Page 161 - A Little Life: A Novel

She didn’t disagree. “I want to hear what you want.”
“What if I say I want to keep it?”
She was ready. “Then I’d seriously consider it.”

I hadn’t been expecting this, either. “Leez,” I said, “we should do what
you want to do.” This wasn’t completely magnanimous; it was mostly
cowardly. In this case, as with many things, I was happy to cede the
decision to her.
She sighed. “We don’t have to decide tonight. We have some time.” Four
weeks, she didn’t need to say.
In bed, I thought. I thought those thoughts all men think when a woman

tells them she’s pregnant: What would the baby look like? Would I like it?
Would I love it? And then, more crushingly: fatherhood. With all its
responsibilities and fulfillments and tedium and possibilities for failure.
The next morning, we didn’t speak of it, and the day after that, we didn’t
speak of it again. On Friday, as we were going to bed, she said, sleepily,
“Tomorrow we’ve got to discuss this,” and I said, “Absolutely.” But we

didn’t, and we didn’t, and then the ninth week passed, and then the tenth,
and then the eleventh and twelfth, and then it was too late to easily or
ethically do anything, and I think we were both relieved. The decision had
been made for us—or rather, our indecisiveness had made the decision for
us—and we were going to have a child. It was the first time in our marriage
that we’d been so mutually indecisive.
We had imagined that it would be a girl, and if it was, we’d name it

Adele, for my mother, and Sarah, for Sally. But it wasn’t a girl, and we
instead let Adele (who was so happy she started crying, one of the very few
times I’d seen her cry) pick the first name and Sally the second: Jacob
More. (Why More, we asked Sally, who said it was for Thomas More.)
I have never been one of those people—I know you aren’t, either—who
feels that the love one has for a child is somehow a superior love, one more

meaningful, more significant, and grander than any other. I didn’t feel that
before Jacob, and I didn’t feel that after. But it is a singular love, because it
is a love whose foundation is not physical attraction, or pleasure, or
intellect, but fear. You have never known fear until you have a child, and
maybe that is what tricks us into thinking that it is more magnificent,
because the fear itself is more magnificent. Every day, your first thought is
not “I love him” but “How is he?” The world, overnight, rearranges itself

into an obstacle course of terrors. I would hold him in my arms and wait to