“Is it that obvious?”
“You’re looking pretty postcoital,” he said.
“You too?”
“Yup. That obvious?”
“You wouldn’t smile unless you were done too.” Finishing a school year rivals being in love for best feeling in the world. The jealousy of it knows no bounds, which is why I wouldn’t talk to Jill or Katie for a couple days until they were done too. The sleeplessness and tedium of two straight weeks of reading, writing, grading, and, this semester, panicking, felt far behind. I had a whole summer stretched out before me. That I had slept four hours total in the previous forty-eight, that I started teaching summer session in just a couple weeks, that nothing had been resolved, didn’t matter at the moment. It was May at last. It was warm and bright. I could do anything I wanted, guilt-free, all day. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow barely crept at all. I had survived another April. It was cause for jubilation.
“I thought you were quitting the latte addiction after grades were in,” I said.
“April,” he said as if that explained everything. “Besides, it’s not like I’m pregnant.”
“Mmm,” I said.
“Mmm? What does that mean?”
“Nothing. I’m supposed to be surprised you’re not pregnant?”
“Oh come on, Janey. Tell me. My life is so boring. You have to help me.”
I scowled at him. Jason and his boyfriend Lucas had been together for seven years. Good—and boring—as married. They lived in Olympia, more than an hour south, which meant I had Jason on my couch when he had to be at school late or early or was too drunk or tired to drive home. Lucas was the head chef at a restaurant in Olympia called Ever After. Very popular. He went to work nearly every day. They paid him a real salary. He read books only for fun. He was our hero. And pretty much as alien to our lives as if he played professional baseball. “Your life is boring,” I admitted finally. “How did you know?”
“Oh Janey, everyone knows.” He rolled his eyes. I was stunned. I couldn’t imagine how anyone knew. “What’s she going to do? Is she keeping it?” It seemed remarkable to me that everyone was going to be so willing to ask such a stunningly personal, intimate question right out of the box. And the terminology “keeping it” is weird. What’s the opposite of keep?
“I think she’s going to have a baby,” I said and thrilled a little guiltily at the conspiratorial drama. He gasped, grinned, nattered on beside me. This news had shattered Daniel, the worst news of his life. But it thrilled Jason as it would most people who heard it. It was great gossip. It would prove endlessly, renewably interesting because it wouldn’t end—she’d just get more and more pregnant and then there’d be a baby to discuss. It had the feel of scandal. We all graded half a dozen research papers each semester on the tragedy of unwed mothers. This was like that but without the heartbreak. It was the plot without the tragedy.
“What did Dan say?” asked Jason. Was telling a betrayal? I didn’t want to gossip—not just because it didn’t seem fair but also because, really, it felt like my life—but I also really wanted to gossip. Two weeks of literary criticism bred a craving to talk about things real. And nothing was more real than this.
“He’s not so much wanting to be a father.”
“Too bad?” asked Jason. It was a question. Is it too bad?
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess she’s going to do it without him?”
“He’s leaving her?” Jason gasped.
I shrugged. “He isn’t leaving her. He just doesn’t want to do this. I don’t know what they’ll do.”
“What an asshole. Too late to make that decision,” he said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “You think he has to be a father if he isn’t ready just because Jill is?”
“If he wasn’t ready, he shouldn’t have been having sex,” said Jason.
“Oh that’s bullshit. What are you—Focus on the Family? Besides, that’s easy for you to say. You can have sex all you want, and no one gets pregnant.”
“Ohmygod, speaking of which, Lucas’s friend Ed called last night to tell us his ex-boyfriend Martin knocked up some girl and is getting married. Stupid fags. No clue how to use birth control . . .” And we were off. Jason moved seamlessly from one bit of gossip to the next, all equally titillating and ridiculous. He was a very close friend of ours. But Jill’s crisis was as removed for him as his boyfriend’s friend’s ex-boyfriend’s poor, knocked-up fiancée. Somehow I wasn’t feeling that distance.
Nine
Secondhand sources are never one hundred percent reliable. Firsthand ones, when they are pregnant and in love and borderline hysterical, aren’t always much better. So I might be shaky on some of the details. I do know that Daniel was over at Jill’s nearly every night after I ran into him at the coffee shop, that they talked and talked until neither wanted to talk about it ever again, until they didn’t even want to see each other anymore. They talked and also spent a lot of time not talking and just holding each other and also spent a lot of time having a lot of sex because, at that point, why not? I know that Jill didn’t just ignore his feelings on the matter, that she heard his point of view and deeply considered it, that Daniel didn’t just up and leave, that he heard her viewpoint too, even tried to change his own, that they continued to love each other, that Daniel tried hard to grow up instantaneously those first few weeks after he graduated from college. I know that negotiations took place. I can promise that tears were shed on all sides. Hearts were broken, to be sure, but not recklessly or thoughtlessly, and if I can’t perfectly reproduce those conversations Jill and Daniel had, I can promise that they were had with full hearts.
In the end, it didn’t matter. One event changed everything. If it hadn’t happened, everything would have been different. I think Jill and Daniel would have sat on her sofa and talked for nine months, would have run their mouths until her water suddenly broke mid-sentence and there were no longer any options. And truly, I think Daniel would have fared just fine with fatherhood thrust upon him. But there was a catalyst, an event, a moment which changed everything and not just for us. This is good for storytelling but bad for decision making, and it is frightening to look back and realize, were it not for that moment, all of our lives would have been so different. Maybe that’s revisionist history. Maybe it’s me making origin myths. But I can’t shake the conviction that Jason’s boyfriend’s friend’s ex-boyfriend’s girlfriend changed the world.
We were sitting around the post-dinner table at my house, all four of us, Katie, Jill, Daniel, and I, about three weeks after graduation, not quite two months into Jill’s pregnancy. We were sated, had eaten and chatted our fill. We had talked very little about babies and more about nothing at all. We had found someplace comfortable in all this where things didn’t seem so urgent anymore. They had to decide, but they didn’t have to decide this minute. We had reached a place where we could talk and think about other things, where we could joke with each other, where it was almost old times (she wasn’t showing; she wasn’t even throwing up). We could almost forget for whole hours at a time. Things felt okay. Then Jason and Lucas knocked on the door and came in bearing news and change and, thankfully, cake.