What was it that fag real-estate agent had called it? A love nest? Sickening. But he’d often thought of it since, and it was true in a way. The lobby had just been modernized, but the apartments still had some Art Nouveau detail. Like the gracefully curved bronze ceiling fixture with its milk-glass shades. And the copper panels with women’s profiles on either side of the fireplace mantel. He’d hung a Mucha print over it, so people would know he understood the period, that he wasn’t some cultural illiterate.
But that was about it. His books and other stuff were still mostly in cartons, stacked neatly against the wall. Except the hi-fi, of course. What was seduction without music? The Eames chair Rachel was sitting in had been left by the former tenant, another fag, who’d also sold him the Navaho rug in the center of the parquet floor.
Then it came to him why he’d never unpacked. Marking time here, that’s what he’d been doing. Waiting for his real move.
And now this bitch was going to try to hold him up.
“What do you want?” he asked sullenly.
“I want an abortion.” Cold, dead. “And I want you to do it.”
David froze. What? What had she just said? He felt the bottle slipping from his grasp. His mind, too, slipping. Like the time he’d run smack into the side of Cuyler Hall in the dark, reeling back from Houseparties. A flash of crimson behind his eyes. Then pain, mushrooming, up his neck, unfolding in dull pounding waves through his skull.
Now the awfulness of her words, coming back to him, exploding inside his head.
[147] Jesus, she couldn’t be serious.
Cool it, he told himself. He had to stay calm, on top of things. But Christ, his head hurt. How the hell could he manage this?
“Okay,” he said. In his mind he pictured himself wearing his white coat with the blue plastic I.D. that read David Sloane, M.D. Yeah, that made it easier. He felt his breathing slow. “You made the right decision. You’ll see, it’s for the best. And like I told you, I have every intention of seeing this through with you. Steve Kelleher just happens to be the best OB man I know. Why don’t I give him a call right now, see if he—” He was already up, crossing the room, reaching for the phone.
“No, David.”
“Look, I know you don’t want this to get around. But he’s very discreet.”
“That’s not it. I don’t care how good he is, or how discreet. It’s you I want.” Again, that quiet, firm tone.
Jesus, now he was sweating, like he used to watching his old man sliding into a binge, waiting for the other shoe to drop. You can stay under that bed as long as you want, Davey. All night if you like. But sooner or later you’re gonna hafta come out, and I’ll be waitin’ for you when you do. Then I’m gonna show you what God gave me this good right hand for.
Sure, you want me, he thought. Like Uncle Sam would if I didn’t stay a step ahead all the time. Like the Grim Reaper. Like my old man.
“You’re drunk,” he told her.
She laughed then, just once, a hollow sound, like a lonesome note on a bagpipe. “I wish I were. Honest to God I do.”
“Rachel, listen ...”
“No, you listen.” She stood up, eyes blazing, the hurt in them so bright he had to look away. “You said it would be as easy as the dentist, like pulling a tooth. I just want you to—” her voice broke a little, then steadied, “to know, that’s all. What it is really like. What we are really doing.”
David suddenly was remembering his father kicking the shit out of his mother. Not the baby, Hal, she was screaming. Please, not the baby. At the time, he hadn’t understood, but later he did. She’d been three months pregnant, and she lost the baby.
Shit, why was she making him remember all that? And his [148] headache, Christ, he needed some Tylenol, or maybe something stronger.
Then anger swept through him, taking hold of him, making him stagger a little.
“You’re out of your fucking mind, babe. How do I even know it’s my kid? How do I know how many guys you been doing it with?” He heard the viciousness in his voice, and a part of him, some part that was standing back from all this, was shocked to realize he sounded just like the old man.
He saw her turn pale, the color of candle wax, and for a moment he thought she might pass out. But she just held on, tightly gripping the chair. Jesus, he had to give it to her. She was hanging in there.
Seeing the anguish on her face, he felt a moment’s shame. She was not, he realized, doing this to get back at him. He had a moment’s crazy urge to take her in his arms, tell her anything she wanted to hear.
“It’s yours,” she said. “Ours. This baby—or whatever you want to call it—we made it together. I didn’t want it any more than you did, but now it’s a fact. So going for an abortion by myself, as if it were some minor procedure, well ... it would cheapen everything. How I feel about myself, life, even about being a doctor. If this little new life doesn’t matter, then what does? So, David, it has to be this way. I’ve thought about it, and it’s the only way. For me. If I’m to live with it.”
Rachel sat back, hands clenched in her lap, thinking how David probably hated her right now, for wreaking some kind of twisted vengeance on him.
When you got down to it, though, it didn’t really matter what he believed. Whatever they had been to each other (and she knew now it was far less than she had imagined) was over. Nothing could ever again exist between them.
But first, they still had to see this through, she and David. Their baby deserved that much. A decent burial, not an unmarked grave with no one to mourn its brief life and nothing to mark its passing.
No, she would not anesthetize this, pretend it was nothing. Lie back while some stranger humming along to the Muzak scraped her baby out like offal from a gutted fish. She felt shame, and David had to also; or afterwards, how could she forgive herself?
[149] But she saw now how much she had underestimated David. There was something about him like a wild animal with its leg caught in a steel trap—a creature who knew that the only way out was to chew the leg off. He stood there at the far end of the living room, his handsome face haggard, his normally perfect, blow-dried hair disheveled in damp tangles that had dribbled dark spots of wetness over the collar and shoulders of his Lacoste shirt.
The expression on his face—she had never seen it on him before. And then it dawned on her: He’s scared shitless.
“No.” His mouth formed the word before the cracked sound of his voice emerged. “It’s ... obscene. You must be crazy to think I would do that to my own—” He broke off, choking himself back.
“Your own what, David?” Say it, dammit, at least say it.
“Nothing.” He pulled out a handkerchief and mopped his forehead. He had never felt so panicky, not even during the most life-threatening surgery. “Look, you can just forget about it, this macabre little scheme of yours. I’m an M.D., not a fucking shrink. That’s what you need, baby. Yeah. You’ve really gone over the edge this time.”
“Maybe,” she said. “But that doesn’t change anything. We’re still in this together, one way or another.”
“What do you mean?” His eyes were narrowed, suspicious.
“I mean that if you won’t perform the abortion, there won’t be one. I’ll have the baby.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“No.” And she meant that too. “I’m just telling you what’s possible for me. What choices I can live with. Having your friend Keileher do a nice neat D and C on me isn’t one of them.”
Rachel felt cold, and thought this was what being dead would be like if you could feel it. She felt scared too.
She looked at David, and thought: You’re not half the man my father is. If he were in your place, he would not have done this to my mother. He would not have made her suffer like this.
Now David was backing away, blindly, frantically. His foot caught one leg of a bar stool, and it toppled over, thudding onto the floor. He bent to pick it up, his long frame moving in jerks like an angled cra
ne.
Then he was straightening, staring at her with wild eyes, white [150] rims showing all the way around his irises. He looked as if he had realized he could chew his leg off and he’d still be just as hopelessly trapped.
David sagged against some cartons, and closed his eyes, his face bleached of color.
“All right,” he said. “Dammit, you win. But I don’t know just what it is you think you’re getting out of this obscene little horror show of yours. I hope you do. I hope to Christ you do.”
Rachel felt very heavy, her head spinning. She was drunk. She just hadn’t realized it before.
She had won. She was supposed to feel good, triumphant at least. But all she felt was this cold, dead numbness inside. The important thing now, she realized, was just to hang on, get through this one way or another.
The next hour was a blur.
David, on the phone with Kelleher, explaining in a low tight voice, asking for the key to his office. Then their leaving, the silent ride down in the elevator. Outside, rain on her face, pricking her scalp. Cold. She kept shivering, even in the overheated taxi.
Only when they arrived at Kelleher’s office, a half-number address tucked alongside an ivy-covered brownstone off lower Fifth Avenue, did what they were doing pierce her like a knife. When David unlocked the door and flipped on the lights, when she saw the bright waiting room with its cozy furniture and Currier and Ives prints, and the Christmas tree on a table in the corner decorated with wooden angels and tartan bows.
I’ll never see my baby. I’ll never hold it in my arms.
Then the examining room, pretty pastel curtains, a border of storks stenciled around the ceiling. And pictures. Hundreds of them it seemed. Snapshots. Stuck up on a big bulletin board with colored pushpins. Pictures of all the babies Kelleher had delivered.
A cry rose in her, blocking her windpipe so for an instant she couldn’t breathe. She was being cheated, and worse, she was doing it to herself. The room blurred in a wash of tears.
I can’t fall apart now, she thought. Later. When it’s over. But, oh dear God, I know I’ll never stop seeing them. All those babies. Those sweet little babies.
There was a little curtained-off alcove at one end of the [151] examining room, and a soft cotton gown folded on the white cane chair in the corner. Rachel changed as quickly as she could, but her hands were trembling; her fingers, as she fumbled with the buttons on her dress, felt like sticks of wood.
A full-length mirror was screwed into the wall opposite the chair. Dressed now in the flimsy gown that tied in back, Rachel stood still a moment, examining her reflection. She saw a face that wasn’t hers, drawn and ghastly white, with eyes sunken like thumb-print impressions in a crude clay sculpture. Even her body seemed a stranger’s, breasts heavy, swollen, the dark nipples visible through the thin cotton. Her stomach gently rounded, and smooth on either side where her pelvis had jutted. She brought her hands to her belly, stroking it tenderly, eyes filming over with fresh tears.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
The cold, dead feeling was gone, and a pain blazed in her chest. I won’t forget you, baby.
David was ready, Rachel saw, when she emerged from behind the curtain. Scrubbed, gloved, the instruments laid out on a metal tray.
She hiked herself up onto the business end of the examining table, feeling its paper covering cold and stiff against her bare behind, reminding her of her mother, oddly enough. You be sure, extra sure, to cover the lid before you sit down. You just don’t know the kind of germs you can catch in public bathrooms.
Rachel was torn between a sob, and an insane urge to giggle. She kept her eyes carefully averted from David’s. If she looked at him, if she looked at what he was holding now in his right hand, she might scream or go crazy.
“It’s not too late.” David’s voice floated past her ear. “We don’t have to go through with it. I can call Steve back, tell him to come over.”
His words shocking her back to reason, as if a bucket of icy water had been dashed over her.
“No,” she said. “Do it.”
Spine held stiff as a yardstick, she lowered herself onto her back, and forced her shivering legs apart. Now the cold shock of the stirrups against her bare feet. Her flesh shrank in anticipation of David’s touch.
[152] But when Rachel looked down the tunnel of her hiked legs and saw what was coming, she very nearly changed her mind.
David. His face hovering between the peaks of her knees like a ghost moon in a cold sky, light flashing off the steel instrument in his hand. A chilling premonition swept over her: It’s like a marriage, isn’t it? We’ll be bound by this the rest of our lives.
And then she knew it was too late.
They had gone beyond the point of turning back.
At the first cold bite of the speculum, Rachel jammed her fist in her mouth to keep from screaming.
Chapter 6
Manon was taking forever to die.
Sylvie shifted in her seat, vaguely annoyed at the lamenting duet, the conductor waving his baton like a madman. She wished the curtain would fall. Strange. Normally she loved being here, at the Metropolitan. Seated beside Gerald in their parterre center box, a stone’s throw above the elegant crowd in the orchestra seats, and directly facing the stage, the best view in the house. Like a king and queen presiding over their court, which in a way they were. Heavens, how many functions and meetings had they attended, dinners, parties she herself had given, starting way back when it was still on Broadway and Thirty-eighth. And every one of those years Gerald’s bank a Grand Leadership contributor.
But tonight she felt restless. Des Grieux, sung by an Italian tenor she’d never heard of, looked like a trussed turkey in his nineteenth-century finery, and worse, sounded as if he had a cold. And the diva, who was supposed to be a ravishing fifteen-year-old beauty, had to be at least fifty and was big as a horse. Really, it was quite a feat he could even support her expiring body in his arms.
Sylvie placed her hand on Gerald’s arm. For some reason there was no one in the dimly lit box tonight except for the two of them. But Gerald probably hadn’t even noticed. He should have been restless too, in his starched collar and too-tight tuxedo he insisted still fit him perfectly, but in the amber backlit glow of the stage lights, she caught the rapt expression on his face. His head tilted back, eyes half-closed, lips silently mouthing the libretto. He was not seeing Manon’s straining seams, or hearing the tenor’s raspiness. For Gerald, there was only Puccini’s tender soaring music.
Darling Gerald. Wasn’t that one of the reasons she loved him so? His talent for seeing only the good, not what was really there. [154] The way he saw in her only beauty and loyalty. Over all these years he had remained as blind to her sins as Des Grieux to Manon’s.
Sylvie groped for his hand now, and felt it fold about hers, warm and reassuring. Did he look more tired than usual? She felt a bit anxious. Or was she just imagining? It pained her to compare the picture of Gerald she carried in her mind—the elegant and energetic bank president she had married—with the stooped, white-haired man she had watched tonight inching down the stairs one by one, gripping the banister tightly for support.
He’s seventy-six, she thought, irritable with herself. Of course he’s slowed down a bit. But he’s as healthy as ever.
Still, Sylvie couldn’t ward off the shiver that slid down her spine, watching Manon die.
Without him, she thought, I couldn’t survive. My protector, my dearest friend.
Not her lover anymore; they had not been together as man and wife in years. Since Gerald’s last operation, he had somehow been unable to ...
But that didn’t matter. She felt closer to him now than ever. Safe and beloved. When they strolled in Riverside Park, her arm tucked in his, or just sat like this, hand in hand, she felt a closeness deeper than she had in all their years of lovemaking.
Since he had retired as chairman at Mercantile, they had been together constantly. T
he cold months in Palm Beach, reading novels side by side, playing two-handed bridge on the pool deck while Callas serenaded them on the stereo. And that trip to Venice last spring—how overflowing with marvelous memories!—staying in the same suite at the Gritti where they’d honeymooned nearly thirty years before.
Sylvie thought of the trip they’d planned for next month, cruising around Bora Bora and Tahiti. She relaxed a little. Yes, just what he needs. The sea air will do him good, and that whole Gauguin paradise put some color back into him, make his eyes sparkle.
Now the curtain was falling, accompanied by a wave of applause, cresting in some scattered cheers of “BRAVO. BRAVISSIMO.” Seconds later the principals were trooping out, looking a bit outlandish in their costumes, cut off from their scenic world, spotlighted now against the crimson velvet, bowing low, the fat diva lowest of all, hobbling a little as she pulled herself up.
[155] Then the lights. Chandeliers lowered majestically, magically, at the end of brass rods from the vast dome of the ceiling, starbursts of twinkling crystal.
Below, people were starting to stand, some still applauding. Men in velvet jackets and tuxedos, and women in long gowns, silks and satins and stiff brocades, their glossy furs draped casually over the backs of their seats. Sylvie heard her mama’s voice in her head as if she were in the next chair. A real lady wears a doth coat as if it were her best mink, and tosses her mink about as if it were cloth. If only she could be here now, see Sylvie’s own Russian sable hanging in the anteroom. Mama, with her one good black coat, relined again and again over the years.
Mama would have loved the jewels, too, Sylvie thought. Marvelous pieces winking off throats and wrists and fingers and ear-lobes—Bulgari, Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels. Dazzling.
Sylvie fingered the necklace about her own throat. Beautiful old cabachon emeralds set in filigreed eighteen-carat gold, designed forty years ago by the legendary Jeanne Toussaint of Carder’s in Paris. Gerald’s gift on her last birthday. They matched her eyes, he’d said, never mentioning the fortune they must have cost. And how perfectly they went with the Schiaparelli gown she was wearing now, a simple black panne velvet sheath, elegant and timeless as the emeralds for which it served as backdrop.
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