“Sit here, please,” he said, indicating the table, and he went through the usual routine, taking my temperature, peering into my eyes, listening to my heart and lungs. “Now, if you’ll just lie back,” he said finally, puffing for breath as if he’d just climbed a steep hill. I lifted my legs to the table and lay back, wondering about that, and then it came to me: he was out of condition, that was what it was, as disordered on the inside as he was on the outside, overweight, sloppy, with an appetite for deep-fried food and no wife or mother to anchor him. I felt sorry for him suddenly, felt as if I wanted to reach out and console him, help him, but then he was there leaning over me, his fingers pressing at my abdomen, roving from one spot to another, liver, kidneys and lower. Was this painful? This?
I was unconsciously holding my breath, his odor — it was B.O., plain and simple, and I saw myself gift-wrapping one of the spare bottles of Old Spice Wyatt’s sister sends every Christmas and leaving it on his porch in an anonymous gesture — settling over me like a miasma. Listerine. Maybe I’d leave some Listerine too.
“You understand you’ll have to go to the mainland, to a gynecologist, for a complete exam,” he offered at the conclusion of our little visit. “I can’t really do an exam without a nurse present — for my own protection, you understand — and since we don’t seem to have funding for a nurse…”
“Yes,” I said, feeling nothing but relief.
He was writing a prescription for some sort of pain medication — or a placebo, more likely — and saying, “Just take one of these every four hours for pain, and if it gets worse, or if there’s any bleeding or unusual discharge, you let me know right away.”
I smiled as best I could, and then, ignoring everything — the mess of the room, his beard, the fact that his lower teeth were as yellow as a dog’s — I made a leap, envisioning a little dinner party, my shrimp scampi or maybe linguine, Tanya Burkhardt and her mother Mary Ellen sitting across the table from the doctor and Wyatt mixing the drinks. “I was wondering,” I said, as he handed me the prescription, which I was determined to tear up the minute I was out the door, “if maybe you wouldn’t want to come over to dinner again sometime soon? Thursday, maybe? How does Thursday sound?”
—
Tanya and Mary Ellen arrived first, and I saw right away that Tanya hadn’t managed to gain back any of the weight she’d lost from the strain of the divorce and trying to manage the twins all by herself (though I couldn’t understand why, since she’d been back nearly three months now and living at home, where she didn’t have to lift a finger and Mary Ellen heaped up enough food three times a day to choke a lumberjack). And her hair. Tanya had always had the most beautiful hair, her best feature really, since it hid her ears and contoured her face, but here she was shorn like a nun. Which only emphasized those unfortunate ears she’d inherited from her father, Michael, now deceased but living on in his daughter’s flesh. Or cartilage, I suppose, in this case.
Anyway, we were all settled in around the fire, presenting the cozy sort of scene I hoped would awaken some long-forgotten notion of hearth and family in Dr. Murdbritter, when he called to say he’d be late — something about a last-minute patient suffering from an asthma attack, which could only have been Tom Harper, who went around wheezing like a sump pump and should have given up smoking the day he was born — and that put me off my mood. When the doctor did finally arrive, we were just finishing our second cocktail — Wyatt had made up a batch of his famous cranberry margaritas — and I’m afraid Tanya was looking a bit flushed.
I don’t know if I was overcompensating by getting everybody to the table as expeditiously as possible (yes, the doctor had his drink, white wine, and precisely three of my Swedish meatballs and two slices of cheese folded onto half a cracker amidst a smattering of small talk orchestrated by Mary Ellen and me), but I did really feel that we had to get something on our stomachs. I seated the doctor between Tanya and her mother, across from Wyatt and myself, and served the bread hot from the oven with pats of fresh creamery butter and little individual dipping plates of my own garlic-infused olive oil, which I figured would keep them busy long enough for me to excuse myself and dress the salad. I was in the kitchen, trying to listen to the conversation wafting in from the dining room while I tossed the salad and grated Romano, when Tanya sashayed through the open door and helped herself to a glass of the Italian red I’d set aside for the pasta course, filling it right to the very rim. “It’s a nice wine,” I said absently, but she just put her lips to the glass, shrugged, and drank half of it in a gulp before topping off the glass and drifting back into the dining room to take her seat at the table. Was this a recipe for trouble? I couldn’t say, not at the time, but my thinking was charitable and if I was foolish enough to try to play matchmaker, well, maybe I got what I deserved.
It seemed that Tanya took a dislike to the doctor right off, asking him all sorts of pointed (rude, that is) questions about his past and why he’d ever want to maroon himself in a craphole (her exact phrase) like this. I tried to intercede, to have a general conversation, but the doctor, chuffing slightly and making short work of the bread, butter and olive oil, didn’t seem fazed, or not particularly. “Oh, I don’t know,” he breathed, snatching a look at her before dropping his eyes to his plate, “I guess I’d just had enough of the rat race in the city. Know what I mean?”
“No, I don’t,” Tanya returned, with real vehemence. “People look at me like I’m some sort of wounded bird or something just because I’ve crawled back here to my mother, but I can’t wait to get away again. Just give me the opportunity — give me a ticket anywhere and five hundred bucks and I’m gone.”
“Tanya,” Mary Ellen said, coming down sharply on the first syllable.
“But you can’t mean that, Tanya,” I said. Wyatt stared at the paneled wall behind her. The doctor studied her as if seeing her for the first time.
“Damn straight I do.” Tanya lifted her glass and drained it, and this wasn’t just a run-of-the-mill red but an imported Chianti that cost twenty-two dollars a bottle on the mainland and was meant to be sipped and sniffed and appreciated. She glared round the room, then pushed herself up from the table. “And if you”—she pointed a finger at me—“and my mother think you can shove me off on some man I’ve never laid eyes on in my life just because you’ve got nothing better to do than play matchmaker, then you don’t need his kind of doctor, you need a head doctor.”
We tried, both Mary Ellen and I, but Tanya wouldn’t sit back down and eat. She wandered away from the table and into the living room, where she sank into the easy chair by the fire, and I was so involved in that moment with getting dinner on the table — the green beans were within ten seconds of being overcooked to the point of losing their texture — that I didn’t notice her slip out the door. What could I do? I put on a brave face and served the pasta and the green beans and we all seemed to find common ground in the vacancy Tanya left behind. The doctor perked up, Wyatt regaled us with a story about the young kayaker killed by a shark that apparently mistook the silhouette of his boat for a basking seal (a story so fresh I’d only heard it twice before), and Mary Ellen used her people skills to bring the doctor out — at least as far as he was willing to come.