Body & Soul (49 page)

In the event, he was late for the doctor.

"I'm sorry," he said as he sat down. "I got into something. I really should get a wristwatch."

Dr. Maxwell was a cheerful, roly-poly urologist of about fifty. He had seen Claude appear in concert several times, and confessed to a lifelong love of music, particularly opera. He was the leader of an amateur recorder quartet that he had formed with some of his medical colleagues. During his first examination of Claude's genitals he had abstractedly hummed an aria from
Tosca
while palpating a testicle. Now he sat down behind his desk, opened a file, and then stared off into the middle distance.

"It's too bad we don't have a history," he said.

Claude noticed Dr. Maxwell's uncharacteristically blank expression. "I never saw a doctor till I got to college, as I said." He waited, beginning to grow uneasy.

Dr. Maxwell tapped the file with the tips of his fingers. "Well, first of all, from the anatomical point of view everything is completely normal.
No blockages, no stray tubes or bad valves. Normal, normal. You're in remarkably good health generally, as well, so that's something to be thankful for."

"I get the feeling I'm about to hear something I'm not going to like," Claude said.

Dr. Maxwell nodded. "You are not producing live sperm cells, I'm sorry to say."

Claude stared into the man's steady gray eyes. "What does that mean? Why not?"

"It means there are no live sperm cells. None at all. Why? I'm not sure." He leaned forward and closed the file. "But that's the reason Lady hasn't gotten pregnant."

Claude's thoughts suddenly fragmented, skittering off in all directions, fading, slanting, or bouncing back on themselves. After a moment the spasm subsided and he realized he was still looking at the doctor. "Can we fix it? Is there some kind of treatment?"

Dr. Maxwell shook his head. "I can only guess at the cause. There are any number of viral agents—mumps, orchitis, undulant fever, for instance—and since we lack a medical history..." He shrugged and made a gesture in the air with his hands. "There are chemical agents, certain toxins. In fact, there are a lot of ways it could have happened. The best bet is an undiagnosed childhood illness from the right viral group. You might have had swollen testicles—there's no atrophy, by the way—or then again maybe not. Fever, chills, nausea almost certainly."

"You mean all this time I've..."

"I imagine so," Dr. Maxwell said. "I can't say with certainty, but it seems most probable. The trouble is, there's not much the sperm cells can tell us. Their only abnormality is the fact that they're not alive. Spermatogenesis itself is a process we don't understand very well."

Claude sat silently, staring at the closed file. He could see his own name on the tab. Part of his mind was trying to let the information in, and part was trying to keep it out. He felt a floating sensation, and simultaneously Dr. Maxwell seemed to be receding in space, like a trick shot in the movies. Claude watched the doctor's lips moving.

"Let me say again that in every other regard you are completely normal. The aspermia has no effect on your libido, your sexual life, desire, performance, and so on. You can and should consider yourself the same as other men, because that is the case—emotionally, anatomically you are the same. However, you cannot have children. You must reconcile yourself to that fact."

"Yes, I understand," Claude said.

"It can take getting used to, but my patients—I mean those in the same situation—have done well. Particularly those with a passionate interest in their work, like yourself. I suppose it helps them retain a sense of proportion. They tend not to dwell on things."

As the man went on talking, Claude gradually came back to himself. He barely heard what was said. Finally Dr. Maxwell walked him out to the door. At the last minute he grabbed Claude's elbow and caught his eye. "Mr. Rawlings," he said, "do not blame yourself for this." He waited for his words to sink in. "This is fate," he said, "as impersonal as the stars."

Claude found himself walking along the street without any clear idea of where he wanted to go. He wound up at the Ninety-first Street entrance to Central Park and proceeded to the reservoir, where he sat down on a bench and watched three pigeons scuttling at his feet.

That his body had betrayed him' was a surprise, certainly, and yet there was something familiar in it, something that harked back to childhood and his anger at being thin and weak, his resentment at being trapped in his ridiculous skin. He had wanted nothing more than to transcend his body, to leave it behind through love and music. He had allowed himself to believe he was succeeding, but now, in an almost sinister fashion, hidden at a microscopic level, his old enemy again pulled him down. The gross, mute, stupid machine of his body was once again filling him with shame.

In years to come Claude's sterility would mean different things to him, rising and falling in importance according to where he found himself at various stages in his life, forcing him into tortuous philosophical speculations he might otherwise never have entertained, sometimes creating in him an almost unbearable sense of isolation, but sometimes, oddly enough, lending him a near-mystical appreciation of the value of life, of its unspeakable beauty. But for the moment, sitting on the park bench at the age of twenty-six, he was preoccupied with the practical.

Lady's announcement some months earlier that she had ceased using her diaphragm for the past year had stunned him. He could not understand why she'd kept it a secret, why he had not been included in the decision to have a child. He'd resented it more than he'd allowed
himself to admit—not only for the fact itself, but because it tied in with other ways in which she kept him at a distance. For all her ambition she was a rather fearful person, he'd discovered, with a tendency to build elaborate defenses for herself before they were necessary. Silence, privacy, and occasionally secrecy were second nature to her. She could not share her sense of what was happening to her with him, could not reveal her sense of herself to him, and as a result he felt she didn't trust him.

It was confusing because he believed that she loved him, and if it was a guarded, somewhat timid love, it was nevertheless all that he knew, with nothing to compare it to. In every way that was possible for her she was supportive, generous, and as caring toward him as she might have been toward her own child. She made so few demands on him he felt almost lonely.

Educated by the movies, he had believed love would conquer all. It was not easy for him to give up that hope. But in their lovemaking she retained that distant air of an observer, of someone at a slight remove, never holding his lust against him but never understanding it either. He was, perforce, and without knowing it, a clumsy lover, utterly preoccupied with his own anxiety. The most common themes in his dreams of Lady were these: he would speak but have no voice; he would be in a position of great danger, but she could not discern the danger and hence remained calm and undisturbed; he would play the piano for her and she would try to change the music by turning the dial of the radio. In almost all his dreams she exhibited a kind of nonmalevolent obduracy against which any efforts of his own were futile. In his dreams he was a man beating his head against a brick wall, and knowing it.

He got up from the bench, the pigeons scattered, and he walked along the path. The fact that he could not have a child forced him now to think about why she had wanted one in the first place. To move deeper into life, perhaps. She had been unable to find any kind of work to which she could commit herself, and despite her silence he had glimpsed a certain amount of anguish and frustration. She might understandably consider motherhood as good work, something she could control and do well. (Had she not mothered him?) Nor would it be out of character for her to think of it as largely a private, feminine matter, particularly since the greater share of the responsibility would redound to her rather than him. Although Claude had not been privy to the steps she'd gone through on the way to her decision, he nevertheless recognized it as an act of courage. She had been driven very deep into herself, doubtless deeper than ever before, to come to such a point, to take what must surely seem to her the most profound risk of her life. And of course she'd done it alone.

Her hand flew to her mouth and her eyes widened when he told her. She reached back and grabbed the mantel of the fireplace.

"Some childhood illness, he thinks," Claude said from the couch. "I'm perfectly normal in every other respect."

"My God," she whispered. "Out of the blue like this. Is he sure?"

"Oh, yes. Quite sure." He looked down at the floor and shook his head. "I'm sorry."

She was beside him in an instant, her arm around him. "You poor thing. There's nothing to be sorry for. It isn't your fault."

"That's what he said."

"Of course he did."

"It feels ... strange," he said. "I mean knowing. I've been this way half my life probably, but now I know, and I sort of wish I didn't." Even as she comforted him he felt a twinge of fear—another element added to keep them apart—and he got up to pace the carpet. She had passed her tests months ago.

"Do you want a drink?" she suggested. "I think we should have a drink."

"We can't pretend this doesn't change things," he said.

But she was out the door and on her way down to Esmeralda in the kitchen. He didn't know if she'd heard him. He didn't know if he wanted her to hear.

The matter was dropped. For some months there was quiet around the house, a feeling of marking time as they moved through their routines. Claude kept busy with his writing and his preparations for an upcoming chamber music recital. Lady puttered around, worked at her desk upstairs, and enrolled in some classes at the New School. When she gently introduced the idea of adoption one morning after bringing him his tray, he found himself nodding and agreeing that it might be something to look into. He felt he could hardly do otherwise. His hope was that it might be no more than a passing fancy, something she needed to cling to at the time and would release when she was strong enough. But one afternoon he came home and found her having tea with her
grandfather, Senator Barnes. The old man got up with a smile to shake hands.

"Good to see you, Claude. Lady tells me you're doing a concert up at Columbia next month."

"That's right. Schubert."

"Well, I'll have to try to make that. It would be a treat."

"I hope you can, sir."

Lady fussed nervously with the china and poured Claude a cup of tea, placing it on the table so that, when he sat, he faced both of them.

The senator was getting on in years, but with his clear, intelligent, penetrating eyes, his air of physical vitality, and his deep voice he still seemed larger than life to Claude. There was a vibrancy to the man's image, as if he were packed into himself, as if the specific gravity of his body were higher than that of ordinary men.

Lady glanced up as she passed Claude his cup. "We've been talking about adoption," she said.

Taken aback, Claude busied himself with his spoon. He was aware of the senator watching him. "Right," he said.

"Grandpa knows a lot, as it happens," she said.

"That's good," Claude said. "That's lucky."

"I helped Linda with the Heuval Foundation years ago," the senator said. "One thing led to another and I wound up involved with a smaller operation up in Larchmont. Very dedicated people, wonderful people. Just the right sort of organization."

"It's the kind of thing...," Lady began. "I mean, the way it's set up, the risk is minimized."

"There is always risk," the senator said, looking at Claude. "I'm sure you both understand that." His voice was gentle.

There was silence as Esmeralda arrived with a plate of shortbread and small crustless cucumber sandwiches. She placed them on the table and left. No one touched them. As much as he admired the old man, Claude felt uneasy. The degree of seriousness in the discussion seemed premature, since he and Lady had not really talked about adoption at any length. It seemed that she was ahead of him, assuming he would somehow just come along, moved by the forward progress of events. She herself was nervous, slightly trembly, in this strategy, which he took as a warning to keep his misgivings to himself.

"But Lady," Senator Barnes said, "I want you to think about something."

She looked up at him.

"Let me speak as your grandfather now." He paused, and as a musician Claude could appreciate the timing. "You're thinking of starting a family, you two young people, and that is a noble enterprise. The future lies ahead of you, right you are, but I wonder if it's wise to fail to connect it to the past. I wonder if that's starting off on the firmest possible footing."

For one horrible instant Claude thought this was going to be yet another, albeit gentler, approach to the question of his own origins, but then he recognized that Lady was in fact the target.

"Do you mean ...," she started.

"I mean that this estrangement with your parents has gone on too long. Linda told me the whole story years ago. It was a shocking mess, of course, and Ted behaved badly. But I'm concerned that things might get set in stone here simply out of inertia." He gave her his full attention, watching her face closely, as if gauging precisely the right amount of pressure to apply. "Courage is called for now, it seems to me. Family is too important, Lady."

She said, almost under her breath, "If anyone needs a lecture on courage, it's him." Meaning her father.

The senator gave a little nod and sighed. "Well, perhaps he's learned something." He shifted his gaze to Claude. "Would it be intrusive of me to ask your thoughts on the matter?"

"Not at all," Claude said. "I've deferred to Lady, and I'll keep on doing that. At the same time, she knows I've always felt some doubts—I mean, this way everything just stays. Sort of frozen."

"I take your point," the old man said, tactfully leaving it at that.

Claude realized he wanted the senator's approval—as if it would work against the ill will of his in-laws—wanted to be included in the steady warmth that seemed a function of his strength. It was childish, surely, but in the presence of the senator he felt the quiet glow of decency he associated with the image of Spencer Tracy.