forgotten—more like pushed out of my mind. Our thirty-first anniversary is this weekend. We used to celebrate that night by having dinner at the location of our first date, a tiny Italian restaurant in the West Village. But we let that tradition lapse quite some time ago. We used the same set of excuses the first year or two: We were too busy, it was such a hassle to get into the city, etc. But I don’t think we even mentioned our anniversary to each other last year. I look at my wife, hoping for a clue to what is happening here. She’s been behaving differently in the last few weeks. She is more emotional, and more often home.
I say, “I thought you might want to skip this year.”
Kelly hesitates, then rushes forward. “We have to go on Saturday night, because I’m throwing Gracie’s baby shower on Sunday. I’ve been going through these baby magazines all afternoon. I really want it to be something. Martha Stewart’s ideas are the only ones with any class, but the execution is almost impossible. I’ve never done this before—I’m too young to have a daughter who’s having a child.”
I shake my head. I was thinking a few hours earlier that the only choice was to end our marriage. I’m not sure now whether I’m agreeing to a last dinner, or a celebratory date. “Saturday night is fine.”
“The shower has to be this weekend, you see. After all, time is running out. Gracie’s due in three weeks. She could give birth any time now.”
I sit down in the armchair by the door, a big leather chair that used to belong to Kelly’s father. No one ever sits in this chair. It is on the fringes of the room, outside of any direct line of conversation. I always feel my lack as a man when I sit in this chair. It seems to demand a pipe and a glass of scotch from its visitor. Kelly’s dad was not a happy person, but he was indisputably a man in a hard-living way I’ve never tried to achieve.
“Your hair looks better,” Kelly says. “You look human again. You went to Vince?”
I hope that my wife knows what she’s doing. I have seen this determined look on her face before. She has the ability to make a decision and then inflate her emotions like a bicycle tire until they back up the decision with no wiggle room. The problem is that if her emotions are false, there is still a hole in the tire and the air will eventually seep out.
All I can do is show up on Saturday night and pull out her chair. I will chink glasses and hold her hand. I’ll hope that she has found an answer, a solution that I haven’t yet been able to see. I will speak loudly that night, and try not to listen for the hiss of escaping air.
Kelly seems to read something in my expression. “Are you going to keep sleeping in the den, Louis?” She sounds curious. “I know you,” she says. “You’re sleeping there to protect me, or to help me somehow. I want you to know that you’re not helping me by doing that.”
Her words, though quiet, boom between the four walls of the room. I find myself thinking that where we are headed in this moment is going to be messy, more complicated, unpredictable. I put my hands on my knees. I grip the joints through the denim of my jeans, through the pounds of muscle, tendons, ligaments, and fat. “I’m not sleeping well,” I say. “I’ve been having nightmares. I might kick you.”
“I’ll kick you back,” Kelly says.
“Okay,” I say.
“Okay, then,” she says, and turns back to the baby magazines.
GRACIE
I wake up at five-thirty in the morning. I haven’t slept past dawn since the seventh month. I am so uncomfortable at night tossing and turning and getting up to pee every hour that when the first light slides under my window shade I crawl out of bed. While I make my way downstairs I remember how difficult it was for my father to wake me up in the morning when I was a teenager. I used to be a gifted sleeper. I could sleep anytime, anywhere, but as a teen I was at the height of my powers. I could go to bed at ten at night and sleep until one o’clock the next day. It drove my parents, overachievers that they are, absolutely