fic: how i lose myself in a shadow cast (pre raphaelites)
HOW I LOSE MYSELF IN A SHADOW CAST.
pg-13. pre raphaelite au. 2414 words. siddal/rossetti. He’s relieved to be alone, which isn’t very romantic, but you see, it’s not that he doesn’t love her-when there’s something that’s that hard, that intense, that tears that many pieces out of you, it’s a relief to get away from it, to be on your own, to not be spun and torn and owned by some kind of mad, mindless thread neither you nor the person you share it with even really understands.
Can't define a purpose, our hands set adrift, islands, cobwebs forming
Coalesce through the vapor, some strange trembling gas
In sleep, I dream of houses in the sky, in the sky
And I watch them go by.
Sometimes I'm pulled away from my own misery
Your hands cover me, eyes drift slowly.
(TO THE LIGHTHOUSE, MEMORYHOUSE)
There is no life higher than the grasstops
Or the hearts of sheep, and the wind
Pours by like destiny, bending
Everything in one direction.
I can feel it trying
To funnel my heat away.
If I pay the roots of the heather
Too close attention, they will invite me
To whiten my bones among them.
(WUTHERING HEIGHTS, SYLVIA PLATH)
They aren’t together at the time. He’s heard she’s doing well-better than anyone really expected her to, really-he’s heard she’s somewhere in London, that she’s studying, that people say she’s beautiful and strange and an anomaly, even in art school. That’s supposed to be surprising.
Howell talks about seeing her-actually, when he sees Howell they’re all a bit drunk and out and he has a blonde with him and Howell talks about seeing her, he makes motions with his hands, rather grasping rather graphic and Gabriel isn’t the fighting type, so he just shoves down his drink in a gulp and gets up to the balcony-the girl has a hand on his knee, a questioning look-he pushes her hand down and goes out to the balcony and New York is very bright back there and he wants to punch something but he doesn’t.
Gabriel’s something of a hypocrite. He’s relieved to be alone, which isn’t very romantic, but you see, it’s not that he doesn’t love her-when there’s something that’s that hard, that intense, that tears that many pieces out of you, it’s a relief to get away from it, to be on your own, to not be spun and torn and owned by some kind of mad, mindless thread neither you nor the person you share it with even really understands. And in the end, it’s only the idea that there is or could be any permanence to the separation that drags you back-but now that’s not necessary because whatever Lizzie thinks, he knows it’s not permanent.
He knows her too well (and he’s too arrogant) to think she won’t come back, even if she left him.
This is his time, out in the city, but he is a hypocrite because somehow, even while he drinks and fucks and talks about how much better things are without her, he doesn’t want it to be the same for her, he can’t let it be the same and he hears about her fucking Howell, pictures the pale legs spreading and his head feels hot, he pictures blood, Howell’s blood squirting from his chest, one of Gabe’s medieval films where he has the dagger in his hand-
He’s being ridiculous, probably. He finishes his drink and goes inside.
-
If you can get your mind back where it should be (with Gabriel, we jump around), he was thinking-as you remember-imagine us as narrators-that they aren’t together at the time. The time he means is a telephone call at four o clock in the morning, which is a more common occurrence than you’d really think and so, Fan Conforth’s wide warm body next to him, is more infuriating than frightening.
“What the fuck?”
“It’s Emma.”
He sits up. He turns on the light. This is when he starts to think-Emma’s her friend, not his-
“Oh, god.” It comes out quickly.
“It’s about Lizzie.”
-
He’s up the next day. He doesn’t tell Fan what’s wrong-she tries to put her hands on his shoulders, standing behind him in the morning and he tells her to get the fuck off. He gets the next flight.
The doctors won’t talk to him, because he’s not her husband and her sister Lydia’s there, picking up and putting down a pack of cigarettes. She talks to him, nobody else will talk to him but she does and they go down to the café together and she looks like some kind of Lizzie grotesque, Lizzie distorted but it’s always that way with relatives of people you fuck or people you love or whatever you call it, they look wrong and he listens while she talks.
“They don’t think it looks good.” Her eyes are red.
“Oh.”
“She overdosed. Again.”
He swallows hard. He doesn’t want to cry in here.
“Did she-did she-“
Lydia’s head has been down. It snaps up.
“Did she what?”
“Did she-again-you know-“
“It’d be nice if you had the nerve to say it, Gabe.”
“Did she do it on purpose? Did she try to kill herself?”
“Did she try to bring you back, you mean?”
“No. No. I didn’t mean that. Jesus.”
“No, I don’t think she did.”
“You know,” Lydia says, “I don’t hate you. Everyone else does, in the family. But I don’t.”
“That’s a vote of confidence, I guess.” He shrugs.
“It doesn’t mean I think you’ve been good for her, though.”
“Probably not.”
“It’s hard to separate sometimes-what’s just that whole world and what’s you. But-“ She breaks off. “Enough is you. Enough.”
“Look, I-I’ve fucked up. Big time. I know that.”
“Yeah.”
“I want to make it right. I-if she’ll still have me, I want us to get married, if she can, as soon as she-“
“You’d better actually mean that.”
“I do. I really do.”
Lydia draws her head back.
“I don’t even know, Rossetti. I don’t know what makes it better and what makes it worse.”
“I want to make things good.”
“She didn’t do this because of you.”
“I know. I know.”
“Sure, you do.”
-
He comes back the next day and says he is her husband. He doesn’t know whether the staff doesn’t know who she is or just lets him slip by anyway.
She’s awake.
Her hair is spread across the pillow. It’s very red, almost more than usual. He shouldn’t notice that. She’s pale. She looks awful, really.
“It’s you.” Her voice is very flat.
“Hey. I’ve-I’m-you-“
He realizes there’s nothing that isn’t going to sound false.
“I’ve been thinking, you know, Gabe? I’ve been thinking-thank god I lived. Because I knew, I knew if I’d died, that you’d think for the rest of your life that I’d spent eighteen months without you and decided I couldn’t live and gone and killed myself. Because you’re just that fucking special.”
“I wouldn’t have thought that.”
“Don’t lie.”
“I’m not-“
“And I’d never get the chance to tell you to stop being such a narcissist, not this time, because it’d be too late.”
“I’m really sorry. I just-I had to see you.”
“I didn’t try to kill myself.”
“I know.”
“And I’m not going to die, they know that, so you don’t have to pretend anything to me.”
He takes a breath.
“I-thank god for that. Really, thank god.”
“You knew that, though. I wouldn’t be up and talking to you if I was going to die, Gabe. Don’t be stupid.”
“I’m not as familiar with the facts of drug overdoses as you seem to think I am, you know.”
“Fine.”
“I thought you were going to die.”
“At least you showed up.”
“I-Sid, of course I showed up, I-“
“Please go.”
“I-“
“I said, please go.”
-
It’s funny, playing the part of her husband to the hospital, it’s not so very difficult and he wonders why he thought the distinction counted so much before.
There’s a nurse in the hallway-thin, red hair, a bit like Sid was towards the beginning and he thinks about photographing her, where he’d put her arms and hands and she walks towards him.
“You’re all right, sir?”
I’d like to photograph you. Your eyes when you look down, the shadow under your lips-I’d put you in a pose like-
“I’m fine,” he says, “I’m-I’m just waiting for my wife, actually.”
“Shame,” she says, “the good ones are always taken.”
He laughs. It’s short.
“I’d hardly say I’m one of the good ones.”
-
He’s there again the next day.
“I-“ She looks very tired. “I’m sorry I yelled at you before.”
“It’s fine.”
“You came back.”
He shrugs.
“Duty, right? Hospital might start thinking it was funny if your husband didn’t show up again.”
“You told them you were my husband?”
“Well, I had to, didn’t I?”
She laughs.
“That is-Gabe, that is ironic.”
“It didn’t escape me.”
He shifts his weight.
“Well, this is very Wuthering Heights, isn’t it?”
“I guess.”
“Why don’t those books ever have men withering and dying?”
“Probably because we don’t have to push small humans out of our genitals, Sid. It kind of lowers our mortality rate.”
“Oh, bullshit. You never even get TB in books. I’ve read them. I know.”
He shrugs.
“It’s probably not fair.”
“No.” She pauses. Her hand lifts a bit. There are wires coming out of it in a thousand places. “I’m glad you came, you know.”
“Yeah, I-I missed you.” He can’t quite figure out if this is true or not. He thinks of nights drinking in New York and Morris’ girl Jane who he hasn’t managed to sleep with and Howell spreading his hands and it doesn’t fit together into one answer, really, but he’s glad to see her now.
“Yeah. Me too. Sometimes.”
“I’d like to try again, you know. You and me. If you want to-if you’ll have me.”
“I don’t know.”
He bends down and kisses her-light, across her lips. Her skin is cold.
“I don’t-I want you to be okay.”
“That’s nice to know.”
-
They make her stay, after she’s better. There’s a day rehab program. She’s staying in her old apartment.
He has a room at a hotel.
“I could stick around, you know.” (Hands in your pockets, Rossetti, as ever.)
“Okay.”
“As your friend, if you want. Just while you’re doing this stupid thing here.”
“If you want to.” She seems indifferent.
“If I want to?”
“If you want me to beg you, it’s not going to happen.” She’s standing in the doorway. Her head is tipped back. The hair is falling all over. Her hands are on her hips.
She couldn’t look less like a photograph.
“Well,” he says, “I would like to stay. I would.”
“Then you can stay.”
-
They haven’t slept together for more than a year, he realizes. It’s funny, thinking of it that way.
The first time (first time after) is on her bed in the apartment and it’s in the middle of the day, after one of her sessions and she starts kissing him as soon as he is inside the door, it takes him by surprise, actually and she pushes him back on the bed and she laughs when he takes off her dress and there’s something right about it, something that fits and how could he have forgotten that?
“Marry me,” he says afterward. He is lying on the bed-he’s still naked.
“When?” she says lazily.
“Now.”
Her head lifts.
“You’re serious.”
“Artists don’t do weddings, Sid. They go down to a judge and shock everyone afterward.”
“Well, you’re the one who would know.”
“I’m serious. Let’s go. Let’s go now.”
She looks at him for a second.
“This is pretty sudden.”
“I’m sorry, I-“
“I think we should do it.”
-
They get a hotel room. It’s the same damn town but they get a hotel room. He says he’ll take her away when the rehab stops.
“I was supposed to be your best man,” Michael hisses over the phone.
“I’m sorry. I really am. It was sudden, you know.”
“I figured out what I was going to wear. I was always going to be your best man. Like-as children-I assumed we were always going to be each other’s best men. And then you go and do this without me.“
“You thought about my wedding when we were children, Michael?”
“I-“
“Were you planning on being the other groom, too?”
“Give Lizzie luck.”
-
“How many women?” she asks.
“I-“
“I saw your pictures of her. The Cornforth woman. What kind of a name is that, anyway?”
He shrugs.
“I’m not with her anymore.”
“You two seemed to be together. Like really together, not just fucking.”
She is sitting at the end of the bed. He leans forward and kisses her shoulder.
“We weren’t.”
“You fucked her. I know you did. When you were with me.”
“Yeah.”
“You can’t do that anymore.” She doesn’t turn around to look at him. “You can’t have other women anymore.”
“You’re exhausting enough for me,” he says into her neck.
“All right.”
“And what about you?” He draws back. “I heard an interesting story from my art dealer, you know.”
She turns around. Her eyes roll a bit.
“After all of this, really-“
“You and Howell?”
She shrugs.
“He might have been making it up.”
“Was he?”
“You don’t get to know, do you?”
-
She likes to come with him on shoots now, when they get back to New York. Sometimes he photographs her and when he doesn’t, she sits next to him and she seems more relaxed, more solid, more herself, when she’s watching him, when she knows what he’s doing.
He’s not sure how he feels about that.
-
He goes out to a dinner she doesn’t want to go to the night she tells him. She laughs at him while he gets dressed, at the blazer and the tie and the jeans and says he looks like an idiot, a trendy idiot and he raises his eyebrows and grins a bit and says maybe I am.
Later in the evening (the evening is long and quick), she takes off his tie and he makes faces while she does.
“I should tell you something.” She looks almost nervous.
“Oh?” He’s distracted.
“I’m pregnant.”
He turns around.
“I-oh, god.”
“Look, I know-I know it doesn’t sound good, under the circumstances it doesn’t look good, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing, it doesn’t have to be-“
“So you want to keep it, then?”
“Well, of course we’re going to keep it.”
“I think the ‘of course’ here is a little-“
“Look, I’m thirty-one, we’re married-“
“You’re a fucking drug addict, Sid.”
“Nice way to put it.”
“Well, there isn’t really a way around that one, is there?”
“I just think-I think it could fix things. Or start to fix things. If I had something to work towards, to work for-“
He realizes she is crying. He doesn’t know what to say.
“Oh.”
“I think I could be happy, you know. I didn’t do this on purpose or anything but I think-“
“I’m sorry,” he says, after a moment. There isn’t really anything else to say.
-
It’s a delicate balance, he thinks-too delicate, being happy, whatever that is, and his photography and everything else fitting into some kind of place and he doesn’t know what he thinks of any of it.
He doesn’t know anything, really. That's not what people keep him around for.
He just sort of lets it all go by him.
pg-13. pre raphaelite au. 2414 words. siddal/rossetti. He’s relieved to be alone, which isn’t very romantic, but you see, it’s not that he doesn’t love her-when there’s something that’s that hard, that intense, that tears that many pieces out of you, it’s a relief to get away from it, to be on your own, to not be spun and torn and owned by some kind of mad, mindless thread neither you nor the person you share it with even really understands.
Can't define a purpose, our hands set adrift, islands, cobwebs forming
Coalesce through the vapor, some strange trembling gas
In sleep, I dream of houses in the sky, in the sky
And I watch them go by.
Sometimes I'm pulled away from my own misery
Your hands cover me, eyes drift slowly.
(TO THE LIGHTHOUSE, MEMORYHOUSE)
There is no life higher than the grasstops
Or the hearts of sheep, and the wind
Pours by like destiny, bending
Everything in one direction.
I can feel it trying
To funnel my heat away.
If I pay the roots of the heather
Too close attention, they will invite me
To whiten my bones among them.
(WUTHERING HEIGHTS, SYLVIA PLATH)
They aren’t together at the time. He’s heard she’s doing well-better than anyone really expected her to, really-he’s heard she’s somewhere in London, that she’s studying, that people say she’s beautiful and strange and an anomaly, even in art school. That’s supposed to be surprising.
Howell talks about seeing her-actually, when he sees Howell they’re all a bit drunk and out and he has a blonde with him and Howell talks about seeing her, he makes motions with his hands, rather grasping rather graphic and Gabriel isn’t the fighting type, so he just shoves down his drink in a gulp and gets up to the balcony-the girl has a hand on his knee, a questioning look-he pushes her hand down and goes out to the balcony and New York is very bright back there and he wants to punch something but he doesn’t.
Gabriel’s something of a hypocrite. He’s relieved to be alone, which isn’t very romantic, but you see, it’s not that he doesn’t love her-when there’s something that’s that hard, that intense, that tears that many pieces out of you, it’s a relief to get away from it, to be on your own, to not be spun and torn and owned by some kind of mad, mindless thread neither you nor the person you share it with even really understands. And in the end, it’s only the idea that there is or could be any permanence to the separation that drags you back-but now that’s not necessary because whatever Lizzie thinks, he knows it’s not permanent.
He knows her too well (and he’s too arrogant) to think she won’t come back, even if she left him.
This is his time, out in the city, but he is a hypocrite because somehow, even while he drinks and fucks and talks about how much better things are without her, he doesn’t want it to be the same for her, he can’t let it be the same and he hears about her fucking Howell, pictures the pale legs spreading and his head feels hot, he pictures blood, Howell’s blood squirting from his chest, one of Gabe’s medieval films where he has the dagger in his hand-
He’s being ridiculous, probably. He finishes his drink and goes inside.
-
If you can get your mind back where it should be (with Gabriel, we jump around), he was thinking-as you remember-imagine us as narrators-that they aren’t together at the time. The time he means is a telephone call at four o clock in the morning, which is a more common occurrence than you’d really think and so, Fan Conforth’s wide warm body next to him, is more infuriating than frightening.
“What the fuck?”
“It’s Emma.”
He sits up. He turns on the light. This is when he starts to think-Emma’s her friend, not his-
“Oh, god.” It comes out quickly.
“It’s about Lizzie.”
-
He’s up the next day. He doesn’t tell Fan what’s wrong-she tries to put her hands on his shoulders, standing behind him in the morning and he tells her to get the fuck off. He gets the next flight.
The doctors won’t talk to him, because he’s not her husband and her sister Lydia’s there, picking up and putting down a pack of cigarettes. She talks to him, nobody else will talk to him but she does and they go down to the café together and she looks like some kind of Lizzie grotesque, Lizzie distorted but it’s always that way with relatives of people you fuck or people you love or whatever you call it, they look wrong and he listens while she talks.
“They don’t think it looks good.” Her eyes are red.
“Oh.”
“She overdosed. Again.”
He swallows hard. He doesn’t want to cry in here.
“Did she-did she-“
Lydia’s head has been down. It snaps up.
“Did she what?”
“Did she-again-you know-“
“It’d be nice if you had the nerve to say it, Gabe.”
“Did she do it on purpose? Did she try to kill herself?”
“Did she try to bring you back, you mean?”
“No. No. I didn’t mean that. Jesus.”
“No, I don’t think she did.”
“You know,” Lydia says, “I don’t hate you. Everyone else does, in the family. But I don’t.”
“That’s a vote of confidence, I guess.” He shrugs.
“It doesn’t mean I think you’ve been good for her, though.”
“Probably not.”
“It’s hard to separate sometimes-what’s just that whole world and what’s you. But-“ She breaks off. “Enough is you. Enough.”
“Look, I-I’ve fucked up. Big time. I know that.”
“Yeah.”
“I want to make it right. I-if she’ll still have me, I want us to get married, if she can, as soon as she-“
“You’d better actually mean that.”
“I do. I really do.”
Lydia draws her head back.
“I don’t even know, Rossetti. I don’t know what makes it better and what makes it worse.”
“I want to make things good.”
“She didn’t do this because of you.”
“I know. I know.”
“Sure, you do.”
-
He comes back the next day and says he is her husband. He doesn’t know whether the staff doesn’t know who she is or just lets him slip by anyway.
She’s awake.
Her hair is spread across the pillow. It’s very red, almost more than usual. He shouldn’t notice that. She’s pale. She looks awful, really.
“It’s you.” Her voice is very flat.
“Hey. I’ve-I’m-you-“
He realizes there’s nothing that isn’t going to sound false.
“I’ve been thinking, you know, Gabe? I’ve been thinking-thank god I lived. Because I knew, I knew if I’d died, that you’d think for the rest of your life that I’d spent eighteen months without you and decided I couldn’t live and gone and killed myself. Because you’re just that fucking special.”
“I wouldn’t have thought that.”
“Don’t lie.”
“I’m not-“
“And I’d never get the chance to tell you to stop being such a narcissist, not this time, because it’d be too late.”
“I’m really sorry. I just-I had to see you.”
“I didn’t try to kill myself.”
“I know.”
“And I’m not going to die, they know that, so you don’t have to pretend anything to me.”
He takes a breath.
“I-thank god for that. Really, thank god.”
“You knew that, though. I wouldn’t be up and talking to you if I was going to die, Gabe. Don’t be stupid.”
“I’m not as familiar with the facts of drug overdoses as you seem to think I am, you know.”
“Fine.”
“I thought you were going to die.”
“At least you showed up.”
“I-Sid, of course I showed up, I-“
“Please go.”
“I-“
“I said, please go.”
-
It’s funny, playing the part of her husband to the hospital, it’s not so very difficult and he wonders why he thought the distinction counted so much before.
There’s a nurse in the hallway-thin, red hair, a bit like Sid was towards the beginning and he thinks about photographing her, where he’d put her arms and hands and she walks towards him.
“You’re all right, sir?”
I’d like to photograph you. Your eyes when you look down, the shadow under your lips-I’d put you in a pose like-
“I’m fine,” he says, “I’m-I’m just waiting for my wife, actually.”
“Shame,” she says, “the good ones are always taken.”
He laughs. It’s short.
“I’d hardly say I’m one of the good ones.”
-
He’s there again the next day.
“I-“ She looks very tired. “I’m sorry I yelled at you before.”
“It’s fine.”
“You came back.”
He shrugs.
“Duty, right? Hospital might start thinking it was funny if your husband didn’t show up again.”
“You told them you were my husband?”
“Well, I had to, didn’t I?”
She laughs.
“That is-Gabe, that is ironic.”
“It didn’t escape me.”
He shifts his weight.
“Well, this is very Wuthering Heights, isn’t it?”
“I guess.”
“Why don’t those books ever have men withering and dying?”
“Probably because we don’t have to push small humans out of our genitals, Sid. It kind of lowers our mortality rate.”
“Oh, bullshit. You never even get TB in books. I’ve read them. I know.”
He shrugs.
“It’s probably not fair.”
“No.” She pauses. Her hand lifts a bit. There are wires coming out of it in a thousand places. “I’m glad you came, you know.”
“Yeah, I-I missed you.” He can’t quite figure out if this is true or not. He thinks of nights drinking in New York and Morris’ girl Jane who he hasn’t managed to sleep with and Howell spreading his hands and it doesn’t fit together into one answer, really, but he’s glad to see her now.
“Yeah. Me too. Sometimes.”
“I’d like to try again, you know. You and me. If you want to-if you’ll have me.”
“I don’t know.”
He bends down and kisses her-light, across her lips. Her skin is cold.
“I don’t-I want you to be okay.”
“That’s nice to know.”
-
They make her stay, after she’s better. There’s a day rehab program. She’s staying in her old apartment.
He has a room at a hotel.
“I could stick around, you know.” (Hands in your pockets, Rossetti, as ever.)
“Okay.”
“As your friend, if you want. Just while you’re doing this stupid thing here.”
“If you want to.” She seems indifferent.
“If I want to?”
“If you want me to beg you, it’s not going to happen.” She’s standing in the doorway. Her head is tipped back. The hair is falling all over. Her hands are on her hips.
She couldn’t look less like a photograph.
“Well,” he says, “I would like to stay. I would.”
“Then you can stay.”
-
They haven’t slept together for more than a year, he realizes. It’s funny, thinking of it that way.
The first time (first time after) is on her bed in the apartment and it’s in the middle of the day, after one of her sessions and she starts kissing him as soon as he is inside the door, it takes him by surprise, actually and she pushes him back on the bed and she laughs when he takes off her dress and there’s something right about it, something that fits and how could he have forgotten that?
“Marry me,” he says afterward. He is lying on the bed-he’s still naked.
“When?” she says lazily.
“Now.”
Her head lifts.
“You’re serious.”
“Artists don’t do weddings, Sid. They go down to a judge and shock everyone afterward.”
“Well, you’re the one who would know.”
“I’m serious. Let’s go. Let’s go now.”
She looks at him for a second.
“This is pretty sudden.”
“I’m sorry, I-“
“I think we should do it.”
-
They get a hotel room. It’s the same damn town but they get a hotel room. He says he’ll take her away when the rehab stops.
“I was supposed to be your best man,” Michael hisses over the phone.
“I’m sorry. I really am. It was sudden, you know.”
“I figured out what I was going to wear. I was always going to be your best man. Like-as children-I assumed we were always going to be each other’s best men. And then you go and do this without me.“
“You thought about my wedding when we were children, Michael?”
“I-“
“Were you planning on being the other groom, too?”
“Give Lizzie luck.”
-
“How many women?” she asks.
“I-“
“I saw your pictures of her. The Cornforth woman. What kind of a name is that, anyway?”
He shrugs.
“I’m not with her anymore.”
“You two seemed to be together. Like really together, not just fucking.”
She is sitting at the end of the bed. He leans forward and kisses her shoulder.
“We weren’t.”
“You fucked her. I know you did. When you were with me.”
“Yeah.”
“You can’t do that anymore.” She doesn’t turn around to look at him. “You can’t have other women anymore.”
“You’re exhausting enough for me,” he says into her neck.
“All right.”
“And what about you?” He draws back. “I heard an interesting story from my art dealer, you know.”
She turns around. Her eyes roll a bit.
“After all of this, really-“
“You and Howell?”
She shrugs.
“He might have been making it up.”
“Was he?”
“You don’t get to know, do you?”
-
She likes to come with him on shoots now, when they get back to New York. Sometimes he photographs her and when he doesn’t, she sits next to him and she seems more relaxed, more solid, more herself, when she’s watching him, when she knows what he’s doing.
He’s not sure how he feels about that.
-
He goes out to a dinner she doesn’t want to go to the night she tells him. She laughs at him while he gets dressed, at the blazer and the tie and the jeans and says he looks like an idiot, a trendy idiot and he raises his eyebrows and grins a bit and says maybe I am.
Later in the evening (the evening is long and quick), she takes off his tie and he makes faces while she does.
“I should tell you something.” She looks almost nervous.
“Oh?” He’s distracted.
“I’m pregnant.”
He turns around.
“I-oh, god.”
“Look, I know-I know it doesn’t sound good, under the circumstances it doesn’t look good, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing, it doesn’t have to be-“
“So you want to keep it, then?”
“Well, of course we’re going to keep it.”
“I think the ‘of course’ here is a little-“
“Look, I’m thirty-one, we’re married-“
“You’re a fucking drug addict, Sid.”
“Nice way to put it.”
“Well, there isn’t really a way around that one, is there?”
“I just think-I think it could fix things. Or start to fix things. If I had something to work towards, to work for-“
He realizes she is crying. He doesn’t know what to say.
“Oh.”
“I think I could be happy, you know. I didn’t do this on purpose or anything but I think-“
“I’m sorry,” he says, after a moment. There isn’t really anything else to say.
-
It’s a delicate balance, he thinks-too delicate, being happy, whatever that is, and his photography and everything else fitting into some kind of place and he doesn’t know what he thinks of any of it.
He doesn’t know anything, really. That's not what people keep him around for.
He just sort of lets it all go by him.