Expecting

The calendar indicated spring, but the weather was equivocal and kept the city on hold. Steep sunlight, as yet unfiltered by any leaves, dazzled the eyes and burned the skin, but the winds were icy. A month of recidivist weather: tomorrow it might easily snow. Leonard and Halli Losco were driving home after their Sunday brunch in the Market—a ritual that had been central to their life together since they had met four years ago, but which Losco suspected might soon be subject to suspension, or worse. Halli was due in two weeks and last night had experienced some preliminary cramping, a benchmark they'd learned about in the pre-natal classes that had recently concluded.

"So here we go," Losco had said.

"Not yet, silly," she'd told him, curled on her side, her head on his shoulder while his eyes probed the ceiling, as if for hairline cracks. "I mean, it could be a couple more weeks, even more."

Losco as a child had been so anxious that, had he grown up three decades later, he'd have been well acquainted with shrinks and therapists and would have swallowed medication with his morning juice. Instead, he'd painstakingly coached himself beyond his phobias and become—as his business partner, Vance, put it—cowboy calm. He was a bulky, plodding kid with black-frame spectacles and curiously abbreviated legs. Sitting very upright at his school desk, he seemed of average height, even a bit above, but when he stood up, his large head remained more or less at the same level and his true stature was revealed. This anomaly generated both merriment and considerable creativity among his schoolmates, who called him Tiny Lessco, Lost-legs, and Legs-low, as well as Colossco, Moscow, and Loser Losco. More laconic peers skipped the preliminaries and simply shoved or struck him, though seldom with any committed hostility. Allusions to his ethnicity—he'd inherited the swarthiness and vaguely Semitic features of the Maltese parents who insisted on ferrying him to and from school each day—were less frequent and, when they came, oddly tentative. Possibly his schoolmates considered ethnic slurs superfluous, given his physique, or else they didn't know how to go about disparaging the Maltese, who were not quite Wops, or Kikes, or Greasy Greeks, or Pakis, or anything else, and came from an island no one had heard of or could find on a map.

Then Losco chose Stendahl's Le Rouge et le Noir for his grade ten French project and was struck by its little hero's Napoleonic willpower. It hadn't occurred to him that you could so fully and plausibly concoct a new character for yourself, thus tightly regulating how others saw you. Invisibility was not the answer after all. Nor was a class clown's ingratiating hi-jinks. Image management was the key. So Losco—constantly goading and grading himself—worked to perfect a quiet, wry, never-ruffled persona that his peers slowly began to notice. At university he was widely admired and even imitated by men who, a decade earlier, would have despised or simply overlooked him, or noticed only his oddly truncated lower half, a feature he had not grown out of and continued to regret. Still, he was rarely anxious now about his physique or any other thing. His years of disciplined shamming had convinced his very core.

Halli was the sort of woman whose every step or gesture is a small calamity for any watching male—so Losco told himself, with pride. Her slimness and tallness (she was taller than he was anyway) seemed to him patrician; she moved with a panther's elastic ease and grace. Yet she seemed unaware of, or indifferent to, her charms. Her large brown eyes appeared wholly uncalculating—instead sympathetic and gently amused. She laughed often but not at jokes (she hated jokes). She lapsed easily into reveries or trances but in a moment could bear down and focus with tenacious practicality.

He had never been with a woman of such varied enticements, and hardly a day passed when he didn't shake his head and...