Elizabeth and After by Matt Cohen

Author:Matt Cohen [Cohen, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-36877-5
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 1999-03-20T16:00:00+00:00

It was early May when Elizabeth told Adam she was pregnant. “It happened at New Year’s. Can you imagine? Bill got too drunk, the way he always does at the Richardsons’ and when we got home—well…” She said all this while looking Adam straight in the eye. They were at the Timberpost. Since January Elizabeth had been stopping by for lunches as though nothing had transpired. No coy hand-holding, no whispers or winks. Nothing at all to relieve the terrible secret Adam felt weighing on him the whole time, a secret so literally, physically heavy, he felt, especially when he saw Elizabeth, that it could send him crashing through the earth.

He had thought of that secret as an actual stone expanding inside him; when Elizabeth told him about the baby his first impulse was to point out this comical connection. And yet there was that other smaller lighter secret, the one he had already tried to tell Elizabeth; in fact, the coincidence was that Adam had been planning—that very same lunch—to let Elizabeth know of his engagement to Maureen Knight. For months he and Maureen had been keeping it “to enjoy it for ourselves,” as Maureen had put it but now that they were about to tell Albert and Elspeth, Adam had decided he must first inform Elizabeth. But with her eyes on him—daring him to contradict? begging him not to?—he felt his tongue begin to tremble with the words he couldn’t find. Tremble, then tingle and swell. That old feeling had come over him, his face was layered with sweat and he was gripping the table, terrified by what was coming. Elizabeth started again: “When I got pregnant with McKelvey the first time, I changed my whole life, which turned out to be a mistake. So this time I’m not changing anything. I’m just going to go on as I am and hope the baby gets born alive. That’s what I want and I want it very much.”

Adam could feel the sweat pooling in the hollow of his collarbone and armpits. Elizabeth pushed her glass of water to him. Eventually he was able to let go of the table and take a sip. “I … I…” he started but had to wait until his tongue was almost normal. “I wish you every happiness.”

That night Adam sat in his kitchen drinking Scotch and asking himself what it would be like to be married to Maureen while watching the baby he might or might not have given Elizabeth become a man or a woman. That would be a secret big enough to fill a whole house. Then Adam asked another question: what might Maureen think of being married to a man who’d made another woman pregnant on the night of their engagement? Of course there was no need for Maureen to know. But if he told her it would be her secret, too. They’d both have their guts filled with it. Until it killed them or dissolved or wore away or turned them into something else—whatever it was such secrets did.

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