Permanence Read Free Page A

what I do: I release the pillows and raise myself up on the couch. I have no choice but to do this. I kiss doctor hard, his teeth smacking against my teeth. I use both hands to bring his body closer to mine. Our teeth chatter. I slide out from beneath doctor, roll over onto my knees. Doctor lies back onto the couch. Using my knees, I position myself on top of doctor, his torso between my legs. I reach for doctor and guide him into me.
    I close my eyes.
    I want to forget about Jamie, but I can’t help but see him. I see his face as clearly as the morning he left me so many months ago. I hear Jamie’s mild, soothing voice. I feel his smooth hands against the back of my neck and his solid, compact body against my own. Jamie was older than me, but only by a few years. Jamie was an engineer and a designer of dams and bridges. He used to say he performed God’s work, not because he could make a child with me, but because he had the ability to reshape the earth. We used to laugh when Jamie said that, but there was truth to it and he believed it, I’m sure. “God and mechanics,” Jamie used to say. “Mechanics and God.” He was my husband before we lost baby.
    I listen for the sound of rain, but the rain is not romantic.
    I open my eyes. I keep them wide open. But doctor keeps his eyes closed while we begin the familiar hip motions. This is motion and emotion. We move together. I feel doctor inside of me and I swallow my breath. I do this to forget about baby. But trying to forget about baby makes me think of him all the more.
    Outside, the rain falls to the pavement.
    As I take doctor into my arms and bury my face into his neck, I am remembering baby and Jamie in a way that breaks my heart.
    God, fate, and Jamie
    Jamie was a logical man. He understood machinery—auto engines, turbines, and computers.
    “Mechanics is control. Control is mechanics,” Jamie used to say like a small prayer. And he believed.
    Jamie trusted mechanics and engineering like a religion. As though God and mechanics were the same (“God and mechanics,” Jamie used to say. “Mechanics and God.”)
    Listen: I don’t trust machines or mechanics of any kind. I don’t like anything that takes control—anything that does not live or breathe. I ride over a bridge, I picture its collapse. I see a dam, I imagine the water breaking through. I see a jet plane taking off, I imagine disaster.
    All this is not ignorance. I am a college-educated, self-sufficient woman. A woman who, before the death of baby, had a terrific career as a travel agent. My job was to help others seek adventure and to see the world. My job was to make sure other people got far away from it all. But the escape to “Sunny Florida” or to “Beautiful Paris” or to “Rugged Africa” was for other people. Not me.
    Once baby was born, I never went anywhere.
    Despite my education and my career, I have some problems. I have these fears. For instance, I am frightened of riding in elevators. I am scared to death of being lifted into midair inside a small box. I’m scared to death of hanging by a relative thread. So tonight, like any other night, I climb the concrete and plaster stairwell that leads to my apartment, step by step. This is after my twenty-fourth Friday afternoon session with doctor. I climb the staircase slowly, patiently. I cling to the metal railing. I place each step carefully against the treads.
    I am in control.
    I listen to my footsteps echoing inside the stairwell. There is a sour fish smell that comes from the rainwater that has soaked into my wool coat. I climb by sight, by touch, and by sound. I live and breathe.
    This is a harshly lit staircase. The staircase has been freshly painted since baby died—white-washed of the dark, gray stains that seeped through the floor of the bathroom to the plaster ceiling of the stairwell beside it. This is the water that ran and stained in streaks against the plaster walls the night we pulled baby from the tub. This is no