by Julie Hilden
There’s no need for you to have this surgery,’ he tells me.
‘I might not need it, but I want it.’
‘If you insist, there is fat that can be removed, but it’s really not worth it.’ He shows me the part of my belly he will flatten, the part that will still curve.
‘I want to do it,’ I repeat, and he says he will.
At our next appointment, I am scheduled to have the surgery. The area of my body from which fat is to be removed is carefully circled by the doctor with a black marker. Then I am told to lie down on a gurney. My mouth is dry and bothered; I have been forbidden to drink water for hours beforehand. I chew ice and wait for the surgeon.
I realize I find the idea of the surgery disturbingly erotic: it is a sleep in which I will be touched without consent, from which no one will awaken me until they are ready, within which I will never really know, except from later evidence, what occurred. The perfect sleep beyond mortal sleep, the perfect trust of surrendering even the ability to be roused by noise or speech. I would not even wake in a fire.
Ilan, wearing a green mask and gown, holds my hand as the anesthesia is administered. He insisted on being here, and eventually the doctor assented. The lights shine above me so brightly, in their metal cups, that it is hard for me to see. My only link to the world is Ilan’s hand.
As I begin to go under, it flashes to me that it is as if he were watching me give birth, the same encouraging grasp. That is the last thought I have before I am suddenly gone.
My body has never really been my own, I have not wanted it – not since I was eighteen when occasionally, rowing, it pleased me to be in it and alive. For the past two years, ever since we met, it has been Ilan’s – he who can reach down with his hand, his tongue, and make me shudder. For an hour now it is the surgeon’s, and that has been my only infidelity in all this time.
The surgeon – so I am told later – makes a small incision through my belly button. Through the cut, he inserts a metal tube into my abdomen, to create a series of small canals in a fan shape; through these canals, he sucks out the fat there. Then he makes a second incision, just above my pubic hair, and inserts the tube again, pushing it upward to create another set of canals, in another fan shape, that Crosshatch the first set. Through this second set of canals, fat is again sucked out. And then the operation is over.
‘You had good fat,’ the doctor tells me when I awaken. The nurse is holding a basin, waiting for me to throw up, but I don’t; I feel good. I feel wonderful, actually. Except that I powerfully need to sleep.
‘Your fat came out nicely,’ the doctor continues. ‘Some people’s fat is like cottage cheese.’
I smile. Whether my fat was good or bad, I know I am better off without it. Now I am the girl Ilan wanted, am I not? I fit the dress, the ring, the wedding, the life that will follow.
Afterward I wear a tight girdle for a few weeks, as I have been instructed to do. All my body has to do is heal in time for the wedding, and it does heal.
Flowers of blood soak through the girdle in the first few days, then transform into yellow and purple bruises, and then the bruises fade. They heal into invisibility with a regularity that moves me – as if, rather than being a biological process, it is my body saying it wants to live. As if it believes in my life more than I do.
The scars the surgery leaves are small, perhaps an eighth of an inch long. The one from the incision in my belly button is impossible to see, lost in the tiny creases. But the one from the incision above my pubic hair is still dark red.
It is at eye level for Ilan when he goes down on me, and for a while, as he tongues me, he will touch it. It is a mark that will never leave me. At most it will fade, but I will always know it’s there. In some sense, it is his mark, and I will bear it forever.
The surgery does not change my life, as perhaps in the back of my mind I hoped it would. I am not even sure, though, what I was hoping for – that it would make me so beautiful that I could be enough? That once it was accomplished, our bargain might somehow be broken, taken back?
Whatever I had hoped, it was too much. The surgery does not change me. But it does, at least, change my body. I feel the change settling in, week after week; I feel the skin shrinking over the spaces the surgery left.
That January, six weeks after the operation, I slip into Ilan’s mother’s dress again. I shift my breasts into the place where her breasts were, and lean over to rearrange them. I pull the dress to my waist, and all at once I am lost in the same pouf of skirt, the same soft mound of hilly satin in which she once walked.
Ilan zips the bodice up in a single quick motion. Around the dress’s waist, there is room where I used to stretch it. I live in it very comfortably now, the silk falling slack over my newly flattened stomach.
I look down nervously, as if the flowers of blood that once soaked through the ugly girdle’s mesh will somehow soak, too, through this glossy silk. But it is only my imagination. You would never know from the outside that I was not born this way, born to fit into a dress like this.
In the mirror one cannot – Ilan has to say it – help but think of a princess.
An announcement to be submitted to the Times, from which you might have believed that happiness was our birthright, is drafted at my mother’s insistence, and photographs are taken to accompany it. We are to be married in April, in a Newport mansion with a lawn that leads down to the sea.
The night before we marry, I have a dream. I am underwater, just beneath the surface of a running river that would carry me away were it not for the crooked black tree branch I hold. The branch extends toward me through the water, like a hand reaching down.
The surge of the blue-green water is strong and unrelenting, and my hold on the branch is uncertain, slippery. I should be moving along it hand over hand, like a child twisting in the air, legs trailing, across the span of a jungle gym. I should be closing in on the shore, moving into the shallower water, so that I can break the water’s surface and take a breath.
But I am not, I cannot move forward at all. My hand cannot even fully get purchase on the branch’s mossy skin. So rather than getting closer to the riverbank, I only slide farther out along the branch’s length, deeper into the water.
Underwater, I do not even hear the crack of the breaking branch. All at once I lose my grip, and I only hear the water rushing. I only feel it move my body wherever I am destined to go. The water engulfs me, and as I drown, I feel at peace. I do not bolt awake, the prospect of my own death does not jolt me into the waking world.
The truth is that I am comfortable, drowning.
On the day of the wedding, my parents pretend to get along with each other, albeit a little icily. My six half sisters are my bridesmaids, wearing light pink sleeveless dresses and carrying identical pink flowers – a row of lovely blondes that I, with my shock of red hair, interrupt. In the wedding photos, later, I look like the changeling I know I am.
Ilan’s father is also his best man, which moves me – his father is so close to him, he has superseded any mere friend, Ilan has trouble coming up with groomsmen, but my four half brothers are happy to fill the gap. They flank him, in their tuxedos, as if they were his brothers too.
It occurs to me that, like me, Ilan has never had many friends; even before we met, both of us had so few. I lost touch with my few high school friends when I drew apart from my family and our town, lost touch with my college roommates when I abruptly left school. As for Ilan, he has many acquaintances – and a few glancing, slight friendships – simply because he’s lived in the city all his life, attended the same private school, on the same street as his family’s apartment, for twelve years. But none of his friendships are close.
He is too solitary and difficult, too strong-willed for that; his closer friendships typically ended in a disagreement he couldn’t forgive, and after a while I think he stopped having them. Now he has only me – and his father.
It looks like a beautiful wedding but the core that is real is very small. It s
hould be just the two of us, standing in a room somewhere. Instead there are two hundred people assembled, first in a hall and later in a ballroom. We marry before all of our parents’ friends, having invited only a few of our own – but with my many half brothers and sisters to toast us, perhaps no one notices.
The odd service is alternately Jewish and Christian – at Ilan’s father’s and my parents’ requests, respectively – a pastiche I was surprised everyone agreed to. At some point, a glass breaks without cuts or blood. At some point, one of my half sisters reads: ‘Love bears all. It believes all. It hopes all. It endures all.’ It is not this, it is not that. I cannot remember the rest.
I remember thinking at the time, I don’t know what love does, but I know what it is. It is this.
And afterward, I remember selecting in my mind only part of what my half sister said, as if certain words applied, and others did not. ‘Love bears all, it endures all’ – that is what I remember later.
As we are about to say our vows, Ilan’s father produces a wedding ring and hands it to Ilan. ‘My wife’s,’ he whispers to me. I almost shake my head no. There was a plastic band at rehearsal and Ilan never mentioned this.
It surprises me, this extraordinary thing. Ilan’s mother’s dress, her ring – her lost wedding, why has it come to us? I want to return the ring, and say to Ilan’s father: ‘Take another wife, you’re not yet dead.’ But there is no time and I don’t have the heart.
I smile at Ilan’s father; I hope he has not seen me wince; and I hold out my hand. Next to my yellow diamond, Ilan slides on my golden ring – and then I slide on his, and then it is done.
On our honeymoon, Ilan and I are alone in Italy – a country where he speaks the language and I do not. I begin to think, after a while, that this is why he chose it.
He does everything for me, solicitous. Our hotel rooms are filled with rose petals, and we are greeted, always, with chilled champagne. Yet every time he speaks to a pretty woman, I believe it is starting; now it will all begin.
There are several women I remember even now – as if I, not he, had been the one who wanted them. There is one with shining black eyes and a small backpack she won’t take off, even sitting at the bar of the restaurant where we meet her – a woman who drinks all night next to us, smiling at Ilan more and more frequently, the more she drinks. And there is another at a museum, a blonde whose breasts shift in her sleeveless top as she moves, who wears a sweeping skirt that trails behind her almost like a bride’s train. She lingers near an abstract painting that Ilan and I are looking at too – the painting delights her, and she delights Ilan, I can tell.
The suspense as to when it will all begin seems to make more acute the pleasure of the museums, the cafés, the countryside, of every moment – of the sex especially. We are obscene in bed in the Rome hotel. I ride Ilan remorselessly. He thumbs my breasts harshly, until it is too much and I tell him to stop. He presses me up against walls and doors, and he takes me; I am taken.
The intensity of his gaze is purer than usual, and he often keeps eye contact with me during sex, from beginning to end.
Once I start to describe to him the way he looks. ‘You have three different expressions,’ I begin.
‘Don’t, you’ll make me self-conscious.’
I keep my thoughts to myself.
He wants to watch me, too, but he never describes to me how I look to him, except to say that I am beautiful. I have difficulty, at first, coming with my eyes open, but I learn to do it. The first time I look into his eyes and no longer care how my face contorts, I know I am sexually free, he has freed me.
He wants us to be visible from the hotel window sometimes, pushing aside the curtains so our bodies can, from the correct angle, clearly be seen. I protest at first but eventually he convinces me to forget that people can watch us, and I simply give in to him. Let them watch us, he entreats. They are strangers.
We travel to the coast and spend days on the beach. I become tan but I refuse to take off my bikini top, as many of the European women do. At our hotel, Ilan touches the lines around the still-white parts of my breasts as if they were markings of what is forbidden. He licks the line that separates white from tan, and he watches me as I watch him do so.
All this time, I almost enjoy the suspense, the waiting to know which woman it will be. Part of me waits in dread; part, in anticipation.
In the end, though, nothing happens with any of the women to whom Ilan speaks, or whom he carefully surveils, in Italy. He watches them, yes, but in the end, he does not act. His eyes move over them and move on, like the beams of headlights playing over buildings as the car passes.
It is a time in my life I would love to relive, to replay over again and again like a videotape – with the knowledge that every threat of infidelity is false; each woman we meet will drop out of our lives forever. It is only me, for now, whom Ilan will be inside, and for now I will be the only one inside him.
When I climb the steps to board the plane that will bring us home – a sleek tourist in expensive sunglasses in a beautiful city where I have been happy – I know I can keep this time against all the time to come, a block of memory I can shore up against eternity, secrete against loss. I know this trip is both a gift and a shield against what will happen to me. And I know, too, that this is the way Ilan planned it to be.
Shortly after we return from Italy, we are to travel again, this time to Las Vegas for the weekend. I have never been there before.
Ilan has an assignment to write about the dancers and strippers: where they come from, how much they make, and, of greatest interest to his readers, how to date one. Ilan, of course, will imply that they often date their patrons. We will never discuss it, but somehow I will be the one who ends up writing most of the article, and this is one reason, I believe, that he has taken me along.
But there is also another purpose for the trip: Las Vegas is to be the scene of our first debauch. There, where everything is legal, we will be safe. We will go far, but on a leash. The two plane trips will separate our New York lives from this experiment. Afterward, we will keep the memory separate from us, in a little compartment as tightly sealed as a souvenir snow globe.
It is a late-night flight. We rise above the lights of the city in darkness. In the row behind us, a child shrieks with complaint as the plane banks sharply, as it whirs and shakes.
I am calm. Takeoff used to make my palms sweat. I used to have a song I sang to myself silently as a ritual, as if it were a prayer to ensure all would go well. But that is not the case anymore, not when I am with Ilan. I no longer worry about dying in planes as long as I will die with him.
We are in first class, courtesy of Ilan’s father. After takeoff the passengers around us, mostly business-people, begin one by one to tip their seats back and click their lights off to sleep. Even the child behind us burbles, chirps, then quiets.
Soon our bank of two seats provides the only halo of light in the section, and the stewardess attends only to us. Ilan starts drinking as soon as liquor is available.
‘Will you have a drink?’ he asks me.
‘No.’ I shake my head. I want to be fully aware when it all begins.
‘You’re so tight, let me feel your shoulders,’ Ilan coaxes me. I relax a bit to his touch.
‘This is a lark, a game,’ he says quietly. ‘We have to treat it that way or we’ll never get through it. Have a drink,’ he urges me again.
Then he wets his finger in his own drink and passes it over my lips, even as turbulence shakes us. It does not fail to arouse me.
Ilan flicks off the overhead light. First class is entirely dark now, except for the small emergency lights that run along the floor. He wets his finger in his drink again, and this time he reaches below the blue blanket in my lap.
Even in the darkness, I feel uneasy. I sense the sleeping passengers around us, I hear the small breaths of the sleeping child.
‘Look at me,’ Ilan whispers. ‘Concentrate on me.’ But I can barely
see him in the darkness.
Against instructions, I shut my eyes. Quickly his fingers are inside me and then, a moment later, in my mouth. I bite down on them. They are wet with gin, with my saliva and arousal. Then I feel them inside me again, over and over – until I am almost exhausted past coming with the ache inside, with the effort of maintaining the silence I would so like to break with a cry.
It takes a long time but finally, soundlessly, I come for him.
By the time we arrive, I have had the drink Ilan insisted upon, and three more, and I feel more ebullient than afraid. I rarely drink, so by now I am dizzy. Getting off the plane, I walk unsteadily and Ilan must hold my arm; he carries both of our bags over his shoulder.
We drive in from the airport in our spotless rental car and stop at the hotel Ilan has chosen. It is demeaning and embarrassing, but also tremendously exciting, at every step. To check into the hotel knowing what we are planning to do; to have our luggage taken from us in the lobby; to leave without even seeing our room. To drive with Ilan to find the nearby neoned strip bar that I dread, and for which I long. And to listen to him ask there for the VIP room, where we can be alone with the stripper. I am helplessly aroused by it all, even as it mortifies me.
I feel grateful to Ilan for ensuring I would be drunk; otherwise the embarrassment might have been too much. As it is, I can sit back slightly, in this heady state, and watch myself do whatever he asks.
As he walks me to the VIP room, he cups my breasts from behind so that anyone can see. I do not fight his hands, don’t even try to brush them away. I feel so detached, so remote, as he touches me. It is almost as if he were touching some other woman as I watch.
The VIP room is small and two bouncers linger in the background. Their presence does not worry me. If they watch us, I think, what can it matter? Like the strangers who might have seen us in the window of the Rome hotel, they will simply have an image in their minds that happens to coincide with my body. And, as Ilan has said, why should that matter to me?
I am demure in a black dress. The blonde stripper is topless, trashy and alluring, in a gold lamé thong. The skin pulls taut over her implants; her breasts seem to float, riding high over her bony rib cage. Music begins, and she begins dancing.