She leaned forward, and some dismayed tubes shook. He slipped a pillow behind her back. She hissed at him. “You can’t say mutilation may enhance sex.”
“Minata said it for me.”
“‘Choice,’ she said,” Gabrielle bitterly remembered.
“‘Luck,’ she meant,” Henry soothed. “Probably rare.”
Gabrielle’s recovery was awful. One of the little bones failed to heal properly. “We have to go in again,” her surgeon admitted. Back to the hospital, back to rehab, back to her apartment at last. Her hairdresser couldn’t make a home visit. Her coiffure acquired a wartime negligence. Wherever she parted it a white stripe appeared.
Stilclass="underline" “I have a darling device to get around the house,” she told her friends. It was like a child’s four-wheeled scooter. Rising from its running board was a post, and atop that post, at knee level, was a soft curved resting place. Gabrielle could bend her affected leg at the knee and lay her plastered shin on that resting place and then grasp the scooter’s handles and propel herself by means of her good leg. In this circus manner she went from room to room, from chair to chair, from bed to bathroom. With it as support she could water her flowers, even make an omelet.
She received many get-well cards — from friends and coworkers, from Minata, from her aunt. I wish you a speedy recovery, wrote Selene in penmanship that resembled her samplers. Men and mannish women sent flowers — the white-haired projectionist, Dr. Gouda, Mr. Devlin of course. Henry brought books. “I could go back to work now, my surgeon says,” she told Mr. Devlin on the telephone. “With the scooter. Perhaps the guests will be amused…”
“Come back whenever you’re equal to it,” he said, sounding harried. “Not a minute earlier. But not a minute later.”
Another week went by and the surgeon took off her immobilizing plaster and replaced it with a fat walking cast and a crutch. The cast was white fiberglass with wide blue straps. The monstrosity reached almost to her knee. Within its unyielding embrace her bones and tendons would continue to heal. But of course she couldn’t bike. And she was to throw her high heels into the trash, the doctor said, and never buy another pair.
Mr. Devlin sent the hotel handyman to pick her up every morning. At the end of the working day sometimes the handyman drove her home, sometimes Mr. Devlin himself, sometimes she took a cab, sometimes even Henry showed up. At least she hadn’t gained weight. But her hairdresser had rented a house in Antigua for a month.
“Why don’t you just go gray,” said thoughtless Henry.
She waited a minute or two, then asked, “What’s happening with the chapter?”
“Oh, still high on the list of do-good causes,” he told her. “Contributions are up, in fact.”
“Minata…”
“Didn’t hurt us. May have helped us. People adjust to contradictions, you know. And she’s prettier than that horse face.”
“She gave the lie to what we believe,” said Gabrielle, furious again.
“Anything we believe may be disproven. Think about it, Gabby. The Salem women were possessed by the devil. Homosexuality was a sickness. Cancer was God’s punishment. False beliefs, every one.”
“The earth still circles the sun!”
“Today,” he admitted. “Don’t count on tomorrow.”
VI.
Gabrielle was working late one evening, sitting at her glass-topped desk, reviewing tomorrow’s tasks. She looked up, as was her habit: to see what was going on in the little lobby, to smile at guests in a welcoming but not forward manner. She could not avoid the glimpse of herself in the mirror beside the clerk’s desk — head striped like a skunk’s fur, leg awkwardly outstretched within the disfiguring cast, crutch waiting against a pillar like a hired escort.
A woman stood at the elevator, her back to Gabrielle. Though she was wearing an orange jacket, not a green raincoat, and though her hair was flicked sideways into a toothed barrette, not hanging loose, Gabrielle knew who it was. The hatbox was a sort of hint. But beauty like Minata’s once seen is recognizable even from the rear — beauty originating in a place where skin is brown and teeth white and nymphectomies the local sport. Gabrielle identified also the white-pompadoured man pushing the elevator’s button.
This is not a love hotel…She kept staring until Minata turned. Minata flashed a happy grin, and Gabrielle gave her the professional grimace with the gap where a tooth once resided.
Minata walked across the lobby toward Gabrielle. Her eyes traveled downward and stopped at the boot. Her smile collapsed. “You must wear that thing? For healing? They tell you that?”
“Yes. I can hobble now. When they remove it I’ll be able to walk.”
“Do not wait. Go to Selene.”
Gabrielle felt her face redden. Shame? No, desire: desire that had eluded her for fifty-two years until Selene, maimed Selene…
“Hobble to her from the train station,” Minata suggested. “Or take a cab,” she added, revealing a practical streak, perhaps the very quality that enabled her to make the best of things.
Gabrielle frowned at her own enlarged and stiffened leg.
“Ugly but only a nuisance,” Minata said. “‘The tortoise knows how to embrace its mate.’”
The Golden Swan
The Golden Swan is the grandchild of the Normandie,” said Dr. Hartmann in his frail but grating voice.
What on earth was he talking about now. His slight accent was German, she guessed.
“I mean, Bella, that cruise ships descend from the great transatlantic liners. There was a time, before airplanes, when if you wanted to cross the ocean you boarded a steamship.”
His student — for Bella felt like his student, though she and Dr. Hartmann were in fact fellow passengers — fingered her limp hair. Dr. Hartmann was what you called professorial — yesterday he had delivered himself of a brief impromptu lecture on semiotics. She wished she’d understood it.
“And there was a time before steamships when, if you wanted to cross the ocean, or even if you didn’t, you sailed on a three-masted schooner.”
“‘Even if you didn’t’?” Bella echoed.
“If you happened to be a slave.”
Their small library — not theirs alone, but they were the sole occupants — was in the innermost portion of the lowest deck available to passengers. It was entirely devoid of natural light. It had a patterned rug, leather chairs, lamps with parchment shades, and four walls of shelves entirely filled with books…some stern hardbacks, some lively paperbacks.
“And now,” Dr. Hartmann wound up, “these ships are constructed solely for the joys of the cruise.” How joyless his voice was. “For swimming, dancing, sunbathing, eating, gambling. The ports of call, you will see for yourself, are incidental. And I have heard of ships which make no stops, giving up all pretense of purpose.” And he produced an inadvertent shudder, and then affected to twinkle.
This cruise was a gift to Bella and Robin from Grandpa, a gift to his dear girls, sweet as candy, pretty as pictures. He liked a little flesh on a female, yes sir! And so, last June, when they were both about to graduate college, he offered them a trip. Anywhere within reason, he said. He didn’t mean Paris.
They didn’t want Paris. They didn’t want Europe at all; they didn’t want to exhaust themselves tramping from site to important site. They wanted bright places and good food, and they knew that a Caribbean cruise promised both. An off-season one would strain Grandpa less — and so, though they could have claimed their gift along with their diplomas, they decided to wait almost a year, until the low rates of March. Meanwhile they got themselves jobs, found apartments.