Sweet Affliction (19 page)

“Prostitutes are
working
, Alex,” Lynnie says. “They're not poor deluded women who somehow have the idea that every man in the world wants to fuck them. They understand that not all guys are johns.”

Alex says nothing, and Lynnie feels the hot flush of embarrassement that comes with winning an argument.

But now she wonders if she was right. She is beginning to feel that she can see through men's clothing, through their skin, into their desires. What they want is to consume her. She can no longer make eye contact with strangers, she's taken to wearing sunglasses or pulling her jacket's hood low over her face when out in public.

She whispers to the tadpole. “I won't let them get you,” she says. But really she knows she is talking to herself.

Lynnie's roommate, Alice, who Lynnie suspects of not being totally okay with her line of work, says she can probably get Lynnie hired at her job. Six mornings a week Alice gets picked up in a van and driven an hour outside the city, to an organic farm. There she spends six hours in a zucchini patch with a paintbrush, hand-pollinating the flowers. Due to the bee shortage, she explains, small farms have suffered terrible fruit and vegetable drop, since most of them refuse or can't afford the patented self-pollinating seeds the mega-farms rely on. Their only option is to hire people like Alice to hand-pollinate their crops. “I work with recent immigrants mostly,” she says, “guys from El Salvador and Sudan and Lebanon. It's less than minimum wage but I feel like I'm helping out. Anyway it's a pretty easy job,” she tells Lynnie. “Not too physically demanding and you're outside all day.”

“I'll think about it,” says Lynnie.

Raelle's thumbs work their way down Lynnie's forearm, moving the buried muscle in circles. Her hands are incredibly strong; it feels like she has ball-peen hammers in place of fingers. Lately Lynnie has been cramping up very easily. Alice tells her to eat more bananas and Alex offers a family-sized tub of IcyHot. It must be the fetus draining her energy like this. Though it could be that her job is beginning to enter her bones. When she senses that look of masculine hunger she feels she could be swallowed in a single slurp, like a Jell-o shot.

“I'm walking home from work last night,” Raelle says, rubbing, “and I pass by this apartment. It's about four-thirty or five, I guess. And the lights are always on in this place, and it's in the basement, so I can kind of see right down into it, you know, without really trying.”

“Uh huh.”

“And the guy who lives there, every time I look in, he's either jerking off, doing lines of coke, or playing a video game.”

“Ha.”

“Okay, but so last night, I happen to glance in as I go by, and guess what he's doing?”

Lynnie has no idea.

“He's eating a pie, from the middle.”

“From the middle?”

“Yeah.”

“With a fork?”

“A
spoon
.”

“Somehow that's the most unwholesome part,” Lynnie says.

“I know. Don't lift your shoulder like that.”

“Like this?”

“Better.”

Many months earlier, Alex waited for Lynnie in San Simeon, just off the Main. As he watched the window a group of men in jeans and short jackets entered the café and sat down. They were Italian or Greek maybe, but to Alex they formed nothing so much as a great conflagration or manifestation of Man: Man in baseball hat, Man in bomber jacket, Ray-Ban Man with sturdy and stylish heavy black shoes. Where did one buy such shoes? Alex had no idea. They seemed a different species altogether. They were thicker than him, their hair was short and coarse, and close-up they would smell of man-smells, like Brylcreem? No, that was his grandfather's generation. These days it would be Axe, or Polo Sport, or Hugo by Hugo Boss. These Men occupied another landscape, another dimension parallel to Alex's but completely separate. Their conversations were on subjects Alex could not fathom, nor could he guess at their ages. What would it be like to be them, or to be with them? Alex imagined their thick hammy chests pressing up against other bodies. What kind of sounds would they make?

His friend Sally had scorned the idea of sexual difference to him, once, after he pointed out a women's magazine with its monthly boast of “New Positions Guaranteed to Make Your Man Drool!”

“What do you think they are this month,” he asked. “The Flying Buttress? Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon? The Dow Jones Industrial Average?”

Sally just scowled. “All these ideas about different positions, different styles, different gender orientations,” she had said. “We only have so many orifices, and there are only so many ways to stuff them. And everyone does it more or less the same. The toolbox is not infinite.”

“How come it's all about orifices?” Alex had said. “You are such a dyke. What about surfaces, protrusions, tumescences? Don't they deserve a little love?”

“Fucking is fucking,” she said, “cock or no cock. Within limits,” she added after a pause.

Still, Alex could not imagine that what these men did with their wives and girlfriends, their mistresses, even with each other, if that was possible, was anything like anything he had ever done or would do with anyone. They were like characters from television, these Men, but here they were; they and Alex shared a café, somehow. Worlds that were less accessible to him than Indonesia, Australia, Greenland existed and intersected his at every turn. It was one of the great mysteries of civilization.

Now he watched Lynnie glide up on her bike, lock it to a parking meter outside. She had called him out of the blue, saying she had a proposal for him.

“What?” he had said.

“I have to ask you in person.”

“Sounds kinky.”

“Like you wouldn't believe.”

She waved at him through the window. The door opened with a blast of autumn smell. As she walked past the table of Men they stared unabashedly, like children. And Alex knew, before she even opened her mouth, that he would say yes.

Raelle walks Lynnie to the metro station after work. An older man in a tweed coat is coming towards them, holding an umbrella even though it hasn't rained in weeks. He smiles solicitously. “You girls shouldn't be walking alone,” he says. “This isn't a good neighbourhood.”

“We're not alone,” says Lynnie.

“Still,” he says. “There's bad men around. I could be a rapist. How do you know?”

“Well then maybe
you
should stay off the streets,” says Raelle.

“I was just trying to help.”

“Thanks,” says Lynnie, as Raelle glares after him.

Raelle thinks about the first time she met Lynnie, at the clinic. None of the doctors or nurses wore uniforms, which made Raelle feel like she was in a Pilates class. She couldn't remember any other situation in which she'd been surrounded by women of various ages and shapes and ethnicities, all in comfy breathable cotton and elastic waistbands. In fact there was something YWCAish about the whole thing, the casual banter, the nonchalance about nudity and bodily functions. It was how she imagined a low-budget spa getaway to be.

The clinic had offered a special service, a doula, to accompany her during the procedure. She had refused, picturing a woman in many scarves placing crystals on her abdomen and chanting in a made-up language. But due to some clerical mix-up, when she entered the small clean room, aside from the doctor and nurse there was this woman with a great bush of black hair held back from her face by a bandanna. She wore brown trousers and a green shirt. She smiled, showing front teeth that were whiter than the ones on either side.

“My name is Lynnie,” she said. “I'm here for you.” The way she emphasized
you
made Raelle feel like the other people were not there for her. Which, in a way, they weren't.

In the recovery room after, Lynnie sat with Raelle, feeding her saltines and orange juice.

“I am never ever having sex again,” said Raelle. “Unless it's for money.”

“Oh c'mon, it wasn't that bad, was it?” said Lynnie.

Raelle was still dopey from the sedative. “Do you guys ever use the vacuum to, like, clean up the place? After hours?”

Lynnie stared at her, then laughed, a great cackle that shook the curtain drawn around Raelle's reclining chair.

On the other side of the curtain two women were talking about what they were going to do when Club Boîte du Sexe closed down. Raelle had seen them in the waiting room together earlier. It was hard to tell who was there for the procedure and who was the support; they were both wearing those weird paper slippers they give you that are like some kind of test of your origami skills. Raelle started wondering if they were both getting abortions. Maybe one of them got pregnant, and the other one decided she wasn't letting her friend go through it alone, so she went out and got knocked up that night.

“No,” said Raelle, “it wasn't that bad. A bikini wax hurts more.”

Lynnie gave Raelle her cell number. “Call me if you're worried about anything.”

“Cindy works at Cleopatra's now,” one of the women said. “She says it's all the rage.”

The next day, Raelle dialled the number from her roommate's landline.

“Alex?” said Lynnie's voice.

“No,” said Raelle. “This is Raelle. From the clinic, from… yesterday.” For some reason her throat stuck on the word “abortion,” a word she had always held inside her like a hard-won diamond. She swallowed. “I had an abortion at three fifteen?”

“Of course,” said Lynnie, “sorry. Is everything okay?”

“No,” said Raelle. She felt like if only she could hear that laugh again, everything would be okay.

“Are you in pain?”

“No.”

“Are you bleeding?”

“No,” said Raelle. “But I could use a drink.”

There was a pause, then Lynnie laughed.

“I get off at eight,” she said.

They met at an all-night diner that served a dark reddish coffee that tasted like armpits. The waitress had a faded tattoo of a fleur-de-lis and called them both “Cocotte.”

“Listen,” Lynnie said. “It happened to me once, this kind of occupation.” She spoke a bit formally, as though this were a story she had told many times before.

“The thing, the embryo, or zygote, whatever it is at that stage, lodged itself in my womb and set down to busying itself with basic and then more advanced mathematics: addition, multiplication, exponentials. I started thinking of it as Unknown Quantity N, and then just N. My boyfriend wanted to call it Kevin, a name he hated. But to me it was N. N the Unknown. N the Destroyer. Because let's be real here: that thing was sapping my resources as surely and as thoroughly as a strip mine. I could barely stay awake with all that compounded math in me; I was dropping off in the middle of my classes. It would grow and grow and eventually tear its way out of me and if I lived or died, it could give two shits. It didn't love me. I was just a feedbag it had strapped on, a big nutrient-rich ball it was draining like a tick. I didn't understand how my body could act so completely and incontrovertibly against my wishes. It was a betrayal of the deepest order.

“I called the clinic and made an appointment. Three weeks was the earliest they could give me. I didn't know if I would make it that long; I kept thinking it would just burst out of me like the alien from
Alien
and run screaming through the kitchen while I expired in a puddle of corn syrup and red dye.”

She smiled at Raelle and took a sip of her coffee.

“Then the accident happened,” she said. “I was biking home one night from a movie; I had just crossed Sherbrooke and was picking up some speed when a car pulled out in front of me without checking its side mirror. Later I was told I flew five feet through the air, landed hard enough on the car's hood to knock the front bumper off, and then bounced to a landing on the concrete with my arms and legs splayed like I was making the most perfect snow angel, face down. All I remember is a crunch and then the odd sensation of looking up and seeing the ground.

“I came to in the hospital with a broken collarbone, a sprained wrist, a gap where my favourite teeth used to be, and some pretty gnarly bruises, but other than that I was miraculously unhurt. It also felt like I was leaking in some vital and possibly fatal way, but I couldn't move enough to see what it was. I tuned in and out to the doctor's lecture about how my helmet saved my life. Talk about preaching to the converted. Then she moved in closer and spoke in a low voice. ‘You were pregnant. Did you know?'

“It was a double shock, hearing it out loud from a stranger and the use of the past tense. An affirmation and negation in the same phrase.

“‘N,' I said, waiting for the outcome of the equation.

“‘You miscarried,' she said.

“I didn't say anything.

“‘It was very early,' she went on. ‘Too early to know if the pregnancy was even viable. I'm sorry,' she said, ‘I know it's a shock. But there's no reason why you couldn't have another, when you're ready. How are you feeling?'

“‘N,' I said again. It must have sounded enough like an agreement or an admission of alrightness, because she straightened her shoulders and said, ‘Well, okay, the nurse will be in to see you shortly. Good luck.'

“I know I should have felt a sense of loss, of grieving. The nurse had such big gentle eyes, touched me so carefully, as though I were an orphaned animal unaccustomed to human care. But what I thought was,
my body chose me.
When it came down to it, it considered me, Lynnie, whatever that meant, enough of a going concern to divert the resources needed to keep me alive. It was, in a way, the biggest self-affirmation I've ever had.”

She leaned back in the naugahyde booth.

“Yeah,” said Raelle. “Fuck having kids.”

Lynnie looked to one side. “Well, I wouldn't quite say that.”