Thomas McGuane - Driving on the Rim

I asked him to wait. I finished with Carl shortly and he sort of bowed out with a wordless glance at Wilmot, stuffing a few bills in the blue glass flower vase Jinx had given me, into which I had failed to put flowers, letting it now serve as repository for my fees, such as they were. When Jinx saw what I was doing with it, she said, “Oh, boy,” since she went on performing the ministrations of a bookkeeper despite the claims of her own busy practice.

I was not looking forward to seeing Wilmot, or to doubtless polished explanations for my situation, to which I had no doubt he had contributed generously. I was not sure why, but I sensed that he thought I wasn’t playing the game as it should be played, that the puzzle pieces of the hierarchy were not well served if doctors went around being undignified. Perhaps he had learned of my brief service at the hot dog stand, or my indiscretions with nurses and others — all commonplace among bachelors in such a setting. My association with Tessa, during her happier days, was not viewed positively, and the latest event seemed to spread the stain. There was an awful time when Tessa was living in a homeless shelter and telling tall tales in which I sometimes figured unfavorably. She had long been displeased with me and even wrote letters to the editor about certain persons who had “grown too big for their britches,” widely viewed as a reference to me.

I think Wilmot had expected me to stop what I was doing, but I had to see Ellen Coopersmith, age fifty-one, who believed she had pneumonia, though she did not. She had bought an old rock house near her job teaching school in the country, and on a very cold morning discovered there was no water in the kitchen sink, so she went to the downstairs bathroom for water to make coffee. The next day the water in the bathroom was gone too, and she had to go to the second floor for water to make coffee. The following day, also cold, there was no water on the second floor and teaching school without coffee had seemed an impossibility. But Ellen forbore this inconvenience, and the weather abruptly warmed up that night, as it does in this country, letting Ellen know why she’d had no water for her coffee: every pipe in the house had burst and in the thaw Ellen was now showered in falling ice water while each room in the house flooded. Still, she did not have pneumonia, she had a cold; and I showered her with samples and placebos while declining payment, though she stuffed something in the vase anyway. Then I turned to Wilmot, who had elevated his chin a degree or two with every delay, and smiled coolly to Ellen Coopersmith as I saw her to the door.

“Not missing a beat?” asked Wilmot. I was jubilant just from having seen a couple of patients.

“Pecking along as best I can.”

“But you look quite pleased.”

“It’s a living,” I said.

“Well, good then. I say, in fact, ‘Marvellous.’ ”

I was sorry I had to hear that. “So, Raymond, what’s up?”

“A courtesy call, really, just a courtesy call. We are working on the status of your situation, which is many-layered.”

“Like a cake?”

“Well, sure. Could be. I did want you to understand that it wasn’t only the staff and board that are the voices being heard. There is always an unseen presence in the room whenever we go through a bad patch like this, and that presence is the community.”

“I’m anxious to know about that,” I said sincerely, even though I knew that “the community” was a bogus concept generally invoked in the service of self-righteousness.

“Oh, rest assured, they’ll be heard. Would you like to be kept in the loop?”

“Not really.”

“Oh?”

“Just tell me how it turns out.”

Wilmot was already backing to the door, having assumed a look of bafflement. “I will. I promise.” I thought about Wilmot’s style of communication: speaking to you in supposedly transparent earnestness while his face grimaced faintly as though from acid reflux. It was a form of snobbery that looked like it could be cured with Pepto-Bismol.

“Adrienne sends her best regards. She was always very fond of you.”

“It’s good you’re still in touch.”

“Adrienne really landed on her feet. I still feel challenged. She married a guy retired from some boutique bank in New York. He needed something besides issuing letters of credit to occupy his time. So he bought a sawmill and a forest. He’s almost ninety, no prenup. I’d love to have her back. Always wanted a forest.”

He was backing out the door as he glanced around the room, looking for medical equipment, I suppose. I meant to get a catalog, but as there were still a few home doctors I thought I could just as well wait for one to die. I realized I was drifting toward this obsolete category, but it seemed to fit. Maybe I had resigned myself to being a square peg in a round hole and welcomed a setting where I could spend less time on explanations.

Perhaps I had gotten ahead of myself, though, because no one called for my services the rest of that day, and by the end of it the little respite I’d enjoyed from obsessing over Jocelyn was gone and I was frantic. I was so uncomfortable that I had to act. I fired up the 88, relieved not just to be doing something about my torment but to find that the car was willing to start, as was not always the case when it had been parked for more than a day. When the Oldsmobile had not been used, the steady press of sunlight on its plastic upholstery produced the smell of obsolescence reminiscent of my pleasant rides with Throckmorton in his giant Audi with its radar and satellite uplinks, the silent highway rushing under its hood. Perhaps in imagining a time when I might stop pushing this old boat down the road, I foresaw days of great change. Nice!

I left town on Highway 12 and soon passed Two Dot, where I once had a patient, a superstitious old lady who described suicides in the distant past and several local ghosts, including a girl on Alkali Creek guzzling blood from a bottle, a cowboy ghost with a hole in his chest, and a woman on fire holding a jug of gasoline. After Mrs. Tierney told me of these things, she always looked me dead in the eye and said, “I’m of sound mind.” And I’d say something like, “Of course you are, but if you don’t measure your glucose regularly and write it down I’m not going to be able to help you.” These phantoms seemed to haunt the benign but lonely landscape as I drove.

Perhaps I was starting to calm down, because as I passed the Hutterite colony at Martinsdale I thought fondly of the beautiful vegetables they brought to our farm markets. When I reached Checkerboard, I spotted the bar among a number of trailers. The sign just said BAR. If it had said EXCELSIOR TAVERN or something I wouldn’t have stopped. I was alone with the bartender under a low ceiling covered with dollar bills. Not much light in there. A jukebox. I drank a shell of draft without a word from the bartender and left. The phone booth outside with its bifold door ajar and phone hanging at the end of its metallic cord seemed to taunt my increasingly forlorn state of mind. I hurried on to White Sulphur Springs, reviewing how I had enhanced the concept of “bar” into some kind of cow-town Brigadoon with fiddle music, two-steppers, and irrepressible ranch hands throwing their hats in the air.

At the medical facility in White Sulphur Springs, I identified myself at the desk and went straight to the office of the physician who had treated Jocelyn, Dr. Aldridge. He did not seem pleased to see me, but I launched a wave of cordiality his way. “I understand that you and Miss Boyce have gotten very close.” He just stared at me.

He said, “Yes, we have. I don’t think that needs to get out, do you?”

“Not because of me, Doctor!” I said.