He made a crushing motion with both hands.
—Several times I walked onto the beach at night toward the rolling ocean. I never believed in God, but I asked the ocean, the universe, to take me. To swallow me whole. I laid myself down at the shoreline. But it turned out the ocean didn’t want me.
—The white man’s burden, I said.
—I’m sorry?
—You’re a white, wealthy male. Once you were a young, white, wealthy entitled piece of shit. Now you are old and you have the diseases you should have.
He nodded. He appeared suddenly chastened.
—Yes, I know, Joan. I understand. And I’m telling you this terrible thing I did. Not to absolve myself. But to sacrifice the last thing I can.
I nodded, but my rage was so intense at that moment I imagined it issuing from me in a bear-shaped vapor and killing the man. It was the female rage that builds for decades. I thought of the day I watched two skinny teenage boys playing Ping-Pong in the rec room of the hotel where I cleaned. I watched as another cleaning woman, Anna, heavy, with four children and a broken back, vacuumed the floor. The Ping-Pong ball jumped off the table and rolled into the mouth of Anna’s industrial vacuum. I saw how she hadn’t gone for the ball, but neither did she veer away from it, and the ball was swallowed by the vac and the young boys swore. She turned the vacuum off just in time to hear one boy cry out, Fuck! The fuckin ball! The other said, Give it back! And Anna sneered. Your little ball is gone, she said. And she turned the vacuum back on, a poltergeist of light and noise. Anna needed that job but she would have lost it that day if she had to.
—The facts, Leonard said obediently. I took Lenore back to Sandstone. To punish myself. It was late August, and there was a party at the ranch. I bought her a dress that was nothing but a swath of purple silk, and she tied it like a toga over one shoulder. She had long thick legs, like a Clydesdale. I wore a tuxedo. Most people were clothed that night; some, of course, were not. There was a band playing on a strange little stage in the main room. Doctor Johnson.
—Oh, I said, and Leonard nodded at me.
—And we watched them and danced. Lenore was easily the most gorgeous woman in the room. The lead singer of the band was eyeing her. He was, effectively, singing to her and her alone. Halfway through a dance someone came up to us, a bearded man, oily and tanned, and he handed us both a pill. Back then we called it a mickey. Within thirty minutes Lenore and I were both reeling.
She went to the bathroom and I thought to accompany her, but then some red-haired bimbo came and intercepted me. She had tassels on her tits. I’ll never forget the way they swirled. And in my brain the drug was dancing. The red-haired woman sat me down on a couch and sat on my lap, just staring into my eyes and kissing my eyelids every so often. It was a divine feeling. I felt helpless and delicious. Finally I found the strength to get up. I pushed her off of me and went to look for Lenore. The band was not playing and this struck me as ominous. I passed many rooms where people fucked, groups of four and five. One room was just a chain of cunnilingus, woman on woman on woman, and at the head was one man fucking one woman. I stopped and watched several rooms until finally I saw a sight that shot me down. Lenore’s purple swath of silk on the floor. This was in the doorway of a large room and the door was open because that was the rule at Sandstone. Open doors, open hearts, whatever nonsense. Lenore was on the bed, naked. Beside her was the lead singer of the band, the man you must have met already, stroking her side, kissing her nipples. Many times I’ve thought to kill him. But I’m a goddamned coward. He was much younger than me, than both of us, about twenty years. My head was spinning. I had no words. He looked at me, he said, Hello, my friend.
Lenore fluttered her eyes as he entered her. She looked at me and held out her hand and I took it. I was shaking, crying. But she smiled at me as though it were me entering her. It went on for ten minutes, but God knows it felt like a century, with me watching and sobbing like a child, getting all that I deserved. He kept going until he orgasmed. And she came along with him; I’d never seen her climax so hard. Afterward they lay there, the two of them, spent.
—Jesus, I said. I was trembling all over.
—The next morning we both woke with terrible hangovers and started to rework it in our brains that she was raped. Not violently, but that she was taken advantage of while under the influence of a very powerful drug, and I had come to the room too late to stop it. That was our story. In a sense, it was the truth.
He coughed. I looked at the thick blue veins on his wrist, the watch twinkling across them.
—I am sure, Leonard said, you can guess what comes next.
In fact, I had no idea what came next.
—Weeks passed. She took one of the home tests. She already knew because her breasts ached. Her mouth was full of spit. She couldn’t hide her happiness. That was the hell.
He began to shake.
—We could have pretended it was mine. No one would have questioned it. It was the happiness in her that I couldn’t take. The happiness that someone else had put there. And so we decided and yet we never discussed it out loud. I said, Let Dr. Menta see you. She knew only a bit about Dr. Menta, but it was enough. All right, she said. She said she would drive herself to the appointment. She would get a drink first at the Beverly Hills Hotel and wanted to be alone. I paced the house all that day. I couldn’t read or eat. The day was overcast. I pictured her driving through the fog down the canyon. Part of me hoped for a car accident, something absolving. She came back late, past nine.
—Darling, you said, did you do it? You didn’t, and that’s all right.
—Yes, I said exactly that, I believe, how did you—
—Go on, finish, I said, surprised that men always seemed not to know it when you hated them.
—She didn’t do it and I told her it was all right and she cried out in gratitude. She wanted a child at any cost.
—She wanted that child, I said, because she already knew who it was.
—Perhaps, he said, stroking his wattle.
—You did something.
—Yes. I did something terrible.
I shook my head back and forth, vibrating with wrath.
—This canyon is full of the types, you know, their pebbles and sands and crystals. The Bulgarian at the dry cleaner whom I’d known for years. Her breath you could smell from ten feet away. As though she ate bugs and dirt. One morning, along with my pressed shirts, she handed me a little brown sack and inside were two vials, one of black cohosh and one of blue.
—You old sick fuck.
—You know what they do?
I knew. In the hospital once a woman had tried to induce labor with blue cohosh. She’d been ten days past her due date and could no longer tolerate the heartburn. But she was allergic to cohosh. She died during the emergency cesarean. I spent most of the night outside the nursery watching her baby, who had a full head of rich black hair.
—That night I made Lenore her tea, Lenny continued, only it was steeped in triple the recommended dosage of both.
—She had no idea.
—No, I believe she had some idea.
—And she bled.
—She bled so much I was afraid she would die. It started in the middle of the night. The coyotes began to circle and howl, and then the contractions began, and after an hour of screaming and pain, it came out of her. A seahorse shape, blue and red. She held it to her breast, gently, and kissed its alien skull. Even in my fear and guilt, I felt the rage. Another man’s seed at Lenore’s breast. Within seconds the thing died.