The Baby Merchant Page 5

  Neither can she. God knows why she is still hopeful, but she starts out hopeful every single time.

  “It’s OK,” they told each other the first time. “We can always adopt.”

  It’s what you say to each other in the early stages, especially when you’ve done so well at everything else that success seems inevitable; it’s coming, it is! It’s just a little late. You exchange blurred, hopeful smiles and one of you says— kidding!— “Well, we can always adopt.”

  Frankly, Maury was ready after the second miscarriage. Two boys. She would have had two boys. She thinks she was the first to turn that smeared, desperate smile. She thinks she was the one who swallowed a sob and said, “Well, we can always adopt.”

  Then one of you— Jake in this case— said, “One more try.”

  It made her want to weep. “It’s not your body, Jake.”

  “Oh honey, let’s just try this one last thing, OK?” He’s an investigative reporter after all. Alert to every new development. “The odds are good.”

  At Jake’s urging, Maury’s tried them all. When she still couldn’t conceive they moved on to in vitro. Difficult. Expensive, but they were both well into the six-figure bracket by then so, hey. Some took, some didn’t. Even when Maury went to bed for weeks after implantation, even though she was prepared to stay down for as long as she had to just to make it work, none of them, not one of those flimsy, might-have-been babies stayed with her for long.

  Later, when she was still shaky from the last loss, she said, “Jake, let’s adopt.” Not the knee-jerk usual, this was a considered decision. “We have to. Please?”

  Fixed on the future— his genetic material!— Jake, her Jake, turned his handsome head that the camera loves so much and wouldn’t look at her. “Sweetie, let’s don’t go there.”

  She said in a low voice, “Not even now, after everything?”

  He made a sound she didn’t recognize. “I can’t.”

  “sake!”

  Glaring out the window at something she could not see, the man she thought loved her was so fixed on what he wanted that he didn’t respond. After too long he turned back with a look so bleak that she could see into his skull. “What would be the point?”

  “Oh honey, I just want a baby!” She didn’t when she started, not really. Now it’s all she thinks about.

  Oh Jake, oh, that Top Ten smile. Does he know that when he turns up the voltage like that it isn’t personal, it’s only that invented smile that won a million viewers? “I don’t want just any baby.”

  Oh God, don’t let me cry. “Jake!”

  Then Jake said with terrifying gravity, “We’re not just anybody, Maury. This is us. Your body. Mine. We’re too good to waste.”

  Amazing, what comes out under pressure: the truth. “Mine isn’t working, Jake.”

  “I know.”

  Like it was something she did. “Then let’s adopt.”

  “We’re not just anybody, OK?” Why was he so angry? “I don’t want just anybody’s baby, Maur. We have to keep trying.”

  “We used to be funny together.” Her voice tore like a rag. “Now this is all we ever talk about.”

  “Work with me here.”

  “You want me to get pregnant.” Oh my God this is so terrible. “I can’t.”

  “But we can,” Jake said, and then he said the unthinkable. What is it, Jake, why the burning need to lay down your own DNA like an animal scent-marking, or a scout blazing a trail in the woods? Good reporter, does his research. “There is one more thing we can try. I have some names.”

  She loved him. She still does. Grieving, she agreed.

  The first surrogate couldn’t conceive. Common phenomenon these days, but Maury thought with a savage righteous pang that, in spite of all the testing, maybe their problems had less to do with her than they did with Jake. During the screening process he was relentless, grilling and discarding candidates because they tested badly, because they said the wrong thing, because they didn’t look enough like him. He settled on a Brown senior trying to bank grad school tuition. Maury came away from the meeting in tears; the girl was lovely, she was intelligent, she was still young. She’d have Jake’s baby and it would look like him and Jake would fall in love with her. He’d leave Maury and start over with his nice new family, his very own baby safe in the world at last, with the potential for dozens more.

  Instead of turning up at the clinic for insemination, the Brown senior took their down payment and vanished.

  In the end, even Jake was defeated. He lowered his head like a dying bear determined to stay standing. “OK. We’ll adopt.”

  “I’ll call the state agency.” God, it was a relief.

  Jake flashed his palm like a figure in a No Smoking poster. “No way. We can afford a private agency, Maur. If we’re going to do this …” His breath shook. “No Korean babies for me.”

  She grimaced. “We don’t have much choice.” No more Korean babies for anyone, none from China or Romania, the Center for Disease Control and the immigrations authorities saw to that. No more babies from outside these heavily protected United States. Even before Immigration shut them out she knew Jake would never go along. He’s not that kind of guy. I don’t want just anybody’s baby. Agreeing to adopt, Jake set down parameters: he expects a child from their demographic, a close genetic match.

  He wants to look into the face of his new baby and see somebody who looks like him looking back.

  On the surface of it, any adoption agency would be happy to see the Bayless-Zorns coming: handsome, high-powered professionals—yuppies once, but young is receding into the past. So is the “upwardly mobile” part of the acronym. These two are at the top. Maury’s a valued senior partner in a first-rate firm. The Jake Zorn Exposes, the ragged hair and that distinctive voice that sounds like it’s been kicked downstairs, the professional charm put Jake next in line for a job as anchor on the national network news. They make enough money to keep bushels of babies, and in style. They just took a little too long deciding to adopt.

  Although they’re, ahem, older, the Bayless-Zorns have a nice way about them. It’s clear that they’d be good with kids, although they wouldn’t be where they are in life if they weren’t ambitious. He has an immediate grin and a firm grip, but even when he’s smiling, that intent look lets you know that when he’s on the job, Jake turns into somebody else, and the wife? In these interviews, Maury glows as if somebody’s lighted a cosy fire inside her head. She plans to quit the firm as soon as they put a baby into her arms, after all it takes everything you’ve got to see a child through the crucial first six years. If she does go back to work, she tells them, it will be part time.

  Alone today, waiting, Maury’s surprised by the sound of her own voice. “Plenty of lawyers work from home.”

  Sitting in the back of the empty courtroom pretending to read, she is in fact making her case. If she gets this baby, she will be home for this baby and when he goes to school she’ll leave work early to be home when he gets there. A good mother never, ever lets her child come home to an empty house. Maury’s child will come home to a warm, bright kitchen where every day is like a little party, milk and cookies, a big hug; they’ll make brownies on snow days; she’ll read to him! She wants her kids— how did they get to be kids instead of just one?— she wants her kids to associate home with the smell of dinner cooking. Home, where it’s warm and safe and they know they are loved.

  Then why do agencies keep turning them down? At first glance the paperwork’s impeccable, but that’s only at first glance. Sooner or later the case worker researching the Bayless-Zorns discovers Maury’s hospitalization and drops them. Hospitalizations are OK, especially when a couple has spent so long trying to have a baby. It’s this particular hospitalization that stops them cold. The reason behind it.

  This is what failure does to you.

  Nobody wants to give a child to a woman who’s been hospitalized for depression. Not without close scrutiny. Not after they find out that she tri
ed to off herself.

  “What would you do,” Maury says to the empty courtroom. Public defender now, pleading her own case. “Ten years,” she says aloud. “Ten years of trying and failing. What would it do to you?”

  Lame, Maury, she thinks. Lame. “But I got past it. I’m all better!”

  It’s late. What happened in Atlanta? Jake should have been in touch hours ago. She trusted him to win over the board at Fayerweather, the last agency on their list. God, she thinks, did I make a mistake? No, with her benched, it’s bound to go better. The recognition factor alone will do the job. Sweet, gruff Jake is a brilliant pitchman. His reputation walks in the door ahead of him: The Conscience of Boston. People defer. With that calculatedly rumpled, diamond-in-the-rough manner, Jake Zorn looks like a man you can trust.

  Maybe his meeting ran long because everything is going right; they love Jake so much that they’ve brought out folders so he can take his pick. Unless everything is going wrong. They brought up the hospitalization. That must be it. Fine. Jake can explain it away. If it can be done Jake will do it and if he can’t he’ll con them into giving him and Maury a child. The man could charm concessions out of a cobra and when charm doesn’t work he knows how to threaten with the best because— face it. Much as she loves him, Jake isn’t always very nice. Look. Without Maury hanging in his shadow smiling her ashen, desperate smile, the man can do anything. Anything, she tells herself, sliding into the sweet, familiar loop between despair and the merciless hope that won’t let go and never lets you quit.

  No wonder she can’t let anybody see her right now.

  Crazy, what Maury does when her cell phone finally does vibrate. She switches it off and waits. She’ll know soon enough, but right now she isn’t strong enough to get the news first-hand. She’ll wait until Jake is done talking. Then she’ll give it another couple of minutes to be sure. When he’s good and finished, she’ll pick it up from her voicemail.

  Jake Zorn didn’t get to the top in television with sloppy sound bites. The message he leaves is one of those thirty-second teasers: you’ll pay anything just to hear more. It does less than Maury wanted but more than she’d hoped.

  “Honey, it’s no go, but are we surprised?” Nice Jake, he keeps it light the way he always does when things are at their worst. “No sweat. I’m getting us a baby. Details when we talk. Too sensitive to do by phone.” Then, not like him! He lets a silence fall. Only the electric crackle of his breathing tells her not to click the phone shut. Deep breath. He takes a deep breath. What comes out next comes in a throaty bark wrenched out of some place she doesn’t recognize. Jake, forceful and jubilant. “I’ve found a guy.”

  iii.

  Understand, Starbird presents as an individual without backstory. Don’t ask him what he means by unwanted. Not if you expect to do business with him.

  Whatever you do, don’t ask about his life. There is too much at stake. Haven’t you ever thought you wanted something and then gotten it and discovered it wasn’t what you wanted after all? This explains why he works so hard at what he does.

  His mother the failed poet thought a baby was just what she needed to make things right, but she was wrong. The man she chose was out the door before the baby came. Starbird counts himself lucky that the dude sometimes sent presents— out of guilt, probably. The occasional post card from Darjeeling or Damascus or Hong Kong; they still come. Summer or winter the card says, Happy Birthday, Tom. If Daria Starbird thought having a baby would make her a successful poet, she was wrong. All it did was make her tired and distracted and profoundly sad.

  Tom was her mistake. She said it out loud before he was old enough to parse it. She didn’t blame him, exactly, but Tommy knew. She told him with crap meals and bleak evenings, long silences at the supper table, which served as her desk until six P.M., when she swept aside all her books and unfinished poems with an ostentatious sigh. Most nights they lived on canned soup and Hot Pockets because for a poet, life is too short to waste it cooking dinners. Daria never reproached him, she didn’t have to. He sensed her bitterness every time her rivals published books or won prizes; they got the world and all she had was him.

  Gracious, handsome woman. Elegant— you’d never guess. Only Tommy knew she was miserable. He tried his hardest to make it better, but he didn’t have the touch. Try and she’d turn on him. “Get out, how can I concentrate?” “Why are you always in the way?” “If it wasn’t for you …” Once, before he knew better, he ran at his mother and locked his arms around her rigid body, sobbing. He gave her everything he had. “Oh, Mommy, don’t feel bad!” The look she gave back when she pried him off and backed away was so forbidding that even though she apologized with tears running, he never touched her again.

  Who exactly knows what “unwanted” means? Who has the right to decide who is welcome in any house? Better leave that to the experts, if you expect this man to help you. If there were snapshots in Starbird’s paneled office instead of eighteenth-century water colors and that single extraordinary oil, you’d see that little Tom certainly didn’t look unwanted; his mother dressed him in good clothes, kept the house tidy; she gave up her career (“now clean your room, I gave up my career for you!”) and went to work. She took a crap office job to pay for pediatricians and dentists Tommy needed, tuition at good schools, wouldn’t any mother do the same?

  And what else are mothers supposed to do? What’s the first thing they’re supposed to do?

  Starbird knows the answer well enough. If you have to ask, you can’t afford it. He is looking for it in you.

  Before he got old enough to know better Tom convinced himself his mother loved him, she just wasn’t good at remembering to tell him. He had to believe. She is, after all, his mother. How else could he make it through? Then he found the papers. Don’t ask about the papers if you expect to stand anywhere smiling ever again. He found her papers and he knew. Oh, they went through the formalities all right, good-mornings and school lunches and night-nights, sleep-tights and cool hugs on the expected occasions, but it was empty, all of it. She said “I love you” but only when she had to, to make a point. It didn’t help. He knew. No matter what Tommy did for Daria Starbird, no matter what nice thing he tried to say or do, he was nothing more to her than the unfortunate outward and physical sign of a bad career move.

  5.

  Tom Starbird

  When you get blown out the door of your life it’s never just one thing that does it. In the realm of proximate and remote causes, known way stations on my road out of the rescue business, Morgan Sterling was the spark that lit a very long fuse. And the charge? Until I ran into the Carsons, I didn’t even know there was a charge set inside me, just waiting for detonation. By the time I finished with Rita and Geoffrey Carson I knew damn well that it was there and sooner or later it would go off.

  And why? We’ll get to that later.

  This all came down when I still talked in figures. I honestly thought if I could just find the right words for things, I could do what I had to and know it was right.

  The hell of it is that the Carsons looked right. Nice couple, ran a private school, lived like churchmice, scrimping to buy my services. Or I thought they were. I checked them out on the Web before I opened their application. Kindly headmaster, A-1 school, laughable salary, the guy had to be an altruist. He’d turned his back on his rich dad’s empire to work with bright, unconventional kids who from all reports loved both Geoffrey and his wife Rita like parents. On paper, they looked terrific.

  They looked terrific in person, too. Attractive, energetic. They’d passed all my tests, no problem; they looked good, coming into my office. They interviewed well— a little too eager, but that’s to be expected.

  It was time to study them in their native habitat. All brick and ivy, I supposed, great place for a kid, first-class ticket to a first-class college guaranteed. Young, energetic, hands-on parents, I thought, no handing this one off to some old lady for the day-to-day, no daycare, no nanny. This is what I want for my ki
ds, and I have reasons.

  Their nice brick house was everything you’d hope for: on a hill overlooking the brick quadrangle. That came with the territory, I assumed, one of the perks of the job, no headmaster could afford a place like that. They offered tea and cookies in a lovely room with Persian rugs and museum quality furniture, which should have been the tipoff. If you’re a headmaster you get the house free, but the Utrillo and the Chagall?

  I don’t know what I expected.

  Afternoon tea segued into the cocktail hour, Perrier for me, thanks, I don’t drink when I’m working (“Oh, but surely a little wine for dinner …”). She’d roasted duck and made a pie (“Don’t leave, I did it for you!”). As a provider I keep a professional distance but this time I stayed. I had to be sure. OK, I was psyched at the idea of somebody cooking for me. They were wine snobs and the labels on the wines Geoffrey brought up from the wine cellar (the headmaster has a wine cellar?) had that you-can’t-afford-this sheen. Although I am especially careful when someone else is pouring, they’d both had too much of Geoffrey’s Chateauneuf du Pape and even I was a little boiled.

  When people want children they always want them for a reason, but most people’s reasons are, maybe, less obviously venal? The penny dropped after brandies in front of Ye Olde Englishe Fireplace under the ancestral portrait in their oak-paneled library.

  “It’s so painful,” Rita was saying, “giving our lives to the children, watching them grow up and loving them, knowing all the time that no matter how close we are, we’ll have to send them home at the end of the year.”

  “So this is wonderful,” Geoff said, because by that time I was Geoffing him. “And you can get us a baby by …”

  I had a great prospect scoped for them, ready for the pickup. It was easy to finish his sentence; I all but promised: “Christmas.”

  “A month before your big Four-Oh,” Rita sang.

  “The big birthday.” Geoffrey laughed. Then he went: “Ka-ching.”