A Termination

Cover image of A Termination (A Public Space, 2024) by Honor Moore

He bends to look in.
It comes to me now that right then, the gynecologist asks again if I want to do this, and I say yes. Did you waver? asks a voice in my head. I want to say no, and that is correct. I did not waver.
Are you sure?
Yes. Have you told anyone?
No.
It amazes me I didn’t tell anyone. I made the decision by myself. But also with the remote-control help of my mother: Don’t come home pregnant.
My father was twenty-three when he came home wounded—shrapnel through his chest at the Battle of Guadalcanal (November 1942). Three months in a New Zealand hospital: I damn near died. I was twenty-three when I spent one night in a hospital where a man I did not know scraped from my womb the viscera of my body’s first bout with reproduction. My only bout with reproduction.

L was born in 1927, eight years after my father, eighteen years before me. He was magical, funny, mercurial, and a Jew. A great love had died young from cancer. I want to say her name was Jane. He drank good wine, I noticed, and he wore Italian cashmere turtleneck sweaters. His hips were narrow, the Italian trousers. He had spent a year in Italy on a Fulbright. He knew Latin and Greek, languages I had studied and loved. He had a musical sense of language. His idea of fun was to rhyme in real life; once when he got a check from his agent, he sent her a telegram: Thank you, you lovely bank, you. He wrote poems and lyrics, operas and plays. He was of the age of abstract expressionism and went often to the Cedar Tavern. He was of the age of jazz, had been present at the Five Spot when Billie Holiday sang, maybe the same night Frank O’Hara listened while she whispered a song along the keyboard / to Mal Waldron . . . (“The Day Lady Died,” 1964). The first year I was at the school, he was a presence, but not, I think, anyone I knew.

By late June, I’m in the Berkshires, my first real job, a theatre where the very famous of New York and Hollywood perform away from it all. I was the press agent—make friends with the performers so they will consent to the glare of publicity they say they want to avoid. I knew about the funny dark-haired woman because my parents listened to the records she made with a funny man with reddish-blond hair, who one night stood in the back and watched the play she had written and was starring in (Nichols and May, 1959–1962). She was brittle and scary, so how could I say hello? What I said was that I went to the drama school and she asked if I knew a friend of hers named L: Say hello.
When I get back to school: I have a hello for you, I said and saw myself come into focus in his brown eyes. It begins then. An exit from passivity but also an entrance into it—if I could get back all the hours I’ve spent sitting and waiting by the telephone. I did not say: I want you.

What is “falling in love” language for? I strike off anything to do with love. I first felt it as a force that suggested it would dissolve if coupled with its object. I believed love had meaning and that what I called “passion” was the entrance to it.
I saw the face of God, he says. These are the years of AIDS, and his lover had died. Like me, he has been single. For him, as for me, the poems he writes document desire. In the face of his beloved, at climax, he beholds the face of God. He says this matter of factly, as if he assumes I understand what he means.
In Los Angeles, I read a new poem in a large gallery crowded with women, and afterward, Emily, a friend since college, comes toward me: You have written a great poem. And so I was not alone. Many of the other women in the room were lovers of women, and by then perhaps I was, but the poem tracked my desire for a particular man, the man I met slipping on the ice at the artists’ colony.

Like a scraped knee, only inside you, was the image I came up with. Nothing like the pain I sometimes feel in the middle of the night or early this morning, hours before I want to wake up, an ache in the right side of my head, down my right side, a clench half down the back, then tension in the lower back, right hip. A woman in her seventies, alone, much of her life behind her. I take a pill.

No matter how many times I did the math, I could not figure out who made me pregnant.

Read a conversation about A Termination between Honor Moore and Elide Vincenti.