Use Me

by Elissa Schappell

By the time dessert is served—chocolate decadence and crème brûlée—we are all toasted. Not on purpose of course, but we do seem to go through a lot of wine very quickly. It’s that kind of night. It becomes clear that Evie is drunk when she nearly falls off her high heels (my shoes) on her way to the ladies room. While she is in the loo her father and I look out at the city below us, there is a pack of Christian missionaries—mostly teenage boys in cheap blue suits—trooping over to the Red Light district to spread the good word.

  “Jeez, if anybody is converted down there, I’ll never forgive myself for forgetting my camera,” her father says, “Damn it anyhow—watch, we’re going to see a mass baptism in that canal.”

  Left alone with Evie’s father, I suddenly feel a little shy. Before I know it Evie is tottering across the restaurant toward us, with her hands slightly out at her side like a tightrope walker. As soon as he sees her, Evie’s father starts to stand up like he wants to rescue her, but it’s obviously a matter of dignity, and so we both just watch, and sigh with relief when she finally plops down in her seat.

  “I can’t believe I didn’t bring my camera,” he says again.

  “Oh, Daddy,” Evie says.

  “Hey, you’ll be happy you have those slides one day,” he says. “The memories…”

  “No, no, no memories. Now, I don’t want to talk about it,” she says.

  “I was talking about taking pictures,” he says, “honey.”

  It’s clear that he doesn’t think it’s appropriate to have this conversation in front of me. Thankfully, the waiter appears at his side. “Sir,” he says, “would you or your wife care for a cognac?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your wife,” the waiter repeats, nodding at me. I start to laugh, but I catch myself when I see the look of shock on Evie’s face.

  “Oh, no,” her father protests. “This is not my wife.”

  “Ah, too bad,” the waiter says, then with a shrug, he turns and saunters away, not the tiniest bit embarrassed by his faux pas.

  “What a cretin,” her father says. “I ought to…”

  He won’t. I’ve seen my father reduce waiters to tears, and Evie’s father just isn’t the type.

  “How ridiculous,” I say, but it isn’t. It isn’t ridiculous at all. “Did you see that dreadful caterpillar mustache?”

  Evie reaches over and takes a sip of her father’s wine. She glances at me, then looks away. It’s awkward, it shouldn’t be. It should be funny, but for some reason it’s not, or at least not now. Surely one day, if we ever speak of it again, we’ll laugh.

  “Well then,” Evie says, a smile frosted onto her face, “let’s get out of here, shall we?”

  Evie holds tight to her father’s arm as we walk back toward the apartment, maybe it’s the wine, or maybe it’s the shoes, or maybe she thinks I might try to steal him. If I was another kind of girl, I might be hurt, but I’m not. I’m not. I just feel like telling her, fathers like me. Just now, I am remembering how as a little girl I got invited along on more of my friends’ family vacations than anyone else. Cancun, Gstaad, Hilton Head. The fathers were always nice to me. I laughed at their jokes, and they bought me lift tickets. I told them they were getting too skinny, and I got an all-day pass to Disneyland. I liked fathers and fathers like me. Why had this never occurred to me before?

  Maybe I get a little lost in this thought and take a wrong turn, or maybe it’s just that we were all looped, but before I know it were right smack in the center of the Red Light district. Not that it matters, after all, one shouldn’t come to Amsterdam and miss out on this wonder, but for half a second I felt a little uncomfortable, and then I thought it’s just that Evie was uncomfortable. The only one who appeared comfortable was her father. I liked this. We were alike, both of us liked adventure.

  The buildings in the Red Light district seem closer together than in any other part of the city, like they can’t help crawling on each other. Their facades are absolutely gray, almost papery-looking, the result of pollution and perhaps all those postcoital smokes; the floors and floors of heavily curtained windows lit up with yellow light make it feel like a hive. There’s an undeniable heat in the air, an illicit buzz that draws you in regardless of how uptight you are.

  Evie’s father had untangled himself from her grasp and was now walking ahead of us. If you had noticed Evie staring at him, frowning and hobbling to keep up with him you’d never even guess that he was her father. He could have been any man.

  Tourists moved silently across the bridges of the canal, peering into windows, slowing, but not daring to stop, to commit, or appear to bargain shop; after all one never knew what fantasy might appear just around the corner. A thirty-year-old shaved angel in red leather, an unbelievably obese young girl in a see-through teddy. It is all so cinematic.

  As we walk deeper into the center, more women began to appear in the doorways, lounging against the walls, like baseball players in a dugout, perhaps talking shop and sizing up the crowd, or exchanging stories about their kids, how they weren’t invited to speak at their kids’ Career Day. It’s strange but they seemed so comfortable, superior in some way to the rest of us.

  Behind us in the distance I could swear I heard the far off sounds of those boys praying, a dull and distant howling, following us, their coyote yelps of conversion echoing in the canyon of streets. You’d think they’d just give up.

  I hurry to catch up with Evie’s father. My shoes are so slippery it’s like I’m skating on the cobblestones, for an instant I reach out and take his arm, he seems surprised, but he doesn’t pull away.

  “Look,” I say, and point up at one of the yellow and gray windows above us, the large liquid outlines of women luring men to their quarters thrown up on the walls. A shadow of a woman taking off a man’s coat looms above us, his hands moving like bats, swooping onto her breasts, then he wraps his arms around her hips.

  You can’t not watch. There it is, it is impossible to look away, but of course I barely have his attention before Evie interrupts.

  “Dad,” she says incredulously. Her father is mesmerized by the couple’s shadows, spread out on the wall, getting huge and hazy, becoming a dark indistinct mass as they move away from the window. “I can’t believe you.”

  “I’m fading,” she says. “Let’s go back, okay? We can have a nightcap at our place.”

  “All right, honey,” her father says. He’s obviously annoyed. We were just starting to have fun. “It’s been a long night, I guess. Jesus, I’m all turned around here. Can you get us out of here, Mary Beth?”

  “Of course,” I say.

  Even though I was supposed to be leading, her father hurries ahead of us, taking in all the sights. Gerhard always had to walk slightly ahead of me too, and it made me crazy. Would it kill a man to walk beside me?

  I wonder what Gerhard would do if he happened on me here with Evie’s father. Maybe he would make a scene or follow us. He would be jealous. I knew Chas Wakefield would protect me, he’d put his arm around me and tell Gerhard to fuck off. He wouldn’t ask any questions, he would just defend my honor. He wouldn’t let anything happen to me.

  “God, I hate this place,” Evie says, hurrying to sidle up alongside me. “Men ruin everything.”

  “Oh, right,” I say. “You really know.”

  “What?” she says.

  “That Billy, he’s really a fabulous catch, huh?”

  “What’s wrong with you?” she says in a low, don’t-you-dare voice.

  “Come on, Ev, you’ve got to admire the girls’ spirit,” I say loudly.

  “Absolutely,” Evie’s father says, sounding for one sick second like my own father.

  “Why don’t you just call Billy and have him pick you up?” I say. “Oh, darn he doesn’t have a phone. How would you live without a phone?”

  “What are you talking about?” she says. I am about to ask her when was she going to tell me she was moving out, but I notice that Evie’s father is getting too far ahead of us.
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  “Oh god,” I begin to moan, bending over at the waist, clutching my stomach. “Owww,” I moan again, but louder.

  “Jesus,” Evie said. “Do you think you’re going to be sick?”

  I don’t answer her. I moan again, holding tight to my middle. I don’t even lift my head until I see the tips of her father’s shoes.

  “I just need a moment,” I say, so stoic. Concern flickers in his eyes.

  “Jesus, are you all right?” He reaches out and touches my shoulder. I nod up at him. He cares. “Maybe we should get a cab, or…”

  “No, I’m fine,” I insist. “Really.”

  “Can you walk?” he says.

  “Oh, absolutely,” I say.

  He takes off his suit jacket. “Here,” he says, handing it to me like a rescue blanket.

  “No,” I say.

  “Please,” he says. “I insist.”

  “I’m better now,” I say, slipping my arms into the slippery silk-lined sleeves, which are still warm.

  Evie wraps her arms around her, like she’s cold, but it’s a warm night. She just doesn’t want me to have anything.

  “All right, buckle up kiddos,” I say. “It’s going to be a bumpy night.”

  Despite feeling a little drunk and light-headed I set off quickly toward the short cut, an escape route Franz once showed me, a dark and twisting alleyway. Chas is close on my heels as I take off down an unlit and slanting side street, turning the corners quickly. It’s far too narrow for cars and barely wide enough for two to stand abreast. It’s an adventure. I bet he is loving this. Even though I can’t see, I plunge ahead madly, arms out testing the dark, then I stumble, stretching out my arms, bracing myself for the fall, but I recover my balance. I think I hear my name being called. The alley makes a T and I take the left. I can hear Chas close behind me now, he is also moving fast, hurtling along like he can’t stop himself, like it’s a game. I hear him stop at the T. I wait, trying not to breathe too hard, pressed up against the wall. My heart is pounding like I’m afraid, but nothing is wrong. I don’t need protection.

  Chas peers around the corner, and seeing me, grins. He collapses against the wall across from me, and leans there, eyes closed, panting and out of breath, half-smiling, half-embarrassed, as if he is asking me to be patient with him, as if this sort of thing never happens. I move over to his side, I turn my head toward him, both of us resting against the wall. I swear I can hear the echo of those evangelizing boys baying at the moon. Who among them could resist a girl like me who wants just one thing? As her father struggles to catch his breath, his eyes find mine, and there I see that eagerness, that same blank and grasping desire I’ve seen in so many men’s eyes.

  I watch as my hand moves to touch his chest, as if to stop him.

  SISTERS OF THE SOUND

  A nun peered at me through the hedge as I rang the bell of the convent for the second time. I sat on my suitcase and wiped the sweat from my lip. I wondered how many other pregnant women had sought refuge at the Sisters of Saint Genevieve’s convent. How many of them had been desperate enough to lie to the Mother Superior, as I had on the telephone, professing to be a Catholic? When in fact I was a Presbyterian interloper who’d just recently embraced Catholicism because I was desperate for religious rules and rituals that imparted meaning to life’s suffering. I’d sought out this holy place because surely if God existed, he was here.

  Even though Mary Beth and I weren’t as close since Billy and I got married two years ago—she was the maid of honor—she was still the first friend I’d reach out to when there was a crisis. Even though I had friends I saw more and spoke to more often, she knew me best. I didn’t have to explain anything to her.

  Mary Beth had recommended the convent, which accepted paying pilgrims as lodgers. The fashion magazine where she was an editor had recently done a photo shoot there.

  “It’s an austere spiritual fortress,” she assured me. “A perfect escape from loving husbands and sick fathers.”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “I can get you into the Golden Door if you’d rather, darling,” she offered. But I knew the convent was the answer.

  In reality, the convent, snuggled down among pink dogwoods and wild rosebushes, resembled a cheerful little Bavarian-style castle, as likely to be inhabited by a pack of singing dwarves as the faithful and pious brides of Christ.

  As I rang the bell again, I could feel the baby moving inside me, wedging toes and fingers between my ribs, dancing on my kidneys. I wondered if when my father lay in bed awake, he could feel the cancer inside him, if he could ever feel it growing. If he ever had any affection for it.

  Although my father hadn’t said he disapproved of me taking off for the convent, he clearly didn’t understand the need or the inclination to go directly to God and beg for his divine assistance. For fourteen years and two stays of remission, our family’s way of coping with my father’s illness had always been an unholy amalgam of defiance and denial, suffused with the belief that my father had the power to save himself, and us, too. He always had, until nine months ago. It was the inoperable part of this lung cancer that scared us, that scared me into getting pregnant. I feared that one day my father’s pain would eventually outweigh his love for my mother and sister and me. He’d give in and give up. So, selfishly, I tried bribing him with a baby. A baby we barely spoke of.

  “A convent, huh?” he’d replied when I told him my plan, offering no hint as to whether my sudden embracing of Sunday-school-style religion, the gaudy show of penitence, the white gloves and panty hose, amused or comforted him.

  “I think so, I think it seems—”

  “Is it pretty?”

  “Pretty?”

  I coughed. I’d recently developed a strange cough my doctor could find no cause for.

  “What’s the architecture like? It’s on the Sound, you say?”

  “Yes, I think so—but I’m going there to, you know…I don’t imagine there will be time for—”

  “Take advantage of the water,” he said.

  Since my father had a lung removed some seven years before, he’d taken up swimming and scuba diving, which seemed to me not only reckless, but as if he was flashing the bird at God, saying, “Go ahead, take me apart in bits and pieces, but you can’t stop me.” Seeing him working out in the yard without a shirt on, his torso mapped with scars of tumor excavations, it was easy to think of them as war wounds, a keloid diary of adventures.

  Waiting outside the convent’s front door, I said a quick prayer.

  Help me, Father, to understand your plan. Help me, God, please, save my father.

  From here I could see the blue of the Sound stretching to the horizon. I glanced quickly back at the hedge to see if the nun was still lurking, but she’d vanished. Perhaps I had imagined her. Perhaps the pregnancy and the heat had caused me to hallucinate a nun with—I thought—a butterfly net. I knocked, no one answered. I knocked again. Then I saw the nuns, at least a dozen of them, their moth-gray habits whipping in the wind, black-and-white veils blown stiffly back from their heads like flags as they tramped over the lip of the cliff, a column of sturdy, industrious ants approaching the convent like God’s army. They marched in two straight lines past me without even a glance, their heads bowed, their hair discreetly concealed by wimples, their fingers polishing rosaries, intent on their prayers. Up close, they were not the dowdy, carbuncular, cow-faced lot I’d expected. Most of them were young, their faces unlined, unblemished except by a faint mustache here and there, and one lazy eye. One sister, with skin white as chalk, was unmistakably a redhead; another had a mole on her lip, bright and big as a ladybug.

  According to the brochure, the nuns of Saint Genevieve hailed from Italy, Mexico, India, Spain, and Guatemala. Deep in prayer, they filed by with their heads bowed, all except one sister, the nun I could have sworn only moments earlier was spying on me, a pretty Indian nun who now boldly sought out my gaze, her large, dark-lashed green eyes framed by high, arching brows that thr
eatened to meet over the bridge of her nose. Her gaze moved down my body to my swollen abdomen, and then to my left hand, which, because of swelling, was bare of its wedding ring. She imagined, no doubt, that I was a single mother, my no-good lover on the lam, or a born-again Christian carrying my rapist’s child, or maybe that I’d been recently, tragically, widowed. Surely some sordid story had brought me here. In reality how dull my tragedy was. At least she and her sisters could understand my desire for celibacy. I wanted to tell them how my husband seduced me against my wishes, over and over again. The back of the neck, the back of the knee. I was helpless.

  “I need you,” Billy would breathe into my hair. “I need us,” he’d say, holding me as close as one can hold a pregnant woman. “This is too fucking scary, all this grown-up stuff,” he’d say, sucking on my earlobe. If I didn’t believe him, I needed only to check the recycling bin: half-gallons of scotch and whiskey, a silver sack of beer cans.

  As the pregnancy progressed, I’d imagined he would become less and less interested in sex, but I was wrong. “I had no idea pregnancy would be so erotic,” he’d say, kissing my belly. “Maybe it’s not all bad.”

  There are women who would want this, would kill to have a husband ambushing them in the shower, in the closet, in the kitchen, in the car, but I am not one of them. I am ashamed to say there were orgasms, big ones, that came all in a rush, like somebody cutting open a sack of candy. But it wasn’t me, it was just my body. The nuns would support and value my quest for celibacy. They’d understand that being touched by Billy could ignite a panic in me akin to being held underwater. That even with his tongue in my mouth, all I could think about was my father.

  The Indian sister smiled beneficently, as though she could read my mind, her teeth as shiny and white as the mother-of-pearl rosary beads she clicked between her fingers like dice. Perhaps it was the heat, but I felt as if I might faint. I started to tremble, my whole body vibrating like a blade of grass being blown between God’s thumbs. I studied her small, square, mannish hands. Three of the fingernails on her left hand were bruised a dull blue-black and appeared ready to drop off. I wondered if she had done it herself, an act of obeisance, or if she’d slammed her hand in a drawer. Perhaps she’d willfully battered her hand with a stone, or bludgeoned her fingers with a hammer. Just as I’d attempted to curry God’s favor by getting pregnant. Perhaps the way to his heart was mortification of the flesh, but really, how much more mortified could I get?