The sooner we take care of this, the better, he says; no more mysterious calls. She says, “You’ve been fucking someone.” She doesn’t actually say it. The words fill her mouth, she can taste their bitterness, and she feels like choking. Frank asks her what’s wrong. She says, “That young patient of ours, that eighteen-year-old girl who’s coming from the next county, I want to keep her baby.”
* * *
She is well aware that that’s not going to happen. The girl is suffering from hysterical fits and has to be sedated for the abortion. Under the drug, she has delusions that the baby is crawling through her veins, contaminating her blood, and that she will burst open at the pores, like a fruit exploding. There is no way she would ever make the hard decision and forego the procedure.
Abortion, Frank reminds her, is an act of desperation, arrived at either after agonizing deliberation, or in an emergency. In almost all cases, there is no way they can save the mother’s life without sacrificing the fetus. That’s what they’ve always tried to tell the countless Christian lunatics who frequently come to spit Jesus in their faces.
The clinic in Dobbs Ferry has had its share of troubles. Several nights, from the two-bedroom apartment above it where they live, they can hear streams of cars passing by, the drivers yelling at them to burn in hell.
Frank himself doesn’t want any more children. His own haven’t spoken to him in years. He hardly talks about them, and whenever he does, it’s always as if he’s talking about an ancient, unhealed wound. He hardly ever mentions their names. Sometimes he even seems to have forgotten he has any children.
Obviously, the only alternative is adoption. There’s Romania, Russia, Sri Lanka, Thailand. But adoption is expensive, tedious, and complicated by corrupt bureaucracies of donor countries. Just to find out for sure, she applies with a couple of agencies. They immediately deny her application upon learning of the kind of work she does. There you go, says Frank; that’s the kind of people you’d have to deal with.
Then she hears of a couple who’ve come back from the Philippines with a perfectly normal, legal, healthy Amerasian boy. They bought the baby through an underground adoption ring operating there. The baby was handed to them just a couple of days after its birth, a scrawny creature, pink and hungry and full of need.
She invites the couple over one evening. They seem to have been transformed by this new presence in their lives, and they come with all the accoutrements that signify that change, an unwieldy baby carriage and FAO Schwarz bags brimming with bottles, diapers, and silly toys. They say they feel like a closer couple now, their relationship made more meaningful by a kind of aegis, a holy trinity. They talk of themselves no longer as individuals but as a single unit, a family. Suddenly their lives are mapped out more clearly, with plans for the next ten, twenty, thirty years. It’s cloyingly sweet and she loves it. She holds the baby in her arms. It’s soft and small and breathtaking. She is unaware of the growing anxiety on Frank’s face, even when she turns to him and says, “I know what I want. I know what to do.”
* * *
On the Delta Air Lines flight to San Francisco, she reads a story in the New York Times that Frank told her about earlier that morning, before she boarded a taxi to JFK. A certain Arthur Herman Bremer shot the governor of Alabama, George Wallace. Doctors have said the governor will be paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his life.
Neither she nor Frank cares much about the governor or his would-be assassin. But Frank says there you go: that’s the kind of world we’ll be bringing a baby into.
She transfers to a Japan Airlines jet in San Francisco, and as soon as the attendants start rolling dinner out she sets her watch twelve hours forward to Manila time. She realizes that by doing so she has just jumped into the future. She looks out. The moon is a flat disk of light. Just less than a month ago, two humans were out there digging dirt. She closes her eyes and tries to imagine what it must have been like, but there’s a constant hum in the plane that she finds distracting. She is awake all through the sixteen-hour flight.
She has the name of a contact given by the couple who had adopted earlier. It takes a few weeks for someone from the adoption ring to call her back. The couple had told her this was normal. They would be doing a background check to make sure she wasn’t just some decoy.
An “agent” meets her at the lobby of her hotel apartment in Manila. The transaction is informal. It makes her feel like she’s just purchasing a line of home products from a traveling salesman. It’s also simple. All she has to do is put some cash down. One of their women has already been impregnated, and it looks like the father is American. The agent hesitates at the word impregnated, and apologizes for not knowing a term less vulgar. He is a middle-aged man in a business suit that seems too heavy for this weather. He is constantly dabbing his forehead with an already soppy handkerchief. She feels sorry for him and offers him a drink, which he declines. He seems like he’s in a hurry to get this business over with. He says the mother is expecting in a couple of months. There is obviously no way to tell if it’s going to be a boy or a girl. But here is a rundown of her possible expenses:
Cost of adoption: 210,000 pesos
Processing fee (documents, etc.): 7,000 pesos
All papers, he adds, are going to be arranged through contacts with the local authorities. Mentioning this, the agent’s face suddenly seems transformed by what she thinks is a hint of personal pride. “You have nothing to worry about,” he says, smiling broadly. His teeth are stained red with tobacco and betel nut. “We know people. We take care of all the bribes.”
She hands him the down payment, mentally calculating the equivalent in dollars. With the peso quickly sliding down nearly seven pesos to the dollar, that would be about thirty thousand dollars and an additional one thousand in fees.
After that, she waits. It’s like going through an actual pregnancy herself. The next couple of months are unbearable. She calls Frank every day.
The hotel is surrounded by sweltering alleys, which fan out to the boulevard and the expanse of the bay, wide and open like a sigh of relief. This is all she can see from her apartment, the postcard-pretty sunset and the coconut trees lining the boulevard. This is all she wants to see. Cities terrify her, and Manila seems more hostile than any other. Just a few blocks away, the streets are littered with trash. Peddlers and pedicabs and commuter jeepneys fill every single space. Beggars and homeless children are everywhere, crowding around cars stalled in traffic, their passengers rolling up their tinted windows to shut out the heat and the miasma of human suffering.
The weather in Manila flips from torrid summer to torrential rain. The alleys turn into muddy rivulets, waist-deep, which some intrepid souls maneuver on makeshift rafts—planks of wood and rubber tires. A sheet of monsoon gray blurs Manila’s huddled skyline—a small stretch of midsize hotels. This is a city used to constant erasure. Lives and homes are lost, but disasters come and go like clockwork, quickly forgotten when the next one arrives. Beneath the veneer of hospitality reserved for tourists, she senses an overwhelming self-contempt and a simmering hatred.
In August, floods wash away several farming villages just a few miles north of the city. A group of peasants march to the president’s palace to ask for aid. They are met with teargas and truncheon-clubbing police. Sometimes the hostility boils over, touching even foreigners. From her terrace overlooking the bay, she watches students lob Molotov cocktails at the American embassy nearby.
In September, in the middle of the worst tropical storm of the season, Frank calls to say he is having second thoughts.
“About the baby?” she asks.
