You Deserve Nothing - Alexander Maksik [81]
Then I flushed and it was gone.
* * *
It’s still hard to believe, but we went to school afterward. We took separate taxis. I spent the day there as if nothing had happened. He taught his classes. Twice I passed him in the halls.
* * *
That afternoon I met him at his apartment. He undressed me and we got into bed and held onto each other. I kept my palm against his chest so I could feel his heart beating. I cried and cried. He stroked my hair and for a long time didn’t say anything. He never let go, never shifted. He kept me pressed against his warm body and eventually I was able to take a full breath and slowly I stopped crying. I fell asleep. I was exhausted. I don’t know if he slept but when I woke up we hadn’t moved. My hand was right there on his chest.
I told him about the baby. I mean the imaginary baby. About how it looked like him. How I thought it looked the way he looked in the photograph with his mother. I said that I loved him. I said, I’m sorry, Will. And he said, You have nothing to be sorry for. We were quiet. Then I told him that I thought I’d miss the baby. I said, That’s probably stupid, but I think it’s true. He said, It isn’t stupid at all.
All of this happened so slowly. The conversation, I mean. One of us would speak and then there’d be a very long pause as we’d both fall asleep for a few minutes and then wake up and say something else. There was a strange quality to the whole evening, like we were drunk or hadn’t slept for days, and we lay there for hours just looking up at the beams never at each other.
And then he said, You’ll be a wonderful mother someday, Marie. Maybe, I said. But what about you, Will? Don’t you want to be a father? He didn’t say anything for a long time. I lay there listening to his slow breathing and then he began to cry. I could feel it, and I sat up in bed and looked at him. He was lying there with his eyes closed and he was crying.
Hey, I said as gently as I could. I touched his face. Hey.
But he wouldn’t open his eyes. He looked like a kid, like a boy. Will, I said. I kept saying his name.
After a while he opened his eyes and when he did I understood that I didn’t know him at all. Because I didn’t know what else to say, I said, Will, why are you crying? He said he was sorry that I’d had to go through it. And I told him not to worry about me. That I was sick of talking about me. And he laughed the way someone laughs right in the middle of crying.
He said, Yes. He’d planned on being a father. He said he’d been married for five years. That at the time they were planning on having children.
I looked at him and tried to imagine him married, living with a woman, carrying his child in his arms. And even if I expected it to be hard, I realized that it was easy to imagine. I asked him what had changed and he told me that he’d left his wife and moved to Paris. Or maybe he’d moved to Paris and then left his wife. I don’t remember. Why? I asked him. Why would you leave your wife? Weren’t you happy?
He lay there and reached out his hand and touched my face and said, I don’t know, Marie. And I said, Of course you know, Will. Of course you know. Why would you leave your life like that?
He looked at me for a long time, not speaking, as if he were about to begin a story. I watched him, his mouth slightly open. But he never spoke and slowly he disappeared as fast as he’d come to life.
GILAD
After school on our first day back from the break, I saw Colin sitting in the small caf