He came to act less respectfully with me fairly soon. No more talk of prophylactics, for example. I started to mind a little, even though it was part of my plan. It would have been nice to have some sort of feinting towards love, even when he was telling me in bed, breathlessly, that I was a worthless slut. Instead I just responded, More. More! The proclamation of my entire life. I could be very agreeable, when I wanted to be.
He came to my house too. In my bed I felt the imprints of other blue-ticket women on his body, as if he had absorbed them; what they liked, how they behaved. I wondered where they were, those women past or present, how they had ended up in his arms. You must pay the bill of grief coming your way, I told myself every time he went home at night. The house empty. The neighbours still asleep in the houses around. Each time, I raised my legs above my head, planted my feet on the wall above the headboard. Gravity could not be altered. Gravity was on my side. Then in the morning there would be dirty footprints above the bed—very faint, but still there—and every time they were heartbreaking to me, as if they belonged to my ghost, as if they belonged to me in a different world.
We went away, as a treat, to one of the love motels that everyone used. It wasn’t really a trip, only a little way out of the city. You could still see all the downtown lights from the balcony outside our room, where we chain-smoked in between fucking. The room itself was shabby white, pale pink covers on the bed and a plywood headboard painted with red and blue birds. I counted three cigarette burns on the duvet and lay down on my front, underneath it. He buried his face in my neck. You’re lovely, you’re beautiful, he said. They were just words. They were just sounds coming from a mouth.
He had brought a plastic bag of beers, clinking gracefully. We filled the bathtub with cold water, the bottles, and ice we ordered from downstairs. When we were drunk I took out one of the bottles and wrapped it in a hand towel as if it were a baby. He did not seem to find it funny, but we still drank the baby-beer, passing it between us until it was gone.
He spoke a little about his journey into the city. It sounded like a camping trip. The boys teamed up. Sometimes groups fought other groups. I was the tallest and the strongest, he explained. I considered myself a man already. There was nothing really in my way.
We didn’t have the lottery, but don’t think it was easy for us. There was a note of hurt pride in his voice. Perhaps we passed on the same road.
I hope not, I said, and he laughed.
I know what the boys do on that road, I didn’t say.
The beer stripped me of any inhibitions. I forgot about everything else except our bodies and knelt down on the floor, stretched my arms out over my head. Felt my hair fall everywhere, pulled from where I had tied it up. Pillow at my face. Hand at my neck, thumb right in its hollow. Physical action followed physical action. He pulled out and finished on my stomach and didn’t do anything to clean it up, switched on the television, laughed at an advert. I just lay there until it dried, taking pleasure in being unclean.
But later, I pinned him sweetly to the bed with my hands. My body moved and moved. Stay with me, I told him. Stay right where you are. The fringed light fitting above us rattled. He slapped a satisfied hand on to my thigh. I waited until he was soft before I let myself lie down.
When he was asleep I watched the lights from the cars on the road outside move over the ceiling, over and over and over, stroking the little smooth spot of my clavicle where his hand had pressed too hard. That spot was his favourite part of me and I couldn’t see why, what had made him fixate on this unassuming piece of bone among all the things that made me up. I had an idea it might be about fragility, and so I didn’t want to ask, I didn’t want to be disappointed or to disappoint, for I was not fragile, I was not protectable, I was dark wind and dust blowing across a landscape, and there was nothing anybody could do for me.
I looked inside the cool shell of myself for guilt, and found nothing. Only my heart, tense as a fist. My thighs wet. I might have been pregnant already. There’s no way of telling now.
9
I knew that my bleed would stop if I was pregnant. That was the only thing I had been able to pick up across all the years of my adulthood, and even that could have been an urban legend. I bled as usual the first month. But when it was time for the second, there was a missed day. Then two, three, four. A queasy count. Ten. Eleven. Like hide and seek, or staying underwater during my swimming routine. I was hoping and not-hoping. I was indifferent. No; that’s a lie. I wasn’t indifferent at all. But to admit how much I wanted it was a shame even I couldn’t articulate. My mind tuned it out like static when I tried. So I just counted instead. Blameless, abstract numbers.
Fifteen. Sixteen.
My supervisor came to watch me squeezing a pipette of silver nitrate into a beaker of water. It dissolved almost at once. Lunar caustic, she said. That’s what they used to call it. Very beautiful.
You’re a poet, I said. I pushed my goggles up, careful not to touch my face, my eyes.
I had entered chemistry because of the comfort in it. Because you produced a specific outcome, a result known because the combination of substances had been tested many times before, because other people had carried out exactly the same procedure. Of course, you had to be careful about contamination, about the slight fluctuations that could tip the whole process off balance, into something else entirely. But I loved the repetition, the sense of something elemental at work, and the ability of science to explain itself.
Sometimes my life felt like a faulty experiment. I followed all the instructions and yet I did not turn out to be the person I should have been. That was the problem with biology, I supposed, that it was a more inexact field—the bad science I had started to think of it privately, spitefully, but only because it didn’t go my way. True, I was not as careful with myself as I was with the materials in the lab. In the lab everything had its place, everything depended on the equilibrium of correct labels, cleanliness. Safe handlings and protocols. Rooms where only those with certain privileges could go.
Not a people person, are you, Doctor A had said once, our first or second session. I had wished to be offended, but could not summon it.
The numbers built up. I repeated them over and over, pumping foamed chemical soap in between experiments and lathering it carefully over my palms.
Twenty. Twenty-one. Twenty-two.
10
You seem different, Doctor A said to me. You’re nervous. It’s like someone has told you a secret and asked you to keep it from me. What could this be, I wonder.
I’m fine, I said.
He got me to breathe into a spirometer to check the capacity of my lungs. I blew until my face was red and the room spun. He took my temperature with a thermometer that went into my ear and bleeped. I prayed for no blood test, no urine test, no palpation of my stomach, no internal exam.