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awaiting that overriding urge I’d always heard about, the narcotic pining that draws childless women ineluctably to strangers’ strollers in parks. I wanted to be drowned by the hormonal imperative, to wake one day and throw my arms around your neck, reach down for you, and pray that while that black flower bloomed behind my eyes you had just left me with child. ( With child: There’s a lovely warm sound to that expression, an archaic but tender acknowledgment that for nine months you have company wherever you go. Pregnant , by contrast, is heavy and bulging and always sounds to my ear like bad news: “I’m pregnant .” I instinctively picture a sixteen-year-old at the dinner table—pale, unwell, with a scoundrel of a boyfriend—forcing herself to blurt out her mother’s deepest fear.)
    Whatever the trigger, it never entered my system, and that made me feel cheated. When I hadn’t gone into maternal heat by my mid-thirties, I worried that there was something wrong with me, something missing. By the time I gave birth to Kevin at thirty-seven, I had begun to anguish over whether, by not simply accepting this defect, I had amplified an incidental, perhaps merely chemical deficiency into a flaw of Shakespearean proportions.
     
    So what finally pulled me off the fence? You, for starters. For if we were happy, you weren’t, not quite, and I must have known that. There was a hole in your life that I couldn’t quite fill. You had work, and it suited you. Nosing into undiscovered stables and armories, searching out a field that had to be edged with a split-rail fence and sport a cherry-red silo and black-and-white cows (Kraft—whose cheese-food slices were made with “real milk”), you made your own hours, your own vista. You liked location scouting. But you didn’t love it. Your passion was for people, Franklin. So when I saw you playing with Brian’s children, nuzzling them with monkey puppets and admiring their wash-off tattoos, I yearned to provide you opportunity for the ardor that I myself once found in A Wing and a Prayer—or, as you would say, AWAP.
    I remember once you tried to express, haltingly, what was not like you; not the sentiment, not the language. You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself. You feared that too much examination could bruise the feelings, like the well-meaning but brutish handling of a salamander by big, clumsy hands.
    We were in bed, still in that vaulting Tribeca loft whose creaky handworked elevator was forever breaking down. Cavernous, sifting with dust, undifferentiated into civilized cubicles with end tables, the loft always reminded me of the private hideout my brother and I had fashioned from corrugated iron in Racine. You and I had made love, and I was just swooning off into sleep when I sat bolt upright. I had to catch a plane for Madrid in ten hours’ time and had forgotten to set the alarm. Once I’d adjusted the clock, I noticed you were on your back. Your eyes were open.
    “What is it?”
    You sighed. “I don’t know how you do it.” As I nestled back to bask in another paean to my amazing adventurousness and courage, you must have sensed my mistake, for you added hastily, “Leave. Leave all the time for so long. Leave me .”
    “But I don’t like to.”
    “I wonder.”
    “Franklin, I didn’t contrive my company to escape your clutches. Don’t forget, it predates you.”
    “Oh, I could hardly forget that.”
    “It’s my job!”
    “It doesn’t have to be.”
    I sat up. “Are you—”
    “I’m not.” You pressed me gently back down; this was not going as you planned, and you had, I could tell, planned it. You rolled over to place your elbows on either side of me and touched your forehead, briefly, to mine. “I’m not trying to take your series away. I know how much it means to you. That’s the trouble. The other way around, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t get