"Gimme the good news first," she said, turning on her bedside lamp.
"The good news," Shelly said, "is that I'm in Texas and I'm rip-roaring drunk, or as some of the folks here like to call it, shitfaced."
"Yeah? So what's the bad news?"
Silence. Static. Then, "The bad news is that I came here to see a specialist because I suspected I was at risk."
It took a moment for the words to get to her solar plexus, and when they did she didn't think she'd ever be able to breathe again. But the news wasn't a surprise. She'd been waiting to hear it since his departure, feeling all the while as if she was hanging from the edge of a cliff by her fingertips fearing the fall, and at last here it was.
"I'm HIV-positive, Ru-Ru," he said. "But there's good news about that. I don't have any symptoms, and my helper cells are at seven hundred and thirty. Ready for more good news? I've managed to convince my mother it's because I'm an intravenous-drug user."
Shelly was doing horrible jokes at three in the morning from Texas. Ruthie's stomach throbbed and a chill raced through her so that she took her slippers off and pulled the bed covers close around her.
"Okay," she said. "It's funny. We can't use it on the show. It's in terrible taste, but it's funny. And I miss you."
"I'm coming home tomorrow. American Airlines flight two twenty, at two o'clock your time."
"I'll pick you up at the airport," she promised.
"Do you remember," he asked her, "the night a few months ago when we were having dinner at the Mandarin, and the waiter brought the fortune cookies, and when I opened mine it was empty? This must be why."
"I love you," Ruthie said, "I love you, and I'll be at the airport waiting for you tomorrow."
After a while, exhaustion forced her to fall asleep again, but she opened her eyes in a panic at the first light. As she got out of bed, the truth ran over her with the force of a freight train and so immobilized her that she had to recite aloud to herself the steps she needed to take to get dressed. "Put on underpants, socks and bra, sweatpants, sweatshirt."
When she was dressed she walked to Sid's room, where the nanny was dressing him.
"Mama, can we go to the park?" he asked, smiling a delicious smile, and there was a look in his eyes that reminded her so much of Shelly that she had to turn away for a beat to catch her breath.
"How about some eggies?" she asked him.
"Yay, eggies, and jelly on toast," he said.
She held him very close as she carried him into the kitchen and instead of putting him on the floor to play, she held him on her hip while she cooked his eggs. Then while he spooned them into his mouth, she told him her version of the "Three Bears," in which there was a Mommy bear, a Daddy bear, and a Sidney bear. When the nanny had taken him out the door to head for the park, Ruthie called her office and said she wasn't feeling too well, made sure the writers knew how to proceed, then sat on the living room sofa, holding the morning paper but not really reading it.
She thought about going to the airport and what it would be like to see Shelly get off the plane, wondering if his being HIV-positive meant he'd be emaciated and sickly. She'd seen him only two weeks ago and he'd looked great. She felt cold and weak, and didn't know how to spend the day waiting for him to come home, so she made an outing of taking the car to fill it up with gas. She took Sid to Harry Harris's shoe store and
bought him some sneakers. She made popcorn and ate all of it. Then she took a very long shower, and decided that instead of driving to the airport she would call a limousine service, so she called Davel Limousines and asked for a driver to pick her up at home to take her to and from the airport.
The driver was the same man who had driven Ruthie and Shelly to the Emmys last year and he recognized her and wanted to make small talk, but Ruthie closed the window between the front and backseat, and immediately regretted hiring a limo because the long blackness of it felt so funereal. She would have to be strong and in charge to take care of Shelly now. This wasn't like taking care of Sid, a job for which she had help. Besides, there was a library full of books about what to do with a baby. But Shelly with this virus inside him. This was different.
She realized as she looked up at the television screen for his arrival time that she should have called from home to check because she saw now that the flight from Houston would be late. Houston, Texas. He had gone there to be diagnosed. Afraid that if he went to UCLA he'd see someone he knew there, or be examined by a doctor who would tell someone.
For a while she sat on a bench near the gate where Shelly's flight was scheduled to land, looking out the window at the airplanes. She hated to fly, tried to avoid it by traveling as rarely as possible, as if by remaining on the ground she could trick death into staying away from her. Death. In her mind now, she did what she'd been trying not to do since Shelly's phone call. She ran down the list of all the friends they had lost to AIDS in the last few years.
Then she fished around in her purse for some paper, but all she had was a MasterCard receipt, so she turned it over and on it she wrote their names, sat in the corner
of the airport on a bench near the window in the terminal and made an unbearably long list. Brilliant colleagues, cherished close friends, people who were gone too soon. With each name came the memory of the service she and Shelly had attended for that person. Some ceremonies were so dark and gloomy they could barely speak to each other about them later. Some were so filled with the love of the deceased's family, and relief from the pain they'd suffered that the memory felt as light as the balloons they had let fly at the close of the service.
When she finished the list, Ruthie prayed silently to all of them to help Shelly have enough time left so that Sid could get to know and remember him. When she felt someone standing next to her, she looked up, into the sweet face of Shelly.
"Sid's mother, I presume?" he said.
Ruthie stood and threw her arms around his neck. In her embrace his body felt the same as always. Good, healthy, not thin or weak or sickly, but perfectly fine, and she stepped back to look at him again.
"It's me," he said quietly, "and it wasn't a nightmare you had, Ruthless. However, there's a bright side. I'm leaving everything to you. So with your money and mine, you'll be the richest Jew in Hollywood, unless you count Marvin Davis, who is really four or five Jews in a very large suit."
"We missed you so much," she said, hugging him again. He was carrying his suit bag over his shoulder and a duffel bag in his hand, and he didn't have any other luggage so they walked, arms around each other, directly to the curb and the waiting limo.
"Mr. Milton," the driver said, "welcome home, sir," and opened the door. As the car moved on to Century Boulevard, Shelly slid his hand over the black leather seat and took Ruthie's.
"I'm scared," he said.
"Me too," she admitted. "Me too."
"How's Sid?"
"He doesn't sleep, he throws his food, he removes his diaper in the supermarket, in other words he's perfect," she said.
Shelly smiled, a tired smile, and still holding her hand, he fell asleep with his head pressed against the back of the seat. When the car pulled into the driveway of the house, the stop awakened him. The driver carried the bags inside, and Ruthie and Shelly walked in with their arms around each other. When Sid saw his father, he broke away from the nanny, ran to him and threw himself at Shelly, crying long and hard.
''Daddeeeee. Daddeeeee.''
Shelly knelt, and spoke gently to him.
"Hi, Sidney. How's my boy? Don't cry, honey. Don't." Then he lifted Sid and held him tight.
After he'd unpacked and presented Sid with some Corgi cars, he got into bed for a nap. Ruthie kissed him good-bye, covered him warmly, changed Sid's diaper and turned him over to the nanny, then she left to keep the appointment she'd made a few days earlier with Barbara Singer.
"The first thing you must do is be tested and have Sid tested too," Barbara said to Ruthie when the painful story had been told and hung in the air between them. She could see that spilling it all out had been good for Ruthie, who seemed to relax in her chair for the first time. When Barbara reached to turn on her desk lamp, she realized she'd been so involved in and intrigued by Ruthie's story that she'd never once looked at a clock. Now it was night, and hours had passed since her arrival.
"When I first made this appointment," Ruthie said, "it was to come in and ask you to help me to help my
son grow up in a world where people like his father, who I love more than my next breath, are stigmatized, condemned, and dropping like flies from a disease that must be stopped. But I guess there was always a part of me that feared this day might be coming, and when it did I'd have to face the real dilemma of how to get the three of us through it.
"I told Shelly today that I made an appointment to come over here and talk to you about raising Sid, and what kind of problems we were going to face. Only when I made the appointment I didn't know what I know now. He told me not to tell you he has HIV. We're writing and producing a new television series right now, and the executive producer is a nasty little bigot. Shelly's afraid he'll fire us if he hears about this. But I said you have to keep everything we tell you a secret, right?"
"Right," Barbara told her.
Ruthie took a tissue from the box on Barbara's desk, but her eyes were dry. "I hate to feel sorry for myself because I have had so much in this world where most people have so little, but goddammit, it took such a long time for us to hammer out a little niche for ourselves, after both being odd man out all our lives, and just when it was feeling like we had it together, there's this." Her head hung toward her lap and finally she let the tears come, and for a little while she cried quietly. Then she looked up at Barbara, her face a mass of red blotches, her bloodshot eyes large with fear.
"I'll go get Sid and we'll both be tested right away," she said. "And I'll see if I can get Shelly to start coming in here with me to talk to you. We've got so much to work on, and nobody to ask how to handle it. I mean it's not exactly your run-of-the-mill situation is it?" She smiled an ironic smile beneath her despairing eyes.
"Not exactly," Barbara said. "But I know you and
Shelly and Sid and I can work out a way to handle it that will be right for your family."
"Our family," Ruthie said, liking the sound of that. "We really are a family. Although I'm sure we're not the kind you're probably used to counseling."
"True," Barbara said. "But things are changing." Then she told Ruthie about her idea for the group.
9
T
HE SENIOR STAFF MEMBERS were all women, and they jokingly referred to their weekly meetings as "the kaffee-klatsch." But after the first few minutes of commenting on the quality of the coffee and asking about one another's families, their meetings were far from social. In fact, they were sometimes so serious that during a presentation Barbara had the same performance anxiety that she used to get at University High School when she stood up to deliver an oral book report.
"As you're probably well aware, there are sperm banks all over the country, selling sperm which has been donated by men identifiable to the purchaser only by numbers, and a few broad-stroke descriptions of their race, religion, and favorite hobbies." One of her colleagues let out a titter of a giggle over that information, and Barbara knew they had to all be wondering what this had to do with their child-development program.
"It's a chancy way to go, but women who want
babies badly are willing to take the risk. Donor insemination obviates the discomfort of dating, awkward sex, and uncomfortable relationships. The irony is that the same women who were freed up by the sixties to have sex without the problems of babies, twenty years later find themselves eager to seize the opportunity to have babies without the problems of sex.
"What's happened with all of the reproductive technologies is that some important issues are being created that will affect us, the child-development professionals. In this era of embryo transfer, in vitro fertilization, menopausal mothers carrying pregnancies for their daughters, and much more, it seems what many of these families may not be considering fully is the psychological and emotional effect the circumstance of these births will have on the people being created.
"And I say it that way because even in our studies here of intact nuclear families, frequently the baby-craving is just that. I mean, there's little thought about what happens beyond the excitement of new babies, when the realities set in. When the babies become children who have language and begin to wonder about their genesis. In my private practice in the last two weeks, I've met with a single woman who's been donor inseminated twice, and a couple in which the heterosexual mother was inseminated by the baby's father, who is her homosexual male best friend. And in both cases the families have toddlers who are very verbal, and the parents are concerned." That got a few "Hmm"s.
"It'll take a long time before there's real data on how those babies will feel when they're adults, but I suspect that the key to making it all work has something to do with creating a loving context for them. To find warm ways to deal with cold realities.
"I'd like to alert pediatricians and run an ad in some publications in order to look for and then begin a group
for those special families. I believe the world isn't prepared yet with a new way of thinking to go hand in hand with those newfound methods. That culturally, socially, ethically, morally, and legally, we don't have adequate rules or answers for the exquisitely complicated issues that have already come up around these methods. Nevertheless, we need to find some way for the families to operate now."
Louise Feiffer, the director of the program, was a tall dramatically attractive woman in her fifties, with high cheekbones, ivory skin, and dark hair pulled back into a bun. Barbara was relieved to see her bright-eyed and smiling as she went on.