Ninety-Three Million Miles Away: Short Story (3 page)

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?

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

B
ARBARA
G
OWDY
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.

Gowdy’s books, including three bestselling novels—
Mister Sandman
(1995),
The White Bone
(1998) and
The Romantic
(2003)—have been published in twenty-four countries. Gowdy has also had stories appear in a number of anthologies, including
Best American Short Stories, The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English
and the
Penguin Anthology of Stories by Canadian Women.

Gowdy has been nominated repeatedly for many prestigious literary awards: four times for the Trillium Award and two times each for the Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.
The Romantic
earned her a Man Booker Prize nomination in 2003. In 1996, she was awarded the Marian Engel Award, which recognizes the complete body of work by a Canadian woman writer “in mid-career.” Nine years later, Ben Marcus praised Gowdy’s literary realism in
Harper’s Magazine,
singling her out as one of the few contemporary writers who has “pounded on the emotional possibilities of their mode, refusing to subscribe to worn-out techniques and storytelling methods.”

Barbara Gowdy has also appeared on television as a regular commentator on literary matters and has taught creative writing courses at Ryerson University. Her sixth novel,
Helpless,
was published by HarperCollins in 2007.

She lives in Toronto.

THROUGH THE GREEN VALLEY
FALLING ANGELS
MISTER SANDMAN
THE WHITE BONE
THE ROMANTIC
HELPLESS

“Ninety-three Million Miles Away” © 1992 by Barbara Gowdy.

All rights reserved.

Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

This short story was originally published in
We So Seldom Look on Love
by Barbara Gowdy, first published in print form in 1992 by Somerville House Publising. First published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. in print form in 2001, and in an ePub edition in 2011.

Original epub edition (in
We So Seldom Look on Love
) April 2011 ISBN: 978-1-443-40248-4.

This ePub edition DECEMBER 2012 ISBN: 978-1-443-42185-0.

All rights reserved under all applicable International Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

HarperCollins books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use through our Special Markets Department.

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
2 Bloor Street East,
20th Floor Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M4W 1A8
www.harpercollins.ca

Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street
Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
http://www.harpercollins.com.au

Canada
HarperCollins Canada
2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor
Toronto, ON, M4W 1A8, Canada
http://www.harpercollins.ca

New Zealand
HarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) Limited
P.O. Box 1
Auckland, New Zealand
http://www.harpercollins.co.nz