Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [25]
They boarded the Circle Line like a couple of giddy tourists and rode the boat around the island. They went out dancing at night, throwing their arms over their heads and whooping under strobe lights that illuminated others crowded against them on all sides as the sound system blew bass beats that walloped their very bones. After David proposed they visit the botanic gardens—calling her Friday afternoon at work, while fellow commodities brokers shouted strings of numbers in the background—Ariel made lunch for them the next morning, and off they went to Park Slope. Another Saturday, after a softball game in Sheep Meadow, they walked up to Columbia where Ariel showed him her old dorm window. At the Chelsea flea market they discovered two treasures, a church-shaped birdhouse and an ornate bamboo birdcage whose door was broken. Ariel bought David the birdhouse, joking that he could use a little religion, and he got her the cage, saying it would serve as a symbol their love should always be free.
A year to the day after their first encounter, he showed up at her door holding aloft a cardboard box with airholes in its side, and in his other hand a bottle of champagne. “Happy anniversary,” he said, as Ariel peeked inside and saw two brown-and-white zebra finches. “Songbirds for your empty pagoda.”
It was a sweet gesture, she knew, but one that had the weird effect of making her feel wary. Notwithstanding her unease, she smiled and thanked him, uncorked the champagne after fixing the door with wire and settling the finches in their new home. Then, as ever, though serenaded from behind the bamboo spindles instead of by the usual music of the city, they took each other to bed, and her faint sense of odd misgiving vanished.
That Ariel didn’t get pregnant, with all the love they made that second spring into summer and autumn and during the holidays beyond, was something of a miracle. Their craving for each other, having bordered on the obsessive, slowly calmed. But even when the affair waned toward more tepid registers, they sometimes left themselves open to the possibility of an accident. None chanced to happen. Which was fine, especially with David, who’d made it clear—despite his having forgotten the birdcage was meant to be left empty, its door broken—that family life was not for him.
So how much more miraculous was it that now, with three years gone by and their surfeit passion not extinguished but oddly abstracted, Ariel faced this improbable crisis of motherhood? No, absolutely not. It wouldn’t be fair to either of them. So she felt when she first suspected something was wrong. She’d missed her period and blamed it on nerves, the moon, anything that came to mind. But her nausea, though mild, elicited real fear. A home pregnancy test showed positive. But that couldn’t be right. She tried another company’s product which gave her the same reading. When her gynecologist confirmed the earlier results, the news put Ariel back onto the sidewalks of Gramercy Park, in a haze matched only by the stifling late July morning itself.
When had it happened? She remembered as she walked around the gated gardens. After the worst argument they’d ever had, over whether to go to this party or that, something of no inherent consequence, which ended with apologetic sex, in the midnight wake of which he’d quietly left. They’d patched up their problem over the phone, but David called less often than ever in the weeks that followed. There was no denying they’d hit a bleak stretch. That what had arisen with such unexpected passion, then floated along for unquestioning years, now seemed to be dwindling with equally unexpected quickness.
Whether because of this downward spiral or independent of it, Ariel found herself ambling through midsummer days with a wintry heart. Even before she