Driving on the Rim

1

MY NAME IS BERL PICKETT, Dr. Berl Pickett. But I sign checks and documents “I. B. Pickett,” and this requires some explanation. My very forceful mother, a patriot and evangelical Christian, named me after the author of “God Bless America”; so, I am Irving Berlin Pickett and well aware of the absurdity of my name. My father wanted Lefty Frizzell Pickett. That would have been worse. In any case, my very name illustrates the borrowed nature of my life, not easily denied. In fact, I’ve learned to enjoy my circumstances as I have moved among people trapped in their homes, jobs, and families — and their names! My esteemed colleague Alan Hirsch, mountaineer and cardiologist, calls me Irving, with a chuckle. When I first arrived at our clinic from the Indian Health Service, Dr. Hirsch told me that I couldn’t call myself a physician until I had delivered babies to ambivalent parents or taught the old to accept their grotesque new faces. I don’t know about that, but I do abide in the conviction that I’ve come a long way, and lately I’ve wondered how this all happened.

L. Raymond Hoxey bought an old mansion in Livingston, Montana, and converted the third floor into a delightful apartment with a view of the Absaroka Mountains. The second floor housed his print collection in archival conditions, with humidifiers and air-quality equipment. The first floor was divided into two smaller but still comfortable apartments, one of which was home to his assistant, Tessa Larionov, and the other, in summer, to a textile historian employed by the Metropolitan Museum in New York, who was also a trout fisherman.

The year the historian died, I was still in pre-med and painting houses to support myself; I moved into his vacated apartment. Acknowledging that there is a difference between being naive and being innocent, I will say that I was entirely naive. My parents lived a few miles away, but we weren’t getting along and I needed some distance, despite the fact that my mother was sick and often ranted about God. There are many versions of God around the world, but my mother’s was definitely a guy, and a mean one. Like many aspiring to study medicine, I planned to get rich but I wasn’t rich yet; I was just a poor house painter — out of work and looking for whatever came along — and despite all other evidence, I feared that I would be one forever, packing a great wheel of color chips from one indifferent house to another. I don’t mean to suggest mild insecurity here: by any reasonable standard, I was losing my mind.

Tessa Larionov was the daughter of a Russian engineer who had immigrated to the United States in 1953 and found his way to Montana, where he set up business building bridges for the railroad. His offices were in Choteau, where Tessa was born and grew up. Tessa’s mother was not Russian; her father had met her in New Jersey, where he first landed. She may have been Italian. Tessa was a powerfully built but attractive woman, with black hair, black eyes, and the look of a Tartar, wry and a little dangerous. She was liked by everyone who knew her. Trained in library science, she had worked as an archivist at some very august places, including the Huntington, in Pasadena, where she’d met her future employer and our landlord, L. Raymond Hoxey, who had let Tessa talk him into retiring to Montana to run his rare-prints business with her help. Hoxey was eighty-one years old, and his arrangement with Tessa was a means of avoiding assisted living. She was very fond of him and had wanted to go home to Montana, and so it worked for both of them. Tessa was exactly thirty, still single, though she had enjoyed an active love life, leaving in her wake only grateful hearts, or so she said. “They’re all still crazy about me,” she told me. “That’s why I left California.” Settling down was of no interest; she’d grown absorbed with the prints, and she wanted to keep her eye on Hoxey. I was twenty, but she treated me as if I were even younger — a salute to my retarded behavior.

My father had worked briefly as a pipe fitter for the Northern Pacific Railroad. In the course of corporate takeovers, the railroad had actually changed its name several times, but Northern Pacific was the one that stuck in all our minds. It meant something. Burlington Northern meant nothing. Then he had a little stock farm he liked to call a ranch, whose main purpose was to let him keep horses. But he lost it to the bank and went to work for the post office. My mother was a hairdresser and, because of her big mouth and religious mania, had enemies all over southwestern Montana and very few customers. During my childhood, they had had a traveling rug-cleaning business, and the three of us saw most of the West as we towed the steamer behind our van, an old-fashioned Steam Jenny with an oil-filled crankcase and a picture of a Vargas-type girl in black nylons emblazoned on its side — wonderful years, really. As an only child, I was all but homeschooled, then run back and forth between our house and the less fashionable of the two grade schools, before going to the local high school, where I was anonymous, never having been allowed by my overprotective mother to learn a sport. My mother joined one Pentecostal church after another, followed by my father, whose skepticism had long ago evaporated in the heat of her enthusiasm; they stopped just short of snake handling. But I liked to fish; I’d fish wherever there was water, and I fished in a lot of ditches where there was no hope of success. I now understand that I was for my age a weirdly underdeveloped human being, ripe for the sort of encounter I had with Tessa Larionov. Even my mother noticed my immaturity; she was always telling me, “Stop staring at people!” But she had once given me a gift beyond price: looking down at me when I was a little boy, she said, “You’re an old soul. You’ve been here before.”

It was Hoxey whom I got to know first. The day I arranged to rent from him, he happened to have received several Reginald Marsh prints, of which he was very proud and which he wanted me to see. I acted like I’d heard of Reginald Marsh. I didn’t know one painter from another, but I had a hunger for this sort of information; I felt it would be useful later, when I was rich. Hoxey was a pleasant old man who must have once been very fat, because he had loose flesh hanging from him everywhere and as many as seven chins. I always tried to count them while he was speaking to me, but then something in his remarks would break my concentration. This physicality, which bespoke a lifetime of phlegmatic living, gave his discourse on prints the authority of a weathered desert rat holding forth on cactus. I remember him carefully unpacking one of the prints — a kind of crazy thing with blank-faced people swarming in and out of doorways, none of them reacting to anyone else. Hoxey said that it was the calmest Reginald Marsh he’d ever seen. “No ‘Moonlight and Pretzels’ in this one!” he cried. I could see both that he’d be an agreeable landlord and that many health issues lay before him. As someone aspiring to be a doctor, I could make a little game of guessing which one would kill him.

Tessa asked me over one night for drinks. She had done a beautiful job of making her apartment habitable, with comfortable old furniture that she’d bought cheap and upholstered. She also had a good many of Hoxey’s prints on loan, though, as she explained, she was really just storing them, and her collection changed as things were sold from Hoxey’s inventory. She made a little face when she told me that she couldn’t afford to get attached to any of the prints, quite a trial for her, as she loved the art of all nations. Cocktails and art, I thought; maybe I’ll get into her pants. I’m sure that at the time I had a big goober smile on my face as I contemplated such an outcome. Tessa said I reminded her of Li’l Abner.

“Because I work upstairs, I’ve had to become a walker just to get outside,” she said, making our drinks in a blender. “You start getting curious about different neighborhoods — where the railroaders lived, where the ranchers retired, where the doctors and bankers lived. In the winter, when the wind is up, I have to tie a scarf over my face. Anybody you see in the street is ducking for a building, kind of like in the Blitz.”

As I waited for my drink, I found myself leaning forward in my chair with my hands pressed between my knees. It was only when she stopped to look at me that I realized my posture was strange. I pretended that I was just stretching and leaned back in an apparently casual but quite uncomfortable position. As Tessa came toward me with a brightly colored drink, both she and it seemed to be expanding, and when she handed me the drink I wasn’t sure I was strong enough to hold it. I felt suddenly that everything was bigger than me, that I was in over my head, trying to handle a situation which, when I was rich, I would take to like a duck to water. But things settled down quickly as soon as she returned to her seat, and I was then glad to have the drink because I was a bit cotton-mouthed. I had gone from my first impulse of getting into her pants to fearing that she’d try to get into mine.

I was not much of a drinker; water would have served as well. That summer I’d made an experimental foray into a local bar, feeling that I needed to learn to be more social. I struck up a conversation with a somber middle-aged fellow in a rumpled suit. He looked so gloomy that I regaled him with what I felt were uplifting accounts of my struggles at school. He stared at me for a while, until I sensed that all the timing was disappearing from my delivery. Finally he said, “Hey, boss, I got to go. You’re creeping me out.”

“Now,” Tessa said, “let’s start at the beginning: what do you think being a doctor will do for you?”

“I don’t know.” My answer came out so quickly it startled her. She leaned back into the sofa — she was at one end, I at the other — with her elbow propped on the back of it and her fingers parting the hair on the side of her head.

“You don’t know?”

“I wish I did. Sorry.” Involuntarily singing out this last word.

“No, that’s all right. That’s fine. If you don’t want to talk about it, I’m okay with that.”

I didn’t share the image that I had of myself, still dark-haired but with a graying moustache, going up the gangplank of a yacht. I kept sipping my drink, looking into it as if it were a teleprompter and I were the president of the United States. The colorful liquid seemed like something I had found. I don’t know why I made people so uncomfortable. As a kind of icebreaker, I thought to ask her a question.

“When people use the expression ‘rest in peace’ do you think they have some basis for saying it, or is it just wishful thinking?”

I can’t imagine what made me believe that she’d have the answer to this doleful conundrum. But surely my mother’s poor health was on my mind.

“You mean, about the dead?”

“Sure.”

Tessa looked at me for a very long time before saying anything.

“You know, let’s try this another time. Maybe it’s you, maybe it’s me, but at this point in time and space it’s just not happening.”

I backed out of there like a crab. I felt sorry for Tessa; she probably had trouble sleeping after this weird visit from the new neighbor. I just didn’t know what to do about it — an apology would have made it seem even stranger.

Thereafter, we sometimes ran into each other in the hallway adjoining our apartments, and it did not get any less awkward. I made increasingly maladroit attempts to be cordial, these being received with growing skepticism, even revulsion, until upon seeing me Tessa would dart into her apartment and slam her door. What was strange was that if I lingered in the hallway after she’d gone inside, I would always, moments later, hear her phone ring.

Once she said to me, “I know you’re tracking my movements.” And another time, “Don’t think you’re fooling me.” And another, a cry,

“Please stop!”

“Stop what?”

A mirthless laugh followed and a slammed door.

I made every effort to avoid these encounters. Indeed, I did start tracking her movements, if only to avoid her. She headed upstairs to work for Hoxey at exactly nine, out for the mail at ten thirty, lunch with Hoxey in his apartment Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, catered by Mountain Foodstuff, out to lunch Tuesday and Thursday, but always back by one thirty, dispatching UPS and FedEx and other outbound packages at four o’clock, at which point her workday was over. I really didn’t have a bead on her activities and so came and went from my apartment nervously. When she had men over, they seemed to linger around my door as if on the lookout for me. One strapping fellow with a shiny black goatee positioned himself as though to actually block my way. I gave him a big smile and pushed past. He smelled like motor oil. He said, “Hello, Doc.” Tessa must have told him that I was in pre-med. I said hello. I was glad to get inside, and when I looked through the little spy hole in the door, I saw into his ear.

Concentrating on the Help Wanted ads calmed me down. I had discovered that I needed to look for work elsewhere, as people in town knew who I was and — this really is very funny — held my studies against me. “You can’t paint my house,” Mrs. Taliaferro said. “You’re going to be a doctor!”

“Not necessarily!” I said in my warmest tones, while hers cooled markedly. I have no idea why I answered her that way. I was sure I was going to be a doctor, but when I was under pressure to make conversation, it was as if all my life’s plans went up in smoke. I felt the need to persuade Mrs. Taliaferro that I would be a lifelong house painter.

I kept studying the paper. I recognized that real opportunities existed for those who would sell cars or apply siding, but given the trouble I was having with my communication skills, I thought those occupations might not be up my alley. Still, I really felt that once I got my timing back — and it was a timing issue — I’d be able to look into a different set of prospects. I was very much focused on the chance to be unexceptional; if I had the opportunity to keep my head down, I meant to take it.

I got a job working for a very nice guy, or so I thought, named Dan Lauderdale. He was an attorney in Billings who specialized in whiplash and owned a cute little turn-of-the-century cottage in Harlowton, which he used as a weekend place — or, rather, somewhere to vacation with his secretary, who did not enjoy the same legal standing as his wife. “Lawyers like me make doctors leave the profession every day!” he joked. “Stick to painting houses.” But he was an amiable fellow with a big laugh that drew one’s attention away from his shrewd, close-set eyes. His dark brown curls were so uniform and regular as to suggest the work of a beautician. When I asked him if they were natural, he told me to mind my own business with such vituperation that I actually flinched. The previous owner of his cottage had used stolen Forest Service paint for the trim and shutters, and Dan now wanted it to be all yellow, “like sunshine, get it?” I was basically rehearsing what I thought to be the style of my current position when I said, “No problema,” but he must have sensed something wrong with my delivery, for his eyes grew narrow and he just said, “Right.” Many years later, Dan Lauderdale would become a well-known judge and part of my life.

I rented a pressure washer, masked everything, used a quality primer, and picked my weather for the final coat. It looked much better, but Lauderdale never responded to the bill I sent, nor the second or third. Live and learn. I wasn’t much interested in exploring my remedies, and since other revenues were unassured, I sold my car and went on a grocery binge. Also, in celebration of two months in the apartment, I bought a bed, which I put out in the middle of the living room, where I could luxuriate in all that space and gaze east, west, and south, but not north, at fine window views that were better than any painting, in that they were full of those moving, changing parts known as “Life.”

I heard a timid knock on my door and called, “Enter!” I was stretched out on my new bed in my shorts reading a newspaper I’d found in the doorway to the bank. My visitor was the chief of police. I was really pleased to see him, so pleased that I easily set aside any worries over the reason for his visit. I suppose I was lonely. In a decent society, the chief of police is the one stranger you should be able to welcome into your home without reservation. In this case the first thing he told me was that I’d better get dressed, as I was going to jail. He gazed at me with sad knowingness. He had a big, warm face; it shouldn’t be misunderstood if I declare that he looked like Porky Pig, with all that guileless amiability, the same pink complexion.

“Tessa Larionov”—he gestured with his head in the direction of Tessa’s abode—“has charged you with making obscene phone calls to her.”

“Oh?” I said. “I don’t have a phone.” For one miraculous moment, there were people passing all three windows, and the chief remarked that I needed curtains. “How bad were they supposed to be?” I tried to picture myself as the twisted man placing these calls. In a weird way, it seemed plausible.

“They were not nice.”

It comes as a great surprise to anyone jailed in a small town that it is a remarkably stress-free environment. If your reputation is of no concern, your troubles are behind you. The local jail was as good a place as any I’ve found to unravel all the causes for the state I was in. In a rare moment of lucidity, I suggested a wiretap. The chief didn’t take my idea seriously, but tomorrow was a new day because Tessa informed him that the calls had continued while I was in custody. So the wiretap was tried after all, and it soon paid off.

Hoxey was making the calls. Tessa declined to press charges, and it all went down as a lovers’ quarrel, once you swallowed the fifty-one-year difference in their ages. Tessa’s routine continued unaltered, except that her phone no longer rang so much after her workday was done. I finally ran into her in the hallway just as she was coming down with the packages one afternoon. She stopped in her tracks, arms loaded, and regarded me quizzically. “Hello,” she said. I waited before replying. I wanted her to think about what she had done to me. But she didn’t seem troubled, and the longer I waited the less troubled she looked.

“Hello,” I said.

“You look like you’ve been painting.”

“Yes, I’ve been painting a house.”

“Here in town?”

“Yes, a doctor’s house on Third.”

“How funny. Since you’re going to be a doctor.”

“Yes, I’m going to be a doctor.” Riches danced before me like sugarplums.

“I don’t suppose we’ll ever get to the bottom of that.”

“No, probably not.”

“If you were sick, would you go to a doctor or treat yourself?”

“Oh, I’d go to a doctor. I’m not a doctor yet.”

“I mean if you already were… Oh, never mind. Can you help me with these?”

We took the packages to the post office and I stood outside on the steps while she mailed them. I watched a grackle walk between parked cars, one of which had an American flag on its antenna. A strong young man was wheeling a cart of pies into the back of a restaurant. He looked too powerful to wheel pies. My mother drove past, blowing her horn, her colossal agitation visible through the windshield. People in town enjoyed such scenes.

Once the packages were sent, Tessa and I stood in front of the building and had a delightful conversation. She commended me for having taken the jailing episode with such good grace. I told her that I didn’t know how I could have done otherwise, which she mistook for some form of chivalry. I used both speech and body language to indicate that I mostly understood and what I didn’t, I forgave.

I had been raised to believe that time delivers our dreams and quietly carries our nightmares away, and that most of what lies ahead is welcoming and serene. It was part of the strange but cozy world of my home with God in the role of Mr. Goodwrench. Or at least that’s how I saw it, peering out from the cocoon of my oddly sheltered Pentecostal household, where there was nothing to worry about but the flames of eternal damnation, which didn’t seem like all that much. I saw Satan as just another person who could be bought after my career took off. My mother was always telling me how deceitful the devil was, but that only made me think that I could handle him.

My parents lived on a small piece of ground north of town where there was no hiding from prevailing winds and the desolate ground-hugging plants offered no shade. My father soldiered on at jobs he disliked while my mother was busy with her evangelical splinter group. While my father’s religious convictions were mostly an attempt to get along with her, both of them awaited the Rapture with a complacency that in my father’s case was mostly the hope of getting out of the wind. They were aware of my impractical nature but proud that I had somehow got myself into a small college, even though they must have realized that my bizarre if loving upbringing had not fitted me well for life in the world. Schoolwork had been my anchor in all our wanderings, and having had an aunt who saw to my ardor and venery, I was able in my airhead way to satisfy the odd lonely girl during my school years. I called it “pollinating coeds” and thought I was funny.

Having heard of my godless ways in town, my parents moved me out to a friend’s ranch, where I helped with chores until it was time to resume my studies. Gladys and Wiley were subsistence ranchers on an old place called White Bird. I had known them all my life. Wiley and Gladys liked my mother, whom my father had met at a USO facility in Arkansas, and they could tolerate her religious enthusiasm without sharing it. I don’t think they believed my dad shared it either, and later, when he told me he believed in God but also believed that God was crazy, I began to realize that Gladys and Wiley might have been right. I have a thoroughly secular mind, and despite all the sessions I endured at churches in storefronts and old gymnasiums I never believed any of it. Still, I am content to have had this background, as it acquainted me with the fabulous range of hope entertained by humanity.

Wiley had fought in the Pacific, some very nasty places like Peleliu and New Guinea, hand-to-hand stuff. He had brought home a Japanese suicide sword, a wakizashi, which he used for all sorts of things around the ranch until it wore down and ended up in Gladys’s kitchen drawer. After the war he had worked at many jobs trying to hang on to his land. He and Gladys spent three winters south of Billings feeding Cheyenne steers on beet tops and treating septicemia outdoors in winter conditions that included regular blizzards. Wiley was another VFW guy with my dad, along with a relatively new friend, Dr. Eldon Olsson, who had been a battlefield surgeon in Italy and North Africa. Dr. Olsson left a family practice in the Midwest, and then came to Montana to hunt partridges, practicing only enough to support his austere lifestyle. He confided in my parents that he had never married because his true love had married his best friend. He took up with my parents after he’d joined the VFW, and with Gladys and Wiley because they had nice creek fishing and a spring pond.

Dr. Olsson took me fishing quite often as he awaited the opening of bird season, and made me carry all his gear while he addressed himself to my future. At a time when I was universally regarded as an idiot, Dr. Olsson was sure I had great potential, though in need of a more substantial education that would involve getting out of my house. He was very fond of my parents but thought my mother was fanatical. I was flattered that he was so interested in me. We fished and hunted, he gave me books to read, he corrected my English. I still have a vivid picture of him looking as I thought a doctor should: medium height, thick white hair in a brush cut, a carefully trimmed military moustache. You would take advice from a man who looked like this, and I readily succumbed to his authority, though it led me on one of the strangest missions of my life.

I learned a great deal during my stays with Gladys and Wiley, and I was well fed. Wiley taught me to smoke cigarettes, something I no longer do but still miss and plan to resume late in life. And Gladys taught me over the many times I stayed on the ranch about the hard, wordless love of some country women who lead by example in these out-of-the-way places.

Gladys also liked cigarettes. Sometimes the three of us smoked instead of talking, in individual styles: Wiley rarely took the cigarette from his mouth and squinted one eye; Gladys held hers in an elevated manner between the first two fingers of her hand; I pinched mine between thumb and forefinger and sometimes sucked up the smoke that rose from the ash. Paper sticking to lips, irregular burning, the advent of filters, assaults by the surgeon general — all came under discussion. When we watched TV, I felt stylish lacing my hands behind my head, slouching in my chair, and allowing the cigarette to hang from the exact center of my mouth. We liked to fill that room with so much smoke you could barely see the screen. I enjoyed forcing one or the other to remind me that my ash was about to fall. The hiss when I dropped a burning butt into a beer can as Wiley fussed with the volume control was a memory that would recur long after Wiley was gone. Horses and farm equipment were dangerous and produced a fatalistic culture impervious to health warnings.

I irrigated, fixed fence, cut cedar posts, rewired the calving shed, repudiated the government, ate three squares a day, and borrowed Wiley’s International truck to pay regular visits to Tessa, who treated me like something she might have acquired at a pet store. That was just fine with me, though. I only wanted to be around her.

Tessa soon took charge of my life. She would have given me money if she’d known I needed it. Instead, she decided that it would be good if we did something together, just for fun. “Mr. Hoxey feels terrible about all that has happened,” she said. “He wants to treat us to a night on the town.” That Friday, we signed up for tango lessons.

Tessa and I and six other couples entered the Elks Hall, with its terrible acoustics and all-consuming clamminess. We were conventionally dressed, I in a secondhand sport coat and wide tie, Tessa in a black sheath that struggled to encase her well-muscled shape. The others were more South American in style, hot-red lipstick on their small-town faces, tortoiseshell combs in swept-up hair. The men had gone with a pomaded look that spoke of their sense of mission. They seemed to smolder in anticipation of their future proficiency.

Our instructor was Juan Dulce, or just Dulce, a genuine Argentine who worked his way around the American West giving lessons. He had created a real interest in the tango in the most unlikely places — cow towns, oil towns, uranium towns, coal towns — where such a hint of another kind of life carried a special allure. He was perhaps sixty, thin as a herring in his striped pants, formal black coat, ruby cravat, and stacked heels. His hair, slicked to his skull, emphasized eyes that seemed to belong to some sort of marine creature. He was without humor in conveying the sacredness of his mission. I doubt that I shall forget the sight of him standing on a Pepsi crate and pouring out his introductory remarks in a deep and vibrant voice that seemed to make the room hum.

“When I am fifteen in Buenos Aires, I am longing for love and suffering and, above all, success — the hope of becoming a legend of our hot and drowsy tango. I underwent numberless deprivations, but success would reward the sensual designs that I displayed in many venues. Now the money I earn is exchanged for my fatigue, but I have no other way to go, and there are days I awaken upon wretchedness. Once I converted my dancing of three weeks’ duration by a pocket ruler into three hundred seventy-two kilometers. Still, tango is all! Without tango, my face inspires doubt. Therefore, my advice is, press your tango to great advantage! And now we begin.”

He turned on the big sound system, which had hitherto been employed to enlarge the voices of prairie politicians bent on higher office or nostalgic Scandinavian chorales with cow horns on their heads. The system had astounding capacity, and as the old tangos were broadcast by Dulce, the room was filled with the somber, inevitable cadences of this prelude to intercourse. At school, I had not only enjoyed several instances of copulation — albeit with Mr. Goodwrench staring down at me — but I had seen it explained on huge blackboards, so that there could never be any doubt about what was going on.

We began to learn the little steps, in the chest-to-chest Argentine style. We arranged ourselves counterclockwise and concentrated on maintaining our space between the other dancers. The great power of Tessa, at first exhilarating, gave way to apprehension, as though I were riding an unruly horse, and when I failed to comprehend the crossover steps as required by Dulce, Tessa, a determined expression on her face, used her might to drag me into position. To avoid humiliation, I attached myself by my wiry grasp to her flying carcass. Her cry of alarm brought Dulce to our side and the other dancers to a dead halt just as I was beginning to enjoy myself.

“Señor! Grappling has no place in our national dance!”

“I cannot follow her movements,” I explained in an accent accommodatingly identical to Dulce’s, which I found infectious.

“You are not to follow — you are to lead!”

“It’s my fault,” Tessa said. “I lost patience with him during the first abrazo. He just seemed lost. I’ll try to do better.”

“Perhaps, this is the time to work on our syncopation,” Dulce said sternly to both of us, “with greater respect for the movements of each other.”

“The music is unfamiliar,” I explained. “You don’t happen to have ‘La Bamba’?” He held his head and moaned as though he’d been shot.

The other couples had deftly caught on to the oddly triangular chests-together, feet-apart position. An older pair of bottle blonds, obviously trained in other kinds of ballroom dance, made an effort to slide past us. The woman had a fixed and toothy Rockettes smile, and at close range she caught my eye and called out, “Piece of cake!”

I gave Dulce my word that I would syncopate respectfully, and I proceeded in earnest. At first, Tessa complimented me on my “good hustle,” but she soon proved unequal to my speed and dexterity. Whatever had been going on in my life up to that point came out in my tango, and the exultation I began to experience was interrupted only when Tessa let out a real showstopper of a screech. Then Dulce came between us and made the mistake of laying hands on me. Insofar as I retained a modicum of male pride, this quickly devolved into a dusty floor battle, with the raucous music of Argentina and the angry sounds of interference from the other students. With their help, I was flung into the street. “Good night, Doctor!” I realized that Tessa had told the others that I was already out of medical school and that she was no cradle robber.

I recall feeling breathless and completely without direction as I allowed Tessa to take charge of our stroll home. She stopped momentarily, between two old commercial buildings, not far from the railroad yard, looked straight at me, and said, “Boo. Hiss.” We went on. “I’m lucky you didn’t request Mannheim Steamroller,” she added. I was defeated. “Now don’t be offended, and more importantly, don’t walk in front of that car,” she said. “I realize you aren’t attracted to me, are you?”

“That’s not the real story,” I replied. “I just need a little encouragement.” At these two sentences, uttered with such sincerity, Tessa responded with visible pleasure.

“Then let me tell you my own fears. Why? Because you’re adorable. Of course you’re a complete idiot, but within that, there is a certain appeal. But I have fears, too. Isn’t that real friendship, to tell someone your fears? You could have been extremely disagreeable about those phone calls.”

“What good would it have done?”

“None, but how many would recognize that? I sense that you have a good heart, a good heart trapped in a self that is a hop, skip, and jump from kiddie day care. Obscene phone calls from a stranger are intolerable. But when they come from someone you know, particularly a deluded old walrus like Hoxey, well, they don’t arouse quite the same wrath. The right to revenge belonged to you, and you declined to take it. Mr. Hoxey and I are in your debt.”

I had a clear glimpse here of the sensible side of Tessa, and a hunch that she would end up a friend, which rather worried me because she was the sort who might anchor me and teach me to accept reality, such as it was then emerging.

“How about you just walk me home?” she said finally. “That work for you?”

“Sure,” I said, my voice rising.

We paused at the railroad tracks to watch a big northern express rip through. She peered intently, and I positioned myself behind her so that it looked like the train was pouring into one of her ears and out the other. I knew then that I would kiss her. I suppose it took ten minutes for us to get back to the house, during which time Tessa did her level best to spill out her hopes and dreams, which were honest and simple: ride old man Hoxey into the ground and clean out his estate. This wasn’t how she put it, naturally. Her concern was expressed as a passion for aesthetic rarities. “No one knows the inventory as I do. No one cares as I do, and no one knows the importance of getting it into strong and caring hands as much as I do.” I didn’t say anything, and I suppose she took my silence as censorious. We entered her apartment. Before pushing the door shut behind her, she said, “At the end of the day, it is what it is.” I wondered what that meant. Of course, it is what it is, and it didn’t even have to be the end of the day to be what it was. I couldn’t understand this sort of thing at all, and in a way kissing someone who said things like that was even more confusing.

When I did it, it was with the kind of apprehension one feels on placing a cocked mousetrap in a promising corner. She held me at arm’s length, giving me what one of my professors had called the pre-copulatory gaze. Tessa seemed ominous. I thought of the Big Bang Theory, wherein a tiny speck of matter mysteriously expanded to fill the universe.

I said, “What do you think?” My heart pounded.

She said, “Let’s give it a whirl.”

We made love on the couch. I performed in a state of amazement at all that skin, Tessa egging me on with smutty cries. She asked, “My God, who taught you to do it like this?” and I said, “My aunt.” And she said, “Oh God, no, please not your aunt. No details, thank you very much!” Skin everywhere! She said, “I wonder if you could change your expression. I can barely do this.” When I reached that point to which all our nature aspires and where the future of the species is spasmodically assured, she gave a great sigh and remarked, “Never a dull moment.”