Touchy Subjects by Emma Donoghue Read Free Book Online

his voice.
    "OK. What the hell," said Margaret. He winced, but not so she'd notice. "We've both done it before and it didn't kill us."
    Then she laughed until he laughed, too, and she came over and kissed him on the ear.
    But as he was signing his name in the register—his ballpoint pressing the paper a little too hard—he knew that this time wasn't going to be like those other times. Neither he nor his first wife in DC nor Margaret nor her first husband in LA had had the slightest idea what they were really doing. This time would be the real thing, because now he knew what a promise was. Now he knew what the words meant.
    To show she wasn't taking the whole thing too seriously, Margaret was wearing red. He didn't care; it looked good on her. "You can bring your God buddies if you like," she'd told him, but he said that was all right, he'd rather keep it small, just the two of them and a pastor (not Pastor Tull,just some Unitarian) and a few friends who drove down from Seattle and Vancouver.
    After the ceremony he was high like he hadn't been since that time he tried cocaine at the prom. He was a bank robber who'd made it to Acapulco.
    The next Sunday after church he said the word. "My wife and I are taking a vacation," he mentioned to Mrs. Keilor, and relief stabbed him through the ribs.
    For their honeymoon—about ten years too late, according to his mother in San Francisco, but she sent them a check anyhow—he and Margaret were going to drive right down the West Coast. That first night in a motel in Mount Saint Helens he lay under the weight of his wife and moved and shut his eyes. It felt like he was running down the right road at last. But later when he was letting the condom slither off him, he wanted to cry.
    They hiked up a volcano the next day, cinders crunching like cornflakes under their feet. Later they squatted over tide pools and saw anemones blossom like green doughnuts and purple sea urchins as big as their hands. Margaret tilted her face up to the sun while he took pictures and figured out the distances between towns.
    In Eugene, Oregon, he woke up in the middle of the night and had to shake her awake. "Honey," he said urgently. Then, apologetically, "Honey, I just realized, we're meant to have children."
    The words shocked his ears.
    At first Margaret didn't answer, and he thought she was still asleep, till he saw the line of her jaw. Then she said, "For god's sake."
    Exactly, he was tempted to say, but didn't.
    In the morning he woke up to find her packing.
    He stared at her knotted hands, ramming two pairs of his socks into a corner. "Who was it," Margaret asked, "just remind me who was it who talked me out of it all those other times?"
    "You were never sure—," he began.
    "That's right, I wasn't sure, but you sure were." A little bead of spit on her lip caught the sunlight. She plucked up another pair of socks but didn't put them in the bag. "Who was it always told me it would be madness to go off the Pill? Who was it said we'd lose all our freedom, tie ourselves down?"
    His throat felt like it was full of wadding. He cleared it. "Guess everybody gets tied down one way or another."
    Margaret's hands were jammed into the pockets of her silky dressing gown; her nails were stretching the seams. "Who was it kept saying he wasn't ready?"
    "I don't know," he said, nearly whispering. "I don't know who that guy was." There was a silence so complete he could hear the chambermaid vacuuming at the other end of the motel. "But I'm different now."
    "You can say that again." She stared at him; her eyes were hard as hazelnuts. "You're on another planet."
    "I'm finally ready," he pleaded.
    "Oh yeah?" Her voice was bigger than the room. "Well I'm forty-two, so you and your friend Jesus can go to hell."
    It took them two days to drive home. Awhile before they stopped for a burger on the first day he thought Margaret was crying, but she was looking out the window so he couldn't be sure. At the motel he called his mother