Avalanche Read online

  Avalanche

  A LOVE STORY

  Julia Leigh

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  Independent Publishers Since 1923

  NEW YORK | LONDON

  Avalanche

  For a great many nights I injected myself with an artificial hormone produced in a line of genetically modified Chinese hamster ovary cells. I did this knowing that no matter how hard I hoped, no matter what I tried, chances were I’d never have a child.

  My first visit to the IVF clinic was when I was already 38. I was accompanied by Paul, the man I planned to marry and with whom I’d first been in love when I was 19 and he was 23, both of us then studying at the University of Sydney. That same year, it was back in 1989, I wrote a short story that won a student prize. This pleased me because I wanted to be a writer and, more so, because it made me look good in the eyes of my friends. I did keep a copy somewhere but have trouble recalling the exact details—except for the last line, which was “Crazy bitches.” The two women of the story were on a bridge in a park and one of them had tossed a baby into the pond below. A passing jogger, a man, had raced in to save the child only to find that it was a doll. At the time of writing that story I had a deeply ambivalent view of motherhood. I scorned women who thought they could only feel fulfilled if they had a child. The first thing the judge said to me at the award ceremony was “I thought you’d be older.”

  Our relationship began when I bumped into Paul walking from one building to another between lectures. He was wearing a polka-dot shirt and did a double-take: “Hello!” He could be like that—effusive, exuberant, the right side of comic. He was also handsome. More beautiful than handsome. Tall, dark hair, blue eyes, aquiline nose, small full mouth, a Roman. Expressive fine hands. Lady legs. I adored him. But this early love did not last long, it collapsed after a year. The end was his doing, there was no real showdown. He wanted to sleep with other people—as well as with me; he didn’t want to be monogamous. This didn’t come as a surprise. Early in our courtship he’d taken me aside and said he had something important to tell me: he’d been at a party and had performed cunnilingus on a girl against the living-room wall while everyone was dancing. That was the word he used—cunnilingus—very formal. He wanted to be the first to break the news. The incident did perturb me but in those initial weeks of our relationship, initiatory weeks, I felt like a traveler in a foreign land where it was incumbent on me to observe the strange new local etiquette. It was after we had agreed to the lovers’ contract, the body seal, that I couldn’t bear the thought of him being intimate with another. A girl was lurking around and the revelation that she had been secretly hurling herself at Paul made me ill. I said he could sleep with the interloper for two weeks. He wanted longer. And so that was it.

  We stayed friends. We each fell in and out of love with ten thousand people. Every time I saw him I would be delighted. More than delighted—overjoyed, reconnected. I know exactly how I felt: I witnessed that same feeling the first time I picked up my niece, Elsie, age 2, from day care. This was a long way down the track. About six little ones were sitting in a circle with their teacher, waiting patiently for their parents to arrive. When I entered it took Elsie a split second to realize I was there in her mother’s stead—but once she did she leapt up, arms stretched high to the sky, and ran away from her group of playmates, forgetting them forever, rushed toward me.

  Paul made me laugh; I made him laugh. We were conspirators. Beneath that was a bone-deep sense of recognition. Yes, I was always slightly jealous of whatever new girlfriend he had; I regarded her with unfriendly close attention. When I was 24 and we were at the first wedding of our peers—a gay wedding, not legal—Paul said we should get back together, get married. I was drunk and turned him down. There’s a picture of me in the wedding album—I’m wearing kitten heels, fifties-style black shorts, a men’s shirt, and I’m sitting down, unable to stand, my wasted youth, a champagne glass emptying onto the ground. Not long after that wedding Paul met his Irish beloved, a costume designer, and soon they were married and he was a father. He hurried to leave the country.

  To this day I know very little about what he was up to in those years away: I never really asked for more than the broad brushstrokes. He worked at an executive level in mortgage finance, earned a good salary. Supported his wife and child. Went on fancy European holidays. He had completely stopped composing music, something at which he had earlier excelled. I recall meeting him once: he made the trip from Dublin to London to see me reading from my first novel at the Southbank Centre. It was a dreary affair cooked up by Australia House to promote Australian literature . . . or maybe I’m remembering it wrong and my publisher organized the night with other Australian writers in their stable. Either way, I felt embarrassed because I was new to the literary world and considered readings an awkward kind of pantomime. I desperately wanted Paul to think well of me, to be impressed, but the circumstances were underwhelming. When the reading had finished we walked together by the river. I noted that under his suit he was wearing the exact same T-shirt he used to wear when we were together. It couldn’t have lasted that long so he must have bought a new one: gray marle, with a stick-figure man doing the splits. I was crushed when he said he had to go, didn’t ask me to dinner.

  In October 2007 I was living in New York, working on a screenplay and a novel. Paul and I reunited. By now he had the marriage and a garland of girlfriends behind him; he was also a loving father to a 12-year-old son. I was 37 with my own trail of tender affections. I received an email announcing he was passing through town. Would I like to meet? He knocked at the door of the miniature studio I was subletting in the West Village. All the chemicals of love spilled through my bloodstream. We spent the day together. Walked around the neighborhood, talked, saw a documentary about mass-produced corn. Talked and talked. Ate and talked and nodded and laughed and stared and smiled and talked and smelled and grinned and I was 19 again, he was 23, and we parted, chaste, my heart thumping, and I realized—joyfully—that it was too late, our soulless souls had flared, whatever doubts I’d ever had about him I no longer wanted to protect myself, I just didn’t care.

  “OK. Time to be direct. I adore you. I always have and always will whatever happens.” He took decisive action. When he returned to Australia he wrote to me from the Southern Highlands, just outside of Sydney, where he now lived in a small house while his ex-wife and son lived in another small house nearby. A warm and civil arrangement. He expressed his fears that our chance may have already been lost; that he had grown dull and hard; that we could hurt one another. He worried about what I wanted: did I really want him or did I just wonder what it might be like to be together? Did I want a child? He promised that there was nothing he would not do for me if we met each other full and open. “Could you bury me? Can you see yourself with me until then?” he asked.

  The child, the child. The child was there in that correspondence, nestled in among words of fear and hope and promise. Our child. Our beautiful child, our destined child was called forth as a possibility, conjured out of the ether. I told him that yes, I wanted a child very much, and that I did understand the magnitude of that commitment. I no longer wanted to be responsible solely for myself, I wanted to be intimately involved in the care of another. And I also said—it pains me now—that I needed to safeguard “my hard-won creative life.” Why was I so quick to add any sort of caveat? Why did I set the two ways of being—motherhood, writing—at odds? The truth, which I knew very well at the time, was that many women had gone before me and found ways to lead a creative life and also be a mother. There were countless prams in countless hallways. It wasn’t “rocket science.” It wasn’t either/or. There was enough space. The universe was expansive. Universe? Old-fashioned. Didn’t we live in a multiverse?
I could have multiple centers of being; I already had multiple centers of being. Or no center at all. So I wrote to tell all of this to Paul—as best I could—assuaging his anxiety and mine, adopting the tone of someone much wiser than myself, emanating the invincible power of love. I drew strength from the future. From our child, the treasured child-to-be. “Darling, darlinger, darlingest,” I said. “We only have this one life to live so we are obliged to be magicians.”

  There’s another email worth mentioning. November 6, 2007. That day The New York Times ran a story on page 4 titled “A Foul Menace, Ready to Burst Again onto Gaza.” It was reported that a LAGOON OF SEWERAGE (I used all caps at the time) had broken through its embankments and flooded an impoverished village. Five died, along with scores of sheep and goats. There was a real threat of another sewerage deluge. It’s the only news story on the entire page, I told Paul. That report of abject misery is surrounded by huge ads for luxury goods. Diamond earrings; a zebra print handbag; a Philippe Starck candleholder; three bejeweled rings. So perverse: I suggested we frame it. I can see that even though I was already enthralled with our new-old love I hadn’t yet completely lost perspective. No matter how miserable things could ever be for me I was not at risk of drowning in a lagoon of sewerage.

  Early December. At the airport we kissed for the first time in eighteen years. We went home to my tiny apartment in South Bondi. I showered; we made love. We entered what we called our feral period, lovefucking day and night. It was so much better than when we’d been young. A couple of weeks later he asked “May we marry?” I said yes without hesitation. The sun exploded then reformed. I remember that instead of an engagement ring he gave me a golden wedding band he’d bought from an antique store in the Southern Highlands; he knew I thought the prestige of a diamond ring was a hoax. I noticed an inscription on the inside of the band. “Oh it’s engraved,” I said, touched. His face fell in horror: I realized he had never noticed this himself. There was a moment of silent mutual panic. But it was all right; I read the inscription aloud—a jeweler’s mark, “18ct Rodd.”

  I suggested we should be engaged for a year. We decided to marry on the solstice, December 21, 2008. Since we both wanted a child we felt we had to be sure our relationship was truly solid, that it could take the beatings of dirty nappies, dirty dishes, sleeplessness, sexlessness, and whatever else a new baby ensured. Actually, it was a stupid formality. I didn’t have time to be cautious. I knew him; I recognized him; I truly loved him. He had offered everything. Our union was inevitable. One of my inner eels had slipped loose, an eel that took the guise of reasonable caution but which really was a small wriggling mistrust.

  We drove to the highlands for the New Year. On the radio there was a discussion about the death threats once made against a Danish newspaper cartoonist who had unfavorably depicted Mohammad. In response, we decided to devise the most offensive, the most grossly offensive cartoon image we could possibly think of. I took pleasure in our playful transgression. My sweet husband: the same breed of monster. It was certain he would never bore me—and wasn’t this the Holy Grail of marriage . . . or so I’d been told. (Misinformed.) We spent a cozy New Year’s Eve together; we cooked a meal and watched Ermanno Olmi’s I Fidanzati, The Fiancés, on DVD. He wore a sea-green Chinese silk dressing gown that I’d found for him earlier that day in the local antique store; it was more like a wonder emporium than a store. For myself I’d picked out some hand-embroidered oyster silk shorts. My predilection for soft silky clothing turned out to be something we didn’t share: he thought it slippery. When I used to wear my UGG boots, tracksuit pants, and a pink silk T-shirt around the house he’d ruefully shake his head and say, “You look like a jockey.” That New Year’s Eve, laying my head on the warm hairy pillow of his chest, I was a tiny baby. At long last, rested.

  We bought a bottle of Cointreau and called it kissing syrup. Over breakfast he’d play love songs like Nick Cave’s “Sweetheart Come” or “Do You Realize??” by The Flaming Lips. When we listened to The Beatles’ “Come Together” we’d loudly interject, so the lyrics became “Come Almost Together.” He gave me a golden compass. I was erotically charged when he would help me zip up the back of my dress. We shared all our “elective affinities.” And our vulnerabilities—lovers’ currency. One day we made a visit back to campus especially to kiss in the stacks of the library. We had our own names for local landmarks. I called him my Gentle Liege, my Ur-Prince, my Anarchist Master. He was also known as Captain Frolic, the Resplendent Quetzal, and the Magnificent Pigeon. I bought his favorite foods at the grocery store. He gave me the name Cheese Prices because I would despair at the cost of a block of cheese, calculating I needed to sell five books per block. We counted the days since we’d reunited at the airport—that was Day 1, we reset the calendar. Each night we’d give thanks for the day together; each morning we’d greet one another on waking. There were minor skirmishes at the border . . . and he would call an Emergency Meeting that involved him lying flat on the floor and I would lie on top of him and we’d talk things through that way, nose to nose. It was summer so we swam together and took walks along the Bondi cliff tops. I pointed out an avalanche in a white curl of wave breaking against the shore. When we passed a man coming in the opposite direction with a baby strapped to his chest Paul squeezed my hand. We dared to discuss baby names. For some reason, I think because he already had a son, we only talked about girls’ names. I said I liked names ending in “ia.” “Indicia,” he suggested. “And she’ll know she’s met the right person when they ask ‘Of what?’ ” I didn’t like it that much, thought it too tricksy, as if it belonged in a Thomas Pynchon novel, but we kept it as an option, a precious placeholder. Returning from a business trip, Paul bought a little teddy bear in a pink top at the airport. Whenever either of us would travel alone that teddy bear would go in the suitcase.

  Our child. In February 2008 we made our first visit to the IVF clinic. There was the not insignificant matter of a vasectomy to deal with, a procedure Paul had undergone not long after the birth of his son. Our plan, our hope, was that a vasectomy reversal would work and I’d fall pregnant naturally, wouldn’t need further intervention—but just in case the reversal failed or I had problems then we wanted to ensure we were in good hands. I went online to compare the success-rate claims of the two Sydney clinics I’d heard the most talk about. I didn’t keep notes at the time but today I went back to the same clinic websites and looked at their information. I figure the statistics haven’t radically altered: if anything the chances of IVF working have only improved over time. For women aged between 35 and 39, using their own eggs, one clinic claimed a live birth rate per embryo transfer (fresh and frozen) of 28 percent. A transfer is a procedure where an embryo is placed in the uterus or fallopian tubes; the embryo can be fresh or it can have been thawed following freezing. When I looked at the second clinic I found it presented its data differently. It used a narrower age range; didn’t give exact percentages in numerical form but instead relied on a visual graph with columns per age group; and it counted only fresh transfers, not frozen. The graph showed that for women using their own eggs between 37 and 39 years there was a live birth rate of around 22 percent for each fresh embryo transfer. On the same graph the natural conception rate for a woman aged 37 to 39 was 10 percent. A direct comparison of success rates between the two clinics wasn’t possible—perhaps by design. And there was nowhere else I could turn to for clarity: in Australia data about the IVF industry has been collected but the success rates that identify specific clinics are not released to the public.

  Back then, right at the beginning, I had an uneasy response to the so-called statistics. I told myself: each human body is a mystery; there are too many factors that distinguish one 38-year-old from another. What if one woman had only one ovary? What if another had endometriosis? Didn’t they drag down the overall probabilities of success? An aggregate figure was not convincing. My own chances would surely be better (this was the irrational leap). Paul had another na
me for me: Pollyanna Juggernaut. Pollyanna was determined to look on the bright side, plow ahead. She would not, could not, countenance the abyss. I always liked Pollyanna Juggernaut: she would lead the troops to battle.

  What actually swung our choice of clinic was not the data but a personal recommendation from a trusted friend, someone I’d known since high school and who was diligent by nature, always doing a lot of homework before taking a step ahead. She’d tried one place and had no luck, then moved on. She recommended a man whom I shall call Dr. Rogers. “I didn’t like him,” she said, “but he’s the guy who got me pregnant.” Dr. Rogers, it turned out, according to his web profile, had an expertise in male infertility. So I went ahead and fixed an appointment.

  The clinic was in the central business district, somewhere I’d largely avoided since graduation from law school. For me, a trip to the city had the novelty of a trip to the Big Smoke. We took the elevator to the fifth floor, both having made an effort to be well dressed, citified, as if stepping into the clinic together was as symbolic a first step in marriage as any state-sanctioned union. Heads in the waiting room did not turn. This was a temple of discretion. No one expected or wanted to be here. Immediately I noticed the wallpaper was neither girl-pink nor boy-blue but a considerate shade of yellow. The magazines on the low tables were up to date. Paul and I held hands (who reached out their hand first for comfort, to comfort, I don’t know). Dr. Rogers was friendly. It must have been the kind of appointment he looked forward to—a new couple, committed to having a child together, glowing with an undimmed hope. We hung off his every word. What we were chiefly there for was to talk about reversing the vasectomy. Ah, the vasectomy! Dr. Rogers reached into his drawer and pulled out a laminated flipbook of gruesome surgical photos. He regaled us with a detailed description of what would need to be done. Paul would have a general anesthetic. The tubes that carry the sperm from the testes along with other ejaculate are called the vasa (collective) or vas (singular). The vasa—left side and right side—had been snipped and the doctor would find the two ends of each snipped tube or vas, remove the scar tissue, and attempt to rejoin the ends. As a result, the sperm that Paul was currently producing and which couldn’t find its way up the vasa would be able to flow free. A feat of irrigation engineering worthy of a Balinese subak master. A small mystery was solved for me: the sperm he had been producing with snipped tubes had just died on the spot and been reabsorbed by the body, it hadn’t gone anywhere. Even if the tubes were successfully rejoined—the long length of time between the vasectomy and the reversal diminished our odds—it wasn’t guaranteed the sperm would return. And if it didn’t? Dr. Rogers explained that during the procedure they’d also take a significant amount of sperm and freeze it so that it could later be used for multiple treatment cycles. And if we wanted, at any future time, fresh sperm could be taken straight from the testes, during another minor operation.