Moonface (12 page)

Under the stately dome, a Russian judge with dyed red hair and burgundy glasses begins the ceremony but interrupts herself, suddenly curious about her state-issued script: “Do you think that line is from Shakespeare?”

“Uh, no. Maybe the Bible?” I say, curious myself.

“Ha!” she snorts. “How about that?”

She says “Charles O”Doily” instead of “O”Doyle,” and Charlie looks at me cross-eyed. The entire scene looks like an awkward dress rehearsal of a cast of understudies who don't quite know their parts. We had finalized Charlie's costume at a vintage store on Haight Street the night before: a brown cowboy shirt with pearlized buttons and dark brown chinos. I had flown to San Francisco with a white, knee-length eyelet dress, collared and belted around the waist, folded in my carry-on. While we waited for our time slot, Charlie went around the corner to a flower shop and bought me a bouquet of bright yellow tulips bound with a thin ribbon. He squeezes my fingers as we face each other to take our vows. I'm not actually sure if we're supposed to say, “I do,” or “yes,” or something from Shakespeare. But when Natasha the Ab-sentminded Judge finally tells us to kiss, Charlie pulls me close, holding my face in his sweaty palms. As I stand there on my tiptoes, my lips pressed against his, the judge lets out a sigh, and the tour group of young people, who have been watching the entire ceremony in silence from the balcony, explodes in cheers and applause.

My mother is speechless when I tell her on the phone what we have just done. The pause is remarkably long, and I just want to make sure she didn't hang up.

“Hello?” I say.

But the person who answers is not her but my father. “What's wrong with your mother? She looks white,” he says. When I tell him the news, he is not quiet at all, but screams with joy. “What news! What news!” he says. “We love you both!”

“Mom does, too?” I ask him.

“Yes, she's just caught off guard. She's happy.” Then I hear him whisper to her, “Tell them how happy you are.”

She gets on the phone and starts to tell us off in Tagalog just as

Charlie and I turn onto Fulton Street, and I look at him like we're two kids in big trouble. She tells us we're selfish and irresponsible, and just before she hangs up, she says, “Pag-u-untogin ko ang ullo ninyo!” Translation: “I'm going to take your heads and bash them together.”

“Uh-oh,” Charlie says, when she finally hangs up.

“Don't worry,” I tell him. “She can't stay mad at us.”

We walk up the hill back to our hotel to change before we get dim sum and take a ride around, up past the Golden Gate. We keep making calls, though, enjoying the different reactions we're getting. Charlie's brother cackles into the phone for three minutes straight, unable to contain his laughter. My brother refuses to believe us.

“Is this a joke?” he says. “For real. Tell me the truth.”

“No,” I tell him.

“I won't believe you until I see the marriage certificate.”

Charlie's mother starts crying immediately. We hear nothing but sobbing for several minutes. “Mom?” Charlie says.

“Yes, I'm happy, I'm happy,” she says, sniffling between breaths. “Now it's time for grandbabies.”

My mother calls us back several hours later. We have already driven up to the coast, hiked a trail, and sat on the beach looking out over the Pacific. I pick up the phone, and she says, with the same singsong tone she usually uses to tease me, “Hello, Mr. and Mrs. O”Doyle.”

Poor Charlie can't catch a break. On our honeymoon in Belize, I stand on the beach in a bikini and push out my belly as far as I can without falling over onto the sand.

“Chaaaaaaarlie,” I sing to him.

He looks up at fake-pregnant me, rolls over in his lounge chair, and hides his face in a beach towel. He's just barely been forgiven by our parents for our clandestine wedding, and already his wife is hitting him up for sperm.

Once we get back to Baltimore, we visit our three-year-old niece Genevieve often, as she and her parents live just a few blocks down from our building. Charlie comes home exhausted after a day of tossing her in the air, stumbling over his own feet just to make her squeal, and tickling her from her neck down to her feet. He falls like dead weight on the bed, and I stand over him looking disappointed. “Yeah,” I say. “You'd never last a day as a dad.”

He pops up on his elbows. “What? I'd make a great dad. I'm offended,” he says with a scowl.

“Prove it,” I say.

When we circle the issue of having a baby, Charlie doesn't avoid it. He looks me square in the eyes and explains his resistance.

“You're not losing this kidney,” he says.

“I don't want to lose it,” I tell him.

“Okay,” he says, like the conversation is through.

“That's it?” I ask.

“No,” he says. “I want a baby, too. If you can find a way to have one without losing this kidney, then the conversation will continue.”

I never officially asked my doctors if having a baby was out of the question for me. Despite the envy that grows in me when I see pregnant women walking down the street—their bellies protruding over their toes—and despite this craving I cannot ignore, I know that my health is always precarious, tilting on the edge of a cliff. But at night when Charlie sleeps, I look at him and know that I cannot lose this kidney. I devise ways to get what I want without putting us in danger.

In a meeting at an empty office building one weekday evening, a woman who appears to be the facilitator has high hair from the Glam Rock era and a harsh orange tan from a bottle. Charlie and I squeeze into narrow office seats between several other fresh-faced young heterosexual couples. As the woman clicks through a slideshow of orphans, all categorized by country, she chooses the saddest faces on which to pause. A toddler walking on a cement floor in Guatemala. A baby girl with the sweetest face from China. It is like watching one of those commercials with Sally Struthers—the babies have wide eyes and are swaddled in blankets that look like they have come from flea markets. It tugs at your pathos until you cough up seventeen cents a day.

“Now, these babies, they are really cute. Just look at those little noses,” she says, pointing to a toddler with a high afro. “Ethiopia has been a really easy country for us to get the babies and get their paperwork in order.”

Seeing the faces of those beautiful babies makes me want to bring them home right now, but I get a creepy feeling from this woman, who speaks about acquiring the children as if they were merchandise. “I don't know how I felt about her delivery,” I tell Charlie as we make our way down the florescent-lit hall.

Charlie says, “It felt like I was being sold a car.” He cringes and shakes, as if to get the woman's hard sell off him.

I know what he means. This is different from what we had imagined they'd tell us—stories about the children and what they were like, and how we could open our home to them. But deciding on a country and basing our decision on what the babies look like—it just doesn't feel right.

“So, maybe we should just hold off on this for now?”

“Having a baby?” Charlie asks.

“No, adoption.”

“Um, okay.”

“We should just see if I can get pregnant.”

Then,
boom!
Before he has a chance to agree, Charlie is sitting next to me in a clinic for high-risk obstetrics. The OBGYN is an old man. He is wearing a navy bow tie with bright red squares all over it, but I can't take my eyes off his ears, with their long, low-hanging lobes. The old man wears thick glasses, and he doesn't look up from them. His eyes focus on the folder in his hands, which, among other things, includes a letter from my nephrologist as to the reason we are there.

The doctor doesn't read the words aloud but mumbles through the sentences under his breath, the way people do when they are reading quickly and just trying to find the point of it all. He guides a finger through the lines on the pages as he skims through the information.

“Your medical history is extensive,” he says, still not looking up from his desk. “Two transplants.”

“Yes, one from my brother, and one from my husband,” I say, turning to Charlie.

“Mm-hm,” the old man says. When people hear about my medical history, they are usually impressed. But this guy? He acts like I came from central casting. Straitlaced old-timers like this always make me nervous. I'm trying to understand what he sees when he looks over at me. It is difficult to be taken seriously about pregnancy by an aging obstetrician when you look like you're seventeen. I've been known to overcompensate for this insecurity. At the risk of sounding like a loquacious adolescent, I respond succinctly. I refrain from an impulse to smile (I think my smile makes me look younger), and I attempt to keep mature company, though with Charlie's loose-hanging jeans and his holey orange t-shirt, I'm sure this doctor thinks we're both young idiots who want to get pregnant when they know they shouldn't.

“There are risks,” he says. “There's small birth weight . . .” —he continues to rattle them off in a sleep-inducing monotone— ” ... pre-eclampsia . . .” and while I'm listening, I'm just waiting for the okay. I am ready to hate him, but his words weigh heavy on me. Especially when he says “loss of the graft,” or in other words, “loss of Charlie's kidney.” That's the one I hope he'll overlook or the one he might not consider a threat. “All this being said,” he finishes, “I can't tell you what to do. I can't tell you to get pregnant or not. But ... I would not recommend it. A pregnancy probably would not work out well for you.” He takes his reading glasses off his face, tosses them to the corner of the desk, and eases back into his chair.

This is not the answer I am hoping for. I came to his office so excited because Charlie was willing to come with me and listen to what the doctor had to say, and this is the bullshit he hears. Now I wish Charlie hadn't come with me, that maybe I could go home and construe this conversation a different way for Charlie, focusing on the part where the doctor says, “I'm not one to tell you what to do.” I want to take my hands and cup them over this little man's mouth.

“Your consultation is appreciated,” I tell him. The old doctor stands but doesn't move from behind the desk. He waits for us to leave the room. Walking out of his office, I see the young pregnant ladies of Baltimore—the lady with a bulge pushing through her button-down business shirt, the mother already pushing a jog stroller with twin toddlers, a Latina teenager with large hoop earrings the size of her shoulders. Their bellies are round and full, and I try not to hate them.

Charlie holds my hand in the elevator. We stand side by side facing the door. I keep my eyes focused on the row of numbers above, how they darken one by one as we descend. I try to keep from crying.

Charlie hunts for our car in the parking garage, which seems much colder now than it was when we arrived. “I think we're up a level,” he says, to cut the silence between us. I trail behind him as he starts up the stairs, and I think, What does that doctor know?

“3C or 3D. I can't remember,” Charlie says, making a left out of the stairwell.

I want something different. I want him to tell us how to start making plans. To hope for the best, even if we have to plan otherwise. Before I realize it, I am standing behind our car and Charlie is holding the passenger side door open. I look up from staring at the bumper.

“How dare he!” I shout. My voice resonates against the concrete walls and it feels powerful for only a few seconds before it fades into the corners of the garage. Charlie stops and looks around to see if there is anyone else nearby. “I mean, how dare he, right? He doesn't know how it is going to work out.”

“Moon, the guy has a pretty good idea. Isn't that why we were there?” Charlie says, walking closer to me cautiously.

“But you never know what can happen. This isn't anybody, right?”

Charlie nods.

“Isn't that what you always say, Charlie? Maybe if we believe something magical can happen, it will.”

“He's just looking out for your health,” Charlie says. “He's just giving you the facts.”

“No, he wasn't looking at the possibilities. The good possibilities. He was only looking at the bad.” Charlie knows I'm right. He exhales and his shoulders deflate.

“I know what you mean,” he says. “That guy was totally negative. He was like a wall we couldn't penetrate.”

I am not crying, but as we stand there, I try to imagine our lives three years from now, a baby toddling between us. One that moves like Charlie, has a defiant look, a stiff chin. Maybe he imagines something similar.

“You want this, huh?”

I nod.

“If you really want this, then maybe we can make it happen.”

The next week, I make an appointment with another high-risk doctor at a community hospital north of the city that may not have the prestige of the university hospital but has a reputation for its solid obstetrics department. Yes, I admit it: I am shopping around for a second opinion, or a third, until I get the right answer. It seems unethical, like I'm cheating the results of an experiment. The scenario is the same, only this time, the doctor is in scrubs and he smiles when we take our seats in front of his desk. Silver hair and piercing green eyes, he has color in his cheeks and his ear lobes are undoubtedly normal sized. A good sign! Lebanese, maybe, and he moves swiftly like he keeps himself in shape.

“You know, a surrogate would be ideal,” he begins, looking at us over his tortoiseshell reading glasses. Oh, boy, here we go again. I've decided that this time, no matter how I look or sound, I will be honest with him. “Yes, but—” I start.

“But you want to get pregnant,” he says, smiling. “Yes. I know.” Clearly, he's heard about this overwhelming feeling women get as they move into their early thirties, wanting their bodies to experience something more. He has listened to them. “Well, there are risks—you would have to come in once a week so we can check on you and the fetus. The baby might be small; you might be on bed rest for many months to prevent pre-eclampsia. No questions asked.”