Of course they're not really orphans, because Daniel is their legal father, but so far they have lost two mothers apiece, the Vietnamese women who bore them and Daniel's wife, Blair, who is, as it says on all those old tombstones, Not Dead Only Sleeping, in a nursing home on the North Fork of Long Island, with a spot-on view of a meadow, a salt marsh, and the daily sunrise, none of which she is ever likely to lay eyes on again.
Daniel explained all of this to me over coffee, days after I had moved back to the city and we met at the gay-lesbian-all-welcome AA meeting in the gay-lesbian-all-welcome neighborhood where we live. But by all welcome, they don't only mean boring straight people like Daniel and me; they mean cross-dressers, transsexuals, and a surprising number of people who haven't made up their minds. He and I ended up there separately and by accident, thinking it was nondenominational, but we stayed because, story for story, it's the best theater in New York, a darkly inspirational, Frank Capra-in-drag movie that could be called It's a Wonderful Life One Day at a Time. It's also a place where a man telling his life story can say, "During that period, which went on for five years, I was so busy drinking-I mean, honey, I was taking Ecstasy as a mood stabilizer-that I forgot to meet men and have sex, which brings us to Fire Island," and seventy-five people will howl with sympathetic laughter.
Daniel and I innocently sat next to each other, and he invited me out after for coffee at Dean & DeLuca on Eleventh Street. I was still thinking about the speaker at the meeting whose name was Robert'S., and who wore a platinum pageboy wig and a chartreuse DKNY miniskirt and said to us, "Girls"-though I was the only one in the room-"I am waiting for God to work her magic," and I suppose I was waiting myself. That's what made me ask Daniel, at the start of our first date-as I began to take inventory of all the ways he appeared different from my gray-haired, salty-looking husband-where he stood on God.
"Off to the side," he answered, "quite a way. But here I am, knee-deep in drunks who talk about the Almighty as if he lives next door. It's a lot for an Englishman to sign up for. We have a long tradition of drinking ourselves to death quietly and all alone. Then again, this wasn't my idea." Daniel had the look of a youthful Tom Wolfe, long-limbed, clean-shaven, wearing a suit I didn't know then was an Armani; and there was not a strand of gray in his fine brown hair. He might have been my age, mid-forties, or a few years younger.
"Whose idea was it?"
"My physician advised me three years ago that I'd die in short order if I didn't quit. And what about you? Where do you stand on God?"
I said that for the first ten years I went to meetings, I had a difficult time overcoming my godless Unitarian upbringing, but in the last six months, I found myself leaning in another direction, dispensing with some of my skepticism. I wasn't a practicing Unitarian any longer, I told him; I considered myself lapsed. Trying that out for the first time, the "lapsed." Daniel laughed out loud. But I wanted to play it for laughs; I was flirting like crazy. I hadn't slept with anyone but my husband for the ten years of our marriage, plus the two years before, and I wasn't leaving anything to chance.
"And what's at the core of a lapsed Unitarian's belief system?" he asked.
"Nothing to speak of, so there's room for reconsideration, but not much motivation for it. What about you?"
"I'm Jewish," he said, "but in the English style, sort of half a Jew, as if it were only one of your parents, and you're not certain whether to take it or leave it."
"What's the other half, in your case?"
"Pure capitalist. I come from a long line of merchants. Fur and microchips. My great-grandfather was furrier to the czar. My father was the last furrier in London to move away from the East End when the Bangladeshis moved in. He went to Golders Green in 1962 and sold dead animals until the PETA people threw a can of fuchsia paint on my mother's full-length sable, which coincided roughly with the discovery of the microchip. He and my older brothers are computer consultants to the Queen. They have the lucrative gift of being able to endure long hours of bowing and scraping. I'm the youngest of four sons and, some say, the family rebel. Instead of software, I peddle paintings."
In AA, of course, you are not supposed to tell anyone your last name, but Daniel blithely told me his. I knew it from going to galleries during all the years I lived in New York and reading art reviews in the Times during all the years I didn't.
A cappuccino or two later, we were swapping infertility stories like girlfriends, by way of explaining how he ended up with four imports and I ended up with no offspring at all, except this gryphon-like dog Henry, whom I had left with my husband until I got settled. I didn't tell Daniel that night that Henry had been Will's present to me when I quit trying to get pregnant. "I still carry around a picture of him, ugly as he is."
"Your husband?" Daniel said, visibly startled.
"The dog."
And I didn't tell Daniel about the immense sadness that had made me stop trying to have a baby. It was our first date, after all, and I wanted him to think my past was safely behind me, buried like nuclear waste, in airtight containers, even though I'd walked out on it only a handful of days earlier. Instead, I entertained Daniel with stories of my test-tube encounters with Green-Blue, the code name for the nuclear physicist at the California genius sperm bank I had wanted to be the father of my child, after it became clear that Will's sperm motility wasn't what it had been when he'd fathered my two grown, soon-to-be-ex stepdaughters.
"Green-Blue is six-one, IQ of one fifty-six, and the father, as of two years ago, of thirty-one children of lesbian mothers and straight single women scattered across the fault lines of Southern California. They Fed Exed me the stuff in tanks of liquid nitrogen. But I ovulate funny. It was like waiting for three cherries to come up on a slot machine. And my husband was convinced that the only sperm donor in the joint was the skaggy-looking guy who ran the business and called me at seven in the morning-mind you, that's four A.M. in California-to say, 'Sophy, I have to know, is your temperature going up or down?'"
Daniel told me that he and Blair had done the temperature business, test tubes, and Pergonal injections. She had even made an appointment with a faith healer named Falling Rain Drop, who insisted they participate in a fertility dance in Washington Square Park every day at dawn for a week. Daniel refused.
The years of trying piled up, and Blair, pushing forty-three, grew impatient and fearful. In one fell swoop, they adopted three siblings, two boys and a girl, ages approximately six, four, and two, who had been living in an orphanage in Hoa Binh for six months, and a fourth child, Vicki, whose sad face in a photograph Blair could not resist. They nearly emptied out the orphanage and filled every room in the narrow, turn-of-the-century brownstone Blair had inherited from her stockbroker father.
Adopting all those children, you could say she was Mia Farrow minus Woody, and now, poor lamb, poor Blair, she is Sunny von Bulow minus the millions. Not that they are destitute; Daniel's two art galleries are doing record business, despite his long afternoon absences. He was a willing partner in the international quest for children, and he is a devoted father, though he is often sleep-deprived and frequently flummoxed, as when his five-year-old said to him, "If you don't buy me a Beanie Baby, I'll say the F word all the time, starting right now."