Free At the Heart of the Universe by Samuel Shem Page A

take. “Shall we? I’ll change.”
    It was so good-natured, he was so with her right then, she actually blushed.
    They began. A new beginning for them both. She thirty-seven, he forty-three. To any new adventure, they said, “Yes!” Later, he told her that she had tipped him out of his middle-aged leaning into aloneness—into the dead history and expectations of his Mayflower family: his father Phillip Noble Macy, a rock of insurance and curiously disinterested in him, and his Boston-bred mother Faith Cabot Macy, fragile and cautious, cowed and fearful and early dead. Yes, she had tipped him out of all this shit into something new and exciting and sexy and fun and of great meaning—a leaning into life. Those were his words, “of great meaning, a leaning into life.” It was an adventure, one of meaning, which she too was ready for after wandering the tropics and then bucking the slithery and glib New York art scene. And the essence of their adventure was not the two of them alone, but their shared vision of a child with them.
    The electricity of the romance led to a startling passion—they were a great match in making love. She loved his horizontal height on the bed, his strength, and his attentiveness to her. And his playfulness—as he put it, one long sensual afternoon, “There’s nothing for endurance like a man who sells insurance.” Why have they had so much trouble getting back to lovemaking? When they do, it’s still great. But they don’t get there easily. She wonders, why not? Part of it is Katie, to be sure, always around—for years sleeping in their bed—and if not there in person, there all the time in her awareness. He resents it, but all her friends say that it’s normal. The real crusher was the infertility—having to do what their doctor in Columbia, Orville Rose, called “work sex”—doing it at certain times no matter what, poor Pep feeling like a bull with a ring in his nose having to “get it up,” hoping that it would take and then each month—month after month of failure—the sorrow and rage when she got her period. And then the miscarriage. At one point Pep himself–despite his squeamishness—was giving her tightly scheduled hormone shots—running upstairs at a party, pulling up her dress and pulling down her panties and jabbing her in the butt.
    But still, every month, bleeding. No explanation, no diagnosis, just that they were maybe too old. The trauma of having to see other women cradling their babies—she’d cross the street rather than meet one of them. One failure after another. And then, both of them depressed as hell, a profound and mostly unspoken sorrow eating away at the marriage, trying to try to drag themselves out of their exhausted desolation and get it up to adopt ? More failures—they soon found out that they were either too old to adopt, or they hadn’t been married long enough, so that when they had been married long enough they would be too old—every avenue they tried leading to a dead end.
    They were ready to give up, to say no, until a trip to visit old friends in Vermont. The friends with a perfect house, a perfect garden, perfect jobs—and no children. And after that weekend, on the drive home she and he agreed that it all really was perfect, and absolutely sterile. That was his word, “sterile.” She said to him, “I can’t give up.” He asked, why not? She said, “Because I just keep seeing that little face!” What little face? “I don’t know, just a little face that needs us and that we need too. Just that little face.”
    Two weeks later, the agency called and told them that China had opened up for adoption, and they could be among the first group to go. No age requirement, no marriage requirement. If they hurried with their documents, they could have a baby girl in eight weeks. After being so