But at least he was thinking. His lovely young face was screwed up with the effort.
Suddenly he said to Laura, as if expecting to trip her up, “When’s it due? The kid?”
“November,” she said. She had anticipated him.
“Well!” His face brightened. “If it isn’t due till November, we’ve got a long time to play around.” And it was Jack he looked at now.
But Laura jumped at him, bristling. “I don’t want an alcoholic for a husband!” she said. “I don’t want my baby to have an alcoholic for a father. A drunken, miserable, tormented man who doesn’t know which sex he is, who has to chase around after a thoughtless character like you all night. I don’t want to lose my husband, Terry. Not to you or any other gay boy in the world. You’d ruin his health and make him wild inside of a month.”
She was crying, though she didn’t realize it, and her cheeks were flaming. Terry stared at her for some moments in surprised silence. And then he looked at Jack, who was still propped on one arm, taking it all in with an inscrutable smile.
“Well…,” Terry said again, almost diffidently. Apparently he believed they were having a child. He looked to Jack for moral support. “Is that the way you feel too, honey?” he asked.
“Why certainly,” Jack said cheerfully, incongruously.
“Can’t you tell? Whatever she says, goes.” A soft note of hysteria sounded in his voice.
“I guess you don’t want me to stay for dinner now,” Terry said, glancing at Laura. For answer she only turned away and began to cry. Terry walked over to Jack and knelt before him on the floor, putting his hands on Jack’s shoulders. “I do love you, Jack. I never lied about that. I didn’t know it was so bad. For you, I mean. I still don’t see how it could have been. But I don’t want to mess things up for the kid. Shall I go? You tell me.” He waited, watching Jack’s face.
“I told you to leave me once, Terry. I haven’t the strength to say it again. It’s up to you.”
Terry leaned forward and kissed him on the lips. “If you haven’t the strength to say it, I haven’t the strength to do it. No matter what she says,” he said.
Laura came at him suddenly from across the room. “Go!” she flashed. “Go, damn you, and never come back!”
Terry looked uncertainly from Laura to Jack, and Jack covered his face abruptly with a noise rather like a sob.
Terry stood up. “All right,” he said in a husky voice. “I’ll go. I’ll go for the baby’s sake. But not forever, Laura. Not forever.”
At the front door he turned to her. “You say you love him,” he said. “Then you must understand why I can’t leave him forever. I love him too.” He said it sadly but matter-of-factly. And Laura, staring at him through tear-blurred eyes, realized that he never would understand what he had done to Jack or how. He thought it was a simple matter of giving a kid a break. And because he loved Jack enough he was able to do it.
“Enjoy your flowers,” he said with a rueful grin, and then Terry went out the front door and shut it carefully behind him. Neither Jack nor Laura stirred nor made a sound until they heard the elevator arrive, the doors open, shut again, and the elevator leave.
“He’s gone,” she whispered. “Dear God, don’t let him ever come back.”
Jack rolled over, his back to her, and wept briefly and painfully with desperate longing. There was a moment of silence while she watched him fearfully. And then he stood up and headed for the door. Laura threw herself against it.
“No! Don’t follow him, Jack!” she implored, her voice rising.
“I won’t,” he said, trying to reach past her to open the door, but she threw her arms around him and begged him to stay with her.
“I got him to leave, Jack. He won’t dare come back for a long time. Maybe he’ll find somebody new. Maybe we’ll be lucky and he’ll never come back.”
“I should be so lucky,” he said acidly.
She looked at him, dismayed. “Isn’t that what you wanted?” she asked.
He stopped trying to grab the doorknob for a minute to look at her. “Yes,” he said, with effort. And after a pause, “You were masterful, Mother. You really played your scene.”
She looked at the floor confusedly, hearing all the sarcasm and the hurt and the grudging admiration in his voice. “Do you hate me for it?” she asked.
“No. I’m grateful.”
“Do you still love me?” she whispered.
“Yes. But don’t ask me to prove it now.” He got the door open in a sudden deft gesture, but Laura was still clutching him.
“Where are you going?” she asked fearfully.
“For a bottle.”
“Oh, God!” she gasped. “Then it’s all been for nothing,” she said despairingly.
“No,” he said. “I’m not drinking this for Terry. I’m drinking it for the baby.”
“The baby?” she said tremulously.
“The little kid who wasn’t there.”
He turned to go and she followed him into the hall.
“But Jack—” she protested as he rang for the elevator. “Jack, I—I—” She looked up and saw the long bronze needle moving swiftly toward “three” as the elevator ascended, having barely emptied Terry into the first floor. It seemed to be measuring off the last seconds of their marriage. She had to do something. Trembling and scared, she caught his lapels and said, with great difficulty, “I meant it, Jack.”
“Meant what?”
“About the baby.”
He stared at her, one hand holding back the door of the just-arrived elevator.
“I’ll have a baby,” she said. “If you still want one.”
For a while they stood in the dim little hall and gazed at each other. And then Jack let his hand slip from the elevator door and, circling
