Attachment (3 page)

She knew what came next and that it didn’t serve to watch: the central shaft of the machine would be lowered like a dumbwaiter, pinning her to the glass, sandwiching her breast in a painful wedge, as if the whole extrusion was designed not to take a photograph that could save her life but to hasten nature’s decline. Why else did they clamp so hard, as if squeezing the last drops from a lemon? Why crank the vise when no other tissue impeded the view? They’d explain it was to allow the lowest possible dose of radiation, but Jean would be more convinced if they said it was to deter second-thoughters. And what a sisterhood of silent fury, as each annual twenty-second examination undid the faithful bra wearing of the preceding year…

It was best to look away, not just from the radiation but because it wasn’t a good sight. The clamp was released and the dumbwaiter sent upstairs, but the pale breast lay there, spread and settled on the tray like an uncooked Danish. With her arm still thrown in a pally hug around the X-ray machine, Jean was sure Thing 2’s breasts never looked like pastry dough.

“You can remove yourself.” The radiologist startled her, looking her in the eye for the first time before leaving the room.

Jean wasn’t so sure. She thought her breast might stick when she tried to unpeel it from the glass, and possibly rip, like a rug’s rubber underlay.

As she slowly pieced herself back together, looking at the diagram on the wall, she remembered the sheep’s heart she’d been given to dissect in a high school biology class, and how dense it was—rubbery, solid, slime-coated, and intermittently spongy, anything but breakable. Where had that come from, the broken heart? Jean had loved dissecting, and as she left the clinic she realized it had been the graphic precursor to her job as a columnist: that sheep’s heart, one time a whole frog, even the lowly pods and leaves. Then, suddenly, she knew exactly what the secret password was—why hadn’t it struck her before? Munyeroo, a fleshy Australian plant, whose leaves and seeds, as Thing 2 helpfully pointed out, could be eaten. Mark had told her about it just the other day, after his trip home, and even suggested Munyeroo—bashfully, in fact—as a name for the stray cat who’d come along but abandoned them as soon as Mark returned. Clearly it hadn’t appreciated being named after his crude mistress. Jean knew now just what she was going to do. She was going down to the Internet café to open e-mail 69.

Back in the waiting room, the stately woman in her turban was still sitting patiently. What would she be thinking as she watched a dazed Jean walk past, making for the door?
How did people with such raw-looking skin get the idea that they could rule the world? What made you believe you were entitled to happiness?
As Jean stepped outside, her idle hand feeling the top of her own head, she couldn’t help imagining that the lady’s crown of fabric wasn’t for cushioning freight, and not for fashion either. Maybe it was an elaborate bandage that covered a gaping hole.

Jean was practically quivering with adrenaline as she drove to the Internet café, her diesel engine roaring. And then she instinctively pulled over: for the willed caution of delay, the gym. Under the glinting gilt cupola at the top of Le Royaume, the only smart hotel not on the coast, Jean, changed into old canvas tennis shoes and faded sweats, took her place alongside
two unimprovably trim and toned women on a row of step machines. Most people came here to develop their bodies. What she wanted to develop was an attitude. Did she dare find out any more about this Thing 2? Could she—or they—survive an affair? And if not, was she remotely prepared to paddle off in her own canoe? Had Mark already done just that? Maybe the whole business of choice had already been settled. He was the one who had acted, and decisively.

She started to climb. Soon she was hanging on, hunchbacked, as if riding a motorcycle into strong wind, sinking as she gripped the bars, putting as much weight as possible on her arms. The women beside her, both wearing bright Lycra outfits, didn’t seem to notice they were exerting themselves at all; they chatted effortlessly, their rounded backsides pushed up and out like the rumps of show ponies. Watching the ceiling-mounted television hurt Jean’s neck. Head down, she was forced to eavesdrop—which was, she couldn’t help thinking, exactly what she planned to do at the Internet café.

“Well, every time we meet, he say me ‘You have a beautiful ass, I love di
tex
ture’ ”—Jean heard “
taste
tour”—“always di ass you know. Latinos day love di ass. And den, one day, no more texture. Now he say me, ‘I can teach you song good essersizes for you ass.’ Das how I starting in di tango feet.”

“Tango feet?” The other climber whipped around, frowning with interest.

“Yes, tango wit di beat, you know, tango for di feetness.”

“Oh, tango
fit.
Cool. Can I have a listen?”

The other one was Australian, Jean guessed, mesmerized by the sight of the woman’s bouncing chest, as extravagantly upholstered as Tangofeet’s, only Jean thought hers might be real.

“Chore.” The Argentine, if that’s what she was, passed the earphones to her friend.

What, Jean wondered, did Thing 2 look like? What sort of “texture” was she? That was an advanced sort of concern, wasn’t it? Jean would settle for shape. She thought of her boyish straight line from pits to hips and moved away to try an arm machine. Settling her bottom on the seat pad, she imagined a man’s body being lowered onto hers, his sneakered feet in the air: 69, the yin-yang of sex positions. A pose for show-offs, Jean thought: fundamentally unserious. You could hardly meditate on your own pleasure doing
that.
Anyway, Mark was too tall to be the 9 to any woman’s 6—unless Thing 2 was an Amazon. Or would that be Jean, she thought mirthlessly, remembering how the Amazons’ breasts were lopped off to facilitate the use of a bow. Jean never wanted to pick up her mammogram results, let alone a weapon. But the thought of those warrior women emboldened her: she would at least take a look.

T
he cyber
café was unusually crowded. Jean got the corner computer, beside a black teenager whose forehead glistened like a polished plum. He was typing one-sentence replies to one-sentence questions: instant messaging. She knew what this was—one new skill she didn’t feel called on to acquire. She checked her work e-mail first, and then the joint account set up by and mainly for Victoria. The boy beside her didn’t look up as she finally typed in the new account name, naughtyboy1, and the password, munyeroo. And there was 69, a lonely pair of inverted spermatozoa, each chasing the other’s tail. The sender slot was discreetly blanked. Steeling herself to click and open, she looked again at the letter in the white envelope. Munyeroo. Jean immediately thought of the Australian at the gym, the blond woman with the spectacular natural frontage. But there was Italian here as well—that
ciao bello.
An Australian of Italian descent, that’s it, Jean thought. She remembered Mark joking, many years ago, that the primary appeal of Australian girls in London was their departure the following morning for New South Wales,
forever.
But the letter had originated in London. Thing 2 didn’t play by the rules.

Jean opened the attachment. It took a long time to download. Luckily the boy next to her left before the full-screen image appeared.

Jesus!
Australia didn’t waste time. She wondered how much a chest like that might weigh. At almost life-size, it was a not-so-good pair, she thought—big nippled and uniformly bronzed. Jean believed in the essential sexiness of untanned triangles—the idea, at least, that not just anyone enjoyed this view—not that her skin ever turned anything but redder, or that she ever wore a bikini. But these were undeniably young and undeniably large. And what was that black thing? The edge of a tattoo? A whole generation of young people—including Victoria with her lizard—in painful pursuit of decoration and emphasis, just what they didn’t need. Their inkings should warn off persons from their parents’ era, Jean thought. In fact, that might be just the sort of boundary tattoos were there to demarcate—noli me tangere.

There were a couple of other photographs, all with elaborate captions. “Giovana” promised Mark
L.O.V.E.—long overdue experience,
even fucking that up; but then Giovana with one
n
couldn’t even spell her own name. Which was probably Joan anyway. Or Jean—who just now remembered that, when she was about fifteen and yearning for instant glamour, she’d briefly insisted on being called Gina.

Giovana thanked him for the “replacement” underpants, which she gamely modeled on her round bottom—
fat,
Victoria would’ve said, taking her mother’s side. A red ribbon was threaded through chubby cheeks—buried, actually—reappearing at the top to bloom into a triangular swatch of white trimmed with red, like a yield sign. What happened to the first pair? Were they the same, or cut to resemble a different traffic warning: a red octagon of phony protest (stop!), or maybe a slinky something in yellow and black (slippery when wet)? Helpless against the tide of imagining, Jean
stolidly went on, in punishing detail. So, underpants #1, given, and kept, as a souvenir? Ripped by his teeth in the heat of the moment? Tossed from a moving taxi? Ridiculous. Right?

Another photo—headless like the first two—gave a side view of the same body, this time pantyless and bending at the waist, wearing a frilly white apron that served as a sling for heavy breasts, with a giant birthday-present bow tied at the back. An unfamiliar hand trained the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner on the crescent seam of her buttocks. What was Jean supposed to make of that? Had Mark put in a request in the housewife department? The crassness of these offerings stunned Jean, though she couldn’t say if she’d be any less stunned by
tasteful
nude shots of Mark’s lover. Her ability to think clearly about any of this was hampered by the much more upsetting thought that, after twenty-three years together, she didn’t really know her husband.

Plainly, this was a spoof of some kind. She could see you weren’t supposed to take it seriously. But affairs were always corny, always an imitation of other affairs. What would be the point of a highly original affair? Repetition was the whole idea, with thrilling (and repetitive) limits on time and place. Nothing like a marriage, with all its unrelieved specificity unfurling over the years, in a variety of landscapes, public and private, rural and urban, in the long roll from innocence to…loss of innocence. (Jean wasn’t sure anymore about knowledge: what did she know?) But being corny didn’t make it harmless, even if that’s what he’d told himself.

Before she knew it, she was typing her reply.

Thing 2: Is it really you? (I’d forgotten how wonderful you look: was that—rather, were those—really you? More! Never 2 soon. PLEASE.)

Write back. Telling detail, please, so I can be sure its you.

T1

Darling Munyeroo, bella stella giovanela, you slut! I adore you!

She didn’t pause. And when she was done she read over her reply: not bad, she thought. Mark could be whimsical, uncertain about punctuation; his favorite word was “wonderful,” and “adore” his second favorite. Jean didn’t resist matching Giovana’s stray numeral—“4 your eyes only”—a rotting fish tossed to a trained seal. She
had
wavered between “slag” and “slut,” worried that the latter was too American, but finally decided it was somehow jollier, and above all she could hear him saying it. Finally, she trusted the recipient’s vanity to weaken her sleuthing skills.

Jean sat upright and looked blankly through the window. Outside, the blinding day. She was acting almost robotically, but she couldn’t stop. The moral high ground held no appeal—and no
information.
She would continue even though, before she sent a single line, she knew that soon she would be like the boy who’d just left—foolishly awaiting replies she would then foolishly return, in a gripping, humiliating dunces’ volley. She checked her reply once more and pressed the send button. And she was, however briefly, euphoric.

Driving home around the outskirts of Toussaint, Jean thought how much of her day so far had been about the body—a particular strain considering she’d always felt most herself with the smallest amount of movement: reading, thinking, writing; and watching, absolutely frozen, birds through binoculars. Very early on she’d discovered you could learn a great deal if
you just stayed still and more or less left your body out of it. Suddenly it was all bodies—and breasts were in the air! Blown up and plastered on posters and billboards, or plumply rolling by on the sides of public buses, perfect pairs assailed her, incongruous and looming in this lapsed, rust-encrusted, weedinfested, sugarcaning community.

The ads, featuring skin tones not seen here except on tourists, weren’t much noticed by locals, who passed them by in threes on mopeds and bicycles, or on foot, balancing barrels on their heads or bent under back loads of kindling. Jean passed a flock of schoolchildren in checked uniforms, skipping alongside leaching salt beds; she tracked broken-down farms and roadside food stands and
tabagies
and, in and among all this, stationed at regular intervals, the local prostitutes, their breasts spilling from front-tied halter-neck tops. Gift wrapped, she thought, helplessly slowing down to look.

Out on the coastal road, the bay flashing beside her like a vast mirror, she was blocked by a delivery truck attempting to turn. She stopped right under a breast-festooned billboard. “There you go,” she said, as if it was proof of a general conspiracy, this one an ad for fizzy orange drink, in the photograph falling from some height, like a waterfall, into the mouth of an ecstatic bosomy teenager.

The side of the long truck was blazoned with a hand-painted globe, denoting worldwide scope in the local style. Jean stared at the homely planet as the truck inched through its dangerous maneuvers, shielding her face from the wall of sunlight beaming from the west. And she felt, sitting under a womanly chest the size of her car, that she herself was stuck, and not just in this wedge of narrow road, with the wild ocean storming below. It seemed to Jean there were no facts; that rules might give way to exceptions and that everything was open to interpretation, the play of the light, the smacking waves of further revelation. The trapped feeling reminded her of a terrifying childhood episode: out of her depth, caught in the tides, she’d been thrashed between two volcanic boulders, scraped, sick and gasping for air, gulping salt water from a lurching horizon. That time, Dad plucked her out and brought her in, carrying her tight against his huge chest back to shore. And this time?