by Jonathan Dee
That afternoon Molly sat on her childhood bed with the county Yellow Pages. After trying unsuccessfully to guess the pertinent euphemism – Child Services; Pregnancy Counseling; Family Planning – she called the local chapter of Planned Parenthood and got a list of abortionists in the greater Albany area. Later, when she made the short drive into town, she went to the bank – they were used to seeing her now – and withdrew, with one of the blank slips her mother had signed for her, two thousand dollars.
She opted for a smaller clinic, forty miles away in Canajoharie, thinking there would be no protesters there, and she was right. It wasn’t that she feared the protesters or the remorse they might try to fan in her over what she was doing; her only desire was to clear her own path of other people to as great a degree as possible. If she could have performed the procedure on herself, rather than have to endure the benign looks and remarks of a doctor and a nurse, she would have done it. She told the woman at the desk she had called yesterday to schedule a D and C. Without a word the woman passed through the window a clipboard with a form attached and a capless pen dangling from a string.
“Do I have to fill all this out?” Molly asked. Stout, unsurprisable, the woman in the window said, “Yes,” flatly, without looking up. Molly took a seat.
There was no one else in the waiting room. Molly filled out both sides of the form, giving a false name and address but otherwise answering truthfully. She checked the box to decline counseling. She checked the “Cash” box next to “Form of Payment.”
The first thing the woman did, when Molly handed the form back, was to ask for the cash in advance; Molly then waited for half an hour. On the table was an old issue of Glamour; she ignored it. The time passed slowly, with no distractions, and Molly struggled to make her mind a blank.
Finally she was shown to a changing room, just large enough to turn around in, and given a surgical gown. The room had two doors, one on each side; on one tiny wall was a Monet print, and on the wall across from it a sign read “Not Responsible for Personal Property.” That reminded her that she was carrying nearly eighteen hundred dollars in the pocket of her fatigues; she put it in the toe of her shoe and pushed the socks in after it. When she opened the door opposite the one she had entered, she was face to face with a nurse, and over her shoulder, sitting on a stool, was the doctor. The doctor held a clipboard in his hand. He smiled at her as if crossing the word “smile” off a list.
“Okay, Ms Wheelwright,” he said. “If you’ll lie down on the table, please.”
Molly saw where her feet were intended to go. The doctor sat on a small stool between her knees. At his feet was a small metal garbage can with a lid.
“Just to double-check, Ms Wheelwright, you’re here for a D and C, is that right?”
“Yes.”
“Your last period was when?”
“About nine weeks ago.”
“And you’ve declined an offer of counseling on the alternatives to abortion, is that right?”
“That’s right.”
“Okay then.” He signed something on the clipboard and handed it to the nurse, who placed it on the metal table behind her. She handed him a pair of rubber gloves.
It took about twenty minutes. The nurse had no duties to perform; it dawned on Molly that she was there because she was a woman, simply to bridge the gap in some mysterious way between Molly and the man who squinted as he scraped the inside of her uterus with what looked like some sort of sewing tool. The silence was broken only a few times by his saying, “Now you’ll feel a dull ache,” or “Now you may feel a sensation like cramping.” He was never wrong about it. Molly wasn’t aware of any particular look on her own face, but at one point, without warning, about halfway through the procedure, the nurse reached out and took her hand.
Jesus, thought Molly, struggling not to lose it; what a terrible idea. Let go of me.
She could hear the opening and closing of the garbage-can lid. “Garbage can” must not be the right term, she thought; but that’s what the opening and closing sounded like.
She had no idea how long such a thing should take, five minutes, an hour, so she was surprised when she heard the snapping sound as he removed his gloves. “And we’re through,” he said, not unkindly. Molly propped herself up on her elbows. “If you have any questions, Renee here can answer them, but if you need to talk to me for any reason, of course I’ll still be around.”
Renee took Molly’s elbow as they walked the few feet back to the changing room. “Now you may feel some cramping-type pain in the next few days,” Renee said intimately. “That’s normal. A little bleeding is also nothing to worry about. If you get a heavier flow, call us here, or go straight to the emergency room if you feel it’s necessary. Use a pad for the bleeding – no tampons. You may want to take it easy today and tomorrow.”
At the door, Renee handed Molly a piece of paper. “This is a prescription for some Tylenol with codeine. I’d advise you to fill it on the way home. With most people, especially as young as you, the pain isn’t that severe. But sometimes it is. Now,” she said as she closed the door, “you just take as long as you need to in here, to collect yourself. Nobody’s going to hurry you.” She closed the door.
Collect myself? Molly looked around the tiny room for a minute, having numbed herself to such a degree that it was difficult to think at all. She dressed quickly and left. The exit did not take her back through the waiting room; she pulled open a fire door and was back in the bright sunshine of the parking lot.
On the long drive back to Ulster the pain commenced. Soon Molly’s fingers were white around the steering wheel. No bleeding, though, which was important, since this was her mother’s car. She fished the prescription out of her pocket. Without slowing down, she crumpled it up, rolled down the window, and threw it into the weeds along the highway.
“There you are,” Kay said absently when she heard the door open. “I didn’t know where you’d gone.”
“Visiting friends.”
“Oh, lovely. I saved you some lunch.”
“No thank you,” Molly said, not breaking stride. “I’m not feeling that well.”
“What’s the problem?”
“Cramps,” Molly called from the stairs.
“Poor thing,” Kay murmured. Molly went into her room and shut the door.
She lay on her side, facing the wall. Each wave of pain squeezed the tears from her eyes; they rolled sideways across the bridge of her nose and on to the pillowcase. Good, she said to herself. Good. It should hurt. She did not have to think of John, or of their aborted child, in order to feel that where she was right now was where she deserved to be. She wanted, but couldn’t quite bring herself, to wish it would last longer than just one day.
IF JOHN WAS unsure at first what his duties might be as Osbourne’s adjutant he didn’t have the luxury of wondering for long. The new business that poured their way after the mirror ad necessitated expanding the staff; Osbourne insisted on no more than three new employees (though they could have used and afforded twice that number), and he left John in charge of the hiring. They didn’t have to recruit – the office was besieged by job applications, by phone, by mail, by Internet, at the very door of the mansion – but John, eager to impress, recruited anyway. In the end he hired a graphic novelist from Cleveland, a faculty member from the American studies department at Yale, and a video-installation artist whose work he read about and subsequently traveled to see – with Osbourne’s blessing – at the Biennale in Venice. He kept raising the stakes for himself, wondering when he would contact someone who would refuse to consider his offer. But no one ever did.
John also ran all the client meetings now, which was sometimes a touchy business – in spite of the agency’s escalating fame – only because Osbourne had decreed that they were not to take part in any pitches. If a client wanted them, then the client could hire them, but Palladio would not expend its creative energies in these demeaning closed-door competitions. This rubbed a great many exe
cutives the wrong way, and John – flying around the country, usually working alone – needed all of his unthreatening charisma to convince these executives that, considering the agency’s brief but unblemished record, they really weren’t taking any undue risks; and that Osbourne’s refusal to pitch their account was not a slap directed against them, but a measure of the lengths he would go to in order to insulate the best creative staff in the world.
That staff was indeed working at peak inspiration. They had internalized Osbourne’s message, which was that only the art mattered, that clients and their interests were an aesthetic crutch which was hereafter kicked out from under them, that the world of commerce would subsidize them endlessly in return for a portion of the reflected glory of the work they happened to do within the walls of the mansion. The more personal, the better. They were dependent on no one; and John, free of the stress now of competing with them, was able to take pride in the greatness of the work they were producing.
Inevitably, as Osbourne’s name – despite his efforts to stay out of the spotlight, to credit only his employees – grew more and more revered, offers began to materialize for him to write a book. John flew to New York to negotiate on his boss’s behalf. Private cars took him everywhere, from the hotel to the publishers’ offices, from the offices to the restaurants, yet he was still surprised to find himself a little keyed up at the prospect of running into someone he knew in the city – from his days at Canning & Leigh, or possibly even Rebecca herself, who still worked in midtown, as far as he knew. In his daydreams about it he concentrated mostly on how not to appear condescending, in light of the success none of them had predicted. But in the end, he saw no one but strangers and new acquaintances, and he flew home to Virginia with no such experience useful for measuring his old life against his new one, only a contract for his boss to sign, for 1.1 million dollars.
Though it was late when he got back to Charlottesville, he drove straight to the office. Osbourne would certainly be there, and might even be awake, since he kept strange hours; but John would wait to see him first thing in the morning. He went to his own bedroom – the one now generally recognized as his – in the west wing, and he opened the door. The bedside light was on; but Elaine, though she had tried to stay awake, was sleeping on her side, one knee drawn up, under the sheet. John smiled; he undressed, turned off the light, and, sliding in as noiselessly as he could, moved his fingers lightly across the solid curve of her hip, to see how far he could get without waking her. It was a game they had.
The next morning, when John handed Osbourne the book contract for his signature, his boss looked it over and shook his head appreciatively, then offered it back to John and said that, after thinking it over last night, he had changed his mind and decided not to do it. John, though somewhat put out by this, had to admit he was also not terribly surprised. For months now Osbourne, via his instructions to John, had turned down one by one every request to be interviewed, or photographed, for print or TV. He turned down public appearances of all kinds, in all countries. Even inside the office, in fact, he was less and less visible, though he was usually, as they were all aware, in the mansion somewhere. No one knew if this reclusiveness was calculated or not, but if it was calculated, it couldn’t have been working out any better for them.
WITH EIGHTEEN HUNDRED dollars held in a tight roll by a hairband in her front pocket, and a heavy bag with a shoulder strap on the seat beside her, Molly drove Kay’s Honda to the Albany airport and left it in long-term parking. Inside the terminal she bought a postcard with a picture of the airport on it, wrote a note to her parents which said only that the Honda could be found in long-term parking (Lot G-2) at the Albany airport, bought a stamp at a newsstand, and dropped the card in the mailbox near the terminal’s police station. Back outside the doors to baggage claim, Molly hailed a cab to the Trailways bus depot on Foundry Avenue. She staggered down the narrow darkened aisle of a half-empty bus, slouched in a seat by the tinted window with her knees pressed high up on the metal seatback in front of her, and with the cold, antiseptic-smelling air conditioner blowing on her forearm, her other arm resting on top of the bag stuffed shapeless with her clothes, she began to disappear from the lives of the few people who knew her.
Like the bus ride itself – torturously boring, until the moment she emerged from the Lincoln Tunnel and understood how completely her life had just changed – the years of Molly’s life that followed seemed to pass at two speeds simultaneously: interminable and abrupt. Inside Port Authority she called information for the address of the youth hostel, which turned out to be all the way up on Amsterdam and 105th Street. A few nights there, sleeping on a woven mat, in with the backpackers and the foreign boys who kept encouraging her, as baldly as if she were an idiot, to go out and get drunk with them; then she answered an ad in the Voice and took her place as one of six roommates in a three-bedroom apartment on Gansevoort Street. The third bedroom, which Molly now shared with a tall, sallow aspiring actress named Iggy, was actually a dining room with a Japanese screen placed in the entrance. Molly could look out the window nearest her futon and see, on one corner, the unmarked entrance to an S/M club, and on the other the trucks backing in and out of the meat wholesalers, the thick men, none of whom seemed any younger than middle-aged, in their absurd white coats like surgeons, covered with sawdust and blood. Molly came with enough money to cover two months’ rent and a lie she had prepared about a publishing job she was up for, but in the end the other tenants of the apartment never even asked her if she was employed. She had enough cash for a security deposit and that’s where their interest ended. They were used to people coming and going.
All of them in the slovenly apartment were involved in the arts in some peripheral and materially unsuccessful way. They passed around their part-time jobs the way they might have borrowed each other’s clothes; Molly found work first at a Kinko’s, then at a video store, then as a waitress. They sometimes went, in groups of three or four, up to Columbia for jobs as human subjects – drug experiments and the like. These jobs were so unrelated to who they felt they were that the changes, the hirings and firings, meant nothing. But Molly could meet her measly rent and her one-sixth share of utilities in this way, which was the only accomplishment in which she felt she could afford any interest. Everyone else Molly met took it for granted that she was an artist of some sort herself; she was living the life, she had the demeanor, and after all she had come to the city with no prospects in the first place. But if Molly was involved with creation of any kind it was only to weave herself so seamlessly into this life that she might not stand out from it at all.
Friends introduced her to friends. So many people she met now, men and women, were gay that she couldn’t always anticipate when some friendly figure at a club or a party in someone’s apartment would suddenly try to get over on her. She took up some offers and not others; she did make herself a rule – one which her roommates had long ago discarded – that she wouldn’t sleep with anyone else who lived in the shared apartment; she didn’t want to endanger her spot, since, should she find herself homeless now, she really had no safety net at all. If, in theory, Molly had suddenly changed her mind and decided to have sex with any one of them, she would have known in advance what kind of sounds they tended to make when they came; with the Japanese screens and the temporary walls and the excess of people, there was no privacy to be had at home. No one minded, because you couldn’t overcome the closeness of the quarters in any other way than not minding.
In the end they lost their lease anyway, when James, who had been at NYU film school for something like seven years, got drunk and set fire to his mattress after his dissertation was rejected. Molly and Iggy moved into a tiny one-bedroom on Seventeenth Street; the guy Iggy was sleeping with came over the first weekend they were there and put up a plasterboard wall in the middle of the one bedroom, with a gap cut on one side for a door. This meant that Molly had to walk through Iggy’s room to get to her own bed; but again, the pretense
of privacy was best forgotten if you wanted to live sanely in such a situation. The boyfriend was married and he never knew very far in advance when he could sneak away and come over; if Molly walked in on them, he made no attempt to cover himself, and once in a while asked frankly if Molly would care to join them.
“Maybe some other time,” Molly said. Iggy just laughed.
She went to readings, she went to clubs, to gallery openings when there was the prospect of free food. The art that she saw everywhere was an art of personal expression; most of the theatrical productions were monologues or one-man shows, if only for budgetary reasons. This kind of highly confessional art, when it was bad, seemed false, insincere, yet Molly wondered if you could fairly call it inauthentic when the artists themselves (they were usually friends of hers) were sacrificing everything for it – comfort, money, security. Rarely did any kind of failure incline them to question these sacrifices. They would do anything to get their confession on the record.
Every time Molly met a new person, in a social situation, the fourth or fifth question out of their mouths was, What are you working on?
Iggy got a job playing a Mexican hooker on a soap opera, but then the character was killed off and she went on unemployment for a while. She tried to take a job at Starbucks but was fired for cursing out the manager before her training was even completed. Accustomed to such setbacks, Iggy continued going out at night, and refused to admit the possibility of real disaster.
“There’s always whoring,” she’d say brightly, shrugging her shoulders. It became a running joke between them, every time a bill collector would call or the landlord would wait for them on the stoop.