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She speaks the dreaded words for the first time on their way to the opening gala of the New York Fashion Week. “Look at those kids!” she says, pointing out the window at the intersection. She blindly grabs his arm. “Aren’t they cute, Harry?”
He leans forward, taking in the crowded playground. Children dart around chaotically. Tired parents push strollers back and forth, sipping coffee. It looks like hell on earth.
“Yeah.” His eyes flick to her, trying to determine how serious she is. “Cute.”
She smiles brightly. “Did I tell you James C. and Mary K. are pregnant?”
She did not, just like she doesn’t tell him three weeks later it’s a baby shower they’ve been invited to. He finds out because the huge sign sticking to the windows is quite hard to miss. ‘Welcome Timmy!’ it screams to every passer-by in bold blue letters. He’s introduced to the parents—people he’s never met; he isn’t quite sure why he suddenly needs to meet them now.
They serve cake that tastes like card boxes. He is shown around the whole house, because the parents only moved in seven weeks ago. They’re so proud of the baby room he cannot manage to get a single word in to excuse himself to the bathroom. While he suffers through the complexities of light green versus olive green and the effects of wall color on a baby’s sleeping pattern, Lucy hums along with an interest that scares him.
He isn’t even sure how he ends up on the couch with a sleeping baby in his arms half an hour later. “Timmy likes you,” Lucy’s friend, the mom, says. “He never settles in Ben’s arms.”
Harry nods. He cradles the baby awkwardly, wondering if John ever got this right. Lucy winks at him across the living room. “Handsome,” she mouths. He nods back, sits dutifully through the rotation of a handful of the parents’ friends visiting. They all coo over Timmy as his arms grow numb under the weight.
He prays Lucy’s sudden interest in kids turns out to be just a fluke.
He met John a few times. Mostly fleetingly, one of them just arriving as the other was about to leave. Awkward handshakes, tense silences, that one time they had both been waiting for Lucy because she had insisted on going out for brunch together. So, what if he had stared a little that time, had filled the dragging minutes with studying John out of the corner of his eye.
John probably hadn’t noticed.
He wished his own body hadn’t either.
He stares at the baby-blue clock steadily chopping away at time. The waiting room is all soft tones and carefully chosen colors hinting at the softness of wrinkly infants without screaming “BABY!” in his face.
A damned fertility clinic, the one place he told his parents time and time again he wouldn’t visit in a thousand years.
He knows his family doesn’t have the strongest genes on his dad’s side—something he had always secretly been grateful for. He is aware his brother has been trying to get his wife pregnant for the better part of a year now, and throwing money at the best fertility clinics and most promising IVF treatments hasn’t yet managed to improve their success rate of zero.
Lucy had been talking about kids more often lately, pointing them out to him in the streets and cooing at James C. and Mary K.’s newborn not too long ago. It could be a false alarm. She could not even want them—his dream case scenario—but if she does, he needs to be prepared. As far as he knows, he hasn’t impregnated anyone. He is quite sure he would have known if he had—too much money on the line for the mother not to try and get a share after all.
The waiting takes ages. He refuses to look any of the other men in the waiting room in the eye. Soft ocean sounds play over the speakers, meant to create a calming ambiance. It mostly makes him feel like he needs to use the bathroom again.
Some older guy with balding hair is called upon by a friendly-looking nurse, a petite woman who tries to whisk away all male insecurities this place shakes loose with a kind smile.
He checks his watch. He has a meeting in an hour. If this clinic doesn’t hurry along, he will miss it. He drove over himself, parked the car two blocks down. No one can know he is here. He didn’t tell Lucy either, or John.
He is not entirely sure why John matters in this scenario.
He gets up, walks over to the brochure wall next to the service desk. Most of them are about fertility trajectories and the first ‘exciting’ weeks of fresh parenthood.
On the bottom shelf, a colorful brochure grabs his attention. He looks left and right. The other men in the waiting room are kindly avoiding eye contact. He kneels. His knees pop, the sound deafening to his own ears.
The brochure reads: Understanding gay relationships. The front page shows two guys holding hands at a riverbank under a blazing sun.
He grabs it, folds it inside out in hopes of not making it too obvious what kind of information he is interested in. It doesn’t work. That intimidating rainbow flag is printed everywhere on the paper, swirling between the text like a personal challenge.
Ashamed? It whispers, too fucking bad.
He looks at the lowest shelf again. Unconventional relationships. It sits innocently between a brochure about different kinds of sexualities and one with the bold title: Being gay and getting pregnant.
He grabs two more rainbow-drenched pamphlets, leaving the one about pregnancy behind.
“Mr. Castillo?”
He stuffs the pamphlets in his back pocket. The thick paper crumples loudly. He quickly turns around. The same petite woman from earlier smiles kindly at him.
He doesn’t quite manage to smile back.
She gestures at him to follow her. She leads him deeper into the clinic through a sterile hallway with the same soft pastel-green walls and a spotless light wooden floor. She holds open the door to a small examination room. “The doctor will be with you shortly,” she tells him.
His hands are clammy. He is too wound up to sit down in the chair at the desk. He walks over to the windows, peeks between the silk curtains. An old tree paints sunny speckles on the floor with its leaves. New York City traffic passes by unassumingly.
The door opens. “Mr. Castillo?”
He smiles nervously, extending his hand. “Yes. Hello.”
“Dr. Jonathan Hendricks.” He gestures at the chair. “Please, sit down.”
He does, carefully, crossing his legs and turning sideways slightly to confidently lean on the plastic armrest. He trails his fingers along his mustache.
Dr. Hendricks drags the keyboard closer. “Tell me why you’re here.”
He stares. Surely, the very nature of this place answers that question.
Dr. Hendricks smiles. “Let me rephrase that,” he says patiently. “What is the reason you’re visiting now? Are you and your partner trying for a baby and not having any luck? Are there conditions in your family that have you worried? Are you looking for a check-up to determine the state of play?”
He looks at his shoe as it nervously kicks the air. “What can I say?” He takes a deep breath. “Have to keep the wife happy.”
“Very well.”
Harry does not like the sound of the keyboard ticking down his answers like some transcript of doom. He doesn’t like anything about this whole conversation. They dive into his medical history, and he talks about his dad’s problems with infertility, calls it a small miracle his parents managed to have two sons and hadn’t given up after they had had Peter. He tells Dr. Hendricks about his brother’s unsuccessful road to parenthood.
“You mentioned you have a wife?” Dr. Hendricks asks, face lit up by the desktop. “Anything you can tell me about possible fertility problems in her family or her own history?”
He shakes his head, anxiously plucking at the loose skin between his thumb and index finger.
“That’s alright. We’re here for you, after all.”
He nods timidly.
“Any problems with intimacy?”
“No.”
Dr. Hendricks raises his eyebrows. “That was a rather fast response,” he says. “I understand this might be difficult to talk about, but I assure you it will help me get the full picture. Sometimes—”
“No. The se—” he cuts himself off. God, he is such a prude. “Intimacy is great.”
No such thing as crying sessions in front of the mirror in the middle of the night because her hands wandering over his body had caused such a surge of panic he couldn’t get it up anymore. No wandering thoughts about men’s lips while softly kissing his girlfriend. Certainly no vivid dreams about a dirty blonde waiter with no money to his name who still stupidly dreams of making it as an actor.
“The relationship isn’t the problem,” he says. He straightens in his chair. “Can we get on with the diagnostics? I’m not here for the full evaluation.” He checks his watch. “And I have a meeting in twenty minutes.”
“The full evaluation is what gets the best results.”
He will regret them for days to come, the words that tumble out of his mouth in turn.
“I’m the one paying you, aren’t I? So, let’s get to the part I came here for.”
Dr. Hendricks’ facial expression hardly changes, as if he is used to the entitled attitude his rich clientele suffers from. “Most certainly, sir.” He is already getting up from his chair. “My assistant will take it from here.”
The assistant is not the girl from before, but they must be hiring on the ability to still smile at the vilest rich people, because she shows him bright white teeth and an easy laugh, and kindly asks him to follow her.
He is shown to a windowless room with low lighting, a small TV mounted to the wall, and a stack of magazines filled with models showing too much skin. She points at the door handle, completely unfazed. “The door can be locked.”
He nods once. She hands him a sterile cup. “Just leave it on the table once you’re done, sweetheart.”
She closes the door softly. He locks it immediately, then grants himself the time and space to stare at the cup and curse himself into damnation.
What was he even thinking? Maybe Lucy had only been fantasizing a little without meaning anything by it. He could be dragging himself through this hell for literally nothing. And hasn’t his inability to get any girl in his life pregnant before proven that he inherited his dad’s bad genes and is thus infertile?
This is stupid, a waste of money and precious time.
He checks his watch. He has about five minutes before being fashionably late to his meeting turns into impoliteness.
He grabs a magazine from the stack, thumbs through glossy photographs of clean-shaven women in bikinis so sparse they basically count as being naked. It doesn’t do anything. Not a single bodily reaction. For some unsettling reason none of the women interest him. He tries thinking of Lucy, painting a mental image of her in his bed with a teasing smile playing around her lips. It does frustratingly little.
He finds a magazine with male models at the bottom of the stack. Against his better judgment, he flips it open and stares at the kind of abs that make him wonder if John works out too.
He unbuckles his belt, puts the magazine down open on the table, showing him a full frontal of some blonde, European-looking guy with bright blue eyes and muscles sculpted like a Roman god. He puts down a boudoir photograph of a woman next to it, her pose and clothing just teasing enough that he knows from experience it should provoke something.
He pulls his briefs down, grabs the cup, takes a deep breath.
He tries to think of Lucy again, but he must admit that fantasizing about her turns out to mostly be for show so he won’t feel too guilty after.
Because thinking of her? It simply doesn’t work.
He stares down at the guy in the magazine. His eyes remind him of John. The lean-muscular build has him wondering what John is hiding under his cheap clothes.
What follows will forever be engraved in his mind as the most humiliating five minutes of his life, and he mentally plans a moment to panic about it somewhere tomorrow, between dinner and bedtime.
He leaves the cup on the table, washes his hands in the sink. The soap smells like lavender. The foam is cool against his flushed skin.
He texts his PA that he is not going to make it to his meeting. He can’t even manage to tell the nurse goodbye in passing, keeping his eyes trained on his phone screen.
The pamphlets burn in his back pocket.