Making Love (20 page)

She passed her gynecological examination with flying colors. Dr. Charney couldn't remember her name or place her. He'd probably never looked at her face, and she wasn't upset by his detachment, just grateful that she'd been cleaned out, gutted, could bear children in the future if she wanted to, and had no infection. He'd done his job, collected his money in cash. A really nice, clean, abortion factory. She'd recommend it to all of her friends. She took a batch of his cards. Sonny could give them out to any of the kids who needed them, maybe work out a fee-splitting arrangement with the doctor. She was on the point of making this suggestion to him, but held back. He wouldn't really understand.
 

She got dressed, smiled at him to see if he was alive, but his head was down and he shuffled through buff-colored charts.
 

“Thanks very much,” Jane said. There was no way of not thanking him.
 

“Could you please pay the nurse outside. It's fifty....”
 

In the waiting room she was surprised by the number of women—more than twenty—who'd appeared. There'd only been two or three when she got there at eleven-thirty, but this was lunch hour, and she assumed that somewhere along the line these women had got tired of shopping and their husbands. No simpering, unwed kids who'd been raped by escaped convicts, or naïve girls from the Midwest forced into white slavery by slick-talking pimps. Everyone was wonderfully cool. She wondered if there was a ticket system to guarantee who was next. It was probably on order. The only problem she noticed in the office was that they'd run out of magazines. Another group of women came through the door while she was at the nurse's desk and stood in line behind Jane. She handed the nurse a hundred-dollar bill.
 

“Have you got anything smaller?” the nurse asked with irritation. “They've taken all my twenties.”
 

“I didn't know you had to have exact change,” Jane said, but the nurse had already pressed the buzzer. Everyone in the city, from cab drivers to restaurant cashiers, complained about change. Where had it all gone to? Had Nixon ruined the change situation along with everything else?
 

Dr. Charney came out. Jane saw through the partly opened door a woman's legs dangling on the metal stirrups. Charney took out a wad of bills that would impress a shylock and counted a hundred in tens. The nurse gave him Jane's hundred and he looked briefly but vacantly at her for a second.
 

“I'm not really a troublemaker, Doctor.”
 

But he was through the door back to his counter.
 

As she walked out, a woman took her arm, a fearful first-timer.
 

“How'd it go?”
 

“Terrific.”
 

“No problems?”
 

“No, just like any business. Bring change.”
 

 

* * * *

 

There was the sound of gut twang as a tennis ball was whacked. God, she hated the sound. It always made her sick to her stomach. She watched two small black children hitting a dirty old ball with warped rackets as she rode by on the back of a two-seater bicycle. Wesley Junior was on the front end, and every now and then he turned to look at her and to ask if he was going too fast. Sonny rode alongside them on a beat-up old racer that he'd rented earlier, admonishing Junior to keep his eyes front.
Family day in Central Park
, Jane thought,
and I've got something that looks like a family.
Junior spied a hot-dog wagon and braked slowly.
 

“Can I have one, Pops?”
 

“Okay, just one.”
 

He was an open-faced, bright-eyed child with an expression of permanent wonderment on his face. Sonny as a father had performed a remarkable feat—he'd kept the boy innocent in New York City.
 

“What do you think, Jane?” Sonny asked. “Are these hot dogs safe?”
 

“Let's all have one, so if we die, at least it's together.”
 

“You're a funny lady,” Junior said. “Thank you very much. Anyone who gets Pops away from football on TV is fantastic.”
 

Sonny came up with a rumpled single, bummed a nickel from her, and sniffed the hot dog suspiciously in an effort to detect the scent of horse. Training camps and team meals for years had provided him with an appetite for blood-rare steaks and chops. Everything else was poison.
 

“Pops, can I ask Jane something?”
 

“Why not?”
 

“Jane, are you gonna be my mother?”
 

The question, so direct and naked, shocked her, and Sonny cuffed his ear. She'd been thinking the same thing.
 

“Wesley, that's not a nice question to ask.”
 

“You said I could ask.”
 

“Next time ask me.”
 

“Okay.” He gulped half a hot dog. “Is she gonna be my mother?”
 

“Why do you want to know?”
 

“Well, she looks awful young to be anybody's mother and I wonder what my friends are gonna say if she becomes my mother, and do I call her Mother?”
 

“Jane is fine, Junior,” she said. “I wouldn't want to embarrass you with your friends.”
 

“Oh, it won't embarrass me. I just wondered. In case somebody asks.”
 

“Listen, Wesley, these bikes are a deuce an hour and you wanted to go riding, so let's ride.”
 

They passed the children's zoo and Wesley wanted to stop. He cast long looks at the crowds piling in and complained of leg cramps, but Sonny made a fist in mock threat and they rode by. Her life had taken on a firm, rounded shape, and she had the exquisite sensation of controlling her fate, striking a balance between the past and tomorrow. Seldom plagued by anxieties, she wondered how long it would all last, a compelling question now that she'd begun a new cycle, different from any she might have imagined.
 

Her routine was changed by Sonny's working hours, late to bed, sleeping late in the morning. She commuted between Gramercy Park and West Ninety-eighth Street to meet him every day for one-o'clock brunch. Oddly, he seemed satisfied with fondling her. The only fact that aroused his curiosity, making him vaguely uneasy, was her means of support, and she made up her mind to look for a job, although office work struck her as tedious and unnecessary. The concept of earning money, of working for a living, had a totally alien aspect, and in a sense existed in her mind as some obscure abstraction which she found difficult to relate to the real world. The fact was, she didn't know anyone—apart from people teaching college—who actually worked; but weren't professional people a class apart? The practical requirement for survival was something she'd heard about, read about in novels, but it had never made any deep impression on her. And yet just about everyone did some kind of work.
 

Looking through the tonnage of the Sunday
Times
classified section later that afternoon, while her two boys were glued to a late-starting West Coast game, she discovered that she was puzzled by the abbreviations, the range of pointless jobs, the hard-sell shrieking insistence of employment agencies. A strange world of straphanging on subways, jostling on buses, opened out to her.
 

Regularity and punctuality were never her strong points. She ate, floated in to appointments, appeared in class, when the mood struck her. Holding a job had for her all the implausibility of a mystical experience.
 

“Sonny, what does
fee paid
mean?”
 

“The people that hire you pay the agency a fee; now, shush, Jane, will you?”
 

Three of them were sprawled on the bed along with the grimy barges of
Times
sections, covering every irrelevance known to man. She picked up the book review, and Sonny hit the back of it.
 

“Stop clownin', Jane, and look, will you. I showed you where. There ain't any jobs in this part.”
 

She dropped the book review with some reluctance and continued her research into help wanted.
 

“You got three quarters to come up with a few jobs, ‘cause I wanna go through them with you before you start applyin'.”
 

“Will you shush, Pops. I missed two plays. Did Oakland make a first down?”
 

“Jane, you're distractin' us from the game.”
 

“Okay. I'll go home. Goodbye,” she said, getting into her shoes.
 

“Now cut it out. Nobody's gettin' anything done. We can't watch the game and you're not serious about findin'
anything.”
 

“Do you want me to stay?”
 

“I want you to, Jane,” Junior insisted. “Or else it's Franco-American spaghetti for dinner.”
 

“I said you could have Chinks, dint I? Look at that Lamonica throwin' the bomb. That mother, what protection he gets. Stands in the pocket like he's got all day, and he does. Junior coulda hit Wells with that front four blocking.”
 

Curt Gowdy with his special excited redundance proceeded to explain what was obvious to everyone watching.
 

“Sonny, do you think I'd make a good clerk?” Jane asked. “Or should I sell medical equipment?”
 

“You got rent to pay, do what you like.”
 

“I can't type or take shorthand. Let's see. Store detective at Masters? Or a programmer?”
 

“Watch the guard set himself, Junior. See him move to his right ... that means he's gonna move to the outside and block for the halfback on a screen.”
 

“You're right,” Junior said.
 

“I think I'd make a great store detective.”
 

“We could rob anything we wanted, Pops.”
 

“Hey, that ain't funny,” Sonny said, getting the boy into a headlock.
 

“I was only kidding.”
 

“Silk-screen hand printer. That sounds like me. I like to paint.”
 

“You're really a nutcase. Lookit, I'm gonna clear out if I can't listen in peace.”
 

She dug her thumbs into his hips and he shouted and laughed with the total, uninhibited joy of a child.
 

“So you found out Pops is ticklish.”
 

“Uh-huh, I found out.”
 

“Jane, please, wait'll half time or I'll belt you,” Sonny said in his most truculent manner. She made him laugh when she stuck out her tongue. She knew with certainty that she loved him, but what she hadn't expected was an overwhelming sense of gratitude, for in some unseen magic leap he had returned her to the world of childhood, not one that she'd lived through or recreated but some golden realm of inviolate innocence.
 

 

* * * *

 

“Let me explain how a parlay works, Jane,” said the winner of one, an exultant Sonny. “I bet fifty on the Jets—”
 

“What about the points?”
 

“For a sec, forget about points.”
 

“I got to lay five-and-a-half to five, which is dollars. I win the Jets, right. Which gives me a hundred and five bucks; then my hundred and five goes on to the Oakland Raiders. I lay a hundred and five to a hundred. I win it. Total two hundred and five. I subtract my fifty-five dollar investment and my profit is a hundred and fifty.”
 

“But the points? I still don't understand.”
 

“That's the equalizer. One team is better than the other, and are expected to win, so the price-makers compensate. They make Jets twelve-point favorites. If I take the Jets I gotta win by at least thirteen. If they win by twelve it's a push, or no bet.”
 

“How much can you bet?” she asked, finding the system easy, logical, a sure way to financial security.
 

“As much as your credit line is.”
 

“And if you lose, it's only fifty-five dollars? That sounds like you could clean up a fortune.”
 

“Oh, really?” Sonny smiled at her, brought out a ballpoint and explained with astonishing precision the unlikelihood of winning two games in a row with any consistency. “The bookie's got a double edge—one the vigorish, in which you gotta lay more money than him; the other, winning two out of two by the points.”
 

“I still think it's easy.”
 

He threw up his hands in despair.
 

“This has foxed some of the greatest brains walkin' around, and you now got a system. Do me a favor, Jane, get yourself located in a job, and stop with the opinions.”
 

He got up from the kitchen table and went to check on Junior who was now soundly sleeping. The boy had gorged three eggrolls, an order of spareribs, and pork egg foo yong.
 

“Man, does he smell of garlic,” Sonny observed. “I'll take you home now.”
 

They walked down a flight of stairs and Sonny rang the bell of the apartment directly below his. A girl in blue jeans in her twenties, with a red wig and an unbuttoned shirt, answered the door.
 

“Hi, Sonny, what's happening?” she asked.
 

“Do me a favor, Gloria, and check on Junior in an hour or so.” He handed her his keys.
 

“Where should I leave the keys?”