Right now Zoë’s house was rather empty. The previous owner had wallpapered around the furniture, leaving strange gaps and silhouettes on the walls, and Zoë hadn’t done much about that yet. She had bought furniture, then taken it back, furnishing and unfurnishing, preparing and shedding, like a womb. She had bought several plain pine chests to use as love seats or boot boxes, but they came to look to her more and more like children’s coffins, so she returned them. And she had recently bought an Oriental rug for the living room, with Chinese symbols on it she didn’t understand. The salesgirl had kept saying she was sure they meant Peace and Eternal Life, but when Zoë got the rug home, she worried. What if they didn’t mean Peace and Eternal Life? What if they meant, say, Bruce Springsteen. And the more she thought about it, the more she became convinced she had a rug that said Bruce Springsteen, and so she returned that, too.
She had also bought a little baroque mirror for the front entryway, which she had been told, by Murray Peterson, would keep away evil spirits. The mirror, however, tended to frighten her, startling her with an image of a woman she never recognized. Sometimes she looked puffier and plainer than she remembered. Sometimes shifty and dark. Most times she just looked vague. You look like someone I know, she had been told twice in the last year by strangers in restaurants in Terre Haute. In fact, sometimes she seemed not to have a look of her own, or any look whatsoever, and it began to amaze her that her students and colleagues were able to recognize her at all. How did they know? When she walked into a room, how did she look so that they knew it was her? Like this? Did she look like this? And so she returned the mirror.
“The reason I’m asking is that I know a man I think you should meet,” said Evan. “He’s fun. He’s straight. He’s single. That’s all I’m going to say.”
“I think I’m too old for fun,” said Zoë. She had a dark bristly hair in her chin, and she could feel it now with her finger. Perhaps when you had been without the opposite sex for too long, you began to resemble them. In an act of desperate invention, you began to grow your own. “I just want to come, wear my bonehead, visit with Charlie’s tropical fish, ask you about your food shoots.”
She thought about all the papers on “Our Constitution: How It Affects Us” she was going to have to correct. She thought about how she was going in for ultrasound tests on Friday, because, according to her doctor and her doctor’s assistant, she had a large, mysterious growth in her abdomen. Gallbladder, they kept saying. Or ovaries or colon. “You guys practice medicine?” asked Zoë, aloud, after they had left the room. Once, as a girl, she brought her dog to a vet, who had told her, “Well, either your dog has worms or cancer or else it was hit by a car.”
She was looking forward to New York.
“Well, whatever. We’ll just play it cool. I can’t wait to see you, hon. Don’t forget your bonehead,” said Evan.
“A bonehead you don’t forget,” said Zoë.
“I suppose,” said Evan.
The ultrasound Zoë was keeping a secret, even from Evan. “I feel like I’m dying,” Zoë had hinted just once on the phone.
“You’re not dying,” said Evan. “You’re just annoyed.”
“Ultrasound,” Zoë now said jokingly to the technician who put the cold jelly on her bare stomach. “Does that sound like a really great stereo system, or what?” She had not had anyone make this much fuss over her bare stomach since her boyfriend in graduate school, who had hovered over her whenever she felt ill, waved his arms, pressed his hands upon her navel, and drawled evangelically, “Heal! Heal for thy Baby Jesus’ sake!” Zoë would laugh and they would make love, both secretly hoping she would get pregnant. Later they would worry together, and he would sink a cheek to her belly and ask whether she was late, was she late, was she sure, she might be late, and when after two years she had not gotten pregnant, they took to quarreling and drifted apart.
“OK,” said the technician absently.
The monitor was in place, and Zoë’s insides came on the screen in all their gray and ribbony hollowness. They were marbled in the finest gradations of black and white, like stone in an old church or a picture of the moon. “Do you suppose,” she babbled at the technician, “that the rise in infertility among so many couples in this country is due to completely different species trying to reproduce?” The technician moved the scanner around and took more pictures. On one view in particular, on Zoë’s right side, the technician became suddenly alert, the machine he was operating clicking away.
Zoë stared at the screen. “That must be the growth you found there,” suggested Zoë.
“I can’t tell you anything,” said the technician rigidly. “Your doctor will get the radiologist’s report this afternoon and will phone you then.”
“I’ll be out of town,” said Zoë.
“I’m sorry,” said the technician.
Driving home, Zoë looked in the rearview mirror and decided she looked — well, how would one describe it? A little wan. She thought of the joke about the guy who visits his doctor and the doctor says, “Well, I’m sorry to say you’ve got six weeks to live.”
“I want a second opinion,” says the guy. You act like your opinion is worth more than everyone else’s in the class.
“You want a second opinion? OK,” says the doctor. “You’re ugly, too.” She liked that joke. She thought it was terribly, terribly funny.
She took a cab to the airport, Jerry the cabbie happy to see her.
“Have fun in New York,” he said, getting her bag out of the trunk. He liked her, or at least he always acted as if he did. She called him “Jare.”
“Thanks, Jare.”
“You know, I’ll tell you a secret: I’ve never been to New York. I’ll tell you two secrets: I’ve never been on a plane.” And he waved at her sadly as she pushed her way in through the terminal door. “Or an escalator!” he shouted.
The trick to flying safe, Zoë always said, was never to buy a discount ticket and to tell yourself you had nothing to live for anyway, so that when the plane crashed it was no big deal. Then, when it didn’t crash, when you had succeeded in keeping it aloft with your own worthlessness, all you had to do was stagger off, locate your luggage, and, by the time a cab arrived, come up with a persuasive reason to go on living.
“YOU’RE HERE!” shrieked Evan over the doorbell, before she even opened the door. Then she opened it wide. Zoë set her bags on the hall floor and hugged Evan hard. When she was little, Evan had always been affectionate and devoted. Zoë had always taken care of her, advising, reassuring, until recently, when it seemed Evan had started advising and reassuring her. It startled Zoë. She suspected it had something to do with Zoë’s being alone. It made people uncomfortable. “How are you?”
“I threw up on on the plane. Besides that, I’m OK.”
“Can I get you something? Here, let me take your suitcase. Sick on the plane. Eeeyew.”
“It was into one of those sickness bags,” said Zoë, just in case Evan thought she’d lost it in the aisle. “I was very quiet.”