It Takes a Worried Man

Henry’s Women

Henry had already bought a bottle of pinot noir before he remembered he’d have to drink it all himself.

A steamy, rain-dark evening in Houston. Kate lived west of Rice: funky student housing, beer signs and naked-lady posters in most of the grimy windows. A hamburger joint sealed the street at the end of her block, along with a second-run cinema. Tonight, Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast was on.

Kate’s place was a surprisingly large walk-up: six rooms, two stories above a liquor store.

Kate and Ben’s place, Henry reminded himself. As recently as last week she’d shared it with the capricious bastard. Henry’s nerves nearly folded him in two.

She met him at the door wearing an airy smock. Elegant yellow. Apparently, she took his gaze to be critical. Frowning, she turned her head and twisted a curl of her hair. “Maternity clothes,” she said. “Yuck.”

“I think it’s nice.” She noticed the bagged bottle in his hand. “I forgot you couldn’t drink,” he said.

“Would you like some?”

“A small glass. After I wrestle your boxes.”

“I really appreciate this.” She stood aside to let him in.

Eight boxes, tightly taped, blocked most of the chairs and the couch in the living room. Henry carried them, one by one, up the rickety attic steps. “Geez, what’s in these?” he asked, huffing.

“Clothes, college yearbooks — I don’t even know,” Kate said. “Ben packed them himself. I just want them out of sight.”

With the boxes finally stowed, Henry settled on her couch, an old hounds-tooth affair. The room looked spare now (had Ben already moved his share of the furniture?). A framed David Hockney print (L.A. pool, pale blue) hung above a portable black-and-white television; azaleas drooped in clay vases on a tiny glass-topped table. Henry smoothed his straight black hair, dabbed at a scuff on his shoe. Kate brought him a glass of wine.

With obvious pain she bent forward, toward the couch. Henry held out his arm. She smiled, shook her head no, then plunked herself down.

He sipped his pinot noir, and accidentally made a sucking sound. He felt himself blush. “So,” he said. “Do you know what the baby’s going to be? Or do you believe in that sort of thing? The tests and stuff.”

“Oh yes, I’ve been through it all. Amniocentesis, ultrasound. Doctor says it looks like a girl.”

“Right. I guess they make you take the tests.”

“They’re all girls at first. I think. I mean, I don’t understand this chromosome stuff, but something odd has to happen to make the X-Y switch — to make a hoy.” She poured herself a glass of Fresca. “Ever been married?”

“No.”

“Smart.”

“How’d you meet Ben?” he asked. If she’d told him the other night, he didn’t remember.

“Computer convention, downtown Ramada, six years ago. No — seven, now. He’s a television newswriter.” Kate was with Wang.

“Is he your first? Husband?”

“Only. And last.”

Henry fingered the stem of his glass. She was more bitter, tonight, than the last time they’d talked. “I understand,” he said, though he didn’t, not really; nor did he know if he should have accepted her slightly desperate invitation this evening.

Last Saturday, when he’d met her at a friend’s dinner party, she’d been astonishingly direct about the wreck of her marriage. “We still love each other,” she’d confided to him over stuffed lobster and long-grain rice. “But he can’t handle the baby.”

Henry had been flattered by the apparent ease she felt with him (she didn’t open up to just anyone at the dinner, he’d noticed). And he’d felt moved by her beauty in spite of her swollen belly.

Or — the thought disturbed him still — because of it.

Always before, he’d been drawn to slender, boyish figures. He promised himself he wasn’t going to stumble over the first woman he saw now, at his first outing in weeks. For God’s sake, he hadn’t been that lonely since Meg.

As they’d eaten dinner, to protect what he’d convinced himself was his brutally Meg-bashed heart, he had tried to find Kate ugly. Mentally, he had listed hateful words: bulbous, eggplant, behemoth. But no matter how meanly he’d barbed his thoughts, she looked gorgeous. He’d felt a surging sexual urge in her direction.

She’d gone on about her unexpected pregnancy, her financial pressures, Ben’s ambivalence about the baby, and his decision to leave. Henry had lost himself in her long, starry earrings, her slender nose, her light-brown eyes. Her sweater had kept sliding up on the boldly curving mound of her abdomen. It was the best thing he’d seen in months.

By dinner’s end, charmed by her candor, shocked by his ratcheting pulse (he had felt physically winded), Henry had given her his numbers, home and work — a clumsy moment — and told her to get in touch with him if he could help her in any way.

Then, this morning, she’d called him at the office. “I’m sorry to bother you,” she said.

“No, no.” He’d just traded eight quarters for a vending-machine sandwich, turkey with mayo. He wiped his mouth with his handkerchief, as though she could see him. “How are you?”

“A little queasy today. I’m kind of embarrassed — ”

“What is it?” Henry said.

“Ben’s being a first-class shit. I need help lifting boxes.”

“I’m off at five.” He had to meet with a couple of clients and go through last year’s tax returns with them. “Can I bring you anything? Food? Medicine?” Did pregnant women take medicine?

“I’ve got some spaghetti if you’d like to stay for dinner,” she said. “Bring a jar of sauce, the Paul Newman stuff? Tastes like motor oil — I’m afraid everything tastes vaguely automotive to me these days — but I like Paulie’s eyes.”

She refilled his glass.

“I see Beauty and the Beast is playing down the street,” Henry said.

“Oh, I love that movie.”

“Would you like to go see it? Maybe tomorrow?”

“I don’t think so. Too romantic.”

“Nothing wrong with a little romance, right?” He sounded nerdy to himself.

“Except it’s a lie,” Kate said. “I mean, who ever thought I’d end up raising a kid by myself?”

Henry felt brave now. The wine. Her startling honesty. “Did you ever consider not having it?”

“No. That’s not a problem for me, you know, I’ve got no religious qualms about it, but … I always wanted a child,” Kate said. She was going to cry, Henry saw. “The truth is, I didn’t think Ben would really leave.”

He didn’t know what to say. He held her hand. “It’s okay. Listen, why don’t you let me cook the spaghetti? You sit still.”

“Oh, the spaghetti. I forgot.”

Idiot, Henry chided himself. Now she probably figured he only cared about his stomach.

“That’s nice,” she said.

He’d been stroking the back of her hand.

“You know, the worst part about pregnancy …” Kate squeezed her thighs with her hands. “It’s what it does to your conception of yourself. As a woman, I mean. I look in the mirror and think, what a bloated, ugly — ”

“No,” Henry said.

She turned to him. “Do you think I’m —?”

He placed his palm on her belly. “I think you’re exquisite,” he said.

The tears came now. She tried to laugh. “I’m being vain — ”

“Shhh.”

Neither of them made the spaghetti. Henry finished his wine and left (he’d forgotten Paul Newman anyway). “Are you sure you can drive?” Kate had said.

Something seemed to have solidified between them, but they were shaken by the suddenness, and felt a need — they both knew it without speaking — to step back and think. She had made him promise to call.

Weaving home in his car, a little drunk, he wondered what he’d fallen into. Rebound, he thought. This poor, lovely woman’s ricocheting all over the city.

And what about him? Maybe he was needier than he’d dreamed.

A baby? A little girl?

A pair of university students — female, male — went jogging past a pizza parlor in the rain. Henry watched them in the neon bath of a Pepsi sign. I’d like a small deep-dish, extra cheese, with pepperoni and X-Y chromosomes, please.

At home he made himself a bologna-and-pickle sandwich and caught the tail end of a Tracy-Hepburn movie on TV Affectionate repartee, romantic wit — bullshit, he thought, in Kate’s weary voice. Still, he enjoyed the couple onscreen.

He looked around. His apartment seemed especially barren tonight, though in fact the chairs had taken over. Meg had kept only the green recliner. Somehow, Kate’s half-empty place had felt more welcoming and whole than his well-stocked kitchen and den.

The pink envelopes in which he mailed his rent checks (supplied annually, in packets of twelve, by the investment firm that owned his building) sat on the counter next to his cutting board and knives. The Hot Pink of Authority, of single people living in generic rooms all over this quarreling, splitting city. He stuffed the envelopes into a drawer.

The smell of Kate’s hair came back to him. Coconut. Sea breeze. Sweetness and … Jesus, too much wine, he thought. He sat to stop his spinning head. The chair was hard. “Damn it,” he said aloud, hoping to nudge his mind off Kate, “that green recliner was mine!” Meg had kept the best piece and cast off the no-goods. In the shock of their separation, he’d agreed.

“Time to renegotiate,” he spurred himself.

He remembered, then, that today — tonight — was his birthday. Twenty-eight. In his two years with Meg, she’d always remembered to plan a celebration.

He toasted Katharine Hepburn. “Happy birthday,” he told the snowy screen.

That night he dreamed pregnant dreams: rising dough, hot-air balloons, great windy dirigibles.

His first girlfriend, Markie Barnes, was a dentist’s daughter. They were sophomores in high school together. The night she told him he’d be the luckiest boy in the world tonight, she also said, “I’ve got, you know, medicine to keep it safe.”

He didn’t know what she meant. Had she smuggled a pain-killing drug out of her father’s office? Would they need relief? Later, he misunderstood her again and thought she’d called the sticky stuff “homicidal jelly.”

He’d slept with two women in college, Natalie Sparks and Lisa Baines, neither of whom really loved him — they’d made that persistently clear — but each time, with each woman, the sex had been without pain. They both loved movies, especially the old Hollywood romances — Lubitsch, The Thin Man series — that played at the repertory theater near the Rice campus. Each Friday night it was cheeseburgers or pizza, kisses in black-and-white, then blind groping in the stale mess of a dorm room: textbooks, Glamour magazines — or at Henry’s place, his roommate’s exotic beer bottle collection.

“Don’t worry about babies,” Natalie used to tell him. “We’re covered on that front, hon.” He wondered what the panting, the salty taste of popcorn on Natalie’s full lips, had to do with the glib banter between Nick and Nora Charles.

Lisa liked to wait until the last possible moment, after she’d urged him inside and he was well past controlling his impulses, to whisper, “Come on, come on, that’s it, you can’t resist me, can you, honey, I’ve taken care of everything.” He’d never bought a condom, not once.

He understood he tended toward the “passive” (a term he’d learned in an introductory psychology course, junior year). He knew he should take more initiative in life, but somehow, preparing for sex, premeditating it, always felt to him like the morning his mother had caught him pawing through her panty drawer. He’d been — what? — nine or ten. Frightened. Embarrassed. After her sputtery scolding that day, he stayed out of women’s spaces, though his curiosity often swelled, like the smell of mothballs in a bolted closet.

Two years ago, when he’d met Meg at a jazz bar on lower Westheimer, he learned right away that she was the take-charge type. She introduced herself to him — “Larsen,” she said, “Meg”—and bought him a drink. She asked him home a week later, after their second date. It was her idea that they move in together. She was the one who ended the affair.

In all that time, it didn’t occur to him to ask her about birth control. Of course she’d see to it. She saw to everything. To even raise the question would have insulted her organizational skills, on which she prided herself keenly. “You know that book, The Five-Minute Manager?” she asked him once. “I do it all in three.”

Each night she whispered herself to sleep, ticking off tomorrow’s tasks until she was still and lost beside him.

These attempts to order life’s sloppiness Henry found touching — the way she stacked her pillows on her side of the bed, folded her clothes neatly in the laundry hamper. His things — wallet, ties, handkerchiefs — sprawled around the rooms like relaxed, friendly guests.

One morning, shortly before their second anniversary together, Meg pressed him, “Do you think you’d like to be a father someday? What do you think of children?”

They’d never even talked about marriage. “Don’t you think we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves?” he asked. He didn’t mean to stall; he’d honestly never considered kids.

“I don’t know. It’s just something I’ve been thinking about,” Meg said.

“Well, how do you feel?”

“I asked you, Henry. Don’t turn it around on me.”

“I don’t know.”

“Forget it, then.”

“Well, I don’t.”

After that, she acted impatient with him whenever he broached the subject. He still didn’t know how he felt; on the other hand, he had no trouble at all picturing himself with a little girl or boy, playing catch on a lawn, scribbling dragons with crayons, or singing the child to sleep with tales of princes or cows. These thoughts even warmed him — maybe he knew how he felt after all.

But Meg wouldn’t talk about it now. She looked more exhausted than usual each evening when she returned from her job at the advertising agency. One night she went to bed immediately after supper. “What’s the matter?” he whispered. She flinched when he touched her.

“I’m tired of having to make up my mind, and yours, about every little thing, Henry.”

His hand stiffened on her hip. “That’s not fair, Meg, and you know it.”

“No?” He caught the scornful edge in her voice, a quick swipe in the air like a lawn-mower blade. “I’ve tried and tried to get you to act — ”

“Exactly! You even want to plan my taking control!”

“That’s not true.”

“When you’re ready to discuss something, we have to decide on the spot, right? I like to take a little more time, honey, be a tad more careful — ”

“Damn you, Henry!”

“Well, damn you too!”

“I can’t stand it!”

“Who’s asking you to?”

That night he spent, angry, on the couch, listening to her wracked sobbing in the bedroom. In the morning he apologized; so did she, and that evening they baked a nice lasagna together (she insisted on adding a dash more basil after he’d stuck it in the oven), and made love after dinner.

Two weeks later, she disappeared for a couple of days, a Thursday and a Friday. When she showed up again, early Saturday morning, looking washed-out and weary, she wouldn’t tell him where she’d been.

“For God’s sakes, I was frantic, Meg. I was ready to call — ”

“I had to be on my own for a while, to think things through.”

“What things?”

“Our things.”

“You had me worried sick.”

“Henry.” She touched his arm — more gently, he thought later, than she ever had. “I want you to move out,” she said.

He woke with the sliver of a hangover, a piercing ache right above his left ear.

At lunch, he called Kate from work. “How are you feeling?”

“Better today, thanks. It’s such a relief to wake up and not see those boxes. Thank you. I’m afraid I was a bit of a pill last night — ”

“Not at all.”

“No, I was in a pissy mood. I know I wasn’t pleasant. If you’re still game, I’d like to see the Cocteau film. My treat, okay? Make it up to you.”

He assured her she didn’t owe him a thing, but they agreed to meet at the theater at seven. He spent the afternoon tracking the quarterly losses of a local shoe company, a raggedy wholesale outfit whose CEO had come to him for help. Their books were a tangle, and by the time he got off work he was beat.

Kate in her yellow smock perked him up. She’d tied her hair in a lazy bun; it wasn’t going to stay, and he found himself gleefully eager, waiting for the soft and sexy tumble.

The theater was sparse, stale, cramped. The film — an old, scratchy print — broke twice, blurred: Beauty looked as bristly as the Beast. The crowd booed. Henry didn’t care. He was happy, holding Kate’s hand. He cried at the end, when the handsome lovers kissed.

Afterward they walked to the hamburger shop to split a basket of fries (“I’m craving grease,” Kate said, “platters and platters of grease”). Kitschy paintings of Marilyn and Elvis lined the light-green walls, old 45s (“Telstar,” “My Boyfriend’s Back,” “Love Potion Number Nine”) stocked the restored, ancient jukebox, and a pair of fifties’ car fins crowned big silver doors marked “Guys” and “Gals.”

The Cokes came in thick glass cups with paper straws.

Henry loved the good-old-days decor, the laughter, the talk. Men and women at play. “They do nostalgia very well here,” he said. “Kind of romantic.”

Kate nodded.

“Anything wrong?”

“No. Well. Ben and I used to come here.”

“Oh,” Henry said. “Of course. Of course. We can go somewhere else.”

“It’s not the place, Henry. Really. I like it. It’s … when you mentioned nostalgia …”

“What?” He touched her hand.

“It hit me: that was Ben’s whole deal. I mean, look where I live.”

Henry reconsidered the tables. He noticed the curves of the booth seats, the plump leather angles that spilled people into each other, accommodating the body’s desires. “I’m not a college kid,” Kate said. “But here I am, right in the middle of the Nikes and the back-assward baseball caps. Why?” She shook her head. “Ben wanted to ‘stay young.’ He liked living like a student. Reminded him of his best days, as a fraternity jock.”

“Football?”

“Soccer and track.” She slurped her Coke. “And fucking.”

Henry squeezed her fingers.

“I knew of at least a couple of affairs he had right after we married. He’s probably having one now.” She rubbed her eyes. “He doesn’t want a baby because he’s an immature little piss-ant.”

“A deadbeat.”

“A son of a bitch.”

They laughed together.

All along, these last few days, Henry had been thinking of Ben as The Bastard. Anyone who’d give up ample Kate —

“Well,” she said. “It’s a weary old story.”

“Not to you. To you it’s your life.”

She looked at him, over the cooling basket of fries. “You’re a nice man, Henry.”

“I like you.”

“I know,” she said. Behind her, Marilyn tried to fluff down her skirt.

He fed Kate a fry. “Where would you live if you could?” he asked.

She told him she’d been a high school exchange student in Germany, and loved the countryside, but the rules! “I couldn’t survive long in such an ordered world.” She bobbed her head to the music from the jukebox. Her bun loosened just a bit. “What? Why are you laughing?” she said.

He described his life under Meg’s iron rules.

“Poor Henry.”

“Oh, it wasn’t — ”

“Really, Henry. She doesn’t sound human.”

“No?”

“More like a robot. Perfectly programmed.”

Had he made her sound so bad? He hadn’t meant to. “She tried hard,” he said quickly. “She wanted things to be nice.”

“Still,” Kate said. “Even so.”

Uneasy (on Meg’s behalf?), he squirmed, ordered a second Coke.

That early Saturday morning, back from her trip, Meg had looked entirely too human, Henry thought: pale, almost ill.

In those first few minutes, when he’d tried to learn where she’d been, he’d said, “I even called your office. They didn’t know anything.”

“I didn’t tell them I was leaving,” Meg had said.

“You just took off?”

“That’s right.”

“How will you explain your absence to your bosses?”

“I’ll give them a reason they’ll be too embarrassed to challenge.” She’d thought for a moment. “I’ll tell them I had an abortion.”

A mind like an instruction manual, Henry thought, full of tight little plans, even under pressure.

Kate didn’t want the rest of the fries.

They walked slowly back to her place in prickly, misty rain, bright from reflections of the buzzing curbside signs. On the sidewalk in front of the liquor store, near the stairs that led to her door, her bun finally unraveled, a shock, a gift, a festival of fragrance. “Kate,” Henry whispered, and kissed her.

In bed she rubbed his thighs. He spread almond oil on her belly. “That’s wonderful,” she said. She closed her eyes. “My doctor says some women, when they’re pregnant, lose all interest in sex.”

Henry tickled her navel, an oval bloom as delicate as that of his old girlfriend, Markie. “Yes?”

“It hasn’t been true for me.”

Fertile Kate! “I’m glad,” he said.

“My breasts are a little sore. Go easy.”

“How’s this?”

“Mmmm.” She lay in his arms. “Henry?”

“Yes?”

“Do you think you could do me a favor tomorrow?”

He raised his head.

“Can you drive me to the clinic? I have an appointment at two with my doctor. More tests.”

He pictured his desk calendar. He could rearrange his meeting with the shoe man. “Sure.”

“Henry?”

He kissed her shoulder. “What?”

“I know it’s probably a little soon to say this — ”

“Say it anyway.”

“What’s going to happen with us?”

He turned to face her. “Right now …” he said. “Right now, what’s going to happen is, you need to take good care of yourself. I’d like to help.”

“Ben called me last night,” she said. “After you’d left. I wasn’t going to tell you.”

“Oh?” His scrotum tightened.

“I think it finally struck him,” Kate said. “He’s going to be a father whether he’s with me or not — and his daughter’s going to grow up without him.”

Henry swallowed hard, surprised at the breadth of his panic, stunned by his commitment to this woman already. “Does he want to come back?” His voice shook.

“I don’t know. I don’t think he knows. I do think he’s having a fling. I mean, all the signs are there — ”

“Like you?”

She reached for his hand. “This isn’t just a fling. I don’t know. I don’t know. There was a different tone in his voice — I think he misses me more than he thought he would.”

Henry brushed her hair with his hands. “This is what made you so glum in the hamburger place, isn’t it?”

She shrugged.

“What do you want? I mean, with Ben?”

Kate shook her head against his chest. Clearly, she was too upset to say more now.

“Guess what,” Henry said swiftly then, smiling, trying to slam-dunk the lump in his throat. “Last night? Last night was my birthday.”

“Wherever Your Heart Wanders,” said the magazine ad on his desk, “Pace Shoes Will Take You There in Comfort!” A couple, holding hands, ran through a meadow of poppies, wearing bright-yellow sneakers. If that’s the best they could do, Henry thought, it’s no wonder this lousy outfit cratered last quarter.

He’d already spoken to Mr. Pace, rescheduling for tomorrow. Now, the receiver piped “The Way We Were” into the folds of his ear. The cellos swelled like tight little bags of microwave popcorn.

Meg finally came on the line. “Larsen,” she said.

“What can you do for sports shoes?”

He thought he heard her smile. “Forget it. Nike’s cornered the market. How are you, Henry?”

“Good. You?”

“Splendid. What can I do for you? Happy birthday, by the way.”

“Thanks. It’s sweet of you to remember.”

“Do anything fun?” She almost sounded tender.

“Actually, I forgot till the end of the day.”

“And what’ve you forgotten now?”

“Nothing. I was just calling to — ”

“Really, Henry. I’m busy.”

“Well.” He hesitated. “You know that green recliner?”

Instantly, the climate of her voice eroded a few degrees. “The green recliner. Yes. You can forget that too.” Icy, icy. “We settled this.”

“Except — ”

“I forgot. Nothing’s ever settled with you, is it? It’s easier for me to become a virgin again than it is for you to make up your mind about something.”

Same old edge. She might as well have nicked him in the lungs. “Can we not be nasty?” he wheezed. “I’ve got some things of yours — that old Cindy Crawford workout book — ”

“All right. I can’t talk, I’ve got a meeting now. How ‘bout Saturday at nine? If that doesn’t work, leave a message on my home machine. Bye, Henry.”

A little detonation in his ear. Damn Barbra Streisand. And holding hands, he thought. Robert Redford too.

The ob-gyn clinic was tucked away in the back of a strip shopping center south of Rice. It shared a parking lot with a CD store, a ski shop, and a Hallmark card outlet. How did the city get so ugly, so repeatedly convenient and bland? Henry thought, staring at the mud-brown walls, the windows full of dull and expensive merchandise.

Closer now, he saw that the clinic’s parking spaces were blocked from the rest of the lot by thin wire mesh. Two men in leather coats guarded an opening in the fence. They waved him through, past a small, shouting crowd. “What’s all this?” Henry asked.

Kate pointed to two young women thrusting their fists at the car. Their faces were red. “They call themselves the CALL Girls,” Kate said. ‘“Collegians Activated to Liberate Life.’ And that guy over there, see him? He’s always here. I swear, he never rests.” She nodded at a sallow man in a black turtle-neck sweater. “He’s down from Dallas, with the Advocates for Life Ministries. They’ve lectured me every time I’ve been here, though I’ve told them they’ve got the wrong girl.”

Henry didn’t get it.

“Abortions, Henry.”

“Oh.” His fingers tingled on the steering wheel.

One of the leather-coated men escorted them from the car to a door marked “Women’s Health Services” while his partner stood firm in front of the shouters. “Harlot!” Turtleneck screamed at Kate. “Murderess!”

One of the women yelled, “Sister, stop, please! Abortions cause breast cancer! Turn back! It’s not too late!”

Turtleneck rushed, and shook, the mesh. Kate grabbed Henry’s arm. “Don’t look their way. You’ll just encourage them.” He stumbled after her into a bright beige hallway with glass doors at the end. “Katie, why do you come here?” he asked, breathless. “Aren’t there safer places?”

“I was referred to Dr. Beston once years ago, when she worked in the Medical Center, and I built a real trust with her,” Kate said calmly. “Last year she left her HMO. They’d adopted an anti-abortion policy — didn’t want the kind of trouble you just saw.”

The glass doors opened and they moved into another drab space with white-tiled floors. “Dr. Beston partnered with some other doctors here. I followed her because I like her.”

They turned a corner into a large, impersonal waiting room. Kate approached a receptionist sitting behind thick glass. The names of four gynecologists hung, on plastic strips, on the wall behind her. “Kate Moore for Dr. Beston,” she said. “I think she wants to do another ultrasound?”

Henry sat in a hard chair by a table piled with magazines. Ladies’ Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, Architectural Digest. A woman in an apron, hugged around the neck by a gap-toothed little girl, smiled at him from one of the shiny covers. A coffeemaker sat on another table nearby. Torn packets of Sweet ‘n Low lay crumpled around it, pink as his rent check envelopes.

He wasn’t the only male in the room. A teenage boy sat on the edge of a couch holding a shaking young woman. “Laura, it’s all right. Laura,” he whispered. “Shhh.” Though they had their arms around each other, there was a space between them on the couch, as if, when this awful afternoon was over, they’d shove off instantly, away from each other. It probably all began with them in a hamburger joint, Henry thought, when a booth seat spilled them together.

He looked away, embarrassed, at the posters on the walls: cutaway drawings of naked women, revealing intimate details of the uterus.

“—you’d like?” Kate was saying.

“Hm?”

“Saturday night. Your belated birthday celebration. What do you want to do?”

“Oh, stay in with you.”

Two black women at the far end of the couch were trying to cheer themselves up. “So I says to him, I says, ‘God may have gave you sperm, stud britches, but he sure as hell didn’t give you no sense.’” They cracked up.

The receptionist motioned to Kate. “Back in a flash,” Kate said, and squeezed his hand. She disappeared down another long hall.

No one in this room can afford to purchase a CD player or a pair of ski boots, Henry thought sadly, checking their clothing and looks.

“Laura, Dr. Simpson’s ready for you now,” the receptionist said. Laura jumped up, and straightened her blouse.

Henry leafed through Good Housekeeping. A recipe for key lime pie, mascara comparison charts. He was aware of a man’s voice, from a room down the hall. “—nausea?”

“A little,” a woman answered.

“All right, I’m going to wipe this off. Breathe in for me now. Good.”

Henry glanced at the teenage boy. He was rocking on the couch, gripping his head in his hands. Once, Meg had sat this way on the queen-sized bed she’d shared with Henry. He remembered the woolly heat of their room, the green recliner in the corner, the rotoring of crickets outside.

“—slightly numb. Breathe out. No, keep yourself loose, that’s it.”

“What’s happening?” Henry had asked. “What’s the matter?” Meg hadn’t answered.

How to Decorate Your Kitchen. Ten Ways to Rekindle Your Marriage. Savings Tips.

The black women laughed together.

Henry’s spine went cold.

“Big stretch. You may cramp a little. Okay.”

A low, metallic hum. Suction.

Then Kate was in the room, fishing a Blue Cross card from her purse. She handed it to the receptionist past the glass partition, turned and smiled at Henry. Down the hall, the sucking stopped.

“Kate!” A man had rushed into the clinic. He fast-walked past the couch. Henry tensed. He thought it was Turtleneck. Before he could rise from his chair, the man had grasped Kate’s arm. “Why didn’t you return my calls?”

Kate blushed. “Jesus, Ben — ”

Henry, mid-motion, somewhere between sitting and standing, didn’t move.

“What are you doing here?” Kate said.

“What am I —? What do you think? The other night, when you told me you had an appointment, I figured you’d want — ” He followed Kate’s eyes to Henry, crouched by the coffeemaker. “Who’s he?” Ben asked.

He was tall, slightly balding, ruddy and athletic. He wore a black, V-necked sweater. The Bastard, Henry thought.

Kate was arguing with him now in raspy, urgent whispers. She looked angry and embarrassed. The black women pointed and laughed. Ben just seemed confused. “But is the baby all right?” he kept saying, and, “Who the hell is he?”

Kate broke away from him, toward the examining rooms. Ben lanced Henry with a glance, then followed. “—is this bullshit?” he yelled.

The receptionist appeared to have vanished. The boy still rocked on the couch. Henry pushed by him. “Kate?” he called. The hallway was deserted.

He poked his head into a room — a cubicle, really. Empty, except for a paper-covered table with stirrups. Henry caught his breath, backed away quickly.

Someone called after him. “Sir? Excuse me, sir —?”

“Kate?” Another empty room. “Kate, are you — ” In this one, next to the waiting room, the young woman, Laura, sat on a table staring at a stainless steel tray on a cabinet. She didn’t seem to notice him. Her cotton blouse was wrinkled, her hair pulled back. The overhead light hummed, harsh. Henry stared at the tray. In it, a white fluid membrane, bright with blood.

He felt a hand on his arm. “Sir, please, you have to wait out front.”

A foot floated in the tray, no bigger than an eyelash.

“Sir. Please.”

Laura looked up at him, pale and ill.

“I’m sorry,” he said. The receptionist led him away.

Meg lived now on Swarthmore Street, on a weedy block in an otherwise fashionable area. Soon after kicking Henry out of their apartment, she’d moved. She’d cut her hours at the ad agency to take a part-time media consulting job.

She’d bobbed her hair, lost a little weight, seemed, to Henry, a bit more bosomy now.

Her house was small but decorous. Glass swans on the kitchen table. Cut flowers. A David Hockney photograph.

Henry had a couple of clients considering investing in art. Hockney, he thought. The bastard’s everywhere.

“Cream and sugar?”

He felt a little pang. She’d forgotten already. “Just black,” Henry said.

“The thing is, The Los Angeles Times earns more money in a year than any of the Central American countries it covers. How can you get balanced reporting out of that? I mean, there’s something wrong there, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know,” Henry said.

“I’m telling you, Henry, since taking this new position, I’m learning so much more than I ever dreamed about the media. I’m meeting publishers and editors and TV anchors from both coasts — they all seem to pass through Houston. What about you?”

“I live here, remember?” he said.

“No, I mean what about now? What are you up to?” She sat in the green recliner.

In their recent conversations, her voice had been flattened by the phone. Thank you for choosing American Telegraph and Monotone, Henry thought. She sounded rich now, robust and full of promise.

“I’m in love with a pregnant lady,” he said. His stomach curled. Why had he told her this?

“Yours?”

“No.”

“What is she, then, a charity case?”

He sipped his coffee, with sugar and cream.

“I swear, Henry.” She laughed. “You’re amazing. Always let the other fellow do it, right?”

He tried to laugh with her, to show her there were no hard feelings.

His hand shook, spilling coffee. He felt his face go hot. His feelings were hard. “Damn it, Meg. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Tell you what?”

He stood. On his way over, he’d thought of several ways to free the subject, like prying a stone from a dam, but none of them would work. He couldn’t even remember them now. He was too tense. He’d had no practice taking the initiative. “It was my baby too,” he said. “I should’ve had a say.”

Meg blushed. She set her cup down. “Henry …”

“Can you tell me now?”

She looked at him, astonished, for a couple of minutes or more. Her eyes misted. “I did,” she said finally. “I tried to tell you.” The richness in her voice had vanished.

“Only after the fact.” But was that really true? Would a keener man, a man more used to women’s spaces, have discerned more than he had? “God, Meg. I could’ve helped.”

She laughed softly. “You? You, Henry? The kid would’ve been in college before you decided to keep it.”

Henry rubbed his face. “The truth is, Meg, for all your talk about wanting me to do more, you couldn’t step back.” His eyes stung. “It was my baby too.”

She nodded. “Yes. It was.” She started to pour herself more coffee, then set the pot back down. “It wasn’t like me, to be so careless. I was exhausted, that spring, every night after work … what made you realize —?”

He pictured Laura’s face in the clinic. Heard, again, the humming of the ceiling lights: a drizzle of bees. “Was it awful?” he said.

“It’s what I had to do.”

He jammed his hands in his pockets, not knowing what to say.

“For both of us,” she said.

“I understand.” Though he didn’t. Not really. He turned to go.

“Henry? Henry, what about the chair?” She tried to smile. Her face had fallen, like a dark, failed cake. “Aren’t we even going to haggle?”

He stared at the swans on her table. Their necks intertwined. “Take care of yourself, Meg.” He closed the door behind him.

The leaves on the trees outside, in the glare of the streetlamp, made gentling shapes on the walls. Just below the sill, the liquor sign pulsed, purple and green. Kate kissed him. “Happy birthday,” she whispered. She pointed at a dozen pink shoe boxes, stacked together loosely. “Except I’m the one who got gifts. You’re too good to me, Henry.”

“They were a bargain. I had inside info.”

He pulled her to him, in bed. The arc of her belly reminded him of his mother’s old cedar trunk in the back of her closet. As a boy, he’d always wondered what was in it. “You know,” he said softly, “you have to decide.”

Purple. Green. Purple.

She frowned. “I can’t, Henry. Not now. Let’s not talk about it.”

“I want to buy you pumps, more sneakers, high heels, boots — ”

She stroked his chin with her thumb. “Aren’t we getting a little ahead of ourselves? One step at a time, okay? I swear, I’ve never met a man so certain — ”

“I’ve never been so certain,” he said, and he was pretty sure this was true.

“Why now?”

He touched her mouth. “I don’t know. Birthdays. I’m aware of getting old.”

“Oh, right.”

He dropped his voice: a gruff John Wayne. “Or maybe, pilgrim, I have the sense that time’s a-wastin’.”

She laughed.

He reached over and put her hand on him.

“God …”

“What?”

“It’s so strange when men get hard. It never ceases to astonish me.”

The leaf-forms on her walls squirmed like little fists. Tomorrow he’d take her to the movie — The Magnificent Seven, her first Western. He’d hold hands with her in the cool, flickering dark. On Saturday, she was meeting Ben for lunch.

Shortly, then, in the baking light of day, she’d have to decide about The Bastard.

Tonight, all he could do was continue to astonish.

“What are you thinking?” she said.

He grasped her shoulders. “I’m thinking, I don’t know how you can resist me.

“I don’t know.” She smiled, smoothed his hair, his brows, his lips. “I really don’t know.”