“And have you inserted your penis into anyone’s mouth or rectum in the last six months?”
“Yes,” I replied, riveted to a tiny red ant that crept across the vast expanse of the Formica tabletop.
“Approximately how many times?” the boy asked.
“Well, it’s been…I don’t know. How many weeks since my last visit here? Twenty-five? Twenty-six weeks? Let’s say thirty-two times.”
“Did you use a condom?”
“No.” The ant made a right turn and disappeared into the corner of a pink bakery box. filled with Valentine cookies. The boy. flipped a page over and inhaled through clenched teeth. “Okay. Has anyone inserted his penis into your mouth or rectum in the last six months?” he asked.
“Oh, probably, who remembers?” I could never manage to get through the whole interview without joking. The boy didn’t look at me. “I suppose so. You want to know how many insertions?” I asked pointedly.
“Yes.”
“Damn, I just lost the key to my Betty and Veronica diary. I guess now we’ll never know for sure.” I grinned, but my interviewer, a dark and not altogether unattractive Semitic lad in his midtwenties, never glanced up from the answer sheet.
“Would you say more than twenty times?”
“Yes.”
“And was this person your primary partner?”
“Yes.”
“And did he use a condom?”
“No, we don’t. We’re monogamous—six years.”
“Okay. On to the next category.” The boy flipped the page again, bent it back and ran his thumb down the center to flatten the seam. He poised his number two pencil over the tiny bubbles, ready to smudge in my replies.
Jim and I had been coming to the Men’s Study since it had begun five years earlier. At the start, we were two of two thousand supposedly healthy gay men who were being followed as part of the Natural History of AIDS study sponsored by the N.I.H. Every six months we went through a battery of blood tests and interviews, which tried to link behavior to the appearance and progression of the virus. Since 1984, one half of the participants had sero-converted and almost half of those had died.
“In the last six months, did you place your penis in anyone’s vagina?”
“Yes.”
He glanced up at me. “Perhaps you didn’t understand the question. Let me repeat it.”
“I heard the question. The answer is yes.”
“Let me reread to you the definition.” The boy fumbled back to the preceding pages. “‘Placing one’s penis into a vagina means’…”
“I know what it means. The answer is yes.”
“Okay, fine. So, how many times did you place your penis, uh, you know…”
“Well, that I can tell you exactly,” I said. “Three times in October, three times in November. No insertions, per se, in December. Two in January. Hmm. That makes eight. Eight times.”
“Are you sure you don’t want me to reread the definition?” the boy asked.
“Yes, I’m sure.”
The interviewers were an odd lot—a cadre of unkempt psych students with white lab coats and earrings—all of whom struggled valiantly to contain their curiosities toward the study participants. My lover, Jim, had described them once as “perfectly cute queer robots—with cowlicks.” They were well trained to conceal any hint of exuberance, with painted-on poker faces and flattened monotones, and usually they tore through the twenty-minute interrogations without ever glancing up from the computer sheets in front of them. It was as if any eye contact might make them burst out of their professional personas into full-tilt versions of “The Man That Got Away.”
This particular boy seemed especially on edge. I had never met him before, so I surmised he had just recently been hired—probably a U.C.L.A. psych major. He had black, thick eyebrows on a ridged forehead that had reminded me, at first glance, of a sexy young Omar Sharif. At present, he had succeeded in furrowing himself into a veritable Neanderthal.
“And did you use a condom?” he asked.
“No.”
“No?” he challenged.
“No, it wouldn’t have made sense,” I said. “See, we were trying to make a baby.”
The boy suddenly brightened and looked up. With his features relaxed, he looked like Yuri Zhivago, which made me happy.
“Oh. That’s cool,” the boy said, dropping all professional protocol. “Whaddayaknow? Well, now I feel better.”
“Well, I’m glad you do. I do, too,” I responded.
“Can you tell me a little bit more?” the boy asked.
I filled him in on the baby-making trials. We were at the fifth attempt, and Cathy was on her way out to L.A. next week to try again. We had started off doing it the natural way, and when that proved unsuccessful, we moved on to inseminations. I would make deposits into a bank in Westwood and those carefully labeled vials would be sent to Cathy, who lived back East on Cape Cod. The specimens arrived via UPS in giant tanks of frozen nitrogen, and their removal required delicate handling with rubber gloves. Although Cathy proclaimed herself an expert at it, after two expensive experiments, we had determined that shipping frozen spunk back East was a waste of time and money. Apparently, unless you could centrifuge it upon thawing, you were stuck with a lot of useless drowned spermatozoa. Old-fashioned fucking was determined to be the most effective.
“I wish someone at the sperm bank could have filled me in on that one,” I had whined to Jim at the time.
“Well, we’re learning as we go along,” he replied.
“Yeah, well, I waste hours jerking off in some cubicle for nothing.”
“Oh, stop complaining. There’s no one in the world who loves jerking off more than you do. This is the one time in your life you have a decent excuse.”
“So we scheduled real-time inseminations, with fresh sperm, as soon as we could and complemented those with actual lovemaking,” I explained to the interviewer boy, who was looking less like Julie Christie’s paramour and more like Nicky Arnstein by the minute. “It turns out that the greatest chances of fertilization occur when you do it the old-fashioned way, and after that, on-site inseminations are the best bet. And that’s where we’re at,” I concluded.
The boy nodded his head and stood, gesturing for me to follow him out the door to the blood draw room. “Well, I think it’s great. And who is the surrogate?” he asked.
The word stung me. “She’s not a surrogate,” I told him. “She’s the mom. She’ll always be the mom.”
1968. Suburban Connecticut. The hallways of Hamden High were filled with dark-haired girls in angora the color of gelato who prayed their rosary for admittance to cheerleading club and packs of boys with big white teeth who slapped each other hard, laughed at stupid jokes, and delighted in slamming themselves against metal lockers.
It was a world of black eyeliner and linebackers, of letter sweaters and tiny gold crucifixes, and I was unceremoniously dropped there at the threshold of puberty like a cactus plant at the North Pole. Not that being outside the group was something new for me. I had been banished from the inner circle of boyhood at twelve, when I willingly replaced the burdens of Cub Scout merit badges for my bar mitzvah lessons. Back in elementary school, my best friends had all been girls. I had played “house” with Lisa Diamond up the street and “Broadway musical” with anyone who was kind enough to sit on my mother’s couch and pull open the bay window curtain—“Slowly, and in time to the music, please!”—as I danced back and forth to the strains of “The Carousel Waltz.” By age fifteen, I had grown about as far from the social inner circle of the neighborhood gang as I could get. Of more urgent concern was not my self-defined spirit of artistic nonconformity, but a dark, peculiar tugging. Sex with myself was focused not on women, but on a long and varied fantasy parade of odd characters: Salvatore, the school bus driver; Monsieur Boisvert, our suave French professor who wore Canoe and sported a perpetual five o’clock shadow; and even certain unlikely boys in the locker room. The cast changed weekly, but the gender did not. In terms of real contact, I had experienced something barely approaching sex with my friend Bobby a couple of years earlier, at our pool club, huddled under towels. But that was short-lived and he was now dating girls.
Swimming against this dark current, I chose to hide out as the high school drama freak, a gawky spire with wire glasses, beret, and London policeman’s cape that hung down to my knees. It was in this masquerade that I wandered the cream-and-brown-tiled hallways, half-obscured in yards of wool, waving those bolts of fabric like a signal to like-minded souls. I didn’t know my fluttering would catch the unlikely eye of Cathy Smith.
Cathy, with long, thin, sandy-colored hair parted to one side, was as round and solid as I was thin. She told me she had suffered the pain of being the heaviest girl in her class through most of her elementary and junior high school life. But unlike other haunted, heavyset girls who mastered only the art of hiding, Cathy made up for her size by being one of the smartest and best read. Inspired by the voices of Tolstoy and Flaubert, Anne Sexton and James Dickey, she developed an impassioned sense of the theatrical as well as a love of the stage. In junior high she spent many an afternoon constructing lavish collages out of magazine pictures, giving them names like, “My Darling, My Hamburger” and “Butterflies Are Free.”
One November night, Cathy kissed me in the front seat of her father’s purple Toronado, parked in her driveway. I remember that I got scared when her lips parted because she was soft, too soft, not like the kisses I had imagined with the men in my fantasy life. Their mouths would have been closed, a pressing together of lips, a scraping of beards. When Cathy’s tongue left my mouth, I tried placing mine in hers, but she had already pulled away. I looked at her, in the pale green glow of the dashboard lights, touched her on her cheek, and felt a surge of emotion that was decidedly unfamiliar. “I love you,” I blurted out. I had never said it before. I felt like a grown-up character from a wide-screen movie, replete with a lush soundtrack.
After our kiss and my declaration, Cathy and I were inseparable—between classes, after school, on weekends, the two of us let loose in whatever vehicle Cathy’s father happened to have on loan from the car dealership where he was head salesman. I told her I loved her again and again. We sent poems back and forth. In a yellow Thunderbird we parked alongside autumn fields and discussed Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas. We sang Simon & Garfunkel and James Taylor and the Fifth Dimension, our blue Coupe de Ville swerving lanes in a frenzy to acknowledge the first few bars of “Up-Up and Away” on the car radio.
Some months later, we both got jobs at the Cinemart, a fancy neighborhood movie theater that still sold assigned seats. I was a true usher, tuxedo and all. Cathy was the candy girl, in a dirndl skirt. We mischievously stole candy and made out in the storeroom behind huge plastic bags of popcorn. Cathy and I foiled our boss’s ability to prove inventory shrinkage by removing one solitary Junior Mint from each tiny box, slowly amassing little mountains of the chocolate candy, which we consumed in peals of laughter on our way home.
On two occasions, we told our parents we were shopping at the mall on a Saturday, then drove 180 miles round-trip to New York to see Broadway shows with Lauren Bacall and Katharine Hepburn, lunching at Sardi’s, praying no one would think to investigate the odometer.
And so it went, this madcap teen romance, all impulse and indulgence until a voice intervened and my old fear crept up my back like a poison vine. No matter how I tried, I couldn’t force a sexual interest in my new best friend. All I was able to write in my journal about it was “I hope something changes soon,” as if this predicament I had been in for years was now like a stubborn winter freeze that had held on into May. I blamed my dilemma on the lack of a soundtrack. “If only there was music,” I wrote, with a slow pen, darkening the letters over. Cathy was attentive, her kisses ardent, but my eyes unquestionably burned with visions of men.
As winter settled in during my final year of high school, and the anniversary of Cathy’s and my first kiss came and went, I panicked and pulled away. The more she sensed a retreat, the more Cathy would accommodate. She showed me her diary, which contained, in tiny, delicate scrawls, a listing of what she had eaten each day, what movie, if any, we had seen, and if I had kissed her. Day after day, the litany ran on: shrimp cocktail, Butch Cassidy, baked potato, lobster bisque, Midnight Cowboy, kissed behind the school, at my locker, rhubarb pie, The Royal Hunt of the Sun, fried chicken, The Sterile Cuckoo, in the car, True Grit, behind the ear, Bonnie and Clyde.
I came to realize that while telling Cathy I loved her and that she and I would always be together was the greatest mistake of all, it had become unavoidable. What choice did I have after the day she bought me tickets to Hair, plus seven Streisand albums, including Simply Streisand and Je m’appelle Barbra, thereby completing my collection? At Christmas she had presented me with a storybook of our romance, complete with poetry and collages. I knew that I loved Cathy as a friend, but not like in the movies. Whether it was the absence of a film score or Panavision, I decided I had to say something.
On Valentine’s Day, the air rife with expectation, I took Cathy aside by the lockers, handed her a bouquet of tiny pink roses and told her that I couldn’t go on bearing the responsibility of a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship.
“But do you still love me?” she asked.
“Not in that way,” I stammered. “Just as a friend, I guess.”
Her eyes welled up but not a tear escaped. Though I had never seen her cry before, I saw now that she wore her grief in fathoms and leagues, that her eyes had stockpiled years of disappointment, of rejection, but that she had, until now, refused to let them break. When enough silence had passed, I couldn’t bear it anymore and simply walked away.
We spoke the next day over the telephone while I was on a break from work on her day off. I imagined her eyes, wet and dark. I saw her room, the closet packed with lacy floral skirts. I heard Laura Nyro in the background singing “New York Tendaberry.” Cathy’s voice, normally gentle and even, was pinched along the edges.
“What did I do?” she asked me.
I looked outside the phone booth where snowflakes as big as quarters and as wet as her kisses were turning to giant droplets as they hit the glass wall and struggled for just the right word, as if the wrong one would annihilate us both. Anything not to hurt her, anything to remove from her more burden, more doubt, to quell my ever-mounting guilt.
“It’s me, not you,” I replied. “It’s all me.”
Of course she didn’t get it. “But I must have done something!” she insisted, unwilling to let me go. “What can I do?” Her voice became whiny. “It’s because I’m fat, right?”
“You’re not fat,” I countered quickly. “Don’t do this to yourself.”
After the matinee that day she appeared, even though I had begged her not to. She stood in the parking lot, under the glare of orange lights, a half-sculpted clay figure in a camel coat. By now the sky had darkened and the snow landed on her head and shoulders, staying there in perfect formation. Her long thin hair was parted in the middle and covered with icy frost.
I approached her because there was nothing else I could do, hugged her awkwardly, and she lay her lips against my collar. In our bulky overcoats, we couldn’t even feel each other. When we pulled away, I watched her eyes fill. I walked her back to her car. Neither of us spoke.
She drove off, a translucent figure behind fogged windows, and I began to cry, thinking of her, tucked behind the wheel, and about her diary of kisses and films and food. I sat myself down on a concrete parking-lot divider when my sobs choked me, twisted in my cape. From my woolen confines, I made a solemn promise. No matter how I felt, and no matter what I thought, I would never say “I love you” to another girl.
High school ended. We went our separate ways, but remained constant friends through letters and occasional phone calls. I found that life did, in fact, supply a kind of soundtrack. I fell in love with a boy named Michael. And then another named Nick. And later a significantly older man named Bob. I learned that sex and love could be mutually inclusive, and I learned that while love could hurt, it was always worth the experience. I also experimented with a few girls along the way—it was the seventies, after all.
When I told Cathy I was sleeping with boys, I sensed her relief through the telephone wires, as though the one missing chip of a jigsaw puzzle had finally found its home. She passed no judgment. She said she still loved who I was. In this, she was constant.
We saw each other through the revolving door of each other’s love lives, confiding back and forth the titillation of new affairs, the tribulations as they arose in longer-term relationships, the eventual heartbreaks and oftentimes complicated denouements and disengagements. After college, Cathy lived in England, and years later met Greg, a warm and sweet-natured hippy who stuck around long enough to teach her vegetarian cooking and the joys of tantric sex, but not long enough to help her raise their son, Hanlon.
Labor Day, 1989. A white-hot Los Angeles morning. Even in our Santa Monica apartment five blocks from the Pacific, Jim and I could feel the baking Santa Ana heat battering at the blinds. We were lying back on our bed, after some enjoyable sweaty lovemaking. The phone rang.
“Get it,” Jim said, nudging my thigh.
“You get it.”
“No.”
“Well, then let the machine get it.”
“I hate that. Go get it.”
“I’m covered with sticky you,” I whined.
“So here’s a towel.”
“No, I like sticky you. I don’t want to get up.” I rubbed my stomach.
The machine clicked on: You have reached Philip and Jim. We can’t come to the phone right now. Please leave a message after the beep…
The voice at the other end was sweet, quiet. Perhaps a tad breathless and hesitant: Hi, guys, listen. I don’t know how to say this but I’ve thought and thought about it. I know I couldn’t do this for anyone else, but I really think if you want, I mean, I think I would be able to be the biological mother for you guys. I mean, if you really want to raise a kid. One of your own, you know. I know it sounds crazy, but if you are into it, call me. Let’s talk.
We froze, and then in one move, both of us bounded to the phone, but by the time we had disentangled ourselves from the bedclothes, the caller had hung up.
“Who was that?” Jim asked, knowing full well, but seeking confirmation anyhow.
“It was Cathy,” I replied, in a half voice. I grabbed for the receiver with a gummy hand and dialed madly. “It was Cathy.”
“So…whose jism?” Jim asked me as we were brushing our teeth after returning Cathy’s phone call. We had been discussing adoption for nearly a year. Now, Cathy’s shocking offer was forcing us into an entirely new arena of conversation. Basking in the fantasy of having a biological child, something I had not seriously considered before, I simply assumed Jim would take it for granted we would use my sperm. Cathy was my friend first and since she and I had briefly even been actual lovers, after high school had ended—fleeting though those encounters had been—it made sense that I would supply the requisite X or Y chromosome. I sensed us heading for a Really Serious Talk.
Jim smiled. “What? What did you think? That of course it should be you? Why, Philip? Because you’re one of the ‘chosen people’?” Toothpaste dripped down his chin.
“Maybe that’s the best reason,” I countered. “Cathy’s Catholic, or I should say, raised Catholic. Now quite horribly fallen. But still, she has the Christian gene. Surely you don’t want to quibble over allowing this child a tiny bit of Jewish D.N.A., now do you?” It felt good to lighten the argument.
“Hmm. I might buy that.” Then he grew serious. “Does it matter to you if it’s mine genetically or yours?”
“Honestly?”
“Of course.”
This was hard, and it felt like one of those discussions that could go horribly wrong. I knew it was important to me and yet I knew I would be willing to give it up if it was that important to Jim. I told him so.
“You know what?” Jim replied. “It doesn’t really matter to me. It doesn’t. And since it seems to matter to you, I don’t have any problem with you being bio-dad. I mean that.”
Then Jim asked the next question, the one I’d hope he’d wait to ask until at least another day.
“How are you going to make this baby? I have a funny suspicion that Cathy would like it done au naturel, if her boyfriend allows it. And David’s cool, he just might.”
“And what do you think about that?” I asked.
“Honestly?” Jim rubbed the back of his neck and sat quietly on the edge of the bed. “I guess I think that’s sort of weird. I’m not saying no, but, honestly it’s kind of weird.” He went on. “Somehow, I think it’s a decision we should all make, not just Cathy.” He paused and looked up at me. “It’s not like you’re going to enjoy it that much, are you? I mean, you’re such a fag!”
I pretended to be taken aback. “From what I remember, it’s okay,” I said, with a mock nonchalance. Of course, my memory was rather shaky in this regard. There had been scattered episodes of heterosex in my college years, my “D. H. Lawrence period,” I called it. Cathy and I had finally consummated our high school romance, albeit clumsily, one summer break from our respective colleges. I had thought of it as a kind of poetic bookend to our childhood together.
“Well,” Jim went on, “just don’t get too used to it.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll talk to Cathy. I suppose we can always do the sy-ringe method.” I pronounced sy-ringe in two distinct syllables and winced when I said it, to make it sound really awful. “It’s not very special that way. I mean, eventually the kid’s going to ask. It would be nicer to say that we made love. Don’t you think?”
Jim shrugged. “I guess.”
Day twelve of Cathy’s cycle, the night of The Deed, was a full moon, which all of us interpreted as a great sign. Jim and I flew to Boston and drove to Cathy’s home on Cape Cod. In order to facilitate everything, it was decided that we would take Cathy’s eight-year-old son, Hanlon, to a movie first and that Cathy and I would do it afterward, while Jim took Hanlon out for pizza at the video arcade.
While Hanlon and Jim played Donkey Kong in town, Cathy straightened up her room and I nervously peeled off my clothes and climbed under the comforter. I watched Cathy obsessively sweeping around the edges of the rug. In her white cotton nightgown she appeared to be floating and it seemed to me that she was not all that different from how I remembered her nearly twenty years before. Her hair, still chestnut and shiny, hung halfway down her back.
“Come to bed before I lose my courage,” I said.
She dropped the broom, removed her nightie, and snuggled in next to me. She had lit a dozen candles. Her smell was the same as it had always been, a mixture of honeysuckle and tea rose. Her skin was like cool chiffon. We hugged for a while and laughed and kissed under the down comforter. Then I stopped and pulled away.
“Why?” I asked.
“Why what?”
“You know ‘why what.’ You’re going to make me ask outright? Okay, why are you doing this amazing thing for us?”
“No,” she said quickly, covering my mouth lightly with her hand. “We’re not going to talk about that.”
“Not ever?”
“Just not tonight. Besides, I think you know why.”
Her voice was low and I kissed her again, softly, deeply, for a long time. I forgot then the oddness of being with a woman, and probably because I had purposefully not come for ten days—a lifetime record, I figured—it wasn’t difficult for me to get hard. I reached down to feel her wetness and was filled with the memory of the two of us back in a Chicago dorm room one hot summer night, two decades ago. I embraced the thought that we were still there, barely nineteen.
She guided me into her, and I moved with hesitation, wondering what images flashed through her mind. When I was fully inside, she moaned, and I sensed it was not from lust but from a remembered intimacy. We moved against each other for only minutes but I didn’t worry about coming too quickly because, after all, it was about getting the stuff in the right place. As it poured out of me and into her, I clenched tight against her so not a drop would leak. It flashed through my mind that it might not be as easy two days later and a day after that, once we had all spent time together in the bright light of day. We moved apart, lying side by side, saying nothing until we heard Jim’s rental car pull into the driveway. I was relieved that this gave us a reason to get up. I pulled on pajama bottoms and went to the hallway. Something told me it was not a good idea for Jim to find us in bed together.
He walked in carrying a sleeping Hanlon: “Pac-Man did him in.” The three of us walked together to Hanlon’s room and put the boy to sleep.
“So,” Jim asked in the hallway, with a grin as wide as could be, “was he good, Cathy?”
I rolled my eyes, more for effect, grateful that there would seemingly be no serious talk.
“He was great.”
“I bet.” Jim laughed.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“Nothing. I didn’t say anything.”
I pushed aside the discomfort of worrying what Jim really felt.
We slept in one bed and spooned each other, with me, of course, in the middle.
“Bob and Carol and Ted,” Jim muttered.
I couldn’t sleep. Even after I was sure Cathy and Jim had drifted off, I lay awake wanting something more, bugged by the informality of it all. I knew the significance of what was happening overshadowed our inability to discuss it then and there. I pictured a hundred different conversations we might have but then I must have dozed off, for I saw Cathy sweeping all of them under the Oriental rug that covered her bedroom floor.
We had invested a magical quality in that night, yet it took us nearly a year to get pregnant. A year of flying back and forth between Los Angeles and Boston. A year of lovemaking, inseminations, testing. A year of worry and disappointment, of huge frustration. A year of withholding ejaculatory sex from Jim so that I’d have enough of a sperm count to matter, and a year of Cathy’s boyfriend trying to understand why she was devoting herself to sleeping with her ex-, now gay, boyfriend. A year of therapy and obsession on everyone’s part.
Eleven months from that first try, sperm met ovum. The phone rang one morning, as I was frying another kind of egg, trying hard not to think that exactly two weeks had passed since our last lovemaking episode. I was trying hard not to expect a call, trying hard not to allow myself the depression of another letdown. In any case, Jim had laid down the law for us: “No more. That was the last time. It just wasn’t meant to be, Philip. We’ll tell Cathy soon.”
I answered the phone. “Hello?”
No hello back. Just a young boy’s voice. It was Hanlon: “Hey guys, you’re going to be dads. Mama said it worked.”
The day has come when Jim and I are to return to Los Angeles with our infant daughter. Cathy, Jim, and I have had a substantial amount of counseling around this moment, but as the morning arrives, the air feels thick and uncomfortable. I am queasy. We agreed that Fanny—lovingly named after the spirited title character in the Bergman film, Fanny and Alexander, that Jim and I saw on our first date—should be with her mom for the first five weeks of her life, that taking her away any earlier would be detrimental to both mother and child. “An amputation,” our therapist had called it. Jim, Cathy, Fanny, Hanlon (who is now nine), and I have lived together as a kind of family on Cape Cod since a week before Fanny’s birth. It hasn’t been easy.
The birth itself was quick, almost too quick. We arrived at the tiny hospital in Wareham, Massachusetts, just forty-five minutes before she popped out and went home a few hours later with our newborn daughter.
The hormones raging through Cathy’s body made each subsequent day a sort of obstacle course. After one week, we felt it better to allow Cathy alone time with the baby, so she and Fanny moved back to her own house, about seven miles from the farmhouse we had recently bought as a vacation home.
Jim and I spent most days walking around perplexed and scared. There were no rules for this. Some days Cathy would bring Fanny by or encourage us to take her for hours; other days, she guarded her closely and complained about the physical pain of being separated from her because of her nursing.
We had always assured her that when the time came to leave, the risk would be ours; that if she could not, in fact, relinquish this baby, there would be no argument. We would simply have a child who lived three thousand miles away.
Day thirty-five has arrived. Cathy has carefully packed up every newly washed cloth diaper, piece of clothing, and attendant bit of paraphernalia. As we pull our car up to her house, we see her through the living room bay window, speaking to the baby in her arms.
“What do you suppose she’s saying?” I ask Jim.
He doesn’t reply, but takes my hand.
A half hour later, Fanny is safely buckled into the rear seat of our rented Pontiac, and I’m standing beside the car door. Jim is at the wheel. Cathy is beside me in a white T-shirt and denim jumper, clutching Fanny’s brother’s hand.
“I’ll be okay,” she says, as she hugs me awkwardly with her other arm. “Call me when you arrive so I know you’re safe and sound.” I kiss her lightly on the cheek. I don’t have any words. I expect her to burst into tears but her eyes remain calm, waterless, just as they were the day I handed her that bouquet of consolation nearly two decades earlier. I climb into the backseat beside our already sleeping infant. The car backs up slowly over the leaves strewn on the driveway. I look back once more at mother and child side by side and notice that two huge wet spots have sprung up on Cathy’s chest where her breasts are leaking, weeping milk for her departing child.
Fanny is now fifteen, the same age her mother was when I met her back in the high school drama club. Jim and I are taking her to New York to celebrate Cathy’s fiftieth birthday. Our unusual family has come together four or five times each year since Fanny was born—in the summers, at Christmas, over school holidays.
When Fanny was nine months old, Cathy ceded her parental rights as planned so that Jim could be the other legal dad. Since then, Cathy has been “Mama” but really more of a fairy godmother. Jim and I agreed that she should not be burdened with the task of disciplining a child she sees only every four to five months.
It has not all been a fairy tale. Jim and I broke up when Fanny was six years old. I have stopped trying to analyze whether this was the old cliché of pouring our love into our child rather than into each other or simply a predictable growing apart. My guilt over it has certainly cemented itself into my being. Luckily what has remained central to both our lives has been Fanny. We are laughingly referred to as the “poster couple for gay divorce.” No fights, no recriminations, little tension. We live near each other and Fan goes back and forth week by week. Sometimes we even vacation together. Mama’s visits over fifteen years have amassed a surfeit of etched memories, free-floating in our minds and hearts. They are catalogued in duplicate photographs that sit, like those of most families, in huge frantic stacks of shoe boxes in our respective hall closets, in a scattering of mismatched picture frames on pianos, bureaus, and mantels, and in wallets and albums.
When she was not quite four years old, Fanny asked me if I knew I was gay. I was driving at the time and nearly crashed my new Infiniti into the gatehouse of Bel-Air. I recovered with aplomb, telling her I did know I was gay and asking her what gay meant. “Papa,” she replied, as if to a nitwit, “gay means handsome.” That was as good a definition as we needed at that stage.
At her bat mitzvah, her three weepy parents watched her lay into the Torah, lashing out with great charm, intelligence, and wit at its homophobic and misogynist portions. At the end, Fanny turned directly to us and said, “From my mother, I learned the definition of unconditional love, from my dad, Jim, I learned love of the outdoors and nature, and from my papa, Philip,” and here she paused for effect, “I learned which Barbra Streisand album showed her at her peak.”
Despite us or because of us or a combination of both, Fanny has grown to be a confident young woman who is proud and eager to tell the world about the two dads who have raised her and the mom she adores, who lives five hours away by plane.
“Is it weird having two gay dads?” she is often asked.
“No, why would it be? It’s what I know,” she replies.
“Why didn’t you just move out to California to be near your daughter?” people ask Cathy.
“That wasn’t the intention,” she explains to them. “The idea was for Jim and Philip to have a child of their own to raise.” She often sees the bewilderment—or is it judgment?—behind kind eyes.
On this, our sixth or seventh New York sojourn as a family, Cathy is with Hanlon, now twenty-three, and her long-term companion, a sweet, slightly older man named Gary who has been devoted to her for more than a decade now. We go see The Light in the Piazza, a new musical at Lincoln Center. The lush, romantic story begins in Florence when Clara, a young American girl, loses her hat to a gust of wind. The hat is rescued by a handsome young Italian named Fabrizio. Their eyes lock, and they fall immediately in love.
After the play, Cathy and Gary walk hand in hand, and Jim walks with Hanlon. I ask Fanny what she thought of the play. “I don’t buy that opening,” she says. “No one falls in love at first sight. It’s overly romantic.” She rolls her eyes.
Her words alarm me and I look to Cathy for her reaction. How can Fanny, at fifteen, so adamantly disdain this notion, the basis of so much literature and art and music? “Surely you don’t really believe that it’s impossible to recognize one’s soul mate across a crowded room?” I ask her.
“Papa,” she says very seriously, as if she’s the parent speaking to a child, “to really love someone, you need to know them. You can’t truly love someone you don’t know. You can feel sexual attraction for them, of course. But not love. That comes later.” I’m annoyed that she’s telling me something I cannot logically argue.
At Café Fiorello, we order profiteroles with hot fudge sauce. Fanny goes to the ladies’ room. Jim, Hanlon, and Gary are discussing Hanlon’s life at college. Cathy takes both my hands from across the table.
“Did you ever figure it out?” she asks me.
“Figure out what?”
She looks surprised. “The answer to your question.”
I’m puzzled, but I know she isn’t being coy. There was, there is a question, but it is so wedged into my life, so much a part of me, that I have to unearth it, gently, slowly, from its resting place. The question begs at me from a candlelit room, nearly sixteen years back, and then the CD shuffle that is my mind flips back further still—to two figures awkwardly embracing in the parking lot of a suburban mall, to the reflected green glow of a dashboard. The question endures. It’s a question that has been asked of me about Cathy time and time again: Why did she do it? How could she give up her daughter?
“I think I know that you loved me,” I tell her.
“And I loved that you loved Jim. Giving you Fanny, giving you parenthood, I just knew it was the right thing.”
“What about you?” I ask her.
“I have a daughter,” she says. “A beautiful, amazing daughter.”
“But I hurt you so much, back then,” I say.
“And you also loved me so much. In your way. Before anyone else did. You were the first. That changed everything for me.”
I let this sink in.
There is another, a bigger question, of course, one that I ask only of myself and cannot share out loud. What part of me could have allowed Cathy to do this? What kind of man allows a friend to make that kind of sacrifice?
This thought is interrupted by Fanny’s return from the washroom. She sits beside her mother, amidst our silence. She digs into the gooey ice cream in front of her. Perhaps the answer to my question takes me to a place where I cannot linger. Or maybe it’s a lot simpler. How could I have missed the opportunity to be this child’s father?
To distract myself, I decide to ask Fanny a question. “So, honey, you never really said which Streisand album does show her at her peak. I’ve always meant to ask you. Ever since your bat mitzvah.”
She looks at me blankly. “Oh, that. I don’t remember. It’s bad enough that people think you named me for her. I mean, for her character in that movie. I always have to tell them that even though I have gay dads, they weren’t queer enough to name me after some gay icon’s Oscar-winning role. And then when I tell them that my name is actually from the title of some Ingmar Bergman movie, they just look really confused.”
I pretend to be crestfallen.
Cathy pipes up and takes Fanny’s hand. “Well, didn’t Papa always say it was The First Barbra Streisand Album?”
Fanny looks very serious. “No, I think it was The Second Barbra Streisand Album.”
“No,” Cathy says adamantly. “Definitely it was The Third Barbra Streisand Album.”
And then at the same moment, they both crack up.
Cathy spoons some melted ice cream to her lips, in near hysterics. Fanny joins her, practically snorting ice cream from her nose. I watch the two women I love most in my life, my heart full to bursting, and I begin to laugh, too. I laugh so hard that I feel tears streaming down my face.