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

“Tanya,” Mary Ellen said, coming down sharply on the first syllable.

“But you can’t mean that, Tanya,” I said. Wyatt stared at the paneled wall behind her. The doctor studied her as if seeing her for the first time.

“Damn straight I do.” Tanya lifted her glass and drained it, and this wasn’t just a run-of-the-mill red but an imported Chianti that cost twenty-two dollars a bottle on the mainland and was meant to be sipped and sniffed and appreciated. She glared round the room, then pushed herself up from the table. “And if you”—she pointed a finger at me—“and my mother think you can shove me off on some man I’ve never laid eyes on in my life just because you’ve got nothing better to do than play matchmaker, then you don’t need his kind of doctor, you need a head doctor.”

We tried, both Mary Ellen and I, but Tanya wouldn’t sit back down and eat. She wandered away from the table and into the living room, where she sank into the easy chair by the fire, and I was so involved in that moment with getting dinner on the table — the green beans were within ten seconds of being overcooked to the point of losing their texture — that I didn’t notice her slip out the door. What could I do? I put on a brave face and served the pasta and the green beans and we all seemed to find common ground in the vacancy Tanya left behind. The doctor perked up, Wyatt regaled us with a story about the young kayaker killed by a shark that apparently mistook the silhouette of his boat for a basking seal (a story so fresh I’d only heard it twice before), and Mary Ellen used her people skills to bring the doctor out — at least as far as he was willing to come.

We learned what had become of the oil paintings, which were now stored in the closet on the ground floor (“Too nautical for a landlubber like me,” he said with a chuckle) and discovered that his family name was of Franco-German origin. He had a brandy after dinner, his eyes at half mast and his big hands folded over his abdomen, and he never mentioned Tanya or the scene she’d created. And when his eyes fell shut and his breathing began to slow, Mary Ellen gently shook him awake and he looked at us all as if trying to recollect who we were and where he was, before rising massively and murmuring that he’d a lovely evening and hoped he could repay us someday with an invitation of his own.

—

Spring came in a long succession of downpours that flooded the streets and got the peepers peeping and the birds winging in from the south, a spell of nice weather took us by surprise in mid-May, and then it was June and the summer people began their annual migration. I saw Tanya around town with her two boys (three-year-olds, and a real handful), but we didn’t stop to chat because no matter what she’d been through with her ex or how sympathetic and forgiving a person I might be, her behavior in my dining room had been inexcusable, just inexcusable. As for the doctor, I did slip out one evening and leave a few anonymous gifts on his front porch — the shaving lotion and mouthwash, along with a plastic bucket of cleaning supplies and a mustache trimmer I found at the drugstore — but I was busy with a thousand things and hadn’t got round to inviting him over again and, of course, we were still waiting for him to live up to his parting promise and have us over one night in return. Not that I blamed him for putting us off. He had enough on his hands with the influx of summer people and the rash of contusions and snapped bones they suffered pitching headlong over the handlebars of their mopeds or careening down the rocks at Pilcher’s Head without having to worry about entertaining (though certainly it wouldn’t have killed him to host a cocktail party in that magnificent front room of the Trumbull House — if it still was magnificent, that is). In fact, all I knew of the doctor during the ensuing months came to me on the wings of rumor and complaint. Everybody had something to say on the subject, it seemed, and at the next town meeting, sure enough, Betsy Fike, who could hone the knife blade of a grudge for months if not years, stood up and declared that something had to be done about the state of the doctor’s office, not to mention the house, which was common property of the township and needed to be kept up out of consideration for the next generation and beyond.

Mervis Leroy, who was chair of the meeting, asked if she’d actually been in the house since the doctor’s occupation thereof and could testify to any lack of upkeep or deterioration, and Betsy (she’s five foot one, whip-smart, with two grown daughters and a husband about as expressive as a wall) admitted that she hadn’t. “But I’ve been to his office twice, after that first time when he wouldn’t even answer the door, and I can tell you the place is a pigsty. Worse. Even a pig wouldn’t put up with it.”

Voices piped up all around her and Mervis pounded his gavel and recognized one speaker after another, everybody supplying anecdotal evidence but pretty much saying the same thing: that Dr. Murdbritter seemed all right as a doctor, neither conspicuously bad nor conspicuously good, but that the way he maintained his office and his person was a disgrace. Someone, I forget who, pointed out that his Volvo had been sitting at the curb with a flat tire for two months now and that when he did make house calls he did it on foot, which was no way to operate if a crisis ever arose. Especially if you were overweight. And then there was the garbage situation and the way the dogs would get into his cans and scatter trash (and worse: medical waste) all over his back lawn and how he never bothered to do a thing about it. Junie Jordan said that while she was in the waiting room Wednesday last she’d peeked in the door at the main room of the house and saw that it hadn’t been touched since the day he moved in, except that the chairs were all covered in cat hair and there were dust bunnies sprouting up everywhere and cobwebs in the corners like in a horror movie, big ropes of them. People looked angry.

Then came the question: what to do about it? Send him a letter of official condemnation? Tell him to clean up or ship out? Start all over again searching for a replacement, one who was a model of personal hygiene? Do nothing and hope for the best? Finally — and this was my inspiration, because I had so much invested in making this work and could always see my way to a compromise, unlike some of my neighbors, who will go unmentioned here — it was moved that the township should allocate two hundred dollars a month out of the general fund for the purpose of hiring a maid to go into the Trumbull House once a week and straighten up. Betsy Fike seconded the motion. The chorus of ayes was resounding.

We found a young immigrant woman from Lincolnville and she took the ferry out and marched up the street with her own mop and broom slung like weapons of war over one shoulder. I watched her mount the steps, try the door handle — the door was left unlocked during office hours — and vanish inside. Five minutes later, she was back on the porch, the doctor hovering in the doorway like some dark presence while the young woman — a girl really — seemed to be giving him what for. I only wished I could have heard what they were saying, and I did go to the front door and ease it open, but at that moment a pack of tourists went buzzing by on their mopeds and all sense was lost to the racketing of their engines.

I waited ten minutes, watching the erstwhile maid head off down the street, the mop and broom dragging behind her in the dirt in the very picture of defeat, before I rang the doctor’s number. He answered on the second ring. “Dr. Murdbritter,” he announced in his official voice.

“I just wanted to know why you turned that girl away,” I started in without preliminary, and I guess that was a mistake. “We allocated the funds. For you. To help you with, well, to give you a hand keeping the place up—”