“Oh, I’ve got venereal disease here,” Salo said. “You know, I’m sure there’s nothing wrong. We probably need some hormone shot or something.”
The “we” was a nice gesture, and she appreciated it, but she was careful not to look at him. She had been educating herself on these matters for over three years, reading every magazine article and every New York Times Science Section update on the new fertility frontiers, and she highly doubted that a simple hormone shot would be the end or even the beginning of things. She had a strong suspicion that they were—or she was—about to commence a long slide down a steep slope of increasingly uncomfortable and frightening interventions, from the aforementioned hormone shots （hers, not his） all the way to the brave new worlds of surrogacy and test tube babies. She had, in her head, a whole list of possible diagnoses, ranked from least to most fearful: a blockage was preferable to a hormonal dysfunction. Hormonal dysfunction was preferable to absent or unviable eggs, which weren’t as bad as insufficient sperm, which was better than an incompetent uterus. Of all the things she worried might be wrong, the one Johanna feared the most was “unexplained infertility.”
“What if there’s nothing wrong?” she asked, whispering.
“There is nothing wrong,” he answered.
Dr. Lorenz Pritchard was a big guy who seemed to be spilling out everywhere: hair from the sides （but not the top） of his head, flesh at the waist and wrists and neck. He was waiting for them at a long antique desk, covered with files and legal pads and a small plate on which remained the corner of a tuna-fish sandwich on rye and a crumpled napkin.
“Dr. Pritchard,” he said, extending a faintly fishy hand. They both shook it.
“I read about you in New York magazine,” Johanna blurted.
“Okay. Which year? We’re so much further along than we were, even a few years ago.”
“Well, good,” said Johanna, forcing a smile. She knew exactly what he was referencing, of course. The test tube baby, Louise something, was two years old, and that was long enough for an entire genre of TV movies to have been written, produced, aired, and seen by herself. There was a story in Ladies’ Home Journal about a couple who’d paid a woman to be pregnant with the husband’s child, and then the woman had just handed over the baby to the father and his wife after it was born. They all seemed happy about it, but it sounded horrible to Johanna. She wanted to be pregnant with her own baby. And anyway, what if the mother—the other mother—decided she wanted to keep the child after it was born? What then? It wasn’t as if you had King Solomon on hand to settle things.
“I’m afraid there’s something wrong with me,” Johanna said. Then she started to cry.
Dr. Pritchard, to his credit, took this in stride. He’d been a perennial in New York magazine’s “Best Doctors” issue as long as Johanna had been checking. He had seen crying women before.
“Mrs. Oppenheimer,” he said, passing her the Kleenex, “I have treated over five hundred couples, the vast majority of whom are now parents, some several times over. Sometimes nature doesn’t go our way, and that will always be true, but I can promise you that everyone in our office is here to support you on your infertility journey.”
Even in the depths of her embarrassment, our mother found room to despise the term.
Salo reached for another Kleenex and passed it to her.
“So, you got yourselves here, and that’s the first step. Also the hardest.”
A blatant lie, as Johanna would later be the first to say. A ridiculous lie. Getting herself and Salo into an office where his underwear and her menstrual cycles could be scrutinized had certainly not been fun, but it wasn’t by any measure harder than some of what lay ahead. From the hormonal testing to the early-morning sperm analysis to the Clomid prescription she walked out with that very first day （a drug that made her even more weepy, crazy, and scared than before）， to the hysterosalpingogram, which Dr. Pritchard’s radiologist herself referred to （just seconds before actually performing the procedure） as “having your tubes blown out.” It was all terrible, fearful, and degrading.