Forbidden Fruit (43 page)

Later that same night, while Coln was out on business, by an unhappy chance I switched on the TV, only to see an abortion.
I watched with horror as a thirteen-week-old fetus was vacuumed out of the womb. It must have been a partisan program because
the commentator spoke of the silent scream of the fetus.

Sitting bolt upright in my chair, I could hear a scream of pain rise out of my own womb and echo in my head. I rushed into
Peter’s room and went on my knees beside him. Thank God, he was still safe and sound. With his closed eyes and quiet breathing,
he was the one oasis of peace in my life. To protect him, I had to sacrifice everything.

When I retired and finally managed to get to sleep, it was that silent scream that woke me in the night.

One afternoon in December 1978, I left Peter with Mommy and took a bus to Cornell Hospital, New York. The Swedish doctor asked,
“You want to be awake or asleep?”

“Awake? Are you kidding?”

How could I watch the destruction of Coln’s child?

A nurse gave me an initial jab and, soon after, I was wheeled into an operating theater. I felt a blast of hot air and blinked
at the harsh lights. On the table, my legs were put in stirrups. I felt like an animal. Once again, Catholic guilt swept over
me. Would I ever be free of it? If I died on this operating table I’d go straight to hell.

After another injection, I started counting backward from a hundred. After ninety-five, I remembered nothing until I woke
up in a curtained cubicle.

The doctor hovered over me in the half-light.

“You all right?”

“Yep,” I said, though I felt sore inside and utterly exhausted.

Immediately, I clambered out of bed.

“Someone coming to meet you?” the doctor asked.

“No need.” I wanted to punish myself even then.

He gave me some big pads to wear and a supply of pills. “Any cramping or excess bleeding, Annie, and you get back to me at
once, right?”

I took a cab home.

Coln, really upset, came in half an hour later with a big bunch of flowers. He had arrived at the hospital to find I had left.
“Are you trying to prove something, Annie?”

“What?”

He tossed the flowers aside, seeing I did not want them. “That you’re so goddamn tough you can do without me? That we don’t
belong together anymore?”

I walked into the kitchen and he followed me, saying, “What do you think
you’re
doing?”

Without a word I started to prepare dinner, though I could not have kept down a mouthful of broth.

“Are you telling me you’re on your own from now on?”

“What do you want with your steak?” I said.

He grabbed me by the shoulders and looked into my eyes. “Was it my fault? Why punish me?”

I removed his hands and went on preparing a meal.

“If that’s the way you want it,” he said, “that’s fine. But at least let me go to your mom’s and pick Peter up.”

“He’s
my
son,” I said pointedly. “I’m going.”

As soon as Daddy set eyes on my white face, he knew.

I became anorexic. It was another way of punishing myself. In the public library, I read medical books on blood clots. I got
it into my head that I could somehow dissolve my clot and thin out my blood. That way I could have another child. With this
in mind, I swallowed pints of vinegar. Though I still held down my job in the New York University Medical Center, I wasn’t
eating or sleeping and was hyperactive. Weekends, when I left Peter with my parents, I was drinking so that Coln had to stay
dry and drug-free to watch me full-time as once I had watched my mother.

In desperation, he went to Daddy and told him that I was a different person. Maybe I had a death wish.

Daddy gave me a prescription for twenty-five Valium.

One night, I went alone to a bar and came back with a bad bruise on my head. I had been mugged, but I remembered nothing.
A transit cop had picked me up on the subway with coffee grounds all over me. I was far away in Brooklyn, with no idea how
I had made it to there.

Christmas approached. I was walking hand-in-hand with Peter down Fifth Avenue. We passed a Santa Claus ringing a bell; we
looked in the windows of Lord & Taylor with displays depicting Christmases of long ago. It made me feel sad and lonely. Eamonn
and I had never spent a Christmas together and I began to fantasize about what it would be like. Eamonn planning with me for
the Christmas festivity, deciding what to buy for our son, insisting on a Yule log fire in the hearth, playing carols on his
mother’s piano with Peter and me singing the words.

Living with Coln had made me even more aware of Eamonn’s absence. It was unfair of me to compare Coln’s coolness now with
the intense warmth and concern of Eamonn. I tried desperately to forget him, but he was too deeply anchored in my heart.

Feeling my tensions rising and fearing the effects of drink, I took instead to smoking pot, which Coln kept in the apartment.
I felt I could control it. I kidded myself that a few puffs had a calming effect on me whereas liquor made me black out. Soon,
with my guilt increasing and my soul eroded by a sense of desolation, I was taking both.

It was only a matter of time before disaster struck.

J
ANUARY 3. The windows were blanked out with snow driven northwest through the canyons of New York.

I had read Peter a story when, thinking his room was too cold for him, I moved him into Coln’s and mine. The hollow wind filled
the hollows in my body and my heart.

I had got my haircut for the new year and bought myself an expensive outfit of velvet pants and a white silk top. But I still
could not hide from myself that I was a barren woman.

Coln was preparing supper. I popped my head into the kitchen, saying, “We need a bottle of wine.”

“
We
do or
you
do?”

Without answering, I put on my mauve Irish cape and slipped out of the apartment. Snow fell white-black like newsprint, silencing
the sound of traffic and making all the streets alike. Somehow—was this deliberate?—I lost my way. I had been drinking,
something I normally did only on weekends when Peter was staying with my parents. Drink brought on panic and I ran and ran.
What was I running away from?

Everything. Past, present, and future.

I slid to a dead halt inches away from a giant snowman. Looking up at it breathlessly, I found myself inches away from an
ebony face with jutting cheekbones and big shiny teeth.

Smiling crudely, he dangled in front of my snow-flaked eyes what in college we called a nickel bag. “The sweetest Colombian
red this side of the Rio Grande.”

His stiff sleety presence so startled me, I whimpered, “How much?”

“For you, lovely
la-dy
,” he drawled, “how ’bout
fifteen
dollars.”

I handed him a twenty, grabbed the bag and—“
Thank
you, lovely
la-dy
”—flew down what I now recognized as 77th Street and into the corner liquor store.

Freddie, the owner, a thin pop-eyed man with a gleaming bald head, knew me. In his reedy voice: “You seen a ghost, Annie?”

It took me a few minutes to get my breath back and tell him I had forgotten to bring my purse.

“Choose,” Freddie said, gesturing; “pay me tomorrow.” I picked up a bottle of Beaujolais.

Outside, in the darkness of West End Avenue, I opened the nickel bag and inhaled. Delicious. On a wintry night like that,
I looked forward to a pleasant evening of pot and booze.

At home, I threw off my cape.

Coln immediately picked up on my mood. “What’s with you?”

I touched the side of my nose. “Surprise, surprise.”

“Come
on
.”

Laughing, I dangled the nickel bag in front of him.

He frowned. “Where’d you get it? You won’t say? Make sure you let me try it first.”

“Okay, I’ll cook spaghetti, you roll the joints.” Running smoky-breathed into the fogged-up kitchen, I poured a glass of vodka
and tonic out of the cupboard where I had hidden the supplies and swallowed swift and hard. Ah, velvet. Replacing the glass,
I picked a paper from the drawer and rolled myself a fat joint in readiness.

Coln ambled in and examined the bottle of Beaujolais. “My favorite. Thanks,” and he uncorked it.

“Open the living room windows a bit,” I said. “It’ll help clear them.”

“Sometimes I think fog suits you.”

“What d’ya mean?” The giggles were already on me.

“You’re a witch, that’s what.”

I put my arms around his neck and looked for miles into his eyes. Not a tree, bush, blade of grass. Emptiness.

“Okay, so I’m a witch.”

He wrenched himself free. “Can’t you ever be serious?”

“Hey,” I complained, “it was you who said I was a witch.”

“So you damn well are.”

“And I just risked my life getting you the best Colombian red.”

“I’d be happier, Annie, if you told me the truth for a change, starting with why you’re starving yourself to death.”

I gritted my teeth before saying, “So I can forget.”

“Forget what?”

Jesus, he wanted me to spell it out? Tell him I was still in love with someone in Ireland who filled my nights and days but
who would as soon marry me as fly to the moon? Tell him we were through?

He went to the living room and put on a disc by the Rolling Stones. I heard caterwauling about a girl with faraway eyes. To
steady my nerves, I drained my secret glass of vodka before pouring myself a glass of wine. I could feel my cheeks turn red
and the knots in my neck and stomach untying.

Before I knew he was there, Coln was touching my face. “What caused that, Annie, winter’s wind or wine?”

“Both.”

I stretched up to plant a kiss on his lips, but his mouth was closed to love.

He rummaged around in the cupboard till he found my glass, empty save for a few melting cubes of ice. “Getting a head start?”

“Is that a crime?” I said, unable to stifle a laugh.

“You tell me.”

I suddenly exploded in wrath. “Sure it’s a crime, like everything I do. I killed your child, didn’t I?”

“You did nothing of —”

“You asked me a question so you
listen
.”

I poked him in the chest, hard. “I ripped your kid out of my womb. I wouldn’t take a risk with my son’s life for yours and
mine. Yeah, say it, Coln.”

“Say what?”

“That you’ll always take second place with me. I have other commitments. It’s that bishop bastard in Ireland, isn’t it?”

“Bishop bastard,” he repeated vacantly.

“Go on,
say
it,
mean
it.”

He looked at me, through me.

“Say
something
,” I yelled. “What am I good for? For making you lousy spaghetti dinners, for giving you a few puffs of pot? I’m just a few
cubic feet of fog.”

In a frenzy I grabbed him by both hands. “Go on, Coln, take a big breath and blow me away.”

He stood quite still, not breathing, refusing to look into my eyes for fear of what he might see there.

Then, defeated, a murmur: “Oh, Annie.”

“You tell me the truth, Coln: haven’t I just said what you wanted to hear?”

His refusal to answer was answer enough.

“Okay,” I said with forced gaiety, “let’s enjoy the night.”

He waved his hand in front of me as though wanting to erase me like writing on a blackboard and went back to the living room.
Wind rattled the kitchen window as I poured myself another vodka. There was no hope for me, so why not just get wasted? Vodka,
wine, a few tokes of pot, and I’d be able to laugh in the face of Satan himself.

Coln was pretending to read the
New York Times
when I approached him with a glass of wine in one hand and a joint in the other. “Wanna share?”

He gazed fixedly at his paper. “Get away; you’re drunk.”

“Oh,
really
, Coln? You
never
are? You wake up with the shakes, you dilute your breakfast orange juice with the remains of last night’s vodka, but Coln
O’Neill, gentleman, is always perfectly sober.” I sloshed the remains of my wine in his face and ran into the bathroom, locking
the door behind me.

He came after me with unaccustomed haste.

Banging on the door: “Listen, you goddamn bitch. I’ve had enough. That fucking bishop made you barren. Fly to him, I’ll pay.
Vent your fury on him.”

I waited a long moment before asking, with my face pressed to the inside of the door, “You feel he murdered our child?”

As he walked away, I heard him say, “I guess I do.”

I turned and sank to the floor. Minutes later, when I opened up, he was sitting distantly on the couch.

I lit the joint, took one deep inhalation, and a cyclone hit my head. I took another puff and the whole room changed, concertinaed
in and out. I panicked. I stumbled across to Coln and grabbed his arm.

“Help me. For God’s —”

He shrugged me off with “Shit, haven’t I had enough for one night?”

“No, no, please,
please
.”

His eyes and ears changed places before his head split apart. Blood gushed out of him and ran down the walls and I couldn’t
remember if I was to blame. Jagged multicolored light flew at me like pieces of glass, stabbing my eyes and mind. I had just
enough sense to know the pot was laced with a hallucinogen, God knows what.

“Call the cops, fucking cops.”

With pot on the premises, Coln wouldn’t hear of it.

Had he not been so furious with me, he would have known this was an emergency. I staggered into the kitchen, fearing I would
fall into some drug-induced coma. I fumbled in my purse for the Valium. Swigging from the vodka bottle, I swallowed tablet
after tablet until all two dozen were gone. I clasped my hand over my mouth to make sure none popped out.

I didn’t want to die, I just wanted to be knocked out.

Then I remembered Peter was in my bed. Jesus, what would become of him if anything happened to me?

My eyesight was failing. I went into the living room, knocking over a chair. It was dark everywhere. I opened the front door.