The Blondes (18 page)

The issue for me now wasn’t whether the abortion was worth an extra four hundred; it was whether including Karl in my decision was. Fundamentally, I felt he had a right to know I was pregnant. At the same time, I didn’t think he had any right to choose what would happen. Is that a contradiction?

On the one hand, I wanted him to say that he would leave Grace and we should have you together, but at the same time I didn’t want to hear him say those words, because a cheater cheats—that’s one thing you know when you start sleeping with one. Worse than that, by now I knew I didn’t want to be tied to him even for a minute. The fact that he would send me to Wanda Kovacs had permanently changed how I felt about him.

I remember there was one other time my feelings toward Karl had irrevocably changed: we were buying cheese in St. Lawrence Market in preparation for our weekend at this cottage. He purchased the same kind twice, from two different stands, because, he said, the second one was better. When I
told him he’d already bought that kind and why not a nice havarti or Edam, he insisted there was no comparison. I remember thinking,
Oh, so that’s who you are
. I wasn’t going to stop flirting with him over a block of cheese, of course, but the exchange had niggled at me for months.

In any case, I decided to stay in the city and deal with my dilemma there.

Within a week,
National Geographic
ran a fold-out colour map charting the attacks and outbreaks. New York had a bright red circle over John F. Kennedy International Airport. Land was shaded red all up and down the West Coast, starting in Los Angeles, which had the greatest concentration of cases and incidents, into Las Vegas, and up to San Francisco. Florida was like a sunburn, as were all the major cities and most of the southeastern seaboard. In Canada, outbreaks were concentrated in Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa, and Halifax—port and business cities. Calgary had a lone single orange freckle. Likewise, all of the middle American states and cities were fairly empty—a muddy landscape of brown, blue, green.

Siphonaptera
. The term sounded like something siphoning off the land, an earth vampire. What do I know about fleas except that they ride into one’s home on the backs of stray dogs and cats? Imagine this tiny little creature, born into a cocoon, hatching out, not much more than a millimetre long, wingless and blind. It avoids sunlight, lives in dark places—sand, cracks, crevices, bedding—jumps on and off animals and humans,
lives solely to find blood. It eats blood, then breeds. Wreaking havoc. Larissa had owned cats all her life and I remember visiting her after she left to go away to school in Toronto, a few years ahead of me—away from her mother’s clean house—in shared student apartments on Huron Street or Spadina. I’d pick fleas off her pets, pinching the insects between my fingers.

The first time I heard about the Flea Vector Denialists I was sitting in a diner one afternoon, eating a hamburger. The volume on the flat screen in the corner was cranked. Onscreen, two men of about the same age were arguing across an illuminated desk. One man’s hair was combed directly back from his forehead; the other man’s hair was combed directly forward.

For some reason, this silly conversation galvanized me. I finished off the coleslaw and pickles and went back to room 306 at the Dunn Inn, where I phoned Information and asked for the number of the clinic the post-airport doctor had mentioned to me. A computerized voice read out the number in a clipped tone.

When I called, a woman with a deep Queens accent booked me an appointment. I should expect to be in their offices for three to five hours, she said, for blood work, a pregnancy test, medical history, ultrasound to determine my dates, discussion of my options and their risks and benefits, and the procedure itself if I decided to go ahead with it. Once they completed the procedure I would need someone to accompany me home. I wrote down the address and time at the top of the bloody-looking
National Geographic
map of North America.

An hour or so before my appointment at the clinic, I was standing on a Midtown street in front of an American Apparel store. A transparent photograph of a woman in a one-piece gymnastics suit, her arms thrown up above her head as if she was about to do a handstand, had been affixed to the window. In the window on the other side of the door was the same girl in a similar position, slightly turned. She was layered over the headless mannequins that had been pushed into gold lamé leggings by some patient window dresser. Decapitated figures wore items of clothing I couldn’t identify as either shirts or dresses, complete with zip-up purple hoodies. On the wall inside, more plastic torsos—headless, legless, armless—hung from a metal grid, zipped into New Arrivals. I was early for the appointment, which was just beyond double doors to the right of the American Apparel store, through the lobby and up ten floors.

Someone was standing behind me, assessing me in the reflection. I turned and it was Kovacs. We both breathed a sigh of relief.

“That is you. Good, good.” Kovacs swept a hand out and we shook, like colleagues, as people streamed around us on either side.

I had forgotten that my hair colour had changed since our meeting. Kovacs’s own hair caught the light. It surprised me. I remember how I couldn’t stop looking at it: spun sugar. She was the first blonde I had seen in at least a week. In the September breeze, her hair didn’t budge, just sat on her shoulders perfectly, like a long golden helmet. On closer examination, I realized it
was a wig, cut and styled. She must have shaved her head, but then vanity overtook her.

“Dr. Kovacs—” I began.

“Wanda,” she said. “Really, let’s not be formal at a time like this.”

I thanked her for coming and said it went beyond the call.

But Kovacs wasn’t looking at me. She was blinking in the window, fussing with the mascara on her eyelashes. When she finished, she said, “Pardon me,” and flicked her fingers and frowned at the mannequins. She was dressed more casually than the last time we had met, but still expensively: a dark sweater and jeans, a cashmere scarf that might have been Hermés draped loosely about her neck, though it seemed to me we were just barely out of summer. I wondered if there was a designer collection out there inspired by “What to Wear to a Young Woman’s Abortion.” It occurred to me that she had probably spent as much on her day-off sweater as I was about to throw down at the clinic.

I marvelled that people in my age group were supposed to be the demographic for the store in front of us. I gestured to a figure in a chambray jumpsuit—a strapless top and a cinched elastic waist. It would flatter someone only if they were five-eight and a hundred and ten pounds.

“Can you see me in that?”

“No, I do not think so, dear. Leave it to the undergrads. They still need some regret in their lives.” Then Kovacs asked if we had time for a coffee, or should we get me upstairs to the suction room?

I couldn’t tell if she was being funny or mean, or if the two were always one and the same with her. Maybe she and I were more alike than I wanted to admit. Maybe Karl dated the same woman again and again. Around us, morning traffic surged and honked. To make myself feel better, I imagined Kovacs taking a shit. This is something I do sometimes when I feel nervous around people. It’s better than imagining them naked, you know. I started doing it when I was in high school. When I confided in Larissa, she told me it was the sickest thing she’d ever heard. She told me I must have a fetish, which just for the record is not true. I’ve never gone there. I’ve hardly gone anywhere. Larissa did try my technique once though—at an art event where she felt like everyone was “scads” older and more important than her—and she admitted that it had worked. Part of it is about posture. The posture a person might adopt when alone. There are some people you imagine sitting very tall and upright, hands tightly clasped. Others you imagine slumped with hands between the knees. The secret posture of shitters. We all do it, right? At one point in university I switched it to imagining people’s sex faces, but that had a strange effect on me. I became sexually attracted in third year to a lecturer whom I really didn’t like—one who always said, “So what does this tell us?”—and it was mortifying, even though I kept thinking about it. So I went back to the taking-a-dump exercise. I decided that Kovacs was a chin-clutcher, like
The Thinker
, and felt a bit better. Don’t get me wrong, I was happy she was there. It’s just that she was such a pill. It’s old-fashioned, but that’s the word for her.

We hit the café two doors down, where she ordered an Americano and biscotti; I snagged a bottle of water in case I needed to drink something for the ultrasound, and paid for all of it. Kovacs did not reach for her wallet that time. She knew very well the favour she was doing me.

Aside from the shops at street level, the building housed a number of physicians and clinics—physiotherapy and psychotherapy—as well as design firms. I joked that I had thought there might be protestors, and Kovacs told me that it was no joke, we were lucky. This wasn’t Canada, where maniacs were polite.

As we rode the elevator to the top floor, we stood side by side looking straight ahead, not at each other. I remember Kovacs slurped her coffee loudly and it made me think of her as more human.

Before the doors could ding open, I turned to Kovacs and said, “I really do appreciate it—I hate to put you out this way. It’s only because I don’t know anyone else in the city.”

“Here I thought it was because we got on so famously.” She smiled and stepped out into the hall. The place smelled of rubbing alcohol and Froot Loops. As we walked toward the clinic door, she asked me to please stop with the apologies and self-consciousness or we would never get through the day. If I continued in this manner, she said, I would only remind her how she could be at home doing her pilates or walking Tallulah. Then she stopped abruptly, her shoulders drawn back.

“My Westie,” she amended, but the name of her dog wasn’t what had made her halt.

The health clinic was closed. A sign had been taped to the glass:

There was a phone number scrawled in blue pen across the bottom, in case I was in emotional crisis. It was for a children’s helpline. A stack of pamphlets for the same organization had been dropped sloppily on the floor to the left of the door.

I registered the meaning of the sign, but found I couldn’t move. I wasn’t quite ready to leave. Perhaps I thought that if Kovacs and I stood outside the clinic door a little longer, something would change. I could feel my nasal passages becoming inflamed. I so did not want to cry in front of Kovacs. I swallowed and said I couldn’t imagine being thirteen or fourteen and dealing with something like this. I tapped the note, indicating the number. It was something to say. The burning subsided.

“I can’t imagine being thirteen or fourteen. Period,” Kovacs said. Her face had taken on a sour look. It was as if she were more put out by my inability to access the clinic than I was. She
tried the door handle. It twisted but didn’t open. “There’s blood on the carpet,” she said.

It was true. Someone had pulled down a shade inside the glass, but it stopped partway. On the blue-grey carpet, there was indeed a bloodstain—about the size of my hand. In spite of the lights being out, the stain was unmistakable.

“That’s why they didn’t phone you—they shut down hastily. They’ve had an attack. Check your phone,” Kovacs commanded. It was as if she honestly couldn’t believe what had happened and required proof.