Breed Read Free

meditation was offered, and where all they got was a wrenched back for Alex and a touch of food poisoning for Leslie. They have consulted homeopaths and psychiatrists, and, though neither of them is particularly religious, they also went to a clinic called Answered Prayers, in which words and phrases such as ectopic, ovarian cysts, endometriosis, polycystic ovarian syndrome, teratozoospermia, and oopause were bandied about but where it basically boiled down to readings of the New Testament and listening to sermons about opening yourself to the blessings of God. They fasted, they ate nothing but fruit, they had the cleanest colons in the world.
    And they worried about their marriage. They had seen firsthand how the Baby Hunt doused the flames of romance, turning the joy of sex into the job of sex and making the body a source of failure rather than pleasure. But still they persisted—six different in vitro fertilizations, and a thorough investigation of the legal and psychological dangers of an egg donor or a sperm donor, or even a live person who could impregnate Leslie or whom Alex could impregnate, even though expensive technicians had already tested Leslie’s eggs and Alex’s sperm and as far as anyone could see they were just fine. Yet lightning would not strike; it was out there, but it was dry, distant lightning, just a little quiver of light in the lowering sky, with no rain to follow.
     
    Tonight as they make their way through Central Park after the support-group meeting (what Alex calls the Fertilize-Her Society), with nothing to look forward to except a quiet dinner for two and, depending on Leslie’s basal temperature, some sad copulation, Leslie and Alex see Jim and Jill Johnson walking their little Yorkshire terrier.
    They had come to know the Johnsons, however slightly, through the Uptown Infertility Support Group, though it has been months since the Johnsons have been in attendance. The Johnsons are like them in many ways. Like Alex, Jim is significantly older than his wife; Jim, too, is a lawyer, though with a practice far less lucrative than Alex’s. Like Leslie, Jill is from the Midwest; Jill is a high school teacher and seems to envy Leslie, imagining her job as an editor at a publishing company to be full of glamour and excitement. Twice they all had drinks together after their group meeting, and once they even met for dinner. The dinner was not a success. Jill seemed to have some strange grievance against Leslie. She would say things like “Oh, it must feel strange for you being out with a poor little high school teacher.”
    “That’s insane,” Leslie had exclaimed, to Alex’s delight.
    Tonight, Jim Johnson is dressed in a dark brown leather jacket and a light brown beret. His hair is much too long. To Alex, he looks like one of those lawyers who imagine themselves champions of the underdogs but who are actually vain grandstanders, would-be gadflies, Sandinistas in three-piece suits. But the real sight to behold is Jill. Never particularly slender, she is immense. At first Alex thinks unhappiness and bad genes have made Jill obese, but he realizes she is pregnant, gloriously, radiantly, and, by the looks of it, quintupfully pregnant. New York City, some say, is the schadenfreude capital of the world—but for Alex and Leslie, seeing a formerly infertile couple pregnant gives them hope. The Johnsons have been trying to get pregnant for eleven years.
    “So how did this happen?” Alex bursts out, pointing at Jill’s belly.
    “Alex,” Leslie says, giving him a little shove.
    “It’s a reasonable question,” he says, as if to her but really to them. “After all we’ve been through together? Come on, we’re soldiers in the same battalion. Right? So what is it? A new diet, a new exercise, a new doctor?”
    But the Johnsons are playing coy. “You know, the thing is,” Jill says, “we tried so many things, in the end I’m not sure what the heck worked.” Her voice is breathless; she