Attachment (12 page)

W
hen Jean opened
her eyes at dawn on Friday, Mark was already dressed. She hadn’t slept well—her appointment, his trip—but also it was so noisy, with not only muted traffic sounds but every conversation, every laugh, every footfall funneling up from the sidewalk straight into their bedroom. She sat up. Mark was not only dressed, he was in his coat, the long green loden they’d bought together in Vienna. His hair was slicked back.

“Well, you certainly look the part, Herr Hubbard.” Jean yawned. “Very handsome. Maybe your Barbour would be more like it, though.”

“Gathering mold in St. Jacques. Don’t worry. I feel sure Fleischauer will lay on the full kit—including lederhosen, I shouldn’t wonder. Good-bye, darling, I’ll call tonight. I want to hear exactly what Scully has to say, so take notes, will you? And please don’t forget to take my sketches to Dan. Bye, darling.”

The quick peck between his good-byes showed some eagerness to be off. But what was that
goo
he had on his hair? It smelled old, faintly medicinal. And, wait a minute, was that a pompadour? Yes, it was, a very small pompadour—not a Memphis wave, more like an English escarpment, one inch high. Still, she thought, patting his shoulder and not commenting, he had to be horribly hungover.

Mark’s long strides took him outside in twenty seconds, the door slamming behind him. From one floor up, Jean could hear his rap with the knocker, as if to say sorry, or just to say goodbye again, like someone driving away and tooting his horn, pleased to have made a clean escape.

5:55. Always these tidy numbers: the little men who lived in the clock were fanatical neatniks. She looked out at densely metallic clouds—lead admixed with antimony and copper. Friday already—impossible to go back to sleep now, even if the sky wore its own blackout curtain. Somewhere up there was a sun, but London was under wraps.

Jean arrived on time in Harley Street, refreshed by a windy, surprisingly sun-dappled walk across Regent’s Park. Mounting through the core of this ornate Adam town house, wary as the one-person birdcage elevator lurched upward, she remembered earlier visits—annual checkups but particularly when she was pregnant and the cage was even tighter, before she was condemned to bed rest with the preeclampsia.

Scully specialized in this mysterious condition not known to occur in any other species, he’d explained, just as only human babies amassed thick layers of fat—nutrients successfully diverted from the mother. In fact, he’d chosen to focus on the disease because it seemed to support his hunch that pregnancy represented a maternal-fetal conflict—an intensely fraught competition for nutrients and even for survival—rather than the spontaneous harmony the rest of the culture insisted on, biologists included. At the time, Jean had been greatly relieved
there might be a medical basis for her anxiety, a kind of prenatal depression she’d at first put down to the imminent breakup of her exclusive intimacy with Mark, though her shame, and her dread, were instantly dispelled when Vic herself appeared.

Scully, fit and young looking with a full head of dark hair, was waiting on the landing when she stepped out of the elevator. Special treatment: he must have known she was worried. He took her lightly by the shoulders, kissed her cheek, and stepped back with the pursed smile that didn’t want to show its teeth.

Jean was, as she expected to be, immensely relieved to see him. He was a great man. Despite a labor made more difficult by the continuing threat from preeclampsia—to her liver, her heart, her brain—he’d safely delivered Victoria. Jean thought it must be wonderful to be Mr. Scully (despite the inevitable intimacies she’d never been able to call him Francis, and no one in England called the top guys “Dr.”), with his power not only to bring forth new life but to calm and soothe life all too firmly established. He clearly relished it, the God role in countless nativity plays—and here, as in the more famous version, the father had been relegated (or anyway stuck, grounded in Paris by a baggage handlers’ strike). Scully was a smash hit, as the densely scrawled-over wall calendar in his reception room confirmed; he was sold out for the next three years.

He dressed accordingly—bright shirts and brocade waistcoats, gold signet pinkie ring, the collection of bold ties. The style could support a watch fob and a reassuring paunch, but Mr. Scully was taut and springy as a cheetah. She appreciated the dressing up, not necessarily the clothes themselves—today a sunflower-yellow shirt and a wide tie swirling with red and gold fleurs-de-lis. No, it was that the gesture showed sensitivity, a sense of decorum, an understanding of the physics of the relationship: if someone had to be undressed, the other should be dressed enough for two.

“So, where do we start?” he asked, smiling, his forearms flat on his burl veneer desk.

She leaned back in the leather club chair, legs and arms crossed, momentarily speechless. She’d told him on the phone about the spot—she was touching it now, as if to cover its ears. “Well,” she ventured, “I had a mammogram a few months ago, the results are there in the envelope, and then they suggested the
échographie.
” Now he’d think she was being coy, but she’d forgotten; what the hell was it called in English?

“Okay,” he replied finally. “Do you want to hop up on the table.”

As he rose to wash his hands in the little corner sink, she unzipped her brown suede boots—an embarrassingly loud and suggestive sound—and wondered, briefly alarmed, if this hand washing meant he’d given up using gloves. Hanging from the back of the door was a choice of fat terry-cloth bathrobes, blue or yellow. Every movement in this room was so self-conscious that she could almost see the “study” in the
Journal of Gynecology and Obstetrics:
“seventy percent of women over forty-five choose the blue robe.” She duly unhooked the blue and slipped behind the folding screen that separated the examining table from all the leather and polished wood.

Letting her boots clunk to the floor, wriggling out of snug jeans, she imagined slinging a stocking over the zigzagged screen—wasn’t that what they were for? Then she remembered she was wearing socks: thick, opaque, “skin-colored” knee-highs, putty hued and smooth, like prosthetic limbs. Somehow she felt sure that Giovana didn’t touch knee-highs. Unpeeling the dun socks she saw the top bands had left reddish crenellated marks in her airplane-swollen calves. Mmm, she
thought, scrunching up the nylon to wipe the boot grime from between her sweaty toes: sexy.

Mr. Scully was gloveless as he began by palpating her breasts, the two hands working together like a piano tuner. He homed right in on the dense nodule, tapping repeatedly, a note that was giving him particular trouble, his head cocked as if he was
listening
to her bosom.

“Lumpy,” he pronounced neutrally as he turned away from her, stepping over to his workstation beyond her feet. Short for “lumpectomy”? she wanted to ask. She watched him through the V of her feet as he squeezed an upright forearm into a rubber glove. His hand opened and closed like someone in charades miming the beam of a lighthouse, his fingers working their way into their individual condoms. “Now slide right down, put your knees up, and just let your legs
fall
open,” Mr. Scully said, squarely facing her. She tensed as he slipped a hand inside her, and kept her eyes fixed on the busy much-painted plasterwork of distant cornices. One finger, she thought the middle finger, poked and prodded up toward the surface of her lower abdomen at the bikini line, where his other hand pressed down from outside.

This probably was not the moment to ask him if the G-spot really existed—but wasn’t it supposed to be around there somewhere? And when would that moment be, she asked herself, trying to lighten her spirits so she could breathe. Again his head was turned to the wall, as if not looking helped him to feel. (Mark, she thought unhelpfully, did this during sex, like someone on a rollicking, squall-tossed boat focuses on a cleat, trying not to be sick.) Scully poked around some more, covering the bases. “Feels absolutely fine,” he said, turning to look at her and bringing his hand mostly out, leaving in just a couple of fingers. “Now squeeze for me.”

She obediently squeezed.

“
Very
good. How often do you do your exercises?” he asked, looking straight at her and nodding and smiling encouragement. His hand was still inside her while he waited for her to answer, and she continued to grip.

“I don’t know,” Jean said, inhaling, her eyes wheeling around the room, still hanging on, quickly exhaling and inhaling again. “Whenever I remember.” The true answer, of course, was “never.”

Had he ever fucked anyone on this bench? Just let your legs
fall
open. When the idea of doctor-patient coupling first occurred to her, during her pregnancy, Jean thought: He couldn’t. He
wouldn’t.
Now—many years after her cocooning in the purity of impending motherhood and convinced as she was of a universal corruption—she wasn’t so sure. Wouldn’t she do it herself, in return for not having breast cancer? She was already making deals with the reaper.

On balance, she still guessed he didn’t or, at least, not very often. Of course Jean was joking to herself—how else did you get through these sessions? Still, she thought one thing was for sure: every odalisque who’d graced the padded slab had wondered the same thing.

“I’ll take a smear,” he said, turning to the sterilizer to get his speculum, a steel instrument shaped like an eyelash curler, with its wide-set pliers grip. The part she truly dreaded. And I’ll take a Diet Coke, she thought, desperately clinging to her humor like a life belt. He slipped it in. Not very cold but not very warm either.
When
would a female gynecologist introduce heated instruments, Jean wondered, not for the first time, already sketching the campaign in her column.

He followed with another tool, and then the muted
clip.
Nothing hurt, more as if someone had snipped off the callus on her heel. Finally he unparked the second instrument and turned back to his sink, perhaps to arrange the lab sample on a slide,
leaving the speculum inside her.
How could she explain the outrage of this?

But she trusted Mr. Scully. Preeclampsia was a serious condition, and the only cure was delivery. How pathetic, she reminded herself, to whine about a routine pelvic exam. He removed the offending tool, and her knees snapped shut.

“You can get dressed now.”

Back at the desk Scully examined the St. Jacques mammogram pictures she’d brought with her. “Mm-hm,” he murmured, holding them up against his lightbox, taking, she thought, an excessively long time. “Nothing necessarily unusual here. Cloudy. Fibrous. Quite normal for your age, particularly if you’ve had children late.”

She’d been twenty-six. But biologically, of course, she could be a grandmother—even a great-grandmother, she thought, not really wanting to ponder what he meant by nothing
necessarily
unusual, or
quite
normal. Maybe that’s how Scully really saw her: a great-grandmotherly womb in side-zip boots. She hoped he wasn’t going to start talking to her about menopause.

“The good news is, your mammogram looks fine. There is this fibrous matter that we may want to aspirate, but I would feel better, and I’m sure you would too, if instead we settled the matter definitively, which means a biopsy.”

“Do I have to go to the hospital?” she said, babyish.

“No, we can do it here. In fact, if we can get a sample to the lab by eleven”—he looked at his thin gold watch—“we’ll know where we are on Monday. How does that sound?”

“Sounds good.”

“Okay. Why don’t you get back on the table, take off your blouse, and I’ll give you an anesthetic.”

By the time she was numb, Jean was no longer distracted by thoughts of Mr. Scully as a man. The doctor had returned by popular demand for another performance as God. This time she didn’t look and, as he cut away a tissue sample from the underside of her right breast, she didn’t feel a thing.

“I’ll call you soon as I get the results, around this time Monday. Certainly before noon,” he said, returning his hands to her shoulders, as they’d begun this meeting. “Try to have a decent weekend.”

T
he sun had gone
in but the air was fresh. Jean had a free hour before she was due to meet her editor for lunch in Piccadilly and then head up to the office to hand in Mark’s reworked sketches for the fridge campaign (he didn’t trust couriers). She walked south toward Oxford Street, intending to shop for clothes, only to find when she got there too much reality for her first day in London for six months—and stripping off again in the middle of the day? Only for a doctor or a lover. She saw a naked Giovana, brainless Eve skipping and bouncing through a black forest, her pale Adam in gay pursuit. She thought of Mark this morning with his revised hairstyle and unfamiliar scent: too handsome, and too much effort, for a dawn business trip. Jean urgently needed to ignore the body and recover the spirit. She retreated north for a block and turned to the west: the Wallace Collection.

It was proximity alone that drew her in. She didn’t particularly like eighteenth-century French painting—those rheumy portraits of milkmaids and duchesses and striding cavaliers—or the spindly-legged gilt furniture and blue Sèvres porcelain cluttering those well-proportioned rooms. So it was no great loss that she got only as far as the gift shop, paralyzed there by the unexpected sight of Larry’s postcard,
Cupid a Captive,
on a rack near the entrance. This—and the pale, weirdly familiar duchess disdainfully observing her from an adjacent postcard—sent Jean straight back into the daylight.

A moment of bright sunshine gave way to fast-moving clouds and even the threat of rain in the short time it took her to cross Manchester Square, and Jean found it exhilarating. Maybe this island was more promising after all, she thought, walking down Bond Street, past the auction houses and galleries, the fancy linen and leather goods, the jewelry and the gowns… At least in England you still had the seasons intact, even if all four sometimes turned up in a single day. She wondered if the rhythm didn’t somehow give you a better shot at living each season of your life.

So which season had she gotten up to? She figured spring was Oxford, when she first arrived in England, where she met Mark at the very end of her schooling, on the night of the May Ball. Jean imagined her family as in a Victorian calendar, little fairies, costumed in flowers of the season. Summer was all their life together—Victoria a petal-capped budding baby, sprouting from the center of a hand-painted rose—until St. Jacques, oddly. Not of course St. Jacques’ fault, but Giovana’s, who had banished Jean to still another island, from whose shores she could only wave and hope for rescue. And so, she supposed, without warning she’d begun the autumn of her life—Jean floating down, zigzagging to the ground on yellow leaves, as in the Yeats poem about first love ending, yellow leaves falling “like faint meteors in the gloom.”

The advent of Giovana had also brought a change of season for Mark—only he of course had gone the other way. Through her, he’d returned to spring, wasn’t that the idea? Rejuvenation—Mark’s long legs sketched as daffodil stems—through his elective realignment with a natural world in bloom.
Why couldn’t he have tried gardening? The sky had turned a dense gunpowder gray—rain coming and, as usual, Jean had no umbrella. She glanced at her watch: plenty of time for a pit stop.

She pressed through Hatchards’ heavy brass-handled doors just as it began to come down in earnest. After half a year on print-scarce St. Jacques, her hands helplessly grazed the teetering fiction towers, the solid ramparts of history and biography, the table groaning with glossy cookbooks. Poor St. Jacques, where the finest print was a woodcut. She dropped her bag on the floor and picked up a heavy loaf of a recipe book, contented as if she was in a warm cake-scented kitchen, turning the thick satin pages of browns and creams and raspberry reds, until she was called away from the feast by a familiar voice.

“Well
hello,
Mrs. Hubbard…”

It was her college friend Iona Mackenzie, the other St. Hilda’s First in Law. More than two years had passed since they’d last met, also briefly and by chance. Iona looked the same: tall, erect, and narrow hipped, wavy black hair scraped back from a middle part. She was wearing a faded jean jacket lined with fur and carrying a big, dark brown leather bag—a thing so luscious it might have been poured from the pages of this cookbook. Jean eyed the bag and beheld in it all the temptations of the great city, and she nudged her own sorry sack under the display table with her boot.

“
Iona.
How great to see you—completely unchanged.” Mrs. Hubbard: was that for Old Mother Hubbard or just a dig at her having taken Mark’s name, unlike Iona, so insanely proud of her roots? Even if she’d only ever been to Scotland once a year, for “Hogmanay.” She leaned across the large book to kiss Iona’s cheek and saw behind her a little boy of about nine, with his mother’s wavy dark hair and blue eyes, climbing up and jumping off from the third step of the staircase she was never going to get to now. “That must be Robert,” she said, pleased she’d remembered a name.

“Torean, actually. Number four. Cry for help, right?”

Four?
When had that happened? Jean felt the current of jealousy pass through her like an electric shock, sickening, but over in an instant. Cry for help, oh what a winsome remark, she thought irritably, pretty sure Iona Mackenzie had plenty of help. She was annoyed, too, by the nutria-lined jean jacket—“luxurious casual”: laborious cool. But she’d been close to Iona, especially that final year.

“Torean.
Torean.
Come and meet Mummy’s
old friend.
”

So, Old Mother Hubbard. Iona was clever but, Jean long ago decided, just too competitive for friendship. Which made no sense: she was the one who’d had the serious career. She’d been a successful solicitor in the City before she finally quit, with child number three, to devote herself to the school run. “Is it a crime to waste your talents?”—this was the question from their Moral Philosophy Final they’d rushed to affirm all those years ago. How would they answer it now?

“Robert’s headed for Edinburgh—a
golfing
scholarship of all things, it’s almost embarrassing. Though of course Dom is thrilled to bits, and, let’s see, Caitrionagh
says
she aced her prelims, modern history—Christ Church.”

“No surprise there—she always was the brightest of the bright,” Jean said, not wanting to volley with an update on Vic. Instead she asked after another Hildean, their friend Ellie Antonucci, now a costume designer in New York. “Speaking of Oxford, have you heard from Ellie?”

“Not only heard from but
saw:
with her gorgeous little boy. Yes—she’s got a baby, didn’t you know? A baby at our age, can you imagine? No man in the picture, of course.” Iona raised her eyebrows.

Jean knew Ellie was expecting but hadn’t heard the result. And now Iona’s smug expression made her furious. Looking away for a moment, she tried to get ahold of herself: why was she so petty and ungenerous, why was she
overcome
this way? Iona had been a good friend, and a rare friend—a peer but also an equal. She recalled their long afternoons in Oxford’s covered market, arguing passionately over toasted sandwiches about Rawls versus Dworkin, Nagel, and Dennett, about
Language, Truth and Logic
and
Anarchy, State, and Utopia…

Suddenly Torean, jumping from five steps up, gave her a feeling she hadn’t had in years, one that used to nag at her like a hangnail: Where’s my handsome giant, where’s my
son
? Even semiemployed Ellie Antonucci, who famously didn’t have enduring relationships with men, had a son. When Vic was still little and Jean was questioned about further children, she’d reply that “Real estate is destiny,” and there was no room at the inn. In fact, her other pregnancies, and there’d been a few, had ended when the embryo failed to attach to the uterine wall. Victoria, it turned out, was a kind of miracle.

Torean was now leaping from the sixth step and causing consternation among the staff.

“Torie!
Torean.
Come here at
once,
” Iona called. The boy bounded over, hopping from foot to foot in huge steps, as if he was bravely crisscrossing an invisible live wire. Iona grabbed his shirt collar as he issued a karate kick in Jean’s direction. “Do you want to go home and straight to bed?” She practically lifted him off the ground from the neck. “Torean is off ill today. We
were
on our way to Fortnum’s for an ice-cream sundae.”

“How old are you, Torean, nine?” Jean asked, leaning toward him, admiring the gap where his front teeth should have been, and the dividing ridge on the gum like a seam pinched from Play-Doh. Torean slouched theatrically and sighed, letting his head roll back.

“Seven this week!” his mother answered for him, overlaying her weariness with something bouncy as the boy disappeared under the table.

“My goodness!” Jean said, knowing she sounded like someone who had never spoken to and possibly had never seen a child before.

“Yes, he’s enormous. They’re all monsters,” Iona said, leaning pointedly over the open book in Jean’s hands and snorting, theatrical like Torean, as if she’d caught her old pal with
The Joy of Sex.
“Mmmm,” Iona murmured, looking at a rococo violet syllabub. “Entertaining a lot?”

Jean couldn’t imagine ordering let alone making this velvety, occasion-streaked dessert. “Too heavy to carry back to Albert Street, never mind St. Jacques,” she said, setting the book down on the table. A curly dark head popped up between them, making Jean start.

“Look, Mummy!” he shouted, holding up Jean’s purse like a sack full of gold. “I found a funny old bag. Can I keep it?”

“That would be mine, that funny old bag,” Jean admitted, “or that would be
me,
” she said, glancing at Iona, wishing she wouldn’t unpeel his fingers quite so forcefully. Turning away from this mother-child tussle, she picked up the cookbook, opening at random to a recipe for pasta sauce made from leftovers—
borsa della nonna,
grandmother’s handbag. She imagined rough-crushed laxatives and floating tubes of Dentugrip with a sprinkling of biscuit crumbs. What would her own grubby sack yield, a blue coulis of sunblock and explodedpen ink? Jean was instinctively working up a joke to lighten the mood, but the spectacle of Iona manhandling her son made her just want to crawl back under the table with him. Poor Torean, with his gapped mouth like a sandwich someone had taken a bite out of.

Even though she knew there was more to her old friend than
what she was seeing now, she hated her. And she hated herself. She was bare bones: so reduced, she’d become a person who hated perhaps the best friend she could ever have. Then she saw Larry’s book in a stack near the cash register. She made for the pile, slightly overeager, and Iona followed her movements. “Oh yes, your old swain. I hear it’s wonderful.”

“Yes, it is,” Jean said proprietorially, though she’d barely cracked open her own copy. “Let me buy it for you.” She remembered their moral philosophy tutor. “In honor of Dr. Ernst Niestokel.”

“Kneestroker!” Iona shrieked. “He
must
be dead by now.”

Jean went to pay. “I’ve got to run,” she said. “Lunch with my editor.” She guessed Iona would be impressed by this, while she herself was merely downcast as she faced the second grim task on her list. Mackay was an old egotist and lech, but her unease went beyond the boredom of that to a niggling sense of her own false position. How could she once again sit though lunch, stirring up enthusiasm for her column, “Inside Out with Jean Hubbard”?

She was twenty minutes late to her date with Edwin Mackay, and she didn’t care. The moment she emerged from the revolving door into the restaurant she spotted him sipping peach juice at the bar: fatter, balder, but the unmistakable protuberant pucker—“Mrs. Moonlight with his D-cup lips,” according to Mark.

“Bellini?” he asked her, frog eyes popping. And D-cup
eye-balls,
she thought, with his prominent lower lids like a terrible balconette bra.

Two more Bellinis later—they were very small—Jean, who in Mackay’s presence was usually stripped of all ideas, found herself proposing a series of columns on gynecology. “My readers are all women, and this is the information they
need.
Men will read it for reasons of their own,” she added, just trying to bulk up her numbers.

Mackay was definitely leering at her now. Jean solemnly vowed she was never going to have lunch with him again. It was a mistake even to say the word “gynecology.” Made men like Mackay think of pussy, or would that be “minge”—her least favorite word for it. Every term was bad in its way, but this was the worst, with its suggestion of mean and dingy. For a moment she thought of Giovana, and how amazing it was that she didn’t know the sound of her voice but she knew her pubic coiffure: a trim little square, as dark and dense as an After Eight Mint.

She looked away from Mackay—scanning for help among her immediate neighbors. Pussy, she thought again, as she absorbed the group of curvy women at the next table—all young and provocatively dressed—arranged around a hideous man in dark glasses. Professionals, Jean assumed, since power alone couldn’t deliver those bodies to that face. This tableau gave her an idea for a different series altogether, on the seven deadly sins, several of which she’d researched already: lust, anger, envy, pride.

Mackay, stupidly chewing, briefly flickered with life at this suggestion. “Great idea,” he said. “I like a bit of sin.” Which was just as well, because Jean thought the series might be her last.

For recently, following her meeting with Bruce McGhee at the Captive Breeding Center, she’d offered a serious British newspaper an article about the vanishing kestrel population on St. Jacques. The editor was keen, and over lunch with Mackay this boost gave her a steady charge of inner power. Like the frisson of adultery, she couldn’t help thinking: having something
up your sleeve, something you didn’t share, helped you to endure the daily grind. If the paper published the piece, she could move on from
Mrs
and from Mackay, who over nearly twenty years had been her principal sponsor—the guardian, however implausibly, of her independence. But she wasn’t quite ready to quit. Before they’d gone to St. Jacques she’d overheard Mark’s deputy at the Christmas party, dispensing sound advice to a young employee who wanted to try her luck as a dancer: “Don’t quit the day job.” He was probably right. But how, in your spare time, were you ever going to find out if you were a dancer?
Was
it a crime, or maybe a sin, to waste your talents?