Justin Tussing - Vexation Lullaby

“You got a sweet tooth?”

The speaker’s heavy-lidded, bloodshot eyes peered out from behind a pair of thick-framed reading glasses. Peter thought he recognized the roadie he’d spotted writing at the table when he’d first entered the suite.

“I just ate the one.”

“Anybody hassle you?”

“Nothing I can’t handle.” It sounded like a reasonable approximation of what Martin Vinoray might say. During the week Martin headed Internal Medicine at Rochester Memorial, but on the weekends he served as the front man for a seven-piece surf band called the Steel Retractors. Peter considered Martin his best friend.

“Do you need anything? You want a something to eat, maybe a drink?”

“Have you seen Mr. Cross?”

The roadie smiled, a smirk of a smile, as thin and as crooked as an earthworm. “Man, you’re looking at him.”

A switch flipped and everything about the man’s face became familiar, the palest blue eyes, the downturned corners of his mouth, that battering ram of a nose. The glasses were the thinnest of disguises, standard reading glasses from a drugstore spinner. A sentence wedged itself in Peter’s throat. If he so much as breathed, “You’re Jimmy fucking Cross” would come spouting from his mouth.

“You’ve got your mother’s eyebrows,” Cross said. “She was like a Jewish Frida Kahlo.”

Judith had finally started trimming her eyebrows. The last time Peter was in Boulder, his mother had dragged him into a little shop off Pearl Street so he could watch an aesthetician tame her brows with a loop of thread.

Sticking his hand out, Peter said, “It’s an honor to meet you.”

Cross clasped his hand as though he were trapping a butterfly. “We’ve met before.”

It was a ludicrous idea, but Peter decided it would be easiest to play along. He retrieved his stethoscope and a blood pressure cuff. He plucked a pair of examination gloves from a crumpled box. “Do you mind opening your shirt?”

“Right to business.” Cross sounded relaxed, but Peter noticed that the singer kept opening and closing his right hand.

“Did you meet Judith in Colorado?”

“Not Colorado.”

“Not Colorado?”

“She turned up at my farm.”

“Where’s your farm?”

Cross, who had started to unbutton his shirt, paused. “Someone told me it’s under a Lowe’s parking lot, but I haven’t been back to check.”

Here was something: a purple scar started at Cross’s suprasternal notch and ran down past the xiphoid process, bisecting his sternum.

“Someone crack you open?”

Instead of looking at his chest, Cross kept his eyes on Peter. “Down in Baja I flew a three-wheeler off a limestone cliff. Busted four ribs and punctured a lung. I wound up in this whitewashed adobe hospital that looked like a Spanish mission. This Swedish doctor who’d gone down there to catch black marlin saved my life.”

Hospitals maintained flowcharts to steer patients through their visits. Physicians and nurses gathered information according to prescribed channels; sometimes a headache pointed to dehydration and sometimes it pointed to a medulloblastoma. Medicine required structure. Doctors Without Borders was something of a misnomer — every time they helicoptered into a remote disaster, they brought borders with them, Tyvek-walled field hospitals, blue wrap, mosquito netting, even triage cards were a kind of border.

“What else should I know about your medical history?”

Cross pulled an electronic cigarette from his shirt pocket and set it in the bowl among the candied almonds. “I’m an open book.”

“Are you on any medication?”

“You mean prescription medicine?”

“Exactly.”

“I don’t think so.”

Peter pointed to the vaporizer. “How long have you smoked?”

“I don’t.” Cross centered the candy bowl on the table. “Someone handed me that backstage.”

“Maybe we should start with why you wanted to see a doctor.”

“What do people usually say?”

Peter took a deep breath. “They usually tell me what’s been bothering them.”

“Last week,” Cross began, “I met a friend in Quebec City. He used to deal antique books but he’s in power now, transmission lines, turbine generators. We’ve been going to this Italian place since forever. As soon as I walk inside it’s 1978—this Romanian heartbreaker I used to know is sitting at the bar chewing on her thumb. Next to her is Bobby Swain, my first manager. Bobby’s heart killed him in Toronto fifteen years ago.”

“You were hallucinating.”

“Last I heard the girl had a bunch of Romanian babies with a French duke. I ducked into the bathroom and splashed some water on my face. When I finished, I found my old friend at a table popping some pill that allows him to eat dairy.”

“Did you speak with a doctor?”

“You’re a doctor.”

“Have there been other incidents?”

Cross slumped into a chair beside the card table. “I spent half my life trying to give people the slip, and now I’m scared some vital part of me will split without leaving a forwarding address.”

Peter didn’t like standing while his patient sat, but neither did he want to sit down across the table from Cross. Instead, he got down on a knee, like a quarterback or as if he were about to ask for Cross’s hand. “Have you considered speaking with a mental health professional? A psychiatrist or a psychologist?”

“I see Ari Mendelsohn, on the Upper East Side. He lets me do phone sessions while I’m on the road. When we started I paid him less than my dog walker, but I made the mistake of mentioning that to him. Now he charges me the same as White and Case bills for lead counsel.”

“And he knows about this episode?”

“Ari keeps all my secrets.” Cross got up and walked to the bed. From beneath the black hat he retrieved a small manila envelope. “This is for you.”

Peter set his stethoscope down and extracted a single 3-by-5-inch photo from the envelope. The picture’s subject, half-veiled beneath the branches of a willow tree, a squat sports car with round headlights and an open grille — Peter thought the car resembled a kid sucking on a bar of soap.

“You recognize it?”

“Is that a Fiat or something?”

“That’s a Sunbeam Tiger. They bolted a small-block Chevy to a British frame with drum brakes and bad wiring. Your mother drove that car through snowstorms. She was fearless.”

Fearless. That was Judith in a nutshell.

“I should have sent you tickets,” Cross said.

“Tickets?”

“For tonight’s show. I take it you weren’t there.”

The room phone rang again, an expensive, dulcimer sound.

“Do you want to get that?”

“I’m not obliged to be convenient.” Cross settled into a chair and rebuttoned his shirt.

Peter got the feeling he wasn’t there to deliver medicine; at best, he could advocate for it.

There was a knock as the door cracked open. Cyril said, “Bluto wants you to know the plane cleared Teterboro. We should leave for the airport in thirty.” With his message delivered, the large man retreated.

Peter said, “I’d imagine losing track of time is an occupational hazard.”

“Did your mother tell you how we met?”

Was it possible Judith hadn’t realized that her friend Jimmy happened to be one of the most famous recording artists on the planet? “Tell me.”

“I went out to pick up the newspaper and found her sitting on my porch with a sleeping bag wrapped around her shoulders.”

“Judith?”

“I asked if she needed to use the phone. She said she didn’t have anyone to call, so I brought her some coffee. She wouldn’t drink it, so I brought her a glass of milk. She finished it in one gulp. She was just a kid.”