In those days, if you didn’t do it in the first eight weeks, it became much more difficult, and if you hadn’t done it after sixteen weeks, you couldn’t do it at all. But in the first eight, you could at least go to someone, and if that someone knew what he was doing, chances were pretty good that you wouldn’t die. Lilly told me that Charles didn’t know, and she thought it would be cruel to tell him, which made sense considering how hard he’d taken it when she’d broken up with him the month before.

I’d never needed an abortion, but Cass had, so the next day I got the number of the person she had used, who was an actual doctor, a Viennese gynecologist who used anesthesia and only charged three hundred dollars, but when Lilly called the number, it was disconnected. The best kind of abortion to get was a therapeutic one, because then it could be done legit in a hospital. For one of those you had to get a shrink to say you needed it for mental health reasons, and none of us had the kind of bread shrinks required. Even if we had, a lot of shrinks wouldn’t prescribe them; you never could tell.

Tuesday, I spread the word that a friend of mine needed to know where to go. By Wednesday I had a number. Lilly had to call after five p.m., and then she had to ask for Mike and say she wanted a haircut, and if she said anything different, the person would hang up. It cost five hundred dollars and Lilly only had two hundred. I gave her a hundred and fifty that I’d been saving for the second issue, and Renaldo got a hundred and fifty from a married banker he was seeing. When I gave the money to Lilly, she asked would I come with her, so of course I said yes.

29. River of No Return, New York, 1954

The four women standing in front of this movie poster make it impossible to read without the title’s help. Obviously, once you violate the art/life connection ban, knowing the photographer’s situation at the time changes everything; but even if you’re clueless about Lillian’s personal history, this one’s got power. Four women all with their hair fresh out of hot rollers, all waiting for their dates while twisting their gloves in their hands, four versions of the same black handbag dangling from their wrists. Not one of those women is certain her man is going to show. Marilyn Monroe looks like she’s smirking at them from the poster. A different photographer would have had you laughing along with Marilyn, but because this is Lillian’s photograph, your eyes dart back and forth, scanning the street, your gloves clenched in your hand.