I sit at my desk and listen to Don Giovanni and watch the martins through the open door. From the lower desk drawer, where I also keep the free samples of Bayonne-rayon Skintone organs, I fetch a fresh bottle of Early Times.
My office is exactly as my father left it twenty years ago: three rooms, one behind the other like a shotgun cottage, but with a hall alongside, my office at the rear, treatment room in the middle, and at the front the waiting room furnished with the same sprung green wicker and even the same magazines: the Ford Times, National Geographic, the Knights of Columbus magazine, and the S A E Record (my father was an S A E).
The offices are dark. No sign of Ellen, my nurse, and no patient in the waiting room. A sigh of relief and a long happy evening.
No such luck.
A half hour of happiness, the fresh sour evening, the gathering storm, a warm toddy, and the singing god-like devilish music of Don Giovanni and—bang.
Bang up front, the door slams, and here comes Ellen clop-clopping down the hall.
It seems I’ve got not one but three patients. They went away all right, but they’ve come back. Ellen told them: don’t worry, she’d find me.
I sigh and console myself: I should be able to polish them off in thirty minutes — and do right by them, Ellen! Leroy! Hippocrates! — and get back to my researches. I’ve the strongest feeling that the second breakthrough is imminent, that if I wait and be still and listen, it will come to me, the final refinement of my invention that will make it the perfect medicine. I’ve the strongest feeling that the solution is under my nose, one of those huge simple ideas that are so big you can’t see them for being too close.
“Good heavens, Chief, where’ve you been? I’ve been looking for you all day.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why have you been looking for me? Today is Saturday.”
I lean back in my chair and watch Ellen sadly as she picks up the fifth of Early Times and puts it back in the drawer of organs. Then she rinses out my toddy glass, closes the back door, turns off Mozart, pops a chlorophyll tablet in my mouth, wets her thumb with her tongue and smooths my eyebrows with firm smoothings like a mother. My eyebrows feel wet and cool.
Ellen Oglethorpe is a beautiful but tyrannical Georgia Presbyterian. A ripe Georgia persimmon not a peach, she fairly pops the buttons of her nurse’s uniform with her tart ripeness. She burgeons with marriageable Presbyterianism. It somehow happens that the strict observance of her religion gives her leave to be free with her own person. Her principles allow her a kind of chaste wantonness. She touches me, leans against me, puts spit on me. I shudder with horrible pleasure and pleasurable horror. Caught up by her strong female urgings, one to mother, one to marry, one to be a girl-child and lean against you, she muses and watches and is prodigal with herself — like an eleven-year-old who stands between your legs, eyes watching your eyes, elbows and knees engaging you in the lap, anywhere, each touch setting off in you horrid girl-child tingles. She doesn’t know how close is close.
Now she stands in front of me even closer than usual, hands behind her. I have to look up. Her face is tilted back, the bones under her cheeks winged and wide as if the sculptor had spread out the alar ridges with two sure thumb thrusts. The short downy upper lip is lifted clear of the lower by its tendon. Her face, foreshortened, is simple and clear and scrubbed and peach-mottled, its beauty fortuitous like that of a Puritan woman leaning over her washtub and the blood going despite her to her face.
“Look, Ellen, it’s Saturday. What are you doing here?”
“Not an ordinary Saturday.”
“No?”
“It’s your birthday.”
And what she’s hiding behind her is a present. She hands it to me. I feel a prickle of irritation. My birthday is but one more occasion for her tending to me, soliciting me, enlisting me. Yes, it is my birthday. I am forty-five. As I unwrap it, she comes round and leans on my chair arm and breathes on me.
It is the sort of present only a woman would buy. A gift set of Hell-for-Leather pre-shave and after-shave lotion. Through the chair arm comes the push of her heedless body weight. Her sweet breath comes through her parted lips. There is nothing to do but open a bottle. It smells like cloves.
“We’ve got customers, Chief.”
Though she is an excellent nurse, I wish she would not call me Chief and herself my girl Friday.
Forty-five. It is strange how little one changes. The psychologists are all wrong about puberty. Puberty changes nothing. This morning I woke with exactly the same cosmic sexual-religious longing I woke with when I was ten years old. Nothing changes but accidentals: your toes rotate, showing more skin. Every molecule in your body has been replaced but you are exactly the same.
The scientists are wrong: man is not his own juices but a vortex, a traveling suck in his juices.
Ellen pats some Hell-for-Leather on me.
“How do you like it, Chief?”
“Very much,” I say, eyes watering with cloves.
Ellen, though she is a strict churchgoer and a moral girl, does not believe in God. Rather does she believe in the Golden Rule and in doing right. On the whole she is embarrassed by the God business. But she does right. She doesn’t need God. What does God have to do with being honest, hard-working, chaste, upright, unselfish, etcetera. I on the other hand believe in God, the Jews, Christ, the whole business. Yet I don’t do right. I am a Renaissance pope, an immoral believer. Between the two of us we might have saved Christianity. Instead we lost it.
“Are you ready now, Chief?”
“Ready for what?”
“You’ve got two patients. Or rather three. But two are together.”
“Who?”
“There’s Mr. Ives and Mr. and Mrs. Tennis.”
“Good God. Who is Mr. Ives?”
“You know. He’s an old patient of yours.”
“Wait a minute. Isn’t he from Gerry Rehab over in Fedville?”
“Yes.”
“Then what’s he doing here?”
“He wanted to see you.”
“He’s the patient who’s up for The Pit Monday, isn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“I still don’t understand how he got here.”
“He wanted to see you. I brought him.”
“You?”
“Don’t forget, Chief, I used to work over there.”
She did. She even took care of me in the acute ward when I was strung out, bound by the wrists, yet in the end free and happy as a bird, by turns lustful and exalted, winging it like a martin, inducing scientific theories, remembering everything, quoting whole pages of Gerard Manley Hopkins:
Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-color as a brinded cow;
For rose moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls;
and inviting her into my bed, her of all people.
Nevertheless, when I left the hospital, she came with me and set up as my nurse. Toward me she feels strong Presbyterian mother-smoothings.
“Did Mr. Ives want to come or was it your idea?”
“My idea?”
“Did you think I needed a little briefing before appearing in The Pit?”
“Tch. What do you mean?”
“Are you afraid Dr. Brown is going to beat me?”