The Romantic by Barbara Gowdy

Author:Barbara Gowdy [Gowdy, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780312423247
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2003-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The hard, metallic feeling persists. I lie face up on the barge-sized bed, arms rigid at my sides, eyelids heavy as coins, and immediately fall asleep. My dreams feature glass high-rise buildings and insidiously clean bathrooms. Nine hours later I haven’t moved, except for unclenching my fists. I now notice that gold stars are stuck all over the ceiling, some clinging by a single point and some already fallen but commemorated by the glue mark. This sight is not disorienting. I have woken up knowing exactly where I am (the Water’s Edge Hotel, room 1014, Honeymoon Suite) and why (Abel, that bastard).

I take a shower. While shampooing my hair I sense a plunge of dim light behind my left shoulder. “The Angel of Love,” I think wearily, and let myself dwell on the prospect that I have some kind of eye disease that causes me to hallucinate light in my peripheral vision. Either that or I’m delusional. I believed Abel loved me, didn’t I? I look at my belly and remember I was going to say,“A little you in there.” Well, the mad-scientist abortion doctor in Buffalo can have the little him in there. Wrench out its tiny black heart.

I put on my blue jeans and T-shirt, tug the ballet slippers over the bloodied bandages that, despite the shower, hold fast, and limp down to the dining room, where I eat a stunningly bad breakfast of rancid orange juice, undercooked bacon, rubbery scrambled eggs and soggy toast. All the other guests are complaining and spitting mouthfuls back onto their plates. When a woman at the next table turns to me and says,“You must have a cast-iron stomach,” I say,“I can’t really taste anything,” although I can. It’s just that for the first time in days I’m not even slightly nauseated, and so taste is a negligible sensation compared with the relief of effortless swallowing. “Anyway,” I say, touching my belly,“I’ve got to eat. I’m eating for two now.”

Why do I tell her that? Because I want to shock her, I guess (and there it is—the blank expression, the eyes scanning me up and down, then zeroing in on my naked ring finger before she says,“Well, congratulations”). Also because I am eating for two, however reluctantly, however temporarily, and I’m in a mood for looking at things dead on. An hour later, in the taxi on my way back to the airport, I admire the scenery but I don’t try to see the mountains as metaphors for some noble sentiment, and I don’t worry about forgetting what geological era they belong to, either. I think,“This is how it feels to have Abel out of my life.” Everything truer to my own experience of it. In his letters he was always going on about the truth—“The truth shall make you free,” “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—as if betrayal and pools of vomit were fabrications. Or, even more ridiculous, as if even these things, because they aren’t fabrications, must be counted as beautiful.

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