THE BABY WAS ISABEL, an almost perfect baby. At birth she resembled her father, dark, long, and lean, and she remained so through the years of her childhood. Caroline and Ivan welcomed her with bemused surprise like an unexpected treasure, a windfall, so that she grew happily. It was natural to treat her like a treasure because she was so agreeable, as if upon joining their family—creating for them a family—she had pledged not to be disruptive, to do her necessary crying and falling and experience her necessary frustrations with the least disturbance. She was readily soothed. Nor did goodness make her bland. Her father’s daughter, she was a child of wit and energy and grace, who spoke, as an only child does, with a winning fluency. Envious friends warned that such children become terrible in adolescence, saving up, as it were, the powers of destruction, but Caroline and Ivan, restored to grateful calm after years of agitation, lived in the present. They had an elderly baby-sitter who took care of her during the days so Caroline could teach, but she dropped whatever administrative tasks she could, and did fewer projects of her own. Ivan became a true father as he had promised so long ago: not only did he tend and nurture, but he woke for night feedings, he diapered, he pushed the stroller.

He was always glad, that first year, to get her alone. Filled with relief that her shape had re-emerged after the pregnancy, he pursued her greedily, reminding her of the high school boys whose hands had ceaselessly and involuntarily twitched and roamed. She would laugh to herself when she came downstairs after putting the baby to bed and read the jittery message in his eyes. Working and caring for Isabel, she was tired, and often she couldn’t fully savor his passion. But she was happy to know it existed, still, because of her. She was happy in his arms. When he told her she was growing passive she tried to be more active. It didn’t strike her as too important either way, active or passive, she was so relieved herself to have finished with pregnancy and childbirth.

And then, when the baby began to sleep and eat on a civilized schedule and amuse herself for spells during the day, Caroline’s passion returned. Ivan’s cooled. Isabel was more of an intriguing presence now. She was delighted to greet her father at the door each night. Ivan saw his face mirrored in hers. He whispered words to her that Caroline couldn’t hear, he took her for walks alone at twilight on the shady green streets and returned proudly bearing anecdotes of her wit. It was Caroline, more often now, who pursued with a glittering eye. But she hardly worried; she understood it was rare for lovers’ cycles to coincide. He would be back.

Isabel had just one noticeable flaw, and that was a right eye that did not focus properly. It turned in. The doctor said to operate, the sooner the better. She was four. Caroline spent the night before the operation tossing on a cot alongside Isabel’s hospital bed, getting up intermittently to watch snatches of old movies on television in the patients’ lounge. Ivan came the next morning, barely in time to say hello and good-bye to Isabel as a young bearded attendant strapped her to a wheeled table. She was holding a stuffed replica of Babar the elephant and seemed inordinately cheerful, far more interested in the handsome green-coated attendant than in Ivan. They gazed after as the attendant wheeled her, much too quickly, Caroline felt, to the doors of the elevator. He jiggled the table in time to a Beatles tune he was singing to Isabel.

“You’re wearing your glasses,” said Caroline.

“My eyes were burning.”

A passing nurse suggested they might want to go to the staff cafeteria, since it would be a long wait.

“How long?” asked Ivan.

“Two hours. Maybe more. We’ll let you know as soon as she’s in the recovery room.”

At the words “recovery room,” Caroline’s heart leaped to her throat. Her father had gone to the recovery room but never recovered. Now Isabel was her only blood kin.

The staff cafeteria, at the end of a series of musty tiled basement corridors, was filled with young men and women in white uniforms, chattering and laughing.

“Do you mean to say these are doctors?” asked Caroline.

“They must be students. Anyway, they’re down here, not up there. Look, Caroline, you get a table and sit down. You look terrible. What do you want to eat?”

“Coffee, black, with something. Anything.”

He brought two coffees and two pecan danishes with coconut sprinkled on top. His hands trembled when he set down the mugs. After eleven years of marriage, she thought, coconut. She hated coconut, but she bit into it.

“Isn’t it strange that we can sit here and eat while our child is being cut up?” she said.

“Don’t you remember what that lady in Rome told us? You have to eat no matter what happens. Wars, assassinations, minor surgery. Just keep eating.”

“Maybe I’ll have another, then.” It was amazing how, since her pregnancy, she had never had any more stomach trouble. She had developed what Ivan’s father called a cast-iron stomach. They must remember to call Ivan’s parents later, to let them know everything was all right.

Ivan started to get up.

“No, it’s okay. I’ll go this time. How about you?”

“Oh, all right, bring me a roll and some scrambled eggs and bacon, and more coffee.”

She found a pastry without coconut. After they ate, Ivan took a deck of cards out of his pocket.

“Do you want to play gin?”

“When you play with me, it’s not even a challenge.”

“You have a chance,” he said. “I’m not in my best form. Anyway, you have the basic ability. Your problem is that you don’t concentrate.”

“Thank you, Jerome.”

They went up to the main floor to play. The waiting room was enormous, with deep brown leather seats and huge teardrop chandeliers. The few people scattered about were reading newspapers. War was raging. Students were demonstrating. Ivan shuffled the cards and they cascaded to the floor. “I guess I’m nervous,” he said, picking them up. “Did I ever tell you that I had an operation like this when I was a kid?”

“No, you never told me,” she said. “How come you don’t tell me these things?”

“I was seven.”

“Well, how did it feel?”

“It wasn’t bad.”

She looked up and hesitated. “They didn’t fix it exactly right.”

“I know, but it came out much better than it was. They did the best they could. They’ve improved the technique a lot over the years.”

“We’ll soon see.”

Ivan won four games handily. He put the cards back in his pocket and got up to pace the room. When he returned he said, “Caroline?”

“What?”

“Are you glad we met?”

She didn’t want to be bothered. She was sewing, and she wanted to be lost in her cross-stitches. They were very absorbing, very soothing in their unvarying monotony. She had never seen Ivan so fidgety. “What a question.”

“Are you? I mean—” and he smiled weakly—“with my defective eye genes and all?”

“You’re not so defective. You’re all right.”

She wore glasses herself now, for close work. She adjusted them and bent over her sewing.

“What’s that thing you’re doing?”

“It’s a sampler, to embroider. I bought it in the gift shop yesterday.”

“You mean one of those things that says God Bless Our Happy Home? Let me see.”

She held it up. “No, see, this one just has the alphabet, in big and small letters, and flowers.”

“I never saw you do embroidery before. Since when is this?”

“I sew on special occasions. I’ve already done the capital X and the J, and the small a, d, and f, and two roses, and I’m working on the q.”

He gave her an odd look. “Well, I think I’ll go and ask at the desk.”

“It’s only an hour and a quarter.”

“I’ll ask anyway.” He returned in a moment, unsatisfied, and sat down. “Oh, I forgot to tell you the good news. We had a letter from Vic yesterday. He’s getting married.”

Caroline put down the embroidery and took off her glasses. “Vic is? That’s wonderful! Who’s he marrying?” Vic was thirty-five, the same age as she was. His single state had been preoccupying Ivan’s parents for years.

“Someone named Susan. She’s a lawyer too. She works in his office. They’re going to move to New York and set up a practice, so we’ll get to see them more often. In fact, they’re having the wedding in New York in a couple of months, so we can go.”

If she lives, thought Caroline, we’ll go. “That’s wonderful, Ivan. I’m really glad. Did he say how come this one, after all the others?”

“I suppose Miss Right just came along. Or Ms. Right, I should say.”

“Oh, Miss Right. You always said you didn’t believe in Miss Right. You said everything was random. Like us.”

“They’re not necessarily mutually exclusive.”

She pondered that for a few seconds, then said dryly, “I’m deeply touched,” and resumed sewing.

Ivan inquired at the desk about Isabel three times and was embarrassed to ask again. “You go this time, Caroline.”

“You were just there a minute ago. I don’t like the way that woman looks. She’ll yell at me, and I don’t feel like being yelled at.”

“Please.”

The woman, who had a greenish pallor, fixed bulging eyes on Caroline and tightened her lips. “I have already told your husband you would be informed,” she said, and turned her back.

“Oh, fuck off,” said Caroline under her breath. A young man typing behind the desk caught her eye and grinned.

They were summoned five minutes later. “The child is in the recovery room,” the frog-faced woman said.

“But when can we see her?”

“You may go up to her room now. They’ll be bringing her back shortly.”

Caroline turned from the desk and fell weeping into Ivan’s arms. “I was so scared. Oh God, I was so scared. This was much worse than having her.”

“It’s all right now, baby. Everything’s all right. It was nothing, a small thing.”

“I am glad we met, Ivan. I am.”

Isabel was given a pair of dark glasses with round lenses and pink plastic frames, and told to wear them outdoors for two days. In front of the hospital, Caroline dropped the sampler in a wastebasket and studied her. Her heart quickened: with the glasses, Isabel looked like a blind person. But they would be home soon and she could take them off. She herself could hardly wait to get to bed—she hadn’t slept for two nights.

“These are good glasses,” said Isabel. “I’m going to wear them to school.”

Ivan said, “Maybe we should get her a box of pencils.”

“Ivan, really.” But she laughed.

“I don’t want pencils,” said Isabel. “I want my sandals.”

Ivan looked down at her feet, in plaid sneakers. “What sandals?”

“Mommy promised if I didn’t scream when they took my blood I could get sandals after. I didn’t scream.”

“We’ll get them tomorrow.”

“You said as soon as it was over,” said Isabel pleasantly. “Don’t you remember?”

Ivan was opening the car door. Caroline looked over at him. “Please stop at a shoe store,” she said. “I did promise. There must be something nearby.”

“I saw the kind I want at Jack and Jill.”

At night they fell asleep instantly. Caroline awoke to the particular stillness of the hour before first light. She relived her stay in the hospital, the television vigils, the hard cot, the babies with gross deformities and their hapless mothers. The singing attendant, the coconut danish, Ivan dropping the cards. When she had run it through she had the blessed relief of waking from a nightmare. All was well. The stillness around her deepened, and in the dark hour descended like a visitation of grace one of those moments when miraculously it is clear that all things will be well. She knew by now how ephemeral such moments were, and how they must be savored. Except that Ivan, in his sleep, began groping around her back and hips. She was used to his restless sleep, less sleep than a muted form of action. He liked to cling to her at night, as a displaced person journeying to parts unknown clings to a loved relic of home. She didn’t mind; it made her feel needed. But this was extreme: he fumbled in blind frustration with the light fabric of her nightgown. Not for love; had he wanted that he would have whispered her name and groped in a way more calculated to arouse. He was fast asleep, tugging and pulling. All at once in the clarity of the darkness she understood. What he wanted was a feeling. What he wanted, after his own nightmare, was to touch living skin. She was awed by the rareness of him, a creature of such unimpeded instinct that even in sleep he sought what he needed. As she raised the nightgown for him his hands settled on her skin and he quieted, breathing evenly.

It was by accident, a few months later, that she heard Ivan talking about the sense of touch. Vic and his wife, Susan, were up for a long weekend. Susan was Miss Right, Ivan and Caroline agreed. She and Vic were alike—hearty, gregarious, and clever. They even looked alike, both sturdy with ruddy outdoor faces, neatly combed hair and frank brown eyes, the muscled right arms of tennis players. Their life in New York was busy and sociable, and they seemed surprised, in a benign way, that Caroline and Ivan could find enough stimulation in a small university town. They held hands on the couch as they sipped their wine. If one of them needed a hand to light a cigarette or put cheese on a cracker, the hand was reluctantly withdrawn and quickly returned. “Disgusting,” Caroline and Ivan joked in private, in bed, playing their rough games of hide-and-seek with hands. Vic and Susan called each other sweetheart and darling all the time, which she and Ivan laughed at too, benignly, in private. They were planning to start a family right away, Susan said, since they were not getting any younger.

Caroline put Isabel to bed and got out another bottle of wine. Just as she came into the room Ivan was saying, “But still, the senses exist in very different proportions in different people.” He sat in the rocking chair with the fingertips of both hands gently tapping against each other. “I don’t hear a lot, for example—I mean the fine gradations that some people do. That Caroline does. With me it’s the sense of touch. I guess I come to know things by touching them.” He paused a moment, letting each fingertip meet its opposite one in turn, like playing a silent scale on the piano. “I like to feel the textures of things.”

She set down the wine very quietly. It was so intimate, especially coming from Ivan. More intimate, somehow, than revealing a visual or auditory bent. Vic and Susan regarded him curiously.

Susan said that that was more or less what she meant in the first place, that Ivan was as different from Vic as brothers could be. Vic was so intellectual; she was always telling him he should get more in touch with his feelings.

“But I wasn’t talking about any pop psychology,” said Ivan kindly. “I was talking about primary, sensory experience. Before the emotions, even.”

Touch was the most primitive. In all their years together he had never told her that.

She lay in bed waiting for him while he brushed his hair, examining it in front of the mirror as he did nightly, for signs of thinning. There came a rhythmic rustling from the next room, where Vic and Susan were staying.

“They’re starting a family,” said Caroline.

“And getting in touch with their feelings,” said Ivan.

“Oh, talking about feelings, you never told me about your sense of touch....Sweetheart.”

“No?”

“No. That’s very important.”

“I never thought of it. I suppose I thought you knew.”

Of course, she did know. The hands on her skin at night, coming to know her by the touch. Except she needed to hear him speak it aloud to know that she knew.

Ivan approached her earnestly, brush in hand. “Caroline? I mean, darling, do you think my hair is getting any thinner? Feel.”

“It feels fine. I can’t feel any difference.”

He squinted at her. “I think you’re just being kind.”

“You know I’m not kind that way. I’d tell you the truth. Oh, all right, just a few hairs less. Nothing to worry about. You’re still beautiful.”

“That is not an objective opinion,” he said.

“I can’t help it. I do my best. Listen, Ivan.” She put her hand on his. “Do you really think I ought to go, this winter? You give me an objective opinion.”

“My opinion is yes, you should definitely go. Why all the fuss?”

She had been invited to spend three months—a trimester—as a visiting professor at a small college in the north woods, giving advanced seminars in topological groups and the topology of manifolds.

“Go ahead. You’ll be on loan,” her department head quipped when she showed him the letter. “We’ll manage.” He sounded like Ivan.

She was hesitant about leaving Isabel, who was five, but Ivan kept reassuring her that everything would be all right. Mrs. Seward would pick her up at nursery school and stay in the afternoons.

“But she can’t stay long enough to cook dinner.”

“I’ll cook.”

“You’ll cook! But your cooking is too fancy for her.” In cooking he lacked the common touch. His hamburgers were leaden, fortified with bread crumbs. The first evening he had asked her to his apartment in Rome he let the chicken burn to a crisp while he described how the lights on the Ponte Vecchio were reflected in the Arno on a summer night. The description made her shiver with love, yet she felt he should have been able to manage lyricism and chicken at the same time.

“I’ll make Chinese food,” he said. “She likes that. Don’t worry about it.” It was true, he did quite well with Chinese food. He had taken a course.

He urged her on, countering all her doubts with reason. At night, lying close in bed, she teased him, running a finger vertically down the hairs of his chest. “Why are you so eager for me to go?”

“Because it will be good for you,” he answered seriously. She felt a stirring of love. But hours later she awoke and heard those words resound in the dark air. Were they patronizing words, perhaps?

Patronizing or not, they were correct, and she would go. She was excited by the change, and by the prospect of the seminars, new colleagues with new ideas, and solitary walks in the snowy north woods. In her life now she missed solitude. She wondered what she would be like in solitude, what her habits would be, if she would enjoy her own company or be bored.

The first few weeks in the north woods she was very happy. The classes went well, the students were bright, and the other teachers congenial. She had a small, pleasant efficiency apartment in a low building housing some twenty single faculty members. Her private office was luxurious compared to the one she shared at her own university, and it looked out over a vista of imposing evergreens in precise, satisfying rows. Best of all were the long walks in the woods along cleared snowy trails. Caroline shook the laden branches of trees and laughed as heaps of snow came tumbling down around her and over her. She discovered small bubbling waterfalls that trickled into lively ripples edging the frozen surfaces of ponds. There was even a romantic old stone tower on a hill. She clambered up with the exaltation of a prince going to rescue a maiden from captivity. She was not bored; she found herself excellent company. In the evenings she sometimes ate alone in her apartment with a book propped on the table, and sometimes, if she felt like talk, in the faculty dining room. Late at night she read Proust in bed, and smoked.

At the beginning her mind would stop abruptly at odd moments like a train pulling up short, and she would think: Where is Isabel now? Isabel is at nursery school, listening to a story. Isabel is in the bathtub with her rubber fish. Isabel is having dinner. (What bizarre Asiatic concoction is she eating? Has he taught her to use chopsticks?) But in time those questions stopped. Caroline wrote Isabel letters and received in return stick-figure drawings with a few tender penciled words slanting downward across the page. These she treasured.

She spoke to Ivan occasionally on the telephone, late at night. The first few times she hung up feeling weak-kneed with want, from the sound of his voice. Soon she began to long, uncomfortably, for someone to make love to her. She gaped childishly at any chance muscled body glimpsed in the drugstore or the bank. Reading the lush rhythmic prose of Proust aroused her. The homosexual and the sadistic passages aroused her most. She worried briefly about the possible implications of this, then decided there were none, she simply needed someone. Tentatively, she took a look around.

Her department, mathematics, consisted of an elderly patriarch, a tired married man in his mid-fifties, and a chubby precocious boy of twenty-five, whom she thought of as The Callow Youth. The English department occurred to her. English departments were generally large, and their members reputed to be forever in quest of sensation. She assumed it came from dwelling so continuously in poems and stories. Gazing in the mirror at her unappreciated body, she was embarrassed to acknowledge her undertaking. But surely she was a grown woman now, she retorted to the image, old enough to know what she needed and seek means to obtain it. Hadn’t Ivan once said she looked like the kind who could go after what she wanted? And this was another world—no one who mattered would ever know.

She began eating in the faculty dining room more frequently and more attentively. Of the English department’s three single men, one was a perpetually disgruntled Australian poet with rotting teeth, and another a specialist in Middle English, whose flailing morning hesitancy suggested that he drank all night. The last, a recent arrival, taught Victorian and modern poetry and dressed in neat faded jeans and cashmere sweaters in rich colors—wine, olive, sienna. Tall, fair-skinned, and mustached, he wore aviator-style tinted glasses, the same as hers. Common tastes. He seemed about her age too, perhaps a few years younger—old enough, anyway, to have had some experience. He had an incipient pot belly, which she would have to learn to ignore, but otherwise he was well-built, with long legs and tight muscles, and he moved easily, with comfortable nonchalance. Only his voice made her hesitate: it was strained, as if from inner tension withheld. Yet he could laugh readily at a joke with a disarmingly modest, amused light in his blue eyes. She had an old unsatisfied hunger for blue eyes, ever since the editor of the high school paper who put his hand under her skirt on her mother’s couch. His name was John and he was shy. It would take some doing.

She first engaged his interest over the Ping-Pong table in the lounge of the faculty dining room. They played similarly: with fervor, their pride at stake in every volley, castigating themselves for errors and relishing a point well taken. Neither of them was often able to outplay the other—the mistakes were mostly self-destructive. He told her that a point lost in that fashion was called an “unforced error.” Caroline marveled at the ramifications of that term, unforced error, but John did not seem to appreciate its nuances, as Ivan would have.

After a few nights they grew adapted to each other’s style and developed canny modes of retaliation. He had an angled, menacing serve; Caroline learned to stand near the right-hand corner of the table, to return it. Her plays were swift, if erratic; he learned to adjust his timing. More and more they indulged in prolonged, deceptively relaxed volleys, playing a waiting game, alert for the other’s slip in attention. She felt with him, during those passages, the tacit intimacy of opponents, really accomplices secretly finding and inhabiting each other’s rhythm. The long volleys usually ended with his slamming the ball hard in a burst of violence: these were either brilliant strokes, irretrievable, or else they veered absurdly, bouncing off the walls and ceiling. She laughed out loud at his unlikely recklessness. Yes, she decided after many evenings of Ping-Pong and careful scrutiny, that is the man.

The first time they made love she responded to him with the stored desire of five weeks. He will believe that I am mad about him, she thought; he will not understand that it is desperation. But then it hardly mattered.

She was right. John, who even in intimacy kept a vestige of shyness, was pleased and flattered. Without his glasses his eyes were a richer blue, and they glowed with an appealing, gentle pride. Leaning over her, his fair hair brushing her face, he smiled with a tremulous curve of the lips she had never seen across the Ping-Pong table. An amused twinkle sprang to his eyes as he said, “If you like that so much I’ll be glad to do it again sometime.”

He was a very lovable man, she realized with some surprise.

“Oh, by all means.”

Not bad, she congratulated herself, not bad for a small out-of-the-way college in the north woods.

One evening Ivan said over the phone, “I’m so busy here that in the whole time you’ve been gone I’ve only read forty pages of The Dream of the Red Chamber.” He made it sound tragic.

“I’m sorry.” I’ve read three volumes of Proust, she added silently, with guilt.

“Things are awful at work. Lanier quit without any notice and left a six-month backlog of stuff not done. It took us three days just to go through it.”

“Oh, Lord!”

“There’s so much laundry. And Isabel has started staying up so late at night.”

“How late?”

“Nine. Nine-thirty.”

“Well, why don’t you make her go to bed?”

“I don’t know, it’s kind of nice having her around. It’s so quiet in the evenings.”

“Well—”

“I’m not complaining.”

“You’re certainly giving a good imitation.”

“How are you? How is it going out there?”

“Fine. Really fine.” She had no desire to tell him much over the phone. She would tell him when she got back. Ivan seemed very remote now, while John was close to hand, palpable. It made her happy to have John around, even though she did not love him. He didn’t break in on her solitude the way Ivan did, nor did she need to think about him when he was not with her. Sometimes even when he was, she thought about events in her past, or her work, or the volume of Proust she was up to, things that had nothing to do with him and that she had no wish to share. Her walks in the snow were not spoiled by his company. He was a hand to hold, someone to show her discoveries—the waterfalls, the tower—yet they remained no less hers. Ivan would have infiltrated the north woods. At home he infiltrated everywhere. The air around him carried a magnetic charge that distorted her sense of boundaries. There was no solitude.

She and John, meanwhile, discovered that beyond sex, they had enough to talk about: New England, where they had both grown up; music, which Ivan knew nothing about; politics—John didn’t think anarchism was so impracticable; painting. What she knew about painting she knew from Ivan, she remembered guiltily whenever she said something intelligent. They also liked to play chess, which Ivan hated because he lost to her, eat pizza, throw snowballs at each other, and do all the things that lovers do. But we are not really lovers, Caroline thought. She hoped John did not love her. He had never said so. She did not want to leave wrenching pain behind her when she left; her own memories would be pain enough. And she was only on loan, after all.

In another telephone conversation Ivan said, “Isabel’s been invited to a birthday party, a new boy in her class, Dick, but she doesn’t want to go.”

“Why not?”

“She says she doesn’t like him.”

“Why doesn’t she like him?”

“Well, listen to this, this is terrific. She has three reasons for not liking him. He’s too fat, he spits when he talks, and his shirt hangs out over his pants.”

Caroline laughed.

“I tried to tell her those are no reasons to condemn a person, but she really is set against going.”

“I don’t blame her. I think those are pretty good reasons for not liking a person.”

“Oh, Caroline, really. My shirts sometimes hang out.”

“But you don’t spit,” she said.

“Oh no? I’m going to spit right now. Watch out.” He made a succulent sound into the phone.

Suddenly he was not remote at all. He had infiltrated the north woods. She slumped back in her chair. “I miss you,” she whispered.

“I miss you too. I put your pillows away. There were too many on the bed. Four. They made me lonely so I put your two in the closet.”

“Oh, Ivan, how could you?”

“The sheets are cold,” he said.

“Please.”

The next evening, with John, she felt something she recognized in panic was very like love. She clung to him and asked him to stay the night. She had never wanted that before. She felt a pang of delayed jealousy over the woman he had been married to for three years, a decade ago. What kind of woman would John choose as a wife? While he slept she spent a long time staring at him, and traced the lines of his face, neck and shoulder with her finger, very lightly so he wouldn’t wake. She wondered if she was headed for trouble.

But that passed, and then for the first time she knew a shallow duplicity, for all along she had felt her integrity rested in keeping John and Ivan distinct.

When it was time to leave she packed her bags with eagerness. John drove her to the train in the pale early morning light. Weeks ago she had imagined herself thanking him kindly for the many hours of good company, but when the moment came she could not summon such detachment. He had become too real.

“I hope you’re not going to be very unhappy,” she said. “You knew it was just for a little while.” She heard her words as callous, and saw herself as a character in the kind of 1940s movie she and Ivan liked to watch late at night on television, a male character, Charles Boyer or Humphrey Bogart with important secret missions, not the type to be relied on for permanent arrangements. It was not a pleasant image.

“I knew,” John said. His blue eyes shone behind the aviator glasses with an odd light she hoped was not tears. “You will write, though, won’t you?”

“Of course,” said Caroline, and she left the north woods.

All day, on the train and in the first hours at home, admiring Isabel’s stack of abstract paintings from nursery school, resettling things on her desk and in her closet, checking to see what Oriental oddments were in the refrigerator, John was a shadow over her shoulder. But at night when Ivan touched her the shadow vanished. He made everything vanish.

“Let me see if you still feel the same,” he said.

“I’m so glad to be home,” Caroline said as she embraced him. In a while, amidst pleasure, she had a fleeting image of John at the train station gallantly holding her bags, with possible tears in his eyes.

“Well, tell me, do I feel any different?”

“Yes,” he said.

She moved from him, surprised. “How?”

He touched her like a blind man. “You feel as if you’ve been somewhere else.”

“I have been somewhere else. What do you mean?”

Ivan was silent.

“What are you not saying? Say it.”

“No. So long as you came back.”

“Well, of course.”

In the morning she awoke to the sound of soft voices behind her. She could feel Isabel’s hand resting on the curve of her hip.

“His name is Koh Ma. I don’t like him. He goes around hitting everyone in the class.”

“Have you told him to stop?” Ivan asked.

“I tell him, but he doesn’t understand. He can’t talk. He only talks Chinese.”

“Korean, I think it is.”

“There was this doll, and he grabbed it and said ‘dog.’”

“He’s learning English. Why don’t you try teaching him some words?”

“I don’t like people who hit. I don’t hit. More of the boys hit. When you were younger did you use to hit girls?”

Ivan gave a deep sigh. “Talk softly. Mommy’s here now, remember? She’s still sleeping.”

“Well, did you?” Isabel whispered. “Hit girls?”

“Everybody does things, when they’re very angry, that they’re sorry for later. But sometimes they can’t help it.”

“But did you?”

“Well, to be honest, I suppose I did.” He paused for a moment. “Once or twice.”

“You don’t hit me.”

“That’s different. This boy, Koh Ma—he hits because he’s frustrated. I mean, he can’t show what he wants any other way. Probably once he learns to speak English he’ll stop hitting.”

“Whenever we sing a song he yells.”

“How do you think you would feel if you were in his country and all the kids were singing something you couldn’t understand?”

“I wouldn’t yell.”

Ivan laughed. “Don’t be too sure, sweetheart.”

Caroline turned around. Isabel, wearing the dark glasses she had saved from last year’s operation, was sitting up in the center of the bed facing Ivan. As she talked his hand stroked her sleek dark head from the wide forehead back down the sweep of smooth hair, in long slow strokes. His hand covered almost her whole head. He didn’t notice that Caroline was awake: he was staring at the child, absorbed in the touch, burying his fingers in her fine hair while she chattered on. They were quite content without her, she thought. All the time she was gone they had lived like this, happily ever after, a fairy tale’s sequel. Her feeling for John was nothing like this. An unease woke in her blood and spread through her every cell.

When she remarked, much later, that he loved the child more than he loved her he denied it, naturally. He said he loved Isabel not more but differently. “Can’t you see that? It’s so obvious. It’s a different kind of relationship.” It was jarring to hear Ivan use words like “relationship”; it made her doubt certain coveted visions she still had of him: that he was the noble savage who had approached her warily, with subtle grace, through the crowd. Or else the reverse, self-made eighteenth-century man released from the Augustan setting—balanced and serene, witty and sentimental, yet more attuned to brute impulse than he cared to acknowledge. But would a primitive or Augustan speak of “relationships”?

In any case, his love for the child didn’t appear different in kind to Caroline. What was so obvious was its sameness. All love was the same, a desire to gather in and embrace.

Isabel was at her most beautiful the summer she was seven. With an enviable bronze glow, she resembled an Indian of the Southwest. Half her length was legs. “A dancer’s legs,” one of their friends commented, and Isabel, her legs stretched out before her on the rug, smiled back shyly, uncomprehending, with missing teeth. Caroline was grateful for the missing teeth: they represented a visible lapse from perfection, even if temporary. She didn’t like the way the friend had looked at the child, but told herself she was being absurd. Isabel was a baby. She liked to wear her long hair severely tied behind with a ribbon. It swung over her straight back like a skein of velvet. She winced and groaned every morning under the hairbrush, while Caroline hardened her heart and brushed on. “You can have it cut if you want.” Isabel shook her head with gentle stubbornness. “I like it long. Daddy likes it long.” She was strong, infatuated with life and her own beauty, spreading an entrancing glow of goodwill. More than sheer infantile magic—she was truly good, Caroline believed, the outer beauty an accurate portrait of the inner. The fluctuations of emotion played openly on her face in hundreds of tiny gradations in lips and eyes and color: reading her expression, Caroline felt she saw through to the purity of nerve and bone. In her seductive contradictions of innocence and subtlety she was Ivan all over again, and she was bewitching.

They went, that summer, to an inn in the Berkshires for two weeks. After a hike in the woods they lay on the large double bed, Isabel resting between them, holding a hand on either side. Ivan was silent, possibly dozing, while Isabel asked her usual questions and received the usual answers, from a script of unending fascination to her.

“So what do people do when they want to make a baby? Do they say, let’s make a baby, just like that?”

“Well, not exactly. It happens in different ways. They usually both know if they want to.”

“And then do they just go to bed and do it?”

“Yes.”

“Do they have to take off all their clothes?”

“They don’t have to, but they usually do.”

“It must be so embarrassing. Do they have to be married?”

“No, they don’t have to, but most people who have babies are. It’s better for the baby that way.”

The child suddenly clutched Ivan’s arm. He started and blinked. “Let’s get married!” she cried.

“What?”

“Let’s get married.”

“Oh. But I’m already married,” he answered her, smiling. This, too, was from the script.

Instantly, with the fleetness of a butterfly, she was stretched out full length on top of him. “Well, let’s make a baby anyway.”

Ivan put his hands on her shoulders and laughed out loud. “I already made a baby.”

“Isabel,” said Caroline, “it’s hot in here. Go and open the window, please.”

Grunting with mild resentment, she climbed off Ivan and did as she was asked. “Anything to get me out of the way,” she said good-naturedly.

Caroline blushed. “Come here,” she said, smiling. She moved over to make room for Isabel on her right, away from Ivan, circling an arm around her and hugging her close. Her body was soft, immediately yielding. Despite herself, Caroline, too, yielded. “You know I don’t want you out of the way.” Isabel snuggled into her side. After a while Caroline added, “How did you get so clever?” But no one heard. They had both fallen asleep.

She watched them. They even slept alike, their brows slightly furrowed and their lips, the bowed, exquisitely articulated lips, barely parted. But Ivan, as usual, groped and clung; one leg was flung over her own, a heavy, comforting weight, his fist was pressed into the bend of her waist, and his chin had found her shoulder to lean on. Isabel’s sleep was essentially solitary; Caroline might have been a wall or a pillow. She noted with a tinge of nostalgia how Isabel’s primitive infant desires were restrained even in sleep: the renounced thumb came to rest gently on her lower lip, pulling it down to reveal the soft inner pink of her mouth.

The child had an unfair advantage, she thought. Isabel did things that she couldn’t do. Evenings when she heard the click of the door—and she always heard it first—she raced through the living room to meet Ivan and leap up in his arms. When his hair periodically grew long enough Isabel would tie it back in a rubber band and bring him a mirror to see. He submitted like a ludicrous enchanted lover. Bottom and Titania, Caroline thought, looking on. After her bubble bath Isabel would run out, the huge flowered towel fastened like a sarong, and offer him her small shoulder to smell. Ivan rolled his eyes, sighed, and pretended to swoon.

All little girls did these things, most likely. And she was glad Ivan could yield with whimsical abandon. She loved that in him. In men. Her own father would never have humored her in any such silliness. Caroline could not even recall trying out seductive games. Perhaps all little girls did not do those things, or at least not in quite that beguiling way.

She might attempt things equally beguiling. But the lure of ingenuousness had never been her style, and besides, at thirty-eight years old she could not stoop to copying the wiles of a child. Amazing Grace, another friend called Isabel, after the spiritual. Such a quality descended at random. Useless, mortifying to imitate. Nevertheless, she thought as she watched the child begin to stir and stretch lithely in her sleep, there were a few things she could do that Isabel could not. And recalling those things, she smiled with languor, and a touch of smug, vengeful satisfaction.

Isabel’s long lashes fluttered. She smiled up at her mother.

“Did you have a good sleep?” Caroline murmured. She nodded and rubbed her eyes. Caroline glanced over at Ivan. His breathing had changed, quickened. He had rolled off her and lay flat on his stomach. He began to scratch his wrist in his sleep. In five minutes he would be awake.

“Why don’t you go take a swim?” she said to Isabel, and sat up to peer through the window at the pool outside. The lifeguard was on his chair and several children around Isabel’s size were playing in the shallow water.

“Okay.” But she did not move.

“Go on, now.” Caroline gave her a gentle nudge. “We’ll come out too, in a while. Get your suit on quietly, Daddy’s asleep.”

As she watched her undress and pull on the one-piece bathing suit she chided herself for being a fool. It was a baby’s body. Look at the way she yanked the suit up, shifting from side to side in awkward exaggerated movements. But then, the way she gave herself a final appraising glance in the mirror, flicked her hair off her neck and flung the beach towel over her shoulder...no, that was uncanny. Caroline sighed, discomfort flickering in her chest. “Don’t slam the door,” she said. “Have fun. And be careful.”

The closing of the door, though obediently soft, woke Ivan. He turned, opened his eyes and threw a weighty arm across her. “Mm,” he said lazily. “You still here?”

“Obviously.”

“Did you sleep?”

“No. I watched you.” She ruffled his hair and smoothed it off his forehead.

“Where’s Isabel?”

“She went swimming.”

“Ah,” said Ivan, and put his arms around her, settling his head on her breast as if to sleep again. Then he looked up. “Is the lifeguard there?”

“Yes, I checked.”

He settled back on her. “You’re soft.”

“I know. You’re hard.” She stroked his back and smiled. She liked the hardness and sometimes wished she were like that. Her mind wandered and blurred, she felt herself falling into sleep. If her body were hard Ivan would not love her in the same way. If she were different in any other aspect he would not, perhaps. She suddenly imagined herself on probation, with all her lovable qualities liable to vanish at any moment, leaving her with no resources. But she smiled—these notions rose from the irrational edge of sleep. The dazed warmth of him drew her in. Then an odd idea struck her, and she was wide awake. Ivan still lay on her breasts and ran a hand aimlessly over her thigh. Her age was against it, but it wouldn’t be the first. It was having the first at her age that was most dangerous. She could keep her job—she had gotten tenure two years ago. It would mean more juggling of schedules, more baby-sitters. Money. They could manage it. And they still had the old things in the cellar. Every time friends borrowed them they were returned promptly and in excellent condition. That was almost like an omen. Why not, except for the wear and tear on her own body, before and after? But it would be worth it. Her blood seemed to thicken and slow down, and she felt the heaviness of her years settle softly in her veins—a warning. She shivered; the alien feeling passed. Ivan rolled over on his back. As she regarded him, the idea took root in her body with a frightful tenacity. It seemed a tactic worthy of his invention.

In an instant motion, she sprang up and stretched out full length on top of him. “Let’s make a baby,” she whispered.

Ivan clasped his arms around her. The bones of his wrists dug low into her back, and her insides pounced in response. “Are you serious, Caroline?”

“Why not? We did so well with the first. I bet we could do it easily this time.”

He raised his eyebrows in a parody of shock. “Darling, this is so sudden. I mean...Maybe we ought to think about it for a while.”

She shifted her weight and reached down to caress him so he would forget the practical objections sprouting in his mind. Raising her head, she could see out the window Isabel at the pool, beautifully poised on the higher of the two diving boards but hesitating, peering with some trepidation down into the blue water. She had only recently learned to swim and had never dived from so high a place. Caroline stiffened with fear, then a sense of immense distance overcame her fright. Let her learn to take risks too. Jump, she thought. Go ahead and jump! As she sent her message she assumed the burden of responsibility for the dive, and accepted the outcome, whatever it might be. With her hand still on Ivan she watched, holding her breath, till Isabel finally jumped on the board, leaped in the air, made of her body a curling arc and plummeted into the water. After a long moment she reappeared yards from the board, shaking water from her face. When she waved at her companions and swam over to join them, Caroline breathed again, heavily, in relief, and turned back to Ivan. She did not tell him about the triumphant dive.

Ivan’s face softened, his mouth curved into a smile. She brought her hand up to run a finger over the rim of his lower lip. He rolled her off him gently and began to unbutton his shirt, his fingers fumbling. “Why not?” he said in a low voice. “I don’t know what I’m saying,” he added after a moment. “This is no way to decide. You must have cast a spell.”

“Yes,” she whispered in his ear. “I cast a spell.” She kissed his lips and reached out to snap the lock on the door. I have him, she thought. Then tears rose in her eyes; she had never intended to be this way with him.

Ivan put his hands on her shoulders. “You’re not crying, are you? What is there to cry about?” He had all his clothes off and began on hers. “Come here,” he said in a soft urgent tone. “Come on.” He stroked her hair. “I’m going to make you very happy.”