Making Love (15 page)

The procedure was so mechanical that Jane found herself shocked. An event of this kind in the late nineteeth century, or even in the mid-1960's, might be expected to mark the victim indelibly for life; but now it had become as respectable as lancing a carbuncle. No stigma, Jane realized, only temporary discomfort. Blood was drawn from her left arm, a urine sample deposited with the lab nurse, and a date was made for Friday at three so that Conlon could be with her, since there was a definite absence of next of kin.
 

An orderly person, and with an American Express card at her fingertips, Jane checked into the Regency Hotel, developed a solid rapport with the room-service waiter, a paternal Greek, and waited.
 

Saranac authorities were informed that she had come down with bronchial pneumonia and would return when the miracle drugs had done their work. She sent a letter to this effect on Dr. Charney's office stationery to the dean of women, with the suggestion that a recuperative period in Arizona might be necessary.
 

Jane had a few nervous flutters. She hadn't been under the knife since tonsils and adenoids at seven, but green-gowned Charney and his informative nurses, who answered every question she could think of asking, gave her confidence. Ether for pain, and pethadine for forgetfulness, brought her some confused dreams; she woke up in a sunlit room at the back of the brownstone with a tree branch, not entirely bare, fluttering outside her window. Conlon, wearing dark vigil glasses, sat under a lamp reading a copy of
Playboy.
 

“Is it over?” Jane asked, dazed, but relaxing with the assurance that she was able to ask a question.
 

“Yes, how do you feel?” The magazine dropped from her lap.
 

“I'm thirsty. Can I have a drink?”
 

A glass of water was held for her with a glass straw.
 

“What's stuck in my arm? It hurts like hell.”
 

“That's intravenous something.” Conlon examined the label on the bottle. “It's a glucose solution. I guess it's low blood sugar or something equally unfatal.” She put the glass back on the night table. “How are you, Janey? I was worried.”
 

“God, I'm glad this is over.” She pushed her hair back from her eye. “No bittersweet memories, just a belly ache.”
 

“I spoke to your father in California after it was over.”
 

“That got him off the hook.”
 

“I had a different impression. He sounded concerned.”
 

The room was passively anonymous and Jane cast her eye around at the metal cabinets, the green chair, a no smoking sign under the opened transom. A half-eaten hero sandwich with congealed tomato gravy on the dresser made her retch. A nurse she vaguely remembered came in and placed a small metal bowl under her mouth. Her stomach was empty and the dry heaves made her throat raw and brought a searing unlocalized pain in her chest.
 

“You ought to try to sleep,” the nurse said.
 

“I don't think I can.”
 

“I'll get you something.”
 

“Jane, I don't understand why you didn't tell me about this weeks ago ... ?” Conlon's voice carried a sense of shrill grief. “Don't you trust me?”
 

“It wasn't that. I wanted to work it out myself. I didn't even tell Alan he was the prime suspect. It just didn't make any difference.”
 

“He wants to marry you,” Conlon said a bit nervously. “I told him the truth.”
 

“I wish you hadn't.”
 

“He kept calling me and following me around. I had no choice.”
 

Her eyes rested on Conlon's worried face and she extended her hand. Her recent encounters with her parents had made her aggressive toward everyone. Her dangerous ability to wound possessed the impersonal impact of a bomb.
 

“You did the right thing,” she said. Conlon's face lightened.
 

“Jane, I'd never do anything to hurt you.”
 

The nurse came in, slipping between the two. She rubbed alcohol on Jane's arm, then pushed a syringe in.
 

“I want to start a new....” Jane muttered, closing her eyes and falling off into a dreamless sleep almost instantly.
 

She awoke at around nine. Darkness and faint rumblings from the street. Two men argued about a car double-parked and a woman protested about a lost key. Conlon had dozed off with the transistor on her lap, and Jonathan Schwartz's voice promising softness along with musical oblivion paused to identify WNEW-FM.
 

“Con—”
 

“What? Thought I was sleeping? Just resting my eyes. Any better?”
 

“Hungry.”
 

“I think all you can have is beef bouillon.”
 

Conlon got up and opened the door and found the duty nurse. Words were spoken but Jane was still too fuzzy to make any connection. Beef boullion was brought and Conlon spooned it to Jane. It was the best beef boullion she'd ever tasted.
 

“I feel like shit,” Jane said.
 

“That's the road to recovery. I went to mass and lit a candle for you,” Conlon said, blushing. “I think it helped, Janey. You're going to be all right.”
 

“I knew I would be,” she said sourly.
 

“What, death wishes from you? I don't believe it.”
 

“I don't know ... just feel terribly messed up.”
 

“That's normal.” She disapproved of Jane's courage.
 

Jane bit into an apple and picked some skin out of her teeth. She pushed herself up on an elbow, pulled out a Kleenex from the box, and blew her nose and looked at Conlon.
 

“What day is it?”
 

“Still Friday. You can go tomorrow if you're well enough.” She paused, then came and sat on the edge of the bed. “Jane, I think you should come back to school.”
 

“I couldn't face it now. I don't know if I'll ever go back.”
 

“Then what do you think you'll do?” Conlon asked. The prospect of losing Jane, finishing her year marking time, was unbearable. The routine of classes, bleak weather, and sneaking down to New York to see Mel (once a month at the most) depressed her. Leaving school would bring a break with her parents, giving up the scholarship, the floating sensation of uncertainty. Jane propped up her pillow and lit a cigarette. She coughed when she inhaled.
 

“I was eight weeks' pregnant with the thing or whatever it was. And I'm not sorry I got rid of it.”
 

“I suppose you're right to feel that way. If you loved Alan....”
 

Jane angrily rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. Conlon had almost made her cry and she wanted her to go.
 

“I thought I did for about five minutes. Oh, Conlon, it's over, so stop milking it, will you?”
 

Conlon got up to go. She was late for Mel, and knew he'd leave without her.
 

“In a way I'm lucky, Jane ... not to have your guts. I'll see you when I'm down again.” She checked her makeup quickly in the mirror, hoping Jane wouldn't notice, then hugged her friend. She felt irritable and aroused.
 

 

* * * *

 

On Monday Jane left the clinic, stronger and strangely happy. She had her hair done at Vidal Sassoon's, always an uplift. The beautiful young man who worked on her told her that she'd left it too long. Her hair was greasy and needed a cut, but she talked him out of it. When he combed it out, he complained that she looked like a lioness, but his remark pleased her and she put down the
Cosmopolitan
she'd been half-reading—which had introduced her to the “New Feminism,” by another
Wunder-kind
of ladies' journalism and Smith—and stared at her image. She imagined she detected a new layer of depth, or was it simply her chalky complexion and the determination to resume her life at some mysterious point?
 

She ate a blood-rare piece of liver at the Running Footman. The atmosphere of the place relaxed her and she had a corner booth which allowed her to spread out the
Times
and study the sublet situation. Later that afternoon, walking off the Irish coffee, she struck oil in Gramercy Square. A heavy-breathing hysterical woman whom she called from a United cigar store agreed to meet her and show her apartment after Jane swore she wasn't a real estate leech.
 

Turning up at the apartment, Jane was confronted by a shrill, scrawny woman in her forties, wearing glasses on a chain and the unhappy facial characteristics of a Doberman. She kept Jane standing in a dimly lit foyer and explained that she was returning to her family in Duluth, a city with a reputation for sanity and unambiguous sex, for her husband (Mr. Burke, Jane learned under the mauve floral wallpaper) had absconded with money from their joint savings account to run off with a younger man who'd bewitched him when the two had appeared in an unsuccessful ABC-TV pilot episode. Officials from the Bowery Savings Bank and the network were mounting a two-pronged search to locate both the missing funds and certain items of wardrobe the demon lovers had taken.
 

“We're going to try to get Mr. Burke on a morals rap,” she announced to Jane, who was admiring the view of Gramercy Park from the seventh floor. “George Mosley to the best of my knowledge is under twenty-one. Never trust a Scorpio, Miss Siddley.”
 

As the oral petition of grievances continued to pour out, Jane was struck by the fact that the woman's suffering had reached a peak of desperation which she was compelled to confide the agony of her personal life to a stranger.
 

“There's nobody to talk to, is there?” Jane said.
 

“It's been a season of disasters. We had more returns than Klein's. I guess I know where I stand now.” Tears dribbled down her face but she didn't bother to wipe them.
 

“The kitchen is through the arch. Small but serviceable. I put the louvers myself. Mr. Burke couldn't even change a plug. It's three hundred a month.”
 

“Do you want any references?”
 

“I don't think that'll be necessary. Just a year's rent in advance and five hundred dollars against breakage,” she said, expecting Jane to faint in her tracks.
 

Jane wrote out a check for forty-one hundred dollars, and Mrs. Burke eyed her suspiciously.
 

“I'll have to wait till it clears, with all the rubber bouncing around.”
 

“You can get it cleared fast if you pay an extra dime.”
 

“I never knew that.” She stopped, examined Jane from head to toe. “How does a young little thing like you come to have that much cash?”
 

“I inherited it.”
 

“You could buy yourself a mink coat.”
 

“Or two Volkswagens, but I prefer the apartment.”
 

“My lawyer'll send round the lease in the morning. Where are you staying?”
 

“The Regency.”
 

“Doesn't sound very respectable,” Mrs. Burke observed. “It's not one of those places on Forty-second Street, is it?”
 

“Park and Sixty-second.”
 

“One other thing—you're not an airline stewardess, or fronting for a group of them?”
 

“No, honestly, I'm not.”
 

“I turned away dozens of them. A whole crowd from American Airlines wanted to camp down here. If you ask me, I'd say they were call girls in uniform.”
 

She held the check tightly in her hand, blew the ink even though it was dry, and adjusted her glasses.
 

“I've got a washing machine that you can use and I suggest you stick to Lux. I've never swerved, even though there've been all these commercials about enzymes. It tests a person's loyalty. Listen, my lawyer will give you a call in the morning.”
 

“Have I got it?”
 

“Let's hear what he has to say on the subject. I'll tell him I like you.”
 

“Thanks. I hope you catch up with Mr. Burke.”
 

“I wonder if I really want to.” She was still crying silently and Jane took out a handkerchief and wiped her face.
 

The hotel room began to bug her and she had trouble sleeping so she switched from one talk show to another. Celebrity guests were selling books, records, movies and fighting hungrily for the camera. They were all the same, everyone talking at the same time, trivial stories were applauded and no one listened. Me, me, me, I, I, I were the only words that came over. There was news that wasn't news and personality weathermen with flashlights and charts who babbled on so much, so that she couldn't even be sure if it was going to rain or not. She wasn't so unhappy as simply numb, and when she leaned over to look at the sleeping pills, toying with the idea of swallowing a batch of them, she made the irritating discovery that she had only two Seconals left. Even if she wanted to end it all she'd have to send out for it, and the drugstore was probably closed. She took the two remaining pills, found an early Raquel Welch movie, and went blissfully off to slumberland in five minutes.
 

At ten-thirty in the morning the phone rang, interrupting her dream at precisely the right moment, since the nurse at the clinic was just preparing her for Dr. Charney. Had she had the abortion? The growth of new hair which itched settled the question in her favor. The set was still on and Nancy Dickerson was advising an anxious world that Washington, D.C., was still in business.