I had twenty-two folders of my private photoshopped images, representing twenty-two families. Of course, the twenty-two folders were a small fraction of all my clients. But those were the families who had made an impression on me. In certain cases, there was a story to be told, with groups of images that conveyed something about a life I’d shared with someone. In other cases, it was just a matter of one or two gratifying pictures.
I opened the Straub, Alternates folder. Clicking through the photos, I stopped when I came to the pictures of me and Fritz in bed together. I had done impressive work in making the photos feel alive. In my estimation, they were artistic creations. I’d successfully fabricated an expression of ecstasy on Fritz’s face. Some of the photos were tight on our body parts and some allowed a view of the whole scene. I stopped again when I came to the photoshopped pictures of Amelia and me and took a few minutes to savor the image of us sharing a piece of birthday cake. I felt uneasy leaving all the images on my hard drive, now that I would be living in the Straub home. So, painful though it was, I deleted each photo individually, followed by the entire folder.
Ian and I were having coffee around the corner from my apartment, at his insistence. The coffee shop was mostly empty, except for one woman with headphones working on her laptop in the far corner.
He was angry when he learned about my being the Straubs’ surrogate. But I wasn’t inclined to discuss my choices with him.
“Have you ever heard of generosity?” I said.
“It’s not generosity,” he said. “You can’t bear to be in your own skin.”
I felt pressure in my sinuses and ears, like I was on an airplane. Ian was trying to provoke me. I couldn’t allow him to see that he’d succeeded. He felt he had the right to talk to me like that because we were having sex. In his mind, we were in a relationship. I resented his presumption. I’ve always considered the contents of my brain private.
I wiped up a little coffee that had spilled on the table in front of me.
“If you want to get pregnant so badly, then have a baby with me,” he said. “The idea of being someone’s surrogate. I don’t even get what you think it does for you.”
I wasn’t interested in Ian’s idea of normal behavior. He thought that the surrogacy was fulfilling some short-term desire, at the expense of my long-term happiness. He didn’t realize that my definition of long-term happiness had nothing to do with his.
“It’s an end in itself,” I said.
“What does your son think of it?” I saw some challenge in his gaze.
“No one is asking for your opinion.”
“Do you really have a son?” His eyes bored into me.
“Of course.”
A twentysomething man entered the coffee shop and walked to the counter to order. Cold air rushed in behind him.
“I don’t think you do.” Ian spoke in a low voice.
I laughed. “You have no idea who I am.”
“Does anyone?”
I felt a compression of my rib cage.
Ian put his thumb and forefinger on the bridge of his nose and squeezed his eyes shut, like he had a headache. “Is it about Amelia and Fritz?”
I nodded. “I want to help them.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
In mid-April, two Polish men with thick accents knocked on my door. My father was Polish, so I recognized the movers’ accents as being similar to my two uncles’. The men wrapped my couch in plastic wrap, then blankets, like they were swaddling a baby, then walked it out the door. I’d never hired professional movers. I’d never owned decent enough furniture to make it worthwhile.
Eliza hissed at the men when they entered, and clawed one of them on his pants. I had a feeling she understood our future home to be precarious. She knew that we were undergoing a sea change. And she also sensed my anxiety. I locked her in the bedroom again.
I had invested a lot of my artistic self in the apartment over the last several years: painting the walls, hanging the drapes. And over the last few months, I’d hung photos of Jasper everywhere. The home in which my son and I had lived would soon be vacated. I was giving up all that I had for something uncertain.
Since moving to New York, I’d lived in several different apartments, most of them dumps. I shared my first apartment with Lana and one other roommate. Lana got me my first job in New York as a photographer’s assistant, working for Emily Miller, who was considered the grande dame of event planning at the time. (I’d done similar work in Florida, on occasion, so I already had many of the necessary skills.)
One day Emily’s lead photographer had a family emergency. I flew to Puerto Vallarta and shot a wedding that night. The pictures were remarkable, especially the ones of the children. Within a year, her clients were calling me to photograph their kids.
In the end, she and I had a falling-out. She mistakenly thought I was going to give her a cut of my business. She viewed me as being indebted to her and thought I ought to be grateful. I suppose she’d always considered herself superior to me, but I’d chosen not to see it.
I quit my job waiting tables. After two years I had a regular roster of clients and I’d doubled my rates, so I moved into my present apartment, which wasn’t gorgeous, but it was respectable and more my home than any other place had ever been.
“Cute kid,” one of the movers said when he removed a photo of Jasper that had been hanging on the wall in order to wrap
