James Tadd Adcox
Does Not Love
~ ~ ~
~ ~ ~
~ ~ ~
~ ~ ~
I
~ ~ ~
Viola is sitting on the examination table at the doctor’s office in a green dress with an empire waist and sky-blue shoes. She is thinking about floating up through the ceiling of the doctor’s office. She is thinking about passing through the clouds then coming to the edge of the earth’s atmosphere and then continuing onward, past the rim of debris caught in the earth’s gravitational pull, past the meteors and the asteroids and so forth, she’s not picturing the details too clearly now, past the moon and the earth-like planets, past the unearth-like planets, out of the solar system. Her husband Robert is holding her hand. This is their third miscarriage. Robert is wearing wrinkle-free gray slacks and a wrinkle-free white shirt. The doctor is telling them about how it is possible to have a healthy child even after multiple miscarriages.
“Spontaneously abort,” is the term for what Viola’s body does and has done with the pregnancies. There is not always a good explanation for it, the doctor explains.
They are cursed, Viola thinks, Viola and Robert and the doctor, to repeat this scene over and over, like ghosts replaying the circumstances of their untimely deaths.
Viola and Robert have a fight in the parking lot of the doctor’s office, except that it’s not a fight, because Robert is being too reasonable. That’s how Robert gets when he’s upset: too reasonable. “It would make me feel a hell of a lot better if just for once you’d raise your voice,” Viola says.
“I’m not going to raise my voice,” says Robert.
Viola wants to go back inside and tell the doctor to get the damn thing out of her. “Then we should go back inside and talk with the doctor,” Robert says. “We should discuss our options.”
“It doesn’t make any sense to have the doctor get it out of me,” Viola says. “It’s an unnecessary procedure and potentially damaging to my health.”
“That’s true,” Robert says. “I mean that may be true. The part about it being potentially damaging to your—”
“I don’t have diabetes,” Viola says. “I don’t have heart disease, or kidney disease, or high blood pressure or lupus. My uterus contains neither too much nor too little amniotic acid. I don’t have an imbalance of my progesterone nor a so-called incompetent cervix. I have had ultrasounds and sonograms and hysteroscopys and hysterosalpingographys and pelvic exams. I have eaten healthy. I have exercised. I have refrained from tobacco and alcohol and caffeine. I have taken folic acid and aspirin and—” Viola starts crying, standing there in the parking lot.
“You’ve done everything exactly right,” Robert says.
“I know that,” Viola says. “That is what I am trying to tell you.”
During the drive home, news helicopters fly overhead. On the radio there’s a story about another shooting downtown. Outside their windows, rough parts of Indianapolis stream by.
~ ~ ~
On the midday news the governor of the state of Indiana discusses the downtown shootings. “We will not stand for them,” the governor says. “These shootings. They will not be stood for.”
“Is it true that all of the victims have been associated with the pharmaceutical industry?” asks a reporter.
“I didn’t say it was time for questions,” says the governor.
“Is it true that the shooter was dressed in what appeared to be a fake fur coat and black goggles, brandishing two silver pistols that glowed in the moonlight?”
“No questions,” the governor says.
The governor and his retinue fold themselves back into the governor-van, and they remove themselves from the press conference.
“Was that ‘no questions’ or ‘no question’?” the anchor asks, from his desk at the studio.
“I believe it was the former, Bill.”
The wind picks up throughout the city, a great whistling through trees and between buildings.
~ ~ ~
Viola’s aunt and uncle arrive from North Carolina. They are prepared to do whatever they can to help. What is there to do? Viola presses her face into her aunt’s bony shoulder. Viola’s huge uncle walks around the house, testing the structural integrity of the walls. Robert returns from the grocery store.
“I bought a baked chicken,” Robert says. “It’s… I don’t know. Normally I would cook something but… ” Robert removes the baked chicken from its plastic container and puts it on a serving dish, which he places on the carved walnut dining table. He adjusts it. “There,” he says.
Viola’s aunt and uncle encourage her to eat. “Eat, baby, eat,” they say, rubbing her back, stroking her hair. Viola looks down at the baked chicken.
Viola’s uncle asks Robert what he thinks about the secret law. “I’m in favor of it,” Viola’s uncle explains. “I might not be in favor of it under other circumstances, but these are difficult times.”
“Is it about to come back up for a vote?” Robert asks.
“It is unclear whether the secret law requires a vote, constitutionally speaking. Or whether the secret law can be said to be governed by the constitution at all. There is, perhaps, a secret constitution, corresponding to the secret law. One might go so far as to suppose the secret law’s existence to create a secret constitution, through the rules of logical implication. Though I’d expect you know more about that than me… ”
“I don’t work in secret law,” Robert says. “I do corporate litigation.”
“How is the corporate litigation world these days?”
“Complicated.”
Viola stays in bed for an entire day. She looks at the blinds. I’ve never liked these blinds, she thinks. Bamboo. They don’t go with anything else. Why do we have these damn blinds.
~ ~ ~
Viola and her aunt get drinks at a country-western themed bar in a strip mall near the actual mall. There are cactus-shaped strings of lights hung from the ceiling and the servers are dressed in cowboy boots and western-wear shirts with name tags on them. Stuffed vultures perch atop plastic tombstones lining the wall.
Viola still looks pregnant. The blond waitress who comes to their table stares at her belly, dubious. According to the doctor, Viola’s body should expel the child naturally in several weeks. “I don’t want to expel the child naturally,” Viola says, slightly drunk. “I want it out of me.”
Several nearby patrons glance over. “My womb is become a grave,” drunk Viola says, trying to be quieter.
“What?” says her aunt.
“My womb is become a grave.”
Viola’s aunt, who never had kids of her own, helps Viola into the car.
“My womb is become a grave,” Viola, still a little drunk, whispers to Robert in bed that night.
“Stop it,” Robert says. “Your womb is become no such thing.”
The next day Viola heroically cleans the bathroom.
Every night for a week after that Viola dreams about giving birth to her dead child. Or, it appears dead, at first, but after a moment it coughs, rubs its eyes, and crawls from the doctor’s hands up onto her belly.