Paul Theroux - My Secret History

“You’re a very funny kid, Andy. I had no idea.”

I yawned again, pretending I hadn’t heard her.

“I mean strange. If you ever want to talk about it—”

“Tomorrow I have to see some friends of mine,” I said.

“I was hoping we could go to a museum. See the Picassos. Have some lunch. Take in a show.”

I pretended to be asleep by snoring softly, and soon she stopped talking. But I lay awake almost all night, and in the morning I slid off my bed and went to the door on my hands and knees.

She was staring at me.

“It’s in the door,” she said, meaning the key she thought I was hunting for.

She made me nervous, because when I was around her I could not think clearly about my problem; and I knew I was running out of time. I spent the whole of that day, Sunday, walking up and down the sidewalks with my hands in my pockets wondering what to do. I liked the city because the city ignored me, and I felt that it was so large and such a mess that I had as much right to be there as anyone else.

When I got back to the Plaza at about six, Mrs. Mamalujian was sitting in the parlor room of the suite having a drink.

She said, “I could live like this,” and from the way she said it I knew she was drunk. Her head wobbled. “I mean, waiting for you to come home from work.”

“I haven’t been to work,” I said, and yawned.

She said, “The trouble with you”—and she gestured with her drink—“is that you don’t know how to enjoy yourself. Where is your pep?”

“I’m tired from walking.”

“You said you were with some friends.”

“Walking with them.”

It was very hard to lie or invent when I was so distracted.

“What are they like, these so-called friends of yours?”

“Nice bunch of guys,” I said. “But there’s one who has a problem. He wanted me to help him, but how could I?”

Mrs. Mamalujian looked at me drunkenly and I wondered whether to tell her.

“I love problems,” she said. “Know why? Because I usually have the solution. Know what the solution usually is? Money.”

She took sips of gin between sentences.

“The stupid idiot knocked up his girlfriend.”

There was a certain way she had of swallowing that meant she was thinking.

“Isn’t that the girlfriend’s problem?”

“He promised to help her,” I said. “He’s looking for a doctor to get rid of it.”

“There’s plenty of those doctors around,” Mrs. Mamalujian said.

“That’s what people say, but where the hell are they?”

“Right over there,” she said, and pointed out the window.

I went to the window. I said, “Where?”

“Park Avenue,” she said in a halting voice.

When I turned around she was crying. I asked her what was wrong.

“I know someone who got an abortion from a doctor there,” she said.

“What was his name?”

“It was a woman,” she said, and sobbed. I believed I knew who that woman might be.

I said, “No — the doctor’s name.”

It sounded something like Zinzler. That was all I wanted to know. I was so grateful I almost relaxed enough to take my clothes off and eat and sleep properly.

Mrs. Mamalujian went on drinking and around ten o’clock she let out a little giggle and passed out. I put her to bed with her clothes on — she was wearing so many. She looked very small after I took off her shoes and her hat. We didn’t go to the play.

I slept fitfully in one of the armchairs and at six I wrote Mrs. Mamalujian a note thanking her for the lovely weekend. I found D. K. Zinzler, MD , in the phone book, with a Park Avenue address and then went out and located the building, fifteen blocks away. I had breakfast to kill time and at nine o’clock made my move. The doorman, a goon in a blue uniform, tried to stop me as I headed through the revolving door. I swallowed my pride and told him I had an appointment and asked him whether there was any information he required from me. He was so bored by my eagerness he let me go.

Zinzler was on the eighth floor. The corridor was cool, very quiet, smelling of flowers and floorwax. And Zinzler’s office was so clean I was hesitant to sit down. His receptionist asked me whether I had an appointment.

By then I had given the matter some thought.

“No. I’m delivering a message.”

“Yes?” And she put her hand out.

“My message is for the doctor.”

“I’ll have to know what it is.”

“I can only tell you that my client regards it as highly confidential.”

Client? she was thinking, as she looked at my army jacket, combat boots, sunglasses.

“Just a minute.”

While she was out of the room, a woman and a girl of about seventeen or eighteen entered from the outside corridor, the mother looking suspicious and hateful, the girl rather stupefied, as if she’d been hit on the head. The girl also looked ill. I was sure she was pregnant and that the doctor was going to give her an abortion. The mother, annoyed that I was witnessing their arrival, gave me a black look.

“Go in,” the receptionist said to me, and began apologizing to the mother and daughter for the delay.

Doctor Zinzler was waiting for me in the office. He was half out of his chair and as soon as he saw me he frowned, knowing that I was there on false pretenses.

“You have a message for me?”

“It’s more of a question.”

“Yes,” he said, and hurried me with a movement of his hand.

“This friend of mine was wondering whether you’d take care of his girlfriend.”

He was an old man and he had an old man’s terrible stare.

“She’s pregnant.”

His stare made me keep talking.

“She doesn’t want to be pregnant. She’s looking for an, um—”

I didn’t want to say the word, but in any case I didn’t have to.

He said, “Who sent you here?”

If I said Mrs. Mamalujian it might get back to her, and she’d die if she knew it was me.

“My friend.”

“What’s his name?”

“You wouldn’t know him.”

He had already started heading for the door. That was my signal to leave. He said, “You came to the wrong place.”

But I knew it wasn’t the wrong place. I knew that was his business. But he didn’t like my looks.

“How much does it cost?”

“I’m very busy,” he said, taking my arm and steering me out.

“These friends of mine are pretty desperate.”

He said, “Maybe they should have thought about the consequence of what they were doing.”

I pushed his arm away and was about to hit him when I heard a gasp — either the mother or the daughter. And if I decked him there were witnesses. I now saw that they were wealthy. So was Zinzler. But I wasn’t. That was why he said it was the wrong place. I had planned on raising the money, whatever it cost; but it wasn’t a question of that. You had to look wealthy. I was not humiliated. I was angry. And my only satisfaction was that in the split second in which I had raised my fist to hit him he might have feared for his life. Going downstairs I regretted that I hadn’t said to him, I’ m coming back to kick your ass .

On the Greyhound Bus to Boston I considered how much I hated that doctor, and I began to dislike Mrs. Mamalujian. When she put her glass out someone poured gin into it. When she approached a door, someone opened it. When she stared at something in a glass case they took it out and showed her. If she had gone to the doctor he would have done what she wanted. These things cost money. I had no money, and it seemed as though, having none, I did not exist. What annoyed me was that I had not thought much about this before, and I had been happy.

Going back to the pool was like going home. I slept in Medford, but I didn’t live there. My life was a system of secrets. My mother said, “How was the Cape?” and I said “Fine,” remembering that I had said I was going to the Cape for the weekend. How could I say I was going to New York City with a fifty-year-old woman in order to find an abortionist? They did not know me at home anymore. They knew me better here at the pool, but even so my life was hidden.