Songs for the End of the World - Saleema Nawaz Page 0,12

even more so.

They had sipped lemonade and nibbled on baked goods of varying quality as the mother-to-be opened gifts and her unremarkable boyfriend handed around napkins. Rachel played a clapping game with a baby who belonged to one of the few non-academic guests. When Owen slipped into the kitchen for a glass of water, Rachel’s department head, an older woman with a messy halo of coppery curls, seemed to detect something in his expression.

“It’s a bit of a farce, isn’t it?” said Gretchen, pouring herself a glass of San Pellegrino. “Celebrating this baby. You think so, too.”

He did, but he found Gretchen’s bluntness distasteful, so he only shrugged. “She seems happy.”

“Young women shouldn’t be allowed to fall in love.” Her laugh was sharp and low. “But it might be for the best. Her candidacy paper was a complete disaster.”

He followed Gretchen back into the living room, where he noticed one of Rachel’s male graduate students appraising him. Owen knew that his wife attracted a certain type of interest from her students and colleagues. When they’d first moved to Lansdowne, he had attended all the departmental parties to make his presence known, until he’d satisfied himself that it didn’t matter. Rachel wouldn’t stray.

It was during their walk home that she mentioned the child.

“What a sweet little baby,” she said. “And smart for eight months old, I thought.”

“Yes, very cute.”

“Maybe we should have one.” She said it lightly, almost playfully, as though she were any other woman and not his Rachel, whom he’d always known as driven, level-headed, constant—the last person to break a promise.

When he didn’t answer, her face fell, and the rest of the walk was silent and strained. Owen had been caught off guard, and he resented it, even as pain seemed to radiate from his wife in all the little twitches of her eyes and mouth. But for her to upend their whole life so casually, to test the waters with a joke, felt like a betrayal.

Now, Owen stood up and stretched before settling back on the rug for a set of crunches. The most galling thing was that Rachel had been the first to forswear children, and back then she’d been even more certain of her choice than Owen. They’d been at a bar after a midnight screening of Rosemary’s Baby at the Sunshine Cinema on the Lower East Side when she’d twirled her glass by the stem, finished her Kir Royale in two gulps, then blurted out that she saw an upside to the movie’s ending.

“I’d rather give birth to Satan’s baby than have to look after a normal one.” Her voice was arch, but Owen could sense her sincerity. She was wearing wine-dark lipstick and her chin was set and serious. “At least Rosemary has a whole coven to help her.”

“You don’t want kids?”

Rachel shook her head. “I want to be an auntie. And not have to feel guilty about how much I work.” She was ambitious and came from an unhappy family. She said she was grateful for her life but did not think her parents ought to have had children.

And so he had ordered them two more drinks before running through a whole list of scenarios in which he predicted her changing her mind, grilling her with what he thought had been an exhaustive thoroughness.

“The very idea of me having a baby,” he said. “It would be like splitting the atom. It would be a fucking disaster.”

Rachel had laughed then—laughed as though a baby were the last thing she wanted, a joke. But it was a cruel joke to have used that to make him choose her, to let him dare to think that he could be safe in a relationship when he knew, when he ought to have known, that he never could be.

Owen felt the fibres in the Mexican rug clinging to the sweat on his shoulder blades, and a flush overtake his torso as his muscles warmed. He was in even better shape now than when he and Rachel had first met. A better lover, too. As graduate students at Columbia, they used to spend hours at home alone together. They planned movie dates, visits to MoMA, even trips to Cape Cod or Martha’s Vineyard, but they rarely managed to get past the front door. Rachel cooked shakshuka, which she had learned to make in Israel, and cholent, a slow-cooking stew that she would usually prepare on Friday and serve on Saturday, even though she did not generally observe the