Life Blood Part 1

Life Blood.

by Thomas Hoover.

Chapter One

New York, New York. A blissful spring morning beckoned, cloudless and blue and pure. I was driving my high-mileage Toyota down Seventh Avenue, headed for the location shoot that was supposed to wind up princ.i.p.al photography for my first feature film, _Baby Love_. It was about the pain and joy of adoption. I guess directing your first feature is something like giving birth to your first child, but that gets us way, way ahead of the story.

My name, by the way, is Morgan Smyth James, after two grandmothers, and I'm thirty-eight and single and strive to be eternally optimistic. That morning, however, in spite of everything else, I was missing Steve terribly and feeling like I'd screwed up essential components of my life.

To try for some perspective, let me say I'd always planned to have a normal, loving family. Really. Find an emotionally present soul mate who cared about things I care about--okay, slim and smart and spectacular in bed wouldn't be a minus--get married on a lawn with lots of white roses some sunny June afternoon, work one or even two perfect kids into our fulfilling, giving lives. But somehow I'd managed to have none of that. I'd messed up at every turn.

In reality I had n.o.body to blame but myself. Eighteen years ago, just out of college, I turned down two really nice guys. My body was fertile and hormone-driven--was it ever!--but grad school loomed and my greatest fear (instead of, as now, my fondest hope) was getting "trapped" into motherhood. Also, I had the youthful delusion that life was forever.

There was, in truth, one simpatico young director I met at NYU film school whom I would have married in a minute, but after Jason won my heart he dumped me for his undergraduate sweetheart who had skillfully gotten herself knocked up during his Christmas break.

Which was when I first developed my fallback strategy for coping with bad news. After moping around in sweats for two days, cutting cla.s.s and hiding in a revival house showing a G.o.ddard retrospective, not understanding half the French and too bleary-eyed to read the subt.i.tles, I decided to build a defense system. From that day on, I'd put all heartbreak in a special box, nail down the lid, and act as though it wasn't there. It worked then and it still works, more or less, now. People sometimes accuse me of living in selective denial (they're right), but it makes me one heck of a survivor.

And something else. I decided then and there to focus my life: I'd concentrate on learning to make movies and let the family part just play out naturally. I had the idea that whereas men's affections couldn't be controlled, a career could. Even then I realized it was only a partial truth, but I decided to go with it anyway.

Which brings us down to three years back. And a funny thing was happening. Almost without realizing it, I'd started lingering in stores to look at little pink jumpers, begun gazing into the baby carriages that suddenly seemed to be sprouting everywhere. The phrase "my baby"

became the most powerful one I could imagine, made my throat swell till I'd half choke.

At which precise time, like a _deus ex machina_, enter Steve Abrams, the man who gave me hope. He came along just as I was noticing that infinite stream of wonderful guys had dwindled down to relations.h.i.+p dropouts, men with distant eyes and former wives in other states. We discovered each other at the reopened Oloffson Hotel in Haiti, where I was shooting a doc.u.mentary about voodoo and he was photographing that country's ragged, plucky children for National Geographic. No ex-spouses, no need for psychic pampering. Okay, he wasn't going to win a Mr. Universe contest any time soon; he had a couple of extra pounds that, actually, I kind of liked. But he was my age, had great brown eyes, sandy hair thinning only just a bit. No Greek G.o.d but definitely a man. He could tune a Jeep carburetor with his eyes closed or fix a cranky hotel lock, then recite Byron (sort of) and proceed to snare the perfect Chilean red for crawfish _etouffee_ (yes!). But I knew I loved him when I realized it was more than any of that. I felt as if I'd found the other half of myself. Just one glance across the table and we each knew what the other was thinking, feeling. We'd laugh at the same instant, then as though on cue, half cry together over the miseries of that wretched island. Sometimes it was almost eerie. And as for lovemaking, let me just say Steve didn't need a how-to manual. We were made for each other.

Maybe it's un-PC to mention it, but I also felt safe around him. And I think he felt the same. We liked that feeling. Us fending off the world.

When we got back to New York, we had to see each other every day. We still had separate apartments--thanks to the New York real-estate squeeze--but we were scouting in our spare time for an affordable loft in lower Manhattan that could accommodate Steve's darkroom, my office, and--yes--a baby. We evolved into parents-to-be, pricing baby carriages. Who could have predicted it? The joy of sharing a need. It was a total high.

Before long we decided to stop waiting for the perfect

s.p.a.ce. We'd start on the baby anyway, our first joint project--which, we believed, would only be the first of many.

But nothing happened. Over a year and still nothing.

That was when life began to feel like a cruel bait-and-switch. When you aren't ready, you can produce a baby in a momentary absence-of-mind, whereas once you're finally an adult, accomplished, lots-to-offer woman, ready to be the mother you wish you'd had, your body has closed down your baby-making equipment like an unused Rust Belt factory.

Fertility has calculatingly abandoned you for the Sun Belt of youth.

"Well," Dr. Hannah Klein, my long-time ob/gyn, declared, "our tests all indicate you're both fertile, so just keep trying, under optimum conditions."

Optimum conditions. There followed almost a year of "optimum conditions." Do it upside down; wait and have a cold shower while I take my temperature; no, not that way, not tonight. My mucus is thicker: Quick! Eventually we both began feeling like laboratory rats.

Our once-incredible love life drifted into something only a boot-camp sergeant with n.a.z.i leanings could be turned on by.

I think that's what finally caused Steve to go over the edge. Three months ago--a Friday morning I shall never forget--he stepped out of my shower, swathed himself in a white towel, and announced he was going to Central America to do a book. He needed time to think. The move, he explained, wasn't about us. He really wanted to spend a year down there with his Nikon, capturing the region's tentative processes of democratic transition. Besides, he was beginning to think we'd both gone a little mental about the baby.

Out came that special box of heartbreak again. I consoled myself we were just having a seventh-inning stretch, but the wisdom in that box told me I'd somehow blown it. The baby we hadn't created had become a specter hovering in the ether between us, ever a reminder of failure.

As a parting gesture, the never-say-die long shot, he left a "deposit"

with Dr. Klein--for her liquid-nitrogen womb-in-waiting--enough for two final intrauterine inseminations. Later on today I was going to see her and find out if our last and final attempt had stuck. But nothing about my cycle was giving me any hope.

In the meantime, though, I had a movie to finish. We were shooting an interview at a five-story condominium building in Greenwich Village belonging to a woman named Carly Grove, who'd recently adopted. Her story was intriguing, but now--with my own hopes of ever having a baby down to two outs in the bottom of the ninth--well, now I had more than one reason for wanting to meet her. . . .

When I arrived, I lucked into a parking s.p.a.ce right in front. Our security guy, Lou Crenshaw, was off today getting some city paperwork sorted out, but my crew was already upstairs--as director I get to arrive at a decent hour, though later on I also get to do lonely postproduction work till midnight--leaving our three vans double-parked, with a New York City Film Board permit prominently displayed inside each winds.h.i.+eld. The building, formerly a Hertz parking garage, was near the end of Barrow Street, facing the Hudson River, and was filled with artists and entrepreneurs.

The truth was, I wanted to get the interview on film as soon as possible. I was more than a little worried Carly might decide to get cold feet and back out. She'd started to hedge when I had one last confirming chat with her last night, something about a "no-disclosure"

agreement she now remembered signing. This had to be a one-take, all-or-nothing shoot.

Which was why I'd sent down the full gang this morning, not just the "key" personnel as I'd initially planned. Leading my (motley) crew was the director of photography, first cameraman Roger Drexel, a grizzled veteran with a ponytail who'd been with my producer, David Roth and his Applecore Productions, from back when he did beach movies and splatter films. He worked with the production manager, Erica Cole, our lipstick lesbian, who coordinated crew schedules. The second camera was handled by Greer Seiber, recently of NYU film school, who was so happy to have a job, any job, she acted as though David's previous string of low-budget, B-flick epics were remakes of _Gone With the Wind_.

Scott Ventri, another Applecore old-timer, was key grip, the guy who got the gear on and off the vans, set it up, and signed off on safety regs. Today he also was responsible for blacking out windows and setting up lights. The chief electrician, gaffer, was Ralph Cafiero, who'd come down the previous day and temporarily hot-wired the circuit breaker in the apartment to make sure there was enough amperage. He and his lighting "crew," another bright-eyed (and cheap) NYU grad named Paul Nulty, had arrived this morning ahead of everybody else to pre-light the "set," a northeast corner of the apartment.

I'm always a little hyper about sound, so I'd asked Tony Wills, who handled recording, to also come down the previous day and record the "tone" of the living room, the sound when there is no sound, in order to have it available for editing. Today he'd run the boom mike and be a.s.sisted by Sherry Moran, his latest girlfriend, who was mixer/recordist. For Carly's makeup and hair, I had Arlene Morris, an old friend from all the way back to my early days as an AD on the soaps. . . .

I rang Carly's bell and she buzzed me right up.

She doubtless had a closet full of Donna Karan suits, but she came to the door in pre-faded jeans and a striped sweater.

A successful publicity agent, she was pet.i.te, with dark hair and eyes and an obvious don't-bug-me take on life.

"Come on in. My nanny's here to help keep Kevin out of the way." She was sounding like she'd gotten her old s.p.u.n.k back, or so it seemed at first. "I've completely cleared the living room."

I looked around the place, now a vision of setup pandemonium. "You're sure this is all right?"

"Well . . ." She was biting at her lip. "Maybe we ought to talk first, okay? But come on in. I'll probably do it. Maybe I just need a good reason to. . . ."

As her voice trailed off, I found myself mining my brain for a sales point. Finally, out of the blue, I settled on one. "Because you're totally crazy?"

She laughed out loud. "Not a bad start. I live in total madness. It's the definition of my life."

I laughed too and looked around. No kidding. Her loft apartment was a wild mixture of stairs and galleries and levels--unconventional in every way. Also, it had a lot of in-your-face decor, outrageous posters, and African fertility masks, signs of a wonderful, irreverent personality. Then too, stuffed animals and toys were strewn all over.

"I can't really afford the rent," she declared, seeing me survey the place, "but I need the s.p.a.ce for Kevin. I've just joined Bloomingdale's Anonymous. Twelve steps to shredding your charge plates."

Her nanny, a Jehovah's Witness from Jamaica named Marcy (who reminded me of a cuddly voodoo doll, complete with cornrows), was bringing Carly's little boy Kevin down from his bath in the upstairs bathroom.

He was definitely adopted, sandy-haired and peachy, nothing like Carly's dark, severe strands and Mediterranean skin. When Marcy put him down, he tried to walk, and I felt my envy ratchet upward a notch. He'd just started taking tentative steps, at eleven months old, and there was still a Frankenstein quality as he strode stiff-legged, arms out for balance.

I walked over, picked him up, and gave him a kiss. He looked like a Scandinavian travel poster, a cherubic vision, and I felt a great void growing where my heart had been. Then Marcy reached out and pried him from me. I hated to let him go so much I almost pulled him back.

"You're so lucky," I said to Carly, feeling a surge of yearning. "He's great."

"You know," she said, "I've been thinking about that 'no disclosure'

thing Children of Light made me sign. That's their name, by the way.

Like a vow of silence about them. They seemed pretty serious about it."

Dear G.o.d, I thought, don't let her chicken out. Don't, don't.

"So, we won't mention them. Just never use their name."