by Sue Miller
“I don’t know. I want to see what happens with you and me. To give that its time.” He looked up at me. “Maybe you’ll want to come too.”
“That’d be hard,” I said, feeling a reluctance still connected to my anger.
“Why?”
I shrugged. “Molly. Brian. Our agreement. My life.”
He persisted. “But maybe we’ll want to work that out, Anna. That’s one way it might happen.”
Suddenly I wanted to believe in it again. “Yes. We might,” I said.
He looked at me a long time. Then he got up and went to the refrigerator. Standing in its open door he turned to me. “You want another?”
“I’m fine,” I said.
He came back, twisting the cap off, and sat down again. In unison, we drank. He looked at me. “I didn’t think this could happen with the I.U.D.”
I grinned. I recognized the impulse to argue with reality. I’d had it too, in this case. “Well, of course, in theory it can’t,” I said. “Nonetheless.”
“Well, thank God for theory,” he said. “Let’s drink to that. To the theoretical impossibility of this event.” We clicked bottles and glugged. Then we sat looking at each other for a long moment, the smiles slowly fading.
He got up again, came and stood by me and pulled me to him. My face rested against his jeans, and I could smell the faint odor of turpentine that permeated everything he owned.
“I’ll come with you,” he said. “When will you do it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t talked to the doctor yet. Just the nurse told me the test results. I have to call him in the morning to see what comes next.”
He knelt by my chair. I bent towards him and he reached up and gently pushed the hair back from my face. “You know I love you,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. Again I wanted the release of tears, but I didn’t cry.
I was lucky, Ursula told me. It was legal anyhow. “God, it’s absolutely mundane, it’s like going to the dental hygienist. It’s like having your fucking car tuned up.” We’d finished her lesson and were having a glass of wine before I went to pick Molly up. Ursula sat on the couch, the late-afternoon sunlight lying like a slanted grid across her, making all her baubles and rings and earrings sparkle and gleam whenever she moved. She’d already spilled some wine on her turquoise pedal pushers, making a grand gesture. She leaned forward. “In the old days, . . .” she said, and then stopped and laughed. “Listen to me. Those bad old days.” She shook her head. Then abruptly, she frowned. With her stubby face she looked like a child trying to concentrate. “But I mean it,” she said. “It was terrifying. One time—my first—” I started to ask of how many, but she raised three bejeweled fingers in anticipation of my question, twinkled them back and forth as she went right on. “I was living in Philly at the time, and that reminds me of a joke, but I’ll tell you later; and God, I had to get in this car on a street corner. That was the arrangement if we can dignify it with such a term. I had six hundred dollars in cash in my pocket, and I just drove off with this asshole I’d never seen before, wearing white shoes. This man who could have been a killer for all I knew. I mean, I wouldn’t have been surprised if my mutilated body had turned up floating in some river somewhere. And on the phone when I arranged it, the guy said, ‘Don’t have nothing to eat or drink the night before.’” She raised her eyebrows. “‘Don’t have nothing!’ Can you imagine the confidence that inspired, that particular double negative? I mean I’m not a snob. I can misuse the language with the best of them, but this particular man was going to be using some very sharp tools on me.”
It occurred to me that when Ursula talked, she seemed to make up for the musical discipline I imposed on her by denying her the loud pedal.
“You almost make me look forward to it,” I told her. “Although the dental hygienist hasn’t ever been my favorite person.”
“Oh, I know,” she said. “The idea of those fingers, all the mouths they’ve been in.” She shuddered, and another little wash of wine leapt onto her lap. “Shit,” she said.
“It isn’t that with me. It’s how much it hurts.”
She was thoughtful. “Yes, it does hurt, doesn’t it? Scrape scrape scrape. I guess I’d kind of forgotten that.” She sipped some wine, simultaneously brushing at the splotches on her lap. Then she set her glass down. “God, why are all my objections always so frivolous, so aesthetic? It fucking hurts. I forgot that.” She punched her thigh. “It makes me think that Leo was right.”
“Right about what?”
“About my insensitivity to pain. About my killer instincts.”
I remembered. Leo had accused her of these things at a party a couple of weeks earlier, although among my friends Ursula was his favorite, for her casual profanity, her benevolent wackiness, her obsession with her work. But she’d been drunk and was talking loudly, persistently, about patterns of female child murder in India. There was a kind of self-satisfaction in it, but I hadn’t been paying much attention to her. I was talking to a friend of Leo’s (we’d embarked, a bit self-consciously, on a campaign to meet each other’s friends), a performance artist who was describing a project involving a live pig.
It was hot outside, but also raining heavily. The black windows in the living room were gaping open, noisy with rain, but the air was thick, brought no relief, and everyone’s flesh—there were eight of us in the room—seemed slightly filmed in the candlelight, as though we’d all been coated with a sweet glaze. Leo’s and Ursula’s voices got louder and louder, and I started to listen to them, though I kept frowning and nodding at the details of Steve’s performance, which involved his making a film of the pig’s entrance into fancy restaurants.
“Let me know what you want me to do about it, Urs,” Leo was saying. His voice was hard. “Cut my cock off or what.”
“My God, I didn’t mean for you to take it so personally. You’re being perverse.”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “There’s this accusatory note in what you say—can’t you hear it yourself? This really vindictive, accusatory note, as though I should be held somehow responsible for all these female deaths, for all these little girls in India.”
I watched Ursula’s little-girl face pucker with sincere, drunken intensity over the issue. “Well, maybe in a really global sense, you are.”
I laughed, but no one noticed except the performance artist, who turned and began listening too. Leo had twisted back in anger, and then, on the attack, leaned forward again as he spoke. “Give me a fucking break, Ursula. And if what we’re talking about here is purifying ourselves of certain impulses, then let me say that no matter how egregiously sexist I am, I think you’ve got violence problems. I think you love this stuff, all these . . . homicidal methodologies.”
She sat back, her button mouth open a little in pain. Then a problem, light as a moth’s touch, flickered across her face. Frowning slightly she said, “Um, do you mean methodologies, or methods?”
“Jesus!” he said. He took an enormous gulp of wine. “I mean, what I mean, Ursula, is that you’ve got killer instincts. Got it? Or else you’ve just been around this stuff too long, it’s got no meaning for you anymore.”
Ursula had sat nodding and nodding, examining her drunken soul. Now her face had that same self-absorbed blankness.
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” I said.
“But I do,” she said. “I mean here the whole reason I got involved with this project was because it made me weep, the idea of these little babies, just because they’re girls, being refuse, having absolutely negative worth. And it’s true, now I can go on for hours about how they did it in China, and why it’s different from how they do it in Iceland, and the logical reasons for the differences fascinate me.” She shook her head, and gently stroked her wine-splattered lap. “And here I am, telling you what a piece of cake your fucking abortion is going to be. Where are my values?” she wailed, and gulped some wine. “But no kidding,” she said then. “It’ll be a breeze.�
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The night before the abortion, to calm me, Leo got a babysitter and we went to the Square for dinner and a movie. We had Chinese food, and drank a lot of beer. In my fortune cookie, the little paper banner proclaimed, “From now on, everything will go your way,” and we clinked our bottles together in honor of that thought too.
The movie was Lina Wertmuller’s Swept Away. We had more beers afterwards and agreed we hated it. It seemed just one more version of every woman simply needing a good fuck. On the long walk home, talking about something else entirely, Leo abruptly said, “There was one part of that movie I liked though. You know where she says she wants him to fuck her ass? She wants him to do something to her no one’s ever done? I liked that. That seemed real to me, that impulse. Didn’t it to you?” In the purplish light from the street lamp, Leo’s white skin looked dead, gray. I looked away, over the whizzing cars on Mass. Ave. at the garish sign for the Holiday Inn. Behind the high blank fence around its pool, I could hear the happy splash of its patrons.
“Yes, sometimes I feel that way. That I’d like you to claim me in some special way.” I was thinking of the baby, but I knew he was not. He was high on beer and with that characteristic wound-up intensity that seemed entirely self-generated.
“And the way she said it.” He deepened his voice: “‘Sodomize me.’ Like opera, no?” Now he sang it, over and over, slowly and tenderly at first, then with a Pavarotti-like tenor crescendo. People walking past turned to smile and stare. I smiled at him too; and I can still smile when I think of him, walking along Mass. Ave. on a summer night, the changing colors of storefront lights transforming him and retransforming him, singing imaginary Italian opera to dirty words. But even then I felt the pang of distance between us. “Italian,” he said when he’d finished his solo. He shook his head. “Imagine being able to speak Italian.” In his voice I could hear the pure yearning to be elsewhere, and I knew that he’d left me far behind.
In fact, the only really hard part of the abortion came just before it. The social worker assigned to me, a graying, elegant woman named Mrs. Sack, wanted to talk to me and Leo about our feelings, about what the procedure would be like, about what we were going to use for contraception from now on. Her tone was kind, and I responded; but Leo stirred restlessly in his chair and didn’t look at her, even when she held up diagrams and traced, with the eraser end of her pencil, what was going to happen to me. Near the end of the interview, she turned to him. A bright official smile lighted her face. “So, I take it this was a completely mutual decision, a decision you both feel comfortable with.” There was a moment of silence. “Is that right, Mr. Cutter?” she asked.
Staring fiercely out the window at the parking lot, Leo waited a moment before he said, “Yes.”
She frowned at him, and then directed a few more questions at me. I told her about my yearning for the possibility of having the baby, about my worry that our decision reflected something permanent about our relationship; but said that I knew it was basically the right choice. When I was quiet, Mrs. Sack sat for a moment, again looking at Leo. Then she said, “What I find myself wondering, Mr. Cutter, is whether you might have something to share with us. I mean, you seem awfully angry to me.”
There was a long silence. Then Leo looked at her for the first time and said, “No. Nothing to share.”
She bowed her head a second, came up smiling and efficient. “Well, then, I think we’ve really covered everything. Do you have any more questions, Anna?”
“No, I’m clear.”
“You feel you understand the procedure.”
“Yes.”
“And I’ll be there the whole time if you have any questions then, or just need a hand to hold.”
I thanked her, and we went back to the waiting room until it was my turn. The other couples in the room were all much younger, and Leo and I, as if by some agreement, sat at a distance from them. He took my hand and held it, but he seemed jumpy still.
“What is it with you?” I asked after a minute.
“It didn’t bother you?”
“No. I thought she was nice.”
He shook his head. “A fascist. A fascist of the spirit.”
“How do you mean?”
“You’re so fucking orthodox, Anna. You’re always willing to do things the way they’re supposed to be done. But none of that stuff is any of her business.”
“But she was trying to help.”
“And did she? Did she help you?”
“No. Not really. Except to understand what’s going to happen. But I can see that it might help someone. Maybe one of these girls.” I nodded to the group of adolescents across the dingy room.
He shook his head again. “In the old days, some stern old fart would just have lectured you about sin and damnation or something, but at least that’s honest. Here, there’s all this solicitude, but by God, it’s the same thing. It’s the same thing prettied up. It’s really, ‘You’ve done an awful thing, a terrible thing, and now we have the right, we’ve got the entrée here to your personal life, your emotions, your sex.’” He paused a moment. “And I’m the asshole for not wanting to fucking share.”
I leaned my head on his shoulder. “A world-famous asshole.”
He put his arm around me. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” he whispered and kissed my hair. And we sat like that, like the other couples, until they called me.
The doctor’s voice was kind behind his mask, though I’d noticed when he introduced himself that there were black hairs which bristled from his ears and nose, a few even sprouting from the dark pores on top of his nose; and that a delicate arc of dried blood dotted the chest of his green surgical shirt. But he talked gently, kindly during the procedure to me, using the tone I used with Molly while I cleaned a cut or drew a splinter from her foot. And Mrs. Sack did let me squeeze her hand as tightly as I wanted while he dilated me and inserted the vacuum. The drug he injected into my cervix before starting had rocketed to my brain by the end of the procedure, and when the nurse gently rolled me over at the hip to attach a pad between my legs, I felt the way a sleepy baby must feel when she’s being diapered.
In the recovery room, the thin teenager with bright blue eyeshadow in the bed next to me talked incessantly to her social worker. Her parents were furious with her; her boyfriend had wanted her to drop out of school and have the baby, but she knew she shouldn’t, that an equivalency degree would get her nowhere. “Everyone knows it’s just a piece of shit with your name on it.” From far away, I heard my own giggle.
Down the hall somewhere, a woman was having slow, persistent hysterics, and we could hear the murmur of a nurse trying to bring her peace of mind. For a while the two voices would seem almost connected, the patient singing several octaves above the nurse. But then she’d break free and her voice would loop and meander wildly in the upper registers, until the nurse’s steady accompaniment brought it down again.
I began to have spasms of pain, though I could feel the blood wetting the bulky pad. One whole wall of the room was leaded windows, and the light which flooded everything seemed benevolent, seemed to consecrate the pain, the blood, the wild whoops down the hall. The nurse brought her face down in front of my unfocused eyes and asked me if I wanted a pain killer. I shook my head. I welcomed the pain, I realized, as I would have welcomed the terror, the illegality of Ursula’s kind of abortion. In my drug-fogged, cramped euphoria, I was making some distorted equation, striking a bargain. And what I thought I was buying with my suffering was the right to my happiness with Leo. Every slow convulsion of my womb seemed like part of the purchase price, and I grunted softly, as I had early in labor with Molly, and counted up my treasure.
The piano recital was three days later. Because I was still bleeding heavily, Leo carried the rented chairs up to my dining room. Ursula had called twice the evening before to inquire about whether she shouldn’t change her piece to something easier; and David Humez’s mother woke me at eight to say that he was feeling sick to his stomach and s
he wasn’t sure he’d make it. By three o’clock, about twenty-five people had gathered, were sitting in the neat rows Molly and I had arranged, talking in muted voices as if a church service were about to start.
David had arrived, white and big-eyed with terror, and Ursula was pacing in the long hallway, wearing her recital best, a Suzy Wong dress slit to the upper thigh. Dr. Fisher, invited by Ursula, sat in the back row and smiled at me encouragingly whenever he caught my eye.
When it seemed as though everyone who was coming had arrived, I stepped to the front of the room and welcomed them. Then one by one, the students trooped to the piano and made their versions of music. First the beginners, fumbling and awkward. Then Ursula and David. Last Mr. Nakagawa and Laura. The relief in the final applause was palpable, and when we moved into the living room afterwards for drinks and punch, the noise of conversation rapidly became deafening.
I was happy that everyone had done adequately, and some even well; and I had a few drinks really fast. The room, the noise, suddenly seemed to float at some distance from me. I noticed Ursula sitting on the couch as she had the day she told me the abortion would be easy, talking animatedly to Mr. Nakagawa’s wife. Dr. Fisher, in passing, touched my shoulder, said something inaudible. I bent forward to hear something Laura’s grandmother was saying, something about the Suzuki method, how awful it was for children; and with my body’s motion, a little pulse of blood flowered warm and wet on the pad strapped between my legs. In my mind’s eye I saw it there, the bright red of injury on the white pad, not like menstrual blood. I imagined it spreading, gathering force from deep within me, cascading down my legs, staining my shoes, the rug, in front of the polite company, the strange shameful measure of the happiness I’d earned. But no more came. And after a few minutes, I excused myself and went to the bathroom to change the pad.
CHAPTER SEVEN
IT HAD GOTTEN COOLER IN THE NIGHT, and when I waked, I was covered with a blanket Leo must have found in the closet. It smelled of camphor, mothballs. I was disoriented by the scent, by the strange light in the room. It seemed to be coming from the wrong place, then wheeled oddly around me into familiar patterns. After a few dizzy seconds, I realized I was home. I was lying in my own bed. But it took me a moment to remember why.