"Hold on," I tell him. "I thought we went through all this last time." I try to stare him down. The effort is fruitless, though, in light of my last visit: me passing him stool samples, him digging around inside my asshole with his lubed, latexed, incredibly knuckled finger. It felt like he was feeding a knotted rope into my gut.
He's still watching me. I take off my patent leather shoes, unwrap my satin cummerbund, slide down my black pleated trousers and roll miserably onto the examination table. He doesn't even show the token modesty to look away. Instead, he starts talking. He talks about fecal occults and flexible sigmoids and adeno-something polyps and asks me if I've read the pamphlet he gave me.
"Yeah," I lie. "But I thought I just had piles."
"Hemorrhoids, yes. They certainly cause some blood in the stool. Today we're testing farther up."
He stops talking to sneeze again. I turn away from him, wince as he grazes the hard lump outside my rosebud, then a sharper pain, then a real humdinger:
Elise — my daughter, my baby girl — just a bloody, scraggly mess between my wife's harness-hung legs. Hideous under the man-made lights. Then a lump of flesh, stewing in sickness, pulling every possible contagion out of the air and into her body. The pain burns. Weeks and months she lay, first in the incubator, then the cot, under the watchful eyes of her mother. Her mother, who watched me as closely as her. Elise inherited her seriousness. Even before she could speak she'd look at me, unblinking, bringing me down to an accusable level, her eyes deep with understanding. I hadn't wanted her and she knew it. My lower body floods with water. It feels warm and wrong. Something's yanked out of me and my eyes tear up.
We're done, I realize. From the pain, my ass must look like black pudding. I start pulling up my underwear when I hear Hingess's voice, "Hold on there." I look over my shoulder. He's wheeling something toward me-a laptop-attached to about ten feet of evil-looking black rubber hosing.
"That was just the enema," he says, "to prep you. This is the sigmoidoscope." "You're not going to-"
"Only two feet of it."
"I want a smoke," I say. My face is salty, sopping with sweat.
I eye the hosing. Easily as thick as my thumb — probably thicker.
He frowns. Then he purses his lips and says, "All right. It'll help you breathe."
It hurts too much to sit up so, slouched on my side, I fumble in the bunched pant pockets around my ankles for a cigarette. I light it.
"Will you mind if I ask someone to assist?"
"What?" "A medical student. I want to demonstrate the procedure."
And then she's there, white-smocked, clipboard in hand, hair tied back in a bun. From sideways she's hot in a birdlike way, and I wonder refiexively if the doctor here has slipped it to her. She studies me with a detachment that verges on impudence. No way she's just some schmuck med student. It's Park Avenue- someone must have called in a favor. She acts like she sees this every day: a sweat-drenched man, naked save for his white wing-tip formal shirt, blood leaking from his ass, lying in a fetal position, shakily smoking a cigarette. Her coolness feels familiar to me.
The two of them start doctor-talking. I'm ordered to shift onto my left side. Someone lifts my right buttock, then from the locus of my rosebud the cold-hot pain flares again through the grid of my body. I can't breathe. It's okay, the doctor says. Slowly, breathe slowly through my mouth. Then he talks to Birdgirl, quick-fire, every word punctuated by a twist in my guts. The hosing goes in so deep it feels like part of it might snap off, stay trapped in there. My wobbling fingers drop the cigarette. I arch my head to look at the laptop screen, for some sign that it's worth it, that it'll be over soon, but all I see are smudges of gray and white. Large, hob-knuckled fingers pointing to them.
Then silence. The doctor and his sidekick are studying something on the screen. They mutter, speaking in Latin and percent ages. I rest my eyes. On the website photo she's got her mother's mouth. It doesn't smile.
"It's a big deal," Birdgirl says in a casual voice. When I turn to look I see it's Olivia; she's running her hands in small circles on her white smock, shaking her head at my thickness. "Of course it's a big deal. The Mayakovsky String Quartet. Carnegie Hall. Eighteen years old."
"She's getting married," I say. "To her manager."
"It's a big deal. It's serious."
"He's English."
"It's serious."
I agree with her — I'm nodding full of agreement when a putrid smell jogs me awake. Old anchovies and drain-clogged vegetables. The doctor, an inch from my face. My eyes heave into focus.
"Henry. You all right?"
Without asking permission I pull up my crinkled pants, cram my shirt into them and haul myself upright with only a slight moan. My feet dangle, toes stretched down, trying to hook my shoes. She doesn't usually come so close, so clear. The doctor confers with Birdgirl in a low tone. Then he turns to me.
"You have a number of adenomatous polyps in your colon."
"It's not your fault, Doc," I joke automatically. I grope again for my shoes.
"Most polyps are benign and the sigmoidoscope can remove them. However, the size and number of adenomatous polyps I have observed means we will have to carry out further tests."
"It's serious," Birdgirl murmurs. The doctor glances at her and she frowns, blushing.
At this point I catch on. They're not talking about my hemorrhoids. I zip up my pants.
"Tests? For what?"
He shows me pictures he's saved on the laptop. The polyps, he explains, are superfluous bits of tissue, generally shaped like mushrooms. There, he points, and there. I study the grainy images, trying, pretending to see. Then I see: the colony of little mushrooms in my colon. He's only inspected one third of it. He will perform biopsies through a colonoscope, he tells me, during a full colonie examination. He has awful breath. He will use a scythe-like wire to harvest my mushrooms, but there is a chance that malignant cells have already metastasized into my bloodstream or lymph system. I'm having trouble getting past the mushrooms. Birdgirl looks down, nods thoughtfully.
"Give it to me straight," I say.
Hingess is one of the most expensive gastro men in town and this is why I pay him: for his straight-shooting, no-holds-barred, expert opinion: "You will very likely develop colorectal cancer," he says, "if you haven't done so already."
I'm a painter. A good one, by most accounts. I look for the angles, the things that lend complexion, the joke in things. My doctor's mouth smells like a fish has flipped inside and died. I'm sweating in my penguin suit, my asshole burning from all the wrong-way traffic. There's a girl in the room who I'd jump if I could stand up, but even if I did — get this — her face wouldn't budge from the same mix of tenderness and pity holding it together now.
I'm looking, waiting, but I can't find it. It doesn't exist. There is no joke.
***
IT WAS JACOB APELMAN'S DOING that I met Olivia eighteen years ago, when I was unhappily married to a terminally passive-aggressive wife, father to a chronically ailing baby daughter, and caretaker of a career that made my domestic life seem idyllic. I'd been with him a few years — he wasn't yet the hotshot he is now, of course — and maybe I wasn't his most gracious artist. In any case, when a life-study model canceled at the last minute, Apelman kept mum (he said later he was afraid I'd take it personally) and found a girl to replace her. He didn't tell me she was seventeen years old, had never modeled before, had been plucked like an apple from Washington Square.
The girl had a boyish haircut and a botany textbook. Immediately she took charge. Without a word, she let her clothes fall to the floor and stepped out of them, as though from a pool of water. My studio — the top floor of an old box factory in Gowanus — faced westward, and as the day wrung itself into evening the sunlight streaked across the river and through my tall, rust-flecked windows, stenciling light and shadows across the room. A chintzy coral effect. The girl ignored the chair, sat on the cement, naked, on a reef of light. She sat so her knees touched, her feet splayed apart to create a triangle of dark space. I was taken aback by the perfect fluke of the composition. Then, cool as you like, she picked up her book and said: I'm ready.