Thomas Hoover - Life blood

"Thank you for coming," he said by way of farewell, just brushing my hand, then turned and disappeared through one of the ancient wooden doors along the veranda, leaving me alone.

Well, I thought, the calm voice and casual outfit are probably just part of his bedside manner, but you can't be near Alex Goddard and not feel a definite sense of carefully controlled power. But is his power being used for good?

This was the man whose staff was trying to deny me interviews with mothers who'd adopted through Children of Light. And what about the Hispanic hood with the gun? Did Alex Goddard send him? If not, his appearance at Paula's building was one hell of a coincidence. So why should I trust…

That was when I noticed it. My lingering cold had miraculously vanished, inflamed sinuses and all. I was breathing normally, and even my chest felt cleared.

My God, I thought, what did he do? Hypnotize me? It was as though a week's healing had passed through my body.

I had an epiphany, a moment that galvanizes your resolve. I had to do a documentary about this man, to find out what he was really up to. He'd mentioned he had a place in Central America. Was that the source of his special techniques, some kind of ancient Meso-American medical practices he'd discovered?

He claimed he didn't want any publicity, but that's always just an opening move. When somebody says that, what they really mean is they don't want any bad publicity; they just want to have final say about what you produce. There're ways to handle the problem.

I liberated a brochure from the hall table on my way out, thinking I would study it soon. Very closely. I had a nose for a good story, and this one felt right.

When I got back to the car, Lou was nowhere to be seen. He'd given me the impression he intended merely to sit there and doze while I went inside, but now he was gone.

Then he appeared emerging from the forest of trees. Actually, there was another building opposite the stone drive that I hadn't noticed at first. Hmmm, I thought, I wonder what that's all about. For some reason Alex Goddard hadn't offered me a tour; he'd taken me for a stroll in the opposite direction…

"That was fast," Lou said settling into the car. "You get what you came for?"

The answer to that was both yes and no. In a sense I'd gotten considerably more than I bargained for.

"He wants me to come back," I said. "And I think I might do it. There's a lot more going on with Alex Goddard than you'd know from just looking at this place. The trick is to stay in control when you're around him."

I tossed the brochure into Lou's lap as I started the engine. He took it and immediately began looking through it.

Lou, I knew, was a man always interested in facts and figures. As we headed toward the Parkway he was pouring through the brochure with intense interest, even as I tried to give him a brief reprise of Alex Goddard's medical philosophy.

"It says here his patients come from all over the United States and Europe," he noted, finally interrupting me.

I found nothing odd in that, and went back to rambling on about Quetzal Manor. Give the place its due, it was placid and tranquil and smacked of the benign spirituality Goddard claimed to put so much stock in. Still, I found it unsettling.

However, Lou, as usual, chose to see matters his own way. He'd been studying the fine print at the back of the brochure, mumbling to himself, and then he emitted a grunt of discovery.

"Ah, here's what I was looking for," he declared. "You know, as a registered New York State adoption agency, this outfit has got to divulge the number of babies they placed during their last yearly reporting period."

"According to him, he only resorts to adoption if he can't cure your infertility with his special mind-body regimen," I reminded him. "Your energy flows-"

"No shit," Lou observed, then went on. "Well, then I guess his mind-body, energy flows, whatever, bullshit must fail a lot. Because last year the number was just under two hundred. So at sixty thou a pop, like it says here, we're talking about twelve million smackeroos gross in a year. Not a bad way to fail, huh?"

I caught myself emitting a soft whistle as he read out the number. There was definitely a lot more going on with Alex Goddard than met the eye.

"So what's he do with all that dough?" Lou mused. "Better question still, where in the hell did he find two hundred fresh, orphaned babies, all listed here as Caucasian? And get this: The ages reported at final processing are all just a couple of months, give or take."

Good questions, I thought. Maybe that's the reason he doesn't want publicity; it sounds a little too commercial for a mind-body guru.

My other thought was, with so many babies somehow available, why was Alex Goddard so reluctant to even discuss adoption with me?

The answer, I was sure, lay in the fact he already knew more about me than I knew about him. He knew I was making a film about adoption (how did he come by that knowledge? I kept wondering) and he was concerned he might be mentioned in it. I kept asking myself, why?

On our drive back down the Henry Hudson Parkway, I decided I was definitely looking at a documentary in the making. I just had to decide whether to do it with or without his cooperation.

After I dropped off Lou at his space in Soho, where he was house sitting for an estate now in the courts, I decided to head on home. The more I thought about Alex Goddard, the more I felt frustrated and even a little angry that I'd completely failed to find out any of the things I'd wanted to learn about him. I replayed our interview in my mind, got nowhere, and then decided to push away thoughts of Quetzal Manor for a while and dwell on something else: Sarah, my film, anything.

It was Saturday, and unfortunately I had no plans for the evening. Translation: no Steve. Back to where I started. How many million stories in the naked city, and I was just so many million plus one. It's not a jungle out there, it's a desert.

The truth was, after Steve took off, I hadn't really been trying all that hard to pick myself up off the canvas and look around. Besides, I didn't want some other guy, I wanted him. Added to that, I somehow felt that when you're on the short countdown for forty, you shouldn't have to be going out on blind dates, wondering whether that buttoned-down MBA sitting across from you in some trendy Italian restaurant thinks you're a blimp (even though you skipped lunch), telling yourself he's presentable, doesn't seem like a serial killer, has a job, only mentioned his mother once, and could qualify as an acceptable life's mate. There's no spark, but he's probably quite nice. You wanly remember that old Barney's ad jingle, "Select, don't settle," but at this stage of life you're ready to admit you've flunked out in Love 101 and should just go with Like.

Which was one of the reasons I missed Steve so deeply. He was a lover, but he was also a best friend. And I was running low on those.

Every woman needs a best pal. After my former best, Betsy, married Joel Aimes, Off-Broadway's latest contribution to Dreamworks, and moved to the Coast with him, I was noticing a lot of empty evenings. In the old days, we could talk for hours. It was funny, since we were actually very different. Betsy, who had forgotten more about clothes and makeup than most women would ever know, hung around the garment-center showrooms and always came away with samples of next season's couture, usually for a song. I envied her that, since I usually just pretended not to care and pulled on another pair of jeans every morning. But she shared my love of Asian music.

Anyway, now she was gone and I could tell we weren't working hard enough at staying in touch. She and Joel had just moved to a new apartment and I didn't even have her latest phone number…