Rumpled and engaging, Jake Zorn is a willful dynamo. With that smile he can get anything he wants, and he usually does. Maury’s gruff, grinning husband never gives up, which is why he, and not Maury, is in Atlanta today making the pitch. He’s in the offices of the Fayerweather Agency, pleading for something he didn’t necessarily want when this whole thing started. Jake always wanted a baby, but when he looked into its face he expected to see his own face, looking back. The perfect child to complete the perfect picture, but they are going to have to settle for less than perfect. Now that they’re at the end of the trail, he’s willing to adopt. In fact, he’s in Atlanta, trying to make it happen.
Poised on the curb in front of Departures, he broke Maury’s heart with that brave, uneven grin. “I love you, babe. I’m going to get us a baby.”
Ten years of trying and this is the last stop. Jake will do anything to make her happy. All their colleagues, everybody they care about has at least one, what’s the matter with them? They started out with such confidence, and now look. They are reduced to begging.
Nobody really wants to adopt, Maury thinks, not if they can have their own, but for too many women now, that’s getting harder and harder. Jake doesn’t, in spite of his gallant attempt to convince her that he’s fine with it. “Whoever he is,” he said, grinning, “We’re going to love him.”
At this stage in their efforts, it’s their last chance. Jake is in Atlanta, pleading their case. He’s turning on the charm at the Fayerweather Agency, one of the best private adoption agencies and, face it, the last on their list. The others turned them down because they’re older than the usual. Maury and Jake are in their forties and— OK. The other thing. The deal breaker, she thinks, sagging.
Maury ought to be down there arguing this, after all she’s the lawyer, but frankly, she’s too wrecked to argue anything. She’s holed up in an empty courtroom in the federal courthouse in downtown Boston. She doesn’t want people watching when Jake phones with the news. Good or bad. She has to be alone when she gets it.
To look at Maury Bayless, you’d never guess that she is desperate. She looks young and confident: great profile, good hair and good jewelry, beautifully cut suit. Prada bag. Cell phone in a silver case. Cool boots. Bestseller in paperback, so she can pretend she is reading. Fresh sprouts in the sandwich, she could be any busy lawyer grabbing lunch between court dates. Nobody has to know that she can chew but not swallow and stare at a page and stare at it with no idea what she is seeing.
For the last ten years Maury has zig-zagged between hope and despair, hostage to her own body, and now the next thirty—sixty?— years of her life are hanging on Jake’s phone call. The Fayerweather meeting began at eleven, which means that deep as they are in this last ditch effort, she can’t talk to the only person in her life she can really talk to. Her failure stands between them like a wall of ice.
“You go,” Maury said at curbside check-in. “I’m too messed up to do this interview.”
Jake raked his fingers down her arms as she pulled away. “But I was counting on you.”
“I’m the wrong person.” Bright woman, senior partner, but she has a history. “They won’t see me sitting down with them, all they’ll see is my files.”
“Oh,” Jake said, and she thought she heard his heart crack.
She murmured, “I’m so sorry.”
He dropped his bags and kissed the pale insides of her wrists. “Oh, my sweet one.”
She waited until she was back at the Park and Fly to lock herself in the car and cry. So Jake is alone in Atlanta, pursuing their last hope. Sweet Jake with his great gravelly voice and that disarming grin and the things he’s willing to tell you about himself to get you to unbutton. When they were twenty, Jake got Maury on board, no problem. The coolest guy at the party. Spilled his beer and picked her up so her feet wouldn’t get wet, so nice! He convinced her to marry him right out of college. The man can sell anything, charm strangers out of their deepest secrets, expose liars and have them thank him for it, could sell snake oil and make people believe it really cured them.
Maury thinks bitterly, And I can’t even have a baby.
Interesting and terrible, what failure does to you. Whatever you thought you were when you started out, you are only this now. The sum of what you have tried and failed to do. Of course you have to go out and show yourself to the people, dress like a winner and smile like a champ, but it won’t change what you are feeling. The worse you feel, the better you have to look. Believe it. Put on that grin— lady, accessorize!— and hope to God that nobody knows that inside you are hung with gauze and shadows, a shrine devoted to everything you’ve lost.
She isn’t depressed, exactly. She’s just in mourning for something she knows she should have had.
If only they’d gotten pregnant when Jake first brought it up. First-year law student, what did she know, she was only a kid! Her Jake was breaking into TV news— weekend anchor; it was small town TV, but, hey. Not bad for a go-fer just out of college. Charismatic Jake shmoozed his way into a terrific story. His pals at town hall suspected that the town clerk was shooting kiddy porn with a city camcorder. Jake brought him down. He dug up the tapes, which he duped and turned over to the police. The angry parents even let him interview the kids involved for the first-ever Jake Zorn
Expose. Now he’s famous for them; the Television Conscience of Boston. These days the Jake Zorn Expose airs nationwide.
After that first show Jake ran the tape obsessively, looking for—what? What turned him on? It wasn’t vanity, she doesn’t think. She thinks it was a passion to— what, transmit his image, sending part of himself hurtling into the future, to live on and on. She came in and found him on his knees in front of a freeze frame, fixed on his close-up. Still kneeling, he looked up at her with a bright, amazing smile. “Oh, Maury. What if we had a baby?”
It rolled in from out of nowhere. Stricken, she blurted, “We’re too young!”
“But look at us. Wouldn’t he be beautiful?”
Her mind ran ahead to the real question: could she have a baby and still make the Law Review? Men get to the top however, but for any woman who cares about what she does, professional life is like climbing a wall. You cut hand holds and notches for your feet, hacking them out of solid rock. It’s hard work, the climb is slow and you can’t let down for a minute or you’ll start to slide. Keep at it long enough and in the end all you want is to reach the top so you can rest. If she told Jake, he’d think she was weak.
She punted. “What makes you think it would be a boy?”
With a foolish, loving, confident grin, he said, “Trust me.”
“You want me to quit law school?” Oh, Jake.
Standing, he hooked his arms around her, drawing her in. “Just for a little while. How long could it take?”
When a couple has a baby, it’s the woman who pays. Maury set her jaw. “Try eighteen years.”
Professionally, they were both hanging on by their fingernails. She argued the parallels, which Jake refused to recognize; they had a fight.
“’s OK,” Jake said in the end, with a new smile that she didn’t understand at the time but has come to know by heart, like a Top-Ten song that you keep hearing long after the guy you thought you were in love with has dropped you. TV has taught Jake exactly how to modulate the voice so viewers buy everything he says without
wondering whether it’s true or not. Her skull vibrated as he put his mouth to her temple, rumbling, “We have plenty of time.”
They honestly thought they did. It was a sweet lie, but it was still a lie. Taut with waiting, Maury says to the empty courtroom, “You only thought you had time.” She is her own prosecutor now.
Maybe she should have given in after she passed the bar. That summer Jake caught the suburban cops taking bribes; he got it on tape and the exposé won him an award. THE CONSCIENCE OF BOSTON SCORES AGAIN. The headline ran the same day Judge Aylward offered Maury the clerkship; she could hardly wait to get home. Laughing, she and Jake hugged and squealed like high school cheerleaders after the big touchdown. He took her out to celebrate.
Then her lover, her husband, wonderful guy, wrecked the celebration. What did he see in her eyes? Maury, or only himself reflected? “The plaque plus twenty K,” he said— so proud! “Now you can afford to quit.”
“Is that all you think about?”
“We’re great together. With a kid, we’re our own corporation. You and I and Jakey.”
“I can’t yet.” Why do you want a child so badly, Jake? Am I not enough for you? “I just can’t.” Maury doesn’t know why, she can’t explain it. You just aren’t ready until you are. Having a baby is such a big thing, especially when it’s your body. “Give me time,” she begged, unless she was praying.
Wistful, he took her hands. Her Jake. Terrible in hope, he was pleading. “OK, honey, but let’s do it soon.”
Privately, she set her timer for thirty-five. It’s perfectly possible for a woman to stay on the pill without the man in the house knowing. Thirty-five seemed like a safe number, partly because it was so far away. Forty looked even better to her. Hell, women in their fifties have been known to conceive— with a little help. The biological limits expand all the time. At the back of Maury’s mind there was the knowledge that when she did get pregnant, her professional life would roll onto a siding while Jake’s roared ahead full
steam: It isn’t fair. In spite of his pointedly not badgering— in spite of his wistful, insistent charm, they let it rest. When you’re young and running hard you think you have plenty of time. Idiot bitch, Maury thinks, despising her stupidity, you thought life was like business. Wasn’t having a baby supposed to be like an arraignment or a court date that you could schedule and bring off by the numbers? One. Two. Three.
Hard-driving, high-jumping Maury. So organized. She landed a job with a top firm. She made partner. She cleared her calendar. A thirty-fifth birthday present for Jake. A surprise.
Nothing happened. Now, that was a surprise. Fine, all those years on the pill, don’t expect results right away.
It took her more than a year to conceive.
Once you get committed to a thing, it’s all you think about. Every disappointment is like a little death.
The first disappointment was exactly that. A little death. She had a miscarriage so sudden and dramatic that it was over before the airport paramedics reached her. Her fault, she thinks, for running hard when she should have laid back as advised, but she was in the middle of a copyright matter that couldn’t wait. Her plaintiff was a Boston novelist who had been ripped off: his novel to their major motion picture, opening next month in a theater near you. He could prove it, line for line; they needed a settlement meeting before the opening, while they had the power to keep it out of the theaters. The studio said we meet in Los Angeles or forget it. Maury never knew whether it was the stress that did it, or the rough flight in bad weather or some tragic biological flaw, but she flew from Boston to Los Angeles in her first trimester and she lost the baby. She won her client a six-figure settlement but she lost the baby. Her baby. Jake’s. It happened— this was so awful— in Chicago on the way home. The cramping started at LAX, but what did she know, she’d never been pregnant before. She hemorrhaged as she was running to make her connection in O’Hare.
Jake flew to Chicago to take her home. He brought white flowers and a white plush Teddy. “Oh, honey!”
They were both crying. You always do. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s OK, this isn’t the last baby in the world.” Careful, Jake. That which you don’t know enough to fear is closer than you thought.
They had no way of knowing what was coming. All Maury knew was what you did to get past it. Pick yourself up, girl. Attend to your look! She felt something new on her face. A few more miscarriages and it solidified, like a layer of makeup that won’t wash off. The chronic failure’s carefully constructed smile. “It’s OK, Jake, I’m OK.”
But Jake’s a born overachiever. He took it as a challenge. Nobody beats us. “As soon as you’re all better we can try again.”
They’ve been trying for ten years.
When things go wrong the woman always pays.
Maury and Jake have tried everything: obsessive temperature taking, hers; hormone-sensitive paper strips, hers, because in these matters it is she who bears the burden; breathless midafternoon meetings in downtown hotels because all signs indicated that her cycle was high, followed by the hours Maury spent on her back willing the sperm to ignite. There would be days of hope followed by ambiguous home pregnancy test results followed by the blind, rising excitement no woman can stifle followed by her period, which was only late, followed by the next attempt. The next.
Too late, they turned to technology: the flurry of sperm counts and comprehensive ultrasounds and exploratory procedures and, when it was indicated, courses of clomiphene, with Jake stifling her worries with that ruthless, hopeful smile. “So what if we end up with triplets? Cheap at the price.”
When things go wrong the woman always pays.
Now they are at the end of the trail.
Alone in the echoing courtroom, Maury Bayless checks her silent cell phone and flips it shut. Then she bows her head over her knuckles, gnawing until the blood comes. She won’t cry. She won’t! She can’t call Jake and she can’t change or prevent whatever is happening from happening.
Now that she and Jake are at the bottom line they will do anything to get a baby. Anything.