Detour

SIX

You didn’t say anything,” Joanna said.

Joanna wasn’t sleeping. Paul wasn’t either, but only because she’d just woken him.

Said anything when ? He’d been in the middle of a dream involving a college girlfriend and a torpid tropical beach, and for a moment he was shocked to be on a bed in what was obviously a hotel room.

In Bogotá. Yes.

Consciousness continued to fill in like a Polaroid being furiously waved in the air. He was in a hotel room in Bogotá. With his wife.

And his new baby daughter.

Not with Galina, though. She’d departed for home after allowing them to go downstairs for dinner, where they couldn’t find a single Colombian dish on the menu.

Galina was what Joanna was talking about. He hadn’t said anything when Joanna accused Galina of putting Joelle to sleep the wrong way.

“I thought discretion was the better part of valor,” Paul said.

“I see. I read babies are supposed to sleep on their backs, Paul.”

“Maybe she hadn’t read the same articles.”

“Books.”

“Right, books. She probably hadn’t read those either.”

“You should’ve taken my side.”

Paul considered that one. That maybe he should’ve taken her side. He was tempted to point out that they were novices here, and that all things considered, he was inclined to go with empirical knowledge over self-help books and Mother & Baby magazine. On the other hand, if he agreed with her, he had a reasonable chance of being able to turn over and go back to sleep.

“Yes, sorry,” Paul said. “I should’ve, I guess.”

“You guess ? We’re her parents now. We have to support each other.”

“You mean we didn’t have to support each other before?”

Joanna sighed and rolled away from him. “Forget it.”

It was clear that Joanna didn’t actually mean he should forget it.

“Look,” Paul said. “I didn’t know who was right. Suddenly, this baby is ours. We’re . . . responsible for her. Galina seemed to know what she’s doing. I mean, it’s her job. ”

It occurred to Paul that the process of becoming a circle might involve some growing pains. God knows, they’d had enough of them trying to have a baby.

Take sex, for instance.

You could pretty much mark its decline from the moment they’d decided to start a family.

As Paul remembered it, they’d been lying on a nice four-poster bed in Amagansett, Long Island, sloshed on California cabernet. When Joanna said I don’t have my diaphragm in, he didn’t say okay, I’ll wait, and she didn’t get up and get it.

They’d been married six years. They were thirty-two years old. They were drunk and horny and certifiably in love.

It would turn out to be the last spontaneous moment they’d have involving the act of conception.

When her period came a month later, they immediately decided to have another go at it.

This time there was no California cabernet and no Amagansett surf. The results were pretty much the same.

Her friend came right on schedule. Again. Only it wasn’t a friend anymore, as much as an embarrassing if intimate relation she thought she’d booted out of the house, only to discover sitting back out on her front stoop.

In the Breidbart household, menstrual tension became decidedly post.

They soon began the exhausting roundelay of doctors in search of ever-elusive answers, as sex continued its slow and painful evolution from lovemaking to baby -making.

At one point he’d needed to shoot her with fertility drugs exactly one half hour before they performed sex. And it was a kind of performance—increasingly a command performance, summoned to do his duty at various times of the day and night. These times predicated on all sorts of physical factors, none of which had anything to do with actual lust.

A subtle kind of blame game ensued. When a thorough testing of Paul’s sperm revealed that he had a below-average and barely serviceable sperm count, he’d sensed a slight shift in the air. The word you seemed to enter Joanna’s conversation with greater frequency and with what he perceived as an accusatory intonation.

When a thorough testing of Joanna’s ovaries revealed a slight abnormality that could, in some cases, inhibit proper fertilization, Paul had returned the favor. It was cruel and unforgiving.

It was also impossible to stop.

For both of them.

And it wasn’t just each other who began getting on their nerves. Other people too. Lifelong friends of Joanna’s, for instance, whose only crime was their apparently unlimited aptitude for getting pregnant. Including her best friend, Lisa, with two towheaded toddlers, right across the hall. Complete strangers began bugging them as well. Three seconds into meeting them, they’d invariably ask the k-question. Have any kids? Paul wondered why that wasn’t considered unconscionably rude. Did they go around asking strange couples if they owned a car, or a decent bank account, or an in-ground swimming pool?

Eventually, their long road of futility inexorably led them to the new great hope of infertile couples everywhere. In vitro fertilization, otherwise known as your last chance . It was a kind of roulette wheel for high-stakes gamblers. After all, it was ten thousand dollars a spin. And Paul could’ve recited an entire actuarial table on its success rate—28.5 percent, with the odds getting lower with each attempt.

They took Paul’s sperm. They took Joanna’s eggs. They formally introduced them. They sat back and hoped the romance would take.

It didn’t.

They tried once.

They tried twice.

They tried three times.

They were up to forty thousand and counting when a remarkable thing happened.

It came the morning after a particularly bad night.

All their thinly nuanced charges had finally turned the air poisonous and explosive. Perhaps that wasn’t surprising given that all exhalations are made of carbon dioxide; it had just been waiting for a match. In this case, a shouting match where they both said—okay, screamed —things better left unmentioned. Joanna had dissolved into tears, and Paul had sullenly disappeared into the den to watch some b-ball, which, given the general state of the New York Knicks, hadn’t improved his mood any.

They were walking it off the next morning in Central Park, neither one saying much to the other, when they passed the playground off 66th Street. The sound of laughing children was particularly hurtful that morning, a lacerating reminder of what they couldn’t have.

Paul was about to execute a detour when a small girl wandered past them in the futile process of capturing a runaway pink balloon. She was dark, Latin, and impossibly cute.

“Where’s your mother?” Joanna had asked her.

But the more interesting question would have been, who’s your mother? The woman who came breathlessly running up to them just a few seconds later, gently admonishing her daughter for running away. This woman was blonde, pale, and about their age. She picked up her giggling daughter, nuzzled her neck, smiled at Paul and Joanna, and retreated back to the seesaws.

Up to that moment they hadn’t thought about it.

Adopting.

Maybe they’d just needed to see it in the flesh.

That afternoon when they got back to the apartment, Joanna asked Paul to take out the garbage. Surprisingly, this garbage consisted of syringes, thermometers, various fertility drugs, dutifully recorded journals, and everything else they’d accumulated in an effort to have a baby. Paul gladly dumped it all into the incinerator room.

When he got back inside, they’d ended up making love the way they used to—which, all things considered, was pretty terrific.

They went to a lawyer the very next day.

Now Paul could hear Joanna next to him in the dark. And the soft, soothing sound of Joelle’s breathing. He rolled over and kissed his wife on the mouth.

“Next time I’ll support you. Okay?”

He could sense her smile in the dark.

All systems were go for reentry into the land of Nod.

Except Joelle woke up.

And screamed.