The boy was a little timid now—he didn’t want to put his hands where they weren’t wanted—but the girl was kissing him more earnestly and she had done a strange thing with her legs. They were parted over his upper thigh and as she kissed him, she pressed against him and she kissed him more quickly. He eased his thigh up against her crotch and her body became taut, like a tuned string. She moved faster now and his hand was on the back of her jeans and she pulled her face away from his so that she could breathe. He wanted her now, wanted every part of himself inside her and he saw on her face not desire but a look of confusion or surprise, her eyes open so that he could see the milky whites even with just the low light of the cathedral behind her. Her hair hung down and a few strands were wet and caught against the side of her face like the loop of a question mark.
Then he stopped. Abruptly he stopped. There was a firefly-sized light directly to the side of him that shook and flickered as it approached. The boy stopped and the girl smoothed his face with her hand and said, “What’s wrong?” And he said, “Shhh.” She rubbed his chest and bent down to kiss him and she squeezed his thigh with her legs.
“I think there’s a guy coming,” he said.
She untangled her legs and slid down alongside him and put her head on his chest just as the light licked the edges of the Navajo blanket and dazzled their eyes. “Sorry to bother you,” the man said. “I’m going to have to ask you to move.” He was gone almost as quickly as he came. He explained how it looked. The church didn’t like people making out on the lawn.
Back on the median, on the way to their dorm rooms, the boy and his girl wrapped the blanket around themselves like they were a couple of refugees. It was a while before either of them spoke. The boy was embarrassed and still incredibly horny but the girl shrugged him off every time.
Finally, she said, “we just had sex with our clothes on.” It was like the finger of God had come down and named it.
But the boy said, “I don’t think so.”
* * * *
The boy, married, seven years last April. He was lying in bed depressed. His wife lay on her side with her hand on his chest. They had failed their first round of in vitro fertilization last month and they had two embryos in storage for the next. So here they were, the failed parents, in the eye of the storm, two weeks after his wife’s period, waiting.
The boy remembered last month, the nights where he gave his wife progesterone shots. He would swab the bit of skin behind her hip bone with rubbing alcohol and push a needle through the fatty tissue and into the muscle. His wife sucked air through her teeth. Sometimes it hurt more than others. What did it feel like? There were little red pricks all over her hip after a full month of injections. Gave another meaning to needling your wife. The boy needled her every night, “shooting up” they called it, all because the boy had problems, below-the-belt problems, whirligig sperm and too few of them.
Now, in bed, depressed, the boy thought of Dr. Zimmerman during their first meeting, before they signed the papers and froze the sperm and bought the progesterone-in-oil injections and shot up night after night.
First, the pitch: a story that Dr. Z had probably told to hundreds of aspiring parents but was new to the boy and his wife. “You don’t have a lot of good-quality sperm,” he said. Then he used a persuasive metaphor, a metaphor that the boy never forgot and then repeated word for word to his family, to his close friends, to some of his co-workers who tittered when they heard the word sperm: You are a like a one-man army trying to invade China. Sure, there is the theoretical possibility that you’ll be successful, but you would have a lot better chance if you had a whole army.
Then the stories.
The first was a couple in their forties and a man with a zero-sperm count. “Zero,” Dr. Z said. They did a sperm extraction directly from the testes and came up with five blobs of biomatter that may have been healthy sperm at some point. They injected these into the woman’s eggs and surprise! Produced two embryos. They transferred both and the woman got pregnant, gave birth to a baby boy. “The closest thing I’ve ever seen to immaculate conception,” Dr. Z. said.
The second was less optimistic. In this one, a woman was gifted with multiple eggs, a whole farm of them, extracted from her ovaries by the dozens, the Follistim hormones doing their job. Her partner had several good sperm injected one by one into the eggs, fifteen healthy grade-A embryos, three transferred for good measure, the others frozen, and not a single take. They did it again and again, month after month and gave up after the money ran out. So, there’s a spectrum of failure and success.
But for the boy and his wife, everything had been about average, middle of the bell curve. How many eggs? 10, about average. How many embryos? 5, about average. They had a forty percent chance, he knew, about average, for getting pregnant. This had made them hopeful. When his wife had her period the next month, he took a drive out into the country in the middle of a thunderstorm and cried, dripping tears and snot onto the steering wheel. Now they had another month to wait before trying again, another couple embryos on ice.
Lying there, the boy wondered if his wife was sleeping or deep in thought, dreaming perhaps like he often did about their unborn children. The idea of a child was still very abstract to the boy; he’d dreamed about his wife’s growing abdomen, ultrasounds with bat-winged fetuses or premature deaths. She birthed a tow-headed winged angel, triplet boys, a body-snatcher seed pod, and once, a Popple covered in green goo.
So the boy was surprised when his wife turned and put her hand on his chest and played with the hair there. Her hands were warm, supple, like the hands of a child. She touched his stomach and the boy could feel the familiar pull in his groin, that tingling in his penis as it became engorged with blood. He wasn’t sure he wanted this. There was something sad about it, desperate, like a one-night stand or a truth-and-dare game. She touched him now in earnest and he felt his hardness in her hand.
The boy was still reluctant. Sometimes when the boy was very turned on he thought of calamities like burning houses or muzzled terriers in animal shelters or dentists giving root canals to try and push his mind from the sex, so it would delay his orgasm until his wife was coming so long and loud that it was all he could do to keep from giving in.
Tonight, he thought, dead baby, dead baby, dead baby. He started to go partly limp, like a wilted carrot. His wife pumped him for a while. Dead babies in burn barrels, dead babies in gutters, nannies pushing dead babies in prams. His wife shifted in bed, went down and kissed him from his shaft to his glans. Her entreaties were so sincere, so tender that he found himself following her lead, moving the way she wanted him to in spite of the images he had conjured in his mind. The boy heaped all the dead babies into a mound, one for every one of his whirligig sperm, mouths agape, frozen in anguish, then pushed them away until they disappeared in a pinprick on the horizon of his mind. He let her pull him in on top of her and she came quickly and the boy moved, rocking and rhythmic, a man trying his best to give a woman a gift. She put her hands on his buttocks and he pushed in deeper and the woman groaned and said “oh, oh.” There was a feeling of possibility and sadness to their sex. How many times had they both let themselves be duped? A couple of infertile adults, humping like rabbits to try and prevent their own extinction. The boy pushed harder, the woman groaned softly, gulping breaths of air. Infertile adults, just a couple of oversexed and baby-less yuppies in their empty home with their empty cars, walking clichés, really, humping in futility. The boy thought, Baby Gap, pastel blues and pinks, car seats, nursing bras, mobiles, Gerber, nipples sore from teething, all images in miniature like a diorama of the first two years of life. He kept these in his mind until he was groaning too and he felt his body go tight and warm for a few moments and then slack. He lay on top his wife, propped up slightly by his arms, not wanting to leave that place inside her. But she was crying. The boy moved, shocked by his wife’s depth of feeling, his wife who never cried, who only said I love you if he said it first. His wif
e touched his shoulder, almost pawing at it, while she wept.
And as he lay there, the boy confused yet happy, he thought how Dr. Z got it wrong. He imagined his sperm mixing with his wife’s cervical mucus, struggling into her and swimming through the uterus. Over the next day millions of sperm would die, a literal genocide of his own genetic code. But one sperm would make it up to the ampullary portion of his wife’s fallopian tubes where it would meet an egg, a full round egg in a nimbus of light. And that egg, in a process that nobody quite understands, would invite that one exhausted spermatozoon in, not like a warrior bent on invading China all by himself, but like a meeting between two wounded travelers, two souls who had been alone for so long, wanting to share some news, a chain letter telling the endless story of themselves, saying look, look how far we have come.
Men Alone
by Steve Almond
from Drunken Boat
You see them there almost by accident, through a window from a rolling car. They are at once recognizable as members of a tribe coming to believe in the absurdity of their bodies, drifting through rooms whose few flourishes, supplied by old girlfriends, now seem vindictive.
There’s a TV, a phone, a few chairs. They do just enough to keep the place from ants. Afternoons, taken by a brief whimsy, they dance alone. At night they reach into cupboards for hidden sweets and make lists of things to be done the following day. They read magazines on the can, renewal cards molting the carpet. Sometimes their hands come loose and fall into their laps and dream a few minutes of women they will never see in church, a last stamp of decency worn away on the sofa nearest the window where they sleep on those certain evenings, the radiant concern of news anchors a lullaby onto them in socks. You could stare into these windows for years and not see anything essential or shocking, only the last rites of men who would pay any price to be you, and have.
For the Sake of the Children
by Sarah Salway
from Night Train
There’s no notice on the door of the office. This is deliberate. As is its position upstairs in the shopping centre, where not many people go, tucked away between the staff entrances of Next and, like some bad joke, Mothercare.
Two security guards walk past, stop and stare at a couple leaving the office, the woman being held up by a man as she weeps openly, making no effort to mop up the tears. Blimey, says the new security guard. It’s his first day, and he looks to the more experienced guard for help. “It’s the baby shop,” explains the other, shrugging his shoulders. Then they stroll on, a touch less jauntily, their heads bent together as they talk about how just one trip there means you could have thousands of little you’s walking round. “Father of the Universe,” says the first guard, beating at his chest. “That’s fucking King Kong. That’s me.” He can’t explain exactly why this excites him so much.
* * * *
Sitting behind the reception desk, Susan wishes she could change the music. It’s on a loop pre-recorded by Dr. Jones himself. He’s one for the old-fashioned atmosphere, she’ll tell the clients when they comment on the songs. After a day at work, Susan will croon Oh, what a beautiful morning to herself on the bus home as she considers the statistics. Only four of the twenty-six couples she’s seen today will conceive. Which will it be? She swings her hips to it’s not what you do, it’s the way that you do it as she walks up her path. Then she stands still for a moment, patting her stomach.
On the other side of town, Dawn tells Peter that if he says again how it doesn’t really matter if they have a child anyway, she’ll leave him. What she hasn’t told him is how she hears him crying in the bath, that she’s found the pair of tiny blue and red striped baby socks tucked away in the bottom of his drawer. In the place where some men keep perfumed letters.
“There’s no need to be so macho,” Dawn says, squeezing his arm because in many ways she feels the same. It is him she loves, with or without. She opens another bottle of wine, red this time because they’ve run out of white, and they toast. “To us,” she says. “To us,” Peter replies, pushing his glass gently into Dawn’s stomach.
* * * *
Dr. Owen Jones always washes his hands four times when he gets back home after the clinic. It’s his lucky charm. He likes to do it properly. Wash, then dry. Wash, then dry. Only then does he feel able to touch his own children. “You are so important to me,” he whispers into his daughter’s hair, letting her crawl into his lap, using his body as a gymnasium to pull and tweak as she tells him about a pair of shoes she’s seen that change into roller blades at the click of a button. Could she have some, daddy? Could she?
Karen Jones stands at the doorway watching them. “Your dad’s not made of money,” she says and little Michele laughs, tugging at her father’s ears. “Yes he is. These are five pounds each,” she crows. “I’m going to spend daddy.”
A spasm of fear chills through Owen. What if he only washed three times? He pushes his daughter away sharply and then, seeing her face, reaches out to hold her too tight. “I only want for you to be happy,” he tells her as she struggles against him.
* * * *
Dawn and Peter sit on the sofa, not touching, in front of the television. “Are you watching this?” Dawn asks. “There’s never anything good on any more,” says Peter.
Talk to me, Dawn cries silently. Let me tell you how it’s as bad for me as it is for you.
It hasn’t worked, it hasn’t worked. The words drum their way backwards and forwards through Peter’s brain. “We should have got a video out,” he says and Dawn just nods.
* * * *
Susan turns her front door key as quietly as she can manage. She wants just five minutes peace on her own before Colin finds her. He’s too kind these days. It makes her edgy. She wants to be strong, hard working. She wants to give birth in the fields, squatting down in a corner and then back to work with the baby slung warm and damp against her chest. Work. She’ll lose her job. Could you have a pregnant receptionist in an infertility clinic?
“You’re home,” Colin shouts from upstairs before he bounds down to greet her. “Now, sit down. Don’t move a muscle. I’m here to look after you.”
* * * *
Peter slides down to sit between Dawn’s legs, the better for her to massage his back. He edges a few inches to the right so she can reach the sore spot. The only bit of him that he can actually stop from aching these days. He feels her fingers prod between his muscle and skin and wills for his genes to pass through them like this. As easily as this.
“What if,” he says and Dawn pauses for a fraction of a second too long. So alert is he to her these days that he can feel the tenseness in her fingertips. “What if we have an early night,” he continues. “That’ll be nice,” Dawn says brightly although she doesn’t want to. She hasn’t enjoyed sex since all this business started. Peter knows this but hopes she hasn’t realised that he doesn’t want to either. That the thing that went the first time he picked up one of the magazines left out for him so discreetly hasn’t come back yet.
* * * *
Michele Jones calls for her brother. “Daddy’s full of cash,” she shouts. “Lovely, lovely money.” His wife laughs and squeezes down next to him on the sofa, thrusting a catalogue in his face. “I thought this in salmon pink,” she says. “Nice,” says Owen. He glances at the price, comparing it instinctively to the cheques from the clinic Susan has banked that day.
I’ll have one in salmon pink, he imagines each couple asking. Nice, Susan will smile, her short buffed nails tapping on the enveloped cheque.
* * * *
Susan shouts at Colin to leave her alone. He goes off into the kitchen and she can hear him slamming cups down, crashing plates against each other as he clears the dishwasher so she won’t have to do it although it’s the one job she enjoys. She likes taking her time, putting things back in their place, playing house. It’ll take time to pacify him tonight, she thinks. She’ll have to be extra docile, thin
k of things she wants him to do for her. Later, she promises herself.
* * * *
Michele and Kevin Jones play at spending daddy all evening. It’s the kind of non-participatory game Owen normally enjoys because he can doze on the sofa as his legs get chopped off for mountain bikes, skateboards and even, yes, why not, a sports car for mummy, while his fingers are buying a new computer game each. If only, Kevin thinks as he looks at his father and shakes his head. As the spending goes on it hurts Kevin more and more. His wants turn into needs. By the time he goes to bed, he is too angry to sleep. It’s not fair. So much he can’t have.
* * * *
Susan stares at herself in the mirror. She’s aware her posture has changed even over the last week, her hips thrusting forward, her knees locked as if to bear the weight. Surely it would only be a matter of time before people notice. There must be a job she can do in the background for the next few months. If she sits tight enough into the reception desk would it show? She couldn’t bear her life without her job. She sings the way you look tonight as she thinks of Owen Jones weaving miracles on his own. Without her. She’ll tell him. He’ll sort it out for her.
* * * *
Owen keeps thinking of things he’s forgotten to tell Susan. “Or maybe lemon sherbet is a better colour,” his wife says. “But then again it shows the dirt so dreadfully. What do you think, Owen?”