Ninety-Three Million Miles Away: Short Story Read online

  He was motionless.

  You are kissing me, she thought. She seemed to feel his lips, cool, soft, sliding and sucking down her stomach. You are kissing me. She imagined his hands under her, lifting her like a bowl to his lips.

  She was coming.

  Her body jolted. Her legs shook. She had never experienced anything like it. Seeing what he saw, she witnessed an act of shocking vulnerability. It went on and on. She saw the charity of her display, her lavish recklessness and submission. It inspired her to the tenderest self-love. The man did not move, not until she had finally stopped moving, and then he reached up one hand—to signal, she thought, but it was to close the drapes.

  She stayed sprawled in the chair. She was astonished. She couldn’t believe herself. She couldn’t believe him. How did he know to stay so still, to simply watch her? She avoided the thought that right at this moment he was probably masturbating. She absorbed herself only with what she had seen, which was a dead-still man whose eyes she had sensed roving over her body the way that eyes in certain portraits seem to follow you around a room.

  The next three mornings everything was the same. He had on his white shirt, she masturbated in the chair, he watched without moving, she came spectacularly, he closed the drapes.

  Afterwards she went out clothes shopping or visiting people. Everyone told her how great she looked. At night she was passionate in bed, prompting Claude to ask several times, “What the hell’s come over you?” but he asked it happily, he didn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. She felt very loving toward Claude, not out of guilt but out of high spirits. She knew better than to confess, of course, and yet she didn’t believe that she was betraying him with the man next door. A man who hadn’t touched her or spoken to her, who, as far as she was concerned, existed only from the waist up and who never moved except to pull his drapes, how could that man be counted as a lover?

  The fourth day, Friday, the man didn’t appear. For two hours she waited in the chair. Finally she moved to the couch and watched television, keeping one eye on his window. She told herself that he must have had an urgent appointment, or that he had to go to work early. She was worried, though. At some point, late in the afternoon when she wasn’t looking, he closed his drapes.

  Saturday and Sunday he didn’t seem to be home—the drapes were drawn and the lights off. Not that she could have done anything anyway, not with Claude there. On Monday morning she was in her chair, naked, as soon as Claude left the house. She waited until ten-thirty, then put on her toreador pants and white push-up halter-top and went for a walk. A consoling line from Romeo and Juliet played in her head: “He that is stricken blind cannot forget the precious treasure of his eyesight lost.” She was angry with the man for not being as keen as she was. If he was at his window tomorrow, she vowed she would shut her drapes on him.

  But how would she replace him, what would she do? Become a table dancer? She had to laugh. Aside from the fact that she was a respectably married woman and could not dance to save her life and was probably ten years too old, the last thing she wanted was a bunch of slack-jawed, flat-eyed drunks grabbing at her breasts. She wanted one man, and she wanted him to have a sad, intelligent demeanour and the control to watch her without moving a muscle. She wanted him to wear a white shirt.

  On the way home, passing his place, she stopped. The building was a mansion turned into luxury apartments. He must have money, she realized. An obvious conclusion, but until now she’d had no interest whatsoever in who he was.

  She climbed the stairs and tried the door. Found it open. Walked in.

  The mailboxes were numbered one to four. His would be four. She read the name in the little window: Dr. Andrew Halsey.

  Back at her apartment she looked him up under “Physicians” in the phone book and found that, like Claude, he was a surgeon. A general surgeon, though, a remover of tumours and diseased organs. Presumably on call. Presumably dedicated, as a general surgeon had to be.

  She guessed she would forgive his absences.

  The next morning and the next, Andrew (as she now thought of him) was at the window. Thursday he wasn’t. She tried not to be disappointed. She imagined him saving people’s lives, drawing his scalpel along skin in beautifully precise cuts. For something to do she worked on her painting. She painted fishlike eyes, a hooked nose, a mouth full of teeth. She worked fast.

  Andrew was there Friday morning. When Ali saw him she rose to her feet and pressed her body against the window, as she had done the first morning. Then she walked to the chair, turned it around and leaned over it, her back to him. She masturbated stroking herself from behind.

  That afternoon she bought him a pair of binoculars, an expensive, powerful pair, which she wrapped in brown paper, addressed and left on the floor in front of his mailbox. All weekend she was preoccupied with wondering whether he would understand that she had given them to him and whether he would use them. She had considered including a message—”For our mornings” or something like that—but such direct communication seemed like a violation of a pact between them. The binoculars alone were a risk.

  Monday, before she even had her housecoat off, he walked from the rear of the room to the window, the binoculars at his eyes. Because most of his face was covered by the binoculars and his hands, she had the impression that he was masked. Her legs shook. When she opened her legs and spread her labia, his eyes crawled up her. She masturbated but didn’t come and didn’t try to, although she put on a show of coming. She was so devoted to his appreciation that her pleasure seemed like a siphoning of his, an early, childish indulgence that she would never return to.

  It was later, with Claude, that she came. After supper she pulled him onto the bed. She pretended that he was Andrew, or rather she imagined a dark, long-faced, silent man who made love with his eyes open but who smelled and felt like Claude and whom she loved and trusted as she did Claude. With this hybrid partner she was able to relax enough to encourage the kind of kissing and movement she needed but had never had the confidence to insist upon. The next morning, masturbating for Andrew, she reached the height of ecstasy, as if her orgasms with him had been the fantasy, and her pretences of orgasm were the real thing. Not coming released her completely into his dream of her. The whole show was for him—cunt, ass, mouth, throat offered to his magnified vision.

  For several weeks Andrew turned up regularly, five mornings a week, and she lived in a state of elation. In the afternoons she worked on her painting, without much concentration though, since finishing it didn’t seem to matter any more in spite of how well it was turning out. Claude insisted that it was still very much a self-portrait, a statement Ali was insulted by, given the woman’s obvious primitivism and her flat, distant eyes.

  There was no reason for her to continue working in the nude, not in the afternoon, but she did, out of habit and comfort and on the outside chance that Andrew might be home and peeking through his drapes. While she painted she wondered about her exhibitionism, what it was about her that craved to have a strange man look at her. Of course, everyone and everything liked to be looked at to a certain degree, she thought. Flowers, cats, anything that preened or shone, children crying, “Look at me!” Some mornings her episodes with Andrew seemed to have nothing at all to do with lust. They were completely display, wholehearted surrender to what felt like the most inaugural and genuine of all desires, which was not sex but which happened to be expressed through a sexual act.

  One night she dreamed that Andrew was operating on her. Above the surgical mask his eyes were expressionless. He had very long arms. She was also able to see, as if through his eyes, the vertical incision that went from between her breasts to her navel, and the skin on either side of the incision folded back like a scroll. Her heart was brilliant red and perfectly heart-shaped. All of her other organs were glistening yellows and oranges. Somebody should take a picture of this, she thought. Andrew’s gloved hands barely appeared to move as they wielded long, silver instruments. There was no bloo
d on his hands. Very carefully, so that she hardly felt it, he prodded her organs and plucked at her veins and tendons, occasionally drawing a tendon out and dropping it into a petri dish. It was as if he were weeding a garden. Her heart throbbed. A tendon encirled her heart, and when he pulled on it she could feel that its other end encircled her vagina, and the uncoiling there was the most exquisite sensation she had ever experienced. She worried that she would come and that her trembling and spasms would cause him to accidentally stab her. She woke up coming.

  All day the dream obsessed her. It could happen, she reasoned. She could have a gall bladder or an appendicitis attack and be rushed to the hospital and, just as she was going under, see that the surgeon was Andrew. It could happen.

  When she woke up the next morning, the dream was her first thought. She looked down at the gentle swell of her stomach and felt sentimental and excited. She found it impossible to shake the dream, even while she was masturbating for Andrew, so that instead of entering his dream of her, instead of seeing a naked woman sitting in a pool of morning sun, she saw her sliced-open chest in the shaft of his surgeon’s light. Her heart was what she focused on, its fragile pulsing, but she also saw the slower rise and fall of her lungs, and the quivering of her other organs. Between her organs were tantalizing crevices and entwined swirls of blue and red—her veins and arteries. Her tendons were seashell pink, threaded tight as guitar strings.

  Of course she realized that she had the physiology all wrong and that in a real operation there would be blood and pain and she would be anaesthetized. It was an impossible, mad fantasy. She didn’t expect it to last. But every day it became more enticing as she authenticated it with hard data, such as the name of the hospital he operated out of (she called his number in the phone book and asked his nurse) and the name of the surgical instruments he would use (she consulted one of Claude’s medical texts), and as she smoothed out the rough edges by imagining, for instance, minuscule suction tubes planted here and there in the incision to remove every last drop of blood.

  In the mornings, during her real encounters with Andrew, she became increasingly frustrated until it was all she could do not to quit in the middle, close the drapes or walk out of the room. And yet if he failed to show up she was desperate. She started to drink gin and tonics before lunch and to sunbathe at the edge of the driveway between her building and his, knowing he wasn’t home from ten o’clock on, but lying there for hours, just in case.

  One afternoon, light-headed from gin and sun, restless with worry because he hadn’t turned up the last three mornings, she changed out of her bikini and into a strapless cotton dress and went for a walk. She walked past the park she had been heading for, past the stores she had thought she might browse in. The sun bore down. Strutting by men who eyed her bare shoulders, she felt voluptuous, sweetly rounded. But at the pit of her stomach was a filament of anxiety, evidence that despite telling herself otherwise, she knew where she was going.

  She entered the hospital by the Emergency doors and wandered the corridors for what seemed like half an hour before discovering Andrew’s office. By this time she was holding her stomach and half believing that the feeling of anxiety might actually be a symptom of something very serious.

  “Dr. Halsey isn’t seeing patients,” his nurse said. She slit open a manila envelope with a lion’s head letter opener. “They’ll take care of you at Emergency.”

  “I have to see Dr. Halsey,” Ali said, her voice cracking. “I’m a friend.”

  The nurse sighed. “Just a minute.” She stood and went down a hall, opening a door at the end after a quick knock.

  Ali pressed her fists into her stomach. For some reason she no longer felt a thing. She pressed harder. What a miracle if she burst her appendix! She should stab herself with the letter opener. She should at least break her fingers, slam them in a drawer like a draft dodger.

  “Would you like to come in?” a high, nasal voice said. Ali spun around. It was Andrew, standing at the door.

  “The doctor will see you,” the nurse said impatiently, sitting back behind her desk.

  Ali’s heart began to pound. She felt as if a pair of hands were cupping and uncupping her ears. His shirt was blue. She went down the hall, squeezing past him without looking up, and sat in the chair beside his desk. He shut the door and walked to the window. It was a big room. There was a long expanse of old green and yellow floor tiles between them. Leaning his hip against a filing cabinet, he just stood there, hands in his trouser pockets, regarding her with such a polite, impersonal expression that she asked him if he recognized her.

  “Of course I do,” he said quietly.

  “Well—” Suddenly she was mortified. She felt like a woman about to sob that she couldn’t afford the abortion. She touched her fingers to her hot face.

  “I don’t know your name,” he said.

  “Oh. Ali. Ali Perrin.”

  “What do you want, Ali?”

  Her eyes fluttered down to his shoes—black, shabby loafers. She hated his adenoidal voice. What did she want? What she wanted was to bolt from the room like the mad woman she suspected she was. She glanced up at him again. Because he was standing with his back to the window, he was outlined in light. It made him seem unreal, like a film image superimposed against a screen. She tried to look away, but his eyes held her. Out in the waiting room the telephone was ringing. What do you want, she thought, capitulating to the pull of her perspective over to his, seeing now, from across the room, a charming woman with tanned, bare shoulders and blushing cheeks.

  The light blinked on his phone. Both of them glanced at it, but he stayed standing where he was. After a moment she murmured, “I have no idea what I’m doing here.”

  He was silent. She kept her eyes on the phone, waiting for him to speak. When he didn’t, she said, “I had a dream …” She let out a disbelieving laugh. “God.” She shook her head.

  “You are very lovely,” he said in a speculative tone. She glanced up at him, and he turned away. Pressing his hands together, he took a few steps along the window. “I have very much enjoyed our … our encounters.”

  “Oh, don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not here to—”

  “However,” he cut in, “I should tell you that I am moving into another building.”

  She looked straight at him.

  “This weekend, as a matter of fact.” He frowned at his wall of framed diplomas.

  “This weekend?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “So,” she murmured. “It’s over, then.”

  “Regrettably.”

  She stared at his profile. In profile he was a stranger—beak-nosed, round-shouldered. She hated his shoes, his floor, his formal way of speaking, his voice, his profile, and yet her eyes filled and she longed for him to look at her again.

  Abruptly he turned his back to her and said that his apartment was in the east end, near the beach. He gestured out the window. Did she know where the yacht club was?

  “No,” she whispered.

  “Not that I am a member,” he said with a mild laugh.

  “Listen,” she said, wiping her eyes. “I’m sorry.” She came to her feet. “I guess I just wanted to see you.”

  He strode like an obliging host over to the door.

  “Well, goodbye,” she said, looking up into his face.

  He had garlic breath and five-o’clock shadow. His eyes grazed hers. “I wouldn’t feel too badly about anything,” he said affably.

  When she got back to the apartment the first thing she did was take her clothes off and go over to the full-length mirror, which was still standing next to the easel. Her eyes filled again because without Andrew’s appreciation or the hope of it (and despite how repellent she had found him), what she saw was a pathetic little woman with pasty skin and short legs.

  She looked at the painting. If that was her, as Claude claimed, then she also had flat eyes and crude, wild proportions.

  What on earth did Claude see in her?
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  What had Andrew seen? “You are very lovely,” Andrew had said, but maybe he’d been reminding himself. Maybe he’d meant “lovely when I’m in the next building.”

  After supper that evening she asked Claude to lie with her on the couch, and the two of them watched TV. She held his hand against her breast. “Let this be enough,” she prayed.

  But she didn’t believe it ever would be. The world was too full of surprises, it frightened her. As Claude was always saying, things looked different from different angles and in different lights. What this meant to her was that everything hinged on where you happened to be standing at a given moment, or even on who you imagined you were. It meant that in certain lights, desire sprang up out of nowhere.

  If you enjoyed “Ninety-three Million Miles Away” by Barbara Gowdy, look for the print and e-book versions of the entire short story collection We So Seldom Look on Love.

  E-book: 9781443402484

  Print: 9780006475231

  About the Author

  BARBARA GOWDY was born in Windsor, Ontario, in 1950. When she was four, her family moved to Don Mills, a suburb of Toronto that would come to inspire the settings for much of her fiction.

  Gowdy considered a career as a pianist until she decided her talent was mediocre. While working as an editor at the publishing house Lester & Orpen, she found herself writing characters into her clients’ non-fiction and took this as her cue to start writing professionally.

  Her first book, Through the Green Valley (a historical novel set in Ireland), came out in 1988; the following year she published Falling Angels to international critical acclaim. Her 1992 collection, We So Seldom Look on Love, was a finalist for the Trillium Award for Fiction. Four years later, the title story from this collection was adapted into Kissed, a film directed by Lynne Stopkewich. Falling Angels was also adapted to film in 2003, with Esta Spalding as screenwriter.