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.
He stripped, sat on the absorbent pad, and closed his eyes. He put his hands between his legs. It felt like rubbing his ear. He tried to remember the loud, low sound one of his ex-girlfriends made when she came. Okay: this was the beginning of arousal, modest progress. But his memory of the stills from the videos was a floodlight that blotted out the stars. His little erection seemed almost to recoil as it contracted and fell. He could hear the traffic of nurses in the corridor. He looked at the big digital numbers. Five minutes had passed.
Why was it that he couldn’t forget his glimpse of COMBAT ZONE, MOTHERLOAD FACIALS, and the rest of the collection? Maybe this was how people got addicted to porn in the first place; its violence, its car-crash quality, was there to make it indelible. If the stills had been tableaux of lovers engaged in humane, mutual gratification, they would have been easier to banish from the mind. Seven minutes had passed. He thought of the cash they’d dropped on this round, thirty-one thousand dollars on the line.
Maybe he was thrown by the images from the porn because they played on his most shameful fantasies. This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine, he thought, striving to unleash and nurture some heretofore chastised inner frat bro. Still, no stirring in the loins. Thirty-one thousand dollars was a vast understatement if you considered how the money would have multiplied over decades, had it remained in mutual funds, where it belonged. Ten minutes had passed. The foot traffic outside sounded closer to the door than ever, and he wondered if the nurses were circling, ready to give him a five-minute warning. Nobody knocked. But he knew the nurses and the other men were out there. They were depending on him to get it done and leave.
He stood and looked at his naked body in the mirror. He concocted elaborate fantasies, of sacramental sex, ceremonies in tents. In a few minutes, he was hard. But the expression that came over his face when he imagined himself partaking in an ancient ritual reminded him of the scowl of the ogre in BLONDE AMBITION. Once more, he watched a fledgling erection flag in his hand. He lowered himself back onto the pad. Fifteen minutes had passed, and then twenty.
He was stalling the rotation of men through the room to such a degree that he was almost certainly reducing other couples’ chances of conception. His penis was raw and cowering, his progress negative. He varied his movements and tried to empty his mind. Now thirty minutes had passed. Why was he so unmanned by his glimpse of what other men liked? Perhaps if he could understand the reason the still frames had robbed him of his potency, he could wrest his potency back. The problem, he speculated, was that he liked to feel superior to other men. That was why his dick would not stoop so low as to respond positively to porn, as an average dick would. Turning up its nose at coarse, misogynistic imagery, that is, at the peasant fare upon which average dicks feasted, was an assertion of its refined, aristocratic nature. Now that he had figured out what was going on, maybe he could be a dick-whisperer. He literally whispered, to his dick and to himself, ‘There’s nothing wrong with being like everybody else. There’s nothing wrong with being like everybody else.’ But the fact was, he did think there was something wrong with it. He couldn’t get turned on by the still frames because, deep down, he didn’t want to be turned on by them. And yet he could not push them out of his head. Forty minutes.
The time had come to face facts. It was a terrible thing. But it would do no good to pretend the situation was otherwise. His hands trembled as he picked up his belt, with its once-fashionable rodeo buckle, and laced his boots.
When he pushed open the door of the waiting room, Rita waved, and held out an arm to welcome him. He sat beside her on one of the plastic chairs and took her hand.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t do it.’
She wore an N-95 because she was worried that if she caught Covid, or the flu, or a cold, it would compromise her fertility. The only exposed part of her face was her eyes. She blinked, twice.
‘Sweetie,’ she said. ‘You haven’t done it yet. But you’re going to do it now.’
He released her hand, stared at the floor, and scratched the back of his neck.
‘I believe in you,’ she said, sounding desolate and frightened. ‘You’re going to get back in there, and you’re not going to come back out until you’re finished.’
‘All of these people,’ he said, ‘are waiting to go. They need the room, too.’
‘Which is why you need to go back right now, before the nurses think you’re done and send in somebody else.’
‘But I’ve taken too much time already. I can’t do anything at all.’
‘Is it the porn?’ she asked.
He nodded. ‘They left it on the screen.’
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I can see how that would be weird for you. I know that you’re pure in certain ways. It’s one of the reasons I love you. But you need to get turned on, any way you can. Have you tried using the porn?’
He shook his head.
‘I think you should try it. You need to find a way to have fun in there.’ She stroked his hair. ‘I know that it’s a new thing for you. But I think that if you keep an open mind, you’re going to have fun.’
He took a deep breath. He focused on the soothing touch of her hand. ‘Fun.’
‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘Can you try to have fun? Will you do that for me?’
‘I’m going to do it,’ he said. ‘I’m going to have a good time.’
She seized the arm of a passing nurse. ‘He needs to try again,’ she said.
Back in the room, he took off his clothes and resettled himself on the crinkling pad. It was a matter of turning into a different person for a few minutes. He pulled open the drawer of the cabinet full of magazines. On the top of the pile lay Just Barely 18. The cover girl, who wore a thong, braced herself against a gymnasium wall, turning to regard the viewer with a guileless expression that emphasized her status as a child. He threw it on the floor and looked at the next one, Barely Legal. He wondered if Barely Legal had ever brought an intellectual property case against Just Barely 18. He threw it on the floor. Next was Hustler, which was like the video stills, in print form. He threw it on the floor, and it skidded over the others. Beneath Hustler, at the bottom of the pile, lay a hard-used Playboy, its cover torn off.
The Girl of the Big Ten, a brunette, hailed from Wisconsin. She was corn-fed, wholesome. Naked on her stomach, casual, on a nondescript bed, she was propped up on her elbows in the fashion of a person reading a book or scrolling on a phone. She regarded the camera with an indulgent, irritable smile. All the other women in the magazine were odalisques, but this one attended an excellent land-grant university, and her attitude was one of thinly veiled disdain. Her posture and face reminded him of Rita’s disposition after an argument. And so in his imaginary coupling with the Girl, they had recently argued, and sex was their way of beating swords into plowshares.
‘It’s okay,’ she said, with her wry mouth, her arched eyebrows. ‘I know you get stressed about work sometimes. And then you get dark. But I don’t care. It’s because you work so hard. There are so few people at the good NGOs who are so fucking good at operations and strategy. When I really think about it, I don’t think there’s anyone who’s as good at them as you are. It’s true you fucked up, a little, in this room, today. But I fuck up sometimes, too. I’ll admit that. I’m driven to be so good. Sometimes I get so dark, just like you.’ And she assured him, over and over, for five minutes, that it felt good to fuck, because he was so good, the best in the world, at everything she cared about, and because he made her life better with his competence.
The climax was so feeble it barely took place, but it sent him into ecstasies of relief. He and Rita were going to have a baby. It might have her red hair, her wide nose, her narrow eyes. Or, if they didn’t have a baby, it would not be his fault. He screwed the lid onto the cup and committed the hour and minute to the label in a faint, trembling hand. The numbers looked as if they’d been written by a stranger.
Two hours later Rita was released from the hospital. They walked to the subway with her hand on his arm, slow, almost shuffling. Her ovaries hurt, and her cramps were getting worse as the fentanyl wore off, but she was elated. The doctor had harvested ten eggs, a good haul, considering Rita’s age. It was likely that half would fertilize, and half of those would grow to blastocysts. Of the two or three likely blastocysts, it was probable that one would test genetically normal, and thus qualify for transfer to her uterus. Once implanted there, it would have a 65 percent chance of resulting in pregnancy. She rattled off these odds, already a specialist in the field.
She spoke of the future. In two weeks, she’d be allowed to exercise and have sex again. But not for long. If they were lucky, the
transfer would take place in a little more than a month, and then she’d have to be careful, in deference to her age and the delicacy of the first trimester.
‘I knew porn was pretty fucked up, but I didn’t realize how fucked up,’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘To find attractive people, I usually have to look at terrible shit. Did you know that the women sometimes surgically remove part of their labia?’
‘The genitals didn’t look like real genitals.’
‘What did you watch to get off ? You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.’
He told her.
‘That’s not even porn.’
‘What’s Playboy if not porn?’
‘What people mean by porn these days is different from that. With a video, it can surprise you. Last week I was watching what seemed like shitty, heterosexual, anal-sex porn, and I assumed the woman was faking it, and then she started touching herself and shaking, and it was like, Holy shit, I think she’s really having an orgasm. Other times, I’ve been having a decent experience, and suddenly I’ve looked at the woman more closely, and been like, Oh my God, am I watching a person getting raped?’
‘When we have sex, and you tell me your fantasies, are they from porn?’ he asked.
‘Sometimes.’ She studied his face, amused. ‘You’re getting an education. You look a little traumatized.’ They rode an escalator down a long way underground, and then another one even deeper. On the train, a woman walked from car to car selling candy from a cardboard box, saying ‘chicle, chocolate’ over and over in a quiet voice. She had a boy in tow, four or five years old. Twice, he knelt on the seats and tugged at a strap of her backpack, calling to her in vain.
The next day was bright and very cold. The tiny mounds of snow on the sidewalk were hard and glimmering. Luke stepped over patches of ice on his way to the bakery. At eleven o’clock that morning, Rita looked at a number on her phone and picked up. She paced and covered her free ear. The only sound she made was an occasional ‘okay’. She said thank you, hung up, and stared at the wall.
‘Who was that?’
She looked at him for a moment before she spoke. ‘Only two of them fertilized.’
They sat at the dining-room table. She was hunched as if ill.
‘What’s going to happen?’ he asked.
‘Maybe we’ll get one blastocyst. But, if we do, it probably won’t be genetically normal, because most of them aren’t, when you’re my age. So, nothing.’ She went into the bedroom, kicked off her shoes, and lay on her back with her hands over her eyes.
He followed her in, and held the balls of her feet, in their threadbare socks. She spoke of the grief she felt for the baby girl she’d imagined, and tried to visualize her fading and disappearing, like a ghost, so she wouldn’t think about her anymore.
‘We did everything we could have done,’ he said.
‘Did we? I’m not sure that’s true. If you’d been able to jerk off without panicking, things might have been different. Stress affects sperm quality. I googled it, but I didn’t tell you, because I didn’t want to stress you out about getting stressed.’
‘Obviously,’ he said, ‘they mean stress over days, and weeks, and months. But, I mean, yeah, the orgasm was really bad. The cup looked like a gnome had jizzed in it.’
‘You know what? I don’t find that funny right now. I find that upsetting. There was a study where men who took longer than twenty minutes to produce made fewer viable sperm than other men. So I’m not sure what to say to you.’
‘You’re making me feel like shit,’ he said. ‘You’re forty-one. That’s the problem.’
She lifted her hands and sat up. ‘I made ten eggs.’
‘Wow. Ten fucked-up, middle-aged ovary eggs that have little to no hope of ever becoming a human being. You must be really proud of yourself.’
‘I’m glad we’re doing IVF,’ she said. ‘We just burned up thirty-one grand, but at least I don’t have to fuck you.’
The two of them adopted the same tone of voice, one of conspicuous self-control, non-shouting. He said he didn’t want to have a baby with someone who found him repulsive. She flinched and said that it was hard not to experience a little resentment when she’d had to coax him into doing what every other man in that waiting room seemed to be able to do; he said that it wasn’t his fault that the hospital was set up for men who used porn; she said that she wished he could have looked at some porn ahead of time, having been warned, by her, that it was going to be present in the room, and that she wished the pride he took in being the last non-porn-contaminated American man could have been weighed against other considerations.
A day passed without conversation. Luke brushed his teeth at the kitchen sink to avoid standing beside Rita in the bathroom and weathering her refusal of eye contact. In bed, she donned her wax earplugs and face-mask and turned away from him, curled on her side. When his alarm went off in the morning, he rushed to work, even though he wasn’t required to go to the office that day. He came home to find Rita seated at the butcherblock kitchen island, eating microwave popcorn. She addressed him as he took off his coat.
‘I don’t have the luxury of staying angry,’ she said. ‘I called Dr Licavoli. She doesn’t think either of the embryos has much chance of making it to blastocyst. She said it’s best if we start another round as soon as we can, in two weeks, when I have my period.’
‘So we need to come up with the money now.’
She nodded. ‘She said it might have been your sperm that fucked us but it might have been my eggs. That’s why we need to hurry. I’m not getting any younger.’
They ordered takeout, shut themselves in the study, and devised entreaties, taking turns at the keyboard and gesturing with chopsticks at the document on the screen, like a screenwriting team. Her parents, like his, were divorced bohemians threatening to outlive their nest eggs, whose growth had been stunted by leftist lapses of faith in the financial system, investments in gold and ethical portfolios. Two of their four parents had romantic partners who discouraged them from giving money to their children, and the other two lacked the means. They were all potential lenders, in other words, not potential donors. But they needed to be massaged as if they were the latter, given the astronomical sums involved. The email drafts proposed interest rates and schedules of repayment. They promised access to any resulting grandchild so unfettered it was tantamount to custody; and they stated, in euphemistic but unambiguous terms, that principal and interest would be mailed in hard cash, undetectable to the IRS. (‘We are very comfortable with large bills and padded envelopes, if you are.’) No lawyers, no paper trail. In all likelihood, they would never own an apartment, not on this coastline. But they would be able to service their debts and save up for day care, if they managed to have a baby in the end. When they were done, Rita went into the bedroom and called her mother, and then two of her best friends. He could hear her crying through the wall.
Afterward, he paced the kitchen and read her the drafts they’d composed, and she nodded, her back against the fridge, her head cocked to one side. She said she’d already broached the subject of a loan with her mother, who seemed receptive.
‘Good work,’ he said.
‘You too.’ They embraced but avoided eye contact. This reminded him of cats. ‘Say we get all the money,’ she said. ‘It’s round two. How do we know there won’t be another crisis in the porn room?’
‘I’ll take something in there. Something to distract me from the atmosphere.’
‘You mean a toy? A magazine?’
He shrugged.
‘You need to think about it,’ she said. ‘Because we need it to work. I never want to go through that suspense in the waiting area again. That was hell. I think it’s going to be hard for you, because you’re going to be under even more pressure this time. This is the last stand for the Rita–Luke baby. We’re both going to feel it.’
He deliberated. ‘If I’m being honest,’ he said, ‘what would be most helpful would be for you to film yourself on your phone. Just go into the bedroom, take off your clothes, and jerk off. Maybe you could say something to me while you do it, but only if you feel inspired. If I could have that to watch, that would be the closest thing to taking you in there.’
She winced. ‘Interesting.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s just that I find porn disgusting, because I’m not used to it, and so, if you want something that’s going to work –’
‘I get it. I have zero libido right now, because of the meds. But I’ll do it.’
‘I know it’s hard to get all the way there,’ he said, ‘when you’re being asked to get yourself all the way there.’
She shrugged. ‘I can do it.’
He averted his eyes in shame, and then looked at her to see what she was doing. She opened a cupboard and took down a mug decorated with a faded flag of the Faroe Islands, where they’d gone on their final vacation, two years ago, before they’d started to squirrel everything away. She studied the contents of a tin. ‘We’re out of green tea,’ she said. ‘Okay. I’m going to pee, and then I’m going to go do it. Just don’t come in. It would make me self-conscious.’
He marveled at the strength of her compulsion to strike any task from her to-do list as quickly as possible. She had an obsessive, prideful self-discipline that he’d always found irritating and attractive. While she peed, he sat at the kitchen island, spinning in circles on his stool, and wondered if he should thank her, or if that would be cloying, like thanking somebody for sex. ‘Break a leg,’ he said, as she opened the bathroom door and crossed the kitchen. She lingered in the bedroom’s door-frame. Neither of them spoke for a little while.
‘I can figure out something else,’ he continued. ‘It’s too shitty, asking you to make a porn. Next time, I won’t be shocked by the pictures on the monitor. I think it’ll be okay.’
‘You don’t say “make a porn”,’ she said. ‘It’s “make porn”. I’m going to get it over with. If the video doesn’t do it for you, you have to let me know, and I’ll try again.’
He wondered if she would turn on the overhead light in the bedroom, or go with the reading lamps, for ambience. Would she be cold, when she stripped, and lay on the bed? Their landlord skimped on heat, and it was always colder in there than in the rest of the apartment. Would she be haunted by the things he’d said during the fight? Would she fake it, and worry that, as her husband, he would be able to tell? Was she angry at him, despite her disavowal of anger? If they failed to have a child, she might be angry at him for a long time. They waved goodbye, for some reason, before she slipped into the darkness with her phone and shut the door.
Photograph by Thomas Ruff, nudes yv 16, 2000, courtesy of David Zwirner
