As Professor Utonium understands these things: when you’re engaged in sexual intercourse for the expressed purpose of procreation, it is called trying, a nifty linguistic substitution meant to express teleological intent and thereby elevate, refine, class-up, or else reduce sexual acts into cerebral exercise, a matter of discipline, will, and perseverance in hopeful fulfillment of one’s biological, social, cultural, domestic, and even economic obligation; in an interpersonal setting, the euphemism trying serves an even greater purpose as it allows for Professor Utonium to openly discuss with others—colleagues, family, even strangers—his sex life in a way that is not burdensome, untoward, grotesque, or creepy; at various work functions, when he is asked if he and his wife have kids, he answers, “My wife and I have been trying.” To which a stranger receives the information warmly and without necessarily picturing him and his wife naked and fucking, even though that is what is implied, yet fucking and trying remain linguistically, and therefore epistemologically, independent acts.

But honestly, the longer Professor Utonium and his wife try the less it feels like fucking and the more it begins to feel like trying in the literal sense of attempting to attain a desired outcome whose reward remains unpromised. Trying, as in sweating and wanting and hoping. Trying, as in physically and mentally exhausting. The pleasure of sex as Professor Utonium has come to know it (namely, an act that arises spontaneously and whose only motivation was ephemeral pleasure ideally, but not always, reciprocated) soon becomes eclipsed by its biological, animal, and even biblical pretense. Every thrust of his narrow hips, every soft moan from his wife, every dirty word—artificial means to a speculative end. It becomes not love’s expression, but an advanced stoichiometric equation with imbalanced coefficients.

His wife keeps track of her ovulation cycle in a pink notebook left by her bed and when the clock strikes just so, he mounts. He tries. If he fails, which he often does, he blames the stress of it all, their collective future weighing heavily on his shoulders and tickling his nether-region in a decidedly unpleasant way. His wife, his sweet wife, experiments with variables. She makes his favorite breakfast (French toast) while wearing lingerie, which only made things immeasurably and inextricably worse, the pretense louder than bombs.

In the darkness of their bedroom, desire paints her eyes, but it’s not desire for him; it’s desire for a possibly impossible future: their little family, happy ever after, going on vacation to Myrtle Beach or Disney World. To even hope to achieve this possibly impossible future requires trying, and trying requires many climaxes, and the irony of it all is that he only enjoys sex to the point of climax if the climax itself presents nothing more than a conclusion to a series of sexual chapters; when the climax is literally the entire point of the metaphorical book and everything else is just metaphorical fluff, he can’t get himself invested in the metaphorical exposition, to say nothing of the metaphorical rising action.

It would be easier, ironically, if he didn’t want children. But he does. Desperately. Not because he feels that his life is meaningless without them, but because he’d like to see a tiny person get older with his help, a tiny person whose tiny fists reflexively hold any finger presented to them, which is also very cute, not to mention the tiny outfits and illustrated editions of classic novels written in monosyllabic child-speak.

So there is plenty of reason to continue trying, but over time trying is all there is. Not just in the bedroom but everywhere. Each conversation he has with his wife, trying not to talk about the hole they’d dug in each other’s chests. Every time they see a mother pushing an infant around in the grocery store, trying to appear unbothered for the benefit of the other. Every time they directly discuss the state of things, trying to coax from the other an assurance it is not their fault.

Professor Utonium is the one to suggest they visit experts who take samples and run tests and everything is pronounced theoretically fine, which is supposed to be good news, but it isn’t a year later before things come to a what-should-have-been-obvious but nonetheless blindsiding end, each believing themselves a broken tool to the other’s wasted potential. And while they assure each other this isn’t the case, each suspects the other is only saying it in order to salvage whatever time they have left to try again despite the other person’s faulty wiring.

They never actually speak aloud the magic word divorce, but nonetheless find themselves elsewhere and alone. At least for a short while. She is remarried in a year and within two months after her nuptials announces her pregnancy. Professor Utonium isn’t even sure such efficiency really counts as trying, but he expresses his sincere congratulations in a card he mails to her workplace. The card reads: You deserve this. Which of course means: You deserve this [because I was obviously the imbalanced coefficient].

Professor Utonium dates some nice women, friends of friends, but whenever it comes time to engage in meaningless and pressureless sex, he can’t perform, which is another linguistic substitution suggestive of polite carnal theater, and it does feel like that: like he is on stage and can’t remember his lines.

He considers adopting a dog but instead begins taking cooking classes at the community college where he learns to make supposedly authentic French toast, but it still isn’t to his liking, so he tries improving the recipe with exotic sugars and spices. Trying, trying. New coefficients, new conditions, new variables. He knows all about trying, but he doesn’t know its antonym. Giving up seems too moralizing, quitting too deprecating. He tries new recipes and new recipes after that. He introduces into the recipe chemical reactants of questionable solubility, digestibility, and overall edibility. His ex-wife sends him a Christmas card with her baby in a stocking. He eats French toast for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. His kitchen table faces the window where he can better see the diaphanous alien blobs laser-beaming Townsville into cindering ash. They’ve been doing this off and on for years. They leave, they return, they try again.