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time to get bored with me.”
    “I won’t get bored.”
    “Also,” Joan says, “I still feel—I don’t know—off. I mean in my body. I did when I was pregnant, too. I don’t feel like myself. I don’t feel sexy. I feel strange.”
    Jacob does ordinary, utilitarian things with his body: eat, drink, sleep, walk, jog, swim occasionally, have sex if the opportunity presents itself. He doesn’t do any of these things with unusual finesse or grace or stringency. Joan talks about her body as though it were her primary stake in the living world, an entity capable of moods separate from her own. Jacob wants her to say that both she and her body want him, that she is looking forward to a lifetime of sex with only him. But begging for reassurance is unattractive, unmanly, something he can permit himself only in tiny, rationed bursts. Joan’s father left when she was a baby and never came back, and Jacob thinks, psychoanalytically speaking, she should be the one to worryabout his leaving. It’s worrisome that she doesn’t seem to worry. In fact, in all the time he’s known her, he can’t remember her ever seeming as relaxed as she does when she’s home with the baby.
    Harry curls his toes and claps his feet together like two scoops.
    “I like how he gestures with his feet,” Jacob comments, giving up the subject of sex. “I should start doing that. Just wave them around when I want to make a point.”
    Harry pushes out his legs and, rolling sideways, swivels up to a sitting position. He flaps in celebration. Gently, Joan grasps his hands, and Harry pumps his torso and bows his legs and is suddenly, startlingly upright, balanced on those gesticulating feet. His diaper hulas for balance. He has been doing this for a week. Seven months is early for a baby to stand—Jacob knows this even though infancy isn’t his field. His dissertation is on the identification of gifted children, but he is wary of getting attached to the idea of Harry being gifted, of inadvertently pushing the boy or making him feel like a disappointment.
    “Do you want to show Daddy?” Joan asks Harry. “Do you want to show him what you can do?” She releases the baby’s hands, and for a breathless moment he balances on his own, feet spread wide like a surfer’s. Then he flexes at the waist and falls onto his padded butt.
    Jacob picks Harry up under the arms, turns him around, and looks into his face. “You,” he says. “We’re going to have to watch you.” Joan had asked him to name the baby, bestowed complete power on him to do so, and he had chosen Harold after his grandfather who died early in Joan’s pregnancy.
    Joan stands and goes to their tiny kitchen nook to warm up some formula. She is wearing poufy harem pants, thick socks, and that thin, soft shirt he wants to put his hands in. “Is there anything to eat?” he asks.
    “Formula, bananas, and cereal.”
    “You didn’t go to the store?”
    “It was too cold.”
    Jacob eases down on his back, bringing Harry with him to lie on his chest. “Mommy thinks because she can live on bananas, so can everyone else,” he tells the baby. Harry grasps his shirt with both hands and squints drowsily, coming down from the thrill of standing. The old chestnut is true: Jacob has always liked babies, but the love he feels for his own is an epiphany, shocking in its irreversibility. Even so, as he watches Harry’s tiny fingers crab at his shirt, he can’t help but wistfully consider, again, the early end to his bachelorhood. When Joan had come to see him the previous summer and hopped so briskly into his bed, it had seemed to vindicate his long-held conviction that his stock would rise steadily the further he got from high school. Finally holding Joan’s naked body, he had felt tenderness and love, but he had also, distinctly, felt the primal triumph of the sower of wild oats.
    “Guess who I ran into?” Jacob says in a low voice, not wanting to interfere with Harry’s