Free A Window Across the River by Brian Morton

not writing stories at all.
    Unwilling to write about Isaac and unable to write anything else, she finally did the same thing she’d done when she was seeing Daryl. She decided not to write stories at all. Once again, she turned her attention to essays, reviews, and other things that didn’t matter to her.
    When she got pregnant, she realized that she had to change her life. Isaac was the best man she’d ever known, but their relationship couldn’t survive her pregnancy.
    Maybe it could have if he hadn’t been so insistent. She was clear about not wanting a child, but Isaac wouldn’t let it rest; he hectored her about it for two solid weeks while she was waiting to have the abortion.
    During those two weeks, she began to shrink away from him. He began to seem terribly old to her: his skin, his hair, his breath, his teeth, his preoccupations. He compared her once to Emma Peel, the heroine from some old TV show she’d never heard of, someone he’d had a crush on since the age of five. He looked as if he’d just given her the greatest compliment in his vocabulary, and she felt as if she was going steady with Methuselah.
    Renee was telling Isaac how great it had been to work with him. Nora reached out for Isaac’s teacup and took a sip to
establish her territorial rights. She did this automatically, while continuing to think about the way things had fallen apart five years ago. She remembered taking his arm when the two of them were standing on the roof of a building—they were in someone’s penthouse during a party, and they had ended up on the roof, thirty floors up, looking out at the city—and mischievously asking, “Would you throw yourself off this roof for me?” He had looked at her glumly and said, “Well, I don’t think I would. But I’d probably consider it.” She remembered the look of resignation on his face, as if his love for her was something that he didn’t even want, just something that he’d gotten stuck with, and she remembered that she was at one and the same time full of sympathy, because she didn’t really want to make him suffer, and delighted, because she loved being able to think of herself as a woman a man might throw himself off a roof for.
    Why had she been so cruel to him that night? Because she knew she was going to leave him, and she was so angry at herself, so sick at heart, that she was seized by a wild desire to treat him monstrously.
    He had insisted on accompanying her to the clinic—not taking her seriously when she said she wanted to go alone—and as he sat beside her in the cab, oppressively glum, she wished she had an ejector seat so she could send him popping up into the air and be done with him. While the madman cabbie bolted down Ninth Avenue as if they were in a war zone, she had chattered on about the most foolish things she could think of, knowing that she was hurting him by doing this, and taking pleasure in it.
    Even then, on the street outside the clinic, he’d made one last effort to change her mind. He just wouldn’t give up. She remembered that she said something that finally silenced
him—something he didn’t have an answer for. But she couldn’t remember what it was.
    She didn’t make her decision lightly. She knew it was a grave decision; by the time she had the abortion she was eight weeks pregnant, and the being inside her had a heartbeat and the beginnings of a central nervous system. (Nora couldn’t stop herself from looking at books that charted the development of the embryo.) It wasn’t like lancing a boil. She was prepared to suffer over her choice, and she did suffer—not so much during the day, but at night, while she slept. She kept having dreams in which she was pregnant, though the embryo or fetus was never in her womb: it was growing in her hand, or in her arm—her left arm, her injured arm—or in her brain. The being inside her, in these dreams, was always sleeping—except once, when it was reading a book by Agatha