Rachel squeezed her eyes shut, waiting, ready for the first thrust, oh so ready. Then felt something hard, bony, poking between her thighs, surprising her a little, not his cock after all, but his fingers. Pushing in and out in a hard, steady rhythm.
The table, the harsh light overhead, the pressure of David’s fingers for a moment reminded her of something else, something she didn’t want to think about. She felt the hotness inside her begin to cool. The gynecologist, that was it. Like a visit to the gynecologist’s, a pelvic exam.
This is what David does to pregnant women at the hospital, feeling up inside them while they lie on a table, feet in stirrups.
No, no, I won’t let myself think about it that way. It’s not the same. Just my mind playing stupid tricks. Because of the baby. Because I need him to be gentle tonight.
But playing together like this could be good too. The fire inside [121] her was coming back. Yes, oh yes. David knew so well just how to please her. She could come like this, any minute now. Would he let her?
No. David was pulling her over on her side, face toward him, eye level with his crotch.
“Suck me,” he said.
Rachel hesitated an instant, then took him in her mouth. It was always like this, the little shock first, feeling somehow as if it was bad to do this, depraved. But then she began to feel good, powerful almost, feeling him swell even larger, hearing his moans of pleasure, imagining she was the only woman in the world who could do this. She would give David what no one else could.
And it’s not dirty, she told herself, not when you love someone.
She moved her tongue along his shaft. He was thrusting against her now, grunting, she could hear the steady ticking of his zipper against the edge of the table as he pumped his hips. He kept the rhythm with his fingers too, still inside her, sliding in and out. Hot. So hot they felt as if they were on fire, burning her.
She came, like shooting up in flames, and at the same time felt David burst out too, tasted the surge of salty liquid filling her mouth. She didn’t mind the taste, though she’d heard some women did. Maybe she would have with someone else, but David was the only one she’d ever done this with.
David was pulling away from her now, pulling up his pants, helping her onto unsteady legs. His face was flushed, but otherwise they might have been sitting here playing cards, Gin Rummy. Cool. Nothing ruffled him. That’s what made him such a good doctor. But damn it, she wished he would hold her. She needed his arms around her so badly.
Rachel watched David walk to the sink, begin washing his hands, and the awful feeling she’d had before swept over her, of being in a doctor’s office. Well, young lady, it looks as if you’re pregnant, about six weeks I’d say, but we’ll run a urine test to be sure.
“David?” she called to him softly over the pattering of the water in the old enamel sink. She sank down on a chair, not bothering to put her pants on, just pulling her shirt down over her knees. “I’m pregnant.”
He twisted his head around, looking at her as if she’d told a [122] bad joke, his mouth crooking at the corner as if he wasn’t sure whether to laugh or sneer.
“Rachel, that’s not funny, not even to joke about,” he said, smiling now.
“I’m not joking.” The words seemed to rise, not from her throat, but from the aching hollow of her stomach.
She watched his face grow dark, remote. Why was he looking at her like that, as if she’d spoiled everything, as if she was somehow attacking him?
“Christ, Rachel. Are you sure?” He caught himself, hitting the heel of his hand against his forehead. “Dammit, of course you are. You’re a doctor. How on earth could you have let something like this happen?”
You. Not “we.” Like it was all her fault.
“I wasn’t exactly playing solitaire when it happened,” she snapped.
Two quick strides, trailing splotches of water on the floor from his dripping hands, and he was in front of her, leaning toward her, palms smacking down on the table. Anger flashed in his green eyes.
“Holy Christ, Rachel. You’re not one of those kids we see, sixteen, illiterate, knocked up because they’re too dumb to know what birth control is. You told me you were using a diaphragm. Just now, I thought ... shit, that’s why I didn’t, inside you, because I was too hot to wait for you to put your goddamn diaphragm in.”
His eyes had a queer flat look that made the blood in her veins turn to ice water. She felt his anger humming and crackling in the air like electricity seeking a ground.
She stared at his hands. She couldn’t look at him. His fingers were splayed against the knotty pine tabletop, the fine golden hair below his knuckles glistening with jewel-like droplets.
Damn him. The bastard.
Rachel took a deep breath, struggling to subdue her hurt and her anger. “I was using the diaphragm. They’re not infallible, as you know. Maybe I took it out too soon. Or put it in too late. Or maybe little green men from Mars poked holes in it when I wasn’t looking. Dammit, how should I know how it happened?”
She looked up and saw his face now was very still and cold.
“Maybe you do know. Maybe it wasn’t such an accident.”
[123] Rachel felt, more than heard, his words—like ice in the pit of her stomach. Oh God. Did he really say that?
No, he couldn’t really believe that. Not really. He must know she’d never do a thing like that. She wanted to hit him, shatter that expression of cool disdain.
Then suddenly the anger went out of her, and she felt deflated, flat and empty. “Look, let’s not do this. Getting angry won’t help. It’s no one’s fault. It just happened.”
David straightened, driving the fingers of both hands through his thick sandy hair, and exhaled as if relieved. “You’re right. I’m sorry. No sense getting all worked up. It’s not as if any real harm was done.”
“What do you mean?”
He looked at her as if she were a child, and not a very bright one. “An abortion. You’ll have one, of course. I’ll arrange it.”
Shrinking away from him in her mind, Rachel felt as if she were standing at one end of a long tunnel, seeing David as a dark speck silhouetted at the other end. She felt a vast distance between them, certain as she sat here in the safety of her snug kitchen that if she stretched her arm out to touch him, it would meet only cool darkness.
David, mistaking her silence for acquiescence, was smiling now, walking around behind her to knead her shoulders, his touch sure and deft.
“Look, I know what’s eating you,” he continued. “Those girls, the ones who come in all cut up from some back-street butcher with a coat hanger. It won’t be anything like that. I have a friend, from med school. He’s in private practice now. OB-GYN. He owes me a few favors. It’ll be done right. Safe. Easy as pulling a tooth.”
She pulled away, and turned to stare at him, a rushing sound in her ears.
Rachel thought of the baby inside her, its warm glow, and how she’d already begun imagining what it would look like, how she would feel holding it in her arms. She’d thought, too, of the cozy house she and David would live in, the room they would decorate as a nursery.
And she wouldn’t have to give up medicine, she had told herself. [124] Maybe a few months’ leave, and then with David’s help, and Mama’s, and a nursemaid, she could still do her residency.
But now he was telling her to get rid of it, her child, as if it were something nasty that had to be scraped from the bottom of her shoe.
Rachel shot to her feet, bumping the table with her hip. She heard a crash. She looked down through tears at the starburst of white crystals and broken china that had been the sugar bowl.
“No,” she said, amazed at how steady her voice was. “I won’t have an abortion.”
“Then you—”
“That’s right I’m having this baby.”
He stared at her, an instant of blank disbelief, then his handsome face began to harden, his emerald eyes narrow.
“You’d be
throwing away your career,” he said coldly. “For a clump of cells. What are you, six, eight weeks? A clump of cells no bigger than your thumbnail then. Something we studied under our microscopes in embryology, way back in pre-med. Or have you forgotten? Romanticizing it doesn’t change the biological facts.”
“You bastard.” She wanted to slug him, punch his handsome, smug face as hard as she could. “You cold bastard.”
“Did you expect me to marry you, was that part of the fantasy, too?”
“No,” she said, her voice breaking. “I just thought you’d care.” She stared at him, a tall stranger poised against the pans that hung from hooks on the brick wall behind him. She was trying to remember why she had ever thought she loved him.
He turned away, showing his profile, like a Roman emperor on a coin. “I care,” he said, each word separate and exquisitely wrought. “I care about being a doctor, and I care about you. But I won’t make any excuses. I never promised you anything in the beginning, and I won’t now. If you have this baby, Rachel, you’ll have it alone.”
Rachel stared at the shattered bowl on the floor. Whole one minute, broken beyond repair the next.
She felt slightly nauseated, dazed by his coldness. The thought of what they’d done on this table a few minutes ago now seemed dirty, humiliating, a locker-room joke.
[125] And an even worse joke was that even now, in spite of all he’d said, she longed for him to take her in his arms, and make the pain go away. Pain like dull knives hacking at her insides, making her struggle to breathe.
“Go away,” she told him. “Just go.”
“Guess what?”
Kay blew in through the front door, plump arms laden with Balducci bags, her round face flushed with excitement.
“What?” Rachel asked, curled on the couch amidst crumpled Kleenexes, feeling even worse than she had last night with David.
Rachel watched Kay plop the bags onto the pine hall table. Delicious spicy, smoky smells drifted toward her. Only now they made her stomach heave.
If this is because of some guy, Rachel thought, he must really be something. Kay, the original yenta, the Sherlock Holmes of Jewish mothers, still hadn’t picked up on the fact that Rachel was lying here in the dark at two in the afternoon when she should have been at the hospital.
“I quit!” Kay threw off her coat, and did a clackety dance in her Dr. Scholl clogs across the bare strip of floor. In her white uniform and gold-rim glasses, her hair crinkling in a dark cloud about her round face, she looked like a demented Orphan Annie.
“No more Valium overdoses,” Kay jabbered on. “No more breast implants. No more nose jobs. No more Barbra Streisands who think they can look like Grace Kelly.” She gave a little hop to keep from tripping over the telephone cord, stretched across the floor. “Rachel, would you believe, today this woman, this kvetch, comes hopping into the ER. Sprained her toe, now get this, on the escalator at Saks, and while she’s whining and bitching, a kid with multiple stab wounds is practically bleeding to death not five feet away. I don’t know what happened, something in me just snapped. I told her she should take her dear little toe back to Saks and get a refund. Then I went outside for some air, and I got to thinking about Abbie Steiner. Remember her? She bailed out last summer and went to a Red Cross hospital in Vietnam. I got a letter from her. Boy, do they need help over there, nurses, doctors—like, desperately. And I’m [126] sick of making noises about this war, and not doing anything, so I decided—” She stopped, her round face puckering in sudden concern. “Hey, Rachel, you all right, you sick or something? What are you doing home now? I thought you were on call.”
“It’s a long story.”
Rachel winced as Kay raised the blinds open, harsh winter sunlight stabbing her eyes. “Please, not that much. A little lower. I like it dark. No, I’m not sick, just a little bit pregnant. Kay, you can’t be serious.”
Dumb question, she thought. When it came to good causes, Kay was nothing if not serious. Rachel remembered the nurses’ walkout that first summer of her Bellevue clerkship. When Rachel had tried to wrangle her way through the picket line, Kay, a frizzy-haired munchkin with the bellow of a longshoreman, had buttonholed her, winning her over with an impassioned outpouring about how it was mostly the patients who suffered when the nurses were short-staffed and underpaid. She was so intrigued that she’d invited Kay for a cup of coffee later. They’d been friends ever since.
Kay flopped onto the sofa beside her. “As serious as a Richard Nixon is about trying to run for President again.”
“Jesus, Kay. I can’t believe you actually quit Lenox Hill. Just like that. And Vietnam? It’s too much.”
“I know.” Kay gave a gravelly laugh that didn’t quite hide an edge of unease. “No place for a lady to be caught in torn underwear, as my dear ma would say. But think of it, Rachel. My God, a chance to do something besides sit, clucking over what a rotten waste it all is.”
Rachel smiled. “Somehow, I just can’t quite picture you ever sitting and clucking.”
“My mother, God forbid, when she finds out about this, she’ll go to Washington, harangue Johnson and every member of Congress to stop me.”
“Oh, Kay.” Rachel rested her head against Kay’s shoulder, letting her tears spill out. “I think you’re crazy. And brave. And I don’t know how the hell I’m going to get through this without you.”
And for an insane instant, she thought: I wish I were going, too. So far away from this mess I’m in.
[127] Then Kay was hugging her, crying a little too. “You’ve told him then?”
Rachel nodded. She had fallen into an exhausted sleep last night before Kay got home, and this morning Kay was gone by time she’d dragged herself out of bed.
“He wants me to have an abortion.”
“Is that what you want?”
“No.” Rachel buried her face in her hands, the pain of last night coming back acutely. “But it’s so damn complicated. Without David, how would I manage? Give up everything I’ve worked for? And if I don’t, how fair is that, having a baby when I’ll hardly be around?”
Kay shrugged. “Who said life was fair?”
“The crazy thing is, even knowing how hard it would be, I still want it. And for all the wrong reasons. I can’t bear the thought of someone scraping it out of me. And I want to see it, see if it looks like me. But the big thing is, it’s already a part of me. I feel changed by it. I can never be the same again. Kay, tell me, are those good enough reasons?”
Kay stood up, moving across the room, reaching for the packet of Salems that sat on the bamboo bookcase. She lit one, jetting the smoke out through her nose.
She gave a harsh little laugh. “Who’s to say? Did you ask for your parents? Did I? My mother, you could eat off her kitchen floor, but she hated to cook for her family. She would push her vacuum cleaner to the North Pole and back, but try getting her to sit down for an hour and play a game of Gin Rummy with me or one of my brothers. Yet in her own meshuggene way, I know she loved us. The way I figure it, when you’re a kid, you take what you can get from whatever parents you’re stuck with, and be glad for it.” She looked at the cigarette between her fingers as if surprised to see it there, her wide, generous face falling. “I gave them up last week. Six whole days without a smoke, and now look at me. Jesus. Maybe I ought to take up vacuuming like Ma.”
Rachel thought of Sylvie then. Did wanting this baby have something to do with Mama? All those years she’d watched Mama gazing sadly at the empty cradle in the nursery? Now there would finally be a baby to fill that cradle. A baby they would both love.
Then the rosy fantasy faded. She imagined what it would really [128] be like. Every day she’d be pulled in two directions. She’d hear secondhand from the nursemaid, or maybe her mother, about its first smile, its first steps. She’d probably end up creating the same distance she’d felt with her own mother.
Oh, why was she making this so hard? Why couldn’t she grab hold with both hands, or simply let go?<
br />
God, oh God, what should I do?
Staring at the drift of balled-up Kleenexes, Rachel felt a sudden self-loathing. This was not the end of the world. She wasn’t the first woman to get knocked up.
She stood up. “Come on, let’s unpack these goodies you brought and eat before they get cold. My head can’t take any more major news, or any more soul-searching.”
Instantly, Kay was reaching into the bags, pulling out plastic containers and foil-wrapped packages.
“I wanted it to be practically a catered affair. Wait till you see what I got. French-style chicken with grapes. Nova Scotia salmon. Pickled artichoke hearts ... Rachel? Are you okay?”
Rachel suddenly was dashing for the bathroom. Oh Jesus, I’m going to throw up.
Afterwards, her stomach empty, the bathroom tile cold against her knees, head aching, she sagged against the toilet seat.
Minutes later, from what seemed like miles away, she heard the front-door intercom, a faint droning, then the clatter of Kay’s clogs, as she ran to answer it.
“Rachel!” she called. “It’s your mother. She’s on her way up!”
Oh Lord, not now. But, yes, she had told Mama sometime last week that today would be fine to drop by with those drapery samples. Mama, always trying to make everything more beautiful. She doesn’t know I’m here. I told her I’d be on call, that she could go over the samples with Kay. Rachel looked down at her rumpled bathrobe. Now she would have to dream up some reason why she was home, looking like death warmed over.
She dashed to the sink and washed her face, blotting it with a washcloth to try to ease the swelling around her eyes. Oh, what was the use? Mama would see in an instant that she’d been crying. If only I could tell her, Rachel thought, how wonderful if I could confide in her, let her help me decide.
[129] But she knew what Mama would say. Have the baby, have my grandchild. An abortion—she’d be shocked at the very idea. So why even involve her, drag her into this mess?
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