Dear Digby by Carol Muske-Dukes Page A

guy who says he’s a feminist,” was Page’s comment when I floated back to SIS to type up his remarks. But I didn’t listen.
    I slept until late afternoon. He called around five, he was just out for a light supper at Joe Allen’s before the eight o’clock curtain—no time to talk. He didn’t mention anything about the night before. I contemplated getting dressed and taxiing over to the theater, but it was sleeting and I’d already seen the play about fifteen times. I decided to build a fire, put some bubbly on chill, wait for him. (We’d planned to celebrate my birthday the following night, Sunday, which he had off.)
    “What a gift,” I thought, hugging myself, taking a peek at my still-flat stomach. “What a gift.”
    “Wow,” said Terence. “Unbelievable, Will.” He leaned against the kitchen doorjamb, a glass of champagne in his hand. He looked tired, his curly hair rumpled, dark circles under his matinee idol’s eyes. It was 12:30 A.M.
    “We’ve been using something, haven’t we?”
    “I thought so,” I said, “but I’ve been thinking back. You know, we’ve been slipping up a lot lately, overlooking things. …” I laughed conspiratorially, chinked his glass with mine. “Subconsciously, we must have meant it to happen!”
    He looked at me. “Will. We didn’t mean this to happen.”
    A little frost in the air. I smiled. He started talking about “problems.” I stopped listening. I didn’t want to start feeling bad. I just felt too good.
    He walked into the living room. He sat down hard on a teeny chair and cursed as the champagne sloshed on his shirt. He set the glass on the weenie-roast-height table and dabbed halfheartedly at the spreading stain. Then he put his head in his hands.
    This was not the radiant papa I’d pictured. I followed him into the living room and adjusted my fall into the squat chair opposite him. The firelight enlarged our reflections in the black glass: giants in a child’s playhouse.
    “Are you serious about this?” he asked. “You want to have this … kid?”
    I felt great again. He was going to raise all the routine objections, and I was going to shoot them down. I’d already practiced this argument in my head—with myself—trying to figure out why the hell I did want this kid. I talked about the difficulties of our lives: his traveling, my demanding job, our mutual desire for freedom and independence. I was rational but passionate. I was witty and self-deprecating. I told jokes.
    The straw opponents tumbled one by one. I could do it. We could do it. I stopped myself just short of promising him more freedom than I would have—I stopped myself before offering to handle diaper duty full-time, to take the late-night feedings on my own. Me, a feminist, close to that brink!
    I was on that brink.
    I took his hand. “Hey,” I said, “we love each other.”
    He pulled his hand away. He drank down his champagne, got up with some difficulty and crossed the room to the bank of windows that looked out over the East River. It had started to snow: the same storm that had chased me across Pennsylvania. It bore down on Manhattan’s towers and stone gargoyles, it guttered the lights on the bridge.
    “I’ve been through this before, you know. I can’t go through it again.”
    When Terence was nineteen, he’d knocked up a South African girl. Her unsuccessful but enterprising father (mastermind of several failed import schemes), in a final attempt to balance his personal trade deficit, had taken his family of five eager daughters traveling through the United States. Pressure was brought to bear on Terence. He and Candy were married and had Troy. Their alliance went, predictably, down the drain, but it lasted long enough to force Terence to drop out of college and out of the acting conservatory. Then came the squeeze. The Ex had been living cheekily in Johannesburg on Terence’s alimony (along with her new boyfriend and two new kids) ever since the divorce. She’d