Читать книгу Astonish Me - Maggie Shipstead - Страница 10

As the plane descends, Joan holds the curtain to one side and peers out. Desert crinkles up into scrubby mountains topped with antennae; those drop away into low hills fringed with a terraced reef of neighborhoods. Then parking lots, electric blue swimming pools, golf courses, highways, and, just beyond the plane’s falling arc, the ocean. She fidgets, flipping the armrest ashtray open and closed. The smell of stale ash and sweet mint gum reminds her of touring with the company, everybody sleeping and stretching and getting up to smoke in the back, circulating up and down the aisle as though at a cocktail party.

Jacob is already down there somewhere. A school district, flush with state money, has hired him to expand a program for gifted children. First the children are identified, then they are placed in small classes with specially trained teachers, and then they are tracked and studied over the long term. Jacob is enthusiastic, pleased to be regarded as a young hotshot, an innovator. He can build something here, he says. The system shouldn’t neglect the most promising individuals. He flew out before Joan and Harry and bought a house in a place called Valle de los Toros, one of those California towns that melt invisibly into the next, forming a continuous, hundred-mile-long patchwork of coastal domesticity.

“Really,” Jacob says to Joan as they unpack the kitchen things, “what they’ve done is taken suburbia to the next level, cut out the middleman.” He has emptied a box of newspaper-wrapped dishes, and now he makes a precarious stack of mugs in a cupboard, not bothering to rinse off the ink and dust. “People like to live in places with specific names, so they chopped the sprawl into tiny little pieces and gave each piece some fakey Spanish label. This way, we can all tell ourselves we actually live somewhere—like we have a hometown, like we’re living the wholesome small town life, when really each of us is just one fleck of pig snout in the biggest hunk of real estate sausage ever made.”

“Appetizing.”

“You’ll like it. Don’t think too much about it. It’s easy not to think when the weather’s so nice.”

Joan shuts the cupboard on the dusty mugs. “What do I have to think about anyway? Thinking’s not my thing.”

“Come on. You know I didn’t mean you specifically. I was making fun of the whole California thing.”

“Maybe you’re right. I don’t dance anymore. I should try thinking.”

“What is this? Why are you jumping on me?”

She shouldn’t trap him, poke at him. He hasn’t done anything wrong. “Sorry,” she says. She searches the kitchen for a way to change the subject. “We don’t have nearly enough stuff to fill these cupboards. It looks like we’re pretending to live here.”

He takes off his glasses, polishes them on his shirt, and puts them back on. “Sometimes you act like a child.”

“I said I was sorry.” She sounds more petulant than she intends. She hates to disappoint him. She fears the slow, corrosive trickle of reality into his adulation. There is a silence. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do here.” She gestures out the window at their patio, their overgrown lawn, Harry playing in the grass.

“Do whatever you want. Teach ballet, maybe. Or don’t. Do nothing if you want.”

Joan stares out the window.

Jacob goes on. “I don’t know how much more supportive I can be. Literally. I can’t think of anything else I can do for you. Just tell me what you want.”

“I don’t know. Nothing.” She watches Harry. “It’s the new context. I tell myself I’m making a fresh start, and then I stay the same.”

“It’s fine to stay the same. I just want you to be content. That’s really it. I don’t have a secret agenda.” He hesitates, plunges. “Most of the time now you’re here with me—really here, invested; it’s not like it was at first—and I think, good, she’s letting me know her, really know her the way people do when they’re married. And then other times you’re so distant it’s like someone’s swapped you out for a forgery. You seem like you’re going through the motions.”

Joan looks out the window. Harry is collecting dandelion puffs, gathering four or five in his small fist before he puffs out his cheeks and blows them into smithereens. The motions. She has been trained to believe that the motions are enough. Each motion is to be perfected, repeated endlessly and without variation, strung in a sequence with other motions like words in a sentence, numbers in a code. “I’m trying,” she says. She is crying.

He comes to her and puts his arms around her. “I know. But I wish you didn’t have to try so hard.”

She rests her face against his shoulder, relieved the conversation is over, that they have moved on to comforting. She knows he wants her to say she loves him. He always wants her to after he has expressed any frustration or dissatisfaction. He is afraid and wants her to soothe him. She doesn’t want to say it. She wants to grasp a barre and to go through the battements.

SANDY WHEELOCK PICKS kumquats from the tree in her backyard, dropping the tiny orange fruit into one of her daughter’s sand pails. Really she is outside because Chloe came running into the kitchen proclaiming, “The lady is doing tricks on the patio!”

“What lady?”

“Next door.”

“What tricks?”

“Belly tricks!”

Chloe had been unable to clarify (“With her feet!”), and so Sandy went out to see for herself. From the shelter of the kumquat tree, sneaking glances over the fence, she sees a slender young woman in ballet shoes, a T-shirt, and odd black overalls made of a thin, billowy material. Her hair is in a ponytail, and she is standing on a rubber mat and using the back of a metal chair as a barre, resting her heel on it and pressing her forehead against her knee. Then she briefly stands flat on both feet with her heels together before rising onto her toes and lifting one leg out and up so her pink satin shoe is well above her head. In the shaggy grass, a little boy about Chloe’s age plays absorbedly with dandelions and pinecones.

Chloe is leaping and spinning around the yard. Sandy gestures at her to calm down, but the child is lost in her game and begins to accompany herself loudly in the funny, guttural voice she uses for singing and for making her toys speak to one another. Across the fence, the ballet woman and the little boy look up.

“Hi there!” Sandy says.

The woman’s leg descends slowly, less like a leg than a settling wing, and her gaze is curious, wary, divorced from the contortions of her body. Her smile, showing small teeth, is bright and jittery. She bends to untie the pink ribbons and leaves her shoes on the rubber mat as she walks barefoot across the grass, her toes wrapped in white tape. The stranger introduces herself as Joan Bintz, and her little boy is Harry.

“I didn’t realize a family had moved in,” Sandy says. “I only saw a man.” On several evenings, she had spotted him sitting out in the late sun and reading in the same chair Joan was using as a barre. He is handsome in a bookish way, trim and dark, with a narrow face and wire-rimmed glasses, and Sandy is annoyed to discover he is married to someone so lithe, a woman who does ballet alfresco and has a son content to play with pinecones. Sandy is still dogged by the weight she gained with Chloe. Hidden by the fence, she runs a hand over her stomach, checking on it. From a distance she guessed Joan would be in her early twenties, but, up close, she looks closer to thirty, a few years younger than Sandy. She is pretty in the way someone so thin can’t help but be pretty, with a jaw both dainty and square, a sharp nose, and eyes that are large, dark, and cautious. Sandy has the impression she has been crying.

“Jacob came out first to find the house,” Joan says. “Harry and I came later. Everything’s still a mess in there. I’m having trouble making myself unpack.” She smiles again, abruptly, quavering.

“I hear you. I still have boxes in the garage, and we moved in four years ago.” Sandy lifts the pail of kumquats over the fence. “Would you like these? This tree hasn’t gotten the memo that the season’s over.”

Gingerly, Joan ventures two fingers into the bucket and extracts one of the little fruit. “Do I peel it?”

“No, you eat it whole.”

Joan holds the kumquat between thumb and forefinger as if it were a quail egg and examines it before opening her mouth and resting it on her tongue. She chews pensively. Sandy wonders if eating is always such a production with her.

“Interesting,” she says when the tiny mouthful has finally made its way down her gullet. “Like a dollhouse orange.”

“Here, take the whole bucket.” Sandy does not care for kumquats. The tangy burst of juice does not make up for the waxiness and bitter oil of their rinds. Gary likes them and plucks them like jujubes from a bowl she keeps on the kitchen counter. “We’ve got a million.”

Joan smiles—unforced for the first time—and reaches for the pail. “That’s so nice.”

Though she would never say so, Sandy holds the opinion that mothers who keep their figures have sacrificed less than mothers who have widened and softened. Furthermore, though the idea is only half formed and well buried beneath her good nature, she suspects thin, maidenlike mothers, who might more easily find new men, of being less committed to their children than she is. Joan is a very thin mother to be sure—and, at first appraisal, maybe too tightly wound—but her gratitude for the kumquats softens Sandy, who says, “It’s none of my business, but are you okay?”

Joan’s eyes well up. She bends her head, hiding behind the fence. Sandy observes that her forehead is perhaps higher and rounder than ideal and is gratified by the imperfection. “I’m a little homesick,” she says.

“For where?”

“Nowhere, really. I just feel uprooted. It’s fine. I’ll settle in.”

“Moving is very stressful,” Sandy says. “You’re stressed—you’d be a freak if you weren’t. Do you want to come in for a cup of tea or something? Shot of tequila?”

But Joan has noticed Chloe, who is still dancing. “How old is your little girl?”

Chloe stands on one foot and hops in a circle, arms straight up over her head like she is riding a roller coaster. Sandy studies her, trying to see what has interested Joan, but only sees a child at play. “She just turned four.”

“Harry is four, too. Does she take dance?”

“No. She does tumbling.”

Joan fingers her ponytail, frowning. Sandy doesn’t want to have to talk about Joan’s ballet shoes, the exercises at the chair, the flexibility that the husband must enjoy. “What does your husband do?” she asks.

And Joan’s answer sends a thrill through Sandy because she and Gary know Chloe is gifted. There can be no doubt, Gary says. Their daughter observes more keenly and learns more rapidly than any child he has ever met. Gary should know, too—he was a gifted child and an excellent student until he got bored in high school and stopped trying. He’s always wished someone had challenged him. “Aren’t teachers supposed to inspire you?” he says. “None of mine could have inspired paint to dry.” And his dad had been a dud, and his baseball coach hadn’t liked him. With a little encouragement, a little recognition, who knows how high he might have risen? Admittedly, he’s great at his job, but, given half a chance, he might have done something more significant than managing the leasing office at the mall. He might have made the big leagues or been a professor or a doctor or something. Sandy was never very studious, and she worried when she was pregnant that her genes would drag down Gary’s. But even when Chloe was a baby, Gary could see all the smart things Chloe did, and now Sandy just wants to get her tested already, stamped as gifted, so they can relax.

“Come inside,” she tries again. “Have something to drink. Bring your son.”

Joan looks back at her house, her discarded ballet shoes. “I should finish.”

“Oh, come on,” Sandy says. “Live a little.”

In a few minutes, Joan is at her front door, her white-taped toes and battered feet in a pair of rubber sandals, a cardigan over the billowy overalls even though it is eighty degrees out, her son hanging from her hand. This, Sandy knows, ushering them inside, is the beginning of something. They will live the next part of their lives side by side, their children growing up in tandem. Even though she doesn’t quite like this thin, wary woman yet, she will try to be her friend. They are neighbors.

“WELCOME!” JACOB SAYS, opening the door for the Wheelocks. “Come in before you blow away.” It is October, and the Santa Anas are in full force—dry, prickly autumn winds that whip trees around and howl at windows and rattle leaves along the gutters and pile them in the corners of yards. Driving home from school, Jacob had seen an actual tumbleweed blow through an intersection. Californians treat the winds as a weather event of grave importance. On Santa Ana days, his colleagues discuss them in knowing, respectful tones, squinting at the horizon like Bedouins crossing the Sahara. Somewhere up north in LA County, a brushfire has started, and the evening sky is a hazy orange grey.

The Wheelocks have a posed, formal look on the doorstep, and they don’t lose it as they come inside and go through the greeting routine. Jacob can’t blame them for being uncomfortable; he hasn’t been able to establish a rhythm with either Sandy or Gary, but he is glad Joan has a friend and that the kids get along. Harry leans against Jacob’s leg and Chloe against Gary’s. The children regard each other with serious faces, full of solemnity and apprehension about their impending playtime. Chloe, Jacob fears, is the reason Sandy and Gary are tense around him. According to Joan, Sandy talks a lot about how gifted the child is, and indeed every time Jacob goes next door to pick up Harry or runs into Gary taking out the trash, he is regaled with another overblown story about this little girl he strongly suspects falls within the normal range of intelligence. Jacob has already decided that he can’t be the one to test Chloe next year.

Sandy is carrying a rectangular pan covered in foil, a cake for Joan’s thirtieth birthday. “Double fudge!” she says.

Probably with a lard center, Jacob thinks. Joan’s main complaint about Sandy, reluctantly confided, is that she gets after her to eat more, and now that he’s started paying attention, Jacob has noticed Sandy pushing food on Joan like she’s planning to turn her into foie gras. Gary holds out a bottle of wine by its neck, showing the label. “Thought we’d have a nice little cabernet.”

Jacob leans in to look it over and nods, sure the other man knows his appreciation is feigned. “Joan says you’re a connoisseur.”

Gary waves the word away. “Barely.”

He is tall, an advantage he emphasizes by affecting a slight stoop whenever Jacob speaks, as though otherwise Jacob’s words might not find their way all the way up to the lofty altitude of his ears. He has a small head and a fox’s triangular face and narrow, sly eyes. On weekends and in the evenings he is devoted to his road bike and cycles for hours, crouched head down over the handlebars that curl like rams’ horns, decked out in a stretchy neon green outfit that displays his lean, if borderline stringy, physique. His hair is always side parted and combed in a careful fluffy swoop over his forehead, and he dresses for work as though he were heading off to some trading floor and not the leasing office at the mall, favoring striped suspenders and blue shirts with white collars and cuffs. For Joan’s birthday dinner, he has opted for yachting attire: a white Izod shirt with the collar turned up, chinos, and loafers with no socks. Jacob, in jeans, longs to tease him, but the man is humorless.

Jacob takes the wine. “Birthday girl’s in the kitchen,” he says, leading them down the carpeted hallway that connects the living room with the rest of the house. The Wheelocks’ house is a mirror image to the Bintzes’, and Jacob always feels unnerved in their same-but-different rooms, oddly violated by the sight of another family living in a box the same size and shape as the box that contains his family and their unique life. The children scramble away upstairs to play. Jacob walks slowly so that Sandy and Gary have a chance to admire a wall of enlarged photos of Joan onstage, midleap in a tutu or striking a modern, angular pose in a leotard. He picked them out himself and had them framed. In the only photo Joan chose, she arches backward over Arslan Rusakov’s arm. Rusakov’s face is turned away. Her throat is taut and exposed, and her eyes bore into the lens. Jacob dislikes the photo and the pulse of anxiety it causes in him, but Joan said the others were pointless without it.

Sandy bustles ahead in a hurry to deliver her cake while Gary pauses and leans close to one photo and then another, scrutinizing. Even though this is what Jacob wanted, he doesn’t like the man’s silence or his nose just inches from Joan’s leotard. “Come on into the kitchen,” he says. “We’ll open the bottle.”

The wine has turned. As soon as they clink a toast to Joan, Gary sips and then barks so loudly everyone jumps, “Spit it out! Just spit it out. It’s piss.”

Sandy and Jacob swallow—after all, the wine is only a little sour, not too terrible, not poison—but Joan is startled into letting hers splash out of her mouth and back into her glass.

“You try to give people a nice bottle,” Gary says, “and look what happens.”

“No big deal,” says Jacob. “We have wine here.”

“No, the fun’s gone out of it. I’ll just have beer.” Gary crosses to the sink and upends the bottle. The purple liquid glugs away down the drain.

When they sit down to dinner, Gary fixes Jacob with a hard stare meant to suggest he won’t be easily fooled and asks how anyone can really be sure which kids are gifted and which aren’t. “No offense to your profession,” he says, “but how can a test really prove anything? What if some kids are so gifted they resent tests? Some kids don’t like structure, you know, they get bored easily. It seems to me like those kids might be some of the ones you’re looking for.”

Harry and Chloe are under the table pretending to be dogs—they are going to be dogs for Halloween—and Jacob slips one of them a bit of chicken, uncertain if fingers or teeth take the scrap. “Well,” he says, “with five-year-olds, boredom and rebellion don’t tend to be big problems. If you have a five-year-old who’s too disillusioned to take a standardized test, that kid’s probably not a good match for the program anyway. You make a fair point though, Gary, because it’s true that people test differently on different days and over the course of their lives. And there are different forms of intelligence—Howard Gardner’s idea. People think IQ is the be-all and end-all, but it’s not.”

“But IQ’s what counts, isn’t it? For your program?”

“For the purpose of grouping children into special day classes, psychometrics are the best tool we have right now,” Jacob says.

Beside him, Joan sits watching the Wheelocks eat, her own plate untouched, tensely monitoring the trajectory of each forkful. She has already apologized for her cooking, which no number of compliments will ever convince her has gotten pretty good. No number of compliments will convince her of anything, and one of Jacob’s projects in their marriage is to wean her off perfectionism. After Harry turned two, some private impulse had driven her, finally, to learn how to prepare something other than hard-boiled eggs and yogurt. He had played it cool, being careful not to overpraise her first mangled meals—Joan has no patience for flattery—but even now, two years and immense gains in skill later, even the simplest recipes tie her in knots, and she murmurs the instructions to herself as through incanting over a dangerous potion.

“Joan, you eat like a bird on a hunger strike,” Sandy says. Obediently, Joan takes a bite of salad.

“Don’t hassle her,” Gary scolds. He gives Joan a brisk, apologetic nod, and she looks back at him, stymied. Her knife and fork hover over her plate. Jacob has wondered if Gary has the hots for Joan, but that doesn’t seem quite right. More likely Gary just appreciates her as a physical template, a more refined model of wife than his own. Something about dancers’ bodies, the obviousness of their manufactured perfection, makes people brazen about looking and commenting.

Flustered, Sandy redirects her attention to Jacob. “What do you mean, people can be gifted in other ways?”

“The gist is that someone who might not do well with traditional academic tasks could still have other aptitudes. Like for music or spatial relations. Or someone might have interpersonal gifts.”

“That’s you, honey,” Gary puts in, conciliatory.

“Or someone might be physically gifted—Gardner calls it bodily-kinesthetic intelligence—and be an excellent athlete or a dancer like Joan.” Jacob strokes his wife’s leg under the table, then remembers the children and stops.

Gary says, “I aced an IQ test when I was a kid. Off the charts, I guess.”

Jacob nods politely, as though it were possible to “ace” an IQ test. All people want to do is tell him about their IQs, which are either off the charts or, in the case of a certain breed of red-faced men on airplanes, so low they almost put me out with the cattle, but, sure enough, a few years down the road I started my own business, and now you wouldn’t believe what I’m worth, so just goes to show you IQ tests don’t amount to a pile of beans.

“What I’m afraid of with Chloe,” Gary goes on, “is that she won’t get the support she deserves.”

“That happened to Gary,” says Sandy. “No one challenged him.”

“I’m not complaining, but I want Chloe to have every opportunity.” Gary wipes his mouth, drops his napkin back into his lap, shakes his head. “Every opportunity.”

“In my experience,” Jacob says, hearing and regretting the preachy note in his voice, “the key is to allow children to discover what they’re passionate about.”

“How old are you?” Gary asks.

“Twenty-eight.” Before he can stop himself, he adds, “And a half.”

Gary’s smile is controlled and contemptuous. “Robbing the cradle,” he says to Joan.

A yipping comes from under the table. “Do I hear a puppy?” Sandy says. “Is there a puppy under this table?”

The yipping turns to a howl and then trails off.

Sandy leans to one side and lifts the tablecloth, peering underneath. “What kind of puppy is it?”

“Two puppies!” Harry announces. “And one’s a bitch!”

Gary dives under the table like a sea lion after a fish. “Excuse me, young man? What did you say?”

Jacob feels his son’s small hand on his knee. He bends and peers into the dim space, at the small curled bodies of the children and the large staring faces of Sandy and Gary. “Dad,” whispers Harry. “A bitch is a girl dog. Chloe’s a girl. We’re playing dogs.”

“You’re right,” Jacob tells him, “but it’s also a bad name people call each other to be mean. Probably you should just avoid saying it.” He sits back up, and the Wheelocks surface too.

Joan is fighting the giggles and losing. For a long minute she turns away, shielding her face while the others watch in silence. It’s the tension, Jacob knows. In high school she would laugh when someone got yelled at in class. When she looks up, her eyes are red and watering. “Sorry,” she says to Gary and Sandy, her face crimping with the effort of seriousness. “I didn’t even know he knew that word.”

“He owes Chloe an apology,” Gary says.

“As far as he knew, he was being factual,” says Jacob. “If we make a big deal out of it, we only draw attention to it.”

Joan trembles in her chair, tears rolling down her cheeks. He can’t look at her or he’ll laugh too.

Gary runs his tongue over his incisors, close mouthed, making a gorilla face. “Thanks for the parenting lesson, but Chloe needs to know she’s respected.”

“He’s not being a misogynist. They’re playing puppies.”

“I don’t see what’s funny.”

Joan plunks her elbows down on the table, making the china rattle, and presses her face into her hands. Jacob feels himself being pulled after her as though by a tether. As he tries not to laugh, he makes an accidental strangled sound, which sends him shooting off the edge. He lists toward her and presses his face into her shoulder. She leans back against him, shaking, and rests one hand on top of his head, lightly gripping his hair. “I’m sorry,” he wheezes. “I’m sorry. It’s contagious.”

Whether it is a blessing or curse that the contagion spreads to Sandy, Jacob doesn’t know. Probably a blessing for him and a curse for her, as Gary singles her out as the target of his most stern and outraged glaring. The children are laughing too, under the table. They are all in it together until, inevitably and abruptly, control filters back, and they pull themselves upright, hot faced, spent, vaguely ashamed.

“Got that out of your systems?” Gary asks. He has an air of beleaguered dignity, like the only sober one in a room full of drunks.

“I’m sorry,” Joan says. “I just lost it.”

Sandy waves her hands. “It feels so good to laugh like that.”

Gary’s narrow eyes cut to her, and the woman cringes. In his agitated state, Jacob is acutely aware of the guilty, animal way Sandy’s back hunches and she flashes a grimace, exposing her teeth.

“What were you saying before?” she asks Jacob. “I was interested.”

“I don’t remember.” Jacob gropes for the lost thread of his thoughts, his euphoria draining away.

“Something about passion.”

“Oh. Right. Well. My basic point was that people tend to make opportunities for themselves when they love something. Look at Joan. She saw a picture of Margot Fonteyn in a magazine when she was four and said, ‘I want to do that.’”

With the air of scoring a point, Gary asks, “Did you want to be a psychologist when you were four?”

Joan dabs her eyes one last time with her napkin, rises, and begins clearing their plates. Jacob has noticed their ongoing refusal to acknowledge her dancing. When he mentioned it to Joan, she brushed him off, saying she’s not a dancer anymore, she doesn’t need anyone to make a big deal about it. “No,” Jacob says, resisting the urge to ask if Gary had played Mall Leasing Office as a kid, “but I was always interested in people and the way their minds work.” He twists in his chair, watching his wife. Everything she does is elegant, including carrying dirty dishes for a pair of boors. “Joan, tell them how you remember feeling when you saw that picture.”

“I was so little.”

He holds out his hand, beckoning her back from the kitchen. “Tell them.”

She comes closer, uncertain, like a fawn, her cheeks flushed from laughing. Even those few steps betray her as a dancer. She hasn’t lost her turned-out, precise walk. She is so upright, so deliberate; her head is supported so regally by her long neck.

“It’s silly,” she says, “but I just loved her. I loved this woman I’d never met. I didn’t even know what to call her or why she was up on her toes. I wanted an explanation. I had to find out what that picture meant.”

The Wheelocks look at each other. Gary raises his eyebrows slightly, skeptically. “Well,” he says, “it’s getting late.”

Sandy puts a hand on his arm. “No, Joan has to have cake.”

“Did you ask her if she wants cake?”

“It looks delicious,” Joan says.

“Joan was the one who helped Arslan Rusakov defect,” Jacob persists, avoiding his wife’s eyes so as not to see her surprise that he would bring up Rusakov. “Did she tell you that? She drove the getaway car. Have you heard of him?”

“I read the newspaper every day,” Gary says. “Of course I’ve heard of him.”

Sandy is staring after Joan, who has retreated to the kitchen. “Joan, you never said.”

“It’s ancient history.” Joan’s voice floats back from the kitchen. “It could have been anyone. I just did what some strangers told me to do. Should I light these candles?”

“You can’t light your own birthday candles,” Sandy says.

“EVERY FAMILY HAS a mythology,” Jacob says in bed, lying on his side with his arms folded across his chest. His pillow pushes his glasses away from his face at a funny angle. Joan has always found his postures of relaxation to be odd and stiff, and this one is no exception. He looks like a tipped-over mummy.

“How so?”

“You know, everyone has a role and an epithet and a story about how they came to be who they are.”

“Epithet?”

“Like, ‘Unappreciated-Genius Gary.’”

“Hmm.” Joan considers. She has always liked it when Jacob comes up with these theories. They become games to play, puzzles to solve. Lying on her back, she stretches her arms up and eyes them critically, letting her elbows and wrists curve out so she is holding an oval of air, her fingertips almost touching. Her arms are still thin enough, but she is losing tone. She drops them. “Perfectionist Joan.” She points a finger at him before he can protest. “It’s what you think.”

“Then what am I?”

They stare at each other, and Joan senses they are both trying to gauge how truthful the game should be. “Gentle Jacob,” she offers.

“Jacob the Nerd.”

“Jacob the Gentle Nerd?”

He smiles, and she can see that he will not offer up one of the labels they know would be more accurate: Jacob the Proud, Jacob Who Does Not Make Mistakes. It must have cost him to mention Arslan to Gary. He says, “Perfectionist isn’t the first word I think of when I think of you.” His tone is mild, but the game has turned dangerous.

“No? What is?”

He rolls onto his back, looks at the ceiling. She likes his profile: his strong chin with its dense, clipped beard, his long nose with a bump just below the bridge. “Unobtainable.”

“Oh, Jacob. I have been obtained.”

Behind his glasses, his eyes briefly close. “You know what I mean. It’s vestigial.”

She considers climbing on top of him, kissing him, but he will recognize the cheapness. She could tell him there is no one she would rather be married to, that her love is growing, but slowly, accumulating imperceptibly the way trace minerals in dripping water build rock structures in caves, and it would all be true. But what he wants is impossible—he wants to change the past, for everything to happen in the right order. He wants them to love each other equally, but he is afraid of what it would be like if they did.

“I haven’t laughed like that in a long time,” she says. “I used to lose it in high school when someone would get in trouble. Remember? It was the same at ballet. If Tchishkoff really tore into someone, I’d get the giggles. I felt like a monster. Some poor girl would get ripped apart, and I’d have to leave because I was laughing so hard. What is that?”

“You’re what’s known as a sociopath. You have no empathy.”

“Oh, okay. Glad to have a diagnosis.” After a moment, she says, “You know, if I had loved you right away, like I should have, when I was fourteen, you would have gotten tired of me, and I wouldn’t have you now. I had a whole plan, you see. You fell for it.”

He turns to look at her. “I am such a dupe.”

She slides across the sheets, hooks one leg over him, and sits up so she is straddling his belly. She rests both her hands on his chest and looks down at him. The beauty of sex, Elaine said once, is that you don’t have to talk. Jacob’s hands come up to clasp her thighs. His chin lifts; his eyelids droop. Desire looks like something going away at first, an ebbing. Sex is something they do well together. With Arslan, fear had made her ravenous. Even his laziest, most perfunctory touches had thrilled her because they meant he was not yet gone. She had clambered around doing his bidding, neither of them considering what she wanted. There is no thrill with Jacob, but there is comfort and pleasure and the freedom that comes from trust.

He shifts. His hands move to her hips. “Why don’t we ever talk about having another baby?”

He must feel her unease because his hands stop moving, and his eyes lose their dreaminess. “We do,” she says.

“Not really. I hint, and you dodge.”

Sitting on him has become awkward, but she is afraid he will take it as a rejection if she moves away. “No, I don’t.”

“You do. Look, if you don’t want another one, you should at least say so.”

“How can you be sure you want another one?”

He nudges her off him, not roughly but with an apologetic grimace. “You’re sitting on Sandy’s cake. I just am. I see us with another. I liked having sisters.”

“God, a girl.” Joan sits cross-legged, one of her knees against his thigh, and picks at her fingernails. “I don’t know. I don’t know if I want to risk all the things that can go wrong. Everything would be different if we had another. Why take the chance? Why mess with something that’s working?”

“No,” Jacob says, excited, lifting onto his elbows. “No, you have to be biologically brave. It’s in our nature to take that chance. I understand the fear, but I don’t think fear should be enough to stop us.”

“You’re not the one who has to be pregnant and give birth. You don’t have to push another person out of yourself. I hear women say they forget all about birth as soon as it’s over, but I didn’t. I don’t know why nobody seems to take birth into account when they think about having a baby.”

“A few stretch marks aren’t the end of the world, Joan.”

“I’m not ready.”

After a moment, he pulls her down beside him, her head on his shoulder. “I wish you wanted one.”

“I know.”

After another silence, he sets his glasses on the nightstand and switches off the light. In the dark, lying against his body as though it were a gently respiring bolster, she imagines she can feel his thoughts coming through his skin like a fever. She feels his disappointment, his accusatory argument that she had been willing to trick him into conceiving a baby when he was young and unprepared but now that he has spent five years proving himself as a husband and father, she is unmoved by his desire for another. She feels him criticizing her vanity, rejecting her concern for her body as unjustified, even pathetic, now that she doesn’t perform. She feels his sadness that the family he imagined isn’t to be. She feels his love grow less dense around her, like fog lifting.

But, really, all she can feel is his breathing. It strikes her as strange that two people lying quietly in the dark, remote in their thoughts, locked away in their bodies, have everything necessary to make a third person who will, barring tragedy, lie quietly through darknesses long after they are dead. She had excused herself from Jacob’s love when they were teenagers because she was young and unprepared, a luxury she hadn’t granted him. But now she is his, they are each other’s, and for him to be unhappy, to love her less, is intolerable.

“There’s still time,” she says. “I need a little more time.”

Under her ear, she feels a pulse in his shoulder. That his heart has begun to pound with hope makes hers pound with fear. She should give him what he wants. She will, just not quite yet.

“When?” he says.

“Soon.”

He shifts to lie squarely on her. She touches his face. In the early days, his weight had felt oppressive, suffocating, but now the burden of him is comforting. “I can live with soon,” he says.

She doesn’t want to have to say anything else. She pulls his head down and meets his mouth with hers.