T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

Her eyes close, the sun pressing at her lids like a palpable weight. She can feel everything, every molecule of the hot aluminum slats of the chair and the fading grains of sand, she can taste the air and smell the cold depths of the lake, where no one ever drowns and every child comes home safely. There’s a splashing in the shallows, a dog raising its voice in ecstasy, the sharp tocsin of the lifeguard’s whistle. And then peace, carving out a space where the big green turtles rise lazily from the depths and the geese float free and a little girl, somebody’s daughter, comes wet and shivering to her mother’s sun-struck embrace.

(2009)

When the new doctor first moved in — it was a year ago now, in January — my husband Wyatt and I had him over to dinner. We were being neighborly, of course, that goes without saying, but we were also curious to see what he was like when his guard was down. After he’d had two Cutty Sarks and water, that is, and maybe half a bottle of chablis, and he was sitting by the fire with his legs stretched out before him and the remains of a platter of my cranberry tarts balanced on the swell of his belly. That was when you found out what a man was really like, in the afterglow of dinner, when he was digesting, and believe me the doctor had been no slouch at the table, putting away two steaming helpings of lobster bisque, a grilled haddock fillet with rosemary potatoes and my own tartar sauce, three buttered slices of homemade sourdough and a wilted spinach salad with bacon bits and roasted pine nuts. Of course, we weren’t the only ones to invite him over — probably half the families on the island had the same idea — but we were the first. I’d been chair of the committee that brought him here, so I had an advantage. Plus, that was me standing out there in the cold to greet him when he drove off the ferry in an old Volvo wagon the color of jack cheese.

He’d begged off that first night — too much to do, he’d said, what with unpacking and all, and that was understandable, though I really did fail to appreciate why he wouldn’t accept my offer of help, especially in the absence of a wife or children or any sort of family, if you discount the two slope-shouldered Siamese cats staring out the front window of the car — but he agreed to come the following night. “Just name the time,” he said with a little click of his fingers, “and I’ll be there.”

“We tend to eat early this time of year,” I said, trying not to make my voice sound too apologetic. We were standing on the porch of the house he was seeing for the first time and I’d just pushed open the door for him and handed him the key. There was a breeze out of the northeast, bitter as the salt smell it carried. The cats mewed in unison from the confines of the car, which sat in the driveway, sagging under its load. I was thinking of the city, how they ate at all hours there, and trying to balance Wyatt’s needs — he was a bear if he didn’t get fed — with what my mother, when she was alive, used to call etiquette.

“How early?” He lifted a pair of eyebrows thick as spruce cuttings.

“Oh, I don’t know — would four-thirty be all right?” He frowned then and I added quickly, “For cocktails, that is. Dinner can always wait.”

Whether he was put out or not, I’ll say this for him: he was prompt. There he was rapping at the door the next evening just as the light was fading from the sky and Venus brightening out over the water. He’d come at four-thirty on the dot and that showed consideration on his part, but both Wyatt and I were surprised to say the least when we got a look at what he was wearing. I don’t know what we expected, not a tux and tails certainly, but he was a doctor after all, an educated man, and from the city too, and you’d think he’d have some notion of what it meant to accept an invitation. I don’t know how to put this politely so I’ll just say I was dumbfounded to see him standing there on the front porch dressed in the very same paint-spattered blue jeans, shapeless gray sweatshirt and pinched little baseball cap he’d been wearing the previous day (which I’d excused at the time because he was in the process of moving and nobody wears their Sunday finest for lugging boxes and hauling furniture, not that he had much — medical equipment, mainly — but then the Trumbull House was furnished. That was the whole point, wasn’t it?).

Of course, I’m nothing if not adaptable, and I did manage to recover myself quickly enough to give him as gracious a smile as I could muster under the circumstances and usher him in out of the cold. I didn’t have time to worry over the peculiar odor he was bringing in with him or where I could possibly seat him without having to think about the furniture, because there he was, stamping around in the anteroom and clapping his arms to his shoulders as if he’d walked twenty miles in an arctic blast instead of just kitty-corner across the street, and the moment had come for me to act the role of hostess — and Wyatt too. Or, in his case, host.

Wyatt was looking chicken-necked in the white shirt and tie I’d made him put on, and his eyes dodged away from the doctor’s even as he took the man’s meaty big-knuckled hand in his own. “Pleased to meet you,” the doctor whispered so you could barely hear him and ran a hand through his beard. Did I mention he had a beard? A doctor with a beard? That set me back, I’ll tell you, but at least I’d seen him the previous day and this was Wyatt’s first exposure to him. (Not that there’s anything wrong with beards — half the lobstermen wear them. So does Wyatt, for that matter.)

As planned, we got sociable over the scotch whiskey, the doctor sitting in the wooden rocker by the fire and Wyatt and I settling into the couch with its linen slipcovers and ecru pillows that are nothing but dirt magnets and why I didn’t go for a darker shade — or gray even, a nice charcoal gray — I’ll never know. Of course, I didn’t want to dominate the conversation but I’m afraid there were long stretches when I was pretty much resigned to listening to my own voice as I filled him in as best I could on our institutions, our likes and dislikes, and some of our more colorful types like Heddy Hastings, who at eighty-seven years old ignored everybody’s advice and named a whole litter of Pekinese puppies after her deceased siblings and then went around talking to them as if they were living, breathing people. The doctor didn’t seem surprised, or not particularly — I guess he’d seen just about everything in the city. He was more a listener than a talker, in any case, and Wyatt wasn’t much of a conversationalist unless he was sitting down at the fishermen’s shack with the Tucker brothers and some of the other old boys he’d grown up with, and that was a problem right from the start. But I’d given Wyatt a couple of prompts, and as he got up to refresh our drinks, he cut me off in the middle of a description of the sins and venalities of the summer people and blurted, “So you’re divorced then, is that it?”

The doctor — he’d said right off Call me Austin, but the way my mother raised me I just couldn’t bring myself to address him as anything other than Doctor — held out his glass and gave us two words on the subject: “Never married.”

“Really?” I said, trying to cover my surprise. I looked at him closely, looked at him in a whole new light. I thought of the two cats in the car — Siamese, no less — and made a leap. Was he gay, was that it? Because if he was he hadn’t mentioned a thing about it when he applied for the position, and though we didn’t have a whole lot of choice (there was one other applicant, a black woman from Burkina Faso who was still working toward her certification), I don’t know if we would have wanted a gay doctor. I tried to read Wyatt’s face, to see how he was taking it, but he turned his back to me as he measured out the scotch whiskey.