Bruce Walters had spent his adult life avoiding domesticity. Marriage, sobriety, 9-5, these were -- he'd been sure -- not for him. Marriage and sobriety turned out to have charms he'd not expected. Of course, marriage to Janet was far from a rut. She didn't let a day go by without a crisis.

But, at least he no longer had to worry about the university and her father finding out that he was sleeping with her. If she didn't cook him the dinners he'd always thought of as part of marriage, at least their visits to restaurants brought no fear of discovery.

Even though he realized -- when he thought about it clearly -- that the brief ceremony couldn't be expected to change Janet into a housewife, he was still a little disappointed that she did so little housework. His standards weren't high, weren't even as high as hers, but he did realize that the rugs weren't going to be vacuumed unless one of them did it. Janet wasn't in school; she wasn't at work; what did she do with her days? She couldn't spend all her time throwing up.

"You think," she said, "that you are the only one with a life. When you're at the University, I should be running around dusting and vacuuming. Well, running around is harder these days. So I spend a little time watching General Hospital. When I was your student, you expected me to read all that stuff. Now, I'm your wife, you expect me to make your meals and iron your shirts.

"I never asked you to iron my shirts. I don't think we own an iron."

"You would. Well, I'm carrying your child; that's enough work for anybody. You should have thought of that before you got me pregnant." That wasn't the way he remembered it. Whether the pregnancy had been her carelessness or -- as he had often suspected -- her idea, he hadn't been consulted.

The charms of sobriety were less surprising. He'd always cut out the booze when he was doing the final draft of his poetry. His previous dry times had lasted for as long as a week at a stretch. Now, realizing that alcohol was a threat to the fetus growing within Janet, he'd gone cold-turkey to set her a good example. (Besides, he was trying to put together another book.) Since she was too young to buy liquor legally, this made her supply harder to acquire. If Janet didn't join in his sobriety, she drank less than she had when he was outdoing her.

Even 9-5 started to be attractive. He'd already learned that Janet was unwilling to share his attention with anyone -- even anything -- else. So, he left home every morning to go to his old office. He wasn't teaching that summer, but the university didn't reassign faculty offices for that reason. He put in a couple of hours polishing his verse, maybe turning one set of his old notes into a poem. He ate lunch on campus and visited the library. He either prepared for the advanced course he would teach in the autumn quarter, Cummings, or worked a Nation crossword he'd brought from home. Then he put in another couple of hours on his poetry. He got home in time to take Janet out to dinner. All right, it was closer to 11-5 than 9-5; it was still a solid block of work seven days a week.

And since he spent those hours alone, he could be attentive to Janet when he was with her. Aside from dinners, some campus events, and a few visits to her family, they spent their time at home. She didn't fit in with his fellow faculty, and he didn't fit in with her fellow students. For that matter, neither of them had socialized much previously -- searching for bedmates excepted. As he was neither drinking nor bringing a woman home, he had no reason to visit the cocktail lounges which had been his previous social milieu.

At home, they watched TV -- more than he ever had as an adult. This being summer, Janet complained about the number of reruns. Bruce couldn't see the difference. Each series had only one plot, not that the different series had such different plots. If it was desirable to watch the same show when the villain was named Smith even though you'd seen it when he was named Jones, why complain that it was a rerun of the episode when he was named Jones? And when had Janet, who was supposed to have spent the previous year studying, seen those episodes anyway?

Their other recreation pleased them both more. Pregnancy hadn't lessened Janet's erotic interest. He worried about damaging the fetus, but that only led them to new positions. Neither him on top nor her on top looked safe. He persuaded her to stand bent over. The best piece of furniture for that was his old desk. He'd originally planned to keep his home office as a refuge, but most of the time he spent in it was with her.

This was something else which -- like versifying -- he could perform better while sober. Even so, he couldn't perform every night. Janet, on the other hand, was nearly insatiable. On nights when they went to bed without visiting his home office first, he brought her to two -- sometimes three or four -- climaxes with his hand.

Even the pleasures she derived from a four-climax night didn't seem to sweeten Janet's mood for longer than it took to achieve it. When she wasn't bitching about television reruns or some immediate problem, she was bitching about being pregnant and the prospect of looking after a baby.

Bruce suspected that bitching would be Janet's major contribution to parenthood. He could ignore a messy house and a sink full of dishes. (A sink full of dirty dishes in a house which provided breakfast for two, lunch for one, and almost no dinners, was a wonder in itself.) He didn't feel capable of ignoring a baby with a messy diaper.

But the prospect of parenthood wasn't totally unpleasant. He got When We Were Very Young out of the University Library and put bookmarks at the Connie poems in his volumes of Steffano. "My Little Connie, bathed and bare," Steffano had written in "The Towel." Bruce could see his own Connie bringing him a towel to dry her hair.

It would be a girl; the ultrasound technicians were positive. Of course, she would be named Janet rather than Connie. Still, the second Janet in the house would need a nickname.

As Janet's pregnancy advanced, her behavior didn't improve as he had hoped it would. If she'd been honest and logical, he could have reasoned with her that she couldn't receive pain that might hurt the baby. They could seek out sorts of pain that didn't. But she wasn't logical and was anything but honest, especially with herself. She denied wanting pain, she merely misbehaved until she received some.

Among other problems, her passion for misbehavior meant that he couldn't afford to tell her what was important to him. Rather than hearing that as areas where she should take care, she would hear that as areas which she could use to rouse his anger.

One night, when he got home, she was still in her bathrobe. Instead of apologizing or explaining her state of undress, she greeted him with, "Why do you get this Communist shit?" She shoved the latest copy of The Nation into his hands. Now, The Nation wasn't quite Communist in editorial stance, though it had certainly been sympathetic to the CPUSA throughout its past. Still, that question demonstrated more awareness of the print in her environment than he'd come to expect from Janet.

"I told you; I get it mostly for the crossword in the back."

"Fine story. Dad was here when the mail came, and he blew up." Which explained where she had got her information.

"Well, this is our house. If your dad doesn't approve of our subscriptions or our housekeeping, tough shit!"

"That's awful uppity of you." He'd intended for the inclusion of housekeeping to spread the immunity over her as well. He remembered, too late, that she didn't consider housekeeping her responsibility. He wasn't sure that she considered anything her responsibility.

He'd been working. He wanted dinner and some peace, followed by a nice bit of lovemaking. He wasn't going to get any of that. He would certainly get nothing resembling peace until Janet got the pain she craved. The living room was the wrong place. He grabbed The Nation and headed up the stairs. "Motherfucker," Janet said pounding his back all the way into his office. He could probably have moved fast enough to leave her behind, but he didn't want her trying to run upstairs in her condition. "Where do you think you're going?"

"I'm putting the magazine," he said, "where it belongs. I keep the undone crosswords in a pile by date."

"Not until you've apologized for embarrassing me in front of Dad." She'd apparently been wearing the bathrobe when her father came. The mail never came earlier than 3:00 in the afternoon. But not bothering to dress all day embarrassed Janet less than having her husband subscribe to a -- however left leaning -- clearly intellectual magazine. He tossed the magazine on a fairly short stack before turning to face her.

"Why aren't you dressed?"

"Dad brought me a big bag of Fritos," she said. It could hardly be called an answer. "I'm not ready for dinner yet."

"Was your mouth as dirty when you were talking to your father?"

"My mouth? You should have seen him."

"However dirty I would have thought his mouth had I heard him, you shouldn't talk like a stevedore. And you shouldn't entertain in your bathrobe either. You're supposed to dress fully before breakfast; you didn't put on one article of clothing before lunch." Well, he cared about these points, but not deeply. And, since she would disobey the next time she wanted punishment, he wouldn't mention anything which would threaten the baby.

"He didn't call before he came, and it was just Dad, anyway. What are you doing to me?"

What he was doing was pulling her over to the desk. He grabbed her left wrist and her hair to force her to bend down with her face inches from the desktop. He held her in an arm lock with his left hand while he lifted the skirt of the robe with his right. He'd wronged her. She was wearing one article of clothing, panties. He tore them down before scrabbling in a drawer for the whip he'd made from an electric cord.

Biting blows on the outside of her legs and her hips would deliver a good deal of pain to Janet without harming the baby directly. What consequences would result from her struggles and any possible convulsions of the womb resulting from the pain -- that was a different question. Bruce paused in his beating to feel her cunt. It was as wet as he'd suspected. He rubbed the cunt lips together while she wiggled. When he reached up to check the hardness of her nipples, he found a bra. She'd managed to don two articles of clothing in the last seven hours. He had some trouble unsnapping the bra while keeping her in the arm lock, but he found a hard nipple when he had done so. He gave it a pinch through the cloth of the robe.

He switched hands on her wrist to reach up under the robe. He pinched her other nipple harder. "Oww!" Janet said, "Motherfucker." She kicked his ankle.

That was his signal to switch hands again and resume his whipping. He raised welts all over her ass and right leg. Then he fingered her cunt again while still holding the whip in that hand. She climaxed while he was rubbing her clit. Then she collapsed onto the desk. He took off his shirt, shoes, and socks before his trousers and shorts. She stood up when he came over.

"You can't," she said. "I'm tired and sore. I can't stand bent over like that."

"Turn around," he replied. "Sit on the desk." She winced when she did. He grasped her hand. "Now lie back." He had to bend his knees a little bit to line his cock up with her cunt, but he slipped right in. He raised her legs to his shoulders and supported himself on his left hand. He found himself striking against something when he drove in, so he stopped to lower her legs to his waist. Then she was hot and moist and cooperative. He played with her tits with his right hand.

When he felt himself start to peak, he began rubbing her clit again. Her heels beat against his legs as she climaxed. He slid almost all the way out and drove into that hot, clutching cunt. Then he pumped gallons into her.

When he felt his arms bending and his weight beginning to rest against her belly, he wrenched himself away. He turned around and half sat on the desk facing the room. He put his left hand out to touch Janet. When she stirred, he straightened. "I'll take a quick shower," he said. "We can go out to eat when you're ready." She liked long tub baths these days.

But when he came out of the bathroom, she was dressed. "Hurry up," she said. "I'm hungry."

She winced when she sat down in the restaurant, but whatever soreness his beating had left on her ass didn't prevent her from plopping down in front of the TV set when they got home. He lasted through one show, and then went to bed.

He came home towards the end of the summer to find Janet in the kitchen drinking Bloody Marys. She had a half-gallon jug of vodka on the table, and an opened carton of small cans of V8.

"Join me," she said.

"Not now. Where did you get that, anyway?"

"All the more for me, then."

"You can't mean that. There's enough there for a regiment."

"You ran through them fast enough. Nothing worse than a reformed drunk."

There was enough vodka left in the bottle to kill Janet, let alone the baby. He made himself a pitcher of orange juice and sat down across from her. "Hey!" she said when he poured himself a drink from the jug.

"You offered." At first, the drinks were just to keep her from having it. Soon enough, though, he felt better. He'd been worrying about her, about the baby, about an idea which was nearly a poem, about his whole future. By the third screwdriver, he wasn't worrying about anything. Even when she went to the refrigerator for another carton of V8, he just took that as an opportunity to pour himself a stiffer drink without risking her complaint.

By the time the pitcher was low in orange juice, his bladder was full. He went up the stairs to the bathroom. Once he'd taken care of that problem, he took off his jacket and hung it in the closet. Something was filling the inside breast pocket. Of course! it was a Nation with a half-done crossword. He'd put it crosswise on top of the stack.

In his office, he couldn't find the stack of magazines. He couldn't be that drunk; he felt almost sober. There didn't seem to be a Nation in the office. "Janet!" he shouted.

She came upstairs. "Did you like your surprise?"

"What surprise?"

"Remember you wanted to work crossword puzzles. I got you a whole book." She lifted it off the desk. It's title was Dell Easy Crosswords.

"Easy?"

"Sure. You don't need those red magazines with only one page of crosswords. This is full of crosswords, more in the one book than in all the magazines I threw out."

"Threw out?!"

"And you complain I don't keep things neat enough. You had magazines from months ago."

Words failed him. He grabbed her and, on his second try, tossed her over the back of the armchair. One of her kicking feet hit his thigh as he reached in the drawer for the whip. It hurt, but not as much as it would if it had landed on his balls an inch away. Not bothering to strip down her slacks, he beat her until his arm was tired. He crossed over to whip her from the other side with his left hand. This time, Janet's kick did land on his balls. He was in such agony and nausea that he barely made it into the bathroom fast enough so that his vomit landed in the toilet.

When he'd rinsed out his mouth, he staggered into the bedroom and collapsed on the bed.

"I'm sick," Janet woke him to say. "I'm bleeding." She was lying in bed beside him. "Call a doctor." He pulled back the sheet. There was blood on the bottom sheet and on her thighs. Her thighs -- the baby!

A glance at the clock and out the window told him it was 4:00 a.m. No time to call the doctor. He dialed 911, instead. The paramedics called ahead, and took her straight to an operating room when they got to the hospital.

"Your wife," a nurse told him hours later, "is still in serious condition, but the prognosis looks good."

"The baby?"

"Was already lost when you arrived. Our efforts were to save your wife."

After looking in on Janet, he went home to cry. This wouldn't have happened if he had been sober. He poured the rest of the jug of vodka down the drain.

Janet recovered more every day. He saw that the baby had succumbed to one risk in what had been an incredibly risky future. Deciding that no later child would ever be put to those risks, he got a vasectomy before Janet came home. He took care of her until school started, and then her father paid for a cleaning woman Tuesdays and Thursdays. Despite the demands Janet put on Mrs. Jackson's time, the house looked neater and smelled cleaner than it had all summer. Bruce found himself washing dishes the night before Mrs. Jackson came.

Bruce visited some AA meetings, but the program involved telling your story, and he couldn't bear to tell anyone about the night he'd killed his own baby.

He moved his Nation subscription, and then all his subscriptions, to his address at the university. He didn't sleep or eat or bathe there, but otherwise he lived in his office. He got there at 9:30, left at 6:00 to pick up some take-out to share with Janet. He got a cot to put in what would have been the baby's room and slept there. Janet was an invalid and needed her own space. Out of the hospital, Janet had taken to sleeping later and later in the mornings and watching TV late at night.

One night, he'd left her watching TV and gone to bed. He awoke when the bedclothes were dragged off his body. "I'm horny," Janet said.

Already naked herself, she opened his pajamas and sucked his cock until it firmed. Then she gored herself on his horn. The cot creaked alarmingly under her motions, but that wasn't enough to dampen his excitement. She was lush and wet around his cock and her tits filled his hands. "Oh!" she said at her climax, "Yes!" Then she dropped down on him. He held her and patted her back as she recovered her breath. When she got off and went back to her room, he got up himself. He visited the bathroom and remade the cot. He lay there for a while before falling asleep. He hadn't had a climax.

The next day was Saturday, and his last class let out at 2:00. Instead of going back to his office, he went home. Janet was in her bathrobe and nightie watching television. She hadn't dressed since getting home from the hospital. He waited for the commercials before trying to get her attention. "About last night," he began.

"I was horny."

He decided to not pursue the derivation of that word. "The cot is an inconvenient bed for sex. Why don't I move back into the bedroom?"

"All right."

"And if you get dressed," he decided not to suggest a bath, though she needed one, "I'll take you out to a good restaurant. You must be tired of takeouts."

"Buy me a drink."

"I'll buy myself a drink. I'm not drinking these days, so if somebody steals sips I probably won't notice."

Whatever her state of personal hygiene, Janet wore full makeup for their excursion. That night, their sex satisfied both of them. The next morning, he enticed her into sharing a shower. It was quite a long one, and he made certain that his caresses were with soapy hands. He changed the sheets while she watched TV.

Tuesday morning, he bought a local paper to look up the TV schedule. He called in the middle of "The Days of Our Lives." As Janet wouldn't leave that for a fire in the house, much less a telephone call, the cleaning woman answered.

"Mrs. Jackson, this is Bruce Walters."

"Yes, Mr. Walters."

"I would really appreciate it if you cleaned up the main bedroom as much as possible today. I don't know what the rest of your schedule looks like, but I would accept anything else you have to leave undone."

"The laundry is already in the washer."

"Well, use your judgment."

"I think I can take care of the bedroom."

"Thank you."

And, when he got home, the bedroom looked clean. As the windows were open on a quite chilly day, it smelled clean, too.

He phoned Mrs. Jackson on Thursdays after that. They would discuss the cleaning schedule for the next week. He established a pattern of sharing showers with Janet Monday, Wednesday, and Friday nights. He took Janet out to dinner Tuesdays and Thursdays. Most Fridays, there were entertainments on campus which interested Janet. He didn't make a point of her dressing on other days.

His father-in-law actually got Janet to register for the winter quarter, and she resumed what was -- for her -- a normal life.

Meanwhile, all the time he'd spent on poetry began to pay off. He had more than he needed for a book, and selected ruthlessly. He couldn't bear to look at, let alone rewrite, the poems celebrating Janet's pregnancy. Vaguely, he was aware that the rest of his selection -- even many of the poems themselves -- reflected the darkness of his mood. The hell with it; poets told the truth. If the readers bought a book to see him bare his soul, they shouldn't bitch that his soul was a little darker than they'd expected.

He sent A River in Africa off to his publishers. The title was one thing he'd gained from his evenings in AA meetings. "Denial," they said. "It's not just a river in Africa."

These days, Janet didn't need to tease him with her disobedience. One "you haven't the balls" and he would wrestle her into what had been his home office. With the crosswords book and the easy chair as mute witnesses, he would whip her until she sobbed.

He wouldn't fuck her there, though. He never could get it up in that room.