Part 14 (1/2)

She smiled. ”Actually, it feels great.” She patted her stomach. ”Want to?”

”I'll take your word,” he said, blus.h.i.+ng and turning away; it was like refusing to look at someone's family pictures. He took his empty coffee cup to the sink, then he turned around. ”He?”

Sylvie's face filled with color. ”Oops,” she said. ”Sorry.”

”No, don't apologize,” he said. ”You think it's a boy?”

She grinned. ”I can just see you teaching him to catch.” Lowering her voice, she said, ”OK, Hank, down thirty and out five.”

He looked at her curiously; what else had she imagined? He didn't know how to respond. ”I don't think it would be Hank,” he said, finally. He glanced at his watch. ”Where's Julia?”

THE GUESTS ARRIVED shortly after one: just two other couples. Henry fixed drinks, and they ate Julia's soup in the study to be near the fire. It was the first time they'd had company since Sylvie's arrival, and he was relieved that she seemed to be at ease. She told a funny story about the nuns when she was a little girl, and Julia roared with laughter, leaning so far back in the rocking chair where she sat that Henry thought she would fall. It was this, Henry thought, her obvious affection for Sylvie, that was making everyone relax.

At the table they all admired Sylvie's napkins, and although Henry was afraid it would embarra.s.s her, she seemed pleased. She stood up and gave a little demonstration of how she'd folded the pockets, and then, encouraged, went on to show how to make a flower out of a napkin; a bird, a bow. What are her other talents, someone wanted to know. There was an awkward silence and Henry cringed at the condescension. Then Julia rushed in with ”baking,” and Sylvie, crimson but laughing, patted her stomach and stunned Henry by saying, ”Nothing's as loving as something from the oven.”

Everyone laughed, and the pie was served as evidence. Raising his winegla.s.s, Henry toasted the crust with the cider in it, saying he'd always known he could count on Sylvie for the magic touch. At the other end of the table, Julia cupped her chin in her hand and smiled a smile of pure love at him, and it occurred to him that in a few weeks Sylvie would be gone and his life with Julia would close back in on itself. And he knew, too, that someday, in a month or a year or five, he would discover that he had begun to think of the child as their child; it would just take time.

As they were leaving, one of the guests, Ivy, whose three sisters had made her an aunt three times in the last year, asked Sylvie how much longer she had, and when Sylvie said ”Two weeks,” ushered her into the hallway where she made her stand sideways, against the wall.

”What are you doing?” Julia asked.

Without thinking Henry said, ”She wants to see if the baby has lightened.”

Julia stared at him.

”He means dropped,” Ivy told her. ”Same thing.”

Still Julia didn't speak.

”The baby's head,” Ivy said. ”It's in position for delivery, I can tell.” She wagged a finger at Julia. ”You haven't done your homework.”

Now Julia turned away from Henry, and he saw the edge of a huge, gaping silence, and he knew he could do nothing about it. Then someone began taking coats from the coat closet, cheeks were kissed, good-byes said, and the door was opened onto the dark rain.

Julia went into the dining room and came back with her wine. She took a sip of it, her eyes on Henry. ”Explain,” she said.

Sylvie touched Julia's shoulder. ”You remember-when the baby's ready to come out its head moves down into the pelvis.” She smiled. ”It presses on your bladder and you have to pee all the time again.”

Julia swallowed the rest of her wine. She stared at Henry, her lips narrowed into a thin line, and for a moment he was afraid she was going to throw the winegla.s.s at him. ”What I want to know,” she said, ”is where you got that word.”

He hesitated. ”I'm not sure,” he said. ”I must have heard it somewhere.”

Sylvie put her hand on her stomach.

Julia turned to her. ”Are you all right?”

”I think so. Maybe I should sit down.”

”All that rich food,” Julia said. ”Let's put you in front of the fire.” She avoided looking at Henry; instead she guided Sylvie into the study.

He followed them. The fire had died down and he added a couple of logs, then stood watching until the blaze began to climb again.

Sylvie was in the easy chair, her eyes closed, one hand on her stomach. Julia sat on the chair's arm, stroking Sylvie's hair. ”I'll do the dishes,” Henry said. He didn't wait for a response.

THERE WERE PLATES and gla.s.ses and pots and pans all over the kitchen. He began stacking them next to the sink, then decided to take a quick walk first, just a minute or two to clear his head. He took his umbrella from the closet, made sure the door would lock when he closed it, and went outside. It was only then that he patted his pocket and realized he didn't have his keys. He was about to knock on the door but stopped himself-they weren't going anywhere.

Walking through the quiet streets of his neighborhood, he breathed in the cold, wet air until his lungs began to ache. He found himself thinking of the night when he proposed to Julia. At the time, they'd known each other for only seven months, but the idea had been in his head for the last five; he would lose and regain his nerve several times a week. At one point he even bought a diamond ring only to return it the next day, telling himself it was absurd to think that to change your life all you had to do was buy a piece of jewelry. On the evening when he decided to ask her, she made dinner for the two of them at her apartment, and while they were eating he felt so sick with apprehension that he barely spoke. Finally, while she was in the kitchen making coffee, he couldn't take it anymore. He went and stood in the doorway until she turned around, and he said-and he hated this, what an oaf-”Julia, I want you to get married.” But she didn't laugh. He would always remember that-it had saved him. She didn't even giggle.

The rain was falling harder. In the distance, Henry could hear the occasional swish of a car driving through a puddle. He turned up his collar and headed back toward home. When he got there, he knocked at the door, but no one answered. He knocked again, harder. Finally he made his way around the side of the house to the study window.

Sylvie was still in the easy chair, but Julia was on the rug. She was leaning sideways against Sylvie's legs. Her shoulders were shaking. Henry took a step closer and one of the spokes of his umbrella tapped against the window, but they didn't even turn to look. Sylvie leaned over and put an arm around Julia's shoulder, but Julia pulled away. Her face was in her hands, and she was shaking her head. Then she looked up and placed her hands flat on Sylvie's belly, and her face filled with all the anguish of a desire never to be satisfied. And Henry watched as Sylvie said the words that he had never once said-I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.

”NAME THE QUAD CITIES,” said Tillman.

It was the middle of the morning and we'd just crossed the Mississippi and entered Iowa. I tried to remember the highway signs we'd pa.s.sed. ”Moline,” I said. ”East Moline.” I was stuck. ”North Moline and South Moline?”

”I'm sorry,” said Tillman. ”You do not win the walnut dinette set. The correct answer is: Moline, Rock Island, Bettendorf, and Davenport.”

”Rock Island sounds pretty.”

”It's the armpit of the Mississippi. How about a sandwich?”

I laughed. ”Don't you want to save them for lunch?”

”No,” he said. ”We'll stop for lunch in Iowa City.”

I reached for the cooler, which was sharing the backseat with our suitcases, a gift-wrapped bottle of Scotch, and Tillman's gun. The Scotch was for Tillman's brother, Casey, whom we were going to visit. The gun was so Tillman-and I-could shoot some pheasants. ”Or maybe some ducks,” he'd said. ”We'll see.”

The trip had come about almost by accident. Tillman and I had been keeping company for only a few months, but one of the routines we had established was that on Sunday mornings when we woke up together we'd buy coffee to go from the local greasy spoon and walk out to look at the lake: I grew up forty minutes from the Pacific Ocean and went to college thirty minutes from the Atlantic, but Tillman was from the dead center of the country and Lake Michigan still thrilled him. One chilly October morning as we walked along the city streets Tillman sucked in his breath and put a hand to his chest as he let it out again. ”It's a perfect fall day,” he said. ”Makes me feel like killin' animals.” I laughed, but I had seen the gun and knew he liked to hunt. His hunting belonged in a category with former lovers and the most crus.h.i.+ng adolescent humiliations: I didn't think we were ready for it yet. ”You laugh now,” he said. ”Wait till you try it. You're a lady who could shoot, I'd put money down.” I experienced the usual guilty pleasure his calling me a lady made me feel-it wasn't something I'd ever been called by anyone I hadn't irritated in some way. (”Lady, move your car” I had heard before I met Tillman, but not ”You're a lady I could see having dinner with,” which he said about five minutes after we met.) I said I probably wasn't a lady who could shoot but that we'd never know, would we-and here we were.

I handed Tillman an egg-salad sandwich and took an apple for myself. ”Isn't this fun?” he said. ”And the great thing is, we've still got about six hundred miles to go.”

I moaned. ”Maybe we should play a license plate game or something. Did you used to do that when you were little?”

”I was never little,” Tillman said. ”You know those little white booties babies wear? I had basketball shoes.”

”Come on-when your family went on trips? We'd have races to see who could spell out the European capitals first.”

”That a.s.sumes someone knows them,” he said. ”Anyway, we didn't go on trips.”

A light rain had begun to fall and Tillman switched on the winds.h.i.+eld wipers. I looked at him. There was something in the way he held himself, in the relations.h.i.+p of head, neck, and shoulders, that made me very happy. And he had such a winning way of driving a car: one hand on the wheel, the other in his lap, an alert look on his face but not too alert-he wasn't looking for trouble but he could handle it.

”So you're ready for me to meet your brother,” I said.

He pressed his lips together in a sly smile. ”Amy. It's hunting we're going to do. Pretend it's a coincidence my brother'll be there.”

”OK,” I said, nodding. ”That's what I'll do.” And in that way we continued to keep on hold any discussion of our, as my friends called it, feasibility.

AN HOUR OR so later we began to see exit signs for Iowa City. Tillman had spent eight years there, first as a student at the University of Iowa and then working in a bakery, baking m.u.f.fins from four in the morning until noon. It was hard for me to reconcile that Tillman with the one I had been getting to know, who worked as a lab technician at Northwestern Hospital, but he insisted the two jobs weren't very different: he liked his hours better now was the main thing.

We ended up in a crowded little diner where our waitress was actually a waiter: a man with a shaved head wearing a flowered dress of the type someone's mother might have worn to a garden party in the fifties.