Cheyney Fox by Roberta Latow

bleached-blond homosexual hairdresser in a Park Avenue doctor’s waiting room, trying to figure out how she could have sunk to this humiliating experience.
    There was a buzz and the inner office door clicked open. Najda nudged her and whispered, “Just go in and sit down, dawlink. Not to worry, we’ll wait here for you, dawlink.” Roland squeezed her arm.
    The doctor was an immaculate, white-haired man in his late sixties. Handsome, well dressed, sitting in an expensively appointed office. He motioned her to be seated and then askedseveral questions about her condition and the father of the child, whether he was a husband or a casual lover. No names, and he took no notes. And Cheyney felt confused and set on guard by his cold, matter-of-fact manner, and a mean glint in the steady gaze he fixed on her.
    “Are these questions necessary?” Cheyney asked defensively.
    “As necessary as your being here because you have been negligent and rather stupid. Now shall we get on with it?”
    She felt her lower lip tremble and bit the inside of it not to burst into tears. She answered several more questions.
    “Good,” he said, and rose from his desk and walked around it to Cheyney, “Now come with me.” He took her by the elbow and ushered her through a door, flicked on a light switch. They were in a white-tiled, antiseptic, gynecological examining room. In the center, under a large surgical light, a black, leather-covered operating table was supported on a metal frame dominated by large and small adjusting wheels. At one end of it, a pair of shining chrome contraptions raised two feet above the table, culminating in foot stirrups, were flung wide apart. Cabinets of chrome and glass, with shelf upon shelf of gleaming, bizarre-shaped surgical instruments, stood against its walls. A white-painted iron chair and a backless, black leather seat on wheels, a white enamel washbasin. The place terrified Cheyney.
    The doctor walked her to the table and said, “There is nothing to be frightened about. I’m going to examine you, nothing more. Take off all your clothes and leave them on that chair.”
    Cheyney found everything the doctor did frightening, seemingly calculated to humiliate her. There was no screen to undress behind. He sat in a chair opposite her. Was he actually watching her remove her clothes? When she asked for a robe, a smock, he answered, “No. Place your hands by your side and stand up straight.”
    Never taking his eyes off hers, he stood up and removed his jacket, unbuttoned his tweed waistcoat and placed them both on the chair where he had been sitting. He had her nearly frozen with terror when he touched her breasts, pressed the flat of his hand just above her pubis, and said, “You’re a beauty, and sensuous, a good body in good health. Take a sheet fromthat cabinet, open it, and cover the table with it.” She did as she was told, and, from the corner of her eye, watched him roll up his sleeves to wash his hands.
    She didn’t cry when he lifted her up by the waist and sat her down on the table nor when he examined her breasts more sensually than professionally. Nor when he had her lie down flat and roughly pulled her down to the edge of the table by her naked hips. Nor when she asked him for a sheet to cover her nakedness and he refused, answering her by raising her legs and spreading them wide apart, adjusting her thighs on the curved braces and buckling them secure, placing her heels in the stirrups and prizing her legs even further apart. Not even over having to tolerate the discomfort, the humiliation of lying thus exposed and vulnerable under the glaring light. Only when he spread her vaginal lips, examined them with gloveless fingers, found her clitoris, did she cover her face with her arm and cry.
    “You like your sex, my girl. You always will. Even if you have to pay the piper for it. That’s the way you’re made. Oversensitive genitalia used to masturbation. I could, even now, unhappy as you