The Survivor Read Online Free PDF Page A

sex with you or keep talking to you.”
    “That,” she says, “is the finest compliment I’ve been paid in all my twenty years.”
    Inevitably, sex wins out. They lie facing each other afterward, breathing hard, Nate’s cupped hand tracing the flushed dip of her side. Her straw-colored bangs are now dark, sweat-pasted to her forehead. “What do you think about seeing other people?” she begins tentatively. “I know a lot of guys get weird around commitment.…”
    “Commitment?” Nate says. “I love commitment.”
    Charles goes from scorned buddy to third wheel to joint best friend. Janie studies biology and French nearby at Pepperdine, but when she and Nate are apart, the half hour between campuses feels like a transatlantic separation. They are still young enough to pine as though pining were an Olympic event. Though they see each other almost every day, they pen indulgent letters, drunk on bad poetics. “Jesus H.,” Charles says, uncrumpling a rough draft he lifted from Nate’s trash can, “you’re turning into a Celine Dion song.”
    On the occasions when Janie is dressed up and doesn’t turn heads in a restaurant or bar, Nate is surprised. Yet this makes her somehow more special, that she is not as arresting to everyone, that her grace and manner put a hook in his limbic system as if she were designed for him and him alone.
    They are engaged within three months.
    *   *   *
    She hails from Wisconsin, a normal childhood and family, with antecedents she calls Gammie and Papa. “What if your dad doesn’t like me?” he asks, and she laughs. “He won’t like you.” Their circle of friends, however, is thrilled; they are the first to take the leap. They tell and retell their origin story, embellishing it by degrees, and he knows that by their fiftieth anniversary it will involve his rescuing her from a tidal wave in a tropical monsoon. Every time she gets to the rescue, no matter what company they’re in, she takes his hand and quotes him back to him: “‘Stop fighting,’ you told me. ‘I got you.’”
    They marry by spring. After the Olive Garden reception, exhausted and half drunk on bad Chianti, they collapse on the hotel mattress, Janie kicking off her heels, her white sundress unzipped. “Okay, Husband,” she says sleepily, “we have to consummate this thing.” That laugh. “You on top?”
    Nate mumbles, “I would if I knew which direction that was.”
    “Give you a hundred dollars.”
    “I’m a grand, minimum.”
    “We have to. Or it’s not legal.”
    “Right.”
    “And I might change my mind here.”
    By morning they are legal. They honeymoon at Nate and Charles’s apartment, since they blew all their money on the fifty-person affair and their night at the Santa Monica Holiday Inn. Someday, they vow, when they have money, they will go to Paris for a makeup honeymoon, but until then they will always have Westwood. They spend their time drinking root-beer floats in bed and studying for midterms. It is like playing house without the house.
    “Would you like Eggos in bed, Wife? On our finest paper plate?”
    “Thank you, Husband. That would be delightful.”
    A week later she crawls under the sheets with him and announces, “We are having a baby.”
    All around him the world seems to pull itself into wonderful alignment. He blinks back emotion. “Are you sure?”
    “The pee stick doesn’t lie. And five of them certainly do not.”
    They move into a closet-size apartment of their own. Janie swells, her tiny frame accommodating near-impossible proportions. A former Boy Scout, Charles buys a pager for Nate. He is in Abnormal Psych when it goes off; her water has broken. Everything is a blur between Franz Hall and the delivery ward. She is growling and clawing the sheets, and when she takes his hand, she nearly crushes the bones of his fingers. “Look at me,” he says. “I got you.”
    That night they crowd into her single hospital bed, a threesome. Two days later the