Page 37 of Gifted & Talented
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A few months ago, public opinion polls showed Arthur struggling for the first time against his right-wing opponent. A couple of months later, it became steadily clearer that Arthur’s momentum was slowing down, that he was starting to—might very likely—lose. After his campaign team broke down the poll results from August, Gillian had set a cool hand on his arm, wordless (disappointment? pity? regret?), and out of a sudden desperation for escape, Arthur had called Philippa and Yves and asked them to meet him in the Hamptons. Arthur had conveniently been invited to a fundraising gala thrown by the one percent, which was part of the problem. If he didn’t go, he snubbed his donors. If he went, he snubbed his base. Election costs were climbing, spiking, his septuagenarian opponent driving PAC contributions left and right, solidifying Arthur’s many, many enemies. He wanted to cry on someone’s shoulder. He wanted someone to draw him a long bath and lie in it with him. To sink into the depths of his misery beside him, hip to hip.
Yves had been sympathetic, soft with him. Yves stroked Arthur’s cheek, kissed the edge of his jaw, spoke sweetly to him. Philippa, meanwhile, seemed agitated, fidgety, irritated with him, with both of them. She sat them down when Arthur was halfway through a bottle of champagne, his cheek slicked to the bare skin of Yves’s waist, his lips traveling aimlessly, gratefully. He felt drowsy with relief, with the impending catharsis of quitting, giving up; capitulation like a distant orgasm that might finally revive him, bring him back to life. He could be done with it. He could run away with his lovers, disappear into this bed.
“I’m pregnant,” Philippa announced, jarring Arthur from his syrupy contentment, his postcoital haze. She wore the sheets around her body, her hair floating around her shoulders. She looked like Aphrodite rising from the foam, and Arthur loved her. When she said it, bracing herself for something, Arthur didn’t feel fear. He seized her face in his hands and kissed her, and reached out one hand for Yves and kissed him, and felt a moment of blissful certainty, of having found his family, of holding his whole world in the crooks of his arms.
“Yes,” said Arthur dizzily, overjoyed, suffering the kind of happiness that felt unearned and undeserved, like maybe in another life he’d had to fight for this; like maybe it had taken countless tries to get it right. Like this was always the answer he’d been waiting for, the words he’d been wanting for so long to hear, as if they could mean Welcome home and At last, I found you and I’m finally done searching, it’s here, it’s always been here . He remembered the feeling, as if from a dream, of “Yes, yes, yes—”
“Oh Arthur, don’t be ridiculous,” snapped Philippa now, from the shadowed cavern of his adolescent bedroom. Moments before, over Gillian’s finely crafted cheeseboard, Arthur and Philippa had exchanged glances in wordless, telegraphed argument until Arthur had finally led her up the stairs to calmly chat.
Philippa sighed at him with impatience as if he were some little frivolity—a shoe that didn’t match, a fraying cuff. “Is there something so terrible about accepting a glass of wine when it is offered? We don’t have this silly fixation with alcohol like the rest of you American puritans. One glass is harmless. I barely had a sip!”
Later, when Arthur asked me for my seasoned postpartum opinion, I confirmed that this was, by technical constraints, true. Obstetricians, especially if they are old-school, are generally less strict about wine than they are about caffeine, although I was allowed one precious cup of coffee a day to contend with the lifelong wrestle of my own brain trying to kill me (migraines).
Of course, just because something is true doesn’t mean it answers every question. The problem was that after Gillian had been so certain—and Gillian was never wrong—that Philippa couldn’t be pregnant, objective perinatal clarification wasn’t what Arthur was hoping to hear.
Which was, admittedly, an Arthur problem.