The residential terraces at Schultz University are arranged in tiers, ascending one side of the shallow valley rice-paddy fashion; those few department heads who chose to live on campus — me among them — inhabited the topmost tier, most distant from the lake.
Even higher, on the valley rim, is a vast Spanish-style villa, surrounded by high stucco walls: the ‘White House’, Queensland home of Dr Hollis Schultz.
My apartment was fully furnished; the possessions I chose to bring with me from the south were scanty: books, for the most part. And clothes: my various xerox copies of The Uniform. Tad arrived a week after me; a container-load of his favourite Beautiful Objects arrived the day after that; we spent a weekend arranging and rearranging his furnishings.
Did the neighbours imagine us to be husband and wife? Perhaps in some senses, unintelligible to them, we were. I had often dreamt, vaguely, of having a ‘wife’; envious of male colleagues who arrived home at day’s end to find food on tables, clothes washed and pressed; who were able, in short, to concentrate totally on their work. Men whose achievements match mine always seem backed by these vast domestic life-support systems, with wifely love and devotion as perhaps the most nourishing part of the package.
My mother’s move to the city had solved none of these problems. Love, especially, had been no more plentiful in our new house than it had been in my childhood.
Tad met one of the criteria for the role of Wife: he was a fine cook. He was also the world’s worst housekeeper, entirely happy to prepare and eat exquisite meals in filthy surrounds. And so once again I found myself taking part in the Modern Women’s Pentathlon: Washing, Ironing, Shopping, Cleaning — and Career. At least I had company. Tad followed me about on my odd cleaning binges like some kind of useless caddy, handing over implements as I needed them: mop, bucket, featherduster, broom. Three-iron.
There was ample time for housework. Teaching duties through those first months in Queensland were near zero; the handful of First and Second Year students enrolled in the Hollis Schultz Medical School — last preference on their list, surely — had not yet reached the clinical years of study.
As for the hospital work: easily delegated. I was top hen in the pecking order; on the fifth floor — The Department of Reproductive Medicine — my word was law. In fact the work was mostly gynaecology. Blue-rinse gynaecology, post-menopausal gynaecology: prolapses, adhesions, messy bleedings, the standard tumours of the aged. I kept my distance. I was closing fast on that age myself; a few years at most from The Change. I could do without reminders of the lot of the Crone. I kept my hand in when needed, surgically: the occasional hormone-secreting tumour or teratoma — rare, beautiful cancers, these — were still worth a visit to theatre. The stodge-work I left to the interns. Keeping the widows alive and happy, the donations flowing in, a cynic might have called it — and I suppose I just have.
Obstetrics? There were women of child-bearing age on the Gold Coast: the occasional blonde-rinse or brunette could be spotted among the blue. Their pregnancies were largely in private hands: local midwives and specialists. These practitioners formed my own immediate catchment area. From their various practices, and from the wealthy Asian rim — Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan — enquiries from infertile couples began to trickle in: the test-tube candidates, the contestants for the egg-and-sperm race.
Tad’s phrase — a favourite.
Of course that race had been won long ago, elsewhere. My aim was to refine the process, to improve success rates. In Adelaide we had been proud of our fifteen per cent, among the best in the world, but nowhere near high enough to guarantee continuing commitments in a world of shrinking funds.
As for anti-obstetrics: no scrapes were performed at Schultz. This was spelt out to me early: the sin of abortion was forbidden by Hollis Schultz himself, on behalf of God Almighty.
These, also, I didn’t miss. To repeat: I’m not opposed, on principle. I’ve done my quota, served my time. I can scrape out a twelve-week embryo as freely and guiltlessly as I scribble the ugly word here, on this page: scrape.
I simply had better things to do. The promised endoscope was waiting when I arrived: state of the art flexible fibre-optics. The instrument-tip was barely a millimetre across: fine enough to thread through any human orifice, and into the most complicated anatomical maze. An expensive precision toy — quarter of a million dollars, and insurance premiums to match — but worth every cent. I spent the first months at Schultz playing endlessly: guiding that luminous pin-head into largely unexplored areas, the innermost cavities of the body.
Sometimes even my own body. Often my own body.
At times it was easier to use the thing on myself: a matter of locking the office door and switching on the power. No volunteers to persuade or bribe, no theatres to book, no consent forms to be signed, in triplicate
And no danger of being sued if something went wrong; if the tip of the instrument nudged a blood vessel, bruised a nerve, perforated a viscus.
Again, I feel no shame in setting down these facts: no more certainly in writing about it than I felt at the time in actually doing it. Twenty years of medical practice had long sealed off the normal avenues for shame.
Steering the instrument through my own innards was difficult at first — a little like writing in a mirror — but I soon learnt the knack. Once the cervix was breached it was mostly hands-off: a television screen and a clutch of simple steering controls. By mid-year I had caught the process of ovulation on film: the actual eruption of eggs from ovaries — my eggs among them, my ovaries. Using a suction tip in parallel with the scope I was even able, although not reliably, to harvest my own ova.
There can never be enough human roe in an embryology laboratory.
A confession: it was oddly reassuring — even for me, an unmarried nullipara, verging on menopause, not interested in having children — to see that eggs were being produced, that the potential, at least, was there. That I was — inescapably — woman.
By July several dozen eggs were stored in Tad’s freezer in the Embrology Lab: mine and others. By September I had photographed a human ovum (mine, again) being beaten down its long salpingeal tunnel towards the womb. I would have liked to capture this on video; stills did not quite do the process justice. There was something driven about it, something harassed, almost panicky in the movement of that tiny egg-bubble: flushed by waves of cilia like a tigress through long grass.
By Christmas I had photographed fusion: the point of impact, tadpole and egg (not mine!).
All of which — I admit — was mostly icing. PR fun and games. Glossy portraits for the journals. My real intention was to become so adept with the instrument that I could plant an egg wherever I wanted; for that matter fertilise an egg wherever I wanted.
And keep an eye on the growing blastocoele for the first crucial days thereafter.
Tad spent those first months playing in his own lab (the Embryology Labs with a variety of lasers, teaching himself new techniques of cell manipulation: methods of handling an individual cell, of turning it this way or that, with a focused beam of laser light.
Weekends were difficult. New patterns of living were forcing themselves on me; I was attempting to make sense of the strange notion of leisure. In this I was usually alone: each Friday night Tad vanished by bus in the direction of Brisbane, in search of various pleasures that only the larger, darker city could offer.
The Gold Coast was a little too clean for him, he complained. Too much the artificial, created city. Too new. There were no dark corners, no alleys — no opportunites for any kind of reasonable evil. Rarely he returned on the Saturday, more often late on Sunday, too exhausted to cook. He had never learnt to drive; the prospect terrified him. On Sunday nights I chauffeured him into Surfers Paradise for a meal: mostly Japanese, his preferred cuisine. His weekends of adventures in the bigger city were never mentioned; nor was our work together. He preferred to swap gossip over food than talk shop; when pressed on the progress of his work he invariably steered the conversation elsewhere.
My own weekends were less easy to fill. Of course my work — my Work — still drew me each Saturday and Sunday morning; if anything I preferred my Department on weekends, with no one else in sight. But there were limits to the things I could do, singlehanded. I took long walks through the afternoons, circumnavigating the lake, wandering through the Rose Cathedral, and the Bible Museum — often ending the day in the Bible Theme Park, on the deck of the Ark. Those two impossible birds, shuffling clumsily about their enclosure, always had the power to move me, to lift me.