We So Seldom Look on Love

by Barbara Gowdy

  One night she dreamed that Andrew was operating on her. Above the surgical mask his eyes were expressionless. He had very long arms. She was also able to see, as if through his eyes, the vertical incision that went from between her breasts to her navel, and the skin on either side of the incision folded back like a scroll. Her heart was brilliant red and perfectly heart-shaped. All of her other organs were glistening yellows and oranges. Somebody should take a picture of this, she thought. Andrew’s gloved hands barely appeared to move as they wielded long, silver instruments. There was no blood on his hands. Very carefully, so that she hardly felt it, he prodded her organs and plucked at her veins and tendons, occasionally drawing a tendon out and dropping it into a petri dish. It was as if he were weeding a garden. Her heart throbbed. A tendon encirled her heart, and when he pulled on it she could feel that its other end encircled her vagina, and the uncoiling there was the most exquisite sensation she had ever experienced. She worried that she would come and that her trembling and spasms would cause him to accidentally stab her. She woke up coming.

  All day the dream obsessed her. It could happen, she reasoned. She could have a gall bladder or an appendicitis attack and be rushed to the hospital and, just as she was going under, see that the surgeon was Andrew. It could happen.

  When she woke up the next morning, the dream was her first thought. She looked down at the gentle swell of her stomach and felt sentimental and excited. She found it impossible to shake the dream, even while she was masturbating for Andrew, so that instead of entering his dream of her, instead of seeing a naked woman sitting in a pool of morning sun, she saw her sliced-open chest in the shaft of his surgeon’s light. Her heart was what she focused on, its fragile pulsing, but she also saw the slower rise and fall of her lungs, and the quivering of her other organs. Between her organs were tantalizing crevices and entwined swirls of blue and red—her veins and arteries. Her tendons were seashell pink, threaded tight as guitar strings.

  Of course she realized that she had the physiology all wrong and that in a real operation there would be blood and pain and she would be anaesthetized. It was an impossible, mad fantasy. She didn’t expect it to last. But every day it became more enticing as she authenticated it with hard data, such as the name of the hospital he operated out of (she called his number in the phone book and asked his nurse) and the name of the surgical instruments he would use (she consulted one of Claude’s medical texts), and as she smoothed out the rough edges by imagining, for instance, minuscule suction tubes planted here and there in the incision to remove every last drop of blood.

  In the mornings, during her real encounters with Andrew, she became increasingly frustrated until it was all she could do not to quit in the middle, close the drapes or walk out of the room. And yet if he failed to show up she was desperate. She started to drink gin and tonics before lunch and to sunbathe at the edge of the driveway between her building and his, knowing he wasn’t home from ten o’clock on, but lying there for hours, just in case.

  One afternoon, light-headed from gin and sun, restless with worry because he hadn’t turned up the last three mornings, she changed out of her bikini and into a strapless cotton dress and went for a walk. She walked past the park she had been heading for, past the stores she had thought she might browse in. The sun bore down. Strutting by men who eyed her bare shoulders, she felt voluptuous, sweetly rounded. But at the pit of her stomach was a filament of anxiety, evidence that despite telling herself otherwise, she knew where she was going.

  She entered the hospital by the Emergency doors and wandered the corridors for what seemed like half an hour before discovering Andrew’s office. By this time she was holding her stomach and half believing that the feeling of anxiety might actually be a symptom of something very serious.

  “Dr. Halsey isn’t seeing patients,” his nurse said. She slit open a manila envelope with a lion’s head letter opener. “They’ll take care of you at Emergency.”

  “I have to see Dr. Halsey,” Ali said, her voice cracking. “I’m a friend.”

  The nurse sighed. “Just a minute.” She stood and went down a hall, opening a door at the end after a quick knock.

  Ali pressed her fists into her stomach. For some reason she no longer felt a thing. She pressed harder. What a miracle if she burst her appendix! She should stab herself with the letter opener. She should at least break her fingers, slam them in a drawer like a draft dodger.

  “Would you like to come in?” a high, nasal voice said. Ali spun around. It was Andrew, standing at the door.

  “The doctor will see you,” the nurse said impatiently, sitting back behind her desk.

  Ali’s heart began to pound. She felt as if a pair of hands were cupping and uncupping her ears. His shirt was blue. She went down the hall, squeezing past him without looking up, and sat in the chair beside his desk. He shut the door and walked to the window. It was a big room. There was a long expanse of old green and yellow floor tiles between them. Leaning his hip against a filing cabinet, he just stood there, hands in his trouser pockets, regarding her with such a polite, impersonal expression that she asked him if he recognized her.

  “Of course I do,” he said quietly.

  “Well—” Suddenly she was mortified. She felt like a woman about to sob that she couldn’t afford the abortion. She touched her fingers to her hot face.

  “I don’t know your name,” he said.

  “Oh. Ali. Ali Perrin.”

  “What do you want, Ali?”

  Her eyes fluttered down to his shoes—black, shabby loafers. She hated his adenoidal voice. What did she want? What she wanted was to bolt from the room like the mad woman she suspected she was. She glanced up at him again. Because he was standing with his back to the window, he was outlined in light. It made him seem unreal, like a film image superimposed against a screen. She tried to look away, but his eyes held her. Out in the waiting room the telephone was ringing. What do you want, she thought, capitulating to the pull of her perspective over to his, seeing now, from across the room, a charming woman with tanned, bare shoulders and blushing cheeks.

  The light blinked on his phone. Both of them glanced at it, but he stayed standing where he was. After a moment she murmured, “I have no idea what I’m doing here.”

  He was silent. She kept her eyes on the phone, waiting for him to speak. When he didn’t, she said, “I had a dream …” She let out a disbelieving laugh. “God.” She shook her head.

  “You are very lovely,” he said in a speculative tone. She glanced up at him, and he turned away. Pressing his hands together, he took a few steps along the window. “I have very much enjoyed our … our encounters.”

  “Oh, don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not here to—”

  “However,” he cut in, “I should tell you that I am moving into another building.”

  She looked straight at him.

  “This weekend, as a matter of fact.” He frowned at his wall of framed diplomas.

  “This weekend?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “So,” she murmured. “It’s over, then.”

  “Regrettably.”

  She stared at his profile. In profile he was a stranger—beak-nosed, round-shouldered. She hated his shoes, his floor, his formal way of speaking, his voice, his profile, and yet her eyes filled and she longed for him to look at her again.

  Abruptly he turned his back to her and said that his apartment was in the east end, near the beach. He gestured out the window. Did she know where the yacht club was?

  “No,” she whispered.

  “Not that I am a member,” he said with a mild laugh.

  “Listen,” she said, wiping her eyes. “I’m sorry.” She came to her feet. “I guess I just wanted to see you.”

  He strode like an obliging host over to the door.

  “Well, goodbye,” she said, looking up into his face.

  He had garlic breath and five-o’clock shadow. His eyes grazed hers. “I wouldn’t feel too badly
about anything,” he said affably.

  When she got back to the apartment the first thing she did was take her clothes off and go over to the full-length mirror, which was still standing next to the easel. Her eyes filled again because without Andrew’s appreciation or the hope of it (and despite how repellent she had found him), what she saw was a pathetic little woman with pasty skin and short legs.

  She looked at the painting. If that was her, as Claude claimed, then she also had flat eyes and crude, wild proportions.

  What on earth did Claude see in her?

  What had Andrew seen? “You are very lovely,” Andrew had said, but maybe he’d been reminding himself. Maybe he’d meant “lovely when I’m in the next building.”

  After supper that evening she asked Claude to lie with her on the couch, and the two of them watched TV. She held his hand against her breast. “Let this be enough,” she prayed.

  But she didn’t believe it ever would be. The world was too full of surprises, it frightened her. As Claude was always saying, things looked different from different angles and in different lights. What this meant to her was that everything hinged on where you happened to be standing at a given moment, or even on who you imagined you were. It meant that in certain lights, desire sprang up out of nowhere.

  The Two-Headed Man

  My memory is photographic, in living colour. I’m flooded with memories, mostly images from dreams I’ve had. A leather jacket with four tulips, eating blueberries half blind and having blueberries scattered on the ground, growing limbs that turn out to be tree limbs, useless.

  I remember all my nightmares, they come back twice as horrible. My heart stops.

  My heart stops at the back of my throat. Anger hits me above my left ear, there’s a pressure there, like a finger pushing. Fear is between the eyes. Instead of my guts turning over I feel a popping at the bridge of my nose. After a few seconds the sensation, whatever it is, turns into a burning sensation, a slow smouldering that can last up to five minutes. Sometimes I’ve got half a dozen of these fires going on at once, all over, overlapping.

  What’s happening is that my brain messages aren’t getting through. My brain works like anybody else’s, it sends out messages to the body. But in my case the messages hit a roadblock at Samuel’s collarbone. They are all fuelled up for a long trip, and then they have to reverse into my head and park with their engines idling until they burn themselves out.

  Inside I’m a mess of burn tissue. Scientists can’t wait for me to die so they can open me up and get a good look. Just a couple of days ago a woman researcher wrote me, asking would I donate myself to her lab. I thought of writing back, “Anytime you want me to give you head.” I had Samuel write her and ask for an eight-by-ten. If she looks anything like Jill St. John, I’m hers.

  An entire week, and not a word from Karen. I suppose I attributed to her a courage she never had. I have always known that I was meant for unhappiness, and yet the human heart yearns. Did not the Son of God yearn? And did He not weep to be forsaken?

  It occurs to me that the physical agony Christ suffered on the cross served to distract Him from the more terrible agony of abandonment. God’s subtle mercies … with which man interferes! I am offered excruciating pain by God, and a painkiller by the nurse. A painkiller! I have thought of saying to her, “If it were that easy, do you think I’d have used a saw?”

  My lawyer has warned me about my wry sense of humour. She has urged me to list all the ways Simon persecuted me. So far I’ve written:

  —Biting my ear, provoking numerous chronic infections. Also yelling into that ear, eventually causing deafness.

  —Regularly assailing me and everyone around us with the most despicable imprecations.

  —Depriving me of sleep. Waking me in the middle of the night with his howling.

  —Depriving me of love by tormenting my beloved.

  —Libelling me. Telling people that I stuck him with pins, punched him and burned his eyes with Javex.

  Nobody believed Simon’s lies. If I caused him pain, it was never intentional, our mother having instilled in me a conviction that he was my cross to bear. It was not until our mother died that I understood God’s intention was not that I should bear him but that I should cast him off. And even then I thought of “casting off” only in its figurative sense—ridding him of his power to hurt or influence me. At that point I was naive enough, pompous enough, to imagine that I could subdue him. For the first time in our lives I raised my voice at him, and for the first time (in spite of what he claimed) I gagged him in order to compel him to listen.

  Sure, Samuel’s going to waste me. I’ve always known that. The question is, how. And when. When is soon, now that the old lady has kicked the bucket. How? I’ll tell you one thing, it won’t be poison.

  Everything I eat or drink, he siphons off. I used to have the old lady spike my coffee. It was hilarious. I’m guzzling gin and coffee, feeling nothing except maybe a nice sweet shimmer, and Samuel’s sliding off his chair.

  The way I look at it, you’ve got a brain, you’ve got all the power you need. Doctors will tell you I can’t do fuck all, it’s Samuel who’s the whole man with the limbs and organs, and I’m nothing but this turd he carries around on his shoulder. But what the doctors don’t know, what even Samuel doesn’t know, is that I’ve developed my brain to the point that I’m a master of extrasensory manipulation.

  There have been a couple of times I’ve played Samuel like remote control. One night I was really cooking. He was on his way to a fellowship meeting, and I think, “Hang a left,” and suddenly he turns left. I think, “Cross the road,” he crosses. “Now go right,” he goes right. I had him turning on a dime that night. We went to the pool hall, took in a movie. I tried to get him into a massage parlour, the one at the corner of First and King, but no dice—sex is one area where I can’t get through. It kills me. Women are always coming on to us so they can say, I made it with the two-headed man. But Samuel doesn’t believe in premarital sex. And his taste in women, it’s enough to turn you into a fag.

  A couple of years ago he got the hots for a dental hygienist. Six foot two, skinny, no chin, glasses. She’s cleaning our teeth, acting like there’s nothing unusual going on, and if there’s one thing that burns my ass, it’s people pretending there’s nothing unusual going on. I mean, we’ve got two heads here! We’ve got show time!

  Samuel’s heart starts pumping. It makes me sweat. What does he see in her? I don’t know. I don’t care, either, because he’s never asked anyone out. But fuck me if he doesn’t invite her to a fellowship meeting!

  I’m sweet as sugar. Give him the impression I like her. I’ve decided I want to see what happens. He buys a new suit, blue.

  What happens is nothing. They go to the meeting, walk home, talk about the meeting, sit on the porch. She keeps trying to draw me into the conversation. It starts up that pressure above my left ear. Finally I tell her. “Show us your skinny tits or shut up.”

  “I beg your pardon?” she says.

  “Samuel’s getting hard,” I say. “Samuel wants to fuck you in the ass.”

  She grabs her purse and runs off. Know something funny? From the back she reminds me of Jill St. John.

  For most of my life I considered Simon inseparable from myself—my cross to bear, as I’ve said. And yet I had faith that one day the cross wouldn’t weigh down so heavily. Foolishly I believed that Simon would come to accept his lot, as I had accepted mine.

  He fed this belief. By remaining virtually silent and submissive for days, sometimes weeks, he would raise my hopes and nurture in me a feeling of profound pity. Our mother thought that he entered visionary dreams during these silences. In her mind he was a temperamental genius, and despite knowing that “temperamental” was much too benign a word to ascribe to his tantrums and crude outbursts, I made an effort, while she was alive, to see him through her eyes.

  It was very difficult. I witnessed far more than she did. I saw that he lied to her face. I
saw that the control he exercised in her company was entirely self-serving. Never would it have occurred to him that she was capable of loving him even at his most vile.

  She was a true martyr, our mother, and in her gentle way she encouraged me to be one, too. When she cooked chili for him, I was meant to suffer in silence the inevitable heartburn. Until she died I never had to feed or groom him—she was devoted to these tasks—but it was understood that I would always serve his whims. I endeavoured to do so, taking my strength from her. There was no one more patient and humble.

  Except, I regret to say, when she drank. Then, she was another person, Simon’s confederate. The change in her personality was truly frightening. But I do not sit in judgement. I have read that alcoholism is a disease, and in any event her resistance was constantly under siege. He stormed at her to get out the bottle. He damaged my liver.

  I have just added that to the list: “Drinking in excess, damaging my liver.” Having spent most of my life ignoring Simon’s incitements, I find it hard to call every one of them to mind. I am often distracted by pain. And by the silence. The silence is very strange, very foreign to me. I must confess that, blessed as his absence is, it will take some getting used to. Imagine my life. Imagine a head two inches away from your own, a head that, at its natural angle, faced into your right ear. Imagine feeling the heat of every breath the head took, smelling the odours of the mouth, suffering a permanent rash on your shoulder as a consequence of the mouth’s drooling. Imagine the weight of the head, the strain to your neck and spine. Imagine not a moment’s solitude.