I packed up and moved my entire room at Penny's in about five hours. I gave Andy a makeover and a home and he paid our rent and gave me someone to love. We got a python. I bought us a bed, a dresser, and a couch at a cheap furniture store on Sixth Avenue. My parents came into the city to have lunch with me on weekends and my mother constantly restocked our freezer with lasagna and chicken soup. I reheated her food for our dinners and called it cooking. We were practically all grown up.

It was my fantasy in many ways, having this normal life but still being complete freaks. An arty hooker (or a hooker-y artist, depending on the day) and a genius computer hacker, taking over the world by day while enjoying quiet nights at home watching cla.s.sic films and eating Chunky Monkey. On odd nights, when the stars aligned, this is what our life looked like. But truthfully, I spent many of those nights alone. Andy was a workaholic and was almost never home. I told myself that it was ideal because I was a girl who needed her s.p.a.ce. Andy wasn't the only one with a career. I had my own career to think about.

I went on auditions and went back to working at the Wooster Group a few hours a week. I filled notebooks with my scribbles of script ideas. Most afternoons I walked to Andy's studio, sat on the long orange custom-made leather couch, and ate sushi while I watched Andy work, composing music on his elaborate computer console. He was so talented, so una.s.suming, so f.u.c.king smart. I envied him. He didn't have to audition for anyone or f.u.c.k anyone or pretend to be something he wasn't or kiss anyone's a.s.s or beg for a role, a job, a chance. He just had to be Andy. That's what you get from the world for being exceptional. The rest of us have to work harder. If I were just me, just Jill, I'd be nowhere.

Andy and I never used birth control. My little hysterical pregnancy in Brunei aside, I didn't really think I could get pregnant. As a result of starving myself in high school, I didn't get my period for a year straight. And I had never been regular after that. I thought I had turned my own insides to stone.

So it wasn't my lack of a period that alerted me to something being wrong; I just knew. But I peed on the stick and it came up negative. I peed on sticks again and again and my doctor insisted the sticks didn't lie. When I finally demanded a blood test, I was almost three months pregnant. Andy was strangely unfazed when I showed up at his work with the news of a pregnancy. He consoled me with a brief hug before going back to work, leaving me frozen in front of the orange elevator doors with the receptionist staring at me.

She and I must have had warring astrological signs or something, because our interactions were always bristly. She was the one who screened my calls when Andy didn't want to be disturbed. He denied it, but I knew it was true. I stuffed any display of weakness or emotion and planned to have my feelings when I got somewhere private. But when I got home, I couldn't find the feelings I'd put aside for later. That's the danger of pretending. You can forget what you were pretending not to be in the first place.

Andy a.s.sumed that I'd have an abortion, because there was no other option in his universe. When he came home later that night, he started talking details, like when he would have to take off work to take me to the clinic and whether he'd have to take a whole day or a half day. I made him a BLT and served it to him on our c.r.a.ppy sleeper couch. I had picked out the couch while trying to be thrifty, and it was terrible. It was made of black canvas and was tilted and lumpy, and the cushions were always sliding out. We had to put them back in place ten times a day. That albatross of a couch dominated the living room. It was an indictment of me, a visual reminder that I couldn't do anything right. I wasn't even woman enough to pick out a good couch.

"I'm not sure I want to get rid of it," I said.

Andy generally complied with my wishes without protest. It was a good trick he had. He made people feel like they were in control, but actually he was getting them to take care of everything for him. Sure, I could decorate the place any way I wanted, but the catch was I had to do it all myself. That way when things went wrong, like with the couch, it was never Andy's fault.

In this instance, however, I saw a side of Andy that I hadn't before. He was quietly decided and direct. It seemed that he was capable of having an opinion after all. He may have had opinions all along and just hadn't been letting on.

"If you want to have a baby," he said, "you'll be doing it alone."

In high school, I had bussed down to Washington to march with pro-choice advocacy groups. When the militant antichoice organization Operation Rescue attacked New York in force during the Democratic National Convention, I volunteered with the National Abortion Rights Action League doing clinic defense. We gathered at various clinics at six a.m., locked our arms, and protected the entering women from screeching picketers with gory, unforgivable signs. I had rarely felt such a clear sense of being a partic.i.p.ant in the fight of right against wrong. We were right; they were wrong.

I didn't really tell Andy or anyone else how badly I wanted to keep the baby, how my heart twisted in protest against the decision my head had made. I was nineteen and my boyfriend didn't want a baby. I would rather have chewed tacks than asked my parents for help. My friends were career-minded artists. My choice was spelled out.

I hung out in Penny's kitchen, my old kitchen, and drank tea.

"It's a loss," she said. She'd had an abortion a few years before. "I don't regret it, but it still haunts me."

"Nineteen years ago my birth mother had this same conversation with her best friend. She came up with a different solution."

"She was a different girl in a different time. This is your life, not hers."

But I thought about my birth mother probably more than I ever had as I made my decision. And in my thoughts she wasn't a long-limbed ballerina in a spotlight; she was a girl like me, imperfect and feeling totally screwed. I wondered if, like me, some part of her had believed that her boyfriend was going to turn around and tell her that she wasn't alone. His eyes would have the tilt, the gleam of a man who had changed his mind. He would offer her a family, a little bohemian tribe. And she would offer him one right back. And her life would change in dazzling and unexpected ways.

When I had thought I was pregnant in Brunei, the choice to keep the baby against all odds had seemed so simple, so n.o.ble. Maybe deep down I'd known all along that I never was pregnant.

I thought of my adoptive mother newly married and vacuuming the brown rug in her New Jersey apartment as again a month came and went without anything taking root inside her, her insides slippery and hollow and out of her control. I thought of her ticking off each interminable minute of each month until doctors became lawyers and creating a family became a project of proportions neither she nor my father had ever dreamed of.

But then there was the baby, the perfect and whole baby in her arms, wrapped in a pink blanket and sleeping through the flight from Chicago to New York, breathing in and out and smelling like sweet, powdery newness. My mother's life changed in dazzling and unexpected ways. And for a moment, she was happy.

It was the end of summer, the beginning of September-usually my favorite month in New York.

But this was what savvy girls did, postfeminist girls, girls with futures, right? They tried hard not to get knocked up in the first place, but if the unfortunate accident happened they grimly proceeded to Planned Parenthood and exercised the choice their mothers had fought so hard to guarantee them. They did it and maybe went to some therapy. They did it and acknowledged the scar tissue, but they did it.

A baby was an unthinkable enc.u.mbrance. Having a baby at nineteen was something only girls in urban projects and Midwestern trailers did, girls who knew that it was unlikely that their future would differ from their mother's life anyway. But my mother had raised me to believe that without question my life would differ from hers.

My body, my choice, I had shouted on the steps of the United States Capitol building. And so it was. It was my choice alone and it was alone that I sat, in an office on the second floor of a building somewhere in Midtown. I had shouted on the steps of the United States Capitol building. And so it was. It was my choice alone and it was alone that I sat, in an office on the second floor of a building somewhere in Midtown.

I waited in a cold hallway, wearing a gown and paper slippers, craning my neck to watch Batman Batman on the television. The women who waited with me talked to each other with the candor that women have, the ease we often share at nail salons, at the gym, in doctor's offices. The woman across from me was Latina, with green eyes and cocoa skin. She was wide around the belly but had slim and shapely legs crossed at the knee and covered with goose b.u.mps. She told her neighbor that she had three kids already and had been on the pill when she got pregnant. on the television. The women who waited with me talked to each other with the candor that women have, the ease we often share at nail salons, at the gym, in doctor's offices. The woman across from me was Latina, with green eyes and cocoa skin. She was wide around the belly but had slim and shapely legs crossed at the knee and covered with goose b.u.mps. She told her neighbor that she had three kids already and had been on the pill when she got pregnant.

"Ninety-nine percent effective my a.s.s," she snorted.

Every plastic bucket of a seat was filled. My arms brushed the arms of the women on either side of me. I spoke to no one.

Andy's genes, I thought. Andy's wonderful, brilliant, musical genes. I recognized that I was on the precipice of something irreversible, far more so than any choice I'd made before that. A piece of me was turning cold, dying. Maybe it was the piece that believed so strongly in my own rightness, in my own goodness, in the fact that I would do better than my mother, my mothers, that I'd outshine them both by immeasurable wattage. I'd outrun them both by a thousand miles.

Instead I shuffled down the hallway, no better than they. Worse. Worse.

One thing they often tell adopted children is, Your birth mother loved you so very much that she gave you away so you could have a better life. That may be true. It may also be true that if she had loved you just a little bit more, she would have kept you.

I didn't love my baby enough. But I did love her in those last moments. I could feel her with me. And in my head floated the "stages-of-development" fetuses, the plaster casts on display in the Museum of Natural History, the exhibit my father had taken me to see as a child, the miracle of life.

What did she look like? Her eyelids. Her ears. Her hands folded over her tiny, beating heart.

I lay on the table in the small procedure room with my legs strapped into stirrups, my gown hiked up to my waist, and a three-inch square of paper towel draped across the top of my thighs. I've always had difficult veins. The anesthesiologist sighed impatiently and stuck me several times.

"If you would just stop shaking, I could get this needle in."

Silent tears streamed across my temples and into my hairline. Finally, I felt the sting in the crook of my elbow and then the swell at the back of my throat and then the sleepy warmth.

In the moment before the twilight sleep took me into nothingness, I dreamed of the hospital, of my father. You don't see a vein; you feel a vein. It was a recurring dream, grounded at least partly in memory.

[image]

At age twelve I had ovarian cysts so painful that the doctors almost removed my appendix. As a result, I was in and out of the hospital, but I didn't mind. I liked the hospital better than school. People took care of me and brought me chocolate bars and I ate floppy string beans and white bread with b.u.t.ter packets and watched TV all day in my pajamas. My dad took off work to stay there with me. He also liked hospitals. Medicine was his true love. He would have been a doctor but for his inability to concentrate, his lack of patience, his poor bedside manner. He says it's why he wound up in finance instead.

An inept medical tech stabbed at my arm with a needle. This was my least favorite part about the hospital. I looked in the other direction, the same silent tears running down my face. My father watched from the other side of the room until his rage overtook his sense of decorum and he lifted the tech off his seat by the collar of his lab coat and threw him up against the wall. He held the man there by his throat and pointed an emphatic finger a centimeter away from the tech's nose.

"You don't see a vein, you f.u.c.king moron. You feel a vein."

He dropped the man and sat beside me, gently and capably feeling for the vein in the hollow of my elbow before inserting the IV catheter in one try.

I don't know if this occurrence was a hallucination or the real thing, but I know that in my dream replay of that moment, I love my dad so much.

[image]

Andy picked me up at the clinic. He cried in the elevator when he saw my face, but he dropped me at home and went back to work. When he came back later that night, he brought me Ben & Jerry's and moved the television into the bedroom, breaking my adamant no-television-in-the-bedroom rule. It hurt. It did not feel like cramps, as they had said it would. It didn't feel like cramps at all. It felt like something was clawing its way out of me.

I bled through pad after pad. Andy found a friend who had some Vicodin. I took one. Then I took another, and was magically enveloped in a soft cloud of okay that floated me into a mercifully dreamless sleep.

When I woke, a brick-red stain, brown at the dried edges, was spread out on the sheet beneath me. Something was wrong. I took two more Vicodin and thought, If I just had a Vicodin tree, a never-ending supply, my problems would all be solved, would melt into the ground like b.u.t.ter into toast.

When by the afternoon the bleeding hadn't stopped, I called my doctor and left a message. I considered a trip to the emergency room, but the thought of a New York emergency room on a Sat.u.r.day afternoon drove me back to the Vicodin bottle and back into bed, towels folded underneath me. It took a few days before the bleeding finally eased. The doctor told me it was caused by something called "retained products," pieces of tissue that hadn't been properly removed. Retained products. You try to scoop out the consequences of your actions but the residue hangs on. She called it harmless-painful and disturbing, but ultimately harmless. I wonder sometimes now-after injecting countless syringes full of powerful hormones into my stomach, after going to clinic after clinic for a series of fertility procedures straight out of the movie Species Species, all of them failing-if she was wrong.

I curled around a heating pad and watched Law & Order. Law & Order. I watched it and then I just kept watching. The doctor at the clinic had said that I would be up and around in a day or two, so Andy couldn't really understand why I stayed in bed for two weeks watching television. It wasn't the pain. That went away after a few days. And the Vicodin went away a few days after that and in place of warm nothingness I found a pit, a crater, a black hole, the sides of it lined with retained products. I watched it and then I just kept watching. The doctor at the clinic had said that I would be up and around in a day or two, so Andy couldn't really understand why I stayed in bed for two weeks watching television. It wasn't the pain. That went away after a few days. And the Vicodin went away a few days after that and in place of warm nothingness I found a pit, a crater, a black hole, the sides of it lined with retained products.

I wanted to fall into that black hole and become so small that the force of the compression itself would send me exploding into a billion pieces, would explode my arrogance and my careless decisions, explode the unshakable sadness, the heavy stone tied around my throat from the inside. I wanted to give up and just explode the self I couldn't quite find, flailing and unwise. My own big bang. Please, I begged whomever, whatever, let me just fall apart and start over.

chapter 22.

Her name was Carrie Gardner. It sounded perky and Midwestern and plain, the name of an airline ticket-counter worker, a waitress at Outback Steakhouse, a kindergarten teacher.

Slowly and on shaky legs, I'd been emerging from my funk for a few weeks. At Penny's behest, I had begun seeing a therapist named Paul Pavel. I rode the A train every day to his uptown apartment. He was a man of uncommon hope, a man who rescued half-frozen animals from Central Park in the wintertime, a man who had himself been rescued half-frozen in the snow by American soldiers after the liberation of Auschwitz. Paul reached his hand, his tattooed arm, out to me and defrosted me as well. He led me out of the darkest part of the depression that had come hard on the heels of my abortion.

Paul was convinced, among other things, that my biological origins were of far greater significance to me than I was willing to admit. He made a connection between the loss of my birth mother and my crippling guilt over my abortion. And just as my therapy was excavating all this, Johnny called me with my birth mother's name.

Johnny was home for the High Holidays from yet another boarding school. As usual, I wouldn't be observing the holidays except to call my parents and wish them l'shanah tovah l'shanah tovah: for a good year. And while I didn't miss the hypocrisy, the moneyed religion, the rigidity of the doctrine, I felt a sadness I couldn't put my finger on. Maybe the holidays made me yearn for a time when I had believed in something as unlikely as G.o.d, or a time when I had believed that I was a part of something.

There had once been High Holidays when distant cousins swarmed me in the temple lobby with open arms and lipsticked smiles, smelling of Chanel No. 5. I remember pressing my face into new wool suits that were too warm for a sunny September New Jersey day. I remember sneaking out of the children's service downstairs and walking around the temple grounds while the sun shone through the turning leaves, colorful and translucent as stained gla.s.s. I remember cut apples dipped in honey, so sweet they hurt your teeth.

Johnny, who ten years later would be so religious he would have all these things and more, was at the time a rather gifted criminal. Our parents had always told us that they had no information about our biological parents. The only birth certificates we ever saw listed our adoptive parents as our parents. Period. Any previous records had been sealed permanently. The pieces of paper were insistent and so were my parents. Johnny called that day to tell me that he had uncovered evidence discrediting my parents' story.

My parents did, in fact, have information about our birth parents. Johnny had found it by breaking into a lock box. He uncovered detailed information about himself, as he was younger and benefited from more relaxed adoption laws. But for me, Johnny had found a name-a name and a brief story pieced together from an attorney's correspondence, and an old address.

Everything I know about what Johnny found I know from my memory of our conversation. I have never seen the papers with my own eyes. I'm sure my parents would show them to me now, but I can't bring myself to ask. It is still a sore spot for them and a source of guilt for me. I'm guilty that we snooped, that we cared in the first place. I am ashamed, illogically, to have discovered that they lied to us.

I vaguely remember Johnny telling me that there were some newspaper clippings about a birth father who tried later to regain custody. But maybe this was a conflation of my life with an episode of Law & Order Law & Order or a CNN sound bite. It was such a strange moment that I can't remember exactly what he said. But I do remember that there was confirmation of a story my parents had always told me. I expected to discover that this story had been a lie, too, but it wasn't. My parents had been telling the truth when they told me that my birth mother had been a ballerina. I realized how much I had clung to this one little thing only when its confirmation flooded me with a sense of profound relief. or a CNN sound bite. It was such a strange moment that I can't remember exactly what he said. But I do remember that there was confirmation of a story my parents had always told me. I expected to discover that this story had been a lie, too, but it wasn't. My parents had been telling the truth when they told me that my birth mother had been a ballerina. I realized how much I had clung to this one little thing only when its confirmation flooded me with a sense of profound relief.

A young ballet dancer in Chicago is pregnant with a baby she is unable to care for. . . .

I wrote the name and the Highland Park, Illinois, address on a piece of paper and put it in a drawer. Somewhere there was a woman to whom this name belonged, who had once written this address on the official forms she had signed when she gave her baby away. My music-box mother, locked up safely with satin lining and a perpetual soundtrack, a princess trans.m.u.ted by a spell into the body of a swan. Carrie Gardner. An airline ticket-counter worker, a waitress at Outback Steakhouse, a kindergarten teacher. A name that wasn't an answer, it was a question, a question to which I decided to seek the answer; I just wasn't sure how yet.

I had a habit during that time of browsing one of New York's many international-magazine stands, buying a few beautiful and unfamiliar glossies and reading them at a cafe, frequently Cafe Orlin, on Eighth Street. Before there were Ed Hardy T-shirts (and bottled water and office supplies and motorcycles and shower curtains), Don Ed Hardy was an artist who published a beautiful art magazine called Tattootime. Tattootime. Once I picked up the magazine, I was hooked. Each Once I picked up the magazine, I was hooked. Each Tattootime Tattootime had a theme: New Tribalism, Life and Death Tattoos, Art from the Heart, Music and Sea Tattoos. As it does with most people who are drawn to tattoos, the imagery and the history of tattooing struck a chord in my soul. The San Francisco tattoo artist who has done most of my work says that the tattoo G.o.ds announce themselves to you when it's time. had a theme: New Tribalism, Life and Death Tattoos, Art from the Heart, Music and Sea Tattoos. As it does with most people who are drawn to tattoos, the imagery and the history of tattooing struck a chord in my soul. The San Francisco tattoo artist who has done most of my work says that the tattoo G.o.ds announce themselves to you when it's time.

I looked at the people in the pages of Tattootime Tattootime and felt an instant camaraderie. I, too, was a pirate, a sailor, a prost.i.tute, a gangster, a sideshow attraction, but n.o.body knew it. n.o.body saw it. It occurred to me that I'd have to achieve a deeper level of authenticity in how I was living or wind up a shapeshifter-will do whatever-for the rest of my life. and felt an instant camaraderie. I, too, was a pirate, a sailor, a prost.i.tute, a gangster, a sideshow attraction, but n.o.body knew it. n.o.body saw it. It occurred to me that I'd have to achieve a deeper level of authenticity in how I was living or wind up a shapeshifter-will do whatever-for the rest of my life.

The tattoo G.o.ds announced themselves to me. It was nothing less dramatic than that. No sooner had I begun to seek my first tattoo than I had a plan for what I wanted my whole body to look like. With my story writ large on the surface of my skin, I would no longer be tempted to fool people into thinking that I was normal. Tattooing was going to be my own radical statement about permanence and impermanence. It was the scarlet letter that I would proudly embroider across my chest.

Reading Tattootime Tattootime, I learned that across the island of Borneo, in the rainforest of the Sarawak, not far at all from the royal yachts and palaces and car collections of Brunei, live the Maori tribesmen, who tattoo their bodies from head to toe using a bone chisel. The spiraling, swirling, black-ink tattoos have a sacred significance. The Maori warriors emblazon their ferocity on their skin. Their tribal designs have migrated to the West and shown up on the arms of weightlifters in Venice Beach and street punks in Tompkins Square Park. While I had sat in the palace in Brunei and spun stories for Robin that evaporated into the air, miles away tribesmen were embedding their stories into their skin.

These were the pieces of my story that I decided were missing: I needed to find my birth mother and I needed to get a tattoo. I wanted to find myself and at the same time I wanted to create myself. The two things converged in an unexpected way. I studied the magazines and found the perfect artist. His name was Guy Aitchison and he lived in Chicago. The great thing about a tattoo is that you have no room for the luxury of doubt. You have to stand behind your decisions A young ballet dancer in Chicago is pregnant with a baby she is unable to care for. . . .

chapter 23.

On the plane to Chicago for my twofold mission, I dozed and in my half sleep I thought of Robin. I was supposed to be on a plane back to him and his world. Who was there now? Was someone else already in my chair and, if so, had he forgotten me completely?

I couldn't say I missed him, couldn't say I missed that whole warped world, but part of me, and not just the Patty Hearst part, had cared for him. Part of me remembered his face at odd times, remembered eating peaches off the hotel breakfast tray, the morning light cutting across the sheets in hot, white stripes while he dressed for work.

The girls in Brunei weren't the only ones with a role to play. Robin, too, had a life in which he was called upon to play role after role. Even princes tire of being princes sometimes. There were moments late at night when he was sick of the party, moments in the morning when he lingered an extra ten minutes in bed before complying with his rigid schedule, moments when he drove his car too fast on curvy country roads and I wondered if he wanted to just keep driving. These were the moments that crept into my unguarded consciousness when I was sleepy or s.p.a.cing out on a walk through the park or staring out the window of a plane.

I thought, too, of Andy at home. He hadn't seen me off at the airport. He had been working, of course. He barely came home when I was awake anymore. I placed my bets on all the wrong horses. I loved only the ones who left me with a belly full of longing. At love, I was a jacka.s.s. But they say the ultimate tattoo is the one that changes the jacka.s.s into a zebra. I hoped for nothing less. My first tattoo is a big tattoo, a life-changing tattoo. It's a purple snake spine that spirals out from my navel and across my whole stomach, blossoming into a garden of flowers that crawls down my left thigh and decorates my entire p.u.s.s.y with th.o.r.n.y monster teeth. You can now find photographs of my tattoo in a bunch of tattoo books.

Before we started, Guy sagely tried to steer me away from the idea of a p.u.s.s.y tattoo.

"Maybe you want to get something on a different part of your body until you know what it feels like."

I told him that I was quite sure of myself, that I wanted to be transformed.

He shrugged. It wasn't the province of tattoo artists to stop people from being stupid and melodramatic. Guy was famous for his ectomorphic sci-fi landscapes and exquisitely detailed poisonous gardens. Even if my first tattoo isn't in the wisest location, at least it's a beautiful tattoo.

One of the many unoriginal questions heavily tattooed people get asked when walking down the street is, "Does it hurt?" My friend in San Francisco wears a T-shirt that reads, f.u.c.k YES IT HURTS. My whole nervous system misfired. When Guy tattooed my ribs, it felt like he was working on my neck. I twitched and broke a sweat and eventually I settled into some kind of accord with the pain. They tell you to lean into it. When your insides have been all twisted, the pain of a tattoo becomes a metaphor: This is unbearable and yet this I can live through.

The next day I felt like I had a terrible road rash on my stomach, and I also had a slight fever, but I was elated. I had my membership card to a new club. Guy, his girlfriend, and I took a day off. The three of us ate a handful of psychedelic mushrooms and went to the science museum to see an exhibit of giant insects. We walked under a cerulean Chicago sky and the wind came off the lake and blew through the too-thin dress I wore, helping to numb my burning skin.

When we entered the museum, the woman in the ticket booth asked Guy how much his tattoos cost. This is the second most popular question after "Did that hurt?" That day with Guy, I learned my first lesson in having tattoos: When confronted by oglers, you need to have your routine down, whatever it's going to be. They treat you like a freak. So what? So what are you gonna do about it? What would Patti Smith do about it?

Guy looked like Al Jourgensen, but with violet-blue eyes. He responded to the woman with a growl and a milk-turning, I-will-sacrifice-your-baby-to-Satan glare. I had spent two days with Guy and found him equal parts sweet science nerd and acid-dropping hippie. He was the nicest guy. Satan would have turned him away at the gate. The scariness was completely an act, but it shut her right up.

Inside, the insects were colorful and alien and phosph.o.r.escent. I had stepped into an alternate universe. I stared at my reflection in the luminous sh.e.l.l of a purple scarab twice my size. Maybe it was the hallucinogenics or the fever or the fairy dust of the tattoo G.o.ds, but I swayed with a vertiginous sensation similar to the one I'd had on the balcony my first night in Singapore: There she is, the girl I want to be, real and unashamed and rendered in bold Technicolor strokes-just out of reach, but closer.