Life Blood --I---Page 1

New York, New York. A blissful spring morning beckoned,
cloudless and blue and pure. I was driving my high-mileage
Toyota down Seventh Avenue, headed for the location shoot that
was supposed to wind up principal photography for my first
feature film, Baby Love. It was about the pain and joy of adoption.
I guess directing your first feature is something like giving birth to
your first child, but that gets us way, way ahead of the story.
        My name, by the way, is Morgan Smyth James, after two
grandmothers, and I'm thirty-eight and single and strive to be
eternally optimistic. That morning, however, in spite of everything
else, I was missing Steve terribly and feeling like I'd screwed up
essential components of my life.

To try for some perspective, let me say I'd always planned to
have a normal, loving family. Really. Find an emotionally present
soul mate who cared about things I care about—okay, slim and
smart and spectacular in bed wouldn't be a minus—get married on
a lawn with lots of white roses some sunny June afternoon, work
one or even two perfect kids into our fulfilling, giving lives. But
somehow I'd managed to have none of that. I'd messed up at
every turn.

In reality I had nobody to blame but myself. Eighteen years

ago, just out of college, I turned down two really nice guys. My

body was fertile and hormone-driven—was it ever!—but grad school loomed and my greatest fear (instead of, as now, my fondest
hope) was getting "trapped" into motherhood. Also, I had the
youthful delusion that life was forever.

There was, in truth, one simpatico young director I met at

NYU film school whom I would have married in a minute, but after
Jason won my heart he dumped me for his undergraduate
sweetheart who had skillfully gotten herself knocked up during his
Christmas break.

Which was when I first developed my fallback strategy for

coping with bad news. After moping around in sweats for two

days, cutting class and hiding in a revival house showing a

Goddard retrospective, not understanding half the French and too
bleary-eyed to read the subtitles, I decided to build a defense
system. From that day on, I'd put all heartbreak in a special box,
nail down the lid, and act as though it wasn't there. It worked then
and it still works, more or less, now. People sometimes accuse
me of living in selective denial (they're right), but it makes me one
heck of a survivor.

And something else. I decided then and there to focus my life:
I'd concentrate on learning to make movies and let the family part
just play out naturally. I had the idea that whereas men's
affections couldn't be controlled, a career could. Even then I
realized it was only a partial truth, but I decided to go with it
anyway.

Which brings us down to three years back. And a funny thing was happening. Almost without realizing it, I'd started lingering in stores to look at little pink jumpers, begun gazing into the baby carriages that suddenly seemed to be sprouting everywhere. The phrase "my baby" became the most powerful one I could imagine, made my throat swell till I'd half choke.

At which precise time, like a deus ex machina, enter Steve
Abrams, the man who gave me hope. He came along just as I
was noticing that infinite stream of wonderful guys had dwindled
down to relationship dropouts, men with distant eyes and former
wives in other states. We discovered each other at the reopened
Oloffson Hotel in Haiti, where I was shooting a documentary

about voodoo and he was photographing that country's ragged,
plucky children for National Geographic. No ex-spouses, no need
for psychic pampering. Okay, he wasn't going to win a Mr.
Universe contest any time soon; he had a couple of extra pounds
that, actually, I kind of liked. But he was my age, had great brown
eyes, sandy hair thinning only just a bit. No Greek god but
definitely a man. He could tune a Jeep carburetor with his eyes
closed or fix a cranky hotel lock, then recite Byron (sort of) and
proceed to snare the perfect Chilean red for crawfish etouffee
(yes!). But I knew I loved him when I realized it was more than any
of that. I felt as if I'd found the other half of myself. Just one
glance across the table and we each knew what the other was
thinking, feeling. We'd laugh at the same instant, then as though
on cue, half cry together over the miseries of that wretched island.

Sometimes it was almost eerie. And as for lovemaking, let me just
say Steve didn't need a how-to manual. We were made for each
other.

Maybe it's un-PC to mention it, but I also felt safe around him.
And I think he felt the same. We liked that feeling. Us fending off
the world.

When we got back to New York, we had to see each other
every day. We still had separate apartments—thanks to the New
York real-estate squeeze—but we were scouting in our spare time
for an affordable loft in lower Manhattan that could accommodate
Steve's darkroom, my office, and—yes—a baby. We evolved into
parents-to-be, pricing baby carriages. Who could have predicted
it? The joy of sharing a need. It was a total high.

Before long we decided to stop waiting for the perfect

space. We'd start on the baby anyway, our first joint project—

which, we believed, would only be the first of many.

But nothing happened. Over a year and still nothing.

That was when life began to feel like a cruel bait-and-switch.
When you aren't ready, you can produce a baby in a momentary
absence-of-mind, whereas once you're finally an adult,
accomplished, lots-to-offer woman, ready to be the mother you
wish you'd had, your body has closed down your baby-making
equipment like an unused Rust Belt factory. Fertility has
calculatingly abandoned you for the Sun Belt of youth.
        "Well," Dr. Hannah Klein, my long-time ob/gyn, declared, "our
tests all indicate you're both fertile, so just keep trying, under
optimum conditions."

Optimum conditions. There followed almost a year of

"optimum conditions." Do it upside down; wait and have a cold

shower while I take my temperature; no, not that way, not tonight.
My mucus is thicker: Quick! Eventually we both began feeling like
laboratory rats. Our once-incredible love life drifted into something
only a boot-camp sergeant with Nazi leanings could be turned on
by.

I think that's what finally caused Steve to go over the edge.
Three months ago—a Friday morning I shall never forget—he
stepped out of my shower, swathed himself in a white towel, and
announced he was going to Central America to do a book. He
needed time to think. The move, he explained, wasn't about us.
He really wanted to spend a year down there with his Nikon,
capturing the region's tentative processes of democratic

transition. Besides, he was beginning to think we'd both gone a little mental about the baby.

Out came that special box of heartbreak again. I consoled myself we were just having a seventh-inning stretch, but the wisdom in that box told me I'd somehow blown it. The baby we hadn't created had become a specter hovering in the ether between us, ever a reminder of failure.

As a parting gesture, the never-say-die long shot, he left a
"deposit" with Dr. Klein—for her liquid-nitrogen womb-in-waiting—
enough for two final intrauterine inseminations. Later on today I
was going to see her and find out if our last and final attempt had
stuck. But nothing about my cycle was giving me any hope.

In the meantime, though, I had a movie to finish. We were
shooting an interview at a five-story condominium building in
Greenwich Village belonging to a woman named Carly Grove,
who'd recently adopted. Her story was intriguing, but now—with
my own hopes of ever having a baby down to two outs in the
bottom of the ninth—well, now I had more than one reason for
wanting to meet her. . .

When I arrived, I lucked into a parking space right in front. Our
security guy, Lou Crenshaw, was off today getting some city
paperwork sorted out, but my crew was already upstairs—as
director I get to arrive at a decent hour, though later on I also get
to do lonely postproduction work till midnight—leaving our three
vans double-parked, with a New York City Film Board permit
prominently displayed inside each windshield. The building,
formerly a Hertz parking garage, was near the end of Barrow
Street, facing the Hudson River, and was filled with artists and
entrepreneurs.

The truth was, I wanted to get the interview on film as soon as possible. I was more than a little worried Carly might decide to get cold feet and back out. She'd started to hedge when I had one last confirming chat with her last night, something about a "no-
disclosure" agreement she now remembered signing. This had to be a one-take, all-or-nothing shoot.

Which was why I'd sent down the full gang this morning, not
just the "key" personnel as I'd initially planned. Leading my
(motley) crew was the director of photography, first cameraman
Roger Drexel, a grizzled veteran with a ponytail who'd been with
my producer, David Roth and his Applecore Productions, from
back when he did beach movies and splatter films. He worked
with the production manager, Erica Cole, our lipstick lesbian, who

coordinated crew schedules. The second camera was handled by
Greer Seiber, recently of NYU film school, who was so happy to
have a job, any job, she acted as though David's previous string
of low-budget, B-flick epics were remakes of Gone With the Wind.

Scott Ventri, another Applecore old-timer, was key grip, the
guy who got the gear on and off the vans, set it up, and signed off
on safety regs. Today he also was responsible for blacking out
windows and setting up lights. The chief electrician, gaffer, was
Ralph Cafiero, who'd come down the previous day and
temporarily hot-wired the circuit breaker in the apartment to make
sure there was enough amperage. He and his lighting "crew,"
another bright-eyed (and cheap) NYU grad named Paul Nulty,
had arrived this morning ahead of everybody else to pre-light the
"set," a northeast corner of the apartment.

I'm always a little hyper about sound, so I'd asked Tony Wills,
who handled recording, to also come down the previous day and
record the "tone" of the living room, the sound when there is no
sound, in order to have it available for editing. Today he'd run the
boom mike and be assisted by Sherry Moran, his latest girlfriend,
who was mixer/recordist. For Carly's makeup and hair, I had

Arlene Morris, an old friend from all the way back to my early days as an AD on the soaps. . .

I rang Carly's bell and she buzzed me right up.

She doubtless had a closet full of Donna Karan suits, but she came to the door in pre-faded jeans and a striped sweater.
A successful publicity agent, she was petite, with dark hair and eyes and an obvious don't-bug-me take on life.

"Come on in. My nanny's here to help keep Kevin out of the
way." She was sounding like she'd gotten her old spunk back, or
so it seemed at first. "I've completely cleared the living room."

I looked around the place, now a vision of setup pandemonium. "You're sure this is all right?"

"Well . . ." She was biting at her lip. "Maybe we ought to talk first, okay? But come on in. I'll probably do it. Maybe I just need a good reason to. . . ."

As her voice trailed off, I found myself mining my brain for a sales point. Finally, out of the blue, I settled on one. "Because you're totally crazy?"

She laughed out loud. "Not a bad start. I live in total madness. It's the definition of my life."

I laughed too and looked around. No kidding. Her loft

apartment was a wild mixture of stairs and galleries and levels—