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Eleanor’s stall, “Welp, see you out in the real world.” I looked in the mirror; the glare and precision of it startled me. I had that old look: that look where you look—old. When I got back to our table, Eleanor was already sitting there lighting one of my Winstons. “You took a long time,” she said.
    “Oh, my god,” I laughed. “I just confessed my entire life story to someone in black boots.”
    “I would never wear black boots,” said Eleanor.
    Which was some residual thing, she said, having to do with Catholic school. Which was why I never finally told her about the pregnancy: She still had weird, unresolved strings to Catholicism. She was sentimental about it. She once told me about a frugal, lapsed Catholic aunt of hers who, when she died, left two large, mysterious boxes in her attic, one full of various marital and contraceptive devices, and one labeled “Strings Too Short to Use,”which was a huge collection of small pieces of string, multicolored and inexplicable, matted together in large coils and nests.
That
, I realized, was both Eleanor’s and her aunt’s relationship to Catholicism: ties too short to bind and therefore stowed away in a huge and secret box. But Eleanor clearly liked to lug her box around, display her ties like a traveling waresperson.
    “You can’t really be a fallen Protestant,” she said. “How can there be any guilt?”
    “There can be guilt,” I said. “It’s my piety, I can cry if I want to.”
    “But being a fallen Catholic—that’s skydiving! Being a fallen Protestant—that’s like mugging an old lady, so easy why bother.”
    “Yeah, but think how awful you’d feel after you’d mugged an old lady.”
    Eleanor shrugged. She liked lapsed Catholics; I think the only reason she managed to like Gerard at all was that they both had been Catholics. Sometimes when Gerard got on the phone to ask her things about Virgil, they would end up talking about Dante and then about nuns they’d known in Catholic school. They’d both attended parochial schools called The Assumption School, where, they said, they had learned to assume many things. More than once I sat at Gerard’s kitchen table and listened while he talked on the phone with Eleanor, uproarious and slap-happy, exchanging priest stories. I had never known a priest. But it was curious and lovely to see Gerard so taken up by his own childhood, so communed via anecdotes with Eleanor, so pleased with his own escape into an adulthood that allowed him these survivor’s jokes, that I would sit there, floating and transfixed as a moon, laughing along with him, with them, even though I didn’t really know what the two of them were talking about.
    “I’ve made an appointment,” I said to Gerard.
    We were in my apartment. He thought he might have left his keys there.
    “Christ, Benna,” he said. “You stare at me with those cow eyes of yours—what am I supposed to say? I’ve got to go off to a gig in a half hour and you say, ‘I’ve made an appointment.’ It’s like what you did the night of the cast party: cow eyes and then ‘I think I’m pregnant.’ ”
    “I just thought you’d want to know.” I kept thinking of that horrible saying mothers tell you about getting the milk and buying the cow.
    “You make me feel like I’m in a tiny store and all I want to do is relax, look, and enjoy, but because I’m the only potential customer there, you keep coming over and pressuring me.”
    “I don’t pressure you,” I said. I have a lump in my breast, I wanted to say but didn’t. Maybe I will die.
    “Yes, you do. You’re like one of those ladies that just keeps coming over to say, ‘Can I help you?’ ”
    I stared at his square chin, his impossibly handsome unshaven chin and then I looked off at the Mary Cassatt print on the wall, mother bathing child, why did I own such a thing, and it was at that moment I really truly understood that he was in love with Susan Fitzbaum.
    Things, however, rarely