Indignation

“What are they giving you to eat?” she asked.

“Jell-O and ginger ale. Tomorrow they begin with the snails.”

“You seem very chipper.”

She was so beautiful! How could she blow Sonny Cottler? But then how could she blow me? If he took her out only once, then she would have blown him on the first date too. Too, the torment of that “too”!

“Look,” I said, and pulled back the sheets.

Demurely, she lowered her lashes. “What happens, my master, should someone walk in?”

I couldn’t believe that’s what she had said, but then I couldn’t believe what I had just done. Was it she who emboldened me, or I who emboldened her, or we two who emboldened each other?

“Is the wound draining?” she asked. “Is that tube dangling down there a drain?”

“I don’t know. I can’t tell. I suppose so.”

“What about stitches?”

“This is a hospital. Where better to be when they come undone?”

There was a gently erotic sway to her gait as she slowly approached the bed pointing a finger at my erection. “You are odd, you know. Very odd,” she told me, once she’d at last arrived at my side. “Odder than I think you realize.”

“I’m always odd after I have my appendix out.”

“Do you always get as huge as this after you’ve had your appendix out?”

“Never fails.” Huge. She’d said huge. Was it?

“Of course we shouldn’t,” she whispered mischievously while wrapping my dick in her hand. “We could both get thrown out of school for this.”

“Then stop!” I whispered back, realizing that, of course, she was right — that’s exactly what would happen: caught and thrown out of school, she to slouch back home in shame to Hunting Valley, I to be drafted and killed.

But then she hadn’t to stop, she hadn’t even really to begin, because I had already ejaculated high in the air, and down over the bedsheets the semen showered, while Olivia recited sweetly, “I shot an arrow into the air / It fell to earth I knew not where” and just as my nurse walked through the door to take my temperature.

She was a round, gray-haired, middle-aged spinster named Miss Clement, the epitome of the thoughtful, soft-spoken, old-fashioned nurse — she even wore a starched white bonnet, unlike most of the younger nurses on the hospital staff. When I’d had to use the bedpan for the first time after the surgery, she’d quietly reassured me, saying, “I’m here to help you while you need help, and this is the help you now need, and there’s nothing to be embarrassed about,” and all the while she was gently positioning me over the bedpan and then cleaning me with moist toilet tissue and finally removing the pan containing my slime and settling me back under the sheets.

And this was her reward for ever so tenderly wiping my ass. And mine? For that one quick stroke of Olivia’s hand, my reward would be Korea. Miss Clement must already be on the phone to Dean Caudwell, who’d himself be on the phone to my father following that. And easily enough I could envision my father, after receiving the news, swinging the meat cleaver with such force as to split wide open the four-foot-thick freestanding butcher block on which he ordinarily cracked open the carcasses of cows.

“Excuse me,” murmured Miss Clement and, pulling the door closed, disappeared. Quickly Olivia went into my bathroom and returned with hand towels, one for the bed linens, another for me.

Struggling to feign a manly calm, I asked Olivia, “What’s she going to do now? What’s going to happen next?”

“Nothing,” Olivia replied.

“You’re awfully poised about this. Is it all the practice you’ve had?”

Her voice was husky when she replied. “It wasn’t necessary to say that.”

“I apologize. I’m sorry. But this is all new to me.”

“You don’t think it’s new to me?”

“What about Sonny Cottler?”

“I don’t see where that’s your business,” she shot back.

“Isn’t it?”

“No.”

“You’re awfully poised about everything,” I said. “How do you know the nurse is going to do nothing?”

“She’s too embarrassed to.”

“Look, how did you get like this?”

“Like what?” asked Olivia, in anger now.

“So — expert.”

“Oh, yes, Olivia the expert,” she said sourly. “That’s what they called me at the Menninger Clinic.”

“But you are. You’re so under control.”

“You really think so, do you? I, who have eight thousand moods a minute, whose every emotion is a tornado, who can be thrown by a word, by a syllable, am ‘under control’? God, you are blind,” she said and went back to the bathroom with the towels.

Olivia came by bus to the hospital the next day — a fifty-minute bus ride in either direction — and in my room the same delightful business transpired, after which she cleaned up and, while in the bathroom disposing of the towels, changed the water in the vase to keep the flowers fresh.

Miss Clement now tended to me without speaking. Despite Olivia’s reassurance, I couldn’t believe that she hadn’t told someone, and that the payoff would come when I left the hospital and was back at school. I was as sure as my own father would have been that as a result of my having been caught having sexual contact with Olivia in my hospital room, full-scale disaster would shortly ensue.

Olivia was fascinated by my being a butcher’s son. It seemed far more interesting to her that I should be a butcher’s son than what was of no little interest to me, that she should be a doctor’s daughter. I’d never before dated a doctor’s daughter. Mostly the girls I’d known were girls whose fathers owned a neighborhood store, like my father did, or were salesmen who sold neckties or aluminum siding or life insurance, or were tradesmen — electricians, plumbers, and so forth. At the hospital, after I’d had my orgasm, she almost immediately began asking me about the store, and very quickly I got the idea: I was to her something on the order of the child of a snake charmer or of a circus performer raised in the big top. “Tell me more,” she said. “I want to hear more.” “Why?” I asked. “Because I know nothing about such things and because I like you so much. I want to learn everything about you. I want to know what made you you, Marcus.”

“Well, the store made me me, if anything did, though what exactly was made I can’t say I entirely know anymore. I’ve been in a very confused state of mind since I hit this place.”

“It made you hardworking. It made you honest. It gave you integrity.”

“Oh, did it?” I said. “The butcher shop?”

“Absolutely.”

“Well, let me tell you about the fat man, then,” I said. “Let me tell you what he gave me in the way of integrity. We’ll start with him.”

“Goodie. Story time. The fat man and how he gave Marcus integrity.” She laughed in anticipation. The laugh of a child being tickled. Nothing exceptional, and still it enchanted me as much as everything else.

“Well, a fat man used to come every Friday and pick up all the fat. It’s possible he had a name, though it’s equally possible that he didn’t. He was just the fat man. He would come in once a week, announce, ‘Fat man here,’ weigh all the fat, pay my father for it, and take it away. The fat was in a garbage pail, a regular fifty-five-gallon pail about this high, and while we were cutting we were tossing the fat into the pail there. Before the big Jewish holidays, when people loaded up with meat, there could be a couple of pailfuls waiting for him. It couldn’t have been a lot of money that the fat man paid. A couple of bucks a week, no more than that. Well, our store was right near the corner where the bus to downtown stopped, the number eight Lyons Avenue bus. And on Fridays, after the fat man picked up the fat, he left behind the garbage cans, and I had the job of washing them out. I remember once one of the pretty girls from my class saying to me, ‘Oh, when I stopped at the bus stop in front of your father’s store, I saw you there cleaning out the garbage cans.’ So I went to my father and said, ‘This is ruining my social