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to be happy.
    Ironically, the life they led in Washington was one that anyone looking on from the outside would envy. They were each accomplished in their fields, recognized for their work, and they occasionally rubbed shoulders with people who made history. Maggie had played her cello at the White House; Rob had sat on a dais with Andrew Young at a seminar on World Hunger. To all who knew them, they appeared as independent, strong, and fulfilled people. The very essence of what modern marriage was supposed to be.
    What Maggie knew was that it was no longer a marriage at all. It was a bed-and-board arrangement between two people who lived separate lives, and whose values were growing more divergent with each passing day. When they found themselves together, they talked of daily events, masking their crying need for intimacy. They never talked about their feelings
     
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    any more, their secret hopes and dreams. It was as though that were a forgotten language; a language of their childhood that didn’t apply to their roles in the adult world.
    Maggie had thought for a while that time itself would bring them closer together. But it was not happening, and she felt she could wait no longer. In recent weeks she had been waging a battle with depression. Not the kind of feeling she once referred to as the blues. This was different; a desire, when she awakened each morning, to close her eyes again and find oblivion in the deathlike darkness. She had even thought, at odd times of the day, for no apparent reason, of suicide. Of being found dead in some bizarre way. Once when she saw a blood-donor truck, on that day of the year when everyone is suppose to give blood and get a boutonniere in return, she wondered whether if she went from hospital to hospital giving blood, she might simply expire. A noble death. One that Rob might approve of. Giving her all to those who needed it.
    The depression lifted, however, when she realized she was no longer menstruating and might be pregnant. For the first time in months she felt the loneliness leave her. She felt somehow warm and loved. Loved by Rob, even though he knew nothing about it.
    She had not intended to become pregnant. She had merely relaxed her precautions. She and Rob were so rarely together, in the same bed at the same time, with enough energy to make love, that the exercise of inserting a diaphragm became in itself a rejecting experience. When it had to be removed, unused, in the morning, it accentuated her feeling of being unwanted.
    Maggie knew that if she were pregnant, it would provoke a crisis beyond any she had ever faced. It would cause anguish and recrimination, and would possibly confront her with the kind of decision that she did not even dare to think of. Rob would refuse
     
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    to have a child. And the need within her was overwhelming.
    “Maggie?”
    The doctor who summoned her was someone she had known since they first moved to Washington. Peter Hamlisch had been Rob and Maggie’s next-door neighbor in their first apartment in Georgetown. When Maggie had come in earlier that week she was turned over to a laboratory technician. This was the first time in three years that she had seen Peter.
    “My God,” he said. “Look at you.”
    “That bad?” Maggie smiled.
    “That good. Come on in.”
    She followed him down a corridor and into his office, where he closed the door, gesturing toward a chair. Maggie remained standing.
    “I can’t believe it,” he said. “Has it been two years?”
    “Going on three.”
    “How’s Robert?”
    “Fine. Working hard.”
    “Still keeping the same hours?”
    “Oh, yes.”
    “And how ‘bout you?”
    “Busy.”
    “We keep meaning to get to the symphony …”
    “That’s okay.”
    “I saw your picture at the White House …”
    “Bad picture.”
    He smiled, delighted to be with her. “You look glorious. But then again, pregnant women always do.”
    It took a moment to sink in. Then it hit like a body