“But we haven’t been trying to get pregnant,” Salo said. He looked more mystified than anything. This gave her hope.
“I’d like to try. I think we’re ready.”
He was only twenty-seven. She was only twenty-four.
“I’m not ready,” said Salo.
Johanna canceled the appointment and went back to not telling her husband that she wasn’t doing a single thing to not get pregnant.
Another two years passed.
She became increasingly, privately, intractably frantic.
“Bobby and Christina are pregnant again,” she told him one morning as he was looking through his briefcase for some elusive bit of paper.
“Oh?” said Salo. “There it is. I knew I picked it up off my desk, but I couldn’t remember what I did with it.”
“Are you still not ready? Because I am ready for you to be ready.”
“Ready for what?” he actually said. He was snapping the latches of the briefcase. It was burgundy, made of eel skin, the one she had picked out to replace the Big Brown Bag.
“To have children, Salo. I would like to. I think we would be such wonderful parents.”
This was not precisely true. She was full of apprehension when she thought about him as a parent.
“Well, sure. But why is this so important right now?” he said.
Why? Because each individual cell in her body was howling at her, every day, all day, incessantly. Because she walked through their house on the Esplanade imagining children into the empty bedrooms. Because even their dog, a standoffish dachshund named Jürgen, seemed to understand he was only a placeholder for something vastly more significant that might at any moment replace him.
“I’m concerned that something is wrong.”
“Nothing is wrong. We’re not even trying to get pregnant.”
Three years was a long time. She had different priorities now.
“I thought it would take a while, so I went off the pill,” she said.
Salo frowned. “And when was that?”
That, said Johanna, doing a rapid calculation in which she omitted the first year of unilaterally not trying to not get pregnant, was two years ago.
After a long moment, he said: “I see.”
So this time they made it to the famous infertility doctor, Lorenz Pritchard of Fifth Avenue and Lenox Hill （“and Georgica Pond,” Salo would later joke, “courtesy of me”）。
“We’ll see you and your partner on the fourteenth, at four P.M.,” said the receptionist.
Dr. Pritchard’s office was papered with photographs of infants, smiling and drooling infants, infants in color and black-and-white. Johanna shielded her eyes against the glare of these children as she went inside. She took a seat on the leather banquette, eyed the vat of pink ranunculi, and began filling out forms on the clipboard. Height. Weight. Sexual history. Sexual habits. Drug use. There was no end to what she was being asked to reveal.
Beside her on the banquette, Salo was frowning over his own form.
“I don’t see what my choice of underwear has to do with your not becoming pregnant.”
“Really?” Her heart jumped. Underwear? Could this all be solved by … underwear?
“Or how many drinks per week.”
“I have that one, too,” she said.
“Do you have the underwear question?”
Johanna looked. “No. But I have lots of lovely questions about my period and venereal disease.”