Francophile

Technically speaking, he was old enough to be her father, but she’d always preferred a looser interpretation of things. Wiggle room, either/or, mucking around in the gray areas. Janey of the variegated existential guidelines. Prickle of his appreciative gaze, brief argument about the definition of variegated. An electric fence surrounded her memories of those days.

He appeared only vaguely fatherly when he arrived at her door that May morning: clean-shaven skull, scruff everywhere else; ambiguously licentious smile; thinner than she remembered. Thinner than she.

“I suppose I buried the lede,” she said, blushing, smiling, looking down. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to tell him over the phone.

“Janey,” he said. “Well, God, you’re beautiful.” He reached for her hand, still standing on the front stoop. “Who’s in there? When’s she arriving?”

“A girl,” she validated. “Mid-July.”

“Mazel tov,” he said, leaning in, kissing her cheek. There was something about her bulge that made all of this okay, allowed them to be more openly intimate than they’d ever been. She was a marked woman, had that strange virginal aura despite the contrary implications of her belly. She felt her face heating up; she was unaccustomed to his boldness. “Why on earth did you say I could stay here, then?” he asked. “You’re nesting. You’re preparing for new life.”

“I can multitask,” she said.

He smiled at her. “I’ve missed you.”

If she wanted, she could have ridden on the vibes of this for weeks.

It isn’t some sordid, twisted tale of fatherless teen falling for comely-and-sex-starved vaguely paternal figure. She is 24 when it happens, and it doesn’t end up being much of anything in the long run, not by cinematic standards.

She answers an ad that Clara has placed in the lobby of the World Literature department office: Seeking date-night sitter. Her rent has just been raised, and Clara has nice, temperate handwriting, and she is seized with the notion that maybe caring for young children will make her feel like more of an adult.

Clara is a professor of French literature, and her husband, Charlie, is a playwright. Their boys, at the time, are lanky charming moppets, ages seven and 12. Jane drifts easily into their lives. Gus likes to cuddle with her in his bed before he falls asleep, listening to her tell outlandish stories about dogs who are employed as doctors and secretaries. Léo sits with her at the kitchen table after his little brother goes to bed, telling her about his extracurricular geology club and the trip he’s trying to get his parents to take them on to Alaska. Clara and Charlie return from their dates in high spirits, bringing a warm, boozy breeze with them as they enter through the kitchen. Once, Charlie offers Jane his leftovers and Clara swats at his shoulder with her handbag.

“That’s repulsive,” she says and hands over an elaborately boxed mousse she has ordered specifically for Jane. Her foresight touches Jane deeply.

Translators of French literature, even those who are world-renowned, are not a particularly affluent breed—and neither, of course, are playwrights—but they both come from some modest family money, and everything about their life strikes Jane as impossibly glamorous, their palatial old house and their quiet shiny cars and their skin that seems to stay subtly bronzed even through the eight annual months of Chicago gray.

At this point, it has been six years since Jane’s father moved to Ojai to marry a meticulously coiffed kindergarten teacher and two years since she has returned home to visit her mother, a corporate litigator with a penchant for chenin blanc and verbal abuse. She is well aware that she is a textbook case of something but chooses not to examine things too closely. She is pursuing a Ph.D. in contemporary German literature, a field in which she is largely unaccompanied. She lives in a one-bedroom fifth-floor walk-up in Pilsen, a neighborhood that has yet to be gentrified by the proximate university and one in which she is afraid to walk alone at night. Charlie gives her a ride home when she babysits late, and it doesn’t occur to her until later that this is an unusually illogical arrangement for Charlie and Clara, who live 15 miles north of downtown, in Evanston. Having a babysitter you have to drive home kind of defeats the purpose, but she never really considers Charlie’s sobriety either, feels utterly safe as they glide along the S curves of Lake Shore Drive in his Audi.

“Tell me your story,” he’ll say to her warmly, turning down the music.

“I’m the most boring person on the entire earth,” she’ll reply, and he’ll smile at her.

“Nice try. Make it up if you have to.”

So she starts telling him, first embellished theatrical stories about her literature classes and the foosball-obsessed man-boy she casually dated last year, and then more serious stuff, stuff about her parents’ divorce, stuff about how lonely things feel sometimes. Charlie watches her steadily with placid graphite eyes, when he’s not looking at the road, and sometimes he reaches over to pat her shoulder or give her a little hang-in-there punch on the thigh.

Each time he drives her home he sits parked in front of her building until she makes it upstairs and flicks her living-room lights on and off twice.

Last month he’d called out of the blue—his voice on the phone startled her to such a degree that she’d had to sit down heavily in a kitchen chair—and asked if they had a spare room. A conference, he said, keynote bullshit somethingorother, and he’d love to see her. Three days, two nights. Just a stopover.

“Of course,” she’d said, breathless, and it wasn’t until hours after they’d ended the call that she realized it would have been polite to ask Greg if he minded having a guest.

During dinner his first night she rose frequently to serve them—insistently, because both Charlie and her husband had formidable Midwestern manners and Greg kept saying things like “Sweetie, you’re making me feel like a Neanderthal.” But she liked it, had always been fond of bustle and motion and order, neat rows of plates, even intervals of time between courses, wine that flowed freely only to a point.

It was strange to have them both at the table. Greg was a contractor, either the most or least likely mate for a woman who’d chosen such a fickle and weirdly intellectual field for herself. She’d met him at a friend’s birthday party, and his proximity imbued her with an instant calm. He was a straight shooter. He was attuned to nuance but often chose to ignore it. She found this to be a refreshing change. He was kind to Charlie, a good host, jovial and inquisitive. Entirely unsuspicious, ostensibly, as Clara had been before it all started to go south.

She came out with a pie she’d baked—this, admittedly, had been somewhat of an affectation, because she and Greg never ate dessert and she didn’t even like pie, but it seemed like an elegant, wifely thing to prepare; she’d even cross-hatched the crust, to dubious results.

“Jesus, Janey,” Charlie said. “You realize I’m still wildly unimpressive, right? Is there someone else coming over? Who’s deserving of this kind of hospitality?”

“Maybe I am nesting,” she said, sitting back down, handing Greg a knife, reaching to pour herself an inch of wine. She allowed herself half a glass once a week. Tonight seemed as good a night as any.

“It looks incredible,” Charlie said. “What kind is it?”

“Apple,” she said, and then, a little self-consciously, “Jonagold. With salted caramel.”

“You are not of this world,” Charlie said, and before she could let the statement permeate her skeleton, Greg spoke up: “She’s a wonder.”

“She’s sitting right here,” she said without thinking, unfairly hostile, and the look Greg gave her made her feel a sickly guilt low in her esophagus. “Sorry,” she said. “Charlie’s awakening the latent unreasonable feminist within.” She reached for Greg’s hand under the table. “Collegiate nostalgia. I’m pining for the times when I was much prettier and much dumber.”

“You weren’t that dumb,” Charlie said.

“You’re more beautiful than the day I met you,” Greg said, oppressively kind.

She reveled a little bit, the tolerantly exasperated mother: “Knock it off, both of you.”

One night the Crosses have her over for dinner and Charlie is under the weather so he goes to bed early and she and Clara stay up until three on the back porch, drinking wine and listening to Curtis Mayfield.

“I live in a cave,” Clara says, against the ironic backdrop of their gorgeous Queen Anne in the middle of the suburban wilderness. “Testosterone bleeds through the wiring and the foundation is composed entirely of dirty socks.” She rests her head back and Jane watches, rapt by her confidence, her material comfort, her existential security. “Hold off while you can,” she continues, rolling her wine around at the bottom of her glass. “Go do wonderful things first before you do any of this.”

“This seems kind of wonderful,” Jane says shyly, emboldened by the wine.

Clara smiles at her. “It is. Sure. Of course. Kind of. But it’s not—don’t ever be fooled into thinking I’ve achieved any kind of anything, okay? I have a husband I adore and two kids who mean everything to me. But you can have that too. We can all have that. It’s the other things that are harder to come by.”

Emboldened still, Jane allows herself to be a little bit offended by this. “I don’t think it’s so easy for all of us to find husbands we adore,” she says. “Or ones who adore us back.”

She isn’t sure if Clara knows about her parents. Charlie knows, in great detail, owing to a night a few months earlier when the Cubs made it to the playoffs and traffic was at a standstill, but the disclosure arrangement in their marriage is still unclear to Jane.

“Well, that’s true,” Clara says, reaching over and squeezing her wrist. “That’s absolutely true. Usually the man you’d leap off a bridge for when you’re 25 doesn’t turn out to be the one who you wake up next to when you’re pushing 50.” Clara pours them both more wine and sighs. “And if that does happen to you—I mean, the odds that you’re still always happy to be waking up next to them are—well, Charlie would say negligible is too fatalistic a term.”

“This isn’t the most inspiring conversation,” Jane ventures.

Clara laughs. “All I’m suggesting is that you wait, if you can. This is lovely. Truly. All of it ends up being lovely, sometimes.”

“Are you saying that Charlie.…” She stops. She’d watched Charlie and Clara together, had earlier that evening seen the man nibble casually at his wife’s neck when he thought no one was looking; she had been playing rummy with the boys in the living room, but she’d cut through the kitchen to use the bathroom. On some dark nights, alone nights when she is horny and maligned, she pictures them together: the wiry electric man who’d once pulled over on a side street to make her listen to a “Hello, Goodbye” B-side, pumping over his sun-kissed, formidable wife, working a lizard tongue into the crook of her neck, parting the lips of her sex with fingers he used to drum deftly on the steering wheel. She’s pictured him driving Clara to the hospital when she was in labor with Gus or Léo, counting her breaths, mopping her brow. She’s pictured them sitting on their porch pre-sunrise, maybe up early or maybe still awake from the night before, Clara’s feet in his lap or their bodies twined together in a chaise longue; she’s pictured them tending together to one of their feverish children; she’s pictured them falling into bed at the end of a long day.

But to see them like that—close and offhanded, Charlie teasing and Clara pretending to be annoyed, nudging past him to reach for the pepper grinder, hands to yourself, mister—well, it had stirred something in her, something that’s painful to think about too hard, something that makes her bristle at the thought of Charlie straying, even straying with her, Jane, though that has been the subject of her most lewd fantasies for months.

“Charlie’s crazy about you,” she says.

Clara laughs and sips her wine. “Sure he is,” she says. “Sometimes.”

She can’t think of anything to say and this seems to give Clara pause. She reaches over and squeezes Jane’s knee.

“I’m lucky; you’re right,” Clara says. “Look at me, aiding in the disillusionment of a minor.”

Jane spends the night in one of their three guests rooms, where the bed is a cumulus cloud and the pillows smell like jasmine.

“Is she doing okay, at least?” she asked, sitting with him on the back porch the next morning, before Greg awakened. He and Clara were taking some time apart, he’d told her. Nothing serious. A breather.

“Oh, Christ, yes,” Charlie said. “She’s having a blast. She just got back from three weeks in Abu Dhabi.”

“Alone?”

Charlie looked at her slyly, smirking. “With a few of her friends.”

“Ah.”

“Platonic, PTA-mom type of friends. She hasn’t turned on me quite so far. Not yet.”

“I didn’t mean——”

“No, she doesn’t have a man, Janey; not as far as I can tell. Which struck me as odd at first because—I mean, she could, easily, don’t you think?”

“Absolutely,” Jane said. Clara was gorgeous in that kind of timeless, graceful way, beauty without effort, the kind that radiated from naturally unclogged pores. And it extended beyond the physical—beyond her honey twist of hair, beyond the lively softness of her body (not fat but fully inhabited, a body that boasted both its childbearing abilities and an affinity for pastries; its fondness for vigorous walks along the river and days spent reading beneath afghans). Clara glowed. She exuded goodness.

Jane cleared her throat. “Do you think it—I mean, with Clara. Is it—is there a chance that you’ll….”

“Oh, sure.” He crossed his ankle over his knee and leaned his head back. “We’ll work it out. Don’t worry about us. Is that a creek in your backyard?”

“Mm.” She folded her legs beneath her, rested her cheek against the cool wicker of the loveseat. “Pure Michigan. We’re landowners now; hadn’t you heard?”

“I’m happy for you,” he said, a little sadly.

“Nothing you don’t have already.” She wasn’t sure how to talk to him without flirting.

“You deserve all this,” he said. “You’ve always deserved good things.”

“Ditto,” she said, and he smiled at her across the porch.

“Those undergraduate delinquents are rubbing off on you.”

“Maybe.”

“You teaching this summer?”

“Absolutely not,” she said.

“Too busy gestating, I suppose?”

“Actually I’m planning on learning how to hang glide.”

“My adventuress,” Greg said from the doorway. His face was puffed with the lines of his pillow but he’d changed into jeans, she supposed because of Charlie. He joined them outside, bent to kiss her before he sat down beside her on the loveseat. “Wow, coffee?”

She could feel his gaze, so she focused instead on the dark liquid in her mug, espresso roast with a pinch of cinnamon, Charlie’s secret ingredient. The caffeine was getting to her more than she was willing to admit, making a fizzy feeling in her veins. She pressed a hand subtly to her throat to feel her pulse.

“It’s my fault,” Charlie said. “She protested, but I——”

“Clara never gave up caffeine,” Jane said. “And Gus is starting at Harvard in the fall.”

“Well, in that case,” Greg said. She could hear the effort behind his nonchalance.

“Just one cup,” she said. She smiled at him. She reached over and took his hand.

It’s okay for her to drink so much wine with Clara that she has to sleep over. A precedent has been set. She is invited to Gus’s belt tests at the karate studio and Léo’s Northwestern Astronomy Bowl competitions. When she babysits in the afternoons and takes the Purple Line home, all family members hug her good-bye.

But Charlie still drives her when it’s dark out, and it’s on one of those nights that she asks him in for a glass of wine. He and Clara have been at a university-wide memorial service for one of Clara’s esteemed and prematurely cancer-stricken colleagues—Josephine Grimes; she’d glimpsed the name in the Dearly Departed section of the University Circle newsletter on their mail table—and they are both notably sober afterward. Clara doles out Jane’s pay with a desultory exhaustion and leans in to kiss her dryly on the cheek.

“You’re a doll,” she says. “I have to either go slit my wrists or take an Ambien.”

“So long as you’re only dead to the world when I return,” Charlie says, cupping a hand to his wife’s face and kissing her, more affectionate than normal. “You sure you’re okay?” he whispers, their faces close, and Jane has to look away.

“I’m fine. Just sad. Take Janey home.” Clara looks over at her and winks. “Make her regale you with stories of the innocence of youth.”

They drive the LSD stretch in silence, the tinny thump of a Replacements album playing softly from the stereo. Jane rests her forehead against the window and watches the glittered blur of the lake in the reflection of the glass, and at one point Charlie reaches over and pats her shoulder.

“Clara and I are humbled by our own mortality tonight, I’m afraid,” he says. “It’s a thing that’ll start to happen to you eventually.”

When he pulls up in front of her house she turns to him as if to say good-bye but instead she says, “I’m sure it’s not quite up to your standards, but I’ve got wine if you’d like some.”

It’s actually a relatively pricey bottle by her standards, $15.99 at the sketchy Jewel-Osco on Roosevelt and Wabash. She’d purchased it that morning without quite knowing why.

“A hundred-something academics in a chapel,” he says. “And no booze to be found for miles. What kind of sendoff is that? I wanted to bring a flask but Clara said it was disrespectful.”

“Well.”

“I’d love some of your lowbrow wine,” he says, and they’re both silent as he circles the block a few times looking for parking.

Inside she tries to seem confident and autonomous, proud of her sparsely furnished 1980s architecture. He’s winded from five flights of ascension and she politely turns her back to him as she opens the wine.

“To Josephine Grimes,” he says when she’s poured it. “Christ, that’s crass, isn’t it?” he amends, withdrawing his glass.

“Why?” She pushes hers toward him. “To Clara,” she says, and he gives her a sad smile, the kind you give a kid who’s just asked when they can go visit the dog on his new farm.

“And that, my darling,” he says, “is the dictionary definition of the word.”

“I didn’t——”

“To you,” he says. “To lithe, lovely Jane, our saint and savior.”

She clinks to that and leads him into the living room, where the lighting is better. It begins awkwardly, which reassures her, lulls her into the false sense of everything being aboveboard and allowed. They sit beside one another on the couch, not on opposite ends but together toward the middle, knees practically touching.

“Thanks for having me,” he says. “I needed a little break.”

“Of course.” Her voice cracks.

“I hope I’m not——” he says, and she replies, teasingly, “Not what?”

She isn’t sure where to place her hand. Over his dick? In the dick region? Is it okay to call it a dick when it has been used to electively father offspring who aren’t yours? He solves the problem by twining his fingers through hers, holding her hand in the upside-down V of his rib cage over his belly.

“I never do this,” he says, like a sigh.

“Sit on a couch?”

“I need you to not be coy.”

“Me either,” she replies, and it’s then that she rests her head against the worn warmth of his shoulder, fitting the bones of her cheeks and jaw around his pointy protrusion where humerus meets scapula. “You don’t have to,” she says. “To be honest I’d probably like you more if you didn’t.”

“I like you,” he says. “Very much.”

“Ditto,” she says.

He leans his head back and she can feel his bones rearranging themselves beneath her cheek. “Isn’t this one hell of a cliché.”

“Well, I don’t know about——”

“But there is a chemistry thing happening here, is there not?”

“I can’t explain it,” she says. “I have this thing about men in their 50s who give it to me straight.”

“Some may call that a father complex,” he says.

“Fuck you,” she says, and she laughs, but it’s the kind of laugh that is 40 percent crying, and he moves closer to her, rearranging her legs, lifting the heft of her ass so it’s tilted against his thigh. He bends over unnaturally to kiss her forehead, then her mouth, then her neck, and then her mouth again.

She was awake when Greg came to bed, reading by penlight like an adolescent at summer camp.

“I thought you’d be deep in REM by now,” he said. He undressed quickly, neglected to brush his teeth, and slid in beside her, fitting the length of his body along the length of hers and tucking his chin against her neck.

“I was, for a while,” she said. “Your daughter has the hiccups.”

“Oh yeah?” He sounded intrigued.

She ruffled idly at his hair. Their baby did not have the hiccups; their baby was, in fact, sleeping soundly at a remarkably convenient time when Jane wished to be sleeping herself. But she squirmed against her husband and put her hand low on her belly and wrinkled her nose.

“For the last 20 minutes,” she said, and Greg put his hand beside hers, rubbed around in little circles, trying to feel.

“I can’t find them,” he said. His breath in her ear still always awakened something between her legs. She pushed her thighs together and sighed.

“Sort of a little to the left,” she said, and she felt his hand follow her instructions. “Not so left. And a little bit down. No, not—yeah, but not—a tiny bit to the right.”

He was so compliant. She almost felt bad. “You honestly can’t feel that?” She felt him stiffen against her, alert now, on a mission. His fingers palpated her belly. She worried it would wake the baby, already a casualty to something Jane was unwilling to articulate.

“Sort of,” he said after a minute, and the lie broke her heart. She relaxed against him and laced her fingers through his, both now feeling for the fabricated extraterrestrial movements.

“Probably just gas,” she said.

“Talk dirty to me,” he said, and she laughed, and as they lay in the dark she felt him fall asleep, felt his breath slow and his body slacken, and a few minutes after that the baby awakened with such vigor that eventually she had to extract herself from his embrace, go for a walk around the backyard, a hand bolstering her belly, thinking, Please just calm down; I promise you that everything is going to be all right.

Eventually she wandered back inside and drifted off in the armchair in her office. She dreamed that she was making out with one of her students beneath the cypress tree in the Crosses’ backyard. She dreamed that all her teeth crumbled out of her mouth. She dreamed she was on a boat with Greg and Charlie attacked them from behind, overturning the vessel and sending them both plunging underwater. She dreamed that she was lactating dark roast, using her space-age new breast pump, the funnel channeling the liquid directly into her mouth.

He has an exotic, gorgeous wife and yet for some reason he falls for Jane, boring, beige Jane with the worst shade of dirt-brown hair and a body that isn’t skinny in any of the right places, slow-on-the-uptake Jane who normally has great difficulty making casual conversation.

“Get yourself some wine,” she says, and when he starts to the kitchen she adds, “but come kiss me first.” He comes over sometimes, now, when he’s not driving her home, stops by on his way to or from his office with coffee or a pack of Dunhills or beignets from the dubious Creole place on Maxwell Street.

He comes to her and she clamps his thighs between her legs, pulling him closer, gripping him in the diamond of her knees. He bends his face down to hers and she catches his lips gently between her teeth, eliciting a moan that renders her momentarily reassured.

“You taste good,” she says. “Something garlic.”

He stands straight and studies her, smiling in his way, half amused. She realizes then, suddenly, that Clara had been at dinner with him. It shouldn’t surprise her, nor is she allowed to be offended, but the knowledge opens up a little pit inside of her, an irritating ache like a menstrual cramp.

“Dinner. Faculty husband,” he says, affirming.

She swallows hard and rubs the arch of her foot along his fly. “Don’t just stand there,” she says. “My sommelier.”

She doesn’t talk like this to anyone else in the world. The secret self flows from her like vomit. He touches his knuckles to her forehead for a second, and then he disappears into the kitchen, where she hears him uncorking the wine, setting down the glasses, unfurling the bag of chocolate-covered pretzels she’d bought on impulse. When he returns he smells of that instead, cocoa and sugar, and she lifts her legs onto the back of the couch to make room. He sits beside her and she lowers her legs into his lap, taking her glass, careful not to jostle his. She’d worried to him last week that she thought she was developing a bunion. He strokes the red knuckle now with the pad of his thumb.

“It’s those boots,” he says.

“I look stumpy otherwise.”

“You could never.”

He tells her sometimes that she should be indulging the young men who are surely knocking down her door when he’s not around but what he doesn’t seem to get is that those men don’t exist, that she is for whatever reason only capable of inciting the amorous attentions of those old enough to parent her, that her thighs are too melty for men in their 30s, that they don’t respond well to the ruminative melancholy that overtakes her post-sunset.

Clara dresses practically, but with undeniable style, the confident ownership of a woman with a Ph.D. and plenty of money and an accomplished husband and a stable station in life, a big green house overlooking a naturally formed creek.

He presses at her arch, at the spaces between each of her toes. “You should get this looked at.”

She flexes around his finger like a monkey, like an infant in sleep.

The wood for the crib arrived on Sunday, when Greg and Charlie were alone together and Jane was holding her office hours at the café on Devonshire. When she came home they were building it, not a crib from a box but one they were designing themselves, using Greg’s blueprints. She watched them from afar for a moment. Her husband was formidable and confident, straightspined, work-booted, damp at the armpits. She felt a twinge for him, his big shoulders and his mechanical mind and the pleasure he took from interacting physically with the world.

But then, beside him: It was the first time she noticed that Charlie’s vulpine allure—the reedy brawn of his body that had so electrified her during their months together—had faded somewhat, melted into something almost—she flinched—geriatric.

“What on earth is all this?” she asked mildly, coming into the garage where they were both sweaty and hunched and listening to Led Zeppelin. Greg came over to kiss her. She rode it out for a couple extra beats, exhibitionism that was uncharacteristic for them both. Greg looked surprised. Charlie eyed them sideways and sipped indelicately from a Sierra Nevada.

“The balsa finally came,” Greg said.

“You didn’t tell me you’d married the most gifted carpenter since the Lord himself, Janey.”

She looked at Charlie to assess the level of hostility in his voice, but his smile remained nervy and even. She put her hand on Greg’s shoulder. “I don’t like to brag,” she said. Then: “Sweetie, it’s gorgeous. Already. I can’t wait to see it when it’s finished.”

“This is more manual labor than I’ve done in my entire life,” Charlie said, but then his smile warmed slightly and he winked at her. “But it’s all for a good cause.”

She felt, weirdly, like she was going to cry, but it passed, just as the track changed on the stereo.

“Babe,” Charlie twanged theatrically, suggesting that the beer was not his first. “Baby, baby, I’m gonna leave you.” She’d read about incongruous arousal during the third trimester. She had not yet experienced it until that moment. He did a little bit of air-guitar finger-picking and then continued, ad-libbing, “Just as soon as I build this fucking ridiculously ornate cradle for your kid.”

“Couple of craftsmen,” she said, all she could muster.

Greg wove his arm around her waist and she took his hand beside the insurmountable swell of her belly.

She can’t pinpoint specifically when Clara starts to look at her differently, but one day she notices that she’s grown accustomed to it, the little bit of tightness around the corners of her mouth as she smiles, a barely perceptible hardness in her eyes.

“Charlie’s very fond of you,” she says one day, when she and Jane are sitting on opposite ends of the living room couch, folding an immense pile of the boys’ laundry.

She startles and tries to brush it off as a crick in her back. “Well,” she says. “That’s nice to hear. I’m fond of him.”

Clara gives her the smile and she wonders how she hasn’t seen it sooner.

“Is everything——” Clara falters and directs her attention to a pair of Gus’s tiny Animaniacs briefs, social clumsiness that’s unlike her. “Are you all right, Jane? Is everything okay with you?”

“How do you mean?” She feels a surge of existential gratitude for the fact that heartbeats are not audible outside of the body.

“You can—you can talk to me, I guess is all I’m saying,” Clara says. “I hope you know that you can—if anything’s going on…in your life, I mean; I hope you know that I’m around and I won’t be—you’ve become a part of our family, and I’d like to think that we can trust each other.” She meets Jane’s eyes and holds her gaze.

“Of course,” Jane says. “Yes. I mean, thank you. Of course I know. We can. Thanks.”

Clara smiles again, just her ordinary mom-smile. “You don’t have to thank me. I was just—you know, checking in.”

“I broke up with my boyfriend,” Jane blurts out. The lie has arisen from nowhere, sprung from the ether with startling ease. Clara looks startled.

“Oh,” she says. “I didn’t realize you were—you’ve never mentioned anyone.”

“I guess I never thought of it.” It is not specifically she who says this but the ether-person, the confident liar. “Maybe that should’ve been a sign.”

“It could go both ways, I guess,” Clara says. “We either hide things because we’re ashamed or because we want to protect them. I had this wretched, laughable, Romeo and Juliet hostage situation with my high school boyfriend—we’d just spend all of our time in his basement. Pathetic. It seemed like sacrilege to share him with anyone else.” She laughs. “But I’m sorry, Jane. That’s—do you want to talk about it? How long were you together?”

“Almost two years.”

“Well, God.”

“It’s fine,” she says. “It was for the best, I guess.”

“And yet you still seem….”

The liar stands up straight, an icicle along her spine. “Well,” she says. “It’s a little more complicated than that, actually.”

“What do we do?” she asked. Charlie was cooking and she was washing dishes as he went, adopting a leisurely pace, leaning against the counter between pans. “When she’s born? How are we supposed to—what, we’re just allowed to take her home and—everything’s copacetic?”

She watched the side of his face lift into a smile.

“It’s the thing they never tell you,” he said. “You’re on your own. Isn’t that something?”

“You two seemed to do okay.”

“We had our moments,” he said. “But the day we brought Léo home, God.”

“Did something happen?” She rested a hand—wrapped damply in the dish towel—against her belly.

“Of course not. He cried. He nursed. He was thoroughly investigated by the cat.”

“But you were okay?”

Charlie was quiet for a moment, scrubbing insistently at the eyes of a potato with the special brush that Greg had put on their wedding registry. “There was a moment,” he said, “when he wouldn’t stop crying, and Clara’d had an episiotomy and she could barely walk, and the frightening Unitarians next door were trying to bring us muffins and they were ringing the bell, and there was just this—there was just this extra person, suddenly, in our lives, Janey, and it was so fucking surreal that I started laughing. And Clara was standing with him over by the fireplace and she was hunched over like an old woman but the strangest thing was that she didn’t look like an old woman; she looked about 12, for the first time since I’d met her, just holding this tiny screaming baby, and I——” He paused and she couldn’t bring herself to reach over and turn off the faucet. It ran, insistently, a coursing stream down into the saucepan and over the mugs. “She didn’t laugh, is the gist, I guess,” he said finally. “She didn’t find it funny and it was—she didn’t laugh with me. Not the first time, certainly, but it felt—that felt seminal. That felt like a door closing.”

Over the course of his telling her eyes had filled with tears and she wiped at them with the dish towel. Charlie regarded her evenly.

“It just changes things,” he said, making no effort to comfort her. “Not necessarily in one direction or the other. It advances you to a parallel life. You just switch tracks.” He shrugged, rifling through one of the drawers for a knife. “You guys’ll be fine.”

“So long as we find an ugly babysitter, right?” she said, suddenly aware of how fast her heart was beating, of how her breath made a sound when it pushed out of her nose.

Charlie smiled at her sadly. “Yes. Let her not be brilliant or charming or wildly dexterous, either, if you can manage.”

Her face flushed. “A gay man, perhaps,” she said with some amount of strain.

“An elderly homosexual child-minder,” he agreed, laughing, and all was well again when Greg came in from the garage. She could see at once that he was ill, a cold maybe, pink around the eyes and shivering visibly. His hair was damp with sweat and sticking up on one side.

It flipped a nervous switch inside her, seeing him weakened like that.

“Sweetheart,” she said, going to him, touching her hand to his cheek. “Oh, you’re warm.”

“It just hit me out of nowhere,” he said. “You shouldn’t come near me; we don’t want you getting sick.”

“They’re a hearty bunch, the gravid,” Charlie said from the sink.

She saw a flicker of irritation in her husband’s eyes.

“She had bronchitis in her first trimester,” Greg said. “It was hell for her.”

“Honey,” she said.

“At first I thought Janey was overreacting,” Charlie said, “but you do have this tendency to talk about her like she’s not in the room.”

“Both of you, stop,” she said. She touched Greg’s shoulder. “Do you have to go to bed, sweetie? Charlie and I are making dauphinois.” She knew the way she curled her lips around the ph would drive Greg nuts.

“I feel like I’m going to pass out,” Greg said. “You’d better eat without me.”

“Let me tuck you in,” she said.

She lets Clara Cross support her through a fake abortion. It is the second most fucked-up thing she will ever do to a person she loves.

“I actually had one between Léo and Gus,” Clara says to her. “We’ve always had the testing done because I’m older and I—well, she—it was a girl; she would’ve had——” Here Clara chokes up a little, brushing at her eyes, leaving no traces of the indulgent eyeliner that Jane favors at the time. “They can test for those things, you know? Down’s. And we just couldn’t—I just couldn’t—Léo was such a handful already and Charlie was gone all the time and I couldn’t envision a way in which that was something that we could——” She composes herself and shakes her head. “I was 17 weeks. I was showing already. Luckily I’ve always had this,” here she places a hand over her lower belly, the maternal paunch between her hipbones. “Luckily I’ve always had a little bit of extra weight, otherwise I would’ve told a lot more people and I would’ve had to explain it to——” Jane vows, in that moment, that she will never again allow Charlie to run his tongue along the fleshy, razor-burned skin of her upper thighs. He claims to love the halfhearted novelty of her grooming, professes that Clara hasn’t done anything to her nether regions since she got pregnant with Léo. “I’ve never quite forgiven myself.”

“I’m sorry,” she says, and Clara takes her hand.

“It’s really not as bad as it sounds,” she says. “It’s still early for you. You’ve got so much ahead of you. It’s uncomfortable for a day. Then you’re back into the swing of things.”

And the next week she lets Clara pick her up before sunrise on a sickly Thursday morning and she rides in the passenger seat of the Volvo while Clara drives her to the most coveted student-insurance-accepted clinic in Edgewater, and she weeps, but not for the reasons that Clara is imagining. Clara sits in the lobby with a heavily pregnant blonde person to her right and Jane allows herself to be led into an exam room.

“Get undressed,” the nurse instructs her, and she lies back with legs splayed as she undergoes her annual pap smear. For the first time in eight years, she wears the institutional pad they offer her for possible spotting.

Afterward Clara takes her to a Polar Bear in a nearby suburb and they eat frozen custard together sitting in the car parked beside the forest preserve.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Clara asks, and Jane shakes her head, but not too vigorously, because she is still recovering.

After dinner, after she checked on Greg—her husband sleeping soundly, NyQuilled and blanket-wrapped—she discovered Charlie sitting in the back, not on the porch but in the grass, legs spread before him, pale and hairy in the blue light of the moon.

“I don’t want to scare you,” she said.

“Never, my dear,” he replied without turning, as though he’d known her to be there all along.

“Do you want to be alone?” she asked.

“Knowing there’s an alternative?” He rose gracefully, springing his body up like a backward diver. “Absolutely not.” He smiled at her. “I’m guessing the lady is averse to sitting in the grass these days?”

“Not averse,” she said, settling herself in one of the Adirondack chairs. “Just incapable.”

He sat beside her, bringing with him an absurdly filled tumbler of something brown. “Aren’t you supposed to be sleeping?” he asked. “Confining? Languishing in the sprouting of your seed?”

“She has the hiccups,” she said, which was again not precisely true at the moment.

“Can I feel?” he asked.

“Not now,” she said. “I’m fat and heinous.”

“You’re gorgeous,” he said. “You’re aglow.”

“That’s the moon.”

“It’s not.” He ran the arch of his foot along the length of her calf. “It’s you.”

“Knock it off,” she said, hoping her voice didn’t betray her anxiety, the amount of pleasure that was still buzzing through her tibia.

“You’ll name her after me, I assume?”

“Charlize,” she said.

He laughed. “She’s going to be invincible,” he said. “I can’t wait to meet her.”

“Will you come back?” she asked, and she was embarrassed to hear her voice squeak. “When she’s born?”

“Well, sure,” he said, then: “I’ll try.”

“It would mean a lot to Greg,” she said. “All of this is making him a little nervous. His parents both died years ago. We’re lacking—” she swallows “—strong parental figures. Nice to have another dad around. A pro.”

“And to you?”

“To me what?”

“Would it mean a lot to you?”

She stilled. Then, quietly, almost a whisper: “Yes.”

“I’ll see what I can do, then,” he said.

She sat back and sighed, sipped her tea, shifted her weight. “Is it really happening?”

“I’d say so,” he said, gesturing to her belly.

“You and Clara,” she said. “Getting back together. Are you really—is it real?”

“It’s complicated,” he said finally.

“Is it ever not?”

“In this case, especially so.”

“Because you’re both still thinking about it or because——”

“Jesus, can you not sound like you’re enjoying this so much?”

“I’m not,” she said, hurt. “I’m really not. I’m curious.”

“Voyeurism doesn’t suit you,” he said.

“I’m not being——”

“We’re divorced.”

“Oh.”

“As of last month.”

“Charlie.” She reached in the dark for his hand, found it, damp from the condensation on his glass. She brought it up to her face, felt the hair on his knuckles brushing against her cheek, inhaled his smell into her nose.

“There was a——” He stopped. “A girl—a young woman, last year, and she—I mean, nothing ever—well, certainly not nothing, but it was——”

She tried to make an empathetic murmuring noise but it came out as a squeak.

“Nothing like you, Janey,” he said. “It was stupid. I was stupid. She was helping out around my office. Clara came to bring me lunch one day and I——”

She realized that the latest pause was caused by his tears and she stiffened, his hand still near her mouth. She lowered it gently to the armrest of the chair and deposited it there like a baby bird. After a minute she spoke: “Well, I’d say something about cliché.…”

He snorted.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“It’s my own fault.”

“Well.”

“She’ll be happier,” he said. “The boys are almost out of the house and she’s finally working on a book. She’s planning a trip to Nice in the fall.”

“Did she ever—with me, was she ever——”

“You’re in the clear,” he said.

“But the fellowship—the timing with the——”

“That was just Clara being Clara. She adored you. She wanted you to go forth and prosper. Which it seems you have. She’ll be happy to know.”

“You guys still talk?”

“Of course,” he said, and the ease with which he spoke still sent a niggling spark down her spine. “Glass of wine on the sun-porch every Sunday afternoon when I come to get my mail. Haven’t been able to bring myself to forward it.”

“But she never thought that I——”

“You’re too pure, Janey. You’re too good for all of that.” He took her hand again. “We missed you, when you left. All of us.”

She was not allowed to ask any of the most glaringly obvious questions: Then why didn’t you call? Why didn’t she call? Why didn’t the boys ever respond to my postcards? Her parents all over again, almost, except that time she was the adulterer, living in a spacious sunlit loft in Berlin, reading Sebald and eventually finding German boys who were charmed enough by her American accent to disregard her shortcomings.

“Did you get another babysitter?” she asked instead.

He squeezed her hand twice. “Naah. You were irreplaceable. Plus Léo was old enough to take care of Gus by then. You trained them well for self-sufficiency.”

“I really am sorry,” she said absently.

“Oh, Janey. Knock it off.” He took back his hand to wipe his eyes and she turned away, embarrassed for them both. “Just sit with me.”

“She’s kicking,” she said, and Charlie turned to her, interested. “Come here.”

He knelt at her feet so she could feel the heat from his T-shirt bleeding into her legs.

“Put your hand here,” she said, but instead he laid the side of his face, resting the full weight of his head against her. The baby kicked hard—right, she estimated, into his cheekbone. “Do you feel that?” she asked. “She just kicked you in the face. She must have some of my genes, at least. I wonder if she——” But she stopped, then, because she felt a strange wetness on her dress, a weird shuddering that was coming not from within her but from the outside, Charlie’s head, his chest heaving a little against her knees.

“Oh,” she said. She put a hand on his shoulder.

“I miss her,” he said, and before she could stop herself she replied, “Me too.”

The envelope arrives on a thawing Thursday in early May, thick and linen and intimidating. She opens it while perched on the edge of her couch, noticing one of Charlie’s stray socks beneath the coffee table. A fellowship in Germany, six months, all expenses paid, on the recommendation of Dr. Clara Cross. She goes straight to the Halsted L stop and transfers halfway to the Purple Line, finally showing up on their doorstep, breathless and uninvited.

“It was my pleasure,” Clara says. “You deserve it.” Charlie is at work, she says, so they’ll have to do their best to make a dent in the Veuve without his help. She opens the bottle deftly, a towel over the top to prevent the cork from flying. “Old restaurant trick,” she says.

“I didn’t know you waited tables.”

“Seven years,” Clara says. “While I was finishing my Ph.D.” She regards Jane placidly over the champagne flutes.

There’s a quiet that feels full of something that Jane can’t bring herself to address.

“We shouldn’t leave Gus alone for so long,” Clara says, and the fullness has been acknowledged, and they carry their champagne onto the back porch, no Curtis Mayfield this time, just the sputtering of the automatic sprinklers and the lazy creak of Clara on the glider. Jane knows somehow to not sit beside her.

“You know, I misspoke,” Clara says. Gus, running in frantic circles around the bursts of water, comes by to bury his face against his mother’s knees. She ruffles his hair and smiles down at him, dips her neck to kiss the crown of his head before he sets off again. “It’s work,” she says. “All of this actually takes quite a great deal of—work.” She stays quiet until Jane meets her eyes, and then she smiles a smile that makes Jane so sad she almost drops her glass. “We’re going to miss you,” Clara says.

But Jane can’t reply because this time it’s her turn to be greeted by Gus, who dives into her lap and sends a wave of champagne over her arm and into the geraniums.

He was hungover when she drove him to the lecture, breathing deliberately through his mouth, keeping his eyes closed against the sunshine.

“I don’t mind doing this,” she said, “but isn’t it sort of odd that the college didn’t handle your travel arrangements?”

“What?”

“At least a room at the Days Inn. Their endowment is huge, from what I hear.”

She taught at the state university, which was neighbored by the tiny private college to which they were currently driving.

“Oh,” he said. “Oh, you thought——”

“I thought what?”

“I’m—just visiting. Just going to see.”

“I thought you were the keynote.”

He looked over at her and pressed his palm against her thigh over the gearshift. “Oh, Janey,” he said. “Lord.”

It dawned on her coolly and she gunned the accelerator without meaning to.

“What an asshole you must think me,” he said.

“She doesn’t know you’re coming?” He shrugged, sheepish. “Thought she might like a surprise.”

“That’s——”

“Pathetic,” he said. “I’m aware.”

“You could have told me,” she said. “Why didn’t you—I mean, I could come in with—I haven’t seen her since——” She coughed, a bleating sound.

“You’re a lovely hostess.”

“Now you’re being kind of an asshole.” She pulled over a block from the glassy expanse of the college’s library and shifted to face him.

“Thanks for the ride, Janey.”

She got out of the driver’s seat and let him come around and kiss her neck, the base by the bones where she could feel her own pulse, and she wished him well and smoothed his hair and told him that the guest room would always be there in case of emergencies, not that she was hoping for them.

And he laughed at that, and he walked away, and she watched him with a sickly melancholy until his reflection disappeared behind the automatic doors.

They throw her a going-away dinner, but it’s tepid, no Motown, conservative pours of Bordeaux, the boys being moody and childish and Charlie drinking whiskey to their wine like it’s water and Clara not quite meeting her eyes. It feels like Thanksgiving at her mother’s house, clinky and stilted and strained. She rises at one point and finds herself deep-breathing in the bathroom, staving off tears. She slips one of Clara’s shea butter seashell soaps into her pocket before she rejoins the party.

“Janey’s abandoning us for more illustrious things,” Charlie says.

“It was bound to happen,” Clara says, still not looking at her.

“I’ll miss you guys,” she says, and Gus is the only one who echoes the sentiment.

After dinner, there is no proffering of aperitifs or chocolate mousse on the terrace.

“I’ve got an early morning tomorrow, I’m afraid,” Clara says. She pauses to write something in dry-erase marker on her big color-coded wall calendar, and it feels to Jane like an affectation. Clara turns back to face her. “But I’m happy to give you a ride.”

“Oh, I——”

“For Christ’s sake, sweetheart,” Charlie says from the doorway. “I’ll take her.”

“Don’t,” Clara says softly, not looking at either of them. She puts a stack of plates in the sink and the clatter echoes across the countertops. “Boys?” Her voice has lifted in pitch and verve; Gus appears behind Charlie and Léo a few paces after that. “Say good-bye to Jane,” Clara says. “Wish her luck.”

Gus hugs Jane fiercely around the legs and she squats to kiss him on his head, feeling weirdly disembodied, feeling self-conscious kissing him while his mother is watching.

“Behave yourself, Gustave?” she says, and he nuzzles briefly against her.

Léo comes to her then too, offering a bony hand and a charmingly bowed head.

“You,” she says gravely, “should feel free to e-mail me anytime.”

And then he hugs her too, and it brings tears to her eyes, and she’s just standing there, not-quite-crying in their big lived-in kitchen.

Charlie clears his throat. “Bedtime, soldiers,” he says, and Jane doesn’t have to turn to know that Clara is rolling her eyes at the unnecessarily masculine reference. Then, to Clara: “I said I’ll take her.”

“Your coat’s in the foyer, Jane,” Clara says temperately, and Jane knows this is her cue. Once she leaves the kitchen she won’t see Charlie again, not until he shows up on her doorstep in Michigan 11 years later.

She stops before him and bows weirdly. “Bye,” she says.

Charlie takes her in for just a second—she can feel the lightning-quick absorption of her being into his consciousness—and then he bows back at her, even more weirdly, dipping at the waist, kissing his tented palms and blowing in her direction.

“Godspeed, Janey,” he says.

Clara is quiet over by the sink. Jane ducks out before she can take stock of what has happened. In the car, Clara remains quiet, and the air is quiet, and Clara’s car is quiet as it rolls along Dempster Street. Jane is opening her mouth to speak when Clara interrupts.

“I’m dropping you off at the train,” she says. “Is that all right?”

There’s the weird ache in Jane’s throat that has to be ignored. The jasmine smell inside the car. The too-long stoplight at Chicago and Main.

“Of course,” she replies, mouth full of something, a cottony faraway ache.

Clara pulls up to the South Boulevard stop, dutifully flicking on her flashers. “Well,” she says, brisk, courteous, efficient. The mother-voice. She is wearing one of Charlie’s blue poplin button-downs and slim cropped pants; Jane has half a mind to ask her where she acquired her tasteful snakeskin flats, her unbending self-possession. “Go forth, I suppose.”

“Clara,” Jane says, but her throat stops her, a nauseated surging.

“You don’t wear your headphones on the train, do you?”

Jane shakes her head.

“You’ve got your wits about you?”

“Uh-huh.” She feels as though she might throw up.

There’s a pause, something heavy and sad, white noise of the radio, 97.1, the Stones, success success success success.

“Thank you,” Clara says, “for helping take care of them.”

She was conspicuous, trundling. If the lecture was being given in a large space, she reasoned, she would stay, skulk near the back, pass it off as professional development. But the room in which Clara was to speak, she found, was small, maybe 30 chairs, and the ficus near the door not tall enough for her to hide behind. She turned to go, but stopped when she saw them at the end of the hall, Charlie and Clara Cross, mid-embrace, her hands on his shoulders, a big smile.

Clara looked even more formidable than she remembered, stately, now, in a wrap dress and conservative heels, that same chignon. But her ease with Charlie was the same, her hand against his cheek, her straightening of his collar, the slight leftward tilt of her head. And Jane felt that familiar ache, nervy and uterine. In Berlin, missing them, she’d begun to think of the ache as a kind of shock therapy. The conjured feel of Charlie’s hands: zap. The warm benevolence of Clara’s attention: zap. The awareness that she existed outside of them both, that she always would, that there was no way for her to win: zap zap zap.

When she looked up again, Charlie and Clara were gone. She slipped out the back way, burping up something that felt like asphalt in her throat.

“The Lost Weekend,” she calls it for a couple of weeks after Charlie leaves. But Greg stops smiling at the reference after she’s made it four times, so she stops making it, and they make do, wait for their universe to right itself, wait for the baby to be born, wait for the subtle rosemary of Charlie’s Eau Sauvage to filter its last musky dregs through their window screens. She cannot bring herself to wash the guest room sheets until six weeks later.

They don’t ever talk about it, about the fact that after Charlie leaves she and Greg don’t have sex again until five months after Simone is born. She goes down on him on selected weekend evenings and satisfies herself with two-fingered friction in the bathtub on nights she says she needs alone time; she passes it off first as physical discomfort and then as hormonal rigmarole and when the baby shows up at first they’re both too tired to notice. When she finally does cede to his advances, she weeps afterward, and Greg holds her tightly in his arms and apologizes, which makes her weep even harder.

“Do you want to talk about it?” he says. “You know how much I love you, don’t you?”

“No,” she says. Then: “Yes.”

Four years later she travels to Baltimore for three days. Greg offers her the weekend away as a half-assed birthday present, Sure, go ahead to the Round-Table Consortium of Franco-Prussian Agoraphobic Bibliophiles or whatever; I’ll hold down the fort here. He drives her to the airport and she ducks into the backseat to kiss Simone. She mothers their daughter with a haphazard mix of warmth and remove. Simone, in spite of this, seems to be turning into a lovely person. Jane credits Greg for the victory.

Greg retrieves her suitcase from the trunk and pulls her against him for a second. “Behave yourself,” he says.

“Ditto,” she says.

At the conference, on the first evening, Clara will regard Jane from across a crowded banquet hall, the cool dim recognition with which you might acknowledge a fellow commuter. Jane will return to her hotel room and stare at her bland face in the mirror over the desk and ponder the accumulation of years and whether childbearing has really so dramatically altered her.

“I love you,” Greg says in the Grand Rapids departures lane. He does his furtive visual sweep of her face, looking for the fault lines.

“I love you back.”

She doesn’t ever tell Greg about the night in the yard, the night when he was dead to the world, feverish and breathing phlegmily alone in their bed. She doesn’t ever tell him that she lowered herself onto the grass beside Charlie and that at first it was just kind of sweet and sad, people sitting on the bus, knees touching and her arm around his warm shoulders. She will never divulge what happened next, the way he lowered her gently, gradually, onto her back, and fitted his body alongside hers; how his breath in her ear as he asked “Are you sure this is okay?” would have been enough on its own but how she nodded, reaching back to stroke his temple, and how he lifted her dress and lowered her underpants so that she’d barely had to move. How having him inside her was not specifically physiologically pleasant, given everything, but how the sounds he made—low, familiar, distinctly mournful—changed the tenor, shifted the balance in the air, made her arch her spine and reach helplessly for the backs of his thighs. How afterward, when she was crying, he began to rub little circles around her temples with the pads of his fingers. How she recognized the gesture—a remedy for headaches or fatigue—as belonging to Clara.

She doesn’t ever tell him about that night in the yard, but she’ll always suspect that he knows, and they’ll go on like that, and everything’s fine.