Bodily Harm (4 page)

Ready to have babies yet? the doctor asked, his standard opening joke as he snapped on his prophylactic gloves. You’re heading for the cutoff point. He’d been saying this for six years. Half an hour later, everything ceased to be funny.

Though as she walked home she was still thinking in the ways she was used to. For instance, she could do a piece on it. “Cancer, The Coming Thing.”
Homemakers
might take it, or
Chatelaine
. How about “The Cutoff Point”?

This is a fact, it’s happened to you, and right now you can’t believe it
, she would begin.
You’ve been used to thinking of yourself as a person, but all of a sudden you’re just a statistic
. Dying was in bad taste, no doubt of that. But at some point it would be a trend, among the people she knew. Maybe she was way out ahead on that one too.

On the plane they serve warm ginger ale in paper cups and sandwiches wrapped in plastic film. The sandwiches are made of slices of white bread, with slightly rancid butter and a thin piece of roast beef between them. Rennie picks out the lettuce: she’s been to Mexico, she knows about amoebic dysentery.

The seats are hard and covered with scratchy maroon plush, like those on ancient buses. The stewardesses, two of them, one with straightened upswept hair like Betty Grable’s, one with cornrows and beaded Rasta braids, wear hot-pink satin outfits with tiny white aprons. They teeter up and down the narrow aisles on high-heeled sandals, open-toed with multiple straps, magenta: fuck-me shoes,
Jake would call them. When the plane bumps they grab for the back of the nearest seat, but they seem used to it.

Though the plane is just half full, there’s a man beside Rennie. It isn’t the white man in the safari jacket, who’s sitting at the very front reading a newspaper, but an older man, brown. He’s wearing a dark suit, despite the heat, and a tie in which a small pin shines. She notices that he’s taken only one bite of his sandwich. When the remains of the sandwiches are being collected he speaks to Rennie, throwing his voice above the drone of the engines.

“You are from Canada,” he says, stating it rather than asking. He’s about sixty, spare-faced and tall, with a high-bridged nose; he looks vaguely Arabian. His jaw is undershot, his bottom teeth close slightly over the top ones.

“How did you know?” says Rennie.

“We get mostly Canadians,” he says. “The sweet Canadians.”

Rennie can’t tell whether or not this is meant as irony. “We’re not all that sweet,” she says.

“I trained in Ontario, my friend,” he says. “I was once a veterinarian. My specialty was the diseases of sheep. So I am familiar with the sweet Canadians.” He smiles, speaking precisely. “They are famous for their good will. When we had our hurricane, the sweet Canadians donated a thousand tins of ham, Maple Leaf Premium. It was for the refugees.” He laughs, as if this is a joke, but Rennie doesn’t get it. “The refugees never see this ham,” he says, explaining patiently. “Most likely they never eat ham in their lives before. Well, they miss their chance.” He laughs again. “The ham turn up, surprise, at the Independence Day banquet. To celebrate our freedom from Britain. For the leading citizens only. Many of us were very amused, my friend. There was a round of applause for the sweet Canadians.”

Rennie doesn’t know what to say to this. She feels he’s making fun of her in some obscure way, but she isn’t sure why. “Was it a bad hurricane?” she says. “Was anyone killed?”

He ignores this question entirely. “Why are you coming to St. Antoine?” he says, as if it’s an odd thing to be doing.

“I’m writing a piece on it,” she says. “A travel piece.”

“Ah,” he says. “To entice the sweet Canadians.”

Rennie is becoming irritated with him. She looks at the pocket in the seatback in front of her, hoping there’s something she can pretend to read, an airline magazine, barf-bag mags as they’re known in the trade, but there’s nothing in it but the card illustrating emergency procedures. On the 707 to Barbados she had a thriller she bought at the airport, but she finished it and left it on the plane. A mistake: now she’s bookless.

“You must visit our Botanic Gardens,” he says. “The British made very good ones, all over the world. For medicinal purposes, you understand. Ours is one of the oldest. It is still in good repair; they have only been gone a month. Now that we are free, we have to pull out the weeds ourselves. We have a small museum there, you must see that. Broken pots made by the Carib Indians and so forth. They did not make very accomplished pottery. We still have a few of them in our country, we have not fully modernized.”

He reaches into his jacket pocket and takes out a bottle of aspirin. He taps two into his palm and offers the bottle to Rennie, as if offering a cigarette. Rennie doesn’t have a headache, but feels she should take one anyway, it’s the polite thing to do.

“There is a fort also,” he says. “The British were proficient at that, too. Fort Industry. Under the British it was called Fort George, but our government is renaming everything.” He signals the stewardess and asks for a glass of water.

“We just have ginger ale,” she says.

“It will have to do,” he says. His teeth clamp together in a bulldog grin. “In my country that is a very useful phrase.”

The ginger ale comes and he swallows his aspirins, then offers the styrofoam cup to Rennie. “Thank you,” says Rennie. “I’m saving
mine for later.” She holds the aspirin in her hand, wondering if she’s just been rude, but if so he doesn’t seem to notice.

“I have many statistics you might find useful,” he says. “Those on unemployment, for instance. Or perhaps you would prefer the Botanic Gardens? I would be happy to escort you, I take an interest in plants.”

Rennie decides not to ask him about restaurants and tennis courts. She thanks him and says she’ll have a better idea of what she’s looking for once she gets there.

“I think we are approaching,” he says.

The plane dips. Rennie peers out the window, hoping to see something, but it’s too dark. She glimpses an outline, a horizon, something jagged and blacker than the sky, but then the plane goes down at a forty-five degree angle and a moment later they hit the ground. She jolts forward against the seat belt as the plane brakes, much too fast.

“We have a very short runway here,” he remarks. “Before I tendered my regrets to the present government I attempted to have something done about it. I was at that time the Minister for Tourism.” He smiles his lopsided smile. “But the Prime Minister had other priorities.”

The plane taxis to a stop and the aisle jams with people. “It’s been nice meeting you,” Rennie says as they stand up.

He holds out his hand for her to shake. Rennie transfers the aspirin. “I hope you will have a pleasant stay, my friend. If you need assistance, do not hesitate to call on me. Everyone knows where I can be found. My name is Minnow, Dr. Minnow, like the fish. My enemies make jokes about that! A small fish in a small puddle, they say. It is a corruption of the French, Minôt was the original, it was one of the many things they left behind them. The family were all pirates.”

“Really?” Rennie says. “That’s wild.”

“Wild?” says Dr. Minnow.

“Fascinating,” says Rennie.

Dr. Minnow smiles. “They were common once,” he says. “Some of them were quite respectable; they intermarried with the British and so forth. You have a husband?”

“Pardon?” says Rennie. The question has caught her by surprise: nobody she knows asks it any more.

“A man,” he says. “Here we do not bother so much with the formalities.”

Rennie wonders if this is a sexual feeler. She hesitates. “Not
with
me,” she says.

“Perhaps he will join you later?” Dr. Minnow says. He looks down at her anxiously, and Rennie sees that this isn’t an advance, it’s concern. She smiles at him, hoisting her camera bag.

“I’ll be fine,” she says. Which is not what she believes.

When Rennie floated up through the anaesthetic she did not feel anything at first. She opened her eyes and saw light green, then closed them again. She did not want to look down, see how much of herself was missing. She lay with her eyes closed, realizing that she was awake and would rather not be. She also realized, though she had not admitted it before, that she had expected to die during the operation. She’d heard stories about people going into shock or being allergic to the anaesthetic. It was not out of the question.

Her left arm was numb. She tried to move it and couldn’t. Instead she moved her right hand, and not until then did she understand that someone was holding it. She turned her head, forced her eyes to open, and saw, a long distance away, as if she were looking through the wrong end of a telescope, the image of a man, a head surrounded by darkness, glassy and clear. Daniel.

It’s all right, he said. It was malignant but I think we got it all.

He was telling her that he had saved her life, for the time being anyway, and now he was dragging her back into it, this life that he had saved. By the hand.
Malignant
, Rennie thought.

Now what, she said. Her mouth felt thick and swollen. She looked at his arm, which was bare from the elbow down and was lying beside hers on the white sheet; hair licked along the skin like dark flames. His fingers were around her wrist. She did not see hands but an odd growth, like a plant or something with tentacles, detachable. The hand moved: he was patting her.

Now you go to sleep, he said. I’ll be back.

Rennie looked again and his hand attached itself to his arm, which was part of him. He wasn’t very far away. She fell in love with him because he was the first thing she saw after her life had been saved. This was the only explanation she could think of. She wished, later, when she was no longer feeling dizzy but was sitting up, trying to ignore the little sucking tubes that were coming out of her and the constant ache, that it had been a potted begonia or a stuffed rabbit, some safe bedside object. Jake sent her roses but by then it was too late.

I imprinted on him, she thought; like a duckling, like a baby chick. She knew about imprinting; once, when she was hard up for cash, she’d done a profile for
Owl Magazine
of a man who believed geese should be used as a safe and loyal substitute for watchdogs. It was best to be there yourself when the goslings came out of the eggs, he said. Then they’d follow you to the ends of the earth. Rennie had smirked because the man seemed to think that being followed to the ends of the earth by a flock of adoring geese was both desirable and romantic, but she’d written it all down in his own words.

Now she was behaving like a goose, and the whole thing put her in a foul temper. It was inappropriate to have fallen in love with Daniel, who had no distinguishing features that Rennie could see.
She hardly even knew what he looked like, since, during the examinations before the operation, she hadn’t bothered to look at him. One did not look at doctors; doctors were functionaries, they were what your mother once hoped you would marry, they were fifties, they were passé. It wasn’t only inappropriate, it was ridiculous. It was expected. Falling in love with your doctor was something middle-aged married women did, women in the soaps, women in nurse novels and in sex-and-scalpel epics with titles like
Surgery
and nurses with big tits and doctors who looked like Dr. Kildare on the covers. It was the sort of thing
Toronto Life
did stories about, soft-core gossip masquerading as hard-nosed research and exposé. Rennie could not stand being guilty of such a banality.

But there she was, waiting for Daniel to appear (out of nowhere, she never knew when he would be coming, when she was having a sponge bath or struggling to the toilet, leaning on the large wattled nurse), hooked like a junkie on those pats of the hand and Rotarian words of cheer and collective first-person plurals (“We’re coming along nicely”), and in a feeble rage because of it.
Shit
. He wasn’t even that handsome, now that she had a good look: his proportions were wrong, he was too tall for his shoulders, his hair was too short, his arms were too long, he gangled. She sniffled with anger into the wad of Kleenex the nurse held out to her.