She would be having a mad, passionate affair with Marco, who would be devoted solely to her; she would not have to share Marco with a call girl named Trixie.

Blair closes her eyes to better focus on her rapture, and she must have dozed off because the next thing she knows, the nurse is shaking a blurry black-and-white film in front of her face and saying, “Would you like to see a picture of your twins?”

Twins.

Blair bursts out sobbing.

The next afternoon, there’s a knock on the apartment door, and Blair suspects that, on receiving the news that there will be two grandchildren instead of one, her mother immediately left Nantucket and is now back in Boston. When Blair opens the door, she finds a tall, attractive man in a neatly pressed khaki suit. It takes Blair a moment to recognize Joey Whalen, Angus’s brother.

“Joey!” Blair says. “Are you a sight for sore eyes. You look wonderful. What a surprise!”

“A surprise that I look wonderful?” Joey says, beaming. He kisses Blair on the cheek and hands her a bottle wrapped in brown paper and a bakery bag that smells of chocolate.

“Babka, right out of the oven,” Joey says. “And our old friend, cold duck.”

“You sure know how to cheer a girl up,” Blair says, and she holds the door open for her brother-in-law.

Twins.

Every time she says the word in her mind, it seems more outrageous. Twins. Two babies. Two babies at once. The enormous life change that is having a baby has doubled in an instant. She presently has one of everything—one bassinet, one crib, one stroller—and now she needs a second of each. It’s overwhelming.

Joey steps inside, loosens his tie, and sheds his jacket while Blair admires him. Right after Angus and Blair got married, Joey moved to New York City and landed a job with a prestigious advertising agency that specializes in food products. He worked on the Sara Lee campaign and has been chosen to promote the brand in New England and parts of eastern Canada. He’s going to be in Boston for three to six months, he tells Blair; the agency rented him a suite at the Parker House hotel on Tremont, right down the street from the Marliave, Blair’s favorite restaurant, and gave Joey a house account. He’s wearing a beautiful suit, tailored for him at Alan David in New York, and gleaming Florsheim loafers. He’s clean-cut and freshly shaved, and he smells good—in distinct opposition to Angus, who often forgets to brush his teeth and apply aftershave before he dashes headlong into his days.

Blair pours two glasses of the cold duck for old times’ sake as Joey gets plates and a knife and slices into the warm, fragrant babka. They sit next to each other on the sofa and Blair feels happy for the first time in a long while, despite the fact that she won’t be able to get up off the sofa without help.

“Babka,” she says. “I don’t think I’ve ever tried it before.”

“New York has the greatest Polish bakeries,” Joey says. “I eat so much Sara Lee that it’s a nice change to have something made from scratch. But I’d never tell my bosses that.” He takes a sip of his cold duck. “The other thing I love about New York is the Thai food. Have you ever had Thai food?”

“Thai food?” Blair says. She can’t believe that Joey Whalen, who used to pedal the swan boats and whose idea of a gourmet meal was the oyster stew at Durgin-Park, has become so sophisticated. She remembers how he held Angus’s notebook filled with calculations over the candle flame in a plea for attention and how, at that time, it had been crystal clear that she would be far better off with Angus.

Now she’s not so sure. If she had married Joey instead, she might be living in New York City, visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Sunday afternoons and hanging out in Greenwich Village with the likes of Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg.

“How’s your brother?” Joey asks, which Blair supposes is a natural segue—from Thai food to the battlegrounds of Vietnam.

“Still alive,” Blair says. “He sends letters.”

“It’s an immoral war,” Joey says. “Our guys are over there killing women and children.”

The babies kick with the first bite of babka. Blair can’t believe that Joey now has political opinions. She privately agrees the war is immoral. The last three administrations have valued the eradication of Communism over the lives of American soldiers. But Blair knows Tiger is over there fighting for their continued freedom and she’s proud of him for that.

“So I have two pieces of news,” Blair says. “The first is, I’m having twins.”

Joey gives a whoop and then, crazily, he moves the coffee table out of the way and gets down on his hands and knees in front of Blair so he can rub her belly. “That’s incredible. Not one human life contained inside you, but two. Two!” His touch feels good and Blair feels faintly aroused, sexually aroused, which is wrong on many levels. She laughs and swats at him. “Get up.” She prefers Joey’s enthusiasm to Angus’s reaction yesterday, which fell somewhere between apathy and scientific interest. He had studied the X-ray, trying to see if the twins would likely be identical—one egg that split—or fraternal, two separate eggs, both fertilized. And then, all the way home from the hospital, he wondered aloud if at least one of the twins would be a boy.

Joey sits back down on the sofa, closer to Blair than he was before. “What’s the second piece of news?”

Blair takes as deep a breath as she can manage. The babies have started to crowd her lungs. “Angus is having an affair with someone named Trixie,” she says. Every time Blair says the name, she pictures a character from a Disney movie. “He meets her during the workday. She called here on the phone.”

Joey’s elation at the news of twins twists into something fierce and angry. “You have got to be kidding me.”

“I wish I were,” Blair says, and she starts to cry.

“Oh, hey,” Joey says. “Hey, Blair, come on now.” He puts an arm around Blair’s shoulders and she falls into his arms and sobs all over his fine white shirt. “Angus is a dope. He’s a heel. He’s never known what he has—he’s so damn smart, he just takes everything as his due.”

“I thought he loved me!” Blair wails.

“I’m sure he does,” Joey says. “I know he does. This is just…well, he must be panicking about the moon launch…or the babies.”