The Boat (10 page)

"Your trousers too," he's saying. His eyebrows contort operat-ically. Then he sneezes. Two, three times: wet, clotty sneezes. "I'm sorry," he says. "What were you saying?"

"Hold on," I tell him. "I thought we went through all this last time." I try to stare him down. The effort is fruitless, though, in light of my last visit: me passing him stool samples, him digging around inside my asshole with his lubed, latexed, incredibly knuckled finger. It felt like he was feeding a knotted rope into my gut.

He's still watching me. I take off my patent leather shoes, unwrap my satin cummerbund, slide down my black pleated trousers and roll miserably onto the examination table. He doesn't even show the token modesty to look away. Instead, he starts talking. He talks about fecal occults and flexible sigmoids and adeno-something polyps and asks me if I've read the pamphlet he gave me.

"Yeah," I lie. "But I thought I just had piles."

"Hemorrhoids, yes. They certainly cause some blood in the stool. Today we're testing farther up."

He stops talking to sneeze again. I turn away from him, wince as he grazes the hard lump outside my rosebud, then a sharper pain, then a real humdinger:

Elise – my daughter, my baby girl – just a bloody, scraggly mess between my wife's harness-hung legs. Hideous under the man-made lights. Then a lump of flesh, stewing in sickness, pulling every possible contagion out of the air and into her body. The pain burns. Weeks and months she lay, first in the incubator, then the cot, under the watchful eyes of her mother. Her mother, who watched me as closely as her. Elise inherited her seriousness. Even before she could speak she'd look at me, unblinking, bringing me down to an accusable level, her eyes deep with understanding. I hadn't wanted her and she knew it. My lower body floods with water. It feels warm and wrong. Something's yanked out of me and my eyes tear up.

We're done, I realize. From the pain, my ass must look like black pudding. I start pulling up my underwear when I hear Hingess's voice, "Hold on there." I look over my shoulder. He's wheeling something toward me-a laptop-attached to about ten feet of evil-looking black rubber hosing.

"That was just the enema," he says, "to prep you. This is the sigmoidoscope." "You're not going to-"

"Only two feet of it."

"I want a smoke," I say. My face is salty, sopping with sweat.

I eye the hosing. Easily as thick as my thumb – probably thicker.

He frowns. Then he purses his lips and says, "All right. It'll help you breathe."

It hurts too much to sit up so, slouched on my side, I fumble in the bunched pant pockets around my ankles for a cigarette. I light it.

"Will you mind if I ask someone to assist?"

"What?" "A medical student. I want to demonstrate the procedure."

And then she's there, white-smocked, clipboard in hand, hair tied back in a bun. From sideways she's hot in a birdlike way, and I wonder refiexively if the doctor here has slipped it to her. She studies me with a detachment that verges on impudence. No way she's just some schmuck med student. It's
Park Avenue-
someone must have called in a favor. She acts like she sees this every day: a sweat-drenched man, naked save for his white wing-tip formal shirt, blood leaking from his ass, lying in a fetal position, shakily smoking a cigarette. Her coolness feels familiar to me.

The two of them start doctor-talking. I'm ordered to shift onto my left side. Someone lifts my right buttock, then from the locus of my rosebud the cold-hot pain flares again through the grid of my body. I can't breathe. It's okay, the doctor says. Slowly, breathe slowly through my mouth. Then he talks to Birdgirl, quick-fire, every word punctuated by a twist in my guts. The hosing goes in so deep it feels like part of it might snap off, stay trapped in there. My wobbling fingers drop the cigarette. I arch my head to look at the laptop screen, for some sign that it's worth it, that it'll be over soon, but all I see are smudges of gray and white. Large, hob-knuckled fingers pointing to them.

Then silence. The doctor and his sidekick are studying something on the screen. They mutter, speaking in Latin and percent ages. I rest my eyes. On the website photo she's got her mother's mouth. It doesn't smile.

"It's a big deal," Birdgirl says in a casual voice. When I turn to look I see it's Olivia; she's running her hands in small circles on her white smock, shaking her head at my thickness. "Of course it's a big deal. The Mayakovsky String Quartet. Carnegie Hall. Eighteen years old."

"She's getting married," I say. "To her manager."

"It's a big deal. It's serious."

"He's English."

"It's serious."

I agree with her – I'm nodding full of agreement when a putrid smell jogs me awake. Old anchovies and drain-clogged vegetables. The doctor, an inch from my face. My eyes heave into focus.

"Henry. You all right?"

Without asking permission I pull up my crinkled pants, cram my shirt into them and haul myself upright with only a slight moan. My feet dangle, toes stretched down, trying to hook my shoes. She doesn't usually come so close, so clear. The doctor confers with Birdgirl in a low tone. Then he turns to me.

"You have a number of adenomatous polyps in your colon."

"It's not your fault, Doc," I joke automatically. I grope again for my shoes.

"Most polyps are benign and the sigmoidoscope can remove them. However, the size and number of adenomatous polyps I have observed means we will have to carry out further tests."

"It's serious," Birdgirl murmurs. The doctor glances at her and she frowns, blushing.

At this point I catch on. They're not talking about my hemorrhoids. I zip up my pants.

"Tests? For what?"

He shows me pictures he's saved on the laptop. The polyps, he explains, are superfluous bits of tissue, generally shaped like mushrooms. There, he points, and there. I study the grainy images, trying, pretending to see. Then I see: the colony of little mushrooms in my colon. He's only inspected one third of it. He will perform biopsies through a colonoscope, he tells me, during a full colonie examination. He has awful breath. He will use a scythe-like wire to harvest my mushrooms, but there is a chance that malignant cells have already metastasized into my bloodstream or lymph system. I'm having trouble getting past the mushrooms. Birdgirl looks down, nods thoughtfully.

"Give it to me straight," I say.

Hingess is one of the most expensive gastro men in town and this is why I pay him: for his straight-shooting, no-holds-barred, expert opinion: "You will very likely develop colorectal cancer," he says, "if you haven't done so already."

I'm a painter. A good one, by most accounts. I look for the angles, the things that lend complexion, the joke in things. My doctor's mouth smells like a fish has flipped inside and died. I'm sweating in my penguin suit, my asshole burning from all the wrong-way traffic. There's a girl in the room who I'd jump if I could stand up, but even if I did – get this – her face wouldn't budge from the same mix of tenderness and pity holding it together now.

I'm looking, waiting, but I can't find it. It doesn't exist. There is no joke.

***

IT WAS JACOB APELMAN'S DOING that I met Olivia eighteen years ago, when I was unhappily married to a terminally passive-aggressive wife, father to a chronically ailing baby daughter, and caretaker of a career that made my domestic life seem idyllic. I'd been with him a few years – he wasn't yet the hotshot he is now, of course – and maybe I wasn't his most gracious artist. In any case, when a life-study model canceled at the last minute, Apelman kept mum (he said later he was afraid I'd take it personally) and found a girl to replace her. He didn't tell me she was seventeen years old, had never modeled before, had been plucked like an apple from
Washington Square
.

The girl had a boyish haircut and a botany textbook. Immediately she took charge. Without a word, she let her clothes fall to the floor and stepped out of them, as though from a pool of water. My studio – the top floor of an old box factory in Gowanus – faced westward, and as the day wrung itself into evening the sunlight streaked across the river and through my tall, rust-flecked windows, stenciling light and shadows across the room. A chintzy coral effect. The girl ignored the chair, sat on the cement, naked, on a reef of light. She sat so her knees touched, her feet splayed apart to create a triangle of dark space. I was taken aback by the perfect fluke of the composition. Then, cool as you like, she picked up her book and said:
I'm ready
.

For years after that day, I'd continue to be amazed by the ability of her body to hold light. Even at the end – when she was flat and wooden under the hospice sheets. I'd watch her endlessly: following her body across each foot and nook of my studio; outside, walking through
Central Park
, lying down, the sun caught in her skin – or in bathtubs, watching how the water refracted the light on her face. I'd paint. It felt like cheating. Even after she moved in-after my wife and daughter left – she posed for me almost daily. Then, when she was tired of being watched, she'd lick a fingertip as though to turn a page but the finger would drop below her book and dangle over her groin. This didn't mean anything special, of course. If she smiled, though – not any old stretch but a smile broad enough to reveal her chipped canines – that was it, my cue, the first infallible move in our formula of sex. Always enough – there and then – to make me happy.

***

OLD APELMAN BEAMS WHEN HE SEES ME. "The big day!" he cries out, before marching across the polished floorboards of his gallery dodging sculptures made of wire and rubber bands, to give me a hug. Apelman's a sucker for all that man-to-man contact stuff. Right now, though, I'm a convert. I can't get enough: I'm nestling my chin against his beard when he shoves me away, pats me hard on the back a couple of times and says, "You smell like the main floor at Bloomingdale's."

It's true-I smell good. Mixed with sweat, the half ounce of French cologne I splashed on this morning seems to have brought forth a chemical pungency.

"And hey, buddy, did I see you
power walking
just now?"

I realize, after a while, he's talking about my squirmy, gimpish gait. A new aerobic regime, I tell him. We joke around about black-tie marathons and cardiac arrests – who'll finish first – but my heart's not in it. My mind's jammed. I know why I'm here – I'm ripe for Apelman's pep – and honestly, I'm trying to follow him as he jabbers away, but in my head I'm still inside her matchbox apartment, sharing a bathtub so small we both sit chin to knee; I'm watching her eat, sloppily lips smeared with mango juice, sweet with the nectar of plums. I never thought it would be me: the painter who falls for his nude model.
I love that
, she says. What?
When you look at me too long
. Then she smiles. I drag her toward me, fend her off. Through it all, she loves hitting me. Her lips turn martial. Afterward we fall apart, marks on our bodies, smelling of fruit and mineral spirits, soap and charcoal.
You're a dirty old man
, she says, giving me her best dirty young girl look, steering my cigaretted hand to her lips. I leave, each time, with new bruises.

No, I think to myself, no, get with it. Stay with the program.

"How's business?" I ask.

Apelman 's looking at me funny. I take another drag. Maybe he'd been hot for her. Maybe not. He'd never married. After a prolonged period of sulking and half-veiled threats on my part, they'd both denied it.

"Better," Apelman says slowly, "if my biggest name would give me something to sell."

"Freud's up to eight months now. Per painting."

"He's a perfectionist."

"I'm a perfectionist."

"Well," he says, "that explains why you've got nothing to give me."

We both grin. We're a regular riot together.

"Listen," I say. Then I stop – I realize I've got no idea what to tell him. "Actually. I've been meaning to talk – "

He motions me toward the back office. "Hey," he says, "forget it, buddy. That's not why I asked you here." He rests his hand on my tux shoulder. "Take all the time," he says.

But I know what he's thinking. I glance at the walls as I dodder behind him: splashes of chalky-colored oilsticks on linen and vinyl, photogravures and woodcut prints – all pulled off with the impatient skill and insolence of youth. They're good. Clamoring at his door. He always had a good eye, Apelman. He's thinking of my last exhibition – when was it?-more than a year ago now: those obsessive portraits of Olivia, black-layered and liquid, how I'd worried the same lines – trying to keep in the light – before it was shut off for good. The tube running out of her mouth, two plastic offshoots from her nose and the bright green wires that led to the bright blue box pumping breath in and out of her. Disney colors.

"How are your eyes?" Apelman asks.

I blink, looking for a place to throw my cigarette butt. A few months ago, my eyes joined in on my body's general strike. Some condition that made them more sensitive to light. An ironic incapacity. Everywhere I looked, everything looked brighter – then dimmer in a bright way through my sunglasses – like the color was drained out, like I was seeing everything at twilight. Anyway, my ophthalmologist, Andrew Werner, ran some tests and found nothing physically wrong.