do it once. The bathroom they sent him into was no bigger than an airplane’s, the process blessedly quick—so quick that he lingered for another few minutes after, embarrassed to show himself too early. He hadn’t been thinking of Charlotte. Instead, he’d summoned a detailed image of the body of a woman sent into the bathroom to pleasure him. An employee. A fluffer in a tight, white coat. He’d even told Charlotte this, back in the waiting room, as they waited for his issue (issue—this was the kind of word that reduced them to more teary, helpless laughter, to obnoxious nine-year-olds at the back of a bus) to be spun, so a nurse could then insert it with a catheter into Charlotte’s uterus. He knew Charlotte would ask him what he’d been thinking of. She loved that kind of stuff, loved to weasel it out of him and then tease him with her mock outrage.
That the turkey basting had ultimately become necessary didn’t seem as important, in the end, as the fact that it worked (on the first try!), clear evidence that they were charmed. It took weeks for the pregnancy test to confirm it, but Charlotte claimed she knew right away, though it was probably only the effects of the drugs that she was feeling. Between the day of the visit and the day of the bright blue line, Bruce did something he’d never expected to do, that he still couldn’t fully explain. He sat at his computer at work one morning and, without premeditation, typed in a string of keywords, chosen a site, dialed a phone number, made an appointment for the following afternoon, which he nearly missed when the time came, having sunk into a near-somnambulant denial, perhaps, of what he’d set in motion. At the chosen hour he was listening to the new hire’s droning breakdown of the back exercises his chiropractor had assigned him, lingering in the conference room doorway, when he remembered with a start, and, after a moment’s reconsideration of the whole thing, made his way calmly down to the street and caught a cab up to the same Sheraton he frequented for work functions. He’d had plenty of chances to back out, then, had chosen and rechosen what came next through the small series of efforts required to show up, but he felt at the time (in the cab, back on the street, adjusting his messenger bag on his shoulder, checking in at the reception desk) like someone who had chosen nothing but was operating from a proscribed set of directives. He’d seen a woman he knew, a broker, crossing the Sheraton lobby on her way to lunch at the moment he entered and felt nothing but mild pleasantness at the sight of her, felt no rush to draw their conversation to a premature close.
They’d found each other easily. In the elevator, he’d introduced himself by name, had smiled in a ridiculous effort to put a twenty-five-year-old prostitute at ease, as if she were the one who was uncomfortable. Two condoms folded together along the perforated seam that joined their wrappers, in the bill compartment of his wallet, purchased hastily at the deli next to his office building. God. He was really in this elevator, he thought, awed. Things like this actually happened. It all seemed normal, ordinary. The magnetized key card in his pocket. The synthetic, cool smoothness of the burgundy-colored spread in the room. The paper wrapper looped around the toilet seat to telegraph hygienic sterility. Come to think of it, that is what the sex had been like, too: hygienic, a performance utterly outside of context, history, or feeling. Sex with Charlotte had always had an intimacy that threatened to cancel him out; he could literally lose track of where he was, feel himself dissolving, while at the same time his mind grew increasingly jumbled and frantic. He loved his wife too much, invested her with too much, feared for her too much; if anything, sex with an indifferent woman, buffed to artificial perfection like a product, was a relief. It was terrible and revelatory at once.
He needed a secret. He needed something outside his life with Charlotte to help him fashion a space, even as thin as a membrane, around himself so he could function apart. Even the guilt that burned in him like a coal provided some ballast to weight his side of the scales—it was his alone; he’d generated it himself. That was something. What he