Private Practices

by Linda Wolfe

  “Aren’t you keeping that baby waiting?” the detective was asking. He was watching Ben caress Naomi with a glint of vicarious enjoyment in his blue eyes.

  “Right,” Ben said, and drew his body away from hers. She was crying. “Poor Ben. Poor Sidney. Oh, what a fucking waste.”

  His feeling of success was overwhelming. He forced himself to stay stooped, to maintain his usual hesitant slouch as he left the room. But once he was on the way to the hospital he straightened up, his long legs striding free.

  Emily had been shaved, given an enema, and put to bed in a tiny private labor room. A white-haired delivery nurse slathered her belly with a plastic gel and hooked her up to the fetal-heart monitor and the resident on duty, a young black woman, examined her. Later, Philip read aloud to her from a crumpled copy of the Daily News he had found on her night table. But after a while, Emily couldn’t concentrate.

  She asked Philip to stop reading and in between contractions she held his hand and watched the contractions and the baby’s heartbeat translated into wriggly hills and small, bumpy plains on the monitor. When the contractions came, she ceased caring about the machine, and pulled her hand out of Philip’s, her fingernails digging into her palms. Then as soon as the immediate stress was over, she reported that the contractions had been more interesting than painful, and went back to holding Philip’s hand and studying the geography of her ordeal.

  It was Philip who began to look blanched. Twice he called her “Champ,” and repeated the old saw about how if men had to give birth, there would be an end to babies.

  “It’s nothing,” Emily assured him, “nothing at all,” and resolved that for Philip’s sake she would leave her hand in his when the next contraction came. But she couldn’t do it. The bite of her nails into the soft flesh of her palms somehow alleviated the sensation of being pulled and pushed apart deep inside herself, in a place she had never before known existed.

  “I wish Zauber would get here,” Philip complained.

  “He will. He’ll be here soon.”

  She loved Philip utterly at that moment, loved the worried pallor of his face, and the way he stroked her hand with his thumb whenever he was clasping her, as if trying to add to mere comforting pressure a hint of remembered sensuality. He was stroking her that way when she felt a great spurting of fluid between her legs, a sensation she had feared would dismay and embarrass her, but which instead made her feel deliciously free and exultant. On the fetal-heart monitor she saw right afterward a tall, jagged peak and she felt she was somewhere else, somewhere high in hot, wondrous mountains that sparkled with lakes and pools and rushing waterfalls. She closed her eyes and dozed for a few minutes.

  When she awakened, Zauber was there. He was standing at the foot of the bed, conferring with Philip, the resident and the nurse. He was all in white. Starched.

  He looked like a god, she thought. Like a savior. Like the way Cortez must have looked to the Indians. And everyone in the room, except herself who was distant and dreamy and uninvolved, was watching him deferentially as he studied her chart and the tracings of the monitor. When he had finished his perusal of her records, the resident and the delivery nurse left the room discreetly and Zauber came to the head of the bed. “How are you doing?” he asked.

  “Fine,” she tried to smile. But there was another contraction on its way. She turned away from him, concentrating on the breathing exercises she had learned in her childbirth classes. When the contractions came, their urgency shattered her usual concern with sociability and propriety. And indeed she quite enjoyed the way they freed her of obligation and restraint. She was alone with her baby. They were in the mountains. They were climbing. She was out of breath. She was panting.

  “She seems to be having quite a bit of pain,” she heard Philip say to Zauber as she slid slowly down the slope she had been climbing.

  “Well, what did you expect?” Zauber sounded so white and wintry that Emily half-sat to stare at him.

  “Lie back down,” he admonished her. “I’m going to examine you. Check up on that resident.” Philip laughed ingratiatingly and she wondered what had struck him as funny.

  “Can you hold off for just a second?” she asked. “I feel—I think there’s another—” Zauber didn’t wait for her to finish her sentence. He was at the foot of the bed, forcing her thighs apart, so that when the contraction came she felt unable to ascend. She thrashed her legs, unable to climb free.

  “Can’t you stay still?” Zauber commented. His voice was icy.

  “It hurts,” she said, panting.

  She saw him look up and give her an annoyed, even contemptuous glance, but then once again the baby began to push at her. Too soon. She hadn’t rested yet. Zauber was probing inside her. “Wait. Wait,” she cried out loud to the baby.

  Zauber said, “I haven’t got all night.”

  Philip had returned to the chair and was sitting on the edge of it, shaking his head. “The pain is really something,” he said. “All the preparation doesn’t really prepare you.”

  Zauber said, “Maybe you ought to go out for a while.” He looked down at Emily’s chart and spoke without lifting his eyes. “You know, maybe it would be better if you weren’t here. I think she’s playing up to you.”

  She heard him with anger. “You promised Philip could stay the whole time!”

  “Give the poor man a rest,” Zauber sighed. “Let him get a cup of coffee.” It had begun to snow all around him and she couldn’t quite make out his features. “Now be quiet and let me finish up.” He pushed her legs apart again.

  His fingers felt frigid. She shivered and saw him through the snow. Perhaps she could melt him a little. Melt him and make him warmer toward her. Perhaps he was still worried about that woman she had heard him talking about the day she had first noticed his cold streak.

  She wanted to ask him but suddenly another contraction distracted her. She started to perspire, exuding moisture from every pore in her body. The baby was tearing at her. It was marching. Parading through her. Trampling her flesh. It was her enemy. In its quest for life, it would stop at nothing. It would rend her asunder.

  She shrieked. The sound thrilled her. She was still alive. She had thought the creature in her belly had killed her but no, the sound that hurtled from her throat reassured her that she was unhurt. She began to relax, her palms, opening onto the bedsheets.

  “If you can’t control yourself, Mrs. Harper, I’ll have to send your husband away,” Zauber said. “It isn’t fair for him to have to listen to you carrying on like this.”

  “He doesn’t mind,” Emily said as soon as she could speak.

  “I don’t mind,” Philip echoed loyally. He reached for a piece of gauze and began wiping her forehead. But then Zauber whispered something to him.

  “If you think so,” Philip answered. His voice betrayed relief.

  “I really do. Go ahead. You take a break.” Zauber clapped Philip around the shoulders and Philip stood and eagerly left the room.

  Emily began to shiver again.

  “Mrs. Harper,” Zauber said, sitting down in the chair Philip had vacated. “I have a theory about birth. About labor that is.”

  For a moment he reminded her of his old self. He seemed to want to explore cultural phenomena with her, as he sometimes used to do in his office. She remembered how flattered she had always felt when he chatted with her. But she wasn’t in the mood for intellectual conversation now. It was the wrong time. The wrong place.

  “Excuse me,” she murmured. “I can’t concentrate.” Her teeth were chattering and already her stomach was starting to cramp.

  “My theory is that all pain can be suffered in silence if the sufferer wills it,” he said, ignoring her plea.

  She shook her head. She didn’t agree. She had liked the primitive reassuring screams that had begun to issue from her throat. But she couldn’t explain her point of view. She had to start panting again.

  “I’m convinced of it.” He crossed his legs and sat back
. “I’ve become a great believer in will power.”

  She wished he would stop speaking. His words were squalling through her ears and his eyes were shiny and hard as icicles. She couldn’t bear the way they pierced. But she couldn’t say words at the moment. All she could do was groan. The baby was beating against her spine. She arched, her back surging with pain. It was splintering, she thought. Her spine was breaking into a thousand shreds and shards. “Oh God,” she yelled. “Oh God. Oh help me.”

  Zauber was watching her, his features composed. “Mrs. Harper, I’m disappointed in you.”

  She shivered and pulled the blanket up around her neck.

  “Actually all the literature indicates that much of the pain of childbirth—the expression of pain, that is, the screaming and shouting and carrying on that are so distracting for the people who have to work with women in labor—is mere hysteria. It’s culturally determined. Not all women scream and carry on. Eskimo women don’t do it much. Whereas Puerto Rican women are notorious for making unnecessary noise. Studies have shown—”

  “Please,” she managed at last. “Please don’t talk to me now. I’m in pain. I didn’t know it was going to hurt like this.”

  He closed his lips. They looked white, frosted over. “Who are you to ask for pleasure without pain?” he said, his lips barely parting.

  What happened next was something that she was never able to make Philip believe. She felt, slowly at first and then with an increasing urgency, another contraction coming on, and she opened her mouth to scream, and her mouth was a vast wide open tunnel and there was another tunnel at the bottom of her and she was sure that if she could just get them to connect she could make the baby crawl out through the top of her. She tried to scream wider and then she felt a door lock across her mouth and a hand, his hand, clamp down across it, and she kicked and flailed and thrashed her legs and he said, “See? See what I mean? You don’t need to make noise.”

  She lay back, limp, her eyes terrified. He was smiling at her, but his smile was twisted, askew. She began to whimper and he said, “I was trying to help you. To teach you something.”

  Her heart began to beat so wildly she thought it too was trying to burst out from within her. Zauber shrugged, looking at her with disdain. “You weren’t listening to me, were you?” He stood and said coldly, “I’ll call your husband back in.”

  She tried to tell Philip what had just occurred. She was drenched in sweat and her teeth were chattering. “Zauber’s crazy,” she said. “There’s something wrong with him.” But Philip was wiping her forehead and saying, “I think you’re getting a little hysterical, Champ. Do you think you ought to ask for some Demerol?”

  “No. It’s bad for the baby. And I’m not hysterical. I’m perfectly rational.” But it was difficult to convince Philip of her rationality when now, in each minute, she had only a few seconds of composure. The contractions were coming without any but the most minimal separations, and each time one enthralled her she could do nothing but groan and cry out, her thoughts scattering like seeds. Still, whenever the pain subsided even for a second, she tried again to tell Philip that there was something different about Zauber, something peculiarly arbitrary and detached about him, and that she wanted someone else to deliver their child. But she couldn’t get Philip to understand.

  She screamed, “He’s crazy. Fucking crazy,” but then she was shrieking, “Oh God, make this stop. Kill me. Kill the baby. I can’t bear this. I’ll go crazy.” She knew it was no wonder that Philip didn’t listen to her about Zauber. He was too alarmed by her shrieks whenever the contractions came. He called the delivery nurse and Emily heard him say, “I think she’s delirious.”

  The nurse held a moist cloth to Emily’s lips. “She’s okay. She’ll be ready to push soon. I’ve heard a lot worse than her.” She winked at Philip. “Some of them even ask God to kill their husbands.” Straightening up, she added, “But if you want, I’ll ask Dr. Zauber to come have another look and see if he advises an injection.”

  Emily shrieked, “No. No,” and the nurse said, “She doesn’t want anything.” She patted Emily’s arm encouragingly. “Well, you’re almost there, honey. A few more big ones and you’ll be ready to push.” She glanced at the monitor, her forehead wrinkling. “Just a little while longer.”

  “You sure you don’t want any Demerol?” Philip asked again.

  But Emily was in the midst of another contraction and she couldn’t reply. And then the nurse was bending over and tearing back the sheet and listening to her belly with a curved stethoscope and staring at the fetal heart monitor and yelling something and there was a great scurrying and commotion in the tiny room and the resident was back and barking instructions to two white-jacketed men who were trying to lift Emily onto a gurney, rolling her sideways while at the same time someone else was digging an IV needle into her arm, and the resident was shouting, “Get Dr. Zauber. We’ve lost the heartbeat” and someone was clamping an oxygen mask over Emily’s mouth just as she tried to ask, “What is it? What’s happened. Tell me.” And then they were wheeling her down the corridor to the delivery room and Philip was running alongside her saying, “Can you understand me? Can you hear me, darling? The baby’s heartbeat stopped during the last few contractions. It’s alive, but they’ve got to get it out fast.”

  “Not Zauber, not Zauber,” she wanted to scream, but the mask was over her mouth.

  She slept. She was up in the mountains again. Someone was calling her name. She awakened to its sound and saw Dr. Zauber holding a fat white snake in his hands. No. It was her baby. Her baby was part serpent. She began sobbing.

  Zauber was gazing with curiosity at the snake that was her baby. It writhed, and he held it without moving, regarding its twisting head as if hypnotized.

  “Dr. Zauber?” A nurse, capped and masked, thrust herself forward from behind Zauber. The snake hissed, gasped.

  Zauber was motionless, abstracted. “Hadn’t you better cut it?” the nurse whispered. Zauber raised his eyes to stare at her.

  “You’d best do it now.”

  Zauber said, “Quiet! Sssh!” his voice a hiss like the sound coming from the snake.

  Suddenly the nurse reached past him. In her fingers something steely flashed. Then at last Zauber began to move. “You’re in my light, Nurse!” he snapped, and began wrestling with the wriggling creature in his hands.

  Emily held her breath, listening for the sibilant sound, but it had stopped. The room was silent. She groaned and Zauber cut the snake that was wrapped around her baby. She slept again.

  “It’s dead,” Zauber was saying. “It choked. Couldn’t be helped.” She was in a bed with white curtains all around it and Zauber was standing at the foot of the bed. He was shrugging. “You’ll have another, I’m sure.” And then he was gone.

  Much later that night Philip was holding her in his arms.

  “Is our baby dead?” she asked.

  He nodded. His lashes were glistening.

  “What was it?”

  “A boy.”

  She turned toward the curtains opposite him. “Zauber killed him.”

  “No. The cord was wrapped twice around his neck. He was born dead.”

  “He was alive. Zauber didn’t cut the cord fast enough.”

  “No. He told me he cut it as quickly as he could.”

  “He didn’t. He was distracted. Detached. Like when he was in the labor room with me.”

  “No. No, darling. You’re just terribly upset right now.”

  “He said terrible things to me.”

  “You said terrible things.” Philip tried to smile through tears. “I never knew you knew half the words you said. Champ.”

  “I hate Zauber.”

  “It wasn’t his fault. These things happen.”

  “He wanted it to happen.”

  “Oh, Emily! Oh, my darling!” Philip let go of her and pressed the buzzer for the nurse. Emily slipped down onto the mattress. A moment later she heard Philip whispering, “I think
she needs a sedative.”

  “I don’t. I’m all right.”

  “You’re still confused. They doped you up.”

  The nurse stuck a needle in her arm and Philip sat down beside her again.

  “If you don’t believe what I’m telling you, I’ll never be able to love you again.”

  “I believe you. Sssh. I believe you.” Philip began patting her hand as if she were a child and the nurse tiptoed away.

  Behind her eyes, Emily felt a smooth, creeping numbness. “There was a nurse there, I think.”

  “She’s just gone away.”

  “In the delivery room, I mean.”

  “Of course. There were two.”

  “Talk to the nurse.”

  “I will. Sssh, darling. I will.”

  “You’ve got to believe me.”

  “I do. But sleep now. Sssh. Sleep.” Philip’s hand began to move up and down her arm. “Sleep. We’ll have other children. Lots of them.” He stroked her rhythmically. “We’ll make love. We’ll start another baby as soon as the doctor says it’s okay. But for now, sleep. Oh, my darling, try to rest. Sssh. I believe you.”

  He didn’t believe her. She let her eyes shut, trying not to blame him. He couldn’t help it. But still her heart hardened against him. She would never ask him for anything again, she thought wildly. Never trust him. Not him or anyone.

  She fell asleep thinking that she would never love or make love again.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.