Does This Baby Make Me Look Straight?: Confessions of a Gay Dad (4 page)

I began to question everything. Maybe I didn’t know what love was after all. Maybe I was incapable of
real
love—of nurturing. Though having kids was the furthest thing from my mind at that time, I do remember wondering if I would ever have a parental bone in my body, given my inability to care for Mimi and nurture her and love her unconditionally. But it all felt too intimate, intense, and ultimately sad. I wanted out. And Don sensed I had one foot out the door. But his closest friend, Susan, and my friends Linda and Jodi worked tirelessly to encourage each of us to stay the course.
They all seemed to feel that Don and I belonged together and so we went on blind faith and stuck it out. Much to Mimi’s dismay. She resented me despite my efforts to help her, bring her lunch or groceries when she was on bed rest. She tried to act like she liked me. But after a minute or two, all conversation would turn to
our
boyfriend “Donny.” How I hated how she said that
Don-ny
. “Where’s Donny?” “What’s Donny doing now?” “Could you evaporate and rematerialize as Donny?” That last one she said with her eyes.

Six months into my relationship with Donny, on Valentine’s Day, I heard from David. We spoke and I felt . . . normal. Two people making small talk. There was no power in our conversation. No heat to speak of. Just two old friends. I was so relieved it was finally over. I wondered if it had ever really been love or was it some unconscious wish for me to be the kind of guy who could find love and succumb to it? But then look what happened: I had stopped trying so hard and, at long last, I had fallen in love. With Don. Despite the gravitational pull of Mimi’s progressing disease.

By April or May, Mimi was walking with crutches, had lost her sight in one eye—and had daily episodes of extreme cramping that, luckily for me, could be abated only by Don spooning with her and rubbing her back.

“She has
brain
tumors. Why does she have cramps all over her body?” I asked. The chemo, asshole! Of course. Don was so patient with her. But I couldn’t stand how much time and physical attention she needed. And she was so unapologetic. I was sure that if I were in her position, I’d be embarrassed to keep asking for more. I spent hours imagining what I wished Mimi might say:
No. I’ll be fine. Go to the movies with your
boyfriend. For God’s sake, you’ve only been together for six months. If I need anything, I’ll call. Go. That Danny is so cute! And funny. And smart
. Yeah. No. Those words were never said.

One morning, she called us in a panic, screaming. Her hair was coming out in clumps. We brought in a hairstylist friend to shave her head. Don held her hands and wiped her tears as the hair fell to the ground. I watched from the other room, my own tears hidden from view. That night, Linda took Mimi to see her friend at the time, Liza Minnelli, in concert. They went backstage afterward, and Liza, moved by Mimi’s story, taught her how to twist scarves attractively around her bald head. Mimi beamed with excitement. The story brought tears to my eyes. Of course I was sad for her—like the others I’d grown to care about her. But I also resented Don for putting me in this position, which made me hate myself even more. I was trapped. I could either leave—a person too weak and selfish to stand by his boyfriend when he most needs him—or stay and risk falling out of the love and affection I’d developed for Don. Obviously I stuck it out. I knew it couldn’t go on forever. To be blunt, Mimi’s days were numbered, so there’d be a natural end to this hell we were all living.

Well. The end came sooner than any of us had expected. It was August. In a couple of months, it would be Don’s and my one-year anniversary. We’d gotten a little better at carving out time for ourselves to be a couple. We planned and took weekend trips. We even talked about getting a dog.

A bunch of us made a plan to get together. We hadn’t all socialized without Mimi for many weeks. In a restaurant, talking, after having just seen Woody Allen’s
Manhattan Murder Mystery
, we were all buzzing about the film—and speculating
about crimes that could be committed right under our noses.

“That could be Mimi, for all we know,” Don’s sister, Amy, teased.

“Hey. You know she has a gun,” Susan remembered.

“Really? Why?” I asked.

“It’s an antique or something. Her dad gave it to her,” Don said.

“So. Why bring that up? You think she’d ever kill someone? Or herself?” Our friend Ann, a crime writer, was taking copious notes.

“No. But. You know. That movie got me thinking. You don’t really know what goes on behind someone’s closed door,” Susan added.

“Hey. What’s Mimi’s nurse like?” Ann asked.

“I don’t know,” Don said casually.

“What do you mean? I thought you hired her.”

“No. You hired her.”

“I talked to a nurse once over the phone, but never again . . .”

“But Don, you’ve spoken with her doctors . . . ?” He shook his head. We were all shocked. Because we had all witnessed how Mimi during a particularly needy spell would tell Don how the clinical trial wasn’t working and how her doctors wanted to meet him. She’d tell us all about them. One was named Nigel, and he was gay. His partner was named Omar. And she’d talk about how they really loved Mimi and were invested in her recovery. Her eyes would fill when she spoke of them. Don felt bad, but he could never meet her doctors.

“That’s not my job,” he’d explain. Mimi had to be the boss of her own treatment. We all knew this was the rule we were following. But we remembered seeing two Polaroid photos of her doctors on Don’s bulletin board.

“Mimi took those pictures. She gave them to me. So I put them up.”

“Right,” one of us said. “But wait, have any of us ever
seen
a doctor or a nurse or
any
health care professional of hers in the past two years?” Blink. Blink. We were stunned. All of us.

That night, each of us made a different phone call we would have thought unimaginable. One of us called her mother. Someone else tried her doctors. I called the hospital to see if I could talk them into telling me if Mimi was in their patient database.

“Try Mirabelle,” I asked them frantically. “Or Mira? Or M.?” But the search came up empty. She had never been a patient of any doctor at UCLA Medical Center.

It was all a lie. Everything. There was no cancer. She was not dying. It was a con. And she’d kept it up for over two years! She was a genius, really. And fearless. A bold, fearless, needy, sociopathological, and butt-ugly genius.

The year Don took Mimi to Lourdes, Mimi’s mother took her to the airport and hung out until it was time for them to head to their gate. Don remembers sitting in a coffee shop with Mimi and her mom. Mimi had shown up with her luggage and her backpack filled with her “medication.” Her head was also shaved. Mimi had asked Don not to mention her cancer as it was destroying her mother and Mimi didn’t want to upset her. So he didn’t. When the truth came out, we learned how she’d simply told her mother she was going to
London to do a small role on a sci-fi movie Don was directing. How easily the lies could have been exposed! If Don had even mentioned Lourdes or his hopes for a cure, it would have been over. Or if Mom had had even the slightest clue about the kind of filmmaker Don was, she’d have known he wasn’t the type to do sci-fi. It was such an enormous risk. It made me think her mother was in on it but that never proved to be true. Or maybe Mimi somehow wanted to get caught.

No. It was a fail-proof lie on her part, trading on nothing more than raw human empathy. So much so, actually, that Don’s first reaction was relief—that this woman he’d come to love was not going to die. I couldn’t believe it!

“
What
are you talking about? That bitch
stole
from you! From
us
! And not just money and time but your
trust
!” And of course we all knew there was some part of the lie in which we all played a role. How it fed us. Our thirst for drama. Or our need to be needed. Or in Don’s case, to be a hero. But I didn’t say any of those things. Because I was also grateful. That in some way the whole ordeal had actually brought us closer together. Forcing us to work so hard to connect right from the very beginning. To see what we were made of. And letting me see Don’s capacity for a kind of love I hadn’t even known was possible.

Had we all been living a lie? Yes and no. Mimi was lying. The details of her life were a lie. But our feelings and our ability to experience real love and compassion for her and for one another—that was all
real
. And proof to me that I was also capable of that same kind of love. And if I could take care of a sick, lying bag of shit like Mimi, maybe a kid or two wouldn’t be beyond me.

Mimi did a little bit of jail time as a result of her fraud. Which felt like a little bit of redemption at the time. Needless to say, none of us ever saw Mimi again. I’m not mad anymore. Don and I are still very much together. With all the things I seemed to associate with being in love in my twenties: wedding rings, a house, a coffeemaker. And two kids. But now we know the difference between what’s real and what isn’t. Between actual love and a desperate desire to
be
loved. And that’s what’s remained after Mimi has become nothing more than a faded memory—a fat, needy, and thankfully
distant
memory with a gummy-toothed smile and full-on busted grille. Okay, maybe I’m still a
little
mad.

T
hree months after Don and I had completed all the paperwork, classes, background checks, and home visits required to adopt a baby in California, we met our first birth mom candidate. I’ll call her Samantha.

“It’s her!” I remember screaming as I ran to another extension, tripping over the leg of an end table and cursing Crate & Barrel as I grabbed my throbbing toe. Hiding my pain, I picked up the phone with my best, cheery airline representative voice:

“Hi, Samantha! I’m so glad to hear from you.” Don threw me a look from the kitchen. I could hear his voice in my head:
There’s gay and there’s
over
gay. Tone it down a notch!

We asked a lot of questions about her life that were unrelated to her pregnancy, following the guidelines we’d been taught about talking to prospective birth moms. We knew she was talking to more than one couple and that the decision was in her hands. We wanted to make a good impression but didn’t want to come off as desperate. We took notes about the name of her three-year-old son, Tye, her ex-boyfriend, and even her love of Wheat Thins. We’d been prepped by the adoption agency and our lawyer to follow
up the call with a FedEx containing our birth mother letter, photos, and a short note that made reference to as many things as we could remember from our phone call. We wanted her to know we were interested in her and not just her baby. Sure, we weren’t
as
interested in her as we were in adopting her baby, but we didn’t think we were being dishonest. We are good listeners, after all, and polite. A few days later, Samantha called to say she wanted us to be the parents of her child. I couldn’t believe it. Choking back tears, I asked Don, “Is this really happening?” My mind flashed to what felt like a hundred images: holding a baby, walking with a toddler, teaching a kid to ride a bike, reading bedtime stories, going to school plays, cheering at soccer games, helping with homework, teaching our kid to drive, dropping the kid off at college, standing side by side at the wedding . . . It was too much. I needed a bowl of cereal. Or six.

We spoke with Samantha a few more times to arrange a visit. She was coming from Las Vegas, so it was fairly easy to get her to Los Angeles. We agreed to put her up for three days so we could meet with the adoption lawyer, a social worker, and an obstetrician, and still have time for some sightseeing. She was to arrive on a Wednesday and would stay till Friday afternoon. We booked her a plane ticket and a hotel room that wound up being more expensive than we’d planned. Especially after discovering the soft, white, terry-cloth bathrobes had gone with her when she checked out.
Small price to pay
, we thought. We scheduled the appointments, got tickets to the Universal Studios theme park, and made plans to take her to dinner and a movie.

On that Wednesday morning we drove to the airport in silence. We parked, walked to the baggage area, and leaned against the wall to wait for her. Neither of us spoke for the longest time. We had been emailed one picture of her so we’d know what she looked like. But it still felt like any one of the people coming through those glass doors could have been her. I made eye contact with every single one of them as if to ask,
Are you Samantha?
There was an Indian man and a black woman and two businessmen . . .
not
Samantha. I had to distract myself to calm my nerves. I started imagining myself in each of the people coming down that escalator. One guy just getting back to L.A. after flying home to put down the family pet; another may have missed his original flight because he broke onto a set to work as an extra on a Meryl Streep movie before being caught and sent away; and a third seemed kind of nervous, like he was being picked up at the airport by a guy he’d only just met ten days before—a guy with whom he’d eventually settle down, make a home, and try to start a family. Why I was attributing my own life experiences to these complete strangers, I have no idea. But it did help mitigate the panic.

Don elbowed me; outside the glass doors, leaning against a pillar, wearing a backpack and smoking a cigarette, was Samantha. How had we missed her?

“Samantha?” I smiled at her. She looked up, cracked a smile, took one last drag, and stomped out her butt.

“They wouldn’t let me smoke on the plane.” She rolled her eyes. We both laughed and rolled our eyes as well, as though she’d been singled out for this injustice. Don commiserated: “The airlines are always making up crazy rules.
It’s not like it used to be, that’s for sure.” What the hell was he talking about? Like he and she were experienced business travelers from the seventies!