Read Online We So Seldom Look on Love by Barbara Gowdy - Free Book Online

up. Her bedroom is next to his, and that night, after kissing her on the forehead, he tells her to knock on the connecting wall if she needs anything.
    “Do your servants know who I am?” she asks.
    “I’ll tell them in the morning,” he says and evidently does, first thing. The flustered, astonished look on the housekeeper’s face as she’s serving breakfast is a look Sylvie recognizes. Familiar territory, a relief in a way. All night Sylvie spent trying to convince herself that this unbelievable man, house and turn of events were possible. “He loves me,” she kept telling herself. “Dr. John Wilcox loves me.”
    After breakfast John takes her into his office and asks her to drink a bitter-tasting tea to calm her nerves. As he passes her the cup his hand shakes, and she is very moved by this and also reassured. He sits beside her on the sofa and puts his armaround her and says that she doesn’t need to explain about her little legs being female; he is a doctor after all. Everything else, though, he wants to hear—everything about her.
    He prods her with gentle questions, he hazards answers so close to the truth that she senses a holiness in him. Her head drops to his shoulder. She feels exquisitely calm and trusting. Nothing she says seems to surprise or even impress him, not until she mentions her memory spells. “Remarkable,” he says, and she feels his body tighten. “Fantastic.”
    Eventually she falls silent. John strokes her arm and asks, “May I see the legs?” She registers how formal this sounds—”the legs”—as if she carries them in her purse, as if he hasn’t heard her calling them Sue. Not that she minds. She is very serene. She lifts her skirt to her waist.
    Her eyes are on his face. She is so alert to repulsion that she can detect it in a blink. But his expression is like Mr. Bean’s. Absorbed and professional, nothing to do with her.
    “May I touch them?” John asks.
    She nods.
    He crouches down in front of her and starts with the right leg, pressing it as if checking for a break, lightly pinching the skin, asking does she feel this? This? “Yes,” she whispers.
    “This?”
    “Yes.”
    He taps her knee, and the leg kicks out. He goes on pressing and pinching up to where the white stocking ends, up to the naked thigh and up farther to the little hips in their toddler-sized underwear. She closes her eyes. He immediately lowers her skirt.
    They don’t talk about her legs again that day. At least, they don’t talk about them directly. In order to spend every minute with her, John has cancelled all his appointments. They go for a walk in the park. They hold hands. He tells her he is the only child of deceased parents. His father invented the grip in thebobby pin, that’s where the money comes from. After lunch in a ritzy restaurant they wander into a bridal shop and he picks out a tight white wedding gown that he insists on buying. “Surely not,” she says, for it takes her a few seconds to remember that, by the time of the wedding, she will be able to wear tight dresses. He laughs at what he thinks is her horror at the price tag. In bed that night she tells herself, “I am going to be a normal,” but she can’t grasp what being a normal means, other than that she will be able to wear the tight white wedding gown and to sleep on her stomach.
    The next day John sees patients until lunchtime, then he has her drink two cups of the nerve-calming tea before they go across the city to visit a renowned specialist in congenital malformations.
    “I cannot perform the operation myself,” John says. “I am not a surgeon. But I will be assisting. I will be right by your side.”
    The surgeon explains to Sylvie that she is an autosite-parasite. “You are the autosite,” he says. “They”—he gestures at her lap—”are the parasite.” He shows her pictures of other autosite-parasites: a boy in a turban who has a headless body growing out of his stomach, and a drawing of a man who