“Mark?” she called, fully aware that this was the least opportune moment to consult her husband, let alone confront him. (He was the type who believed the entire square mile around his toilet should be discreetly evacuated every morning, until he was done.) She coughed. “I’m going to have to set off now.” No reply. Fine, she’d go down to Toussaint on her own—space and time to think. She swooped through the house, collecting her purse, her hat, and, on impulse, her gym bag, and went out to the car.
The uniformed nurse at the front desk said her name twice before Jean recognized it.
“Jhanh OO-bahd?” the nurse said again, and Jean jumped up, catapulting onto the floor the straw shoulder bag she’d wedged beside her on the seat. Mark called these gaping nosebags of hers “beggars’ lucky dip.” Had he meant all along that she was the beggar? Jean wondered, squatting and raking in handfuls at a time of ink-stained lists, ink-stained pens, wads of nearly worthless ink-stained banknotes—basically garbage.
She was now on her knees, reaching after a rolling ink-stained lip sunblock and wondering how spoiled it would look to ignore the lottery of loose coins that had already bounced and wheeled so far out she’d have to crawl to the four corners to recover it all.
A glance at the nurse-receptionist told her to forget the coins—how childish the sacklike cut of her white dress suddenly seemed—and concentrate on the additional medical forms she’d been handed. With increasing speed and irritation Jean filled in the facts of her life: Jean Warner Hubbard, forty-five years old, born New York City, August 1957, daughter of…She skimmed over the questions: father, mother, education, driver’s license, nationality, insurance, marital status, first menstruation, number of pregnancies, number of children, age at first pregnancy, age at birth of first child, name(s) of child(ren), name(s) of child(ren)’s father(s)… How impertinent, she thought, to ask the names of “father(s),” about pregnancies and children in separate questions, as if expecting them not to match up, as if it was any of their goddamn business.
She wondered what Thing 2’s real name was. Was this her business? Maybe she should just open the e-mail herself. Why not—she’d already opened the letter. Surely she had the right, whether or not she had the stomach for what she might find there. It was clear they’d just seen each other, presumably on Mark’s recent trip to London, and Thing 2 was trying to keep it going. Still working on the form, Jean imagined a male version in which there was one question about the number of ejaculations and another about the number of children produced. But they didn’t have these for men, and there was no men’s clinic on St. Jacques—though she supposed the island’s one hospital had mostly geezers racked up in rows of steel-tube beds, inmates looking down from high windows at the old buffers still upright enough to bowl in the sand under the lavenderfeathered jacaranda trees.
Jean had noticed that, unlike the men, St. Jacques’ women didn’t linger in the square. As their reproductive function ended, they grew to resemble their husbands—thickening and flattening and even sprouting whiskers—but they didn’t have time for bowling, and when they hurried past, expertly balancing shopping on their hips and heads, the square must have looked to them like nothing so much as the hospital’s waiting room. On any other day, Jean would’ve used this time to stitch such thoughts into a column; but sitting here now, stunned and unprepared, all she could conjure up was an endless procession of old women, bent under heavy bundles, shuffling along single file…
She handed back the form and tried, in an effort to tame her panic, to think chronologically, to remember their purpose here. For Mark, time on the island offered a practice retirement. He was only fifty-three, but it was a phase he’d planned as assiduously as his many business trips. In fact, his retirement might be a business venture: he was talking again about the advertising-world board game he was going to devise, what he called, and thought he might just name, “my pension.” Cocktails on the terrace were ever earlier; he’d at least set up his easel on the back terrace. She’d been pleased to think he’d be around more. But now she wondered. Was all this exaggerated retiree behavior overcompensation for a frenetic, belated oatsowing when he went away without her?
Jean had never even considered not working. On the contrary, as they both got older, things would pick up. Advanced age, the older the better, would be a boon for a health writer—all the new ailments to cover, and so many keen readers, readers with time. This was one thing she’d never doubted they had—time. She’d always assumed, naïve though it seemed to her now, that separation would come only with death.
The clinic was virtually empty—just the lady in the turban and Jean. What was taking so long? She rested her head against the wall and watched the geriatric fan. The looming terrors—infidelity, denials and recriminations, the sundering—made her long, almost physically, for the respite of a more innocent time. Closing her eyes, she placed herself thirty-five years before, in the Adirondacks. Those end-of-summer dances with all the chairs pushed back against the walls of the high-ceilinged Quonset hut, girls on one side in calico and gingham, helplessly gripping their seats, and the boys opposite, wetted-down hair cleanly parted and no eye contact whatsoever. Everyone listens to the caller, the buzz-cut head of camp, and Jean tries not to think about being left unpicked when the next line of boys crosses over. Do-si-do! Swing your partner round and round! Duck for the oyster, dig for the clam! She needs to be picked. This is the best night of the summer and it’s half over. And it’s on to the next in the valley, and you circle to your left and to your right…and you swing with the girl who loves you maybe, and you swing with your Red River gal.
Again someone called her name. She was led down a long echoing hall, shown into a small examining room, and abandoned.
Affairs don’t just happen, Jean told herself, not sure if she should undress or just wait. There had to be a reason; if only she could think hard enough, she probably already knew what it was. So she tried, and found nothing. She was aware women liked Mark, felt lucky if they were seated next to him. Of course they did—everybody did. He was handsome and witty but not too challenging. He was at ease with most people and a frank appreciator of womankind. Jean felt clear about that, and also that he didn’t like to be cornered by other men’s wives. She assumed he had his chances—successful males always have, since long before man separated from monkey—but was also confident he played it straight, did his work, paid his taxes, and slept well at night.
And she knew, however much she didn’t like to admit it, that he’d had his sexual obsession, more than a decade before they’d even met, one summer in Brittany. Now, by extension, he loved all things French: French clients, which meant more time in France; French wine, French islands, French actresses, French butter—tasteless logs, in Jean’s opinion, unsalted fat. Like Thing 2’s “sweet thighs”? What kind of person called her own thighs “sweet”? But she didn’t mind Mark’s French bug, even if it was a trip to Paris that had made him miss the birth of their daughter. Energetic enthusiasms, comprehensive enthusiasms—these were his kind of charm.
“Put this on,” said a surprise nurse, leaving Jean alone with her folded green smock. There was a large cutout for the head, and open sides, so it hung over the torso like a saddlebag. Thus draped, she crossed her naked arms, looked around the cramped examining room, and waited.
This dead time spent waiting, especially in poor countries…it converted everybody going about his daily business into a disaster victim, queuing for relief. Mass paralysis—a phenomenon, she thought, to compete with mass migration, meriting international treaties, conventions, philanthropic interest. And for Jean? She somehow knew, having failed to confront Mark at once, she’d entered the waiting game of her life.
The room contained a padded table, another lethargic fan, and, in the corner by a high window, an old-fashioned wicker hat rack where Jean had hung her clothes, bra discreetly tucked under the childish sundress, and the letter folded into childish sundress pocket. Another standing object filled t
he center of the room, stainless steel and glass, loaded with dials and levers—yesteryear’s futuristic. After a decade of annual mammograms, Jean knew the machine and the drill. Here she was again, stripped, bored, and coursing with dread. She tried to distance herself by considering alternative uses for the Senograph, with its motorized compression device: patty maker, phone booth, mechanical valet, time machine.
But distraction was not encouraged here. On the wall, above the examining table, hung a framed poster of a vagina and a womb—in the family of the butcher’s chart, sectioned, colored, and neatly labeled in teachers’ script. Jean wondered what sort of image awaited Mark at the Internet café. Photographs of Thing 2’s privates would be a lot harder to ignore than this diagram. As if being ignored might come into a Thing’s plan.
In England, she thought, hearing footsteps and checking her gown, such a room would have a picture of wild ponies on Exmoor, Brighton Pavilion, or an Alma-Tadema muse draped in billowing gauze. In the States you might get fall foliage or Capitol Hill. And in either country—she now saw a hairy arm opening the door from the corridor—the radiologist would not have been a man. This one was wearing short sleeves and a hospital V-neck, as if to feature his pelt. And a paper hat.
Jean didn’t want to look at this man, so like an entertainer escaped from a children’s party. She didn’t want to look at the vagina and womb. She didn’t want to say anything, with her hopeless French and miserable state of mind. He wasn’t even a doctor. More like a mechanic, brought in to mind the precious robot. Someone else would interpret the pictures he took, hunting for messages among the lucent smudges and ghost tracks, the familiar crescents rendered deathly in monochrome. So she studied the ceiling fan and imagined herself levitating to just the right height whereby the rotating blades could serve as a guillotine for her obviously imperfect breasts.
Meanwhile the radiologist busied himself. His soap-scented arms extended one of hers around the time machine. Dignity demanded that she be as involved as a mannequin being dressed in a store window, and she, shy flower, could only submit as he fussed with the display—frowning, squinting, making several seemingly insignificant changes to her position. The pose she struck was elaborately casual, like in the first photograph she’d sent her parents of herself with Mark, her arm reaching awkwardly up around his shoulder. Too tall by half, was her mother’s verdict following that first experimental airing of his existence, not knowing that Jean had already decided. His height was the first thing she loved about him, her personal lightning rod. Feeling safe with Mark: before she felt it, she had not been aware of any special vulnerability or want. Much of what he brought her came in this form of unanticipated necessity.
With her upper body strained into the leaning position, Jean’s breast had naturally swung out from the sideless smock onto the machine’s glass tray—the coolness of the glass not unwelcome in this close heat—and the technician positioned it with his hairy hands, as focused as a potter centering a lump of clay. This, Jean thought, was the real reason younger women didn’t get mammograms: their breasts couldn’t yet swing out onto the tray. And then she thought of Thing 2, “26 this week.”
She knew what came next and that it didn’t serve to watch: the central shaft of the machine would be lowered like a dumbwaiter, pinning her to the glass, sandwiching her breast in a painful wedge, as if the whole extrusion was designed not to take a photograph that could save her life but to hasten nature’s decline. Why else did they clamp so hard, as if squeezing the last drops from a lemon? Why crank the vise when no other tissue impeded the view? They’d explain it was to allow the lowest possible dose of radiation, but Jean would be more convinced if they said it was to deter second-thoughters. And what a sisterhood of silent fury, as each annual twenty-second examination undid the faithful bra wearing of the preceding year…
It was best to look away, not just from the radiation but because it wasn’t a good sight. The clamp was released and the dumbwaiter sent upstairs, but the pale breast lay there, spread and settled on the tray like an uncooked Danish. With her arm still thrown in a pally hug around the X-ray machine, Jean was sure Thing 2’s breasts never looked like pastry dough.
“You can remove yourself.” The radiologist startled her, looking her in the eye for the first time before leaving the room.
Jean wasn’t so sure. She thought her breast might stick when she tried to unpeel it from the glass, and possibly rip, like a rug’s rubber underlay.
As she slowly pieced herself back together, looking at the diagram on the wall, she remembered the sheep’s heart she’d been given to dissect in a high school biology class, and how dense it was—rubbery, solid, slime-coated, and intermittently spongy, anything but breakable. Where had that come from, the broken heart? Jean had loved dissecting, and as she left the clinic she realized it had been the graphic precursor to her job as a columnist: that sheep’s heart, one time a whole frog, even the lowly pods and leaves. Then, suddenly, she knew exactly what the secret password was—why hadn’t it struck her before? Munyeroo, a fleshy Australian plant, whose leaves and seeds, as Thing 2 helpfully pointed out, could be eaten. Mark had told her about it just the other day, after his trip home, and even suggested Munyeroo—bashfully, in fact—as a name for the stray cat who’d come along but abandoned them as soon as Mark returned. Clearly it hadn’t appreciated being named after his crude mistress. Jean knew now just what she was going to do. She was going down to the Internet café to open e-mail 69.
Back in the waiting room, the stately woman in her turban was still sitting patiently. What would she be thinking as she watched a dazed Jean walk past, making for the door? How did people with such raw-looking skin get the idea that they could rule the world? What made you believe you were entitled to happiness? As Jean stepped outside, her idle hand feeling the top of her own head, she couldn’t help imagining that the lady’s crown of fabric wasn’t for cushioning freight, and not for fashion either. Maybe it was an elaborate bandage that covered a gaping hole.
Jean was practically quivering with adrenaline as she drove to the Internet café, her diesel engine roaring. And then she instinctively pulled over: for the willed caution of delay, the gym. Under the glinting gilt cupola at the top of Le Royaume, the only smart hotel not on the coast, Jean, changed into old canvas tennis shoes and faded sweats, took her place alongside two unimprovably trim and toned women on a row of step machines. Most people came here to develop their bodies. What she wanted to develop was an attitude. Did she dare find out any more about this Thing 2? Could she—or they—survive an affair? And if not, was she remotely prepared to paddle off in her own canoe? Had Mark already done just that? Maybe the whole business of choice had already been settled. He was the one who had acted, and decisively.
She started to climb. Soon she was hanging on, hunchbacked, as if riding a motorcycle into strong wind, sinking as she gripped the bars, putting as much weight as possible on her arms. The women beside her, both wearing bright Lycra outfits, didn’t seem to notice they were exerting themselves at all; they chatted effortlessly, their rounded backsides pushed up and out like the rumps of show ponies. Watching the ceiling-mounted television hurt Jean’s neck. Head down, she was forced to eavesdrop—which was, she couldn’t help thinking, exactly what she planned to do at the Internet café.
“Well, every time we meet, he say me ‘You have a beautiful ass, I love di texture’ ”—Jean heard “tastetour”—“always di ass you know. Latinos day love di ass. And den, one day, no more texture. Now he say me, ‘I can teach you song good essersizes for you ass.’ Das how I starting in di tango feet.”
“Tango feet?” The other climber whipped around, frowning with interest.
“Yes, tango wit di beat, you know, tango for di feetness.”
“Oh, tango fit. Cool. Can I have a listen?”
The other one was Australian, Jean guessed, mesmerized by the sight of the woman’s bouncing chest, as extravagantly upholstered as Tangofeet’s, only Jean thought
hers might be real.
“Chore.” The Argentine, if that’s what she was, passed the earphones to her friend.
What, Jean wondered, did Thing 2 look like? What sort of “texture” was she? That was an advanced sort of concern, wasn’t it? Jean would settle for shape. She thought of her boyish straight line from pits to hips and moved away to try an arm machine. Settling her bottom on the seat pad, she imagined a man’s body being lowered onto hers, his sneakered feet in the air: 69, the yin-yang of sex positions. A pose for show-offs, Jean thought: fundamentally unserious. You could hardly meditate on your own pleasure doing that. Anyway, Mark was too tall to be the 9 to any woman’s 6—unless Thing 2 was an Amazon. Or would that be Jean, she thought mirthlessly, remembering how the Amazons’ breasts were lopped off to facilitate the use of a bow. Jean never wanted to pick up her mammogram results, let alone a weapon. But the thought of those warrior women emboldened her: she would at least take a look.
The cyber café was unusually crowded. Jean got the corner computer, beside a black teenager whose forehead glistened like a polished plum. He was typing one-sentence replies to one-sentence questions: instant messaging. She knew what this was—one new skill she didn’t feel called on to acquire. She checked her work e-mail first, and then the joint account set up by and mainly for Victoria. The boy beside her didn’t look up as she finally typed in the new account name, naughtyboy1, and the password, munyeroo. And there was 69, a lonely pair of inverted spermatozoa, each chasing the other’s tail. The sender slot was discreetly blanked. Steeling herself to click and open, she looked again at the letter in the white envelope. Munyeroo. Jean immediately thought of the Australian at the gym, the blond woman with the spectacular natural frontage. But there was Italian here as well—that ciao bello. An Australian of Italian descent, that’s it, Jean thought. She remembered Mark joking, many years ago, that the primary appeal of Australian girls in London was their departure the following morning for New South Wales, forever. But the letter had originated in London. Thing 2 didn’t play by the rules.
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