Winter/Spring 2004

     Audra pulled back the heavy curtains of the hotel room, watched the promenade of pretty South Beach people below. They formed a vibrating mass that thinned out toward the horizon, where she could make out just a few heads bobbing in the ocean. It was like watching a living thing disperse into all of its atoms, each one as desperate and quivering as the whole.

     It had been more than twenty-four hours since her abortion and the only human contact she’d experienced had been with the bell-hop: hello—thank you—goodbye. Leaning her body out into the humid, salty air, she was sure she could see Ben’s BMW parked three blocks up Collins Avenue. It was classic Ben, to set her up in an expensive hotel suite where the stuffed shrimp and champagne were included. And to then ignore her. But she’d gotten involved with him, and she should have foreseen how he’d behave once anything went wrong. She’d love a peek at his Daytimer, for a quick review of the hours leading up to this morning:

     5 PM Call hotel, make arrangements. 8 AM Primp. 9 AM Drop Audra at doctor’s office (promise to see her soon). 9:30 AM Immerse self in work. 5 PM Find pressing distraction. 9 PM Stall. 10 PM Check hair. 12 AM Shower and floss. 1 AM Consider visiting Audra, decide to let her rest. 9 AM Go to hotel, break it off clean.

     Audra felt the Codeine slip through her legs in a sudden release and decided to walk along the beach. At least a walk would be doing something. She pulled on her shorts, picked the hotel key off the corner table and slipped it into her pocket.

     At the door she heard a light tapping, and she opened it. “Hey,” Ben said, quickly assuming an extended-arm lean against the door-jamb. His free arm was artfully slung behind his back. She smiled, relieved, but no less pessimistic.

     “I was just going to walk the beach,” she said, and the hoarseness of her underused voice startled her. She cleared her throat, straightened her back, stuck out her chin. “Care to join?”

     His hidden arm emerged, bursting with calla lilies, and he laid them across her arms, forcing her to cradle them. She wanted to let them drop, saw that he knew the significance of his gesture—the cradling—and that he intended it to be his only reference to the abortion.

     She turned coldly from him, went to the kitchenette and found a vase in a high cabinet. “They certainly have everything here,” she said. The lilies flapped by her ear, releasing their clean odor.

     Audra watched Ben touch the plush bar towel strewn on an end table. He ran his finger along the base of the upended champagne bottle. “Oh,” he said, so quietly she barely heard him from the kitchen. “I didn’t know champagne came with the room.” Last night, waiting for him at this hotel he’d reserved for her recovery, she’d eyed the wavering vapor at the mouth of the bottle and wondered what cause there was for celebration. She hadn’t wanted champagne, not alone, and she’d pictured herself freshening the ice through the night, tending to the bottle until he arrived to share it with her. But he didn’t arrive and eventually the champagne’s high quality seemed ridiculous wasted, and she drank it all. At the doctor’s they’d given her the bottle of Codeine, so this morning wasn’t as frightful as it could have been. She felt detached from pain in fact; her legs seemed to follow her around like pokey but willing ghosts.

     “It’s beautiful isn’t it? Much better than home,” he said, shrugging at the champagne and walking to the curtains to watch the beach people. The afternoon sky was the color of aluminum, buffed by palm fronds. She wondered, looking from the kitchenette past his head, if a walk would be wrong; her body yearned for the bed again.

     “Why don’t we swim, instead of walk?” he asked, and she felt hot with anger. The idea of swimming made her imagine herself as interlocked pieces that in the water would disengage and float apart. But, she’d known. He was going to treat the incident as if it were nothing. He wouldn’t ask her about it or apologize for his lateness. She’d known this was how he’d behave.

     “That would be great!” she said, surprised at the sharp edges in her voice. “Let’s take a swim, really.” She rummaged through her overnight bag and found the bathing suit that she’d somehow packed. She changed in front of him, hoping to cause unease with the sight of her body, her no-longer-pregnant belly. She still needed to wear a pad, and she put the bathing suit on over her underwear. Ben flinched at the sight of this, started to say something, but then didn’t.

     “Did you get the report done?” she asked, wriggling the rest of the way into the spandex tube.

     “Yes,” he said, “Finally. Dempsey wants me do go through a due diligence exercise one more time, he says. Of course, he made this decision without looking at my report. It’s always the same, you know how disorganized they are. Did anyone hassle you about taking yesterday off?”

     “Oh,” her voice rose a notch and she tried to fight the urge, but lost, and her sarcasm bubbled up, “did I take yesterday off? That’s right, I had a doctor’s appointment, yes, of course.”

     He turned, eyebrow cocked—it was the roguish look models used in the black and white ads that were so popular. “Are you ready?” he asked, no time for hysterics. He looked her up and down. “Do you have a sarong or something?”

     In the bathroom, she wrapped a hotel towel around her waist. She wanted to kick herself for bringing it up. Maybe he wasn’t so bad. Maybe he had planned to talk to her about yesterday in the calming repetition of the tide. Now she would never know. Now she had blown it. She tried to steel herself against any more ridiculous behavior. Posture, stomach in, like the star of your own movie.

     It was predictable, how he believed his provisions had made his being there unnecessary. He had promised—though it depended on his schedule, on the unlikelihood of his finishing the report that was due on Monday—that he would come that night, it might be late, very late, but he would do his best to come. At any rate, he said she deserved the best, and that surely didn’t mean lying in bed at home, with cramps and tears and her mother asking what the hell was the matter. Jesus, she was a grown woman and it was bad enough she still had to live at home, but that domineering mother! He insisted she should recover in a dignified manner. So he ordered up the very best room in the most lovely of South Beach hotels, so she could watch the beautiful people strolling by if she so chose.

     “Yell out French obscenities from your balcony,” he joked and kissed her lightly, too lightly, she thought. That was two nights ago at Hobie Beach. They’d perched on the hood of his BMW, watching the distant buildings loom and glisten over the subdued tide that lapped just a yard before the car. The hood was hot under her thighs, but her shoulders were cold. He sat like a pin-up boy: the foot closest to her propped on the front bumper and the arm that should have held her confidently bent, hand planted firmly in the crook of his hip, his thumb pointing toward his crotch, as though the subject of this meeting were an extraordinarily well-made inseam.

     But it was all in the crotch after all, she’d smirked to herself, and he asked what was funny, but she shook her head and said that if anything went wrong at the doctor’s office she wished that there was a number they could call, because she didn’t want them calling home. Could they call him, could she give out his number at the law firm, or his cell phone number?

     Oh, yes, of course, of course, and he’d do his best to get there on Friday night, would definitely see her Saturday morning. Later, in front of her parents’ house, he’d looked regretfully at the porch light and wished aloud that the same South Beach room had been open right away, so she wouldn’t have to face her childhood, so much history, while walking out the door in the morning to have the thing done. “You know, you don’t have to make me sound like a study in anthropology,” she laughed. But he pushed his lips together and she knew if it weren’t for this larger, looming topic, he’d have been back on his favorite one about her need for an apartment, her need to get out of her parents’ house. She agreed with him, but was irritated nonetheless, since he rarely allowed for the raw fact that she was office manager at the firm where they both worked and where as a lawyer he made roughly five times as much as she did. An apartment, in Miami, with car payments and student loans, was no small financial coup.

     And, privately, she liked her mother. She considered telling her about the whole thing, knew her mother would understand her choice, would have the decency (which he didn’t) to grieve a little with her.

     She was pulling it off quite well. Second glances from men at sidewalk tables, even from some of the beauties who hurried by with portfolios tucked under their arms. And Ben noticed too, putting his hand to the small of her back. Ben loved it here, loved to watch the pretty people in their rush to those agencies that seemed to have sprung up all at once, their doorways between islands of sidewalk dining areas, so that people eating had something elegant to admire. It was funny Ben had time to be a smart lawyer; he spent so much of his imagination on what was beautiful. “She has the most captivating depression over her lips,” he’d say, flipping through one of her magazines, pausing to appreciate some model. Audra supposed it was because he was so good-looking himself. She had seen him looking at his GQ magazines more than once with a peculiar expression on his face, something like longing and regret. And his poses amazed her, when she would find him waiting at her cubicle entrance, or on her parents’ doorstep, or even in the parking lot, his hand on the steering wheel. Every part of him would be placed in such a flattering way, she got the sense that he’d practiced again and again in front of the mirror, for he seemed to move with her as she walked around the car to get into the passenger’s seat: his hand coming down from his chin to rest just-right on the stick-shift, his chin lowering so that his eyebrows became the focus of the picture of his face. He thought himself the perfect package, sealed with the kiss that was his BMW’s vanity plate: PLAN. His father had corralled him into law school, then set all the right connections up ahead of him like a follow-the-dots pattern that outlined the picture of a solid career. He might wish he were a model, but then, he liked just looking like one too.

     She often couldn’t believe she had fallen for it. Though she knew she fit the picture physically, she was no example of composure otherwise. Perhaps she’d had some yearning for that kind of control, for Ben’s ability to close out any unpleasantness. She certainly hadn’t expected to get pregnant, and when she suspected it, she hated herself for this loss of control, and she hated him for how she knew he’d react. She knew he would view it as an unfortunate thing, as this thing. Not polished exteriors or exquisite design, but untidy, shameful innards. She kept it from him until she had the solid evidence of a doctor’s test.

     There’d been no question in his mind as to what their only choice was, and Audra knew better than to mention the other choices, since that would only mean to him that she’d misconstrued their relationship, that she was clearly unstable: it was, after all, nothing but an office fling.

     “I thought after our swim we might have a quiet lunch at the Colony,” he said now, as they walked. “They have the freshest mussels you’ll ever taste. I’m completely free today. All yours. There’s a play in Coconut Grove. If you’re up for it. And while we’re there we can stop at Moda, they’re altering a suit for me. But that will just take a second.” A rollerblader whisked by and Ben smiled and inhaled heartily through his nose. He was back on track, had never been off the track: planning his itinerary, reveling in the weather, never taking a moment to review things with her.

     She remembered the face of the nurse, the dark eyes floating over her, the hand that rose again and again to warm her forehead, push back her hair. The woman had been what no one else had been to Audra so far, what she had come to believe she didn’t deserve, or was too tough to need. Repeatedly she had reminded herself that this was the nineties and thousands of women were having abortions and many didn’t have reputable doctors and some were accosted by protesters at the clinic doors. Thirty years ago they were doing it with hangers and what did she expect from a shallow man and a shallow relationship and sensibilities that came from the slick unreality of movies?

     He’d once told her to meet him at the theater during the workday, when they could easily escape; it was a steamy movie tempered by frigid air-conditioning, nothing too explicit, just flawless moving bodies, but he wasn’t there, and she stood at the door and studied the outline of each sparsely placed head but none of them were his, and she thought about sitting down at one of these seats in the back row, so she could leave if she had to without disturbing anyone, after all she was late, the movie had been going on for a few minutes, he probably wouldn’t show, she should just turn and leave, but before she turned—and he must have watched and waited for her to go in, must have orchestrated the whole thing—but it was very effective, how his hands came up from behind and around her waist, wrist bones grazing the sides of her breasts, she hardly knew him, they’d only shared some suggestive notes over E-mail, she hardly knew him and this was the way it started, his hands resting on and lifting her face, not unlike the face of the bronzed woman on the screen, turning her face to him, and it was easy to think of the two of them from then on as movie characters, cool, worldly, polished: sweaty and breathless only when the time was right for it.

     So she shouldn’t have expected anything as real as the nurse, the steady hand, the expression of hope and understanding that might even allow for a moment of self-pity. Pity could be a good thing, if it were evoked in a moment of real tragedy. This was a tragedy and she hadn’t been able to admit that to herself until then and she was angry that she’d disallowed herself a moment’s compassion, until then, when this kind woman pulled her through the entire procedure, with encouraging words and the most perfect, most calming hand on her forehead.

     “What?” he asked now, as they walked. “What’s the matter?” Audra saw that her arms, despite the heat, were locked around her middle. She unknit her brow, managed a breezy smile. There was no point in appearing so severe around someone who didn’t care.

     “There was a nurse yesterday. She was good. Kind and—just very good at her job.”

     “I’m not surprised,” Ben said, raising his chin slightly. “That doctor is one of the best in the city.”

     “Do you think I should write a letter to him?” Audra brightened with the thought of a good deed. “I’d like to say how much that nurse meant to me, how much easier she made it for me.”

     “That would seem perverse, don’t you think? Nurses aren’t like customer service reps!”

     The sidewalk was wet where a clump of teenagers splashed under the spray of the shower, where the low wall opened onto the sand. Audra reached down and pulled off her sandals before stepping from pavement to beach. “You’re right,” she said, “I suppose a normal person would try to forget. She’s forgotten me by now.” Audra was aware of the admiring stares of the beach people. It was hard to avoid basking in the shimmer she and Ben created with their tanned lengths, their solid heels kneading the sand. Now would be a good time to forget.

     The tide changed voices and radios into tiny gems caught in a jar. The water ran in between her toes, over her ankles, to her knees and higher. Ben sloshed behind her, water kicked up like sprays of hot sparks. She felt the water’s lip touch her belly and was reminded again, pushed her whole body under to smooth out the emotion. She swam forward against the low waves, knowing he would watch her and appreciate the length and grace of her body in the water. She let her feet touch bottom again, and her head was just above water; she had gone far. His glistening head moved smoothly toward her. He stopped just two yards away and stood, smiling.

     She felt better in the water, not at all like falling apart. She ducked under and swam toward him, longing to trace a finger across the ripple of his belly. She pushed herself down, opened her eyes to the grainy murk. The salt didn’t burn her eyes, and again it occurred to her that she might emerge unscathed, controlled, as he had remained.

     She pictured her glamorous, glittering self coming up through the waves right at his face for a bittersweet kiss.

     Then a form enlarged fast in her peripheral vision, something long and white about the size of Ben’s arm but perhaps not the same shape and she was struck – smack! – in the head, she felt herself bob up, her senses spin, but it couldn’t have been his arm because he wasn’t that close, then again it came crashing into her temple, right where the nurse touched her forehead, but this was violence. She felt the thing receding, then thought she saw it again and struggled to move away, and she needed air and came up for a sputtering gasp, smelled something like metal and soda water, saw Ben’s shocked expression, then fell back dizzy into the water, sinking. His arms were quickly about her, he lifted her up and she opened her eyes. They were washed with blood.

     “A fish!” he exclaimed, and her world began to spin down, back into place. “You were hit by a fish!” She thought about laughing, remembered her plan from seconds ago to emerge like a perfect mermaid before him. It was pathetic and hilarious at once, how everything had changed into this gory scene. Her head throbbed and she tried to twist from his arms, tried to stand. Her feet found the sand and her toes curled into it. Circles of blood on the water slid into ovals. His arms were off her suddenly, then again a hand steadied her elbow and in his other he held up a long grey form, the thing she’d seen coming for her. “This was the second one,” he said. “Your head killed it. The first one’s gone. They came right for you, with a current, like a boat!” He looked at her bloody face and grimaced, looked quickly back at the fish. She reached her hand out to touch the thing. It reminded her of a closed umbrella. “It was like they aimed themselves at you,” he looked at her again, his expression incredulous, and she scoffed. She tried to ask if he meant to say she deserved it, but her voice was lost as her aching head fell forward into the salt water.

     He caught her chin in his fingers, held it above the surface. “You don’t open your eyes when you swim.” He sounded aggravated.

     “No,” she said. “I do. I did.”

     He considered the information. He opened his hand but the dead fish lingered by it. He picked it up and threw it across the water. “Then why didn’t you get out of the way?” he yelled, like a child in a tantrum.

     “And what about you, Ben?” she gasped. “Why didn’t you arrange a fish-free ocean?” A wave pushed Audra forward and she stepped with it. Her steps accelerated and when the water pulled itself back she trembled. “I can’t be here,” she sputtered. “It’s too cold.”

     It wasn’t until they’d reached the shore that she was thankful for the fish. She glanced up at him from her stooped and pained stance and saw his stricken face in the light of so many staring people. Ben and Audra had gone into the ocean beautiful and composed, and come out covered in blood and salt and she had dozens of tiny fish teeth embedded in her head, teeth that would take hours of emergency room time to remove.

     And because he would bring her to the hospital and the doctor would encourage his presence, he would be forced to sit beside her and suffer through each extraction. Audra would put the teeth in a jar and set them on her childhood desk at home, where not long after she would write to the abortion doctor. “The kindness of your nurse was unexpected. Thank her for me, please.”

Jennifer Bannan's short story collection, Inventing Victor, was published October 2003. Her stories have also appeared in ACM, Passages North, Café Eighties and Radio Transcript Newspaper. She works a day job with Zer0 to 5ive, a technology marketing firm. Jennifer is a 1991 graduate of Carnegie Mellon University's creative writing program.