If You Could See Me Now

Figure 1.

One crystalline spring evening in London I heard from a woman who declared, "I have reason to believe you're my biological father." Speaking long distance from Los Angeles, she said she had been born there on December 24, 1964. As she told me the precise time of her birth, her weight and the color of her eyes and hair, the conversation assumed the sort of sinking inevitability that attaches itself to events that you realize you've been waiting for, half in dread, half in hope, for decades.

The woman—her name was Amy—assured me that she didn't want to impose herself on anybody. She had had good adoptive parents and a happy childhood. She just wanted to know about her biological family and its medical history.

When I asked how she had found me, she stunned me with the news that my last name was on her original birth certificate. Sensing that this perplexed and upset me, she offered to put me in touch with her adoptive mother and to send a photograph and copies of her files from the Children's Home Society of California.

A manila envelope arrived in London less than a week later, and Amy's picture left no doubt. The color close-up showed a beautiful, vibrant woman in her early thirties. The shape of her eyes, the texture of her tanned skin, the set of her jaw with its slightly cleft chin, the tension of her mouth, whose economical upper lip contrasted with the generosity of the lower one, her large, bright teeth—everything called to mind the college girl I had loved a lifetime ago.

After speaking to her adoptive mother, I knew I had no choice but to tell Amy the truth. "I'm sorry," I said, "but I'm not your father."

"Your name's on my birth certificate," she protested.

I couldn't account for that. I tried to explain that I was the other guy, the boyfriend referred to in her files, the one who came to California with her birth mother to help her through the pregnancy.

Amy sweetly and politely refused to accept this and bombarded me with questions. I tried to be helpful, but it was hard to do this without humiliating myself and implying harsh criticism of others. For a moment I entertained the notion that I might simply give Amy a name and tell her to keep her eyes on the newspapers, cable television and magazine covers. Sooner or later she'd see her birth mother. In the end, though, I decided that no third party, no institution, regardless of how well intentioned, had the right to hide a person's life history and claim that legal privilege or privacy superseded her own identity. So in the course of a dozen transatlantic phone calls I recounted to Amy all that I knew.

When Adrienne Daly confessed that she was pregnant, alternating currents of pain and panic surged through me. Against all reason—we hadn't gotten beyond the petting stage—I felt it was my fault, if not for something I had done, then for something I had failed to do. But what?

Where I was raised, the way I was raised, the protocol in such cases was strict. If a woman cheated, a man dumped her, but not before doling out a wicked tongue-lashing or worse. Yet I stayed on, overpowered by contradictory impulses. Along with anger and disbelief I felt something close to resignation that gradually shaded into relief.

Of course she's pregnant, I thought. Something would have to be wrong before I had a chance with a campus queen like Adrienne. But rather than self-pity, this thought brought on a strange elation. My life seemed to be opening up, not narrowing, and among the new possibilities for a boy of my bookish inclinations was the thrill of being swept up into an absorbing narrative.

Two of my novels, published twenty years apart, contain scenes based on Adrienne...