Three months later, she was pregnant again. This time the plus sign went undocumented. They didn’t stay up late, discussing the future life of an embryo smaller than the head of a pin. Things seemed as likely to go wrong as to go right. It wasn’t until the midwife showed them the fetus on the ultrasound at eleven weeks that Elise began to believe a baby might very well come of this. But even then, she kept thinking of that old-fashioned word, expecting. To be expecting was to assume that something would happen—but one could be wrong, one could be disillusioned, one could live in a permanent state of unfulfilled hope.
When her poetry book was published, Elise lined up as many readings as she could and traveled around the country at her own expense, losing money on her book, as poets did. She wanted to invest as much effort on its behalf as she could while the book was new, and before the baby was born. A Facebook friend who’d once lived in the Berkshires recommended a charming bookstore in a charming town, and so Elise set up a reading there. She hadn’t been in touch with Sam since he’d sent the letter that destroyed her hopes, but from Googling him occasionally, she knew he taught music at a public high school in that very town. She hadn’t intended to never speak to Sam again—she valued their friendship, too—but after his rejection, she hadn’t wanted to connect again until her circumstances had changed and she was no longer the tentative girl pining for a future she wasn’t sure she deserved.
Now that she was thirty-four, she could recognize that at twenty-one she’d been, if not beautiful, pretty enough, certainly worthy of someone’s desire. Frown lines and crow’s feet had emerged in her face now; under her clothes, her skin was coarser and her body more flaccid than it used to be (though she was still young, of course she was; it was obnoxious to complain of being old when you were in your thirties). But the sapphire ring on her finger, the purposeful bulge at her midsection—this was evidence that she was wanted, that she contained multitudes, or at least one miraculous new life. Elise rubbed her hand over her stomach, her own genie in a bottle. She was probably more satisfied with herself now than she had ever been—and she might never be this satisfied again.
She decided to email Sam, keeping it casual (Hey, old college buddy), letting him know that she’d be coming his way. Sam emailed back promptly: Wonderful to hear from you! Congratulations on the book—I knew you’d do it someday. His guest room was available, he wrote, if she needed a place to stay while she was in town. Just like that they were back in touch, and she was going to see him again, as a woman married to a man she loved, a woman well-published and well-pregnant.
* * *
—
There was still a good ways left to drive, but as soon as Elise saw a sign welcoming her to the Berkshires, she thought of it all as belonging to him. Sam of the long eyelashes and curly brown hair. Sam of the sporadic zit, the floppy old-man hat, the good-luck necklace of baby teeth his mother had made for him. Sam, who could do everything, or everything that mattered. He played piano, clarinet, and saxophone. He sang and acted in college theater productions. He drew fantastic pictures in a sketchbook. One night when they were studying together in his dorm room, Sam sitting at his desk, Elise cross-legged on his bed, he kept looking up at her. She bored her eyes into Middlemarch, felt the heat in her cheeks. Could this finally be it? The moment he would come over and take her hands and then make love to her, and when it hurt, because she was a virgin, crack a gentle joke that would allow her to relax and enjoy it? At the end of a long, dense page she’d read several times, she raised her eyes to meet Sam’s. He had his sketchbook in his lap, draped over his biology textbook.
“Keep your head down,” he said, pen grazing the paper. “Nice eyebrows.”
When he was finished, he ripped the page out and gave it to her. Elise, Reading, he’d written at the top. In the bottom right corner, he’d signed his name. It was her, she had to admit it—the squarish face, the bumpy nose, the heavy eyebrows. Nothing to do but praise his work, hide her disappointment. She still had the picture, folded once, right through her mouth, tucked into that annotated Penguin edition of Middlemarch. That was Sam: her study partner; her cafeteria-table seatmate; her Friday night, don’t-have-a-date, movie companion; but never her boyfriend, never her lover.
Elise was off the highway now, the Berkshires in early June parading before her. She passed fields dotted with cows; clapboard houses skirted by rose gardens; whole families on bicycles; elderly couples on porch swings; railroad tracks; main streets with post offices, art galleries, cheese and ice cream shops. From time to time, the Housatonic River appeared, flanked with trees, a postcard of lovely and placid New England.
The summer after junior year, when they’d both lived in New York, working office jobs, Elise and Sam had boarded a Port Authority bus together one weekend, bound for the Berkshires. Sam and his bassist friend Clint had bought tickets to see the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood, and then Clint’s grandfather had died, and he couldn’t go. Elise was the substitute. All those hours sitting beside each other on a bus—what had they talked about? Sam would have told her things about the repertoire at the concert they were going to attend. He would have shared his headphones, his cassette tapes of symphonies copied from the library, instructing her on how to listen for the themes and variations, the sonic elements she could really only hear if they were pointed out to her; otherwise, the music just became a winding river, with nothing detectable beneath the dark, glistening surface. They would have discussed how they were spending their days, the minutiae of their boring jobs, and the weird people who worked in those offices, and the tiny anecdotes of life in New York, saved up for a like-minded person to laugh at. For some time they would have sat in silence, looking out the window, and Elise would have monitored the force field between their elbows and their knees; she would have been wearing something soft, softer than anything she owned now.
The lawn at Tanglewood shone green-green-green, with picnic blankets and lemonade and the Taconic Mountains in the distance. The concert hall glimmered gold as the heart of fire: polished wood of cellos, flinty nickel of flutes, the sounds struck by almost a hundred instruments vibrating with air. Then the room they shared at the B&B, with its high double beds, quilts glowing pure white in the half-moonlight, while Elise lay awake, thinking that anything, failure and humiliation, would be better than the forever regret of not doing it, not climbing into the bed two feet away from her own, where Sam’s cheek grazed the pillow; where his body could only be warm under blankets on a summer night; where he would have to concede, whatever his reservations about her, that skin wanted to touch skin—and not doing it. Instead, sinking down into the leadenness of time passing no matter what, and then waking up to running water in the bathroom and Sam coming out fully dressed, combing his wet hair, saying, “Let’s go downstairs and see how much we can eat for breakfast.”
* * *
—
Sam’s street was lined with oak trees and Cape Cod–style houses painted steel gray, forest green, sailor-suit blue. His front yard was bordered with ragged peonies. Elise wondered if Sam had planted them himself, or if they’d been growing here before he bought the house. The kind of detail it used to seem vital to know: the lover’s imperative, the poet’s imperative, to collect, collect—as if scraps of information were a kind of currency, as if you could save them up to buy something you’d never thought you could afford. He opened the door and gave her a hug, then stepped back and looked at her belly.
“Well. I don’t want to presume.”
“I’m pregnant.”
“Phew.” He smiled with his same face, older but the same. Crinkles around his brown eyes, his thinning hair a bit scraggly, the worn-out T-shirt and jeans of a guy who didn’t give a damn about clothes. Even back then he wasn’t the kind of person you’d fall in love with at first sight. It had taken a whole semester of sitting next to him in that existentialism class, in those uncomfortable lecture hall seats, wat
ching him doodle extravagant monsters and bearded philosophers in his notes, exchanging a few playful words after class, before she could admit to herself that she’d never wanted anyone as much as she wanted him.
He took her around the house and she admired all the rooms with their rag rugs, woven baskets, antique toys, sheer white curtains. A woman’s touch—dumb phrase—kept running through her head. But no, he must live here alone. He would have told her otherwise. And it all seemed like Sam’s good taste, his deliberate artistic handiwork. He didn’t care how he looked, and he could be messy, but he’d managed to class up a college dorm room with a pretty red lampshade, a lush plant, incense burning in a wooden holder carved like a tiger.
The refrigerator was decorated with pictures of two adorable children. “My niece and nephew,” Sam said, pouring her a glass of iced tea. “They call me Uncle Sam. Actually, Meg’s coming to your reading tonight.”
“She is?”
“They live just a few towns over. Her husband will stay home with the kids. Since I’m assuming your poems aren’t about dogs and cats and pizza.”
Elise had met Sam’s sister a few times. Four years older than them, she’d been working in Boston as a consultant: a sexy, adult job. Meg looked like Sam—cute, not remarkable—but she’d made herself hot by wearing funky, revealing clothes, and joking about sex with just the right amount of knowing self-deprecation. Elise was uncomfortable around Meg, sure that Sam’s sister was wise to her painful crush. If Meg had had such a crush, she would have gotten drunk and taken care of it one way or another, rather than waiting around for years, stupidly hoping, and finally writing a letter, the coward’s way out.
Elise asked about Sam’s teaching and his music, and he told her that after living in New York for six years after college, trying to get gigs and giving private lessons, he got tired of just scraping by and did a master’s in music education, then applied for the high school job here because he thought it would be nice to live close to Meg and her family. “So I’m not as cool as I thought I was, but I like my teenage minions. And I play with a quartet. We get down to New York sometimes. In the summer there’s a music scene around here, with Tanglewood nearby. Have you ever been out for it?”
“Not since—not in a long time.”
Elise forced down a gulp of tea. Did he really not remember that weekend? Just the word Tanglewood and she was back in that ghostly bedroom, with the night draining away the thought that she might be brave enough to disturb the universe.
“That’s right, we took the bus up,” Sam said, as if she’d reminded him. “They did the Mendelssohn violin concerto and Prokofiev, the ‘Lieutenant Kijé’ suite.” He hummed a bit of something that sounded familiar. Sam could slip into a tune as easily as a jacket, and he would hum it just long enough to suggest that singing was superior to speech. “Too bad the season doesn’t start till next month.”
He gestured toward her belly. “So tell me—boy or girl? Do you know?”
“We decided to go the old-fashioned route and be surprised.”
“I think I’d do that too. Prolong the mystery.”
One night when they were eating together in the dining hall, Sam had talked about wanting to have kids someday. “I’d be a good father, don’t you think?” he said, puffing out his chest. She did, she did. But she’d just laughed and left the table to get a dish of vanilla soft serve, trying not to start mulling over what they would name their babies. Now she thought about asking Sam if he still wanted kids. But she didn’t want to hear him say that he did, he just hadn’t found the right woman yet. He was a man; he had plenty of time. When they first got to be friends, she’d wondered if he might be gay. Maybe that was why he was so damn good at the arts, so sensitive to beautiful things. Was that why they could walk around campus talking, laughing, never holding hands? But no. As it turned out, there had been girls; there would be women. Sam just didn’t discuss them. So she was free to fantasize that their future together was inevitable; it didn’t mean he wasn’t interested just because they hadn’t become a couple yet.
“Are you feeling it move a lot?” Sam asked. “It. The creature.”
“The alien.”
“Do you feel like you’ve been colonized?”
“It’s funny, being on this book tour—such as it is—I feel like I’m traveling with someone else. A perpetual audience. But I have no idea who this audience member is.”
“Right, like does it enjoy your poetry, or is it secretly thinking, ‘Lady, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ ”
Elise laughed. She’d always basked in Sam’s teasing, welcomed it as a kind of intimacy.
“So you’re going to give birth to this little critic. Are you excited? Terrified?”
His face shone with that intense curiosity, that genuine interest, that she’d found so desirable.
“Both, I guess. I keep telling myself to think about it, to prepare somehow, but I can’t get my mind around what it’s going to be like.”
If Elise were less on guard, less determined to present herself to Sam as flourishing (while being disarmingly humble about her successes, of course), she might have told him about the miscarriage, how it had made her alert to the precariousness of it all. Developing organs could quit growing. A beating heart could just stop. During delivery, a few minutes of insufficient oxygen could mean a lifetime of damage. A bacterial infection could attack a tiny body—born and then gone. But no, he had lost the privilege to be close to her, to know her desires and her fears. She’d wanted to bare all of that to him, and she’d been afraid to, and with a few sentences dispatched through the mail, he’d wiped out her vision of what could be. And now she was standing in his kitchen, a visibly pregnant woman, the way pregnant women stood as if on display, as if embodying love and life and hope for the future—all of the things that others, and the women themselves, wanted to see.
* * *
—
Elise was the last poet to read, after two fifty-something women, Berkshire locals. She heard herself being gracious, thanking the bookstore owner who’d invited her to come, the audience of twenty or so people, no doubt most of them friends of the other poets. She began to read the Post-it Note–marked poems in her book. When she’d started writing, she was all about yearning and despair. Writing poems about Sam was her weakness. They were bad and she knew it. But there was something consoling in trying to put her feelings into a poem and failing. Sam couldn’t overtake the page; there was no monument erected to his greatness. One day, she thought, she’d transcend the who-cares-about-your-dumb-love-life poems and capture the aching perfection of the exquisite swoon: love as disaster, love as elixir, love as crushing flood and holy water. It hadn’t happened yet. Instead, she had started writing about other things: the origins of words, geological structures, weather patterns, household objects. She’d made a book out of intriguing distractions and chiseled restraint. She read her last poem, thanked everyone again, and allowed herself one glance at Sam. He was clapping vigorously, his face flushed and smiling. She knew that look from years ago, from the dorm room, when he would turn around to take a break from studying, and she would say something that pleased him, that seemed to slip inside his skin and switch on a light. It was that look of pleasure that had given her the most hope.
As the small audience dispersed, a woman, young and pretty, tapped Sam on the shoulder, and Elise was struck by a jealous twinge. Then Meg put an arm around her shoulders and steered her toward the table by the cash register, where the poets would sign books. “That was awesome,” Meg said. “I was afraid I might have to lie to you afterward.”
Elise laughed. “How do I know you’re not lying right now?”
“I can’t even lie to my kids. Really, you were good.”
“Thanks. It’s great to see you again.”
“I always liked you. You were mysterious.”
; “You mean I was shy.”
“In a good way. I approved.”
“You approved?”
“For a while I thought you and Sam were together, and he just wasn’t telling me.”
“Oh.” Elise’s hand went to her belly, a protective gesture—for herself, not her womb.
Meg leaned in. “I think he made a mistake,” she said. “But anyway, you’re doing great. You got a book published. You’re married. You’re having a baby.”
She’d pinpointed the reasons that made it seem okay to see Sam again, but it was disconcerting to hear them directly articulated. Like Elise was trying too hard, still, to get Sam to notice her. What could she say to his sister? She didn’t have to say anything. One of the other readers was coming toward her, waving Elise’s book and a pen.
* * *
—
She sat on Sam’s couch, drinking a mojito minus the rum. The stereo was playing Debussy, one of Sam’s favorites, oboes and flutes chasing each other like nymphs through a forest. After she’d signed a few books at the bookstore, they’d gone out for Japanese food with Meg and that woman who’d been talking to Sam, an English teacher at the high school, who, Elise had learned with an irritating flicker of relief, had a boyfriend at home. And now she and Sam were alone at his house. He was sitting in a rocking chair with his sleepy eyes fixed on her, his chin resting on his hands. “Thirteen years since we graduated, huh? When you look back on college, are you nostalgic?”
Fuck you—you were college, she thought. “Are you?” she replied.
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