The Embryos
When Jesse and Norman first decided children were something they wanted, they agreed on only one thing—adoption was the way to go.
They disagreed on the number, the sex, the situations they might be open to, which continents they’d be willing to travel to (no penguin nestlings!), and how soon they could open their home.
But some things were unarguable. The world was too hot, too hungry, too crowded to bring someone new into it, not when they could satisfy their desire to become dads and do some small amount of good by giving a loving home to a child in need of one.
As it was, Jesse liked to take long, hot showers, and when Norman would challenge him on the wastefulness, he would say he was actually doing well by the environment by not procreating.
He was using his water, his children’s water, and maybe even his children’s children’s water, but that was it.
After that, his existence would no longer be a drain.
Adoption, as Jesse said, allowed him to retain both his penchant for long showers and the moral high ground.
They registered with an agency that was highly regarded, but not before Norman did his due diligence.
They endured the paperwork and home visits, the supplemental forms needed to explain the wild discrepancies in Jesse’s income in the three years of tax returns they provided.
(The life of an artist and academic! they’d cheerfully say, because they couldn’t decide which made them seem more desirable.) They redecorated a spare room, not as a nursery (they didn’t want to appear too eager) but as a study someone could easily envision as a nursery, sat with social workers who picked apart their lives, and had friends and family members—including Lally—write glowing letters of recommendation that made them seem both stable and wildly unique.
They assembled a booklet with photos of themselves cooking dinners in a kitchen that looked like it was ripped from a Nancy Meyers film.
Walking barefoot along the beach during golden hour while laughing (at what, neither remembered).
Tending to their backyard with pruners and shears and something called the Garden Weasel.
Of course, absolutely none of this reflected their actual lives.
The kitchen belonged to their friend Rani, a caterer who lived in Ojai.
Norman loved the beach but detested the actual ocean and was deathly afraid of seaweed—he screamed whenever water would lap his toes.
The Garden Weasel they had to borrow from their landscaper, Odie, who along with his brother Mando usually pruned and weaseled for them; Jesse didn’t even know what it was for.
Their booklet looked so professional it could have been published by Random House, and while they were warned that the average wait to be selected was eighteen months to two years, the receptionist at the agency let slip that sometimes gay male couples were chosen sooner, as it was of comfort to certain birth mothers to imagine themselves their child’s only mom.
When all the paperwork was completed, they agreed on dinner to celebrate.
“Waiting for Jesse,” Norman said in perfect singsong as he stood by the door with car keys. It was a common refrain in their house.
“Hold on, I have to get my road Tums.”
Norman knew he would regret asking but couldn’t help himself. “What in god’s name are road Tums?”
Jesse approached the door swinging his arms in a way that made it look like he was hurrying, but only from the waist up. “They’re the Tums I take in the car on the way to the restaurant, different from the Tums I have after the meal when we get home.”
Norman shook his head. He didn’t like Jesse aging; if Jesse was old, then Norman was positively ancient, even though they were a mere six years apart and their age difference had flattened over time.
The young men they were when they met would never have dreamed of conversations like this, but Jesse would say in his own defense that it’s impossible to imagine something as simple as a cocktail or tomato sauce betraying your esophagus in such a way.
“Stop it. I have a good feeling.” Jesse rubbed his hands together like a fly. “I think I’ll have a martini.” They had two, toasting each time for luck.
Their phone rang seven weeks later. They celebrated with more martinis (bookended with Tums) and got to work turning the study into that nursery. Jesse commissioned a mural of a cow jumping over a moon. Norman bought books about newborns.
But something seemed off from the start.
The adoption was a late-breaking decision from a birth mother who was due in less than five weeks.
She already had three children and carrying this pregnancy as long as she had before committing made it seem like she had made the decision on impulse.
That should have been their first warning, but Jesse chalked it up to common sense.
Three kids already ran the asylum, but four?
Four would tear it down. So there was part of Jesse and Norman that understood.
Although she looked exhausted, the birth mother, Valentina, was clearly stunning.
Her family was from Peru, and that gave them pause, not for reasons of race but rather of religion—a creeping fear that her Catholic extended relatives might not approve of this baby being raised by two men.
And although Valentina hinted otherwise, the father, whoever he might be, did not seem to be part of her decision.
Still, things progressed quickly and the shortened timeline allowed them to ignore the obvious warning signs, which were piling up like a bad freeway collision as the nursery progressed right along.
“Is that a yak?” Norman asked when the mural was done.
“It’s a cow,” Jesse replied defiantly. “A cow jumps over the moon.” But when he tilted his head to one side he saw it. “Oh, yeah. That’s a yak.” He paid the artist to paint over it and try again.
Soon they flew to Scottsdale for the birth, bringing too many bags (it was unclear how long they would need to stay) and a pile of cash to cover the mother’s living expenses for three months afterward as she recovered from the trauma, physical and emotional, of giving birth.
“This feels like a bribe,” Norman worried as he counted the money, like a cop might have slipped an exploding ink pack into the bills.
“It’s standard procedure,” Jesse assured Norman, just as the agency had assured him.
They were there in the delivery room when the baby was born, a girl whom they planned to call Agnes after Agnes of God, the Jane Fonda film directed by Norman Jewison (they liked the name more than the film, but they both loved Jane Fonda).
Each of them wore plastic bracelets that allowed them to come and go from the maternity ward—the kind that designated them as the parents; Jesse even cut the umbilical cord before passing out cold on the floor.
When he came to, a bevy of confused Peruvian faces hovered over him, before tenderly helping him to his feet.
That was the last moment of kindness extended their way.
Valentina’s family loudly objected when Jesse wanted to bond with the girl skin-to-skin; that was a nonstarter with the birth mother’s parents, who, while they didn’t seem to be that involved in their daughter’s life and helping raise the three kids she already had, had very strong opinions about their new granddaughter that they shared in Spanish with increasing urgency and alarm.
Eventually Jesse and Norman were in the middle of a screaming match in a language that wasn’t their first. They held their ground as best they could, Jesse, the tallest in the room by a mile, growing particularly red.
The dream was alive; the baby, all six pounds, eight ounces of her, with a dusting of dark hair and a mighty grip, was here.
But when it became clear they were being accused of unsavory things, not the least of which implied racism and purchasing a brown baby, even the agency was forced to tell them the adoption was a lost cause.
Of course, they’d been warned that this kind of thing happened, although rarely in as dramatic a fashion, that in all cases the mother could change her mind.
Yet that didn’t seem to be the case here; it was the mother’s family that was blowing this to shit, and Jesse and Norman held in there as long as they did, as the family, as far as they understood it, were not the ones with legal standing to make the final decision—Valentina was.
When Jesse unbuttoned his shirt, insisting there was a limited window in which to bond with his daughter, an accusation so hideous was hurled (the accusations by bigots and homophobes, Norman later observed, never changed no matter how many rights people gained, how many advances were made, or how many seasons of Glee had aired) that Jesse and Norman knew they would have to cut this most final cord.
It was dusk as they walked through the hospital’s sliding doors and a blast of hot air hit their faces.
They retreated to their tragic rental car—a model with a celebratory name like Fiesta, but not that—and cried to a Melissa Manchester CD that a previous traveler with Hertz Gold Plus Rewards had left behind as Norman squealed out of the hospital parking lot, Melissa instructing them the whole way not to cry out loud.
At the first red light, they desperately clawed at the hospital bracelets to get them off.
But the bracelets were made from some polymer that maddeningly would not break, and before they gave up, they inflicted scratches and wounds on their wrists that took weeks to heal, which was a lot faster than their emotional scars, which perhaps never fully scabbed.