She was having ceviche and a salad, sipping a glass of Chilean red and looking through the local newspaper—she couldn’t resist the Personals: they were so tacky, so dishonest and nakedly self-serving, and how pathetic could people be?—when she felt a tap at her shoulder and there he was, Dr. Mellors, in a pale gold sportcoat and a black silk shirt open at the collar. “Hello,” he said, “or should I say buenas noches,” and there was nothing even faintly medicinal in his tone.
“Oh, hi,” she said, taken by surprise. Here he was, looming over her again, and though she’d been thinking of him all through the concert, trying to fit him into the empty seat beside her, for one flustered second she couldn’t summon his name. “How are you?”
He just smiled in answer. A beat went by, Enrique giving her a sidelong glance from the near end of the bar. “You look terrific,” he said finally. “All dressed up, huh?”
“The concert,” she said.
“Oh, right, yeah—how was that?”
“All right, I guess.” It had served its purpose, giving her an excuse to put on some makeup and leave the house, to do something, anything. “A little dreary, actually. Organ music.” She let her smile bloom. “I left at the intermission.”
His smile opened up now too. “So what do I say—I’m glad I couldn’t make it? But you look great, you do. No complications, right? The headache’s gone away? No visual problems?”
“No,” she said, “no, I’m fine,” and then she saw Maggie, with her hair down and a pair of silver chandelier earrings dangling above her bare shoulders, watching them from a table in the dining room.
“Good,” he said, “good. Well, listen, nice to see you—and I guess we’ll be seeing you next week, then?”
The first thing she did when she got home was put on some music, because she couldn’t stand the silence of an empty house, and it wasn’t Bach, anything but Bach, her hand going to the first disc on the shelf, which turned out to be a reggae compilation her husband had left behind. She poured herself a glass of wine as the chords fell like debris into the steadily receding sea of the bass line, a menace there, menace in the vocals and the unshakable rhetoric of the dispossessed. Reggae. She’d never much liked it, but here it was, background music to her own awakening drama of confusion and disappointment. And anger, anger too. He’d blown her off. Dr. Mellors. Said he was busy, too busy to sit beside her in a dim auditorium and listen to a professor from the local college sweat over the keyboard, but not in the least embarrassed to be caught out in a lie. Or even contrite. He’d tried to make a joke of it, as if she were nobody, as if her invitation counted for nothing—and for what? So he could fuck his secretary?
The windows were black with the accumulation of the night and she went around pulling the shades, too many shades, too many windows. The house—it was what she’d wanted, or thought she wanted, new construction, walk-in closets, three-car garage and six thousand square feet of views opening out to the hills and the ocean beyond—was too big for her. Way too big. Even when Rick was around, when she was wound up twenty-four/seven with selecting carpets and furniture and poring over catalogues and landscaping books, the place had seemed desolate. There were no nooks—it was nookless, a nookless house that might as well have been a barn in Nebraska—no intimate corners, no place where she could feel safe and enclosed. She went through the dining room to the kitchen and then back round again to what the architect called “the grand room,” turning on all the lights, then she poured herself another glass of wine, went into the bathroom and closed and locked the door.
For a long while she stared at herself in the mirror. The lines—the two vertical furrows between her eyes—didn’t seem appreciably different, but maybe they were shallower, maybe that was it. She put a finger there, ran it over the skin. Then she smiled, seductively at first—“Hello, Dr. Mellors,” she said to her reflection, “and what do I call you, Ed? Eddie? Ted?”—and then goofily, making faces at herself the way she used to when she was growing up with her three sisters and they’d pull at their lips and nostrils and ears, giggling and screeching till their mother had to come in and scoot them out of the bathroom. It didn’t do any good. She snatched the glass up off the marble countertop, drained it and looked at herself the way she really was, a not-so-young woman wearing a permanent scowl, her nose too big, her chin too narrow, her eyes crystallizing in wariness and suspicion. But she was interesting. She was. Interesting and pretty too, in her own way. Prettier than the secretary or the nurse or half the other women in town. At least she looked real.
Or did she? And what was real worth, anyway?
She shrugged out of her clothes then and for a long while studied herself in the full-length mirror on the door. In profile her stomach swelled out and away from her hips, a hard little ball of fat—but she’d just eaten, that was it—and her buttocks seemed to be sagging, from this angle, anyway. Her breasts—they weren’t like the breasts of the women in the porn videos her ex-husband seemed so turned on by—and she wondered about that, about the procedure there, about liposuction, a tummy tuck, maybe even a nose job. She didn’t want to look like the secretary, like Maggie, because she didn’t care about Maggie, Maggie was beneath her, Maggie wasn’t even pretty, but the more she looked in the mirror the less she liked what she was seeing.
On Tuesday, the day of her pre-op appointment, she woke early and for a long while lay in bed watching the sun search out the leaves of the flowering plum beyond the window. She made herself two cups of coffee but no eggs or toast or anything else because she’d resolved to eat less and she didn’t even lighten the coffee with a splash of non-fat milk. She took her time dressing. The night before she’d laid out a beige pantsuit she thought he might like, but when she saw it there folded over the chair like a vacated skin, she knew it wasn’t right. After trying on half the things in the closet she decided finally on a black skirt, a cobalt-blue blouse that buttoned up the back and a pair of matching heels. She looked fine, she really did. But she spent so much time on her makeup she had to speed down the narrow twisting roads to the town spread out below and she ran a couple of lights on the yellow and still she was ten minutes late for her appointment.
Maggie greeted her with a plastic smile. She was wearing another revealing top—borderline tacky for business dress—and she seemed to have lightened her hair, or no, she’d streaked it, that was it. “If you’ll just follow me,” she chirped, and came out from behind the counter to lead her down the hallway in a slow hip-grinding sashay and then she was in the examining room again, and the door closed softly behind her. Awaiting an audience,she thought, and this was part of the mystique doctors cultivated, wasn’t it, and why couldn’t they just be there in the flesh instead of lurking somewhere down the corridor in another hushed room identical to this one? She set her purse down on the chair in the corner and settled herself into the recliner. She resisted the impulse to lift the hand mirror from the table and touch up her eyes.
“So,” he was saying, gliding through the doorway on noiseless feet, “how are we today?”
“Okay, I guess.”
“Okay? Just okay?”
“Listen,” she said, ignoring the question, “before we go any further I just wanted to ask you something—”
“Sure,” he said, and he pulled up a stool on wheels, the sort of thing dentists use, so he could sit beside her, “anything you want. Any concerns you have, that’s what I’m here for.”
“I just wanted to ask you, do you think I’m pretty?”
The question seemed to confound him and it took him a moment to recover himself. “Of course,” he said. “Very pretty.”
She said nothing and he moved into her then, his hands on her face, under her eyes, probing along the occipital bone, kneading, weighing the flesh while she blinked into his unwavering gaze. “Which is not to say that we can’t improve on it,” he said, “because it was your perception, and I agree with you, that right here”—his fingers tightened—“there’s maybe just a few m
illimeters of excess skin. And—”
“I don’t care about my eyes,” she said abruptly, cutting him off. “I want you to look at my breasts. And my hips, and, and”—the formal term ran in and out of her head—“my tummy. It’s fat. I’m fat.”
She watched his eyes drop away. “I don’t, uh,” he began, fumbling now for the right words. “You appear to be fine, maybe a pound or two—but if you’re interested, of course, we can consult on that too, and I’ve got brochures—”
“I don’t want brochures,” she said, and she began to unbutton her blouse. “I want you to tell me, right here, right now, face to face, because I don’t believe you. You say I’m pretty but when I asked you to—to what, accompany me to hear Bach of all people?—you said you were busy, too busy, and then I see you out on the town. How am I supposed to feel?”
“Whoa,” he said, “let’s just back up a minute—and don’t do anything, don’t unbutton your . . . because I have to ask Maggie into the room. For legal reasons.” He was at the door suddenly, the door swinging open, and he was calling down the hall for his secretary.
“I don’t want Maggie,” she said, and she had her brassiere off now and was working at the hook of her skirt. “I want to look real, not like some mannequin, not like her. Leave her out of this.”
She was looking over her shoulder at him as he stood at the door, the skirt easing down her thighs, and she hadn’t worn any stockings because they were just an encumbrance and she was here to be examined, to feel his hands on her, to set the conditions and know what it would take to improve. That was what this was all about, wasn’t it? Improvement?
THE LIE
I’d used up all my sick days and the two personal days they allowed us, but when the alarm went off and the baby started squalling and my wife threw back the covers to totter off to the bathroom in a hobbled two-legged trot, I knew I wasn’t going in to work. It was as if a black shroud had been pulled over my face: my eyes were open but I couldn’t see. Or no, I could see—the pulsing LED display on the clock radio, the mounds of laundry and discarded clothes humped round the room like the tumuli of the dead, a hard-driving rain drooling down the dark vacancy of the window—but everything seemed to have a film over it, a world coated in Vaseline. The baby let out a series of scaled-back cries. The toilet flushed. The overhead light flicked on.
Clover was back in the room, the baby flung over one shoulder. She was wearing an old Cramps T-shirt she liked to sleep in and nothing else. I might have found this sexy to one degree or another but for the fact that I wasn’t at my best in the morning and I’d seen her naked save for one rock-and-roll memento T-shirt for something like a thousand consecutive mornings now. “It’s six-fifteen,” she said. I said nothing. My eyes eased shut. I heard her at the closet, and in the dream that crashed down on me in that instant she metamorphosed from a rippling human female with a baby slung over one shoulder to a great shining bird springing from the brink of a precipice and sailing on great shining wings into the void. I woke to the baby. On the bed. Beside me. “You change her,” my wife said. “You feed her. I’m late as it is.”
We’d had some people over the night before, friends from the pre-baby days, and we’d made margaritas in the blender, watched a movie and stayed up late talking about nothing and everything. Clover had shown off the baby—Xana, we’d named her Xana, after a character in one of the movies I’d edited, or actually, logged—and I’d felt a rush of pride. Here was this baby, perfect in every way, beautiful because her parents were beautiful, and that was all right. Tank—he’d been in my band, co-leader, co-founder, and we’d written songs together till that went sour—said she was fat enough to eat and I’d said, “Yeah, just let me fire up the barbie,” and Clover had given me her little drawn-down pout of disgust because I was being juvenile. We stayed up till the rain started. I poured one more round of margaritas and then Tank’s girlfriend opened her maw in a yawn that could have sucked in the whole condo and the street out front too and the party broke up. Now I was in bed and the baby was crawling up my right leg, giving off a powerful reek of shit.
The clock inched forward. Clover got dressed, put on her makeup and took her coffee mug out to the car and was gone. There was nothing heroic in what I did next, dealing with the baby and my own car and the stalled nose-to-tail traffic that made the three miles to the babysitter’s seem like a trek across the wastelands of the earth—it was just life, that was all. But as soon as I handed Xana over to Violeta at the door of her apartment that threw up a wall of cooking smells, tearful Telemundo dialogue and the diachronic yapping of her four Chihuahuas, I slammed myself into the car and called in sick. Or no: not sick. My sick days were gone, I reminded myself. And my personal days too. My boss picked up the phone. “Iron House Productions,” he said, his voice digging out from under the r’s. He had trouble with r’s. He had trouble with English, for that matter.
“Hello, Radko?”
“Yes, it is he—who is it now?”
“It’s me, Lonnie.”
“Let me guess—you are sick.”
Radko was one of that select group of hard chargers in the production business who kept morning hours, and that was good for me because with Clover working days and going to law school at night—and the baby, the baby, of course—my own availability was restricted to the daylight hours when Violeta’s own children were at school and her husband at work operating one of the cranes that lifted the beams to build the city out till there was nothing green left for fifty miles around. But Radko had promised me career advancement, moving up from logging footage to actual editing, and that hadn’t happened. On this particular morning, as on too many mornings in the past, I felt I just couldn’t face the editing bay, the computer screen, the eternal idiocy of the dialogue repeated over and over through take after take, frame after frame, “No, Jim, stop/No—Jim, stop!/No! Jim, Jim: stop!! ” I used to be in a band. I had a college degree. I was no drudge. Before I could think, it was out: “It’s the baby,” I said.
There was a silence I might have read too much into. Then Radko, dicing the interrogative, said, “What baby?”
“Mine. My baby. Remember the pictures Clover e-mailed everybody?” My brain was doing cartwheels. “Nine months ago? When she was born?”
Another long pause. Finally, he said, “Yes?”
“She’s sick. Very sick. With a fever and all that. We don’t know what’s wrong with her.” The wheel of internal calculus spun one more time and I made another leap, the one that would prove to be fatal: “I’m at the hospital now.”
As soon as I hung up I felt as if I’d been pumped full of helium, giddy with it, rising right out of my seat, but then the slow seepage of guilt, dread and fear started in, drip by drip, like bile drained out of a liver gone bad. A delivery truck pulled up next to me. Rain beat at the windshield. Two cholos rolled out of the apartment next to Violeta’s, the green block tattoos they wore like collars glistening in the light trapped beneath the clouds. I had the whole day in front of me. I could do anything. Go anywhere. An hour ago it was sleep I wanted. Now it was something else. A pulse of excitement, the promise of illicit thrills, started up in my stomach.
I drove down Ventura Boulevard in the opposite direction from the bulk of the commuters. They were stalled at the lights, a single driver in every car, the cars themselves like steel shells they’d extruded to contain their resentments. They were going to work. I wasn’t. After a mile or so I came to a diner where I sometimes took Clover for breakfast on Sundays, especially if we’d been out the night before, and on an impulse, I pulled into the lot. I bought a newspaper from the machine out front and then I took a copy of the free paper too and went on in and settled into a seat by the window. The smell of fresh coffee and home fries made me realize how hungry I was and I ordered the kind of breakfast I used to have in college after a night of excess—salt, sugar and grease, in quantity—just to open my pores. While I ate, I made my way through both newspapers, item by item, because thi
s was luxurious, kingly, the tables clean, the place brightly lit and warm to the point of steaming with the bustle of the waitresses and the rain at the windows like a plague. Nobody said a word to me. Nobody even looked at me, but for my waitress. She was middle-aged, wedded to her uniform, her hair dyed shoe-polish black. “More coffee?” she asked for the third or fourth time, no hurry, no rush, just an invitation. I glanced at my watch and couldn’t believe it was only nine-thirty.
That was the thing about taking a day off, the way the time reconfigured itself and how you couldn’t help comparing any given moment with what you’d be doing at work. At work, I wouldn’t have eaten yet, wouldn’t even have reached the coffee break—Jim, stop! No, no!—and my eyelids would have weighed a hundred tons each. I thought about driving down to the ocean to see what the surf looked like under the pressure of the storm—not that I was thinking about surfing; I hadn’t been surfing more than a handful of times since the baby was born. It was just that the day was mine and I wanted to fill it. I made my way down through Topanga Canyon, the commuter traffic dissipated by now, and I saw how the creek was tearing at the banks and there were two or three places where there was water on the road and the soft red dough of the mud was like something that had come out of a mold. There was nobody on the beach but me. I walked along the shore till the brim of my baseball cap was sodden and the legs of my jeans as heavy as if they’d just come out of the washing machine.
I drove back up the canyon, the rain a little worse, the flooding more obvious and intense, but it wasn’t anything really, not like when the road washes out and you could be driving one minute and the next flailing for your life in a chute full of piss-yellow water. There was a movie at two I was interested in, but since it was only just past twelve and I couldn’t even think about lunch after the Lumberjack’s Special I’d had for breakfast, I went back to the condo, parked the car and walked down the street, getting wetter and wetter and enjoying every minute of it, to a bar I knew. The door swung in on a denseness of purpose, eight or nine losers lined up on their barstools, the smell of cut lime and the sunshine of the rum, a straight shot of Lysol from the toilet in back. It was warm. Dark. A college basketball game hovered on the screen over the cash register. “A beer,” I said, and then clarified by specifying the brand.