“Poor, poor Marvin,” Gillian said.
Marvin’s body jerked involuntarily as Gillian slipped her hand inside his shirt and ran her fingers along his ribs. Slowly and methodically she unbuckled his belt and unzipped his trousers. Traffic was beginning to thicken, Marvin noticed, even as he responded to Gillian’s dexterous fingers.
“Maybe not so poor after all,” Gillian continued, stroking him into a full erection.
“Christ, Gillian,” Marvin said. “The other cars, they’ll see.”
“Oh Marvin, let them see. You’ve nothing to be ashamed of. Let them see. Let the whole world see.”
“Oh, God,” Marvin said. “Oh, God, that feels good.”
Ahead, but dimly, Marvin saw the approach to the Throg’s Neck Bridge. Rush-hour traffic, he perceived, was jamming the lines to the toll booths. As he reached for his last quarter, Gillian burrowed her head in his lap. “My God, my God, my God!” he was saying as he rocked up and down on the seat cushion. He had never known this, never known anything like this before. Never. Not anything. And he gasped as Gillian suddenly stopped, pulled back, brushed back her hair.
“No, please,” he said. “Don’t stop now.”
“Marvin,” she said, “you could still lend me the money.”
“How?” he said. “I don’t have it.”
“You could raise it,” she said. “You could raise anything, Marvin.”
“Just don’t stop,” he pleaded.
Gillian bent down once again. The truck driver in the adjoining lane looked down in mute fascination. In the other lane a three-year-old boy was jumping up and down in his car seat, pointing, but his parents didn’t notice anything amiss—just a man sitting silently behind his wheel with a silly grin on his face. Again Gillian pulled up and away.
“Please,” he said. “Please?”
“A thousand,” she bargained. “You could raise a thousand.”
“Five hundred,” he said.
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh! The car behind the white Cadillac sounded its horn as the space widened in front of Marvin Goodman’s car. Marvin stepped down on the accelerator. In the next lane the truck driver, attempting to keep abreast of the car, crunched into a Chevrolet carrying a troop of Cub Scouts and a Den Mother.
“A thousand”—this time Gillian didn’t even lift her head.
“Seven fifty,” he said.
Marvin felt a kind of paralysis engulfing him—every muscle was tense and he stretched himself back against the seat. He noticed, thank God, that he was in the Exact Change Lane. No toll taker. And then he was powerless, his hands gripping the steering wheel like twin vises. There was a rapping on the window beside his head but he ignored it—it was the Den Mother from the rammed Chevrolet and she was asking whether he saw what happened and then she turned away quickly, in horror at the sight of Marvin Goodman in his finest moment.
Then they were abreast of the toll basket and the car behind him was honking furiously. Marvin pressed the button that rolled down the window. “Oh, Gillian-Gillian-Gill.…” Marvin found the quarter and tossed it to the basket. “Ohhhhhhhhhh-hhhh.…” The quarter rimmed the basket, bounced on the asphalt, wheeled on edge in a wide semicircle and finally came to rest under the left front tire of the stationary Cadillac.
The toll booth attendant saw the vast tie-up and signaled the patrolman, who gunned his motorcycle over to the parked Cadillac. He noted that the door on the passenger’s side was open. He noted that the sole occupant of the car seemed in a daze, a small grin pasted on his face in a lopsided fashion. “Hey Mac …,” he began and “Sweet Jesus,” he wound it up.
The man in the driver’s seat was alight with transcendental joy. The aura of Gillian still filled the car. For the moment, at least, Marvin Goodman was a winner.
EXCERPT FROM “THE BILLY & GILLY SHOW,” JANUARY 3RD
Billy: Well, Gilly, there are a lot of pros and cons involved. Abortion is a touchy subject.
Gilly: Obviously. I realize there is a definite question of morality involved. But there are also human considerations.
Billy: No matter what the circumstances, Gilly, you are taking a life when you perform an abortion.
Gilly: I know, Billy, but suppose the pregnancy endangers the mother’s life. Or suppose the mother is a teenage rape victim. Look, those are only two examples. There are lots of others.
Billy: It’s not an easy thing to decide.
Gilly: I mean, I can feel for these poor women you read about who have to go to some sleazy practitioner—someone who’s doing that sort of thing on the side, and has all these dirty instruments and everything.
Billy: I don’t think there’s much question that the law needs to be liberalized. The problem is how. And how much?
Gilly: You have a real talent for summing up, Billy.
Billy: Thank you, dear. I think one of your most sterling qualities is your ability to make a man feel important.
Gilly: Oh, but you are. I think all you men are just terribly important.
Billy: We’re all grateful.
Gilly: Actually, Billy, a panel discussion on abortion would make a very interesting show.
Billy: I think that’s a first-rate idea, hon. We could have someone from the church and, perhaps, a representative from the medical society.
Gilly: There’s only one problem.
Billy: What’s that?
Gilly: I’m afraid we might have a little trouble finding an abortionist.
ALAN HETTERTON
ALAN HETTERTON is a beautiful name—the words were a small song in Gillian’s mind as she stepped from the shower. Oh yes, a beautiful name is Alan Hetterton—she sang the song as she toweled herself dry in the bedroom, sang the song as she stood at the bedroom window, the towel over her shoulders, and stared out at a faraway jet wheeling in the night sky toward La Guardia. Alan Hetterton, in point of fact, was the name mentioned by Maxine of Maxine’s Beauty Parlor during a casual conversation on the subject of abortionists she had known. Dr. Alan Hetterton is a beautiful name—tra-la!—and the bedroom phone rang twice before Gillian responded.
“Hello,” she said.
“You got a pair of big ones,” the voice said.
“Who is this?” she asked.
“I said you got a pair of big ones.” Whoever he was, he was making no effort to disguise his voice. “Big round ones and never mind who this is.”
The first time he had called, Gillian calmly placed the receiver in the cradle, waited a second, then called the police. The police had informed her there was nothing to be done, but should the calls continue she might want to use the new automatic tracking device. It had all seemed so much trouble.
“Are you coming to the point?” she asked.
“I come to a point,” he said. “Don’t worry about that. I come to a point, same as anyone else.”
Gillian remembered the full-page ads—so sober, so shocking—telling women exactly what they must do if they get a harassing phone call. Screw it, she thought. It was the first time in a week she had not been concentrating on the baby beatnik in her abdomen. She didn’t hang up, not this time. Perversely, she lighted a cigarette and kept talking.
“Why don’t you tell me your name?” she said.
“When are you going to meet me in the hay?” the voice said. “When are you going to step out of your step-ins and hop in the old hay?”
“Please, why won’t you tell me your name?” she said. “I may be able to help you.”
“You’ve heard of Jack the Ripper,” he said. “Well, I’m his cousin, Jack the Fucker.”
“Why don’t you tell me all about it?” Gillian said. “That’s a very interesting name. If you tell me all about it, maybe I can help you.”
“You hoooer!” he screamed. “You wanna trap me. You wanna keep me talking just so you can trap me.”
“Maybe I just want to talk to you.”
Click. It took Gillian a moment to realize that he had hung up on her. He had taken the action she
should have taken. Gillian giggled—she had a feeling that perhaps she had just learned a lesson of importance. Maybe that was the one sure way to get rid of all the nuts in the world—try to understand them. She rested back on the bed and discovered, almost to her surprise, that the call had had a strange effect: It had excited her. She found herself sensually aroused, strangely warm, and perhaps there was a lesson there as well. Gillian didn’t dwell on this.
She reached instead for the Three Towns Directory. Hetley, Hetterich … there, Hetterton, Alan, M.D.—office 131 Thompson Lane—KI 1-1377. This time it was the voice at the other end of the line who asked the questions. An operation? Would she care to specify what kind of an operation? No? Would she care to say who had referred her to him? No? Maxine Schwartz? Oh, yes, would Friday evening be satisfactory?
It had not been an easy road that Alan Hetterton had traveled. The road from Kings County to King’s Neck was uphill and bumpy. He had known even in medical school that he was not destined to be much of a doctor. The sight of blood saddened him, sometimes reduced him to tears. To this day he was not certain which was the tibia and which was the fibia. But somehow he had stumbled through medical school, finally acquiring the M.D. after his name—the M.D. that his parents had treated with a reverence he could never understand. Most of Alan’s classmates went on to postgraduate work, but Alan was not one to press his luck. (At times, even then, he thought he might still go into his father’s brassiere business, learning it, as the old man might say, from the inside out.) He settled, instead, for the life of a general practitioner. One of the few on Long Island that found it economically necessary to make house calls. And perform abortions.
In time Alan met Gerda, the sister of a nurse who had helped pull him through his period of interning. Gerda, tiny and small-boned with fair skin and a large mouth, was everything Alan was not: extroverted, adventurous, bubbling with idle conversation. It was she who had been the aggressor, she who had provided the rubber contraceptive during their first fumbling encounter one night in June on the fourth tee of the Plandome Country Club. But even there he had failed. Four weeks later Gerda tearfully announced that she was “preggy,” to use her imperishable term. Six weeks later they were married. Married for eighteen years, eighteen years of relative poverty (whenever Alan encountered a statistical study of average incomes for doctors in the United States he shook his head sadly, wonderingly), and the fruit of their union was an eighteen-year-old boy, who was seriously considering a life as a Country-and-Western vocalist, and a house a mile from the water in one of the less prestigious sectors of King’s Neck.
Alan had never actually regretted marrying Gerda—but there were moments. Moments when he was lancing an ugly boil or giving an enema, and then he would reflect on his marriage. What had they in common? Other than a slow-witted long-haired son who fancied cowboy boots with silver spurs—a boy who had perhaps been the foremost reason for Alan’s first having risked performing an abortion. Well, what had they in common? Gerda’s never-ending quest for Louis XV mirrors bored and impoverished him; her genteel habit of eating prune Danish with knife and fork (which at first had seemed so charming) now irritated him. For her part, Gerda stolidly accepted his refusal to trade in their Rambler station wagon for a Jaguar XKE or to grow what she called an “unobtrusive little Vandyke.” Gerda would, of course, accept almost anything because Alan had fathered a son she found entirely beautiful.
On Friday Bill announced a weekend trip to Chicago, a conference with a prospective sponsor, and Gillian was appropriately grateful. She decided against hazarding the drive herself and called Station Taxi. The cab driver dropped her at a drugstore at the end of town and she walked back the few short blocks to the corner of Thompson. A small unobtrusive sign beside a lamp post identified the doctor’s office. The low brick building was set back from the road and was modestly landscaped—it seemed to serve as a buffer between the business buildings to the south and the split levels and spaced ranch homes to the north. A Rambler station wagon, its chrome running to rust, was parked beside the building. It had M.D. plates.
The foyer was dimly lit. To her right was the waiting room. She sat opposite the door to the doctor’s office. She studied with amused interest a grouping of pictures over the deep green leather couch. Marin’s Lower Manhattan fought mood, color and style with Renoir’s Le Pont Noeuf. Beside the paintings was a Louis XV mirror that Gillian would have sworn was authentic. A copy of a G. H. Davis World War II sketch of German and American fighter planes in aerial battle hung tastelessly with the others. The room furnishings were less expensive than one might expect in a King’s Neck office, and the imbalance of color and style was unsettling.
“Hello, I’m Dr. Hetterton. And you are Mrs. Brown, I believe.”
“That’s right.”
Gillian looked into the full face of a man who was medium tall, maybe five feet ten, and of stocky build. He wore his graying hair in a modified crew cut, and Gillian guessed he was on the far side of forty-five. He returned the glance and gave no indication of his thoughts.
“Mrs. Brown, isn’t it?” he said.
“Yes, doctor,” she said.
“I have a remarkable number of Mrs. Browns on file,” he said.
“That is remarkable,” Gillian said. “I have no relatives here.”
“Just so,” he said.
“Aren’t you going to ask me in?”
The doctor cleared his throat and stepped inside the small office, then led her into an examination room off to the left. He handed her a surgical gown and gestured toward a cur-tained-off sector of the chamber. Gillian was thankful that he had dismissed his nurse. She disrobed quickly and poked her head through the curtain.
“Come on out,” the doctor said. “I don’t bite.”
Following his directions, Gillian climbed onto the examining table. The doctor rolled a large machine over to the table. He draped a cloth over Gillian’s legs and gently placed her feet in the stirrups at either side of the table. Then, less gently, he plunged the speculum into her. He completed the check in silence, then leaned against the wall and ignited a cigarette.
“Two months,” he said. “Two months into a first pregnancy.”
“That’s right—almost to the day. Didn’t I tell you that on the phone?”
“You know”—he seemed not to be listening to her—“the women in France have babies right out in the field and then go on with their day’s work.”
“Bully for them.” If it weren’t for that damn gadget tearing at her insides, Gillian would have walked out of the room.
“I just want to be sure,” the doctor said. “I don’t want you to do anything you’re going to regret.”
“How long is this going to take?” Gillian said. “Let’s just get it over with. Are you going to give me anything?”
Dr. Hetterton pressed down on the foot pedal that opened the sterilizer. Steam billowed up the wall. He reached over to a plastic container in which forceps rested in an alcohol bath. Then he seemed to have second thoughts.
“Stretch your arms straight down and clasp the edge of the table. This will be over in a few seconds.”
He switched on the diathermy machine and firmly clasped the cautery gun. The intense heat spread through Gillian and she bit her lip to stifle a cry. She fought the nausea welling up in her throat.
“Easy,” he said. “There, that should do it.”
“You mean it’s all over?”
“All over now.” Dr. Hetterton handed her a prescription pad and pencil. “Here, write your name, address and phone number. Your real name. You may need me and I’ll have to have the correct facts. It should happen within twenty-four hours. Call me as soon as it does.”
Gillian did as she was told, precisely as she was told. Not glancing at the paper, the doctor thrust it into his trouser pocket and called the taxi. The two of them sat there in the office waiting, not speaking, and Gillian wished for something appropriate to say.
For once she was
wordless. At parties she employed a selection of icebreakers that seldom failed to work—a small smorgasbord of existentialism, Zen and little known facts about obscure students of Bellini. Don’t you think Sartre is very much the twentieth-century man? she would ask. Kirkegaard has a marvelously fey quality about him, don’t you think? she would say. Wouldn’t you say that sex is simply the last resort of two people who can’t communicate? she would offer.
But none of them—nothing seemed appropriate. The doctor looked like the kind of man who would forget to zip up his trousers, a man on the edge of going to seed.
“Why do you do this?” she asked.
“I’m a doctor,” he said. “I help people.”
“Seriously,” she said.
“Seriously, I need the money,” he said. “Why do you do it?”
“Seriously, I don’t need the baby,” she said.
“You don’t look to be suffering,” he said. “You are married, aren’t you? Is the baby your husband’s?”
“No,” she said. “And as long as we’re being honest, I have no idea who the father is.”
“No idea?” he said.
“Some idea,” she said. “But I might be wrong on that.”
“It doesn’t matter now,” he said.
They both heard the cab pull up in front of the office. Gillian nodded at the doctor and opened the door.
“By the way,” he said, “by the way, Mrs. Brown, you are a very beautiful woman.”
It was a strange way to end it, Gillian thought, closing the door behind her. The door closed away the sight of Dr. Alan Hetterton holding both hands straight out in front of him. The tremor was barely noticeable. He stopped then and answered the ringing telephone.
“I told you I had some calls to make,” he said. “Yes, yes, I know what time it is. Why am I still at the office? Christ, I was in the neighborhood and had to take a leak. I think, Gerda, I’m capable of coming to these decisions by myself.”
He replaced the receiver and sat staring at the phone for ten minutes or more. When he could stand it no longer he went to the locked cabinet, opened it, took down the bottle of morphine. He placed two of the tiny white pills, half-gram pills, in the belly of a tablespoon. He drew a single cc of sterile water into the syringe, squirted it onto the spoon, watched the pills effervesce. Rolling up his left sleeve, he searched out the vein and daubed it gently with alcohol. Soon, soon. Drawing the precious liquid into the hypodermic, he squirted out a drop, then jabbed the needle home. An hour. One hour to get home and shower before the euphoria would grip him.
Naked Came the Stranger Page 13