Life Blood --I---Page 2

unconventional in every way. Also, it had a lot of in-your-face

decor, outrageous posters, and African fertility masks, signs of a wonderful, irreverent personality. Then too, stuffed animals and toys were strewn all over.

"I can't really afford the rent," she declared, seeing me survey
the place, "but I need the space for Kevin. I've just joined
Bloomingdale's Anonymous. Twelve steps to shredding your
charge plates."

Her nanny, a Jehovah's Witness from Jamaica named Marcy (who reminded me of a cuddly voodoo doll, complete with
cornrows), was bringing Carly's little boy Kevin down from his bath in the upstairs bathroom.

He was definitely adopted, sandy-haired and peachy, nothing like Carly's dark, severe strands and Mediterranean skin. When Marcy put him down, he tried to walk, and I felt my envy ratchet upward a notch. He'd just started taking tentative steps, at eleven months old, and there was still a Frankenstein quality as he strode stiff-legged, arms out for balance.

I walked over, picked him up, and gave him a kiss. He looked like a Scandinavian travel poster, a cherubic vision, and I felt a
great void growing where my heart had been. Then Marcy
reached out and pried him from me. I hated to let him go so much I almost pulled him back.

"You're so lucky," I said to Carly, feeling a surge of yearning. "He's great."

"You know," she said, "I've been thinking about that 'no disclosure' thing Children of Light made me sign. That's their name, by the way. Like a vow of silence about them. They seemed pretty serious about it."

Dear God, I thought, don't let her chicken out. Don't, don't.

"So, we won't mention them. Just never use their name."

She stood a minute, mute, and then her eyes grew

determined. "No, I've got a better idea. I like you. And I think more
single women ought to know about adoption. So you know what? I
think I'll use their name all over the damned place. I paid what
they asked, and for that I ought to be able to do what I want. What
are they going to do? Come and steal Kevin back?"
        Then she sighed and stared at me. "Maybe, though, you
could run through again how exactly we fit into this movie."
        I liked to tell the story to people, just to get their reaction.
There are always moments of doubt in the film-making process
when you wonder if the audience for your picture is going to

consist entirely of your immediate family, your backers, and your creditors.

"Well, as I tried to explain before, it's a fictional construct

intended to feel like a documentary, about a career slave named
Gail Crea who's based on a hundred women I know. She's got a
great career, manages fund-raising for a major museum, and
work is going great. But then one day she finds herself suddenly
daydreaming about babies, envying mothers. She yearns for
someone to take care of, has a recurrent dream she's stealing a
baby out of a carriage on the street. It's demeaning."
        "God," Carly said, "I know exactly what you're talking about.
I've been there. Have I ever."

The truth was, I also knew it all too well. It was poignant and demeaning at the same time.

"Anyway, Gail's focused on career all through her twenties,
and by her late thirties she's become a serious professional. But
her personal life is still on hold. She 'meets people' at work, or
some other way, and she has a couple of long-standing
relationships that finally crater because the guys, make that
commit-ophobes, 'need space.' Along the way, there're ghastly
fix-ups and dismal dinners with what seem like a hundred
thousand misfits. She becomes the Dating Queen of New York,
but eventually she realizes all the men she's meeting are either
assuaging their midlife crises with some pneumatic bombshell
named Bambi, or they're divorced and whining and carrying a ton
of emotional baggage. The fact is, she's become the sensible,
successful professional she's been looking for all this time. This
all sort of seeps in as back story."

I perched on a stool at the breakfast bar and looked down at
my jeans, and noticed that a rip was starting in the crotch. Shit,
back to cottage cheese. Those horrible eight pounds I could never
get rid of.

I crossed my legs. "Finally, after she gets a couple more

promotions, she wakes up one morning and realizes she's never
going to have a family. All the stable, rational men have
disappeared. Like there's a black hole or something. Nothing's left
but the walking wounded. She concludes it's actually easier to get
a baby than a decent guy—which is what she starts trying to do.
High concept: This picture is about how adopting a baby can
enrich the life of a childless human being and, not coincidentally,
bring joy to an orphaned infant."

I remembered when I'd first pitched it to David Roth of

Applecore. His response had been; "Definitely art-house.

Probably never get past the Angelika. A wide release is gonna be three screens where they serve iced cappuccino."
        I was dead set to prove him wrong.

"So," I wound up, "I've shot the entire film, but now, thinking it over, I've decided there's one last thing I need to do. As I go
through the story, at every step of the adoption process I want to cut to an interview, just talking heads, tight shot, of somebody who actually went through it. Nonfiction. The real-life happy
ending. And that's where you come in."

What I wasn't telling her was, I was increasingly concerned
the picture might be slightly hollow without this punch of real life.
        "Well," Carly declared with a grin, "my ending couldn't be
happier."

"Okay, want to get started?" I looked around at Arlene,

makeup, who always seemed to have more on her face than in
her bag. I kidded her about that a lot. But she was actually the
one who had found Carly, bumping into her at a gym in the
Village.

"Hey, let's go for it." Arlene grinned.

I turned back to Carly. "So how's about we prep a little while you're getting the 'natural' look?"

In the back of my mind I knew what I wanted for the interview.
Something like the feeling I remembered from The Thin Blue Line,
where people engaged in Hamlet-like monologues that told us
more about them than they themselves knew, that let us really
know their secrets and their fears. The interviewer was never
seen or heard.

Arlene ensconced Carly at the dining room table, a weathered country French, where she'd already unfolded and plugged in a mirror with lights.

"Having Kevin has been wonderful," Carly began. "He's

changed my life. Sure, being a single 'supermom' makes for a lot
of bad-hair days, but no matter how much I complain, it's worth
every burp."

I thought momentarily about having her hold him during the interview, but instantly decided it would be too distracting. Kevin and his wonderful eyes would commandeer the camera. A kid this cute in a scene was nothing less than grand larceny.

He came toddling in now, dragging a stuffed brown bear.

Then he banged its head and tried to say its name. "Benny." His

funny, awkward walk reminded me a little of Lou Crenshaw after a couple of drinks. God, he was fantastic.

"Come here, sweetie." I picked him up, inhaling his fresh baby
scent, and wanted to hold him forever—while he slammed the bear
against my face. This child, I thought, is too good to be true.

He was wearing a small bracelet around his left ankle, a tiny little chain, with a small silver medallion attached. It looked like the face of a cat. Funny. Carly didn't have a cat, wasn't a cat person, so why the little bracelet? And the back had a bunch of lines and dots, like a jumbled-up Morse code.

Ask her about that, I thought. But later.

Now Carly was caught up in the sound of her own voice and on a roll. While Arlene continued with the makeup, moving to her eyes, she bubbled on.

"Like I told you on the phone, I tried and tried to adopt,

through a whole bunch of lawyers, but it was a nightmare. One guy even helped me put ads in newspapers all around the
country, but nothing worked. I kept getting scammed by women who wanted thousands of dollars up front, then backed out at the last minute." She was getting up, looking intense. "Let me have a minute. I want to make coffee for everybody."

I followed her into the kitchen, which was the "country" type with a faux granite counter and lots of copper-bottomed pans hanging from the ceiling.

She was right about the pain of adoption, which was why her story was such a burst of sunshine. As part of the start-up
research for my picture, I'd actually gone to meet an adoption
attorney out in Brooklyn, a sleazy-looking guy named Frank
Brasco. I'd been pretending to be a client, to find out firsthand how tough it really was. What I heard was chilling.

"I don't want to get your hopes up," he'd declared for cheery
openers. "Finding a healthy, Caucasian, American baby is
virtually out of the question, so naturally we focus on foreign-
borns. All the same, it can take years, and there's incredible
paperwork. Passports for the kid, an extended visa for you while
you go there and then wait around to process everything in
triplicate. Bribes, corruption, you can't imagine." He sighed and
adjusted his toupee, as though the very thought made him weary.
"And that's just the foreign end. Here you have the INS, the
Immigration and Naturalization Service. They give bean-counting
paper-pushers a bad name." He examined me closely. "Not

Jewish, I take it. 'Cause if that's what you're looking for, you may have to wait for the Messiah."

Now, almost a year and a lot of experience later, I knew full
well how right he was. Which was what made Carly's story so
fantastic.

"So how did you manage to get Kevin? You said it only took a few months?"

"Well, to go back to the beginning, I didn't start out wanting to
adopt. But when the guy I was planning to marry got cold feet—
after four and a half years, the louse—and there was nobody else
on the horizon, I decided to just have a baby on my own. You
know, find some smart, good-looking hunk, seduce him, and get
things going the old-fashioned way, or if that didn't work, then I
figured I'd just go to a sperm bank. Who needs an actual man,
right?"

She took out a white and green bag of coffee beans, labeled Balducci's on the side. I was still holding Kevin, who threw Benny onto the floor, then began to sniffle and point.

But Carly seemed not to notice as she shook the coffee beans
into the grinder. "Well, getting a baby the fun way turned out to be
moot, because it seems I have some kind of uterine condition—
which meant I couldn't get pregnant, or even do an in vitro.
Bottom line, if I wanted a baby, I had to adopt."
        She pressed the button on the coffee grinder, sending a blast
of whirring through the kitchen. In seconds it was over and she
was tapping the batch into her Braun. "So that's when I started on
the attorney thing, got worked over good trying to adopt as a
single mom, and finally heard about Children of Light."
        "The adoption organization? What do you know about them?"
        "Tell you the main thing," she said, "they're the place that can
 make it happen." She reached over and poked Kevin's tummy.
"Right, big guy?"

Sure looked that way. What a cutie.

By now the spacious living room had been turned into a mini film set, with two 35-mm Panaflex cameras set up, windows
blanked out, lights and filters in place, and a video camera and monitor. Having tested the boom mike and the tape recorder, Tony and Sherry were ready.

Carly announced to everybody that coffee was available, and
I handed Kevin over to Marcy. Then together we marched into the
living room.