20
No one was more aware of our impending parenthood than the UPS man. Every day, he arrived with between one and five squijillion packages full of adorable crap for our twins. It seemed like the entire inventory of Babas & Booties was shifting from their San Fernando Valley location to our West Hollywood condo, one cardboard box at a time. Drew’s generosity toward his friends had been one of the things that made me fall for him in the first place. I felt doubly lucky that I got to be there when he finally cashed in.
Of course, Drew’s good-heartedness had its downside in that everyone who expressed the slightest goodwill toward us was scoring a shower invite. Waitresses, yoga instructors, book club acquaintances. They would all be among our well-wishers.
“Didn’t Jessica tell us to keep the guest list to fifty?” I asked Drew, knowing it had ballooned to almost three times that number.
“I’ll deal with Jessica,” he insisted.
I’d always been under the impression that a baby shower was something you only went to grudgingly. Getting that pastel blue or pink invitation in the mail meant a pregnant friend was shamelessly groveling for gifts, and you’d feel like a jerk if you didn’t show up with a steamer trunk full of crib toys. Nobody seemed to see our shower that way, though. People we barely knew were calling us to ask if they could come. “I won’t eat anything or take up much space,” they pleaded. “I just want to be there!”
“Of course you can come!” Drew would say, and I’d quietly cringe in anticipation of Jessica’s inevitable meltdown.
For me, excluding people was much easier, especially when it came to one guest in particular. Things were still tense between me and Bernie, so when the guest list began to swell, he was the first name I crossed off. He’d asked me to be a groomsman in his wedding. Now I was declaring him unwelcome to bestow me with a baby gift at a party someone else was paying for. It felt harsh but also satisfying. This is what you get for voting against my rights, jerk!
It would have been easy to get away with—if not for Drew. “I wish he were coming,” Drew sighed more than once when Bernie’s name came up. It was two weeks before the event, and fate had nudged my number one frenemy to the forefront of my boyfriend’s conscience. By a frustrating coincidence, they’d just spent a week together on jury duty.
For days, they sat next to each other, ate lunch together, watched each other’s stuff during bathroom breaks. They were forbidden from discussing their case and forced to talk about absolutely everything else. Inevitably, Bernie opened up about his and his wife’s struggle to have a baby. As I’d suspected, they’d given up on in vitro.
“Did you know they’re adopting?” Drew asked me.
“No. Really?”
“They’re pretty far along in the process, actually. They might be parents before we are.”
The shower was only days away, and suddenly, I was having second thoughts about snubbing Bernie. I thought I’d put the decision firmly behind me. I’d weighed all the arguments of whether to invite him and come down firmly with a verdict of “fuck him.” There was a strong case indeed to be made for “fuck him,” so why did I feel so guilty? I wondered if there was an even stronger case to be made for “enlighten him.” He had a good heart. Maybe he’d appreciate our gay family more if he saw it at its most celebratory.
Drew finally broke me down. I decided to rise above the vindictiveness, to be the bigger man. I sent Bernie a lying email telling him his invitation had been returned to me because Jessica had mistakenly put the wrong address on it. Damn Jessica! “I’m so embarrassed, and I’m sorry for the short notice, but of course, I’d love it if you and your wife could join us.”
Now I’d have Jessica to deal with myself.
When the big day finally arrived, we rolled up to the shower in style—in a sleek, shiny new minivan. For most people my age, minivans are the great evil, a sign of youth dying, of admitting that you’re satisfied to be identified as a parent rather than as a human being with good taste. For me, that stretched-out super-car with the sliding doors was a symbol of triumph. Drew and I had spent two years and a veritable fortune trying to make babies, and we did it. Yes, my youth had died—and hooray for that. Youth sucked. Bring on middle age! This gay’s got kids, everyone! Climb aboard, there’s room for eight!
The only thing slicker than our new ride was our friend Lauren’s house, where the party was held. Her home was a stunner, a masterpiece of modern architecture you could hardly believe was real as you were walking through it, all bold angles, high ceilings, and sunshine. It wasn’t the design that made it the perfect place to celebrate, though. It was its hard-partying pedigree. One of the home’s previous owners had been the movie producer Don Simpson, known for his raging cocaine keggers in the 1980s. There was no telling how many hookers had turned up dead in the pool in those days. This was a more subdued occasion than wrapping principal photography on Top Gun, but it was comforting to know that the ghosts of awesome parties past were smiling down upon us.
We wanted everyone to have a good time, of course, but no one was more important to us than four guests in particular: Tiffany, Eric and their tiny, intrauterine plus-ones. Usually, the person at a baby shower who gets the showering is the one with the baby inside her. At our shower, that woman would be a virtual stranger, and it would be up to us to make her feel welcome.
Before the shower began, we presented Tiffany with a few gifts of her own. Maternity clothes, flowers, a gift certificate for a pregnancy massage. That way, she wouldn’t have to go home empty-handed. She was also the first to hear our big announcement, the babies’ names. Drew and I, like so many annoying straight couples, had been brainstorming baby names pretty much since our first date. Sometimes, in the middle of a conversation about something completely different, I’d interject with a name that had just popped into my head—“Buster?”—and he’d know just what I meant. “No!” he’d reply.
After eight years of dating, we had exactly seven boy’s names to choose from and four girl’s names. From those lists, we made our selections.
Our son would be Bennett, our daughter, Sutton.
We tested them out to see how they sounded. “I’m so proud of you, Bennett.” “Nice diorama, Sutton!” “Bennett and Sutton, stop smearing pudding on the wall!”
They were perfect—to us, at least.
“Sutton?!” Tiffany said. “Where did you come up with that?”
“We just liked it.”
“Did you make it up?” Eric asked.
“No, it’s a real name. Ever heard of Sutton Foster?”
“Who?”
“What about Bennett? Are you going to call him Ben?”
“No. We’re going to call him Bennett. Why?”
“Nothing.”
“Drew!” I needed help, desperately. I was doubting my own children’s names. I waved my boyfriend over and pleaded for him to do the explaining. “Tell them about the names.”
“Bennett and Sutton?” he said. “They sound rich!”
Tiffany and Eric laughed. “Now that’s a good reason!” I knew instantly I’d be using that line for the rest of my life.
Despite being the last guests invited, Bernie and his wife were among the first to arrive. They brought with them an enormous gift basket full of children’s books. Like everyone else, they were beaming, so happy for me and Drew.
“Bennett and Sutton,” Bernie said. “Love those names!”
In that instant, all was forgiven. We talked about how perfect it would be if the twins could have playdates with their kid someday, and they let me in on a secret they hadn’t told anyone else yet.
“There’s a birth mother who liked our application. Nothing official yet. She apparently thought it was cool that I worked in Hollywood.”
“Does she know you write voice-overs for car crashes?”
“Hey,” Bernie said. “We have glamorous jobs.”
I’d been worried that seeing them at the shower would be awkward. They’d struggled so hard to have a baby, and now I was rubbing their noses in the fact that my boyfriend and I were having two. Instead, it was the best talk I’d had with Bernie since before Proposition 8. We had more in common than either of us ever expected, and each of us was genuinely happy for the other.
I only spoke to them for a few minutes because there were so many other guests to greet. All of Drew’s siblings had flown out, as had his mother, who hated to travel and hadn’t visited L.A. in fifteen years. Just about everyone I cared about in the world was in Lauren’s house, and I was determined to hug them all.
In our eight years together, Drew and I had never thrown a party before, certainly not one that celebrated us personally. Now here we were with an open bar, a five-person catering crew, and a cake the size of Rhode Island. There was a guest book and a gift table sagging under the weight of far, far too many packages tucked inside stork-themed wrapping paper. We hadn’t asked people to wear anything fancy, but even our hippiest friends washed their dreadlocks and put on their best puka shell necklaces for the event. As I gazed around the room, I was stunned to see people from different factions of my life—family, friends, coworkers, Drew’s and mine—all mingling effortlessly. My mother and sister conversing with Drew’s old boss, my guy friends talking baseball with Eric Ireland, Tiffany bonding with the women from my old writing group.
I suddenly realized that this had become far more than a baby shower. No one even knew these babies yet. That wasn’t who brought them here. They had come to celebrate us, me and Drew, in high spirits and business casual attire. At some point, this little party grew into the wedding we’d never had.
“EVERYBODY IN THE KITCHEN! MOVE IT!” Though a hundred fifty people were chattering at once, no one had any problem hearing Jessica.
As the guests shifted en masse, Jessica became impatient. “WHERE’S JERRY? WHERE’S JERRY!!!”
There was no point trying to avoid her. I struggled to slink through the crush of people to get to where she could see me. Jessica was by far the shortest person at the party, and I was fairly well dwarfed by my tall friends, too, so it wouldn’t be easy.
Somehow, I found my way next to Drew, who was standing over the cake with Susie, Tiffany, Eric, and most of our immediate families. Jessica was choked up, struggling to contain herself so that she could begin. It was speech time. Jessica took a deep breath and actually talked in a normal voice.
“I’m not going to cry, but I want to say something.”
She gazed around the room, which resembled a Mumbai subway car at rush hour. “There are TOO MANY FUCKING PEOPLE HERE!” Everyone laughed, except me and Drew. We knew she was only half kidding.
“You know, it really says something that so many of you came here to celebrate the fact that Drew and Jerry are having kids. It says that DREW AND JERRY CAN’T FUCKING FOLLOW DIRECTIONS! I TOLD THEM TO INVITE FIFTY PEOPLE!”
“It’s my fault!” Drew confessed.
“SHUT UP!” Jessica snapped. “It says a lot about Drew that he invited ten thousand people to his baby shower, but it says even more that you all said yes. And I know it’s because you care as much about these guys as I do, and the fact that they’re having twins just makes you feel like sometimes, life happens the way it should. Good things happen to good people.” Jessica shoved Drew, hard. “OH MY GOD, DREW, STOP LOOKING AT ME, OR YOU’RE GOING TO MAKE ME CRY!”
Drew stared at her, all but daring her to break into tears. It worked.
“FUCK IT. I’M DONE!” Jessica waved her hand and disappeared back into the crowd.
All eyes in the room were on Drew and me. One of us had to say something. “Go ahead,” Drew said. “You’re the writer.”
“But I didn’t write anything. You’re the talker.”
That was all the prodding Drew needed. He thanked Jessica and the rest of the Shower Planning Supercommittee for everything they’d done to make this day so perfect. He thanked everyone for coming. He thanked the bartender and the kitchen staff and, though they weren’t present, the bakers who’d made the cake. As he was talking, I realized I did have something I wanted to say after all. I tapped Drew on the shoulder, and he gave me the floor.
“When Drew and I started thinking about having kids, it was because we really wanted to make a family, and nothing went exactly the way we planned. Most of you know the story by now. Susie offered us her eggs, and the surrogacy agency matched us up with this amazing woman, Tiffany, and her amazing husband, Eric. For a long time, it didn’t look like we were really going to have a baby at all, but somehow now we’re having twins. And our lives have already changed so much. We’re closer to Susie than ever, and we’re so grateful to know Tiffany and Eric. I’d been worried about having a baby with a surrogate because I didn’t know what to expect, but when I look at these people now, I realize we’ve already made a family, and it’s one I can’t wait to share with my kids.”
By now, everyone was sobbing—not just the easy targets like Drew, Susie, and Tiffany but Eric and me, too. Our families and friends—and somewhere in the crowd, Jessica.
Packing up the car with all the gifts took almost as long as the party itself. We filled the entire minivan and had to ask Tiffany and Eric to follow us home in their car with the spillover. With Gavin at home with a babysitter, the Irelands stayed the rest of the day at our condo, helping us open packages. They even bought us a few gifts of their own: some baby clothes and our very first case of diapers and wipes.
The whole day had been so overwhelming—such a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of emotions—that it was a bit of a relief the next day just to bask in the aftermath. By then, all of Drew’s family had left, and among the out-of-towners, the only ones who remained were my mother and my sister, Kathy. While Drew caught up on work, I took them to a restaurant down the street for dinner.
“That baby shower was nuts!” Kathy said, as we sat down. A day later, the party was still the only thing we could talk about. “That was bigger than my wedding. C’mon, how many people were there?”
“I think . . . a hundred?”
“That was more than a hundred. It was one-fifty, easy.”
“Kathy,” my mother elaborated, “they’re like the king and king here. They know half the world.”
The two of them had visited me many times in the past, but this was their first trip where they met most of my friends. It struck me that they still thought of me as the sheltered, lonely teenager I used to be. This new Jerry came as a bit of a shock to them.
“I’m really glad you’re here in California,” my mom said. “It’s good for the kids.”
“How’s that?”
“You would have a lot of trouble with a family like this in the Midwest. Here, people actually think this is normal.”
Kathy cut her off. “I think what she means is it’s nice to see you have so much support.”
I knew what she meant. “You’re worried about your grandkids, Mom. It’s okay. I am, too. Most kids have moms, even here in L.A. We’re kind of in uncharted waters. But Drew and I wouldn’t be having kids if we didn’t think we could give them everything they needed. You saw it yesterday. These kids aren’t even born yet, and already, they’re so loved.”
“Jerry,” she replied. “They’re gonna be fine.”
We started talking about parenthood. My sister, a mom of three, was full of anecdotes and advice. My mom was happy to remind both of us of all the headaches we gave her when we were growing up. We all tried to imagine how I’d handle the challenges ahead. We laughed, worried, and wondered. It was one of the best conversations we’d ever had.
Just as our food arrived, my cell phone began to vibrate. I almost didn’t answer, but I decided I should at least see who was calling. The ID came up “Eric Ireland,” so I picked up. He wasn’t a chatty man, so whatever he wanted, it would be quick.
“Hi, Eric.”
The connection was terrible, and the street noise didn’t help. I caught a few words here and there. “Tiffany . . . strong . . . drove . . .” I couldn’t make sense of it.
“Hold on, Eric. I can barely hear you. Where are you?”
His next sentence came through loud and clear:
“The emergency room.”