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and lay on the table as instructed while the ultrasound technician closed his laptop, turned and slipped something that looked like a condom over a plastic vaginal probe. Jake stood close beside Liz and watched the man, tall and stooped with curly red hair, squirt lubricant over the probe. The doctor briefly introduced him as Claude, and Claude murmured, “Careful, cold,” and inserted the probe. “You’re going to be fine,” said the doctor. “No cramping, and you’re not passing any tissue. These are good signs.” This immediatly made Jake breathe easier. The screen next to Liz’s head lit up and swam with blurry gray images. Claude turned his wrist, shifted the probe and pushed it farther inside. Jake looked at him and was sure he saw the man glance down at her breasts. Did he find her sexy? Liz squeezed her eyes shut for a moment. But Claude couldn’t have been thinking about sex—it was all business to him. Vaginas were his clients. Ovaries his spreadsheets. Claude moved the probe left and right and finally stopped, and an image of what had to be Liz’s uterus appeared on the screenbeside her. Jake noted a couple of tiny black swirls inside a patchy gray cloud. Maybe Claude had incredible sex with women since he knew where and what every little thing was. Jake looked down to see whether he wore a wedding ring on the hand that was not between Liz’s legs. He did not. The man wasn’t exactly attractive. His eyes bulged beneath heavy lids, his red hair was frizzy and thinning on top. Still, he touched women like this every day. Slid his hand right inside.
    “Hold on, we’re getting there,” Claude said.
    Jake hadn’t gotten his wife pregnant. Well, technically his sperm had. Locked in a closet-sized room with only a TV, an old VCR and two videotapes hand-labeled “The Firm” and “Mean Girls” (whether these were the actual movies or porn knockoffs he didn’t know, since he couldn’t get the damned VCR to work), Jake had encouraged his sperm out of his body and into a blue plastic cup, which he handed to an obese young male nurse standing behind a desk. The next stop for the tiny fish was a petri dish, where Liz’s drug-stimulated eggs were waiting. Once the sperm swam into the eggs, the mixture sat inside an incubator while it fertilized, and two days later got injected into Liz’s womb. Jake’s body hadn’t gotten her pregnant, or more specifically, more accurately he supposed, sex hadn’t. Love hadn’t. He hadn’t even been present for the embryo transfer—he’d been at a meeting in Minneapolis. He and Liz had unsuccessfully tried IVF several times before, so Liz had told him just to go to his meeting and not to worry about it. He hadn’t wanted to leave her—he’d told her he could skip the meeting, or at least try to postpone it, but she insisted that they’d given up enough of their lives to infertility. This IVF might be no different from their earlier ones, and she would be fine, absolutely,positively fine doing it on her own. “You don’t want me there?” he asked.
    “Jake.”
    “It wouldn’t be such a big deal for me not to go to the meeting.”
    “Jake. End of discussion. Go to Minneapolis.”
    It seemed to him as if she didn’t, for whatever reason, really want him there, but he wouldn’t press the point. He was aware of his tendency to misread her signals, and he often had to keep himself in check.
    Now, in the exam room, he refocused on the task at hand and searched for something that might be a heartbeat. Suddenly Dr. Mancowicz said, “I think we’ve got ourselves twins!” Claude shifted the probe again and Dr. M. pressed his thick finger to the screen. “There’s one heartbeat. And,” he said as he moved his finger to the second black blob and the tiny flickering mass inside it, “there’s the second.”
    Jake swallowed a pocket of air.
    Liz laughed nervously. “Can we see them again?” she asked.
    Claude pointed more slowly to each pulsing dot. He then