Astonish Me. Maggie Shipstead

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      “Like, ‘Unappreciated-Genius Gary.’”

      “Hmm.” Joan considers. She has always liked it when Jacob comes up with these theories. They become games to play, puzzles to solve. Lying on her back, she stretches her arms up and eyes them critically, letting her elbows and wrists curve out so she is holding an oval of air, her fingertips almost touching. Her arms are still thin enough, but she is losing tone. She drops them. “Perfectionist Joan.” She points a finger at him before he can protest. “It’s what you think.”

      “Then what am I?”

      They stare at each other, and Joan senses they are both trying to gauge how truthful the game should be. “Gentle Jacob,” she offers.

      “Jacob the Nerd.”

      “Jacob the Gentle Nerd?”

      He smiles, and she can see that he will not offer up one of the labels they know would be more accurate: Jacob the Proud, Jacob Who Does Not Make Mistakes. It must have cost him to mention Arslan to Gary. He says, “Perfectionist isn’t the first word I think of when I think of you.” His tone is mild, but the game has turned dangerous.

      “No? What is?”

      He rolls onto his back, looks at the ceiling. She likes his profile: his strong chin with its dense, clipped beard, his long nose with a bump just below the bridge. “Unobtainable.”

      “Oh, Jacob. I have been obtained.”

      Behind his glasses, his eyes briefly close. “You know what I mean. It’s vestigial.”

      She considers climbing on top of him, kissing him, but he will recognize the cheapness. She could tell him there is no one she would rather be married to, that her love is growing, but slowly, accumulating imperceptibly the way trace minerals in dripping water build rock structures in caves, and it would all be true. But what he wants is impossible—he wants to change the past, for everything to happen in the right order. He wants them to love each other equally, but he is afraid of what it would be like if they did.

      “I haven’t laughed like that in a long time,” she says. “I used to lose it in high school when someone would get in trouble. Remember? It was the same at ballet. If Tchishkoff really tore into someone, I’d get the giggles. I felt like a monster. Some poor girl would get ripped apart, and I’d have to leave because I was laughing so hard. What is that?”

      “You’re what’s known as a sociopath. You have no empathy.”

      “Oh, okay. Glad to have a diagnosis.” After a moment, she says, “You know, if I had loved you right away, like I should have, when I was fourteen, you would have gotten tired of me, and I wouldn’t have you now. I had a whole plan, you see. You fell for it.”

      He turns to look at her. “I am such a dupe.”

      She slides across the sheets, hooks one leg over him, and sits up so she is straddling his belly. She rests both her hands on his chest and looks down at him. The beauty of sex, Elaine said once, is that you don’t have to talk. Jacob’s hands come up to clasp her thighs. His chin lifts; his eyelids droop. Desire looks like something going away at first, an ebbing. Sex is something they do well together. With Arslan, fear had made her ravenous. Even his laziest, most perfunctory touches had thrilled her because they meant he was not yet gone. She had clambered around doing his bidding, neither of them considering what she wanted. There is no thrill with Jacob, but there is comfort and pleasure and the freedom that comes from trust.

      He shifts. His hands move to her hips. “Why don’t we ever talk about having another baby?”

      He must feel her unease because his hands stop moving, and his eyes lose their dreaminess. “We do,” she says.

      “Not really. I hint, and you dodge.”

      Sitting on him has become awkward, but she is afraid he will take it as a rejection if she moves away. “No, I don’t.”

      “You do. Look, if you don’t want another one, you should at least say so.”

      “How can you be sure you want another one?”

      He nudges her off him, not roughly but with an apologetic grimace. “You’re sitting on Sandy’s cake. I just am. I see us with another. I liked having sisters.”

      “God, a girl.” Joan sits cross-legged, one of her knees against his thigh, and picks at her fingernails. “I don’t know. I don’t know if I want to risk all the things that can go wrong. Everything would be different if we had another. Why take the chance? Why mess with something that’s working?”

      “No,” Jacob says, excited, lifting onto his elbows. “No, you have to be biologically brave. It’s in our nature to take that chance. I understand the fear, but I don’t think fear should be enough to stop us.”

      “You’re not the one who has to be pregnant and give birth. You don’t have to push another person out of yourself. I hear women say they forget all about birth as soon as it’s over, but I didn’t. I don’t know why nobody seems to take birth into account when they think about having a baby.”

      “A few stretch marks aren’t the end of the world, Joan.”

      “I’m not ready.”

      After a moment, he pulls her down beside him, her head on his shoulder. “I wish you wanted one.”

      “I know.”

      After another silence, he sets his glasses on the nightstand and switches off the light. In the dark, lying against his body as though it were a gently respiring bolster, she imagines she can feel his thoughts coming through his skin like a fever. She feels his disappointment, his accusatory argument that she had been willing to trick him into conceiving a baby when he was young and unprepared but now that he has spent five years proving himself as a husband and father, she is unmoved by his desire for another. She feels him criticizing her vanity, rejecting her concern for her body as unjustified, even pathetic, now that she doesn’t perform. She feels his sadness that the family he imagined isn’t to be. She feels his love grow less dense around her, like fog lifting.

      But, really, all she can feel is his breathing. It strikes her as strange that two people lying quietly in the dark, remote in their thoughts, locked away in their bodies, have everything necessary to make a third person who will, barring tragedy, lie quietly through darknesses long after they are dead. She had excused herself from Jacob’s love when they were teenagers because she was young and unprepared, a luxury she hadn’t granted him. But now she is his, they are each other’s, and for him to be unhappy, to love her less, is intolerable.

      “There’s still time,” she says. “I need a little more time.”

      Under her ear, she feels a pulse in his shoulder. That his heart has begun to pound with hope makes hers pound with fear. She should give him what he wants. She will, just not quite yet.

      “When?” he says.

      “Soon.”

      He shifts to lie squarely on her. She touches his face. In the early days, his weight had felt oppressive, suffocating, but now the burden of him is comforting. “I can live with СКАЧАТЬ