High Water Mark

Suzanne McConnell

It is late afternoon. My husband and I have drifted over the main canal to this quiet section. I wander into an expensive jewelry store. A handsome, well-dressed salesman is at my service immediately. “Sto solo guardando,” I say. I’m just looking. “Ma tutti sono belli.”

“Si, belli, sono tipici di Venezia,” he assures me. “Centuries of craft. You have taken the boat to Murano where is the glass blowing to make the jewelry…?”

No. There is enough to see in Venice. Venice is precisely the balm and whimsy we need. Because we are drained. We are barren. In the last month we aged beyond our years and we feel those we have—I in my mid-forties and my husband nearing fifty—and the passing of time as a burden we are grieving.

I own only one necklace, a fine gold chain with two tiny linked golden hearts. But these Venetian necklaces are beautiful. Each bead is vivid and intricately designed. The one that caught my eye in the shop window is composed of ovals, deep dark blue, each oval splashed with a moon of flame.  

My glance flickers to another, scarlet-hued.   

The salesman follows my glance. “Please. May I?” He withdraws the scarlet necklace from the glass cabinet. I protest mildly. He switches back to Italian, keeping it slow and clear. “It costs nothing to look. No?” He knows how to flatter a foreigner.      

He turns me with a light touch on my shoulder, and brings the necklace gracefully around my head. I regard myself in the mirror he holds up. It is spring, but damp here in Venice. The necklace lies on my blue sweater like fire. 

“Quanto costa?” I ask. About $200. This is too expensive. And I am not interested.  

My husband, who has followed me into the shop, motions. “Look at this one.” The one he’s spotted resembles the antique earrings he gave me last June on our fourth anniversary. It is translucent, the faint pink of abalone shell or the lilac sachets of old women, delicate as baby skin.  

“It’s lovely,” I say.    

Another salesman, standing nearby, joins my husband. “Perfect for you,” he says and he retrieves the translucent necklace.  

The first salesman unclasps the scarlet one; his fingers whisper at the nape of my neck. The other’s are equally nimble fastening the second. My husband guides me to the mirror. “It’s elegant. Don’t you think?”  

I tilt my head. “Yes. It is. It’s too long to wear with a blouse, though.” I catch his eye in the mirror. “These are expensive.” 

“You deserve it,” he says. “You’ve been through a lot.”

He wants something from me. He wants me to want something he can give me. But I do not want this necklace. It seems the inside of skin, the lining, what cradles, before it is sloughed off.

The first salesman whisks a third necklace out of the case. “This one is truly Venetian. And it has all the colors. Tutti.” He shows us. Every bead is a marvel of complication, a myriad of hues. He swings it in that marvelous deft circular motion he has come by through sweeping hundreds of necklaces around the necks of hundreds of women like myself. He unclasps the translucent one and hands it to my husband. “This, you see,” he says, gesturing to the one now around my neck, “is also long. But can be doubled, short.” He scoops the two strands up in his hand near my collarbone, knots them together and lets them drop. The strands fall as one between my breasts and show them up under my sweater, soft and round as eggs.

Part II

We have come to Venice over the mountains from Köln on the train. Several days before our departure, the Rhine overflowed her banks. We walked from the train station across the main bridge to the middle of the river, leaning over the rail, like everyone else. From the bridge we could see the Cathedral’s spires, the Allied pilots’ guideposts during the war, for which the Cathedral was spared. They rise sharp and black as sooted horns.  

  The water of the Rhine covered the walk paths. It flooded onto the grass along the several blocks of what is called Old Town. We walked up those cobbled streets. My husband, who lived in Köln a year with his first wife when their daughter was still a child, remembered a monument recording the high water marks. We located it in a small platz on the second street in the old town, where the water from this flooding had not yet crept. The Rhine had risen many times before, and much higher. The highest water mark was far above our heads.     

We have been living in a castle near Köln for several months. My husband, a sculptor, was having an exhibition; more important and time-consuming, a book of photographs of his work was being published. I’m a singer, and for the first time since we married, I was free of performances for an extended period. I took a leave of absence from teaching voice and Early Music part-time at a university in New York. My husband took a leave from the university where he taught art.      

We have been living with the galerists. My husband assured me they like artists as house guests; it makes them feel baronial. She is beautiful, with chestnut hair and pouty lips; she is childish, seductive, charming. She serves dinner on silver underplates at 11 P.M. at the long, long table in the castle dining room, with the huge fireplace and the three-foot thick walls. She serves duck. Only duck. Duck alone. She forgot to buy the potatoes, she says to the dozen dinner guests. She also forgot vegetables, salad, bread, the vorspeise. My husband and I agree: it’s the art dealers and galerists who are the Bohemians.  

She has been married twice before, first to an artist, then to that artist’s art dealer, and now she’s opened her own gallery; her new husband, a young lawyer, began directing the gallery, increasingly, when she became pregnant. He is skinny, Mandarin-lidded, attractive, consumes cups of thick coffee half filled with heavy cream for breakfast and doesn’t eat until dinner. He spends his days phoning artists.   

She has two children already, one with each husband; a man expects that, she told me. The oldest is gone to university. The second, a boy of twelve, has been evicted from boarding school for disruptive behavior. He rattles around in the castle, trying for attention. She neglects his clothes, his meals. He will be sent to the local volkshochschule—the high school for the working class.  

She is forty-two. I am forty-three. She smokes like a chimney. She drinks. She complains of her distorted pregnant figure.  

These turrets, this great water trough in the entrance, these wide staircases, these enormous ceilings, this twelfth century compound of stables and living quarters, this schloss have seen them before: the great man, the great wife, the great dog, the various children, the servants, the disorder, the pretension.

The galerist’s obstetrician is a close friend of ours. A collector of art, it is he who is underwriting the publishing of my husband’s book. He is disdainful of her carelessness and rebellion. He is a good man. He has the classic German characteristics: self-disciplined, hard-working, efficient, cultured, optimistic, decisive. His mother and father died when he was young. He was raised by an elderly godmother. His father was a Nazi, another friend informed us; and so he strives rigorously towards the ethical. He heads the department of gynecology and obstetrics at the hospital. One night he invites us to dinner to discuss a proposal he has for us.

Part III

My husband and I met six years ago. He let me know right away that we needn’t worry about birth control. He’d had a vasectomy. His first wife had wanted it. I recoiled from this information. Such fooling around with the body and fate. How could you eliminate that possibility as though you knew the future? He was glad child-rearing was over, he said, his daughter grown.

A year passed. One night I declared I wanted a child. I burst into a flood of tears. Eventually he warmed to the idea. He became enthusiastic. Before we married, he had the vasectomy reversed. He did not ask if I would refuse to marry him otherwise, but I know the answer to his unasked question. I would have married him, and resented him for my barrenness.

It requires delicate microsurgery to reconnect the vas deferens from testicles to ejaculatory ducts. The surgeon performs by watching a magnifying screen. The operation took three and a half hours. When his daughter and I leaned over my husband-to-be right afterwards, I was aghast. His body was helpless and loose, his green eyes swam, his tongue lolled.   

It took weeks for my husband-to-be to recover. For days he trembled uncontrollably. He dreamed of his ex-wife and me, two women coercing and violating his body: one to avoid procreation, and the other to procreate.   

When recovered, he saw his surgeon. The nurse offered him girlie magazines and a room, and told him to return with his ejaculate. They examined the sperm under a microscope. The operation was a success.  

    Months went by, then a year. We married. We built a loft. I consulted a fertility specialist. I reported my husband had had a vasectomy reversed, and I had never been pregnant. The doctor said treatment was a logical process. He called it a “work-up.” First, we must find when I ovulate: I must record my basal temperature every morning upon waking.   

At the next appointment, I brought samples of my husband’s sperm. The motility was low. But sperm changes daily. We repeated it. Under the microscope, the sperm looked as they do in textbooks: like tadpoles.  Some skittered about; more than half lay dormant. They would never make it to the egg. But it only takes one, I thought. Just one. 

I was insecure, taking my temperature. Ovulation occurs when it’s lowest; but the differences are minuscule—one or two degrees. 

So it dipped. Was this the day? It rose. Had I already ovulated? I woke needing to pee and jumped up, forgetting, jostling my temperature with movement. I blamed myself for forgetting: you must not want a baby or you would remember to stay still.  

We had intercourse timed for fertility. Afterwards I stayed prone, my hips propped on a pillow to aid gravity. We no longer made love; we were trying to make a baby.

After months of charting, I abandoned the thermometer and began using an ovulation test kit, sold over the counter. 

Eventually, I knew which test kit I liked best. I knew where to get the cheapest. I knew I ovulated regularly. I became familiar with the depth of blue my urine test turned. I had my numbers down: ovulation would occur in the next 24 hours; sperm usually live for 48 hours although they can survive up to 72; the egg is readied for impregnation only within about a 6 hour period. Pregnancy could occur two days before and during ovulation and that’s when intercourse must be undertaken. I knew it was all a chancy business, and I knew I was working within the riskiest gambler’s odds.    

It is through word of mouth I found out almost everything about the process. If you are a childless woman past thirty-five, it’s likely you’re hearing the biological clock ticking like an alarm. In New York City, we’re everywhere.  

From a book one friend suggested, I discovered astonishing details. The female anatomy is active; the Fallopian tube has to grab the egg out of a void. Sperm must pass through the microscopic epididymis, a tubule from testicles to vas deferens twenty feet long covering one and a half inches. It’s miraculous anyone gets pregnant, there’s so much chance and so much required to happen.  

The “work-up” progressed to “procedures.” Each procedure forfeited that month’s possibility of conception. The doctor scraped tissue from my uterus to determine if the lining was developing properly in my cycle. The results were inconclusive. I’d lost weight, which can alter the system. Once the doctor suspected the lab of error. Often, I read in a book, emotional stress can delay ovulation.    

The doctor injected purple dye through my cervix to see if there was blockage in my tubes. The x-ray showed the dye flowing, unobstructed.  

I underwent a laparoscopy. The doctor inserted a needle into my belly button and scoped the abdomen, ovaries, and Fallopian tubes to discern scarring or other interference. Everything was clear.  

But my ovulation was so late; it seemed quite possible that my luteal phase—that period after ovulation and before menstruation—might be so brief that the lining couldn’t mature to sustain the fertilized egg. Consenting to another ‘procedure’ and thus sacrificing that month’s possibility for pregnancy was, as time had gone on, excruciating.   

The third month, the results indicated, indeed, insufficient days in the luteal phase. For the first time in my ‘work-up,’ there seemed to be a concrete problem that could be addressed.   

To lengthen my cycle I took both cures: vaginal suppositories for five days before my period, and fertility pills for five days after. My cycle lengthened to thirty-one days.  

But nothing happened. The bed moistened from suppositories leaking onto the sheets. I wanted to scream from the tension between hope and foolish hope. I imagined an elderly woman with loose flesh making a fool of herself flirting with a handsome, supple young man at a party because she’s forgotten her age but not desire.

One month I was two weeks late for my period. I dared to venture real hope, and I found that I was thrilled. 

Blood came. I began to understand the nature of my disappointment: it was as if every month I were receiving a rejection from God.  

And my body, whose femaleness I have always cherished, was a betrayer: I could not trust it. 

We had arrived at the final stage of the “work-up:” artificial insemination.  

Imagine:

I am riding my bicycle amongst taxis, buses, messenger boys, the honking and tumult of New York City. Tucked inside my bra, to keep their contents warm and lively, are two vials. Number 1 contains the first gush of my husband’s ejaculate, Number 2 the second. Here I am, 42 years old, on a bike, in midday traffic, with half a possible baby tucked inside my bra. I want to honk and yell, “Guess what’s inside my bra?”

This is hilarious, absurd. Conception is supposed to occur in the dead of the passionate night, miraculously, unselfconsciously, when the earth has moved. My own mother says I was conceived one evening when, standing on the porch steps, she called out to my father, “Let’s make a baby.” He conceded. So they went in, they did that, and I occurred.

Nevertheless, the doctor’s instruments could place my husband’s sperm nearer the egg than my husband’s most orgasmic ejaculation. We scheduled our lives around this fact; in the summer we drove back from Cape Cod in a mad dash when my test turned blue so the doctor could perform his magic.

One day in his office I broke down. “I’m discouraged, Doctor. This is my tenth insemination. This is now my 43rd year. This is my only husband. This is my last chance.” He is a busy man, his office overflows with women, he hasn’t time or inclination for tears. He referred me to his social worker for counseling.

She showed me pictures of beautiful adopted children. She told me child-rearing is not the only thing you can do with your life. She gave me names of infertility organizations. She discussed parenting in a broad context, beyond the biological.     

I confessed my ambivalence. We are old; our child will be a teenager when my husband is retiring. We are artists. We are devoted to our demanding muses. I’m torn, wondering if I can keep singing and also mother, besides earning a living. My husband has a grown daughter, this child will be largely my job. Adoption is another long process, and I want, I want to see my own reflection and his reflection down the generations. My body aches, my breasts long, I yearn for the milky bloody mucousy juices of life flowing in my life, if this is what she means by biological.  

The next month we reached what I considered the climax of high tech. Because this time my husband wasn’t even there, he’d gone to California. His frozen sperm, “washed” and ready to “swim-up,” was two and a half weeks old. When my test turned blue, I phoned the lab. A few hours later, time enough for the sperm to thaw, I picked up the vials. The technician wrapped them in a sheet of typing paper upon which he wrote the analysis—how many, how motile. He warned me to keep them warm. It was winter. I draped my wool scarf inside my down coat over my double-sweatered left breast where the bulky specimen snuggled, and hailed a taxi. The doctor shot that sperm inside my cervix with his instrument.  

Who was ejaculating? Who was impregnating me? When did we give up? I shoved these questions out of my mind.

Part IV

In Köln, several months later, our friend, the obstetrician and supporter of my husband’s work, invites us to dinner. He proposes we try in vitro semination; my husband’s sperm and my eggs would be coaxed and prodded together in a petri dish. The best fertility clinic in West Germany is nearby, in Bonn. You can come to my hospital in Köln for the daily hormone shots. It will cost you nothing except the hospitalization. I have asked my friend as a favor. I’ve arranged your consultation for this Sunday. It’s up to you. If this doesn’t work, he says, it will be definite. Then you can go on with your lives.

Our galerist-hosts have a baby now. He is so tiny, sweet, and black-haired. Our friend performed the Cesarean delivery. The placenta was hard as a rock. He made the husband touch it. “That’s from smoking,” our friend told him fiercely. “You see?”   

The baby’s mother murmurs sweetly to it. Her older boy coos to the child; they have not yet enrolled him in the volkeshochschule. The boy roams the castle, horses around with the dog, does wheelies on his bike. I worry about what he eats for dinner, about his starvation for attention, the lopsidedness of this luxury. One evening in the second week, the mother complains bitterly: she has been home the whole day with the baby.

They hire an au pair. She speaks only German. The mother resumes her gallery position. Each day, I descend from the library, where I compose and practice singing, for coffee and to see the baby. The baby is so small, he smells so new; I hold him often. 

I say yes to our friend’s proposal. On Sunday my husband and I drive to Bonn for the consultation. We get hopelessly lost. Then we wait for the doktor for hours. My husband, infuriated, insists we leave. We had never considered this method—too expensive, time consuming, desperate, bizarre. We know little about in vitro. I am firm. “I want to try this.” This opportunity, I argue, seems an offering from the universe; one should not look a gift horse in the mouth. ‘Gift,’ my husband tells me, means ‘poison’ in German. In English, I say, it means gift.  

The doktor appears. He has been occupied with an unexpected delivery. He is frank and freundlich. He tells us the chances with in vitro are at best twenty per cent. The process takes two or three weeks. Often pregnancy occurs on the second try. We reply that we will be leaving Europe before a second try would be possible.    

He says we won’t see him again until the insemination. He shakes our hands. He wishes us luck.  

Our lives center on in vitro. We get up, breakfast, drive to the hospital in Köln where a nurse, grim-faced, gives me an injection of hormones, switching from one buttock cheek to the other.

The afternoons we spend in Bonn. My husband waits in the coffee shop, the waiting room, the car. I wait with all of the other women. The clinic is filled with Turkish and German women of all shapes and sizes. We are herded from one room to another. We wait to get a blood test. We drink bottles of water for the sonogram requires a full bladder to push the ovaries to the surface. We are all waiting, waiting. Occasionally I find someone who speaks English. Often I don’t ask or try. I listen to them talking among themselves, telling their stories. I am foreign. I am alone. I am lonely.

Sometimes between procedures, my husband and I take a walk. We discover a beautiful woods. We climb a hillside. We buy kuchen and kaffee at a bakerie, indulge in cream and sweets. We do not talk of our hopes, our fears. We do not talk at all about what we are doing. We, accustomed to turning within the curve of one another’s body, do not touch in the night. It is as though we are holding our breaths.

After two and a half weeks, I’ve come up with several eggs. I feel as though I am in water up to my neck, I am drowning, bloating, floating with eggs. I find myself drawing loops of watery blue. Yes, a young assistant doctor who speaks English says; the hormones make you feel pregnant.

Once I am left in the sonogram room alone when the woman physician who administers them is called out. I notice the medical record book open on her desk. I see my name at the top. I crane my head. Next to my age, forty-three, are five exclamation marks in bright red ink.  

I’m overcome by shame and humiliation. My desire to have a child is desperate, foolish. I imagine their ridicule, what they say among themselves. “Doesn’t she know she’s too old? Americans think they can have everything.” The nurses at my friend’s hospital appear in my mind: is their grimness from resentment, because their boss favors me? Or is it disdain? Do they exclaim and cluck at my unseemly desire, my crone-like middle-age?   

A few days later, I receive information which my sister-in-law promised to send from the States. Indeed, I read in plain English, American clinics do not accept anyone over forty for in vitro fertilization. 

But the next day I am told that I have produced a sufficient number of viable eggs. They are also sufficiently developed. The time has come for in vitro fertilization.  

At the hospital, I am shaved, I am prepared. My husband, once more, is given magazines and a private room. While he produces semen, I am given anesthesia. I see the chief doktor for the second time, long enough for greetings. Then I am under. My eggs are extracted. My husband’s sperm are extracted. They are deposited together in a petri dish.    

And then we wait. We go back to the castle. My husband’s book is finished. We have edited the galleys. It has gone to the printer’s. There is nothing to do. 

We are sitting at the table in the kitchen, the coziest room in the castle, when the doktor phones. My husband speaks to him in a subdued earnest voice. For some reason, for no reason they know, the egg and sperm did not fertilize. 

The kitchen has narrow high long windows, a great wooden cutting block counter, the German bread slicer, the toaster. Outside spring is beginning. The vines bud. The trees sprout. A graze of new green tenders the fields and there is a riot of grasses and bushes.  

My husband’s voice becomes slightly plaintive, raw. Perhaps you don’t know, he says, or perhaps you don’t want to reveal it, but which was it that caused…the egg or the sperm? Can you tell?

The vines loop gaily about the windows. The large ancient trees are budding.  

My husband nods. I thought you might have some policy, he says. It’s just that then we would know and maybe we could do something.

The doktor reassures him, my husband tells me afterwards. We really do not know, the doktor says. This happens in a certain percentage of the cases.

A few days later, when the train passes along the flooded Rhine towards the south of Germany, we witness, wide-eyed, what the flooding has done. Streets in small towns are canals. People go about them in boats. Water arrives at windows. Water submerges an island, trees. A castle floats. 

In the mountains of Switzerland, and then in the mountains of Italy, my husband and I go to the dining car. We smoke petite German cigars; we drink red wine. We have a luxurious meal. We pass spectacular mountain after mountain, sharp contrasts of snow and black rock, sheer valleys, villages with smoke curling from steep-sloped houses. At last we begin to talk. It is a flood of talking. It is as though for a month in the great castle in Köln and driving to the clinic and hospital we have not looked at one another. We have been holding our breath.

Part V

Among these necklaces we are trying, this third necklace, this one typically Venetian which the salesman has knotted and let fall between my breasts, would be my last choice.

It’s colorful, my husband says. This one is a circus of color, lavishes color like an Italian mother decorating not one but five cakes for her son, the prince’s birthday. Every bead is covered by three tiny plates. Each plate has a unique though similar design of successive explosions of color and shape: oval, to jagged circle, to round, amber-turquoise-jade, mustard-peach-sienna, scarlet-lapis-robin’s egg. At the center of each plate lies a dot like an eye or a womb. From that place the color and design emanate and reverberate.

The salesman is describing the necklace, though I can see with my own eyes, the detail, the work, the multitude of color, but delicado. That sort of thing. Tipico di Venezia.  

But I’ve no desire, I’ve just come in to browse, and now these three men are cajoling me, these two dark handsome Italian salesmen who see an American lady, and the third, my husband, who wants to give me something.  

There is a dance among them. My husband watches with his sweet face, his face I love, as the second salesman is describing the handicraft. He repeats that the one he is holding, the translucent one, like the pale orchid, may not be typically Italian; it’s the most tasteful, though, and matches my earrings. I don’t respond.  

The first salesman becomes impatient. “She doesn’t want that one, she told you. She prefers something colorful.”    

So I turn to my husband. “I don’t want one, really, honey. They’re too expensive. I just came in to look.”

But he is not listening hard enough. “They’re all beautiful. I’ll buy whichever one you want, don’t worry about the money,” he says.  

  The first salesman hovers.  

The second salesman presses. “So which do you want?”

The third salesman, my husband, forfeits his choice and aligns with the second. “That one is the most Venetian.” 

The three of them are hovering, staring, breathing down my neck. “I don’t care which one! Okay, this one!” I say.   

My husband is startled. 

   “Please,” the second salesman says, nonplussed. “Allow me to put another way.” He unclasps the necklace, unfurls it about my head; he unknots it, loops it into double strands. 

I envision myself older. I am childless. I am bedecked with things my husband has given me. Necklaces, furs. Salesmen attend me. They try to please me this way, that way. I spend my days like this, browsing. I browse through my life.

The salesman swings the necklace around my head once again, to show me how it can lie brightly coupled near my neck.  

I turn, I am whirling. “They don’t make up for it. None of them. Nothing makes up for it!”  

I flee toward the street.

My husband runs after me. My feet are flying over cobblestones. I hear his clattering. He catches up, yanks me to a stop. I pivot. I begin to beat on him, I pound him with my fists. He clutches my wrists; I can’t move; his grip is fierce. We are face to face, we are furious, tears fill his puzzled eyes and spill, and I begin to sob, his breath heaves, sobbing wrenches as if torn from my chest, and our wailing echoes, sounding hollow and lost, and finally disappears in the watery canals of Venice.