Christopher Beha - Arts & Entertainments - A Novel

Susan came to think of the year they had to pass before going to the clinic as a kind of waiting period. The Clomid the doctor put her on after a few months exacerbated her feelings of despair. Being taken off the Clomid after another few months when it had failed to get them anywhere didn’t help, either. She no longer had any hope that they would conceive without serious intervention, but they had to keep trying, since the intervention would only come once the trying had failed. Sex went from being merely functional to grim and hopeless. Once in a while Eddie still joked, “At least it’s fun trying.” But it had stopped being fun a long time ago.

During this waiting period, Susan had found something online about traditional Chinese medicine. For a period she spoke about “qi” and “meridians.” She took herbal supplements and went to an acupuncturist. Eddie didn’t think they needed any new expenses that insurance wouldn’t cover, but he didn’t say anything. After the gynecologist suggested that the herbals might be counterproductive, there was no more talk of the matter. At this point, Susan decided she wasn’t going to wait for her doctor to acquiesce. She would find a specialist herself.

HOPE SPRINGS FERTILITY CENTER was located on Sixth Avenue in midtown, and its offices might have belonged to one of the white-shoe law firms that occupied the rest of the building. The couches were leather. Expensive paintings covered the walls, by artists Susan recognized. Their doctor, a bald, bearded man named Walter Regnant, exuded a carefully titrated mixture of sensitivity and confidence.

“I have a very good success rate,” he said. “Nearly a dozen children have been named after me.”

After the first series of tests, he diagnosed Susan with endometriosis. She had scarring on her fallopian tubes, Regnant explained, and he believed this was the source of the problem. The scars were minor and could be removed with outpatient surgery. And so they were, after which it was back to the thermometer and the pillow, this time with a new optimism. Two months later they returned to Hope Springs.

“Now,” Regnant said, pointing his finger — literally, pointing his finger — at Eddie, “we need to see how your guys are doing.”

Their next appointment was at another midtown building, this one farther west, in a neighborhood to which the trains didn’t travel. The waiting room inspired less confidence than the one at Hope Springs. The couch had a tear in its upholstery, and the art on the walls didn’t even seek to look expensive. Susan sat outside while a lab technician led Eddie to a door marked “Specimen Collection Room 3.” The room was the size of a large walk-in closet. There was an armchair and a sidetable on which were spread five-year-old issues of Playboy and Hustler. These struck Eddie as almost quaint, pornography having long ago evolved past Hefner and Flynt to hidden cameras and point-of-view shots. For the less imaginative there was also a small television with a VHS player and a pile of videos, most of them still plastic-wrapped with pink stickers that read “3 for $20.” There was a small sink in the corner. While Eddie washed his hands he noted a sign on the wall: “Do NOT use LUBRICANT of any kind!!”

He set his specimen cup on the floor beside a roll of paper towels, wondering how much time he’d been allotted. In the pile of magazines, he spotted a copy of CelebNation, one of the more popular weekly tabloids. Not only was it a different genre than the other materials, it was also of more recent vintage. Eddie guessed that a patient had brought it with him and left it behind. When he picked it up, the magazine fell open to a page that read “Dr. Drake as you’ve never seen her!” Beneath these words was a series of photos showing Martha in a bikini, making out on the beach somewhere with Rex Gilbert. The page was crumpled and stuck to the one behind it. Eddie closed it to look at the cover. The newsstand date was from the previous week. Within the past few days — perhaps that very morning — another man had been in this room with that magazine open. In nine months a child would be born owing existence to the firmness of Martha Martin’s beach body.

“We’ve found our problem,” Dr. Regnant announced enthusiastically at Hope Springs the next week.

Simply put, the problem was Eddie’s substandard semen. It was lacking by every metric — concentration, volume, motility, morphology. Regnant seemed pleased by the discovery.

“Where does this leave our chances of natural conception?” Susan asked.

“Not good,” Regnant said.

“What does that mean, exactly?” she pressed. “One in a hundred, or one in a million?”

Regnant sighed.

“It’s not something I can quantify. What I can tell you is that I’ve been in the business for twenty years and no couple that has come to me with these numbers has ever conceived naturally. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.”

He watched them react to this.

“There’s good news here,” he said. “Lots of people who come into my office I have to tell them, ‘Sorry, I can’t help you.’ They’ve got to start talking about surrogates or adoption. There isn’t anything I can offer them. That’s not what I’m telling you. I can help you. There’s nothing here to suggest that you two are chemically incompatible. Your chances with IVF are actually quite high.”

The procedure would cost fifteen thousand dollars. Insurance would cover one-third, leaving them a ten-thousand-dollar tab. The number made Eddie queasy. It might have seemed manageable except for the obvious fact that it was far from the final cost. A child was a machine for creating expenses.

All it took in the end was a credit card. Two of them, actually. Eddie was surprised, in an abstract way, that he was allowed to spend money he didn’t have on a process that was designed to bring countless new costs into his life. Nobody stopped to ask how he was going to afford it. When it didn’t work out, he joked about asking for their money back. Susan had not found this joke funny. Neither had he, really. On some level he’d meant it. At the very least, for the amount they’d paid, they ought to let them try again, if they wanted.

They couldn’t put another try on a credit card, because their cards were maxed out. This too had been a surprise. He thought there would always be a way to get more credit, but apparently not. Eddie started to think about all the years he’d wasted. He had never regretted them before, but now he could see that time for what it was. It wasn’t just that he had nothing to show for a decade of his life. He had less than nothing. Those years had amounted to a debit on his account.

When told of the situation, Susan’s parents had expressed a religious objection to in vitro, though Eddie suspected that this was mostly to cover the fact that they didn’t have the money to help. Eddie’s parents were blunt: they’d put more than they could afford into their house in Florida and were now in danger of losing it. By the time Eddie had arrived at the reunion, he and Susan were out of options, so Blakeman’s offer to help had seemed like an act of God. Instead it had been an offer to sell a sex tape. Sitting next to Susan in bed after dinner, Eddie wanted to join her in tears.

“On Monday I’ll start looking for a summer job,” he told her. “We can save some money.”

“That’s not going to be enough,” Susan told him. “It will be years before it’s enough.”

She was right. In the absence of decent credit, it wouldn’t suffice to pay off their bills; they would need the money to pay for the procedure itself. A few months of working a second job would hardly make a dent in all that.