“I’d like to reshoot that film in my old neighborhood. All those ruined little thirteen-year-old girls with big bellies, living in rooms with torn-up ceilings and stuffed-up toilets and their mamas getting raped in the stair-wells. You know sometimes these little girls come in here with their eyes full of pride. Like being pregnant is this big accomplishment. Something they’ve done on their own, you know? They don’t even have the sense to think they got better things to do. ’Cause life isn’t this beautiful miracle in there, it’s more like an affliction. A deep dark hole and you can’t climb out.”
Celina had grown up in one of those tenements; she’d been lucky to get out. Michael thought of Annie, who’d grown up on an estate in Bed-ford and had gone to a fancy boarding school. She’d spent her summers at home at the country club, where she became an avid tennis player. She’d told him once that she used to screw the club’s tennis coach in the clubhouse basement after her lessons; didn’t even bother to take off her skirt. The idea of it filled him with dismay, because if Annie had done that, so might Rosie one day. “How about all those pretty Loudonville girls getting laid on their canopy beds,” he said.
“Oh, yes,” Celina sighed. “We had a ninth grader in here last week. From Sacred Heart. Guess her mother wasn’t ready to be a grandma yet.”
A nurse poked her head into Celina’s office. “Your first patient is here, Dr. Knowles.”
“Okay. I’ll be right there.”
“Michael.” Celina touched his shoulder. “Thanks again for doing this.”
“You’re welcome,” he said, and his heart turned with emotion. He was glad to be here, glad to be part of this place, this refuge. He didn’t know if it was right or wrong. He only knew it was necessary.
He would never forget the first time he’d caressed the radiant mound of a pregnant woman’s belly, the extraordinary heat of life under his hands. And the elation he felt with each delivery. There was nothing like it, nothing at all. No matter how many times he did it. Encountering the warm skull of the infant as it twisted into his hands often filled him with a momentary rush of madness.
But today he was here to end life, not help it begin, and it made him feel strange and weak, even though, intellectually, he could easily justify it. Annie had been pregnant once before they were married and they’d agreed to terminate the pregnancy; he was a resident, she was in graduate school. They simply weren’t ready for the demands of a family. He didn’t know if that was a viable excuse, and at the time he hadn’t cared.
It was a difficult subject, he thought. And difficult subjects had no definitive answers. They were the stuff of controversy. He thought of the protestors outside and could sympathize with their side of things. It all depended on how you looked at it.
He didn’t know how the world had gotten so big and ugly. Maybe it had always been big and ugly. He didn’t know the meaning of life—if there was one. He had been raised to make the best of his situation; he tried to do that. If he could do something to help others, then he would do it. He’d spent ten years of his life becoming a doctor because he wanted to help people, to make them better. It was a simple motive, and not very glamorous, but it was the truth.
The nurse showed him into one of the rooms and introduced him to Dana, the assisting nurse, a woman besieged with freckles. The patient was a woman in her forties; she already had three children. To Michael it was a procedure that he would perform to the best of his ability. But for his patient, regardless of her decision, it was an emotional upheaval. He noticed the tears running down her cheeks. “We can’t afford another child,” she whispered, trying to justify what she was doing.
“You don’t owe me an explanation.”
She looked at him gratefully.
He pulled on his gloves and eased her back onto the table. “Let’s get this over with.”
Dana placed the woman’s feet on the stirrups. Within minutes the procedure would be over with and the woman would return home to her husband and children and get on with her life.
It was dusk when he stepped into the empty parking lot with Celina James. He walked her to her car. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” She nodded. “I’m good.” They stood there together under the buzzing street lamp. “Thanks for coming today, Michael.”
“You’re welcome.”
She got into her car and started the engine.
“Where do you live?”
“Near here. Couple of blocks.”
What was he waiting for? Did he want her to ask him over? The quiet suddenly felt awkward and he couldn’t seem to get beyond their past, the fact that he’d known her flesh as well as his own wife’s, yet now she was a stranger to him. It left him cold.
“Well, you take care.”
“You too, Michael.”
He watched her drive off. It was nearly dark now and the street was empty. A police cruiser was parked in front of the clinic. All the protestors had gone home long ago. The cop was just sitting there, with his lights on. Michael waved, but the cop, who seemed to be looking right at him, did not wave back.
He got into his car and put on his lights. That’s when he saw her. She was only a girl, maybe fourteen or fifteen, and she was standing in the shadows across the street, watching him. His headlights had startled her, and she began to run down the sidewalk. He pulled out of the parking lot and drove slowly past her. She was running at a good clip, her two black braids like the reins of a runaway horse. Her red windbreaker had two white wings on the back, over which her name was printed in large white letters: SAWYER. A high school student, he ascertained, a girl on the track team. He supposed she’d been running and had stopped to rest. He didn’t approve of girls running alone at night, especially in this neighborhood. It was a stupid thing to do.
The girl turned down a side street and he lost sight of her. He hoped she was near her home. At the corner he stopped at the light. It began to rain. Still thinking about the girl, he switched on his wipers and turned onto Delaware Avenue, suddenly anxious to get home. A car came up behind him with its high beams on. Michael squinted in his rearview mirror. The car behind him was a black sedan and the light from its own beams illuminated the driver’s face, which, despite the weather and the hour, hid behind a pair of mirrored sunglasses. What the fuck do you want? Michael thought. He sped up and took a right turn toward the expressway, hoping the man wouldn’t follow, but the black car pursued him aggressively and bore down on his tail. This was no typical case of road rage, he thought. The man in the black car seemed to know who he was, and had every intention of scaring the shit out of him. The rain fell harder as he came to the bottom of the hill, where just a few yards away stood the entrance to the expressway. Michael blew past the stop sign and sped onto the entrance ramp, blaring his horn at the sluggish station wagon in front of him. He looped around the wagon and accelerated rapidly, hoping to lose the black sedan in the thickening traffic. But the driver of the sedan had no trouble catching up, and before long they were driving bumper to bumper at over ninety miles an hour. Other cars cleared the fast lane, desperate to get out of the way. Michael cut off a Mack truck, hoping to evade the Cutlass, but just at the moment he was certain he’d succeeded, the Cutlass cut over and was behind him once again. The Mack truck cranked its horn and pulled into the middle lane, sending a van zigzagging off the road. The Cutlass shoved his bumper, causing Michael to swerve. Again he felt the bumper’s kiss, and again he swerved and nearly ran off into the median. Sweat poured off him, the wheel slippery in his hands, and he cut across two lanes of traffic to the slow lane. He was breathing audibly, sucking the air in terror. He searched his rearview mirror for the Cutlass, but it was completely dark now and he could not be certain where it was. Several yards behind him came the flashing lights of a police cruiser. Michael braced himself for what would come next, imagining that he would be pulled over and given a stiff ticket, but the cop ignored him completely and sped right by.
Breathless, Michael got off at the next exit, pr
aying he would not be followed. After a few miles, when he was sure that he was alone, he pulled over and vomited in the grass.
14
LYDIA’S HUSBAND was not a religious man. “Worker bees, that’s what those people are,” he had told her once. Lydia had been raised a strict Catholic and still longed for its sacred rituals, but there was no Catholic church in High Meadow. The new church on Mill Road interested her. People said its minister, Reverend Tim, had jumped out of heaven’s palm. Women thought him wildly handsome, his eyes like the clear blue water of the creek. They liked his crisp oxford shirts and corduroy blazers, his renegade country club look. Men liked his straight-shooter style. He had a way of talking to people, of getting them to think things through. He spoke their language.
One Sunday, when her husband was still asleep, Lydia drove down Mill Road to attend the morning service. Even from outside the small clapboard building she could hear everyone singing. There was a piano and a guitar, too. Lydia slipped inside and sat down on the old pew. The church smelled like coffee and cinnamon doughnuts and there were people from town in casual clothes, with their children on their laps or on the floor at their feet, coloring in pages from coloring books. Coloring in Jesus.
Nobody seemed to notice her, which was a relief. Her husband’s paintings had made her notorious, and people would stare at her with rude fascination, as if she were grotesque, when in fact she was nearly flawlessly beautiful. Her beauty, which so many had envied since her childhood, had become an evil thing in her life, and now, as an adult, she did her best to ignore it. She tried to pretend that hers was a common face, with features that didn’t quite fit. But it wasn’t the truth, and, especially in church, under the gaze of Jesus, her beauty radiated. Many of her fellow congregants had seen her in Simon’s paintings. Many had studied her naked form, lingering obsequiously before a canvas in a gallery or museum. But here, now, in this quiet place, as she sat alone in the pew, she felt an unerring sense of peace, the sense that Jesus was sitting right next to her.
“I, too, have developed a mistrust of organized religion as we know it,” the minister told the group. “And now it’s time to find our own way. Will you help me do that?” Everybody shouted yes, yes they would, and she shouted too, yes! A chill of inspiration went through her body like the breath of Christ. She did not think she would ever be the same.
Lydia told her husband that she would be going to the new church every Sunday, whether he went with her or not, and she asked him to make a donation to it. “For me,” she said. “Because it’s important to me.” Simon seemed stunned. Without a word, he wrote her a check for five hundred dollars. It was the only time over the rigorous course of their marriage that she had ever asked him for anything.
Several weeks later, on a sweltering August Sunday, Lydia stopped by the community bulletin board to read the flyers. She liked looking at the bulletin board, with all its different colored papers and announcements of good things to do. She had been dreaming about getting a job, and Reverend Tim had gone throughout the community gathering listings for people and putting them up on the board. He said work was good for people; it made them useful. Well, she thought, maybe there was something here that she could do. A yellow flyer caught her eye: Operator needed for growing company. Fair pay, good benefits. No college degree required. Reverend Tim came up behind her, startling her, and tore off the little yellow tag with the phone number on it. “Don’t let an opportunity like that pass you by, Mrs. Haas.”
The little yellow notice sat in her pocketbook for a week before she mustered the courage to make the call. Her husband didn’t want her to work. Church was one thing, but other than that he didn’t like her going out of the house. He told her people wouldn’t understand her. How could she stand their scrutiny? They would try to take advantage of her. It wasn’t safe, he insisted.
Lydia took out a stack of bills that he hadn’t bothered to pay, shoving them under his nose. “How do you expect us to pay these, Simon? Tell me that.” Drinking up all his money, his modest salary at the college. The drugs he took on occasion, to feel inspired, not that they worked. He hadn’t painted anything good in years. “We have no choice,” she told him. “We need the money.” She went up to him and kissed him. “You can’t keep me cooped up in here forever.”
The company was situated in a sprawling warehouse chopped up with cubicles that represented workstations. It sold clothing and accessories through a glossy mail-order catalog called McMillan & Taft. Her supervisor, Martin Banner, a studious-looking bald man, hired her on the spot. He explained to her, at length, the kind of consumers the company appealed to, using words that made Lydia feel exotic and important: upwardly mobile, aggressive, status-conscious. The catalog, he explained, with its photographs of attractive people in captivating settings, allowed the consumers the fantasy of a privileged life and gave them the stirring feeling that they were part of a larger destiny. Mr. Banner tugged on his little beard when he spoke, his eyes wandering in the dreamy fashion of a poet reciting a verse. “It’s all there,” he told her, handing her a copy of the catalog, “like a contract. All they have to do is buy.” He gave her a serious look and shook her hand. “You make them feel good about what they’re buying. Not like any ordinary purchase. Like they’ve done something wonderful. Like it’s a significant accomplishment.”
The work was easy, and she took to it well. She enjoyed getting phone calls, a new experience for her since the phone rarely rang in her own home. It made her feel needed. Each morning, she took her time getting dressed for work, carefully pinning up her hair and applying her makeup, copying the instructions in the fashion magazines. Lydia recognized many of her coworkers from church, but they seemed distant. Lydia knew it was because of Simon. The art world was foreign to them. Their husbands were carpenters and electricians, or worked at the factory down the road that made plumbing parts. Most people thought they were rich from Simon’s art, but they’d gone through that money, he’d gone through it, long ago. Simon had a reputation for being wild and dangerous. In the old days, when his work was popular, they’d find photographers peeking through the windows of his studio, stealing shots. Once Simon had discovered a photographer in the toolshed and beaten him with a shovel. He didn’t work at home anymore; he’d rented a studio downtown. Nobody knew the real truth about her and Simon, and Simon wanted to keep it that way.
Lydia had hoped, in vain, that Simon would notice the changes in her once she started working, that he’d be proud of her. After all, this was her first real job. But his reaction was quite the opposite. He seemed to resent her independence. He’d drink, and accuse her of being disloyal. He’d throw the past in her face. “After all I’ve done for you,” he’d scream. “I should never have gone back to that fucking house. I should have put you in the orphanage, good fucking riddance!”
She turned her computer on, logged in, and answered her first call. The woman’s voice was hoarse from too much smoking. Perhaps she’d been up all night with her lover, Lydia fantasized. Lydia’s customer spoke softly, with some urgency. She ordered the satin tap pants and camisole set on page 24 of their Intimates catalog. “Going on holiday?” Lydia asked, waiting for the woman’s card to clear.
“You could say that,” the woman blurted. “I’m spending the weekend with my boss.”
Lydia watched Martin Banner circulate the room.
“Oh, that sounds like fun,” Lydia encouraged, but they were rehearsed lines. In truth she found the woman’s affair with her boss disgusting.
“I never thought I’d be doing something like this,” the woman admitted. “He’s older. He’s got kids, for Christ’s sake, like he could be my father.”
Lydia waited, thinking of her own father. Then the woman said, “Let me ask you something. Is that teddy on page fourteen really as nice as it looks?”
“The black lace one? That may be sold out.” She asked the woman her size. “Hold on a sec, I’ll check.” Even though she knew there was no shortage of merchandi
se, Lydia paused, retrieved a Life Saver from her roll on the desk, then went back to the customer. It was a trick one of the other girls had taught her, and it always worked. “You’re in luck, we’ve still got two left.”
Her customer sounded relieved and ordered both. Lydia completed the sale and hung up.
Patty Tuttle, a coworker of Lydia’s, leaned over the wall of the adjacent cubicle to say hi. She had on her sky-blue pantsuit and her matching eye shadow. She fanned out a handful of snapshots taken at the birthday party of a little girl. “Take a look,” she said. “My little jewel.”