14 Stories (12 page)

Our living together caused a minor scandal among the faculty and school administration. Eventually the principal told us that because of the large student interest in our affairs and the parental concern about the effect such alleged teachers' moral laxity might have on the children, one of us would have to leave. Libby settled on my working, since I had gotten her pregnant a few weeks back and she was more than satisfied to stay home reading and enjoying her pregnancy and whatever she could do around the house for me.

That was a very beautiful time in our lives. We never had a fight, never a serious misunderstanding. Every time we got even slightly ticked off at one another, the less emotionally upset of us would say “Let's talk the damn thing out,” and we would get whatever was bothering us out into the open before it overwhelmed us inside and made us explode. Then the baby dropped, the labor pains came and went and stayed, and I drove Libby to the hospital and waited in the waiting room while the baby was being delivered. A few hours later a nurse told me my wife had just given birth to a healthy cheerful seven-pound-six-ounce boy baby. I said that was nice, very nice indeed, and my legs tottered and I told her I was about to faint. The arms that guided me to the couch were gentle and strong, the hands that stroked my forehead and nose more knowing and softer than any that had ever touched me. In my semiconsciousness I imagined these same hands skimming over my entire body, giving me more physical pleasure than for the first time I could possibly stand. It was the nurse. She was towering over me, more than six feet of her, and she was saying “It's all right, Mr. Block, your wife and son are as well as can be.” I held her hands, said they were soft, very comforting, she was a good nurse and she said “Thanks kindly, as I don't often get roses thrown at me like that.” I told her that Libby and I weren't married because her divorce hadn't come through yet, and she said that wasn't very unusual these days with what she had read and heard about and in fact she had the exact opposite problem as me in that she was very much legally married but her husband didn't want any children. I said I loved kids and unlike Libby I wanted to have a half dozen more of them and that I thought it was a pity about her husband because I felt she'd make a superlative mother with those comforting hands and empathic disposition and because she was in such a selfless if not self­demeaning profession and also because of her body—I meant because she looked so strong and healthy to me that it seemed she could give birth to many babies and even three or four at a time. She said that come to think of it she was quite strong and healthy and that also being my nurse in a sense she was giving her most thoughtfully considered medical advice that I have a coffee with her downstairs, since we both looked like we could use one.

After coffee Regina said she lived nearby and her husband was at the first of his two consecutive jobs he held to stay away from her and that my wife wouldn't be ready to see me for a few hours yet so why didn't I come to her place for a nourishing breakfast and some small talk. I went gladly as I was very much taken by Regina. She was so powerful yet tender, gaminelike pretty in a big physical way. It was exciting merely to stand beside her and think what I could do with a woman with such an immense perfectly proportioned body and legs that had the length and strength of a champion high jumper.

Regina served me sausages and eggs, sat beside me on the couch stroking my hands as I stroked her hair and asking if I had any post­faint effects. Then she said she knew she could lose her hospital job for saying this to a man whose woman she had just assisted in the delivery room, but she was a compulsively truthful type so here goes: possibly nothing but she was drawn to me not only intellectually and wanted to make love right now and she was sorry but that was how she felt and if I had any objections to what she just said she would understand perfectly if I left the flat without saying a word, though if I wanted to be carried to bed as she had to do with her near-impotent husband most times then she would try and understand that minor quirk too.

She was the most imaginative, inexhaustible and relaxed woman I'd ever known in bed and I didn't want to lose her—that was my first thought after she fell asleep. I felt so secure, healthy and strong with her that I thought my feelings for her went beyond my previously held conceptions about love: she was a total physical experience who could help me attain mystical heights during and right after our lovemaking peaks, though Regina had simply referred to us as two very normal good love-buddies. In the time between our shower and second breakfast we decided we could never leave each other nor have the heart or words to tell Libby, Regina's husband and the school and hospital administrations about our impossible-to-describe physical-love relationship, so the one alternative was to pack up some clothes, send Libby almost all the money we had with a promise of more to come, and go to another area to live out our lives as lovers and have half-a-dozen children. I wrote Libby a letter saying I hoped she would understand, Regina left a note for her husband saying her leaving was partly a result of his back-to-back jobs and stomach-to-stomach indifference, and we cabbed to the train station and boarded a train that would take us to Canada and our new citizenships.

About two hours out of the city Regina asked if I wanted to go with her to the dining car. I told her that just for now I wanted to be alone with my thoughts about Libby and the child, and she said she knew what I meant she was luckier than I in that she was leaving nobody behind. Regina left, I closed my eyes and tried to call up the image of an unpregnant Libby and our newborn child, when a woman asked if the seat was taken. I said the one beside me was but the two across from me weren't, and the woman sat down, she was of a strange racial mixture that was unidentifiable and fascinating and beautiful, crossed her legs, these extremely graceful and shapely dancer's legs that I suddenly imagined wrapped around my neck and belly, and looked out the window. I couldn't stop staring at her and finally said “I'm sorry, I'm staring, I don't normally stare at women, no that's not true, I stare a lot, and don't even listen to me if you feel I'm annoying you, I'll change seats in fact if you'd prefer that, but listen, I think you're spectacular, your face fascinates me, your body staggers me, I've always wanted to paint and with you I'd do nothing but spend the next ten years painting every part of your face and body, no all of this is such blatantly corny rot and what I'm going to say next might even sound more ludicrous to you, but listen, something's come over me, overrun and overwhelmed me, how does one go about saying this to a woman: the moment you sat down I knew that I had never felt so excited about someone in my life.”

She said “Well now, that's all very interesting and such and especially when this elaborate confession comes from what appears to be a moderately sane, intelligent and handsome man, but I must rely on the phrase that you know nothing about me,” and I said “Feelings, instincts, impulses, they're always more reliable than knowing and knowledge and they tell me to say that I've never said or done anything comparable to what I'm going to say and hopefully do right now but would you, if I pulled the train's stop cord, jump off and run away with me even if I said I had had similar feelings, instincts and impulses for a woman last night only a few minutes after another woman I love very much had given birth to my first child and that the birth-giving woman is still in the hospital and the woman from last night is now in this train's dining car and about to return and sit close to me, comfy with the thought that she and I will be spending the rest of our lives together in Canada?” “Pull the cord and find out,” she said. I looked down the aisle and saw Regina pushing open the door leading to our car, her other hand holding a tray of food for me. I pulled the cord, the train jolted to a stop, Regina fell down and looked quizzically at me, the woman said “I'd say you proved something or another all right,” and we ran to the other end of the car and jumped off the train.

We walked across the tracks to a diner and went inside. June said “I feel lovely, I've never felt so lovely, I've never met a man with such entrancing derring-do and guts, I have to go to the can, I'll think of you every long second I'm in there, doll.” We kissed, practically knotted our tongues, she rubbed my backside and said “You feel and smell so warm and true, I think I finally got myself a winner,” and danced a whirlabout to the ladies' room.

I sat at the counter. The waitress came out of the kitchen and with just her first nearly incomprehensible question as to what I wanted to order, I felt that she was the most natural looking and acting woman I'd ever come across. Her hair was in no particular state of disorder, her skin as clean and creamy as a just-bathed little child's behind, she wore no makeup, didn't need any, no underclothes either, and her body looked as if it had completed the last stage of its development just an hour before I entered the place. She seemed completely free, unsophisticated and just naturally wise, something I wanted to become as I was now sick of my promiscuous adventures and degenerate city wit and charm, and when she said “Excuse me there,” and smiled the brightest happiest most unselfconscious smile a person could give out, “but I asked what you want to order,” I said “You, that's all, nothing else, just you as you are.” She said “Good Jay, I haven't had one like you in here since about an hour ago when the last batch of foul-smelling horny truckers stopped by.”

“But I'm serious. My woman's in the john there, but if you give me my order the way I want it then we'll be out of this joint in a flash, your apron and sneakers tossed behind you forever, and you'll never regret it, you'll always remain free and warm and happy as you are and never get overcomplicated and neurotic because I'd never allow it, we can make this life the most enriching experience possible for each other and all you have to do is give the word.” She said “What's the word?” and I said “You just said it” and gave her my hand, she climbed over the counter, the cook in back yelled “Where you going, Cora, and what in hell makes you think you can be leaping over the counter like that? Now go back proper around the right way and pick up this egg order. And dammit, you know the Board of Health has serious ideas about our girls wearing hairnets—I said why aren't you wearing your hairnet, Cora?” but we were past the screen door, June was still in the john, we ran across the road and stuck our thumbs out and the first car coming our way stopped for us and the driver said “Where to?” I was immediately taken with his forceful intense looks, his dark hair down to his shoulders and his lean body, and once in the car with the door just shut I said “Would you go into collusion with me and drive me to the end of the earth if need be and even continue to respect and love me though I'm about to ask you to tell this diner beauty here who I love as I've never loved anyone in my life to get out?” The man said “I was really only going to the store for a six­pack and bag of corn chips but I probably would, yes I would.”

He stopped the car, Cora got out and said how throwing away her apron and new white sneakers had been about the most goddarn stupid suggestion on my part because now it would cost her a whole mess of money to replace them if she ever could get her job back, and slammed the door and crossed the road and stuck her thumb out for a ride back to the diner. I felt bad about Cora, but being with the person I loved I knew that everything would turn out all right, that love had its own actions, that when one loved there was always understanding, that love was surely the only way. We drove westward and the countryside and mountains and bright blue sky beyond and really life itself had never looked so glorious.

They want to take my leg away. Cut it off just a little below the hip. Gangrene's set in around the ankle. Spread to the heel and now shoots of it to the skin. Not much blood circulates down there because the aorta's clogged at the knee and calf. Black tissue they call the cancerous stuff. My wife said to me what else can you do? I said anything better than that. She said the only alternative was the implant but it just wouldn't take. A fibrous artery to bypass the blocked spots and get some more blood flowing to the foot so the gangrene would dry up. I'm seventy-five. The real arteries weren't strong enough to stretch far enough to meet the implanted tube, the vascular surgeon said. Or something like that. And that or your life. Plain as that. Horrible as that must sound to you both. Sorry as I am to be so frank. Well I'll at least walk some more before I go. You won't walk for more than a month and probably less. The gangrene's spreading too fast. You mean the black tissue, I said. Call it what you want, he said. Endless trouble's what I'm calling it, though the worst part of the worst dream I'm now waking up from is what I'd like to call that rot. They all agree. Vascular man, internist, urologist who operated on me to have my prostate removed. That's what I originally came in here for. I was fine after that operation. Learning to urinate like I used to. Three days away from home. When my wife noticed two ulcers from the friction burns caused by the postoperative surgical stockings they'd bound around my feet but too tight so I wouldn't shoot an embolism in bed. They said complications like the embolisms they prevented and ulcers they weren't smart enough to avoid by simply removing my stockings at night often happen to men of my age. And because I'm diabetic and my arteries are crummy, the ulcers wouldn't heal. Gangrene set in and spread. But I've been over that route. Those murderous black shoots. And they only gave my wife fifty-fifty I'll survive the operation and nobody's promising my condition won't get worse and worse if I do. I stick my wrist with the vascular man's scissors, then the other. Then the blood flows. Better than getting a leg sliced off. Then my head flows. Better than dying like a what? Sitting outside in front. Trouser leg pinned to my behind by two extra-safe diaper safety pins. In time the surviving leg sliced off. Till I'm sitting in front like a what? Like a what? That's my wife standing by the bed. Comes in every day at noon and here she is at ten. Tough luck, lady, I try to say. She's ringing, screaming. Running, in the corridor screaming. A nurse comes. Tough luck, I want to say. Runs outside the room and yells call the resident. Too late, I say. And I'm so sorry for you, dear.