Morning (19 page)

“I—um—I was disappointed with the doctor,” she said, feeling brave. “He didn’t stop to explain anything to me. And I wish he had gone ahead and done the procedure the third time. Perhaps that would have opened the tube. I wouldn’t have minded the discomfort.”

“My dear Sara,” Dr. Crochett said, “if the doctor had put the dye through the third
time, he would have had to use more force, and you would have experienced something much stronger than discomfort. No, he did what he could. Now it’s time to schedule you for a laparoscopy. This is a procedure that requires day surgery in the hospital. I’ll do a small incision in your abdomen, insert a laparoscope and look around to see if you have serious endometriosis. Find out what’s blocking that tube of yours. If you do have endometriosis, I’ll want to do a laparotomy; I’ll open you up and clean you out. Then, of course, you’ll have a longer hospital stay, probably about five days.”

“Good Lord,” Sara said. “Does this require general anesthesia?”

“Yes,” the doctor replied. “Which means some discomfort. And, of course, if you have the laparotomy, you’ll have scars from the incision. But nothing you won’t be able to hide under a bikini.”

“Oh,” Sara said. “This seems like such a serious thing to do.”

“Well, you don’t have to do it right away,” Dr. Crochett said. “No one is eager to have general anesthesia. You can wait as long as you want. You may not have endometriosis. But we’ve determined that your husband is okay, your mucus and his are compatible, you’re ovulating, and you have one tube blocked. This seems like a reasonable next step. But we can do it whenever you want. Why don’t you think about it? Talk with your husband about it. We can wait as long as you’d like.”

“Fine,” Sara said. “I’ll call you back.”

Steve was at work. The house was silent and bright with winter sun reflecting off layers of snow that glittered from lawns and along tree branches and rooftops. Sara sat thinking.

She had to admit it to herself: she was afraid of general anesthesia. She had heard too many horror stories; she was afraid she would die from it. Not wake up. Or have brain damage. The longer she sat thinking, the more frightened she got.

She knew she couldn’t do it, not just yet. And really, why should she? Look at all that Morris had gone through, only to finally get pregnant for no real reason at all. And she wanted to edit Fanny Anderson’s book, there was that, too, to be responsible for its seeing the light of day. If she went into the hospital, she couldn’t work. If she went into the hospital and died—no. She just couldn’t schedule it, not yet. She would give herself another month or two. Why not? Perhaps if she became truly engrossed with the Jenny book, so that she wasn’t always thinking about getting pregnant, she would get pregnant. And it really would be better, from a financial point of view, if she edited another book or
two and saved up some money before she went into the expense of surgery and a hospital stay.

When Steve came home, she explained to him all that the doctor had said and explained her thoughts to him, including her feeling of fear.

“Well, let’s wait, then, Sara,” he said. “I don’t want you to have to do anything you don’t want to. I admit, if it were my body going under a knife, I’d hesitate, too. Let’s give ourselves some more time. After all, we’ve got years ahead of us.”

“Oh, Steve, I do love you,” she said, and hugged him. She felt she had just been given a reprieve.

All right, body
, she secretly said to herself,
I’m not going to subject you to surgery just yet. So why don’t you get busy and cooperate and get pregnant and we won’t have to do surgery at all?
She wondered if anyone else spoke to her body in quite the same way she had come to speak to hers, as if it were a willful and cunning and traitorous child.

Winter had hit the coast in earnest now. It was too dangerous to fly in the tiny planes that serviced Nantucket through the high winds and thick fogs or snow-laden clouds. Sara had no choice but to take the six-thirty ferry over to Hyannis, where she rented a car to drive to Cambridge.

Sitting on the ferry, Fanny’s manuscript in her lap, Sara leaned her head against the window. Today the sea shimmered like a dream, with snow spiraling down onto the peaks of ice-blue waves and the wind whipping the flakes toward the window, then tossing them away in a flurry. That was the way Sara felt: spirited, energetic, swirling enthusiastically through time. Her energy was high.

She had agreed to edit another romance novel for Heartways House so that she would have additional money for the surgery. She had actively tried to become a more integral part of Steve’s Nantucket group; just this week she had had the group, including The Virgin and her grumpy husband, over for a lasagna dinner followed by a boisterous game of Trivial Pursuit. She had made an appointment to talk to Donald James about Fanny Anderson’s book.

And now she was going back to see Fanny. Fanny had kept her word. As soon as Sara had returned from Jamaica and done the work she needed on the Jenny pages, she had called Fanny, and Fanny had said, at once, “Yes, dear, of course, come tomorrow.”

The final section of the Jenny novel began in London in the early seventies, back
in a world full of men and champagne and dangerous parties. The first few pages were fine, although Sara noticed something that had not been included in the novel before: every time Fanny mentioned a new man that Jenny was involved with, she mentioned the man’s age, and the men were all in their twenties. Sara made a mental note to ask Fanny about this. Undoubtedly she wanted to prove a point—that Jenny was so beautiful and exciting that she could attract men ten and twenty years younger than she. But it made the writing stilted: “Jasper Kitteredge, who was only twenty-two, crossed the ballroom toward Jenny with the assurance and determination of a much older man.” “Jenny returned from her ride just as the Whartons’ new guest was arriving. From the high back of the black thoroughbred jumper she looked down at Stephen Matte, who was twenty-four years old, just stepping out of his sleek low Aston Martin.”

We’ll have to do something about this
, Sara thought.
Eventually
. The end of the novel was surprisingly bleak.

One night at a dinner party, I looked around the elegant dining room table and realized that I had slept with every man seated there. I excused myself, saying I had a sudden headache, and left the room and the party. I knew I had to change my life, and I did, on the first opportunity offered to me. An American banker, fifteen years older than I, visiting London and not aware of my past, became smitten with me and asked me to marry him. I did not love him, but I was not certain of my capabilities for love anymore. And he offered me the security I needed. So I went back with him to the United States, where he set me up in a fine old house in a fine old city. He provided me with every luxury, and we were compatible. It was not unpleasant. My husband worshipped me—but I was uncomfortable with this worship, which I knew was based on my looks, my fading, failing beauty. It was a relief when he died from a heart attack at the age of sixty. It was a relief to be left alone, with enough money to provide a secure hiding place, a place where I could remain comfortable and solitary, with no one to watch me age.

I had come a long way from the Kansas farm where my parents knelt and lifted and strained in the dirt in their ceaseless task of renewing the earth and its animals, a necessary ritual with the stately repetitions of a
dance. Often I sit remembering that farm, those tasks, the people I loved (who are dead now), and I also remember that the only sound of appreciation for their performance was the heartless crack of applause when a thundercloud rolled its lightning overhead. And I remember that the only gold that was tossed to those slavish dancers was the gold of sunlight that fell like glittering coins through the well of the barn where it disappeared among the soiled straw, never to be touched, never to be picked up and carried off to buy them freedom. I had realized early in my life that the gold in that place was only an illusion.

So I had done this much: I had escaped. I had freed myself from a repetitious drudgery, I had seen places in the world where real gold rimmed the plates and paintings and limbs of women. I had possessed real gold myself. I had been admired and adored by many—I had given happiness to many. I had loved and been loved. I judge my life to have been entirely satisfactory. I see years ahead during which I will be able to sit here alone, remembering the freedom, the gold, the far countries, the lovers and their gifts.

It is only sometimes, when the sunlight steals across my room to strike a spark against a prism in a chandelier so that the air trembles with the possibilities of more radiance than I had guessed at, when I feel just as I felt as a young girl, hearing the doves cry out in the barn as the sun sliced golden through the everyday air:

There must be more. But where?

But where?

Sara was not satisfied with the way the novel ended. When she was once again seated in the hot blue living room, with the assorted animals, whom she was coming to learn to know by name, snuffling and purring around her, and Fanny seated across from her in the embracing depths of the sofa, she at first spoke of other things, trying to find just the right moment to give Fanny her criticisms—hoping that the inscrutable and moody Fanny would not take offense. Once again the stone-faced Eloise brought them a cart laden with delicacies and a sterling silver pot of smoky Lapsang souchong tea. Once again Sara spoke first of herself: her meeting with Morris, her doctor’s advice, her fear of
surgery.

“Some women actually love being in the hospital, being fussed over and lifted and lowered and rearranged, but others, like you and me, hate it,” Fanny said. “I think it’s losing control we’re afraid of.”

“I think it’s
death
I’m afraid of!” Sara laughed. “I have so much I want to do in this world, and the thought that one careless slip—” She couldn’t continue.

“I know,” Fanny said. “Really I do. And I sympathize. If it weren’t for that fear, that a surgeon would have some fatal moment of stupidity, I’m sure I would have had several face-lifts by now. Not to mention having everything else lifted, too.” She laughed. “But really, Sara, you know these things are safe. And it sounds as though you really need this procedure. Especially if you have one tube blocked. I think you should go ahead and do it. Soon. Really I do.”

Sara smiled at Fanny and raised her cup in a sort of toast and sipped her tea.
All right, she thought to herself, if you can tell me what to do with my body, I can certainly tell you what to do with your book!

“All right,” she said, smiling but serious. “I’ll make the appointment as soon as I get home. It shouldn’t put me out of commission for too long. You know I’m longing to get this book to Donald James, and he’s wild to see it.” She opened her notebook. It was difficult making out the print in the dim blue light of the room. “Do you think we could have more lights on?” she asked.

“Oh, well, electric lights make everything so garish, I always think,” Fanny replied. “It
is
daytime. I’m sure we’ve sufficient light to read by.”

This time there was no mistaking the will of iron cloaked in the lilting luscious voice.
For God’s sake, what vanity!
Sara thought impatiently.
We’ll both lose our eyesight just to keep it dark enough in here to hide her wrinkles
. But she smiled and said, “Yes, you’re right. This is fine.”

For a few moments Sara pretended to study her notes. Really she was searching for just the right words to say. If Fanny shied away from light on her face, how would she handle the harsh light of judgment on her book? At last Sara stared at the author. She took a deep breath.

“Is this a novel?” she asked.

Fanny, who now held the fat cat and was stroking it, looked up at Sara, startled. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, is this
fiction
?” Sara pressed, her judgment making her bold.

“Why yes, my dear, I thought you understood that absolutely,” Fanny said. “Of course it is fiction.”

“Then you must change it,” Sara said. “You can’t do this to your readers. You make us care so much about Jenny, you make us curious, you take us through her life, where so much happens, until we are longing for her to be happy, to be loved and to honestly give love back. You can’t let her end up this way. You can’t let the last relationship of her life be the sort of marriage you describe. And then such bitter loneliness.”

For a long moment Fanny did not speak. Sara was silent, too, biting her tongue, refusing to take back what she had said.

“The requisite happy ending,” Fanny said at last, sighing.

“In this novel it is fitting,” Sara said.

“But it would not be true.”

“What ‘truths’ do you care about, Fanny?” Sara asked. “A novel is fiction, but it must contain truths. It must seem real. I can believe Jenny’s life up to a point. She was a prisoner of her insecurities and her beauty, but she has been brave enough to get herself away from the farm and to other countries, she has had the courage to lead an interesting life. It isn’t believable that she would settle at last for a loveless marriage and then loneliness. Don’t you see? It’s not real.”

“But it’s very real,” Fanny insisted. “Jenny has no choice, at last. She got old, you see.”

“But what is she at the end of the novel? Only about fifty years old!” Sara protested. “Are you saying that once women turn fifty their lives are over? No men will love them? That’s ridiculous! Steve will love me when I’m fifty, I’m sure of it. And I’ll love him, even though he’ll probably be bald and have a paunch. People might be attracted to each other at first because of looks, but real love isn’t so superficial.”

Fanny smiled. “You are so passionate about this,” she said.

“And another thing,” Sara pressed on. “Her writing. All through her life she writes. In Mexico she wanted to be a writer, she even managed to get things published. In England she worked as an assistant on a fine magazine. She cared about writing, she was not just a beautiful face and body. What happened to that side of Jenny? I really can’t imagine her, no matter how much money she has, just curling up in a hole forever. She
would be so bored.”