The Rose Variations, page 7
For twenty hours in the motel, she stared at ice-blue walls.
Then she lay on her back on a steel table with a nurse at her side who smelled of lilacs and held her hand primly. As she gulped and panted through the procedure, the nurse asked if she didn’t think that perhaps next time she should use protection?
Poor thing, Rose thought—she hasn’t heard that protection does not exist. And Rose would have enlightened her, too, had not the pain come on so strong.
Immediately after, she felt better, emptied out, unburdened. She brushed past the nurse, who reminded her she wasn’t to drive. She walked to her car, the wadding between her legs hindering her gait. She pulled over every few blocks to lie down and rest on the seat, just on principle, she told herself, not because she was tired. By now she knew her way through the streets around the college, or at least had ways of getting lost and backtracking and finding her way again. She was maybe a little tired, but certainly her strength was returning.
She parked in front of the duplex and sat. It was done. The thing was taken care of. Ursula, she thought—she could tell her dreadful news to Ursula. Better yet, she’d tell her mother: in this she could count on her mother’s interest and sympathy and on their shared relief at the outcome. She hauled herself up the back stairs.
On the top step sat Guy, red-eyed, unshaven, hugging himself.
“It was mine too,” he declared.
“Well. Yes, it was,” she said.
“It was my life too,” he said, and stumbled off.
Good-bye, she thought. They’d known each other barely two months.
Chapter SIX
Ursula’s hair was a shock: a reddish-purplish brush above her pale face, instead of the long, fluttering hair Rose was used to, hair in varying shades of brown, hair like a laugh or a shout. Ardent in conversation, the Ursula Rose had known in their grad-school years had tended to fling all that hair over a shoulder or to gather it into a hank doubled up in her fist. This new Ursula curved a palm over the top of her shorn skull, or placed both hands there, which, given her dangerous thinness, gave her the aspect of a prisoner of war in the act of surrender. Her hair was short, she told Rose curtly, so she didn’t have to bother with it as she dashed to the bus to get to the hospital or woke in the awful bunks provided for the resident doctors-in-training.
Having no money to go anywhere, Ursula had done Thanksgiving alone. After her grimly cheerful Thanksgiving letter, Rose offered to fly back to Philadelphia at Christmas and Ursula said yes. She wheedled three days in a row off from the hospital rotation, a break she’d have to pay for by working straight through the eight days prior and the eight after. Rose, for her part, would take Ursula out for a big Christmas dinner at any restaurant she’d care to name.
“How about we cook instead?” said Ursula upon meeting Rose at the airport.
Better yet: Rose would cook while Ursula strode around the kitchen, talking, swearing, gesticulating, passing the odd dirty dish through the dishwater and putting it away with flecks of food still on it. They’d “cook together” and Ursula would be restored.
Stopping on the way in from the airport, they piled the grocery cart high. Rose picked the biggest turkey in the bin so there would be leftovers after she’d gone. Squash and broccoli went into the cart; potatoes, garlic, mayonnaise, yams, three kinds of olives, apples and a big bag of pecans, eggs and cornmeal for Indian pudding. Also boxes of noodles, cheese, flour, butter, vanilla, sugar, and chocolate chips. Did Ursula still have a yen for hearts of palm? Rose tossed in three expensive cans. The bill topped a hundred dollars, which Rose paid with a flourish.
Hauling their booty out to the cab, Ursula grinned, showing her teeth, a hint of the rascal Rose had known. She’d been dining from hospital vending machines, she admitted. Her eyes filled. “Just tired,” she said, and began an emergency room story but fell asleep mid-sentence.
In the back of the cab, Rose eased bags of groceries to the floor,making room for her sleeping friend to lean against her, preferring Ursula’s troubles to her own.
As the Minnesota autumn had progressed, as November turned bitter and December came on, she’d awakened in the mornings, warm in the bedclothes, but sensing cold outside like a great ice dome under which life twitched and scurried; and before coming fully alert, she’d hear herself ask aloud, what’s wrong?—as if someone might answer. Then it would come to her. It was Guy not there. She remembered her cheek against his chest, his hand wandering over her breasts, and the pain of her longing crushed her. She hated him unreasonably for getting her pregnant, for trying to marry her, and at the same time for being someone she would miss so horribly.
Her skin broke out and her hair went dull and flyaway no matter how she tied or pinned it before marching off to her teaching. She missed his eyes, his jokes, his voice. She remembered how he’d hesitated that first night, remembered the dreadful pause. And here was the reason for dread: that, once parted, she would yearn for him, not as for lover of a few weeks, but as for part of herself now missing. Even now, as she was driven through the streets of Philadelphia with dear old Ursula snoring against her, she couldn’t help sense Guy out there, living and breathing.
Ursula stretched, arched her back, and pushed her long legs against the cab floor so her head nearly touched the roof. The shorn head gave her the look of Joan of Arc, which suited her.
In her med school class of ’75, Ursula had been the only woman, a fact brought to her daily attention in unpleasant ways despite her official warm welcome. Whether by necessity or by nature, she’d moved through her training like a guerrilla, swift, stealthy, and taking no prisoners. Her specialty was the lethal comeback. She was quoted by people who hadn’t even met her.
“My legend,” Ursula scoffed, but Rose believed the stories were true.
It was said that one day in Anatomy, Ursula had been requested by a sneering professor to come to the board and diagram “the male reproductive apparatus.” She’d picked up the chalk and taken her time about it, going into detail. When she stepped away, the professor had drawled, “Miss Kaiser, though she may not realize it, has drawn the male member in the erect state.”
“That’s the only way I’ve ever seen it,” said Ursula.
There followed a scene in Dissection when Ursula, assigned to work alone on a female cadaver while the rest of the class worked around her in pairs on dead males, one morning found a set of severed male genitals stuffed up between the legs of her cadaver.
“I guess she died of boredom,” Ursula had observed in her small, clear voice, a voice that carried. Rose laughed aloud thinking of it. In the cab, in her sleep, Ursula turned toward her.
Rose had often wished for similar exploits. The grad program in music had been no more hospitable to females. Its famous program director, whom Rose also suffered as adviser, relished commenting on the rareness of talent and its unexpected indicators: a sense of humor, for instance. His brand of humor ran to sex, crude talk of banging the girlfriend while the wife came up the stairs. If, in telling one of his jokes, his eye fastened like a hook on Rose, she always managed to pass the test, not by laughing— she rarely laughed during those years, unless alone with Ursula—but by keeping herself from glowering. She presented a smooth countenance, absent-minded, as though unreachable, lost in thought, in music. There was no subject the program director couldn’t turn to sex, and the other professors felt called upon to chime in; worse, the other students repeated the stories, chuckling experimentally, distracting themselves from the director’s lack of interest in the music any of them were writing.
Rose’s joy in music only just barely kept her going. One or two other female students would appear at the start of each semester and then fall away, but Rose marched straight through without leave or transfer; and she did it by keeping her head down, a strategy that never produced any zingers—none to compare with Ursula’s.
Ursula found a fascination, regardless, in all Rose had to report. She claimed most doctors were frustrated artists and would, if not for lack of talent, compose or write or paint instead. Rose doubted it. Anyone who really wanted to could compose or write or paint. Compared to music, mending and saving lives seemed more unquestionably worthy. Life without music would hardly be worth saving, answered her friend who was already in name a doctor, Doctor Ursula Kaiser. This awed Rose and made her nervous.
When she was nine years old, Rose had had a boil lanced below her knee. The doctor had enlisted her mother to keep her from kicking, and he carved and carved as though he were boring a hole through her leg, while she, screaming, wet her pants and heard the pee spill to the floor. Ursula had been incensed at the story, furious that the doctor had failed to administer anesthetic. But Ursula herself now yielded the knife and something in her humor might be that way, too, something in Ursula’s truth-telling. They’d chosen each other, however, because they were in some way alike, serious young women, comrades, equals. The hours they spent together were no mere pastime; and nothing had ever polluted things between them, as envy and pity had between Rose and Frances.
Toward Rose, since her disastrous dinner party, Frances had been distant but sympathetic, swapping envy of Rose for pity. With Ursula, there was instead a striving to be worthy of each other. Rose hoped to be worthy of her friend, both of them alone and both lately thwarted in love.
Regardless of her legend, Ursula did not hate men, nor was she indifferent to them, and men were crazy about her. She didn’t fall in love often, but when she did, she fell hard, which was how she’d come to lease a huge apartment with barely a stick of furniture on a street so dangerous, she had to walk with a freon shriek horn.
The cabby pulled in at a smeary dumpster, and Rose paid him and woke her friend. They hauled the groceries, two trips up the graffiti-splashed, glass-riddled stairs.
The apartment filled the top floor of the narrow, crumbling house; six rooms within a mansard roof. Fifteen tall, arched windows spanned ceiling to floor and let in sun from every direction. East to west, the light flooded gorgeously across bare hardwood floors and lit up the handsome double bed with a carved headboard—Russian folk art.
Her last year of med school, Ursula had met Bogdan, who’d dropped out of medicine to pursue his interest in his native land and its literature, from which he quoted tonelessly. His main virtue, to Rose, was his devotion to Ursula. He monopolized her in every setting, hunched over her, running on about her charms. Light of my life, fire of my loins, he called her (Nabokov); a beauty that could overthrow the world (Dostoevsky). Unfathomably, Ursula declared him handsome and demanded agreement from Rose. He was tall but spindly, his hair sloped down his forehead in a brownish gray pelt, and when he smiled a set of crooked teeth seemed to pop forth. Having no sense of humor, he was immune to Ursula’s powers of deflation and he never lowered his voice, but spoke his love talk to her always as though they were alone and not, for instance, in the middle of a crowded party.
Rose kept to herself her opinion of Bogdan, which was odd, given that she and Ursula prided themselves on telling each other everything. As Bogdan and Ursula had sometimes borrowed Rose’s rented room, Rose felt implicated in their union. Bogdan was penniless and lived in his car. Without Rose’s room to go to, they had only the smelly car or Ursula’s narrow bed in the dorm and the impeding presence of a roommate. Ursula had brought her own sheets and aired out the room afterward and made up the bed nicely.
But then Rose gave up the room to move to Minnesota—and where were Ursula and Bogdan to go? He found the airy apartment under the mansard roof, a place worthy of their love, and, plunking down a deposit “borrowed” from Ursula, promoted himself to fiancé, and had them buy, on her credit, the double bed with the headboard carved in Russian wed-ding symbols: apples, a duck, a drake, and a branch of spilling grapes, all nicely rendered in birch. And then, five short months after he and Ursula had moved in together, Bogdan had vanished.
Ursula thought it must have been her fault. She’d been grouchy adjusting to her residency. Or maybe he’d run completely out of money and been too proud to say so. Whatever the reason, Ursula was now stuck paying the rent alone. She’d leave the minute the lease was up. She was nearly through her training and would find a practice to join somewhere else, somewhere far, far away.
“Minnesota?” said Rose.
“Why not?” said Ursula.
The future, however, could wait. They’d have Christmas, three whole days, three days together in the light-enchanted rooms behind the triple locks.
Though they hadn’t really planned it that way, they never left the place at all. There at the top, it was actually hot once they—Rose—started cooking and baking. With the oven and the stove burners blasting, they traipsed around in their underwear.
Christmas Day, they sat on folding chairs with a card table between them, on which the roast turkey rested on a hospital tray and the rest of Christmas dinner was set forth in what, in Ursula’s kitchen, passed for dishes—olives in a jar lid, mashed potatoes in a rinsed take-out box.
“He was a rat. Bogdan was,” announced Ursula. It was the first time she had ever criticized Bogdan, at least in Rose’s hearing. “He was a ratty rodent,” said Ursula, rolling her r’s. “And you knew it all along, Rose. You did!”
Rose shrugged. “Eat,” she commanded her friend.
“Maybe he’s gone to Russia,” said Ursula.
“To Siberia, I hope,” said Rose. “Take bites. Chew. Swallow.”
Bogdan had disappeared without a call or a letter, without so much as a postcard. But Ursula guessed she was over it. Weeks and weeks had passed; she guessed she was over him.
“That’s good, Urse. Maybe I am too. Over him,” said Rose.
She found it difficult to speak Guy’s name, and it wasn’t till the day after Christmas, when the visit was nearly over, that Rose brought herself to tell everything.
She found it hard to begin. That afternoon, after Guy had walked away, she’d at first welcomed the loneliness. To be lonely felt good; to be silent felt right.
“I know,” said Ursula. She was in the bathtub. Reaching back to scrub her neck, she slopped water over the side.
But, as Rose’s memory faded of pain and the suctioning of the clotted blood running through a clear tube from her body to a drain, as days passed and she thought she was calm again, she found herself noticing babies.
Ursula interrupted with a story of her own about a messy triage and Rose realized she’d fallen asleep in the tub and awakened talking.
“Let’s get you to bed,” said Rose. She’d managed to get them to bed late each night of the visit, to bed if not to sleep.
“Count sheep,” Rose had said the first night into the alert darkness. Urse didn’t answer. Asleep, thought Rose. But later, she roused herself to hear her friend wandering.
Ursula declared herself unhappy to hear all Rose had undergone without telling her. They were side by side on the bed again, leaning against the headboard, nursing cups of tea. As Rose went on with her story, Ursula cupped first one hand and then the other over the top of her skull, as though holding her brain in place, and kept setting her cup down. And kept falling asleep.
“Your abortion. Oh, god. I’m losing it, Rose.”
Rose began again, but Ursula broke in. “I don’t fall asleep in emergencies, I don’t think, but who would tell me if I did? Shit, I can’t concentrate. I’m sorry—please go on.”
Rose told her to snuggle down under the covers. She needed sleep. The story could wait.
“No. Tell me now.” Ursula got up and walked to one of the long windows and stood looking out at the hard winter sky. It was one of her most endearing traits—she could look away and yet concentrate all the warmth of her listening, and thus allow Rose to unwrap slowly whatever it was that needed telling.
Leaning against the window, however, Ursula gave a sudden jerk and started in again, mid-sentence about the triage, how blood had sprayed the team and she hadn’t minded, how she, as leader, had shouted orders and they’d gotten the job done. She’d been good at it—really good, absofucking-lutely a performer. She turned and regarded Rose with puzzle-ment. “I’m a monster,” she said. “You had an abortion. Tell me.”
“I am.” Ursula dug her knuckles into her forehead.
When she found herself noticing babies, Rose was struck with the thought of herself as that, as the pulsing newborn she must have been, and it made her yearn for her mother. But she knew better than to ask Marion’s comfort. Marion would not have been sad for Rose, but would instead have praised her for “dealing with realities.”
“Dealing with realities,” Ursula intoned, Marion to a T: half smug I-told-you-so, half barely able to be bothered. They’d met one another’s families, and Urse was a deadly mimic.
“So I didn’t tell my mother. It’s weird. Because she would have approved.”
“You’d want her to disapprove?” Ursula leaned her forehead against the window.
“Yes,” Rose continued, choking the words out—it was too pathetic, too obvious, too much what she felt—”because, you see, I was her baby once, and what if she had wanted to do that? You know—to flush away—to rid herself of me?”
Rose waited for what Ursula would say. She had finally gotten it out, and was grateful to have someone she could tell. She’d declare that, too, in a minute, her gratitude to Ursula, how much she needed Ursula.
“Well,” said Ursula, turning a blind face, eyes closed, to Rose. “It was just a cluster of cells. You lost a cup of blood at most.”
Rose regarded her. She could not have heard what Rose had said. She wondered how much of what she’d said had transmitted to Ursula, what parts, flashing on and off like a strobe. She wouldn’t hold Ursula to blame, but she felt a lonely sinking into a deeper chamber of herself, her heart, her uterus. Someplace hidden and resoundingly hollow.
“I’m sorry,” gasped Ursula, her eyes flying open. “What am I saying? It was a baby. Your child, who would have looked like you and talked like you—”
