Visiting Sam
Sam had always been vain about keeping fit -- "in fighting trim," he called it -- but as he walks toward Louise across the vast lobby of the train station he looks so thin it makes tears start in her eyes. That happens so easily now. She blinks them away and reaches out to hug him.
"Louise! You made it!" His voice is the same as always. He wraps his skinny arms around her and holds her, tighter than she expected. She can feel her swollen belly pressed between them. Lately she's been proud about starting to show but for a moment now she feels embarrassed, unsure what to say or where to put her hands.
Sam stands back from her, looking her over.
"The old first fruits are definitely taking shape," he says. "Pardon the expression." He grins at her in his old way as she blushes. "You look great, Louise -- expectation becomes you."
"Thanks." She wants to tell him that he looks good also but it feels too false; they both know he doesn't. Helplessly, she feels her eyes filling again.
"How's Michael?" Sam asks.
"He's fine," she says, distracted. "Listen, I have to go to the Ladies."
She leaves him standing there with her suitcase. This is more natural for them than the awkward greeting, this old familiar taking for granted. Back when they were roommates their friends used to say they might as well be married; it was something about their ease together, the lack of need for explanations or permission. They kept a refrigerator full of food and didn't worry about who bought what; there was none of the tedious record-keeping that went on in most other apartment-sharing arrangements Louise knew of. They ate each other's leftovers and crashed each other's dinner parties, used the same shampoo and shaving cream. She used to lather up her legs so they smelled like his face and sit on the edge of the tub in her underwear, shaving with the door open, while Sam waltzed in and out getting ready for work. He'd worked as a waiter then, in a pretentious bistro where the customers were sometimes celebrities and the tips were usually great. A night of work sounded like a party, the way Sam described it, with the wait staff getting high in the kitchen and flirting with each other, blasting the music after closing as they set up for the next day, often heading out after midnight to go dancing until morning.
How lucky we were, she thinks now, we had the world by the tail.
It's a relief to get into the restroom. She's never been able to hold it long; one of the things she always loved about Sam was that he didn't give her a hard time about it. He knew where all the hidden restrooms in the city were and he was quite happy to lead her there and then wait outside, watching the world go by.
It's hard to believe she's going to get even worse. She recently examined a book about pregnancy, with illustrations of the changes undergone by the woman's body; what had struck her most was how compressed the bladder and the intestines become.
"I'll be afraid to leave the house at all," she'd said to Michael. "I'll just be living in the bathroom."
He had smiled sweetly at her. Michael is enchanted by the whole idea of pregnancy -- every detail of it seems to delight him. He gets to experience it from a safe distance, she likes to remind him, but she is grateful for his wholeheartedness. It offsets her own more complicated feelings, made still more baffling by the rush of hormones overtaking her.
In the waiting room, Sam is sitting down on the edge of her suitcase. He looks tired -- and old, Louise can't help thinking -- as she hurries back to him. Would he look old anyway? she wonders. Is it just the age they've reached, and not having seen each other for three years?
"You're going to love my apartment," he declares, carrying her suitcase outside to the curb. He puts it down and hails a taxi. "It'll make you want to come back to the city."
She can't imagine wanting to come back. Her life in the city is over -- those crazy carefree single years. When she thinks back on them, it's as if she were remembering a different person's life, not her own.
His apartment is gorgeous, though: high ceilings, big windows, flooded with sunlight. Sam has nice furniture too, not like the second-hand stuff they bought together.
"I knew you'd love it," he says, triumphantly. "It's one of the few good things that came of living with Peter; he left me behind in this place."
She makes a face at the mention of Peter, one villain everyone can agree on. As soon as he heard Sam was sick, he took off and hasn't been heard from since. Sometimes she feels guilty about her own departure, a vague uneasy feeling that she, too, abandoned Sam, but at least he was still healthy then.
"Take off your coat and stay awhile," Sam says. "I'd offer you a glass of wine but I've stopped drinking so I don't have any."
"That's O.K., so have I," she says.
"Oh yes, of course." He laughs. "Well, aren't we the old fuddy-duddies? Who'd have guessed we'd come to this?"
"I'll have a glass of water, actually," Louise says. Her mouth is dry. She goes to the kitchen and opens a cupboard. Inside, on the edge of a shelf, is an incredible array of pill bottles.
"Oh my God," she says, involuntarily, and closes the cupboard.
"Yes, my little stash," Sam says behind her. "Pretty impressive, isn't it? You never thought of me as such a drughead, did you?"
She turns around and looks at him, her eyes filling again.
"You weren't, Sam," she whispers. "Not any worse than the rest of us."
The tears begin to fall down her face this time and he pulls her close and holds onto her gently, as she cries against his shirt. Standing there, she feels the baby move, as if he knew something were wrong.
It was the night the baby first started moving that Sam called. They had stayed in touch by telephone ever since Louise and Michael moved "to the country," as she liked to say, though in fact it was a small town a few hours away. Somehow she'd never made the trip back to visit and Sam was busy with his life and Peter and all. The last time they had talked was when she called to tell him she was finally pregnant.
But this time he sounded different. She and Michael had been sitting together on the couch, while she tried to describe how the movement inside her felt and he pressed his hands against her belly eagerly, hoping to feel it, too. When the phone rang, they almost didn't answer it. Louise couldn't stand to just let it ring, though, so she finally picked it up.
"Louise, it's Sam." That was ominous; he never had to identify himself. She knew his voice, even dead serious as it was now.
"I have some bad news, Louise. I've got it."
She knew immediately what he meant. A dull, pushed-away fear came bursting forward from the back of her mind.
"Oh, Sam." The baby, kicking, felt very far away.
"And Peter's gone. He moved out while I was in the hospital."
"The hospital?" This couldn't be happening.
"Yeah. I was in for three weeks with Pneumocystis."
Not already. Not so fast.
"Are you O.K.? Can I come and see you?" she asked. They hadn't seen each other since a few months after her wedding, when Sam threw a goodbye party for her and Michael before they moved away.
"I'd like that," he said. She'd never heard him sound so serious and humble.
She covered the mouthpiece and spoke with Michael for a moment, then said to Sam, "I'll be up on the train next weekend."
"I should call Michael," she says, finally, pulling away. "Just to tell him that I got here O.K."
She wipes her eyes with the backs of her hands and Sam gives her a tissue. He seems almost unmoved, solicitous of her but not showing any emotion of his own. He lives with this all the time, she thinks. It's unimaginable, like being an old person, watching your friends die, knowing you haven't much longer.
She puts her hands over her belly. She used to think that was an odd habit of pregnant women but it is comforting to know there is a life in there, a constant companion.
"Phone's in the bedroom," Sam says. "Light switch outside the door."
He sits in the living room while she goes into the bedroom. The blinds are down over the windows but she turns them to let in the last sunlight of the day. Through the slits she can see the fire escape outside Sam's window and the brick wall of the next building, a few feet away. Even the nice city apartments, like this one, only have views from the front rooms; the back rooms are dark and tiny. The place she and Sam lived in together was like that. When she first moved in, she was so excited about being in the city she didn't care, but she has come to crave more light and the sight of sky outside the window.
She is picturing the bedroom in the house where she and Michael live now, as she dials the phone. If she leaves the curtains open -- something she'd never do in the city -- she can lie in bed and watch birds fly in and out of the maple tree in the yard.
Michael sounds out of breath when he picks up the phone.
"I just got in from work this minute," he says. "I was hoping it would be you."
Louise is flooded with warmth and relief at the sound of his voice. He is her real life now; the city seems foreign to her.
"How was the trip?" Michael asks. "How is Sam?"
"He's so skinny, Michael. So thin and pale."
"Well, I suppose you have to expect that. I guess he's pretty sick."
"Yes," she whispers, beginning to cry again.
"Are you O.K., honey?" Michael asks.
"I'm O.K., just sad."
"I love you," he says and she says it too and promises to call again.
She sits alone on the bed after hanging up. How lucky she was to find Michael, and how close she came to missing him. If Sam hadn't met Peter and become so involved, she probably wouldn't have bothered looking -- she had felt as if she could stay with Sam forever. She assumed at first that Peter would be just another fling but then Sam started talking about moving in with him, talk Louise had never heard before, and it made her realize, for the first time, that maybe things wouldn't go on as they were indefinitely.
By some lucky accident, it was at this time that Michael first came into the gallery where she was working. He stopped to speak to her and they got into a long, passionate discussion about art and then he asked her to dinner. She said yes at first because she was lonely but as she began to see more and more of him, it gradually dawned on her that he was the kindest man she'd ever known. Sam was funnier but Michael was sweet; it seemed to her a measure of his generosity that he never asked her to say she loved him best.
She goes back into the living room and Sam is sitting on the couch with his head back, his eyes closed. His beautiful long lashes, which she has always envied and admired, look very dark against his pale cheeks.
She tiptoes over, feeling heavy and unstable. Her shape is changing so fast she never quite feels used to her own body anymore.
"Are you asleep?" she whispers.
Sam's lashes open. "No, just resting. Listen, you want to go out for dinner somewhere? All I have around here is raw vegetables and stuff. I eat so healthy it's disgusting."
"I don't mind healthy," Louise says.
"No, I suppose you're doing it too, aren't you? Remember how my mother used to bug us to eat better?"
It was Sam his mother worried about, thought Louise, not us, exactly. But she doesn't say it aloud.
"Let's go get some good greasy Chinese food and really enjoy ourselves," Sam says. There's a new place near here I've been dying to try." He is wide awake now, full of the old enthusiasm she could never resist. He could talk her into anything with that exuberance.
The place is noisy and too brightly lit, but the food is excellent. They eat spare ribs and fried rice and a huge platter of soft shell crabs.
"This feels deliciously decadent, even without a beer," Sam says, licking the grease off his fingers.
Louise nods. It seems like old times between them: Sam showing her something that delights them both. He's always been generous with her -- he even used to pass along the cute guys who weren't interested in him. It was almost a game of theirs, keeping score of who got whom, a lot of laughs as long as neither of them fell in love.
One night she landed the best-looking man at a party and brought him home to the apartment where they did it for hours, then fell asleep, sweaty and exhausted. Early in the morning, Sam came in and woke her, rummaging around on her dresser.
"What are you doing?" she asked, as the guy beside her scrambled to pull the sheet up over their bodies.
"I'm sorry," Sam said. "I was just looking for that nice massage oil of yours. I've got this poor, muscle-bound hunk in my room who needs a rubdown so bad."
He peered over at the bed. "Hmm, want to trade?"
"Get out of here," Louise said, but she was laughing.
They both thought it was hilarious at the time. After an awkward four-way breakfast, the two visitors left and she and Sam kept laughing, off and on, for the rest of the day. She can't for the life of her remember either of their names.
Sam is pushing spare rib bones around on his plate with the end of a chopstick.
"Have you thought about what to do with your body after you die?" he asks suddenly.
Her stomach jumps as she is propelled abruptly into the present, where everything is not a joke.
"I've been thinking about cremation," he says. "It seems like that's the thing to do these days."
"Sam..."
"But I can't figure out what to have done with the ashes. Some people have them scattered but it's not really legal and I don't have a special place anyway. I heard a story about one couple -- they were like us, Louise, except they were still roommates when he died -- she's got his ashes in a little jar on the bookshelf now. Some of their friends say she's finally got him where she wanted him, staying home with her." He tries to laugh.
Louise feels a rush of selfish gratitude. She is not like that woman. No doubt she was in love with Sam but she prided herself, always, on being realistic. And now she has Michael, a happy marriage, and the baby coming -- it's a whole new chapter in her life.
"I think it's a bit grotesque myself," Sam says.
"Oh, me too. Gosh, where would she ever find a matching bookend?" she adds, hoping to make him smile. He does, if a little tightly.
They walk slowly back to his apartment. As they cross the street Sam takes her arm -- to guide her or to steady himself, she's not sure which -- and they walk the rest of the way like that.
Sam makes a pot of herbal tea and they sit beside each other on the couch, sipping and looking at the lights of the city outside the window.
"What are you hoping for, a girl or a boy?" Sam asks.
"Oh, we already know it's a boy. We did amnio, had everything checked out. They can find out everything these days."
Sam looks at her solemnly. "You can't know everything," he says.
They are silent for a moment, looking at each other. Then Sam opens his mouth to say something but stops himself and Louise prompts him: "What?"
"Oh, nothing. It's just...you know, I always wanted a child."
This is not a surprise to her, though he has never expressed it so directly. They used to talk -- joke around, really -- about having a baby together.
"You're the only man I can stand to be around," she'd tell him, after some romantic fiasco.
"And you're the only dame who can interest me," he'd say back, laughing. "Maybe we ought to get married and have babies -- what do you say?"
It was all just talk, of course.
In the five years they'd lived together, they had only tried to make love once. It was a New Year's Eve; they'd gone to the same party and drunk themselves silly on margaritas. As usual, they'd danced with each other more than with anyone else, as disco music pounded through the loft, shaking the floor.
Sometime early in the morning they caught a cab home. Leaning drunkenly against her in the back seat, Sam complained about what a tease the host had been. Louise dimly remembered the guy stirring Sam's margarita with his finger and then putting that finger into his mouth and sucking it. She'd always thought he was kind of a jerk but apparently he'd gotten to Sam. She was feeling generally disgusted with men at the moment anyway; her most recent boyfriend had just left her to get engaged to his former girlfriend, whom he'd described emphatically to Louise as "the worst lay he'd ever had."
Men were beyond comprehension, Louise thought dizzily as they paid the cab driver and lurched into their building. Inside the apartment, she walked through the dark toward the kitchen.
"Want some toast?" she called to Sam.
"No," he said, softly. He was right behind her. She turned and they stared at each other for a long silent moment, their faces close, both a little out of breath from climbing the stairs.
"What about you and me, Louise?" Sam said, and then he kissed her -- not one of the quick chaste kisses they always said hello and goodbye with but a lover's kind of kiss, wet, full of lips and tongue. She could smell the tequila in his mouth.
It was so startling and strange it made her feel disoriented, as if she must be somewhere else. The haze of alcohol surrounded them. She closed her eyes and felt the room spin and then felt Sam's arms around her, holding her up.
They kissed for a long time like that, standing in the kitchen in the dark. But then they broke apart and as he led her into the living room the mood changed somehow. As much as she cared for Sam, as much as, in some ways, she had dreamt of such a moment between them, now that it was happening she felt a little foolish. It seemed artificial, not really like them at all.
The momentum of confused passion carried them for a while. They managed to shed their clothes, not looking at each other, and sank down on the couch, kissing again. But then everything came to a halt. Sam wasn't getting it up.
"Oh shit, Louise," he mumbled. "I guess this isn't going to work."
She felt simultaneously disappointed and relieved. "It's O.K.," she said. "Really." She was suddenly so tired she could hardly move.
"Come on, come to bed," she said, tugging his arm. She walked him to his room where he collapsed heavily onto the bed.
"I'm sorry," he said into the pillow before passing out. Louise smiled ruefully at his small pale behind in the middle of the bed and then hurried to the bathroom to throw up.
She was never sure whether it was the alcohol or her femaleness that had stopped him. In any case, they'd never talked about it or tried it again. The next day, at an open house that Louise did not attend, Sam met Peter and all of that began.
"I hope you'll keep in mind that Sam is a pretty good name," he says. "Since it's a boy. Of course, if it was a girl, I'd probably suggest Samantha."
Louise has already thought of both. She tries to give him a mysterious smile but the sudden awful thought that he might not ever meet his namesake seizes her and the smile fades.
He doesn't notice because at that moment the telephone rings.
"That'll be my mom," he says. "She calls me every night right about now."
He goes to the bedroom, leaving her alone. She'd never felt at ease with Sam's mother -- in fact, she'd never really liked her much. When she came to the apartment, Louise always felt as if they were in competition somehow, and that Sam's mother disapproved of her as well as the rest of Sam's friends.
The first time she visited they had invited her for brunch and she sailed in late, loaded down with plastic containers full of food. She opened the refrigerator and started putting them away, while Sam introduced her.
"My mother, Eleanor, the big provider," he said.
His mother said, over her shoulder to Louise, "Everyone calls me Ellie, or just El."
The image came to Louise of an elevated train, huge and fast and noisy, bursting into the room and drowning out conversation.
Eleanor closed the refrigerator and stood up, facing Louise for the first time, sizing her up.
"I'd thought maybe you were going to straighten my son out," she said and turned her lips up in an odd smile that Louise couldn't read.
"Oh, right, Ma," Sam said, draping his arm across his mother's shoulders, "better give that up." He grinned at Louise. "Mom would like us to believe she'd rather we were living in sin." He kissed his mother loudly on the cheek. "Sorry to disappoint you."
"I just wish you'd settle down with someone nice who would take care of you," his mother said.
Louise found this doubtful, as she watched Sam's mother hover and fuss over him. She was like a parody of a doting mom.
"Do you always use so much cream, dear? And all that butter...look, it's dripping off your muffin; that stuff is so bad for you, honey. I brought you some healthy food -- you be sure and eat it after I'm gone."
Thank goodness I'm not involved with Sam, Louise thought. No daughter-in-law would stand a chance.
Sam comes back after a few minutes.
"I told her you were visiting and I couldn't talk now," he says. "She said to say hi."
"How is she?" Louise asks.
"Not too great, actually. She's having a lot of trouble with all this." He pauses. Louise reaches for his hand.
"Maybe I ought to give her the ashes," he says. "She's always kind of wanted to keep me in a box."
Louise tries to think of a clever reply but to her surprise she is suddenly overcome, washed with a great wave of grief and sympathy for Eleanor. To be facing the death of a child: what could be more terrible? Her new mother's heart is breaking for mothers like Eleanor who are losing their children. She closes her eyes, feeling all that pain.
"It's time to go to bed, isn't it?" Sam says. Together, they pull out the sofa and put sheets on the mattress.
"This is a really comfortable bed," he says. "I should know, I slept here whenever Peter and I had a fight."
Louise can't imagine fighting so hard with Michael that she wouldn't want to sleep with him; he is such a comfort to her. She wonders for the millionth time how she got so lucky. How is it that her life turned the corner into a man like Michael and a whole new kind of joy, while Sam's life is turning out like this? And Eleanor -- how could she have known what sorrow lay ahead?
She can't seem to get Eleanor out of her mind. Before she goes home, she must be sure to ask Sam for her address. She doesn't know yet when or what she will write to her, but someday she will write.
"Well, goodnight," Sam says, and they hug for a long time.
After he has gone into the bedroom, she lies awake, listening to the sirens far down on the street. That's a city sound she could once tune out but after living in a small town for a while she isn't used to it.
The baby stirs inside. He likes to move around just as she's settling down to sleep. She puts her hands on her belly and thinks again of Sam's mother, who must have done just the same thing over thirty years ago.
Louise gets up and goes into the bedroom. In the dim light, she can see the lumpy shape of Sam lying under the covers. She lifts the edge of the blankets and climbs in beside him. He reaches for her sleepily. She takes his hands and presses them hard against her stomach as the baby inside -- little Sam -- kicks and flails in his dark little world.
(first published in The Larcom Review, Vol. 3, Spring/Summer 2001)
"Louise! You made it!" His voice is the same as always. He wraps his skinny arms around her and holds her, tighter than she expected. She can feel her swollen belly pressed between them. Lately she's been proud about starting to show but for a moment now she feels embarrassed, unsure what to say or where to put her hands.
Sam stands back from her, looking her over.
"The old first fruits are definitely taking shape," he says. "Pardon the expression." He grins at her in his old way as she blushes. "You look great, Louise -- expectation becomes you."
"Thanks." She wants to tell him that he looks good also but it feels too false; they both know he doesn't. Helplessly, she feels her eyes filling again.
"How's Michael?" Sam asks.
"He's fine," she says, distracted. "Listen, I have to go to the Ladies."
She leaves him standing there with her suitcase. This is more natural for them than the awkward greeting, this old familiar taking for granted. Back when they were roommates their friends used to say they might as well be married; it was something about their ease together, the lack of need for explanations or permission. They kept a refrigerator full of food and didn't worry about who bought what; there was none of the tedious record-keeping that went on in most other apartment-sharing arrangements Louise knew of. They ate each other's leftovers and crashed each other's dinner parties, used the same shampoo and shaving cream. She used to lather up her legs so they smelled like his face and sit on the edge of the tub in her underwear, shaving with the door open, while Sam waltzed in and out getting ready for work. He'd worked as a waiter then, in a pretentious bistro where the customers were sometimes celebrities and the tips were usually great. A night of work sounded like a party, the way Sam described it, with the wait staff getting high in the kitchen and flirting with each other, blasting the music after closing as they set up for the next day, often heading out after midnight to go dancing until morning.
How lucky we were, she thinks now, we had the world by the tail.
It's a relief to get into the restroom. She's never been able to hold it long; one of the things she always loved about Sam was that he didn't give her a hard time about it. He knew where all the hidden restrooms in the city were and he was quite happy to lead her there and then wait outside, watching the world go by.
It's hard to believe she's going to get even worse. She recently examined a book about pregnancy, with illustrations of the changes undergone by the woman's body; what had struck her most was how compressed the bladder and the intestines become.
"I'll be afraid to leave the house at all," she'd said to Michael. "I'll just be living in the bathroom."
He had smiled sweetly at her. Michael is enchanted by the whole idea of pregnancy -- every detail of it seems to delight him. He gets to experience it from a safe distance, she likes to remind him, but she is grateful for his wholeheartedness. It offsets her own more complicated feelings, made still more baffling by the rush of hormones overtaking her.
In the waiting room, Sam is sitting down on the edge of her suitcase. He looks tired -- and old, Louise can't help thinking -- as she hurries back to him. Would he look old anyway? she wonders. Is it just the age they've reached, and not having seen each other for three years?
"You're going to love my apartment," he declares, carrying her suitcase outside to the curb. He puts it down and hails a taxi. "It'll make you want to come back to the city."
She can't imagine wanting to come back. Her life in the city is over -- those crazy carefree single years. When she thinks back on them, it's as if she were remembering a different person's life, not her own.
His apartment is gorgeous, though: high ceilings, big windows, flooded with sunlight. Sam has nice furniture too, not like the second-hand stuff they bought together.
"I knew you'd love it," he says, triumphantly. "It's one of the few good things that came of living with Peter; he left me behind in this place."
She makes a face at the mention of Peter, one villain everyone can agree on. As soon as he heard Sam was sick, he took off and hasn't been heard from since. Sometimes she feels guilty about her own departure, a vague uneasy feeling that she, too, abandoned Sam, but at least he was still healthy then.
"Take off your coat and stay awhile," Sam says. "I'd offer you a glass of wine but I've stopped drinking so I don't have any."
"That's O.K., so have I," she says.
"Oh yes, of course." He laughs. "Well, aren't we the old fuddy-duddies? Who'd have guessed we'd come to this?"
"I'll have a glass of water, actually," Louise says. Her mouth is dry. She goes to the kitchen and opens a cupboard. Inside, on the edge of a shelf, is an incredible array of pill bottles.
"Oh my God," she says, involuntarily, and closes the cupboard.
"Yes, my little stash," Sam says behind her. "Pretty impressive, isn't it? You never thought of me as such a drughead, did you?"
She turns around and looks at him, her eyes filling again.
"You weren't, Sam," she whispers. "Not any worse than the rest of us."
The tears begin to fall down her face this time and he pulls her close and holds onto her gently, as she cries against his shirt. Standing there, she feels the baby move, as if he knew something were wrong.
It was the night the baby first started moving that Sam called. They had stayed in touch by telephone ever since Louise and Michael moved "to the country," as she liked to say, though in fact it was a small town a few hours away. Somehow she'd never made the trip back to visit and Sam was busy with his life and Peter and all. The last time they had talked was when she called to tell him she was finally pregnant.
But this time he sounded different. She and Michael had been sitting together on the couch, while she tried to describe how the movement inside her felt and he pressed his hands against her belly eagerly, hoping to feel it, too. When the phone rang, they almost didn't answer it. Louise couldn't stand to just let it ring, though, so she finally picked it up.
"Louise, it's Sam." That was ominous; he never had to identify himself. She knew his voice, even dead serious as it was now.
"I have some bad news, Louise. I've got it."
She knew immediately what he meant. A dull, pushed-away fear came bursting forward from the back of her mind.
"Oh, Sam." The baby, kicking, felt very far away.
"And Peter's gone. He moved out while I was in the hospital."
"The hospital?" This couldn't be happening.
"Yeah. I was in for three weeks with Pneumocystis."
Not already. Not so fast.
"Are you O.K.? Can I come and see you?" she asked. They hadn't seen each other since a few months after her wedding, when Sam threw a goodbye party for her and Michael before they moved away.
"I'd like that," he said. She'd never heard him sound so serious and humble.
She covered the mouthpiece and spoke with Michael for a moment, then said to Sam, "I'll be up on the train next weekend."
"I should call Michael," she says, finally, pulling away. "Just to tell him that I got here O.K."
She wipes her eyes with the backs of her hands and Sam gives her a tissue. He seems almost unmoved, solicitous of her but not showing any emotion of his own. He lives with this all the time, she thinks. It's unimaginable, like being an old person, watching your friends die, knowing you haven't much longer.
She puts her hands over her belly. She used to think that was an odd habit of pregnant women but it is comforting to know there is a life in there, a constant companion.
"Phone's in the bedroom," Sam says. "Light switch outside the door."
He sits in the living room while she goes into the bedroom. The blinds are down over the windows but she turns them to let in the last sunlight of the day. Through the slits she can see the fire escape outside Sam's window and the brick wall of the next building, a few feet away. Even the nice city apartments, like this one, only have views from the front rooms; the back rooms are dark and tiny. The place she and Sam lived in together was like that. When she first moved in, she was so excited about being in the city she didn't care, but she has come to crave more light and the sight of sky outside the window.
She is picturing the bedroom in the house where she and Michael live now, as she dials the phone. If she leaves the curtains open -- something she'd never do in the city -- she can lie in bed and watch birds fly in and out of the maple tree in the yard.
Michael sounds out of breath when he picks up the phone.
"I just got in from work this minute," he says. "I was hoping it would be you."
Louise is flooded with warmth and relief at the sound of his voice. He is her real life now; the city seems foreign to her.
"How was the trip?" Michael asks. "How is Sam?"
"He's so skinny, Michael. So thin and pale."
"Well, I suppose you have to expect that. I guess he's pretty sick."
"Yes," she whispers, beginning to cry again.
"Are you O.K., honey?" Michael asks.
"I'm O.K., just sad."
"I love you," he says and she says it too and promises to call again.
She sits alone on the bed after hanging up. How lucky she was to find Michael, and how close she came to missing him. If Sam hadn't met Peter and become so involved, she probably wouldn't have bothered looking -- she had felt as if she could stay with Sam forever. She assumed at first that Peter would be just another fling but then Sam started talking about moving in with him, talk Louise had never heard before, and it made her realize, for the first time, that maybe things wouldn't go on as they were indefinitely.
By some lucky accident, it was at this time that Michael first came into the gallery where she was working. He stopped to speak to her and they got into a long, passionate discussion about art and then he asked her to dinner. She said yes at first because she was lonely but as she began to see more and more of him, it gradually dawned on her that he was the kindest man she'd ever known. Sam was funnier but Michael was sweet; it seemed to her a measure of his generosity that he never asked her to say she loved him best.
She goes back into the living room and Sam is sitting on the couch with his head back, his eyes closed. His beautiful long lashes, which she has always envied and admired, look very dark against his pale cheeks.
She tiptoes over, feeling heavy and unstable. Her shape is changing so fast she never quite feels used to her own body anymore.
"Are you asleep?" she whispers.
Sam's lashes open. "No, just resting. Listen, you want to go out for dinner somewhere? All I have around here is raw vegetables and stuff. I eat so healthy it's disgusting."
"I don't mind healthy," Louise says.
"No, I suppose you're doing it too, aren't you? Remember how my mother used to bug us to eat better?"
It was Sam his mother worried about, thought Louise, not us, exactly. But she doesn't say it aloud.
"Let's go get some good greasy Chinese food and really enjoy ourselves," Sam says. There's a new place near here I've been dying to try." He is wide awake now, full of the old enthusiasm she could never resist. He could talk her into anything with that exuberance.
The place is noisy and too brightly lit, but the food is excellent. They eat spare ribs and fried rice and a huge platter of soft shell crabs.
"This feels deliciously decadent, even without a beer," Sam says, licking the grease off his fingers.
Louise nods. It seems like old times between them: Sam showing her something that delights them both. He's always been generous with her -- he even used to pass along the cute guys who weren't interested in him. It was almost a game of theirs, keeping score of who got whom, a lot of laughs as long as neither of them fell in love.
One night she landed the best-looking man at a party and brought him home to the apartment where they did it for hours, then fell asleep, sweaty and exhausted. Early in the morning, Sam came in and woke her, rummaging around on her dresser.
"What are you doing?" she asked, as the guy beside her scrambled to pull the sheet up over their bodies.
"I'm sorry," Sam said. "I was just looking for that nice massage oil of yours. I've got this poor, muscle-bound hunk in my room who needs a rubdown so bad."
He peered over at the bed. "Hmm, want to trade?"
"Get out of here," Louise said, but she was laughing.
They both thought it was hilarious at the time. After an awkward four-way breakfast, the two visitors left and she and Sam kept laughing, off and on, for the rest of the day. She can't for the life of her remember either of their names.
Sam is pushing spare rib bones around on his plate with the end of a chopstick.
"Have you thought about what to do with your body after you die?" he asks suddenly.
Her stomach jumps as she is propelled abruptly into the present, where everything is not a joke.
"I've been thinking about cremation," he says. "It seems like that's the thing to do these days."
"Sam..."
"But I can't figure out what to have done with the ashes. Some people have them scattered but it's not really legal and I don't have a special place anyway. I heard a story about one couple -- they were like us, Louise, except they were still roommates when he died -- she's got his ashes in a little jar on the bookshelf now. Some of their friends say she's finally got him where she wanted him, staying home with her." He tries to laugh.
Louise feels a rush of selfish gratitude. She is not like that woman. No doubt she was in love with Sam but she prided herself, always, on being realistic. And now she has Michael, a happy marriage, and the baby coming -- it's a whole new chapter in her life.
"I think it's a bit grotesque myself," Sam says.
"Oh, me too. Gosh, where would she ever find a matching bookend?" she adds, hoping to make him smile. He does, if a little tightly.
They walk slowly back to his apartment. As they cross the street Sam takes her arm -- to guide her or to steady himself, she's not sure which -- and they walk the rest of the way like that.
Sam makes a pot of herbal tea and they sit beside each other on the couch, sipping and looking at the lights of the city outside the window.
"What are you hoping for, a girl or a boy?" Sam asks.
"Oh, we already know it's a boy. We did amnio, had everything checked out. They can find out everything these days."
Sam looks at her solemnly. "You can't know everything," he says.
They are silent for a moment, looking at each other. Then Sam opens his mouth to say something but stops himself and Louise prompts him: "What?"
"Oh, nothing. It's just...you know, I always wanted a child."
This is not a surprise to her, though he has never expressed it so directly. They used to talk -- joke around, really -- about having a baby together.
"You're the only man I can stand to be around," she'd tell him, after some romantic fiasco.
"And you're the only dame who can interest me," he'd say back, laughing. "Maybe we ought to get married and have babies -- what do you say?"
It was all just talk, of course.
In the five years they'd lived together, they had only tried to make love once. It was a New Year's Eve; they'd gone to the same party and drunk themselves silly on margaritas. As usual, they'd danced with each other more than with anyone else, as disco music pounded through the loft, shaking the floor.
Sometime early in the morning they caught a cab home. Leaning drunkenly against her in the back seat, Sam complained about what a tease the host had been. Louise dimly remembered the guy stirring Sam's margarita with his finger and then putting that finger into his mouth and sucking it. She'd always thought he was kind of a jerk but apparently he'd gotten to Sam. She was feeling generally disgusted with men at the moment anyway; her most recent boyfriend had just left her to get engaged to his former girlfriend, whom he'd described emphatically to Louise as "the worst lay he'd ever had."
Men were beyond comprehension, Louise thought dizzily as they paid the cab driver and lurched into their building. Inside the apartment, she walked through the dark toward the kitchen.
"Want some toast?" she called to Sam.
"No," he said, softly. He was right behind her. She turned and they stared at each other for a long silent moment, their faces close, both a little out of breath from climbing the stairs.
"What about you and me, Louise?" Sam said, and then he kissed her -- not one of the quick chaste kisses they always said hello and goodbye with but a lover's kind of kiss, wet, full of lips and tongue. She could smell the tequila in his mouth.
It was so startling and strange it made her feel disoriented, as if she must be somewhere else. The haze of alcohol surrounded them. She closed her eyes and felt the room spin and then felt Sam's arms around her, holding her up.
They kissed for a long time like that, standing in the kitchen in the dark. But then they broke apart and as he led her into the living room the mood changed somehow. As much as she cared for Sam, as much as, in some ways, she had dreamt of such a moment between them, now that it was happening she felt a little foolish. It seemed artificial, not really like them at all.
The momentum of confused passion carried them for a while. They managed to shed their clothes, not looking at each other, and sank down on the couch, kissing again. But then everything came to a halt. Sam wasn't getting it up.
"Oh shit, Louise," he mumbled. "I guess this isn't going to work."
She felt simultaneously disappointed and relieved. "It's O.K.," she said. "Really." She was suddenly so tired she could hardly move.
"Come on, come to bed," she said, tugging his arm. She walked him to his room where he collapsed heavily onto the bed.
"I'm sorry," he said into the pillow before passing out. Louise smiled ruefully at his small pale behind in the middle of the bed and then hurried to the bathroom to throw up.
She was never sure whether it was the alcohol or her femaleness that had stopped him. In any case, they'd never talked about it or tried it again. The next day, at an open house that Louise did not attend, Sam met Peter and all of that began.
"I hope you'll keep in mind that Sam is a pretty good name," he says. "Since it's a boy. Of course, if it was a girl, I'd probably suggest Samantha."
Louise has already thought of both. She tries to give him a mysterious smile but the sudden awful thought that he might not ever meet his namesake seizes her and the smile fades.
He doesn't notice because at that moment the telephone rings.
"That'll be my mom," he says. "She calls me every night right about now."
He goes to the bedroom, leaving her alone. She'd never felt at ease with Sam's mother -- in fact, she'd never really liked her much. When she came to the apartment, Louise always felt as if they were in competition somehow, and that Sam's mother disapproved of her as well as the rest of Sam's friends.
The first time she visited they had invited her for brunch and she sailed in late, loaded down with plastic containers full of food. She opened the refrigerator and started putting them away, while Sam introduced her.
"My mother, Eleanor, the big provider," he said.
His mother said, over her shoulder to Louise, "Everyone calls me Ellie, or just El."
The image came to Louise of an elevated train, huge and fast and noisy, bursting into the room and drowning out conversation.
Eleanor closed the refrigerator and stood up, facing Louise for the first time, sizing her up.
"I'd thought maybe you were going to straighten my son out," she said and turned her lips up in an odd smile that Louise couldn't read.
"Oh, right, Ma," Sam said, draping his arm across his mother's shoulders, "better give that up." He grinned at Louise. "Mom would like us to believe she'd rather we were living in sin." He kissed his mother loudly on the cheek. "Sorry to disappoint you."
"I just wish you'd settle down with someone nice who would take care of you," his mother said.
Louise found this doubtful, as she watched Sam's mother hover and fuss over him. She was like a parody of a doting mom.
"Do you always use so much cream, dear? And all that butter...look, it's dripping off your muffin; that stuff is so bad for you, honey. I brought you some healthy food -- you be sure and eat it after I'm gone."
Thank goodness I'm not involved with Sam, Louise thought. No daughter-in-law would stand a chance.
Sam comes back after a few minutes.
"I told her you were visiting and I couldn't talk now," he says. "She said to say hi."
"How is she?" Louise asks.
"Not too great, actually. She's having a lot of trouble with all this." He pauses. Louise reaches for his hand.
"Maybe I ought to give her the ashes," he says. "She's always kind of wanted to keep me in a box."
Louise tries to think of a clever reply but to her surprise she is suddenly overcome, washed with a great wave of grief and sympathy for Eleanor. To be facing the death of a child: what could be more terrible? Her new mother's heart is breaking for mothers like Eleanor who are losing their children. She closes her eyes, feeling all that pain.
"It's time to go to bed, isn't it?" Sam says. Together, they pull out the sofa and put sheets on the mattress.
"This is a really comfortable bed," he says. "I should know, I slept here whenever Peter and I had a fight."
Louise can't imagine fighting so hard with Michael that she wouldn't want to sleep with him; he is such a comfort to her. She wonders for the millionth time how she got so lucky. How is it that her life turned the corner into a man like Michael and a whole new kind of joy, while Sam's life is turning out like this? And Eleanor -- how could she have known what sorrow lay ahead?
She can't seem to get Eleanor out of her mind. Before she goes home, she must be sure to ask Sam for her address. She doesn't know yet when or what she will write to her, but someday she will write.
"Well, goodnight," Sam says, and they hug for a long time.
After he has gone into the bedroom, she lies awake, listening to the sirens far down on the street. That's a city sound she could once tune out but after living in a small town for a while she isn't used to it.
The baby stirs inside. He likes to move around just as she's settling down to sleep. She puts her hands on her belly and thinks again of Sam's mother, who must have done just the same thing over thirty years ago.
Louise gets up and goes into the bedroom. In the dim light, she can see the lumpy shape of Sam lying under the covers. She lifts the edge of the blankets and climbs in beside him. He reaches for her sleepily. She takes his hands and presses them hard against her stomach as the baby inside -- little Sam -- kicks and flails in his dark little world.
(first published in The Larcom Review, Vol. 3, Spring/Summer 2001)
