Manhattan Loverboy (15 page)
“You,” I groaned inaudibly, and made a pathetic attempt at finding that umbilical nurse-button. Despite the fact that I was incredibly weak—it felt as if they had peeled the muscles from my bones—I was terrified. I was sure that she had tried to kill me. Here she was again to finish the job. She could simply grab the pillow out from under my head and put it over my face. After a desperate struggle for the little button, I fell exhausted back to sleep.
I woke up an indeterminate amount of time later. She was still there. Was she patiently waiting for my demise? That deluded dream about her wanting to be my sperm bank, what crapola. No doubt she had observed that my diet consisted largely of greasy fast foods, and she must have realized that along with my poor habits, a screeching halt in that old yellow cab of my ill-maintained body could send everything tumbling forward. But what was she doing here? Even more, why had she let me live this long?
“Will he be okay?” she asked the nurse who was checking a series of needles, tubes, bottles, and beeping electrical graphs as if she were adjusting the transmission of a compact car.
“He’ll be just fine,” the lady in white replied, and left. Amy looked down at me. She kissed and massaged my cold hand and started crying and saying things into my limp metacarpal. I must have had a partial stroke because it was still remarkably difficult to talk.
“Why are you treating me this way?” I said slowly.
“You’re awake!” she exclaimed, hugging me.
“Huh?”
“I love you,” she said without mitigation or hesitance. “I always fight when put on the defensive, and you have this way of putting a girl very much on the defensive. But I also realized that in many ways you’re everything that I was ever looking for. When I wasn’t with you, I realized that I couldn’t stop thinking about you. Have you ever felt that way?”
Yes, I had a severe rash once. When I wasn’t scratching, I was thinking about scratching it. I managed to bend my mouth, a smile. Yes, I loved (adversarial polarity) and wanted her, but I still couldn’t understand her infatuation for me.
Slowly, I ground out words: “Can’t you find anyone else? Is your life really this lonely?”
“Of course not,” she replied, “Whitlock wants wedlock. He’s mad about me.”
“Where did you meet him?”
“Society affairs.”
“Why are you picking me?” I replied slowly.
“Well, in a word, for me it’s always been a case of likes repelling.”
“And opposites attracting?” I wheezed out.
“Not entirely. I’ve always been very sensitive around invalids and sickly types. They disturb me. I can’t stay with an irregular person; people who are handicapped or freakish make me sick to my stomach. Quite bluntly, I’m a complete Darwinist. I think runts like yourself should be drowned like kittens. I’m completely opposed to medical technology’s bent for preserving aberrations that never should be permitted. But the truth is, the closest I can really come to love is pity. In fact, I’m completely embarrassed about my love for you. Indeed, you’re more of a perversion to me, and perversions are stronger than conventional loves because they’re predicated on one’s greatest fears and weaknesses. I really wish I could get out from under these feelings for you. They must be kept in utter secrecy.”
I asked her why I had all these additional bandages on my body and casts on my arms and legs.
“Well, that’s why I can confess my love for you now.”
“Huh?”
“I had to do some alterations.”
“What?”
“There are some things you should know.”
“What?”
“When they brought you in, you desperately needed a bypass.”
“And I’m sure it won’t be my last. So what?”
“They searched for your relatives, but we couldn’t find any. Do you have parents?”
“I didn’t break out of a shell!” I replied laboriously, not admitting I was adopted, which might have led to the possibility that I was hatched.
“Well, we couldn’t locate anyone, so I said I was your wife, and with the assistance of a couple of doctors who were fairly mercenary, and since I love you, and…” She paused.
“What is it?!” I murmured a shout.
“I took the liberty of having some elective surgery done on you.”
“Elective? What was done?”
“Now, I’ll pay for everything. You really don’t have to worry about that, you’re an investment.”
“A what?”
“Like the apartment, I had you completed before I moved in.”
“What?”
“You had a total of seven,” she explained, “not counting the rhinoplasty and the liposuction. You’ve had nine operations. And you’re scheduled for one more.”
“Nine operations! What the fuck…”
“Oh, no, I elected against that one. I didn’t think you needed a penis augmentation.”
“What!” I started squirming against a network of bandages and restrainers. What kind of Michael Jackson had she turned me into?
“You shouldn’t struggle,” she said. “The operation done on your legs is highly experimental. They’ve never tried it on mammals before. You could rip the arteries.”
“My legs? What was done to my legs?!”
“They call it ‘bone accentuation.’ A part of the torso-proportioning.”
“Huh?”
“You’re average height now.”
“What? What’s this?”
“And thin, too.”
“What? Where’s my fat!”
“You’ve had radical fat suction.”
“Out!”
“You still have a pupil-fusion operation tomorrow.”
“What?”
“Brilliant blue eyes that actually glow in the dark, like little blue headlights.”
“Get the hell out of here! I swear I’ll have you arrested. I’ll see you behind bars.”
“All right, calm down.” She rose to go. “You’re tall, thin, and handsome. Get used to it, Bane.”
“Bane? Who the hell’s Bane?” Yet the name rang a bell.
“I decided that you’d make a good Bane. I plan to call you Bane during the length of our relationship.”
“Get the fuck OUT!” I hollered and screamed until I was so frantic that the sound frequency of the electro-cardiograph blended into one long single beep. To my continued screams, Amy calmly left.
When an orderly entered, I screamed obscenities until he called a nurse. I kept screaming until a doctor rushed in. From him I asked exactly what had been done to me and was told of one big life-saving operation and a variety of smaller forays into my body.
He itemized it for me: My face was different. The eyes were almondine, the nose, retrouseè, the cheekbones were reinforced. The chin was clefted, the jawbone strengthened. My ear lobes were connected to my jaw. In short, I was handsome. The balding field of my scalp was seeded with a new crop of hair, the skin sanded. He went on. I informed the good doctor that unless I was prepped stat! for operations reversing the dubious damage, his hospital would collapse under the weight of my Chungking lawsuit. He informed me that this was quite impossible for a variety of reasons. Not the least of which was the fact that experts had been called from all corners of the U.S. Millions of dollars in operations and procedures had changed hands over my body. Articles delineating the many surgeries were currently in galley form and about to be printed. Amy had gone even further than the mass operations done in Bismarck, North Dakota. She had made me supremely into one of her own.
Over the next few weeks, while recuperating from the surgery, when I wasn’t unsuccessfully hunting for big-name trial lawyers who would competently handle my case, I spent the hours flipping through an odd assortment of fragranced, glossy magazines, either men’s fashion magazines, mainly
GQ
, or business magazines, like
Forbes
. Gaze on anything long enough and you’ll learn to love it. I gradually developed a fixation on shady, showy figures of film, fashion, and finance.
I found myself watching that air-time-purchased TV show,
The Millionaire Makers
, desperately trying to follow the “no-money-down process” to becoming a financial wizard. Venture capitalism was on my mind. As a pastime, on little scraps of paper, I began fooling with unusual plans and byzantine schemes: If I could sell the lease of my apartment for such and such, and get a second mortgage, and invest that capital in such and such, before this so-and-so takeover, and then liquidate the assets into X bonds, I’d be worth X zillions in just a few years.
VENGEANCE IS MINE
(KARMA IS FOR PUSSIES)
As the bandages were peeled off, the results were quite embarrassing. It all eluded me at first, but in the mirror of popular opinion, I beheld it. As the gauzy veils unspooled, a sigh went up, like a puff of smoke. I watched with the same goggle-eyed disbelief as the middle-aged nurses who filled the spectator pews in the surgical theater.
“You know, you’re lucky,” one R.N. remarked, in a nasal, outer-borough honk. “Some folks wait years before their bodies can deteriorate enough for the operations you’ve had.”
How fortunate I was. After all the bandages were off, and I started realizing what I was going to look like and what the future would hold, I felt lightheaded. Good looks were a wild card I had not been dealt. Only in the most incidental way had I even thought of my appearance.
Yet, as the nights progressed, I began to love sleeping with myself. During the days, intensive therapy was the regimen: hydrotherapy, parallel bars, Nautilus machines—all awakening stringy gristle that never knew it was muscle, spaghettied around newly fused bones. On a daily basis for months, the hours were filled with intensive aerobic and weightlifting sessions. My feelings for me were intensifying. Initially I had just a crush, a puppy love, but eventually I developed an Adele H. obsession with myself.
One day I was awakened by an ominous numb sensation. I opened my eyes to see the ghastly Whitlock standing before me, pinching an I.V. tube that had been dripping Lord-knows-what into my gorgeous arm.
“Hi, handsome, remember me?” he dropped the tube and began. “We’ve got a problem to work out.”
“Leave me very much alone,” I pleaded.
“Very much like to. Very much like to. But you seem to constantly be stuck in my craw.”
“What do you want?”
“Amy seems to think you’re a god in rags.”
“I’ll sue the bitch if I ever see her again, I swear. Look what she did to me.” I was still hypocritically irate over her five-hour body makeover.
“You don’t look any different to me. But I’m glad to see you feel this way.”
“I’ll sue you, too, I swear.”
“Suppose we settle this right now.”
“How?”
“Suppose I give you a solid figure, and we put an end to all this squabbling.”
“What kind of figure?”
“Suppose I give you, say, ten thousand bucks, and in exchange, you just stay away from us.”
“You mean give up my apartment?”
“Yeah.”
“No way.”
“How about fifty thousand, cold hard cash up front. That’s a lot of money.”
“You think I’m some hick?”
“You stay away from me and Amy, and I’ll deposit a hundred thousand bucks into your personal account.”
“I don’t have an account.”
“All right, I’ll give it to you, but I want a year.”
“Just keep her away from me,” I countered.
“Fuck you,” he said as if it were a salutation.
“Fuck you, too,” I saluted him back, and he left.
During that entire duration, while the hospital kept getting Amy’s checks, subsidizing my journey into ever-unfolding beauty, she didn’t reappear once. They soon moved me to a place outside the city that was more of a sanctuary. Weeks turned to months, and months gave way to seasons. I reasoned that she saw this as payment for stealing my apartment, and I assumed that under Whitless’s ocean of wealth she was able to extinguish any alleged love for me.
When most of the physical therapy was complete, I was informed that I’d be allowed to live at home and come in to the hospital for daily workouts and checkups.
Inasmuch as each of us is the center of our own universe, it takes no effort to believe that we are gods and should be treated accordingly. During the time in the hospital, when all the money and attention was being spent on me, I wasn’t compelled in the slightest to wonder why. I was me and there-fore worth all the money in the world. To me, bad as they were, my farts always came out smelling like roses.
Good fortune has a way of making even the most bitter mind magnanimous. This
jihad
with Amy had gone on long enough. I was soon well enough to check out. Hopefully she and asshole would have moved off somewhere and killed each other with their selfish and surgical forms of love.
On my first day home, I walked across the hallway and knocked on her door. I wanted to set the matter straight. Getting no response, I went to my adjacent door. At the base of it, I found a sealed envelope. Tearing it open, I found a VISA card made out in the name Joseph Aeiou. Inside was a letter:
Aeiou,
Here’s a company credit card with the first installment, five thousand dollars of credit. In return, all I ask is that you leave me and the mother of my future children alone, and you will receive more money with time. This is my last effort at being nice. If this continues I’ll have to be…not so nice.
Andrew Whitlock,
M.B.A. Harvard, 1958
