After This (21 page)

 

The doctor, without a smile, gave her a lecture about venereal
disease and a prescription for birth control and told her about the new
risks a second abortion would raise. Then she handed her a small
white business card, the name and number of a social worker.
Frowning at her from behind the wire-rimmed glasses, the doctor
suddenly asked, in quick succession, “You live with your family?
Mother and father? Are you afraid of your father? Is he violent? Does
he hit you?”

 

After everything, Susan was surprised to feel herself blush. There
was a time when she might have been afraid that her father would hit
her. When she and her brother were kids, he had often shown them
the back of his hand, and though they’d never once been struck, they
had always flinched. But that was long before Tony went to Vietnam,
and came back, and disappeared. Long before the night she saw him
weeping in their father’s thick arms, not like a baby or even a kid, but
like a lunatic, one of her father’s own patients, God’s mistakes, as he
called them, saliva veiling his open mouth. Or the day he put his fist
through the living-room wall. Or

 

the day their mother told Susan that it would have been easier for
their father if Tony had been killed in the war.

 

“My father’s never hit me,” she told the doctor. “Not at all.” After
everything, it was the first time she saw them suspect a lie.
The nurse had just handed her the first month’s supply of pills in
a little case that looked like a pink compact when she said, cheerfully,
“Your girlfriend’s outside.”

 

Annie was on the same couch where Susan had left her, but it was
clear, even in the warm light of the waiting room, that she’d been
crying.

 

There were two other, middle-aged, women also in the room so
Annie whispered when she said, “You okay?” and Susan whispered
back, “Yeah, are you?”

 

“Fine,” Annie said shortly, and then handed Susan her purse.
They walked down the hall to the elevator in silence. Although
they lived on the same street, although Susan’s father had helped to
deliver Clare, they had been best friends only since the first week of
freshman year. At mixers with the all-male Catholic schools, they had
discovered they were the perfect boy-meeting pair: You ask the blonde,
I’ll ask the brunette. They had gone on their first dates together. They
had lost their virginity within a week of each other—Annie on the
night of the junior prom, Susan a week later in gratitude for the prom
and in regret for not having done it, perhaps more memorably, then.
They had gone through this ordeal all summer knowing that their
places were interchangeable—that Annie could be Susan and Susan
could be Annie. Knowing, too, all they knew about breaking the
baby’s arms and legs and drowning it in salt water.

 

“Did you have lunch?” Susan asked her in the elevator and Annie
said, “No. Aren’t we going to the diner?”

 

At the third floor, they got the full whiff of the famous hair sa-
Ion and then watched a tall, beautiful woman get on, her frosted hair
blow-dried to elaborate perfection. Stepping back to make way for her,
the two girls exchanged a look behind her back, a grimace and a grin.
If Annie hated her for what she had just done, Susan thought,
then she would be alone in the world, as lost as her crazy brother
screaming in his dreams.

 

In the diner, they found a booth near the window. The
cheeseburgers were perfect, flat and juicy and turning the soft rolls
beneath them a reddish pink. The sweet egg creams, in frosted
fountain glasses, might have been a balm for any number of things.
They both put their straws in and then drew them out again and licked
the white, vanilla-scented foam.

 

“So, where’d you go?” Susan asked, hoping to deflect Annie from
saying, How was it? This morning she would have trusted her not to
ask “How was it?” but now, suddenly, everything seemed tentative
between them. It was possible Annie hated her for what she had just
done.

 

Annie slipped the straw back into her drink, churned it a bit.
Reluctant to speak until finally, she simply said, “I lost it.” For Susan,
the thick pad and the cramps and the terrible word—curettage—that
set her teeth on edge, all gave way to the sudden descent her heart
took. If their places were exchanged, Annie would not have done what
she’d done. And there was no undoing it.

 

Tears came into Annie’s eyes—green eyes now against their red
rims. Susan saw her swallow hard before she leaned across the
Formica tabletop and asked, whispering, “Do you know she dies?”
Susan felt herself draw away from the question, even as Annie
seemed to lean into it. “Catherine,” Annie said. “In the book. Did you
know she dies at the end, and the baby’s dead and he walks out into
the rain by himself?”

 

Annie’s voice seemed to twist away from her and she tried to
laugh through it, suspecting she would lose it again were it not for the
good cry she had had an hour ago, in a deserted ladies’ room some
floors below the clinic—a place she had sought blindly, flying (as the
receptionist had said) from the waiting room (another pair of women
had entered by then, a greenish-looking girl in her twenties and an
older woman who might have been her mother) and into a nearby
stairwell where the first sob had broken from her throat and echoed so
loudly that she’d run heavily down the stairs just to cover the sound
with her own footsteps. Out onto another floor where there was,
luckily, an empty ladies’ room. She had locked herself in a stall and
sobbed for the unbearable sadness of the story: Catherine dead and
the baby dead and nothing at all left for him—like saying goodbye to a
statue, he had said—but to walk out into the desolate rain all alone.
She had cried for what must have been twenty minutes and then
went out to the sink and splashed cold water on her face—knowing
she should get back upstairs for Susan—and then began to cry again.
Because it was intolerable: Catherine dead and their baby dead.
Intolerable and terrible and made even more so by the fact that within
the same hour of her reading, the book had convinced her (there in
the softly lit waiting room of the abortion clinic) that despite war and
death and pain (despite the way the girl with a woman who might
have been her mother seemed to gulp air every once in a while, a
handkerchief to her mouth), life was lovely, rich with small gifts: a
nice hotel, a warm fire, a fine meal, love.

 

She had studied her own young face, blotched with weeping, in
the bathroom mirror. Terrible things were ahead of her: Jacob would
go to Vietnam. Her father’s surgery had made him an old man. And
how would she bear the empty world without her mother in it? There
was college to look forward to, boyfriends, marriage, maybe children
of her own, but terrible things, too, were attached

 

to any future. What you needed, she thought, was Susan’s ability, her
courage, to fix your eyes on the point at which the worst things would
be over, gotten through. But what an effort it took.

 

Susan’s baby, she thought, might be better off, after all, never to
have been born.

 

And then she had cried twenty minutes more.

 

“I’m over it now, sort of,” she told Susan, laughing at herself. “But
I really lost it.”

 

Susan said faintly, “I guess I’ll have to read it.” In all her
calculations about what to do, about running away, telling her parents,
leaving school, driving to the golf course and throwing herself into his
arms, she had not considered dying in childbirth. The baby dead, too.
She wasn’t even sure if such things happened anymore. Although she
knew the words “even death” had appeared somewhere this morning,
on something she’d signed.

 

Annie pulled some paper napkins from the steel dispenser and
held them under her eyes. “Don’t,” she said, laughing. “Spare yourself.
You can copy my summary when it’s due.” Then she straightened her
spine, threw back her head. She balled the napkins in her hand. “What
is wrong with these people? These nuns?” It was an old refrain, but it
comforted, somehow, returned them to the time before today. “What
is wrong with our school?” It was their friendship’s eternal question.
“Why do they pick these depressing books?”

 

Susan smiled, knowing the tune. “That bridge thing,” she offered.
“God, yes,” Annie cried. “
San Luis Rey.
What was the point of
that?” She held out her hands. “
Ethan Frome.
”

 

“Oh, God.” Susan had a napkin to her eye as well. “When they
crashed their sled into the tree.”

 

“Nice,” Annie said.

 

“Uplifting,” Susan added. It was their old routine. Oh, Mr.
Gallagher.

 

“And the end of
Great Gatsby
” Annie said. “The blood in the pool
from where he’s shot in the head.”

 

“And then that other guy,” Susan said, warming to it, “in the
poem, who goes home and shoots himself.”

 

“Miniver Cheevy,” Annie said. “And
Anna Karenina.
”

 

Susan shook her head. “Couldn’t read it.”

 

Annie leaned across her plate, emphasizing the words. “She
throws herself under a train.”

 

Susan laughed once, like a cough.

 

“Madame Bovary
!” Annie said.

 

“Dead, too?”

 

She nodded. “After about a million affairs.”

 

Susan shook her head. “Well, of course,” she said. “Sex and death.
That’s the message.”

 

Annie threw the balled-up napkins onto the table. “Christ,” she
said, “what is wrong with them? Why do these crazy women want us
to read such depressing things?”

 

“They want us to suffer,” Susan said, sarcastic so that Annie
wouldn’t see how much she wanted to cry. “They want us to be
afraid.”

 

“They want us to be nuns,” Annie added, so she wouldn’t have to
say, Oh, Susan, oh, my poor friend.
I
N COLLEGE
, Michael Keane was given to saying that if they were not
exactly the middle children born at mid-century to middle-class
parents and sent from middling, mid-island high schools to mediocre

 

colleges all across the state, they were close enough. They were out to

 

be teachers, most of them—industrial or liberal arts the predominant

 

goals since any interest in science or math portended better things:

 

accounting, engineering, med school in Mexico.

 

Damien’s, where they drank, was not, as Michael Keane liked to

 

say, in the most felicitous part of town: it was an ugly, desolate old

 

house tucked among ugly, snowplow-ravaged streets that were

 

themselves lined with more narrow, sagging houses, bent fences,

 

scrawny trees. There was a sorry-looking baseball field across the

 

street and the edge of a cemetery off the abandoned lot behind. The

 

black skeleton of an old power plant rose up in the far distance, over

 

the field, and you couldn’t get to the place without feeling three, four,

 

maybe five times the rutted thump and bump of abandoned railroad

 

tracks under your wheels. But by their junior years most of them had

 

had enough of the storefront bars on Main Street, the bars along the

 

river and at the lake, the roadhouses and beer barns out past the

 

fraternities. In the paucity of streetlight and house light that

 

surrounded Damien’s, the place could easily be

 

missed—there was only a bit of red neon in the window—and the joke
was that you couldn’t find it unless you knew where it was. Knowing
where it was brought all of them that much closer to what they

 

thought of as the real life of the city. As did knowing Ralph.
He was in his early forties. Lean, a little stooped, a little paunchy.

 

He lived on the second floor of the old house, above the bar. The

 

house itself had once been a funeral parlor. Then a speakeasy. Then,

 

and currently, a dive. Stories that were told about Ralph Damien said

 

that he had dropped out of three colleges before joining the army. And

 

turned down an offer to attend Oxford after beating the “head guy” at

 

chess in a London pub. And accepted another to service a society

 

matron in Saratoga Springs when he was nineteen. He wore his dark

 

hair long at a time when most middle-aged men still didn’t, and had a

 

drooping mustache at a time when every college student who could

 

did too. He was languid and sarcastic and worldly-wise, a source for

 

pot and hash as well as for beer and schnapps and tequila—for cheap

 

stereo equipment, sometimes; sometimes for a stash of watches,

 

commemorative gold coins, leather jackets; once for sealed boxes of

 

Chanel No. 5 to take home to your mother.

 

Like Michael, most of them who hung out at Damien’s were

 

juniors and seniors. Most of them had done at least one semester of

 

student teaching in some smelly local school—in their dress pants and

 

button-downs and ratty, poorly knotted ties. Most of them had a pretty

 

clear idea of what the next few years were going to be like.
But stop into Damien’s at four o’clock in the afternoon with a

 

cold rain falling, and there would be Ralph, a joint burning in an

 

ashtray on the bar, the newspaper spread before him. He’d open the

 

refrigerator in the back room to show off a dozen choice sirloins

 

wrapped in white butcher paper—payback for a favor he’d done

 

someone. He’d berate, leisurely and with a cool amusement, some

 

perspiring liquor salesman in a cheap suit and a hunting jacket who
was trying to sell him piss for beer. He’d hunker down at a side table
with a pair of locals, his thumb to his jaw, his ringers splayed across
his cheek and then rise, laughing, slapping backs. He’d be in Aruba
over Christmas, he’d tell the college kids, great little hotel, great little
woman waiting for him there, the color of caramel. At ten or eleven on
a weekend night, he’d ask, “Anyone want to pump beer for a while?”
And then step out from behind the bar to slip his arm around the
waist of the woman or the girl who had been waiting on a corner bar
stool. He’d bend down first for an openmouthed kiss and then, with