We heard somewhere that you cannot do it in the ninth month, but that sounded ridiculous to us, so we have proved them wrong. Whoever, wherever, they are. And now we lie here, visible only in our outlines, still sticky, parts still heavy, my big hand resting as it likes to do on the smooth globe of her abdomen. My fingers trace the base of that great curve down to the fringe of her hair, back around under the swell of her breasts, and up along her dark line to rest again. We lie like this, waiting for the boy to move in there, she feeling from the inside, me from the outside, and we talk. We have spoken about names before, and plans. Tonight we make a list of things we won't be doing anymore.

Number one is this very thing: sex. For a while anyway, we will each be healing. At our ages, we agreed we should stop at one, so once we know the boy is here and healthy, I will hang my balls over the edge of the doctor's papered table and fulfill this promise to ourselves. And she will likely have wounds of her own to tend to, so we will bitch to each other while we get over it, and soon we'll do it like rabbits again. Sex, then, perhaps doesn't qualify. It will be resumed in good time.

"I'll tell you one thing," she insists. "I'll never take another picture like Billy Shore." In the authoritative tone I am occasionally permitted to take with her, I agree: "That's right, you won't. If you ever try, I will stop you."

In the shot, sixteen-year-old Billy sits on the chest of a British soldier whose head he has just broken apart with a found chunk of concrete, and he is doing nothing so much as weeping, the lines of his tears cutting through the splattered blood on his face, his arms limp, the stone holding his knuckles to the street. That was how the world had seen Billy Shore. She had cut across Falls Road like a country squirrel to get it, through the smoke of a burning troop carrier, less than ten seconds ahead of a second one coming up through the ghetto. She had time for one exposure before she ducked the gunfire. Billy never knew his picture had been taken, and from all I caught he did not see the other soldiers approaching, nor hear the rifles.

"If I'd been quicker, I'd have stopped you then. It's good that I didn't, and I'm even slower now, but I would stop you, for sure."

"It won't ever be necessary, my old man," she tells me, using the term I occasionally permit in return. She slips her hand under mine, resting near the flat circle her navel has become. I hold still for a moment or two, then set my hand elsewhere on the stomach, to keep waiting. The boy will move within minutes of her coming. Orgasm and Indian food will always get him going.

"There," she says.

"Where?" She slides my hand over silently. He is rolling his head around, nearly pushing it through her skin like a baseball into my palm. Six months of this has taught me the head from the rear. I can tell a foot on a good day. This, I've realized, is the husband's greatest privilege. When we were children, an expectant woman - a mother, an aunt, maybe a teacher - might tell us her baby was kicking, and all of our hands would be there, eight, ten, twenty, but only for a half-minute or so, most of us left to walk away protesting that we hadn't felt a thing, the rest lying that they had. A husband can spend hours doing this, feeling every roll against his own fingers, speaking into there, even, nearly shaking hands with the boy.

"It's your turn," she says. "What aren't you ever going to do again?" Seeing that some version of a confessional game has gotten under way, I roll onto my back to think. This game requires only that I recall the stupidest things I've ever done, so it is easy to play.

Sent once on short notice to photograph the insides of tombs for CondéNast, we neglected vaccinations until we were already in Cairo. A overseas call to the CDC directed us to a dusty room in an old hotel, where a lone uniformed nurse dropped the pants of ailing locals and negligent visitors like us, lined us up and shot us down.

We got into the King's Chamber at Gaza at seven the next morning to beat the tourists - crawled in there nearly on our knees. Then the shot took effect. My head became hot and felt swollen. In five minutes there was nothing left in me. At seven a.m. that stone chamber was already one hundred degrees. The room, four, five thousand years old. The room that old. She left me in the corner to get shots of some New-Agey gal in a gauzy dress who had come in early to lay in the sarcophagus, undisturbed, while I traced my finger up and down the corners of the room, five thousand years old, and my head threatened to drop me in a faint. When she was done, we left the gal in her coffin, crawled out again on our knees, into the blistering Egyptian sun where small boys rushed us with metal buckets full of warm Coke bottles.

"I won't be doing that in the future," I offer.

"Would you want to?"

"Oh, again and again," I say, and I mean it.

It was all either of us had ever wanted to do: to not rest until we had seen every corner of God's acreage under the light of day, to dive into the world's coldest waters knowing we could see Aurora Borealis when we came up. She mentions a morning in Pradesh so uncommonly sweet that she was stupidly moved to wade in the Ganges. She never expected any sympathy for the dysentery which followed, but she still talks about the sweetness of that morning. And we have been lucky with trust: a Russian stranger in the old Soviet Union who invited us to his home for dinner; a friendly Malay policeman with a small offer of hashish. Already I'm inclined not to trust that way anymore, and it's worth lamenting.

I turn onto my side again to feel. The child is quiet for a long time,and eventually only kicks. "That," she says.

"What?"

"That. You're not going to be able to do that anymore." And she pats the back of my hand where it lies. I feel his head roll by, followed by what might be a very small shoulder. She is right, and I'm startled that it hadn't occured to me before, that so late in the day I'm being told how soon it will be gone. I know this: a moment will not stop for you. It is an acquired skill to see one. There is nothing to signal its approach, no bell or light. It isn't there, it is there. See it. There it was.

All night we lie there, waiting for the boy. I do not roll over to my side of the bed. Around midnight I ask into the darkness if she wants me to go out for some Indian food, but she has gone to sleep. Just me and the boy are still up.

(Originally appeared in Oxygen, #14, 1995.)