The Paris Review - Fall 2016

just like there was in me. The sympathy I felt seeing her lie there, in the dark,
murmuring to herself, would briefly brush aside my insanity. I would have
the sense that I should leave this poor woman alone.
BETSY GOT PREGNANT.
“I want to marry you,” I immediately said. We were both in her kitchen,
in jogging shorts. I had imagined this day coming, and my saying this.
“I knew I shouldn’t have told you.”
“I love you.”
As I told her I loved her, I felt, as I often did with Betsy, that what I was
saying was a lie, a melodrama, a way to capture her, that things would not
work out, that I was being foolish, that I was acting as if I didn’t understand
the reality of the situation, except that I did and was willing to break things
and make things very bad just so I could get her.
Tears slid down her cheeks.
“Why are you this way?” she asked.
Seeing her pain, I was thrilled to be sharing an important moment.
“I love you. I want to marry you,” I said, as if it explained everything.
Betsy turned around and walked away. After a moment, I followed her
into her bedroom. She pulled her sports bra over her head, pushed down
her shorts, and pulled back the sheets of her neatly made bed. She lay down
on her left side, holding a pillow against her stomach, and closed her eyes. I
didn’t know what to do. I sat on the bottom corner of the bed.
After a while Betsy began to breathe deeply and evenly.
I got into my car to go home. As I drove, I was scared. I felt that Betsy
would leave me. I also felt that our relationship was hollow, that it should
end, that it consisted of my pretending various things and of her being bullied
by my pretense into various halfhearted agreements.
I thought of going to my mother and telling her that I wanted to marry
Betsy, that she had to come with me and make a formal traditional offer. I
thought that if I did this, if I took my mother and did the things that are
done when a match is proposed, I would be acting like someone who had
behaved honorably. I would be showing that I meant what I said.
I took the Metropark exit and went to my parents’ house.
My mother tilted her head to the side and stared at me. Sun was coming
through the kitchen window. She had just bathed and her curly black hair
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