Slow Hand (11 page)

“Dr. Halsey isn’t seeing patients,” his nurse said. She slit open a manila envelope with a lion’s head letter opener. “They’ll take care of you at Emergency.”

“I have to see Dr. Halsey,” Ali said, her voice cracking. “I’m a friend.”

The nurse sighed. “Just a minute.” She stood and went down a hall, opening a door at the end after a quick knock.

Ali pressed her fists into her stomach. For some reason she no longer felt a thing. She pressed harder. What a miracle if she burst her appendix! She should stab herself with the letter opener. She should at least break her fingers, slam them in a drawer like a draft dodger.

“Would you like to come in?” a high, nasal voice said. Ali spun around. It was Andrew, standing at the door.

“The doctor will see you,” the nurse said impatiently, sitting back behind her desk.

Ali’s heart began to pound. She felt as if a pair of hands were cupping and uncupping her ears. His shirt was blue. She went down the hall, squeezing past him without looking up, and sat in the green plastic chair beside his desk. He shut the door and walked over to the window. It was a big room; there was a long expanse of old green and yellow floor tiles between them. Leaning his hip against a filing cabinet, he just stood there, hands in his trouser pockets, regarding her with such a polite, impersonal expression that she asked him if he recognized her.

“Of course I do,” he said quietly.

“Well—” Suddenly she was mortified. She felt like a woman about to sob that she couldn’t afford the abortion. She touched her fingers to her hot face.

“I don’t know your name,” he said.

“Oh. Ali. Ali Perrin.”

“What do you want, Ali?”

Her eyes fluttered down to his shoes—black, shabby loafers. She hated his adenoidal voice. What did she want?
What she wanted was to bolt from the room like the mad woman she suspected she was. She glanced up at him again. Because he was standing with his back to the window, he was outlined in light. It made him seem unreal, like a film image superimposed against a screen. She tried to look away, but his eyes held her. Out in the waiting room the telephone was ringing. What do
you
want, she thought, capitulating to the pull of her perspective over to his, seeing now, from across the room, a charming woman with tanned, bare shoulders and blushing cheeks.

The light blinked on his phone. Both of them glanced over at it, but he stayed standing where he was. After a moment she murmured, “I have no idea what I’m doing here.”

He was silent. She kept her eyes on the phone, waiting for him to speak. When he didn’t, she said, “I had a dream …” She let out a disbelieving laugh. “God.” She shook her head.

“You are very lovely,” he said in a speculative tone. She glanced up at him, and he turned away. Pressing his hands together, he took a few steps along the window. “I have very much enjoyed our … our encounters,” he said.

“Oh, don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not here to—”

“However,” he cut in, “I should tell you that I am moving into another building.”

She looked straight at him.

“This weekend, as a matter of fact.” He frowned at his wall of framed diplomas.

“This weekend?” she said.

“Yes.”

“So,” she murmured. “It’s over then.”

“Regrettably.”

She stared at his profile. In profile he was a stranger—beak-nosed, round-shouldered. She hated his shoes, his floor, his formal way of speaking, his voice, his profile, and yet her eyes filled and she longed for him to look at her again.

Abruptly he turned his back to her and said that his apartment was in the east end, near the beach. He gestured out the window. Did she know where the yacht club was?

“No,” she whispered.

“Not that I am a member,” he said with a mild laugh.

“Listen,” she said, wiping her eyes. “I’m sorry.” She came to her feet. “I guess I just wanted to see you.”

He strode like an obliging host over to the door.

“Well, good-bye,” she said, looking up into his face.

He had garlic breath and five o’clock shadow. His eyes grazed hers. “I wouldn’t feel too badly about anything,” he said affably.

When she got back to the apartment the first thing she did was take her clothes off and go over to the full-length mirror, which was still standing next to the easel. Her eyes filled again because without Andrew’s appreciation or the hope of it (and despite how repellent she had found him) what she saw was a pathetic little woman with pasty skin and short legs.

She looked at the painting. If
that
was her, as Claude claimed, then she also had flat eyes and crude, wild proportions.

What on earth did Claude see in her?

What had Andrew seen? “You are very lovely,” Andrew had said, but maybe he’d been reminding himself. Maybe he’d meant, “lovely when I’m in the next building.”

After supper that evening she asked Claude to lie with her on the couch, and the two of them watched TV. She held his hand against her breast. “Let this be enough,” she prayed.

But she didn’t believe it ever would be. The world was too full of surprises, it frightened her. As Claude was always saying, things looked different from different angles, and in different lights. What this meant to her was that everything hinged on where you happened to be standing at a given moment, or even on who you imagined you were. It meant that in certain lights, desire sprang up out of nowhere.

AU
THOR’S NO
TE

When one speaks of erotic fantasy, it is not normally the supernatural to which one is alluding. However, as we all know, there are certain potential drawbacks to any earthbound human lover—dandruff, say, and the ability to forget important anniversaries being only the least of them. And so Carolyn Banks imagines a young girl’s sexual awakening not as just the prosaic or ultimately disappointing occurrence it so easily can be but rather as a moment that magic moves out of time. What we sense is the contentment felt by Banks’ narrator, the awareness of her sexual self ignited so long before and still brightly alive within her.

D
addy says our creek is where the mer-maids come to rest.” My grandchild Miranda’s voice, bright and shrill.

Then that of her father, Ed, my son-in-law.“To hear your mother talk,” he says,“mer-men as well.”

I watch my daughter blush.“Edmund,” she says, stepping in toward him, bumping his hip with her own.

My heart leaps at this, at their intimacy, and at the possibility …“Anything can happen,” I say.

Miranda reaches both arms up, and I bend into her embrace. She smells like popcorn and wool. How old is she now? I think five.“Hello, Grandma,” she says, her lips fall wet against my cheek.

“Isn’t it kind of cold for you to be out here like that?” Ed gestures at my sweater. He and Jill wear matching sheepskin jackets. Their cheeks are red, their breath is visible.

“I suppose.” I take Miranda’s mittened hand, but she pulls away, runs down the path and past the house, out onto the edge of the lawn where the creek can be seen.

“What about the mer-maids?” she turns and asks.

We have all three stumbled behind her. I look over at Jill. She is flushed again. Ed’s eyebrows arch, as if to ask what he should answer now.“Well,” I remind the little girl,“this is a bywater, a salt creek that lifts and falls with the tide. It might harbor mer-folk.”

“Mer-folk,” she repeats, laughing. Then she shifts her focus abruptly, as children often do.“Is it true that all your friends wear pantyhose under their bathing suits?”

Her parents rush at her, shooshing. They tell me not to mind.“I don’t know where she gets these things,” Jill says. She glares at her child, takes her shoulders, and nudges her toward the house.“Enough of this,” she says.“Inside.”

But Miranda doesn’t take this seriously. She laughs with every stride. And the minute that she’s indoors, while, in fact, she’s yanking off her cap and mittens, she asks about the pantyhose again.

I wave her mother off.“The truth is,” I tell her,“one or two of my friends do. Wear pantyhose, I mean. Nude pantyhose. They think it makes their legs look better, and actually, from far away, it does. But the wonder is that they wear bathing suits at all.”

Ed laughs uncomfortably and looks at Jill.

I realize what he thinks I mean. I correct myself.“I mean most women their age don’t swim,” I say.

“Oh!” Ed is relieved.

Miranda is bored with my answer. She is scouting what my husband called Our Great Room. Here the ceiling is two stories high and huge fish—tarpon, blue, and sail—arc in taxidermic splendor on the walls. Here, too, tarnished silver cups hold things they shouldn’t: pencils, a ruler, some receipts, and maybe even bills. There are paintings, also—shipyards, yachts, the sea. And there is“The Shame Girl,” an almost photographic painting that our cook—long ago, back when I was small—once named.

The Shame Girl sits naked on a rock, her privates hidden discreetly by the way she wraps herself with her arms. The water that surrounds the rock, still as a mirror, offers the same demure reflection. There is something very formal about that water. Not just its stillness but the sculpted vegetation on its shore. Not like the vegetation here at waterside: thick, impenetrable, unruly.

“Mer-maids,” I say,“Indeed. And mer-men! What an astounding thing.” I look at my daughter with new eyes. If I asked her, would she tell me? I rather doubt it, for what would she say?

I told someone once—my roommate at school—and I wasn’t believed. Our theme for the day was First Sexual Encounter, and I’d already heard hers, a tawdry scuffle in the backseat of her boyfriend’s parents’ car.

“I remember it so clearly,” I began. For my turn, I had made my roommate sit within a nest of throw pillows I’d collected from the dayroom. I had wanted the mood to be right and had chosen something in the pasha mode.

“Wait, wait!” she’d said, arranging the pillows another way, some beneath her knees, others behind her head.

I was, by now, eager to go on.“Ready?” I asked.

I set the scene quite carefully, as I will now:

My parents were having their annual summer party. As usual, there would be no young people there. For me the excitement was in the preparation, the hanging of the lanterns, especially.

My father would stand on a ladder beneath a line of bare
bulbs he’d earlier strung. Cook would be on the ground, at the ladder’s side. I would punch each lantern open—they were boxed and folded flat, but when you pressed them, they’d expand into bright ribbed bells made of the thinnest paper. I would hand the open lantern to Cook, who would then give it to my dad. And my mother, she would stand off to the side saying,“No, it leans a bit to the left,” or“Ah! Just so.”

And every year it would be the same. My father would come down after hanging the last lantern, hug my mother, and say something quietly in her ear. Then he’d boom again,“What an assembly line we make, eh?” And he’d thank me and thank Cook, and he’d take my mother away.

Cook would fuss over me lest I feel excluded, but the fact was, I never minded any of this. One year I even repeated to Cook what I had been told—that Daddy had only heard the mer-maids sing. I knew already that this was the euphemistic—or so I thought—phrase that he often used to signal his desire.

But this time I was sixteen, old enough to move among the party guests as an equal, I thought. When I said so, however, my father had smiled his indulgence and my mother had feathered her fingers through my hair. I still burned beneath my sense of insult.

So, when the party was well under way and darkness had taken hold, I donned a hooded jersey and a pair of blue jeans and decided to swim out to a large flat rock and sprawl there, looking back at the colored lights and spying on the guests.

I had never gone into the water at night. Nor had I swum in other than a one-piece suit. Three strokes in, the clothing I’d selected grew so cumbersome and heavy that I found myself near panic.

I gained the rock and pulled myself up on it. Then I began, with difficulty, shedding what I’d worn. When I was naked, however, I was also quite cold. Without thinking, I assumed“The Shame Girl” pose.

On shore, the colored lights were turning the people beneath them tints of fuchsia and green. I somehow grew cynical and thought the partygoers clumsy and silly and not worth observing after all.

I was sorry that I hadn’t stayed in my room. I had things to do, books to read. It seemed to me then that grown-up parties relied more on laughter than words, but I thought the latter were far superior and so was scornful.

I slipped into the water; it was time, I knew, to leave this childish business of spying behind. The water was warmer, more welcoming than air. I dawdled near the rock, my legs waving as I reached to touch the soft beard of moss on the granite underside.

It was then that someone’s fingers flashed against my own.

I gasped and attempted to lift myself onto the rock again, but the strength in my arms failed me. I tried again with the same result. I clung to the rock, panting, and attempted to coax myself back to a state of calm.

I did this by concentrating on the onshore colors and sounds, the jazzy lyric that floated out over the water from my parents’ wind-up phonograph:“Oh, honey wait for me, oh, honey wait …”

Was
I
waiting? And for what?

While I wondered, a warmer swirl of water began to play at my hips and thighs. I felt that everywhere it touched me I was glowing.

Glowing! I would be seen from shore! I let go my hold on the rock, curled, and let my body plummet down.