1985 to 2006, New York and Latin America

By DL

In early 2007 I will pause to mark what would have been the 21st birthday of the child a woman I will call Sandi and I conceived in the summer of 1985. The child is a palpable yet ghostly presence in my life, since Sandi had an abortion. We chose to destroy the life we created.

Or perhaps, we destroyed a life she created with somebody else, since in all likelihood I was not the father.

I didn’t know that at the time, when, as two New Yorkers in our mid-20s, we formed an uneasy relationship after I answered her personals ad in New York magazine. From the beginning we were mismatched; Sandi was from the New York suburbs with a corporate job; I was a freelance writer originally from the South struggling with the recent death of my mother and a hunger for companionship to break the loneliness of living and working in a Brooklyn studio. We were young and horny, and nature took its course.

In August 1985 Sandi called to say she might be pregnant. Then she thought she wasn’t. Then she definitely knew she was. We had no discussion about the matter, other than to agree that she would have an abortion.

On Aug. 12, 1985, I wrote in my journal: “This is becoming a drawn-out nightmare…. I feel awful thinking I had a role in this situation. The tenseness will not leave. I just wish it were OVER!! OVER! OVER! OVER!”

Together we went to an abortion clinic on Park Avenue. I looked at the other people, women alone, women with men, and tried to fix their images in my mind. A few days later, Sandi sent me a card in which she wrote:

“Thanx for everything! That phrase seems rather shallow considering all we’ve been through. I know you don’t blame me for any of this – but I want you to know that I feel very badly that someone as ‘good’ and as sweet and as understanding as you should have to go through this. Some days when I think about it all – it seems like no big deal, but other days it seems very overwhelming. All I know, without you it would have been devastating.”

The relationship limped to a drawn-out end in 1986. We ran into each other on Madison Avenue in 1988, by which time I was dating the woman who would become my wife. Sandi slipped into the past, one learning experience from those rogue days.

Fast forward three years, through marriage and a move to the suburbs, where my wife and I were ready to start a family. Despite months of trying, nothing had happened. My wife talked to her ob-gyn about the matter. Before doing tests on you, the doctor suggested, why don’t we test your husband just to eliminate him as a variable in the equation?

OK, I thought, I don’t have a problem with that, since the sad episode with Sandi showed, of course, that I could father children.

My smug assumption lasted until an early summer day when a urologist, having analyzed a semen sample, called to say, “There was no sperm in the sample.” Those fateful words hurled us into the world of infertility, of dead ends, thwarted hopes, isolation, Pergonal and Clomid, and depression.

Through it all I never contacted Sandi, even as the neverborn child’s shadow arched over my life like a canopy of accusation. From the past it whispered that I had destroyed, and now I could not create.

Once I stood in the entryway of her apartment building in the East 50s, but I didn’t ring the bell. I checked phone books but couldn’t find her. I knew where her parents lived in Florida, but I left them alone. What had happened in 1985 remained a dormant sore, quietly festering and never resolved.

I constantly scanned the streets of New York, but never saw Sandi. I simply couldn’t get myself to have a five-minute conversation with her; on some level, the unsettled state suited me, leaving a tiny margin for hope. Meanwhile, several doctors told me it was extremely unlikely that I had been the father in 1985.

Eventually, my wife and I fulfilled our dreams. Through the use of a sperm donor, we had a child. We achieved parenthood, but not the loving stability I hoped would replace the vertigo of infertility.

Fast forward another decade, through divorce into single life and the world of middle-aged sexuality. In November 2004 the past clawed its way to the surface, like a zombie that refused to stay buried. I experienced, against all odds and rationality, a pregnancy scare.

I had traveled to Latin America to see a woman, Donna, whom I met online. As soon as we returned to her apartment from the airport, we began to fool around, we got going, we had protected sex, then unprotected sex just for a little while, but that went on a few beats too long and … well, before I knew it she was dabbing her crotch and cursing me in Spanish.

Oh-my-God, I thought, what have I got myself into? Sure, I assumed I was still sterile as a block of wood, but that diagnosis was 13 years old, with no tests in between. Donna was 48 and a heavy smoker, so her fertility was probably quite diminished. But, as I have told others in difficult situations, “Hope is not a strategy.”

Five thousand miles from home, with a woman I barely knew, in a country where I didn’t speak the language, I floundered in an emotional morass that only deepened when Donna told me flat-out she didn’t “believe in abortion.”

During the trip, images of Latin America veered in and out of focus as I considered pregnancy, first with despair and then … by the middle of the week I began to ask myself, “What if?” Could it happen after all these years? The notion of a biological child seemed a fantasy, something I gave up on years earlier, swapped for the real duties of actual fatherhood.

Donna was just as ill-suited for me as Sandi, but I put that thought aside as I considered the teasing possibility of middle-aged fatherhood. By the end of the week, the day before I left, Donna’s period started. There would be no baby. I returned to the U.S. and within six weeks our relationship sputtered to an end.

By the summer of 2005 I had met another woman and we edged toward intimacy. I told her my abortion story as part of a mutual sharing of the curveballs life had thrown us. This relationship looked very promising, and I wanted to know my current status. Fertile after 14 years, or sterile? For both our sakes, I called the urologist and set up an appointment.

The visits were so far apart that the office could find no records. The urologist, who had done a testicular biopsy on me, didn’t remember me. I refreshed his memory, and a few days later, heart pounding, delivered to the office a sperm sample in a green-topped plastic container.

He soon had the results. The urologist’s words were almost exactly the same as before, that the sample had no sperm. He began to outline infertility options, but I politely said that wasn’t the issue for me. I already had my family, right there in the car with me.

After the test, only one matter remained. This was the matter that had dogged me since 1991, the questions about the pregnancy in 1985. For months I delayed doing what I knew I had to do for my own peace of mind: Call Sandi, the other parent of the neverborn child, and ask her.

I finally wrote to her on Jan. 12, 2006. I chose the date deliberately, as the 22nd anniversary of my mother’s death from cancer. I wanted a date that I could always remember exactly.

After years of consideration, I sent Sandi this message:

“I found your email address online. I hope all is well for you. I am writing to you, after a very long gap in contact, because I wanted to talk to you about some matters on my mind, about what happened during our time together in 1985-86. I only need a few minutes of your time. You can reach me at my office.”

I provided a phone number, and to her credit Sandi called within an hour. After an 18-year gap in contact, her joking first words rang with irony: “Have I done something terrible?”

Closing the door to my office, I struggled to keep my voice even and explain why I called. I outlined the infertility, and she asked if I was dating anybody. I said no, but if things got intimate with a woman I didn’t want to rely on saying “I’m sterile” as a form of birth control.

I finally asked The Question: Had Sandi been sleeping with anybody else at the time? I even dared to throw out the name of a male friend of hers. But she said, “I don’t think there was anybody else in that situation.” I rephrased the question and asked again, and she said, “I don’t think so. I’m sorry.” At one point I said, to cover my suspicion that I wasn’t getting the real story, “It must have been a million-to-one shot.”

“Pun intended,” she replied.

We talked about our families. Our paths, to my surprise, ran parallel, in that we both married in the same year, and had children born a year apart. We both work in Manhattan, within a mile of each other. My former office was directly across the street from her old apartment, where, in all likelihood, she conceived.

Finally, she said, “I’ve got to cut this conversation short.” And that was the end. After 15 years, we had the talk.

I felt a wave of relief after we spoke. While friends urged me to contact Sandi again to press her to “remember” what else was going on when we were dating, I demurred. I didn’t want to disrupt her life any more, nor fruitlessly chase a clarity that I doubted would ever emerge from the shadows of loss. I figured years ago that Sandi would never admit another man could have been the father. Asking once more would not yield a different answer.

In the end, “I don’t think so” let Sandi retain some dignity, while its ambiguity confirmed what, in my heart, I suspected all along.

DL is a writer in the Northeast with an interest in digital photography and Latin music.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Wednesday, January 3rd, 2007 | Email This Post

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