Dr. Vernon Petersen was a man of average height with a full head of white hair and decent eyesight, even now requiring only reading glasses. In his day, he’d heard it said he resembled Robert Taylor, but knew that wasn’t true anymore. And, anyway, no one remembered who Robert Taylor was these days, outside of Vernon’s own age group. He took no exercise other than golf, though if it got too cold for that in the winter months, he substituted regular walks. That was all, but his stomach was flat and he hadn’t been a smoker for thirty years and never a heavy drinker. A glass of wine before bed. Maybe a cocktail dining out.
In a pink short-sleeve polo and cream-color shorts, he set out for the country club. Soon he and the other three retired doctors were playing their regular eighteen holes in the crisp October air. The four men were evenly matched and all regularly scored in the low 90s. This made the competition friendly yet fierce.
Today Vernon shot 88 and felt like Arnold Palmer. The other three gave him crap, but they were clearly pleased for him. Only Merle seemed somewhat annoyed, but then he was one of those golfers who scored only misery on the course yet kept coming back for more.
Which of course Vernon and the others found endlessly amusing.
The four finished up around noon and took their regular lunch at their regular table in the clubhouse dining room. Their standing order was steak sandwiches and fries all around, after cocktails of course (Vernon usually just had a Coke, today no exception). Like many doctors, they didn’t eat particularly healthy, and Vernon was the only non-smoker. But at least his fellow physicians didn’t puff away at the table until after the meal.
All four men wore pastel polos and cream-color shorts and golf caps that they were classy enough to remove in the dining room, making them an exception.
“You know,” Walter Johnson said, a heavy-set retired heart surgeon who’d performed Vernon’s double bypass, “we’re getting to be a dying breed around this neck of the woods.”
“Who is?” Vernon asked.
Walter raised an untamed eyebrow. “You heard about Sam Carter.”
“No.” Vernon shrugged. “Haven’t kept in touch since he retired. He’s in Atlanta, isn’t he?”
Short stumpy Merle, an ophthalmologist, grunted, adjusting his glasses on the bridge of his bump of a nose. “He’s in the ground is where he is. You didn’t hear? Don’t you take the paper?”
“I take the paper, but I didn’t hear.”
“Fell down his goddamn stairs,” Jack Matheson said. The retired oncologist was Vernon’s height, bald, a one-time high school quarterback whose chin had long since disappeared into his neck, though only a protruding gut had otherwise impacted his physique.
“You’re lucky,” Merle said to Vernon, “that you only have one floor in that place of yours.”
“Well, Sam Carter, huh,” Vernon said, summoning a frown. “Isn’t that a damn shame.”
Actually, Carter — a recently retired pediatric surgeon who used devices to straighten limbs, a procedure that struck Vernon as sadistic — had been an awful man.
“Oh, he was a prick,” Merle said dismissively. “What’s a shame is what happened to Lee Meyer.”
Vernon nodded.
That death he knew about — it had made the local TV news and the paper. Meyer, also retired though not recently, had been a pediatrician. He’d gone out fishing on his cabin cruiser by himself (never a good idea) and had apparently fallen overboard and drowned. His boat had been found turning in a circle and he was washed up on shore. This was last week, and Vernon had almost gone to the funeral.
Walter, who had a dry, dark sense of humor, said, “Maybe we’re okay. Maybe it’s only retired kid doctors God has it in for.”
“Two accidental deaths,” Vernon said, a little disturbed by this talk, “isn’t an epidemic.”
“No, but still — it makes you think.”
“Does it?” Merle smirked. “About what? Not walkin’ down the stairs? Not goin’ out on the river? You gotta live your friggin’ life!”
“Till it’s over you do,” Walter said with a slight smile. “Then you can take the day off.”
Jack grinned. “Retired people take every day off.”
“Bullshit!” Merle said. “I’ve never been busier! My wife works me like a damn dog, like a goddamn dog! And I spend half my time babysitting the grandkids.”
Vernon smiled. “And you love it.”
Merle shrugged. “Yeah. I do. My point is, you can’t go through life like it’s a damn mine field.”
“But you should,” Walter said. The heart surgeon was big on diet and exercise, though he was lighting up his latest cigarette as he made this remark.
“What you should do,” Jack said, “is live every day like it’s your last.” The oncologist had been the one who discovered Jean’s cancer.
Walter started coughing, the smoke going down the wrong way. “You mean like I do?” he said, still coughing, and everybody laughed at that.
Back at the condo, Vernon took a nap. Then, returning to the world about an hour later, he watched The Match Game before starting the latest Sidney Sheldon novel, which he read until it was time to get decked out for his big night.
That big night was his third date with Jessica Hahn, the widow of his car dealership buddy Norm — actually, Vernon’s third date period, since Jean’s death. Right now he felt much as he had anticipating the previous two dates — exhilarated... and guilty.
In the hospital, in what would soon be her death bed, his lovely bride of fifty years had looked at him with those eyes as clear and blue as ever they’d been and said, “You need to date.”
“What?” he’d blurted.
“When I’m gone, you’re not to be lonely. I won’t have it. Promise me.”
“You’re not going anywhere.”
“Of course I am. And so are you, just a little later than me. I want you to promise me you won’t be lonely and just sit around and mope.”
That was from a song in Damn Yankees, a musical they both loved. She’d played the lead in college — Lola, who got whatever she wanted — and had been wonderful in the sexy role. He hadn’t known her, just another guy in the audience. But he’d gone out of his way to remedy that.
“Sure, baby,” he told her.
She squeezed his hand, harder than a woman dying of cancer should be able to. “Promise me.”
“Sure. Sure.”
But for almost six months, he hadn’t kept that promise. He in fact did, as she’d predicted, sit around and mope; also weep his eyes and heart and guts out. He’d gone around the place talking to her picture in every room and went to the cemetery every whip stitch and put on LPs of their favorite songs and watched old movies on TV that they’d seen first-run together. He would talk to his kids on the phone and pretend to be fine. And then he would cry and feel sorry for himself.
One small solace were the people who came up to him not to offer condolences — usually not even knowing about Jean’s passing — but folks twenty through fifty, with thanks and smiles at running into the doctor who’d brought their children or sometimes themselves into the world. It was the kind of thing that made a life of doctoring seem not only worthwhile, but special.
That wasn’t enough to warm a night, but it was something. Momentary, but something.
He ran into Jessica at the supermarket. She’d lost Norm a year ago. Ten years younger than Vernon, she looked very nice, her hair a believable blonde, her figure full but in a really good way. She did nice things to her yellow and black patterned polyester top and yellow flared slacks. She might have been forty, not sixty-something.