Nosebleed

Josephine Sloyan

Then, for some reason, she abruptly began getting these bloody noses out of nowhere, on her way to work or sipping a latte at Cup of Joe’s, or that first time, brunching with the girls when she looked down and a red spot had appeared in the exact center of her salmon Benedict, a glistening circle like a sniper’s target, and Sharon was going Honey is everything—? and it was a whole big thing after that with everyone gathering around and summoning a waiter to bring ice wrapped in heavy monogrammed napkins, which she hadn’t wanted to ruin, only everybody insisted, so she had gone ahead and ruined them, and although afterwards everybody said it had been completely fine and no problem she had the uneasy feeling that something other than the napkins, something bigger and abstracter and harder to wrap her head around, had been ruined or wrecked on account of what she’d done.

It was strange, the bloody noses, because everything else was going really great. She had a loving boyfriend and a fabulous apartment and it was a fact that she was making a name for herself in the interior-design world, she had been told as much at a party by the one and only Penthouse King, of course she’d seen the ads and recognized him immediately: the precise, symmetrical center-part and big clean-shaven jaw, the signature silk purple shirt. He had addressed her over a champagne flute; she’d watched the shimmering air above the flute’s mouth wonderingly, unable to meet his eyes, as he told her she was showing real promise in the notoriously byzantine world of interior design. And she was looking really good, he went on, really knew how to dress the part. And put his hand on her shoulder in a friendly and slightly heavy way, as though he had slightly lost his balance, which was understandable; the champagne had been flowing for several hours now. His grip on her shoulder was what she would call chummy. He had given it a further chummy squeeze before moving off towards a small circle of other giants of real estate, men in variously striped and plaid-ed blazers who were all holding heavy-looking cut-crystal rocks glasses and talking in low serious voices about something beyond her ken, like politics or stocks or world affairs.

She had stood there, barely able to breathe, stunned, trying to take in the momentousness of it all. Then Raymond had come over and slipped a hand around her waist and asked if she wanted to get out of there, which made her shiver deliciously, because that was something she’d always heard men say to elegant women in movies, and she’d looked at Raymond with eyes shining in a way meant to convey a silent Thank you, and Raymond had misinterpreted and slid his hand further down her dress to right where the backless bit ended, which was a little lower than she actually per se enjoyed, being at a public function, but she knew Raymond had his own sort of little funny obsessions, just as she did, and she supposed that was a relationship, after all: indulging each others’ fantasies.

So she had gone home with Raymond and in the Uber he had gotten a little more forward, having had himself more than a few glasses of Woodford Reserve, and she had not reprimanded him on account of not wishing to cause a scene in front of the Uber driver, and things became unintentionally heated, to the point where Raymond was making these sort of stifled moans as he held her hand over his private area and manipulated her fingers and the Uber driver’s dark eyes were seen briefly in the overhead mirror, expressionless, casting some kind of obscure and probably ethnic-religion-related judgment.

Then once back in the fabulous apartment (hardwood floor, sparse but expensive accents of glass and gold, ceilings so high she felt as though she was looking up at a superior cream-colored sky) Raymond became animalistic in his passion for her and they lay down on the water bed which he had requested, though she personally felt it had a seventies-porn tackiness that did not suit the apartment’s forward-thinking minimalism, and it was as his face came close to hers and receded, came close and receded, swollen with determination, that she felt something wet on her face, though at first she ignored it and tried to bring Raymond’s face close to hers for a kiss, and it was when he pulled away that she noticed the red shining on his mouth and chin and cried out, for she thought it was he who had started to bleed. Afterwards, there was that sense again of something ruined or deflated, something broken on her account, although Raymond gave no indication of this, merely rolling over to his side of the bed with a great sloshing sound and beginning almost immediately to snore.

When it came to love and desire in general her feeling was that there were two types of love, direct and indirect, and that she was more of an indirect-type person, i.e., during sex she would step back slightly from herself and take in the scene as it might play out in a film about a grand and passionate romance, and this would arouse something in her, a warmth that was concurrent with, if not exactly identical to, sexual pleasure. Raymond had showed no issue with this and for that she was grateful, since when it came to actual direct love she felt she was lacking, it was a source of terrible insecurity ever since the time in college she was called cold as a dead fish by Blake Tinworth, about whom she was already having recurring fantasies in which he was down on bended knee, murmuring vows, kissing her softly beneath a bower of white roses, scenes so vivid and intense her chest ached with sweetness and the heat rose in her like a second skin, and what could that be but life itself, how could she be anything but alive?

After the Raymond incident things took what one might call a steep downward turn, a phrase she had been overhearing on the news and so was sort of already in her brain (wasn’t it funny how that worked—like everything in her head was absorbed from the outside, even though she knew her thoughts of course were hers), in terms of nosebleed frequency/intensity. Not but a week later, during a walkthrough of the home of the Yasmin Raisinet, of the Raisinet empire, she was pointing out a lovely area for a vertical garden in the sunroom when an awkward silence fell and the young heiress’s face twisted into prudish disgust, and when she rushed to the bathroom reeled with shock at the blood drying maroon on her good cream blouse while fresh rivulets ran down her chin with a ghastly steadiness that conveyed to her, in her distressed state, a sort of endlessness, an inevitability.

The doctors’ meetings were arranged in secret; she hadn’t even wanted to see one in the first place, she found it humiliating, like the time she’d seen a special doctor for her private area after she’d gotten a sort of illness or affliction after having relations with a very important businessman from Paraguay, who had sworn up and down that his people were immune to that kind of thing and who had been so passionately insistent she had been sure his sentiments came from an overflow of honest emotion, and to this day she was still half-convinced the two were unrelated—the afflicted private area and the Paraguayan businessman—because that was the sort of world she wanted and needed to believe in, a world in which hearts were true and trust rewarded, in which justice was righteous and born out of love, and at the core of each life pulsed a rich and simple beauty.

The doctor she saw was a small man with a small man’s instinctive suspicion of large unknowables. Everything that ailed her, he promised, could be distilled into simple bite-sized facts that were as logical as they were digestible. For example, had she considered that she might be getting too much sun. An overdose of sun, he explained, was shown by several real medical professionals to have a detrimental effect on the psychology of the female persuasion. To which she protested that this wasn’t a psychological problem but a physical one. To which he replied, using the leg that wasn’t propped on the other to rotate himself absently, that nearly all physical problems were psychological. The doctor sat in a computer chair with a height-lever he pressed now and then almost unconsciously, like a tic, raising the seat in increments; by the end of each session she found she had to angle her face up to meet his eyes. He asked her in the patient voice of a teacher of very small children if she knew that pain originated in the brain and not the body. When you cut your finger, he said, the body sends a signal to the brain, which releases chemicals from a certain receptor. He told her to let him know in case he was going too fast or getting too complicated. The doctor went on to say that the problem therefore was not with the finger or the cut or even the thing that had made the cut, but with the brain’s receptor that activated the pain-feeling. With his help, he promised, they would stop this thing where it was hurting her most—inside her head.

He told her that due to certain recent governmental import bans he would not be able to secure the medication he wanted to prescribe, plus with the worsening global situation he wasn’t even sure if it was being manufactured at that time, but promised to see what he could do. There were certain strings that could be pulled, he said, and overcome by a wave of relief and gratitude she asked if there wasn’t some way she could thank him for going above and beyond, and pulled out her wallet, to which he nobly at first shook his head before allowing her to press the wad of cash into his hand, and it was was a little nerve-racking since she’d lost the Raisinet deal, but one could not after all put a price on one’s health.

While she waited for the medication she took to her bed. The nosebleeds had become so frequent and intense she had been forced to cancel nearly all of her appointments, brunches, lunches, dinners, mixers, retreats, and parties, and had taken a hiatus from the interior-design business that was stretching into the future with a timeless uncertainty she didn’t like at all. In an ecstasy of self-pity she lay propped unsteadily on the water bed, sloshing faintly as she ate bag after bag of ultra-refined snack foods and binged a reality program in which women from impoverished countries mud-wrestled for a shot at the Grand Prize.

Upon seeing Raymond, who came by for a visit five nights into her self-imposed isolation, she burst into tears. He gingerly cleared some of the crumpled bags and asked if she was feeling any better and without warning she started to cry. It was awful, she said, she hated to be in bed, she hated to be sick, she had never even thought before about being sick and she hated that she was forced to think about it now. More than anything, she sobbed, she felt ashamed, embarrassed and ashamed. It was embarrassing to bleed in public; blood was a terrible thing to make visible; it was one of those things you just didn’t talk or think about if you could help it. She said she felt that the whole purpose of what she did, the constructing of beautiful rooms with clean white walls and deep lighting and that elusive, perfect thing called ambiance, was somehow in exact opposition to things like nosebleeds, the two phenomena fundamentally at odds, one constantly trying to overtake and stifle the other, and that in spite of everything she’d been working for, she was somehow, incomprehensibly, losing.

To which Raymond said that he was sure it would all go away soon and before long it would be as though it had never happened, in fact better, everything would be better than it had been, pre-nosebleeds, her life was about to be a rollercoaster that went only up, or at least that was the way he thought about it, because it was unhealthy to dwell on the negative—look at her, he said passionately, in bed and miserable, because she was dwelling on the negative. And she realized that of course he was right and that everything really was fine and would continue to be fine, no, would be great, and felt immensely relieved, and put her head into his big warm shoulder and he wrapped his arm around her, sweetly, as he hadn’t done in some time, although the sweet moment was cut short right then as she began bleeding spontaneously from both nostrils.

The pills, when they finally arrived through obscure back channels, strongly resembled but in no way were the same thing, the doctor stressed, as ordinary over-the-counter Advil. She was so relieved to receive the medication that she didn’t mind at all that the pills’ reddish, faintly sweet coating was extremely similar to Advil’s, nor that the spot in the center of each pill where an insignia might normally go instead had just a little scratchy series of white lines. Gratefully, she swallowed three in the morning, three with lunch, and three before bed, and waited.

Ultimately, she believed, the answer lay in waiting. She was a patient woman. Sometimes it felt as though all she did was wait—for a spot in line, for a turn at the podium, for a break in the conversation—and she had come to realize that patience was possibly one of the greatest and truest virtues. Patience justified itself: she, a logical person, would not wait for something that wasn’t worth waiting for, therefore what she was waiting for would be worth it. In bed, she held up a small mirror to her face and rotated it at all angles to check for incoming nosebleeds, for some sign that they were relenting or had vanished altogether, which was not, so far, the case.

She was not accustomed to looking at herself this often and closely and was alarmed by her reflection, which was wan and hollow-cheeked, nose chafed raw. But that was just her face, she thought, it was nothing to be afraid of. Going to sleep sometimes that was the last image she saw, burned bright into the darkness behind her eyes—not Raymond, not the doctor, but her own face, disembodied, looking haunted, though by what she couldn’t say.

Josephine Sloyan has previously been published in Room Magazine and the South Carolina Review. An MFA candidate at Hunter College, she lives in New York.