Baby Love Read online

  The proposal went something like this: How would you like to have a baby with us? We’ve thought about it, and, well, you’re one of the only people in the world we can imagine doing this with. Sure, we’d like you to be involved because children need fathers, but you could choose your involvement level. Oh, and we want to get pregnant the natural way, no turkey basters. Is that all right with you?

  When we initially proposed, the man I favored immediately took himself out of the running. He had been privy to too many of our conversations in which we reduced men to their genetic attributes. He declared that our relationship was intimate enough, thank you very much. Besides, he said with a Cheshire grin, he didn’t know where things might go if we started having sex. I laughed when he said this, and stole a look at his strong, beautiful hands. I didn’t disagree.

  Our second choice was a man who had been close to my girlfriend for many years in several capacities. John was loyal, kind, and intelligent. He picked us up from the airport. He counseled the girlfriend through each of her several dozen career crises. He had already taken on the responsibility of fathering two children who were not his own, and one of them had just been accepted to Harvard. John was also an athlete, an attribute I found particularly alluring. By the time we proposed, he had come to rest in the position of brother, or, at the very least, lifelong friend.

  I liked John.

  We asked John in a more gradual way, over time, using the same questions and phrases, but spaced over months and interlaced with conversations about travel, business, and politics. We asked him to father our child in the way his thoughtful and methodical personality demanded: with gravity, sensitivity, and as much tact as we could muster. Because he was already so embedded in our lives, the proposition was not as much about having a baby as it was about extending our life together and building a nontraditional but committed family.

  We talked seriously about moving to Europe, where the girlfriend had a big following, and where I could write and be cared for by the thriving holistic midwifery and healing network. I could learn French, and the baby could be bilingual, and we could live in one of those charming villages in Switzerland in the crook of a mountain road overlooking Lake Geneva, a few miles from the Evian spring. Or we could move to South Africa, where the girlfriend had a big following, and where we could be surrounded by black people deep in the inspirational throes of the project of self-determination. John could be our business manager. John could be our husband.

  John was not opposed to the idea, or should I say the fantasy, but this is where it began to get messy. In addition to having dreams of his own of living in Cuba, he was not altogether sure that he wanted to enter our relationship. For one thing, the girlfriend and I fought a lot, and for another thing, John had his own idealistic visions of family, and these visions did not necessarily include two additional women, no matter how dynamic.

  There was also the not-minor hindrance of his girlfriend, a woman he’d known since high school and had been involved with for several months. During our discussions, we were surprised to find out that John liked this woman a great deal, that is, when he wasn’t talking to us about not liking her and not knowing how to get out of the relationship.

  And so it was in the very familiar soup of ambivalence and ambiguity that we began our crazy, rather irresponsible, and beautiful science experiment of trying to make a baby with John. The project included serious and somber conversations at restaurants on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, restaurants that were organic, intercultural, and macrobiotic, restaurants that were futuristic stabs at the kind of hybridity we were, ourselves, considering. Seated around tables with chopsticks and carrot juice and brown rice and Chino-Cuban arroz con pollo, we said, Yes, we want to do this; yes, we think this could be a good thing; yes, why not? We love each other, we are already family, right?

  Which led to an evening at one of the hotels we liked, a hotel that felt like home not just because the staff gave us a good rate (fans of the girlfriend), but because we had lived there one summer in a beautiful beige-and-white room that overlooked Broadway and the gorgeous old apartment buildings that line it. I don’t remember much of the encounter, only that I concentrated very hard on getting pregnant. And that the next morning I crawled out from under John’s heavy limbs and made my way to the bathroom. Steadying myself amid the brushed aluminum and stylized black-and-white prints of orchids, I looked at myself in the mirror and wondered: Is this the face of a pregnant woman? Then I stumbled into an armchair and scribbled a few lines in my journal.

  Since accompanying my girlfriend on the road, I used my journal to keep track of our comings and goings. On the inside covers of dime-store notebooks, I made long lists of cities and dates, and pressed my marked-up backstage passes onto the blank sheets in between. I felt that unless I did this, recorded places and times and some tiny sliver, even if only a sentence, there would be no record of the life streaming through each day. And because I am fundamentally a woman who wants stability, I wanted—no, needed—a record, a way to evoke forever the musicians and fans, the airplane flights and bus trips, the hotel rooms and especially the freak encounters that make life on the road, for all of its drudgery, magical.

  (An evening in the aforementioned Swiss village, in an alpine chalet overlooking Lake Geneva, comes to mind. Claude, the legend behind the Montreux Jazz Festival, pulling tapes from his archives and there, in his screening room, Aretha Franklin, twenty years ago, playing the piano and singing her heart out.)

  Because these elements were such an integral part of our life, they were our life, and because I could not imagine that my girlfriend and I would no longer have this life together, I was forced to think pragmatically about bringing the baby on the road. I had moved around a lot as a child and could romanticize the time on the bus as a nomadic lifestyle full of change and diversity. But did I want my child to have rootlessness as an organizing principle? The girlfriend deemed it possible, but I had major doubts, and my scrawled notes from that morning reflected those doubts. After the date and the city and the evening’s activity, I scrawled, Baby on the bus? Nursing on the back of a stinky Prevo?

  I cannot swear that the way I remember the rest of this story is exactly the way it played out, but I guarantee that only small details may be inaccurate and not the gist of the thing, not the core event. There were days of thinking I might be pregnant. Days of waiting and nights of lying in bed trying to figure out how I was going to explain the how of this baby to my extended family and even, to the extent that it was interested, to the world at large.

  At the onset of these days—I would say on day two or three—came the news that John and his girlfriend were no longer seeing each other. Around day seven came the news that John was seeing his girlfriend again, but only to process the breakup and/or talk about the possibility of being together in the future. On day fourteen or fifteen, John came to us and told us that the girlfriend, whom he was now not seeing, was pregnant, and even though he wasn’t sure he wanted the baby, he wasn’t sure he could stop her from having it.

  My girlfriend and I were horrified. Outraged. Deeply hurt. There were long, cross-country arguments on cell phones, and immature, hyperbolic disavowals in doorways. I, for one, was never so happy and relieved to get my period, an event that, from my perspective, took everything down a notch, or ten. Months passed. I stopped feeling like I had lost a popularity contest. I stopped feeling like I had lost a fertility contest. Though my girlfriend was devastated and vowed it would never be the same, the family slowly reconvened. We decided to befriend the actual mom-to-be, and even though I am pretty sure we both secretly fantasized she was carrying a baby that would ultimately belong to us, we came to terms with what in private we labeled John’s gullibility.

  Which is how I came to be holding John’s baby and not my own at a restaurant in TriBeCa ten months later. The birth had been traumatic, and this was one of the first days out of the house for mother and son. We were doing a group dinner, the kind th
e girlfriend and I did a lot as a way of keeping the extended tribe together. We invited John and his girlfriend/not girlfriend and their baby as a way of saying we still love you, there is room in the fold even though you lied to us, or didn’t, and even though you chose someone else over us, or didn’t.

  It was an extraordinary experience—heartbreaking, really—to be eating fish with one hand, and holding in the other a tiny, beautiful creature who should have been mine, could have been mine, but wasn’t.

  I will never forget it.

  September 18

  We’ve arrived in Miami for the Dalai Lama’s teaching: World Peace Through Inner Peace. Glen’s teacher sponsored the teaching, and we are here as special invited guests, which means attending various gatherings with His Holiness and various dignitaries from all over the world. The first teaching is tomorrow at eight a.m. Khenpo expects close to twenty thousand people to attend, which is amazing because the television is full of hurricane warnings and evacuation notices. Two days ago there was talk of evacuating Miami, but Khenpo held firm. When we asked why he didn’t leave, he said that only the people who are afraid of dying are leaving. And then he laughed his huge laugh. When we landed, the sky was blue, not a cloud in sight.

  We checked into our hotel last night and I’ve been luxuriating ever since. They say the architecture is “Mediterranean Revival,” but it’s more Moorish Italianate to me. Whatever you call it, it’s just stunning, with elaborate tile work and impossibly high ceilings. I just came from a nighttime swim in possibly the most amazing pool ever. It’s billed as the biggest in the continental United States, and at 700,000 gallons, I believe it. I swam by moonlight with soft jazz playing and palm trees blowing in the breeze. The hotel was built in the twenties and I truly felt I was in a different era, and the flappers were going to come out and put on a show.

  As I swam, I imagined that the water was precious purifying nectar, cleansing my mind and body of thoughts of anger, jealousy, and greed. I thought about how there is no new water, and that all of the water on the planet has been here, cycling through its various incarnations, for millions of years. I thought about how that same ancient water is inside of me, and so part of me has also been here for millions of years.

  After a while, I flipped onto my back and looked out into the vast night sky. Floating, I wondered about the baby. Where did he come from? How did he get here? Where will he go?

  How is it possible that I love him so much?

  September 19

  Today was the luncheon with His Holiness. He entered the room with his entourage of attendants and bodyguards, bowing and making eye contact with as many people as possible. The electricity in the room was palpable, like it must have been when Kennedy walked into a room, or Gandhi. When he reached the podium, he paused, looked out at everyone, and said that human beings have different hair and different eye color, we wear different clothes and come from different places. But really, he said, at the fundamental level, we are all the same.

  I can’t do justice to the moment, but it was amazing, an empowerment. For a brief second, and forever after for some, you could actually feel the truth of what he was saying. It wasn’t just a social or political idea, but an actual experience of sameness and, ultimately, of a world not chopped up by dualistic thinking.

  It was like the sky opened up.

  September 20

  Tonight after the teachings, we had dinner in the hotel restaurant. A harried mom with baby in tow spotted my huge, unmistakably pregnant belly, and proceeded to tell me her whole story: the difficult pregnancy, the complicated birth, the intense sleep-deprivation. I smiled through the whole litany and then asked her, But is it worth it? And she looked at me like I was crazy. Oh, of course. It’s so totally worth it. You won’t believe it. It’s like no love you’ve ever known.

  I rest my case.

  After my late-night swim, I came back to the room and admired myself in the mirror. I am really getting into my pregnant body. I’ve finally got the full breasts I’ve always wanted, and my thighs, which I’ve always considered just a tad larger than ideal, are now in perfect proportion.

  As I was standing there, thinking how downright voluptuous I am, Glen came up behind me and shared a sentiment that won him the Best Thing Your Partner Can Say When You Are Pregnant Award. He said, You’ve never been more beautiful. Which turned me right then and there into a goddess. I felt so powerful, having just bathed in the moonlight, and rubbed some kind of outrageous-smelling Tahitian oil all over my belly, that I had to turn around and give him the biggest, juiciest kiss ever.

  September 21

  Landed at JFK and was practically blinded by the newspaper headlines: “Yes She Is!” and “Pregnant and Still Thin.” Apparently, a TV star presumed heterosexual is in love with a woman, and most of the rich, pregnant women in New York are starving themselves so that they can stay CWP—cute while pregnant. Both headlines had me at hello. I had to stop at Hudson News.

  The pregnancy article is horrifying. It seems that women don’t want to wear maternity clothes or lose their waistlines, so they restrict their diets and try to subsist on a bottle of water and an apple a day. I guess they’re not having the renaissance of self-love brought on by baby love I’m having. Yikes. The whole idea of DWP, dieting while pregnant, makes me sad and hungry.

  September 23

  Last night I told everybody I am thinking about naming the baby Tenzin. My stepmother looked up from her plate and said, Tenzin? What kind of name is that? Then my father said that no matter what I named him, he was going to exercise his right as a grandfather to call him whatever he wanted, which was Chaim. I told them that Tenzin is the Dalai Lama’s name and that I can’t think of anyone better to be named after. To which my stepmother responded, Isn’t there anyone in the family you could name him after? And my father said, Yeah Rebec, what about Samuel? David? Moishe?

  I felt like Judas.

  Before we arrived at the question of what to name the first biological grandchild of the Leventhal clan, we focused our collective energy on whether or not my sister, an aspiring actress, should take a role on a reality show. My brother and I were vehemently opposed and got so unbelievably vocal about the whole thing, with my father chiming in from the sidelines with a “legal perspective” and my stepmother picking at her miso cod and trying not to get involved, that my sister finally had no choice but to accuse us of trying to control her life. She stormed out of the room as I yelled, We are only telling you this because we love you, to which everyone nodded approvingly and my father said, That’s right, Rebec, after which my sister slammed her bedroom door.

  It was my first dinner with them as a ravenous, two-headed, big-bellied omnivore. My father got a huge kick out of watching me eat two California rolls, one filet mignon yakitori, a giant salad, an order of Agadashi tofu, two bowls of miso soup, and an entire order of steamed vegetable dumplings. He kept beaming and saying things like, So you’re eating for two, my Rebecca? Eat plenty for my grandson in there, the little schmutzky, and asking if I wanted the rest of his chicken-and-vegetable dish.

  September 25

  We went to my stepmother’s best friend Ronnie’s house to break the fast for the Jewish holiday of atonement, Yom Kippur. Jason, Ronnie’s black, white, and Jewish son, with whom I used to watch The Love Boat and Fantasy Island sprawled on his mom’s bed, was there with his new girlfriend. She’s Cuban, but has never been to Cuba. Of course this possibility didn’t occur to me until after I had talked about how beautiful the island is and how the people are so incredible. The blank look on her face tipped me off. Then I started obsessing about how her family must have lost everything in the revolution and they probably hate Fidel or at least have serious and legitimate gripes. Then here I come, a spoiled American, talking about it like just another place I visited and added to my places-I-have-gone-and-now-have-an-opinion-about list. Gross.

  The question of naming came up again. Ronnie said, Tenzin? No, I don’t like that so much. Then my
stepmother said, What are the kids at school going to call him? and my brother said, Ten. My father threw his hands up and said, I like Chaim, and I said, Dad, we talked about this, which we had, earlier in the day. I told him that I would not have anyone, including his grandfather, subjecting my child to even the merest hint of identity confusion. I said, What if Grandma had insisted on calling me Susan? And he paused and said, You’re right, I would have told her that your name was Rebecca. But how is he going to get a job with a name like Tenzin?

  You know, he said seriously, there is a group of women with names like Shanequa speaking publicly about how their names have kept them from succeeding in the workplace. They’re all changing their names to Mary.

  I told him that Tenzin was a perfectly respectable name, and part of a tradition at least twenty-five hundred years old.

  Then I asked him how many jobs he thought Chaim would get, and we both burst into laughter.

  September 26

  The shower was yesterday. It blew me away. There were people from so many different parts of my life in one room, and for the first time I felt elation rather than dread at the thought of them all coming together. My East Coast family, the Yale mafia, the literary troupe, some Bay Area peeps who happened to be in the city, the buddies I got to keep after the big breakup, two rugged and beautiful idealists from the days I was running around raising money for nonprofits.

  Even though I don’t see many of them often, the people who came are definitely a part of my tribe, that ever-expanding crew held together by the resonance of a three-hour talk one night at a club about a relationship, or a series of conversations about a TV show we developed together, or a lunch about an essay that led to a discussion about marriage and kids and where the hell our lives were going. I’ve never felt happier to be surrounded by such a warm and loving bunch, or more certain I was in the exact right place at the right time.