by Lewis Shiner
Their waiter, who was not much older than Cole, kept looking at him strangely during dinner, and when he brought the check he said, “Did you use to be in the Austin Blues Group? Played at the Vulcan?”
“That’s me.” He offered his hand. “The name’s Cole.”
The waiter, whose name was Roger, invited him to a Sunday jam session, “old blues, rock, country, whatever comes around on the guitar, you know?” He tore the stub off the check and wrote his name and phone number.
Amanda, at least, was impressed. “Does that happen a lot?”
“Less than you might think.”
“I’d say it was a good omen,” Amanda said. “You haven’t been back twenty-four hours and already you’re getting offers.”
“Well,” Cole said. “There are offers and there are offers.” He imagined the dingy garage, the smell of old beer cans, the tedious I-IV-V blues progressions.
At the Hancock heb on the way home, Cole bought some basic supplies and a case of Old Milwaukee. He made nice with Amanda and Jimmy while he put the groceries away, then he took two bottles upstairs to begin his project of serious drinking and becoming reacquainted with his record collection.
*
Of course she was pregnant.
Sometime in the early morning hours, after moving to the couch, Madelyn felt an odd little pinch in her uterus and knew beyond a doubt that something had taken hold inside her and started to grow. She knew it had the potential to be the end of her world, of her safe, if exhausting, routine of school and gallery and fortress apartment.
She took a moment for recriminations. How could she have been so stupid, with Cole of all people? What in God’s name was she going to say to Kindred? And so on. Eventually she willed herself into a fitful sleep, waking long enough to send Cole out into the snowy Christmas morning, as if it were all his fault and none of her own, then pulling up the blanket and diving again into her inner darkness.
When she finally abandoned all hope of more sleep, she made a pot of coffee and changed the sheets on the bed. She washed the dishes and sponged off the counters and the table. She put the earrings in the green Macy’s box and tucked them into the back of her sock drawer. She was the daylight Madelyn now, strong and capable, and she reminded herself that abortion had been legal in New York State since 1970, never mind last year’s Roe v. Wade, and it was simply not a big deal anymore. If, in fact, she was pregnant—and she had no rational reason to think so, only a weird feeling after a sleepless night—she could end it before anybody else found out. When her inner voices tried to argue with her, she drowned them out with the vacuum cleaner.
In mid-January, when her period was a week late, she told herself she’d been late before. By the time she was two weeks late, her legs were so tense that she felt lopsided when she walked; her neck was rigid with pain and her eyes bloodshot from lost sleep; she was on the verge of exploding with rage or collapsing in tears whenever anyone spoke to her.
Over lunch on the Wednesday of week three, Paula Cooper said, “Forgive me if I’m out of line, but is everything all right?”
Madelyn felt the blood rush to her face. “Is it that obvious?”
“Well, you might at least apologize to that poor napkin.”
Madelyn saw that she had twisted it into a rock-hard spiral of fabric. “It’s nothing,” she said, and bluffed her way through the rest of the meal.
Back at the gallery, she looked herself over in the bathroom mirror. “You’re a wreck,” she told her reflection, who responded by holding up her middle finger. “This is what it’s come down to,” she said. “You’re the only one I can talk to.” Paula and her other New York friends were little more than acquaintances. She couldn’t tell her mother, who would not be willing to even consider abortion. She and Hope had hardly been in contact since high school. The last time she’d tried Irene’s number it had been disconnected. Alex had never come back from Christmas break, and he was out of the question anyway, as was Denise; she couldn’t put either of them in the position of having to lie to Cole.
Cole, above all, was never ever to know.
Anyway, there was nothing to discuss. It had to be done, like filing her taxes or fixing a flat tire. The sooner she got it over with, the better.
She locked herself in her office, leaving Elaine to watch the front. She looked up the Sanger Center on Bleecker, whose name she knew because she passed it several times a week. She made an appointment for the next day, and the woman on the phone told her not to drink anything before bed and to take a urine sample in a clean glass bottle first thing in the morning.
After she hung up, she waited for calm to descend. She’d made the decision, and she was a day, two at most, from returning to her quotidian existence. Instead she felt worse than ever. Her stomach churned and she kept having to swallow.
If she slept at all that night, she didn’t register it. She peed into an empty jam jar and showered and dressed, wandering dazedly around the apartment, her stomach too tense for food. At 9:30 she headed out with the jam jar in a paper sack.
The weather was hallucinatory, the sky completely overcast, tiny snow flurries invisible except in her peripheral vision, pricking her face with needles of cold, vanishing before they hit the sidewalk. She somehow got turned around and ended up in front of her own apartment building, not even recognizing it at first, and had to rush to make her appointment.
The Caucasian-flesh-colored bricks of the Sanger Center were not, Madelyn thought, well considered; once inside, however, the carpeted floors and dark green furniture projected a mood of calm elegance. The receptionist sent her to the lab, where a middle-aged woman in a navy cardigan and long skirt took her sample and said they should have the result by one.
“The sample is for you, not for me,” Madelyn said. “She’s a girl, by the way.”
“You’re here for counseling?”
“I’m here to get rid of it,” Madelyn said, her harshness shocking them both into temporary silence.
“Come back at one,” the woman eventually said. “I’ve done this long enough that I don’t doubt you, but the doctors will want something more objective.”
Madelyn turned to go. A poster from a medical company, hanging next to the door, showed a series of curved-bottom triangles of spattered gray. “Sonograms?” Madelyn asked.
The woman nodded. “They do them routinely in England now. How many weeks are you?”
“I’m in my fifth.”
The woman pointed to the first picture. “That’s all it is at this point,” she said.
“All she is,” Madelyn corrected her.
She gave the smallest possible shrug. “That black circle is the gestational sac, and the little ring inside it is the yolk sac.”
The next picture, at nine weeks, showed a pale, cloudy creature, curled on itself like a caterpillar. Two black eyeholes were visible, and rudimentary arms and legs.
The third picture, week 12, showed fingers and toes. That was as far as Madelyn got because everything had gone blurry. She did not want this woman to see her cry, so she said, “Thank you,” in the steadiest voice she could summon, and said, “I’ll be back at one.”
On the street, the wind had picked up. As her tears overflowed, they turned bitter cold on Madelyn’s face. If it weren’t for the salt, she thought, they would freeze. Her head thrummed and her stomach burned. It occurred to her that she needed to eat, though she couldn’t imagine getting anything past the blockage in her throat.
She ducked into a deli anyway and stood in front of a glass case full of cheeses. “What’ll it be, lady?” said the bulging-armed man behind it.
“Half a pound of the sharpest cheddar you’ve got,” she said, and her mouth suddenly watered so violently that she had to swallow and swallow again. “Thick slices.”
He wrapped the slices in paper. “What else?”
“Mustard,” she said. “Hot mustard.”
The man showed her a jar and she nodded mutely. She gave him money and
told him to keep the change and found a table in the back of the room. Her hands trembled as she tore open the paper, fought the lid off the jar, and took a huge bite of cheese and mustard.
She had never eaten cheese and mustard before. The demands, she knew, were not hers. And as a reward for her compliance, a warm, gold-colored glow spread from her navel to the ends of her fingers and toes, up her face and forehead into her scalp. Her headache was gone, her throat clear, her stomach relaxed.
All this from one bite? she asked herself disingenuously, knowing it was not the cheese. It was because, bypassing her conscious judgment, she had realized that she was not going back for her one o’clock appointment.
Now, she thought, for the hard part.
*
She called Kindred that afternoon and asked when he was going to be in New York again. She told him she had something she needed to discuss with him in person.
“That sounds ominous. Can I at least have a clue?”
“I’ll explain when I see you.”
“I’ll be there tomorrow,” he said.
He came straight to the gallery from the airport, carrying a black leather overnight bag like the pilots used. He shrugged out of his black cashmere overcoat the minute he was in the front door, revealing a dark, conservatively cut suit, deep blue shirt, and red tie. He barely nodded to Elaine, gave Madelyn a long, searching look, and strode briskly back to the office.
Elaine, already somber in her straight dark hair, black horn rims, and black turtleneck, looked apprehensively at Madelyn. “Something I should know about?”
“Nothing to do with you,” Madelyn said. “Don’t worry.” Though her own worry had left her slightly nauseated, it was vastly preferable to the numb panic she’d been living with for the preceding two weeks. And she still felt the glow from the deli.
She followed Kindred into the office. The words she’d rehearsed now felt too belabored, so she closed the door and with her hand still on the knob said, “I’m pregnant.”
Kindred had always been unflappable, and she saw that she’d been wrong to count on that. All the warmth left his face. “I take it you’re sure?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Are you getting an abortion?”
“No.”
“For God’s sake, why not? Do you seriously think you can go to school, manage the gallery, and raise a kid all at the same time?”
“No, of course not. I haven’t worked out the details yet. I expect I’ll go back to Texas when the time comes and stay with my parents.”
“How did… I mean, I didn’t think you were even…”
“I wasn’t. There was a… chance encounter with my ex-husband.”
“The one who disappeared?”
She nodded.
Kindred tugged at the cuff that projected a quarter-inch past his coat sleeve. “When I told people that I was grooming a girl who was still an undergraduate to be my partner, they told me I was crazy. Women are not cut out for business, they said. You can’t depend on somebody who’s going to make critical decisions based on her hormones. You don’t know this woman, I said. She’s smart, she’s sensible, she’s got her priorities straight.”
What stung the worst was to be dismissed as a cliché. “I did think I knew my priorities,” she said. “Things happen that are watersheds, where you’re not the same person afterward, and unless somebody has had that experience himself, it’s hard to understand how powerful that can be.”
“In other words, until I get pregnant, I’m in no position to judge you?”
“I know I’ve disappointed you—”
“You have no idea how much you’ve disappointed me. In fact, unless you’ve had that experience yourself, it’s probably very hard to understand just how powerful my disappointment is.”
She couldn’t recall his ever lapsing into sarcasm before. “I’m truly sorry to have hurt you. My hope was that we could talk through this and find the best way—”
“I don’t think there’s anything to discuss. Why don’t you give me your keys to the gallery and go on home?”
“Just like that?”
“I don’t give my trust easily. When it’s gone, it’s gone.”
“You’re firing me for telling you I’m pregnant?”
“We had a contract. You admitted that you can no longer fulfill the terms of that contract. As far as I’m concerned, we’re through.”
In the last five years she had spent thousands of hours with this man, met impossible deadlines with him, listened to his dreams and petty annoyances, gotten giggling drunk with him, fought off the occasional moments of sexual attraction, anger, and frustration. Through it all she had seen him as deeply honest, even compassionate in his own cautious way. To now see him as a heartless stranger was devastating.
She rummaged in her purse, found her keyring, and broke a fingernail detaching the gallery keys. Putting off the moment she would have to let them go, she said, “I have personal stuff here. Books, coffee cups…”
“Come back tomorrow. You can pack it up then.”
She dropped the keys on the desk, gathered her coat and scarf and boots, and walked past him to the door, thinking he would say something, an apology, a conciliatory word of praise. Instead there was only Elaine’s voice calling her name as she walked out the front door, pulling on her winter things, into the biting cold of the street.
And yet, in the starkest contrast to the shame and betrayal she believed she was feeling, every step that distanced her from the gallery came more easily than the one before. She hadn’t let herself register the weight of Kindred’s expectations until they were gone. She had been pushing, every day, against the knowledge that she was on the wrong road, that art was not literature, was not an orange hardcover with all the world inside it, was not the thing that she wanted for herself. The knowledge that she had let herself be owned again.
And then she stopped abruptly in the middle of the icy sidewalk. Had she let this happen? Had her Machiavellian subconscious connived for her to sleep with Cole, to get pregnant, because it was the only way out of the trap she was caught in?
The thought was too monstrous to contemplate.
In grade school she’d suffered from Bad Thoughts: the wish that her sister would fall and skin her knees; the memory of the India Ink she’d spilled on the carpet; the doubt that God existed at all. She’d taught herself to banish them by extending her arms at her sides, as if they were wings and she were about to fly away. She lifted them now, oblivious to the downward-gazing New Yorkers around her, and imagined herself rising into the air, up over SoHo, up past the Chrysler Building and the Empire State, to the Long Island Sound and out over the wine-dark sea.
*
Cole slept until late morning, and in the afternoons he caught the ut shuttle bus and rode around town, getting off sometimes and walking from one stop to the next, watching people, getting his bearings. He bought himself some sheets and towels and got his boots resoled. Shepler’s Western Wear turned out to be the only place he could find straight-leg jeans, in the form of button-fly Levi’s that took him a while to master. The weather was mild compared to Wytheville, highs mostly in the 50s and 60s, sometimes with a bonus of blue skies.
In one of his boxes he found the reel-to-reel tape he’d recorded during his acid trip at the motel in San Francisco. His green Japanese recorder was long gone, so he took it to a recording service and had it dubbed onto a cassette. He had no idea what to expect. It had been so long ago, before the Austin Blues Group, before he met Madelyn. The music turned out to be pleasant enough, melodic and played with feeling, but drowned in so much reverb as to be comical.
He bought more new records, and at night he listened to them, and to his old ones, and played along on La Pelirroja and made a mental list of what hurt the most.
On a Friday in the middle of February, Amanda was obligated to a mixer at school and Jimmy insisted that Cole go with him to the Broken Spoke. A local western swing outfit called Asleep at the W
heel was playing, which Jimmy seemed to think was a plus. The club was a straight shot south on Lamar, over the river and past Zilker Park. The sprawling, one-story, red frame building sat in a huge gravel parking lot full of pick-up trucks and beat-up sedans from the early sixties.
A sign on the front door read, “Through this door pass the best country music dancers in the world.” Inside it was mostly dance floor. Bar on the left, stage at the back, tables along the sides separated from the dancers by a plank barrier. Another sign drove the message home: “No standing on the dance floor.”
Jimmy led the way to an empty table. A couple of hundred people milled around, barely making a dent in the room. The band was tuning up and Cole, who hadn’t been on a stage since Woodstock, suddenly missed it with a ferocity that made his chest go hollow and his hands clench in his pockets. The front man was some kind of giant, a head taller than anyone else in the band, with a flaming red beard, long hair, a ten-gallon hat, a three-piece suit, and a blonde Telecaster. Pedal steel stage left, piano stage right, drums and standup bass in back, fiddle and guitar and mandolin in between. Up front, next to the giant, stood a stunning brunette with an acoustic guitar, who gave Cole a pang of another sort.
“You want a beer?” Jimmy said. “I don’t know if they have anything but Lone Star.”
“Lone Star’ll drink if it’s cold enough. Thanks.”
“Hey, everybody,” the giant said. “Welcome to the Broken Spoke. Let’s get the party started with a little number called ‘Well, Oh, Well.’” He vamped briefly behind a piano intro, then the brunette moved up to the mike and started belting the lyrics. The rest of the band fell into a shuffle, and before she made it to the chorus the couples had started two-stepping counter-clockwise around the floor, the same dance Cole had done with Corrina in Tyler. As he watched, the rhythms came back to him, and the timing on the turns. Jimmy arrived with two longnecks and Cole drank half of his with the first pull.
