I wrap the white laboratory coat around me and wait.

In the hospital I have a miscarriage. The inception of a fetus embodied in thick blood. It was hardly alive, no more than a conglomerate of cells. Tony arrives immediately afterwards.

“You should have stayed in bed for a few days,” my gynecologist says, gently admonishing. “As I advised you.”

“I told her the same thing,” Tony remarks. He had never told me that.

I can see as he stands there, hunched over with his eyes latching on to various objects to avoid eye contact, that he does not feel comfortable in the role of a father, or the father of a lost child. Tony, at ease in every social situation, as husband, lover, son, is not comfortable in the new role in which he was about to be cast. Sympathy for him fills me and I reach out and squeeze his hand. The sympathy is lost a few hours later as he begins to lecture me. “Maybe deep down you didn’t want the baby,” or “You could go and see a psychiatrist.”

Because I was at the early stages of pregnancy the miscarriage does not have a major physical impact on me. In fact, the doctor says I can attempt to get pregnant any time I want. The consensus Tony and I reach is to wait for a while. The names, Susan, Cyrus, Ivan, Sarah, have to be discarded for the time being. The baby clothes, the furniture, must be put away. Everything—the bed, the house, even the laboratory—is a little colder without the fetus growing in me, with the knowledge that it is lost.

I work even harder, keeping up a frantic pace until I collapse and sleep for fifteen or twenty hours to compensate. We rarely entertain or go to the movies we used to enjoy so much. We seldom spend leisurely evenings together. At work I am erratic, blood rising and falling in my face at the slightest provocation.

There is a certain sterility about the long, quiet halls of the laboratory with only the automatic equipment tap-tapping. It is as if people walk on tiptoe or have their hands on their mouths when they speak. The atmosphere no longer seems particularly congenial. Conversations in the luncheonette across the street or occasionally in our offices stay close to shoptalk, rarely touching on the personal. My assistant, whose enthusiasm about work had been encouraging, appears scatterbrained and superficial in her ideas. My boss, whose attention to detail I had always admired, seems overly fastidious. I could look for a job somewhere else, consider teaching rather than only doing research ….

This is just a state of mind. I am tired.

In an attempt to slow down a bit I take long walks in the neighborhood. Once on the street behind our house, I see Tony in Jane’s house. He is leaning over the kitchen counter with a drink in his hand and talking to Jane. She is leaning also, looking at Tony and smiling. I pause for an instant and then walk away quickly.