All We Ever Wanted Was Everything Read Online Free PDF Page A

rich husband, twenty-year-old Janice had grown beyond that. This Janice—Jan to her friends—was a French major known, within her sorority, for her bohemian streak. During her first year at the university, an art history professor had written on one of her essays that she had a “sharp mind and an artistic spirit,” and she had taken him at his word. She read Balzac in the original French, took classes in ceramics (producing a series of very respectable teapots), sewed her own skirts, learned to cook pot-au-feu. She even took up smoking Gauloises at parties and liked the way they conferred upon her an appearance of continental nonchalance. By her junior year she was planning a postgraduation year in Paris, where her thesis adviser said he might be able to arrange a job at a student travel agency. Sometimes, when she looked in the mirror, she was thrilled by herself.
    Paul came as a surprise, a quiet and intense MBA student who materialized by her elbow at a sorority mixer at the beginning of her senior year and doggedly pursued her throughout the fall. When he looked at her, sometimes, she felt like a valedictory prize he had claimed as his own, and she would blush at how much this pleased her. By his side, she experienced a new stillness: He could calmly command a room like that, tilt it toward him until he seemed to be at its vortex. And yet he was vulnerable to her too. One night, they drank too much Chianti, and he told her about his banker father’s expectations for him and his mother’s patrician coldness and cried real tears, and she knew she was in love.
    Of course, she hadn’t intentionally forgotten to take the pill; not at all. The pill just passed through her mind, like water through a sieve. Graduation was looming, just a few months away, and the question of her future was growing less clear by the day. She had the job lined up in Paris and a room in the home of a young couple who were friends of friends of friends, but Paul no longer smiled benignly when she talked about leaving, as if her year abroad were some charming quirk; instead he glowered like she was betraying him. But if he was so angry with her, why didn’t he ask her to stay? Even though she wasn’t quite sure what her answer should be if he did beg her not to go, she grew increasingly concerned when he didn’t. Would he just allow this casual amputation? The thought made her ill. She spent most nights motionless and frozen under the old cotton sheets, unable to sleep. Lying there, in a black fugue, she would remember the smooth pink oval, wrapped in tinfoil and buried in her makeup bag in the bathroom, and think: I should get up and take the pill. I can’t forget the pill. And then the next thing she knew it would be morning and she’d be on her way to class and she would have forgotten entirely that she’d never taken it. And she wouldn’t remember again until three days later, when she guiltily gulped down four pills in a row with a glass of milk. She should have said no when Paul crawled in her bed, the way she usually would when this happened, should have told him of her mistake and insisted on a condom, but she didn’t have the willpower to turn him down, not now when he was so distant anyway. And so she lay in bed afterward as he slept beside her in a warm placid sleep and tried to forget that she had forgotten.
    She could have gotten an abortion—there were girls who did, even some who treated it like a badge of honor—but the truth was that she never even considered it as an option. When she got the test results back, she was surprised by the pang of pleasure she experienced: Here it was, her future as a wife and mother, the mistress of a beautiful home overlooking a lake somewhere, decided for her just like that; and it was strangely, comfortingly, familiar, like slipping on an old favorite dress she had forgotten she owned.
    She knew Paul wouldn’t flee when she told him she was pregnant, just as she knew that she was