Thomas McGuane - Driving on the Rim

“I thought I’d see how we’re doing.”

“Well, it looks like it’s still going to be Judge Lauderdale. I made the mistake once of citing the jurist Benjamin Cardoza, which inspired Lauderdale, once he had me in chambers, to caution me against confusing things by ‘citing some obscure wop.’ ”

“How’s he going to feel about me?”

“Hard to say. We hope for ‘valuable citizen.’ But he might suspect immorality in your relationship with the deceased.”

“Tessa.”

“For our purposes, ‘the deceased.’ ”

“Whatever he’d want to call it, it was a long time ago.”

“For the Lauderdales of this world, immorality never dies. First, we try for a dismissal. You had an enemy on the hospital board, old moneybags—”

“Wilmot.”

“Whatever. I want to see if we can’t neutralize him. He is connected through common stupidity to a number of state legislators. So it might not be easy.”

I abruptly knew that it was not certain I would be absolved, and that it was possible I could no longer do the work at which I was most useful. Previously, I had dreaded loss of freedom. Now I was uninterested in freedom. I wanted to be useful and I wanted it more than anything — or almost anything, because I was also raring to be with Jocelyn.

I think it must have been late, at least eleven. I was still awake, in fact, not even sleepy. The neighbors were fighting and I helplessly listened in. “I don’t care what it smells like! I care what it looks like!” I hadn’t seen Jocelyn in several days and I was worried. While I felt she cared for me as much as ever, I did consider she had become somewhat perfunctory in our lovemaking, as would be appropriate for a preoccupied person, is what I believe I thought at the time. Or something. Whatever misgivings I might have had were canceled by a kind of gratitude — yes, somewhat stupid gratitude, but all of my thoughts were of Jocelyn, her grace and particular self-propulsion, which in my enforced idleness I possibly overvalued. So what, I loved her. And even so what if she didn’t love me. Of what final good was love if valued only when reciprocated? As I ran this rhetorical question around my thick skull, I recognized for the first time that Jocelyn did not love me. However obvious it was, I found this a disquieting discovery. Nevertheless, I figured I could go on loving her anyway, and her willingness to make love with me could be a stand-in for actual love until I could make her love me. But how? What if I learned to fly an airplane? There was something about all this that was arousing memories of a long submerged state of mind, that period of my college days when I slipped off to Florida with my host’s wife. That world of eroticism, subterfuge, guilt, and fear set against meaningless vistas of sea and tropical vegetation had produced a sort of disorientation that I felt for the first time in a very long while. Happily, my mind shifted effortlessly to Jocelyn and her marvelous limbs. But it wouldn’t stay there. I should have jacked off, slept, and gone to breakfast, but I wasn’t that smart. I was in that moronic oblivion that makes the world go round. To make things worse, my neighbors were still fighting and I could hear them all the way across the street. The man with the bass voice shouted, “There’s cat hair on my ChapStick!” And shortly after that, “For Christ’s sake, hold the snow peas!” And back came the woman’s tiny, shrill voice: “I won’t let you spoil one more Christmas!” This was just too troubling because we were nowhere near Christmas. I had to get out of there.

What I meant to do was drive over to Jinx’s house and get her out of bed, but by the time I got to her door she was up. “I heard that awful car of yours.” Of course, there were a lot of awful cars and it was interesting that she was so attuned to mine that she got up before I could get to her door. She motioned me in.

Jinx was in a bathrobe and barefoot. I noticed what pretty feet she had and was touched that she liked them well enough to paint her toenails, then had the ridiculously inappropriate thought that if I painted my toenails Jocelyn would never speak to me again. Jinx had tied her hair at the top of her head, and it made her face, which always revealed such a play of moods, seem even more expressive.

I sat at the table while she made a pot of tea with the electric kettle. “You couldn’t sleep?”

“I didn’t try. It wouldn’t have worked if I had. Did I wake you?”

“Uh-huh. You don’t want anything in this, do you?”

“No.” I only wanted to talk about myself. Once we sat across the small round table and smiled at each other over our tea, we were comfortable again. I felt at ease in pouring out my passion for the fair Jocelyn. I threw in various ironies including the uncertainty of Jocelyn’s feelings. I hinted at her lovemaking and described her great skills as a pilot. Jinx listened, smiling quietly, occasionally sipping her tea. At length, tears ran down her cheeks and I felt a wave of gratitude that our friendship was so strong she exulted in my happiness. Jinx had her own sort of beauty, which her tears brought out from where it resided in a deep nature. I admired Jinx and in my excited state could easily picture someone — someone I couldn’t quite imagine — falling in love her, in a different way than I loved Jocelyn but love is love is love.

Right?

* * *

I did see Throckmorton once that week. I stopped at the desk of his receptionist, Maida, who had a cake in front of her. She sat there, arms crossed, glowering at me. “He in?” I asked but got no reply. Then Niles emerged and said without emphasis, “It’s her birthday. She’s not speaking. Are you, Maida?” No reply. “See?”

He led me in and I slumped in the special chair that by forcing the client into a degraded slouch allowed Niles to lay down the conditions by which he would stream billable hours into the client’s mailbox.

Niles’s face crumpled in a look of worry and pain. I didn’t like the anxiety it produced in me. He laid his hand across his stomach and stared at me without a word. My anxiety rose in the eternity that transpired before he spoke. He said, “Ribeyes and bourbon don’t mix.”

“Right…?”

“Gotta slip off and pinch a loaf. It’s killing me. Keep talking—” He abruptly crossed his office, entered the bathroom, and closed the door. “Go ahead, I can hear you from here!”

“Jesus, Niles!” A fart and a booming laugh were the only reply. “You want me to come back?”

“Oh, hell no. You’re here, let’s get some work done. Plus, I’ve got news. I went to see Wilmot and the board. What a mausoleum! I think Wilmot has been behind this all along. He’s got a sympathetic audience with a few of the doctors who are not operating on the facts of the case but on a visceral loathing of you and your calamitous lifestyle. Excepting of course Jinx Mayhall, who thinks you’re cuter than a speckled pup.” I didn’t reply but went on looking at the bathroom door as though it were doing the talking. “One thing I bore in mind is that the way you get on hospital boards is by demonstrating a capacity to create and maintain a substantial bank account. This is where I trained my jeweler’s eye for persuasion. Pretending sympathy for these deviant swindlers, I commiserated over the loss of value to the clinic once this malpractice case hit the papers. I suggested that in such a scenario if turkeys were going for ten cents a pound they wouldn’t be able to buy a raffle ticket on a jaybird’s ass. No, I didn’t really say that, but I hinted as much. Thus I began to pave a trail leading to fabulously ignorant and corrupt Judge Lauderdale’s chambers, where a pagan reverence for lucre also obtains. Hey, you don’t have to hang around here, Berl, that’s all I’ve got for today. And no sense sharing the details of my current physical discomfort. But if you need help interpreting the legal niceties with which I’ve showered you, let me say this about that: the news is good.”