Angels Go Naked. Cornelia Nixon

the wall of her favorite practice room.

      “How do you get a job with the Boston Symphony?” said purple ink right next to it.

      “On your back,” said several different hands.

      “On your knees.”

      Next to the words, someone had drawn a life-sized portrait of a man in a tuxedo, possibly the new conductor of the BSO, or maybe Arthur Fiedler, with a curly blond head where his lap should be. Pointing to it with an arrow was a sign: “Boy, he’s in for a real treat!”

      She went back to her room and drew the blinds. She imagined herself climbing to the roof of the gym, nine stories up with a rose window near the top, and jumping off. She pictured needles sliding into her veins, injecting her with something that would put her mind to sleep. Taking the only drug she had, a tranquilizer saved up since her mother’s death, she slept, and dreamed she was on trial, dancing in the courtroom with Ann, while judge and jury watched.

      “She did it,” Ann said, then swung her arm back and whacked Margy in the face. She woke up, stiff with cold and sick, all the windows open, three A.M.

      She called the doctor with the hanging face, rode the train down on a gray December day. His waiting room was peaceful, three big-bellied women talking quietly beside a broadleaf plant. Their eyes slid to her stomach as she came in, and she smiled shyly, sank into a chair. With a rush of guilty pleasure, she let the daydream start again. Joshua was home, a teenaged sitter taking care of him, and she was Mrs. Henry Bergstrom, only lately made a mother and already in again, perhaps a wee bit pregnant, ready to be teased. . . .

      “Don’t you two do anything else for fun?” the doctor might say, wagging one thick finger as he smiled. She would giggle, cheeks flushed, not really ashamed. . . .

      A nurse shoved back the cloudy window in the wall, fixed her eyes on Margy. “How are you? Any bleeding, nausea?”

      Margy stared at her, lips parted, the flush of pleasure still warm on her cheeks.

      The nurse’s eyes flicked over her. “What are you now, about nine weeks?”

      Margy swallowed, throat so dry it seemed to disappear. The three big-bellied women watched her, smiled. She stood up instinctively.

      “That was last year,” she barely breathed.

      The nurse’s head came forward, as if she couldn’t hear. She was a tall woman with dyed black hair up in a bun, a big bosom, and glasses on a string. Jamming the glasses on her nose, she studied Margy’s chart and threw the glasses off impatiently.

      “Where have you been till now?”

      The room grew clear and sharp, the beveled glass, the dark green rubber plant, the woman’s small but penetrating eyes.

      “What happened to your pregnancy?”

      The car was a Chevrolet Impala, turquoise, with rust, and the man inside had his face hidden in a big black beard, sunglasses, a hat pulled down over the eyes. She had waited for him on a quiet corner of the Back Bay, in a good wool suit, dress flats, a winter coat and brown felt hat, the savings bond her grandmother had given her now rendered down to small bills stuffed into an envelope she held in one gloved hand.

      The man slid the money into his coat and handed her a blindfold, soft black cotton like the curtains used for showing films in school. He told her to put it on and lie down in back, using a phony drawl filled with rounded vowels and crisp consonants, an Englishman’s attempt to sound American. She lay on the squeaking plastic seat, and he must have driven for an hour, listening to Brahms. The Brahms was followed by an ad for a brokerage firm, read in the deep, tasteful voice of the classical announcer. Then baroque flute music, and the first movement of a Mahler symphony.

      Finally they stopped, tires crunching gravel. The back door opened with a groan, and a big hand gripped her arm, Margy staggering passive as a sheep from an hour of being blind. Even through the cloth she could sense the brightening of the air, as if they were near water, hints of diesel oil and rotten crab beneath the snow.

      They went through metal-sounding doors into a space that echoed like a warehouse, and on into a smaller room, where sound closed down to nothing when the door was shut. The man backed her to a chair, told her to sit and not to move until she heard him leave the room. Then she was to take the blindfold off, undress, put on the gown that she would find in front of her.

      The room was fitted like a doctor’s office, skylight above, and very cold. She put on the hospital gown, then her coat. Shivering, she stood barefoot on the cement slab. The sweat was cold beneath her arms, and it smelled sharp as acid, capable of etching steel.

      The man came back. His beard was gone, but a surgical mask and cap and gown had him all covered but the eyes, which were blue and watery, with sandy brows.

      “On the table,” he said, plainly British now. “No coat.”

      The table was dark green artificial leather, padded underneath, but it felt hard enough to bruise. Gingerly she slid onto it, trying to keep the thin gown closed. The man took hold of her around the hips and hauled them to the table edge. Plugging her bare heels into the stirrups, he propped her knees up toward the sky and spread them wide.

      He swabbed her hip and jabbed a needle in. “That’s Demerol. It won’t help much, but it’s all we’ve got.”

      She stared up through the skylight, watched a gull cruise by against gray clouds. His hands moved too fast, and at their first touch she leaped, gasping, lips stiff with cold.

      “None of that,” he said, working something up inside her. “Relax, or you’ll be hurt.”

      The pain inflated out around her, to the ceiling, to the walls, like an explosion in slow motion. She clutched the table, face twisted to one side, drooling on the hard leather. He had not sheeted her, and she could see his bloody fingers and the long-stemmed knives, which he worked inside her, briskly, as if cleaning out a pipe.

      “Stop,” she gasped out once or twice. No other sounds were in the room, except the rasping of her breath and the mushy clicking of the knives.

      Finally he stood up, blood sprayed on his sleeves and freckled on his front. As he moved away from her, the pain diminished, scattering.

      He washed his hands. He told her to get dressed and put the blindfold on. She heaved herself upright, delirious.

      “Where is it?” She didn’t even know what sex it was, or what it looked like, and he did. “Let me see it.”

      He paused, one hand on the door. His pale eyebrows drifted up, and she could see his lips tug underneath the mask.

      “See it? No. You can’t see it.”

      He opened the door.

      “It’s in little pieces,” he added as an afterthought.

      She was crying on the table as the doctor with the hanging face put his hands in her. He made it quick, and patted her bare foot.

      “You look fine,” he said and pulled the sheet down to her feet. “Whoever he was, he did good work.”

      He stood beside the table, one big hand on her sheeted knee. The wattle of his forehead jiggled slightly.

      “Lots of people have disappearing pregnancies.”

      He glanced at the nurse, who quickly turned and aimed her bun at them. Gathering her clipboard, she left the room. The doctor rubbed his forehead, sighed. He wrote a prescription for tranquilizers.

      “Try to relax, you’ll get through this. It’s just that it goes against your instincts.” He squared his shoulders, looked restored