and for my own good, I resented the invasion, and I could imagine how
deeply I would resent it if it were compulsory rather than voluntary.
She said, “Maybe I shouldn’t tell You. Even though You need to know to
. . . to defend yourself. Telling You all of it is like lighting a
fuse. Sooner or later, your whole world blows up.”
“Was the monkey carrying a disease?”
“I wish it were a disease. Wouldn’t that be nice? Maybe I’d be cured
by now. Or dead. Dead would be better than what’s coming.
She snatched up her empty cordial glass, made a fist around it, and for
a moment I thought she would hurl it across the room.
“The monkey never bit me,” she insisted, “never clawed me, never even
touched me, for God’s sake. But they won’t believe me.
I’m not sure even Rod believed me. They won’t take any chances.
They made me . . . Rod made me submit to sterilization.”
Tears stood in her eyes, unshed but shimmering like the votive light in
the red glass candleholders.
“I was forty-five years old then,” she said, “and I’d never had a
child, because I was already sterile. We’d tried so hard to have a
baby fertility doctors, hormone therapy, everything, everything and
nothing worked.”
Oppressed by the suffering in Angela’s voice, I was barely able to
remain in my chair, looking passively up at her. I had the urge to
stand, to put my arms around her. To be the nurse this time.
With a tremor of rage in her voice, she said, “And still the bastards
made me have the surgery, permanent surgery, didn’t just tie my tubes
but removed my ovaries, cut me, cut out all hope.”
Her voice almost broke, but she was strong. “I was forty-five, and I’d
given up hope anyway, or pretended to give it up. But to have it cut
out of me . . . The humiliation of it, the hopelessness. They
wouldn’t even tell me why. Rod took me out to the base the day after
Christmas, supposedly for an interview about the monkey, about its
behavior. He wouldn’t elaborate. Very mysterious. He took me into
this place . . . this place out there that even most people on the
base didn’t know existed. They sedated me against my will, performed
the surgery without my permission. And when it was all over, the sons
of bitches wouldn’t even tell me why!”
I pushed my chair away from the table and got to my feet. My shoulders
ached, and my legs felt weak. I hadn’t been expecting to hear a story
of this weight.
Although I wanted to comfort her, I didn’t attempt to approach
Angela.
The cordial glass was still sealed in the hard shell of her fist.
Grinding anger had sharpened her once-pretty face into a collection of
knives. I didn’t think she would want me to touch her just then.
Instead, after standing awkwardly at the table for seconds that were
interminable, not sure what to do, I went at last to the back door and
double-checked the dead bolt to confirm that it was engaged.
“I know Rod loved me,” she said, although the anger in her voice didn’t
soften. “It broke his heart, just broke him entirely, to do what he
had to do. Broke his heart to cooperate with them, tricking me into
surgery. He was never the same after that.”
I turned and saw that her fist was cocked. The blades of her face were
polished by candlelight.
“And if his superiors had understood how close Rod and I had always
been, they would have known he couldn’t go on keeping secrets from me,
not when I’d suffered so much for them.”
“Eventually he told You all of it,” I guessed.
“Yes. And I forgave him, truly forgave him for what had been done to
me, but he was still in despair. There was nothing I could do to nurse
him out of it. So deep in despair . . . and so scared.”
Now her anger was veined with pity and with sorrow. “So scared he had
no joy in anything anymore. Finally he killed himself . . .