“Shaving you?” I said.

Medical precaution. God you felt dirty. He had rimless eyeglasses on a black string. A jacket unbuttoned over a vest with a thick silver watch chain. She said: will it hurt? The Lithuanian peers over his eyeglasses. Vas you so scared (she imitates his accent) ven you vas vit your boyfriend? Grunts. No: dot vas fun.

And finds herself (oddly now) almost flirting with the Lithuanian. It might hurt less somehow, she thought, if she flirted. Neutralize the pain. The window of the office is slightly open. She hears the voices of children playing in the snow. Eight o’clock. Michael has left her at the doctor’s. Michael is off somewhere having breakfast. She is on the surgical table with its iron stirrups and its leather straps. The doctor shows you an instrument. Now I am going to use this, he says. The window’s open so don’t scream. She wants it over quick but it isn’t. He shows her the instrument again. It is discolored now. She is sweating and she has bitten the inside of her cheek.

When it is over she is covered with sweat and nauseous. He lifts her from the table and carries her across the room and puts her down on a leather couch. The Lithuanian is strong. She wasn’t to move.

The doctor went out. You know what that bastard with his jokes went out for? While I waited to get dry and the pain to stop he went out to get a plum. A plum! she said. He hadn’t had any breakfast either.

She was bleeding into the thing he’d packed into her.

The Lithuanian ate the plum and talked. He’d been a G.P. Made as a G.P. maybe six thousand a year. Now his wife drove around in a Cadillac.

She lay there. No solid food. Take a dose of castor oil. Stay in bed forty-eight hours. Have somebody stay with you.

She looked at me from the bed. She’d finished the story. I’d brought her flowers. Through the snowstorm. That was very sweet of me. The flowers were on Michael’s desk. Michael wasn’t there. She had let Michael go. She was feeling all right and she didn’t need Michael. Michael was out playing poker. It was Michael’s poker night.

34

“Bring me the flowers,” she said. They were hothouse roses. She had settled down comfortably in the bed. She looked astonishingly well for a girl who had been through the ordeal she had described. The room was warmly lit. On the skylight the snow had piled up. Now she had the roses in bed with her.

She wished to talk.

“What would you like me to talk about?” I said.

“Your wife.”

“There isn’t, really, much to tell.”

When the wind blew, the snow on the skylight ridged. She held the roses to her. I thought of the unquenchable health that allowed her to recover so quickly from the Lithuanian.

“She cheated on you, didn’t she?”

“Yes.”

She meant, I could see, that she didn’t think I’d be the one who’d do the cheating.