At the end of my junior year in college, I had an abortion, which was perfectly legal in New York State. But the surgeon bungled the procedure and left a small incision in my cervix. A week later, I began bleeding profusely, and my mother, with whom I was living at the time, rushed me to the ER. While in the waiting room, I had to pass out, sliding off the scuffed plastic chair to the floor, before anyone would pay attention.

Fearing for my mental health, my mom wanted to keep me at home in the city for the fall semester, suggesting I take courses at Hunter or NYU. But really, I think she just wanted me around because she was lonely. My father had left a year earlier, succumbing to midlife malaise with a much younger girlfriend and a one-way ticket to Big Sur.

We settled on a compromise of sorts. I would attend UConn and live off-campus with my best friend, Kate, of whom my mother approved because she was thirteen years older than me and seriously engaged in pursuing a PhD. Kate’s apartment was the entire second floor of a run-down house about half a mile from the university library, convenient for her because she kept a carrel, a tiny nook of an office, in the basement. Good for me because it was far from the administrative buildings where the father of my aborted child was working after graduation. (I know that sounds a bit sick, but honestly my attitude had become flippant—the thing, the fetus, if you want to call it that, was no more than a bunch of cells, nothing more than an annoying tiny dust bunny.)

Toward him I was not so much flippant as irritated, any traces of real passion having flattened into grim-lipped tolerance if I did run across him on campus. In our last exchange I had huffed at him: “Oh, go pee up a rope!” His response: “Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.”

Who woulda thought some fun times in the sack could end in so much rancor and blood?

At Kate’s I had the smallest of three bedrooms, which was more like a den, with a sofa-bed and an elegant but impractical desk, what she called an “escritoire,” picked up at a yard sale. That was fine by me since I wrote most of my papers and did my studying in the library.

But the sofa-bed was a problem because the mattress was thin and lumpy. I didn’t want to complain; I knew my mother was paying my share of the rent, while my father grudgingly picked up tuition and I worked for spending money doing prep at the cafeteria. It was simply hard to fall asleep on the damn thing, and I doubted a better mattress would help; the springs were sprung. Plus Kate stayed up late, eating sauerkraut because she was always watching her weight and always behind on reading papers for the class she taught in comp lit.

To make myself drowsy, and to get my mind off all the little things that nagged at me, I invented in my head a culture of benign creatures who were doing their best to pull together an enlightened society. They were all humanoid, but covered in different colored silky hair, all wonderfully lustrous so that there could be no discrimination based on the shade of one’s skin. Intercourse was accomplished through gentle hand-holding and soft kisses. There was no fucking.

Every night I added some new facet to this parallel universe, which I called Eleutheria after the Greek word for “liberty,” as I had learned in a course on mythology. What did the buildings look like, how were laws made, how did people fall in love? Like that. It was possibly a regression of some sort. I didn’t know, but as I said, it occupied my mind late at night and helped distract me from the nauseating aroma of hot sauerkraut.

My mother asked several times after the abortion and its aftermath, Don’t you want to see a therapist? But I said no, no, I was okay. And mostly I thought I was.

Kate and I settled easily into our routines. She had classes to teach, a dissertation to finish, and she spent two or three nights a week with a tenured professor who was the department’s medievalist. He was a slight papery man, who spoke out of one side of his mouth in a low voice, as if imparting sensitive and important information. I’d taken a class in Chaucer with him junior year, and I didn’t get the appeal. Kate claimed, breathlessly, that he was simply the most brilliant mind she had ever encountered. When she spoke of him, her eyes went soft and dreamy, like a besotted teenager. Why their romance had to be kept secret was beyond me, something to do with departmental politics, but she claimed, with a meaningful lift to one eyebrow, that it kept things “edgy” and therefore “hot.”

Like I cared about edgy and hot anymore. I just wanted to get through senior year and then do something insane, like backpack through Kenya.

In the couple of meals we shared together every week, she was always full of big-sisterly advice, like “be selfish” or “know who you are before you get involved with another boy” or “always nurture your friendships.” As an ardent feminist, she wanted to talk about the abortion, to reassure me I’d done nothing wrong, but as soon as I sensed her broaching the topic, I swatted her away; it was just another dust bunny. Sweep it under the bed.

In my ideal kingdom, Eleutheria, I imagined a place called the Sorarium, where the females of the culture could gather indoors and exchange nuggets of wisdom, gossip, and play cards. There would be no nasty, bitchy competitions around makeup or clothes, because in their shiny silky coats they had no need of either. There would be no Instagram or influencers.  I tried to envision the interior of such a place and furnished it with low tables and lots of cushions where the women could take naps, sip cups of tea, or read. There would be cats threading their way around the occupants, seeking the most comfortable spots to curl up in.

I didn’t tell Kate about any of this, of course. This was my secret garden, my sanctum sanctorum.

And then, shortly after Thanksgiving, into our cozy twosome swept Ellen Bonaparte (I swear, that was her real name), though she didn’t so much sweep as slouch, in a way peculiar to women of her background. Kate’s second full bedroom had been unoccupied since the previous June, and she had been approached by someone who knew someone to find out if she was willing to rent. Kate was always eager to score some extra cash. Ellen, she explained to me, was going through a messy divorce from some Wall Street guy in the city and needed a place to chill out for perhaps six months. She did not have a regular job but was working on a book proposal about women’s friendships in the movies, a topic that greatly appealed to Kate’s scholarly feminist side (though who knew if Ellen could write). There was no reason for her to give me all this background, since my approval was not exactly required, but Kate imparted these details to me as if she were a mother prepping me for the arrival of a new baby sister.

Before Ellen took up residence with us, Kate invited her to tea, her idea of old-fashioned good manners. A cozied pot, China cups, tongs for sugar cubes. I sized up Ellen almost at a glance. Taller and slimmer than either of us, she wore an ancient Burberry raincoat over skinny jeans and an obviously expensive cashmere turtleneck. She had the kind of blonde streaks that meant hours wrapped in foil in the salon, the way my mother got hers done. She oozed the sort of private-school privilege I’d encountered in my years of growing up in Manhattan. When she met me, she graciously extended a well-manicured hand in a way that reminded me of Princess Diana. Even the usually unflappable Kate, as sturdy as her earthenware teapot, seemed a little cowed.

A couple of days later Fergus, the father of my aborted child, texted me: “Sup, bitch?”

I stared at the phone. “Dunno. Kinda hoped you’d be dead.”

“No way, ugly girl.” And even though we were texting, I thought I could hear his laugh at the other end.

“What’s on your tiny mind?”

“Meet for drinks? Like grown-ups? Talk it through.”

“Done talking.” I truly thought I was, but maybe not. It was Kate who claimed that Fergus took a job with the admissions office, after graduation, in the hopes I would change my mind about him, perhaps even marry him.

“PLEEEEZE!”

I hesitated. Then relented. “Usual spot? Six tomorrow.”

“Looking forward, skanky broad.”

It was one of the characteristics of our short relationship—eight months!—that we regularly insulted each other. It was our lovers’ language, our secret talk. Fergus was of Scottish descent on his mother’s side and had fallen in love with the ancient tradition of flyting, a ritual exchange of insults between warriors, generally in verse, but we were not clever enough to conjure rhymes. I asked Kate if she’d encountered flyting in her scholarly perambulations, and she asked Tom the medievalist, and he came up with some examples from Chaucer and Beowulf. Fergus didn’t much care about the history, though he liked that it was probably in his bloodline; he found it arousing if I cursed him out in bed. For a time, this was fun. But only for a time.

The following evening, I walked to the town center. It was a mild night in mid-March, and already a few lavender-tipped crocuses were peeping up around the sturdy trees that lined the main thoroughfare, opposite a clump of neo-Gothic buildings on campus. On the way to a favorite student dive, I passed the new tapas bar, once a cheap and greasy source of Chinese take-out, now gussied up with wrought iron and tiles to look like some romantic eatery in old Madrid. I stopped to check out the menu, wondering if I could ever afford the place, and there toward the front of a long curving bar was Ellen Bonaparte, a cute blood-red beret rakishly perched atop her blonde head. She was in animated conversation with a guy who was much younger, possibly a student. He was nodding at her with a stupid half-grin on his face, as she affectionately stroked his forearm. I stepped back two big paces, not wanting to be seen, and hurried on to the Annex.

Fergus was where I knew he would be, in the back, in a booth, sipping a gin and tonic that he would nurse the entire evening (he wasn’t Scottish for nothing). He stood when I approached, and bowed, making a dramatic gesture, as if sweeping his hat across the floor, though he didn’t wear a hat. He did that kind of charming stuff, and I was pissed at myself that I was so easily sucked in.

He was still breathtakingly handsome, brandishing those good looks usually described as “chiseled,” and I was still bewildered by what he saw in me, though he said once that he liked it that I seemed so vulnerable.

“Hey, little turd face.” He grinned.

“I’m not sure I’m in the mood, cocksucker.”

“I’ll put you in the mood.” He flagged down a passing waiter and ordered me a Cosmo.

I could look at him now. I could look him full in the face, though it had been eight months—as long as we were together—and I could think, impassively, I almost died because of this man.

He tentatively reached toward my face, and stroked my cheek. “You know, I still care about you. A lot. You’re the reason I’m in this two-bit college town and not pursuing my destiny at Morgan Stanley or someplace like that.”

“You’d never get a job at Morgan Stanley. You need to go to B-school for that.”

He pretended to look hurt. “Don’t you want to know how I’m doing at work?”

I suddenly didn’t want to be having this conversation. What I remembered then, what I would never forget, ever, was his face when I came out of the door to the waiting area, after resting for two hours in a half-darkened room on a narrow bed, as Bach preludes streamed in from unseen speakers and two other women rested, hands primly crossed over their stomachs. Fergus was sitting with some other fathers of aborted children, and they were all laughing . . . as though this was the biggest joke on earth. “Perhaps they were just nervous,” my mother timidly suggested when I told her. I didn’t see it that way. I would never see it that way.

I got up abruptly at the memory. “I think I’ll skip the Cosmo. I need to be home.”

“Whatever you like, pervy girl.” He drummed his fingers on the table, looking annoyed.

I suddenly remembered one of my grandfather’s favorite curses: “Oh, go blow it out your ditty bag!”

I didn’t see Ellen at the tapas bar on my way back to Kate’s. The apartment was strangely empty and eerie, a single fluorescent light fixture buzzing in the kitchen. I unfolded my lumpy bed, settled myself against the pillows, and opened my laptop, looking for more information on flyting. The word was of Scots origin, meaning “quarreling” or “contention.” Rivals engaged in contests of verbal abuse, “remarkable for their fierceness and extravagance.” And “In Anglo-Saxon England, flyting would take place in a feasting hall. The winner would be decided by the reactions of those watching the exchange. The winner would drink a large cup of beer or mead in victory, then invite the loser to drink as well.” Yeah, I could see Fergus really getting into that. This was his idea of fun. Maybe he was flyting with the other dads of aborted children when I walked in on his laugh riot.

It was barely eight o’clock on a Saturday night. Kate was probably snuggled up with Tom at his house, watching British murder mysteries, which I knew were their favorites. Ellen was often out on weekends too, which had led us to speculate that she’d already found someone to date, but I couldn’t imagine it was the young guy at the bar. She had to be at least ten years older.

But what did I know? What did I know about anyone?

On impulse I went into Ellen’s room to snoop. Yeah, I could have been caught, but I could always say I was looking for a phone charger or wanted to borrow a DVD from her collection of rom-coms. I couldn’t imagine being 30-ish, married, having my own apartment and a husband, and then giving it up to move two hours away to a shared apartment in a small college town. But maybe she really had nowhere else to go, no parents, no friends or siblings to take her in when the marriage went belly-up. Maybe she didn’t have all that much money, despite the high-end clothes. On her dresser, another of Kate’s treasured thrift-shop finds, she kept one of those old-fashioned silver filigreed comb-and-brush sets and a couple bottles of perfume, Shalimar and Chanel No. 5. I picked up the bottles and sniffed. In her closet I found an Armani jacket, and two Prada cocktail dresses. The shoes in the shoe bag were Jimmy Choo and Manolo Blahnik. And then I stopped myself, suddenly ashamed. This was the sort of thing my mother did in strange apartments, at parties—she snuck off and looked inside medicine chests and closets.

I went back to my room and cruised Facebook for a while, looking to see what my few college friends were up to, before realizing how little interest I had. While I tried to fall asleep, I added some new details to the Eleutherian kingdom: Public swearing would be punishable by fines. If unwanted pregnancies occurred, the males would be required to witness all procedures, just as they sometimes did when their partners were giving birth. And they would pay for everything, of course.

A few days later I stumbled across Ellen Bonaparte drinking her morning coffee in the kitchen. This seldom happened; we all had such separate schedules that mealtimes together were an impossibility, though Kate and I tried to meet for a couple of dinners each week, or rather Kate in her Mama Hen way wanted to make sure I was eating a healthy meal now and then since I could live on yogurt and burgers from the student center.

“Well, fancy meeting you here,” said Ellen.

“Hey.” I poured a cup from the ancient Farberware pot kept by the stove. I was never much for morning chatter but felt it would be rude not to join her at the small table by the window. Ellen wore a beautifully tailored navy silk robe with white piping and, incongruously, big pink fuzzy slippers. “I’m having a luxurious morning at home instead of galloping off to the library,” she said, sticking out one foot and flexing her ankle. “It’s strange the way we pass like ships in the night, isn’t it?”

“I guess so.”

“This place feels kinda like a halfway house for wounded birds.”

I was on the brink of asking if she’d like a bigger spoon to mix her metaphors, but held my tongue. “How so?’

“Well, here you are, healing from, uh, medical trauma, and here am I, running away from a shitty marriage . . ..”

I wondered how much Kate had told her about the abortion. “And Kate?”

“Well, I guess I haven’t figured that one out.”

“For the record,” I said carefully, cradling my cup between my palms, “Kate is probably one of the most together people I know. I’m sure she had a few lost years in her 20s, but she knows who she is and where she’s going. She’ll finish her doctorate and land a great teaching job and probably make her mark as a scholar too.”

“And what about this Tom character she’s been seeing?”

It pained me that Ellen felt familiar enough to refer to Kate’s beau as a “character.” This was beginning to feel like gossip. “Uh, he’s all right. I took a class with him a couple of years ago. A little stiff for my tastes. But an okay teacher.” I remembered the way he perched on the edge of his desk during seminars. He always wore weird socks, with things like birds or checkerboards on them.

There was a silence.

“So you’re from New York too,” she said brightly, pronouncing it “Noo Yawk,” to be cute. Then she added. “Let me guess. Upper West Side?”

“Must be the Birkenstocks,” I joked. I never wore them. Probably she meant that I looked Jewish because I had tightly coiled black hair and a slightly Semitic nose. In reality, my father is half Lebanese.

“And I’ll bet you think I’m Park Avenue.”

“Must be the Manolos.”

One eyebrow shot up. I wondered if she knew I’d been snooping in her closet. She looked suddenly hurt, biting into her lower lip. “Look, I’d really like us to be friends. But you have such a hostile aura.”

It was my turn to look hurt, baffled by the sort of vibes I put out. “I wasn’t aware of that.”

“Maybe it’s all you went through last summer, but I’m going through some shit myself.” She was the sort of woman who looked vaguely uncomfortable when she swore.

I gave no word of encouragement, but she went on anyway. “My therapist thought it would be good for me to get out of town, focus on a project, make a break from routines. I’ve always liked this place, even though I didn’t go to school here. Peter—my about-to-be ex—and I used to go antiquing near here.”

I idly wondered if I would ever turn into the kind of person who went “antiquing.”

“You know, I’d love to hear more,” I said. “But I have class in about twenty minutes. Let’s, um, grab a bite sometime.” I was still smarting over the “hostile aura” remark.

That night I gathered a council of senior Eleutherians. We met in a sober but luxurious suite that resembled the dean of students’ office with its floor-to-ceiling draperies and polished oak conference table. Unanimously we voted that there would be no conversation among citizens before nine a.m.

It was about a week later that Kate returned early from a rendezvous with Tom, around ten p.m., on a blustery foul night that sent sheets of rain beating against the windows. She usually ran the three miles to his house, in a tracksuit and Nikes, but that night I heard her Volvo ease into the garage. I heard, too, her hurried tread on the back stairs to the kitchen. I was curled in an armchair in the living room, reading an old copy of New York Review of Books; Ellen was who knows where. I expected Kate to burst into the room with some explanation—Tom unwell? Not in the mood? Instead, the minutes ticked by, ten, fifteen minutes. I would have heard her if she retreated to her room. Finally, curiosity got the better of me and I eased my way out of the chair and padded into the kitchen. Kate was sitting at the table, still in her raincoat, strands of wet hair plastered to her cheeks, blotchy mascara giving her a lost raccoon look. Between her hands she held a large crystal tumbler of scotch, or maybe it was bourbon. I wasn’t good at sniffing out the difference. “Wanna join me?” she asked weakly.

“What happened?”

“He broke up with me,” she said in a small voice. And then she burst into great noisy sobs that seemed to match the gusty tumult outside.

“What the fuck? Why? I thought you guys were pretty solid.” Or at least I thought they could behave like adults despite the clandestine nature of their meetings. “It’s been what? Like two years almost, right?”

She took a couple of gurgly swallows before answering. “We were coming up on our second anniversary. I was thinking maybe we could go public and have dinner at La Pergola.” The fancy Italian place in town. “You know what, Emily? I think he’s ashamed of me. He’s ashamed that I’m still a student in my 30s, he’s ashamed of my big tits . . ..”

“They’re not all that big.” I was lying; they were at least a D cup. “Well, what explanation did he give?”

“Practically none.” She shrugged out of her coat and swiped at her nose with a well-worn paisley scarf. “Just that it didn’t feel right anymore.”

“Fucker.”

Kate spent the next two weeks in her room, venturing out in an old flannel robe once or twice a day for soup or tea. Her face was wan and haggard, her hair unwashed and greasy. She made it clear there would be no more discussion, no postmortems about the break-up. Once I caught a glimpse of her messy bed, books and magazines scattered among pillows. If one needed proof that words could heal, perhaps this was it. I told Ellen that Kate had the flu and was possibly contagious; she gave us both a wide berth. I felt Kate’s pain acutely and wanted to curl up in front of her door, like a loyal dog, ready to defend his mistress from all intrusions.

On the first day of the second week of Kate’s withdrawal, I texted Fergus. “You still love me, turd face?”

“You know I do, baby doll.”

“Pick me up at 11 pm. Bring wheels.” Fergus owned a very cool midnight-blue Kia Stinger, a graduation gift from his parents.

“A little late for a working dude.”

“Just be there.”

“K.” I shut down my phone before he could ask questions. If he didn’t show, I’d find another way to get where I was going.

I dressed in black yoga pants, a dark blue hoodie, and Kate’s old navy peacoat. Black gloves and high-top sneakers. A glimpse in the mirror told me I could pass for either sex.

Fergus was right on time and even scooted out from the driver’s side to hold the door for me. “You look like some kind of Ninja, babe.”

I gave him my most disdainful smile.

“Where to?”

I issued directions in a clear and commanding voice, a no-nonsense woman with a mission.

When we arrived, Fergus said, “Shit. Isn’t that Professor Blake’s house?”

“It most certainly is.” It was not the sort of house you’d expect for senior faculty at a prestigious university in an expensive college town. Blake’s was a squat single-story brick building with white shutters, a “starter” family home from the 1950s, somebody’s dream of suburban bliss more than half a century ago. I imagined three small bedrooms inside, modest bachelor furniture. I wondered where he and Kate liked to hang out without letting my mind drift to the specifics of their encounters. It occurred to me that surely their romance couldn’t have been all that secret . . . there must have been nights when she parked in the drive, people knew her Volvo. Maybe he was just a control freak about how and when they met. I never liked the creep, and never thought he was good enough for Kate.

“Sup, nasty girl?”

I opened my canvas bag and pulled out a can of red spray paint.

“What the fuck?” said Fergus. “What in the hell do you intend to do?”

“I’m just going to make a little trouble. He hurt my best friend. He needs to be punished.” In truth, I was not sure what I would scrawl on the outside of the house, or where. The front door? The big picture window? Maybe “scum” or “asshole” or even “rapist.” Though the last was not true, it might cause some interesting reverberations in the neighborhood and on campus.

“You set one foot outside this car, little miss, and I’m leaving. I will not be a party to this in any way.” Fergus stared at the can in my lap as though it was something repulsive and foul, like roadkill.

I looked at his hands on the wheel and remembered what they felt like on my body, his knobby knuckles caressing my face. Suddenly I crumpled forward, my head to my knees, the top of the paint can digging into my stomach. I couldn’t cry, though I wanted to. I could only manage a couple of deep sobs. Fergus awkwardly patted my back, and then eased the car away from the curb.

That night I gathered a full quorum of Eleutherian elders, both male and female, though it was always hard to tell them apart because of their sleek coats. I wanted to be fair, as fair as I could be about the whole process, but I was in charge. “I regret to inform you that all Eleutherians of the masculine persuasion will have to leave the kingdom, which will henceforth be made up exclusively of women. This has been a difficult decision, but for the future of our race, it must be. Prospective fathers will be chosen by lottery. We will copulate, as usual, through hand holding and gentle kisses, but any males born from such encounters will be sent to a separate realm. Where they go I don’t really care, but I hope to see as little of them as possible.” To my surprise, everyone cheered, some applauding with their sweet furry paws.

And I slept that night, the true sleep of the just, better than I had for ages.

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Ann Landi has been an art journalist and critic (ARTnews, The Wall Street Journal) for most of her career. She has lately been making her first efforts at fiction, aiming for a coherent collection on the theme of Bad Romance. Born and raised on the East Coast, mostly in New York City, she now lives in Taos, NM. 

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