A little while back, a woman – an ovulating professor from Germany – arrived in Maastricht, the Netherlands, to a neighbourhood just beyond the city centre, on the other side of the Maas River. She parked her car at a distance from her destination so as not to be recognized (she knows quite a few professors in Maastricht), and was briskly moving down the sidewalk towards the apartment of Ed Houben when she got caught behind a father walking his little boy at dusk. The father and son drifted past the square, but when they came upon Ed’s apartment, the father pointed a finger in the dark, and the boy looked up to the third floor, where a star-shaped lantern was lit in a window.
“That is where the Babymaker lives,” she heard the father say.
Later, when he heard the story from the ovulating professor, the Babymaker himself was delighted, for not everyone accepts what he does, and so he spends a lot of time explaining the wherefores and what-hows of his avocation, often with a startling dose of Dutch honesty.
But this boy and his father – what a small victory for Ed: A world in which the Babymaker lives just down the block and no one bats an eye or blushes, no one utters a condemning word, knowing he’s there, ever ready.
The first time Ed Houben slept with another man’s wife was in Amsterdam. It was 13 years ago, Ed was 32, feeling unattractive, convinced no woman would ever consider having sex with him again. He wasn’t a virgin, but the rapports sexuels that had come his way were, frankly, as rare as dogs in space. In fact, it had been ten years since his last encounter, though he claimed not to miss it, the sex that is, busy as he was with his job, volunteering for the national guard, and war re-enactments that a man of his ilk and interests can get sucked into.
However, he’d made a huge decision. Convinced that having a family might not be in the cards for him, Ed Houben (pronounced who-been) decided to become a sperm donor. He would show up twice a month at the clinic, “producing” in “the production room” to fill a cup for cash. The first time he went, they didn’t even take his name. It couldn’t have been more cold and impersonal.
“I was sort of expecting this gift of life to be received with sirens and fanfare,” says Ed. “I remember saying ‘Hello?’ and somebody from another room answered ‘Yes?’ ‘I have a cup here.’ ‘Oh, yes. Leave it on the table.’”
The more he donated, the more he desired some intimacy from the process. He began to advertise his willingness to do house calls on various websites. Produce a sample in the downstairs bathroom, deliver it upstairs – knock, knock – and retreat again, letting the clients take it from there. And on this occasion, here in Amsterdam, he anticipated it would be no different.
The woman had met him at the train station on her bike, and together they walked to her house, where they met her husband. She made some dinner, and they talked – wife, husband, Ed – until about 11pm. She smoked a joint and went upstairs, nervously. Ed had worked a full day in Maastricht and then took the train two-and-a-half hours north. He’d now missed the last train back. It was possible, he thought, that he was too service-minded. The man kept chatting with him until, at midnight, Ed said, “Look, I really have to cut this short, because tomorrow I’m on the first train…” Blah, blah.
He knew how badly the couple wanted a baby, how badly he wanted to help. Sperm donation, as crazy as it sounds, was what now gave meaning to his life. As for the couple, he understood that theirs was what they call in the Netherlands “a traffic-light relationship”, one minute green and one minute red. The light was green now, but the man was sterile, having been snipped.
“I have to ask you a question,” said Ed to the man, “because maybe you notice she’s nervous all the time…”
“Yes, I’ve noticed,” said the man, and then he explained. “She’s an artist,” he said, “and she feels very connected to nature. Basically she can’t imagine a happy child will be created from a 12-cent syringe. She asked me to ask you – because she’s too shy – if you would consider creating this child the natural way.”
At this, Ed found himself flustered. “I really didn’t know what to say. I felt caught in a situation which many men would find highly stimulating. Okay, here’s a guy asking you to have sex with his wife without worrying about consequences, and my romantic reaction was, ‘Did you have an STD test?’”
He was perched, of course, on the dividing line between two lives – between being an artificial inseminator of women and a natural one – and he thought it over for 15 minutes, which is a long time to leave a woman and her husband in limbo. He was thinking: Is there any ethical reason not to do this? Who do I hurt? After all, this was the way seven billion people on Earth have been created. At last Ed decided he would “go with the flow.”
They climbed the stairs and entered the room, and the woman was very relieved when she saw him there. When Ed turned to say, “I’ll take it from here,” her husband already had his pants off:
“We were three persons in the bed, and I was so surprised that I didn’t know what to say. I had this combat inside – my head full of non-stimulating thoughts – but he never even accidentally touched me. He wanted to be present when his child was created.”
After that, Ed had no problem if husbands wanted to be on hand while he slept with their wives. Not that he would limit himself to married heterosexual couples – there were hundreds of single, gay and otherwise ambiguously attached women who required his services too. But there was something edifying about this married couple in particular, something that made sense that hadn’t before: In allowing him to have sex with their wives, the men, too, were on a journey, one as private as their wives’. And in this strange, dichotomous act of largesse and cuckolding, Ed himself might save them from self-recrimination and ego free fall. By sharing his seed with their wives just so, in the ovulation go-zone, he might provide them with the greatest gift of all – a no-strings-attached baby – and in so doing complete their family with the final puzzle piece. What he least expected in return was gratitude, but that’s just what he got.
Sperm donation, as crazy as it sounds, was what now gave meaning to Ed’s life
Ed Houben is now, at the age of 46, one of the preeminent makers of babies on the planet, father to 106 children, of whom two-thirds were made the natural way (ie, by sexual intercourse) and a third made via artificial insemination. In addition, there are 30 or so he estimates from his years at the clinic. Put another way: Ed Houben, who once had sex once every decade, has fathered roughly ten kids every year for the past 15 years. And he’s still at it, thumping his way into history. So prodigious is his legacy that the BBC dubbed him “Europe’s most virile man”, while he regularly gets billed by media as “the Sperminator”.
The prerequisite for his calling, he believes, is full transparency. So visit his website – with the tagline “It is nice you found my website!” – and you will discover that Ed has tested negative for gonorrhea and chlamydia. You can see that he’s tested negative for syphilis and HIV, too. You can gaze upon pictures of him, one in which he kneels beside one of his small children, from some years ago when he was a bit more youthful.
Nevertheless, he’s quick to describe himself as a “truly ugly fat guy with glasses.” An endomorphic bachelor with a somewhat block-shaped head and lower grill of uneven teeth, he lives in a five-room apartment, grad-school humble but relatively roomy by Dutch standards, from which his mother comes and goes, often cooking and cleaning for him. He doesn’t own a car; rather, he bikes everywhere, no matter what the weather.
In short, Ed Houben might be the world’s least likely natural inseminator (known in the donor world as an NI, as opposed to an AI, or artificial inseminator) – and maybe the best, if there is such a thing. Regardless, he’s a very normal-seeming person living a spectacularly abnormal life. He drinks coffee and goes to work (work he won’t specify for his employer’s sake, but it involves sharing his love for Maastricht and its history at an annual salary of 18,000 euros). He strolls the Old City, greeting those he knows with a cheery smile and slightly stiff formality.
But then, his outside-of-work schedule is constructed around an ever-shifting line-up of assignations, all determined by the ovulation cycles of his clients, the women who come to him from the countries of Europe, from Brazil and Australia, Hong Kong and Japan. And sometimes, in turn, they fly him all over the world in order to mate with him. In one record week, he had six partners and 14 ejaculations (releasing around four billion sperm), not that he was counting. (Was he?) He’s also slept with three women in a day, and during one particular fecund streak successfully impregnated eight women in a row.
In a Der Spiegel article published a few years ago, one of Ed’s would-be mothers, one to whom Ed reached out on a fertility site, says, “Ed is so unproblematic. You don’t even notice him.” Another with whom I spoke says, “It’s very nice, what he does. But on the other side, I’m sure it’s not that he has to force himself. He’s a man… Maybe 50 per cent really wants to help with starting a family, and the other 50 per cent likes having sex with women he finds attractive. I don’t really see a problem in that. No one is allowed to have fun having sex? He’s not forcing anyone.”
Ed claims that over time he’s been able to shed his self-consciousness in the boudoir as he’s come to inhabit his role as sperm-provider/paramour with confidence, stressing the fact that, according to his own internet research, odds of conception are higher by the natural method, and higher, too, if a woman has an orgasm. (Experts disagree on whether either is actually true.) Though it’s been a while since Ed had his sperm tested, previous tests suggested that his swimmers are more potent than average, and he guesses that today his sperm at 46 is probably “similar to someone else’s in their 20s.”
As well, Ed claims to be an egalitarian in the bedroom. He emphasizes that for a decade he accepted women regardless of their attractiveness. (In the past three years, however, he’s revised his policy, asking for pictures. “All women are perfect,” he says, “but physically some are more perfect than others.”) He says his impetus was simple: that a normal schlub like him could make a difference in a woman’s – or a couple’s – world full of emptiness. And for those who find themselves at the end of the line – with little dignity and money left – he offers his services for free, as he feels that life shouldn’t have to be bought. “I’m rich in children,” he says, “but not in money.”
When you first meet Ed, he seems very adept at this particular sort of branding – the self-effacing self-aggrandizement. He’s helping, not taking advantage. He’s giving at no cost, after all, not having sex with strangers. He’s quick to tell a story about informing his friends for the first time, fearing that they would regard him as debauched, and to his relief being called “noble”. And it’s disorienting, for Ed lives in what might truly be considered a morally ambiguous space that he argues isn’t ambiguous at all. “I really believe children should be conceived from an act of kindness and that they deserve to know their father as more than a number,” he says. “I forbid myself to feel proud of what I do. I don’t have any children; other people have children because of a small contribution from me.”
To that end, his pact with couples and would-be single mothers goes like this: I’m here if you want your children to know their biological father, or if later they want to find me themselves. I will not stalk you or try to repossess said children. I trust you and accept the tacit agreement we’ve made, without a signed contract or threat of child support, that in procreating I have ceded all parenting to you while maintaining a distant interest only activated by your, or the child’s, approach. (To date, his leap of faith has paid off: No one has sued Ed for child support.)
Depending on your vantage point, his credo might seem revolutionary or manipulative, unpalatable or generous. So is Ed Houben a self-styled saviour or sex machine – or is it possible in this blurry age of inbetweenity to be both at once?
One Thursday evening in March, I went to Ed’s apartment just after he’d had an assignation with another woman, an ovulating surgeon who had driven two hours for a one-hour session. In previous days, a couple of women had cancelled their appointments due to illness and scheduling conflicts, which as it unfolded in a flurry of texts left Ed wondering if theirs had been more an issue of cold feet. Whatever the reasons, hours of communication with no result had left him feeling frustrated and a little grumpy.
Even though his life might seem like a “gangster’s paradise,” he said, when plans fall apart “I can feel quite sad or even angry for a few minutes. In [both] my job and in donating, I’m totally dependent on what other people want me to do.”
But now the spinning world seemed somewhat put back on its axis. Ed was lounging, hair dishevelled, belly protruding from the bottom of his shirt, in a satisfied post-coital haze on the couch. I was looking at a man from both sides: one who was both “helping” people and actualizing himself in the most Darwinian sense. A half-hearted plate of grapes and some crackers sat on the coffee table, not on offer for me but for the woman who had just left. Exactly three grapes had been plucked from their stems.
“I’ve helped rich people, poor people, people who in their country are famous,” he said. “They all come because they’ve reached a point of desperation with our medical system, and I offer myself as a better option than a one-night stand.”
The way these home visits typically work depends upon whether one is a new visitor or a repeat. In the case of a repeat, as the surgeon was, both parties can dispense with the formalities and, after some freshening up and a quick chat, pretty much get right to business. Often the women are driving some distance to be here with plans to turn around and return home that same evening. But in the case of new would-be mothers, Ed will sit for as long as necessary to achieve some level of connection and comfort, then eventually, if they are in agreement, move the action to the guest room.
“This is where the magic happens, the creation of life,” said Ed, showing me into a cramped warren, without a hint of irony.
The guest room features the enticements of coupling: a double bed draped with a pink bedspread. Nightstands, one on either side, hold books touting baby first names and single-mom survival kits, motherhood and pregnancy tips. There’s a framed mantra on either stand, one in blue and one in pink, that reads “Keep Calm And Have A Baby”. On the bottom shelves, there are pads and new panties, offerings of bottled water and juice. Sometimes one woman might leave a little gift for the next woman – lotion, an unopened pregnancy test. Among the tchotchkes adorning the room is a statuette of a pregnant woman with a child touching her belly.
When Ed has a visitor, he’s also happy for her to spend the night, whatever’s easiest. And depending on the schedule, he’s happy to try multiple times. Everything gets a little trickier, though, when people travel to the Netherlands from as far away as Asia and sometimes stay up to ten days. Ed is always very clear with the would-be mothers that he has a schedule to keep, synced to the ovulation cycles of all the others. (He can have a dozen women in rotation at any given time.) If he has free time during their stay – which is rare – he’s happy to act as a tour guide in Maastricht or to accommodate his visitor with advice. He turns over the guest room to them, gives them an extra set of keys to the apartment, explains the bus system.
If it seems a libertine life, Ed is also running his own sort of free, existential Airbnb, meeting new people constantly, taking on their woes and elations. Problems can arise when someone desires time outside the bedroom with him – or even declares her love for him. (Six total, to date, according to Ed… But who’s counting?) And this is where it can get very tricky. Lines blur, and even Ed finds himself confused. In the 13 years of doing this work, he claims to have had three girlfriends, all of whom were clients but ironically none of whom had babies by him. At the moment, a Vietnamese woman wants non-business time with him, but her visit will overlap with a couple arriving from Taiwan, which causes no small amount of consternation.
In the messy office at the other end of the apartment from the guest room, Ed showed me pictures of some of the women, and their children, at least half of whom he’s met: “Jacob” from Jerusalem, “Eve” from Berlin. Some are of mixed race, some of various religions: a Muslim daughter, a son who is Orthodox Jewish. Sometimes he forgets their names. As he flicked through the images, he said, “This one looks like her mother… This one looks like her father.” He pondered. “It seems like half my kids have blond hair and blue eyes,” he said, baffled. “From what I learned about genetics in high school, sometimes I wonder, how come?”
He described the women who came to him, as if reading chapters of an illicit novel aloud
As it turns out, there’s no blueprint for a career in hands-on procreation, no job counsellor urging the latest crop of college graduates into a life of fornication. If there were, we might all just retreat to the canopy and call ourselves bonobos. And yet there is a historical precedent.
In a 2013 TEDx talk given by Ed, he name-checks two of his biggest heroes: Helena Rosa Wright, a 20th century English pioneer of women’s rights, and a mystery man named “Derek” who was called into “secret service” by her. Here’s how it worked: During World War I, over a million British men died in battle (in addition to millions of returning soldiers/husbands who suffered either debilitating war wounds or PTSD), leaving a generation of women without a way to have babies. Enter Derek – a cosmopolitan Brit who had once worked on a rubber plantation in British Malaya. He was, by all accounts, charming, good-looking, a lover of ladies. As Wright witnessed first-hand the deep social cost of these frayed, childless marriages, and as science offered no practical solution (the first “test tube” child would be born six decades later, in July 1978), she lit upon an idea, one practised in other cultures. For those couples desperate for children, a quiet deal could be made. A telegram would be sent relaying likely ovulation dates, and Derek would rush to the scene, impregnate the wife, and vanish again. In this way he surreptitiously helped create 496 children.
Whoever this dashing Derek was and whatever his apparent charms, his were much simpler days. Today, nightmare stories abound: the donor who knew he was sterile, “selflessly” offering himself for sex; the prolific contributor who was autistic; a white supremacist who donated in Scandinavia, figuring his clientele would be white. In the case of “Donor 7042”, a Danish man with a severe genetic disorder helped create 99 children (34 of them in the US, as it turns out) with what the papers came to call his “Viking sperm”. At least ten of the children have the disorder, which can cause cancer and shorten one’s life, in some cases, by 15 years.
And yet by his willingness to be open, and by offering his services for free, Ed also seems to occupy a place apart from his cohort. During our four days together, I confess that Ed’s honesty caused an intense sort of whiplash. On the one hand, I was intrigued by the logistical reality of his life, and of course I was moved by the plight of the women coming to visit. On the other hand, I found myself cynical, critical, disbelieving. (Would someone say I was merely jealous?) Sometimes I experienced these jumbled feelings within the span of a minute, as he spoke so matter-of-factly. But he answered each and every question with graphic willingness and vivid detail, political correctness (and my opinion of him) be damned.
He described the women who came to him, as if reading chapters of an illicit novel aloud. Which seemed both a bit skeevy and a violation of their privacy. (And yet I kept asking questions.) He’d slept with concert pianists and ex-lingerie models. He’d slept with 13 doctors. There was a handicapped would-be mother whom Ed had to carry two stories up to his apartment. Another disabled woman couldn’t control her facial expressions, he said, but when she took off her clothes, she had the most beautiful body he’d seen. There was the woman from a former Communist country who, unlike so many others, knew exactly how to give and derive pleasure. (“I saw a documentary about how people from former Communist countries are better lovers, because without money, that was one of their only forms of self-expression.”) As well, there was a lesbian who told him that if she was going to be with a man only once, then she wanted “to do it all.”
Next came stories of the husbands: There was one from Istanbul who wrote up pages of detailed instructions for how to stimulate his wife in bed (sent via e-mail) – and after travelling all the way to Ed’s front door, he sat outside in a rental car as Ed had sex with his wife, never to meet. There were husbands with testicular cancer, and one from Belarus who lived too close to Chernobyl. Like other men of his generation, the Belarusian ended up realizing he was sterile after a seemingly impossible 15 years of trying. The couple would drive over a thousand miles to get to Maastricht and stay three days. When Ed conjugated with his wife, the husband sat in the living room, watching TV. It was peculiar, but of course Ed understood his pain, too, and his willingness to try anything for a baby. “I think the starting point has to be ‘Can you imagine how it feels after 15 years’ disappointment?’” says Ed. “You don’t start from ‘OK, I heard today I’m sterile, now I’m going to have [this guy] bang my wife.’”
Yet another man arrived, scaring Ed by the sheer size of his person. He was a Special Forces officer, ripped and trained and intimidating. When his wife said she thought she was still a virgin, Ed was incredulous, until her husband removed his pants to reveal his appendage. “Caution,” said Ed. “Some men are not well-endowed. It was really, in erect form, a pinkie finger.” The husband said that his wife deserved the chance to have a baby and that, as well, it would be “a gift” to let her have sex with “a normal man.” Still, he stayed in the room to participate. “We kept to our zones,” said Ed.
The Ed Houben doctrine
All of this honesty was, at times, too much. But the Houben Doctrine, preached often to the media, is dispassionate and simple: The system is broken. These couples are often desperate and “beyond jealousy.” Part of his willingness to be so public about what he does, to put his life on display, he said, is so that his children will know exactly why he acted as he did and that he, above all, had their best interests at heart in choosing to couple with their mothers.
Besides the actual doing of it, plays other roles: quasi-therapist, quasi-friend, quasi-lover, quasi-father. His is a life revolving around ovulation thermometers, pregnancy tests, bodily fluids and occasional fleeting moments of unbridled joy when things work out. The transactional relationship is anything but simple.
But spend enough time in Ed Houben’s world and you begin to get the feeling that his entire life is quasi – and fleeting. He feels he should quit by 50, four years from now, when his sperm quality will likely be declining. Would he miss it? “Maybe I would miss the variety, but I’d trade it all for love anyway, a family of my own. But I have made it so that that is almost impossible.”
I cannot imagine there not being a hole in my life,” said Ed.
In the guest room, then, is there an art to the lovemaking?
“Normal methods,” says Ed. Missionary is best, but he prefers a side-by-side position (especially “if you’re bloody tired,” which, between a 40-hour work week and his line-up of women, he always seems to be). Foreplay, both manual and oral: yes. Later he clarifies in a text: “We see all forms of foreplay both consent to as contribution [sic] to a better chance. The more we accept each other as physical lovers, the more excited about each other we are, the more our bodies prepare for success.”
Has he ever been hurt – a fall from the bed, a blow from the headboard?
“No, never.” Though back in his artificial insemination days, he ran into a painful predicament. It came during a stretch when Ed was flooded with donor requests, ie, a time of excessive masturbation. “The skin got lesions, and they wouldn’t heal. Even with the help of my family doctor, I had to leave it totally alone for six weeks. I couldn’t do anything for anybody for six weeks. Maybe, I thought, it was the universe’s intention that a child would be created. But now it won’t.” The six weeks gave him time to retool, as it were. “That started a bit of a process in my mind,” he says, “because, you know, the natural way is always lubricated.”
The oldest woman he’s ever tried with?
Forty-nine.
The longest he’s tried with someone?
Six years and counting.
How many tries in a day with one woman?
Five.
How many sets of twins?
Four.
Number of virgins with whom he’s had sex?
Four.
Per cent of husbands in the room during intercourse?
“I would say no more than 20 per cent.”
Per cent of lesbian couples?
Forty.
STDs?
“I get tested every six months. If some women could have their way, the test would be no more than a week old, but no one’s going to mistake me for a heroin addict.”
Ever date for fun?
“What would I date for? I basically drown in one-night stands. But I would love to have a relationship.”
Biggest conundrum?
“Once they’re pregnant, they’re gone. It’s a bit of a hollow shell.”
Strange requests in the boudoir?
“I’ve had no requests which I would categorize as strange. In that sense, I admire the courage of the women who say they prefer natural method, but that’s usually it.”
Ever run out of sperm?
“That was a longtime concern of mine. Three days of abstinence is perfect. But there was this woman from Germany. We met at six in a hotel in Maastricht, we slept together, half an hour, everything was ducky… She was hardly gone when a Belgian couple contacted my cell phone and said they were ovulating. I said, ‘Okay, but there will be only two hours of abstinence,’ and they said, ‘Better a small chance than no chance.’ The small chance is now a 7-year-old girl.”
These were unwritten pacts, wrought from secret worlds most of us would never understand
In talking at length to Ed, I began to wonder even more about the couples who came to him, so he contacted a wife and husband, brand-new clients who agreed to meet with me at their home in Germany.
Lara, 36, answered the door smiling, while her husband, Max, 40, floated cheerily in the shadows. (Both requested anonymity.) Lara and Max lived in a largish house for two, under gray skies, in the rich flatlands of the north. They’d just seen Ed five nights earlier. They’d met him for a glass of wine first, in a town halfway between Maastricht and theirs, to make sure he wasn’t an axe murderer. Then they retired to a hotel. Two rooms – Ed had taken one, they the other. And at the appointed hour, Lara left Max and went next door.
When I’d told friends at home about Ed and his work, they usually lasered in on the married couples, the wife and husband, and how they accepted their roles in this. How Lara and Max had reached this place was amazing, even to them. Said Lara: “If you’d told me a week into my marriage that five years from now you’re going to find this Dutch guy and… Never. Ever!” When they weren’t pregnant after six months of trying, they’d had tests done. They learned that Max’s sperm was weak and that Lara was tilting towards early menopause. They soon realized they were part of a statistical group, the one couple in ten who need help getting pregnant. They tried treatments, five in all, at $6,000 a shot. (In the US, IVF can cost $15,000 per attempt.) Lara had two miscarriages. The last, in the middle of the pregnancy, was the worst.
“Everything was fine,” said Lara. “No pain, no bleeding. And then we came back to the clinic for the next ultrasound, and [the doctor] didn’t say anything for the first couple of minutes. I was like, ‘Well, I can already tell what’s going on. There’s no heartbeat anymore.’ The heartbeat just stopped.”
That’s when they realized they were part of another statistical group, the one out of two for whom IVF doesn’t work. Broke and bereft, they felt boxed in, untrusting. They contemplated adoption, but Lara harboured fears of legal loopholes and more heartbreak. “Being unlucky in the whole process, I didn’t feel strong enough to be able to handle it if a child was taken away from me,” she said.
Years ago, as it turned out, they’d seen Ed on German TV. She’d written his name down but lost it and couldn’t remember it. Three weeks ago, they were watching TV and he appeared before them again. They thought of it as pure serendipity. “We were sitting here that night and asked each other, ‘Yeah, what do you think about that?’” said Lara. “‘I mean, we’ve done this, this, this, and that… Why not?’” Soon enough, they were driving to meet him for drinks. “We had good conversation. He’s a nice guy. That’s enough for me. I don’t have the intention to start a modelling company, so what do I need good looks for? I just want a real baby.”
That day, Lara admits, she was very nervous — as was Max — but after having been through all the hardship, she was also fairly zen. (“What we learned from the last year: being humble, being patient, making peace even if it never works. Then, we’re not going to die. We’ve still got each other. We’ve got this place. We’re pretty happy here.”) She’d had one-night stands in her youth, before dating Max. She knew she didn’t have to, as she says, “be in love to have good sex.” Her only worry was that she “might feel like a prostitute after,” and that the feeling might change something essential between her and Max. But then, in Ed’s room, she said that she never stopped thinking about Max, while in the other room Max couldn’t stop thinking about her. “When I came back to our room and I saw him and was smelling him, I had so much appreciation,” said Lara, squeezing his hand. “That was my feeling. And for you?” she said, waiting for Max’s thoughts, which he spoke back to her in German. “Okay, so he was happy that the situation was over,” said Lara, “and that I got out of it being okay.
“Having sex is not having sex in that situation for him. It is coming towards a target. But if I went out alone with Ed for dinner, he would get jealous.”
This was a very specific kind of parsing, in which Ed really did serve as the seed but then not much more. As soon as his function was fulfilled, he began to vanish. He became a footnote. Perhaps it was almost besides the point to care what to make of Ed, to assess some final judgment or moral rank. These were unwritten pacts, wrought from secret worlds most of us would never understand. Lara and Max said they planned to keep meeting with Ed until either Lara got pregnant or “it didn’t feel right anymore.” And if they were to have a baby, would they visit him again? “That’s not how we’re thinking about it,” said Lara. (A while later, when I followed up with Lara, she told me that she’d had a “biochemical pregnancy” that hadn’t taken and that she was still trying with Ed.)
I thought about this – and couldn’t get that image out of my head, the one Lara had just painted, of her and Max that night in their room, having taken a big step towards their dream hopefully, wrapped in each other’s arms. And then I thought of Ed again, alone in his hotel room, T-shirt covering his belly, clicker in hand, maybe watching the symphony on TV.
It reminded me, too, of that little boy and his father on the street in Maastricht, the father pointing up to the star in Ed’s window, calling him the Babymaker.
“He apparently said it in such a nice way,” said Ed when he’d first told the story, “like a guy in Paris saying, ‘Oh, there’s the Eiffel Tower’, you know, not condemning or anything.”
No, it was like the most natural thing. The Babymaker.
Who lives up there. Making babies. For free. Beyond judgment and loneliness.
Making more babies after those babies, too, as many as possible, really, too many to count anymore, in order to fill some hole in the world, or maybe one inside of him, too, for even the Babymaker doesn’t know which anymore.
Words: Michael Paterniti
Production: Sara Lofgren/Crosby. Stylist: Anna Svärdendal. Set Design: Petra Lundkvist. Grooming: Alexandra Aronsson
