short, solid girl with shiny black corkscrew ringlets—was back hovering over their table. “Are you guys ready to order, or would you like another couple of minutes?”
In the bustle of congratulating the server on her marks and getting the drinks ordered, the significance of what Quirk had said hadn’t quite sunk in. Then Karin and Ted enjoyed a private chuckle over the possible adverse effect of bean casserole on the evening’s erotic potential and decided on steak frites all round. It was only when Giovanna returned with the green Perrier bottle and Ted’s usual glass of Beaujolais that suspicion started to dawn. Ted’s eyebrows crept up as he studied Karin’s face. He didn’t dare ask, but she was nodding.
“Hot damn!”
“I was wondering how long it would take you,” she teased.
“ ‘Take us’, you mean.” Three years of the in vitro song and dance, he reflected, and the four years before that trying everything but.
“To figure it out, silly.”
“Good thing intelligence comes from the mother.”
“This mum says it would be smart to keep it quiet for a while. It’s only two weeks—if you can imagine knowing so early. Lots can still go wrong.”
She must have seen from the way Ted was looking around the Bistro that he was dying to tell all the Giovannas and Fairuzas. But her words settled him. He stared at her wondrous, lightly freckled face. “Yippee,” he whispered.
“So, did you book our flight to St. Vincent today?”
Damn. For over a week now, Ted had been promising to make arrangements for their Boxing Day to New Year’s getaway. Today, the conference had distracted him, but he really had no excuse.
“Yep,” he said. “All set.”
“You did not, you goof. You forgot.”
“Not at all.”
“Show me the tickets then,” Karin playfully demanded.
“They’re paperless tickets. I booked over the Internet.”
“Pants on fire! You’ve never bought so much as a CD over the Internet.”
“I’ll get them tomorrow.”
“I’m not swallowing that one either, Ted. You and I will go together to the travel agent on Tuesday. You know, if anyone ever actually believed any of your lies, I’d haunt your dreams.” She must have noticed that that made him smile, for she added, “And not in a nice way.”
By the time they started home, Ted had already made up his mind to go downtown early the next morning and do his conference preparation then. A ten minutes’ walk brought them from the Bistro to the house, their second in this west Mississauga neighbourhood. It was bigger than their first, a vote of confidence in their future family, and was situated on a street that wound quietly to a dead end. It had more rooms than they needed, than they had needed up till now. The master bedroom seemed almost too big for two. They had joked about having a duty to leave clothes strewn around the floor so the place wouldn’t look so empty. Ted found himself wondering where they’d put the crib. There was room on either side of the queen-size bed.
Karin got there first and slipped under the duvet while Ted was still brushing his teeth. Before joining her, he fed some Schubert into the CD player. Piano Trio in E-flat, Op. 100, it said on the box liner. His non-musical memory continued to struggle with these keys and numbers, but he knew the piece. The second movement in particular was a favourite of theirs. With the piano beating time in the background, the cello introduced the melody. Slow and catchy was how Ted described it in his offhand way. Karin had better words—dark, intimate, stirring, otherworldly—but what she did with it on her instrument was more communicative than any of them. She had yet to make good on her promise to record her reading, so they were going to make do tonight with Leonard Rose on cello.
Ted waited for the opening bars so he could adjust the volume. Then he slid in beside Karin, and around her, and it astounded him yet again how perfect every square millimetre of her skin felt against his. Soft, yielding, resilient, firm, warm, caressing to whatever part of him caressed her. How could anything on earth be this perfect? And within her now another her, another him. Quirk was already pulling him on top of her. He supposed in a few months, they’d find it more convenient the other way up. He looked forward to the swelling of her sweet, perfect belly above him.
He moved slowly but still came ahead of her. Extravagantly, joyously, but silently. Quirk was so quiet in bed that he always suppressed his own urge to cry out. When he rolled off to her right side, he slid his hand between her legs and helped her to her own mute convulsions of bliss before they breathed their tender goodnights and let sleep take them.
Karin and Ted thought of themselves as Torontonians and would have identified themselves as such in Moscow or Beijing. Ted’s department was at the downtown St. George Campus of the university. Karin taught at the Royal Conservatory of Music. In point of fact, they lived just to the west of Toronto in Mississauga. Their neighbourhood had a clean, safe, spacious, suburban feel, which they liked—though not so spacious as to make them indifferent to the charms of cottage country.
The couple had planned to spend the Labour Day weekend with Karin’s father in Muskoka. On Wednesday, when Ted was asked to fill in at the “Punishing Homicide” conference, he urged Karin to carry on with the original plan. It was still hot in the city. He would not be able to spend any time with her anyway, and Markus would enjoy her company. Ted had been perfectly sincere in this suggestion. He got on well enough with Markus himself, but Markus had a playful tendency to turn encounters with Ted into manly jousts, with Karin left only to applaud from the sidelines. It would be just as well for father and daughter to have some unhurried hours alone together. Things would be said on both sides that wouldn’t have come up in his presence. Markus had been a widower for some years and seemed to be managing well. Still, health questions could be gone into, questions of diet and hours of work. For all his twinkling smiles, Markus was an intense, lonely man, capable of using reckless activity to keep himself from brooding. Karin understood this yet put up some resistance at being pushed off to the lake while Ted batched it in the city. On Friday morning, in view of her news, Ted wished she had resisted more, and that he’d given way. He wanted her with him so they could go on savouring the long-awaited pregnancy. This was not the weekend he wanted her letting down her hair with her father. But by now Markus would have done his weekend shopping, and it was too late for him to invite anyone else.
Karin had lessons to give at the conservatory in the morning and a rehearsal of her chamber group in the afternoon. The octet. The way that gang went on, it was anyone’s guess when she’d get started on the one and a half hour drive to the lake. Two and a half on a summer Friday evening. Sometimes Ted thought the string quartet and the opera orchestra should be enough in addition to her teaching, but the clarinettist had a pretty decent studio in his basement and had promised to help her make a demo to send around to record companies.
They parted in the driveway.
“Can I drive you downtown?” Quirk’s cello was safely stowed behind the two seats of her gas-electric hybrid, as was her portfolio of scores. It was a sticky thirty-two degrees, and barely five minutes out of the air-conditioned house her face was shimmering above the collar of her white sleeveless blouse. Sweat had pasted strands of red hair to her cheek. “You could take the train back and a taxi from the station.”
Ted said he might be late that night; he wasn’t sure there’d be a taxi.
“Car-pooling is doomed,” she laughed. “The two of us can’t even do it.”
“See you Monday night.” He was waiting for her to go before he backed his second-hand Corolla out of the garage.
She had her keys in her hand as she threw her arms around him. “No need to tell you not to wait up,” she said over his shoulder.
“Wake me.”