Nude Men

replies Henrietta through the blanket. “You should go tell your parrot a bit about it.”
    The moment Sara leaves the room, Henrietta whips back the blankets and goes to her dressing table, on which are a bottle of rubbing alcohol, Band-Aids, cotton balls, and a tube of Vaseline.
    “What are you doing?” I ask.
    “I hurt myself.”
    “How?”
    “I ate all my cuticles and my lips.” She turns her face to me and, with bleeding fingers, points to her bleeding lips.
    “Why?” I ask.
    “I was nervous.”
    “And your nails too?”
    “No, I don’t bite my nails. I prefer skin.” She presses a Kleenex to her lips. The blood seeps right through, and the Kleenex holds there by itself.
    “You don’t have a cold?” I ask.
    “No; I didn’t want Sara to see me bleeding,” she answers, the Kleenex flapping in the wind of her breath.
    “What brought this on?”
    “News.” She opens the bottle of alcohol and starts disinfecting her fingers.
    I sit on the window seat, sensing it will take a bit of time to get things out of her. “Yeah... ?” I say.
    “Yeah,” she says. Flap flap of the Kleenex. She looks like a flag.
    “Is it good news or bad news?”
    “That’s a good question. And that’s the reason I ate myself. I can’t decide. Or rather, it’s both, perhaps.” She wraps Band-Aids around the tips of her fingers.
    “What is this news?”
    “Wait. Let me put on the last Band-Aid.”
    I wait in silence. When she is finished with her fingers, she unsticks the Kleenex from her mouth and applies Vaseline to her lips. She then sits motionless and does not speak.
    “Can you tell me now?” I ask.
    Her pupils turn to me. She springs off her chair, runs to her bed, and dives on it. She buries her face in her pillow, clutching it with clenched fists, her knuckles white. Before I can decide if I should be worried, she slowly gets up, looking much more relaxed now, and comes to sit by me on the window seat. She stares outside.
    “Sara’s doctor called me,” she begins. “He said he spoke to a doctor friend of his, a specialist, about Sara’s condition.” Her pupils slide from the window to my face and then back, like a puppet’s eyes. “... a doctor friend of his,” she repeats, “who said there may be a cure for Sara.” The puppet’s eyes slide again to me and back outside. “He needs to test her, to know.” The eyes are on me again, full of water now, no longer a puppet’s.
    I get a bit of my own water in my vision. A smile develops on my face, expressing my joy, but she shakes her head, frowns, and says, “No! That’s why I ate my skin. It’s because we cannot let ourselves be happy, or it might kill us later.”
    I take away the smile.
    “Jeremy, be careful,” she says, mechanically putting one of her fingers in her mouth, to eat its cuticle, and taking it back out instantly when she tastes the Band-Aid. She begins unconsciously to unroll a corner of the Band-Aid. “This news, I’m sure, is just a cruel trick of destiny,” she says. “Our hopes will go up, and then they will be crushed when the doctor says, ‘Oh, well, I was wrong, there’s no hope for Sara, sorry, oops.’ ”
    “Oops,” says the parrot, walking into the room like a little person.
    The door has been left ajar. Henrietta rushes out, and comes back a minute later, saying, “Sara didn’t hear a thing. She’s in the kitchen, flipping coins.”
    Henrietta picks up the parrot and holds him next to her on the windowsill. She strokes his head, and he starts purring loudly (a feat he learned from my cat, Minou, when they met recently).
    Henrietta goes on: “I’m afraid I might kill the doctor, or do some such thing, when he says sorry oops.”
    “Doctors are prepared for that. They have protection,” I say. “You mean like bodyguards.”
    “Or muscular secretaries.”
    “You mean nurses.”
    “Yes.”
    “Meow,” says the parrot.
    “I want you to take her to the doctor for the test,” she tells me.
    “Why?”
    “Because when the doctor says sorry oops, I will cry. Sara should not see anyone cry about her death. You will not cry.”
    “I might.”
    “I don’t know if you’re saying that because you think it’s nice or if you truly believe it. But I know you will not cry. You don’t care enough about her.”
    There are many things I want to answer to that, but as each one enters my mind, I don’t utter it. We sit in silence, so the parrot whispers, “Is it time yet?” (He knows how to