T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

“Don R.,” I said, getting up from the desk and simultaneously fitting the stethoscope to my ears, “I can see that you’re suffering — but have no fear, you’ve come to the right man. Now, let’s have a look….”

Well, I examined him, and he was as complete and utter a physical wreck as any man under seventy who has ever set foot in my office. The chest pain, extending below the breastbone and down the left arm to the wrist and little finger, was symptomatic of angina, a sign of premature atherosclerosis; his liver and spleen were enlarged; he suffered from hypertension and ulcers; and if he didn’t yet have a full-blown case of emphysema, he was well on his way to developing it. At least, this was my preliminary diagnosis — we would know more when the test results came back from the lab.

Crocifissa returned to inform me that Signora Malatesta seemed to be having some sort of attack in the waiting room, and as the door swung shut behind her, I could see one of Santo’s bodyguards bent over the old woman, gently patting her on the back. “Momento,” I called out, and turned to Santo with my gravest expression. “You are a very unwell man, Don R.,” I told him, “and I can’t help but suspect that your style of living has been a contributing factor. You do smoke, do you not?”

A grunt. The blocky fingers patted down the breast pocket of his jacket and he produced an engraved cigarette case. He offered me a Lucky Strike with a gallant sweep of his arm and, when I refused, lit one up for himself. For a long moment he sat meditating over my question with a lungful of tobacco smoke. Finally, he shrugged his shoulders. “Two or three packs a day,” he rasped, and appended a little cough.

“And alcohol?”

“What is this, Doctor, the confessional?” he growled, fixing me with a pair of dangerous black eyes. But then he subsided, shrugging again. “A liter of Chianti or Valpolicella with my meals — at breakfast, lunch, evening snack and dinner — and maybe two or three fiaschi of brandy a day to keep my throat open.”

“Coffee?”

“A pot or two in the morning. And in the evening, when I can’t sleep. And that’s another problem, Doctor — these pills that Bernardi gave me for sleeping? Well, they have no effect on me, nothing, I might as well be swallowing little blue capsules of cat piss. I toss, I turn. My stomach is on fire. And this at four and five in the morning.”

“I see, yes,” I said, and I pulled at the little Vandyke I’ve worn for nearly forty years now to inspire confidence in my patients. “And do you — how shall I put it? Do you exercise regularly?”

Santo looked away. His swollen features seemed to close in on themselves and in that moment he was the pudgy boy again, ready to burst into tears at some real or imagined slight. When he spoke, his voice had sunk to a whisper. “You mean with the women then, eh?” And before I could answer he went on, his voice so reduced I could barely hear him: “I–I just don’t seem to feel the urge anymore. And not only when it comes to my wife, as you might expect after ten years of marriage, but with the young girls too.”

Somehow, we had steered ourselves into dangerous conversational waters, and I saw that these waters foamed with naked shoals and rocky reefs. “No, no,” I said, and I almost gasped out the words, “I meant physical exercise, jogging, bicycling, a regular twenty-minute walk, perhaps?”

“Ha!” he spat. “Exercise!” And he rose ponderously from the chair, his face as engorged and lopsided as a tomato left out to rot in the sun. “That’s all I do is exercise. My whole frigging life is exercise, morning to night and back to morning again. I can’t sleep, I can’t eat, I can’t ball the girls in the brothel and my cigarettes taste like shit. And do you know why? Do you?”

Suddenly his voice had risen to a roar and the door popped open so that I could see the burnished faces of the two bodyguards as they clutched at their waistbands for the heavy pistols they wore there. “Bastiano!” he bellowed. “Bastiano Frigging C., that’s why. That’s my problem. Not the cigarettes, not the booze, not the heart or the liver or the guts, but that bony pussy-licking son of a bitch Bastiano!”

A week later, in the middle of a consultation with Signora Trombetta over her hot flashes and crying spells, the door to my office burst open and there, looking like death in a dishpan, stood Bastiano C. I hadn’t seen him in over a year, since I’d last treated him for intestinal worms, and, as with Santo R., I was stunned by his visible deterioration. Even as a boy he’d been thin, the sullen elder child of the village schoolmaster, all legs and arms, like a spider, but now it was as if the flesh had been painted on his bones. At five feet, nine inches tall, he must have weighed less than a hundred pounds. His two bodyguards, expressionless men nearly as emaciated as he, flanked him like slats in a fence. He gave a slight jerk of his neck, barely perceptible, and the widow Trombetta, though she was in her sixties and suffering from arthritis in every joint, scurried out the door as if she’d been set afire.

“Don C.,” I said, peering at him through the upper portion of my bifocals, “how good to see you. And how may I help you?”

He said nothing, merely stood there in the doorway looking as if a breeze would blow him away if it weren’t for the pistols, shivs and cartridges that anchored him to the floor. Another minute gesture, so conservative of energy, the merest flick of the neck, and the two henchmen melted away into the waiting room, the door closing softly behind them.

I cleared my throat. “And what seems to be the matter?” I asked in my most mellifluous, comforting tones, the tones I used on the recalcitrant child, the boy who doesn’t like the look of the needle or the girl who won’t stick out her tongue for the depressor.

Nothing.

The silence was unlike him. I’d always known him as a choleric personality, quick to speak his mind, exchange insults, fly into a rage — both in the early days of our acquaintance, when he was a spoiled boy living at home with his parents, and afterward, when he began to make his mark on the world, first as a campiere on the Buschetta estate and later as a man of respect. He wasn’t one to hold anything back.

I rearranged the things on my desk, took off my glasses and wiped them with my handkerchief. Bastiano C. was twenty-six or twenty-seven years old, somewhere in that range, and his medical history had been unremarkable as far as I could recall. Oh, there had been the usual doses of clap, the knife and gun wounds, but nothing that could begin to explain the physical shambles I now saw before me. I listened to the clock in the square toll the hour — it was 4:00 P.M. and hotter than even Dante could have imagined — and then I tried one last time. “So, Don C., you’re not feeling well. Would you like to tell me about it?”

The man’s face was sour, the gift of early handsomeness pressed from it like grappa from the dregs. He scratched his rear casually, then took a seat as if he were stuffed with feathers, and leaned forward. “Pepto-Bismol,” he said in the moist high-pitched tones that made it seem as if he were sucking his words like lozenges. “I live Pepto-Bismol. I breathe it, drink it by the quart, it runs through my veins. I even shit pink.”

“Ah, it’s your stomach, then,” I said, rising now, the stethoscope dangling from my neck, but he gestured for me to remain seated. He wasn’t yet ready to reveal himself, to become intimate with my diagnostic ways.

“I am telling you, Doctor,” he said, “I do not eat, drink, smoke; my taste is gone and my pleasure in things is as dead as the black cat we nailed over Miraglia Sciacca’s door. I take two bites of pasta with a little butter and grated Romano and it’s like they stabbed me in my guts.” He looked miserably at the floor and worked the bones of his left wrist till they clicked like dice thrown against a wall. “And do you know why?” he demanded finally.