Sweet Affliction

by Anna Leventhal

  “It looks like a demented muffin.”

  “It’s not hurting anyone, is it?”

  “It’s hurting my eyes.” My mother says nothing, and I decide to drop it.

  She had a particular way of telling Stacey and I we were getting in her hair. “No thanks,” she’d say if we started a band with a blowdryer and a xylophone. Her tone was light, cordial, final.

  “Well what about if we practise in the garage?”

  “No thanks.” Like we were Girl Guides with boxes of cookies. She never laughed at jokes but instead would say “That’s funny.” She could almost understand what makes people normal, but she couldn’t be it.

  “Stacey been by today?”

  “Oh, not yet,” she says, “She was here last night with that new lady of hers.”

  “Camille? The little kid from down the street?”

  “Not so little anymore.”

  I nod. I remember Stacey and Camille holding hands, practising steps for an Israeli dance they learned at summer camp.

  “I met someone,” Mom says.

  “You met someone? What does that mean, you met someone? At a nightclub?”

  “Don’t be mean. Here, on the ward. His name is Bruce, and he’s very nice. He’s a teacher.”

  “So you, what, go on dates to the vending machine? Wash each other’s bedsores? Do they provide special rooms for conjugal visits?”

  “For godsakes Angela, we’re friends. And he’s married.” But she’s laughing.

  “Never stopped you before.”

  “Angela Davis Feldman! Hush your mouth!”

  “Did Brucie give you the angel?”

  “Oh God no, not his style whatsoever.” She can’t stop giggling. Linda breezes in, bringing a chart and a sharp peppery smell.

  “Well look at you gals, having a grand old time in here,” she says, checking the numbers.

  “Linda,” says my mom, “My daughter was just admiring that sweet angel you gave me.” Of course it would be Linda who gave it to her. She probably has a whole drawerful of them at home.

  “Yes, it’s lovely,” I say. I try to catch Mom’s eye but she just looks at me with a flat, over-pleasant smile.

  “Well I just think a room isn’t a room without an angel’s touch.”

  “It’s stunning,” my mom says, a word I’ve never heard her use.

  “Yes,” I say, “I am definitely stunned.”

  “You know, there are angels all around us,” Linda says.

  I widen my eyes and nod, trying to look credulous. “Really?”

  “Oh yes. This place is chockablock with them.” Linda straightens up and looks at my mother with shock.

  “Abigail! You’re not wearing your hairdo!”

  My mom’s hand flies to her head. “Oh, I forgot to put it on!”

  “Let me get it!” cries Linda. She and Mom bumble around like a couple of soft-shoe comedians, looking for the wig (my mom’s bumbling being mostly with her hands), until Linda locates it in the bottom drawer of the dresser. “Now what were you doing there, you silly thing,” she says. As Linda goes to fix it on my mother’s head, she finds the cigarette behind her ear. “Abby! Naughty girl.” She shakes the cigarette at her like a finger. My mom does an “Oops, I did it again!” face and they both laugh like teenagers.

  Linda spends a good deal of time straightening the wig on my mother’s head, her tongue protruding slightly from her mouth. I don’t know where to look while she does this; it’s like watching your relatives kiss.

  “Ohhh…” she says. “There you go. Now you look absolutely stunning. Like a famous actress.” My mom smiles and lowers her eyelids. She actually seems to be blushing. She’s like a hothouse orchid, blooming under this woman’s care.

  “Really,” Linda says, “you do look just like an old movie star. Who am I thinking of? Garbo? Katharine Hepburn? Who does she look like, Angela?”

  “Yul Brynner?” I say.

  They both look at me. My mom’s eyes are blank as cups of coffee. Linda’s have a bottomless shine—what is it? Pity, I think.

  “Your daughter is so funny, Abigail,” she says sadly.

  “Yes,” my mom says, “she’s a riot.” She gives me a tired smile.

  “Whatever,” I say.

  “Clara Bow! That’s it, that’s who I was thinking of.”

  “Oh, I loved her in Dangerous Curves.”

  “Me too! They don’t make them like that anymore, do they.”

  The hospital doors slide open. The Wellspring. The Omnipotent Wellspring of Reproduction and Health. I walk down the hill, my skin itching from sun and something else, something slow and heavy and inevitable. I feel for the sliver of joy.

  A father and a little kid go by, the dad angrily marching ahead, the kid racing to keep up, babbling in that way kids do when they know something is terribly wrong but they don’t know how to fix or even name it.

  “But Dad, you know what?” the kid says. “Do ants have money?”

  Halfway home I see the Hasid kid again, sitting on a swing in the kiddie park. He’s trying to swing but you can tell he doesn’t really get the mechanism. His legs go out at the wrong time and he doesn’t lean into it. I try not to make eye contact, and when he calls out I keep going. “Wait,” he says, “please.” I turn around, careful. He’s reaching into a pocket of his deep black coat. He pulls out a pack of cigarettes and waves them at me.

  “You can have them,” he says.

  “For what?” I say.

  “Nothing. They’re for you.”

  I hesitate.

  “Don’t you like this kind?”

  “Charcoal filters,” I say.

  “Is that good?”

  “Probably not.” I step forward and reach for them. He shakes his head and gestures for me to hold out my hand. I do, and he drops the pack into my palm.

  “Thank you,” I say. He ducks his chin and starts to walk away.

  “Hold on.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You still want to see it?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Let’s walk.”

  My mom’s apartment is only a few blocks away. The kid looks around with interest. Probably he’s never seen what his people look like in other habitats. “Where do you pray?” he asks. “Everywhere,” I say.

  I’ve done things I would prefer to hide from God. One night I rushed to the pharmacy to get the morning-after pill—it closed at eleven. It was a race against sperm. Outside I saw my old lover, Phil, locking up his bike. A fat messenger bag hung from his shoulder, which I knew meant he was delivering drugs to one of the bare-walled second-floor apartments on Mont Royal. We nodded to each other and asked no questions, as two people do when they are about to commit abominations.

  The pharmacist asked when was my last period. “Two months,” I said, “but that’s because I voluntarily terminated a pregnancy.” She looked at me like yeah, I know, I’m a reproductive disaster myself. Did I have any more questions?

  “Can I drink with these pills?”

  “Well, try not to throw up.”

  “Okay.”

  “If you throw up you’ll have to take them again.”

  I gave her the thumbs up and got back on the street, a precious plastic vial rattling around my bag.

  But this wasn’t one of those things.

  “Do you want to have sex with me?” I say when it seems like a reasonable moment to do so.

  “Aren’t we already?”

  “Well, yeah, I guess, but I mean like sex sex.”

  “Oh,” he says. “Sex sex.”

  His cock is long and thin and narrows a bit before the head. He gets so hard that when we fuck I can hear it clicking against my cervix. It sounds unlikely, but it’s true; it’s one of those half-sound-half-feelings, like snapping your fing
ers. His skin is fine-grained and reddish. It hardly seems like skin at all. He smells only a bit like teenage boy. Mostly he has a vitamin B smell, like garden soil.

  Later we share a smoke on the balcony. He is fully dressed again except for the hat, which is sitting on my mother’s nighttable, like a game of One Of These Things Doesn’t Belong Here. I decide it’s confession time.

  “My mother is dying,” I tell him, “and my father lives with The Turtle’s wife.”

  “The Turtle?”

  “Never mind. So is this like a normal Hasidic thing to do? Are you kind of like the Amish in that way, where for one year you get to—”

  “Shhhh,” says the kid, putting his dirt-smelling hand over my mouth. “Do you hear that?”

  “What,” I say. And then I hear it.

  Zzzmmmmmmmmm.

  A Favour

  Lynnie has to quit her job as an abortion doula because she’s pregnant. She’s not showing yet, but it won’t be long, and she’s worried the sight could upset her clients.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” she tells her roommate Alice, “most of them know exactly what they’re doing. But they feel judged enough by the rest of the world. They don’t need me resting my belly on their arm while they’re in the stirrups.”

  She’s worked at Full Spectrum for six years now and doesn’t have a clue what other kind of jobs there are. She started as a volunteer and now sees up to ten clients a week. When she tells her boss that she’s leaving for good she gets a slightly mechanical hug and a small cactus.

  “Sorry to lose you, kid,” says Miranda.

  “I’ll miss you guys,” says Lynnie.

  Miranda also gives Lynnie two letters of recommendation in unsealed envelopes, which Lynnie puts in her desk drawer. As she shuts it she wonders who is going to care about her commitment to women’s wellbeing, her compassion, her strong work ethic and excellent punctuality record.

  On her passport it says “masseuse” and that’s pretty much the truth of it. She’s considered just putting “doula,” but the foreign-sounding word combined with her brown skin and curly black hair could equal hours of tedium in an interrogation room at the border. So she puts up with the winks and the jokes about happy endings and mostly gets an easy pass.

  However, the passport thing gives her an idea.

  She calls Raelle, who works at one of the rub-n-tugs on Ste-Catherine.

  “Do you think you could get me a job at Renaldo’s?”

  “I don’t know. Are you good with your hands? Can you do intensive body work?”

  Lynnie thinks about the hundreds of shoulders she’s rubbed, hands she’s held, shiatsu pressure points she’s activated over the years.

  “Yeah,” she says. “I think I can handle that.”

  Lynnie loves the unbridled silliness of the peeler joints on Ste-Catherine. In the small Ontario town where she grew up, the strip clubs attempted discretion, a demure classiness; they were called Gentleman Jack’s and Snifters and The Treasure Trove. They had fake Doric columns and fake marble ashtrays and fake palm fronds hanging over the door. Here in Montreal the clubs have names like Sex Box, Sex Castle, and Supersex. Neon women in breast-baring bat costumes circle the signs, their dazzling LED nipples blinking like radio towers. On one sign a cartoon woman in a G-string mouths the words “Le sex: j’aime ca.” She reminds Lynnie of the naked ladies she and her brothers would draw as kids, with startled, spherical breasts. There is something touching about the naive crudeness of the image.

  Although there is a power too in these superhero sex workers. Their lips are glossy and their heads thrown back, their breasts float as though suspended in heavy liquid. They are vibrant, these radioactive women, they light up the streets like rocket fire.

  She meets Raelle outside one of the clubs, and they go into the Second Cup on the corner.

  “I came up with a new package today,” Raelle says. “It’s called the VIP. What it is is I get them to take a really long shower, and then I towel them off.”

  “Yeah?” says Lynnie.

  “It costs two hundred and twenty dollars,” says Raelle. They both laugh, and Raelle starts singing along with the muzak on the café’s sound system in an amazingly melodious and sultry voice, making up lyrics as she goes.

  Baby don’t you worry

  Mama ain’t gone away

  She’s coming back to towel you off

  Just like when you were a babe

  A babe in diapers, barely nursin

  Cause you are a

  Very

  Important

  Person

  Raelle’s boss is named Desmond. He stares at Lynnie for a long time before taking down her name (“Priscilla”) and phone number.

  “So Priscilla,” he says, “what are you anyway? Greek or something?”

  “Or something,” says Lynnie.

  “Anyway it’s no biggie,” Desmond says, “the patrons like variety. It’s a regular bag of skittles around here.” He winks at her, and she smiles in return.

  Lynnie’s phone makes a sound like bubbles popping. She unfolds it. It’s Renaud.

  “My hand moved in physio today.”

  “Renaud! That’s wonderful!”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m so glad.”

  “Yeah. Soon I’ll be playing again.”

  “Well that’s just. Wonderful.”

  Many years ago Renaud was apparently a well-known musician. He was part of a boy band sensation, sort of the Quebecois answer to Menudo, called Gare Garçon. This translates as something like “boy station,” which is maybe why the band had limited success within the province. Now in his late sixties, he is the super of her apartment building, occupying the first floor with his two dogs, inveterate crotch-sniffers named Chip and Mario. Every time Lynnie enters or leaves the building they charge her, noses aimed at her pants seam like heat-seeking missiles. “Get out of there,” Renaud will shout. It seems like the classy thing to do would be not to call attention to it, but Renaud always makes a big deal. “Get out of there, fellas, leave well enough alone.” Lynnie doesn’t know how she feels about her crotch being referred to as there, as though it’s a destination, something you could find on a map. As in, how do we get there? Are we there yet?

  Renaud asks, “is that your bike locked up to the fence?”

  “With the blue handlebars?”

  “No.”

  “Then no.”

  “I was going to say you should move it under the balcony. It’s bike thief season, you know.”

  “I do.”

  “And. Uh. Montpellier wants the rent by the fifteenth at the latest.”

  “Yeah. Yeah. I’m on it.”

  “Otherwise he says he’ll contact the Régie.”

  “He won’t have to.”

  “Goodbye, Lynnie.”

  “Goodbye, Renaud.”

  He’s a handsome guy in that silver fox kind of way, with an oily half-black pompadour that’s creeping further and further back on his skull. Deep lines around his mouth. A stroke froze his right arm this past winter and left his mouth a little crooked, which gives him a rakish air. When he tosses a ball to Mario or Chip they catch it in jaws that are agile and grasping as a pair of hands. He disliked Lynnie until he found out she was Iranian, not Haitian. “I got no beef with you guys,” he said, “not like everyone else does.”

  What must it be like to get old? Her grandpa once described it like this: You’re standing in line for the bus, but the line’s long enough that it doesn’t feel like standing in line. It just feels like walking around. But then, finally, from way down the street, you see the bus. And the line gets shorter and shorter, and you get closer and closer to the front. And then you know. You have to get on.

  Guys, she had discovered, are weirdly attached to their sperm. When her former lover, Sebasti
an, turned her down she didn’t speak to him for two months. “For fucksakes,” she said in their last conversation, “you jerk off like five times a day. What’s the difference if one time you stick it in a turkey baster?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It would feel like my responsibility.”

  “It?”

  “The baby.”

  “But it wouldn’t be,” Lynnie said.

  “But it would feel like it.”

  She realized that she didn’t want to be fighting someone over their bodily fluid; it felt like something out of Philip K. Dick.

  “Fine. Whatever. Keep it. I don’t want my baby to be a selfish jerk anyway.”

  So it’s odd, then, for her to suddenly be faced with such an excess of semen. Her clients can’t get rid of it fast enough, they have an unlimited supply in continual need of draining. It’s an economics that Lynnie has never experienced before: supply and demand have become neatly concatenated in a single bodily function. She thinks of herself as a sales manager; her biggest concern is moving units. This is when she doesn’t think of herself as a farmer, going to work in the wee hours of the morn to milk cows whose insistent lowing is painful to her because she senses their great need in her gut, where the tadpole hangs suspended in jelly.

  Her belly is beginning to punch itself out from the inside. It’s getting rounder and shiny-taut. If the clients notice they don’t seem to care. Possibly she is the embodiment of some kind of fantastical uber-woman to them—mother and whore. She still puts on makeup and does her hair to go to work, even though Raelle tells her not to bother. “They like the just-rolled-out-of-bed thing,” she says. “It makes it seem more intimate.” Raelle’s own dreadlocked hair is pulled into a messy ponytail and she’s wearing a white cotton undershirt and cargo pants.

  Lynnie thinks about a comment her best friend Alex made to her once. He said, “Whenever I pass a hooker on the street, I’m like ‘sorry, thanks but no thanks.’ But then I feel bad about it.”

  Lynnie pulled her coat together at the neck. “What, you think they take it personally? You think their feelings are hurt?”

  “Well, I mean, it’s them I’m rejecting, right? On a very personal level.”

  “Prostitutes are working, Alex,” Lynnie says. “They’re not poor deluded women who somehow have the idea that every man in the world wants to fuck them. They understand that not all guys are johns.”