I called to him and Tom sat beside the bed. I asked lots of questions about his family. I was like a child hearing bed time stories for the hundredth time, a child being inculcated into the myths of the family.

“Did I ever tell you about my n’er-do-well intellectual great grandfather?” Tom asked. “Maybe. But tell me again,” I said. “He was trained to be a minister. Those Iowa farmers wanted someone steeped in the traditions they had brought over with them from Germany, so they sent him back there to study. But what those good German-descended Iowa farmers didn’t realize was that time and ideas hadn’t stood still back in Europe. My great grandfather began preaching the new liberal ideas that to them sounded like heresy. They booted him out.” “Really?” “And he never worked again. He went back to school to study something else. Just kept on reading and thinking while his wife kept the family and the six kids together.” ” That’s who you take after!” I teased. “You mean because it has taken me until forty-seven to complete my PhD? I guess I can’t argue.”

I was looking at Tom coolly, like a set of genes. I was happy to hear that his mother’s father, a Herr Doktor physician and professor, lived into his nineties. They were long lived, an antidote to my frail constitutional inheritance; blue eyes to offset my hazel. They traveled back and forth from Europe to America, before my family ever arrived. It wasn’t until two generations later that anyone in my family traveled for pleasure. Even my parents and their generation were lucky if they got to go to New Jersey.

Some people seek those most like themselves, but without ever knowing what I was rejecting in myself or compensating for, I mostly chose something different. I was curious. Maybe it was that idle curiosity of mine that actually left me in my current position: literally, hips propped up and listening to the familial bedtime stories of a man, a former boyfriend no less, who I might have married years ago, but never did.

“OK, here it is,” he said.

Tom left the partially filled syringe on the marble topped table in the kitchen. How tidy. Gold elixir inside and the cap was on. I was worried that the marble table was too cold and could maybe kill all the sperm. Tom poured himself a tall brandy in a milk glass. I had never seen him need a drink before. Then he worried about the measurements on the syringe. His output seemed meager to him now that it was calibrated. In fact, he was a high volume man.

I turned up what I called male-masturbating background music on the stereo and left Tom alone in the dining room with a glass cup and the syringe in dim light with the door closed. The dog tried to get in, sniffing at the door.

“Shadow, come here.”

I undid the bed, propped some pillows for my back, some for my behind. My baby making book said to recline on my back for twenty minutes with knees up, once I’ve inserted the sperm.

Tom came in, looking anxious.

“It’s not working. You’re going to have to help me.”

“We said no touching. You can do it. Don’t be afraid. Go back in there,” I said, sounding like a boxing coach. Tom obeyed. No magazine, no videos. Just Tom and his imagination and probably years of experience, in my dining room on a hard, straight-backed chair.

“I was abandoned by my father after the death of my mother,” she said. “I was raised by my grandmother. I do not recommend raising a child at 40 and on one’s own. I’ve lived it as a child.” That was all she said.

Beside her sat a round woman, in exotic, drappy clothes. “I’m a psychologist,” she said softly. “If I were to diagnose myself, I’d saying I am trying to free myself from the chains of vague hopes. I have a younger boyfriend. He knows my dreams, but I don’t know if he will ever surrender to them. Given the time line I’m facing at my age, the only alternative is insemination. I can afford it. I just have to do it.”

The tyranny of vague hopes, I liked that phrase. She seemed as if she knew what she needed to do. I didn’t know why she was here. Maybe she just wanted a forum, or the support. The group psychology.

“I’m like you,” I said, “but minus the younger boyfriend. I realize if I want to have a kid I have to begin to try now.”

Finally, there was a very petite, attractive and well dressed woman, a real estate agent, she said, with an immovable hairdo and lots of fashion accessories, including some plastic surgery around the eyes.
“At 45, I am still trying to figure out if I want to have a kid,” she said. She shocked me, which is silly, considering she was not that much older than I. Where have you been I wondered? It’s a bit late.

“Have you confirmed that you are physically able to?” Celia asked, channeling my thoughts but with a bit more tact.

“I haven’t talked to a doctor if that’s what you mean. I came to this class because I have had many dissatisfying relationships. And now I’m starting to feel my age. I was horrified to realize that my boyfriend’s daughter, for instance, was the young attractive woman at a recent dinner party. I’m used to that honor going to me.”

She was completely confounded by the evidence that time had probably passed her by. I looked at her blue double-breasted blazer and her matching short skirt, the gold chain link belt, the carefully arranged red, white and blue scarf slung off center from her shoulder to her neck, and her perfect flip. There were a few crow’s feet pulled tight, a wide open eyed look and red lipstick, outlined in a slightly darker shade of red pencil, on her mouth. She was beyond 45. There was something terrifying about this well preserved cheerleader. The cost seemed so high.

Like alcoholics and chronic gamblers, we went around the room beginning with a brown haired, clear eyed, and slightly chubby woman.

“I’m thirty-seven,” she said.

Smarter than I am, I thought. At least she’s younger.

“I broke off my engagement to a man I love because I know he does not want to have children. I am certain I do, and I will do it, on my own or not. I’m here because I want to find other women in the same situation, women who have had to let someone go over this issue and who have moved on,” she said.

Beside her sat another woman, taller and thinner and older and curly haired. She cried immediately.

“I have also met the man I love, but he is in his sixties, the father of several grown children and a teenage son. He finds it barely tolerable, raising his son at this age. He does not want any more kids. For me, I am dealing with an impossible choice. I either abandon the man I love or the possibility of a child. I also worry about the prospect of losing him some time in the future, since he’s older than me, and then being left with nothing.”

“I know I cannot get pregnant,” said a woman dressed in modified country western, complete with stitched red cowboy boots. “I’m struggling to accept it, investigating adoption. But I can’t quite embrace the adoption thing. I think it’s because I’m still holding out hope.” “What are you hoping for?” the group leader asked. “A miraculous birth and the man of my dreams.”

Next came that very striking woman who filled the last chair. She was fidgeting, looking down. She quivered. Her voice wavered.

“I’m a lawyer,” she said. That explained the suit and the briefcase. “I’m full of internal conflicts. I’m not prepared to speak.” She looked up. I don’t know if it was her beauty, but something made her seem so full of potential, despite being so distraught, as though she was here against her will. She kept her discomfort in check by looking down. I wanted to shake her and tell her she could do it, whatever it was. Then I got it. I realized she was already pregnant. But she didn’t love the father. She was trying to decide what to do.

Inside, the house retained the feeling of a home. There was a narrow hallway with rooms on either side and a staircase at the far end of the hall. The bulletin board just inside the entrance was full of flyers and announcements for parents of young children, in exactly the place where a coat rack or family bulletin board might be. I wasn’t a mother, but I already felt I had pulled back the curtain and crossed into this world. I was peering through a window at motherly obsessions — day care, schools, play dates.

Up on the second floor, a group of women were seated on couches grouped in a horseshoe around three sides of a narrow room, probably a kid’s bedroom at one time. A rather striking woman in a suit with a brief case, eyes downcast, arrived right after me, and took the last chair. There were pockets of discussion and areas of silence in the already filled room. I was one of the quiet ones. The women were short, tall, thin, chunky, perfectly groomed or flowingly natural. The only thing that unified this group was that they were women and presumably they wanted to have a kid.

Shortly after my return from Alaska, The Bulletin appeared in my mailbox, unsolicited. I glanced through it as I walked up the steps to my flat. Then I saw the headline on page three.

The universe had heard my discussions with Steve and my thoughts in Alaska — just as I always imagined it could when I was a child. What the universe then sent me was an advertisement. The universe (if not the subscriptions department of the Bulletin) provided me with a clear next step that both thrilled and terrified me. Getting pregnant inadvertently was one screwy thing. I had rolled those dice with Steve and failed. Making it happen was another.

I wanted to act. Of course I was afraid to act. Even the simple task of calling to find out more information on what I read in the paper, seemed too half-hearted and at the same time, like too much of a risk.

“I already know what I want to do. I’m just seeking others who want to do the same thing. I’m looking for a network and resources, “ I said on the phone, sounding surprisingly confident and certain. “Can you tell more about what I saw in the paper?” I asked.

“I’m a social worker,” the woman on the other end of the line said. “At 40 I decided I wanted to have a child. I was going to try having it on my own. I got pregnant, fell in love and married, as well as adopted a second child, roughly in that order. So I’ve faced single motherhood, insemination, infertility and adoption. I organized this group for women facing any and all.”

“Sign me up,” I said.

“You’re a closet Valentino, despite your cool Nordic looks,” I said, touching the cross. The right side of his mouth curled up. Then his face became serious again.

He took off the pink thermal shirt I was wearing. I didn’t resist. After all, it was his. Then he moved me back onto the bed. I put the exposed and dangling cross in my mouth and kept it there as he was leaning over me, kissing me. He was like a slippery elegant fish, an eel, with a penis as long slender and oddly bent as his conservative views. Oddly bent in a way that seemed to touch something inside of me perfectly. I could not account for it. Was it Alaska? Was it just chance, that out of all the people to end up in a kayak with, I ended up with one who seemed to know exactly what to do? And the odd curve of him knew it over and again, for as long as we remained together in that part of the world. I’ll never know exactly what brought me to that prone position and that decision , if it was the rushing streams, the dense lush foliage, the spawning salmon, or just that we were total and absolute strangers in a far away land. I didn’t think we agreed on anything. But we did.

“A moral struggle?”

“You don’t understand? I am a very spiritual person,” he said to me. “I’m testing myself.”

That night he flunked the test.

Steve walked into my little room unannounced. He didn’t bother to knock. The room had only one window facing onto a wall, like a New York hotel room. The bathroom was down the hall. In the same way that spring and summer were compressed up there in Alaska, in this tiny hotel room, now so were we.

He sat down on a chair opposite the opaque glass door. Here was a man who didn’t believe in birth control sitting in my room in the middle of a primordial rainforest. I was starting to wonder if God was testing me.

“I’d like to stay,” he said.

“It’s the salmon.”

“What?”

“The salmon. The spawning salmon.”

“What?”

“What if I get pregnant?”

“I would like to have as many children as possible,” Steve said.

“What about your wife?”

“The idea of seeing the variety of children with different women is intriguing.”

” You’d want to know?”

“No.”

“But you would know. I’d tell you. Would you ask me to get an abortion?”

“No.”

“Then what are you doing here?” I shouted. “If I am ever going to have a kid, I have to start now. You can’t trust me out here with all the salmon running upstream.”

I had given him fair warning.

“There is only one problem. The kid needs a dad,” Steve said, stroking my hair.

“There’s no time for a dad.”

“Don’t have a kid on your own,” he said, grabbing my chin, looking at me.

“Why not? You are the one who says how wonderful, how important it is.”

“A kid needs a father.”

“The world reproduces. Every living thing.”

“Yes.”

“You don’t believe in birth control? Is that correct?”

“True.”

“You don’t agree with abortion?”

“True.”

“And you have left your room to come here and say you want to stay with me?”

“Yes.”

“But you tell me that as a grown woman with some resources and lots of intelligence, that I am not allowed?”

“A kid needs a father.”

He paused and looked at me, touching me, fingering the LL Bean pink long underwear shirt of his that I was wearing. He had already given me that much to take home.

“By travelling with you, I’ve opened the door,” he said. “I never expected to care for you this much. When I opened the door, I thought it would not make a difference. But it does. I feel very torn.“

I picked up my bear bell from the night table and gave it a shake. It tinkled, like a pint-sized church steeple, the kind whose peel marks time and announces weddings, marks deaths and some times even births.

“A small souvenir of Alaska,” I said, handing it over.

He didn’t blink.

“I ‘ll let you know if there will be any others,” I said.

“You will need this after I’m gone,” he said, shaking the bell.

“I have no intention of coming between a mama bear and a cub,” I said.

“The fact is,” said Steve, putting his arms around me, and pulling me towards him, “Neither do I.”

I could hear the birds begin the chorus at dawn. I put my pillow over my head on the floor.

“You conservative Christians sure sleep soundly,” I said.

“I know.”

He was looking down at me, looking into my eyes.

“What?”

“I know that I’d like to kiss you. Right now. Before breakfast, before you catch the ferry.”

He leaned over and kissed me.

“What’s this?” I said.

“I’ve decided to come with you,” he said, up on his elbow.

“What?”

“I can extend my trip.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Mother-in-law is visiting. My wife will be fine.

“I think you need to have a chat with God.”

“Perfect. Come with me to the Church in the Woods. I planned to visit it today anyway. There is time before you have to catch the ferry.”

The Church in the Woods is a wooden sanctuary with massive windows trained on the outdoors. No stained glass, just nature, lush green rainforest framed as the work of God. I left Steve alone inside, leaving him to commune while I explored the living world and the architecture. He needed to pray and time was running out.

Despite his prayers, he chose to take the ferry. He sat beside me all the way up the inland passage to Haines, past soaring cliffs with eagles nests and the occasional bald eagle, and schools of otter swimming on their back, grooming themselves and nursing their young. It seemed that without meaning to, we both had found something other than what we had planned on in Alaska.

“Tell me about your son,” I asked, watching the otters with their young on their stomachs. I wondered if maybe all the men in Alaska were fugitives from their new babies.

“It’s hard. He’s so young. I can’t wait for him to be a little older. When I can speak with him. Shape him.”

Steve kissed me full on the mouth.

“What if he grows up to be gay?” I asked.

“I’d disown him,” Steve said.

“Are you serious?“

“I am.”

“Do you really think homosexuality is a matter of choice?”

“I do.”

“You’re born to it.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“ How can you be so absolute? You’d turn your back on your own child?”

“Being a parent is the most important thing one can do in life. But if a son of mine was gay, I’d reject him.”

By the time we reached Haines, we had agreed on almost nothing. But all that stuck in my mind was Steve’s assertion that being a parent was the most important thing. It played in my mind as we poked around Haines, a one time nineteenth century Army base with stately white clapboard Victorian houses arranged around a central square. The hamlet was small, but situated near nesting bald eagles and nearby Native American long houses, sweat lodges and totem poles. We saw eagles through high powered binoculars, and spent our time walking, and climbing and clamoring over massive fallen logs on the way to lodges.

We took a trail up towards the top of a windy moutain, a thin sliver overgrown by a lush leafy forest of dense ferns and towering trees. I tied my bear bell onto my pack, but that was pointless. We both knew we had to spot any feeding bears in advance. The stream alongside was green and gushed water that swallowed all other sounds. Steve was relaxed, having already seen Grizzly. He admired the grandeur of the forest as I nervously looked for scat — bluish, purplish berried—in the hopes that if a bear left recent evidence of being there, I’d be forewarned. I sang out loud at the top of my voice, deep and off-key, but in this context it seemed a very poor substitute for the reassurance of Steve’s presence.

In the river, I saw salmon swimming relentlessly upstream to spawn. I saw them again and again, their striving silvery shimmering backs. Reproduction drove them forward at all costs. And I saw the carcasses of all the salmon that died in the attempt. They floated at the edge of the stream, upside down, pounded and torn by the rocks, ripped at by passing birds, their mouths open and their eyes milked over and glazed.

“Do you really believe having a child is the most important thing?” I asked. Even if he was a father in temporary exile, I figured he should know.

“Without question,” he said despite the contradictions. I, on the other hand, was blindly feeling my way along, trying to figure life out from scratch. Even motherhood.

Up against the raw reality of the bears and the spawning salmon, I was feeling oddly imbued by the natural imperative. I was starting to see reproductive messages everywhere. Only I was up in Alaska with a conservative Christian and a married man.

In some ways, he was made for the part. His New York accent reminded me of home. Seasoned by weeks in the wild, he was even more infused with the rawness of nature than me. He was smart and thoughtful, despite a point of view that was rock hard and absolute. And in the middle of a place where the natural imperative was highly condensed, there was also, of course, some obvious sexual tension.

“I’ve booked a sauna and hot tub,” Steve told me over the music.

“What?”

“A sauna and a hot tub. In half an hour. For us. It’s the tradition after a long kayak trip.”

I didn’t say no.

He led me along the floral covered carpet up to the second floor where we encountered a surprising number of half naked people walking through the halls in towels. They were travelling between the saunas and hot tubs and their hotel rooms as we entered a private room where the hot tub was bubbling.

“I’ve got something to tell you,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“I’ve had a mastectomy.”

“Really?”

“So I ’m going to slip in under all these bubbles first. Don’t turn around.”

His face betrayed nothing as he turned away.

Like a flora-dora girl, I sat there camouflaged in the bubbles, waiting as he turned back. He appeared unaffected, cool, poker faced. I felt reassured that this hot tub was, as it appeared, to be completely friendly and innocent. Still, I’d always heard that investment bankers were consumate negotiators accustomed to brokering deals.

“I’m married. And I have a young son,” he said, to reassure me.

He’s a conservative Christian, I thought to myself. Between my mastectomy and his marriage and mindset, this ought to be fine. The hot water felt fabulous, already making me ever so slightly relaxed and drowsy.

“You have no problem reconciling this hot tub with your religious beliefs?” I asked.

Without actually answering my question, Steve simply took off his towel. He slipped nakedly into the water opposite me. There was something about his unapologetic disrobing that made me wonder if he was at least considering boiling in hell.

“What do you think of Alaska so far?” he asked.

“I feel like I’ve landed in the world primeval. Or at least the new world, circa 1600. It’s profound. The order of things is so unmistakable here.”

“What is this? A spiritual awakening?” he teased.

“I see it more as waking up to life as it is – life as necessities, like survival and reproduction. I keep thinking nature is trying to tell me something.” I put my head back and closed my eyes.

“Let’s have dinner,” Steve said.

“My hostel closes soon. I’ll be locked out,” I answered.

“Have dinner. You can stay with me.”

“In your hotel room?” I asked, opening my eyes to look at him.

“There’s space. You’ll be safe.”

I closed my eyes again. Now what? The hot water felt so good. I knew that by the time I reopened my eyes and actually stirred, that the hostel would be closed. I relaxed and relaxed until I had relaxed myself into a corner in the round tub. I soaked my chill and tired bones until it was too late to run up the hill in my steel-toed hiking boots to claim my place.

“My god.” I was trembling.

“Unbelievable,” said Steve.

It was precisely what we were here for. I had seen whale before, from whale watching boats in the seas off San Francisco – shiny black fins and plumes of spray admired in between bouts of throwing up. But this was different. It happened so unexpectedly and so up close. It is one thing to be a passenger on a diesel guzzling party boat, miles from the surface of the water. But Steve and I were essentially floating on a log. From that vantage point a whale the size of a tractor trailer was a stunning shock. We saw the barnacles on his back as he rose and sank down, obliterating the mountains and sky.

“Can you believe it?”

“Will he turn us over? “

Steve laughed, reassuring me by touching my shoulder.

We continued to paddle through the salty grey wet for hours, moving one behind the other with our positions locked. All the while, we talked without eye contact, studying the surface of the sea and how the paddles entered the water or watching the brown pelicans, seagulls and the light and dark battleship sized clouds that moved swiftly through the sky. We discussed, even argued from my position to his position and back again.

“Paddle left a bit here,” he said.

“You honestly think it’s better to bring an unwanted child into this world?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Ah, look. Are those geese, that formation there?”

“Could be.”

“ But I’m sure you wouldn’t want government to support it?”

“Life begins at conception,” he said.

We paddled our way through every possible source of conflict, from abortion to homosexuality to welfare reform. I still hadn’t noticed that the waves had found their way up to my sleeves and into my parka, until one wind whipped wave hit me square in the face. I was soaked and shivering.

“I’m all wet,” I shrieked.

“I agree with that,”Steve said.

We headed to land, to dry off and eat. I stripped my wet parka, my jacket and my rubber overalls away, down to my t-shirt and jeans. I walked a short distance and lowered my pants to pee. I was out in the open, inside the tide line, so that my scent would be washed away and not attract bear. There was no possibility of demure crouching behind a fern in the woods out here. It was open and sandy, sand fleas jumping as I crouched, big fat horseflies circling and buzzing, and giant red ants carrying pieces of a dead insect in elaborate detours around the tip of my boot. I couldn’t help but notice that even at six inches off the ground, this barren stretch of beach was teeming with life.

By the time I walked back, the other boat had pulled in, the nervous guy carefully propping up his camera on a log. Steve was chatting with the guide.

“That’s right. It’s a tradition,” I heard the guide say. “After a long kayak trip, you have to finish it off with a drink at the bar, a hot tub and a sauna, all at the Alaska Hotel. Believe me, you’ll need it.”

“You must be Linda,” the short stocky man with shoulders as wide as a double door refrigerator said.

“You must be our guide,” I said.

My fellow kayakers and I headed out. We drove down a long muddy road through the woods and made our way between fallen logs to the edge of the bay for a safety lesson — how to roll the boat if we turned upside down, how to retrieve it if we fell out. I prayed for the sun as it ducked in and out between the trees, watching the lapping grey water that felt cold by sight, never mind rolling head first into it. The water seemed to extend forever, at least as far as the looming mountains edged in snow in the distance. There were plenty of waves. We put on our booted rubber overalls that came mid-chest and rubber skirts that fit over the two open mouths of each kayak. Then, in the face of what looked like all these obstacles, we got ready to put in south of Juneau in pairs.

“You paddle with me,” the guide said to me. I was scarred, but now I was disappointed. “Don’t do all the work for me,” I protested.

As soon as we entered the boats, the tall, lanky guy, tan and blonde, kind of aloof and definitely attractive, discovered that one of his foot pedals was jammed. Without enough room for his legs, he and the short stocky guide were forced to change places. Now I was sharing a boat with him. His name, he told me, was Steve.

What I took for a Swede or a Minnesotan based on looks had a distinctly New York nasality in his voice. And a New York attitude. At first he ignored everyone but the guide, as though annoyed that he was with such lame people. I agreed with him that the nervous guy with the camera was odd. But I wanted him to know that I wasn’t. To my surprise he smiled at me. “We’ll do fine together,” he said.

Steve held the boat and I got in. Then I worked to keep it perpendicular to the waves, while he climbed in behind me. As a paddling team we were immediately in sync and took off into the sea. The tiny boat dipped right as we leaned right. It was like dancing, particularly when kayaking as two. Wrapped in the pelvis of the boat, Steve and I turned together here, dipped there, doing a pretty good maritime fox trot. As partners, we were a natural.

The sky was uncertain, drizzling, with patches of blue behind massive dark clouds now sitting on those snow covered mountains. The guide called to us to stay close. We ignored him. The waves were low and regular and we paddled through them in unison, making good time.

“I’m just back from canoeing on the Brooks Range,” Steve said from behind. “Two weeks with four guys and grizzly in the Arctic Circle. All our gear was flown in. I planned and arranged the trip myself. But I’ve never actually kayaked. I want to get a sense of it before I left Alaska.”

“What do you do?” I asked over my shoulder.

“I’m an investment banker.”

“Really?”

Remember when everyone was an investment banker?

“Doesn’t anyone do regular banking anymore?” I asked. “Where do you live?”

“Brooklyn Heights.”

I knew that high-end enclave, just over the bridge from Manhattan.

“It so happens I grew up in Brooklyn, in Bensonhurst,” I said.

“Saturday Night Fever-land?”

“More or less, but I live in San Francisco.”

“Oh?”

“So did you study business?”

“No. I studied philosophy. And religion. And then I got my MBA.”

“Religion?”

“I’m a spiritual person. And I might as well tell you now that I am a conservative Christian.

“And a Republican?”

“Absolutely.”

“Oh well. Nobody’s perfect,” I said.

Like that woman in her 70’s. She knew which way to face. She knew which chair to take. I realized she too was traveling alone. She had ridden deck chairs before. This time she was headed to Skagway, Yukon Territory, and back, setting out on her economy journey with curlers in her hair. I watched as in the morning, she carried an electric teapot into the bathroom to fill up and plug it in to boil water while most folks were plugging in their hairdryers and electric shavers. She couldn’t be bothered with the on-board cafeteria or the linen table cloths in the dining room. She drank her hot drinks and hot cereals on her deck chair. The hardest part of the journey for her was getting from the Greyhound to the ferry dock. She took a city bus. She might have taken a cab, I thought. Then I wondered, by the time I was 70, would I?

“I tried to pick the best looking nightshirt I could find,” I apologized. “These old turquoise sweats don’t help, do they?”

Tom continued staring.

“I wasn’t sure how to dress for the occasion. I doubt if this puts you in the mood.”

“Well, it does lack something,” he said. Then he paused.

“Hello, Linda,” he said gravely, while giving me a slow hug.

“Hi.”

I understood Tom�s demeanor. “Is this the mother of my child?” he probably wondered. Is this the father of my child? I asked myself.

“OK are you ready?” I pushed again, leery of too many such pauses.

“Let’s sit down and talk. I need to unwind.”

“Want some tea?” I finally asked, ever the lousy host.

He sat down at the marble café table in my white kitchen, the overhead light barely doing its job. Ironic. Here I was calling on Tom to help me navigate a bumpy, messy and admittedly ill-conceived life transition. It was only now, when he asked for tea, that I realized that whatever Tom�s rhythm was, it would have to be mine. I was way ahead of him. I had to remind myself that he had simply jumped onto my bandwagon the day before. He hadn�t just seen the salmon swimming upstream in Alaska, my shorthand metaphor for all that brought me to this juncture. For him, this wasn�t yet much more than a momentary hiatus from work on his PhD, his professional preoccupation with the trails over the Sierras.

“You’ve really thought about this?” Tom asked.

“Yes, as much as you can think. Ultimately it’s taking a leap and not thinking, isn’t it?”

“I haven’t told Barbara.”

“No?”

“I feel like I have her blanket permission. I don’t want to upset her with the details.”

“You know this could complicate things in ways none of us can imagine,” I said. “We don’t ever know what’s going to happen,” Tom said. “But you need to understand that my first commitment is to my work and then to Barbara. It’s all up in the air right now and I can’t stop to think about any of it. And I’m applying to jobs out of state. How did I get mixed up in all this? Why don�t I just wait till I’m a professor and find a nubile 25 year old?”

“Because you’ve been postponing all your life.”

Like I was one to talk.

“I do want to be involved.”

“How?”

“I can’t promise you support right now. But, well, I�d like to help pay for college.”

“College? Are you kidding? That’s twenty years from now.”

“I have to get my life together. Start earning a real salary. Everything else will have to follow.”

“Well, how about Lamaze classes and baby sitting for starters?”

“I’d like to.”

“Are you sure you are ready to do this?” I asked.

“It’s a big step.”

“Look, it probably won’t work. It takes months and at my age, longer. And anyway, you know what?”

“What?”

“We’re just going to die.”