Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Stephen McCauley is the author of Alternatives to Sex, True Enough, The Man of the House, The Easy Way Out, My Ex-Life, and The Object of My Affection, which was adapted into a film starring Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Visit his website at StephenMcCauley.com.

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Object of My Affection

Washington Square Press

Chapter 1

Nina and I had been living together in Brooklyn for over a year when she came home one afternoon, announced she was pregnant tossed her briefcase to the floor and flopped down on the green vinyl sofa.

"As if I don't have enough problems with my weight already," she said, draping her feet across the worn arm rest.

I was sitting at the makeshift table on the opposite side of the room reading the World War I diaries of Siegfried Sassoon and eating a fried-egg sandwich. I had a Glenn Miller album on the record player, filling the room with bright music that suddenly sounded inappropriate. "String of Pearls," I think it was. Nina's lower lip was thrust out but I couldn't tell from her expression if she was genuinely upset, so I used my standard tactic for dealing with anything unexpected: I changed the subject. I pointed out a water stain on the hem of her dress and passed her half the sandwich.

"We're out of catsup," I apologized.

"I'm out of luck, Georgie," she said, biting into the toast and showering the floor with crumbs.

It was late in the afternoon on a hot, muggy August day, a sweltering day that felt like a concentration of all the fetid air of the summer. I'd pulled down the shades earlier and the apartment was dark, and except for the record player, the persistent sound of a radio blasting on a street corner somewhere, and the upstairs neighbors, carrying on their daily dinnertime brawl with their teenage daughter -- quiet. The place was no more or less cluttered and disorganized than usual, but somehow the combination of the heat and Nina's announcement made it seem squalid. Her soft blond hair was plastered to her forehead with sweat and her cheeks were flushed a Crayola shade of pink. She looked so young and cherubic, so completely unchanged from the way she always looked, that I, in my general ignorance of pregnancy, felt sure she must have been mistaken about her condition.

She sat up on the sofa and raked her hair off her forehead with her vermilion fingernails. The eight silver bracelets she always wore slid to her elbow with a clank. Perhaps she was suffering from heat exhaustion. The idea that someone who'd spent a good portion of her life crusading for reproductive rights should be unintentionally pregnant sounded crazy to me.

"Maybe I should drag out the air conditioner," I said, glancing toward the closet where it had been stashed since the day I moved in.

"Oh, please, George, let's not go through that routine. I'm not in the mood for it tonight."

I often brought up the subject of the air conditioner when the temperature climbed over eighty, but neither Nina nor I could ever face installing it, especially in the heat. Actually, the air conditioner was only one home improvement we never got around to making, the closet also contained an unassembled bookcase, towel racks for the bathroom, a new light fixture for the hallway, and a couple of extension cords for a twin lamp set we'd never bothered to plug in.

The record player shut off with a loud, springy clunk and the room vacuumed in the noises from every corner of the neighborhood. At least the brawl on the third floor was winding down. I attempted a furtive glance at my watch. My friend Timothy had arranged a blind date for me and I knew it was getting time to change my socks.

Nina caught me rotating my wrist in slow motion.

"Do you have plans for tonight, Georgie?"

"Of course not. When do I ever? Do you want to go out and get something to eat?"

"I don't suppose you feel like going dancing?"

"Dancing? Dancing?" I could see Nina in the middle of a dance floor clutching her abdomen in pain while a red strobe light flashed relentlessly on her face. I have a secret passion for tabloid stories of babies born in astrodomes in the middle of rock concerts, but I wasn't interested in being the midwife in attendance. "Maybe we could do something a little more sedentary?"

"I'm not about to go into labor if that's what you mean."

"I'm not that stupid, Nina. Disco or ballroom?" We did both styles, gracelessly.

"Something noisy, I think."

"Hetero or homo?" We alternated, depending on who wanted to be noticed and who wanted to be left alone.

"Homo," she said emphatically. "Definitely homo. We can go to that Mafia-run joint out in Bensonhurst."

She went to the window and lifted the plastic shade and a shaft of bright and hot sunlight cut across the linoleum floor and touched my foot. A strong smell of garlic and burnt coffee wafted in on the closest thing to a breeze I'd felt that day. There was a gentle stirring in the stale air of the room as she stared out past the fire escape to the crisscross of wires and laundry fines that hovered over the gardens and statuary in the backyards -- tightly packed rows of tomato plants and lush grapevines, Saint Anthony statues and Virgin Mothers in pastel-blue niches.

At that time, Nina was working for subsistence-level wages at a walk-in women's center in Clinton Hill counseling battered wives and rape victims. She was a psychologist. Or, as she often reminded me, almost a psychologist. She'd completed her course work at a clinical psych program out on Long Island and had been attempting to finish her dissertation for over a year. Her subject was the relationship between class background and identification with feminist politics and the perceptions of self-blame in female victims of violent crime. I'm paraphrasing, but that was the gist of it. Among other things, Nina identified herself as a feminist. She was always trying to reconcile her politics with her psychoanalytic training, and I thought the whole conflict was limiting her ability to get anything done in either field. But I've never had faith in politics or psychology so I kept my mouth shut.

She let the shade drop against the sill and folded her aims across her chest as if she were suddenly chilled. "Oh, God," she sighed, "what are we going to do about this baby business?"

I cleared my throat and straightened up on my chair. Nina and I included each other in all of our daily travails, but in this ease I was only too eager to assert my complete lack of responsibility. I've never had anything to do with the propagation of the race. "Have you told Howard yet?" I asked.

"Howard?" She started to laugh, a little hysterically, I thought. "Howard? Why on earth would I tell Howard?"

"Well," I said priggishly, "he is the father, isn't he?"

"'The father.' It sounds so serious. Of course he's 'the father,' George. Who else would be 'the father'? You'd know if there was another candidate for 'the father.' But I don't tell him everything. I don't tell him every move I make. I don't report to Howard each time I go shopping at Key Food. There are some things I don't tell Howard." She was ranting. "I just found out about this this afternoon and I haven't had time to think. I haven't had time to consider it at all. I certainly don't need Howard confusing the issue. You know how opinionated he is."

"I'd forgotten. Pretend I didn't mention it."

"Anyway," she said looking up shyly, "I wanted to tell you first."

She stood there surrounded by the yellow light leakIng in around the edges of the shade and shrugged wearily, and I felt my chest collapse in on my lungs. I got up from behind the arrangement of packing crates and plywood we used as a table, nearly knocking the whole mess on the floor, and put my arms around her. I was obviously the kind of person who could offer a friend in need nothing more...