On the day of the procedure I took Isaac to school, after which I was picked up by one of those chauffeured town cars that normally patrolled the wealthier avenues. I was driven to a private surgery, where an anesthesiologist first injected fentanyl to create the initial relaxed and sleepy state, then created a port for the anesthesia that would put me to sleep during the process. I was escorted to the gynecological table and instructed to count backward from ten. I felt the anesthetic burn a trail up my arm but I only managed to count to three before falling into the darkness.
When I awoke I was lying in the recovery room, and the first thing I noticed was the euphoria, that incredible, incomparable, indescribable feeling of absolute, groundless well-being that is apparently common during the period when fentanyl slowly leaves your system. The nurse came over to ask if I’d like anything to eat or drink, as I’d had to fast before the procedure, and I gazed at her as if she was a guardian angel.
“You did really great,” she said with a smile. “I think they got about six dozen out of you, if not more.”
I smiled and thanked her as if it was a compliment. It was only later, when I was home in bed huddled in a ball with the most painful cramps I had ever experienced (I told Isaac I had a bad stomachache) that it occurred to me that six dozen was an inordinately large sum. Hadn’t they told me they would try to produce around six in each ovary for a total of twelve? Of course my ovaries had been the size of grapefruits! Of course I had been “hyperstimulated”! I suddenly deduced that I had been intentionally overdosed.
Horrified, I started researching this online, reading reports on forums from women who had been through similar experiences. I learned that this was an unfortunate yet common deception in the industry, and since egg donation was not yet regulated in the States, it was technically not illegal to mess with the hormone dosages. Some survivors had started a group and were petitioning Congress to establish clear rules for the procedure so that donors were more protected, but as of now, we were guinea pigs to be experimented with on a whim, and no thought had been expended as to the consequences. A few years later I would read the articles of the former donors with ovarian cancer who were fighting for research into the link, but even then no regulation would have been instituted.
The clinic was so pleased with the results that when I arrived to pick up my check for ten thousand dollars they asked me if I would consider donating again in two months. “No!” I said, my tone conveying a horrified reaction.
“But why?” the doctor asked, seeming honestly surprised. “The procedure went so well, and you clearly have excellent fertility.”
“You overstimulated me!” I said. “I produced that much because you gave me too high a dose of hormones. How can I trust you with my health when you would do something like that, just to create more funds? I’m still a human being; I’m not a machine you can optimize to get better results.”
“Well, I . . .” she sputtered. “I don’t think . . . I mean . . . we gave you the standard dose for a woman your age. After all, you had your child at nineteen, but you are twenty-five now. Your fertility changes a lot during these intervening years. We had to assume that you weren’t as fertile now as you were then . . . It’s not an exact science yet, you know. But if you donated again, we could adjust the dose, now that we know . . .”
“I will never donate again,” I said, my voice steely. “And I will certainly never recommend it to anyone else.”
Perhaps standing up for myself was supposed to bring me some vindication, but it didn’t. In the end, they had gotten what they wanted from me. All I had to show for it was the check. I looked at it now, standing on the pavement in front of the imposing office building in midtown: a one with four zeros behind it. Now I understood why egg donation paid this much. They weren’t just buying your eggs. There were buying your life.
I would suffer from inordinately painful, erratic cycles for years following the aspiration, from the sporadic throbbing of twisted ovarian ligaments that would disable me for days if not weeks. My body would never be the same again, as multiple doctors in Europe would later confirm. But although the shocked looks on their faces would remind me of the humiliation and debasement I had been forced to stoop to, simultaneously it would bring with it the reminder that I had been willing to suffer and sacrifice in order to survive, in order for my son to continue to blossom in his new life without being hindered or sabotaged by my failure to sustain him. The shame would always be mixed with a kind of perverse pride, and for a long time I didn’t even try to explain, because I was convinced that nobody could possibly understand the complexity of my circumstances or emotions. Perhaps this still is the case, although now I do discuss it occasionally, because I’ve reached understanding on my own, and it turns out that is enough.
* * *
—
God is like a crutch that you lay down only to discover that your legs had been functioning just fine all along. I was determined to try to stop seeing the world through some mystical lens, convinced that I would be best served in the future by clear sight, no matter how few comforts this might seem to offer.
On the morning of December 25 I got into my car to take a rare drive around the city. I was not expecting the postapocalyptic landscape I encountered as I zoomed down the FDR Drive. I did not spot a single car on the highway, or a single moving boat on the East River. Up the West Side Highway it was the same. A trip that would normally take me more than an hour took twenty minutes. Winding through the narrow streets of Soho, usually packed with chic shoppers, I saw only gray shuttered storefronts and metal trash cans tossed wildly about by the wind.
The emptiness was chilling in a city like Manhattan, which I had only ever experienced as wildly, permanently frenzied. It underscored, intensely, how out of place I was in this world, because it showed me quite concretely that every other human being had somewhere they belonged right now, and this was the full scope of my aloneness, not simply a rarity, but an alien aberration. In that moment, I felt that my very self was an empty vessel, unmoored and floating in deep space, trapped outside the bounds of life.
In the afternoon I went to pick up Isaac from his father. This time Eli looked at me searchingly and said, “It will be three years soon, since you moved out. You’re not coming back, are you?”
I shook my head no, this time knowing that the answer was true, in every fiber of my body, because I had drawn a line between myself and my past simply by enduring the plunges of the last few years. The suffering itself was like a brick wall that barred return.
“So can we get a get?” he asked. I supposed he was thinking about remarrying. To do so in the Jewish community he would not actually require a civil divorce, only a religious one. Technically he could also acquire it without my consent, but that process was costly and time-consuming, as it required a heter meah rabbanim (literally permission from one hundred rabbis).
“Yes, sure, when the civil divorce comes through I’ll go with you to get one.” My lawyer had informed me that the get was protected in the state of New York and its conditions subject to that of the civil divorce. I myself didn’t care about obtaining a religious divorce, since I wasn’t planning on staying observant, although he couldn’t know that. And it was one factor in the small amount of leverage I had, since it still mattered to him, although I had to wonder, as lately his appearance had been changing. First his beard got shorter and then disappeared completely; then the payos were cut shorter and shorter until they were practically invisible little tufts, like sideburns.
“Okay,” he said, “we will go to the table and mediate.” I was delighted he was willing to skip a court battle.
* * *
• • •
The lawyer was very happy to hear about the conversation. We had landed in an ideal situation, she said. I had managed to placate the other side, get them to let their guard down. Mediation was the goal, after all. She would prepare papers
, send them to his lawyer. There’d be a back-and-forth for a while, but eventually we would reach a compromise.
“I don’t want to ask for anything,” I said. “Just primary custody.”
“But, my dear, you are entitled to a minimum of child support! I don’t think any judge will accept a mediation agreement with no child support; it’s not even legal.”
“Well, his income isn’t reported, and I know he doesn’t want that dredged up; it’s my bargaining chip. I can promise not to cause any trouble for him. And technically a judge can’t order a percentage of an income that doesn’t exist, right?”
She reluctantly agreed, although she worried that I would later come to regret this decision. Once the agreement was on paper, she said, it would be close to impossible to sue for support later, should, for example, our circumstances change. But I wasn’t worried. I had learned that I could rely solely on myself no matter the situation. That was always better than having to depend on someone else, and I was ready to face my future on exactly those terms. I walked home with a spring in my step, feeling that freedom was just around the corner. Who knew? I could be living elsewhere by next summer! I eased into a new and cautious optimism.
* * *
—
In February my publisher started sending me on interviews. I received no training beforehand. I was simply instructed to meet up with various people at various places and times. My agent informed me that I was not in a position to be picky, as I should be thrilled with whatever morsels of press interest I could muster. So I didn’t feel empowered to ask why I would be giving an interview to the New York Post, the trashiest tabloid in the city, nor did I understand that their headlines were echoed in distorted form in other tabloids around the world. I also didn’t know how to talk to journalists then. I spoke to them the way I would to a friend and was not prepared for my statements to be presented in convenient, misleading fragments, wholly out of context in order to portray a more newsworthy, salacious image. The way I had always approached any form of authority was still deeply influenced by my childhood; as I had attempted to seduce God with naïve directness, so I approached the lesser gods of journalism with the same faithful intentions.
* * *
• • •
Overnight I experienced that typical American invasion of “fame,” as Baudrillard had put it, that instant and total erasure of anonymity that knocked me completely off-balance and robbed me of any orientation as it trampled over me and in doing so ripped the layers of my personality off with it, leaving my brutally skinned self raw and throbbing underneath. My ability to determine my sense of self was gone; I now existed solely within a publicly imposed framework and was subject to its dictates. During this time of my life I would learn that fame can represent the greatest loss of freedom of all. Had I not already had the experience of living in a world where everyone seemed to know better than I who I was? Yet none of the limitations I had experienced prior felt like they could compare to this all-encompassing psychological net in which I was now hopelessly tangled like a fisherman’s squirming catch, held up to the scrutiny of connoisseurs before ending up on some communal dinner plate.
But that New York Post interview, although humiliating to read, unleashed a wave of attention that crested even before the official date of the book’s publication. Barbara Walters, also a Sarah Lawrence alumna, called to invite me on her nationally syndicated talk show The View, a show that my editors at Simon & Schuster informed me was watched by more than twelve million people, and my editor’s voice quivered with excitement as she relayed this information to me on the phone. The situation had changed drastically in the last week; suddenly my book was no longer niche, but clearly capable of appealing to a wide audience. My publishers were practically beside themselves with excitement and nervous shock. After all, we did not have enough books printed to meet that kind of demand. Although an order had been placed in response to the flurry of preorders reported after the Post interview appeared, it would not be ready for another few weeks, and even that sum would not be enough to meet the kind of demand that followed an interview such as this one.
On the morning of the official publication day, the day I was scheduled to appear on the show, my lawyer called me.
“I have bad news,” she said.
I gripped the phone hard, my knuckles turning white. “What is it?”
“Eli’s lawyer called. I think he is religious; I guess he saw the Post. He says he will be encouraging his client to pull out of mediation and sue for sole custody. He sounded like that was his idea of just punishment for your behavior. It’s ridiculous. I told him he has no chance in a Manhattan court with that kind of position. But if Eli sues, it means we will have to go to court, and it could take years and end up costing you a lot, so even though you could win, it’s not something I would advocate. Do you think there’s anything you can do to make him back down?”
I took a deep breath and steeled myself. “You can call his lawyer back right now and inform him I’ll be on The View today at twelve, telling an audience of twelve million about his threat. Ask him if that’s what he wants. If he wants me to keep quiet about the custody case, he needs to have the papers we’ve agreed upon together signed by eleven.”
She let out a sigh. “Phew. Okay. I will try that and let you know what happens. Are you sure you are ready to call his bluff?”
My hand hurt from clenching the phone so tightly. “I’m sure.”
In the studio a makeup artist worked on my face and hair while I sat nervously in the salon chair, watching my phone. At eleven thirty I was in the green room with the other guests, and still there was no news. I began to mentally formulate an appeal for custody suitable for national television. Only when I had been picked up by the studio attendant to be brought to the side of the stage did my phone finally ring. It was eleven fifty.
“It’s signed!” my lawyer screamed into my ear, laughing. “Holy hallelujah, you’re getting a divorce!”
I thought I might faint right there on the stage steps. But I handed my phone to the attendant, composed myself, and walked up. I gave the interview I had prepared, as if in a daze.
An hour later my editor called and informed me that we had sold fifty thousand ebooks in one hour. I called my agent to tell her the news.
“How can we have sold so many ebooks?” I asked. “I thought you told me they don’t sell as well as real books.”
“Well, we don’t have any real books. Didn’t you know? We sold out almost immediately.”
Three days later, the New York Times bestseller list had me at number two on the combined print-and-ebook list, solely as a result of ebook sales. I had been getting angry messages from people all over the country who had trekked to bookstores to buy the book only to come up empty, with booksellers unable to even offer a date on which the book might become available. It would take three weeks to restock the shelves again, during which time we continued to sell electronic copies and remain on the bestseller list as a result.
It was a whirlwind that would last for months and then would only partially ebb. Suddenly I was juggling multiple interviews each day. My new recognizability was jarring, not only on a general level, but in the way I was accosted while standing in line for a cup of coffee or sitting with my son on the subway. The frightening thing was that I could never be certain if the person approaching me wanted to praise me or condemn me. When so many people have all these caricatured ideas about you, be they positive or negative, you start losing your grip on your own carefully cultivated sense of self, and instead you begin to glimpse yourself only in the mirror of their projections. Soon I was receiving threats of harm from members of my community; someone forwarded me a conversation in Yiddish about whether it was permissible according to halacha (Jewish law) to kill me in the name of God. Uncles and cousins I had only had minimal contact with as a child suddenly wrote me letters inciting me to kill myself. I stop
ped being able to eat or sleep. I needed, more than ever, to finally get away from New York.
Soon it would be possible, for there was money in my bank account now. Enough for a long time. My life had changed overnight, only the new version was not necessarily more attractive than the old one. I was invited to exclusive parties and posh locations; I found myself surrounded by important and famous people and a crowd of underlings and would-have-beens who worshipped them. Money had legitimized me, and suddenly everyone wanted to be my friend. Although I could not have predicted it, I was more devastated by this new social capital than I had been by my enforced solitude. This social world felt false and dangerous, and I could not, would not believe that this was the other option, that this was the form of consolation others seemed to settle for. Surely there was something better out there, something deeper and more meaningful. I had not forgotten my promise to myself to seek it out. Soon. The divorce had been filed in court; it was a question of weeks before I received the judgment.
Indeed, on the eve of Passover 2012, a holiday I no longer observed but the spirit of which I nonetheless still understood, my lawyer emailed me my signed and stamped judgment. “Now you can get married!” she had written. “Just kidding!”
I was free. I was truly free. On the eve of a holiday that celebrated the liberation of the Jewish people, one Jewish woman had been declared liberated. Now there was nothing standing in the way of me and my future.
Exodus, Revisited Page 11
