T. Boyle - Wild Child and Other Stories

“The concert,” she said.

“Oh, right, yeah — how was that?”

“All right, I guess.” It had served its purpose, giving her an excuse to put on some makeup and leave the house, to do something, anything. “A little dreary, actually. Organ music.” She let her smile bloom. “I left at the intermission.”

His smile opened up now too. “So what do I say — I’m glad I couldn’t make it? But you look great, you do. No complications, right? The headache’s gone away? No visual problems?”

“No,” she said, “no, I’m fine,” and then she saw Maggie, with her hair down and a pair of silver chandelier earrings dangling above her bare shoulders, watching them from a table in the dining room.

“Good,” he said, “good. Well, listen, nice to see you — and I guess we’ll be seeing you next week, then?”

The first thing she did when she got home was put on some music, because she couldn’t stand the silence of an empty house, and it wasn’t Bach, anything but Bach, her hand going to the first disc on the shelf, which turned out to be a reggae compilation her husband had left behind. She poured herself a glass of wine as the chords fell like debris into the steadily receding sea of the bass line, a menace there, menace in the vocals and the unshakable rhetoric of the dispossessed. Reggae. She’d never much liked it, but here it was, background music to her own awakening drama of confusion and disappointment. And anger, anger too. He’d blown her off. Dr.

Mellors. Said he was busy, too busy to sit beside her in a dim auditorium and listen to a professor from the local college sweat over the keyboard, but not in the least embarrassed to be caught out in a lie. Or even contrite. He’d tried to make a joke of it, as if she were nobody, as if her invitation counted for nothing — and for what? So he could fuck his secretary?

The windows were black with the accumulation of the night and she went around pulling the shades, too many shades, too many windows.

The house — it was what she’d wanted, or thought she wanted, new construction, walk-in closets, three-car garage and six thousand square feet of views opening out to the hills and the ocean beyond — was too big for her. Way too big. Even when Rick was around, when she was wound up twenty-four/seven with selecting carpets and furniture and poring over catalogues and landscaping books, the place had seemed desolate. There were no nooks — it was nookless, a nookless house that might as well have been a barn in Nebraska — no intimate corners, no place where she could feel safe and enclosed. She went through the dining room to the kitchen and then back round again to what the architect called “the grand room,”

turning on all the lights, then she poured herself another glass of wine, went into the bathroom and closed and locked the door.

For a long while she stared at herself in the mirror. The lines — the two vertical furrows between her eyes — didn’t seem appreciably different, but maybe they were shallower, maybe that was it. She put a finger there, ran it over the skin. Then she smiled, seductively at first—“Hello, Dr. Mellors,” she said to her reflection,

“and what do I call you, Ed? Eddie? Ted?”—and then goofily, making faces at herself the way she used to when she was growing up with her three sisters and they’d pull at their lips and nostrils and ears, giggling and screeching till their mother had to come in and scoot them out of the bathroom. It didn’t do any good. She snatched the glass up off the marble countertop, drained it and looked at herself the way she really was, a not-so-young woman wearing a permanent scowl, her nose too big, her chin too narrow, her eyes crystallizing in wariness and suspicion. But she was interesting. She was. Interesting and pretty too, in her own way. Prettier than the secretary or the nurse or half the other women in town. At least she looked real.

Or did she? And what was real worth, anyway?

She shrugged out of her clothes then and for a long while studied herself in the full-length mirror on the door. In profile her stomach swelled out and away from her hips, a hard little ball of fat — but she’d just eaten, that was it — and her buttocks seemed to be sagging, from this angle, anyway. Her breasts — they weren’t like the breasts of the women in the porn videos her ex-husband seemed so turned on by — and she wondered about that, about the procedure there, about liposuction, a tummy tuck, maybe even a nose job. She didn’t want to look like the secretary, like Maggie, because she didn’t care about Maggie, Maggie was beneath her, Maggie wasn’t even pretty, but the more she looked in the mirror the less she liked what she was seeing.

On Tuesday, the day of her pre-op appointment, she woke early and for a long while lay in bed watching the sun search out the leaves of the flowering plum beyond the window. She made herself two cups of coffee but no eggs or toast or anything else because she’d resolved to eat less and she didn’t even lighten the coffee with a splash of non-fat milk. She took her time dressing. The night before she’d laid out a beige pantsuit she thought he might like, but when she saw it there folded over the chair like a vacated skin, she knew it wasn’t right. After trying on half the things in the closet she decided finally on a black skirt, a cobalt-blue blouse that buttoned up the back and a pair of matching heels. She looked fine, she really did. But she spent so much time on her makeup she had to speed down the narrow twisting roads to the town spread out below and she ran a couple of lights on the yellow and still she was ten minutes late for her appointment.

Maggie greeted her with a plastic smile. She was wearing another revealing top — borderline tacky for business dress — and she seemed to have lightened her hair, or no, she’d streaked it, that was it. “If you’ll just follow me,” she chirped, and came out from behind the counter to lead her down the hallway in a slow hip-grinding sashay and then she was in the examining room again, and the door closed softly behind her. Awaiting an audience, she thought, and this was part of the mystique doctors cultivated, wasn’t it, and why couldn’t they just be there in the flesh instead of lurking somewhere down the corridor in another hushed room identical to this one? She set her purse down on the chair in the corner and settled herself into the recliner. She resisted the impulse to lift the hand mirror from the table and touch up her eyes.

“So,” he was saying, gliding through the doorway on noiseless feet, “how are we today?”

“Okay, I guess.”

“Okay? Just okay?”

“Listen,” she said, ignoring the question, “before we go any further I just wanted to ask you something—”

“Sure,” he said, and he pulled up a stool on wheels, the sort of thing dentists use, so he could sit beside her, “anything you want.

Any concerns you have, that’s what I’m here for.”

“I just wanted to ask you, do you think I’m pretty?”

The question seemed to confound him and it took him a moment to recover himself. “Of course,” he said. “Very pretty.”

She said nothing and he moved into her then, his hands on her face, under her eyes, probing along the occipital bone, kneading, weighing the flesh while she blinked into his unwavering gaze.

“Which is not to say that we can’t improve on it,” he said, “because it was your perception, and I agree with you, that right here”—his fingers tightened—“there’s maybe just a few millimeters of excess skin. And—”

“I don’t care about my eyes,” she said abruptly, cutting him off. “I want you to look at my breasts. And my hips, and, and”—the formal term ran in and out of her head—“my tummy. It’s fat. I’m fat.”