David Gates - A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

“Well, I would say you could come up and stay with me until things get straightened out. It’s not that you’re not welcome.”

“But what would Henry say, right?”

“Henry can say whatever he damn well pleases. I suppose he’d be right.”

In the service area, she parks next to a Sidekick with skis on the roof rack. A leg sticks out the driver’s window: sheathed in metallic blue, the foot in some robot sneaker. It’s a pretty woman with iridescent blue sunglasses and big blond kinky hair, tipping a flat silver flask into her mouth. She sees him looking and lifts the flask as if to toast. Outlaw recognition? Or does she mean to scandalize, mistaking him for what he must look like, in his suit and tie?

Aunt Lissa, getting out of the car, misses the whole thing. “Aren’t you coming in?”

“I’ll just hang.”

He watches her go inside, then gets out of the car. He pries the cap off the pill vial, raises it to toast, says “Cheers” to the woman and drains the fucker. In goes her leg and up goes her window. He walks around to the front of Aunt Lissa’s car, squats, feels behind the bumper and plucks away the little metal box. Then he walks over to the Sidekick and circles his fist counterclockwise. The woman puts her window halfway down.

“How about I race you to New York?” he says. “Loser buys the first round.”

“I’m waiting for my friend,” she says. “Anyway, aren’t you going north?”

“So I’ll race you to what? Lake Placid.”

She puts up her window.

“Bitch,” he says. But again just experimentally, like pretending to be somebody who’d hit on a woman and then call her a bitch.

He gets into the driver’s seat, his bottom warmed by Aunt Lissa’s leftover heat, and sticks the key in the ignition. If he were to drive away, she’d be fine here: all she’d need to do is go back inside and call Henry. Who of course would make her call the police—no, call the police himself, so you’d want to get off at the next exit and take back roads south, as far as Poughkeepsie maybe, where you could be a good boy and leave her car at the train station.

He backs out of the parking space. Experimentally. Drives a few feet toward the entrance ramp, stops, puts it in Park and races the engine while giving the wheel little turns, playing with how it would feel to do this. Probably incredible.

At a decent interval after his seventy-first birthday, Martine sat him down: she was leaving him, moving to New York. To be with a man he presumed she’d met at that conference—last fall, had it been?—from which she’d returned two days late, after supposedly seeing friends and taking in the new production of Così at the Met. She would come up a couple of days a week to teach the rest of her classes, then figure out what next. She would ask for nothing in their settlement. Well, no blame to her: if she lived to be ninety, as more and more people were doing, she had half her life ahead. “The one thing I swore not to do,” she said, “was to be trite and ask you to understand.” Oh? Had she not also sworn to forsake all others? But he couldn’t very well get on his high horse about that.

When the spring semester ended, he went in and told Jack Stephenson that he was retiring. Jack had been urging this for years—“You could get back into research,” he would say or, “You and Martine could travel”—but now he said, “Are you sure this is the time?”

“What’s this?” He sniffed. “The sweet scent of compassion?”

Jack shook his head. “I just don’t want to have to replace you with some twerp out of Johns Hopkins.” This was Jack giving himself airs: Who from Johns Hopkins would come to a state university so far from civilization, with a hospital that looked like a parking garage?

“You’ll bear up,” he said. “With what you’ve been paying me, you can hire two twerps.”

“There’s that.” Jack frowned at the computer screen on his desk. “One second. Let me deal with this idiocy.” He hammered at the keyboard with his index fingers, stopped, nodded and clicked the mouse. “Sometimes I wish I were back tapping old ladies’ knees with a rubber hammer.” He took a deep breath, held it, let it out. “Since we’re being frank, I have to tell you, I do have some concerns. I know it hasn’t been an easy year. Do you really want another change in your life just now?”

“Aren’t you the soul of delicacy. They ought to have made you dean long ago.”

“Whoa.” Jack raised a hand as if to protect his face. “I’m not your enemy, Don.”

“It’s a moot point anyway,” he said. “I’ve decided to become a Doctor Without Borders.”

“You can’t be serious.” In fairness to Jack, Martine hadn’t gotten this joke, either. “Well, I mean, of course there’s nothing worthier. But, my God, you’ve been in the classroom for what? Longer than I’ve been here.”

“I do like the way you put things.”

“Don. With all due respect, I’m not quite seeing you as Mother Teresa. Couldn’t you assuage your conscience by volunteering at a clinic once a week?”

“The still, small voice,” he said.

Jack looked at him over the top of his half-glasses. “You have lost your fucking mind. Okay, look, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to keep your office as is. You go off and think this over, and when you’re ready to—”

He held up both hands. “Will it save time if I tell you I’m not interested in what you’re going to do?”

Jack took off his glasses and laid them on his desk. “Don, are you talking to someone?”

“A higher power?”

“I can suggest a very good—”

“You’ll have to excuse me. I hear that still, small voice calling.”

“Always smarter than everyone,” Jack said. “I’ve never doubted that you could dance rings around me. But, just as your friend—and if I’m out of line here you can tell me—isn’t it possible that you’re well out of this thing?”

“I suspect ‘marriage’ is the word you’re looking for,” he said. “If you don’t mind, I’ll be dancing off.”

—

They’d planned the trip back in November, at Red Fish Blue Fish, the one decent restaurant in town. Dinner was on Martine: the English Department had just made her a full professor. It helped to think that at this point she hadn’t fully decided to leave. Paris, Amsterdam, Prague, then on to Rome—to visit his daughter and her husband—and finally to Crete for the first three weeks of July.

“Can people still go to Jim Morrison’s grave?” Martine had said. “In Père Lachaise?”

“I have no idea,” he said. “He was the singer, was he not? I wouldn’t have thought he came up to your idea of a poet.”

“He didn’t,” she said. “He was just the most beautiful man who ever lived. Present company excepted.” She broke off a morsel of bread and dipped it into the saucer of olive oil. “So, will Claudia be her usual intransigent self?”

“You’ve met Claudia once . In ten years.”

“QED,” she said.

“At any rate, we’ll only be there for two days.”

“I guess I shouldn’t complain,” she said. “I am a home wrecker. Wasn’t that the draw for you in the first place?”

Before leaving for the airport, he flushed away all but one of his last Viagra samples; then he flew across the Atlantic next to Martine’s empty seat. In Paris, he swallowed the last pill and, for the first time in his life, picked up a prostitute: a tall, broad-shouldered young woman made taller than him by spike heels that had her on tiptoes. “So you know,” she said as she took his hand, “I am not a twahn-nee .” What a world: Did they now have trainees? He instructed her in what he liked but found that he no longer liked what he liked. In Amsterdam, he drank a bottle of wine with dinner, had a brandy afterward, and went to a coffeehouse and smoked marijuana, which he hadn’t tried since a party on the night Robert Kennedy announced that he was running for president. That had been pleasant and silly; this overwhelmed him. He couldn’t imagine what was happening to him—could it have been laced with something? When he managed to get back to his hotel, he spent what he believed to be hours lying on his side on the white sexagonal tiles of the bathroom floor, unable to raise himself to do his vomiting in the toilet. In the morning, he put the bathmat and the towel he’d cleaned up with in a plastic valet-service bag and took a taxi to the airport. Instead of continuing on to Prague and Rome, much less Crete, he flew back to New York, paying fifteen hundred dollars to change his ticket. In a Portosan off the bicycle path along the Hudson, he feasted on a street boy—artfully unshaven, hair artfully mussed—who must have been able to tell he’d never done this before. The boy let loose in his mouth, then beat him, took his wallet and kicked him with the snakeskin cowboy boots that had been the pretext for their conversation. In the emergency room at St. Vincent’s, he told the young woman doctor that he was a doctor, too; she slipped him an envelope with a few Percodans to hold him over until he could get to an oral surgeon.