Songs for the End of the World

by Saleema Nawaz

  When he could feel sweat beginning to bead across his back, he stood up and returned to his writing desk, willing his mind to stay in that emptied, receptive zone.

  “Thanks again for making dinner,” said Rachel, poking her head into his office. She had been doing this every night for the past five weeks since they stopped having sex. Even their crisis had fallen into a predictable routine. “I’m going to bed now.”

  “Goodnight,” said Owen. He waited a moment before lifting his eyes from the screen and was surprised to see her wearing the blue lace negligee (his favourite) under the flowered Chinese silk robe he’d bought her for Valentine’s Day last year. “You look nice.” Whatever his misgivings—about their marriage, about monogamy, about his stalled writing career—he felt compelled to pay homage to female beauty.

  Rachel came around his desk and leaned down over him so he could see her breasts. She stroked his cheek, then down along the side of his jaw. “You could use a shave,” she said, her voice soft and affectionate. Showing in so many small ways that she hadn’t lost faith in him yet.

  “I could use a lot of things,” he said, and even to himself, he sounded angry. Put upon. He leaned back in his desk chair and stretched both arms up over his head before cracking his knuckles. “A plot, for instance,” he said, letting his actual discouragement resound in the complaint, and the force of it made his voice shake.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “All things in good time.” Rachel beamed at him, no longer wistful now that he’d tuned her into his problems, and with another quick smile she withdrew, closing the door behind her.

  Owen stared at the screen, then got up from his desk and returned to the rug for another set of push-ups. He’d had a hard time concentrating since the start of the sex stand-off with Rachel. They’d stopped sleeping together the day she announced that she’d changed her mind: she really did want to have a baby after all.

  It had happened after a baby shower for one of her graduate students. A girl who had no business having a baby, whose whole future was being derailed in the service of pointless procreation, but whom the entire department, students and faculty alike, had seen fit to celebrate nonetheless. For most of the faculty, who were older than Rachel, with children already grown, a baby was a novelty; for the other students—preparing with a frantic, punishing intensity for a dismal job market—probably even more so.

  They had sipped lemonade and nibbled on baked goods of varying quality as the mother-to-be opened gifts and her unremarkable boyfriend handed around napkins. Rachel played a clapping game with a baby who belonged to one of the few non-academic guests. When Owen slipped into the kitchen for a glass of water, Rachel’s department head, an older woman with a messy halo of coppery curls, seemed to detect something in his expression.

  “It’s a bit of a farce, isn’t it?” said Gretchen, pouring herself a glass of San Pellegrino. “Celebrating this baby. You think so, too.”

  He did, but he found Gretchen’s bluntness distasteful, so he only shrugged. “She seems happy.”

  “Young women shouldn’t be allowed to fall in love.” Her laugh was sharp and low. “But it might be for the best. Her candidacy paper was a complete disaster.”

  He followed Gretchen back into the living room, where he noticed one of Rachel’s male graduate students appraising him. Owen knew that his wife attracted a certain type of interest from her students and colleagues. When they’d first moved to Lansdowne, he had attended all the departmental parties to make his presence known, until he’d satisfied himself that it didn’t matter. Rachel wouldn’t stray.

  It was during their walk home that she mentioned the child.

  “What a sweet little baby,” she said. “And smart for eight months old, I thought.”

  “Yes, very cute.”

  “Maybe we should have one.” She said it lightly, almost playfully, as though she were any other woman and not his Rachel, whom he’d always known as driven, level-headed, constant—the last person to break a promise.

  When he didn’t answer, her face fell, and the rest of the walk was silent and strained. Owen had been caught off guard, and he resented it, even as pain seemed to radiate from his wife in all the little twitches of her eyes and mouth. But for her to upend their whole life so casually, to test the waters with a joke, felt like a betrayal.

  Now, Owen stood up and stretched before settling back on the rug for a set of crunches. The most galling thing was that Rachel had been the first to forswear children, and back then she’d been even more certain of her choice than Owen. They’d been at a bar after a midnight screening of Rosemary’s Baby at the Sunshine Cinema on the Lower East Side when she’d twirled her glass by the stem, finished her Kir Royale in two gulps, then blurted out that she saw an upside to the movie’s ending.

  “I’d rather give birth to Satan’s baby than have to look after a normal one.” Her voice was arch, but Owen could sense her sincerity. She was wearing wine-dark lipstick and her chin was set and serious. “At least Rosemary has a whole coven to help her.”

  “You don’t want kids?”

  Rachel shook her head. “I want to be an auntie. And not have to feel guilty about how much I work.” She was ambitious and came from an unhappy family. She said she was grateful for her life but did not think her parents ought to have had children.

  And so he had ordered them two more drinks before running through a whole list of scenarios in which he predicted her changing her mind, grilling her with what he thought had been an exhaustive thoroughness.

  “The very idea of me having a baby,” he said. “It would be like splitting the atom. It would be a fucking disaster.”

  Rachel had laughed then—laughed as though a baby were the last thing she wanted, a joke. But it was a cruel joke to have used that to make him choose her, to let him dare to think that he could be safe in a relationship when he knew, when he ought to have known, that he never could be.

  Owen felt the fibres in the Mexican rug clinging to the sweat on his shoulder blades, and a flush overtake his torso as his muscles warmed. He was in even better shape now than when he and Rachel had first met. A better lover, too. As graduate students at Columbia, they used to spend hours at home alone together. They planned movie dates, visits to MoMA, even trips to Cape Cod or Martha’s Vineyard, but they rarely managed to get past the front door. Rachel cooked shakshuka, which she had learned to make in Israel, and cholent, a slow-cooking stew that she would usually prepare on Friday and serve on Saturday, even though she did not generally observe the Sabbath. Owen found himself picking up how to cook because he loved how these meals came together and the way he and Rachel moved around one another in the kitchen, never far from a buzzing awareness of each other’s bodies. Sometimes, when he cooked dinner, Rachel would prepare a salad with tomatoes, cucumbers, and soft white cheese, which she arranged on a plate in a circular design that made Owen exalt in the superiority of women. Whoever was not cooking would pour two glasses of wine or beer or whatever they had on hand that was more special than tap water. After dinner, they would make love, and after that, they would have dessert. Owen got into the habit of buying fruit sorbets that he would scoop into a cut-glass bowl and bring back with him to bed, where Rachel would remain splayed on the sheets soaked with his sweat. She would open her mouth and close her eyes as he spooned tiny, teasing portions onto her tongue.

  Rachel’s body was different back then, too, though unlike the wives of many of his friends, she had not put on any weight in the past decade. If anything, the opposite. She had embraced gym culture and she was fit, toned, even stringy. The Rachel he had fallen in love with had been womanly and soft. Her stomach and ass were rounded, pliable. She had been more pliable then, more flexible in her ideas and in her openness to trying new things. Once, they had driven to Mexico on a whim—on his whim—and although the trip had not been an unequivocal success, she had laughed when they got lost, smi
led through her food poisoning, and taken off her shoes to cool her feet in a fountain in Coyoacán that boasted a statue of two coyotes.

  When they married, it was at City Hall, and Rachel wore a light blue dress shot through with silver, and she looked so beautiful that Owen had been uneasy about her assurances that she preferred to do things simply and quietly. But she expressed only radiance and a calm joy that soothed his own taut nerves, and she had not chided him for not wearing a suit jacket or for not remembering to polish his only pair of dress shoes.

  They were happy. And for nine years Owen had been surprised but relieved. He had always believed that marriage was a part of normal life that would forever remain closed to him, like wearing a suit to an office during the work week, or a steady paycheque, or the hundred other ways in which his life was turning out to be different from what his parents had hoped.

  There were few traces of that blooming woman in his wife now. She of the delicate hollows around her brow bone and beneath her eyes, like the faintest lavender bruises. Rachel’s feet had startled him the other week, mere hours after their return from the baby shower, poking out below the bottom of an afghan. Pale and waxy and cold as the dead. He’d suppressed a shudder that seemed to travel into his stomach, bubbling up as indigestion. This is the end, then, he’d thought. The day he had feared for so long and even dared to think might never present itself. He was surprised his desire could be so quickly dismantled, but then it had arrived just as fast—in one sidelong look at her strong profile. Until now his hunger for her had never abated. Whenever he detected signs of it flagging, he’d allowed himself to yield to temptation with other women. The fear of getting caught and of Rachel divorcing him always rekindled his own red-hot desire for her. He had strayed in their marriage, it was true, but only in its service—to keep its flame alive.

  When Owen finished another two sets each of push-ups and crunches, he stood up again and stretched. He tried to ignore the reluctance he felt as he returned to his computer. His wife could sit down at her desk and take up her work as though it were the easiest and most natural thing in the world. For Rachel, writing was no more than the logical extension of her thoughts on paper. She had come to him once, rubbing her eyes, screen-bleary after a stretch of four or five hours, one hand tugging to keep her wool shawl wrapped tight around her shoulders.

  “It’s a satisfying kind of thing, isn’t it?” she said with a shy smile.

  “What is?”

  “Wrestling with words.”

  Her placid satisfaction in wrestling with words was a thorn in his side, though he tried—and failed—not to let it bother him. But Rachel, for her part, rarely assumed that her own process was at all similar to his. If anything, she was insecure about her writing, deferring to him on everything from syntax to word choice with almost comic humility. Even after the disappointment of his second novel, a critical darling but commercial flop, Owen remained the official writer of the household.

  He saved a new version of the file on the computer, even though nothing substantial had been written or changed, and peeked out of the doorway to make sure there was no light showing through the crack under the bedroom door.

  Inside the room, Rachel was asleep, only half covered by the quilt, her lacy nightgown slipping down from one fine, pale shoulder. His side of the bed was still made, and he slid like a knife into the sheets without untucking them or nudging the bare arm of his sleeping wife.

  * * *

  By the time Owen awoke, Rachel’s side of the bed was cold. It was a Tuesday, one of Rachel’s teaching days, which meant she went into campus early. He dressed quickly and picked up his gym bag and car keys.

  On a day like this—clear and cool—he felt a strong call to the water. He’d taken up sculling in college and had been doing it ever since, though no longer as part of a team. When Rachel was first hired at Lansdowne University and they’d relocated to the town of the same name, he’d joined the rowing club in the next municipality up the river. Two years ago, she’d surprised him with the gift of his own refurbished ocean shell. Not the fastest boat, she’d said, but one of the safest. In the absence of children, all of Rachel’s solicitude had been directed towards him.

  At the rowing club, he got changed in the locker room and retrieved his scull from the boathouse. The stretch of the river outside the launch was still and wide, unlike in Lansdowne, where it was quick and narrow.

  As Owen was pushing off from the dock, a quad racing scull was being taken down the boat ramp by four women. The one closest to the bow was studying him closely, as if she recognized him.

  “Nice day,” he said, catching her gaze head-on.

  “It is,” she said. She was in her early thirties and wore grey and fuchsia shorts that clung to her athletic form. “Enjoy yourself.”

  Owen steered away from the dock and soon put several boat lengths between him and the club. As he fell into a rhythm, his thoughts drifted back to the woman on the crew boat. The glance that had passed between them had been electric. He was sure she had felt it, too.

  Ever since he and Rachel had stopped having sex, he’d been looking at other women without bothering to hide it. And he had been told more than once that the way that he looked at a woman was tantamount to a proposition. He remembered a locker room conversation in high school, when two of his buddies from the wrestling team were discussing their best pickup lines. “How about ‘hello’?” is what Owen had said. When pressed, he’d offered up a partial list of the girls it had worked on, and it had gone down in legend as the ballsiest invention of any braggart seventeen-year-old. His friends still brought it up at the pub when he went home for the holidays, though he wondered what they would think if he told them the real tally he’d racked up over the past twenty years. Likely, they wouldn’t believe him.

  There were also certain women, he was sure, who would be surprised to know he’d gotten married. But Rachel, in the sheer, undeniable beauty of her person—both body and soul—would have been answer enough. And though at this point he took her intelligence for granted, it was her mind that had attracted him in the first place. She was now an associate philosophy professor at Lansdowne, and her research had been radically interdisciplinary even before the concept became a buzzword. She had a third book coming out in the spring, an elaboration on her dissertation, which had taken longer than expected only because Rachel had not wanted to publish it without expanding its scope to a significant degree. Owen knew that it was dedicated to him, though he did not think this was a normal thing in academic publishing, and it made him uncomfortable. He had dedicated his first novel to her, before they were married, but he did not expect reciprocation. Rachel had been his muse, in the old-fashioned sense. Gracewing had been a New York Times #1 bestseller and was featured on the Today show, where it was described as “a love story for the ages.” The L.A. Times called it “a transformative story of redemption by an astonishing young novelist.” Women who came to his readings always asked about Rachel but seemed eager to forget about her afterwards. In one sense, the novel was about a man who worshipped a woman who was a much better person than he was. If he had inspired Being and Becoming: Change and Human Possibility from Heraclitus to Levinas, he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

  Owen breathed deeply as he pulled the oars. He tried to empty his mind and let in nothing beyond the rhythmic sound of the blades going in and out of the water and the knock of the oar handles against the locks on the rigging. Every once in a while he could hear the faraway sound of people on the banks as their voices carried over the water. The swift glide of the scull and the warmth in his muscles soothed him as the craft moved like a dart across the river.

  Stopping to think about things was part of the problem. He was sure it was why he couldn’t write faster. Wondering if the next book would sell. Trying to figure out what people wanted to read about. There was something counterintuitive about needing to be less thoughtful in order
to be a successful writer, but it was a conclusion he’d come by honestly, through hours logged and hundreds of pages discarded.

  After he’d returned to the club and his boat was wiped down and replaced in its rack, he headed to his car. In the parking lot, a woman was lingering next to a new-looking SUV, peering in its driver’s-side window and frowning at a cellphone. She spotted him and waved. It was only once he met her partway across the lot that he recognized her as the quad boat woman, of the tight grey and fuchsia shorts. She was now dressed in a white blouse and black skirt, her black hair freed from its ponytail and brushing against the tops of her shoulders.

  “Hi again,” he said. “Everything all right?”

  “Locked my keys in my car,” she said. “And the rest of my crew is already gone.” She gave a rueful smile. “Spent too long in the shower, I guess.”

  “Is there anything I can do?” He prided himself on his proactive willingness to lend a hand in any given situation. It might not balance the scales in the long run, but it couldn’t hurt.

  “Could you just give me a lift down the road?” she asked. “I have another set of keys at home.”

  “Sure. Not a problem.”

  “Thanks a lot. I’m really not far.” She shifted the weight of her black bag as she gave him directions, before adding, “I’m Stella, by the way.”

  “Owen Grant.” If she recognized his name, she didn’t give any sign.

  She fell into step with him. “Are you new? I haven’t seen you at the club before.”

  “Been around a while. I just tend to avoid all the social activities.”

  “A loner.”

  “Ha. Maybe.” Owen unlocked his car. “I spend too much time in my own head, that’s for sure.” He thought he saw a heavy, prurient look in her eyes as he held open the car door for her, though it was possible it was only a badly calibrated expression of gratitude. Before he drove out of the lot, he slowed and asked, “How do you feel about a scenic route?”