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.