The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966

by Richard Brautigan

  I will probably go on for a long time wondering what he would have said to my poor aborted darling who, though weak and tired from the ways of Tijuana, was the prettiest thing going in the sky above California, the rapidly moving sky to Los Angeles.

  I went from the priest’s interest in Vida to wondering about Foster at the library, how he was handling the books that were coming in that day.

  I hoped he was welcoming them the right way and making the authors feel comfortable and wanted as I made them feel.

  ‘Well, we’ll be home soon,’ Vida said to me after a long silence that was noisy with thought. The priest’s composure vibrated with tension when Vida spoke.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I was just thinking about that.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I could hear the noise in your mind. I think everything’s all right at the library. Foster’s doing a good job.’

  ‘You’re doing a good job yourself,’ I said.

  Thank you,’ she said. ‘It will be good to get home. Back to the library and some sleep.’

  I was very pleased that she considered the library her home. I looked out the window at my talisman. I loved it as much as the coffee stain flying down.

  Perhaps and Eleven

  Things are different at night. The houses and towns far below demand their beauty and get it in distant lights twinkling with incredible passion. Landing at Los Angeles was like landing inside a diamond ring

  The priest didn’t want to get off the plane at Los Angeles, but he had to because that’s where he was going. Perhaps Vida reminded him of somebody. Perhaps his mother was very beautiful and he didn’t know how to handle it and that’s what drove him to the Cloth and now to see that beauty again in Vida was like swirling back through the mirrors of time.

  Perhaps he was thinking about something completely different from what I have ever thought about in my life and his thoughts were of the highest nature and should have been made into a statue… perhaps. To quote Foster, ‘Too many perhapses in the world and not enough people.’

  I was suddenly wondering about my library again and missed the actual departure of the priest to become part of Los Angeles, to add his share to its size and to take memories of Vida into whatever.

  ‘Did you see that?’ Vida said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  This has been happening ever since I was eleven,’ she said.

  Fresno, Then 3½ Minutes to Salinas

  The stewardesses on this flight were fantastically shallow and had been born from half a woman into a world that possessed absolutely no character except chrome smiles. All of them were of course beautiful.

  One of them was pushing a little cart down the aisle, trying to sell us cocktails. She had a singsong inhuman voice that I’m positive was pre-recorded by a computer.

  ‘Purchase a cocktail.

  ‘Purchase a cocktail.

  ‘Purchase a cocktail.’

  While pushing her little cart down the sky.

  ‘Purchase a cocktail.

  ‘Purchase a cocktail.

  ‘Purchase a cocktail.’

  There were no lights below.

  Shine on, O talisman!

  I pushed my face against the window and looked very hard and saw a star and I made a wish but I won’t tell. Why should I? Purchase a cocktail from pretty Miss Zero and find your own star. There’s one for everyone in the evening sky.

  There were two women behind us talking about nail polish for the thirty-nine-minute way to San Francisco. One of them thought that fingernails without polish should be put under rocks.

  Vida had no polish on her fingernails but she didn’t care and gave the women’s conversation no attention.

  From time to time the aeroplane was bucked by an invisible horse in the sky but it didn’t bother me because I was falling in love with the 727 jet, my sky home, my air love.

  The pilot or some male voice told us that if we looked out the window, we could see the lights of Fresno and were 3½ minutes away from the lights of Salinas.

  I was already looking for Salinas, but something happened on the plane. One of the women spilt her fingernail polish on a cat ten years ago and I looked away for a moment to wonder about that and missed Salinas, so I pretended my talisman was Salinas.

  The Saint of Abortion

  We were about to land at San Francisco when the women behind us finished their conversation about fingernail polish.

  ‘I wouldn’t be caught dead without fingernail polish,’ one of them said.

  ‘You’re right,’ the other one said.

  We were only three miles away from landing and I couldn’t see the wing that led like a black highway to my talisman. It seemed as if we were going to land without a wing, only a talisman.

  Ah, the wing appeared magically just as we touched the ground.

  There were soldiers everywhere in the terminal. It was as if an army were encamped there. They flipped when they saw Vida. She was increasing the United States Army sperm count by about three tons as we walked through the place, heading towards the van in the parking lot.

  Vida also affected the civilian population by causing a man who looked like a banker to walk directly into an Oriental woman, knocking the woman down. She was rather surprised because she had just flown in from Saigon and didn’t expect this to happen on her first visit to America.

  Alas, another victim of Vida’s thing.

  ‘Do you think you can take it?’ Vida said.

  ‘We ought to bottle what you’ve got,’ I said.

  ‘Vida Pop,’ Vida said.

  ‘How do you feel?’ I said with my arm around her.

  ‘Glad to be home,’ she said.

  Even though the San Francisco International Airport acted like a Playboy cybernetic palace wanting to do things for us that we were not quite ready to have done, at that moment I felt that the International Airport was our first home back from Tijuana.

  I was also anxious to get back to the library and see Foster.

  The Bufano statue waited for us with a peace that we couldn’t understand with its strange people fastened projectile-like upon a huge bullet.

  As we got into the van, I thought there should be a statue for the Saint of Abortion, whoever that was, somewhere in the parking lot for the thousands of women who had made the same trip Vida and I had just finished, flying into the Kingdom of Fire and Water, the waiting and counting hands of Dr Garcia and his associates in Mexico.

  Thank God, the van had an intimate, relaxed human feeling to it. The van reflected Foster in its smells and ways of life. It felt very good to be in the van after having travelled the story of California.

  I put my hand on Vida’s lap and that’s where it stayed following the red lights of cars in front of us shining back like roses in San Francisco.

  A New Life

  When we arrived back at the library the first thing we saw was Foster sitting out on the steps in his traditional T-shirt, even though it was now dark and cold.

  The lights were on in the library and I wondered what Foster was doing sitting outside on the steps. That didn’t seem to be the correct way to run a library.

  Foster stood up and waved that big friendly wave of his.

  ‘Hello, there, strangers,’ he said. ‘How did it go?’

  ‘Fine,’ I said, getting out of the van. ‘What are you doing out here?’

  ‘How’s my baby?’ said Foster to Vida.

  ‘Great,’ she said.

  ‘Why aren’t you inside?’ I said.

  ‘Tired, honey?’ Foster said to Vida. He put his arm gently around her.

  ‘A little,’ she said.

  ‘Well, that’s the way it should be, but it won’t last long.’

  ‘The library?’ I said.

  ‘Good girl,’ Foster said to Vida. ‘Am I glad to see you! You look like a million dollars in small change. What a sight!’ giving her a kiss on the cheek.

  ‘The library?’ I said.

  Foster turned towards me.
‘I’m sorry about that,’ he said, then turning to Vida, ‘Oh, what a girl!’

  ‘You’re sorry about what?’ I said.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Foster said. ‘It’s for the best. You need a rest, a change of scene. You’ll be a lot happier now.’

  ‘Happier, what? What’s going on?’

  ‘Well,’ Foster said. He had his arm around Vida and she was looking up at him as he tried to explain what was going on.

  There was a slight smile on her face that grew large and larger as Foster continued, ‘Well, it happened this way. I was sitting there minding your asylum when this lady came in with a book and she—’

  I looked away from Foster towards the library where its friendly light was shining out and I looked inside the glass door and I could see a woman sitting behind the desk.

  I couldn’t see her face but I could see that it was a woman and her form looked quite at home. My heart and my stomach started doing funny things in my body.

  ‘You mean?’ I said, unable to find the words.

  ‘That’s right,’ Foster said. ‘She said the way that I was handling the library was a disgrace and I was a slob and she would take it over now: thank you.

  ‘I told her that you’d been here for years and that you were great with the library and I was just watching it during an emergency. She said that didn’t make any difference, that if you had turned the library over to me, even for a day, you didn’t deserve to be in charge of the library any more.

  ‘I told her that I worked at the caves and she said that I didn’t work there any more, that her brother would take care of it from now on, that I should think of doing something else like getting a job.

  ‘Then she asked me where the living quarters were and I pointed out the way and she went in and packed all your stuff. When she found Vida’s things there, she said, “I got here just in time!” Then she had me take it all out here and I’ve been sitting here ever since.’

  I looked down at my meagre possessions piled on the steps. I hadn’t even noticed them.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ I said. ‘I’ll go tell her that it’s all a mistake. that—’

  Just then the woman got up from behind the desk and strolled very aggressively to the front door and opened the door without stepping outside and she yelled at me, ‘Get your God-damn stuff out of here right now and never come back, not unless you’ve got a book under your arm!’

  ‘There’s been a mistake,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I know and you are it. Farewell, creep!’

  She turned and the front door closed behind her as if it were obeying her.

  I stood there like Lot’s wife on one of her bad days.

  Vida was laughing like hell and Foster was, too. They started doing a little dance on the sidewalk around me.

  ‘There must be a mistake,’ I cried in the wilderness.

  ‘You heard the lady,’ Foster said. ‘Damn! Damn! Damn! am I glad to be out of the cave business. I thought I was going to get TB.’

  ‘Oh, darling,’ Vida said, breaking the dance to throw her arms around me while Foster started loading our stuff into the van. ‘You’ve just been fired. You’re going to have to live like a normal human being.’

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ I sighed. Then they loaded me into the van.

  ‘Well, what are we going to do?’ Foster said.

  ‘Let’s go to my place,’ Vida said. ‘It’s just around the block on Lyon Street.’

  ‘I can always sleep in the van,’ Foster said.

  ‘No, there’s plenty of room in my place for all of us,’ Vida said.

  Somehow Vida had ended up driving the van and she parked it in front of a big red shingled house that had an ancient iron fence in front of it. The fence looked quite harmless. Time had removed its ferocity and Vida lived in the attic.

  Her place was nice and simple. There was practically no furniture and the walls were painted white and there was nothing on them.

  We sat on the floor on a thick white rug that had a low marble table in the centre of it.

  ‘Do you want a drink?’ Vida said. ‘I think we all need a drink.’

  Foster smiled.

  She made us some very dry vodka martinis in glasses full of ice. She didn’t put any vermouth in them. The drinks were done off with twists of lemon peel. The lemon lay there like flowers in the ice.

  ‘I’ll put something on the stereo,’ Vida said. ‘Then I’ll start some dinner.’

  I was shocked by losing my library and surprised at being inside a real house again. Both feelings were passing like ships in the night.

  ‘Damn, does that vodka taste good!’ Foster said.

  ‘No, honey,’ I said. ‘I think you’d better rest. I’ll cook up something.’

  ‘No,’ Foster said. ‘A little logger breakfast is what we all need now. Some fried potatoes and onions and eggs all cooked together with a gallon of catsup on top. Do you have the makings?’

  ‘No,’ Vida said. ‘But there’s a store open down at California and Divisadero.’

  ‘OK,’ Foster said.

  He put some more vodka in his mouth.

  ‘Ah, do you kids have any money left? I’m flat.’

  I gave Foster a couple of dollars that I had left and he went to the store.

  Vida put a record on the phonograph. It was the Beatles’ album Rubber Soul. I had never heard the Beatles before. That’s how long I was in the library.

  ‘I want you to hear this one first,’ Vida said.

  We sat there quietly listening to the record.

  ‘Who sang that?’ I said.

  ‘John Lennon,’ she said.

  Foster came back with the food and started cooking our dinnerbreakfast thing. Soon the whole attic was filled with the smell of onions.

  That was months ago.

  It’s now the last of May and we’re all living together in a little house in Berkeley. It has a small back yard. Vida’s working at a topless place over in North Beach, so she’ll have some money to go back to school next fall. She’s going to give English another try. Foster has a girlfriend who is an exchange student from Pakistan. She’s twenty and majoring in sociology.

  She’s in the other room now cooking up a big Pakistani dinner and Foster is watching her with a can of beer in his hand. He’s got a job at Bethlehem Steel over in San Francisco at night working on an aircraft carrier that’s in dry dock being fixed. Today is Foster’s day off.

  Vida is off doing something or other and will be home soon. She doesn’t work tonight either. I’ve spent the afternoon at a table across from Sproul Hall where they took all those hundreds of Free Speech kids off to jail in 1964. I’ve been gathering contributions for The American Forever, Etc.

  I like to set my table up around lunch time near the fountain, so I can see the students when they come pouring through Sather Gate like the petals of a thousand-coloured flower. I love the joy of their intellectual perfume and the political rallies they hold at noon on the steps of Sproul Hall.

  It’s nice near the fountain with green trees all around and bricks and people that need me. There are even a lot of dogs that hang around the plaza. They are of all shapes and colours. I think it’s important that you find things like this at the University of California.

  Vida was right when she said that I would be a hero in Berkeley.

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