The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966

by Richard Brautigan

  Then I noticed what was so extraordinarily strange about her. Her face was so delicate, perfect, but her body was fantastically developed for the fragility of her face.

  She had very large fully realized breasts and an incredibly tiny waist and large full hips that tapered down into long majestic legs.

  Her body was very sensual, inciting one to think of lust, while her face was Botticellian and set your mind to voyaging upon the ethereal.

  Suddenly she sensed my recognition of her body. She blushed bitterly and reached into the paper bag and took out her book.

  ‘This is my book,’ she said.

  She put it down on the desk and almost stepped back when she did it. She was going to step back but then she changed her mind. She glanced at me again and I could feel somebody inside of her looking out as if her body were a castle and a princess lived inside.

  The book had a plain brown wrapper on it and there was no title. The book looked like a stark piece of ground burning with frozen heat.

  ‘What’s it about?’ I said, holding the book in my hand, feeling almost a hatred coming from within the book.

  ‘It’s about this,’ she said and suddenly, almost hysterically, she unbuttoned her coat and flung it open as if it were a door to some horrible dungeon filled with torture instruments, pain and dynamic confession.

  She was wearing a blue sweater and skirt and a pair of black leather boots in the style of this time. She had a fantastically full and developed body under her clothes that would have made the movie stars and beauty queens and showgirls bitterly ooze dead make-up in envy.

  She was developed to the most extreme of Western man’s desire in this century for women to look: the large breasts, the tiny waist, the large hips, the long Playboy furniture legs.

  She was so beautiful that the advertising people would have made her into a national park if they could have got their hands on her.

  Then her blue eyes swirled like a tide pool and she started crying.

  ‘This book is about my body,’ she said. ‘I hate it. It’s too big for me. It’s somebody else’s body. It’s not mine.’

  I reached into my pocket and took out a handkerchief and a candy bar. When people are troubled or worried, I always tell them that it will be all right and give them a candy bar. It surprises them and it’s good for them.

  ‘Everything’s going to be all right,’ I said.

  I gave her a Milky Way. She held it in her startled hand, staring at it. And I gave her the handkerchief.

  ‘Wipe your eyes,’ I said. ‘And eat the candy bar while I get you a glass of sherry.’

  She fumbled abstractedly with the candy bar wrapper as if it were a tool from a distant and future century while I went and got some sherry for us. I figured that we would both need it.

  When I came back she was eating the candy bar. ‘Now isn’t that good,’ I said, smiling.

  The ludicrousness of me giving her a candy bar made her smile, ever so slightly, and almost look directly at me.

  ‘Please sit down over here,’ I said motioning towards a table and some chairs. She sat down as if her body were six inches larger than she was. After she had sat down, her body was still sitting down.

  I poured us each a glass of Gallo sherry, all the library could afford, and then there was a kind of awkward silence as we sat there sipping our sherry.

  I was going to tell her that she was a beautiful girl and she shouldn’t feel bad about it, that she was all wrong in denouncing herself, but then I changed my mind instantly.

  That was not what she wanted to hear and that wasn’t really what I wanted to say. After all, I have a little more sense than that. We both didn’t want to hear what I first thought of telling her.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I said.

  ‘Vida. Vida Kramar.’

  ‘Do you like to be called V-(ee)-da or V-(eye)-da?’

  That made her smile.

  ‘V-(eye)-da.’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Nineteen. Soon I’ll be twenty. On the tenth.’

  ‘Do you go to school?’

  ‘No, I work at night. I went to State for a while, then UC, but I don’t know. Now I’m working at night. It’s OK.’

  She was almost looking at me.

  ‘Did you just finish your book?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I finished it yesterday. I wanted to tell how it is to be like me. I figured it was the only thing left for me to do. When I was eleven years old, I had a thirty-six inch bust. I was in the sixth grade.

  ‘For the last eight years I’ve been the object, veneration and butt of at least a million dirty jokes. In the seventh grade they called me “points”. Isn’t that cute? It never got any better.

  ‘My book is about my body, about how horrible it is to have people creeping, crawling, sucking at something I am not. My older sister looks the way I really am.

  ‘It’s horrible.

  ‘For years I had a recurrent dream that I got up in the middle of the night and went into my sister’s bedroom and changed bodies with her. I took off my body and put on her body. It fitted perfectly.

  ‘When I woke up in the morning, I had on my own true body and she had this terrible thing I’m wearing now. I know it’s not a nice dream, but I had it all during my early teens.

  ‘You’ll never know how it is to be like I am. I can’t go anywhere without promoting whistles, grunts, howls, minor and major obscenities and every man I meet wants to go to bed instantly with me. I have the wrong body.’

  She was staring directly at me now. Her vision was unbroken and constant as a building with many windows standing fully here in this world.

  She continued: ‘My whole life has just been one torment. I, I don’t know. I wrote this book to tell how horrible physical beauty is, the full terror of it.

  ‘Three years ago a man was killed in an automobile accident because of my body. I was walking along a highway. I had gone to the beach with my family, but I couldn’t stand it any longer.

  ‘They demanded that I put on a bathing suit. “Don’t be bashful, just relax and enjoy yourself.” I was miserable with all the attention I was getting. When an eighty-year-old man dropped his ice-cream cone on his foot, I put my clothes back on and went for a walk along the highway up from the beach. I had to go somewhere.

  ‘A man came driving by in his car. He slowed down and was gawking at me. I tried to ignore him but he was very persistent. He forgot all about where he was and what he was doing and drove his car right into a train.

  ‘I ran over and he was still alive. He died in my arms, still staring at me. It was horrible. There was blood all over both of us and he wouldn’t take his eyes off me. Part of the bone was sticking out of his arm. His back felt funny. When he died, he said, “You’re beautiful.” That’s just what I needed to make me feel perfect for ever.

  ‘When I was fifteen a student in a high-school chemistry class drank hydrochloric acid because I wouldn’t go out with him. He was a little crazy, anyway, but that didn’t make me feel any better. The principal prohibited me from wearing a sweater to school.

  ‘It’s this,’ Vida said, gesturing rain-like towards her body. ‘It’s not me. I can’t be responsible for what it does. I don’t attempt to use my body to get anything from anyone and I never have.

  ‘I spend all my time hiding from it. Can you imagine spending your whole life hiding from your own body as if it were a monster in a Grade B movie, but still every day having to use it to eat, sleep and get from one place to another?

  ‘Whenever I take a bath I always feel as if I’m going to vomit. I’m in the wrong skin.’

  All the time she told me these things she did not take her eyes off me. I felt like a statue in a park. I poured her another glass of sherry and one for myself. I had a feeling that we were going to need a lot of sherry before the night was over.

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ I said. ‘I’m just a librarian. I can’t pretend that you are not beautiful. That would be
like pretending that you are someplace else in the world, say China or Africa, or that you are some other kind of matter, a plant or a tyre or some frozen peas or a bus transfer. Do you understand?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  ‘It’s the truth. You’re a very pretty girl and you’re not going to change, so you might as well settle down and get used to it.’

  She sighed and then awkwardly slipped her coat off and let it hang on the chair behind her like a vegetable skin.

  ‘I once tried wearing very baggy formless clothes, muu muus, but that didn’t work because I got tired of looking like a slob. It’s one thing to have this fleshy thing covering me but it’s another thing to be called a beatnik at the same time.’

  Then she gave me a great big smile and said, ‘Anyway, that’s my problem. Where do we go from here? What’s next? Got any more candy bars?’

  I pretended to get one from my pocket and she laughed out loud. It was a pleasing thing.

  Suddenly she turned her attention upon me in a very strong way. ‘Why are you are here in this funny library?’ she said. ‘This place where losers bring their books. I’m curious about you now. What’s your story, Mr Candyman Librarian?’

  She was smiling as she said these things.

  ‘I work here,’ I said.

  ‘That’s too easy. Where did you come from? Where are you going?’

  ‘Well, I’ve done all sorts of things,’ I said, sounding falsely old. ‘I worked in canneries, sawmills, factories, and now I’m here.’

  ‘Where do you live?’

  ‘Here,’ I said.

  ‘You live here in the library?’ she said.

  ‘Yes. I have a large room in the back with a small kitchen and toilet.’

  ‘Let me see it,’ she said. ‘I’m suddenly curious about you. A young-old man like yourself working in a creepy place like this doesn’t show that you’ve come out too far ahead of the game either.’

  ‘You’re really laying it on the line,’ I said, because she had really got to me.

  ‘I’m that way,’ she said. ‘I may be sick, but I’m not stupid. Show me your room.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, dogging a little. ‘That’s a little irregular.’

  ‘You’re kidding,’ she said. ‘You mean there’s something irregular for this place? I don’t know how to break it to you, but you’ve got a pretty far-out operation going on here. This library is a little on the whacky side.’

  She stood up and stretched awkwardly, but it’s hard to describe the rest of it. I had never in my life seen a woman graced with such a perfect body whose spell was now working on me. As certain as the tides in the sea rush to the shore, I showed her my room. ‘I’d better get my coat,’ she said. She folded her coat over her arm. ‘After you, Mr Librarian.’

  ‘I’ve never done this before,’ I said, faraway-like as if to no one.

  ‘Neither have I,’ she said. ‘It will be a different thing for both of us.’

  I started to say something else, but abstraction clouded my tongue and made it distant and useless.

  ‘The library isn’t really open now, is it?’ she said. ‘I mean, it’s after midnight and it’s only open for special books, latecomers like myself, right?’

  ‘Yes, it’s “closed” but—’

  ‘But what?’ she said.

  I don’t know where that ‘but’ came from but it vanished just as fast, returning to some conjunctional oblivion.

  ‘But nothing,’ I said.

  ‘You had better turn out the lights, then,’ she said. ‘You don’t want to waste electricity.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, feeling a door close behind me, knowing that somehow this at-first-appearing shy unhappy girl was turning, turning into something strong that I did not know how to deal with.

  ‘I’d better turn the lights out,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  I turned the lights out in the library and turned the light on in my room. That was not all I was turning on as a door closed behind us and a door opened in front of us.

  ‘Your room is very simple,’ she said, putting her coat down on my bed. ‘I like that. You must live a very lonely life with all the losers and dingalings, myself included, that bring their books in here.’

  ‘I call it home,’ I said.

  ‘That’s sad,’ she said. ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘Years,’ I said. What the hell.

  ‘You’re too young to have been here that long,’ she said. ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Thirty-one.’

  ‘That’s a good age.’

  She had her back to me and was staring at the cupboard in my kitchen.

  ‘It’s all right to look at me,’ she said, without turning her head the slightest. ‘For some strange reason I don’t mind your looking at me. Actually, it makes me feel good, but stop acting like a bandit when you do it.’

  I laughed at that.

  Suddenly she turned around and looked half at me, then directly at me and smiled gently. ‘I really have had a hard time of it.’

  ‘I think I can almost understand,’ I said. ‘

  ‘That’s nice,’ she said. She reached up and brushed her long black hair, causing a storm of bat lightning to flash past her ears.

  ‘I’d like some coffee,’ she said, looking at me.

  ‘I’ll put it on,’ I said.

  ‘No, let me,’ she said. ‘I know how to make good coffee. It’s my speciality. Just call me Queen Caffeine.’

  ‘Well, damn,’ I said, a little embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry but I only have instant.’

  ‘Then instant it is,’ she said. ‘That’s the name of the game. Perhaps I have a way with instant coffee, too. You never can tell,’ smiling.

  ‘I’ll get the stuff for you,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘Let me do it. I’m a little curious about this kitchen of yours. I want to find out more about you, and this little kitchen is a good place to start. I can see at a glance, though, that you are something like me. You’re not at home in the world.’

  ‘At least let me get the coffee for you,’ I said. ‘It’s—’

  ‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘You make me nervous. Only one person can make instant coffee at a time. I’ll find everything.’

  I sat down on the bed next to her coat.

  She found everything and made the coffee as if she were preparing a grand meal. I have never seen such care and eloquence applied to a cup of instant coffee. It was almost as if making a cup of instant coffee were a ballet and she were a ballerina pirouetting between the spoon, the cups, the jar, and the pan full of boiling water.

  She cleared the clutter from my table, but then decided that we should have our coffee on the bed, because it was more comfortable.

  We sat there on the bed, cosy as two bugs in a rug, drinking coffee and talking about our lives. She worked as a laboratory technician for a small institute that was studying the effects of various experiments on dogs in an attempt to solve some of the more puzzling questions of science.

  ‘How did you get the job?’ I said.

  ‘Through an ad in the Chronicle.’

  ‘What happened at San Francisco State?’

  ‘I got tired of it. One of my English teachers fell in love with me. I told him to buzz off, so he failed me. That made me mad, so I transferred to UC.’

  ‘And UC?’

  ‘The same story. I don’t know what it is about English teachers and me, but they fall like guillotines when they see me coming.’

  ‘Where were you born?’

  ‘Santa Clara. All right, I’ve answered enough of your questions. Now tell me how you got this job. What’s your story, Mr Librarian?’

  ‘I assumed possession of it.’

  ‘I take it then that there was no ad in the paper.’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘How did you assume possession of it?’

  ‘The fellow who was here before me couldn’t stand children. He thought they were go
ing to steal his shoes. I came in here with a book I had written and while he was writing it down in the Library Contents Ledger, a couple of children came in and he flipped, so I told him that I had better take over the library and he had better do something that didn’t involve children. He told me he thought he was cracking up, too, and that’s how I got this job.’

  ‘What did you do before you started working here?’

  ‘I kicked around a lot: canneries, sawmills, factories. A woman supported me for a couple of years, then she got tired of it and kicked my ass out. I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It was all pretty complicated before I started working here.’

  ‘What are you going to do after you quit here or do you plan on quitting?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Something will come up. Maybe I’ll get another job or find a woman to support me again or maybe I’ll write a novel and sell it to the movies.’

  That amused her.

  We had finished our coffee. It was funny because suddenly we both noticed that we did not have any more coffee to drink and we were sitting together on the bed.

  ‘What are we going to do now?’ she said. ‘We can’t drink any more coffee and it’s late.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘I guess it would be too corny for us to go to bed together,’ she said. ‘But I can’t think of anything else that would be better to do. I don’t want to go home and sleep by myself. I like you. I want to stay here with you tonight.’

  ‘It’s a puzzler,’ I said.

  ‘Do you want to sleep with me?’ she said, not looking at me, but not looking away either. Her eyes were somewhere in between half-looking at me and half-thinking about something else.

  ‘We don’t have any place else to go,’ I said. ‘I’d feel like a criminal if you left tonight. It’s hard to sleep with strangers. I gave it up years ago, but I don’t think we are really strangers. Do you?’

  She turned her eyes 3/4 towards me.

  ‘No, we’re not strangers.’

  ‘Do you want to sleep with me?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know what it is about you,’ she said. ‘But you make me feel nice.’

  ‘It’s my clothes. They’re relaxing. They’ve always been this way. I know how to get clothes that make people feel better when they’re with me.’