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clinic for Iris to be seeded. I sat in the waiting room with ten other men conversing about the weather, the Twins, as I thought: I hope my sperm is clearly labeled, I do not want to raise the child of this moron next to me poring over the sports page. A challenge to a man’s sense of dignity to sit next to a guy who knows that you—and you know that he—will soon be spilling his seed in a cold office with a copy of Playboy open to the “Women of the Big Ten” pictorial in the other hand, attempting to beget offspring.
    Brianna was smart and quite stunning in her jeans and big cable-knit sweaters and running shoes and her voice was pure Minnesota, the elongated o in So how are we doing today? as she led me down the long hall to the jerk-off suite. She turned on a desk lamp and pulled the blinds and set the cup on the desk. “So you know what to do,” she said. “Wash your hands and leave your deposit in the plastic cup and bring it to me at the desk. And there are magazines in the lower shelf if you need them. Okay? See you in a minute.” And smiled and left, closing the door behind her with a click, and I unzipped my pants and removed my tiny member and glanced at the magazines with their generic plastic blondes, and I tried to focus on Iris, and then I imagined Brianna whispering, “Oh my gosh, Mr. Wyler. Are you sure we should be doing this? What if your wife should come in? Oh God. Oh God. Oh my God.” And then it was 1-2-3, go-team-go, and the Gopher winger sailed over the blue line, faked left and sent the goalie sprawling, and shot into the open net, Goal! The crowd on its feet. Rah rah rah for Ski-u-mah. V-I-C-T-OR-Y, and I zipped up and frowned at myself in the mirror and got the idiot glaze off my face and strolled up the hall and handed Brianna my deposit and she said, “Good,” and she took it into the next room to impregnate my wife. Driving home in the car we discussed whether she should go home and lie down or go to that meeting about the drop-in center for chemically dependent single moms, and of course she went to the meeting. People depended on her. “It’s no big deal,” she said. “If it happens, it happens.” And then her friend Sandy got pregnant and entered the twilight world of daily nausea, bone-aching exhaustion, raw emotions, and weird urges, most of them unmaternal. Sandy was a woman who shared the smallest details of her life with others. She just had a childlike faith that she was an interesting person. She told Iris about every episode of retching into the toilet, every thought of infanticide, every urge to eat raw oysters and inhale bus exhaust. For Iris, this took away some of the wonder of creating new life.
    “I wish Sandy would tell more to Bob and less to me,” she said. “He’s the one who did it to her, after all.”
     
     
     
    It was dumb for me to get involved with Brianna.
    Oh my gosh. Tell me about it.
    Take that to a therapist and put it in his pipe and let him smoke it. Having an affair with the nurse from the fertility clinic who squirted my sperm into my wife’s vagina.
    I could say in my defense that I was doggedly pursuing a novel about political organizing among Norwegian farmers in the thirties that was hopeless tripe and this makes a man desperate. And jerking off in a doctor’s office was truly weird and a sane man craves honest passion. And Iris could go for a month or two without sex. She seemed content in the service of the Lord, rescuing elderly wackos and druggy moms. So there I was with my thoughts of Brianna inspiring my specimen collection, and one day I handed her the cup and she said, “Great job.”
    Huh?
    She said, “This is twice what you usually get. I’m impressed.” She grinned. “Whose picture were you looking at?”
    So there was some provocation on her part.
    I said, “I was thinking about you, dear.” Which was the literal truth.
    “Oh, go on. Get out of here. You big liar.” And she blushed. And there was so much in