Thomas McGuane - Driving on the Rim

“You’ve been making yourself scarce!” she cried. I said that I didn’t think I had, but I had been working hard and at the expense of some objectivity about my patients so that their lives were becoming entirely too much a part of mine.

“Enid, I don’t even see you at the clinic. You still use us, don’t you?”

“I’m never sick.”

“Well, good. I hope it stays that way.”

I happened to know something about Enid’s bawdy sense of humor, which I saluted without having been its beneficiary. Jerry Kagy, one of our general practitioners, had taken a crash course in sigmoidoscopy, which he abandoned because his rough and unpracticed technique was producing complaints for the whole clinic; we had to ask him to stop. Enid was one of his earliest attempts as part of her annual physical; I gather that she was essentially naked on some sort of examining table while Jerry, like a student driver, awkwardly manipulated the flexible sigmoidoscope in her rectum, intermittently inflating the lower bowel to better examine its lining. Lacking much experience, Jerry, a heavyset, redheaded, and rather monstrous-looking man, repeatedly overinflated the bowel, causing Enid to loudly break wind. In response to her gruesome situation, Enid looked over her shoulder at the sweating Jerry Kagy and said, “Doctor, have I ever told you that I love you?” Kagy, entirely lacking a sense of humor, abruptly ended the exam and left Enid to dress in the empty room. Kagy told us the story himself, and we marveled that he had no idea Enid was trying to be funny. He thought she was in love with him. Well aware of the shortcomings of his technique, we found her heroic.

“It’s so sad,” Enid said to me, “that poor Tessa is gone, don’t you think? Don’t you think she had a place here?”

“She must not have thought so.”

“Oh?”

“Why else would she have done away with herself?”

“Is that what she did?” Enid asked carefully, looking at me the while. I saw where this was headed. It was headed for an old issue that had nothing to do with Tessa, but if it arrived there, I felt, the consequences would be bad. I immediately attempted to quell its progress.

“That’s what she did.”

Enid gazed at me for a moment, then, without a word, she got in her car and left.

At the clinic, I was routinely cheerful, a mad if mechanical greeter by name of all I saw, but since the rumors, I looked on myself doing this — the same as I had always done — as though I were watching a busker at some street fair addressing the monkeys. While I knew what had happened to Tessa and felt sufficiently guilty in a maddeningly nonspecific way, it seemed I was even guiltier because others thought that I had done away with her. That it was not true seemed to make little difference. If I failed to find my way out of this mess I was very liable to become a murderer in my own eyes, because when I went over Tessa’s last hours to reassure myself, Cody would suddenly appear. I recognized an emergency: something which could ruin me in my own eyes, despite the fact that “ruin” was a word that came with a faint romantic whiff. The sensation of being trailed by false rumor was its own lure, a costume drama, just behind which lurked something far worse. At my lowest point, not many days after my latest dinner with Jinx, I admitted cultivating an enigmatic smile, even, for instance, while checking my tire pressure. Anyone electing to be touched by my plight will recognize that I was merely holding the wolf at bay with what feeble means were at hand, though I had nightmares in which my struggle to save Tessa in all its visceral detail was converted into something ghoulish and horrible, the face of a dying Tessa replaced by Cody’s innocent gaze. It was not hard to see that something awaited me from which no good could come.

I crossed the bridge behind the clinic and sat over the rapid seam of river that curved in there, making a small back eddy for ducks and other swimmers. Here I could view the clinic, all the bustle, and the occasional faces of daydreaming staff gazing at the water. Often there was a single contemplative raven working along the current edge, sometimes finding something with a gay pounce, but I didn’t know what. Something to eat, I supposed, though I knew that corvids are no slaves to their stomachs or to anything less than schemes for the future of the world.

I had begun grieving unreasonably over the death of Tessa, imagining her young and old, big and bigger, loud and louder, crookeder and crookeder still — all pictured in loving detail just as a man mourns a dog that had bitten three paperboys. I stared at the poor raven as though he could answer my disquiet. I wondered why I had neglected Tessa.

When I returned to my house, I had a message, a returned call, from Vicky Speiser, a very beautiful girl who has cleaned my teeth numerous times. We had a rather awkward conversation when I tried to get her off dental things and invite her out to dinner. I succeeded and we found ourselves across a candlelit table at nine that night. I basked in the observation that Vicky seemed unaware of my problems.

“This is the sixteenth anniversary of Nike’s Air Jordan tennis shoe,” she told me, luscious red lips forming each word lovingly. “Nike says, ‘It’s the last year for that shoe.’ Michael Jordan says, ‘Let’s wait and see.’ Who d’you think will win?”

“Nike.”

“How unromantic! Michael Jordan’s going to win! He’s Superman. He’s from Krypton! ”

Escapism caused me to think about Superman and how he was described as leaping “tall buildings in a single bound.” Wasn’t it enough to simply say that he leapt tall buildings? “In a single bound” really gilded the lily, and gave the whole thing a corny, retro feel, as well as suggesting that Superman was a sort of ape.

I think that by the time our meals came, I had already asked myself, “Where is this going?” And the answer was, “Nowhere.” That was when I started to enjoy myself. It was barely raining outside, about like a cow pissing on a flat rock; this was a good time to stay indoors, eat, talk. I thought I had only to strike something up and the rest would take care of itself; but Vicky was making eyes at the county attorney, a dilettante politician with great landholdings along the Big Horn River; and the county attorney was responding by taking in the ghastly artwork around the walls, eyes swooping unpredictably to meet Vicky’s. I sensed that some sort of delectable situation was at hand, during which I could turn my attention to the handsome cutlet adorning my plate while the eye play went on without any effort from me. As I dined and made perfunctory conversation, watching the lovebirds exchange glances, I began to notice that the county attorney’s wife, who would have been a beauty but for the prominent bags under her eyes, was aware of the situation existing between her husband and my date, the very beautiful Vicky. When I had the chance, I gave her a co-conspirator’s wink, to which she nodded grimly. I realized that it was the food that interested her, too. At the end of the meal, I made a cordial stop at their table. “Why, Earl,” I said, for that was his name, “you’ve hardly eaten a thing.”

Earl said, “New cook.” I introduced Vicky and said that she too had eaten like a bird. Earl’s wife, Edna, bragged that she had cleaned her plate while I claimed that not enough was left of my cutlet to attract an ant. When Vicky returned to the table, I had a sort of out-of-body experience in which I raved on about the dessert cart and aperitifs. This dyspeptic display went nowhere: Vicky said she’d had enough, and I took her home in a remorseful mood despite my real attempt to be charming and funny. She was stone-faced all the way to her door.