American Appetites (4 page)

“How can you say that?”

“Other times, there've been other times—”

“Yes?”

“When I've taken a lot more.”

Ian said, in sudden distaste, “Jesus.”

He urged her to lie back on the sofa bed, on top of the crimson spread; he switched off the radio, stood sweating and panting above her, not knowing what to do. In the slanted mirror a flushed excited man regarded him covertly: glasses sliding down his nose, nostrils widened, flaring.

He said suddenly, as if he'd just now thought of it, “Your boyfriend, this Fermi—where is he?”

“Not here,” Sigrid said.

“Then where?”

“Back up to Cambridge. He left last night.”

“Did you have a fight, last night?”

“Nights. The night before too.”

“And what came of it?”

“I'm going to have the baby. I said.”

“You're going to have the baby?”

“The phone's off the hook, isn't it?”

Ian looked about, in the mess, for a telephone. Yes, the receiver was off the hook.

“I told him not to call me for a while, a day or two, but he might change his mind and call; and I can't talk to him now.”

Sigrid was lying very still, surprisingly docile now, her bluish eyelids heavy and hooded but her voice quite clear. The disheveled braid poked out stiff and clublike above her head as if she, and it, had been frozen in mid-fall.

Ian said, “Have you seen a doctor about the pregnancy?”

“No.”

“Would you like me to find a doctor for you? There is an excellent medical center in Hazelton.”

“Thank you, but no.”

“I'll be happy to; it's no trouble at all. And if you are concerned about payment—”

“It's really an abortion clinic I want.”

“The doctor could refer you to one, couldn't he?”

“I want a woman doctor.”

“It may be that there
is
a woman doctor.”

Though Sigrid could not see him, Ian smiled, smiled in exasperation; their exchange reminded him of nothing so much as one of the typically, and maddeningly, circumlocutious exchanges he or Glynnis was likely to have with their daughter, in which undercurrents of will and desire contend, like literal currents beneath the surface of a body of water, tugging one now this way, now that, in response to no evident pattern. He said again, “Let me help you, though. You called me, after all.”

“It isn't the baby's fault. That's the primary thing.”

“I'm not sure that it's the ‘primary' thing.”

“Then what is?”

“Your health. Your well-being. Your—” And he paused, about to say,
Your future
. He said, “Simply your well-being. What you want to do, and not what another person wants you to do. Having a baby under such circumstances . . .”

Sigrid said, in a vague, rather wandering voice, “But I love him too. The father.”

“I'm sure you do,” Ian said. “Otherwise—” He laughed, but the sound was harsh, dry, and ungiving: the very sound of jealousy.

Sigrid's legs were not smooth-shaven but covered lightly, almost invisibly, with red-blond hairs. Ian felt an urge, an impulse, to kneel and touch, drawing a forefinger against the grain of the hairs . . . an urge, yet more powerful, to press his face, his hungry mouth, against her belly: against the wiry-soft mound of hair, red-gold too it would be, and curly, and warm, and damp, that most mysterious and secret of female hair, between her thighs.

And she was pregnant, too; and that too was secret.

He was thinking of, many years ago, his wife's fresh young body: its beauty that had seemed to him amazing, and amazing that it was in a sense
his
. He was thinking, his breath coming now quickly, the sweat breaking out more frankly beneath his arms, of how he'd made love to her, that first time; and the other “first” times: that summer in Italy and the subsequent winter in Cambridge, the long mornings when they'd deliberately stayed in bed, the long nights when they'd gone to bed early . . . before the baby was born, and their lives were irrevocably altered.

Yet their lives, it had always seemed to Ian, when he was in one of his brooding, involuted moods, had been irrevocably altered before Bianca's birth: Glynnis's very pregnancy and
her
moods, that so excluded him, that (and he was certain he did not imagine or invent) Glynnis willed might exclude him. For her exultation, her supremacy, in pregnancy, childbirth, nursing, had cut him out: made him feel not only irrelevant but, so often, in the way; his wife looked at him and felt the obligation of love, for of course she
did
love him, while another kind of love, sheerly physical, instinctual, as intimate as her own flesh, pulled at her. As hot, heavy, urgent, he guessed, as the milk in her breasts that gave pain if it was not released.

And she had insisted, both times, upon natural childbirth; the psychoprophylactic method, as the medical texts called it. And Ian too, of necessity, had been involved, had of course been involved: attending classes with her, going through her exercises with her, breathing with her, at first wholeheartedly and then with increasing concern and apprehension. For, both times, Glynnis's obstetricians had warned her and Ian against natural childbirth: the pregnancies were not quite right; too much labor, too much pain, might be involved, a protracted strain on both the mother's and the babies' hearts. The obstetricians had issued their warnings; but Glynnis, being Glynnis, chose not to listen. She wanted, she said, to be fully conscious: to be in control of what was happening and not controlled by it. “Childbirth under anesthetic would be like making love under anesthetic,” Glynnis had said half seriously. “I want at least to know that I'm alive.”

So Ian had endured the labors with her, the first eleven hours, the second eighteen: unspeakably long hours of pain, unmitigated agony, poor Glynnis's screams so piercing Ian believed they must have penetrated the hospital walls. If he chose he could hear those screams still, those guttural cries with their note of sheer disbelief and astonishment, as if the sufferer could not quite believe that what was happening to her was really happening. At the height of labor he had assisted the obstetrician in a pelvic examination, each time, and had, each time, almost fainted: helping his wife (herself helpless, slick with sweat and flat on her back) fulfill herself as a woman. As if, he thought, she were a portal by which the invisible universe became visible . . . the inchoate God of mere spirit heaved into living flesh. Had not a mystic named Bousquet, of whom Ian McCullough had never heard, declared that mankind wants to be the soul of those forces that created him? So Glynnis said, and so Glynnis believed.

It was a miracle, and he bowed before it; it
was
a miracle, and he would not have denied it. But the hours of agony, and the hours of screams, and the tears, and the sweat, and the blood, and his wife's beautiful face contorted beyond recognition, like the face of a sinner in hell—in liquefied hell . . . like the face of one of the damned, the
anonymous
damned, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel—those hours had frightened him deeply, as if the marrow of his bones had been permanently chilled. And the second infant had died.

Ian had been impotent, intermittently, for months following both births. He had nightmares, sudden seizures of panic, dread, resentment, fury. He did not blame Glynnis for his own weaknesses, whether physical or emotional; nor did he, he was certain, blame her for the infant boy's death, for her loss after all had been greater than his. And yet, sexually aroused, he was likely to feel a contrary emotion, of something very close to visceral panic. For to enter another person in love is to violate the other in pain and bring about, at once, or in time, irrevocable loss.

He stood above Sigrid Hunt, who seemed to have fallen asleep, thinking these thoughts—indeed, being overcome by them—and could not have said, afterward, how long he stood there, his senses sharpened to the point of pain and his heart beating hard, angrily, as if in the presence of an adversary.

3.

He remained with Sigrid Hunt for most of that afternoon, at first watching over her while she slept (alert to alterations in her breathing that might mean she was slipping into a deeper and more dangerous sort of sleep), then reasoning with her (and Ian McCullough was at his most eloquent when “reason” came into play): persuading her finally that, in her special circumstances, terminating her pregnancy as quickly as possible was the only solution, a solution both humane and logical. Ian had perceived early on that of course the vain young woman did not really want to have a baby; but she did, no doubt, want the struggle, the
agon
, of wanting it and being denied it: or, rather, of being compelled (out of her own magnanimity, for instance) to sacrifice it to necessity. She was vain, but she was also tractable: far more tractable than Glynnis.

So, in the end, she acquiesced—“I suppose you're right; I see your point of view”—precisely as Ian had anticipated, as a gesture of submission to him. As if she could allow herself to go against her heart's desire, to be coerced into doing wrong, moral wrong, only at the urging of another.

By degrees Ian's eyes, which had been, since boyhood, abnormally sensitive to gradations of light—blinded in stark sunshine, weak in the dark—became accustomed to the attenuated light in Sigrid Hunt's flat; as, by degrees, he'd stopped hearing the barking dog in the adjacent yard. He had time, while Sigrid slept, to consider, in detail, his surroundings and to wonder, dispassionately now, why he was here; what urging, as of a hand pressed rudely against his back, had brought him here? With its low ceiling and exposed floorboards and crooked blinds and grimy windowsills, with its quarreling decorative “touches”—the orange, red, and parrot-green carpets, three Georgia O'Keeffe flower-abstraction reproductions on the walls, several aggressively ugly junk sculptures of the kind executed solely by friends—it seemed to him both squalid and intensely romantic; like the room in which he'd lived for a year, the most emotionally turbulent year of his life, in Ann Arbor, in 1959.

He had been a scared boy of twenty-two, skinny and round-shouldered and chronically perplexed, overworked in his graduate studies and exhausted by self-imposed deadlines and tyrannical dreams of perfection, prematurely weary of living, like a creature in whom spasms of life articulate themselves even as the creature sinks, ebbs, dies, like a pebble tossed carelessly into a pond: its very weight, its
quidditas
, dooming it to extinction. Ian McCullough had come to the University of Michigan on a fellowship, suffused with enthusiasm for the future, and within two months he had lapsed into depression, compulsive thoughts, a preoccupation with suicide: a preoccupation with the horror of realizing that, in his flesh, in his skin, in his very being, he was incapable of determining any connection with anything or anyone outside him.
Just as we lie alone in our graves, so indeed do we live alone
, he'd thought repeatedly, so hypnotized by these damning words that he'd long forgotten where he had first heard them. He had never told anyone, not even Glynnis, not even Denis Grinnell, of the visit he had once made to the most highly regarded professor in the Michigan philosophy department at that time, a former student of Wittgenstein, in order to confront the man with a proposition: “If there is no
logical
, no
necessary
, no
causal
connection between interior and exterior consciousness, shouldn't we all kill ourselves? What is the point of continuing?” The reasonableness with which these words were spoken quite belied the desperation behind them, but the man merely smiled at Ian, as at a son, and said, “You're undernourished, you've been neglecting your health, I know the symptoms: your blood sugar is down.”

Not long afterward, in any case, Glynnis entered his life: and changed it forever.

Their meeting was sheerly accidental: Ian had been in a cafeteria, “behaving strangely,” as Glynnis afterward said, as if he were dizzy, or walking in his sleep; suddenly his nose began to bleed, and he seemed helpless to deal with it: blood on his shirt, splotches on the floor, so very red, so suddenly and humiliatingly public. . . . Desperate, he'd searched his pockets for a tissue but found nothing. And a very attractive red-haired girl advanced upon him, asking matter-of-factly, “Can I help?”

Yes. Yes. Oh yes.

HE WAS SAYING
, now, to Sigrid Hunt, in his most practical, fatherly tone, “This doesn't mean that you are cruel, or selfish, or vindictive—or ‘unnatural.' It doesn't mean that you might not, at another time in your life, really want to have a baby.” Sigrid listened, listened very hard. “And if it's a question of money. . . .”

She shook her head slowly, wiped her face with a towel soaked in cold water that Ian had given her. “I can't accept money from you,” she said. “Even as a loan.”

“Surely, as a loan?”

“I just don't think I can do that, Dr. McCullough.”

“Are we back to ‘Doctor'!”

Ian smiled, stared at her, thinking, Why am I so angry? I am in no way an angry man.

“But I think you had better do that, under the circumstances,” he said gently. “Don't you?”

She stared at the floor, wriggled her bare, dirty toes. In moving she released a scent, an odor, of flesh upon which perspiration has newly dried, gummy, talcum-y, reminding Ian of those days, now long past, when he'd changed his infant daughter's diapers: the relief in tossing away the soiled diaper; the small cheery reliable pleasure of affixing the new into place; the comforting smell, now long forgotten, of baby powder.

Sigrid said, not meeting his eye, “But this is a loan, of course. I'll repay it as soon as”—and here her voice dropped, grew vague again—“as things fall into place in my life.”