Charles Baxter - There's Something I Want You to Do

“You’ve been losing weight,” Dennis says dreamily, before coughing uncontroll ably. “So have I.”

“I’ve been running. I gotta try to look good.”

“You’re going to end up like Nathaniel Farber, that line of thinking.”

“Why?”

“Any man over the age of thirty-five who isn’t overweight is a narcissist.”

“That’s kind of oversimpli fied.”

“No, it isn’t,” Dennis says. “You met Nathaniel Farber, didn’t you?”

“Don’t leave me here,” Benny tells Dennis, after a long silence. “Don’t go away.”

“Don’t leave me here,” Dennis repeats, holding his hand out for Benny to take. “Don’t go away.” After another long silence, during which they both hear a car horn honking outside, Dennis asks, “What was her name again?”

“Nan.”

“Oh, right. I introduced you to her.”

“Yeah,” Benny says. “I guess you did. At that party.” If you invited Dennis to a party, he would always hold out on you, in case there might be a better party elsewhere.

“We had a thing,” Dennis says. “Nan and me. For two weeks. I told you that. She was cute. Don’t be offended, but I slept with her. I slept with all of them. Maybe that’s why I got cancer. Or maybe it was the cocaine. There’s a theory about cocaine and…” He winces. “It’s all disinforma tion.”

“But that was just lust, what you had,” Benny says, wanting to rouse Dennis to argumentation after another pause, with the hospital’s ventilation system whirring in the background. “What we had, Nan and I, well, that was special. ”

That morning when Nan had made scrambled eggs in Benny’s apartment kitchen, she had added salsa, and when she approached the kitchenette table where Benny was sitting, wearing only his boxer shorts underneath which his dick was again hardening to pay her tribute, she carried the serving plate toward him with a expression of the purest happiness and anticipation, and at that moment, though never afterward, she walked toward him looking like a gift, like all the colors of the rainbow. If that wasn’t love, what else could it be?

“You’re funny,” Dennis says to Benny, as Lucille comes in, closing the curtain around Dennis momentarily. When she draws the curtain again, his face has relaxed somewhat.

“Well, there are other fish in the sea,” Benny tells his friend. “That’s the cliché with which I comfort myself. Other fish, other seas. I’ll be feeling one hundred percent soon.”

“You’re funny.”

“But I need coaching. From you.”

“You’re funny.” Then he says, “You’re going to be on your own in no time flat. Where’s your hand?” Benny takes his friend’s hand again.

“How come this?” Benny asks.

“I’m scared.”

“Well, you have a right to be,” Benny says, before he realizes how undiplomatic that is. “I only meant that…”

“I know what you meant.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t worry. Did I tell you…they found a hospice for me?”

“No. You didn’t tell me.”

“It’s out in Hopkins. It’s cheap. At last: a hospice I can afford. Where are the girls now?” Dennis asks. “Where have the girls all gone? I haven’t had a lot of them visit me. Maybe they’ll drop roses on my casket.”

“They’ll be here.”

“Describe them. Do me a favor. Tell me a story. Let’s fill the time.”

“Well,” Benny says. He tries to think of what would comfort his friend. A paradise, not of virgins but of experienced worldly women, funny, quick-witted, sharp-tongued women, moviegoers who know the difference between early and late Ozu, or Kurosawa, of the styles of screwball comedies, of Stanwyck saying, “I need him like the axe needs the turkey,” but instead, sitting next to the bed and holding the hand of his friend, who seems now to be drifting into unconsciou sness, he launches into a verbal dreamworld of tits and ass, blowjobs, ecstasy, a little touch of verbal porno here at the bedside, to keep his friend’s spirits up, at least for a while.

For an hour the doctor could think of nothing worth doing and no reason to rise from his chair, so he sat in a corner of the coffee shop in downtown Minneapolis, four blocks away from the hospital, with the newspaper’s sports section spread out in front of him, unread, the evening traffic outside going by with the characteristic hiss of tires on wet pavement, a sibilant personal sound like whispering. He gripped a double espresso but did not drink it. Wind gusts whipped the decorative downtown trees. That day on rounds he had checked in on one of his patients, a little girl whom he had diagnosed with Eisenmenger syndrome. She had developed endocarditis, an infection of the heart that had not been caught before some damage to the valves had occurred. This infection had been followed by a stroke. The family had gathered in the ICU’s waiting area, and one aunt had said loudly to the assembled relatives that her niece, lying there, was unrecogniz able, and the doctor could tell — from years of similar scenes — that she, the aunt, was eager to assign blame to someone, starting with the pediatrician (himself), and then advancing up the scale of responsibi lity, to the radiologist, the surgeon, and at last God. With each new step the accusations would grow more unanswerable. Nevertheless, the arias of blame would soon begin, and they would have their predictable and characteristic melodies of resentment, rage, and malpractice. They were unstoppable. The lawyers would accompany her and provide the harmonizing chorus. For now, thinking of his patient, Dr. Jones could not go home or move in any direction, and, once again, sitting with his back against the coffee shop’s brick wall, the newspaper in front of him detailing the Twins’ latest loss to the Royals, he considered pediatric medicine the very worst of all specialties, a curse upon every physician who had ever practiced it, a field that he should never have gone into and would like to quit for some other better job, like selling boats. People were unusually happy when buying boats. Boat salesmen were dispensers of cheer. By contrast, the observance of pediatric medicine put the insane cruelties of God fully on display. His teachers in medical school had warned him about these psychic difficulties, but they had not warned him sufficiently, and just today one of his colleagues asked him whether he had started “laying crepe” with the girl’s relatives, doctor-talk referring to prepping family members for the patient’s untimely demise.

He had been hoping that his friend Benny Takemitsu, the hack architect, might stop by the coffee shop on a break from his evening run, but there was no sign of him, so with great effort, Dr. Jones, who was a bit stout, at last found some resource of energy and rose from his chair and headed toward the Mississippi River, where lately he had been granted certain…vi sitations. The visitations were products of his exhaustion. He’d considered talking to his psychiatrist friend, Dr. Gloat — his actual name — about his hallucinatory visitors, but Gloat would probably prescribe an antipsychotic like clozapine or aripiprazole, part of that class of drugs that were chemically like a wrecker’s ball set loose in the brain. Or he could call on another pal, a gerontologist, who might diagnose him with Lewy body dementia, an affliction that included voices and full-scale hallucinations of the sort that Dr. Jones had been experiencing. With a diagnosis like that, they’d put you in the bin. Despite his visitations, he recognized inwardly, as the spirals of intuition turned gently and logically, that he wasn’t demented any more than he was psychotic. Nor was he delusional. He was just seeing things as the shamans once did, the holy men and women. He was becoming a holy man. Such a change was unprecedented in his professional experience. The prospect of going mad, or holy, did not seem to be that much of a catastrophe to him as long as he could keep calm while the specters appeared. Perhaps some bed rest would be indicated. The trouble with mad people was not the hallucinations or the garbled speech, but the panic they felt, which could be contagious and often created a vulgar effect among the villagers. Elijah Elliott Jones, M.D., considered himself a scientist. Scientists should remain calm, even if they become sanctified.