Dear Digby by Carol Muske-Dukes

underscores why solving our birth control dilemma, the inadequacy of contraception available, is the central issue facing us as we look ahead to the next ten years of the movement.”
    I noticed Page shaking her head in relief. We drove home after an endless dinner party, through a snowstorm in the mountains. I never left the wheel. I looked over at Page, fast asleep, curled into her leather jacket, her head bouncing against the passenger door, feet against the heater. I felt tenderness for her, sleeping away, unaware of the enormous change sitting next to her. Through the long hours of blowing white, parted briefly, regularly, by the windshield wipers, my eyes hurt, my neck hurt—but I hunched forward feeling wonderful: I was carrying a child.
    Did it matter whose child? Oh, yes, yes. I had never wanted a kid before—but suddenly I was with somebody I could imagine as a father (perhaps because he was already a father). I could imagine us, mid-thirty-type grown-up parents who loved each other and loved our kid.
    We had lived together for three years. I knew Terence—I couldn’t wait to see his face when I told him.
    As I drove through the Upper West Side at 4 A.M. , taking Page home, I saw his face as clearly as if it were before me, perfectly radiant. He touched me. He said, “Willy, God, Willy: our baby!”
    “I’m pregnant,” I whispered in his ear. He was in bed, rolled around a couple of pillows—in the king-sized bed of the midgets (how did they clamber up its daunting height, and did they swing their tiny feet over the edge?). He reached over and patted my stomach gently, he murmured something, but was asleep again in a second, so I knew he hadn’t really heard.
    I lay there and thought about it being an “accident.” “There are no accidents,” my friend Page says, I suspect because Werner Earache or some other self-actualization schmuck told her that, but she was right this time. I had wanted this baby to happen—it had only taken its becoming real to convince me.
    The next day Terence was gone early—it was Saturday: two shows, matinee and evening—and rehearsal time before the first. I heard him gargling and running through a few troublesome lines in the bathroom about nine in the morning. “Desire, Zeus, desire!” I heard him intone. “Desire links god and mortal,” he croaked, and gargled and flushed the toilet. I hope I’m not making him sound like an asshole. Because he was not the kind of asshole some actors are: He did not wear leather pants or go to tanning salons or speak in a fake basso profundo at the deli. He did not interrupt normal human discourse constantly with references to “points,” “TVQ,” and “the sweeps.” He did not use coke, or hadn’t for a long time, like everyone else, and if he did anything at all actorly, it was an occasional overembellishment of a description, a memory of truffles sliced on penne in Perugia or something. “Rubber baby buggy bumpers! Rubber baby buggy bumpers!” I heard him declaim, an old warm-up exercise for the thespian tongue—but it seemed sweetly apt this morning. What I’m trying to say is that Terence’s sense of himself as an actor was so innate that he didn’t seem like an actor—but it was always there, a concentration that never ceased. It made him seem strong.
    This frame of mind also kept him suggestible—passionate convictions stuck to his consciousness like static cling to a polyester skirt.
    When I met him, interviewing him for a special supplement SIS ran one fall called “Feminist Men,” I couldn’t believe my ears. He said things like “Women should run the country, men should not be allowed to vote until they’ve spent a year running a household or working as midwives.” I sat on the edge of my chair in his small dressing room in the theater on Broadway and 52nd and looked at him in the mirror, taking off the makeup of Pancho Villa and talking about child care centers, and I fell in love. “Never trust a