“Mm, for lunch, after Scully. The gyno and the editor—a gay morning program. But what might Vikram feel even mildly touchy about? From what I gathered he comes from a rather posh Bombay family. What can he think of us, more like.” Jean glanced around at all the dingy stripped pine and vowed to whitewash the entire place. As soon as she could be bothered.
“Mumbai, please.” Mark was referring to Vikram’s correction over dinner. “Let’s wipe out all trace of the evil British Empire, shall we? Never mind, say, the parliamentary system or an independent judiciary. Perhaps he’d prefer to hail from Zaire, or should I say the Democratic Republic of the Congo? I guess we should be grateful we’re not dining with Burkina Faso or Xianggang.”
“I think you were right the first time: he’s terrific,” Jean said, steering Mark back around. “A bit pedantic, I grant you.” She picked at some food caught in the tabletop. In fact, she thought Vikram had been strikingly pompous. But Victoria was so full of hope and, here again, their absence made them unnaturally restrained in their judgments. As, she imagined, did Vikram’s appearance: he was pretty and clever—and brown; any criticism was unsayable, and for Victoria completely unthinkable.
“You have to make allowances,” Jean said, as much to herself as to Mark. “He was, after all, meeting the parents.”
“Not that he seemed remotely intimidated by either one of us.”
“Good.” She laughed. “You can see how that would appeal to Vic: someone who can more than hold his own.” Rugby? Radley? She’d already forgotten which middling public school he’d been to—and then she realized, that’s what Mark, himself an old Etonian, meant by Vikram’s touchiness. The narcissism of minor difference, as far as Jean was concerned. “She certainly seems to like him. I can’t remember her so…curious about what someone else has to say. It’s a compliment to you, really, that our darling socialist has ended up with a public-school boy, don’t you think?”
“How do you mean, ‘ended up’?”
“I don’t mean anything, just that I agree: he’s extremely nice. I still can’t seem to get used to how grown-up she is, though. It never bothers me to think of it, but to see her going off, down into the tube hand in hand to sleep who knows where…”
“I can’t believe this is you. Imagine if she’d gone off who knows where, as you say, with that singer if you can call him that—remember that scrawny bass player? His black drainpipes so tight they might’ve been tattoos. Rick or Mick, what was his name? A true Camden hero. The Ex-husbands, we saw them play at the Dublin Castle, remember? Now that’s what I call love. You complained for weeks that your hair smelled of beer. Not a problem for Dad, that, with hardly a hair left to speak of. Did you know that beer is incredibly nutritious for the scalp? Of course you do—I read it in your column. No, no, no—it could be far worse. Far, far worse.” He saw that Jean still wore a worried face. “How would you like it if she was in the sweaty embrace of some hulking rugger bugger? He knows things, about the universe for fuck’s sake, he doesn’t just spout ill-informed opinions like most people their age. Or any age, for that matter. He’s got real, what is it, quiddidity.”
“Are you drunk?” She got up and cleared their cups, leaving them unrinsed in the sink. “And it’s ‘quiddity.’”
Jean thought of Vikram trying to explain cosmic weather to this most earthbound family, how he’d spread his long, delicate fingers on the table and concentrated, seeming to stare at the dust on the inside of his glasses, and of his habit of clearing his throat or stuttering when anyone else tried to speak, fending off interruption—pretty much the only form of talk the Hubbards knew.
Outside the kitchen window, four legs were clacking by on the sidewalk, two in fishnets and stilettos, two in pointy black boots with the tips curling up like gondolas. A cigarette bounced off the glass and down into the light well.
“Charming!” Jean called after them through the foot-high gap of open window, suddenly exhausted. Mark was at the bar end of the counter, unscrewing a bottle of duty-free scotch. “Is that wise?” she asked.
“Certainly not,” he replied, hunched but elated, liberally pouring.
Early the next morning Jean would see Scully and, even earlier, Mark would fly to Munich. She was troubled by what awaited him at the Gasthof, but she was eager to see Vic properly and to be alone in her own house. “I’m finished,” she said, yawning, beginning her lap around the room to turn out the lights.
“Me too,” said Mark, banging down his empty glass and beating her to the bathroom.
When Jean opened her eyes at dawn on Friday, Mark was already dressed. She hadn’t slept well—her appointment, his trip—but also it was so noisy, with not only muted traffic sounds but every conversation, every laugh, every footfall funneling up from the sidewalk straight into their bedroom. She sat up. Mark was not only dressed, he was in his coat, the long green loden they’d bought together in Vienna. His hair was slicked back.
“Well, you certainly look the part, Herr Hubbard.” Jean yawned. “Very handsome. Maybe your Barbour would be more like it, though.”
“Gathering mold in St. Jacques. Don’t worry. I feel sure Fleischauer will lay on the full kit—including lederhosen, I shouldn’t wonder. Good-bye, darling, I’ll call tonight. I want to hear exactly what Scully has to say, so take notes, will you? And please don’t forget to take my sketches to Dan. Bye, darling.”
The quick peck between his good-byes showed some eagerness to be off. But what was that goo he had on his hair? It smelled old, faintly medicinal. And, wait a minute, was that a pompadour? Yes, it was, a very small pompadour—not a Memphis wave, more like an English escarpment, one inch high. Still, she thought, patting his shoulder and not commenting, he had to be horribly hungover.
Mark’s long strides took him outside in twenty seconds, the door slamming behind him. From one floor up, Jean could hear his rap with the knocker, as if to say sorry, or just to say goodbye again, like someone driving away and tooting his horn, pleased to have made a clean escape.
5:55. Always these tidy numbers: the little men who lived in the clock were fanatical neatniks. She looked out at densely metallic clouds—lead admixed with antimony and copper. Friday already—impossible to go back to sleep now, even if the sky wore its own blackout curtain. Somewhere up there was a sun, but London was under wraps.
Jean arrived on time in Harley Street, refreshed by a windy, surprisingly sun-dappled walk across Regent’s Park. Mounting through the core of this ornate Adam town house, wary as the one-person birdcage elevator lurched upward, she remembered earlier visits—annual checkups but particularly when she was pregnant and the cage was even tighter, before she was condemned to bed rest with the preeclampsia.
Scully specialized in this mysterious condition not known to occur in any other species, he’d explained, just as only human babies amassed thick layers of fat—nutrients successfully diverted from the mother. In fact, he’d chosen to focus on the disease because it seemed to support his hunch that pregnancy represented a maternal-fetal conflict—an intensely fraught competition for nutrients and even for survival—rather than the spontaneous harmony the rest of the culture insisted on, biologists included. At the time, Jean had been greatly relieved there might be a medical basis for her anxiety, a kind of prenatal depression she’d at first put down to the imminent breakup of her exclusive intimacy with Mark, though her shame, and her dread, were instantly dispelled when Vic herself appeared.
Scully, fit and young looking with a full head of dark hair, was waiting on the landing when she stepped out of the elevator. Special treatment: he must have known she was worried. He took her lightly by the shoulders, kissed her cheek, and stepped back with the pursed smile that didn’t want to show its teeth.
Jean was, as she expected to be, immensely relieved to see him. He was a great man. Despite a labor made more difficult by the continuing threat from preeclampsia—to her liver, her heart, her brain—he’d safely delivered Victoria. Jean thought it must be wond
erful to be Mr. Scully (despite the inevitable intimacies she’d never been able to call him Francis, and no one in England called the top guys “Dr.”), with his power not only to bring forth new life but to calm and soothe life all too firmly established. He clearly relished it, the God role in countless nativity plays—and here, as in the more famous version, the father had been relegated (or anyway stuck, grounded in Paris by a baggage handlers’ strike). Scully was a smash hit, as the densely scrawled-over wall calendar in his reception room confirmed; he was sold out for the next three years.
He dressed accordingly—bright shirts and brocade waistcoats, gold signet pinkie ring, the collection of bold ties. The style could support a watch fob and a reassuring paunch, but Mr. Scully was taut and springy as a cheetah. She appreciated the dressing up, not necessarily the clothes themselves—today a sunflower-yellow shirt and a wide tie swirling with red and gold fleurs-de-lis. No, it was that the gesture showed sensitivity, a sense of decorum, an understanding of the physics of the relationship: if someone had to be undressed, the other should be dressed enough for two.
“So, where do we start?” he asked, smiling, his forearms flat on his burl veneer desk.
She leaned back in the leather club chair, legs and arms crossed, momentarily speechless. She’d told him on the phone about the spot—she was touching it now, as if to cover its ears. “Well,” she ventured, “I had a mammogram a few months ago, the results are there in the envelope, and then they suggested the échographie.” Now he’d think she was being coy, but she’d forgotten; what the hell was it called in English?
“Okay,” he replied finally. “Do you want to hop up on the table.”
As he rose to wash his hands in the little corner sink, she unzipped her brown suede boots—an embarrassingly loud and suggestive sound—and wondered, briefly alarmed, if this hand washing meant he’d given up using gloves. Hanging from the back of the door was a choice of fat terry-cloth bathrobes, blue or yellow. Every movement in this room was so self-conscious that she could almost see the “study” in the Journal of Gynecology and Obstetrics: “seventy percent of women over forty-five choose the blue robe.” She duly unhooked the blue and slipped behind the folding screen that separated the examining table from all the leather and polished wood.
Letting her boots clunk to the floor, wriggling out of snug jeans, she imagined slinging a stocking over the zigzagged screen—wasn’t that what they were for? Then she remembered she was wearing socks: thick, opaque, “skin-colored” knee-highs, putty hued and smooth, like prosthetic limbs. Somehow she felt sure that Giovana didn’t touch knee-highs. Unpeeling the dun socks she saw the top bands had left reddish crenellated marks in her airplane-swollen calves. Mmm, she thought, scrunching up the nylon to wipe the boot grime from between her sweaty toes: sexy.
Mr. Scully was gloveless as he began by palpating her breasts, the two hands working together like a piano tuner. He homed right in on the dense nodule, tapping repeatedly, a note that was giving him particular trouble, his head cocked as if he was listening to her bosom.
“Lumpy,” he pronounced neutrally as he turned away from her, stepping over to his workstation beyond her feet. Short for “lumpectomy”? she wanted to ask. She watched him through the V of her feet as he squeezed an upright forearm into a rubber glove. His hand opened and closed like someone in charades miming the beam of a lighthouse, his fingers working their way into their individual condoms. “Now slide right down, put your knees up, and just let your legs fall open,” Mr. Scully said, squarely facing her. She tensed as he slipped a hand inside her, and kept her eyes fixed on the busy much-painted plasterwork of distant cornices. One finger, she thought the middle finger, poked and prodded up toward the surface of her lower abdomen at the bikini line, where his other hand pressed down from outside.
This probably was not the moment to ask him if the G-spot really existed—but wasn’t it supposed to be around there somewhere? And when would that moment be, she asked herself, trying to lighten her spirits so she could breathe. Again his head was turned to the wall, as if not looking helped him to feel. (Mark, she thought unhelpfully, did this during sex, like someone on a rollicking, squall-tossed boat focuses on a cleat, trying not to be sick.) Scully poked around some more, covering the bases. “Feels absolutely fine,” he said, turning to look at her and bringing his hand mostly out, leaving in just a couple of fingers. “Now squeeze for me.”
She obediently squeezed.
“Very good. How often do you do your exercises?” he asked, looking straight at her and nodding and smiling encouragement. His hand was still inside her while he waited for her to answer, and she continued to grip.
“I don’t know,” Jean said, inhaling, her eyes wheeling around the room, still hanging on, quickly exhaling and inhaling again. “Whenever I remember.” The true answer, of course, was “never.”
Had he ever fucked anyone on this bench? Just let your legs fall open. When the idea of doctor-patient coupling first occurred to her, during her pregnancy, Jean thought: He couldn’t. He wouldn’t. Now—many years after her cocooning in the purity of impending motherhood and convinced as she was of a universal corruption—she wasn’t so sure. Wouldn’t she do it herself, in return for not having breast cancer? She was already making deals with the reaper.
On balance, she still guessed he didn’t or, at least, not very often. Of course Jean was joking to herself—how else did you get through these sessions? Still, she thought one thing was for sure: every odalisque who’d graced the padded slab had wondered the same thing.
“I’ll take a smear,” he said, turning to the sterilizer to get his speculum, a steel instrument shaped like an eyelash curler, with its wide-set pliers grip. The part she truly dreaded. And I’ll take a Diet Coke, she thought, desperately clinging to her humor like a life belt. He slipped it in. Not very cold but not very warm either. When would a female gynecologist introduce heated instruments, Jean wondered, not for the first time, already sketching the campaign in her column.
He followed with another tool, and then the muted clip. Nothing hurt, more as if someone had snipped off the callus on her heel. Finally he unparked the second instrument and turned back to his sink, perhaps to arrange the lab sample on a slide, leaving the speculum inside her. How could she explain the outrage of this?
But she trusted Mr. Scully. Preeclampsia was a serious condition, and the only cure was delivery. How pathetic, she reminded herself, to whine about a routine pelvic exam. He removed the offending tool, and her knees snapped shut.
“You can get dressed now.”
Back at the desk Scully examined the St. Jacques mammogram pictures she’d brought with her. “Mm-hm,” he murmured, holding them up against his lightbox, taking, she thought, an excessively long time. “Nothing necessarily unusual here. Cloudy. Fibrous. Quite normal for your age, particularly if you’ve had children late.”
She’d been twenty-six. But biologically, of course, she could be a grandmother—even a great-grandmother, she thought, not really wanting to ponder what he meant by nothing necessarily unusual, or quite normal. Maybe that’s how Scully really saw her: a great-grandmotherly womb in side-zip boots. She hoped he wasn’t going to start talking to her about menopause.
“The good news is, your mammogram looks fine. There is this fibrous matter that we may want to aspirate, but I would feel better, and I’m sure you would too, if instead we settled the matter definitively, which means a biopsy.”
“Do I have to go to the hospital?” she said, babyish.
“No, we can do it here. In fact, if we can get a sample to the lab by eleven”—he looked at his thin gold watch—“we’ll know where we are on Monday. How does that sound?”
“Sounds good.”
“Okay. Why don’t you get back on the table, take off your blouse, and I’ll give you an anesthetic.”
By the time she was numb, Jean was no longer distracted by thoughts of Mr. Scully as a man. The doctor had returned by popular demand for
another performance as God. This time she didn’t look and, as he cut away a tissue sample from the underside of her right breast, she didn’t feel a thing.
“I’ll call you soon as I get the results, around this time Monday. Certainly before noon,” he said, returning his hands to her shoulders, as they’d begun this meeting. “Try to have a decent weekend.”
The sun had gone in but the air was fresh. Jean had a free hour before she was due to meet her editor for lunch in Piccadilly and then head up to the office to hand in Mark’s reworked sketches for the fridge campaign (he didn’t trust couriers). She walked south toward Oxford Street, intending to shop for clothes, only to find when she got there too much reality for her first day in London for six months—and stripping off again in the middle of the day? Only for a doctor or a lover. She saw a naked Giovana, brainless Eve skipping and bouncing through a black forest, her pale Adam in gay pursuit. She thought of Mark this morning with his revised hairstyle and unfamiliar scent: too handsome, and too much effort, for a dawn business trip. Jean urgently needed to ignore the body and recover the spirit. She retreated north for a block and turned to the west: the Wallace Collection.
It was proximity alone that drew her in. She didn’t particularly like eighteenth-century French painting—those rheumy portraits of milkmaids and duchesses and striding cavaliers—or the spindly-legged gilt furniture and blue Sèvres porcelain cluttering those well-proportioned rooms. So it was no great loss that she got only as far as the gift shop, paralyzed there by the unexpected sight of Larry’s postcard, Cupid a Captive, on a rack near the entrance. This—and the pale, weirdly familiar duchess disdainfully observing her from an adjacent postcard—sent Jean straight back into the daylight.
A moment of bright sunshine gave way to fast-moving clouds and even the threat of rain in the short time it took her to cross Manchester Square, and Jean found it exhilarating. Maybe this island was more promising after all, she thought, walking down Bond Street, past the auction houses and galleries, the fancy linen and leather goods, the jewelry and the gowns… At least in England you still had the seasons intact, even if all four sometimes turned up in a single day. She wondered if the rhythm didn’t somehow give you a better shot at living each season of your life.
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