by Chase Novak
Except this: another heir.
“That’s not fair, Leslie. I want to have a child with you.”
“Oh God, Alex. Do you think I don’t want to have a child too? I want us to have that. But there are so many children in the world waiting for someone to take care of them. Wouldn’t we do just as well to adopt?”
“I don’t rule it out, really, I don’t. But let’s just try this. Can’t we? All your kindness and intelligence and beauty—it would be a waste not to pass it along, not to keep it in the world. The gene pool cries out for it!” He smiles and lifts his brows, awaiting his smile’s reciprocation.
“I’m going to assume you’ve already made arrangements.”
Alex shrugs.
“When is the appointment?”
“Next Monday.”
“But Alex, next week? It’s not only sales conference but my sister is going to be in town and I offered her the third floor.”
“So now she can stay anywhere in the house.”
“How much is this going to cost?” Leslie asks.
“A ridiculous amount. And I’ve already paid half, since he insists on a wire transfer before the appointment. Which I know is highly irregular, but irregular might be just what we need right now, since nothing regular has done us the slightest bit of good.”
“I can’t stand seeing you so upset,” Leslie’s older sister, Cynthia, says to her. Cynthia, who co-owns an antique store called Gilty Pleasures in San Francisco with her boyfriend, has come to New York to visit Leslie and to attend a few auctions—she especially hopes to procure a set of twelve Chinese export plates made in 1775 for an English earl, each with his beaver and coronet crest in the center, flanked by a pair of mermaids.
“We’re coming to the end,” Leslie says. They are in the parlor and even though it is still light outside, the room is somber, filled with dark blue shadows and the sad perfume of hothouse roses that were supposed to be cheery. “If this doesn’t work, I think we’ll throw in the towel.”
“The towel of the marriage?” Cynthia asks.
“Never. The towel of parenting.”
“And he still won’t consider adoption?” Cynthia asks. She does her best to keep her gaze fixed on her younger sister, but the parlor—indeed, the entire house!—is so filled with antiques, most of them in Alex’s family for generations, that it’s difficult for Cynthia not to take them all in with her appraising, admiring eyes. Just above the Queen Anne chair with its multicolored floral needlework in which Leslie slouches is a two-hundred-fifty-year-old gilt-wood mirror surmounted by a swan’s-neck crest, which in turn centers a feather-carved finial with a female mask nestled in palm fronds. It would probably sell for twenty thousand dollars, maybe more, in San Francisco. Also distracting Cynthia is the fact that Leslie has placed her teacup directly onto the George III mahogany tripod table next to her chair, a caramel-colored beauty with an exquisite piecrust top and leaf-carved feet.
“Look around you,” Leslie says, indicating with a wave the walls covered in portraits of Alex’s numerous relations, ranging from a British army officer with his scrubbed pink face and bloodred jacket; to a shrewd-looking older woman in an amber dress with Pomeranians on her lap and steel in her eyes; to a fatuous dandy in a royal blue tricorn and shimmering silk waistcoat, holding his cane delicately between two fingers; to some more recently minted Twisdens wearing the uniforms of their hobbies (riding breeches, yachting caps, painter’s smocks) or their professions (Brooks Brothers suits, judge’s robes, Episcopal minister’s purple shirt and turned collar). “Alex wants to continue his family’s line.”
“And what are you?” Cynthia says. “Breed stock?” Childless herself, and living with a man who nearly everyone assumes is gay, Cynthia has never been a cheerleader for the conventional family.
“How about I love him and want to make him happy,” Leslie says.
“And what about your happiness?” Cynthia asks. “All these procedures, your intimate life completely invaded. It’s nuts. And your career!”
“Well, as I said, we’re coming to the end of it.”
“And what the hell is this new treatment that you have to leave the country to get? I mean, come on, Les. I’d be highly dubious. In fact, I’d be scared to death.”
“Who said I’m not?” Leslie says.
Cynthia’s attention is captured momentarily by a pair of Chinese reverse paintings on glass hanging above the fireplace. In one, a maiden kneels on a raft holding an oar and navigating rough waters, and in the other, a seated mother and a standing child are beneath a cypress tree, a pagoda on a hill in the distance. “Are those new?” Cynthia asks.
“Nothing in this house is new,” Leslie says.
The primary home improvement Alex and Leslie have made is to triple-glaze the windows as a way of reducing the hum, honk, roar, shout, and screech of New York. Nevertheless, a piercing scream from the sidewalk one story below comes into the room with all the speed, force, and shock of a flaming arrow. Leslie and Cynthia hurry to the window and part the heavy velvet drapes.
Directly beneath them, a nanny in a white uniform and a blue topcoat holds the side of her face and continues to scream. She is obviously in excruciating pain, and a couple of passersby, frozen by the horror of the moment and the terror and torment of the woman, stand gawking at her as she walks in tight little circles holding her cheek and howling in agony. When she moves her hand away, the pink of her flesh shows through the dark brown of her skin. She looks at her palm, which is red with blood, while still more blood courses down her face, some of it pooling in her ear, most of it cascading onto the collar of her woolen coat, turning the bright blue wool brownish black.
Yet as terrible a sight as that is, what has riveted the attention of the people below on the street and Leslie and Cynthia as well is the nanny’s little charge, a sinewy, long-legged, dark-haired, pale child of two or three, a boy, to judge from his clothes—red sneakers, blue jeans, and a little satin New York Giants jacket. He is sitting calmly in his stroller with his hands folded in his lap, his eyes expressionless, and blood drooling out of his mouth.
“Did that fucking baby just bite his nanny?” Cynthia exclaims.
According to Alex, the most irritating aspect of their appointment with Dr. Kis is that there is no way to fly directly to Slovenia unless they fly private. So he books Lufthansa first class to Munich, with a connecting flight on something called Adria, where first class will probably get you nothing more than a larger bag of pretzels. And so, on the afternoon of November 18, they set off on what Leslie hopes is the very last stop on their quest for a biological heir. The first leg of their flight is reasonably relaxed; they reach the meticulously maintained Munich airport around 7:00 a.m. and find a café in which to kill an hour before their scheduled flight to Ljubljana. They stow their Vuitton carry-ons under a black Formica table; inside of Alex’s suitcase is an envelope with $20,000 in hundred-dollar bills, the second half of the payment to Dr. Kis, who insists on cash—he is gracious enough to accept American dollars, though he prefers euros. As luck would have it, someone has left behind a copy of the Financial Times; as they drink their kaffeemilch, Alex reads an article about attempts being made to restructure British Petroleum, and Leslie reads about the resurgence of international gangs who target rich families via kidnapping, identity theft, and blackmail.
“Look at this,” Leslie says, showing Alex the newspaper’s photo of two stubby-looking men with three-day beards, handcuffed, their balding heads down as they are led away by Russian policemen. “They tried to kidnap an American banker’s child.”
“Idiots,” says Alex.
“You know…” They both say it at the same time.
“Go ahead,” Alex says.
“I was just going to say I sometimes wish we weren’t rich.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Really. I wonder what our lives would be like. I mean, money is its own kind of ghetto, isn’t it? Everything we do, everyone we know. And it makes
us a target too. It’s scary. So what were you going to say?”
“Me? I was going to say I wish we hadn’t flown commercial.”
The flight from Munich to Ljubljana is about forty-five minutes. The airport there, in terms of its size and sense of importance, is what you would expect if you flew into Poughkeepsie. Alex and Leslie disembark, along with a couple of elderly nuns, an Austrian businessman, and a stewardess in a peacock-blue blazer. They are brought to the main building in a minivan, the back door of which remains open to the cold, while not far away a jet begins its takeoff. Inside the shabby white building, there seems to be no passport control, no customs; in a few minutes, the Twisdens are out of the airport and in the back of a taxi reeking of air freshener. The driver, a woman in her thirties whose gelled, spiky hair reminds Leslie of those metal guards some people put on their windowsills to keep pigeons away, drives quickly past the frosted hillocks and icy evergreens lining the road into the city.
A sudden rain; it seems to come out of nowhere and all at once. The driver is reluctant to use the windshield wipers, turning them on for only a moment or two and then turning them off, waiting to turn them on again until the windshield has been pelted so thoroughly with rain that it looks as if it is covered with silver paint.
Alex feels the tension in Leslie’s body, and he takes her hand, pats it reassuringly. “How you doing, baby?”
“Don’t even say that word,” Leslie says.
Soon, they are in the city. The outlying area exudes a kind of postsocialist anonymity, as if every building—every brick—feared being accused of putting on airs. But as they get closer to the city center, the architecture becomes less utilitarian, more decorative, and, after a series of switchbacks caused by various one-way streets and other streets recently closed to automobile traffic, they arrive at their hotel, which, from the outside, presents nothing more inviting than a wooden door such as you would use to enter a small church. Above it is a stone carving of an old man with his forefinger pressed to his lips, presumably asking passersby to keep their voices down.
Leslie has fallen asleep. Alex pats her knee as he pays the driver, and, commandeering both of their suitcases, he leads her into the hotel. Her eyes are half closed; he suspects that mainly she doesn’t want to see anything. Check-in is at a charming little desk set to one side of a stone internal courtyard, where they are served by a sallow man in his thirties with thinning black hair and sad brown eyes beneath which hang the crepe of dark circles. Kidney failure, Alex thinks, handing over their passports.
There are potted plants everywhere—hundreds of them—and gloomy, age-encrusted paintings on the walls that remind Alex of the portraits of his ancestors back home except that these are of a jowly Madonna; a glowering bishop; a naked Holy Infant with sausage legs and a potbelly, wielding a sword.
Ljubljana is divided by a river. On one side is the Old Town, stony and Gothic, with twisting streets leading to Dr. Kis’s office, and on the other is the newer section, with office buildings and modern apartments and the hotel where Alex and Leslie are staying.
Alex and Leslie will waste no time; they are booked to fly home the very next day. Their suite is spacious, with a large bedroom, a sitting room, and two baths. For efficiency’s sake, they shower together, though Alex is out of his shower, dressed—he wears a blue suit, a white shirt, and a dark tie, as if he is on his way to court—and sitting in an armchair by the time Leslie, wrapped in a towel, pulls a modest dress out of her suitcase; he looks on with pleasure.
“You are such a beautiful woman,” Alex says, shaking his head.
“I feel nervous and sad and I wish we weren’t here,” Leslie says, putting on the dress.
“Well, that’s just the kind of positive energy we look for in a time like this,” Alex says.
“I’m sorry, that’s just how it is.” She looks at herself in the mirror on the wardrobe door, straightens her collar, pats her hair, shrugs. “Can you at least promise…”
“You don’t even have to ask,” Alex says, rising. “This is it. The last crusade.”
He takes her in his arms, overcome for a moment by his deep love for her and his regret that he has put them both through so many procedures as he pursues the holy grail of an heir. “If we come up empty here, no more.”
“We can adopt, Alex.”
“Mmm,” he says, burying his face for a moment in her hair.
The man at the front desk calls a taxi for them, and, their bones aching with jet lag and fatigue, they wait, sipping coffee in the courtyard, but no taxi arrives.
“We’re going to be late,” Alex says. He excuses himself for a moment and consults with the desk clerk.
“Castle Trg is just a short walk,” Alex says when he returns, holding an extra-large umbrella the clerk has given him.
“What’s a trg?” Leslie asks.
“It means ‘street.’ And it’s just over the Dragon Bridge,” he adds, as if he were somehow familiar with this cold, rainy town.
“I don’t think I want to be in a place where streets are called trg and bridges are named after dragons,” Leslie says.
The real stone dragon of Ljubljana sits atop a castle in the hills overlooking the city, but replicas of it are every twenty feet or so on the Dragon Bridge. By the time they get that far, the rain is beating against their umbrella like a drumroll. Suddenly, the wind picks up, tearing their only shelter from Alex’s hands. They watch helplessly as the black umbrella with its upside-down question mark of a handle spins its way down the river with the new city on one side, and the old city on the other.
They run. The storm is so fierce and their chances of staying dry are nonexistent, and somehow the whole thing is so absurdly awful they find themselves holding hands and laughing. Soon they are on Castle Street and facing the gloomy old building in which the doctor works.
A flashing red traffic light beats like a heart in the rain. Alex and Leslie cross the street and are nearly run over by a motorcyclist who, covered against the rain in a long black poncho, looks like Death itself.
The building is from the 1920s, designed in a vaguely Art Deco style. The doorway is curved; the windows are bowed. Two statues of women in robes holding swords guard the second story. Dr. Kis’s office is on the top floor. Alex and Leslie, rain dripping from their clothes, ride one of those birdcage elevators up to the sixth floor and then must walk up two more flights of moist stone steps to the eighth floor.
“Does anyone back home even know we’re here?” Leslie asks nervously as they approach the doctor’s door.
“Your sister knows where you are, doesn’t she?”
Leslie shakes her head. “I told her the doctor was in Switzerland.”
“Why did you say that?”
“She was so worried and disapproving. I thought I should at least say it was in some country she’d heard of.”
The top floor of Dr. Kis’s could use a sweeping. It could also—and more urgently—use a good hosing-down. In front of a mahogany and milk-glass door, there is a scatter of magazines on the floor, as if no one has been here in weeks.
Alex makes a face meant to amuse Leslie, a face that says Uh-oh, this might be the craziest thing we have ever done. And with that he opens the door and they find themselves in a waiting room of sorts. There are a couple of flimsy chairs, a vinyl love seat. No other patients, no receptionist.
Silence, except for the sound of the rain spattering on the roof.
“Hello?” Leslie calls out.
“We might be a little early,” Alex says.
“Alex?” Leslie says, her voice shaking. She lifts her arm to point at something, but fear has seized her nervous system so suddenly and so violently, it is all she can do to raise her arm a few inches.
Alex follows the path Leslie’s eyes burn into the air and sees, standing in the corner… something. At first he thinks it is a bear. And then he sees it as a wolf. What it actually is is an immense dog, a black and brown rottweiler with vile yellow eyes. Its h
ead juts forward, and a low growl rumbles in its chest.
Compelled by an ancient code of protectiveness, Alex stands in front of Leslie and feels her fingers digging into him. The beast steps closer and closer to them, and still closer. Saliva thick as sour cream hangs from the serrated pink edges of its mouth. Its eyes are imbecilic with avidity, and a smell of meat rises from its flanks and loins.
“Zeus! What are you doing out here?”
Both startled and relieved, they turn and see a dapper fellow in his twenties with a narrow face, a large, reddish mouth. He wears stovepipe trousers and a snug little sport jacket. His inky hair is gelled, and his thick glasses have heavy black frames. Obediently, the dog walks slowly to his side.
“Awfully sorry about that, folks,” the man says in a British accent and in a tone that seems cringing and sarcastic at the same time. He hooks one of his bony fingers through the dog’s collar and leads him into a room off to one side of the waiting area.
Alex and Leslie exchange glances. They are thinking the same thing. What fresh hell? But they have come too far and gone to too much trouble to turn back now.
A few moments later, the young Englishman returns. “Put a bit of a fright in you. He’s actually pretty well behaved, old Zeus, but I know how it is; the first time I saw him I just about muddied my knickers. Reggie Woodward at your service. I am Dr. Kis’s assistant, a position I would fill free of charge but for which, thank God, I am well paid.” He smiles, exposing the jagged archaeology of his teeth, some brown, others, presumably new to his mouth, bright white. “Now, if you would be so kind as to follow me, we’ll get the paperwork out of the way. And sorry for the state of this place—chalk it up to the disorganization of genius.”
Dr. Kis’s clinic is a warren of small examining rooms. Alex and Leslie follow Reggie into one of them that he has turned into an office, with a desk, three chairs, and a very serious-looking file cabinet with a lock on it. There is a dog-food bowl and a water bowl in the corner, and the remains of an immense bone, a giraffe femur, by the looks of it. On the wall is a poster showing some epic soccer match played in the snow, a line of stiff German flags in the background.
