Driving on the Rim

11

I READ A COMIC BOOK VERSION of Don Quixote when I was a boy, and then an abridged one as a young man, and finally I read it entirely in later years, and more than once. It was now part of my general memory, and some of its ideas emerged unexpectedly, especially when I was oppressed by the feeling that I was living my life under an evil star and that everything in life was circular — the seasons and so on — except human life, which hastened in a straight line to the end and, moreover, without hope of renewal. The death of Gladys, which I had attended with such sangfroid, had produced a delayed reaction that, as best I can tell, had to do with my final severance from the world of my childhood. I thought I had dealt with this long ago, but I must not have because I was very downcast and regarded my life, or anyone else’s, as an adventure dubious in the extreme. The part of Cervantes’s disquisition which had once given me hope I had memorized: “Many who have lacked the light of faith, being guided solely by the illumination that nature affords them, have yet attained to a comprehension of the swiftness and instability of this present existence and the eternal duration of the one we hope for.” As to this, Sancho Panza, who his master said feared lizards more than God, had the last word. To Sancho, death was a lady with no flesh on her bones; she was powerful but not squeamish and devoured every single thing that came her way. She on no account took a siesta and was “as hungry as a dog that never has its fill.” I did feel a truth in the idea that just beneath our follies and day-to-day distractions a terrible grinding mechanism was at work and had a full tank of gas. This was not necessarily a bad thing and gave gravity to our madness and ignorance, our persiflage, our deviousness and clamor for renown. In the news today, placentas were being found in urban sewage. I don’t know if the Trade Center bombing just pushed this sort of thing to the surface, but since then we seemed to have lost a layer of skin. And such things as fate, which I had long since viewed as discredited, seemed to have come to life all over again.

Also, I’d say things lacked a certain sparkle. It was Lewis and Clark this and Lewis and Clark that; traveling dinosaur shows and children’s theater staged by aging potheads; ranchers scheming for a buyout and watching the inbound flights from either coast; and the political races for the state legislature in Helena: one notch above a greased-pig contest. Furthermore, I was losing my capacity to go along and get along with my more obstreperous patients. One fellow, a tousle-headed middle-aged wheat farmer from a small valley to the north, suffered, it seemed to me, from unreasonable pride in his origins, which he viewed with outlandish romanticism. While I took his blood pressure and felt his thyroid, which seemed a bit enlarged, he proudly went on about how suspicious the people in his valley were of anyone they hadn’t known for three generations. I agreed that people were very backward in his parts. With much animation, he explained that they had accustomed themselves to subsisting on what little the land and weather yielded. I explained that ignorance and shiftlessness seldom provided reasonable comforts. When he disclosed that his great-grandparents were all born in that same valley, I offered my most heartfelt sympathy. Of course, he went away mad and I doubt I’ll see him again. A doctor who views his patients as clay pigeons has seen better days. I’d by now had many come to me needing a kick in the ass more than any other treatment. You can’t urge them to change their habits or exercise; they just want to take something. Well, anyone could see where that was headed.

Some of my sickest patients have been those indifferent to mortal health issues. One woman thought she would go to outer space when she died and rarely followed my advice, and that reluctantly, because she feared landing on some strange planet only to be called “earthling” by the locals and never really being accepted. One old fellow told me, “It’s been a wonderful life. I wish I understood it.” Another had all sorts of intestinal problems from drinking rainwater out of a barrel. At my urging he drilled a well but complained he “didn’t get enough water to run a washing machine.” I lost a twenty-five-year-old girl to suicide when all my pharmaceutical remedies had failed; her husband had “moved to Nashville to write cheatin’ songs.” Some of the problems in a region where energy development and resource extraction are king came from the battered values of small towns sitting in country desecrated in the search for platinum or gas or coal, whatever you can dig out, dam up, chop down, or sell: the wild world of philistine commercialism had its price even in places like mine. I didn’t always think in these terms, but stretched out on my office couch, listening to NPR and languidly guessing at a piano puzzler, I was inclined to be gloomy. If I bothered changing stations, it was On-Air Bliss for the Demented. It beat flailing. I put on a Pablo Casals suite for unaccompanied cello and felt way better. I promised myself to leave well enough alone with the single nurses, even acknowledging that one’s reputation as an accomplished wencher was at stake. Success in these matters resulted in the circulation of pheromones, which took the guesswork out of venery. I was just trying to give a sense of my daydreams, all of which were unrealistic, fanciful, or ironic.

I’ve said all I can stand about the rug-shampoo years. The lesson I came away with was both to strive and to rebel against the grim and meager standards that had made my home a pleasant place for average people. First, I became a philandering doctor on an Indian reservation — the latter serving a thin social conscience obviated by my many flutters with Indian women: I skipped the sweat lodge but ate the peyote and wandered around the sagebrush having visions. An enduring effect of those days is that women still don’t look quite right to me if they’re not Indians. I’m trying to get over that, as every town contains a few pleasant whites.

The Indian Health Service proved to be accelerated training in emergency medical care. We dealt with the results of so many car wrecks that we began to think of ourselves as a branch of the automotive industry. At any rate, we rebuilt numerous motorists, returning them to the road, and some we lost. I tried to advise the tribal council on the prospects for a safer life on the reservation, but in reality I was just one more witness to the desolation of Indian existence. Years later, when shopping for a laptop computer in Portland, Oregon, I met an Argentine trauma surgeon who told me that the torturers in the basement of his hospital in Buenos Aires would send their victims up the elevator to the surgery interns on the fourth floor. I guess he’d had more practice than I and he was pretty aggressive about his deluxe training. He lived in Portland, supported azaleas in city planning, drove a Porsche, and was passionate about his Mac. Portland is a real outdoors town, and since he focused on sports medicine, it had all worked out for him. I wonder if he felt better about those dark hours in Buenos Aires each time he got another skier back on the hill.

When I left the Res and came here to begin my actual practice, I was still an odd combination of competence and imbecility. There had been enough things from early on in my life to teach me that being an imbecile is a tremendously effective way of getting along in America; if it had been more satisfying, I would have stuck to it. Wanting to cure people of illness robbed me of all that happy conformity. Sometimes I worried that my ambivalence about a career in medicine was best understood as a wish to be stupid again. I might have done better to stay longer on the reservation, where hard times and hard lives had begun to anneal my foolishness and make a man of me.

Wilmot’s latest wife, Jane, was a gruesome woman with big red hands and an overbite. She had a very strong personality, terrifying really, and held opinions on everything, far right politics of the bomb-them-all-and-let-God-sort-them-out school. Once more, Wilmot was my regular patient. He seemed to have forgotten all about tormenting us from his post on our board. “I used to be a leg man,” he confessed to me. “The ankle, the knee, the thigh, all infinitely important. Those days are gone. Now I’m into hereditary landowners. I’ve had a good life. I’m a great guy, but I’m careful. I have never had relations with any woman who was not required to sign a release. I call it the ‘Wilmot Proviso.’ Only you can tell me how much runway I have left. I do hope to defy the actuarial tables, old friend.”

“You have as good a chance as anyone.”

“I noted a dwarf in the waiting room. Is that your patient?”

“Yes, she is.”

“I had a word with her. She said she was a staunch Republican. We take them all sizes. Have you ever had a dwarf?”

“No.”

Wilmot had either mellowed or was slipping into dementia. And why, when he chaired our board of directors, did he so frivolously torment us? I thought he was cruel. There was still a challenge to his bouncing gait and the air of the world at his feet, perplexing and grotesque. I was fascinated that he was so successful financially. That was always a mystery; the relationship of people to money was a much more closely held secret than their love lives, far more covert. We all love stories of the shabby recluse who raided a corporation, lived in a cellar, and hid his fortune in Switzerland. As for my patients, they would rather have to admit they ate ten pounds of mothballs than let me glimpse their bank accounts.

Wilmot would fire me, from time to time, but then he rehired me, and he often had some little ailment he wanted me to look into. He also had some larger problems, most especially a failed kidney requiring dialysis: of such things he never complained. I realized, based on my experience, that Wilmot was one who would face the largest, even terminal illness with equanimity without failing to complain about smaller issues — his hemorrhoids, eczema, dry eyes — because those were signs of ongoing life.

Before the Adrienne affair, I’d bought a rental house on his advice and later sold it, averaging nearly twenty-five percent profit a year for five years. And Wilmot found the renter, a skilled handyman who paid on time and improved the property. In business, he was most helpful; it was what really interested him and briefly suspended his many neuroses. At such times, he even looked normal, the tension gone from his face, his mouth less ready with an unpleasant remark. The other directors on our board had never dealt with a tyrant before and just gave in to him. Wilmot was a high-end idiot savant with Neanderthal social views and the air of continuing crisis. I don’t think he had friends, not real friends, but he did have social connections that were wonderfully enabling whenever he wanted to get something done. Where were those social connections? All over the world. They came with his birth certificate. I think he kept in touch with me in the hope that my peculiarities would see me fail. It all went back to Adrienne. Even when he was laughing at my conciliatory jokes I could see the hatred in his eyes.

Guy McCracken was another of my regular patients, but one of whom I knew remarkably little considering that I had seen him, advised him, and treated him from the beginning of my career. He had previously been cared for by Al Christiensen, a general practitioner who retired to Hawaii. Guy was an unmarried man in his forties, remarkably private, of a cultivated demeanor and very fit. There was never anything wrong with McCracken, but he was punctilious about his annual physical and following up on any health concern, usually dermatological, as he worked outside and had unusual exposure to the sun. Guy was a handyman, in great demand because he could do absolutely anything — plumbing, electrical, carpentry, automotive — and he made a very comfortable living at it. In town he had the standing of a specialist in the several crafts he practiced, and his advice was sought by homeowners. His home was a Craftsman cottage he had restored to perfection, and it was considered an exemplar of its type on the annual home tour. Guy never struck me as being happy; his reserve seemed more a bulwark than anything else. It may have only been that the local habits of forced jollity were not his style.

Right after the Fourth of July, Guy came to see me, still in his work clothes — well-washed jeans, a clean flannel shirt neatly repaired here and there, and work boots. His tanned face was almost unlined, though the flecks of gray in his short, neat brown hair correctly asserted his age. He nodded formally and showed me an infected thumb. It must have been painful, as the swelling had emerged around the base of the nail in an angry red mound. “We’ll give you a shot of antibiotic and may have you back for another.” Guy nodded without expression.

I had my nurse, Chelsea, come in to give the shot. Chelsea is no longer with me because, as entertaining as she often was, Chelsea was a consummate airhead who misfiled records, abandoned patients in examining rooms, incorrectly recorded weights and blood pressure, and so on. She was sweet, comical, and madly insecure, and ended up the affluent wife of a real estate developer, a big fat lout who thought she was a scream. They’ve had several babies, round little tubs that Chelsea brought in for the staff to admire. Extravagantly adorned, she herded them around for the other nurses, though after she left, they said terrible things about her.

Chelsea blew the injection, the needle skimming through a pinch of Guy’s skin and into the palm of Chelsea’s hand. I gave Guy another shot while Chelsea moped in the corner, and this should have been the end of it. Unfortunately, the event triggered the AIDS protocol series of questions and answers, shrouded in political correctness and colored, I’m embarrassed to admit, by my own suspicions. Guy disliked these questions as I read them from a sheet, and his glances at Chelsea encouraged her to leave the room. Finally, I put the paper down and said, “Well, what these questions are meant to determine…”

“Whether I’m gay? Of course I’m gay. What else is there to do in this town?”

I didn’t have a good answer for that. I flicked the sheet of paper onto my desk with affected weariness and said, “If that doesn’t do it, follow up with these.” And I wrote a script for antibiotics, bearing down on my prescription pad with warranted concentration. Guy smiled at my efforts, stood up, took the prescription from my hand as I sat at the desk, gave my shoulder a friendly shake, and, with a small chuckle, left my office.

I lived in an annoying house. I’d bought it in the spirit of nostalgia and the hope that its looks would confer some of the old-time virtues, especially the one we all long for, the one we call “simplicity,” which — it doesn’t matter — may never have existed. The doctors, the fellows nearly retired when I first started, gave me a sense of the old-time simplicity, and it wasn’t that pretty at all. Some of that simplicity spat out corpses like a Gorgon. As to the house, there was nothing simple about it; the wiring, the plumbing, the heating all required expensive attention. Sensible people had moved away some time ago, into homes that were more easily used, and many of the places around me had been divided into apartments. Across the street from my house, a second-floor apartment housed a battling couple whom I’d never seen, but I heard their often hair-raising shouts.

The first story was old bloodred brick, the second white clapboard, and it had a gruesome mansard roof whose reward was a bulging mildewed attic. Its pinched kitchen, inquisitional living room, vertiginous staircase, and mean second-floor sleeping cells all conspired to capture and retain odors. There were things no one would dare cook in such a house. Cabbage was out of the question. Even a fresh filet of some pleasant whitefish, a chicken breast, or a dainty filet mignon could turn Floor B into an abattoir. Often when amorous pursuits had taken me to one of the upstairs bedrooms, my partner would demand another room until we’d exhausted them all and resorted to the first-floor sofa, barely below the observation of pedestrians whose suspicions must have been aroused by the puffs of dust rising rhythmically beyond the venetian blinds. One acquaintance who had passed my window during one of these episodes sent me hurtling back to childhood memories when he asked if I had been steam-cleaning my rug. He seemed baffled when I remarked, “You can say that again!”

Every Wednesday evening, Jinx Mayhall and I had dinner, a meal we prepared together and which she had usually conceived before I had a chance, turning me into nothing more than a sous chef compliant to her chef de cuisine. Dr. Mayhall, who styled herself my executive and made reference to the brigade system, forced us to envision various line cooks, patissiers, station cooks, and other cannon fodder of an imaginary French kitchen. Obviously there was drinking before, during, and after the meal; and Jinx was a splendid inebriant — upright, controlled yet as otherworldly as a religious visionary. She had a very Anglo-Saxon style, russet hair straight to her neck, long shinbones, reassuring directness, and plain purpose. It was easy to become entangled in the peculiarities of Jinx’s character and fail to notice that she was quite beautiful. I was capable of this mistake myself. Without meaning to, she made you feel, when you disagreed with her, that you were wrong. Perhaps as a result I had never been so drunk in Jinx’s presence as to bend the proprieties. I found her attractive, erotic even, but I justly feared blemishing our delightful friendship with some gesture that might be misunderstood. Still, it was difficult not to touch Jinx. Sometimes she widened those green eyes in such a provocative way that it was easy for me to feel terrified. Jinx was a real woman and probably too much for me.

The French atmosphere was just submerged farce because we really only cooked American dishes. Tonight we were having a sort of nostalgic meal, one that I had made for our first dinner but that this time Jinx cooked as a kind of salute to that pleasant day, a chicken dish that James Beard called “a remarkable old San Joaquin Valley recipe”—using onion, garlic, cornmeal, nutmeg, cumin, coriander, almonds, olives, sesame seeds, red wine, chili powder, and one whole, large chicken, preferably one that had disported itself under Montana skies. I liked watching Jinx cook — the straight back, the hand on hip, the absence of false moves. The period when we covered the dish to let it simmer — often almost an hour — was when we did the most drinking, and by the time the meal was on the table we were pretty mellow. We’d have two bottles, tonight’s being a nice wine from Cassayre-Forni Cellars in Rutherford, California. Probably that was one too many, but it never became a problem except that I’d have to give Jinx one of the terrible little bedrooms, more than probably starting new rumors. Sometimes I tucked her in and that was just fine. I would pull the covers up around her lovely face and we would smile.

“This was a five-pound chicken, and I believe we’ll eat it all,” said Jinx. I spooned some sauce onto the bird, olives glistening among the almonds and infusion of spices, wine, and oil.

“We’re not fat. It’s okay.”

We filled our plates and sat across from each other, lit by candles and the last of the evening light coming from the dining-room window, which faced into the side yard and imbued the light with a delicate quality of chlorophyll. When the cottonwood seeds were blowing, the sense of snow in early summer was so persuasive that I had been startled, fearing that I’d forgotten a season and our long winter was upon us again. There was something of the atmosphere of romance — that is, all the best parts of romance: the sense of occasion, of ceremony, of friendship — we’d had these meals for a few years — everything, really, except sex. It was not easy to imagine Jinx having sex; she wore her independence so militantly. It would take some assertion, some conviction, but it might be great! The smart ones were the best, but they were a lot of trouble too. I supposed she would be a spinster someday. I certainly never made a move, but I must say that after a couple of pops she seemed to hold it against me. Of the many complications to our friendship, this was the most conspicuous — this, and her inclination to read me the riot act from time to time, which always hurt my feelings.

Jinx reminded me of a girl from the forties — the thick russet hair, the smart but unprovocative clothes. I thought she looked like Gene Tierney. She had never had a steady male friend, leading to several inferences: that she was gay, that her longing for children led to her career in children’s medicine. Neither was true. She had flings on adventure cruise ships to Antarctica or Cape Horn—“To get it out of my system”—and was unsentimental about children to the point of indifference. Her interest in them — indeed, her passion — was entirely clinical. Only the children recognized this: they were not drawn to her. Her renown was based altogether on her success in treating them. She was such a good friend of mine that when others viewed her sexually, it annoyed me — which should have been a sign. We had a little spell in which we turned into a couple of drunks. That was fun. It just amazes me now: we’d sit around my house and talk, half fried, and never lay a hand on each other.

A year or two ago, in the spring, I went up to the headwaters of a mountain creek and brought back a dozen small, gorgeous brook trout, which encrusted with panko lay before us on a platter, surrounded by broad homegrown tomatoes, new potatoes, sliced Spanish onions, and Manchego cheese. I bought the cheese next to the railroad station that morning under the scrutiny of a hulking man with a black moustache, massive under his nose. He stared at me with such intensity that I awaited his coming outburst with grim patience. At last it came. “My God, I love Manchego.” Jinx had taken on the lassitude one associates with old historians or bookshop operators who hate their customers, a possible effect of the cold bottle of Riesling we’d shared. “That was a goodish white, didn’t you think? What else is there to drink with these minnows? I feel drawn toward inebriation.” We had another bottle, some stony-tasting thing, after which Dr. J began eating the little trout with her hands. Watching her languid moves as she ate, I felt my heart race. Then she was merry and laughed to herself. She plucked a brochure for Airstream trailers from her purse, held it in front of me, and said, “This is how Americans must live.” I remembered when, years ago, the Wally Byam Caravan came to our town and filled the IGA parking lot with their silver Airstreams. A group of hippies parked in the midst of them, wrapping their old vans in aluminum foil from the IGA, and smoked marijuana in broad daylight while making sardonic forays into socializing with the Airstream people. Anyway, Jinx bought the Airstream but never took it anywhere. Finally, it became a kind of office, and from it she published papers in pediatrics. When we had finished the brook trout and the rest of the wine, Jinx gave me her lowering, authoritarian look and advised me to take a real inventory of my life. “Any life,” she said, “consists of myriad elements, two-thirds of which are superfluous. The gift of living lies in enlarging the discard pile as we move to our true gestalt.”

“Our who?”

“Purpose.”

“Of course that’s what you said.”

I found myself examining the figures in my napkin, some old linen my mother had prized. Jinx had risen from the table and was standing at a mirror over the sideboard; then she stuck her tongue out at her own image and returned to the table.

She said, “I wish we’d get a phone call.”

“I know what you mean.”

“There are automated messages, weather and so forth.”

“I think we can do better than that, Jinx.”

“There’s always work.”

“There’s always work.”

“And we are useful, which is quite different from indispensable.” Jinx stared into space and said, “A couple of sad caregivers.”

This seemed unimaginably despairing, and I put the sounds of the humpback whale on my modest sound system. This had a terrific effect on us as the room filled with their oceanic howls. We arose and circled the table with an undulant gait, imitating the movement of the great marine mammals. It seemed as we came up for breath, our spirits rose too. When the recording was stopped, she plopped back into her chair. “Nothing like the sea,” she said. I noted in an utterly abstract way the light falling on the side of her face, candlelight.

“More are cured by salt air than all our ministrations combined,” I groggily proposed. “The people who live near the sea have more plausible ideas about mortality than mountain people, who from birth tend to be a bubble and a half off plumb — not to mention the empty schemers of the prairie, who covet everything between themselves and the farthest point they can see. They drive enormous automobiles and race them at the horizon hoping to expand the objects of their greed. As new things rise up toward them they are seized by a sort of mania, and this goes on until they run out of gas.”

“How right you are,” Jinx murmured, face resting on her palm. “I’m a prairie person and it’s so easy for me to see those folks parked at the end of the world. Life was never easy for them, but there comes a day when it’s time to leap into the void, leave that Cadillac behind.”

Another bottle, a lovely Pedro Domecq, seemed quite harmles, and we went at it with respectful restraint, talking about the “busy bees” at the clinic, the “clueless” we billed. “We’re cloaked in ignorance,” said Jinx, “and yet they come to us with open hearts.”

“A good thing too,” I twanged. I tapped the neck of the Domecq with the ball of my forefinger. “This don’t go for the same as soda pop.” I was just trying to be funny — but my ER days had given me, as it had given others, a certain detachment. No good came of lamentation over the mangled we had to put right. They seemed pleased enough, coming and going on gurneys as was their wont.

I had a houseguest named Clancy Boyer, who had been a classmate of mine at medical school before he dropped out and went into commercial real estate, at which he prospered. Clancy still lived in Ohio, but he came out each year to hunt and stayed with me. He was a dark-complected, wonderfully fit, lanky sportsman who hiked alone in the mountains with a lightweight.270 Winchester over his shoulder, an old-fashioned big-game hunter who did it the hard way and lived on wild meat despite the riches of commercial real estate. He packed out quarters of mule deer or elk from the far reaches of the local mountains, sometimes making two or three trips on foot. I thought Clancy would be just perfect for Jinx, and so I fixed them up. I don’t know where they went or what they did, but Clancy didn’t get back to my house until three in the morning.

I blew up.

“Do you have any idea what time it is?” I demanded. Jinx had given me pajamas for Christmas and I had put them on, thinking that coming down the stairs in only my shorts and the heat of indignation wouldn’t do. I failed to notice until it was too late that the pajamas’ depiction of French Pierrot-type clowns throwing colored hoops in the air could have made me look ridiculous at a time when I meant to be taken seriously.

“What business is it of yours?”

“ ‘What business is it of mine’? Is it necessary to point out to you that this is my house?”

Clancy looked at me in astonishment, walked out the door jingling his car keys between thumb and forefinger, and was gone. I have not seen Clancy since. The next day Jinx said that she thought Clancy was a goon. “I know a goon when I see one,” she said, but the whole thing was for my benefit and I saw right through it. We were painfully uncomfortable.