Every Kind of Wanting

by Gina Frangello

  “That’s funny,” Emily says. “Nick would go along with it. Wouldn’t you, Nick?”

  “I have no fucking idea what you people are talking about.”

  “These guys,” she tells him. “They want to have a baby. Chad’s sister is giving them the eggs, but she doesn’t want to carry the pregnancy. They need a gestational surrogate. We should do it, don’t you think?” She turns to Miguel. “I love being pregnant.”

  “Oh yikes,” Chad rushes—“No, I . . .” he looks at Nick, almost imploringly. “That’s not why I told her about it . . . I was just making conversation. I mean, you don’t even know us.”

  “Miguel knows me,” Emily says. “We haven’t seen each other in a long time, but he knows me better than most people in my life do now, actually. People know each other differently in high school. No one knows each other that way at fortysomething. We’re all too busy—it’d be an imposition. When’s the last time you had a real phone conversation? In high school, I used to spend six hours a night on the phone. I don’t even talk to Nick for six hours a night, and we live together!”

  “When we were long distance,” Nick says, “we’d talk so long we’d fall asleep with the phones in our hands. I had to crash in my car for a month—my phone bill was so high I got evicted.”

  Miguel is not sure if he is relieved or crushed to see the conversation back on the ground of phone bills.

  “I love being pregnant,” Emily says again. “It suits me. Everyone said so, didn’t they, Nick?”

  “I don’t know about everyone,” Nick says. “It suited you, I thought, yeah. You glowed. I always thought that was bullshit. Pregnant women looked the opposite of glowing to me—like chalk, or wax, something . . . flame resistant. Then I saw Emily carrying Miles, before we even knew yet, and something was . . . different about her. It was incredible.”

  “We should do it,” Emily says. “You guys would be great parents. Wouldn’t they, Nick?”

  “Look,” Chad says, and he seems, to Miguel’s ears, more alarmed than is anywhere near normal for him. “I’m sure you don’t need to be pregnant for Nick to think you glow!”

  Nick laughs at this. “Hey,” he says, “if she digs being pregnant so much, that’s up to Emily, it’s her body.” He looks at Miguel, and there is a strange intimacy to the look, as though everyone is speaking in code and Miguel is the decoder. “But is there, you know, money in this or something? Like, you rent the space? Is that how this works? Because that’s a little creepy. I wouldn’t be into that.”

  “We were . . . expecting to pay, yes.”

  Nick shrugs. “They have professionals, from what I understand, for this sort of thing.”

  “But you want it to be someone you trust,” Emily protests. “Not some stranger. That’d be creepy—a stranger carrying your baby. We wouldn’t have to take money. Just the expenses and stuff like that—I wasn’t saying it for the money—Nick and I don’t care about things like that. I’d just . . .” When she smiles, Miguel sees some old fragility in the curve of her lips. The smile conveys some need, but he doesn’t know her well enough anymore to read the source. She says, “I’d just . . . it’d make me feel incredible, actually, to help someone else have that.”

  “Really?” Chad asks, and Miguel does know him well enough that the alarm in Chad’s voice a moment before makes utter sense to him. They have, this past month, run into dead end after brick wall after cliff’s edge. Their hopes rise and fall. They are dashed against rocks. They are emotionally exhausted. They were fools to think they could have this. They live in a world where it is okay to hold hands at a restaurant; where they don’t fear having their asses kicked or being murdered just for being together, and this allowed them to become smug. Their hope has battered too hard, lately, against the glass ceiling of what they will be permitted. Hope, Chad has discovered—which Miguel knew all along—is dangerous.

  “If you want to,” Emily’s saying, just as Lina comes out onto the street, Bebe not here tonight, just Lina dressed in low-slung button-fly men’s Levi’s and a black dago tee that falls low on her braless breasts and reveals an ill-chosen tattoo of her first ex-husband’s initials: JJ. She takes the fresh cigarette out of Nick’s hand without asking and takes a drag, and Miguel thinks instantly, Oh fuck, though Emily doesn’t even blink. “I’d be honored,” Emily is saying. “God, it’d be so fun!” Other people are filing out thinly after Lina; the party must be breaking up; they’ve been out here a long time, even though it’s ostensibly Nick’s party.

  “Did you hear?” Nick says to Lina, but loudly enough that the others turn to look at him—he’s an actor and knows how to project his voice; he’s the writer and they are all used to memorizing his words. “My wife’s having a baby, but don’t worry, it’s not mine.”

  It seems, to Miguel, a punch line that could go either way. People could grow uncomfortable, look at the floor, glare at Emily, wait breathlessly for some messy marital scene. Miguel himself isn’t sure, even, how to react. But no, this crowd knows Nick, and not a single person seems to take the words amiss, and everyone laughs, except Lina, who drags from the cigarette and seems, in her strange way, to have already taken this random development as a forgone conclusion.

  LINA

  You text me the day after the play’s closing party. Your wife isn’t pregnant yet; she’s just talking. Gretchen’s eggs are still inside her own skin, and she knows nothing yet about regret, about plotting treason or staging a coup. She knows nothing yet about watching her own bright future belong to other people, because she can’t see the future. No, today, Nick, everyone is still happy, bubbling with prospects, what could possibly go wrong?

  A fucking lot can go wrong. Starting with this:

  Your text reads, I miss you! Let’s get together! Now!

  I am, to put it mildly, startled. It’s noon. I’ve only been awake for an hour. It’s a Wednesday, and I know you’ve been up since 7:00 a.m. to make breakfast and take Jay to school; I know that Miles rides the bus somewhere you describe as far-a-fucking-way to go to a performing arts school where he studies drama, like everyone in your family for so many generations that you can’t count back to before the Ryans were actors. I know more about your daily schedule than I do anyone’s but Bebe’s—certainly more than about any of the women’s Bebe and I bring home. Still, I keep looking at your text, as if expecting the words to rearrange to say something more expected. I’m used to your guileless exuberance, the way you make no effort to “act cool” by appearing indifferent about people, but I have to admit I always thought that, actually, was part of your shtick: the guy who’s so cool he doesn’t have to play it cool. After the closing party I didn’t think I’d ever hear from you again.

  Much less the next day, with an invitation to get together in person, immediately, with exclamation points.

  I had figured . . . well, I figured you were like me. That whatever circumstances you happened to be in, you zeroed in on the most kindred spirit in that particular room and charmed them and made them your best friend for the hour waiting at the dentist’s office, the three days of jury duty, the months of rehearsing and performing a play, the year of dancing at a skanky west-side strip club, the four years of college. Then, you left whatever environs in which you shared a connection with that person, and you were on to the next place, the next kindred spirit, the next performance. That was who I thought you were, and I had no problem with it. I liked being the chosen recipient of your particular nature, for a finite period of time. I liked the juxtaposition of intense intimacy and implicit transience. I am good at intensity. I am not good at permanence.

  I text back, Sure let’s find a date next week that will work, thinking to put you off. I don’t want to see you, though I realize this seems nuts since seeing you was always my favorite thing about the play. But for some reason now I feel anxious and smothered, uncertain what to do.

  Probably you find this offensive, if you’re reading this now. Like I’m negating what things were like be
tween us from the beginning. The minute I saw you again in the produce aisle, I wanted to be your friend. People talk a lot about that instant sense of “recognition,” and I know it sounds cheesy, but I felt as though instead of asking me to be in a burlesque zombie play, you had suddenly revealed to me that we had the same father and were secret siblings. It wasn’t because you had already seen me naked, because everyone has already seen me naked. It was . . . something else. You were dressed strange as hell in some contrasting striped-plaid combo of wrinkled and too-big clothes, but even in the dim lighting, buried under fabric, the ethereal grace of your bones was evident and you looked brighter, differently lit than the rest of the room. You seemed almost to give off sparks, as though trying to break past your own essential physical barriers, too big to contain yourself.

  We were already setting the stage for lies that day. The lie of “how we met,” it turned out, would set the stage for everything.

  What you and I told everyone: that you approached me at total random in a Trader Joe’s and asked me to audition for your play.

  The truth: we had met, first, at the club, years before. Well . . . met may be too strong a word; we had seen each other in that dimly lit room, sporadically, for months—months in which you started frequenting a strip club in the afternoon, on days you didn’t teach, Jay finally in full-day kindergarten. The club, it turned out, was near a rinky-dink theater putting on one of your plays, and you were “in the neighborhood” for rehearsals, but in all human history no one has ever gone to watch naked women dancing because they were in the neighborhood of anything. You stopped coming by when your show ended, maybe a full year before I quit and the club faded into our mutual rearview. We were not friends there; you never paid me for anything extra; I don’t believe we ever had a conversation. You were not the first customer from the club I’d run into in my ordinary life—others had recognized me, known me by my stage name and tried to talk to me, and I spurned them, kept my boundaries erected around me tight. But when you and I saw each other, both of us rummaging over little prepackaged salads, our faces mutually lit up in a way suggestive of something entirely other than what we were. We smiled nakedly as though running into our first crush from grade school. I said, “I love your hair long like that,” and you grabbed the top of my arm abruptly in a way that should have freaked me out and said, the first time I heard your accent, “I’ve grown it for a play I’m in—you should be in it too!” We both laughed then because the suggestion was so absurd, but suddenly you were writing your phone number down on my hand, a move so girl-like it allowed me to pretend you couldn’t possibly be a threat to anything. “It’s a zombie burlesque,” you explained, still holding my wrist, and I said, “Are you fucking with me?” and you said, “I wrote it!” and I said, “You are fucking with me,” and you said, “Come audition—I want you for the part of the psychiatrist, the lead,” and I said, “Oh, you do not want me to play a shrink, I hate shrinks,” and you said, “Brilliant, now I really want you for the part.”

  Later we would fail to realize that the fake version of our meeting made it sound like you were so instantly attracted to me that you approached a total stranger. The real version was less sexual somehow, but not necessarily better. The real version was that you saw me as someone who already knew your secrets. We were lying for one another before we had a reason.

  Another true thing: if that hadn’t happened, your wife would never have seen my brother again. In a way, your going into a strip club—your sitting at the bar with your back turned most times to the stage, looking exactly like a certain kind of man does in such places: like he is trying to find the Exit sign to his life—was the real beginning.

  From the first, we were always next to one another on rehearsal breaks; we sat together on steps and curbs and tables, our knees touching, passing cigarettes and laughter back and forth. You reminded me of my brother, if my brother would ever actually talk to people in a real way. The same dry, almost pathological irreverence. If anything, we had the familiarity of people who had been lovers long ago but that was all over now: you spoke of your kids and of Emily with an easy grace, as though I were another man or your sister. You told me how hot Bebe was and then spun a once-upon-a-time story about your efforts to get a hot lesbian from London to go out with you, and how as a result you ended up fucking a slew of lesbians because you were always following her around like a dog.

  “Some of her friends were bi or took pity on me, and I got used to the first I heard in the morning being, I can’t believe I slept with a bloke.” You loved being the boy the lesbians passed around—they even had a slogan: Miss dick? Call Nick. You had beautiful lips, they agreed, and a phenomenal tongue, longer and stronger than most women’s. Stick out your tongue, one would command if a new woman dropped by the table. Show her, Nick, move it around. And you’d do so, delighted. Go on, they’d urge the new girl, give him a try, he’s an honorary dyke. And another would say, Let’s not push it—maybe a human vibrator, and they’d all laugh. “I’d sit there,” you told me, sometime during our first week of rehearsal, “and feel myself floating away and melting into the bar seat simultaneously. It was the happiest I’d ever been.”

  I thought you were the most charming man I had ever met.

  Now, looking down at this unexpected text stream, this invitation to . . . get together . . . I’m thinking clearly my judgment was fucked up as usual. Maybe Bebe was right and sex is what you’ve wanted from me all along. Maybe your wife is having some midlife crisis and wants to start swinging with girls, and you’ve mistaken the things I’ve disclosed about Bebe’s and my life for an open-admissions welcome mat. But Bebe doesn’t miss dick or need Nick. She might let Emily in the bed, but I have no interest in your wife. I don’t want to be her friend. I want, though, with sudden ferocity, to be yours—not at rehearsals, during finite times in a finite space, but for real.

  You text, You going on auditions all this week, then? I hope you get them all.

  I have, for the record, never even been on an audition other than for you. I quit the club when we started rehearsals, only kept up dancing at sporadic lesbian nights before that faded out, too. I graduated from college more than two years ago, but I’ve never sent out resumes or gone on a job interview. It’s not like I’m hell-bent on being an actress, so why would I go on auditions? I text back, Yes, a few . . . thanks!

  Em really wants to have your brother’s kid. She was up all night talking about it. So I guess we’re gonna be related, so to speak. Maybe we’ll be spending every Thanksgiving together, Aunt Lina. I make a mean tofurkey.

  I press “contact” on the phone and call you instead of texting back. As you answer in a startled voice, I say, like I’m on to you, “Oh, so that’s why you want to meet. The surrogacy scheme.”

  “It’s like we struck gold,” you say. “Now we have, like, an excuse to keep in touch. We’re going to be family, almost. I was feeling so awful about how much I was going to miss you when the play ended. And then this came out of nowhere, like fate. Now we can just keep going.”

  What are you talking about? If you hadn’t texted me, would I ever even have thought of you again? “Keep going where?” I ask, my voice gentler now, almost cautious.

  “Cuba?” you ask, and I laugh, something like terror, something like joy catching in my throat. “But for the moment, I bet you haven’t had coffee yet, slacker girl. Filter, in an hour?”

  And I guess, in retrospect, right at the moment when everything begins to come together is also precisely the moment when everything starts to fall apart.

  GRETCHEN

  Suddenly Chad is the cruise director of Gretchen’s life. Going through pregnancy herself and then nursing a newborn was less demanding than her brother has become, calling her daily with litanies of insurance information and the surrogate’s, Emily’s, work schedule, which Gretchen must accommodate: Emily needs to be knocked up in October so that she can deliver in the summer when she’s off work, chop chop. On what she has sta
rted to think of as an impulsive move born of cocktails on an empty stomach and the despair of being in a roomful of senior-citizen WASPs, Gretchen now shoots Pergonal into her thighs until she is bruised like a junkie. The hormones make her skin break out, and Troy is horrified. “You should start going into Neiman’s to get your makeup professionally done,” he tells her. “The only time your makeup has ever looked good was at our wedding.”

  Neiman Marcus is not even open at 8:00 a.m. Even Jennifer Fucking Aniston surely doesn’t have a professional makeup job at the crack of dawn, daily. Gretchen wrestles with whether Troy truly means what he suggests—whether this is what he considers a viable option—or if he is only striving to be cruel. When she repeats his remarks to Chad, her brother says, “His shiftless ass lives off our money and he can’t even pretend to be polite?” as though Troy’s feigning niceness out of greed would be a perfectly acceptable solution. Chad adds, “God, I hate conflict—I don’t know how you handle it, Gret.”

  Today is her phone interview with the psychiatrist. “Say as little as possible,” Miguel coached her, missteps apparently a given should she give herself free reign. His interview has already taken place. The fertility center takes care of all these details: attorneys for the surrogate, the egg donor, the dads. A contract has been drawn up in which Gretchen is to relinquish her legal claims on the child—another contract for the surrogate, stipulating not just her lack of rights to the baby, but what kind of compensation she will receive. The going market rate seems to be about thirty grand, but this Emily woman will not accept more than ten. “She isn’t doing it for the money,” Chad says, as though this makes sense. What the hell else would the girl be doing it for? She’s an old friend of Miguel’s, but Gretchen has known Miguel for ten years and never heard of Emily until now, so how good a friend can she possibly be? The situation is inexplicable. Gretchen is donating an egg to her brother. The offspring will be part of the Merry clan. Even if the situation in which she’s found herself makes little sense to her on an emotional level, it sounds sensible on paper.