“Anything,” she said.
One morning after her workout, Ted met her at the front door of the gym. “Don’t go to work yet,” he said, breathing into her neck. “Come home with me.”
For three months, Anne went home with Ted almost every weekday morning. Often, they skipped the workout and met at his apartment. “One workout a day is sometimes all I can manage,” Anne said. It was the best sex of her life: illicit, secret, athletic. Ted was new, experienced, generous, and tireless. Every time she left his apartment, a sense of sorrow settled on her; their mornings together were numbered. She tried to have sex with Jim every time she had sex with Ted, to allay her happiness, but she couldn’t always keep up. Jim warmed to her new openness and availability. He had liked her French silk underwear. He had liked removing it. It had given her a youthful, virginal quality that had aroused him. But he liked the new underwear more. It played to darker fantasies. He liked it half on, half off.
“Who are you?” Jim asked one night as he lay beside her, spent.
“Would you like to tie me up?” she said. “Or down? I’m never sure of the right locution.”
Anne told Ted she couldn’t see him anymore outside the gym. He wasn’t surprised or disappointed. “You don’t have to give me up entirely,” he said. “We’ll stay friends. We’ll play squash. And every now and again, you’ll come over to my place. It will be good for you.”
She cut back on her training sessions. Another woman, short, athletic, and blond, took her hours. Anne liked that she was Ted’s type. This is a very well-run gym, she thought.
—
Anne and Jim had dinner with her parents on most Sundays. Her sisters and brother and their families came also. Anne wondered if parents without wealth could regularly summon their children to a weekly weekend dinner. She loved her parents; they were good parents, affectionate and kind, but still she wished she could spend Sunday afternoons wasting time her own way. Her childlessness had metamorphosed after two years of marriage from a matter of interest among the family to a matter of concern. She was regularly scanned walking into the house, and her intense exercise regimen, which had thinned her out, had them all talking. “She’s no spring chicken,” her mother told her father. “She better get on with it. I had all four children by the time I was her age.” Mr. Lehman told his wife not to say anything to Anne, and Mrs. Lehman held off; his demands on her were so few, perhaps two a year, she believed it her wifely duty to submit. Her demands on him were many; those he didn’t care for, he ignored. “My batting average with your father is almost as good as Ted Williams’s,” she announced during one of the Sunday dinners. All the children immediately understood.
When Anne showed up in late fall rounder and glowing, everyone noticed. There were murmurings during cocktails but no one said anything to Anne or Jim; they waited for them to share their happy news. Throughout dinner, the conversation stalled, no one wishing to miss the announcement. When dessert had come and gone and nothing had been said, Mrs. Lehman lost patience.
“Anne,” she said. “Why haven’t you told us you’re pregnant?”
Everyone looked at Anne. She flushed at the attention.
“I’m not,” she said. “I’ve stopped exercising so vigorously and gained weight. My muscles must have turned to fat.”
Mrs. Lehman didn’t like to apologize; she saw it as a sign of weak-mindedness.
“?‘Three things can not hide for long: the Moon, the Sun and the Truth.’ The Buddha,” she said. “I’d take the test, if I were you,” she said.
Jim didn’t say anything to Anne until they got home.
“Are you pregnant?” he asked. He hadn’t noticed before Mrs. Lehman had spoken but once she had, he too knew she was.
“You can leave,” Anne said.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.
“I didn’t want to have an abortion unless I had to. I was waiting for the amniocentesis.”
“Why did you do this?” he asked.
“I didn’t do this. It happened.”
“Who’s the father?”
“You are,” she said. Jim looked at her for a long time without saying anything. She met his gaze.
“I can’t have children. You know that,” he finally said.
“Vasectomies fail,” Anne said, “and we’ve been having lots of sex.” She kept his gaze. “I think it was the bikini panties.”
“Who are you?” he said. “You’re a different person.”
“Yes,” she said. Jim was silent for several seconds.
“I’m not angry,” he said. “I would have thought I would have been—if I had thought this could happen, which I never did.” He stopped. “I’m stunned.”
“I expected you to be angry and then gone.”
“I’d look a cad if I left you pregnant,” he said. “I’d be a cad.”
“We can say we had agreed not to have children and I decided on my own to get pregnant. I’ll do the explaining. I’ll say we were having trouble before I got pregnant.”
“I’ve never seen you look lovelier,” he said. “How far along are you?”
“Twelve weeks.”
“And it’s my baby?” he said.
“Your baby,” she said.
“Let’s go to bed,” he said. “I’m not thinking straight.”
“There’s no reason we can’t have sex,” Anne said.
He took her hand. “Your breasts are even more wonderful,” he said.
Will was the family pundit. “Granny slap-down” was one of his jibes. Harry briefly claimed ownership but no one believed him. “You don’t have a sense of humor,” Sam told him, speaking for the family.