by Paul Theroux
That was my second whale steak.
8.
We went to New York City separately—Mrs. Mamalujian took a plane, and (under the influence of Kerouac) I hitched. We met at the Plaza. Another Plaza. Each time I saw her it struck me that she had an original face—red puckered lips and big rouged cheeks, each cheek a distinct muscle. Her eyes were pouchy and smeared with green. I had never seen a face like it.
She said, “I’ve been here for hours—shopping. Mainly buying underwear.”
That depressed me. Any mention of underwear or sex or nakedness made me gloomy. I did not tell Mrs. Mamalujian why I had come. As far as she knew, it was for the candlelight dinner we had a few hours later at the Marquis Carvery, where the coat-check girl had to find a necktie for me to wear with my khaki shirt and army jacket. The tie was stiff with soupstains.
“Eat my avocado, Andy—before the waiter takes it away.”
Gloom made me hungry. Eating was sometimes my way of worrying.
“I’ve got tickets for West Side Story, and there’s another play Sunday night. We can go to the Museum of Modern Art some afternoon. Isn’t it fun to be here? Don’t you feel free?”
I felt like a jailbird. I said, “It’s nice. But I’ve got to see a few people tomorrow.”
“That’s all right, as long as you get back here before show time. Did you know West Side Story’s based on Shakespeare? The one on Sunday is Tennessee Williams. Very spicy”—and she winked—“queers and cannibalism. We can have dinner afterwards. It was so sweet of you to come.”
Just to set her straight I said, “No, it was great of you to give me a place to stay.”
“Don’t put it like that,” she said.
“I mean, it was a lucky coincidence that I had this stuff to do. The, um, thing. These people.”
“You’re so busy. I wish I was busy.”
I wanted to kill myself I was so busy. I pushed food into my mouth so I wouldn’t say anything crazy.
She said, “New York has it all over Boston. You can do anything here.”
That had better be true, I thought.
The room at the Plaza had twin beds, I was relieved to find, when we went back after dinner. Mrs. Mamalujian took a long sloppy shower, leaving the bathroom door open, as she had that first time in Boston. I could hear her elbows hitting the plastic shower curtain.
I lay on the bed reading Ezra Pound—The Pisan Cantos.
Mrs. Mamalujian came in dripping, and holding a towel against her front.
“Aren’t you going to take your clothes off?”
“I’ve got to get up early,” I said.
She smiled at that and I immediately realized what I had said was stupid.
“And the thing is, I always sleep with my clothes on in hotels. I have a morbid fear of fires. I want to be dressed if there’s trouble.”
The mention of fire took the smile off her face. She stood in the half-dark and slipped on a silky nightgown.
She said, “If there’s anything you want to talk about, just come over here. Sometimes the best place to talk is in bed. I mean, you can say things that you can’t say anywhere else.”
She switched her light off and sighed.
I lay there rigid in the darkness expecting her to touch me. Her powerful perfume made her seem as though she were very close to me.
“But, um, Andre.”
“Yuh?”
“If you come over to me, take your shoes off, will you?”
Mrs. Mamalujian was quietly snoring and smacking her lips in the next bed the following morning when I slid to the floor and crept out of the room and went to find an abortionist. That was my only reason for being there. New York was where they were.
I knew they were not listed in the telephone book. The practice was illegal. They were known by word of mouth. A doctor could go to jail if he was convicted of performing an abortion. But I knew such doctors existed. The question was, Where should I start looking?
I was prevented from crossing Fifth Avenue by a Kennedy rally making its way with banners and drums to Central Park. And I began to imagine that these wealthy-looking women with their badges and funny hats had all had abortions; but for them it was like having a tooth pulled—a morning’s work. I could also see how these people, women and men and kids my age, all somewhat resembled Kennedy—good families, good clothes, good teeth. They were happy, because they knew that America was going to be theirs for the next eight years. It wouldn’t be mine—that was the sorry feeling I was left with as the rally took its chanting and music up the avenue.
I walked east, across Park Avenue, and kept walking, thinking that I might find a neighborhood bar. But there were no bars. There were hot August streets and big department stores and apartment buildings. I saw signs—B. M. LEFKOWITZ MD AND J.R. STONE OBSTETRICS AND GYNECOLOGY; and I thought of going in and asking. But I didn’t know how to phrase the question—I couldn’t even begin. The thing was to have a doctor’s name. You paid him a visit. He knew why you’d come. He simply named his price and made an appointment. I guessed that an abortion would cost about two hundred dollars, and I had fifty on me for a down payment.
This part of New York was impenetrable. I walked south and then had the idea that Brooklyn was where I should go. Brooklyn had a reputation for illicit activities. It was easy to imagine gambling and prostitution and murder in Brooklyn, and abortion was somehow related to those crimes.
I had no doubt that it was a crime. But what else could I do? I had promised Lucy that I would help her. I was responsible for the fix she was in, and she had become hopeful when I told her I was going to New York to find a doctor. We had not even spoken of marriage the thought was so frightening, and in fact as soon as she mentioned missing her period my love for her was consumed in worry.
I kept walking. I imagined it this way: I was standing in a bar, having a drink. I got friendly with the bartender or maybe the man drinking next to me. What’s up, kid? Oh, you’re new around here. Then I asked whether there was a doctor nearby who knew how to get a girl out of trouble. The way I imagined it, someone always knew.
“Can you tell me the way to Brooklyn?”
The man selling hot bagels from a pushcart didn’t look at me, but he said out of the side of his mouth, “Cross over, downtown to Fourteenth, change to the BMT”—and some more that I didn’t catch.
I had not even noticed the subway entrances—small signs over stairways that led underground. I went down the dirty stairs, bought a token and boarded a train. It was rackety and it went so fast, missing stations, that I got off after a few stops because I was afraid it would take me too far. I asked the way to Brooklyn—about twelve times, just to be sure, and finally discovered that every subway car had a map in it. When I worked out where I was I saw that Brooklyn was huge. I chose Borough Hall, imagining a square with a stately building lined with pillars aboveground. It was a glary shopping district filled with traffic stink and bus horns, and so I walked.
I was encouraged by the brownstones here, and none of the buildings were as intimidatingly tall as the ones in Manhattan.
NICK’S BAR AND GRILL on the corner fitted my image of the bar I had envisioned. I went in and ordered a beer. I had been so impatient I hadn’t realized the time—only nine-thirty in the morning. The bar was empty except for an old woman at a table who looked like an alcoholic.
“Quiet today,” I said to the bartender.
“Yeah.”
“I suppose it really gets lively here later on.”
“You kidding me?” he said and walked away.
A man came through the door, sort of pushing it with his stomach in a comic way. He wore a Hawaiian shirt and a straw hat and two-tone shoes. He said hello to me and climbed onto a stool. Without being asked the bartender brought him a shot of whiskey. He downed the whiskey like medicine, making a face, then took a swig of beer and looked around.
“Going to be a hot one,” he said.
“I don’t mind.”
“You’d mind if you were carting around two hundred and sixty pounds of blubber.”
I laughed, but inside I was asking myself how I could turn the conversation from the weather to abortions.
He asked me where I was from—something about my accent—and when I told him, he said that Kennedy was from Boston, too, and we talked about the election. He said he was for Kennedy and I told him so was I, because I wanted to ingratiate myself. He said he had been a Democrat his whole life.
“I fought in the Pacific with Jack Kennedy,” he said.
I wanted to tell him that the Pacific Ocean was a big place and that he was kidding himself.
“And I think it’s about time we had a Catholic in the White House. It’ll straighten this country out.”
This gave me a very dreary feeling, because I knew this fat man was a Catholic and I also knew that he wasn’t going to give me any help.
“Kennedy would never legalize abortions,” I said.
“Why should he? It’s murder,” the man said.
I found an excuse to leave soon after that.
I was a little unsteady from the beer in my empty stomach, but after a few blocks I went into a crowded place, The Broad Street Bar. I sat next to a man in shirtsleeves who didn’t reply to anything I said. I tried another man and couldn’t shut him up. At last I saw a very sinister-looking man in a torn jacket and said, “Do you live around here?”
“Who wants to know?” he said in a nasty voice.
“I was just wondering, because I’m looking for a doctor,” and I dropped my voice. “There’s this guy I know who knocked up his girlfriend and he told me to come down here as a favor to see if the doctor’s still in business. He lives in this area, apparently.”
“The only one I know is Shimkus.”
“That might be him.”
“I think he’s over on J Street.”
I thanked him and dashed out of the bar and looked for a telephone. There were two doctors called Shimkus and one called Simkiss in the book. None of them answered the phone. Why did I think that these doctors would be in their offices on a hot Saturday in August?
I tried a few more bars, started conversations with strangers, but got nowhere—didn’t even ask the question that was the sole reason for my search.
By midafternoon I was drunkish and hot and had a headache. Walking towards the subway I saw a doctor’s shingle and went straight in. The doctor himself was with the receptionist when I entered, and he looked at me in an unwelcoming way over his glasses.
“Can I see you a minute, doctor?”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“No. I just have one short question.”
His face was very severe, but he sighed and it softened. Perhaps because his office was empty—or perhaps he was headed home—he said okay unwillingly. I had never met a doctor who was polite, because their politeness was just another way of being rude.
I was so desperate I blurted out the question as soon as he shut the door to his consulting room: My friend’s girlfriend needed an abortion—
He placed his fingertips together, making a basket of his hands, and he smiled at me.
“Doctor John can help you. He’s right across the street.”
“Really? Oh, that’s great!” I said, not caring that I was revealing my anxiety and that my secret was probably out.
But as I turned to go, he said, “On second thought, no. Doctor John’s in jail.” He eyed me, looking triumphant, and added, “That’s what I always tell people who ask that question. You’re asking me to break the law.”
“Fuck it,” I said.
That night I saw West Side Story with Mrs. Mamalujian. She had seen it before, and had the record, and she knew all the songs. She sang them in her chain-smoker’s voice and even when a man behind us complained out loud she kept it up.
Back at the hotel, she took another shower—the usual one, with the bathroom door open, for an hour. I read Ezra Pound in the sitting room and thanked God there was a sitting room. But I was still very worried. Pull down thy vanity, I read. After Mrs. Mamalujian got into her bed I yawned and walked around and took my shoes off. Then I lay down on my bed with all my clothes on.
“You’re a very funny kid, Andy. I had no idea.”
I yawned again, pretending I hadn’t heard her.
“I mean strange. If you ever want to talk about it—”
“Tomorrow I have to see some friends of mine,” I said.
“I was hoping we could go to a museum. See the Picassos. Have some lunch. Take in a show.”
I pretended to be asleep by snoring softly, and soon she stopped talking. But I lay awake almost all night, and in the morning I slid off my bed and went to the door on my hands and knees.
She was staring at me.
“It’s in the door,” she said, meaning the key she thought I was hunting for.
She made me nervous, because when I was around her I could not think clearly about my problem; and I knew I was running out of time. I spent the whole of that day, Sunday, walking up and down the sidewalks with my hands in my pockets wondering what to do. I liked the city because the city ignored me, and I felt that it was so large and such a mess that I had as much right to be there as anyone else.
When I got back to the Plaza at about six, Mrs. Mamalujian was sitting in the parlor room of the suite having a drink.
She said, “I could live like this,” and from the way she said it I knew she was drunk. Her head wobbled. “I mean, waiting for you to come home from work.”
“I haven’t been to work,” I said, and yawned.
She said, “The trouble with you”—and she gestured with her drink—“is that you don’t know how to enjoy yourself. Where is your pep?”
“I’m tired from walking.”
“You said you were with some friends.”
“Walking with them.”
It was very hard to lie or invent when I was so distracted.
“What are they like, these so-called friends of yours?”
“Nice bunch of guys,” I said. “But there’s one who has a problem. He wanted me to help him, but how could I?”
Mrs. Mamalujian looked at me drunkenly and I wondered whether to tell her.
“I love problems,” she said. “Know why? Because I usually have the solution. Know what the solution usually is? Money.”
She took sips of gin between sentences.
“The stupid idiot knocked up his girlfriend.”
There was a certain way she had of swallowing that meant she was thinking.
“Isn’t that the girlfriend’s problem?”
“He promised to help her,” I said. “He’s looking for a doctor to get rid of it.”
“There’s plenty of those doctors around,” Mrs. Mamalujian said.
“That’s what people say, but where the hell are they?”
“Right over there,” she said, and pointed out the window.
I went to the window. I said, “Where?”
“Park Avenue,” she said in a halting voice.
When I turned around she was crying. I asked her what was wrong.
“I know someone who got an abortion from a doctor there,” she said.
“What was his name?”
“It was a woman,” she said, and sobbed. I believed I knew who that woman might be.
I said, “No—the doctor’s name.”
It sounded something like Zinzler. That was all I wanted to know. I was so grateful I almost relaxed enough to take my clothes off and eat and sleep properly.
Mrs. Mamalujian went on drinking and around ten o’clock she let out a little giggle and passed out. I put her to bed with her clothes on—she was wearing so many. She looked very small after I took off her shoes and her hat. We didn’t go to the play.
I slept fitfully in one of the armchairs and at six I wrote Mrs. Mamalujian a note thanking her for the lovely weekend. I found D. K. Zinzler, MD, in the phone book, with a Park Avenue address and then went out
and located the building, fifteen blocks away. I had breakfast to kill time and at nine o’clock made my move. The doorman, a goon in a blue uniform, tried to stop me as I headed through the revolving door. I swallowed my pride and told him I had an appointment and asked him whether there was any information he required from me. He was so bored by my eagerness he let me go.
Zinzler was on the eighth floor. The corridor was cool, very quiet, smelling of flowers and floorwax. And Zinzler’s office was so clean I was hesitant to sit down. His receptionist asked me whether I had an appointment.
By then I had given the matter some thought.
“No. I’m delivering a message.”
“Yes?” And she put her hand out.
“My message is for the doctor.”
“I’ll have to know what it is.”
“I can only tell you that my client regards it as highly confidential.”
Client? she was thinking, as she looked at my army jacket, combat boots, sunglasses.
“Just a minute.”
While she was out of the room, a woman and a girl of about seventeen or eighteen entered from the outside corridor, the mother looking suspicious and hateful, the girl rather stupefied, as if she’d been hit on the head. The girl also looked ill. I was sure she was pregnant and that the doctor was going to give her an abortion. The mother, annoyed that I was witnessing their arrival, gave me a black look.
“Go in,” the receptionist said to me, and began apologizing to the mother and daughter for the delay.
Doctor Zinzler was waiting for me in the office. He was half out of his chair and as soon as he saw me he frowned, knowing that I was there on false pretenses.
“You have a message for me?”
“It’s more of a question.”
“Yes,” he said, and hurried me with a movement of his hand.
“This friend of mine was wondering whether you’d take care of his girlfriend.”
He was an old man and he had an old man’s terrible stare.
“She’s pregnant.”
His stare made me keep talking.