Between the contractions, coming quickly now with the brawny inevitability of a freight train, she fell limp and unresisting against him.  Even her skin appeared to go slack as he swabbed her face and neck with tepid water.  At the beginning he'd floated, near paralyzed in the face of her suffering.  Then came a guilty pleasure in her need of him.  For the first time in months he could see she’d forgotten to be angry.  And now, as she snagged the washcloth in her teeth to suck the moisture from it, Richard wondered whether she was unhinging completely.
            "Paula, honey."  He jerked the cloth away.  "What are you doing?"
            "I'm thirsty," she complained.
            "More ice," said the nurse. 
            But by the time the nurse returned, glistening shards mounding over the lip of a cup in her hand, Paula was in the throes of another contraction.  Richard's tongue rasped the roof of his own parched mouth when the nurse set the cup on a small dresser next to the bed.
            Decorated in tranquil pastels, with plain oak furniture and a sailboat print on the wall, the birthing room reminded him of a room in a budget motel, strangely comforting in its bland familiarity.  Unlike the fetal monitor, all wires and dials and blinking lights, kicking out a ribbon of paper to illustrate the peaks and valleys of Paula's labor.  After the first hour or two he'd grown bored with that.
            "Very good," soothed the nurse as she analyzed the latest sheet of spiked scratchings.  "You're doing great.  Soon you'll be ready to push."
            Paula began to shift and sigh, clutching at handfuls of bedsheet.  Richard eyed the black grime of printer's ink beneath her nails.  She should not have gone to the studio that morning, where there was no phone and her water had broken.  He wanted to scold.  But she was lost to him now, completely absorbed by the muscular imperatives of her uterus.  When she forgot to breathe through a contraction, he leaned close, panting along with her, "hee-hee-hee," the way he’d been taught in Lamaze class.  She grabbed him by the hair and pulled hard.
            "Let go," he said.  "Jesus."
            "Stop hissing in my ear," she snarled.
            "Transition," beamed the nurse.
            Richard sat back rubbing the sore spot on his head.  He had no desire to move in closely again.
            The doctor came in, dressed in blue scrubs and a white lab coat, a smiling, courtly man, sandy haired, in his fifties.  Paula sat up straighter, bared her teeth in a crazed attempt at a smile.  The doctor worked his hand into a latex glove, and Richard studied the print of the sailboat, a racing scow by the look of it, fast. 
            "That's it," said the doctor.  "Ten centimeters.  Go ahead and push on the next contraction."  He tore off the glove and took Paula's hand as if he might lift it to his lips like some Bavarian prince.  Then he winked at Richard. 
            Thankfully, it did not take long.  At the childbirth class, a refresher for women on their second or third babies, the expectant mothers had shared torture stories like POWs back from the war.  Richard caught back a sob when on Paula's third push he could see a tuft of black hair poking through a stretched opening in the no-longer-recognizable territory between her legs.
            Another nurse came in, then the doctor, looking surgical now with a long blue gown over his scrubs.  Someone got Richard to put on a long gown over his own clothes.  The room raced, Paula sweated and grunted and cursed, and then almost silence as the baby emerged, face first.
            The doctor said, "One more push, sweetheart.” 
Richard sent him a maiming look, which fortunately, no one seemed to notice.
            "There he is."  Paula's voice was completely new.  "There's my little boy."
            Richard saw the boy's penis and the dark purple sac of his scrotum, and then he lost track of events.  He heard the baby's first cries, irritable, slightly broken, and Paula talking, though he could not make out what she was saying.  The room was moving again, but he stood in a bubble of stillness until someone touched his arm and he saw the baby, wrapped in a green swaddling blanket, black hair still matted and slimy from the waters of Paula’s womb. 
            "Come on, Dad," the nurse said, placing the bundle in Richard's arms.  "Like this.”  She adjusted his elbow under the baby's head.  "That's it."
            "Thank you," he said, and the nurse squeezed his arm before moving away.
            The baby was crying, mouth open, arms pumping, a tiny red-faced mime climbing an imaginary ladder.  Richard could not think what to do besides look, intimidated by the smallness of him.  The baby continued to cry.
            "Try rocking him," Paula said.
            The room came back into focus.  Richard had not moved from his place beside the bed, and Paula looked up at him, a softness in her eyes more bruising in its way than the excoriating glares she was capable of.  Awkwardly he bobbled the baby, which quieted him.  The infant yawned with an elegant shudder and opened his eyes.
            And then the nurses were leaving, maneuvering around him to help Paula sit comfortably.   The doctor clasped his hand with unexpected warmth.
            "You look lovestruck," Paula observed.
            Richard shrugged and concentrated on bouncing the baby.  He thought that he was doing it right; the child seemed alert but quiet.
            "Please," she said now.  "Let me look at him."
            "Oh."  He bent to transfer their son to her arms.              
            Overcome with the need to sit, he pulled over the rocker, probably standard birthing room issue.  Paula talked to the baby in a breathless girl's voice: greetings, endearments.  Richard noted an exaggerated flush to her cheeks, the skin around her eyes dark and pinched with fatigue.  For once she looked her age: she looked like a forty-year-old woman who had just given birth.
            "He's perfect," she said with authority.  "Beautiful."
            She unwrapped the child and proceeded to examine every last inch of him, brushing his skin with her lips, caressing him, squeezing playfully, even down to the tip of his foreskin. "I never thought I could want him so much, " Paula said.  “I just never thought—“ She stopped herself and looked up. 
            "Yes," he agreed, though he was not sure with what.
            The baby began to cry, and she wrapped him again tightly.  Even so, he squeezed his fists and worked himself into a fit.  Paula reached up to untie her gown at the neck and slipped out of it.  Richard watched, wrestling a knot of emotion as she coaxed the baby's mouth to a swollen dark nipple.  When the infant got hold and started to suck, Paula winced.
            "Ouch," she said.  "I'd forgotten how ruthless they are."
            She dropped her head back on the pillows and looked at Richard with a sort of half smile.  She held him in her gaze, and for those few seconds he could almost believe that nothing had ever changed between them.  His heart seemed to stop and his tongue would not move to say any of the things scrabbling around in his chest. 
            Before long she closed her eyes, and in another moment he realized his time was up.  He'd been dismissed.

            The first time he’d asked her to marry him, she said it was too soon after her divorce.  The second time—on the heels of a panicked disclosure that the birth control had failed—she stared as if he had just stripped naked and announced his intention to go live with the wolves. 
            “Be serious,” she’d ordered, on the verge of hysteria.  “You can’t think I’m having this baby.”
            “Why not?” he’d asked.  And asked again many times over the next couple of weeks until finally she walked out.  To be fair, the walking out occurred only after he’d lost his mind sufficiently to suggest that he might file a court injunction to prevent her from aborting his child.  It was a colossal miscalculation, for which Richard had no explanation other than temporary insanity.  The prospect of parenthood had awakened in his middle-aged heart a sharp and desperate longing he had not even known existed. 
            Richard found ample time to ponder his errors, stretched out on the sofa in Paula's apartment, where he awoke in a vaporous dawn to his offspring’s first penetrating wails.  He could not help wondering how differently things might have gone if he'd only shut up and left Paula alone.  She had never explained what made her decide to keep the child, although it clearly had nothing to do with either pleasing or forgiving Richard.  The baby was in and he was out, as if having them both were more than she could handle at once. 
            He sat up to pull on his jeans, thinking he ought be helping somehow, but couldn't quite bring himself to go knock on her bedroom door.  In the two weeks since the birth she'd managed to re-erect her defenses, though she would not go so far as to keep him from his own child.  Richard loved Paula's innate compulsion for decency and fair play.  More than that, he relied on it.  It was the reason she'd kept him informed on her prenatal progress, though she would accept no other contact between them, and it was the reason she could not refuse when he'd told her he wanted to be at the birth.  This admirable quality had become the cornerstone of his strategy to win her back.
            He got up to make coffee, picking his way through the crowded space of Paula's living room.  Besides the sofa and an end table, there was room for no more than her worktable, cluttered now with stacks of paper and drawings, cans of pencils and brushes, bottles of ink, tubes of paint.  Below the table, a half dozen unopened cartons of clothing and books had begun to give him hope that she herself must regard these accommodations as temporary.  Nothing hung on the walls, save a short clothesline for drying watercolors.             
            While the coffee was brewing—decaffeinated for the nursing mother—he washed the dishes in the sink.  Last night he'd made dinner: spaghetti and salad, nothing fancy.  And during the day he'd done laundry and straightened up and shopped for groceries while Paula nursed and slept and slept and nursed.  She’d thanked him with a sullen look that said, Remember, I didn't ask for any of this.  She wasn't going to make it easy for him.  But he hadn't known what else to do when he'd stopped by on Friday to see the baby and found Paula weeping in some sort of post-partum hormonal crisis, near falling down from exhaustion.  He'd read about this in the Lamaze literature.
            Omelets, he decided.  He was hungry, and if Paula wasn't, she should be.  Richard took out the organic eggs he'd bought yesterday at Whole Foods, along with some cheese, an onion, tomatoes and spinach.  He wanted her to eat clean, healthy food.  Left to her own devices she'd go for whatever was quick and easy.  Though after spending the last thirty-six hours watching a nine-pound infant sucking the life out of her, he couldn't really blame her.   
             "Is that coffee I smell?" Paula asked.
            Startled by the sound of her voice, and in the act of dicing the onion, Richard cut himself with the knife.  "Shit."  He stared at his finger, at blood starting to well from a deep cut near the nail.  "I mean, yes, there's coffee.  Decaf."
            "Here, let me see that," she said.  She took his hand in both of hers and drew him to the sink.
            Richard stood very still while Paula examined his finger.  It was the first time she had willingly touched him since the break-up.  Even within the forced intimacy of their childbirth preparation class she’d kept herself physically aloof to a degree he would not have thought possible.  He looked now at her head bent over his hand, at her honey-brown hair, dull and matted, uncombed for days.  The oily, cooked-carrot smell of A&D Ointment wafted upwards.  Paula squeezed the end of his finger, forcing blood from the wound.
            "That hurts," he said, mostly as a point of information.  He didn't mind the pain.
            "Oh, sorry," she said, looking up.  Flakes of dried matter rimed her eyelashes, but overall he thought she looked better.  Her complexion was brighter and the dark rings around her eyes had nearly disappeared.  "Wash that," she said.  "I'll get a Band-Aid."
            He allowed her to bandage the finger, then poured them each a cup of coffee.  While he fixed the omelets, Paula sat at the counter beside a small stack of cards and her daughter's high school graduation picture, as yet unframed.
            "God, I need a shower," she said.  "Do I dare hope he'll sleep that long?"
            "If he wakes, I'll go get him," Richard said, buttering thick slices of toast.
            She raised a skeptical eyebrow.
            "For Christ's sake, Paula.  I know what to do.  It won't be time for him to eat yet.  I can handle him."
            "We'll see," she said.
            Richard set the plate down in front of her, and Paula examined the omelet, sizzling and brown at the edges, the toast at its side.  He waited for something, he wasn't sure what. 
            "Do we have any marmalade?" she asked.

            They walked the three blocks to Wingra Park, Richard straining to conceal triumph at getting her out of the house.  Paula had tried to back out when she couldn't button her jeans at the waist.  Then the baby shit his diaper as they were about to head out the door—a crunchy, gassy sound and then the mess.  It took twenty minutes to clean him up, then herself, and then it was time for another feeding.  Richard stood by patiently.  He wasn't planning to make it easy for her either.
            In southern Wisconsin, there come a few precious days of perfect summer before the air turns thick with humidity and mosquitoes.  This day was one, and he watched Paula take in the deep greens and brilliant sky as if she'd been living underground for the past two weeks.  Her clean hair shone gingery brown in the sun.  Over jeans—he did not speculate how she'd fastened them—she wore a navy blue blouse that covered her hips.  Her body was not significantly larger than her pre-pregnancy size, but it had softened somehow, so that all her edges were rounded.  Robert, or Robbie as she'd begun to call him, lay awake beneath the awning of his stroller, lulled by the sensation of motion, the friction of wheels on concrete.
            Richard said, "Gorgeous day, don't you think?"
            "Don't push it," she said.  And then without warning she smiled.
            At the park Richard spread a blanket on the grass and they sat facing the lake where a family of ducks performed a duck opera of splashes and quacks.  A clump of young birches quivered in the soft breeze at water's edge.  Behind them twenty yards or so, a group of boys played basketball on a patch of asphalt.  The sun on his skin felt warm, restorative after two days indoors, and he closed his eyes.  The ducks kept up their steady argumentative conversation, while the basketball thwapped on the asphalt behind them.
            "I should have brought my paints and brushes," Paula said.
            Richard opened his eyes.  "I noticed the drawings you're working on.  Illustrations?"
            "Yeah," she said.  "Some work Ben threw my way."
            He attempted to appear impassive.  On first meeting Richard, Paula's mentor had been moved to quote Shakespeare—the bit about killing all the lawyers—as if he were the first ever to think of it.
            "Don’t look like that,” Paula said.  “He thought I could use the work.”
            "If you need money—“
            "No," she said.  "Really, I'm fine."
            "This is so silly.  You take money from Steve."  The illustrations were not the only things he had noticed while straightening her apartment yesterday.  Among the congratulatory notes on Robbie's birth was a card from her ex-husband enclosing a check.
            "It's different from Steve.  He doesn't . . . I mean, I don't . . ."  She scowled, pushing her lips out like a child.  "It's just different."
Richard bit back a retort as it dawned on him that she wasn’t going to let herself say she could take money from Steve because nothing existed between them any longer but the toleration of fought-out ex-spouses who still share a child.  At any rate, this was no time to start poking holes in her logic.  He had experience with that, and it never resulted in getting him what he wanted.
            Robbie started to whimper.  His legs kicked under the blanket, creating the effect of rabbits hopping about in a sack.  Before Paula could move, Richard leaned forward and scooped the baby from the bed of the stroller.
            "Hey big guy," Richard said in his own version of the voice all adults seemed to cultivate when talking to babies.  He held Robbie over his head so they looked at each other eye to eye.  "What are you fussing about?  It can't be time for lunch yet."
            He lowered the baby, and drawing up his knees, cradled the small body on his thighs the way one would an open book.  Robbie kicked a few times in his footed babysuit and grasped the fingers Richard held out to him.  Then Richard tugged gently, testing the boy's grip.  Robbie smiled, exposing a shelf of moist, pink gum.
            "He's strong," Richard said.  "And he's got your smile."
            Paula said, "That's ridiculous.  They don't smile for at least four weeks, maybe five."
            "See for yourself," he said.  "That's a smile.  And look.  He's got that little dimple on the right side like you do.  Don't you, big guy."   He bent to kiss Robbie's cheek.  
            Paula began rummaging around in the diaper bag.  "You want a mineral water?" she asked, sounding congested.
            "Not yet."  He turned his attention back to the baby, who might have been attempting pull-ups on Richard's fingers.  "Look," he said to Paula.  "Baby calisthenics."
            She said, "I'd like to go home now."
            "The baby's fine,” Richard said.  “Is it the sun you're worried about?  I saw you pack a hat in his bag."
            "I want to go back."  She spoke sharply.
            Richard felt himself stiffen.  Robbie began to cry.
            "Give him to me," Paula commanded.
            Reluctantly he handed the baby over, and she cuddled him to her shoulder where he continued to squall.  Paula's eyes flooded and two dark blotches appeared on the front of her blouse. 
            "Paula.”
            She ignored him, occupied with getting the baby to her breast while flashing the minimum of skin.
            "Paula," he repeated, once Robbie was settled.
            This time she looked up.
            "I'm doing the best I can," Richard said.  "I'm trying."
            She stared back for a few heartbeats.  “You know I never asked.”  Tears spilled over now, sliding down her cheeks with enough speed to drip from the edge of her jaw.
            "Yes," Richard said, chastened, confused.  “I know.”
Ducks dropped out of the air to land one by one on the water, creating small v-shaped wakes behind them.  Across the lake two fishermen sat still as glass figures in a blue-hulled boat, waiting for a tug on their lines.  Richard thought he could try one more time. 
            "Please,” he said.  “Does it have to be this way?"
            "I don't know," she said.  With her fingers she wiped the wetness from her cheeks.  “I'm still trying to figure that out."

            Richard left work early after accomplishing almost nothing, unless he counted his growing expertise at predicting the seemingly erratic movements of the sailboats on Lake Monona, visible from his office window.  His assistant came in at one point and gave him the look women get when they want you to know they understand something they have no right to.  And there was a small verbal scuffle with his partner, who was miffed that Richard had not shown up for their 10-K run on Saturday morning.
            "You're swimming in shark-infested waters," Dan warned, once he understood Richard's whereabouts over the weekend.  "I'm saying this as your friend and your lawyer.  It wouldn't be too soon to draw up a custody agreement.  Get everyone clear on who, what, where and when."
            Sure, Richard thought, serve her with custody papers.  That'll soften her up nicely for a marriage proposal.   
            On the way home to change clothes he replayed the events of the weekend, arranging his thoughts around those moments when Paula had relaxed and accepted his presence and help, the moments that had been almost easy.  Then, as if propelled by these hopeful memories, he sped back to Whole Foods to buy groceries for dinner: a chicken, green vegetables, fresh fruit.  As an afterthought he selected a preposterously oversized bouquet of tiger lilies and irises. 
            It was after three when he made it, arms full, to Paula's apartment.  Her daughter answered the door.
            "Well, look at you," Lanie said, a smirky though not entirely compassionless grin on her face.   For reasons he did not begin to understand—basic mother-daughter antagonism seemed as much a possibility as anything else—Lanie appeared to be rooting for his success with her mother.
            "How does it feel to be a high school graduate?" he asked.
            "Oh, it's very big," she said, affecting gravity now.  "They gave me a ten-cent-an-hour raise at the restaurant.  I was thinking of asking you to handle my stock portfolio.  Do you do that sort of thing?"
            "Not usually," he said.  "But for you—“
            "Who's there?" Paula called from inside the apartment.
            "Be right with you," Lanie called back, and snatched the flowers from on top of the groceries.  "I'll take that," she told Richard.  "Too obvious."
            "I think I can handle this myself."  He reached to take back the bouquet, but Lanie held it firmly behind her.
            "Oh, right," she said.  "You've handled it brilliantly so far."
            Lanie led him into the apartment, where Paula sat at the small dining table with her best friend Caroline, an auburn-haired psychologist with long, very nice legs, who had two approaches with men: flirt or make them uncomfortable.  Sometimes she did both things at once.  The three of them had been having a tea party.  The table was strewn with cups and crumbs, crumpled paper napkins and a half-eaten plate of pastries.  Richard felt foolish standing there with his groceries.
            The picture of delighted surprise, Lanie brandished the appropriated flowers.  "Look what Richard brought me," she said.  "For my graduation."
            Paula smiled at him, so clearly pleased by his supposed gesture that he ducked his head in what probably passed for modesty.
            "They're lovely," Paula said.  "Really."  She lifted a china teapot, white, decorated with pictures of fat purple plums.  "Would you like some tea?"
            "No," he said.  "No, I just . . . I brought these."  He looked down, embarrassed by celery poking its unruly head from the bag.
            "I'm late for work," Lanie announced.  From behind Paula she waggled her eyebrows at him.  "I'd better put these in water before I take off."
            Lanie went to the kitchen, and he became aware of the two seated women, watching him with polite but unequivocal interest.
            "So Richard, how are you?" Caroline asked.  He thought he detected goading.  Of course, flirting had not been expected under the circumstances.  "It's been a long time.  What have you been up to?"
            "I'm fine, Caroline.  Working mostly.  How about you?"
            "Fine," she said.  "I guess I should congratulate you on your beautiful son."
            "Thank you."  The apartment had grown unbearably warm.
            Unexpectedly, Paula came to his rescue.  "Robbie went down five minutes ago.  You could put those away and go see him if you like."
            "I will," he said, grateful.
            With the shades pulled, Paula's bedroom was cool, the light waxy gray.  He sat on the bed near the bassinet, and tried to steady himself on the features of his baby son.  Even in slumber the child seemed so utterly alive, always twitching and wriggling beneath his layers of wrapping.  Richard could hear the women's voices in the other room, though none of their words came through to him. 
            "Your father's a fool," he told the sleeping boy, and Robbie responded by wrinkling his nose and flexing tiny fingers as if a bug had just crawled on his face.
            He had expected to find Paula alone.  The thought of going back out there exhausted him, having to walk past Caroline again just to get out the door.  Richard flopped backwards on the bed and reached for one of the pillows.  Dropping it over his face he breathed in a faint whiff of the Swiss chamomile soap Paula used for her complexion.  A sweet, uncomplicated scent.  The smell of bedtime. 
            "Richard?"
            He dragged the pillow from his face and slowly sat up.  Paula stood in the bedroom doorway.
            "Is anything wrong?"
            "Wrong?" he repeated, weighing the accuracy of the word to describe the funk that had taken him.
            "You don't usually leave the office in the middle of the day."
            "No," he agreed.  "I usually don't."
            She came over and sat next to him on the bed.  "So what is it?"
            It was easier not to look at her, so he focused on a jagged black spot making its way slowly across the bedroom wall.  "I don't think I can do this anymore," he said.  "Maybe Dan's right.  Maybe it's time to sit down and try to work out some reasonable agreement for visitation and custody.  I'll be out of your hair.  We can get on with our lives."
            The spider moved half the length of one wall before she replied. 
            "Is that what you want?"
            He turned to look at her.  "You know what I want."
            "The guys I know in their forties want faster cars and younger women.”  She pointed a finger.  “You want to settle down and have a family?"
            "You make that sound like a bad thing."  The baby squirmed and grunted in the bassinet.  Richard lowered his voice.  "Considering the situation, it seems like the logical move to me."
            "Maybe I don't find the prospect of marrying for logic all that appealing."  
            "Paula, you know—“
            "Yes,” she said.  “I know you love me.”
            "Then what do you want?"
            "What I want?"  She sounded surprised.  "Do you think what I want has been a factor in anything that's happened in the last two years?"
            What he thought was that she’d had the upper hand from pretty much the first time they’d slept together, but she didn’t seem to be requesting an opinion.
             "Let’s see.  My husband left me.  I lost my house.  I'm losing my daughter.  I got myself knocked up like a teenage hormone case.  And you actually seem to think getting married is going to make our lives easier.”
            “An extreme oversimplification.  But yes.  I won’t apologize for thinking any number of things in our lives would work better if we were married.”
            She reached with one hand to push the hair from his forehead.  Not quite motherly.  “Oh God, Richard.  You can’t possibly want me.  I’m fat, my nipples are cracked, and most of the time I'm too exhausted to think straight."
            "Your nipples are what?"
            "Shh."  She cinched closer, grabbed him by the shirt, and pulled him down on the bed with her.  "Don't talk."
            He was too stunned to talk.  She lay curled against him, the weight of her head on his chest, and he held her like that because it felt familiar and good.  He kept waiting for her to jump up and send him away. 
            "Do you know?" she said conversationally.  "This is what I've missed more than anything."  She ran a hand along his torso, from armpit to hipbone and back up again, and involuntarily he tightened his grip on her.  She lifted her head.  "You're too thin."
            She always said that.  Richard felt the muscles of his face stretching to smile.    "Paula.”
            "What?"
            "Is Caroline in the other room waiting for you?"
            "No.  She left with Lanie.  She seemed to think we had things to talk about."
            "Well, we do."
            "I know.  But I figure we've got maybe thirty minutes before the baby wakes up, and I'm too tired to start an apology-fest right now.  Couldn’t we just lie here like this and communicate telepathically?"
            “I feel so cheap,” he told her, and reached for a pillow to wedge under his head.
            "Welcome to my world," she said.

            Richard woke suddenly, with Robbie's peremptory squawks and Paula's jostling.  He discovered a cooling wet patch on his chest where she'd drooled.  Thick and muddled with sleep he watched his son sucking so energetically that infant-sized perspiration beads dotted his forehead.  Paula, half asleep still herself, stroked the child's hand between her forefinger and thumb.  After a while, Richard pushed himself up to go and make dinner, giving himself to the familiar rote tasks of preparing the chicken to roast, peeling potatoes, cleaning broccoli.  Half way through the potatoes, he heard Paula's voice through the open bedroom door, sing-songy with some nursery rhyme she was reciting.  Richard stopped peeling and waited to see if she would start up again.  In the lull he let himself hope she would find it in her heart to forgive him for having everything he wanted.