All of them liked to be taped, Lardner said.
It was their creativity.
They went like this:
Patient: I feel ugly all the time. I can’t quit cigarettes. The two Great Danes I bought won’t mate. I’m starting to cry over sentimental things, songs on the radio. Is it basically wrong for a man to like macramé? I never feel intimate with anybody until we talk about Nixon, how awful he was. My kid looks away when I give him an order. I mean a gentle order. Let me take a breath.
Lardner: Jesus Damn Christ! What an interesting case! Your story takes the ticket. This is beyond trouble, Mr., ________________ this is art!
Patient: What? My story art?
Lardner: Yes. You are ugly. But so very important.
Patient: You think so?
And so on.
The next one might go:
Patient: I’m angry, angry, Doctor Lardner.
Lardner: Why?
Patient: Because I’m a woman. I’ve taken such evil crap over the years.
Lardner: Why?
Patient: I thought you’d want to know what.
Lardner: You got the wrong doctor. Down on Fifth Avenue, about a dozen doors away, there’s a good what doctor. A little more expensive.
Patient: I’m so angry at men everywhere. Nothing will ever cure me of this hatred.
Lardner: You’re wasting money on me. I’m a man.
Patient: But with time, you and I might produce a cure for me.
Lardner: Well, we can start with your basic remedy and work out from there. How about a glass of pure gin on the rocks and a hard dick? (Sounds of fistfight between Lardner and patient.) You hit my gnarled hand!
Patient: Oh, I’m so sorry! Christ! I didn’t want to.
Lardner: I think you did.
Patient: I. . yes! I did! We’ve produced a cure together. You work so fast. (Sounds of slipped-off panties.) Have me, have! Let me make up for the hand!
And the only other one I recalclass="underline"
Patient: It’s the end of the world. It’s the Big Fight. I read the Times on the subway, and think about my people, the Jews. I think of my good job and prosperity. The oil issue is going to wipe Israel out in ten years. There won’t be an Israel. My people will be raped and burned over. And I want to fight. I want to leave Westchester County and fight. I want to bear arms and defend Israel. How can I stand walking around the streets of this town, this loud confusing city, when there are issues so clear-cut?
Lardner: Shit, I don’t know. Why don’t you fly out tomorrow morning?
When Lardner came back home to the South, he invited me over for a drink in his backyard at Baton Rouge. There’d been a storm in the afternoon and it had made June seem like October all of a sudden when it left. Here he was asking me whether he should go on and finish med school or not, and then he played me the tape recordings.
“The only thing we’re sure about anymore is how much money we need,” said I. “That’s about as profound as I ever get. I’ve got a wife and two kids. Me and the wife drink a great deal in the evenings of Baton Rouge. We’re happy. The great questions seemed to have passed us by. I’m a radiologist. All day long I look for shadows. We’ve got two Chinese elm trees in our backyard and a fat calico named Sidney. Our children are beautiful and I’ve got stock in Shell.”
“You’re right,” said Lardner.
“Every man can be a king if he wants to,” I said. “That’s what my father said. He had harder times than me or you.”
“That’s true,” Lardner said.
The last thing I heard about Lardner, he was on a boat out of New Orleans headed for Rio. From there he took ship to Spain.
I don’t know another thing about him.
Escape to Newark
Carlos, please put me on the Significant Persons list, she said. We didn’t know you had any faith. You never acted like a Catholic. You swore and whored and were petty like the rest of us. Please, please let me and Robinson on your ship. Robinson is always religious when he has a hangover. I myself had a suspicion there were some old verities. We used to go down to the pond and throw bread at the ducks. They always reminded me of the old verities, so white and natural. Robinson even at his worst claimed he was wandering toward the ancient basics, but he was scared numb that he might have found them already. The point is, we always meant well, Carlos.
We loved kikes and niggers, she continued softly.
Perhaps we just had too much confidence, she sighed. The rest was almost inaudible.
We were a handsome couple and knew it, besides — she gasped — talented.
She had thick blond hair and soft-set eyes and had once been a female polo player of some note on the greenest and wealthiest fields of the Carolinas and New York State. Furthermore, she had a style of being stylish that was the envy of thousands of the envious. Carlos was one of those who had coveted her in years past. He quivered in his garage that she was here at last.
Tell me the story of your life, Carlos said sternly.
At heart he was jealous and nosy, and he bit himself inwardly for his poor motives. In her automobile’s windshield he caught a reflection of himself in shorts, bald head, hairy Catholic titties.
Carlos and this woman were the same age, had gone to the same prep school in Boston, both rubes together there. He was from Santa Fe and she was from Alaska. But she got rid of Alaska very early, homed in Florida for seven years, was fourteen and bored in Pennsylvania; over to Boston, thence to college and New York, where she found Robinson among the hundreds of New Yorkers who managed to make a great amount of money for doing almost nothing at all but was pretty as a god and possessed of a voice like a French horn, so that at crucial parties he could say practically nothing and leave the impression among the more musically eared that profundity of the eternal sort had passed near. She was caught.
Her dad was filthy rich from a corrupt deal on the Alaskan pipeline. Everything was guaranteed for a blast of manna and romance. So they married. Robinson was a very clean man and shocked by the filth of the assault she made on him. He developed hobbies to escape her. But when he got ready and had grown to her needs and pressed her, she turned into a sort of brilliant nag who deserted him and had developed her own expensive hobbies. So that one day a helicopter landed on the roof of the club and took her off to the Caribbean. He went to the bar and, among the kind, garrulous blacks in their livery, he became a dreamer on alcohol.
She was faithful to him except for one night with drugs in her, given to her by a friend she trusted in Rio. Oh, Rio, Rio, Rio. Women are patient and men are not. Women are softer and carouse like feathers against each other. She allowed herself to be taken by the featherly Vera and, as she recalled, reciprocated somewhat. Some days she blamed it on the drug and some days she blamed her past, other days she blamed her glands, and on horrible bright days she blamed herself entire.
While in the meantime Robinson drove a lonely, horny and faithful course around the main cities of the nation, sometimes visiting a library or an observatory, making money hand over fist. He did it with the only talent he had never cultivated, his honesty. They bought snowmobiles from his company in Kentucky, because by that time the weather had turned very weird. All the upper South was white and frigid.
She did not tell Carlos much of this. Her story was full of modest lies that proved she had not had an interesting life at all. The taste of Vera came into her mouth as she thinned her tale. She censored one after another the scenes of bliss that she had passed, sometimes in the company of Robinson and sometimes when not, feeling like a lone released atom of rapture in Key West, in Charleston, in New York, in the sky over Ontario in Winston’s glider: oh, the quiet, oh, the blue, Winston at the stick, handsome but not a lover, just the best friend she ever had. Oh, the thick green forest, the fierce rocks below, the eagle who sailed tandem six feet from their window and turned to look directly at her face, as much as saying he was their friend; she had never imagined birds smiled when they flew.