Birth Pangs

It was Solly Kerr-Leigh who had first thought of having a foreign student in the spare room. She had seen an advertisement in the Arlington Gazette. "Got a spare room?" it read. "Want to earn some extra cash?"

She had got a spare room, and she did want to earn some extra cash: it was just that she had never regarded the two propositions as being related. Sometimes she sat in the spare room, which had a sash window overlooking the garden and a neatly made double bed whose pillows were always plumped up, and it did seem to Solly like a kind of fund, an investment, in that she expended the same efforts here as she did everywhere else in the house, yet only here did these efforts actually accrue. No one ever came in to squander them. Martin's parents visited twice a year and tactfully left it as they had found it. Otherwise, it remained for the most part untouched, ringing up its weekly balance of housework.

It had white curtains and a white counterpane, and a beige carpet that was as rich and promising as the day it had been laid. When Solly sat there, the weight of her family seemed to move away from her, like a great, crowded liner decked with lights moving out into a dark ocean. She imagined she was a girl, sitting in her simple girl's room. At other times she felt like a guest in her own house, a person who might be taken care of, though she didn't know by whom. But most of all, in the spare room Solly felt she could see what her intentions had been: it was like a little fold in the densely patterned cloth of life, which by chance had remained unexposed to the relentless glare of her household and hence retained its true colors while all the rest had faded.

And as for money - well, if you had a house to run and a husband and three children and were pregnant with your fourth, it was a question not of getting more, but of pawning what you had. It seemed to Solly that her life had a lot of fat; the difficulty lay in finding a place to trim it off, when everything was connected to everything else. Once, Solly had felt powerful in her expansiveness but now, pregnant for the fourth time, she felt aerated, overblown, while Martin seemed correspondingly to harden into a lean, vertical masculinity. He went to work and came back again with a kind of rotary, mechanical movement, back and forth, back and forth, round and round and round like the steel arm of Solly's electric mixer, beating her up into a more and more voluminous foam. She felt an immense need to make contact with some kind of restraining surface. She wanted to feel a boundary with the world, before she was diffused entirely into fleshy relatedness. The spare room appeared to her as the place where this boundary could be established. As her point of entry from the lost simplicity of life, so it was also to be her means of return from all this marshy expansiveness toward a new independence. Once she'd installed a TV up there, apparently, she could expect to get 80 pounds a week for it.

Martin thought it was a marvelous idea.

"What about the children?" he said doubtfully.

"They won't seem so bad to a foreigner," said Solly. "And I'll enjoy having company the nights you're in Reading."

Tuesdays and Wednesdays, Martin stayed in Reading for work.

"There's no point having it just sitting there, is there?" he said.

"No."

"Eighty pounds a week." He blew out his cheeks and sat back.

First there was Betty. She was a Taiwanese girl with a neat, pretty face and a wide, white smile, who wore beautiful clothes made of printed silks. Betty gave Solly's daughter, Dora, a Chinese silk bag with a long, delicate braided handle. She wrote little letters to the boys, William and Joseph, and left them on their pillows, wrapped around two chocolates in the shape of dragons covered in brightly colored foil.

Betty had a French boyfriend who came to pick her up two or three times a week. Solly would open the door and there would be Gustave, standing on the doorstep in the dark with the collar of his coat turned up. He looked like an old-fashioned film star.