The World Without You Read Online Free PDF Page B

submerged.
    She is woken by the sound of a cell phone ringing. She reaches into her bag, but it’s Nathaniel’s phone, not hers.
    He pulls over to the side of the road. He’s nodding, nodding, taking in some news.
    “Who was that?” she asks when he hangs up.
    “The chair of the department,” he says. “It seems I’ve won some award.”
    “Nathaniel!” she says. “Congratulations!”
    “I guess.”
    “What do you mean you guess ?"
    He’s quiet.
    “Well? Aren’t you going to tell me what it’s for?”
    “Outstanding teacher of the year. I’m supposed to give a final lecture.”
    “A final lecture?”
    “Exactly. I’m forty-four years old, and they’re already packing me off. They’ll hang me like antlers from the wall.”
    “Look at you. It’s amazing news, and you turn it into a cause for mourning.”
    “I’m just dreading it, that’s all.”
    Nathaniel is a professor at Columbia, a behavioral economist turned neuroscientist, possessor of not one but two PhDs. He doesn’t like to talk about this—his PhDs, his success, his work in general. Now, though, the secret is out, because last year he appeared on the cover of the New York Times Magazine in an article called “The New Frontier: How Neuroscience Is Reshaping Human Consciousness.” To Nathaniel, this has all been mortifying. The photograph, certainly—he still gets ribbed by his colleagues—but also the phrase “whispers of a future Nobel Prize,” which appeared in the article next to his name. He’s aware of these whispers; he’d just prefer it if the rest of the world weren’t aware of them, too. Clarissa likes to say that his carefully honed reputation for sloth has been ruined. But that’s not what bothers him. He’s simply embarrassed by it all. “It’s the life of an extremely small-time rock star.” Only that, he says, overstates matters. He doubts there’s a rock star small-time enough to rival him.
    Now, on the Merritt Parkway, he’s close to the car in front of him, too close, Clarissa thinks, so she tells him this, and he touches his foot to the brake. There’s construction ahead. A car is pulled over at the side of the road, and people stop to rubberneck. From behind them comes the sound of a police siren. “I think I’m about to ovulate,” Clarissa says. She has this idea that there’s an exact moment they’re supposed to have sex, though the window is a good deal larger than that, twenty-four to thirty-six hours, most people say. But within that window, certain times must be better than others.
    “We don’t have to do this,” Nathaniel says.
    “Do what?”
    “Be so precise about things.”
    “Precision matters.”
    Still, he wonders aloud whether there might not be a better approach. No basal thermometers or home ovulation kits. Just have sex when they want to. It would relieve the pressure from them.
    “It would decrease our chances.”
    “It’s just that you’re so anxious,” he says.
    Anxiety, she knows, can contribute to infertility. Not getting pregnant is making her anxious, which is making her not get pregnant. Maybe if she pretended she didn’t want it so much it would come to her unbidden.
    “Worse comes to worse, there’s adoption.”
    She knows this, of course, but it stings her to hear it. There are subjects she simply can’t contemplate, as if merely to entertain them will bring them on.
    Ahead of them, the traffic moves so slowly it appears not to be moving at all. She thinks of drives to the Berkshires when she was a girl, those weekends when it seemed to her that everything was one long car ride, she and her sisters jostling in the backseat, Leo on their mother’s lap in front, their father behind the wheel singing songs, making up word jumbles and dictionary games, doing whatever he could to distract them.
    A mist settles on the car. Nathaniel sprays wiper fluid across the windshield, and for an instant it feels as if they’re driving through a carwash before the view in