Falling in Love
"(...)
On a Friday afternoon near sunset, they stood at his window, looking at the river and Cambridge. She said: 'I have to do something before I go to New York. I'm six weekes pregnant.'
He looked at her eyes, and knew that what falling inside him would not stop falling till it broke. He said: 'No.'
'No what? I'm not pregnant? Did you think you were shooting blanks?'
'No, don't do it.'
'I'm twenty-two years old, I'm going to New York, and you want me to have a fucking baby?'
The falling thing in him hit and broke and he trembled and said: 'Not a fucking baby. Our baby, Susan. Our baby.'
He had to look away from the death of everything he say in her eyes.
(...)"
A Love Song
"(...)
The woman's name could not encompass what was happening. Nor could the words love and lie and sorry and you, nor could her own name on his tongue, on the night he told her in the bright light of their kitchen the color of cream, while upstairs their daughters slept. Nor could tears, nor any act of her body, any motion of it: her pacing legs, her gesturing arms, her hands pressing her face. The earth itself was leaving with her sad and pitying husband, was drawing away from her. Stars fell. That was a song, and music would never again be lovely; it was gone with the shattering starts and coldly dying moon, the trees of such mortal green; gone with light itself.
These words in the kitchen, these smoked cigarettes and swallowed brandy, were two hours of her life. What began as the scent of perfume on wool, then frightened and sorrowful ratiocination that led her beyond his infidelity, into the breadth and depth of the river that was their sixteen years of love - its falls and rushing white water and most of all its long and curving and gentle deep flow that never looked or even felt as dangerous as she now knew it truly was - ended with not even two hours of truth in the kitchen, for truth took most of the two hours to appear in the yellow-white light, and the gray cirrus clouds of blows and rising and drifting smoke, or perhaps took most of the two hours to achieve. Then it was there, unshadowed, in its final illuminance.
(...)"
