Nam Le - The Boat

SHE'S COMING TODAY. It's 11:40 a.m. and I can feel my ass again. I get into a kneeling position in the bathtub then slowly stand up, one trembly, lard-like leg at a time. Water runs down my chest, over my creased stomach, coalesces on my creased balls. With my right hand I reach down and squeeze them, sponge-like, until what remains in my fist is a shriveled sac of skin. My ass is burning. My head was doing okay for a while there. I flick the soggy cigarette in my other hand into the bathwater, grab the tube of lidocaine and smear some of that sweet stuff onto my rosebud.

You're a dirty old man , Olivia used to say, speaking generally, smiling that toothy, canine-sharp smile she reserved for me. It made me horny and she knew it. We used to spend half our time here, sitting in this long, deep tub, spying on the street below. She liked to watch strangers. I liked watching her. I almost demolished this apartment so we could both get our perve on. It took a binder full of expert appraisals and zoning permits before I was allowed to knock out the wall, put in a steel frame and glass-brick the whole thing back up.

It gets me a bit loose-headed, all this reminiscing. I climb out of the bathtub and take off my sunglasses. It's not so bright outside, not today. Some days it gets so I can barely even see the street, its lines and depths — cars, buildings, people — everything looks so bleached out. But not today. I light up another cigarette, avoid the mirror, ignore a wolf whistle from outside and half lope, for the dozenth time that morning, to my computer screen. I quickly scroll down through her website bio: Elise Kozlov, cello prodigy, noted for her precocious facility of technique, her inventive fingering for passagework, her grace of phrasing, etc., etc. There's a mention of me too: Henry Luff, "well-regarded neo-figurative painter" — as well as her mother, credited as "raising" her in Russia. Selected by Elena Dernova for the St. Petersburg conservatory at age five; member of Anatoly Nikitin's celebrated Cello Ensemble at age twelve; world's youngest owner of a Guadagnini. Then there it is: the solitary statement that popped up only a few days ago: "Delighted to announce her engagement to Jason Sharps."

I leave off, walk into my walk-in wardrobe. It hurts less when I take small, shuffling steps. Get your clothes on and get working. Olivia liked to say that too. But the thought of picking up a paintbrush right now makes me jittery. The order of the day, then:

First, get dressed. Something swanky for the concert, a penguin suit, probably. It's Carnegie Hall. No counting on time to go home to change after our late lunch. I run my fingers along the plastic-wrapped shoulders of my tuxedo rack: full dress, half-tailcoat, black tie, white tie… finally I pick out a classic number and truss myself up. There I am in the mirror. Craggy, sure — heavy in the lips and nose — but not altogether undistinguished.

Just as I'm leaving I feel the compulsion-one last time-to see what she looks like. The computer blinks the photo on. Long black hair; impatient, deep-set eyes. She's mine in the strictest, most accidental sense. She's beautiful. She looks nothing like me.

***

I'M TAKING MY CLOTHES OFF AGAIN. This time for my gastroenterologist, Eric Hingess, whose patient list includes the likes of Ed Koch and Art Garfunkel — and who charges accordingly. I was lucky to get this appointment just before the long weekend.

"I may as well admit it," I tell him. "I'm nervous as hell."

"It's a natural response." He leans back in his chair, wearing a suit that looks stitched together from carpet samples, watching me as I try to undo my bow tie. Rabbit chasing the fox. Oddly, Hingess seems more nervous than me, sniffing and jerking his eyebrows like a conductor rehearsing a piece in his head.

"This is a big day for me."

"Here," he says, handing me a pill and a plastic cup. After a moment he sighs: "Valium. To relax you."

I swallow the pill. "Yeah, I'm meeting my daughter today. First time in seventeen years."

"Goodness," he says absently. "How old is she?"

"Eighteen."

The metal disk of his stethoscope against my chest is as cold as an ice cube and I imagine it melting, trickling down onto my gut, Olivia's squinting eyes above it and her tongue retracing its route. I follow the lines her tongue chooses. I shiver. The doctor's saying something.

"Your trousers too," he's saying. His eyebrows contort operat-ically. Then he sneezes. Two, three times: wet, clotty sneezes. "I'm sorry," he says. "What were you saying?"

"Hold on," I tell him. "I thought we went through all this last time." I try to stare him down. The effort is fruitless, though, in light of my last visit: me passing him stool samples, him digging around inside my asshole with his lubed, latexed, incredibly knuckled finger. It felt like he was feeding a knotted rope into my gut.

He's still watching me. I take off my patent leather shoes, unwrap my satin cummerbund, slide down my black pleated trousers and roll miserably onto the examination table. He doesn't even show the token modesty to look away. Instead, he starts talking. He talks about fecal occults and flexible sigmoids and adeno-something polyps and asks me if I've read the pamphlet he gave me.

"Yeah," I lie. "But I thought I just had piles."

"Hemorrhoids, yes. They certainly cause some blood in the stool. Today we're testing farther up."

He stops talking to sneeze again. I turn away from him, wince as he grazes the hard lump outside my rosebud, then a sharper pain, then a real humdinger:

Elise — my daughter, my baby girl — just a bloody, scraggly mess between my wife's harness-hung legs. Hideous under the man-made lights. Then a lump of flesh, stewing in sickness, pulling every possible contagion out of the air and into her body. The pain burns. Weeks and months she lay, first in the incubator, then the cot, under the watchful eyes of her mother. Her mother, who watched me as closely as her. Elise inherited her seriousness. Even before she could speak she'd look at me, unblinking, bringing me down to an accusable level, her eyes deep with understanding. I hadn't wanted her and she knew it. My lower body floods with water. It feels warm and wrong. Something's yanked out of me and my eyes tear up.

We're done, I realize. From the pain, my ass must look like black pudding. I start pulling up my underwear when I hear Hingess's voice, "Hold on there." I look over my shoulder. He's wheeling something toward me-a laptop-attached to about ten feet of evil-looking black rubber hosing.

"That was just the enema," he says, "to prep you. This is the sigmoidoscope." "You're not going to-"

"Only two feet of it."

"I want a smoke," I say. My face is salty, sopping with sweat.

I eye the hosing. Easily as thick as my thumb — probably thicker.

He frowns. Then he purses his lips and says, "All right. It'll help you breathe."

It hurts too much to sit up so, slouched on my side, I fumble in the bunched pant pockets around my ankles for a cigarette. I light it.

"Will you mind if I ask someone to assist?"

"What?" "A medical student. I want to demonstrate the procedure."

And then she's there, white-smocked, clipboard in hand, hair tied back in a bun. From sideways she's hot in a birdlike way, and I wonder refiexively if the doctor here has slipped it to her. She studies me with a detachment that verges on impudence. No way she's just some schmuck med student. It's Park Avenue- someone must have called in a favor. She acts like she sees this every day: a sweat-drenched man, naked save for his white wing-tip formal shirt, blood leaking from his ass, lying in a fetal position, shakily smoking a cigarette. Her coolness feels familiar to me.