Foretaste Monday, a little more than two weeks later, I found myself in a meeting of one of those committees the administration wants the faculty to hold. People made their points, and when the rest of us weren't totally convinced, repeated those points as if we hadn't heard them. "Thank God," I muttered as the meeting broke up. I was a little louder than I had intended. "You sound," said the man next to me, "like someone who is not utterly convinced that a statement on the purpose of the University will save the world." "Have you read the last statement?" I asked. "No. Is there one?" "I haven't the faintest idea. I wouldn't have noticed if there were." "You have a point. Sam Bronowsky." "Bob Brennan." "Brennan. Heard something good about you. Hmm? No, sorry, It's another Brennan, entirely. And nothing that I heard. A woman in my evening class." "Maybe it is my wife, Jeanette," I said. "Do you teach sociology?" "Yes," he said, "possibly my best student. Writes clear papers. Don't help her with them, do you?" I assured him that any writing help flowed in the opposite direction. I felt proud. If his evening class was anything like mine, "writes clear papers" was a unique achievement. Maybe that pride added a few percent to the feeling as I called out "Love you," immediately after I closed the apartment door. "Love you. Letter on the sofa." It was hard to miss. I glanced at the university envelope, then dropped my coat before I tore it open. Jeanette came in from the kitchen. "Read it first." I did. "Reappointment." That was expected, if reassuring. "Assistant Prof. -- *tenure track* -- a year from September, if the degree is completed on time." She wrapped her arms and legs around me. Her lips were hard against mine, but her unbound breasts were soft against my chest. Now, Jeanette in an Iranian chadoor would be more arousing than all the coeds in their spray-on jeans; Jeanette without a brassiere, Jeanette against him without a brassiere, would get an erection from a statue. But, as they say, there is more. My wife is a feminist on many things, and can pull me up short when I take her assent for granted. In bed, however, she prefers the responsive to the initiating role. When she dresses without her bra, she is amenable to my advances for immediate sex. Junior, like a little Pavlovian puppy, rose to the signal that he would be fed. "Can dinner wait?" I asked as I started for the bedroom. "I love you dearly." I wanted to get the coming-home "I love you" out of the way before we got any deeper into the serious stuff. The thought was a little silly in context, but we always said it after the first kiss. "And I love *you*. Dinner will wait." After negotiating the doorway, I set her down and we had another kiss. I'd expected to see the impish smile that she usually wears when she springs one of these delightful ambushes. Instead, her expression was almost the same desperate solemnity that she had worn walking down the aisle towards me. I tried to process this datum, but was too distracted. "You do the shirt," said Jeanette as she dropped and began untying my shoes. I was briefly unhappy about that; my feet had done more sweating than I wanted her to smell. Clearly however, the lady succumbing to my advances had no intention of consulting me on the script. Naked, I removed the blouse and skirt which were her entire costume. She was quite damp, but her nipples were not erect. I took care of that little problem before pushing her toward the bed. "Are you okay?" I asked perfunctorily. With the time she'd spent planning this, she wouldn't have ignored contraception, not Jeanette. Hearing no answer, I looked in her face. She shook her head while biting her lip. "You said that we could," she said. The surprise broke me out of my rut. She dropped onto the bed and sprawled out. "Look at me." I caught her meaning. The breasts which I loved to kiss and suck and hold were really intended to feed a child. The wide hips and separated thighs which had cradled me so often and so delightfully were separated to allow a baby's passage. On the other hand, I loved that body almost as much as the spirit which inhabited it. Did I want those pert breasts distended while Jeanette nursed and droopy ever after? Did I want that svelte waist and smooth skin swollen? Sometimes my modest proportions were too much for her tunnel, and I had to move slowly until she accommodated me. How could it endure being stretched by the head of a baby? On the third hand (or perhaps another organ), I found the situation incredibly erotic. Woman is a mystery, and this particular woman is more mysterious than any other. I had pierced the mystery of her virginity, had seen and touched and tasted the mystery of her vulva, without removing more than the outer veils from the central mystery. Fertility is yet another mystery, and I was beguiled -- if a trifle frightened. "Are you certain?" I asked. "I'm *decided*," she said. Certainty in our situation would be foolish; and my wife, her choice of mate excepted, is never a fool. She'd made her decision, however, and would live with it. "Oh darling. Oh God, darling," I babbled. I was almost crying. We were not being precipitate; we'd discussed the matter to death. Now, however, we were committed. I knelt beside the bed to kiss her again. Somehow, we had the sort of tremulous, desperate, kiss that we had shared when the kiss was as far as we went. Her temples were wet when I left her mouth. I kissed those tears away. I got totally hung up on her breasts, kissing them all over between sucks on her nipples. I think that I was asserting my claim before some baby displaced me. Finally, I kissed lower. "The pad?" I asked hopefully. This raised her for my mouth. We had oral sex less often than not but used it for our special times. This time was special, but I couldn't argue if she saw it as a time to concentrate on the genital aspects. "Please," she said. She lifted her hips as I slid the pad under her. I knelt between her feet and kissed her thighs. When I reached their juncture, she was spread open to receive my kiss. The most enticing aroma in the world led me to her center. If you had told me the previous week that there could be a more delightful taste than the one that I had then, I would have scoffed. The taste this evening, however, was as heady but slightly sweeter. I blamed my imagination for a moment, thinking that the consciousness that this act could end in a child must be misleading my senses. Then I realized that this was the first time that I had tasted her when she had not inserted her diaphragm and spermicide. Every previous time, there had been the slightest bitterness hidden in the taste. I tore myself away from the feast long enough to say, "You are glorious." Then I returned to teasing my darling. When I felt her tense on the edge of orgasm, I inserted two fingers. I found the spot on the front of her tunnel and stroked that while I sucked the nubbin on top of her valley. My shifting had inevitably cut into her tension, but soon it returned. Then it redoubled. She bucked under my lips before I felt a rhythmic grip on the fingers that I had inserted. My beloved came in a rolling orgasm. Then she fell limp. I covered her perspiring body with the sheet. Lying next to my sweet wife and hugging her, I felt delighted in her recent pleasure, protective of her present defenselessness, reverent toward that mystery of future fertility, and a little proud of my part in the proceedings. "Bob loves Jeanette," I crooned. "Sweet, dearest, darling, you are safe in my arms." "Oh Bob," she said when she'd recovered. That was my cue to kiss her. She hugged me when I did. I was conscious of the soft breasts under me during the kiss. I stroked her side, and my strokes grew more intimate as her nipples hardened. "Love you," I said on the way from her mouth to her breast. Soon she returned to the state of tension. When I started to move down in the bed to get between her legs, she said, "Help me with the pillow." She then tried to get her pillow between her hips and the pad. I braced myself and lifted her legs while she slipped the pillow where she wanted it. I couldn't resist kissing that sweet derriere before lowering it onto the pillow. I hadn't figured out what she was trying to do, but anything which allowed our union was fine with me. The position was too much of a temptation, though. Once between her legs I kissed and licked her center until the scent and taste aroused my phallus to demand participation. Then I slid up her body and kissed her forehead before slipping in. Enclosed in her, I paused to savor the warm welcome and to say, "Love you; love you a lot," before beginning the ancient rhythm. When we were first married, we experimented with most positions. Some we found wanting and discarded, some we found wanton and retained. I had found as the years progressed, however, that fairly subtle variations in position or motion could produce great changes in sensation. At this angle, I could sink more deeply into Jeanette than I ever had before. She, on the other hand, could hardly move her torso. She crossed her legs behind me after a little experimentation and contented herself with putting pressure on my butt with her ankle and heel. I stopped my strokes in favor of a rotary motion of my hips, stirring within her and rubbing my groin against hers. I could tell that she was approaching her orgasm when she groaned something which sounded like "You," and tried to reach between us. "Do you want me to go first?" "Yes," she said clearly. I resumed stroking in and out, setting the rhythm that I knew would take me over. When my phallus swelled in anticipation, she grasped the base with two fingers. "Oh love!" was all that I could say before I came in gouts and grunts. "Stay there," she demanded before she, too, was taken beyond coherence. Her moans were accompanied by clutches at my suddenly-sensitive member and the drumming of her heels on my thighs. I did my best to obey. I stretched above my love on extended arms, letting my bones carry the weight that my muscles were too weak to carry at that moment. I watched my dearest in the twilight. Her torso shivered in time with her inner clutches, and there was a grimace on her face. Then she relaxed and blushed at her earlier insistence. The pink reached her breasts, and her nipples came out again to say hello before they slowly sank away. A final quiver of her tunnel forced my shaft out. She looked disappointed, but clearly that cork could not be put back into that bottle. I moved off her and to her side. "I love you," I said. She was still up on the pillow, but I hugged her across her shoulders with my right arm. "I love you desperately." "It's all right, then?" she asked. "All right? It was tremendous. You are wonderful." "I mean all right about the baby." "Having a baby will be marvelous. Depriving you of an education for years more will be terribly unfair." "Oh Bob, do you think your colleagues will sneer at me?" "For having a baby? Their ZPG commitment goes only so far. Haven't you seen how all the women cluster around Sarah Thorsen, and that kid will be her fourth." "For not having an education. Everybody around you knows so much more than I do." "You've been to faculty parties. When does the conversation leave you behind?" She giggled at that. We are both ignorant of the present TV programs. When we were first married, we had decided that we could afford neither the money nor the time for television. By the time that we could afford the money, Jeanette was deep into her French and didn't want to spend several hours a day being entertained in English. When we were home but not dealing with each other, I read and Jeanette either read or listened to her French radio. "Okay," she said. "It's more often 'West Wing' than plate tectonics." I resisted the opening. I have read *Scientific American* since my youth (and there are still articles which I can't follow). Jeanette has an unreasonable overestimate of the average difficulty of the magazine. I have gradually tempted her into reading selected articles on history and paleontology. She could have known about plate tectonics if she hadn't been so stubborn. On the other hand, Jeanette *is* stubborn; and I love her, stubbornness and all. Right then, I maybe loved her more than usual. While I had been thinking that, Jeanette had been thinking her own thoughts. "Do you feel outgunned at departmental parties?" I asked her. "Not really. But you seem to worry about my getting enough education." "I worry about your getting the college education that marriage robbed you of. That doesn't mean that you come off as uneducated in casual conversation. I never worried about that." The truth is more complicated, as truth so often is. I had really worried about depriving her of her education. When she had first brought up the question of her appearing jejune, however, it had seemed plausible. It no longer did. I had married a girl, after all, not yet nineteen and often unsure of herself. This was a woman. She ran an office and a household. She had managed to navigate through the public transportation systems of Paris and Boston. (Boston is harder.) When we had discovered that many of the documents that we wanted were handwritten or partially handwritten, she'd found a library with a handwriting text for *eleves* from 1911. We still have photocopies of that as well as of the documents. "Well," she finally said, "nobody seems to look down on me." That's an understatement. Jeanette makes conquests wherever she goes, not exclusively male. Which reminded me. "I met your current instructor today. He says you're a great student, and that he really likes your papers." "That's nice," she said, "but the standards for undergraduates might be a little lower than those for faculty wives." "Well a PHT counts." That's 'Putting Hubby Through.' Then I changed the subject. "You look awfully uncomfortable. Let me remove that pillow." "No!" "You going to stay like that until the rabbit dies?" "Ihm hmm. Which reminds me, would you do me a favor?" "For the sexiest woman in the whole world, I'd do anything." "Yeah. But what would you do for me?" she asked. "You are the sexiest woman in the whole wide world," I said. "For you I would wrestle grizzlies, swim the Atlantic, climb the highest mountain, vacuum a carpet, anything." "Would you finish up dinner?" she said. "It's ramen and sandwiches." "Well ... I dunno about that. Do I have to crush the dujours?" "Nope. I already crushed them." I kissed her belly between hair and navel, about where sperm was meeting ovum if her wishes were coming true. "Swim well," I said. She giggled. "And," she said as I carried shorts and trousers out the door, "you'd only vacuum the *center* of a carpet for me." Washed and partly dressed, I finished fixing the ramen. She had the vegies already in the water and the blocks of noodles broken into small chunks. I started the water boiling before finding ham sandwiches on a plate in the refrigerator. Jeanette had been a real busy girl since she had seen the envelope. Since I crushed the blocks for her as often as not, her crushing them this time was a release of nervous energy while she was waiting for me. Or, maybe, she had anticipated my joke. I dished up the soup, grabbed the sandwiches and squeeze bottles of catsup and mustard, and put everything including napkins and a trivet on a tray. Jeanette had covered herself with a sheet, but she still looked both ridiculous and sexy in that position. I put mustard on her sandwich before handing it to her. "Now," she said, "that is care." "No problem. There are lots of lips to kiss which won't get mustard on them." Jeanette and I love each other dearly, but we aren't particularly compatible. Her liking for mustard is only one example. "I suppose," I added, "that you want me to feed you your soup, as well." "Would you? That would be sweet." "Put my pillow under your head. I won't pour it down your throat. You'd choke." So I put the trivet on the sheet, just south of her breasts, and spoon fed her while I ate a sandwich with my left hand. "The spoon," she said, "would be less likely to spill if you kept your arm away from my breast while it is full." "I'm the one who washes the sheets," I responded. "Anyway, they'll need a washing after this meal." Just to please her, however, I changed the path of the full spoon. "I suppose that you have some complaint about the return path as well." She didn't, but her giggles spilled more of the soup than would ever have dripped off the spoon. As you might guess, this meal took quite a long time. Jeanette finally had to visit the bathroom. We finished in the kitchen after that. "Let's eat out night after tomorrow to celebrate this new contract," I suggested. "Do you want to pick me up after work, or should I come home first?" I would be teaching an evening class the night in between, too rushed for any celebration. "I don't know, Bob. I think we have to tighten the budget again. We still aren't living on your salary, and *three* of us might have to fairly soon." "Not for the next nine months, certainly." "But still." We had handed in new W4s at the new year. All the deductions were on my check, and hers represented her after- tax earnings. This made it easy to see that, even when the car payments ended, we would be spending more than I brought home. I'd get a little more in the fall, with added seniority and a doctorate; but, as she had said, still.... We don't want to send her back to the office when our son is still in diapers. "Whatever you say," I told her. "You know that I enjoyed tonight's celebration more than any restaurant meal." I started to wash the dishes and she went off to do her own work. We went our own way in the apartment for the next several hours. I graded papers, and she did some cleaning and straightening before retiring with what I thought was _Contes Drolatiques_. Instead, I found her busy with a calculator, pencil, and paper when I got to the bedroom. "What are you doing?" I asked. "Rethinking our budget." "Going to leave me any pocket money?" "One beer a quarter," she said. "As long as you leave in enough for the daily call girl." "Fat chance. You're oversexed, but you're not *that* oversexed. Besides, you're too tight to pay for what you can get free." Besides, as she didn't mention, my pocket money doesn't cover much more than lunch. "But my wife doesn't understand me," I said. "Bob, no one. In the whole blooming world. Will ever. Understand. You!" "I'll take that as a compliment. Done?" "For tonight," she said, handing me the stuff. I put it on the dresser before turning off the light. She scooted over, and I snuggled next to her. "We really don't have enough in savings," she continued. "Darling," I reminded her, "we got married on the prospect that you would look for work. We moved to Boston on that same fine prospect. We have more in savings than we ever had before. We have a positive savings rate and several assets. We each have medical insurance. I don't like going to my family, but they are there if something goes wrong. "Anyway," I finished, "we are further from the pit than we ever were before. Why are you worrying now?" "I'm worrying because it's not just us anymore. We took those risks for ourselves. It's not fair to bring a tiny baby into a risky situation. Oh, Bob, tell me that it is going to be all right." She turned to face me and pressed herself into my arms. "It will be fine, darling," I said. "Everything will be all right. I'm here for you, and for our child. Don't worry." I hugged her tight and gave her little protective kisses on her forehead. "You rewrite the budget. I'll pack a lunch. We know how to live cheap, you and I. If we don't have your salary, we don't need the car. Did you figure that in?" "You're right. And I didn't" She kissed me full on the mouth. Now, I knew that this hug was for comfort. We had already had glorious sex that evening, I was getting too old for seconds, and we both needed our sleep. I knew all that, but Junior didn't. As Jeanette's tongue sought mine, it started to stiffen. She smiled, which interfered with the kiss. "Somebody's feeling ambitious," she said. "Ignore him." I pulled her back into the kiss, but she pushed her thigh against my erection rather than ignoring it. I never really feel that I've kissed Jeanette enough, but this kiss had clearly served its purpose. When we broke the kiss, she turned and snuggled back against me. Her nipple was surprisingly firm against my palm as I cupped her breast. I didn't laugh aloud, but I think she felt the snort of humor against her neck. She pushed her hips back against Junior in retaliation. "Are you serious?" I asked. "Are you ... ?" I was going to say, "okay," but that was no longer a question. "Want to try?" she responded. I kissed the back of her neck in answer. I played with her nipple rather than simply holding it. When my hand went lower, she reached back to hold me. Only when we were both ready did we move our torsos apart. She fitted me into her and then pushed back against me. There was the slightest instant when I wasn't going in right, but then I slipped into the familiar warmth. "I love you," I managed to say before my attention moved toward our juncture. She rolled so I could slip my left hand under her. Gripping both her hips, I drove within her slippery tunnel. This seemed to last for a voluptuous eternity before I felt my orgasm approach. I reached between her legs again. A few brushes of my finger around the little nubbin were enough to carry Jeanette over, and her internal clutches brought my pulsing release. We lay there in panting lassitude until I passed her a Kleenex. When her back again pressed against my chest, I started singing. "Bob loves Jeanette. Bob loves Jeanette. Bob loves Jeanette. And I love you." As I cupped her breast once more, my thought drifted back to our earlier conversation. We had entered into another relationship. Our child was not yet born, not even a fetus, but -- at most -- a blastula. We, however, had been planning as parents. It was my last thought before I dropped off. THE END