Bliss (9 page)

“You’re cool?”

“With going ahead,” Eva said.

It was 11: 01 when she got the IV in her left hand and went into the surgery room, and the doctor said, “Count backward from ten,” so Eva counted weeks backward and when she woke up it was 11:07.

“How long is it gonna take?” Eva asked the nurse, who wasn’t actually a nurse but an aide or a junior nurse or whoever wore pink or flowered scrubs in place of white. Wore fake gingham prints and soft clogs and loose ponytails. The doctor wore sneakers and a mask: was just big blue eyes and a smooth forehead.
How’re you this morning?
All in the course of a sure-footed, red-Nike day.
You won’t miss a step, Eva. You’ll make your finals, no problem
. Those words would come later, from a nurse practitioner. Less than a doctor, more than a nurse. Eva was frustrated with the gradations. Who was a nurse, anyway? One who looked like one who nursed? Where was she?

“It’s over. You’re done. Rest.”

Eva felt no pain. She was hazy, and in her haze, Eva wondered why they’d told Mix four whole hours, but then she woke up at 2:17 and they gave her pads to bleed onto and gave her salty chicken broth made from a foil-wrapped cube, and crumbly Lorna Doone cookies and saltines, and Eva sat at a round table with four other girls. The five of them like giant first graders in smocks and with their
snacks, talking about how boys don’t share. About how boys play, but then they want to play rough.

Eva had been going with Mix for a year and a half. He was the sixth boy she’d had sex with, although she’d told him he was the second. He was the first boy she gave head to, and for Eva and her school girlfriends of the time it was a womanly milestone, a graceless grab at new levels of fun and negotiation and, for girls raised to be all they could be, a quenching dip into surrender.

On her eighteenth birthday, Mix had taken Eva bicycling at Santa Monica beach. At around eleven that night, they went to a party at what people were calling an “underground” club, and Mix had told the DJ to say, “There’s a birthday girl in the house! Happy happy to Eva!”

And people yelled it and clapped, and Eva and her man danced for song after thumping song. Then the DJ said, “This next song goes out to Eva, from Mix,” and it was Keith Sweat’s insistent “I Want Her,” and for Eva there had never been such intense intimacy iced with public appreciation.
I want I want I want I want I want her
. There had never been such bliss.

When Mix came back in four hours to the clinic, she told him, as he tenderly helped her in the car, that it had been twins. Eva’s movements were small. Once seated, she clenched everything. She hoped his clutch was fixed. She wasn’t in the mood for a jolt.

“Twins?” Mix walked around back of the car, got in the driver’s seat. He put his hands in the air, fists clenched, winner-and-still-champion. “That’s my super sperm.”

In her Lost City bathroom, a chill rolled through Eva’s body. Skin rose in bumps. She leaned her face deep in the marble basin and retched over and over.

Whatever was still in her, Eva wanted out.

A
t a bit past seven-thirty, Eva picked up a brown woven bag packed before she’d dressed. In it was her passport; glutinous, glass-bottled oil of coconut; a boar-bristled hairbrush; ginger lip gloss;
and four fat fashion magazines. She wanted to lie by the pool before the hotel’s throng emerged at around nine, before her convention mates descended, bloated and burping postmidnight antics.

No I didn’t fuck him. Yes I sucked his dick
.

They won’t impeach Clinton
.

Somebody stole my weed right from my goddamn purse
.

Look, if my boy does the remix, it’s fifty up front plus points
.

Snoop did the dog thing already. DMX doesn’t know that?

If OJ. did it, he should go on TV, admit it. Fuck everybody’s head up with the double jeopardy
.

Don’t know why I didn’t send promo CDs down to the Million Woman March
.

Get off ‘Pac’s dick. He’s dead. For real. Get with the new
.

Eva wasn’t in the mood. She was tense, and she had to pee.

The lobby chandelier dripped giant glass tears, was as big as a living room. Her sandals alternately clicked on marble and sunk into red-and-gold carpet. Small potted Christmas trees lit the concierge’s desk. A gardener, who she also recognized as the bartender from Showcase Savoir Faire, sprayed plants with water and with something acrid from a dented metal can.

“Show your teeth,” he said, smile brighter than his eyes.

Eva gave him the courtesy of a glance. She could see the pools and the beach beyond through the lobby’s glass walls.
Same old slippers
, went a verse she remembered from one of her high schools,
same old rice
.

Same old glimpse of paradise
. Eva didn’t tug at her tiny skirt, a sheer silk orange scarf tied with flourish at one hip, even as she felt the man’s eyes on her ass.

“Eva! Evillene!” Evillene was the name of the Wicked Witch of the West in
The Wiz
.

Don’t nobody bring me no bad news
. That was the witch’s theme song.
Words and music by Charlie Smalls
, went the mainframe in Eva’s head.
Performed originally on Broadway by Mabel King. Show opened 1975
. Evillene. People thought Eva didn’t mind the tag.

As cheerfully as she could, Eva called out, “Hey, ladies.” But she
skirted the trio of older radio women curved over a clutch of lipstick-stained cups. Eva didn’t have it in her to rehash the showcase. She barely had it in her to get to the family pool. It was called Ripples, but the water sat platter flat. Eva was still queasy.

But at least she was lying in real sun. As the pool filled with kids, Eva looked at them and couldn’t imagine being responsible for one of them not drowning. She sat on the pool steps just as she’d sat in the pool closest to the lobby the afternoon before, except the afternoon before she’d been talking to her convention mates and talking to her assistant back in New York on her tiny cell phone. Eva had been drinking vanilla rum and listening to a Latin jazz band. Eva had been jovial yesterday afternoon. Yesterday she’d been thirteen days late for her period.

Today she was thinking about family, so she watched a man of about forty-five rub suntan lotion into his wife’s arms. He wasn’t a part of the second annual Vince the Voice Urban Music Takes Over the World: International Marketing for the Millennium convention. The man rubbed lotion into his wife’s arms from where the short sleeves of her tee ended to the backs and palms of her hands. He tucked in a towel around her legs, from hip to toe, and fixed an umbrella so his wife was in the most possible shade.

Damn. How sweet
.

Then the man walked around to the deep side of the pool and cannonballed in. He swam underwater until he got back to the shallow, then floated on his back, his hairy belly rising from the water like a giant coconut.

Eva eased herself down another step, so the water buoyed her breasts. She noticed a wheelchair by the wife’s chaise. And then Eva saw that the woman’s hand rested on her terry-covered thigh like a dead bird. That the woman’s sapphire ring twinkled like a living eye in the sunlight.

The woman looked at Eva, and Eva didn’t look away. The husband sighed loudly and got out of the water. He’d been talking to his teenage daughter, who was lolling on a blue raft, staring up at the blue sky, which was the brightest blue possible, the only blue that
mattered, even in battle with the bottle-blue pool water, the teal blue of the sea, and the blue of the daughter’s bathing suit, which was dyed the hostile kind of turquoise blue that only a sixteen-year-old Miamian with a springy body would wear.

The man walked over to his wife. His chubby body gleamed bronze, and water ran from his red trunks and pasted down the hairs on his legs. He reached in a sodden pocket and then did something to his wife’s face that Eva couldn’t see. His arm moved roughly. The wife’s bird hand twitched.

The husband stepped from in front of her, and Eva saw him twist a cap back on something. The wife pressed and rubbed her lips together; it was that white zinc stuff, and it was all around the outside of her mouth. The husband leaned over and made the ointment sit perfectly on her lips. Like maybe another time they could have been going out and the zinc could have been lipstick he fixed for her and she would’ve been wearing shoes bare enough to be sexy but comfortable enough to dance in. The wife smiled at her husband in a grateful way, and the blue daughter looked at her father like she hated him, like he was an asshole.

Then the man moved his wife’s hands the tiniest millimeter. Adjusted whatever discomfort the twitch might have caused. Eva baldly stared. She tightened her bladder, overwhelmed by the tenderness. Eva gulped back a sharp desire to care and be cared for. Then pee leaked from her body. It warmed the tepid water around her hips green. The daughter looked into Eva’s eyes, then rolled off her raft, paddled to the other side, and clutched the pool’s edge, disgusted.

Stiff and embarrassed, Eva rose from the steps and gathered her things. She felt even more queasy. Her body was out of control and rebelling in response to rotten treatment. Telling her it was tired and not to be counted on for its usual behavior. The family at the pool had come all the way from someplace else, had wheeled Mom out, folded and unfolded the wheelchair, got to and from airports. And then the husband had hauled himself from the pool to fix up his wife. Eva wiped at herself with a towel like she was contaminated.

He didn’t have to do any of that. He didn’t have to be here
.

Eva felt dead to the world. Felt like she’d done too much, sold too much, been touched too much.

She lay back on the plastic slats of the lounge chair, unfastened her bikini top, and left the stretchy triangles covering half her breasts.

No show. No thrill
. Sunlight was like the force of voices bearing down on her.

It’s my right to do what I’ve done. Thank God it’s my right because I didn’t want those kids. Wasn’t ready. Ain’t ready now. It’s my body. I get that. I want the decision to be mine. But, shit: I want candy. I want certain people to fall off the Manhattan Bridge. Just because you can do something, just because it’s legal, doesn’t make the shit all right. I’m not trying to overturn the law, but I hate freedom sometimes. Free to abort. Free to put out bitch-ho-kill records. Free to put out corny records. Free to lie. People’s parents free to break out on kids already here. I’m free to weasel fools out of their dough. And you and me are free to be you and me
.

Eva wanted a tall bottle of water. She wished she still smoked cigarettes.
I am so burned. Cuticles ragged, polish chipped. Haven’t combed or curled my hair. Have on a cheap leather bracelet with a stupid sunrise-sunset design
. Eva thought of an old country song:

From the twenties
, Eva thought.
They were crooning that in the goddamn 1920s. And I don’t care what anyone says, or what money girls have, the shit is still the same right now
.

She had her hand on her flat belly.

I got to be able to get up and go when I’m ready to get up and go
.

A light palm that communicates, and checks, and protects.

“Eva! You incognito?” Sunny plopped down next to Eva at Ripples. “You look fucked up.”

“Sick is what I am,” Eva said. Her hand moved easily from her belly to her side. “Faded.”

“Say it:
still drunk
. So am I.” Sun leaned back in her chair, pleased for the moment with decisions made, with conquering performance, with morning heat on her face. Starting her own label was vanity, and a strategic pledge of allegiance to Sebastian. There’d been stacks of papers to sign, and an office space on a quiet floor of Roadshow’s modest building in which to move furniture. Sunny wanted Eva to work at Sonrisa/Roadshow, needed Eva to sign artists and build it into something important. It had been her plan to shock Eva, though. Manipulating a melodrama in which Eva was the fool made Sunny feel strong and wise. “When I first got in this business,” Sunny said, “somebody told me there were two bad ways it could go. Said women either get fat because of all the free food, or turn into alcoholics because of the free liquor—”

“Why didn’t you say something?” Impatient with the new self-reliant Sunny, Eva wanted to slap back her star’s shine. “To me, about Sonrisa.”

Sunny shrugged. “Thought Hawk would’ve told. Or Ron. That’s your man.”

“Ron knew?” Eva said this dumbly. She didn’t have it together enough to bite back.

Sun shook her head. “You actually like Ron,” she said. “Why? He’s smart, God knows. But he’s an ass.”