Paul Theroux - My Secret History

That stopped her. She loosened a grapefruit segment and spooned it into her mouth, and frowned as she chewed. I wanted to say You never hear vegetarians eating and saying “Yum!” and “Boy!” and “That sure hits the spot!” Eating this stuff was her way of punishing herself for being hungry — she was a real Yankee. And the grapefruit gave her the exact expression of disapproval she wanted, I was sure, and every time she spooned some of it into her mouth I was put into my place.

She said, “I think it’s as bad as killing human beings.”

“You’ve got to be joking,” I said, and chewed the whale steak in an ostentatious way to make my point, which was: There is no use pursuing this argument. Chomping the meat was my rebuttal.

I was also thinking: We’re incompatible, she’s nagging, she’s nuts, this is no good. And I decided that I didn’t want to see her again. This was it. We couldn’t agree on the simplest thing. I believed that vegetarians were irrational. A person who refused to eat hamburgers I regarded as insane, because that was someone who took a hamburger seriously.

When she was served her soup — it was vegetable soup — she hunched her skinny shoulders and put her head down and submerged her spoon in a pathetic way. I almost felt sorry for her until I remembered how she had tried to make me feel bad for eating the whale steak.

Being angry with her gave me indigestion, or perhaps it was the fact that I was eating too fast in my eagerness to get out of there. I wanted to take her home. Mentally I was on the subway, and then getting out at Memorial Drive, walking down Charles Street and up to Pinckney, kissing her goodnight, saying, “I’ll call you” and not meaning it. Just the feeling I had had with Mrs. Mamalujian two days ago.

“Let’s go,” I said, and called the waiter for my check.

She said, “I’ll be right back,” and hurried toward the sign that said REST ROOMS.

Her absence first made me dislike her; then made me worry and hate myself for thinking I disliked her; and when she returned after fifteen minutes — but it felt like an hour — I actually did dislike her for making me wait and worry for nothing. I thought: Good night, goodbye, I will never see you again.

We traveled back to Pinckney Street in silence. I loathed her for looking sick, and I told myself she was faking.

“Want to come in?” she said.

“Nah.”

Did she know what I was thinking? But when I kissed her I was aroused and I thought What the hell.

“If you want to come in,” she said, “we can sneak past Miss Murphy and you can do whatever you like with me.”

That made me break the promise I had made to myself in the restaurant, but inside her room she seemed weak and inert. She lay back and stuck her legs out and she was as pale as a sacrifice. She did not move when I touched her, which spooked me, and when I saw her cheeks were wet I went no further. Tears always stopped me.

I said, “Never mind,” and started to go.

Her room was so small she was able to stretch out her hand and stop me. “Andy, I missed my period,” she said. “It’s two weeks late. I keep praying, but — oh, God, I don’t know what to do—”

That was my second whale steak.

We went to New York City separately — Mrs. Mamalujian took a plane, and (under the influence of Kerouac) I hitched. We met at the Plaza. Another Plaza. Each time I saw her it struck me that she had an original face — red puckered lips and big rouged cheeks, each cheek a distinct muscle. Her eyes were pouchy and smeared with green. I had never seen a face like it.

She said, “I’ve been here for hours — shopping. Mainly buying underwear.”

That depressed me. Any mention of underwear or sex or nakedness made me gloomy. I did not tell Mrs. Mamalujian why I had come. As far as she knew, it was for the candlelight dinner we had a few hours later at the Marquis Carvery, where the coat-check girl had to find a necktie for me to wear with my khaki shirt and army jacket. The tie was stiff with soupstains.

“Eat my avocado, Andy — before the waiter takes it away.”

Gloom made me hungry. Eating was sometimes my way of worrying.

“I’ve got tickets for West Side Story , and there’s another play Sunday night. We can go to the Museum of Modern Art some afternoon. Isn’t it fun to be here? Don’t you feel free?”

I felt like a jailbird. I said, “It’s nice. But I’ve got to see a few people tomorrow.”

“That’s all right, as long as you get back here before show time. Did you know West Side Story’s based on Shakespeare? The one on Sunday is Tennessee Williams. Very spicy”—and she winked—“queers and cannibalism. We can have dinner afterwards. It was so sweet of you to come.”

Just to set her straight I said, “No, it was great of you to give me a place to stay.”

“Don’t put it like that,” she said.

“I mean, it was a lucky coincidence that I had this stuff to do. The, um, thing. These people.”

“You’re so busy. I wish I was busy.”

I wanted to kill myself I was so busy. I pushed food into my mouth so I wouldn’t say anything crazy.

She said, “New York has it all over Boston. You can do anything here.”

That had better be true, I thought.

The room at the Plaza had twin beds, I was relieved to find, when we went back after dinner. Mrs. Mamalujian took a long sloppy shower, leaving the bathroom door open, as she had that first time in Boston. I could hear her elbows hitting the plastic shower curtain.

I lay on the bed reading Ezra Pound— The Pisan Cantos .

Mrs. Mamalujian came in dripping, and holding a towel against her front.

“Aren’t you going to take your clothes off?”

“I’ve got to get up early,” I said.

She smiled at that and I immediately realized what I had said was stupid.

“And the thing is, I always sleep with my clothes on in hotels. I have a morbid fear of fires. I want to be dressed if there’s trouble.”

The mention of fire took the smile off her face. She stood in the half-dark and slipped on a silky nightgown.

She said, “If there’s anything you want to talk about, just come over here. Sometimes the best place to talk is in bed. I mean, you can say things that you can’t say anywhere else.”

She switched her light off and sighed.

I lay there rigid in the darkness expecting her to touch me. Her powerful perfume made her seem as though she were very close to me.

“But, um, Andre.”

“Yuh?”

“If you come over to me, take your shoes off, will you?”

Mrs. Mamalujian was quietly snoring and smacking her lips in the next bed the following morning when I slid to the floor and crept out of the room and went to find an abortionist. That was my only reason for being there. New York was where they were.

I knew they were not listed in the telephone book. The practice was illegal. They were known by word of mouth. A doctor could go to jail if he was convicted of performing an abortion. But I knew such doctors existed. The question was, Where should I start looking?

I was prevented from crossing Fifth Avenue by a Kennedy rally making its way with banners and drums to Central Park. And I began to imagine that these wealthy-looking women with their badges and funny hats had all had abortions; but for them it was like having a tooth pulled — a morning’s work. I could also see how these people, women and men and kids my age, all somewhat resembled Kennedy — good families, good clothes, good teeth. They were happy, because they knew that America was going to be theirs for the next eight years. It wouldn’t be mine — that was the sorry feeling I was left with as the rally took its chanting and music up the avenue.