She had tried to explain it to her mother in the phone call they’d had the night she’d met Graham. But her mother had misinterpreted what Selina was describing to be some hormonal thing.
“Could it be from what they call ‘pheromones’ these days?” her mother said. “You have so many roommates. Or maybe it’s something you inherited from me. I’ve always been consumed with dread, but my doctor says I need more exercise.”
Selina had then groaned and said, “Hey, Mom, are you trying to tell me that I can’t concentrate on choosing a career path right now because my body is making me so crazy that I can’t think straight?”
“It’s something to consider,” her mother said. “When I was your age, all I could think about was getting married and having babies. That was my only career path.”
“Funny,” Graham said in response to what Selina had just been saying. “Teaching’s the one thing I think I would really like to do. A full professorship in literature with tenure would be nice someday. But if it never happened, I’d always have rock and roll to fall back on, wouldn’t you think?”
“Yeah,” she sighed. “Sounds like graduate school for you.” She tossed the rest of the uneaten crust onto the empty pizza pan. “Unless you just like to perform in front of crowds. In that case, you really ought to just stick with the guitar.”
After dinner, as they walked past the building that housed the inelegant biology department, they ran out of things to say again, and Graham leaned over to give her the entry for the heading First Kiss.
The First ‘I Love You’ came not so much as a murmur but as more of a projectile after she pleaded with him, kissing him on her bed, “Graham, just say it. I know you want to, and if you say it, I can say it, too.” He said it, possibly with more conviction than he had meant to, and she raised up over him as he was washed down onto his back with the torrent of emotion that poured out around him. “God, look at what you’ve done to me, Selina,” he said looking up at her. It was one o’clock in the morning, and everything he said came out in a hoarse, almost falsetto, whisper. “I’m in love with you. I don’t ever want to leave you, I want to be with you for as long as I can.”
Of course, Selina had one other heading on her blackboard that had been discreetly left out of the bride’s book. It was called First Time We Made Love. “Let me touch you down here,” Graham said one night as his hand moved lightly over her hip. They were both naked from the waist up, lying with her back to his front like two spoons in a silverware drawer, and as he whispered to her his fingers traced along the top band of her panties. “Just with my hand. I want to make you come.” She arched her back and dropped her shoulder onto his chest. Then she reached down to guide his hand until he had the rhythm she wanted. In a few minutes, she finished pushing his underwear off with her foot and sat on top of him, feeling his fingers lace together in the small of her back as she tucked him inside of herself. For some reason, she began thinking words in her mother’s voice. Before she knew it, she was close to whispering in his ear, Oh God, Graham, I want your baby. At that moment, getting pregnant was an impossibility since she was on the pill, but still she begged God, please get me pregnant, please let him be the father of my baby. She could have gone on like that for hours, but she knew that he was probably wishing that she would come.
After they had sex, her anxiety about graduation disappeared for a while, and for the first time, she welcomed her own thoughts about the future, even coaxed along little visions in her imagination of what their life together would be like. She saw them traveling a great deal, touring with Graham’s rock band once he became famous, their baby or small child constantly beside them. Everytime she thought of the baby boy they would have, she liked to imagine what it would feel like to nurse him. Graham would be there, helping her keep her long hair out of the baby’s face as he drew up close to her breast, just as she would keep Graham’s hair out of his hands and mouth afterward when Graham cuddled their son.
When ever they both had reading to do, they saved it for the last thing before going to sleep so they could crawl into bed together and read in each other’s arms. On this particular night, Light in August was resting just below the hollow of her neck, propped open in his hand.
“Graham, I’m going to sleep,” she said, studying the ceiling. She had been re-reading Frege’s Foundations of Arithmetic, and she was dead tired.
“Mmm… okay, I’m almost done,” he said. He moved his eyes from the page just long enough to give her a light peck on the cheek.
She closed her eyes and let her thoughts go wherever they wanted to. Even the mathematician cannot create things at will, Frege said. He can only discover what is there and give it a name. When she imagined these scenes from her future with Graham, she felt like she was discovering all the possible pathways from which she would choose one to be her life. This is why I came to this school, she decided. My fate, to meet Graham. So much for “How We Met and Married,” she thought. Most of the blackboard was already full.
Tonight, she imagined that someday they would be on an airplane, the lights lowered for night and the air conditioning turned up to make the hypnotic white noise that would induce everyone on the plane to sleep. They would sit with their son, four years old in this episode of her fantasy, in the seat between them. Graham’s hair would spread like a silk shawl over his shoulder, and she would let her eye drift down his arm to his wedding ring, his hand resting on the hip of their small son, asleep and nestled at his father’s side. The image made her ache. She rolled toward him and started to bring her knees up to her chest, but there was no room left between them in the twin bed. It’s just so simple, Graham, she thought. It’s so beautiful and elegant and simple that it hurts.
“Okay, I know, I know,” he said laughing. ‘I take the hint and I’m putting down the book.” Her knees were digging into his hip. He tossed the paperback onto her desk and turned out the light.
to be continued.
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