This Body

by Laurel Doud

  It was a late Indian summer evening with the promise of cool just a few blocks away. The elephant doors in the back of the Zelig-Ziegfeld Gallerie were open, and inside the skylights were jacked open. A breeze was sneaking in and rippling the flower arrangements that Anne had made for the two long trestle tables now covered with platters of manicured food.

  Katharine stood a little way from the front door, but within the sight line of the entering guests. She felt like a bride but with no groom beside her — hers was the only hand to shake in the reception line. Max had positioned her there, and since this was also in the flight pattern of the waiters with their full glasses of champagne, she didn't protest.

  She watched Puck as he took his right hand and molded it against Vivian's right hip, his fingers almost cupping her buttock. They had come straight from the airport, having flown down from San Francisco where Puck had gone to live in September to see if things could work out between them. Their backs were to Katharine, but she thought she could see their studied but mannered concentration as they took in the exhibit.

  Puck had called Katharine a couple of times after the night they were together. That Night — that's how she thought of it. Like a movie title. It Happened That Night. Both times he was so hesitant and confused, she almost felt sorry for him. He seemed to be trying to dismiss it — That Night, That Woman, Thisby, Katharine, whoever, whatever — as a dream, a figment of his drunken imagination. He was trying to act normal, but the uncertainty was a breach between them. He didn't ask her anything, and, although half of her wanted to confront him — make him writhe in shame and remorse — the other half swallowed their joint culpability and guilt and was mute.

  The last time he called had been to tell her that he was moving up to San Francisco, that she, his sister, had been right, he had held himself hostage with his job; that he wasn't satisfied or fulfilled in it; that it was time to strike out on his own, away from his family, to begin anew, to commit to Vivian, if she would have him; and that he owed this realization all to Thisby. She had steered him toward it. He was beholden to her for everything.

  She found it almost funny; in all her mother-life, one of the things she had always wanted was for someone to confide in her — choose her to be their confidante, draw on her years of experience and well of wisdom. Someone did and then took her advice, but it wasn't even necessarily right. Or true. It was really the fear, the uncertainty, of what actually happened That Night that forced him to act. I'm sure it was.

  And now Puck owed her for it; Vivian had taken him back.

  So Vivian owes me big time too, though she doesn't know; it. She owes me because I taught Goodfellow the thing we both wanted him to learn. I have given him the gray area. He is awash in the nethertones. Never again will the resolution be dear or definite. Never again will things be black and white, yin or yang. I forced Goodfellow away from me and have sent him to her an altered person.

  Vivian owed her all right.

  It's just … it's just … It just wasn't what she had wanted to happen.

  She took a sip of champagne and saw that Anne was pinning her down yet again with a disapproving eye. At the beginning of the reception, Anne had tried subtle hints about not drinking too much and staying focused. She brought up how Thisby's father had bailed her out — yet again — by not only paying for the exhibit but basically doing all the work for her. Anne then escorted people over to divert Katharine. Robert and Anne had asked the entire dramatis personae of their lives, and it seemed to Katharine that they all showed up. Anne and Robert prompted her, “Thisby, you remember Peter Hoskins and Rita Boyle, don't you?” She didn't, but all she had to do was smile, shake their hands, which was often a prelude to a perfunctory kiss, and say, “Nice to see you again. Peter. Rita. Thanks for coming.”

  Now Anne just shot darts at her, and the disapproval and disappointment were thick on her face. But so what if Katharine had been drinking? So what if Anne got upset? What does she know about hardship, about pain, with her big jucking house and her perfect husband?

  Katharine had developed her own thick skin.

  Goodfellow said the magic word as I ran out the door — “Wait …”

  But nothing happened; I'm only waiting to die.

  I went home by way of a liquor store, on the road to ruin, the voice that roared riding shotgun. I owed it to myself to get drunk.

  I didn't look back.

  Robert Bennet had done his dead daughter proud, evinced in the way he had printed, framed, and hung her photographs to their best advantage. He had even come up with the name for the exhibit — “Chameleon Compled”— and the tagline —“Images of the Scurry of Human Lizards Who Have Blended into Their Inanimate Surroundings.”

  He had happily and sympathetically taken over from Katharine weeks ago. She had let it drop one night over the phone that she felt overwhelmed and had lost control of her time. As if I had any fucking control of anything in my life. She then let Robert's running commentary about how the photographs were going to be cropped, framed, and hung wash over her while he did it all. It washed across her ears, across the planes of her cheeks, across her mouth. It was only fitting, only right that she step back and let Robert handle it. What did she know, anyway? She was a parasite in his dead daughter's body, and Katharine's role, her goal in life, the feat, the gift to poor, dead Thisby Bennet, was to allow the exhibit to exist.

  And now it did.

  Quince stood off to the side of the gallery, purposely ignoring her, it seemed to Katharine. She hadn't seen much of Quince in the past two months. Actually, not at all. Katharine supposed it had something to do with telling Quince that she couldn't spend the night anymore when she came down to work at the clinic. Katharine had tried it a few times after she started drinking, and it was just too hard. If she didn't drink, she was so taut that her muscles ached the next day from the isometric strain. If she did drink, it was hard to stop, and she wanted to slap the mad and disappointed look on Quince's face. What does she know about pain?

  Since That Night two and a half months ago, Katharine had sat long hours on Thisby's balcony, baking in the late August sun, a glass of cheap white zinfandel in her hand. At first she had tried to salvage things. She tried to go back to that place where everything she did seemed right. But the harder she tried, the worse everything seemed to become, and the stronger the call was from the balcony and from the glass of wine. The restlessness was like an infection in her, drawing her tight in the body and crazy in the head. The relief, the antidote, was that glass of wine and the balcony, its railing giving in to the soles of her feet, cradling them. There she could think and plan and scheme. And do nothing.

  She used the telephone. That was something she could do — sit on the balcony, the receiver's cord stretched out from the dining area. She called Quince, and Quince would be coldly civil and get off the line as fast as she could.

  So Katharine sat on the balcony, drinking and using the phone. She called home — the Ashley home — when no one would be there, just to hear the greeting, just to hear Marion's voice. She didn't leave any messages, though she filled up the tape day after day with her soft sobbings. Then it was Philip's voice on the recorder, and Katharine stopped calling.

  Katharine followed Puck and Vivian with her eyes and couldn't help but imagine the look on Puck's face if she had been showing by then, the rounded curve of their baby defined by Thisby's thin body. Thisby probably would have shown so much earlier than Katharine, who had been able to absorb the growth of new life in her womb, camouflage it, embrace it. A pregnancy in Thisby would have stuck out like an offense. But Puck wouldn't have acknowledged it either. Just as he hadn't acknowledged their union at all.

  Puck said, “Have I laid my brain in the sun and dried it?”

  Blame it on the alcohol, why don't you? Gimme a jucking break.

  Have I laid my brain in the sun and dried it? Falstaff, of course, said it before him. In The Merry Wives of Windsor.

  She had discovered she
was good at remembering quotes. So much better than Thisby had been. She had a whole slew of them at her disposal. She could have responded with “O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains.”

  Cassio said that, not Falstaff.

  Or she supposed she could have said, “Take a flying fuck, Puck, at a rolling doughnut. I could carve a better man out of a banana.”

  Shakespeare didn't say that, of course. Paul Lazzaro did in the film Slaughterhouse-Five — Valerie Perrine's movie debut of her impressive physical endowments. Valerie Perrine certainly had no trouble passing the pencil test.

  But Katharine said nothing.

  There's something to be said with silence.

  Even before Puck left for San Francisco, Katharine knew she was pregnant; there was no mistaking the rolling nausea of morning sickness. Even when she woke up sick from the previous night's alcohol, she knew what was underlying the hangover. Prithee, do not turn me about, my stomach is not constant.

  She had taken three home pregnancy tests in her life — in her and Thisby's life. The first two were negative, the last was positive.

  Primo, secundo, tertio. The third pays for all. The baby's mother, however, is a drug addict and an alcoholic, and the father is either a drug pusher or the mother's biological brother. Okay, fans, there's the whistle. You make the call.

  She aborted it.

  It was a Saturday when she went to the women's clinic for the abortion. Operation Rescue was there in full force, lined up outside in the gauntlet of righteousness.

  To save me from myself. Christ, if they only knew.

  Katharine had been there a couple of days before to have her required meeting with a family-planning counselor. She felt she had to be sober, or they might not give her an abortion, but it hurt to be sober, the white noise quieting to a mere wail. She liked the solid wall of roaring sound. Then she didn't have to listen to anyone — especially to herself.

  The counselor was a motherly-looking woman with soft padding around her body. The effect was amazing. A part of Katharine wanted to climb up into her lap and cry. But another part, all fire and ice, sat firmly in her chair and answered all the counselor's questions rationally and straightforwardly and lied masterfully, when she had to.

  No, she was currently not taking any drugs, which was true. Yes, she did drink, but only in moderation, which was not. Yes, the father knew — NOT — but no, he would not be accompanying her to … to her … to her appointment with death.

  They allowed her to keep her clothes on from the waist up, and they draped a pale blue cotton sheet over her stomach and raised knees. The feet stirrups were padded, and there was a poster of an emerald forest on the ceiling above her.

  The doctor patted her on one knee and told her it would all be okay. They had given her a pill to relax, but it only made her nauseous. She could feel the speculum inserted into her vagina and the turn of the screw to widen the opening.

  “You'll feel a pinch now,” the doctor said, his voice coming up right through her body.

  Her abdomen cramped, and she gasped.

  “It's okay now. It's all over now.”

  She lay down on an army cot in a room packed full of army cots, a dormitory for the recently unpregnant.

  I was a fool to weep at what I am glad of. Hey, so I'm living prime-time stuff. A soap opera couldn't have written a better script, a tabloid a better headline: GIRL IMPREGNATED BY ASS-HEADED BROTHER. INCREDIBLE PHOTOS INSIDE.

  Roy Bennet arrived an hour into the reception. Roy and Robert were not identical twins, but they were slightly distorted fun house mirror images. Katharine wondered vaguely whether Robert ever thought about a Jekyll-and-Hyde connection. Roy seemed to Katharine a little younger, a little wilder, and a lot hipper, but maybe, she decided, it was the tanned, relaxed, kept appearance about him.

  He walked up to Katharine and took her hand that held the champagne glass. She thought he was going to kiss her fingertips, but instead he brought the glass to his lips and took a sip. “Not as good as I'm accustomed to, but I doubt my brother is serving Rob Roys. I guess this will have to do, won't it?” He looked Katharine up and down and said, “So how's my favorite niece?”

  Roy stood with her then, taking up the role as host, or groom, nodding and greeting people as if he had been her Svengali all her life. He cast his voice in her ear like a ventriloquist, his mouth barely moving underneath the disarming smile that he gave as people appeared in front of them to ooh and aah over the exhibit.

  Katharine wondered if this was how he really made a living, not as the international investment broker he claimed to be. This was how he really paid his bills and kept himself in the style to which he was now accustomed. He was an American gigolo, and he entertained his patrons by making them laugh, by dealing gossip, by telling tales and offering up bedtime stories. He kept his head by playing Scheherazade.

  “Those two,” he said, his voice a narrow beam between his easy smile and liquid voice. “Ellen and Annabel Andrews. Mother and daughter.”

  She watched the two women, who were dressed not identically but enough alike for it to be a little bit weird, approach her.

  “They used to be in the waterskiing show at Sea World. It was quite an act, I hear. They can hardly stand each other, but they're so used to being a team, they can't break it up.”

  After they extended their greetings, the women moved into the gallery and Roy gestured to a handsome man with an extremely wicked grin who was leaning over some batting-eyed blonde. “That's Charlie Sorel. He's a writer for your father's studio, making the switch from bad novelist to mediocre screenwriter. He's also a horseplayer. I hear he's playing the ponies close, real close. One bad bet, and it's goodbye, Charlie.”

  “And those two?” Katharine asked as Anne and Robert were making their way over to Roy, once they finally realized that he was not going to come to them.

  Roy was surprisingly quiet, and when he spoke, his voice had lost its mocking quality. “My better half and his lovely lady.” He then turned to Katharine and said, very low, “But he's so tight, if you stuck a lump of coal up his ass, in two weeks you'd have a diamond.”

  Robert shook hands rather stiffly, which made Roy laugh. “Don't worry, I'm not staying long. I finished my business here in LA. I'm taking a flight out tonight.” Roy turned to Anne and took her hand. “Still hanging around with this bum, are you?”

  Anne gave Roy a kiss on the cheek with real affection and said, “Nice to see you, Roy. I'm so glad you could come. Thisby's done well, hasn't she?”

  Ah, yes. Well done, that's us.

  Roy took a turn around the gallery, leaving her at her post. He returned, offered his congratulations on the show, kissed her on the mouth, and then waltzed back out of their lives to do some deep-sea fishing off the coast of Mosquitia — ta ta.

  Katharine was sorry to see him go and accepted another glass of champagne, though she knew she was moving from that state of euphoria to that hollow where it was dark and the night monsters sprang at her back from the doorway and the ceiling.

  Things were beginning to pile up on her. Dead heat on a merry-go-round, she could hear Philip's voice saying to her. In the beginning, the alcohol had buoyed her, but now she felt as if she were being squashed by it all — sinking underneath, like water under oil.

  Well, it had been a bitch of a two months, considering.

  Considering. Concerning. With respect to. Oh, yeah, and regarding.

  Regarding Hooker.

  Katharine called him after the abortion and after Puck had left. She suggested that they meet for drinks. She could almost feel his eyes narrow over the phone line and wonder what the sting was. But he agreed, and when they went back to his place, she thought he would whack her around a few times for dumping him — I bet he's hell at whacking — but he didn't even twitch a finger to scare her. She was almost disappointed.

  They had some good times. She snorted a few lines of cocaine, smoked a couple of iced cigarett
es, but Katharine found that she was not really interested in feeling wildly euphoric. She was interested in not feeling at all, and she liked the rush to be slow and numbing — and loud.

  He ended up dumping her after a couple of weeks.

  They were at Potters. Katharine had arrived earlier and had already downed a couple of margaritas. Well, margaritas of sorts — I'll have a slush margarita, hold the ice, hold the triple sec, bring the tequila with lime and salt on the side, and I want you to hold the straw between your knees.

  She was propped up against the bar and clumsily lit a cigarette, watching the ring go up in smoke. She did that too now — smoke. There had been no cough of surprise when she inhaled that first cigarette, only relief. She had always heard that nicotine is the most addicting substance known to man, but no one told her how good it could taste.

  Fuck you, Surgeon General.

  On into the evening, Katharine noticed that some young woman in tight jeans and three-inch heels, with boobs the size of honeydew melons, had draped herself against Hooker's back as he was leaning over the pool table. She was biting at his earlobe, and his elbow kept jabbing her in the tit as he practiced his stroke at the cue ball. They were laughing.

  Katharine unsteadily got to her feet and grabbed the girl by her arm and yanked her off.

  “Hey,” the girl protested, rubbing her upper arm.

  “Why don't you go home?” Hooker said in precise tones to Katharine.

  “I don't wanna,” she said, or that's what she thought she said.

  Hooker nodded to one of his friends. “Take her home.”