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something exotic. The breeze rose again and rattled eucalyptus leaves. The night was filled with our whispered pleasures. Even the distant scream of an ambulance – an urban distress call for a gunshot victim, somebody being rushed to die in an emergency room, who knows – couldn’t intrude on this moment. The guy with the knife and the parking-lot were forgotten. And when the phone rang in the house, I didn’t feel the urge to answer it. The answering-machine kicked in.
    I was galaxies removed from distractions. I was elsewhere. I made love as gently as I could, imagining the fragility of the womb, underestimating how much of a strongbox it was, and how securely it contained the unborn child.
    Sondra said, ‘I’m not glass, Jerry. I won’t break. Don’t hold back.’
    I closed my eyes. This intimacy with her was different from anything that had taken place before. A shift had occurred, a new level of commitment had been reached. We made love on the deck as if we were touching for the first time. Our energy was frantic. I lost all sense of my body as an entity separate from Sondra. A fusion, then a splintering, inevitable and seismic.
    When I had nothing left to give, she held me inside her. ‘I don’t want to let you go,’ she said.
    â€˜I’m not going anywhere,’ I said.
    â€˜Are you happy?’ she asked. ‘Have I made you happy, Jerry?’
    â€˜Happy’s a wimp word,’ I said. ‘Ecstatic.’ I looked up into the sky, wishing I could see stars. But the night was cloudy.
    She was crying quietly.
    â€˜What is it?’ I asked.
    â€˜I don’t know, I don’t know. Just …’
    I wrapped a hand around hers and squeezed. She cried a moment longer, then forced out a little laugh. ‘I’m being all weepy about this.’
    â€˜There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s perfectly natural. This is as new to you as it is to me. You’re bound to experience strange emotions. Ups and downs. Fears. Joys. You’re carrying another life. I can’t imagine a responsibility as enormous as that.’
    Out in the dark something boomed and reverberated. A backfire. A pistol. After a time, you went beyond the point of speculating about the source of such noises. They became background, soundtrack to the chaotic low-budget movie the city had become. And finally you stopped paying them any attention.
    â€˜I want to be a good mother, Jerry. I want that so badly.’
    â€˜You will be,’ I said. ‘Absolutely no doubt.’ With the edge of my shirt-cuff, I dried the tears on her cheeks. ‘Jacob for a boy. Louisa for a girl.’
    â€˜No way,’ she said.
    â€˜Something you don’t like about Jacob? Or is it Louisa that bothers you?’
    â€˜Jacob’s sort of uncool. And Louisa … I don’t know, I associate it with whalebone corsets and croquet on lawns. Merry old England.’
    We argued about names in a good-natured way for a time. And then, because a warm rain had begun to fall softly through the canyons, we went inside, where one of the two candles had died and the dining-room was a little darker than before.

Friday, 2.22 a.m.
    An electric storm over the city: thunder rolled like mortar-fire through the canyons. The noise insinuated itself into my dream, and I saw two aircraft, banked in a holding-pattern over a busy airport, suddenly collide. The planes crumpled instantly, and bodies began to fall from the battered fuselages; all at once, imbued with the kind of powers you sometimes have in dreams, I was able to zoom in on the faces of those thrown from the gashed and buckled craft. The faces – and for some reason this was the truly upsetting thing – were without expression, showed no fear, no terror. Nor were there any sounds: no screams, no cries of anguish. The victims, strapped to their seats, were unresponsive, as if they’d silently accepted the inevitability