“My baubles?” He laughs, but it’s partly to cover his embarrassment. “Never as such. I was told at the time that given the extent of the inflammation, it was very likely that my fertility had been, uh, adversely affected. At some point Mandy and I stopped using contraception to see whether she would get pregnant, but she didn’t. So I have to assume that my…baubles…are empty.”
“Well, that’s a bit lame! You should get tested! I’d be willing to assist you with the necessary, um, preparations.”
He stares at me, defensive and outraged at the same time.
“Listen, stop deluding yourself! All my little swimmers are dead! If there are any little swimmers; I’ve never really made it my business to enquire into the—”
“Oh, I’m not much bothered, myself,” I say nonchalantly. “I’m just thinking of the next woman you have sex with. Unlike me, she may actually know that she does want children, so it would be useful to know the exact facts, wouldn’t it?”
My ingenuous little monologue upsets him so much that he jumps up, stalks over into the kitchen, and starts sorting the dirty dishes into the washer.
“End of conversation,” he mutters when I follow him. “You’re doing neither me nor yourself a favor by pretending that you do not want children! You’re in your first year on tenure track. You’re thirty years old!”
“Fair point. The sense I have at the moment that I don’t necessarily need a child to be happy may change. Or it may not.”
He stares at me, a dirty plate in one hand, a chopping knife in the other.
“Don’t start, Anna! It’s no good! Even if you weren’t on tenure track, it would be grossly selfish of me to—”
“You married, knowing yourself infertile!” I protest, by now seriously hurt. “I hear what you’re saying, but don’t pretend you’re being all noble and unselfish!”
“Yes, and look at what a resounding success my marriage was!”
“What if a woman wants you more than she wants a child?” I shout, pushed over the edge.
“She may think that for a while, maybe, if the sex is good enough.”
“Cleveland—you’re a bastard!”
It hurts to be reminded of the limits of our little affair, but the hurt disperses the haze of vague hopes and fantasies in my mind. That evening we don’t make love again, but there is no question of either of us sleeping on the sofa. I’m sad, but after all, I knew that this would make me sad, so I have no one to blame but myself. I wake in the middle of the night, in the pitch-black bedroom, and I miss him. I feel for his thigh, for the waistband of his pajama pants, for the warm, fragrant skin of his groin. His warm, half-erect cock. More tenderly than ever I cradle his soft, heavy balls in my hand and kiss them softly, so gently.
His fingers close around my naked arm.
“Anna…” His voice his faint and gravelly, but I don’t know what he means, so I go on caressing his flesh because that is all I can do to show him what I feel for him.
“You led them…in the night by a pillar of fire…to give them light in the way wherein they should go.” I smile and clasp his pillar of fire in my hand.
His fingers are kneading my arm, and I can hear him breathe in ragged, uneven gasps. I hunch up my knees and pull off my panties, then his shirt that I’ve been wearing as a pajama top. My face fits snugly into the hollow of his throat as I stretch out on top of him.
“You multiplied their children as the stars of heaven,” I whisper, “and you brought them into the land that you had told their fathers to enter and possess.”
With my knees I spread his legs so that my thighs are cradled between his. When I slide him into me, he moans like a man in a dream. I clasp his hands in mine and crook his arms so that his palms face up, like a sleeping child’s.
“So the children went in and —” I ride him slowly, my elbows on either side of him, keeping him immobile “— and possessed the land, and…thou subduedst before them the inhabitants of the land and gavest them…into their hands…that they…”
My mouth finds his throat, finds it stretched to a long, smooth column of skin and muscle as he arches himself against me,