with a book in one hand and a fork in the other, heating a cup of noodle soup while she read, say, At Lady Molly’s for the third time (she was a sucker for series and linked novels). If there was nothing else she would consume all the magazines and newspapers in the house—reading, to her, was a kind of pyromania—and when these ran out she would reach for insurance brochures, hotel prospectuses and product warranties, advertising circulars, sheets of coupons. Once I had come upon the spectacle of Sara, finished with a volume of C. P. Snow while only partway through one of the long baths she took for her bad back, desperately scanning the label on a bottle of Listerine. She’d even read my first book, long before she ever met me, and I liked to think that she was the best reader I had. Every writer has an ideal reader, I thought, and it was just my good luck that mine wanted to sleep with me.
“You can toss them in there,” she said, in a stage voice, pointing me like a tour guide into a small, pale blue room with a parquet floor and a bay window, high-ceilinged like all the rooms in the house. I carried the coats in and Sara followed, closing the door behind us. On the left-hand wall, alongside an Empire armoire, hung two large sets of baseball cards in oblong frames. I’d examined them in the past and I knew they represented the championship New York Yankee teams of 1949 and 1950. The opposite wall was covered in framed photographs of Yankee Stadium, taken at various epochs in its history. Against this wall lay the headboard of a bed with newel posts and a frilly white dust ruffle. Its surface was white and smooth and bare of any wraps or other garments. I spread Sara out across it. Crabtree’s and Miss Sloviak’s coats slid to the floor. I climbed onto the bed beside Sara and looked down at her anxious face.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi, big guy.”
I lifted the skirt of her party dress and placed the palm of my hand against the outcropping of her left hip, where the waistband of her panty hose cut into the skin. I slipped my hand under the elastic and reached for the ten thousandth time for the wool of her pussy, automatically, like a luckless man diving for the rabbit’s foot in his pocket. She put her lips against my neck, beneath my earlobe. I felt her trying to relax her body against mine, joint by joint. She worked at the topmost button of my shirt, got a hand inside, and cupped my left breast.
“This one’s mine,” she said.
“That’s right,” I said. “All yours.”
We didn’t say anything for a minute. The guest room was right over the living room and I could hear a flashing ribbon of Oscar Peterson fluttering below us.
“So?” I said at last.
“You go first,” she said.
“All right.” I took off my eyeglasses, stared at the spots on their lenses, put them back on. “This morning—”
“I’m pregnant.”
“What? Are you sure?”
“My period is nine days late.”
“Still, nine days, that doesn’t—”
“I’m sure,” she said. “I know I must be pregnant, Grady, because although I gave up all hope of ever having a child a year ago, when I turned forty-five, I really only reconciled myself to the notion a couple of weeks ago. Or, I mean, I realized that I’d reconciled myself to it. You remember we even talked about it.”
“I remember.”
“So, naturally.”
“How do you like that.”
“How do you like it?”
I thought about that for a moment.
“It sort of makes for an interesting complement to my news,” I said. “Which is that Emily left me this morning.” I felt her grow still beside me, as if she were listening for footsteps in the hall. I stopped talking and listened for a moment until I realized that she was only waiting for me to continue. “It’s for real, I think. She went out to Kinship for the weekend, but I don’t think she really plans on coming home.”
“Huh,” she said, matter-of-factly, trying to sound as if I had just imparted some moderately interesting fact about the manufacture of grout. “So then, I guess what we do is divorce our spouses, marry each other, and have this baby. Is that it?”
“Simple,” I said. I lay there for a few minutes, with my head thrown back, looking at the wistful, sunstruck faces of ballplayers on the wall behind us. I was so conscious of Sara’s strained and irregular breathing that I was unable to breathe normally myself. My left arm was pinned underneath her and I could feel the first pricklings of trapped blood in my fingertips. I looked into the sad and competent eyes of Johnny Mize. He appeared to me to be the sort of man who would not hesitate to counsel his mistress to abort the first and only child she might ever conceive.
“Is your friend Terry’s friend really a man?” said Sara.
“I believe so,” I said. “Knowing Crabtree as I do.”
“So what did he say to you?”
“He wants to see the book.”
“Are you going to show it to him?”
“I don’t know,” I said. My hand had gone numb now, and my left shoulder was starting to tingle and shut down. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“Neither do I,” said Sara. A tear pooled at the corner of her eye and then spilled out across the bridge of her nose. She bit her lip and shut her eyes. I was close enough to her to study the cartography of veins printed on her eyelids.
“Sara, honey,” I said, “I’m stuck.” I gave my arm a gentle tug, trying to free it. “You’re lying on my arm.”
She didn’t move; she only opened her eyes, dry once again, and gave me a very hard stare.
“I guess you’re going to have to chew it off, then,” she said.
I drank for years, and then I stopped drinking and discovered the sad truth about parties. A sober man at a party is lonely as a journalist, implacable as a coroner, bitter as an angel looking down from heaven. There’s something purely foolish about attending any large gathering of men and women without benefit of some kind of philter or magic dust to blind you and weaken your critical faculties. I don’t mean to make a big deal out of sobriety, by the way. Of all the modes of human consciousness available to the modern consumer I consider it to be the most overrated. I stopped drinking not because I had a drinking problem, although I suppose I may have, but because alcohol had mysteriously become so poisonous to my body that one night half a bottle of George Dickel stopped my heart for almost twenty seconds (it turned out I was allergic to the stuff). But when, after counting off five discreet minutes, I followed Sara and the sparkling pearl of protein lodged in the innermost pleats of her belly back down to the First Party of the Weekend, I found the prospect of navigating the room sober to be more than I could face, and for the first time in months I was tempted to pour myself a drink. I was reintroduced to a shy, elfin man whose prose style is among the most admired in this country, whose company I had enjoyed in the past, and this time found him a leering, self-important old windbag who flirted with young
