And as she held it she felt focused on exactly what she had just named: this moment, these people in front of her, this place. It filled her mind completely, pushing out all the chatter of doubt and ambition and fear.
“Hear, hear,” someone said. There were exclamations of “That’s right!” and “Happy birthday!”
Jenny felt dazed. She could see Laura wiping a tear away with the back of her hand and Elise picking up Nigel. Jeremy tilted his head and something in his solemn face conveyed…was it approval? Or simply understanding? Looking into his eyes, she felt their connection.
“Mamamamama!” Colin babbled as Maria handed him to her. He was beginning to look tired and irritable, his face covered with vanilla frosting and crumbs of birthday cake.
“Hi, my big boy,” Jenny said, pressing his warm, straining little body to her, feeling a foot dig into her belly, a shoulder squirm against her arm.
“We brought you something,” Elise said, as she and Laura deposited a giant blue-and-green wrapped box on the table in front of her.
“Mamamama!” Colin cried.
“What on earth?” Jenny said. “It looks heavy!” And looking at her two friends she felt a glow of love spread over her.
“Well?” Elise said. “Are you going to open it?”
Shifting Colin over on her hip, Jenny tore in.
9
LIFTING OFF THE GROUND, the plane wobbled, groaned, and creaked. For a moment it was still the heavy, earthbound collection of steel and fiberglass it had been born as. But then, as always, the physics of wind and speed took charge.
It was a modern-day sacrament, really, Neil thought: the leap of faith that enabled all these passengers to sit reading their magazines, sipping their bottles of water, tapping away on their computers, full of blind faith in the science of aviation. If there was a God out there, he certainly had not designed the human body to fly. But possibly he was on to something in witholding this. Possibly humans never would have achieved so much if they had started out with more than this paper-thin coat of skin, this collection of breakable bones, these teeth no sharper or more dangerous than a pig’s. If they had been stronger and more physically capable, they never would have embarked on the trajectory of scrappy resourcefulness, big dreams, and constant self-improvement that had led to such inventions as skyscrapers, cars, and airplanes. They never would have made self-invention a stick they measured their success by.
Neil pressed the metal button on his arm rest and reclined his seat despite the still-glowing “Fasten Seatbelts” sign. Boston was receding in the darkness, an uneven collection of lights glowing like the embers of some deep internal fire. Below the plane was ocean—dark, cold, and theoretically terrifying. Neil considered reading the magazine on his lap, but settled instead for closing his eyes. Already news media seemed irrelevant to his new life.
Neil was going to Africa. A graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania had accidentally uncovered two volumes of what turned out to be Albert Sorensen Jones’s own travel diaries. Neil had driven through the night to see them—the unusually neat, back-slanted script he knew from forms and insurance records. He had gotten special dispensation to photocopy the pages and create for himself one thick, semi-indecipherable file. Now he could travel in the man’s own footsteps, something no one had ever done before.
What was he looking for? Would it help him finish his dissertation? These were Jane’s questions for him when he had called to say goodbye. But he was after something bigger than this. He was going to write a biography of the man’s life, something that did not yet exist. He was going to write the story of Albert Sorenson Jones. And he would accompany it with a juxtaposition—the Africa Jones had traversed over 150 years ago and the Africa he, Neil Banks, would walk through now.
Why did it matter? What was the use of this? His knee-jerk cynicism supplied the questions, but this time he had an answer. This man’s small, complicated, and imperfect life mattered. Because if it didn’t, what did? It was his life. He had tried to make something of it—had tried to build something and had failed, but there was meaning in the effort and there had to be meaning in its chronicle.
In the last few weeks, a new freedom had come over Neil. He was done with ZGames, with all its inherent compromise and market pandering. He was leaving Boston, a place he never should have come back to. And now he was leaving his country—a place he was too pessimistic, too unambitious, too unpragmatic to belong to. It felt like shedding cumbersome layers of clothing. He was naked, going out into the world. He could afford to. There was a portion of himself—a little boy named Colin (he had resigned himself to the name)—who would bring the Banks DNA into the bright bold future that had already left Neil behind.
What do you want? Jeremy had asked that night after the police left. He asked it not with anger or rebuke, but with frankness. And the question had flooded Neil with a kind of panic. What did he want? The anger and resentment that had driven him down Belleview Road at two a.m. were gone. Paternity? Visitation rights? Jeremy had continued in that reasonable, sonorous voice that Neil could imagine reassuring investors in his companies, constructing complex business arrangements involving millions of dollars: he was a man whose judgment you could have confidence in.
And so it was Jeremy himself who had translated the engine behind Neil’s actions into the concrete language of concessions and demands. He and Jenny would give Neil an open place in the baby’s life. He would become a known biological father—known to Colin himself as well as to Jenny and Jeremy. It was both minimal and profound. Neil certainly would not have paternity, or even explicit visitation rights. But if he wanted to, he could get to know the boy, just as any family friend could. He would be invited over for dinner if he was in town—and he could make as much effort as he wanted to be in touch.
But he would not be a “father” and bear all the weight and authority and complicated baggage the term implied. Jeremy was the boy’s father. For better or for worse, dead or alive. As Neil watched the baby fall asleep in Jeremy’s arms that night after the police left, this had been totally clear. There was a calmness to Jeremy’s movements, and a knowledge—the intimacy of which Neil had no frame of reference for. Jeremy loved the baby. Not the idea of him, or the DNA he was composed of, but the little boy himself. Sitting at their stark white kitchen table, observing them together, Neil himself had been rendered almost mute with humility.
And watching Jenny flitter with uncharacteristic nervousness between the teakettle and the cupboard, the baby and the teacups (when had he ever seen, or even imagined, Jenny Callahan doing something so prosaic and homey as making tea?), his bitterness and skepticism about what kind of life his child would lead dimmed. So the boy was born rich. Born into blessings Neil himself had never had. Was that so terrible? Did he want his child to grow up with the same sense of want and otherness that he had?
And if there was one thing Neil knew Jenny Callahan would do, it was protect her child.
Neil opened his eyes and looked out the window onto the black sea. There was a distant light. A boat of some kind, a small beacon of fire in the heart of the sea. Neil tried to make out what it was—giant tanker or cruise ship or little sailboat. But it was impossible to tell whether it was big or small from up here. It didn’t matter. He closed his eyes again. He was glad it was there.
10
IT WAS THE FOURTH OF JULY, and even Boston had finally entered summer. The air was not just warm, but humid. The trees hummed with crickets and cicadas. And the bay beyond Lynch Park was thick with sailboats, windsurfers, and even a few kayakers heading ambitiously toward a picture-book-perfect lighthouse.
Elise pushed the double stroller up the hill intrepidly. Beside her, Chrissy looked anxious. Her face was frozen in a distracted, searching gaze as if she were looking for a lost child or runaway dog. A strand of hair had blown across her cheek and stuck to the corner of her mouth.
“They’re probably over there,” Elise said, gesturing at the array
of picnic tables to the right.
“What?” Chrissy said jumpily. “Oh, I know. Do you have the diaper bag?”
Elise patted it demonstratively.
“Wait a minute,” Chrissy said, stopping short and clutching at Elise’s wrist with a cold hand. “Do you think this is a bad idea? I mean—do you still think so? Have I just been totally stupid?”
Elise stared at her and started to laugh. “Are you kidding?”
Chrissy shook her head and looked so miserable that despite Elise’s innate shrinking from public displays of affection, she drew her into a giant hug. James twisted around the side of the stroller to look back at them.
Chrissy pulled away and looked at Elise searchingly. “What if they’re awful?” she whispered.
“Who—the mothers?”
“The children.”
“Ha!” Elise let out a shout of laughter. “They won’t be!” She reached down and tousled Nigel’s hair. “And if they are, we’ll know we got lucky.”
“Okay,” Chrissy nodded like a brave child persuaded to walk into an intimidating classroom. “Okay.”
It was Elise who spotted them first—the balloons and, more prominently, Claire Markowitz and the inimitable Justin.
“I’ll get us settled,” she offered. “You go help her set up.”
And so immediately Chrissy was whisked off into the world of anxious preparations Claire Markowitz lived in. Elise, meanwhile, steered the boys over to the shade beneath a giant oak tree and spread their picnic blanket on the ground.
Slowly the women and their children began to arrive. It was an eclectic crew: lesbian couples, single straight women, even one transgender lesbian couple. Chrissy had given Elise the rundown when the picnic planning was still in its infancy. If Chrissy would calm down enough to come and sit with Elise and the boys, it would be fun to wage bets on who was who. Elise introduced herself agreeably to anyone who approached, but tried to remain genially apart from the hubbub of Donor #176’s uniting progeny.
She did sneak glances at the children, though: this mess of little ones, all half sprung from the same set of genes. They were dark-haired and brown-eyed, and although some were chubby and some were slim, some were big and some were small, there were certain striking commonalities. There was a little boy who had decidedly the same wide-set eyes as the four-year-old twins at the cupcake table and the little girl with pigtails. And four of the children (Nigel and James included) shared the same wide mouths and bumpy little noses they got so many compliments on.
Elise, who rarely drank anymore these days, felt the sweet tingle of alcohol wash over her and turn the whole event into a sort of interesting anthropological experiment. Shouts of laughter rang out from neighboring picnic sites. The air smelled of charcoal fire and grilling meat. It was a beautiful park! In a beautiful country where healthy, happy people could make children out of vials and beakers of biological fluid.
And it was Independence Day, that curiously fitting all-American holiday that celebrated not just victory, or heroism, or the birth of a nation, but independence itself: that peculiar American value that had spawned everything from the two-car household to the Unabomber. Wasn’t that, in some way, what this gathering was all about? Independence from the constraints of nature and corporeal function?
She watched Nigel and James navigate the scene—James boldly engaging in a silent grappling match with one of the other twins, pulling at his end of a plastic dump truck with determination, and Nigel standing more anxiously to the side, observing his brother’s antics with a furrowed brow. Elise felt a swell of love for them that was, she realized, decidedly parental. How could she have questioned that? She was proud of them—of James’s toughness and Nigel’s sweet thoughtfulness. As she watched, James let go of the dump truck and toddled off after another cupcake. And Nigel, seeing his brother safely extricated from the tug-of-war, looked around as if wondering what to do next. Brightening, he took a few steps up the hill and dropped to his hands and knees on the grass. Then he sat back holding something up triumphantly: a fluffy dandelion pinwheel. “Li li!” he called out, looking around with an expression of total amazement and joy. “Li li!”
Elise started toward him, grinning herself. This was something she had taught him last week. They had picked the delicate white globes and blown on them, watching the tiny filaments disperse, seeds for next year’s dandelions, she had explained. His deep brown eyes had taken this in with a kind of gravity, absorbing it into his understanding of the world.
“Li li!” he chirped with delight now as she sank down beside him. He took a deep breath and blew. “Seeds!”
Acknowledgments
SPECIAL THANKS TO MY EDITOR, Jill Bialosky, and agent, Eric Simonoff, to my readers Risa Miller and John Shattuck, to Jay Bradner for showing me around his lab and letting me ask a million stupid questions, to Jennifer Egan for writing the article that got me thinking, to The MacDowell Colony, Richard and Linda Fates, and Ann Hersey for loaning me the rooms in which this book was written, and of course to Preble Jaques for his love, support, and encouragement, as always.
PERFECT LIFE
Jessica Shattuck
READING GROUP GUIDE
PERFECT LIFE
Jessica Shattuck
READING GROUP GUIDE
JESSICA SHATTUCK on PERFECT LIFE
A few years ago I found out that an acquaintance of mine had donated sperm to an ex-girlfriend (now a lesbian) and become the biological father of her child. His relationship to the baby was very loosely and unofficially delineated—he was comfortable with having no legal connection to his son. I found the fuzziness of the relationship fascinating: What if he decided that he wanted to have a significant role in the child’s life? What if his amicable relationship with his ex went sour? What if, after having donated the biological materials necessary to conceive, he wanted in on the result?
The questions this arrangement posed were interesting to me as a writer because they touch on the rawest and most fundamental issues of being alive. How significant is our biology and its replication? What does it mean—and what does it do to us—to bring new life into the world?
I had a two-year-old and a six-month-old at the time I started writing Perfect Life , so these questions were (and still are) near and dear to me. My own family follows the traditional pattern of two parents raising their biological children, but as a parent in the 2000s I have many friends and peers who have brought children into the world in new ways: through sperm donation, egg donation, surrogacy, fertility treatments . . . We have so much more control over the process of procreation than we ever had before, but at base, the end result is the same: We bring babies into the world and raise them in the best way we can. We love them and care for them, and they turn our lives around in expected and unexpected ways.
As I started writing, I kept thinking about an article that Jennifer Egan had written for the New York Times Magazine about single women deciding to become mothers through sperm donation. One of the women it profiled had become part of a donorsibling community of women whose children shared the same sperm-donor father. They had formed a listserve and were planning a vacation together.
This idea became the basis of one of the plot threads in Perfect Life; it was such a vivid illustration of one new kind of family structure that can come out of a new way of conceiving, full of potential for its own unique comedies and tragedies and everyday hurdles.
And so, out of the raw material of these stories that touched my imagination and my own experiences as a parent, wife, and friend, my characters began to emerge, not little by little, but fully formed—like old friends, or pieces of myself that had been waiting in the back channels of my mind. And I began to tell their stories, the end result of which is Perfect Life.
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