Morning

Morning.

An amazing morning, really. It was barely nine-thirty, and here Sara was, not curled up in her robe with a manuscript in her lap, but lying back on a medical table in a white paper gown with her legs drawn up and her knees spread apart.

She had been so tense about it all. Last night at the Joneses’ Christmas party she had hardly been able to hear people talk, so obsessed was she with thoughts of what had to be done later that night and early the next day. What if the weather turned bad, if it snowed or got foggy? Or what if the plane crashed? Or if the cabdriver had an accident? Last night, the more she thought about it, the more impossible it seemed that she would actually make it from the island thirty miles out at sea into the civilized serenity of Dr. Crochett’s office.

But there she was. Everything had gone smoothly. They had made love last night, and Steve had driven her to the airport this morning, and the plane hadn’t crashed, nor had the taxi, and there had been no fog or snow. In fact it was very mild for the twenty-third of December. It might easily have been April.

Sara closed her eyes and relaxed against the table. She was tired. She had awakened very early this morning, around four o’clock, afraid that the alarm—which had never failed before—would, for some reason, not go off on time. When it did go off, she was lying in bed rigidly, staring at it, waiting for it, and so certain that it wouldn’t go off that when the buzz came, she jumped, startled.

She had taken her temperature at exactly the right time, and noted what it was: she would write it down on the chart tonight. She wouldn’t forget what it was; it had skyrocketed, up eight points.

“Sara! Get up! Get in here, quick!”

She raised her head, puzzled. Was that Dr. Crochett calling her? He had done something between her legs that took only a few seconds, and then rushed out of the room. She had lain there, expecting him to come back. Instead, here was his voice again, urgent, excited.

Dr. Crochett was standing in the hall. He gestured to her to come to him. “Hurry!” he said. “I’ve got something to show you!”

He looked a bit like the mad scientist this morning, his white lab coat unbuttoned and hanging unevenly, his hair slightly mussed. Sara went down the hall and into a small laboratory.

Dr. Crochett took her arm and led her over to a counter. “Look!” he said, triumphantly, indicating a small microscope. “Just look at that!”

Sara bent over the microscope. For a moment she could see nothing. Then she saw them, a swarm of tiny sperm swimming around like maniacs, their tiny tails wiggling.

“Wow,” Sara said. “They look just like what the textbooks say they look like. This is amazing.” And in that moment she had much more faith in all the outer world with its technological paraphernalia. For there they really were, sperm, Steve’s sperm, miniature tadpoles, fat round heads, wriggling tails, zipping around the slide with determined energy.

“So!” Dr. Crochett said. “That is great, isn’t it! You should be very happy. Your husband’s got plenty of sperm—look at all those little critters. And your mucus is compatible with his sperm. Another point in your favor.”

Sara looked up at Dr. Crochett, who was beaming as proudly as if he had just that moment created the sperm himself. She couldn’t help but feel fond of him. “Do you mean there was a chance that it might not be?” she asked.

“Oh, yes, oh, yes indeed,” Dr. Crochett said. “It happens quite often. Sometimes the woman’s mucus kills off the sperm! Quite a problem, you can imagine. But not in your case. Now—watch.”

He picked up the specimen slide and held it over the flame of a cigarette lighter. “Aha!” he said, “just look at that!”

Sara couldn’t help smiling. He was so excited. She looked, not certain what she was supposed to see. But she did see it, clearly, how the mucus from her body dried into a delicate, intricate fern pattern on the glass slide.

Sara smiled, elated. She was going to get pregnant today, she felt it, she felt as inspired as a sinner at a revival meeting; she had just been saved by the evangelist. “Yes, yes, all right, thank you,” she said.

“Now look,” Dr. Crochett said, his voice slowing a little, “if you don’t get pregnant this month, call me right away. Then I want to schedule a uterotubalgram. Don’t be alarmed, it’s just a little test to see if your Fallopian tubes are blocked.”

“Blocked? But—how?” Sara asked.

“Oh, easily, with anything. Happens all the time. Sometimes a bit of menstrual matter attaches itself to the Fallopian tube at the wrong place, then the eggs can’t get down from the tube into the uterus. And if that’s the problem, the solution is easy, because when we run the dye through it blows the tube clean. This procedure can be therapeutic as well as diagnostic.”

“Well,” Sara said. “Hmm.” She was trying to envision all that he was telling her, her Fallopian tubes, and a procedure that would clear them.

“Don’t worry, don’t even think about it, the uterotubalgram is just another step, but we may not even have to take it. Just think about going home and having intercourse. Today. And listen,” he said, leaning forward, smiling, giving her this one last gift, “you know, quite often when I take the mucus from a woman’s body, that procedure in itself makes pregnancy a little more possible. Because I opened the cervix slightly, it makes it possible for those little devils to swim right up there and—wham! You might be getting pregnant right now!”

Instantly Sara was covered with goose bumps. She might be getting pregnant right now. Oh, God, wouldn’t it be wonderful?

“Thank you,” she said. If she was pregnant she would come back to his office and fall on her knees and kiss his feet. She would bring him gifts. She would name her child after him. What was his first name? Hiram. Well, maybe she wouldn’t do that. “Thank you,” she said again.

“Well, well, we’ll see what we see. You call me, either way. All right?”

“All right,” Sara agreed.

But now. Now. She might be getting pregnant even now.

She wanted to sit there in his room all day waiting, all month waiting, not moving, willing it to happen, as if the combination of his energy and her desire would make her wish come true.

She had intended to do some last-minute Christmas shopping in Boston, but really she had gotten everything already, and she wanted to be back on Nantucket, back at home, like a bird ready to sit on the eggs in her nest. She would not try to go to Fanny Anderson’s house today—she had not heard from her, and was miffed. And she did not want to encounter the dragon lady, she did not want to have any negative experience today. She wanted to stay in this happy, hopeful state.

Steve picked her up at the airport when the heavy old PBA DC-3 clunked down at eleven-thirty. Only eleven-thirty, and so much had happened. As she came toward him where he stood waiting for her at the gate, looking ruggedly sexual in his weathered work clothes, her heart swelled with love for him. Look at that man! He was so handsome, so good. He should have a son. She ran toward him, threw her arms around him, and kissed him as passionately as if they had been parted for months instead of a morning.

“Hey.” Steve laughed, pulling away, embarrassed a little by her display. “You okay?”

“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m great. Come on, I’ll tell you about it in the car.”

As they drove back to the heart of town, Sara described the doctor and his procedure. Steve listened intently.

“So,” he said, very quietly, “so it seems I’m okay then. That … I’ve got enough …” He didn’t finish the sentence.

Sara studied her husband’s face. He was driving the car very seriously, not looking at her. Oh, she thought, of course. Of course he would worry about that. Although it had never really occurred to her that it could be his body at fault.

“Teeny-weeny,” Steve said, grinning. “There’s a textbook term.”

She laughed from relief because he was kidding her, he was back to normal, he was relaxed. He was fine.

So now, she thought, sobering, now they had to see if she was just as fine.

At their house, Steve stopped the car but kept the motor running. “I’ve got to get right back to work, babe,” he said, running his hand along the back of her neck, gently rubbing. “Will you be okay?”

“Sure,” Sara said, smiling, “I’ve never felt better.”

“Well, I’m sorry you have to do all this running around. I hope you know I appreciate it. All you’re doing. The flying and the examinations and all.”

“Oh, Steve.” Sara leaned across the seat to hug him. She knew how hard it was for him to say something like that. “I love you.”

“I love you. See you tonight.”

“Yeah. You bet you’ll see me tonight.” She grinned.

Once in the house, Sara hung up her coat, then sank down on the sofa to think. She realized then how tired she was, and leaned back on the pillows and instantly fell asleep.

She awoke to the sound of the mail thumping on the floor through the slot in the door. She looked at her watch; it was just after two. She stretched. She looked down at her stomach. She smiled. Maybe she had been so tired, had fallen asleep like that, because she was already pregnant?

After daydreaming awhile she rose and crossed the living room to the hallway to see what the mail had brought. Some Christmas cards, some bills, a magazine, and another manila envelope from Fanny Anderson.

Dear Sara Kendall, [again the dark-blue gracefully round handwriting on heavy cream-colored stationery]

I understand that you have been trying to reach me and I’m so very sorry if I’ve caused you any inconvenience. I haven’t been well lately and have needed to envelop myself in a cocoon of complete peace and quiet. I hope you will forgive me for not seeing you when you stopped by the other day and also for not answering any of your phone calls. It is just that I have been ill, and need to put my health first these days.

But also please believe me, I am grateful for your appreciation of my Jenny pages, and your encouragement means a great deal to me, more than you could ever know, more than I could ever express. And the notes you sent me with my last pages—marvelous! So helpful. You are a gifted editor. You are perhaps the perfect editor for me.

So please bear with me, if you will. I would love to meet you personally when I am better. Until then, I have sent you some more of the Jenny pages. Again let me say that you mustn’t feel obligated to read them or to like them. But your criticism is immensely helpful, immensely appreciated.

Happy Holidays to you and yours. Perhaps we can talk after the new year.

With warm regards,

Fanny Anderson

Sara looked through the envelope. This package was thicker than the others: fifty pages. She read the first page. It was a continuation of the Jenny story, picking up where the last page had left off, with Jenny sitting in a café at Montmartre, plotting to leave Henry Cook, whose love, if it could be called that, had become oppressive.

Sara was hungry. She made herself a thick sandwich and a pot of tea with lots of sugar and milk and settled down to read.

I found a small pension to stay in. The room was five floors up, and tiny and bare, with just a steel cot and a cheap dresser and a rickety chair, but it was clean. The W.C. was three floors down. I moved in with all I possessed—the clothes I had brought with me when I ran away with Henry—and began life modeling for artists. But it was difficult. The artists pressed me to sleep with them. They insulted me when I refused. I thought I was so sophisticated—why couldn’t I sleep with Henry? Many times I tried, only to find myself fighting, scratching, sobbing, running away, ending up on a strange street at two in the morning wrapped only in a blanket, shaking with fear. Henry first told me I was delicate. When he got tired of my evasions, he changed his mind. He told me I was crazy. Perhaps I was. Such a simple thing, to lose one’s virginity, and I had thought myself so adult, so hard. But I was afraid, and even more, I did not love Henry. Over the months we had lived together in Paris I had gotten to know him too well to love him. He was a spoiled rich boy. And he was not a good artist. But I did not want to leave Paris—some of the painters had become my friends. I wanted to stay in Paris, but not with Henry.

When finally I had very little money left, not more than a week’s worth to live on, Henry Cook discovered my hiding place. He had seen an oil painting of me, nude, and assumed I had slept with the painter, after months of refusing to sleep with him. He broke into my tiny room, he called me names, he raged at me, and then he beat me. Not terribly, but enough to hurt me and to frighten me.

I wired Will Hofnegle: Please send me the money to get home. I need to see you. Please don’t tell my parents.

Will sent me the money immediately. I took an Air France flight to New York, then a Braniff flight to Kansas City. When Will met me at the airport, my left eye was still swollen and discolored and my body was bruised. Will looked so handsome to me, so tall, so strong, so gentle, that I wept to see him and could not understand how I ever could have left him.

He drove me down to the Flint Hills in Kansas, where his farmhouse sat in the midst of his thousand acres. His red-and-white Hereford cows grazed on green pastures; it was April. The sun slanted generously across the land, the wind swept through the undulating hills, making the grasses wave, a sea of glowing emerald. His spaniel and her puppies ran out to greet me.

I stayed with Will. He became my lover. That was what I had wanted, what I had always wanted. How simple the right thing can be. Will was a wonderful lover, all I had ever dreamed of.

I called my parents and reunited with them but refused to come home, insisting on living with Will, even though we were not married. This upset my parents terribly and opened a breach between us. It was all right for me to run off to Paris, but it shamed them that I was living out of wedlock with a man in my home country. I could not explain myself to them. I did not have to explain myself to Will; he did not propose marriage to me. He did not even ask how long I was planning to stay.

And I didn’t stay long; I left the next January. I loved Will, but the Kansas winter, with its walls of snow and howling winds and frozen landscape, as dead as the moon, made me wild. I felt trapped. I had to get away. Will gave me some money. He had plenty of money. He did not try to make me feel indebted; he did not try to make me stay. He did not judge me. He did not ask, “What are you searching for?”

I was nineteen. I flew back to Paris. It was winter there, too, but spring was nearer, the weather was not so savage, and did not matter so much in the city. The streets of Paris, the clamor, the clothes, the art, the arches, the artists! Now I was ready in every way for the complexity of this place. Within a few days I had become the lover of a young French painter who called himself, simply, Lalo. I lived with Lalo, posed for him, sat in the café with him, watching spring come in Paris. Once again there were people to see me, and I liked that. I needed the men to whistle and wink and stare and approach, I needed the envious glances of women. Cows would not appreciate my beauty, but Parisians could.

I lived with Lalo for almost a year, then left him for another painter, Jean-Paul. He was more intellectual, more interesting, there was more to him than just good looks, and after a year I went with him and a group of his artist friends to Mexico. We rented an old run-down hacienda outside the small town of Guanajuato. Seven of us, seven artists.

For I became an “artist,” too; I decided to write poetry. Sometimes I would recite my poetry aloud while Phillippe, one of the gay artists, accompanied me on the flute. Artists from other colonies in Mexico came to visit, and we seven bought a dilapidated van and drove through the mountainous, barren, rocky Mexican countryside to visit other colonies. People began to hear about us, to study us! Journalists came down, sweating in their wrinkled city suits to admire us in our loose, bright-colored cottons, bare skins, and sandals. The day came when I read about myself in a prestigious American periodical. There was an article on artists in Mexico, and I was listed as one of the group that was becoming known as “The Seven.” I was very happy. This was what I had meant to happen in my life. I only wished they had taken photographs.

It did not cost much to live in Mexico, but it cost something. One of the members of our group had some money, enough to fill our most minimal needs. But eventually I began to want more, some pretty clothes, some bangles. It was chic then to be bohemian and shabby, but I longed for lovely clothes. For decorative combs to hold back my hair. For the cheap flashy rings from the Guanajuato marketplace. I began to write poetry more seriously, and then short pieces, articles, short stories, fantasy stories, and sent them off to various magazines. My poetry was rejected, as was everything else for a very long time, but at last a short article sold, a mixture of fact and fantasy about an artistic colony in Mexico. I was elated. Now my life was real.

I insisted then that I have a separate bedroom in the old hacienda so that I could write whenever the mood struck. My small success had made Jean-Paul angry and jealous. And it was becoming obvious to us both that although I was his lover, I did not love him. Restless times fell upon The Seven, everyone changed partners, everyone slept with everyone else, or tried to—even the gay couple did their best. A period of discontent set in. Bottles were thrown in anger, voices were raised, dishes smashed, clothes torn. Nothing else I wrote was accepted for publication.

Five years of my life had passed. I had thought I had caught hold of a comet that might carry me into the heavens, but so soon it seemed to be fizzling. I was not as happy with my new lover, François, as I had been with Jean-Paul. My beauty was taken for granted among the five I lived with.

The next time we drove in our van to visit another artists’ colony, I packed my few belongings. And stayed with the people we had gone to visit. This was easy for me; I was so beautiful, and there were many men. This group was British; they served tea in china cups on the hottest day. These people, too, were trying to be artistic and bohemian—and they were artistic—but were so tidy and refined and reserved and brittle that they could never be truly bohemian. But because they were British, they were exotic to me, and I stayed with them, moving from man to man, for four years.

But then it was 1960 and the times were changing. Now England was the place to be. Perhaps that was why I fell so hopelessly in love with Cecil Randolph. Or perhaps I would have loved him anyway. He was a newcomer to the British artistic colony and had come during the time when I (luckily) had fought with my current lover and moved into a room of my own. Cecil wasn’t an artist as much as a connoisseur. He had come to visit his younger brother George. The moment he walked into the room, I was enthralled. Much later I would realize that Cecil was a slimmer, more erect, more sophisticated, more haughty version of Will Hofnegle. But then I did not see the resemblance. I saw only the long, narrow nose, the cold pale blue eyes, the aristocratic lean height of the man. Perhaps one really loves only different versions of the same man all one’s life. Perhaps not. The truth was that I had not loved any man with my heart since Will, but I did fall in love with Cecil—I fell dangerously, helplessly, my wings melted, absolutely everything changed, like Icarus soaring too close to the sun.

But if I was smitten, I was also twenty-eight, and had learned a few things. I did not let Cecil see how attracted I was. On the contrary, I was evasive and cool, pretending that I was absorbed in my writing. Cecil became attracted to me, and eventually we became lovers. We were so opposite—I so hot, he so cold—that we were magnetic together. Except for Will, it was the only really passionately sexual love affair I had been involved in, and with Cecil I was the one who loved more, who needed more, so my love was more painful, and so seemed more deep.

Cecil didn’t care much for Mexico. He wanted to go back to England, and he asked me to come with him. He lived in a vast stone manor house in Sussex and in an apartment off Bayswater Road in London. He often went to visit his parents, who lived in an even larger manor house in the Cotswolds (he drove me by it once and pointed it out) and in a flat in London. I never met his parents, even though I lived with Cecil for five years. All along I was aware that although Cecil was truly in love with me, he found me just not quite right, this American girl he had discovered living with artistic looseness in Mexico. I couldn’t understand his friends, nor did they like me; they were so reserved, like artifacts of people. Each time Cecil had a house party at the manor, I was aware of the women’s unspoken scorn and the men’s kinder condescension. “Good” women did not live openly, then, unmarried, with men. When I walked, in a satin dress, through a blazingly lighted ballroom at one of Cecil’s parties, it was as if I were accompanied by the ghost of my sixteen-year-old self, the girl who had all unwittingly and without intent attracted the ardor of Jeremy Gardner and the dry-ice disdain of the eastern girls. Now I was surrounded by the ultimate “eastern” girls, and again I walked through flames.

I was without female friends. I had never wanted a girlfriend; I had vowed never to trust one. No doubt I created my own shell for protection, but it walled me in as much as it walled others out. I had no one to talk to and no one who could help me understand a thing. All I could use at that time was my physical beauty—and so I used it. When artists asked to paint me, I posed for them. That at least gave me some kind of social contact.

And finally, in desperation, afraid I could lose Cecil’s love, I let myself be painted nude, Rubens-style, reclining on a chaise, satin pillows all around me, fat grapes in a bowl on the table in front of me, my hair tousled over my shoulders, over the pillows, my cheeks flushed. It was a message to Cecil: “Don’t forget how beautiful I am!” But I knew at once, on seeing Cecil’s face as he unveiled the portrait, that I had done the wrong thing. This was too sensual, too blatant a presentation of myself: one did not do this sort of thing. It made me seem common, and compared to Cecil I was common, at least according to the standards of the rigid British class system.

Did I think I could really disguise the Kansas farmgirl in my own voluptuous flesh? I tried. And when Cecil and I were alone together, everything was perfect. Then we seemed two of a kind. Cecil was interested in the farmers who tenanted great parts of his land or who owned adjoining land, and this was something I knew about and could share with him, something I could even occasionally advise him on. Together we rode over fallow fields, discussing the best future use of those fields, or attended local farm meetings to fight for the best pollution control of the local streams, or stayed up all night together watching Cecil’s prize field trial bitch give birth to healthy pups. Then I would forget that we weren’t married; I would feel that we had become as one; I was happy and knew Cecil was happy, too. We were both readers—he loved nonfiction and history, and I loved fiction and poetry—so when we weren’t outside in the fields, we were inside by the fire, reading and interrupting each other to read aloud a fortunate phrase. When other people weren’t around, our union was complete; but we could not always live in our own isolated world.

After we had been together for almost five years, Cecil came to me one day and said, “My parents tell me I must get married.”

For one brief moment my heart leapt up. I thought he was proposing. But then I read his face—how exquisitely embarrassed he was, how miserable. I said nothing. At least, I would later tell myself, at least I had that to pride myself on—I had held back from my instinctive response to jump up and throw my arms around my lover, crying, “Darling!” I had sat there, frozen, watching. I had learned that much from the British.

For of course his parents had not just told Cecil that he must get married, but that he must get married to a certain woman, a second cousin. Their affiliation would join and enlarge their estates. It might as well have been feudal times.

“Well,” I said, “then I must pack and leave. Today.”

With great dignity and reserve I rose from my chair and crossed the room. All my life had led to this point, this act of dignity. At least I hoped it looked like dignity; really, it was a state of shock that made me so still.

When I looked back, I saw something I had never thought I would see: Cecil, seated, weeping into his hands, his shoulders shaking with grief. I was unbearably touched. But I knew enough not to go back, not to embrace him, not to console him. I knew he would soon rise and wipe his eyes and go on with his life. Cecil would marry. What would I do?

I went to London, numbed. I had met many interesting people through Cecil, and I was able to get a job as an assistant to the articles editor on a glossy ladies’ magazine. Again, it helped that I was beautiful. I was too voluptuously built to model—Twiggy was now the rage—but I was photographed everywhere, at parties and nightclubs and theater gatherings. Bewildered by Cecil’s desertion of me, which, when all was said and done, no matter how important his parents and class and station in life, had been cruel and callous, I began seriously to sleep around. To sleep with men not for love or romance or even pleasure, but for reasons that had to do with crasser things, with power and ambition and acquisitiveness.

Perhaps it mattered that, when I knew Cecil was going to marry someone else, I had called Will Hofnegle. I wanted to know how he was, I said, thinking that perhaps he would fly to me now, or ask me to come home to him, for a while, for consolation. But Will was married. He had two children. He was very happy, how was I? Oh, very happy, I told him. And thought: What had I expected? That he would wait for me all his life? That after fourteen years he would still be true to me, pining for me?

For it was true, fourteen years had passed.

I was older.

I was alone.

I had awakened from a dream of life.

So I lived in a frenzy of activity. I slept with several men on any given day. I had so many clothes and changed so many times I had to hire a maid to keep them hung up (Cecil had given me a considerable sum of money on our parting and, not proud, needing to survive, I had taken it). I now had “friends,” women I lunched and gossiped with, women I worked with on the ladies’ magazine, women I talked clothes with. We were all “darling” to each other, we were all “divine.” What we lacked in depth we made up for in movement: I lunched, I dined, I danced, I flirted, I shopped, I made love, I laughed about my lovers with my “friends,” I had a wonderful time. London was swinging then, and I swung.

Carnaby Street, the Beatles, X-T-C, the Rolling Stones, now and then a champagne supper on the lawn at Glyndebourne, drinking all night at the Playhouse, my picture in the society section of the best papers and occasionally in both literary reviews and cheap tabloids. Younger and younger men, richer and richer men.

Then it was 1972 and I was thirty-nine.

There Jenny’s story ended.

“Aaah!” Sara cried aloud, frustrated. She wanted to read more, to know what happened. If she had known Jenny as a living person, she probably would have disliked her—would have seen her as selfish and arrogant. But as Sara read these pages she felt as if she were looking through a kaleidoscope that flashed beautiful patterns and now and then suddenly flared away to reveal a small, clear heartbreaking gem of truth. What would happen to Jenny when she no longer could protect herself from others with her swirling colors? What kind of woman was really hidden back in the necessary dazzle?

Sara spent the afternoon at the dining room table, bent over the Jenny pages, making notes, then typing a long letter to Fanny Anderson. What a book this could be, she thought. With a little shaping, a little editing, what a successful book this could be.

“Here,” Julia said, handing Sara a small silver package. “Open this now.”

“I thought we’d wait until later to open gifts,” Sara said, surprised.

“This isn’t a Christmas gift. And it’s just for you. I think Steve might be—embarrassed about it.”

Sara opened the silver package and lifted out a tiny crescent moon that hung from a clear plastic thread that was so slender it was almost invisible. The moon was made of glass, so that as Sara held it dangling from her hand it caught all the lights from the room and spun and glittered, throwing spangles on the wall.

“It’s beautiful,” Sara said. “We’ll put it on the tree.”

“No, silly,” Julia said. “Read the note.”

Sara unfolded the paper that Julia had put at the bottom of the box. She read:

“ ‘When, however, a childless woman wants a baby she exposes herself to the light of the new moon or makes offerings to the moon and invokes its aid.’ ”

“I didn’t think you’d always be able to ‘expose yourself’ to a new moon,” Julia said, “so I thought perhaps this would do.”

“Oh, it’s beautiful, Julia, and it’s magical. How could it not be? Look at it!” Sara twirled the slender thread and the moon whirled and threw off light. “I’ll hang it above our bed!”

She leaned over and kissed Julia and hugged her. I’m lucky, she thought, I have Steve. Poor Julia.

Julia called the stretch between Christmas Eve and New Year’s “The Suicide Season” because her lover spent every minute of this time in the bosom of his family. After the first of the year, after the family festivities and the two-week family trip to the house on St. Martin, her lover came back to her with the desperate and complimentary greed of a drowning man coming up for air. But these few days were sacrosanct, the time he was a good father, a good son and son-in-law—and a good husband. The presents—diamonds, flowers, chocolates, more diamonds—that he lavished on Julia on the twenty-third of December could not make up for the two weeks of pain that followed.

“Why do you want to get pregnant?” Julia countered, weaving away from the foam to keep her feet dry. She was wearing the silver fox coat her lover had given her and a green scarf over her wildly abundant red hair.

“My desire is reasonable,” Sara said. “Women get pregnant. Husbands and wives have babies. That’s what people do.”

“Well, men get divorced and marry the women they really love,” Julia said. “My desire is just as reasonable as yours!” She kicked a shell away from her path.

Sara studied her friend’s face—what she could see of it, for Julia was staring ahead defiantly as if looking into her future. Sara had tried, over the past three years, to talk Julia out of her affair, which seemed to Sara self-defeating and doomed. But Julia was obsessed.

“We’re obsessed, you know,” she said to Julia.

“I know,” Julia said. “Believe me, do I ever know.”

“What gets me is the waiting,” Sara said. “You wouldn’t believe how long the days take to pass. I seem to spend my life waiting—waiting to ovulate, waiting to see if I’m pregnant, waiting for my damned period to be over so I can wait to ovulate again, and the days just crawl by.”

“I know,” Julia said. “I know that, too. When Perry is with his wife, nothing I do will make time pass quickly, and I’ve tried everything.”

“How did this happen to us?” Sara asked. “We are two intelligent, capable, dynamic women. How did we get to the place in our lives where all we can do is wait?”

“I don’t know, honey. I’ve asked myself that a million times,” Julia said. “At least you’ve got your work.”

“Ha!” Sara yelled. “All I can do there is wait, too! That damned Fanny Anderson, she’s so frustrating! I would love to get to work on her book, but I can’t get in touch with her, she just won’t talk on the phone or see me or anything!”

“She sounds crazy,” Julia said.

“You’ll never get pregnant that way,” Julia said, looking Sara in the eye.

Sara flung herself away from her friend. “Oh, great, thanks a lot, that’s just what I needed to hear!”

“Well, it’s true,” Julia said. “Sara, you need to relax.”

“Julia, you need to find a man who’s not married,” Sara said.

The two friends glared at each other, bristling. Then Julia grinned, “I will if you will,” she said, and they hugged each other and laughed wryly and turned around to walk back down the beach, two hopeless cases at the edge of the careless waves.

January third was a cold bright day, a day for movement. Julia had gone back to Boston and her lover, Steve had gone back to work, and Sara had decided to take charge of her life. She was going to move on. She was going to drop this elusive Jenny business and get back to work on some other books.

She dialed Fanny Anderson’s number one last time. This time she would tell the old bitch who answered to tell Fanny Anderson that she was going to drop the book completely if she continued to be put off in this way. Really, she was a professional, there was no need for her to be chasing after her in this way, if Fanny Anderson didn’t care enough about her own work to even talk to Sara about it …

“Hello?” A soft, hesitant voice came over the phone.

“Hello? Mrs. Anderson?” Sara stammered, caught off-guard, not certain now that she had dialed the right number.

“Yes. This is Mrs. Anderson.” Such a soft voice.

“Oh! Oh, well, Mrs. Anderson, this is Sara Kendall. I’m calling because—well, I hope you received your material back with my comments.” She couldn’t help herself, she had to try one last time.

“Yes. Yes, I did, thank you.”

There was a long silence.

“Mrs. Anderson?” Sara asked at last, for the silence was so complete that she could not even hear the other woman’s breath.

“I don’t believe I could come there. I don’t travel very much anymore, you see.”

“Then I’d be glad to come to you,” Sara said.

“There’s another thing,” Mrs. Anderson said, then paused. “I’m not quite sure just how to put this. But—well, you must understand. I don’t usually see the people I work with. After all, it’s really not necessary, is it? I mean, there is the telephone, there are letters, there is the mail. With Heartways House, for example, my goodness, I must have written ten or twelve novels for them now, and I haven’t met a soul there. Miss Oldham doesn’t seem to mind. I do believe that early on she asked me for lunch or drinks a few times, but I was always unable to make such arrangements, and we have continued over the years to have a very satisfactory relationship without meeting even once.”

Now Sara was quiet. “Well,” she said finally. “Well, you see, the Jenny novel is such a different kind than the ones you’ve been writing for Heartways House. Those have a formula, a pattern, and if the writer sticks with that, there’s not much an editor needs to do, except watch for inconsistencies in timing, for example, or check to be sure the hero has aquamarine eyes all the way through. But the Jenny novel is quite different. It doesn’t fall into any category, any formula. It is romantic, in a way, but the writing is different, so it wouldn’t be a romance novel. It would be—”

“Yes, yes, my dear, I do understand all that. The difference between my little romances and this novel.” This time Sara could almost hear Fanny Anderson smile.

“Then you understand how a different kind of editing needs to be done on the Jenny book. I suppose I could write you a long letter telling you my ideas, but I’ve always found that a dialogue, a give-and-take of ideas, is much more helpful for both the writer and the editor. And it saves so much time.”

“Well, as for time,” Fanny Anderson said softly, “I’m not in any particular hurry to have this little book published. I’ve had it in mind for so long.”

“Yes,” Fanny Anderson said. “Yes, I do understand.”

Sara waited.

Silence.

“Yes, very well,” Fanny said. “Let’s do that.”

“Wonderful!” Sara said. “Shall we set a date now?”

“Oh, well, I don’t have my calendar right here next to me. Perhaps I could have your number and call you back,” Fanny Anderson said.

“I’d be glad to come tomorrow,” Sara offered.

“Yes, but I believe I’m busy tomorrow,” Fanny said. “It really would be better if I could call you back.”

Sara gave the woman her number, refraining from pointing out that she had given it to her before both on the telephone and in letters. She kept her voice courteous. She tried not to be pushy. But she was afraid, when she hung up, that she wouldn’t hear from Fanny for a long long time, if ever.

That night Sara had to admit to herself that her breasts were sore.

The next day Fanny Anderson did not call. And when Sara looked at herself sideways in the mirror, she could see the old familiar pouching of her stomach. Her breasts were very sore, and she awoke and went through the day in a state of barely controllable madness. Mad in both meanings of the word—insane and angry, so angry at fate that she wanted to hit out, to hurt back, to destroy. She drank wine with lunch, but that didn’t help. She took a long walk, even though the weather had turned very cold, but that didn’t help—except to make her so exhausted that her fury died down into a low-burning self-hatred.

When Steve came home that night, she could scarcely speak. She was not angry at him, it was not his fault that she wasn’t pregnant—he had billions and billions of healthy sperm—no; it was her fault. She kept away from him with the wisdom of a wounded animal, knowing that because she was wounded, she would strike out at any kind hand that tried to touch her.

“Oh, honey, I’m sorry,” he said. He rose from the table, came around, bent down, and hugged her. “I know how disappointed you are. I am, too. But listen, we’re both young and healthy. There’s no hurry. If it doesn’t happen this month, it’ll happen next month, or the month after that. And I love you, however you are, whatever happens. You know that, don’t you?”

He turned her face to him, so he could look into her eyes.

“You know I love you, don’t you, Sara?” he asked again, smiling.

Sara could scarcely trust herself to speak. She could see that he loved her. She knew that he loved her, that he understood as well as any man could what she was going through. That he was doing the best he could to help her.

Sara went into the bathroom and ran a tub of steaming water. She sat there, weeping in a fury. Oh, wasn’t Steve a nice husband! Oh, what an understanding husband. Oh, he said he loved her. Oh, he was such an optimist. Didn’t this touch him at all? Didn’t this touch him at all? Why wasn’t he weeping and sick with misery because once again they had missed, they were not going to have a baby? Why was he so cheerful, so calm? Didn’t he have any feelings?

There he was, the perfect husband, and here she sat in the tub, not pregnant, the imperfect wife. The flawed wife. The inferior wife. The rapidly mentally deteriorating wife.

She wanted to go break all the dishes over his perfect, understanding, optimistic, loving, helpful head.

Instead, she sat in the tub for an hour, until she had really exhausted herself and had no more tears. Then she put on her warmest nightgown and robe, and drank warm milk with two aspirin, and watched television until it was time to go to bed.

Then, as soon, it was morning. And she could tell instantly, the way her gown stuck to her legs, that her period had started again.

Chapter Four