Ebenbach
anything. She liked the )-names best-Jessica, Joel, Jeremy-but neither of them had any dead )-name relatives to honor, and of course there was Jacob himself, who was alive. Seemed like bad luck. "Should we go out, do something?" he said. It was hard to be in their tiny apartment for any length of time without going crazy. The heat was inadequate and their walls so close, the shelves tumbling with books and framed photos and decorative things. The window of the apartment looked into what was not a courtyard, but just the large unused space behind all the buildings around them. The space was divided up and empty, aside from some piles of bricks on the concrete and trash thrown from windows like theirs. It was not much to look at, this weird gap in the city's busy continuity, their only view. But they hated to feel forced to go out for dinner or coffee or walks all the time; besides, the city was just as crowded. The evening before, on her way into the subway to meet someone uptown, Naomi ended up trapped on the stairway behind an old couple. They made a blockade in their massive winter coats, holding each other and the handrails on either side. Then, a woman behind Naomi handed off a baby to her, actually placed a small child in her arms as she struggled to get the stroller up the stairs. "I-" Naomi said, but stopped there. Without a word, she slowly climbed the rest of the way, waiting for the baby to explode or capture her heart. In any case, on the bitter cold Sunday after Dalya's phone call, they tried to spend the whole morning in the apartment, eating breakfast and reading, but ended up walking around outside a little and looking into shops. There were many people out, so that at times Jacob and Naomi had to walk single file, and sometimes they found themselves separated and on different edges of the sidewalk. When they found each other again at comers, in eddies in the traffic, they gripped each other's hands and looked up at the buildings that held everyone there as though in a bowl. "I wonder if we could still do this kind of thing if we had kids," he said, leaning against the window glass of a bookstore. She looked around at the several strollers plowing roughly along the sidewalk. There was still a little snow from the storm a couple weeks ago. "I mean in the same way," he said. Jacob was especially worried about what would happen to his music-writing, which he did sometimes, on a weekend or after work. She had to leave him alone in their place those times, while he ran through different word combinations and melodies and phrasings. "There are lots of ways people raise children," she said. Naomi had never thought about what she would look like pregnant. Once, though, a gynecologist had told her that she would probably have to deliver by C-section, because of her hips. She looked at the shape of her hips, hidden by her coat, in the reflection of the window. Behind her 94
FUGUE#30