Luke was forty-five years old, and in all his life he’d almost never viewed pornography in any form. There had been a year in his late twenties, a time of professional failure, in which he’d developed a fondness for a photo on Playboy’s landing page: a woman in the shower, adorned with suds wrung from her loofah. But that was it. He was never tempted to give it another try. He never asked his wife, Rita, to describe the videos she watched in her study with the door closed and her earbuds in. He rarely spoke of his abjuration because he didn’t want to lord it over anyone, and because he doubted any of his friends would believe him.

Once, he mentioned it to his best friend Elijah, while they were cooking dinner in an Airbnb in the Catskills. Their wives had taken the car to a meditation class at a hillside ashram. He half expected Elijah to say something like, I never look at it either, this whole myth about male porn consumption is bullshit. But Elijah’s face darkened. He scraped the seeds from a bell pepper and refused to meet Luke’s eyes. To show Elijah he wasn’t bragging, Luke said, ‘I’m five years older than you, and my parents are hippies, so I didn’t have internet when I was in high school. I’m not saying I have superior willpower. I’m just lucky I didn’t get hooked when I was a kid.’ Elijah did not dignify this remark with a response.

Maybe Luke was bragging. Sometimes, running in the park, he wondered if he was the last of a dying breed. Over the years, a few different women he’d dated had told him his disinterest in porn was unusual and endearing. Those compliments had confirmed that his rejection of porn was more than a personal choice, something more like a talent, an asset. Then, early in his courtship with Rita, she said, ‘I feel like your not watching porn is why you like my body so much and why you have sex slightly differently from other guys.’ He wished it were feasible to tattoo that statement on his neck. In moments of distress – when he missed a fundraising goal at work or glanced at a bank statement – he whispered it to himself, like a prayer. Looking at porn became as unimaginable as shoplifting, or going to business school, an act that would undermine his sense of self.

One morning, when Rita was nearing the end of her first round of IVF, she reminded him, over breakfast, that on the day the doctors extracted the eggs from her ovaries, he would have to go into a room in the hospital and produce. Last month he’d produced the sample for his semen analysis at home, put the sterile cup in a tote bag, and delivered it to the clinic. But this time was going to be different. Weill Cornell rules dictated that all production for purposes of fertilization, as opposed to testing, take place on site, right before the woman went under twilight anesthesia.

Luke drank down his orange juice. ‘It’s weird they don’t send couples into the room together, given what they need the guy to do.’

‘I never thought about that,’ said Rita. ‘That is weird.’ Suddenly, she looked concerned. ‘You realize,’ she said, ‘there’s going to be porn in the room.’

‘Of course. Who cares?’ The truth was, he hadn’t thought about it. But he wasn’t worried. It wasn’t as if he never masturbated. He just thought about Rita and his ex-girlfriends when he did it, and he could do that in the presence of a blank computer screen. Compared to what Rita was going through, his job was so easy it wasn’t a job. She had to: inject herself every evening with multiple medications, including Menopur, an ovary stimulant whose active ingredient was distilled from the urine of post-menopausal women; refrain from exercise; and walk around all day with ovaries so swollen she could feel them jounce. And that was to say nothing of her psychological burden. Their insurance didn’t cover IVF; Rita was a therapist in private practice and Luke worked for an ocean-conservation nonprofit whose employee association had given up fertility assistance, among other benefits, in exchange for flexible hours and a permissive work-from-home policy. To pay for round one, he’d raided his 403(b), Rita her 401(k). A round two would mean either the hunnish sacking of those accounts or the assumption of debt and the death of the dream of home ownership. A round three was out of the question. The prospect of a childless life did not appall Luke. It sounded empty and free. But for Rita, it was the stuff of nightmares. One early morning last month she’d gasped and bolted upright in bed. He’d asked her what she’d been dreaming about.

‘Not being able to have a baby.’

The next day, a sonogram revealed that the follicles housing Rita’s oocytes had grown to auspicious size. It was time to trigger ovulation. That night, she drew a circle in black marker high on her left buttock and Luke knelt behind her, jabbed her with a
long-needled syringe, holding it like a pencil, and drove home the plunger with his thumb, pushing the chemicals through the barrel into her muscle.

Thirty-five hours later, they were in the waiting room. Rita wore a pre-op robe, non-slip socks, a surgical cap, and hospital pajamas two sizes too large for her. A nurse escorted a man Luke’s age down the hall to The Room, and the man returned ten minutes later. The nurse escorted another man Luke’s age down the hall, and this man took longer to produce, about fifteen minutes. Finally, she called
Luke’s name. He squeezed Rita’s hand and followed the nurse down the corridor.

The nurse was stone-faced and silent as she swiped a card against a reader on the wall. The doors at the end of the corridor swung open to welcome them into a secure inner sanctum of the fertility wing. She turned left, opened another door with a key, stepped into a dim chamber, and beckoned.

The room was the size of a cubicle. A urinal was bolted to one of the yellow cinderblock walls. To the right of the urinal there was a paper-towel dispenser, to the left a sink and a mirror. On a fake marble countertop, left of the sink, stood a monitor that displayed a menu of six videos, represented by six still frames of men and women captured in the midst of sexual acts, each option with a title: COMBAT ZONE; MOTHERLOAD FACIALS; DOUBLE-PENETRATION BLONDES; BLONDE AMBITION; 19-YO CUM-LICKERS; BLONDE ASS-BANG. ‘Videos,’ said his Virgil, gesturing with her gloved hand, touching nothing. She indicated a rack of capped vials. ‘Lube.’ She pointed to a blue leatherette recliner facing the monitor. ‘The chair.’ The recliner’s seat was covered with a large rectangular pad, made of disposable, absorbent, synthetic cloth. ‘Magazines,’ she said, pointing to a low, black, filing cabinet. ‘When you’re done, look at the time.’ On the digital wall clock, hours and minutes were eight inches high. Seconds flashed away in miniature. ‘Record the time of production on the label of the cup.’ She placed the sample cup beside a jar of pens. ‘Once you’ve recorded the production time, put the cup in here.’ She showed him a safe embedded in the wall, and a red button to push when he was ready to return to the waiting room. He thanked her. She left and shut the door, leaving him alone with the computer.

Dazed by the violence of the still images drawn from the videos, he treated the monitor like a touch screen, pressing on the menu icon with his index finger to try to make the pictures disappear. In a way, they belonged here, in this house of appendectomies, biopsies, shunts, and debridement. Every vulva was shaved bare. The two anuses were wide open, one filled with a cock, the other empty, a black hole. The women’s mouths, too, were agape, as if for intubation. The faces of the men were the faces of surgeons at their work, detached and focused, and the light was the light of an operating room, every fold and vein illuminated. Finally, he found a remote on the counter. He hit what looked like a power button several times and soon the pictures were gone, replaced by a night shot of the Manhattan skyline.

He turned on the cold water, washed his face, pissed in the urinal, and washed his hands. He washed his face again and ran the cold water through his hair. It was possible that the man who’d used this facility before him, the fifteen-minute guy, was a perv. Maybe the images on the screen reflected his personal search history and idiosyncratic taste, rather than the default choices to which the menu reverted. There was no reason to despair of the human race. There were all kinds of people out there. Everyone knew that porn, these days, fed every conceivable appetite. And of course he’d known that a lot of porn was brutal and degrading. But there was a difference between knowing this to be true and seeing it. The shock would not have been a big deal, really, but for the time-sensitive nature of the task before him. There were seven or eight other couples in the waiting room, each with their own slot on the schedule. Every woman needed to go into surgery thirty-six hours after her ovulation trigger and required the semen of her male collaborator. He could not hold up the works. He would overcome this ridiculous blow to his faith in the goodness of others, and provide.