A Minor Fall

by Price Ainsworth

  “In a few months,” I said.

  “She has to know before then, for the baby’s sake.”

  “Of course. I know.”

  “But you are trying to figure out some way to fix this situation, aren’t you?” she asked. “I’m afraid you’re just going to have to come clean and let the chips fall where they may this time, old boy. People make mistakes. Sometimes they stay married. Sometimes they get divorced. Isn’t the baby’s health the biggest issue here?” She asked. She didn’t seem to expect me to answer.

  Part of me wanted to ask her to leave before she found out anything more about me. She already had enough information to blackmail me effectively. I didn’t know anything about her. I knew her first name was “Chelsea,” but I didn’t know her last name. In a way, she knew more about me than my wife did. Probably, the girl knew more about me than I did. Part of me felt a sense of relief for having told someone, even if it wasn’t the person I knew I should be telling. And interestingly, she had not recoiled in terror when I told her.

  “Relax,” she said, again tugging on my hand. “I told you I am not going to hurt you. You told me a secret. I’ll tell you one.” She pulled me over to the couch, and sat down on her knees. She whispered into my ear as I leaned toward her, “I brought condoms.”

  Then she stood and pulled the package of condoms from the back pocket of her jeans. She held them out for me to see. She walked over to the bed and placed the condoms on the nightstand with a bit of a dramatic flair. Then she walked to the end of the bed and began taking off her clothes.

  I stood motionless as the girl neatly folded her jeans and T-shirt across the foot of the bed and walked silently back to the head of the bed where the nightstand was located. She paused momentarily and peeled off her panties and unhooked her bra. Both fell at her feet beside the bed. She turned to face me for a brief second and smiled. The freckles that gave her face such a youthful appearance extended seductively over her entire body except in those areas that I imagined would be hidden from time to time by a swimsuit. She covered her white breasts with her left arm. She reached up with her right hand and turned out the light.

  “I’m going to take a little nap,” I heard her say in the darkness. “I left the package on the nightstand if you decide that you are ready. If not, I’ll understand.” I heard her sigh as she got into bed and drew up the covers.

  “Burnt sienna,” I thought to myself as I stepped out of my cordovan Alden penny loafers and, without removing my socks, grey slacks, or starched button-down, lay down on the little couch. As I stared up in the darkness at where I assumed the ceiling would be, I remembered the crayon by that name in the box of sixty-four Crayola crayons that I used at College Heights Elementary school back in Abilene.

  For some reason, it was one of my favorite colors and I tried to color everything with it until the teacher at the start of my fourth-grade year asked me if burnt sienna was really the correct color for the baseball glove I was drawing to depict what I had done the previous summer. Admittedly, it wasn’t, and since then I had been involuntarily compelled to make a mental note any time that I saw something that is the color of burnt sienna. The wrapper on a Punch Rothschild Rare Corojo cigar is close. The chalky mark that a Tignanello cork leaves on a white tablecloth is closer. And, while I only was permitted a brief glimpse before the freckle-faced girl turned out the light in what at one time had been my room at the Peabody, I would say that her nipples were exactly burnt sienna.

  When it seemed to me that the girl’s breathing pattern meant that she had gone to sleep, I got up, went over to the writing desk, and turned on the table lamp. I stood motionless for a moment to see if she woke up, and she didn’t. As quietly as I could, I opened the desk drawer and took out a sheet of stationery and a pen. I sat at the desk and tried to compose the poem that had been running around in my head the last few days, weeks, months. There were a few lines that I had committed to memory rather than writing them down, but I could only recall bits and pieces of them. Still, they were enough to get my thoughts rolling.

  I spent most of the night on it—tearing up drafts, throwing them in the wastebasket, and starting over. When I sat back to admire it early that morning, I knew it wasn’t any good. The plagiarized first line was still the only thing that was any good.

  The condoms were still unopened on the nightstand, and the blackhaired girl was still asleep in the bed the next morning when I went downstairs early because I didn’t recall Sullivan saying anything about departure time. I left the keycard to the room on the nightstand by the condoms in case the girl needed to charge anything before she left.

  I didn’t realize that I had left the unfinished poem on the desk until I let the locked door to the room close behind me and realized that I didn’t have a key. I thought about knocking on the door and trying to retrieve the poem and decided not to.

  I put my bag with the bellman. I assumed I would drink coffee and read the sports pages until Sullivan and Riza were ready to go. I was surprised to see them seated in the lobby by the fountain as I walked by. They seemed surprised to see me too. Tim was saying something to Riza about having to sell quickly and discretely when I came up from behind them and said good morning. They both said good morning, and Tim changed the subject.

  He ordered coffee for me, and refills for him and Riza. “Hey,” Sullivan said, “where were you last night? I tried to call you in your room to get you to come see the room they gave me. The ‘W.C. Handy Suite.’ It was something wasn’t it?” He asked Riza. “I think you would’ve liked it.”

  “I went for a drink on Beale Street and ended up dancing a little bit. I got up early this morning and began working on a poem,” I said.

  “Dancing?” Sullivan asked.

  “A poem?” Riza asked.

  Before I could answer either question, Sullivan waved his hand as if to dismiss the topic and stated without attribution, “Every notary bears within him the debris of a poet.” Then Sullivan laughed and shook his head and changed the subject.

  He seemed satisfied with my explanation as to where I had been when he had called. He told us how legend has it that in the early Thirties the hotel manager and his friend came back from duck hunting and put their (then legal) live decoys in the Italian travertine marble fountain in the middle of the hotel lobby. In about 1940, a circus trainer named Pembroke trained the ducks to march from their home on the roof of the hotel, into the elevator, and across a rolled-out red carpet to the fountain every morning and back at five o’clock every afternoon.

  Tim asked us if we wanted to wait around for the ducks to come down. Riza said that we had both seen the “duck march” on previous trips, and, if we waited around too long, Tim would just use the excuse to stay around another evening and go to the Rendezvous. I nodded my agreement, all the while keeping my eyes on the elevators. I wasn’t particularly concerned about the mallards marching across the lobby.

  I also kept thinking to myself, “Sell what quickly and discretely?”

  15

  THE NEXT DAY, IN Houston, I called Dr. Nathan’s office from my cell phone in the car and made an appointment to see him. The receptionist told me that they didn’t usually see husbands at the obstetrician and gynecology offices, but Dr. Nathan would make an exception in my case. She told me to bring my calendar. When I asked if she meant my calendar for September, she told me that Dr. Nathan requested that I bring my calendar for the entire year, including September.

  I showed up thirty minutes early for my appointment with Dr. Nathan a few days later. I checked in with the receptionist, and she told me to have a seat. I sat with my legs crossed, taking a self-graded examination in Cosmopolitan designed to determine which birth control alternative was right for me.

  While the room was by no means full, it presented a wide range of ages of women, spanning a spectrum from younger than Michelle to older than her mother. I wondered to myself why a person would enter this particular specialty of medicine. I could see the fun and ex
citement of childbirth, but otherwise it seemed to demystify the most mystical of all of God’s creations. The male sex organ was, obviously, external and visible to see and study. Phallic symbols permeated art, architecture, and literature, perhaps because males had controlled these fields for centuries, and also probably because the male organ was so obvious, an external display of the sentiment of the person to whom it was attached.

  Conversely, the female sex organ was hidden beneath folds, internal, plunging away from sight, mysterious. Practicing obstetrics and gynecology would seem to me to put a speculum where before there was only speculation.

  But maybe I was wrong. Perhaps every time one question is answered, another two emerge.

  A nurse opened the door to the hallway leading to the examination rooms and called my name. She bit her lip to keep from smiling as I cleared my throat and hurried through the door. “Dr. Nathan is in his office, the last door on your right. He’s expecting you, Mr. Jessie. How’s Michelle doing?”

  “She’s fine,” I said. “Thank you for asking.” I hurried down the hall and went into Dr. Nathan’s office. He was seated behind a large desk that looked like it could have been a principal’s desk in the Fifties. The desktop was covered with a thick piece of glass that protected pictures of his family, including grandchildren, on various fishing trips and sightseeing vacations. Manila folders sat in boxes on either side of the desk, and he was reading a file while talking into an old-fashioned Dictaphone.

  He looked up from his dictation as I walked into the room. He motioned to a seat, closed the file he was reading and put it in the open box on the right-hand side of his desk. He looked over his reading glasses at me. “Hello, Mr. Jessie. How can I help you today?” he asked, trying to initiate a conversation.

  I was appreciative of the fact that he didn’t make any jokes about my coming to see him. “I need to talk to you.”

  He didn’t say anything, and waited for me to continue.

  “I’m worried about Michelle, and I’m worried about the baby,” I said. He looked at me intently letting my statement register and waiting for me to continue. When I didn’t say more, Dr. Nathan opened a desk drawer with hanging folders, and rifled through the files until he came to what I assumed was Michelle’s chart. He placed the file on his desk and looked at me again over his glasses.

  “They seemed to be fine last time Michelle came in for her appointment. What is the cause for your worry? I must say, this is a bit unusual to discuss a patient’s condition, even with the patient’s husband, without the patient present. You, a lawyer of all people, must be sensitive to my concern. But let’s see if there is something I can help you with, Mr. Jessie. Having your first child can be troubling for fathers and mothers alike. You’re not the first prospective dad to come see me without his spouse present. I’ve been doing this a long time. Sometimes, I think too long. I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be able to continue to do it. Anyway, there isn’t much I haven’t seen, I’m afraid to say.”

  “Michelle worships you,” I said.

  He shrugged. “As you know, I delivered her. Her parents, her mother at least, is more a friend of mine now than a patient.”

  “What are the chances she’ll need a C-section?” I blurted out.

  “I guess there is a possibility. There is always a possibility. At this point, the size of the baby does not appear to present a problem.” He peered down through the reading portion of his bifocals and turned a few pages in the file before him. He looked up at me and said, “We’ll just have to see as we go along. Much can happen between now and mid-September.” He took off his glasses, began chewing on an already-chewed earpiece, and closed the file.

  “What if we wanted to have a C-section?” I asked.

  “Wanted to have a C-section?” He said with the earpiece still in his mouth and looked at some spot on the ceiling above. “Well, it’s a surgery that involves risks inherent in any surgery. The recovery time is longer. Future deliveries would sometimes, not always, be restricted to C-sections. It’s somewhat surprising, but many first-time parents wonder why we don’t always do C-sections. I guess the truth is that the risks of surgery have been minimized in recent years, but it is still surgery.” He brought his gaze down from the ceiling and focused on me. Your wife will be going through enough trauma with her first childbirth. Why would you want her to go through surgery, Mr. Jessie?”

  “Remember last time we were here?” I asked. Dr. Nathan opened his file again, flipped forward a few pages, and put his glasses back on his nose. He looked up from his file, and waited for me to continue.

  When I hesitated, Dr. Nathan asked, “Does this have something to do with Michelle reporting to me on her last visit that she had felt a ‘recent vaginal itching and burning that had subsided in a week or ten days’?”

  Again, I hesitated.

  “Look, Mr. Jessie. I can’t help you if you won’t talk to me. My real concern is Michelle and the unborn child, but I have a feeling that what you have to tell me could potentially affect the health of both Michelle and the baby. Now, tell me what it is that you obviously have come here to tell me.” He demanded in a grandfatherly way, but I could tell that there was a note of exasperation in his voice.

  “I’m afraid I may have given Michelle herpes. I’m afraid that it will infect our baby if he’s born through a vaginal delivery. I’m afraid he could be born blind, or worse, even die. Please, help me. I’ve got to do something to protect our son.”

  Dr. Nathan reached into his desk drawer for a pencil. He made a note on the last page of the chart, and closed the file. He took off his glasses again, put his feet up on the desk, leaned back in his old, Naugahyde-covered swivel chair, rubbed his eyes with the backs of his hands, sighed, and then looked at me trying to control his anger.

  “You want me to perform a C-section for the delivery of your son so that you can avoid telling your wife that you have herpes, and that she may have it as well? I’m afraid I can’t promise to do that, Mr. Jessie,” he said. “You know I won’t do that. Frankly, I’m surprised you’d even ask me to consider doing that.”

  I wasn’t sure I had asked Dr. Nathan to consider doing that, at least not in so many words, but he was able to consider bits of conversation that hadn’t even been said out loud, almost as if he had heard them before.

  He put his feet back down on the floor and leaned over the desk toward me. “What about the increased risk to your wife?” Dr. Nathan asked, his voice elevating almost an octave.

  “I guess I hadn’t really thought about that,” I said leaning back in my chair trying to increase the distance between us. “Won’t she have to have a C-section now, if she has herpes?” I asked.

  “She could. It depends on whether she has an outbreak at the time of delivery. If not, we just give the mother a dose of medication, probably the same one you took when you first contracted the disease, and proceed with a vaginal delivery.

  “Look, the bottom line Mr. Jessie, is, if you don’t tell your wife that she has been exposed to herpes, I will. I’ve already made a notation on her chart that indicates she’s a strong candidate for a Cesarean section. I’ll make you this promise, Mr. Jessie. I’ll promise to consider delivering the baby by C-section, if you promise to tell Michelle prior to delivery that you may have given her herpes.”

  He picked up the closed file and placed it in the correct slot in the drawer in his desk. It was clear from his tone that he considered the conversation concluded and that there was no room for negotiation.

  “Okay,” I said dropping my head and talking as much to myself as to him. “I’ll tell her. I promise I will tell her.” I looked back up at him. “Please, don’t let anything happen to her or our baby.” My voice cracked, which only increased my level of embarrassment.

  “I’m not casting any judgments, Mr. Jessie.” He said trying to be reassuring. “That’s not my job. My job is to take care of my patients. You’re clearly emotionally distraught. You need someone to talk t
o about this. Someone other than your wife’s obstetrician.” He paused and waited to see if I would say something.

  “Would you like me to give you the names of a good counselor or two? Talking this through with a trained psychologist would probably do you some good,” he said authoritatively.

  “I know,” I said. “I want to talk to Michelle about it, but I just can’t. It will hurt her so much. I know she’ll never look at me the same way again. Until now, I’ve been perfect in her eyes. I’ll never be that way again.”

  “No, Mr. Jessie,” Dr. Nathan said as he seemed to try to calm down for a moment, “she’ll never see you that way again. But people aren’t perfect. They’re just people. Sometimes they do the wrong thing. They get caught up in situations over which they have no control. And yet they continue to try and control the situation, to fix things that can’t be fixed. It’s true that I am fond of saying that ‘people are the solution to their problems,’ but I mean people collectively not individually. It’s okay to ask somebody for help. I’ll see about doing the C-section, Mr. Jessie, because it’s probably the right thing to do, given the circumstances—assuming your wife contracted genital herpes during her pregnancy. However, you must talk to her. She’s going to be judgmental. She has every right to be. She’s going to blame you, and she may leave you. I don’t know. I am constantly amazed by the human capacity for reconciliation and forgiveness. True, she’ll never see you the way she used to see you.” He rested his elbows on the desk and extended his old, open hands out toward me.

  “But was that really you, Mr. Jessie? Wouldn’t you rather that she, your wife, knows you as you really are—as a human being, not a stereotype—as a person with human foibles and human failures?

  “I don’t know you very well, Davy, but I know that you must have some, well, promise as a young trial lawyer, or you wouldn’t be in the position in which you find yourself as the husband of a senior partner’s daughter. I don’t know the woman from whom you have contracted herpes. And while I don’t know for certain, I suspect that you have transmitted that disease to your wife and potentially to your unborn child.”