What if???
It crossed my mind that unlike pulling my unprotected dick out of some boy’s ass before I came, I could possibly be getting Yulia pregnant.
I also began to wonder when she had her periods, because I never seemed to be aware of them. If she was pregnant, then I was in trouble.
I kind of liked the idea of becoming a father, but I wasn’t sure about being stuck with Yulia. I imagined having to take her back home to New York, where she would see that, indeed, all my friends were “faggots,” just as they seemed to her from the photos in my photo album.
I imagined that I may even want to be sleeping with men again. And I thought of my family in New York, which would probably hate her, her attitude, her non-stop smoking. That I would bring home a Russian bride was probably the last thing they expected. And she would probably despise them for their snobbery and self-righteousness.
Every day, I looked for evidence of her period and wondered if she was already pregnant. Or, could she have been pregnant and have had an abortion – women here seemed to have abortions as frequently as they had warts removed.
I had no idea how to bring up any of these issues, periods, abortions, pregnancies, and I realized that I knew next to nothing about female anatomy, like an inexperienced teenager.
One night, when I couldn’t sleep well, I phoned Henrietta and asked her about Yulia’s period. How do I know if she’s menstruating, what does it look like. Immediately, Henrietta suspected that Yulia was probably pregnant, and if not, she was probably entrapping me into marrying her.
“That can’t be,” I said incredulously. “She smokes like a chimney and she drinks beer all the time, what kind of pregnant woman does that?”
“You’ve got to break up with her,” Henrietta said and every morning thereafter, she would phone me at the office and before even saying hello would ask, “have you dumped her yet?”