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If, Barclay wondered, you are producing semen for the purpose of artificial insemination with your wife and you fantasize about another woman, is that infidelity? Not technically, perhaps, but is it an emotional betrayal? Are you honor-bound to keep only your wife in mind?
He considered the stubby glass vessel, the sterility of which he had guarded with zealous paternal stewardship. He filled out his name on the tiny brown paper bag into which the jar, once filled, would go. And he wondered if light was a factor, light which is hostile to many micro-organisms, light to which sperm in the ordinary course of things would not be exposed.
There hadn’t been much guidance on procedure. The nurse had shown him to a small gray room. She told him blandly that there was a VCR in there and a library of porn, she wasn’t sure what-all, then she vanished leaving him to it.
Barclay had accompanied his wife on her first visit to the infertility doctor. He sat in the waiting room, awkward in what felt like women’s turf, the lone male. Private by nature, he had never liked standing out. In the lingerie section at a department store, for example, he would find himself battling an inexplicable sense of unease. The act of buying condoms was excruciatingly embarrassing for him, the end goal barely worth the pain. He was even uncomfortable buying deodorant, somehow resistant to acknowledging that he had bodily functions at all. Prudish, certainly not hip, but there it was. He lived with a crushing sense of bashfulness about his physical self.
And now here he was with an entire medical office full of receptionists, nurses, doctors, patients, security guards, custodial staff and why not the Channel Four News, for God sake???, who were aware that he alone was in this room, aware of what he was supposed to be doing there. What time had he come in? Was any specific amount of time customary? Were they checking the clock wondering what was taking so long? Or, if he stepped out too soon, would they be stunned by the speed?
He could hear them walking in the hallway, inches away, the busy hum of the office.
Did anybody ever choke under the pressure to perform, bail, turn in an empty jar?
On that first visit to this office, he had sat on one of the lavender couches of the waiting room, endless minutes stretching toward hours. A little girl waited for her mom, absently looking at magazines. Nobody spoke except for a pregnant teenager planning a wedding with her mother, infertility plainly no problem at all for the fecund little tramp.
Barclay offered to read to the little girl from an issue of Modern Maternity, but they couldn’t find an article either found compelling. They chatted. He learned her school got out at one, she always slept with the frayed stuffed baby seal she clutched in one tight fist, she wasn’t crazy about doctors’ offices because she didn’t like shots.
She read Barclay’s fortune on his hand and in return he checked her ears. He looked inside, told her he could see the tiniest family sitting around the tiniest table. The girl was giggling, saying he was making it up.
No, no, this was all true. There was a tiny family, well actually a large family of tiny people, and they were having lunch, seated around a tiny table, eating with the tiniest forks and spoons, macaroni and cheese, lemonade, but this was more than lunch, it was a party of some sort, a birthday party…
The girl laughed happily. The “ear check” always worked with kids that age, or if not the ear check, the flailing arm wrestle, or something else. Barclay could always find a way to engage kids. Clearly here was someone who was meant to be a parent.
But Marla’s and his physiologies hadn’t cooperated.
After an endless wait and after the little girl’s mother emerged and scooped her up with a dark, accusing look at Barclay, he had been summoned inside to the doctor’s office.
Crowded desk, stacks of papers, certificates on the wall, Marla sitting there with her purse on her lap. Clearly she and the doctor had SOME NEWS.
“We’ve gone through extensive testing with Marla and everything was negative.”
“Negative?”
“We find no physical reason why she shouldn’t conceive.”
The dreaded news. Marla was off the hook. HE was to blame.
But he had thought, from the sample he had given at home and driven in, everything had been fine.
Barclay listened as the doctor seemed to be repeating those earlier findings. That sample was also negative for oligospermia.
“So it’s not me?” Barclay asked, to be sure, but confident now of the answer.
Marla and the doctor exchanged a look.
The doctor went on. “What we suspect as the source of the reason that you have not conceived is that Marla has a specific allergy.”
An allergy?
“To some food?” Barclay asked.
“No, this isn’t a food allergy.”
Allergies were actually a condition Barclay knew something about. Years ago as manhood had come rushing at him in his early teens, along with all the other customary physical changes, his sinuses had swelled and clogged. The medical sleuthing of the day had then, also, focused in on allergies as the culprit. An allergy to tomatoes. To an incongruous mix of other foods. And to dust. The dust that infused the air of his dry city.
His mother had been on the case like a mouse on cheese. Tomatoes were banished from the Barclay household – and the homes of all his friends when he was allowed to visit them. He traveled to school and to friends and relatives with a list of forbidden fruits stuffed into his pocket, to consult before meals and to show to anyone involved in preparing his food, from the school dietitian to his father’s cousin, Bette.
The dust itself was attacked with a stream of humidifiers, purifiers, and air filters in every room in the house. He learned to sleep with the hum and gurgle of one or the other of these devices. He even took one to college, and he only stopped using it when Legionnaire’s Disease, brewed up in a hotel air conditioning system, felled all those old guys in Philadelphia.
“What is she allergic to, then, dust?” he said, prepared to shell out the bucks for the latest in air filter technology.
“No,” the doctor said. “Our tests showed Marla’s system reacted to certain enzymes from your sample.”
“I’m allergic to you,” Marla added, able to hold back the news no longer. […]
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Seth Freeman writes for the stage, print and film and television, for which he created the series Lincoln Heights. His short stories have been published in literary magazines and won awards. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Southern Theatre Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Stars and Stripes, The Hill, YaleGlobal, and numerous other periodicals. There have been over two hundred sixty productions and readings of his plays in the U.S. and around the world. His work in television has received multiple Emmys, Golden Globes, Writers Guild and other awards. In 2019 he graduated with a Master’s degree from UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health. He dedicates non-writing time to institutions devoted to health care, education, the empowerment of women, and human rights.
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