RISKS and BENEFITS (cont., p. 7)
8. We understand eggs which do not fertilize become the property of Life, Inc. to be used for practice by employees of Life, Inc.
__________
(initials)
9. Neither Life, Inc. nor its employees or consultants are to be held liable for any damage resulting from any failure of equipment or utilities, strike or other labor disturbance, any war, acts of public enemy, fire, wind, flood, mud, earthquake or any other act of nature or God, foreseeable or unforeseeable at this time.
__________
(initials)
By signing this consent document, we declare that we have read and discussed each clause with a Life, Inc. physician, and that, despite the known risks, and possible risks not yet known, we wish to undergo In Vitro Fertilization – Embryo Transfer (IVF-ET).
_________________________________________May 20, 1998
Audra Irene Rand / Cully Rand (DATE)
These various propositions and so many more, to which we had already acceded and given our written consent, seemed
designed to continue to remove me from my real and understood world. The clinic itself was almost featureless, with long
corridors painted violet-gray and lined with unmarked closed doors. On some there was a sign from the world I’d left behind:
‘men’, ‘women’, ‘utility’ and more than once during the last month I’d felt like a passenger on a starship, with no
knowledge of what was behind a door or what my destination might be. In this place, and during the last thirty days, I’d
been more isolated and disoriented than at any time in my life. My wife was on a wild ride without me. We had mortgaged our
house and our privacy, and all my intellectual capacity had been consumed by legal and biological imperatives.
New clinic people kept turning up, seemingly important people like the woman in the white lab coat presently
on the other side of the curtain in the pre-op room where I now sat by Audra, doped and prone on her gurney. I recognized
the woman immediately, even though I had caught only a glimpse of her before the husband of the other patient in the pre-op room had snapped the curtain shut between us. A hot and spicy argument ensued among them which, no matter how hard I concentrated on the papers and no matter how much the trio on the other side of the curtain tried to mute their voices, I could not shut out. Audra put her knuckles to her eyes and worried her head back and forth on the pillow.
I recognized the woman in the white lab coat as the unlikely woman who had so amused Audra and me on the
first day of our star journey at Life, Inc. It was a Monday morning and, from our vista down the hallway from the chairs
in the lobby, we had watched her approach in some disbelief, a cup of coffee aslant in one of her hands threatening to
spill each time she bumped against the wall as she stumbled along squinting at the papers she held in her other hand. I
remember her a smear of scarlets: silky blouse and scarf of two different scarlets, slacks of a third tending toward
burgundy, two-toned shoes of a fourth and fifth, dangly earrings glittering ruby and carmine, crimson lipstick, and
fingernails—surely more numerous than ten—that were flat-out red.
“She probably put that outfit on Friday night and hasn’t been home yet,” Audra whispered to me.
To top the confection was a streak of white through her raven hair, dyed so black it was almost blue and the
streak bleached so white and pulled back so perfectly, just to the right of center, that it looked painted on like an
unbroken line on a new asphalt highway disappearing over a hill.
But what was most extraordinary, I saw as she got closer, was that the white streak in her hair was mimicked
in her right eyebrow and eyelashes. At a distance it was barely noticeable, a slight asymmetry which confused the image of
her face. But as she neared us, the pure white whiteness of the tiny hairs stood out starkly against the burnt copper of
her skin giving her the appearance of a lopsided mime in negative and rivetting my stare.
When she arrived at the lobby she stopped as though suddenly remembering something. She snuck a peek around
the corner of the wall at the receptionist—Margarita, as she had already introduced herself to us—who was working on some
papers at a back counter and had her back to the hallway. The stripe-headed woman began a very comic tip-toeing toward
Margarita, noticing Audra and me and including us with a wink of white eyelashes and a varnished fingernail to her lips. She
was as tall as any woman I’ve ever seen and lank—a word that seems coined for her—with legs so long that each tip-toe step
covered a good foot and a half. She skirted the front counter, quietly setting her coffee cup and papers down on it so as
to free up both hands as she crept up on Margarita, leaned close-in over her shoulder and blew into her ear as she fastened
a tickle-hold onto her armpits which caused Margarita to shriek and jump so high that her bottom nearly didn’t find the
chair again.
“¡Áy, Margarita! ¡Ya son tres!” the woman cried in a triumphant trumpet. And then, laughing a splashy laugh
she began backing her way out from behind the reception desk, bent double with fun as she pointed one taunting fingernail
at Margarita who, for her part, shared the fun with a shrill giggle that verged on hysteria.
“Vera!” Margarita cried and machine-gunned a fire of Spanish so rapid that my two years of high school
Spanish could not keep up.
Vera turned, grabbed up her coffee cup and papers, and trotted and waltzed a meandering way across the lobby
laughing back at Margarita over her shoulder. As she passed our chairs she glanced down at me from the heights of her
glinting black eyes—so black it didn’t seem possible she could really see out of them—winked at me again with the white
eyelashes, and danced out of sight up the hallway, sending back to us peals of laughter. She was spectacular, really, and
Audra shared with me the look she reserved for such spectacle. Margarita, still laughing, caught Audra’s glance and grew
quickly somber, making a little moue of embarrassment and saying something I didn’t quite catch but which sounded like a
little regretful, “Well, that’s Vera.”
And so it was with surprise that I now saw this very same Vera appear in our pre-op room. Audra and I had
laughed together often over her and Audra even took to performing a very funny and expert impersonation of her at parties,
dubbing herself Vera The Clown, and tip-toeing like a high-stepping horse in dressage. We had decided that the woman must
be an accountant or bookkeeper or some other backroom-type employee since this severe and sterile clinic, dealing with such
a nervous and high-strung clientele, would surely never hire such a motley, ribald character to deal with their public. But
here she was now addressing the couple on the other side of the curtain, a vision of orderliness in her starched white lab
coat and with a voice that was not at all the raucous voice I remembered laughing with Margarita. I doubt I would even have
recognized the woman except for those sport eyelashes and eyebrow and the white streak in her hair. I wondered, in fact, if
she could possibly have a twin, sharing a genetic deviation and reverse mirror-image personalities.
I could hear her on the other side of the curtain, after the man snapped it shut, attempting a soft and
confidential tone with him. Even when their discussion began to grow shrill on the man’s part, she managed an admirable
calm. Finally the man exploded. “Okay, all right, give me the goddamned cup!” he said, and the curtain billowed as he
pulled a section of it open with a harsh swish of rings on the rod. “I know where the goddamned room is!” I could hear
his progress down the hall and could feel that he took with him most of the palpable tension. There followed a few soft
murmurs between Vera and the woman on the other gurney and then the curtain billowed again and Vera let herself into our
sanctuary.
Judging from the expression that came over her face, my own face must have worn some sort of pained expression
as it looked up from the consent forms. “Cully?” she said, the question mark soft and invitational.
“I didn’t know you knew my name.”
“I do. Your picture’s in your chart and—guess what?—your name’s right next to it.” She laughed that same
splashy laugh, which seemed to fit better on the smear in scarlet than on this starch of white, then turned to Audra on her
gurney and waggled her foot playfully. “Audra? I thought you should be introduced to the woman who’s going to be working
with your eggs. I’m loose Vera; I’ll be your embryologist today.” She laughed again.
“Sorry?” I said at the same time as Audra said, “You’re WHAT?!!? WHAT did she say?!!?” swivelling her head
to me with a shock that threatened to burst into laughter.
The woman’s smile faded as she looked from one to the other of us. “I’ll be your embryolo—it’s like ‘I’m loose;
I’ll be your waiter today’. Like a joke? Nevermind, it’s not very funny.”
From my chair near the foot of the gurney I had the advantage over Audra of being able to read the name on
the woman’s badge: Luz Rivera.
Audra persisted. “She’s WHAT, she’ll be our waiter today?!!?”
“L-U-Z, Audra,” I lurched into the morass. “Her name is Luz Rivera, L-U-Z. That’s Spanish for light,” I
said, turning back to the woman as I said it, with the unfortunate consequence that it appeared I was instructing her in
her own language.
“Yes,” she said, only a little off balance and even managing a smile. “Very good.”
“Her name is what?”
“Luz, Luz, L-U-Z, like L-O-O-S-E, but not.” I turned back to Luz with a grin that—I’m positive in hindsight
and was pretty sure then—must have looked utterly foolish. “Whatever you’ve got plugged into her,” I said, gesturing to
the plastic bag of clear fluid dangling from the pole beside Audra’s gurney with its tube leading into a needle in Audra’s
arm, “must be great stuff!”
“Just a mild calmative,” Luz replied with a smile. “Maybe I should have Joan run a line to you too, Cully?”
“Not yet!” Audra said. “He’s still got his job to do! Uh, Luz.”
“You’re right,” Luz laughed and turned to me, her black eyes glinting again, so that for the first time during
these laughable, private processes I found myself flushing as she added, “So Cully, if we can get that semen specimen now? In the E.R.
I know we’ve got visuals more conducive to collecting than those consent forms.”
E.R.: not Emergency Room but Ejaculation Room.
“Sure, yeah, well, but first...” I said, wresting my eyes away from her right eye and trying to focus them on
the papers in my hand, “I was just reading these paragraphs, you know, through again, these here, and I can’t get past this
part where you throw the eggs away.”
“Well, just the unfertilized ones,” she said, and I gave myself cautious permission to look again at her face.
Other than the white pair of eyelashes, their white brow and the white streak in her hair, she was actually almost normal
looking. The blue-black hair was not dyed after all, I guessed. And the white hairs—all of them—could not possibly be
bleached: they were too white and too perfect. And now that her hair was down and the streak fell softly about her right
temple, lending a legitimacy to the extravagance of the brow and lashes, her face was lovely and somehow vulnerable. She
wore no makeup at all. The black brow and lashes were already as black as they could possibly be, and the white begged to
be left natural. I saw too that I had been mistaken about her crimson lipstick: the lips themselves were crimson, and so
full that they presented themselves as extremely—I thought even sensationally—kissable. I glanced back up at the
white-lashed eye, then the black-lashed eye, trying to decide which one to address when I realized that both eyes were
watching me, the glint of goodhumor fading into an expression of peeve and daring. They had read my thought and their
owner didn’t like it. I was shaken. It was only some time later, when I allowed myself to revisit this moment in all its
details again—and again and again and again—that I remembered when and where I had felt so shaken only once before: when I
was a fifteen year old kid in the backseat of Audra’s father’s Cadillac and Audra pinned me down and dared me—to kiss or
not to kiss—and any and all the rest of it. This dare from Luz was different, not invitational but threatening.
“But, but...” I worked to control the stammer, “...but isn’t there any way to save the unfertilized eggs too?”
I asked her, putting my eyes back onto the papers. ”I mean, they just seem so valuable. This whole thing costs so much.
Can’t you just ICSI them?”
ICSI: they pronounce it ick-see, short for IntraCytoplasmic Sperm Injection. They had already explained
this in detail, even though they assured us ICSI did not pertain to Audra and me because my sperm was, in the encouraging
and I thought perhaps even self-consciously flattering words of Dr. Gage, “excellent, abundant and highly motile”. With
ICSI, the embryologist injects a single sperm into a single egg using micro-manipulation of an incomprehensibly tiny needle.
“We could try ICSI,” Luz replied, “if we did it right away. But we don’t really want to do that with Audra’s eggs.
You’ve got good sperm, Cully—good concentration, great swimmers—so there isn’t a reason to do it. Most of Audra’s eggs
will fertilize just being in the dish with your sperm. And the eggs that don’t, well they probably just aren’t meant to
survive.”
“That’s a little fatalistic, isn’t it?” I wasn’t intending to be antagonistic but it was, after all, my
wife’s DNA we were talking about.
“The eggs that don’t fertilize are immature maybe, or not genetically right.” Luz’s matter-of-fact tone
didn’t show offense at my question, but as she turned now to include Audra in our conversation I felt I had just been
segregated, into the male pile. “Remember, Audra, we’ve stimulated your ovaries to produce this whole group of eggs to
grow simultaneously. In a natural cycle, they would have given up their existence to a single dominant follicle with a
single egg. So it’s no surprise that a few of these lesser eggs just can’t make it.”
“So what do you do with them?” I asked.
“Well, they go into a little red biohazard bag.”
“And that’s a euphemism for a little red trash bag.”
“You’re right.”
“But what about this ‘practice’ part? You’ve had us initial this clause in the consent form that says you
can use them in the lab ‘for practice’. What does that mean?”
“Well, it doesn’t mean experiment, if that’s what you’re getting at,” she said, “or anything so Frankensteinian.”
She laughed the splashy laugh. “It’s just that all of these techniques, like ICSI, take a long time to learn. You can sort
of get it by practicing on hamster eggs or mouse embryos, but there’s nothing like the real thing. It takes expert hand-eye
coordination just to move them from place to place without losing them.”
“So most people do initial that clause?”
“Oh, Cully, come on!” Audra squeezed my hand: her exasperation. “Don’t fuss.”
“They do,” Luz said. “I think people realize that it’s in their own best interests not to have a bunch of
clumsy embryologists in the lab. If they don’t get pregnant on this cycle, they may go through it all again. Most of them
do. You and Audra might go through all this again, and you’re going to want to benefit from our practice.” She gazed at me
levelly a moment, the blackness of her eyes confounding me because I could not distinguish where the pupil ended and the
iris began. “What are you worried about, Cully, really?”
“And why the hell are you worrying about it now?” Audra said. “We’ve had those consent forms for over a month.”
“It seems like it’s just now sinking in. You’re the attorney. I’ve been thinking it’s all okay if you think it’s
okay. Are these consent forms okay?”
“Of course they’re okay. All medical consents are like that. Did you read your appendectomy consent? It was
just as apocalyptic. They have to be like this; that’s what makes it ‘informed’ consent. And here they’re going to
account for every egg, every embryo, every step of the way. Don’t fuss.”
“I’d like to have you for my lawyer,” Luz said. “You sound careful. And that’s what we like to be here in
the clinic.”
Audra squeezed my hand again, aggravated, I’m sure, by what she felt was condescension. “I am careful. Why?
You need a lawyer, Luz?”
Luz laughed.
“I thought your name was Vera,” Audra added.
“Nope. Luz. Or at least I’m pretty sure.” She checked her badge. “Yep, Luz.” She laughed, and so did I,
but Audra gazed at her skeptically.
Just then Margarita put her head in through the curtain. “Oh, Rivera, there you are.” (Rivera: an easy
mistake; anyone might have made it.) “I’ve been ringing you in the lab. Holly’s on the line.”
“Okay, be right there.” Luz turned back to us. “Gotta go. Any other questions about the egg retrieval, or
about those consent forms?”
“No,” I said.
“Audra?”
“No. I think ....” Audra paused. “Actually, I’m looped.”
I touched Luz’s sleeve as she started to pull back the curtain to leave. “Is that guy back?” I lowered my
voice and nodded toward the other side of the curtain.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“We couldn’t help overhearing. This is not good, with the pre-op and post-op patients lying here in this one
room side by side.”
“Well, that’s what the curtain is for. And we don’t usually have two surgeries so close together. And this
sort of... volatility.”
“But it can happen. It’s not good. I heard every word her husband said, and so did Audra.”
“I’m sorry. But meanwhile, she can probably hear you too.” She smiled. “I’ll see you again in three days.
Good luck this morning!” she added as she slipped past the curtain and pulled it closed behind her. In a moment I heard
the murmur of her voice as she spoke quietly to—into the ear of?—the woman behind the curtain. The woman’s words were a
little slurred from sedation, but I could make them out: “Thank you. He’ll do the smart thing, he always does, even if...”
Her voice trailed off, and after a moment I heard Luz’s footsteps receding towards the lab.
The sound of the footsteps elicited a sudden and confused mental image of her figure moving away in her white
lab coat, in stark contradiction to the woman in scarlets bent double in play with Margarita. And a sudden pang struck me
as I remembered my father’s eyes and the way they would follow just such a woman—the woman in scarlets, I mean: Loose Vera
the Clown. I used to love to watch my father watch women. I would sit opposite him in restaurant booths and, as my mother
and Audra chattered on, watch him gaze happily about at everything that walked. Then I would see that expression come into
his eyes and I would turn to see who the woman was. It was always someone very much like Loose Vera: “big and brassy and
dark-complected,” as my dad put it to me once, with a wink that let me know there was no betrayal of Mom in it, only a
reaffirmation of her hold on him. Mom was anything but big and brassy and certainly not “dark-complected”, working hard to
maintain a creamy skin that always impressed me as being sickly. But she was the woman he had married: these other women
of Dad’s were for dreaming about. These were the exotic Mexican and Cherokee women of the street whom he had seen as a
country kid visiting the big city of Tulsa in Dust Bowl Oklahoma, lurking in their doorways and gesturing to him to come
into their lairs, big women with big bosoms and big bottoms whom he saw but never knew, fantasized about but never even
spoke a word to as he ran hard away. Why it was the darker women of the street that struck this fancy in him and not the
lighter-skinned women, I always wondered, always meant to ask him, but never did.
But this Luz in the white lab coat... she wasn’t Dad’s type at all and I remarked to myself how strange it
was that the thought had even come into my head. The boisterous woman in scarlets, now—she would certainly have caught his
eye. Though lank and lacking the voluptuous meat of his usual fantasy women, she did have the requisite stature and length
of leg, like a Roller Derby star or gladiatrix mud wrestler. And he would have delighted in her robust, bent-double,
trotty-waltzy sense of fun—which replayed for me now in my mind’s eye again and again as Luz in scarlets danced by me,
looked down at me, winked at me again and again, black eye encircled in its white lashes—and winking and winking and
winking. Enjoying the image enormously, I turned to find Audra’s bright blue eyes fixed upon me.
“She’s nice,” I said.
“I think she’s flippant.”
I lowered my voice. “I thought she handled all that very well.” At Audra’s blank look, I nodded toward our
neighbors on the other side of the curtain.
We had already met them before their argument with Luz ensued. They had been installed in the room when the
nurse—Joan—brought Audra there and hooked her up to her calmative. The double duty pre-op/recovery room was hardly more
than an alcove at the end of the clinic’s mauve hallway, facing one blank door leading to the surgery and another
further to the right to the lab. Joan had begun to pull the curtain between the two gurneys but stopped when the woman
immediately engaged Audra in a groggy conversation. To my surprise, Audra seemed glad of the company and kept asking the
woman questions about the procedures she had just undergone. Her husband sat quietly, looking at the floor, ignoring their
conversation and my presence.
“I don’t think I felt anything,” the woman assured Audra. “I think I fell asleep.”
“How many eggs did they get?” Audra meant well, but her irrepressible courtroom manner was invasive and I
saw the man throw her a look. “Do you know yet?”
The woman rolled her head toward Audra, a sudden look of panic in her eyes. “There were only two on the
ultrasound. I don’t know if they got them both. Did they tell you, honey?” She reached for her husband’s hand, but his
attention had turned to the lab door. He got quickly to his feet as Luz entered the alcove, and that’s when he snapped the
curtain the rest of the way shut between us.
“Good news,” I could hear Luz saying, “we got both eggs and they look very nice.”
There was a gleeful little gasp from the woman, and Audra smiled up at me. Luz’s voice grew more confidential,
and I could tell that she was talking directly to the husband, perhaps pulling him aside. “But you and I need to talk for
just a second.” I couldn’t hear the rest, just low murmurs of properly private lines from down the hallway.
I looked back at Audra. She had tears in her eyes, and it moved me unexpectedly to see her so moved. In the
expression on Audra’s face there was hope and desperation; it was a look I’d seen often on patients in the halls and waiting
room of Life, Inc. but never yet on Audra Rand, Esq.
Friends who know about our efforts at pregnancy have told me it’s ironic that I’ve made a career in journalism
writing about reproductive urges. My interest started, I guess, when I was twenty-four and undertook an early spring
backpacking trip into the Trinity Alps to report on salmon finding their ancestral ways home to spawn. I got some pretty
pictures, wrote a naive and unconventional and inspired narrative, and sold the package to Atlantic for $1700.00, every
aught and digit of which I spent on surgery to repair big-toenail beds ruined by a new pair of boots bought expressly for
the hike. And I found myself utterly fixated on reproduction. I’ve written articles on spiders and penguins and mantids,
their fertility and sex and parenthood down to the last connubial decapitation and cannibalism for the sake of the spawn.
All of this was before I became involved in my own practical applications of the science of human infertility. Now my
resume and my own experience with In Vitro Fertilization got me an editor’s promise to publish an insider’s look at the
business and technology of IVF. It has been very difficult for me to be objective this time through—to keep theory and
emotion and medicine and practical matters in their places—and as I watched Audra’s futile concern over a stranger in a
desperate moment on the other side of a thin curtain, the sense of a human community beyond objectivity became pretty
overwhelming to me. What is altruism? It certainly must spring from understanding one’s own needs. What does preservation
of a species have to do with personal gain? What is the dimension beyond the hormonal? And does it have anything to do
with defining humanness?
This moment with Audra and the unknown woman behind the curtain was tender and complex and was exploded by the
husband, returning from his quiet head to head with Luz, his voice an ugly, hissy whisper.
“I’m so pissed! She says my sperm’s not good enough. ‘Borderline’! She says she wants another specimen.
Like another one’s going to be any better! I held off for three days, like they told me. This is the best they’re going
to get. I’m so pissed! She says they’re probably going to do ICSI, and it’s going to cost thousands more. You know how
much we’re paying for this baby? Shit!”
The woman started speaking at his first whispers, “Honey, shh,“ and now ended in hiccupping sobs. “We just
want to get pregnant, that’s what we want. If it takes more money, if it takes another sample, that’s what we want, that’s
why we’re doing this. If it takes ICSI, we’ll do ICSI. We’ve talked about it.”
Luz’s voice remained calm as she rejoined them in the room. “I can’t talk to you about money. I don’t even
know about that. Talk to Carol again. I just need to know from you both right now whether you want me to do ICSI or not.
If I’m going to do it, I have to peel the eggs and get them ready for the injections. And once I do that, I can’t really
go back to conventional IVF. This isn’t really a surprise: I know you’ve had this conversation before with one of the
doctors—”
“How do you know that? Were you there?”
“It’s standard procedure with an ejaculate like yours. They would have talked with you. It will be in your
records. Shall I check?”
“They told us, honey,” the woman said.
“Okay, yeah, they talked to us about ICSI.”
“And they told you we might need a second ejaculate on the day of the retrieval?”
“They told us, honey.”
“Yeah they told us.”
“And they told you why, I’m sure, but let me explain it again so it’s quite clear right at this moment... we
need about twenty thousand sperm to inseminate each egg, but we need millions to start with; they have to be washed, and
capacitated, and we’ll lose most of them in the process. You don’t have millions, which is why we need a second specimen.”
“Okay, all right, give me the goddamned cup! I know where the goddamned room is!”
It was right after this that Luz stepped through the curtain to talk to us. And now that Luz had left us, I could
hear the woman on the other side of the curtain still weeping, but much more softly. The nurses came for Audra and wheeled
her into surgery, and Joan came back to escort me to the E.R. I had already visited the E.R. at the beginning of the
process more than a month ago and found it quite the amusing center for ejaculative success with its lounge, tv/vcr and
panoply of erotica. In most clinics you just use the bathroom. The doctors at Life, Inc. had requested a sperm sample at
the very start to see if our infertility might be a male factor. It wasn’t, which I already knew from previous sperm tests,
but I didn’t balk at their request and duly visited their E.R. and duly retrieved and submitted my semen sample, the very
sample that inspired Dr. Gage’s very repeatable description of my sperm as “excellent, abundant and highly motile”, which
affirmation caused me a private, thoroughly unaccountable surge of pride.
But Joan did not take me to the E.R. this time. We went past the room, and she showed me instead to the door
of the bathroom. “Sorry, there’s someone in there now,” Joan said with lowered voice, nodding back to the door of the E.R.
It was the hissy husband, I already knew. “You could wait, if you want, but...” Joan lowered her voice still further,
“there’s no telling how long it might be. You might prefer to use the bathroom?”
I had found it very refreshing how frank everybody becomes during the IVF process. The talk is usually
scientific, and seemingly without embarrassment. But we are, after all, only human, and I appreciated Joan’s solicitousness
over the difficulties the man was having behind the door of the E.R. as he worked to provide his second ejaculate of the
day. For my earlier semen samples we had been assured quietly that if we found it necessary, Audra could join me in the
E.R. and they explained that we could capture the sample in a condom during normal intercourse, if we would find that more
advantageous, but there would be a dramatic loss of sperm that way. At this point now, however, with his wife recovering
from her retrieval, this man with the poor ejaculate was on his own in there with nothing but his hand and imagination.
I had sympathy for him. Through the past several years as Audra and I had seen first one doctor then another
in our efforts to get pregnant, I had been called upon to give several semen specimens. At Life, Inc. with its unlikely
location of the E.R. right off the reception area, at my first collection I had sat befuddled on the lounge in the E.R.
pondering a fundamental question: just how long was I supposed to take? The entire staff of the clinic knew I was in
there, and probably most of the patients waiting in the lobby also knew. I could hear footsteps outside the door, so they
would all be certain to hear any escaped moans or perhaps even heavy breathing, gasps or sighs during the “ecstatic gush”,
as that clever author of Fanny Hill was so prone to call it. They had given me a ridiculously small cup, the tiniest of
targets for something as renegade as an ejaculation. Or at least in my own experience. I browsed the selections of
magazines in the rack, Playboy, Penthouse, Cosmo, a Victoria’s Secret Catalog, and even an old Wards Mail Order with the
lingerie pages surprisingly dog-eared and crinkled. The blue movies lying on the VCR looked purposefully well-handled. I
wondered who had made the selections.
The question of how long I was expected to take continued to occupy me as I enjoyed the visuals. Two minutes
or less would certainly be cause for ridicule among the good folk outside, but so on the other hand would thirty minutes. I
wondered whether or not the staff took bets or had ongoing pools based upon the appearance or temperaments of the men who
walked down the hallway and into the E.R. More likely, I supposed, they took coffee breaks and couldn’t care. In the end
that first time, I turned my watch face down.
Now, as Joan walked me past the E.R. and to the bathroom instead, I lowered my voice to match hers and said
with a wink that in retrospect must have seemed to her conspiratorial, or at least odd, “This is fine, thanks.” I
suppressed the sudden desire to add what I had not until now even unconsciously suspected: I didn’t need the movies or
magazines; I had big Luz Rivera and her winking eye nicely tucked away in a lurid corner of my fantasy, and I would use her.
And surprised, agitated and guilty at the thought, yet agog, I proceeded to collect sperm.
Copyright © 2004 Robert Locke
All Rights Reserved