The point is that liking Naomi isn’t the point. The point is rather that she grow to like — love, even — Thanh and, by association, of course (of course!) Harper. That she sees that they are deserving of love. Surely they are deserving of love. Naomi’s goodwill, her friendship, her affection, is an insurance policy. They are both afraid, Thanh and Harper, that Naomi will change her mind when the baby is born. Then they will have no baby and no legal recourse and no money to try again.
Anyway the cheese was old. Harper is getting fat. The beard, which Thanh loathes, isn’t fooling anyone. Thanh has spent too much money on the wedding present. The plane tickets weren’t cheap, either.
Naomi, the surrogate, is on bed rest. Two weeks ago a surgeon put a stitch in her cervix. A cerclage, which almost sounds pretty. How did we end up with a surrogate with an incompetent cervix? says Harper. She’s only twenty-seven!
Naomi gets out of bed to use the toilet and every other day she can take a shower. Her fellow graduate students come over and what do you think they talk about when they’re not talking about linguistics? Thanh and Harper, probably, and how much Naomi is suffering. Does she confide in her friends? Tell them she thinks about keeping the baby? It was her egg, after all. That was probably a dumb idea.
Thanh keeps a toothbrush at Naomi’s apartment. Easier than running upstairs. Their building is full of old Russians with rent-stabilized leases. The women exercise on the treadmills in high heels. They gossip in Russian. Never smile at Thanh when he comes into the exercise room to lift weights or run. They see him go in and out of Naomi’s apartment. Must wonder. Sometimes Thanh works at Naomi’s kitchen table. One night he falls asleep on the bed beside her, Naomi telling him something about her childhood, the TV on. Naomi watches episode after episode of CSI. All that blood. It can’t be good for the baby. When Thanh wakes up, she is watching him. You farted in your sleep, she says. And laughs. What time is it? He checks his phone and sees he has no missed calls. Harper is probably still at work. He doesn’t like me very much, Naomi says. He likes you! Thanh says. (He knows who she means.) I mean he doesn’t really like people. But he likes you. Mm, Naomi says. He’ll like the baby, Thanh says. You should hear him talk about preschools, art lessons, he’s already thinking about pets. Maybe a gerbil to start with? Or a chameleon. He’s already started a college fund. Mm, Naomi says again. He’s good-looking, she says. I’ll give him that. You should have seen him when he was twenty-five, Thanh says. It’s all been downhill since then. Hungry? He heats up the phoga he made upstairs. His mother’s recipe. He does the dishes afterward.
He accidentally saw a text on Naomi’s phone the other day. To one of her friends. The short one. I AM HORNY ALL THE TIME. They should have used a donor egg. But that would have cost more money, and how much more money is there in the world? Wherever it is, it isn’t in Harper and Thanh’s bank account. They went through catalogs. IQs, hobbies, genetic histories. It seemed impersonal. Like ordering take-out food from an online menu. Should we have the chicken or the shrimp? Naomi and Harper have thick, curly blond hair, similar chins, mouths, athletic builds. So they decided to use Thanh’s sperm. Harper says once, late at night: he thinks it would be harder to love his own child.
Thanh wants to tell Harper about the text. Maybe it would make him laugh. He doesn’t. It wouldn’t.
Eventually the fight is about the wedding. Should they cancel? Thanh thinks if they leave town now, something terrible will happen. The baby will come. He can’t say this to Harper. That would also be bad for the baby.
At this stage of a pregnancy a fetus’s lungs are insufficiently developed. Should Naomi go into labor now, the baby will live or the baby will die. It’s fifty-fifty. If the baby lives, the chances are one in five it will be severely disabled. Harper wants to go to the wedding. He won’t know anyone there except for Thanh and Fleur, but Harper likes meeting people, especially when he knows he never has to see them again. Harper likes new people. Harper and Thanh have been together now for sixteen years. Married for six. Anyway, when will there be another chance for adventure? The next stage of their life is slouching over the horizon.
Naomi says go. The tickets are nonrefundable. Everything will be fine. Thanh’s mother, Han, agrees to fly in from Chicago and stay with Naomi. Han and Naomi have become friends on Facebook. Han doesn’t understand anything about Thanh’s life, he has understood this for a long time, but she loves him anyway. She loves Naomi, too, because Naomi is carrying her grandchild. Naomi’s own mother is not in the picture. Harper’s parents are both assholes.
They go to Fleur’s wedding.
Fleur was always in charge of parties. Always threw the best parties, the ones that people who have long since moved out to the wealthier suburbs — Newton, Sudbury, Lincoln — still talk about, the parties that took days in darkened rooms to recover from. Fleur was, in her twenties, thrifty, ruthless, psychologically astute. Able to wring maximum fun, maximum exhausting whimsy, out of all gatherings. And now Fleur has not only filthy improvisatory cunning, but money. Who is paying for all of this? Fleur’s fiancé David’s family owns the island. He does something that Fleur is vague about. Travels. There is family money. His family is in snacks. A van picks up Harper and Thanh, two other couples, and two women from Chula Vista. Friends of Fleur. Fleur moved out to Point Loma a few years ago, which is where she met David doing whatever it is that he does. The women are Marianne and Laura. They say David is nice. Good with his hands. A little scary. They don’t really know him. They know Fleur from Bikram yoga. The air-conditioning in the van isn’t working. The wedding guests are taken in the van from the tiny regional airport where everyone flew in on tiny, toy-sized prop planes to an equally tiny pier. Everything snack-sized. The boat that goes over to Bad Claw Island has a glass bottom. How cute, Marianne says. The pilot, a black guy with the greenest eyes Thanh has ever seen, is gay. Indisputably gay. Down here the Atlantic is softer. It seems bigger. But maybe that’s because everything else is so much smaller. There’s a cooler on the boat; in it, individual see-through thermoses filled with something citrusy and alcoholic. In a basket, prepackaged snacks, crackers, and cookies. Fleur spent her twenties as a bartender in various Boston bars. She and Thanh met at ManRay. ManRay has been closed for a long time now. Thousands of years.
Han has sent Thanh a text. Everything is fine. Okay? Fine! Great! She and Naomi are watching Bollywood musicals. Eating Belgian fries. Naomi wants to know all about Thanh and Harper when they were young and dumb. (Not that this is how Han puts it. Nevertheless.) Don’t tell her anything, Thanh texts back. I mean it.
Harper is in one of his golden moods. Rare these days. He looks a hundred years younger than this morning when they caught the cab. He solicits information from the two couples. Which side of the wedding party. Where they are coming from. What they do. Everyone here is a friend of Fleur’s, but no one has as long and distinguished a claim as Harper and Thanh. Harper, saying he has a bad back, lies down on the glass bottom of the boat. Everyone has to rearrange their feet. No one minds. He tells a story about the time Fleur, inebriated and in a rage, who knows what brought it on, kicked in the front of a jukebox at an Allston bar. The Silhouette. All of those early nineties alt-rock boys in their dirty black jeans. Legs like toothpicks, jeans so tight they could hardly bend their knees when they sat down. Thanh used to marvel at their barely-there asses. Allston rock butt. A U2 song is playing on the jukebox when Fleur kicks it in. Harper, nimble spinner of the spectacular untruth, improvises a story. Bono once jerked off on her little sister when she fell asleep backstage after a concert. After that, Fleur gets free drinks whenever they go to The Silhouette. She even works there for a few months.