Permanence Read online

  Rome is very warm, even in the fall. In the heat, I wear short skirts, t-shirts, and leather sandals with straps that wrap about my ankles for support. Doctor removes his gray jacket and slings it over his arm. I keep my silver pillbox around my neck, allow it to dangle near my heart. I touch it with my forefinger and thumb when I walk.

  Doctor is short on energy so that we must stop every few minutes for him to catch his breath. Once or twice he coughs into a handkerchief. When he does this, I look away. I try to ignore the emotions that cruise through my body like the blood through my veins. Something is terribly wrong, but I act as though everything is normal.

  Now, when I consider doctor’s sickness, there is no question about what I must do about the life I carry.

  I feel the heavy heat of Rome throughout my body.

  Doctor and I hold hands and walk slowly and steadily throughout the ruins of Pompeii. Displayed for us are the grisly plaster castings of the men, women, children, and dogs who, caught within the unexpected volcanic eruption from Mount Vesuvius, were buried beneath layers of volcanic ash. According to the tour guides, when the flesh of the people disintegrated, a perfect hollow casting was made of their bodies, molded into the solidified ash—a mold of the body at the exact moment of death.

  We move on quickly, away from the plaster bodies.

  We carry bottled water with us at all times to combat the heat. Doctor spontaneously bleeds from the wound on his lower lip. He cleans the wound with a handkerchief soaked with bottled water. He replaces the small bandage, carefully, with a fresh bandage. We see a doctor in Rome. The Roman doctor offers my doctor a clear salve to apply once in the morning, once in the afternoon, and again in the evening. “Please stay away from the hot sun,” instructs the Roman doctor, in perfect English.

  Once again, the two doctors confer amongst themselves, behind closed doors.

  Once again, I am an intruder.

  But I will say nothing more about doctor’s smoking or about his bleeding. At night I have been dreaming of fire and smoke. I have been dreaming of my parents, the last time I saw them alive. I see my mother placing me in bed. I smell her body, hear her whispering voice. But before all that, I see my father. I see his face, withdrawn and serious. He appears to me from a time when he was not working, when his business was bankrupt, and when he and my mother were arguing behind closed doors about the house and cars and everything else that was to be taken away. My father gave up his life for his business. Now it was all gone and he had nothing. He wasn’t thinking straight. He was being plagued by the demons—the voices in his head that threatened to take everything away. The voices were, perhaps, real and imagined. How could my father think straight when suddenly, everything that gave his life meaning had vanished?

  So I remember the last time I saw my father. He was seated in the kitchen. He was staying up for a while. He was drinking, alone. He said he wanted my mother and me to go to sleep. He would be up soon enough. Then I kissed him good night, although he never asked for a kiss. But he said he loved me, and I believed him, because he was my father.

  Helpless

  Doctor and I celebrate our last night in Italy with a cocktail inside the bar of our hotel in lively, cosmopolitan Rome. This is the place with the long, stainless-steel bar that runs the entire length of a narrow room with slate flooring, plaster walls, antique tin ceiling, and Casablanca fans that revolve too slowly to be affecting. From the wide picture windows of this bar you can look out in the moonlight and onto the patio with the tables and the Cinzano umbrellas and, in the distance, the darkness broken by white headlights from the cars going into the city and the red taillights from the cars that are leaving.

  We have come to know the bartender and the piano player as well as you can know anyone who serves you drinks and plays music for you in the five days since we’ve arrived. That is, the two men greet doctor and me with ear-to-ear smiles and seem eager to please whenever we come into the bar for cocktails. While the bartender is an older, gentle, heavyset man, the piano player is a thin, chiseled-faced man of middle age, who is well dressed and well groomed. Although the man seems well mannered, he looks at me with piercing eyes, while the bartender looks at me with eyes that convey an honest friendliness.

  The piano player breaks into a jumpy rendition of “New York, New York” when we come into the bar after a supper of grilled steak and fried potatoes. Like most native Italians, the piano player assumes that because we are from America, we are also from New York City. He stares at me long enough to make me feel uncomfortable, so that I consciously fiddle with the silver pillbox that hangs from my neck by the hair-thin, silver chain.

  After doctor orders martinis for us, I excuse myself and head down the single flight of stairs into the empty hotel lobby and through the door to the woman’s lavatory. Later, I come back out into the lobby and there is the piano player standing outside the door of this lavatory, near the staircase that leads back up to the bar. The piano player smiles his now familiar, piercing smile. I return his smile nervously and attempt to get by him without touching him. But he grabs me by both arms and pulls me into him.

  “Bella,” he says, attempting to swing me around the floor as though dancing. “Bella,” he repeats, bringing his face into my neck, kissing. “Bella.”

  I feel the sting at my neck and the snap of the chain. My pillbox falls to the carpeted floor. I try to pull away, but I can’t move at all. This chiseled-faced man slips his hand between my legs, running his fingers up against my thigh. I close my legs tightly on his cold, callused hand. I free my hands and push his face away, scraping his cheek. I scream while he covers his face with his hands.

  Quickly, I bend over and retrieve my pillbox. Then I run back up the flight of stairs, two at a time, screaming for doctor. But doctor is already at the top of the stairs, standing beside the bartender. The piano player is close behind me. When he reaches the top of the landing, doctor pulls him into the bar by his jacket lapels. The bartender follows, attempting to pull doctor and the piano player apart. But the bartender loses his balance and the momentum of doctor and the piano player forces him onto the floor. Then doctor swings at the piano player. He misses. The piano player swings back and manages to hit doctor squarely in the fact. Doctor drops like a stone and remains there on the floor, staring wide-eyed up to the ceiling. He is bleeding profusely from the mouth. I scream again, and several people gather at the entrance to the bar.

  The bartender returns to his feet, runs back behind the bar. Just as quickly he returns to the floor. In his hand is an object that resembles a policeman’s nightstick. He holds the nightstick out for the piano player to clearly see. The piano player has a jagged gash that runs the length of his check. I can feel the piano player’s skin between my fingernails.

  The piano player raises his hands in mock surrender. He is smiling, a great ear-to-ear smile. His hair is disheveled and flattened. His tie is crooked, the ball of the tie running up his neck like it’s choking him. His shirt is hanging outside his trousers. He winks at me. I feel nauseous. I feel my stomach. I fear I might vomit. The piano player walks slowly backward, toward the door that leads out to the patio.

  “I leave,” he says. “I go now, for you.” He drops his hand and points his index finger at me. He laughs and disappears through the doors and into the night.

  Now, I am kneeling over doctor, where he is lying on the floor. He is bleeding very badly from the mouth. His freshly applied bandage and salve has become smeared along his bottom lip. The lip is swelled to twice its normal size, the color of his flesh purple and black. I slide my arms around his torso. He positions his elbows and manages to lift himself off the floor, if only slightly. He holds my hand, squeezing hard. His hand is wet and cold, shaking. He coughs up blood. In my free hand is my pillbox, broken away from my neck. Lodged inside my fingernails is the piano player’s facial skin. Doctor is bleeding onto his shirt. The bartender comes to us with a bottle of mineral water. I take the mineral water away from him an
d attempt to give doctor a drink. But doctor pushes the bottle away.

  “No,” he says, with a strained voice. Then he is silent.

  The people gather around us. Doctor and I have become a spectacle. The entire world seems silenced. I try to speak but the sound of my crying fills the silent space where a voice should be. I pull doctor into me, tighter, his face pressed against my breasts. I am crying. The people form a circle around me.

  “Do something,” I beg. “Do anything.”

  But no one moves.

  Everyone stares, as though doctor is already dead. So many people around me, but I am all alone.

  Helpless…

  Book Three

  Fire

  In the last analysis, what would become of us without abortion?

  —Max Frisch

  November

  Inception

  The ceramic walls of this box-shaped room are antiseptic white, the floors a glossy, battleship gray. The light that emanates from the stainless-steel umbrella fixture stings my eyes when I stare into it without blinking. The light leaves a black hole in my mind that even pierces the darkness.

  The injection is local.

  I wait on my back for the moment when all feeling will abandon my stomach. When it does, I have not gone without feeling my stomach in two months. Being in the first trimester, I am able to undergo a suction process which involves a tube and a stainless-steel attachment. I can see this doctor applying the device from behind the large square of green curtain they have installed around my midsection. The doctor (I am not even sure he is a doctor, although I address him this way) says few words to me, going about his work with a mechanical indifference, leaving me alone with my thoughts. But he asks me if I feel sleepy and tells me not to worry about nodding off if I want to.

  How can I sleep?

  The curtain blocks the view of my legs harnessed and spread wide inside stirrups. Despite the injection, I feel the air of this room like I am standing waist-deep in cool water. I hold to the pillbox wrapped about my neck with my fingers and try to block all thoughts of doctor’s child from my mind. I block out the possibility of this child having ever lived inside of me. I block out the possibility that this child might have ever taken the place of the baby Jamie and I made, so long ago. Perhaps along with this mechanical procedure, so too can my guilt be erased, as though it never existed. The low hum of the machine is surprisingly quiet, the feel of the components warm, but tight up against my insides. The process runs for a few moments, the noise of the machine low and steady at times and then suddenly high-pitched and intense and then low again.

  The sound is the antithesis of conception.

  This doctor positions and repositions the stainless-steel device and I feel the shift in pressure inside my body. When doctor removes the hose device he hides himself behind the curtain. I think, That wasn’t so terrible.

  Then I feel it.

  The cold, steel feel of the instruments, the rough scraping and the red-hot pressure against the interior of my abdomen. The pain that no anesthetic can hide (“Sleep, if you can,” repeats the doctor). The feel of the scraping is like sandpaper rubbed against rough wood. I feel scraping throughout my body. It feels as though he has stuck sewing needles into my belly button.

  How could I ever sleep?

  My abdomen is on fire.

  When the operation is finished I am fitted with a pad for the bleeding. I am shuffled through a small hallway where I lay prone on a cart dressed in nothing but a baby-blue dressing gown. The gown remains open in front, with only the small ties to bring the thin fabric together to conceal my body. Although people shuffle in and out of rooms, they avoid eye contact, as if I do not exist—as if they do not exist. We are here to erase ourselves, what exists inside us.

  I am dead tired.

  I am placed inside a room with soft flowers and a television connected to the ceiling by a metal bracket. The television is on, but there is no sound (I did not pay to have television in the recovery room, but I may watch the picture). I ask the black man who wheels me into this room to turn off the television. I tell him there is a tingling, burning sensation in my stomach. He is wearing green scrubs, a matching surgical cap, and latex gloves. He attributes the tingling to the anesthetic wearing off. He makes a small joke, saying I will really feel it later, as if we have been talking about an extracted tooth.

  But how does it feel to abort doctor’s baby?

  I feel clean. I feel relieved.

  Now there is no evidence of doctor’s child having ever existed. My memories of baby—Jamie’s and my baby—will remain intact. I could never share the memory of baby with another, despite my need for doctor, despite the love I might have for him and the love I know he has for me. What is love?

  But here’s how I also feel: I feel horrible, as though having been emptied of my soul and my life. I feel as dead as those grisly, white plaster castings doctor and I discovered in Pompeii—clean, but so very, very dead.

  This black man in surgical scrubs rubs my head with a damp washcloth. Already he changes my padding, applies fresh, clean material. He smiles a friendly, feeling smile. He is here to help me. Like the doctor before him, he wants me to sleep.

  Doctor’s frown becomes a smile

  Doctor assures me his cancer has not spread.

  He also tries to assure me of this: there is a bright side in all of this. According to doctor, there is a 94.4-perccnt chance that his cancer will never spread beyond his mouth and throat (he claims that the remaining 5.6 percent is up to providence or fate. But I know this: doctor relies on the miracle of science now for saving his life). I have no reason not to believe doctor. Trust is an integral part of our relationship. I believe him whether I want to or not.

  This is life and this is death.

  Listen: this is not the same doctor I traveled to Italy with only weeks ago. The damage caused by the cancer is considerable. I know this is difficult to picture, but the jaw on the right side of doctor’s face has been removed partially, almost completely, and replaced with nothing; the comer of his mouth is sewn closed and seems in danger of tearing if doctor opens his mouth wide enough; the scar from the removed tumor begins from behind his left ear and wraps like a pink snake about the entirety of his neck to an area beneath the opposite ear.

  I look at doctor for a long time without saying a word.

  Then I turn away and try to avoid his face.

  The scar doctor now possesses is not the result of providence or fate.

  The scar is clearly the result of survival, the postponement of dying.

  Listen to this: what doctor has lost through surgery is not the thing that makes me avoid his face. What makes me avoid has face is what doctor has gained. His missing jaw and scar are not as difficult to look at as is his grin. Doctor’s usual, emotionless expression that had been hidden beneath a thin, salt-and-pepper beard is now clean shaven and exposed.

  This is not a bad joke, but since his operation, doctor’s perpetual frown has become a smile. The edges of his mouth, where his lips join at the comers, have been perked up to make this man look happy.

  But I know this: doctor is not happy.

  Doctor is dying.

  His weight is so far diminished, his usual dark gray suit has become even baggier and ill-fitting—ridiculous. His hair is cut so short, he resembles a prisoner of war. The shape of doctor’s skull is completely visible, as are his discolored teeth and gums.

  I know this: we will no longer make love when I make my once a week visit. We will not talk about love. Love is out of the question.

  I need doctor, but I am repulsed by him too.

  We will not talk about anything. Doctor cannot talk. His voice box has been partially removed—extracted—as has a portion of his tongue. With the aid of a machine he forces against his neck, above the Adam’s apple at the underside of his chin, doctor is able to produce a mechanical, robotic-sounding voice that is utterly inhuman. But he refuses to use the voice machine. Naturall
y. He uses instead a note pad and hand gestures for communication. He expects me to know what to do. He expects me to communicate with him.

  “After all,” he writes, “it’s your problems we’re here to listen to, not mine.”

  I smile, but my smile is as false as doctor’s.

  Missing

  What was inside of me, here, near my stomach, is no longer there, but like a missing limb, I can still feel it. The scar will be forever invisible, but there, on the inside. Of course, I will have no more children. Like the voices inside my head, my scars are both real and imagined. Doctor will never know about the scars. But then, I wonder, does he bear the least suspicion I have destroyed our child?

  Lies

  Doctor told me nothing of the cancer or of his operation until it was too late. Doctor said nothing until it was all over. Less than two days after our safe arrival by jet plane from Italy, doctor admitted himself into the Albany Medical Center for the life-saving operation. Doctor’s convalescence was comprised of one week at the hospital and another full week at home, alone.

  Doctor’s receptionist, Wendy, lied when she called me about the normal Friday appointment doctor would not be able to keep. She told me doctor had a routine cold, nothing to be alarmed about. He just couldn’t get over it.

  Then she called again the next week. Doctor was still not up to seeing me. This was not like the doctor I knew.

  I knew something was wrong.

  Doctor hadn’t called me since we returned. Doctor wouldn’t answer my calls—messages left for him on his answering machine. When I went looking for doctor at his home, he wouldn’t come to the door. There was no sign of doctor anywhere.

  This is what I learned later from doctor himself: doctor was a liar. The psychiatric conferences he had attended in Venice were not psychiatric conferences at all. The conferences were medical appointments for him—fourth and fifth opinions for a disease doctor had been diagnosed with four months earlier. He had been diagnosed by at least three different medical specialists from around the United States, the last of whom suggested a Venetian physician who, apparently, was doing amazing things with throat and mouth cancer patients.