Family Vacation

Rubino looks at McGhee, who nods.

Rubino sits on a tan sofa, Aaron plopping alongside him. They watch a cartoon, and immediately Aaron gets sleepy. He rests his head on Rubino's shoulder, sidling closer, so that most of him lies splayed on Rubino's lap and chest. Enough for one night, decides McGhee, who calls out to the kids to get ready for bed.

Aaron is whispering to his mother, asking whether he can sleep between her and Mike. She tells him that Mike will be sleeping in his own bed across the room, with his dog and cat. She points. Mike's bed is about 25 feet away. In a few minutes, McGhee steps into the bathroom, where she changes into her sleeping garb, a pair of gym shorts and a black sleeveless T-shirt from Gold's Gym. She has spent only three hours with Rubino. But when he flicks off the lights, she is ecstatic: They are spending their first night together as a family.

Mike Rubino was married in 1985, and by the early '90s, he and his wife were frustrated over their inability to have a child, as he tells the story. "We'd been experiencing fertility problems," he says, "and she had had surgery, but nothing had changed."

A hard truth took hold. "We finally realized we wouldn't be able to have children of our own," he recalls. "It was hard, though probably not as hard on me."

He tried to console his wife, who bore most of their sorrow, he remembers. Rubino was disappointed but not heartbroken. For starters, he'd wanted only one child, and besides, he'd never been excited by the prospect of diapers, late-night feedings and crying jags. Still, he felt something missing over the next year. He and his wife were watching the news one night when a story appeared about sperm banks and their use of paid donors, who bore no financial or any other legal responsibilities, it was said, to the women who used their purchased sperm or to any children born as a result. The absence of obligation, however, was accompanied by a caveat: The donors enjoyed no rights to see any of the children conceived with their sperm. "We listened to the report, and I said, 'What the hell?'" Rubino remembers. "It was a chance, if nothing else, to be part of the gene pool. And we thought we could help some people. My wife was very encouraging."

He liked imagining himself as a 55-year-old man answering his doorbell someday to discover a charming, good-looking 18-year-old on his doorstep, a young adult whose long quest to find his biological father had brought him to Rubino. "I could imagine all of the advantages and see no burdens," he says.

In 1994, after tests and assessments, Rubino became a sperm donor at California Cryobank, regarded by many as the largest sperm bank in the country. It opened in 1977, an era when gynecologists generally contacted the cryobank on behalf of their patients, who typically had no idea of their anonymous donors' physical and academic characteristics. The cryobank relied then on a small siring stable, which included several medical students from nearby UCLA. Much had changed by the time Rubino arrived. The small stable had given way to donors -- from 150 to 200 at various times -- who had walked into the cryobank to apply for donation work. The proliferation of sexually transmitted diseases had long since made the testing and screening of sperm routine. The "Cryo" in the company's name -- from the Greek kryo for "cold" or "frost" -- was suggestive of an industry built around freezing the donor sperm so that clients could become pregnant when they wished. It was a new world, and perhaps the most important advance was the advent of a computer-friendly, online culture in which California Cryo-bank's clients could learn about both the donor screening process and the intimate details of the donors themselves.

The cryobank purports to select only 3 to 5 percent of its applicants, based on sperm potency and an assessment of intellectual, physical and emotional characteristics. Each applicant must be from 19 to 39 years old and a college graduate or an enrolled student at a four-year university. A graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, Rubino filled out a questionnaire detailing his educational background and appearance. His attributes meant that his semen would be regarded as prized sperm -- his 3.75 grade-point average as an art major and his blue eyes, slenderness and the cleft on his chin were all traits the cryobank's informal surveys indicated were attractive to would-be mothers.

Add to this his cryobank-produced audiotape -- on which he etched his artistic ambitions, mentioned his fluency in French, soulfully offered his hope of helping the infertile, and rhapsodized about his love of travel and Puccini -- and what the cryobank had in Rubino was an alluring bon vivant. Welcomed into the program, Rubino fell into the donor's standard routine. Receiving a plastic cup from a technician, he would enter one of the five small locked rooms that the cryobank's co-founder, Cappy Rothman, jokingly dubbed the "masturbatoriums." There Rubino became Donor 929. He generally produced semen twice a week for about a year at the cryobank's offices, where each acceptable specimen (anything that would yield a minimum of one vial of sperm for shipment) brought him $50 -- which translated to about $400 or so a month.

Abiding by instructions, he always walked into the cryobank the same way, off an alley and up a rear flight of stairs, so as to avoid crossing paths with the sperm-buyers. From the beginning, cryobank officials told Rubino and other sperm donors in the program that none of them would receive information about births attributable to their sperm. But, increasingly curious, Rubino tried coaxing them to hint how many children he may have fathered: 10? 20?

They'd smile but never answer.