David Gates - A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

“You’ve always had women looking after you. So now they’re being paid.”

“That’s how it generally ends up,” he said.

“And you’re going to look into that volunteer work?”

“A Doctor Without Borders,” he said. “Heal the sick, raise the dead.”

“Always so modest.”

“Yes, well,” he said, “I can tell you a story about that.” The wind had shifted now and was blowing snow straight at the windshield, like an attack from the stars. An attack of the stars. “This was back when I started out in practice,” he said. “I had night duty in the emergency room and they brought in—”

“Daddy,” she said, “I’ve heard this how many times?”

“Then I guess there’s no need to drag it out,” he said. “But you see where I’m going.”

A remote white moon was howling down with its man-in-the-moon face as she swung out across the double yellow line to pass an ass-dragging old van (whose driver turned out to be the hero of the story) and we came face-to-face with a Ford pickup. I had time to read the F-O-R-D and to register that the grille looked like a modernist grid of windows. The next thing was this feeling, a certainty rather, of floating up in silence (I’m not saying I floated up—this wasn’t me anymore) and down below a car and a truck with their fronts mashed together and both hoods up as if they were chatting. Off on the shoulder, a guy getting out of a van. Moonlit view of the top of his cap, Red Sox B upside down, and his hands going to his face as he approached the truck. The driver of the truck hadn’t had his seat belt on—blood-alcohol level of such and such—and had died instantly, which I now understand means fuck-all, having had an instant of my own. I’ve told this story so many times that it’s become a story.

The guy from the van got her door open, pulled her out and walked her, his hand in her armpit, into frosted grass at the side of the road. Then he supposedly pried my door open with a tire iron. I wrote him a letter to thank him for my life, Dan somebody, from Barre, but I never heard back. She lived too. Is living still, for all I know, why would she not be, though she’s made herself hard to find. At some point she came into my hospital room, one arm in a sling, and said she couldn’t stay long. How was she going to explain this? Meaning to her husband. I said, Make a clean breast, don’t you have pHisoHex? The morphine was making everything a medical pun. But I could imagine how this might seem real to her. I got off easy, as always: just a limp you wouldn’t notice, even on rainy days. It takes months for my shoes to show the uneven wear.

We’d been coming back from our Saturday night in Burlington. I’d picked her up at the airport the night before—she’d told her husband a lie that she said wasn’t my problem, or maybe she said it wasn’t my business—and driven her down to my cabin. We’d seen each other only in the city, but we had a long weekend because of Columbus Day and I wanted to give her the full-on Vermont. So we’d gone to the Flynn and heard Leila Josefowicz with the VSO, playing the hell out of the Adams Violin Concerto. Two ladies in front of us chattered through the first movement about how awful it was. Subscribers feeling baited and switched—I could sympathize. On the other hand, the Rite of Spring première had been a long time ago. I finally said, Would you mind shutting the fuck up ? Something I wouldn’t have said had the ladies been gentlemen. As the truck came at us, I also had time to think of this: that my last act on earth had been uncharitable.

Not that it would have been my last act on earth in any event. After the concert we went to some Seattleoid restaurant: she had the pork loin with prune sauce and jicama, and I had a steak—how could they ruin that?—with wasabi mashed potatoes. I asked her how was the far pork. She said, Far pork? Ah, oui, entendu . We split a bottle of pretty much okay Washington State Shiraz. She asked if I’d thought Leila Josefowicz was hot. I said I had, but that the conductor was her husband and I was a great respecter of people’s marriages; had she thought he was hot? So-so, she said, I like it that we can cop to this stuff. Do you not have this with your husband? I said. No, she said, he thought that was getting into the danger zone. Ah, I said, well, everybody has things they keep to themselves, do they not? Like what things, she said. Oh, I don’t know, I said, like minor annoyances—do we need to be having this conversation?

I put down what I hoped was a working credit card, signed the slip and said, Shall we? It would be a long drive back to the cabin, down 89 to Montpelier and then over toward St. Johnsbury, but she didn’t want to end the evening. As opposed to never wanting the evening to end, if you see the distinction. So we found a bar where a shaven-headed bouncer, pretending not to be a bouncer, said hello at the door. I couldn’t understand what the place was about: too crowded to dance, too loud to talk, the music too blurry to decode. I said things into her ear, the point mostly being to brush her ear with my lips, and she shook her head, not a specific no but a general can’t-hear-you, or a general you-don’t-get-it. We seemed to have a better time in bed, and wasn’t all this in the service of that? After three rounds of drinks, I helped her along the sidewalk to where we’d parked, first by her elbow, next with an arm around her waist. She kept her hands in the pockets of her jacket until I felt an arm slip around and a hand on my side, then the hand went away and back to her pocket. Either she was disgusted now to touch the old-guy softness, or, or, or. Oh my God, she said, look at the moon .

I drove while she manned the radio and found us a show called The Bible Only Church of the Air , where a woman preacher with a hillbilly accent kept soaring off her sermon into gibberish: O hoola hoola shackalacka! Do you think this actually means anything? she said. Yeah, I said, it means she’s a schizophrenic. The station must have been beaming in from far away—as they do here late at night, from Chicago, Cleveland, Cincinnati, the baseball cities. It faded into static, and she said, Oh shit, I think she was just about to come.

When we got off of 89, she asked if she could drive the rest of the way. She seemed okay, and I wanted to please. Appease, I guess I mean. And can we have the thing open, she said, and blast the heater? The roof thing? I want that moon.

—

I’d met her at a bar party, one of those things where somebody sends around an email, the occasion being to celebrate somebody else’s installation that had been written up in the Times —why not get it out there what kind of people we were? The bar was a good call, sparing everybody the installation itself. I liked her kinky blond hair, advertising wildness. And let me fine-tune that: I liked her need to advertise her wildness. I checked the left hand. Oh. But.

I asked how she knew Rachel, so on and so on, I won’t walk you through it all. She was an actress, back to looking for auditions after a summer in Pennsylvania with a production of The Tempest that had played village greens all over the state. Tiki torches in bamboo holders, Martin Denny on a boom box: the director had wanted a Trader Vic’s vibe to send up the postcolonial thing. And his theory of Miranda—she had been Miranda—was to bag the airy-fairyness and do her as Daisy Mae. She stopped chewing gum only to speak her lines, which actually worked because—I knew the play, right?