equation—or in this case, organism—rather than at its constituent parts, but since he passed that inevitable sexual crisis of his adolescence, breasts have seemed a normal enough part of the human anatomy to him. Attractive, yes … a constant source of sexual stimulation, no.
Gail’s breasts are an exception. They are large for someone her height, but it is not their size that so stirs him. The girls in the magazines laid out nearby to help the sperm donors tend to have huge breasts, but the proportions as often as not seem wrong or downright silly to Jeremy. Gail’s breasts are …
Jeremy shakes his head, finding that he cannot put some things in words, even to himself.
Gail’s breasts are sensual in the extreme. While proportionate to her athlete’s body and strong back, they are … perfect is the only word that Bremen can think of: high but heavy with the promise of touch, much paler than the rest of her tanned skin—small veins are visible under the white near where the tan line ends—and tipped with areolae that have remained as pink as a young girl’s. Her nipples rise only slightly in the cool air, and now her breasts are compressed and raised again as Gail unconsciously hugs herself against the chill, the dark hairs on her forearm visible against the white, weighty undercurve of breast.
Gail’s gaze does not shift, but Jeremy allows himself to change his own perspective on her image in the mirror, thinking to himself as he does so:
Gail’s hips are wide but not too wide, her thighs strong, the V of dark hair between them rising to the cusp of her belly with all the bushy fullness promised by her dark eyebrows and the shadowed stipple under her arms. Her knees and lower legs are elegant not only in an athlete’s honest way, but in the classical proportions of the finest sculptures of Donatello. Jeremy lowers his gaze and wonders why men ever abandoned their fascination with such a sexually stimulating series of arcs and curves as those that constitute such a slim ankle as this.
Gail sets the screen aside, slips her left arm in the gown—no standard hospital gown this, but an expensive artifact of combed cotton for the upscale clientele—and pauses, half-turned from him, her left breast and hip catching the soft light filtering through the Venetian blinds above.
He hears the doctor’s footsteps beyond her door, then their mindshields raise together, not shutting off their sharing but muting it a bit.
Jeremy does not open his eyes.
I have to intervene here to say that my first glimpse of this open sexual feeling between Jeremy and Gail was a revelation for me. Literally a revelation; an awakening of almost religious dimensions. It opened new worlds for me, new systems of thought and understanding.
I had known sexual pleasures, of course … or at least the pleasures of friction. The sadness following orgasm. But these physical responses were nothing out of the context of the shared love and sexual intimacy that Jeremy and Gail had known.
My awe at discovering this aspect of the universe could not have been greater had I been a scientist who stumbled upon the Grand Unified Theory of the cosmos. In a real sense the love and sex between Gail and Jeremy was the Grand Unified Theory of the cosmos.
Jeremy’s sperm count is fine. His part of the testing is over.
Not so Gail. Over the next nine months she undergoes entire batteries of tests—some painful, most embarrassing, all fruitless. She suffers a laparoscopy and repeated ultrasound exams that seek for tubal blockage, uterine abnormalities, fibroid tumors, ovarian cysts, uterine lesions, and endometriosis. None is found. She is tested for hormone deficiencies and sperm-rejecting antibodies. None is confirmed. She is put on Clomid and sent out to buy ovulation predictor kits—at significant expense each month—so that the peak days and hours of fertility can be determined. Gail and Jeremy’s sex life begins to resemble a military campaign; for three or four twenty-four-hour periods each month, the day begins with urine tests on chemically treated paper and ends with multiple bouts of intercourse followed by a time where Gail rests on her back with her hips slightly elevated and legs bent at the knee so that the slowly swimming sperm have the best chance possible of finishing their trek.
Nothing. Nine months of nothing; then another six months of the same.
Gail and Jeremy see three other specialists. In each case Jeremy is cleared on the basis of his single sperm- count test and Gail undergoes another series of tests. She becomes an expert at knowing precisely when she must drink the half gallon of water so that she can last through the ultrasound without wetting her hospital gown.
The tests continue to show nothing, satisfy nothing. Gail and Jeremy continue to try, eventually abandoning the daily charts and test kits for fear of destroying all spontaneity. The possibility of artificial insemination is raised and they agree to think about it, but they silently dismiss that option before leaving the clinic. If sperm and egg are all right, if Gail’s reproductive system is all right, they would rather leave things to chance and the natural system of things.
The natural system of things fails them. For the next few years Gail and Jeremy continue to dream of having children, but quit talking about it. Even Gail’s musings on the subject while they are in mindtouch can send them both into a depression. Occasionally, when Gail would be holding a friend’s newborn, Jeremy is shocked to feel her reaction to the infant’s touch and scent; her heart aches with longing … he understands that … but her entire body also responds: breasts hurting and womb seeming to throb with a physical reaction to the newborn. It is a response beyond Jeremy’s experience and he marvels that two forms of human beings—male and female—can inhabit the same planet, speak the same language, and assume they can have anything in common while such basic and profound differences silently separate them.
Gail is aware of Jeremy’s desire for children, but also of his reservations about having one of their own. She has always seen these snippets of concern in his mind: fear of birth defects, hesitation at introducing another heart and mind into the perfect two-point constellation that is their relationship, a basic jealousy that anyone or anything else could fill Gail’s attention and affection the way he does now.
She has seen these concerns, but dismissed them as typical male hesitations about having children. But what she has missed is important.
Jeremy is terrified of having an imperfect child. In the beginning of their ordeal, when pregnancy seemed only a few weeks or months away, he would lie awake at night and catalog his fears.
Just from his brief work on genetics and probability in college he knew some of the possible outcomes of this roll of the genetic dice: Down’s syndrome, Huntington’s chorea, Tay-Sachs disease, hemophilia … the list goes on. And Jeremy had known the odds even before the doctor spoke to them that first time: a one-percent chance that a couple will have a child with a serious or life-threatening birth defect. At age twenty Gail ran a 1:2,000 chance of having a child with Down’s syndrome and a 1:526 risk of some sort of major chromosomal disorder. If they wait until Gail is thirty-five, the odds shift to 1:300 for Down’s syndrome and 1:179 for a significant chromosomal abnormality. By age forty the probability curve has become a steep and slippery slope: 1:100 for Down’s and a 1:63 chance of having other serious defects.
The possibility of having a retarded or malformed child freezes Jeremy with horror. The inevitability of any child changing his relationship with Gail produces horror on a less urgent but equally disturbing plane. Gail has seen the former and dismissed it; she catches only the faintest reflection of Jeremy’s terror at the second possibility. He shields it from her—and from himself—as best he can, using misdirection and the static jamming of his mindshield during their telepathic sharing when the subject arises. It is one of only two secrets that he holds from Gail through their entire time together.
And the other secret also has to do with their childlessness. Only his other secret is a time bomb, ticking away between them and beneath them, ready to destroy everything they have had or ever hope to have together.
But Gail dies before the second secret is discovered … before he can share and defuse it.
Jeremy dreams of it still.
In This Hollow Valley
