We Need to Talk About Kevin

NOVEMBER 15, 2000

Dear Franklin,

You know, I try to be polite. So when my coworkers—that’s right, I work, at a Nyack travel agency, believe it or not, and gratefully, too—when they start foaming at the mouth about the disproportionate number of votes for Pat Buchanan in Palm Beach, I wait so patiently for them to finish that in a way I have become a treasured commodity: I am the only one in the office who will allow them to finish a sentence. If the atmosphere of this country has suddenly become carnival-like, festive with fierce opinion, I do not feel invited to the party. I don’t care who’s president.

Yet too vividly I can see this last week through the lens of my private if-only. I would have voted for Gore, you for Bush. We’d have had heated enough exchanges before the election, but this—this—oh, it would have been marvelous. Loud, strident fist pounding and door slamming, me reciting choice snippets from the New York Times, you furiously underscoring op-eds in the Wall Street Journal—suppressing smiles the whole time. How I miss getting exercised over bagatelle.

It may have been disingenuous of me to imply at the start of my last letter that when we conferred at the end of a day, I told all. To the contrary, one of the things that impels me to write is that my mind is huge with all the little stories I never told you.

Don’t imagine that I’ve enjoyed my secrets. They’ve trapped me, crowded me in, and long ago I’d have liked nothing more than to pour out my heart. But Franklin, you didn’t want to hear. I’m sure you still don’t. And maybe I should have tried harder at the time to force you to listen, but early on we got on opposite sides of something. For many couples who quarrel, just what they are on opposite sides of may be unformed, a line of some sort, an abstraction that divides them—a history or floating grudge, an insensible power struggle with a life of its own: gossamer. Perhaps in times of reconciliation for such couples the unreality of that line assists its dissolve. Look, I can jealously see them noting, there is nothing in the room; we can reach across the sheer air between us. But in our case, what separated us was all too tangible, and if it wasn’t in the room it could walk in of its own accord.

Our son. Who is not a smattering of small tales but one long one. And though the natural impulse of yarn spinners is to begin at the beginning, I will resist it. I have to go further back. So many stories are determined before they start.

What possessed us? We were so happy! Why, then, did we take the stake of all we had and place it all on this outrageous gamble of having a child? Of course you consider the very putting of that question profane. Although the infertile are entitled to sour grapes, it’s against the rules, isn’t it, to actually have a baby and spend any time at all on that banished parallel life in which you didn’t. But a Pandoran perversity draws me to prize open what is forbidden. I have an imagination, and I like to dare myself. I knew this about myself in advance, too: that I was just the sort of woman who had the capacity, however ghastly, to rue even so unretractable a matter as another person. But then, Kevin didn’t regard other people’s existence as unretractable—did he?

I’m sorry, but you can’t expect me to avoid it. I may not know what to call it, that Thursday. The atrocity sounds torn from a newspaper, the incident is minimizing to the point of obscenity, and the day our own son committed mass murder is too long, isn’t it? For every mention? But I am going to mention it. I wake up with what he did every morning and I go to bed with it every night. It is my shabby substitute for a husband.

So I have racked my brain, trying to reconstruct those few months in 1982 when we were officially “deciding.” We were still living in my cavernous loft in Tribeca, where we were surrounded by arch homosexuals, unattached artists you deplored as “self-indulgent,” and unencumbered professional couples who dined out at Tex-Mex nightly and flopped about at the Limelight until 3 A.M. Children in that neighborhood were pretty much on a par with the spotted owl and other endangered species, so it’s little wonder that our deliberations were stilted and abstract. We even set ourselves a deadline, for pity’s sake—my thirty-seventh birthday that August—since we didn’t want a child who could still be living at home in our sixties.

Our sixties! In those days, an age as bafflingly theoretical as a baby. Yet I expect to embark to that foreign land five years from now with no more ceremony than boarding a city bus. It was in 1999 that I made a temporal leap, although I didn’t notice the aging so much in the mirror as through the aegis of other people. When I renewed my driver’s license this last January, for example, the functionary at the desk didn’t act surprised I was all of fifty-four, and you remember I was once rather spoiled on this front, accustomed to regular coos over how I looked at least ten years younger. The coos came to a complete halt overnight. Indeed, I had one embarrassing encounter, soon after Thursday, in which a Manhattan subway attendant called my attention to the fact that over-sixty-fives qualified for a senior discount.

We’d agreed that whether we became parents would be “the single most important decision we would ever make together.” Yet the very momentousness of the decision guaranteed that it never seemed real, and so remained on the level of whimsy. Every time one of us raised the question of parenthood, I felt like a seven-year-old contemplating a Thumbellina that wets itself for Christmas.

I do recall a sequence of conversations during that period that lurched with a seemingly arbitrary rhythm between tending toward and tending against. The most upbeat of these has surely to be after a Sunday lunch with Brian and Louise on Riverside Drive. They no longer did dinner, which always resulted in parental apartheid: one spouse playing grown-up with calamatas and cabernet, the other corralling, bathing, and bedding those two rambunctious little girls. Me, I always prefer socializing at night—it is implicitly more wanton—although wantonness was no longer a quality I would have associated with that warm, settled Home Box Office scriptwriter who made his own pasta and watered spindly parsley plants on his window ledge.

I marveled in the elevator down, “And he used to be such a cokehead.”

“You sound wistful,” you noted.

“Oh, I’m sure he’s happier now.”

I wasn’t sure. In those days I still held wholesomeness to be suspect. In fact, we had had a very “nice” time, which left me bafflingly bereft. I had admired the solid oak dining set seized for a song from an upstate tag sale, while you submitted to a complete inventory of the younger girl’s Cabbage Patch Kids with a patience that left me agog. We commended the inventive salad with ingenuous fervor, for in the early 1980s goat cheese and sun-dried tomatoes were not yet passé.

Years before we’d agreed that you and Brian wouldn’t get into it over Ronald Reagan—to you, a good-humored icon with easy flash and fiscal ingenuity who had restored pride to the nation; to Brian, a figure of menacing idiocy who would bankrupt the country with tax cuts for rich people. So we stayed on safe topics, as “Ebony and Ivory” crooned in the background at a grown-up volume and I suppressed my annoyance that the little girls kept singing tunelessly along and replaying the same track. You bewailed the fact that the Knicks hadn’t made the playoffs, and Brian did an impressive imitation of a man who was interested in sports. We were all disappointed that All in the Family would soon wrap up its last season, but agreed that the show was about played out. About the only conflict that arose all afternoon was over the equally terminal fate of M*A*S*H. Well aware that Brian worshiped him, you savaged Alan Alda as a “sanctimonious pill.”

Yet the difference was dismayingly good-natured. Brian had a blind spot about Israel, and I was tempted to plant one quiet reference to “Judeo-Nazis” and detonate this affable occasion. Instead I asked him about the subject of his new script, but never got a proper answer because the older girl got chewing gum in her Barbie-blond hair. There was a long maunder about solvents, which Brian put an end to by lopping off the lock with a carving knife, and Louise got a little upset. But that was the single set-piece commotion, and otherwise no one drank too much or took offense; their home was nice, the food was nice, the girls were nice—nice, nice, nice.

I disappointed myself by finding our perfectly pleasant lunch with perfectly pleasant people inadequate. Why would I have preferred a fight? Weren’t those two girls captivating as could be, so what did it matter that they were eternally interrupting and I had not for the whole afternoon been able to finish a thought? Wasn’t I married to a man I loved, so why did something wicked in me wish that Brian had slipped his hand up my skirt when I helped him bring in bowls of Häagen-Dazs from the kitchen? In retrospect, I was quite right to kick myself, too. Just a few years later I’d have paid money for an ordinary, good-spirited family gathering during which the worst thing any of the children got up to was sticking gum in their hair.

You, however, announced boisterously in the lobby, “That was great. I think they’re both terrific. We should be sure to have them over soon, if they can get a sitter.”

I held my tongue. You would have no time for my nit-picking about how wasn’t the luncheon a little bland, didn’t you have this feeling like, what’s the point, isn’t there something flat and plain and doughy about this whole Father Knows Best routine when Brian was once (at last I can admit to a guest-room quickie at a party before you and I met) such a hell-raiser. It’s quite possible that you felt exactly as I did, that this to all appearances successful encounter had felt dumpy and insipid to you as well, but in lieu of another obvious model to aspire to—we were not going to go score a gram of cocaine—you took refuge in denial. These were good people and they had been good to us and we had therefore had a good time. To conclude otherwise was frightening, raising the specter of some unnamable quantity without which we could not abide, but which we could not summon on demand, least of all by proceeding in virtuous accordance with an established formula.

You regarded redemption as an act of will. You disparaged people (people like me) for their cussedly nonspecific dissatisfactions, because to fail to embrace the simple fineness of being alive betrayed a weakness of character. You always hated finicky eaters, hypochondriacs, and snobs who turn up their noses at Terms of Endearment just because it was popular. Nice eats, nice place, nice folks—what more could I possibly want? Besides, the good life doesn’t knock on the door. Joy is a job. So if you believed with sufficient industry that we had had a good time with Brian and Louise in theory, then we would have had a good time in fact. The only hint that in truth you’d found our afternoon laborious was that your enthusiasm was excessive.

As we spun through the revolving doors onto Riverside Drive, I’m sure my disquiet was unformed and fleeting. Later these thoughts would come back to haunt me, though I could not have anticipated that your compulsion to manhandle your unruly, misshapen experience into a tidy box, like someone trying to cram a wild tangle of driftwood into a hard-shell Samsonite suitcase, as well as this sincere confusion of the is with the ought to be—your heartrending tendency to mistake what you actually had for what you desperately wanted—would produce such devastating consequences.

I proposed that we walk home. On the road for Wing and a Prayer I walked everywhere, and the impulse was second nature.

“It must be six or seven miles to Tribeca!” you objected.

“You’ll take a taxi in order to jump rope 7,500 times in front of the Knicks game, but a vigorous walk that gets you where you’re going is too exhausting.”

“Hell, yes. Everything in its place.” Limited to exercise or the strict way you folded your shirts, your regimens were adorable. But in more serious contexts, Franklin, I was less charmed. Orderliness readily slides to conformity over time.

So I threatened to walk home by myself, and that did it; I was leaving for Sweden three days later, and you were greedy for my company. We roistered down the footpath into Riverside Park, where the ginkgoes were in flower, and the sloping lawn was littered with anorexics doing tai chi. Ebullient over getting away from my own friends, I stumbled.

“You’re a drunk,” you said.

“Two glasses!”

You tsked. “Middle of the day.”

“I should have made it three,” I said sharply. Your every pleasure rationed except television, I wished that sometimes you would let go, as you had in our salad days of courtship, arriving at my door with two pinot noirs, a six of St. Pauli Girl, and a lecherous leer that did not promise to hold off until we’d flossed.

“Brian’s kids,” I introduced formally. “They make you want one?”

“M-m-maybe. They’re cute. Then, I’m not the one who has to stuff the beasties in the sack when they want a cracker, Mr. Bunnikins, and 5 million drinks of water.”

I understood. These talks of ours had a gameliness, and your opening play was noncommittal. One of us always got lodged into the role of parental party pooper, and I had rained on the progeny parade in our previous session: A child was loud, messy, constraining, and ungrateful. This time I bid for the more daring role: “At least if I got pregnant, something would happen.”

“Obviously,” you said dryly. “You’d have a baby.”

I dragged you down the walkway to the riverfront. “I like the idea of turning the page is all.”

“That was inscrutable.”

“I mean, we’re happy? Wouldn’t you say?”

“Sure,” you concurred cautiously. “I guess so.” For you, our contentment didn’t bear scrutiny—as if it were a skittish bird, easily startled, and the moment one of us cried out Look at that beautiful swan! it would fly away.

“Well, maybe we’re too happy.”

“Yeah, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. I wish you could make me a little more miserable.”

“Stop it. I’m talking about story. In fairy tales, ‘And they lived happily ever after’ is the last line.”

“Do me a favor: Talk down to me.”

Oh, you knew exactly what I meant. Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesn’t tell well. And one of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story. I should know; I am in flight from my story every day, and it dogs me like a faithful stray. Accordingly, the one respect in which I depart from my younger self is that I now regard those people who have little or no story to tell themselves as terribly fortunate.

We slowed by the tennis courts in the blaze of April sunlight, pausing to admire a powerful slice backhand through a gap in the green mesh windbreaks. “Everything seems so sorted out,” I lamented. “Wing and a Prayer has taken off so that the only thing that could really happen to me professionally is for the company to go belly-up. I could always make more money—but I’m a thrift-shop junkie, Franklin, and I don’t know what to do with it. Money bores me, and it’s starting to change the way we live in a way I’m not totally comfortable with. Plenty of people don’t have a kid because they can’t afford one. For me it would a relief to find something of consequence to spend it on.”

“I’m not of consequence?”

“You don’t want enough.”

“New jump rope?”

“Ten bucks.”

“Well,” you conceded, “at least a kid would answer the Big Question.”

I could be perverse, too. “What big question?”

“You know,” you said lightly, and drew out with an emcee drawl, “the old e-e-existential dilemma.”

I did not put my finger on why, but your Big Question left me unmoved. I far preferred my turn of the page. “I could always traipse off to a new country—”

“Any left? You go through countries the way most folks go through socks.”

“Russia,” I noted. “But I’m not, for once, threatening to ransom my life to Aeroflot. Because lately… everywhere seems kind of the same. Countries all have different food, but they all have food, know what I mean?”

“What do you call that? Right! Codswallop.”

See, you’d a habit back then of pretending to have no idea what I was talking about if what I was getting at was at all complicated or subtle. Later this playing-dumb strategy, which began as gentle teasing, warped into a darker incapacity to grasp what I was getting at not because it was abstruse but because it was all too clear and you didn’t want it to be so.

Allow me, then, to elucidate: Countries all have different weather, but they all have weather of some sort, architecture of some sort, a disposition toward burping at the dinner table that regards it as flattering or rude. Hence, I had begun to attend less to whether one was expected to leave one’s sandals at the door in Morocco than to the constant that, wherever I was, its culture would have a custom about shoes. It seemed a great deal of trouble to go to—checking baggage, adapting to new time zones—only to remain stuck on the old weather-shoes continuum; the continuum itself had come to feel like a location of sorts, thereby landing me relentlessly in the same place. Nevertheless, though I would sometimes rant about globalization—I could now buy your favorite chocolate-brown Stove brogans from Banana Republic in Bangkok—what had really grown monotonous was the world in my head, what I thought and how I felt and what I said. The only way my head was going truly somewhere else was to travel to a different life and not to a different airport.

“Motherhood,” I condensed in the park. “Now, that is a foreign country.”

On those rare occasions when it seemed as if I might really want to do it, you got nervous. “You may be self-satisfied with your success,” you said. “Location scouting for Madison Avenue ad clients hasn’t brought me to an orgasm of self-actualization.”

“All right.” I stopped, leaned on the warm wooden rail that fenced the Hudson, and extended my arms on either side to face you squarely. “What’s going to happen, then? To you, professionally, what are we waiting and hoping for?”

You waggled your head, searching my face. You seemed to discern that I was not trying to impugn your achievements or the importance of your work. This was about something else. “I could scout for feature films instead.”

“But you’ve always said that’s the same job: You find the canvas, someone else paints the scene. And ads pay better.”

“Married to Mrs. Moneybags, that doesn’t matter.”

“It does to you.” Your maturity about my vastly outearning you had its limits.

“I’ve considered trying something else altogether.”

“So, what, you’ll get all fired up to start your own restaurant?”

You smiled. “They never make it.”

“Exactly. You’re too practical. Maybe you will do something different, but it’ll be pretty much on the same plane. And I’m talking about topography. Emotional, narrative topography. We live in Holland. And sometimes I get a hankering for Nepal.”

Since other New Yorkers were so driven, you could have been injured that I didn’t regard you as ambitious. But one of the things you were practical about was yourself, and you didn’t take offense. You were ambitious—for your life, what it was like when you woke up in the morning, and not for some attainment. Like most people who did not answer a particular calling from an early age, you placed work beside yourself; any occupation would fill up your day but not your heart. I liked that about you. I liked it enormously.

We started walking again, and I swung your hand. “Our parents will die soon,” I resumed. “In fact, one by one everyone we know will start pitching their mortal coils in the drink. We’ll get old, and at some point you’re losing more friends than you make. Sure, we can go on holidays, finally giving in to suitcases with wheelies. We can eat more foods and slug more wines and have more sex. But—and don’t take this wrong—I’m worried that it all starts getting a little tired.”

“One of us could always get pancreatic cancer,” you said pleasantly.

“Yeah. Or run your pickup into a concrete mixer, and the plot thickens. But that’s my point. Everything I can think of happening to us from now on—not, you know, we get an affectionate postcard from France, but really happen-happen—is awful.”

You kissed my hair. “Pretty morbid for such a gorgeous day.”

For a few steps we walked in a half embrace, but our strides clashed; I settled for hooking your belt loop with my forefinger. “You know that euphemism, she’s expecting? It’s apt. The birth of a baby, so long as it’s healthy, is something to look forward to. It’s a good thing, a big, good, huge event. And from thereon in, every good thing that happens to them happens to you, too. Of course, bad things, too,” I added hurriedly, “but also, you know, first steps, first dates, first places in sack races. Kids, they graduate, they marry, they have kids themselves—in a way, you get to do everything twice. Even if our kid had problems,” I supposed idiotically, “at least they wouldn’t be our same old problems… ”

Enough. Recounting this dialogue is breaking my heart.

Looking back, maybe my saying that I wanted more “story” was all by way of alluding to the fact that I wanted someone else to love. We never said such things outright; we were too shy. And I was nervous of ever intimating that you weren’t enough for me. In fact, now that we’re parted I wish I had overcome my own bashfulness and had told you more often how falling in love with you was the most astonishing thing that ever happened to me. Not just the falling, either, the trite and finite part, but being in love. Every day we spent apart, I would conjure that wide warm chest of yours, its pectoral hillocks firm and mounded from your daily 100 pushups, the clavicle valley into which I could nestle the crown of my head on those glorious mornings that I did not have to catch a plane. Sometimes I would hear you call my name from around a corner—“Ee-VA!”—often irascible, curt, demanding, calling me to heel because I was yours, like a dog, Franklin! But I was yours and I didn’t resent it and I wanted you to make that claim: “Eeeeeee-VAH!” always the emphasis on the second syllable, and there were some evenings I could hardly answer because my throat had closed with a rising lump. I would have to stop slicing apples for a crumble at the counter because a film had formed over my eyes and the kitchen had gone all liquid and wobbly and if I kept on slicing I would cut myself. You always shouted at me when I cut myself, it made you furious, and the irrationality of that anger would almost beguile me into doing it again.

I never, ever took you for granted. We met too late for that; I was nearly thirty-three by then, and my past without you was too stark and insistent for me to find the miracle of companionship ordinary. But after I’d survived for so long on the scraps from my own emotional table, you spoiled me with a daily banquet of complicitous what-an-asshole looks at parties, surprise bouquets for no occasion, and fridge-magnet notes that always signed off “XXXX, Franklin.” You made me greedy. Like any addict worth his salt, I wanted more. And I was curious. I wondered how it felt when it was a piping voice calling, “Momm-MEEE?” from around that same corner. You started it—like someone who gives you a gift of a single carved ebony elephant, and suddenly you get this idea that it might be fun to start a collection.

P.S. (3:40 A.M.)

I’ve been trying to go cold turkey on sleeping pills, if only because I know you’d disapprove of my using them. But without the pills I keep tossing. I’ll be worthless at Travel R Us tomorrow, but I wanted to get down another memory from that period.

Remember having soft-shell crabs with Eileen and Belmont at the loft? That evening was wanton. Even you threw caution to the winds and lurched up for the raspberry brandy at 2 A.M. With no interruptions to admire dolly outfits, no tomorrow is a school day, we gorged on fruit and sorbet and splashed immoderate second shots of clear, heady framboise, whooping at each others’ top-this tales in the orgy of eternal adolescence characteristic of the childless in middle age.

We all talked about our parents—rather to their collective detriment, I’m afraid. We staged an unofficial contest of sorts: whose parents were the most bonkers. You were at a disadvantage; your parents’ uninflected New England stoicism was difficult to parody. By contrast, my mother’s ingenious contrivances for avoiding leaving the house made for great hilarity, and I even managed to explain the private joke between me and my brother Giles about “It’s very convenient”—the catchphrase in our family for “They deliver.” In those days (before he was reluctant to let his children anywhere near me), I had only to say “It’s very convenient” to Giles, and he guffawed. By the wee-smalls I could say “It’s very convenient” to Eileen and Belmont and they cracked up, too.

Neither of us could compete with that interracial vaudeville team of been-around-the-block bohemians. Eileen’s mother was schizophrenic, her father a professional cardsharp; Belmont’s mother was a former prostitute who still dressed like Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and his father was a semifamous jazz drummer who had played with Dizzy Gillespie. I sensed that they’d told these stories before, but as a consequence they told them very well, and after so much chardonnay to wash down a feast of crabs I laughed until I wept. Once I considered bending the conversation toward this monstrous decision you and I were trying to make, but Eileen and Belmont were at least ten years older, and I wasn’t sure childless by choice; raising the matter might have been unkind.

They didn’t leave until almost 4 A.M. And make no mistake: On this occasion I’d had a wonderful time. It was one of those rare evenings that had proved worth the bustle of rushing to the fish market and chopping all that fruit, and that should even have been worth cleaning up the kitchen, dusty with dredging flour and sticky with mango peel. I could see being a little let down that the night was over, or a little heavy with too much booze, whose giddy effects had peaked, leaving only an unsteadiness on my feet and a difficulty in focusing when I needed to concentrate on not dropping the wine glasses. But that wasn’t why I felt dolorous.

“So quiet,” you noticed, stacking plates. “Beat?”

I noshed on a lone crab claw that had fallen off in the skillet. “We must have spent what, four, five hours, talking about our parents.”

“So? If you feel guilty about bad-mouthing your mother, you’re looking at penance until 2025. It’s one of your favorite sports.”

“I know it is. That’s what bothers me.”

“She couldn’t hear you. And no one around that table assumed that because you think she’s funny you don’t also think she’s tragic. Or that you don’t love her.” You added, “In your way.”

“But when she dies, we won’t, I won’t be able to carry on like that. It won’t be possible to be so scathing, not without feeling traitorous.”

“Pillory the poor woman while you can, then.”

“But should we be talking about our parents, for hours, at this age?”

“What’s the problem? You were laughing so hard you must have wet yourself.”

“I had this image, after they left—the four of us, all in our eighties with liver spots, still boozing it up, still telling the same stories. Maybe tinged with affection or regret since they’d be dead, but still talking about weird Mom and Dad. Isn’t it a little pathetic?”

“You’d rather anguish over El Salvador.”

“It’s not that—”

“—Or dole out cultural after-dinner mints: Belgians are rude, Thais disapprove of groping in public, and Germans are obsessed with shit.”

The tinge of bitterness in such jibes had been on the increase. My hard-won anthropological nuggets apparently served as reminders that I’d gone on an adventure abroad while you were searching suburban New Jersey for a tumbledown garage for Black and Decker. I might have snapped that I was sorry my travel stories bored you, but you were mostly teasing, it was late, and I wasn’t in the mood to scrap.

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “I’m like everyone else: I love to talk about other people. Not peoples. People I know, people close to me—people who drive me crazy. But I feel as if I’m using my family up. My father was killed before I was born; one brother and one mom make for pretty slim pickings. Honestly, Franklin, maybe we should have a kid just to have something else to talk about.”

“Now that,” you clanged the spinach pan in the sink, “is frivolous.”

I stayed your hand. “It’s not. What we talk about is what we think about, is what our lives are about. I’m not sure I want to spend mine looking over my shoulder at a generation whose lineage I’m personally helping to truncate. There’s something nihilistic about not having children, Franklin. As if you don’t believe in the whole human thing. If everyone followed our lead, the species would disappear in a hundred years.”

“Get out,” you jeered. “Nobody has kids to perpetuate the species.”

“Maybe not consciously. But it’s only been since about 1960 that we’ve been able to decide without joining a nunnery. Besides, after nights like this, there might be poetic justice in having grown kids talking for hours to their friends about me.”

How we shelter ourselves! For the prospect of such scrutiny clearly appealed to me. Wasn’t Mom pretty? Wasn’t Mom brave? Gosh, she went to all those scary countries all by herself! These flashes of my children’s late-night meditations on their mother were gauzy with the very adoration so signally absent from my savage dissection of my own mother. Try, Isn’t Mom pretentious? Isn’t her nose huge? And those travel guides she grinds out are sooooo boooooring. Worse, the deadly accuracy of filial faultfinding is facilitated by access, by trust, by willing disclosure, and so constitutes a double betrayal.

Yet even in retrospect this craving for “something else to talk about” seems far from frivolous. Indeed, I may have first been enticed into the notion of giving pregnancy a go by these tempting little imaginative packages like movie previews: of opening the front door to the boy on whom my daughter (I confess I always imagined a daughter) has her first crush, soothing his awkwardness with easy banter, and assessing him endlessly—playfully, ruthlessly—once he is gone. My yearning to stay up late with Eileen and Belmont for once ruminating about young people whose lives lay before them—who made new stories, about which I would have new opinions, and whose fabric was not threadbare from retelling—was real enough, it wasn’t flip.

Oh, but it never entered my head what, once I was finally provided my coveted fresh subject matter, I would have to say. Much less could I foresee the aching O. Henry irony that in lighting upon my consuming new topic of conversation, I would lose the man that I most wanted to talk to.