers. The only people he sees when he enters the Bailey, Twisden, Kaufman, and Chang offices on Fifty-Ninth and Madison are the security guards in the lobby—a recent addition to the building, since the attack on Lower Manhattan two years before—and the cleaners, who on most days are leaving with their buckets and mops and brooms and plastic bags filled with wastepaper just as Alex is walking in, dressed in his bespoke suit, his Turnbull and Asser shirt, and his Crockett and Jones shoes, which he polishes himself.

As usual, Alex uses the early-morning hours at his desk to clear away any lingering paperwork, to make little notes to himself about whatever cases or contracts he is working on, and to simply collect his thoughts, without the distraction of ringing phones, pinging e-mails, and other people. By nine o’clock, Alex feels well on top of his work. He is standing at the office’s espresso machine—a gift from a well-known pop singer, thanking the firm for its pro bono work on behalf of the singer’s chauffeur—when the first arrivals step out of the elevator: Alex’s longtime secretary; his paralegal; his intern (the daughter of an old friend), all of whom know enough to arrive at work promptly; two other secretaries holding their breakfasts in white paper bags; an IT kid with a backpack and earbuds; Lew Chang’s paralegal, who looks as if she has been crying, which more or less confirms Alex’s suspicion that Lew and she are having a fling, a lawsuit waiting to happen; and Jim Johnson, the last one off the elevator. His face has been nicked and scraped by this morning’s hasty shave, and his flowing hair has been sensibly barbered. A classic case of too little, too late.

“Hello, Jim,” Alex says, indicating with a wave that Johnson follow through the outer office and into his corner lair, where Alex settles in behind his desk, a cherrywood Sheraton that used to be in Alex’s house. With a second wave he directs Johnson to an old leather club chair, which looks comfortable enough but is so deep that anyone consigned to it must sit with his knees practically parallel with his chin.

After a minute of small talk, Alex, with the efficiency of a man who bills at $1,750 per hour, arrives at the point of this meeting.

“So, Jim. Pregnancy. We don’t understand your reluctance to give us the name of your doctor. That seems odd to me, to both of us.”

“Well, Alex,” Johnson says, with a weirdly sarcastic edge to his voice, “it doesn’t seem odd to me. Not in the slightest. I noted the look on your face when you saw Jill. And I think you’ll understand this,
Alex:
I thought there just might be something more I could be doing to provide for my family.”

“What look on my face, my friend?” Alex is aware that calling someone
my friend
is usually a way of saying you are not friends, and he notes with equal measures of amazement and amusement how quickly the gloves have come off between him and Johnson.

“Envy. A need to know. Desire. Sorrow. You name it.”

“It seems as if you’re doing all the naming, Jim.”

“Yes, I am. And I am also naming the price.”

“For giving us a simple piece of information?”

“Didn’t you know, Alex? We’re living in an information economy. Information is gold, it’s oil, it’s land, it’s power.”

“Okay, then tell me this, Counselor. And you don’t have to divulge
where
you had this done—but what did you do? Is this some state-of-the-art in vitro clinic? In which case, I’d have to say: I’d be very surprised if there is anybody reputable or anyplace that’s had any kind of track record that we’ve overlooked. Is this something that involves surgery? Because Leslie’s been through enough of that. Is this some mumbo-jumbo faith-healing situation? Because if that’s your great trump card, then, my friend, I might have to throw you out the window.”

“Is there a box I can check that says ‘None of the above’?” Johnson says, palpably enjoying his position in this back-and-forth.

“You know, when we sat together, week after week, in that dank little room at Herald Church,” Alex says, leaning back in his chair, tepeeing his fingers, “there was a consensus, a kind of unwritten law, if you will, that we were all of us there for each other and there would be a sharing of information. I find your behavior, Jim, very strange, if not reprehensible.”

“I can say two words, a man’s name, and you and Leslie will be on your way to the nursery. But meanwhile, I have to do what’s best for my family. Kids change everything, don’t you understand that? This isn’t about me and Jill anymore. This is about our son.”

“Your son…”

“Yes, we peeked. Fact is, Jill’s had a few complications and we’ve spent our fair share of time on the old ob-gyn trail.”

“Okay. So it’s none of the above. Tell me what procedure you used.”

“It’s called fertility enhancement,” Johnson says. He leans forward in his chair and quickly stands up, begins to pace, rolling his shoulders, craning his neck, rubbing his long hands together, like an athlete alone in the locker room.

“So what is that?” Alex asks. “Vitamins? Diet?”

“It’s all done in one appointment,” Johnson says. “You’re in, you’re out, you’re pregnant.”

“Each and every time?”

“So he says. I won’t lie to you, Alex. I don’t really know his success rate. The people who told us about him were certainly successful. And he charges enough—not that that would be an issue for you.” Again that quick zipper smile.

“And he’s a doctor.”

“Indeed he is.” There’s a bit of irony in Johnson’s tone. “All very cutting edge, etcetera.”

“I still don’t know what it is he does.”

“Fertility enhancement.”

“I know. You said that. But that’s what they all do. Fertility enhancement—you either interfere with fertility, and that’s called birth control, or you enhance it, and that’s called the last three years of my life and, oh, something close to three-quarters of a million dollars for everything from laser surgery to Chinese tea.”

“This doctor treats both the woman and the man. He has a formula that radically increases the motility of your sperm and the viability of her eggs. God only knows what’s in the stuff he gives you, but it fucking works, I’ll tell you that. And I’ll tell you his name, and how to get in touch with him, and everything else you need—but I need something too, Alex. I need to work here. My firm—well, you know all about it. It’s a nothing place with flea-bitten clients and I’m not making any money, not the kind of money I need, not the kind of money I see around here. I’m an okay lawyer. Not great, I’m nobody’s hero, nobody’s salvation. But I know how to grind it out. Am I going to be one of the bright lights here? No, probably not. But I can do the work and I’m not going to embarrass myself or you.”