“I never get ear infections,” mumbled the boy.
“He doesn’t get ear infections.” The mother’s voice built upon itself. Something inside her, a governor, had snapped. “We waited an hour to see you. You didn’t even look at his ear.”
Peter imagined Ogata shaking his head. Tsk, tsk.
With one hand holding the boy’s leaden chin, Peter grabbed his otoscope and thumbed on the light. He checked the tympanic membranes. Both sides were red and irritated. He asked the mother to take a peek.
“It’s not about me looking,” she said, shaking her phone from her purse — was she going to call someone, the boy’s father, the police? “It’s about you looking.”
Even after Peter assured her that they could treat the condition, that her son would feel better, probably within twenty-four hours, the boy’s mother managed to stay furious.
AS SOON AS he was safely in his car, he dialed Judith.
When his mother answered, Peter said, “You almost got me fired.”
“Just ‘almost.’ I’ll try harder next time.” There was no echo to her voice; he’d probably caught her fussing in the terraced garden Rolf built for her fiftieth.
“I was with lawyers all morning.”
“Don’t kid your mother.”
He told her he wasn’t, that the hospital had wanted to fire him, but it was all a big misunderstanding; his lawyer was in the process of clearing things up. Peter would know more tomorrow.
“Since when do you have a lawyer?” Her voice let him know that she’d become “concerned.” Was that the reason he’d called? Did he want her to worry about him? If anything, he was supposed to worry about her, his aging, hippie mother.
“I met Jim Cross last night.”
Judith’s silence (she usually hemorrhaged words) caught him by surprise.
“The musician,” he added.
He thought he heard songbirds and the whining big rigs worming their way down those steep canyon roads.
“I don’t understand. Did he come into the hospital?”
“He played a show here last night. Afterward, he called me and asked me to stop by his hotel.” Peter said, “You gave him my number.”
He heard a door close. Judith had gone inside. “Why would I give him your number?”
Peter wasn’t sure if he understood the story he was telling. “I guess because I’m a doctor. He is a friend of yours, right?”
“You’ve caught me a bit off guard.”
“Tony Ogata is his personal doctor. Do you have any idea how famous he is?”
“Your mother isn’t a rube, honey.”
“So why didn’t you tell me you knew Cross? He said you stayed at his farm.”
“Don’t call it a farm.”
It sounded like Judith was trying to trap him. She should have been a spy. “He called it a farm.”
“Farms raise food, Peter. There was a blue Rolls-Royce in the driveway, which someone had encircled with a moat. I don’t mean the moat went around the driveway, I mean it went around the car, all the way around it.”
“He gave me a picture of your Sunbeam Tiger.”
Judith laughed. “Where would I have gotten the money for a British sports car?”
“He implied it was your car.”
“What’s going on with him? Is he dying, or something?”
“Why would he be dying?”
“I got an email from him this spring. I guess he tracked me down through my website — he asked me what I’d been up to for the past thirty years. Rolf got a kick out of it, but it left me sort of sad. The guy’s got all the money in the world, all that fame and success, and he’s tracking down women he knew half a lifetime ago. I didn’t want to seem impolite or bitter, so I wrote back. He asked what you were up to. He was impressed that you’d become a doctor. ‘William Carlos Williams was a doctor,’ he said. ‘And Chekhov.’ I told him about my garden. I told him Rolf was a carpenter. I said, ‘Like Jesus.’ I was trying to be funny. He said he’d been to Jerusalem and it was full of masons, but he hadn’t seen any carpenters. I ought to forward you the messages. I wouldn’t have given him your number.”
“He called my cell.”
“He has people whose job is to bring him what he wants. It’s always been that way.”
“He offered me a job.”
“I guess you weren’t kidding about the lawyers.”
A black truck crowded Peter’s tail, but even when he slowed the truck wouldn’t pass. It loomed there, filling his rearview mirror.
“When I met him, he’d quit music. Did he mention that?”
When Peter stopped for a light, the guy in the pickup revved his engine until Peter’s car shook.
“How long did you stick around for?”
“The only reason he let me use that car was because you liked to sleep with your bassinet wedged between the seats.”
“He said he’d met me before.”
“He was fascinated with you, honey.”
The traffic light was taking forever.
“Then what happened?”
“He became a musician again. He released that album and then he was gone.”
“Which album?”
“I don’t know the name. You’d recognize it. There’s a picture of him sitting behind a table covered with junk, like a yard sale.”
Peter knew which album she was talking about — the table was beneath a streetlamp. Pinched between his thumb and forefinger, Cross held a doll-sized American flag.
Peter’s jealousy returned. “Were you in love with him?”
“What kind of question is that?”
“An obvious one.”
“I was in awe of him. I used to like his music, but being around him spoiled it. All those songs about women with perfect flaws are really about him. He’s always only been in love with some version of himself.”
When the stoplight turned green, the truck shot past. Peter felt spared.
“He might be a good person for me to know. He’s friends with Tony Ogata.”
His mother’s silence made Peter check the connection; the call counter kept tallying the seconds.
Finally Judith spoke: “You sound excited; I can hear it in your voice. I certainly don’t want to take that away from you.”
“But?”
“Don’t expect him to be human.”
Peter laughed, though he knew Judith wasn’t joking.
“It’s a shame that I’m a human doctor.”
“Maybe he’s not looking for a doctor. The important question is, What are you looking for?”
The truth: he hadn’t been looking; he’d been waiting. He’d been waiting so long he wasn’t sure if he was waiting for Lucy or if he was waiting to feel again like he had before she left.
Peter said, “I’ve got everything I want.” He didn’t see the point in upsetting his mother.
19
Gene has set the dining room table with cloth napkins, two forks, a knife, and a spoon. A photograph of a three-masted schooner hangs beside the table — it’s the sort of thing one encounters in the bathroom of a naval history museum. While I look around the room, Gene opens another bottle of wine, a red from California, swapping out our old glasses so the Wisconsin wine won’t contaminate the good stuff. The new bottle doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Jimmy.
He delivers the casserole to the table.
“What do you think,” Gene says, “shall we do this?”
It’s been months since I had a home-cooked meal. I eat beyond all reason.
When I push back from the table, Gene asks, “You ready for the salad?”
“I never would have pegged you as one of those salad-after-dinner kind of guys.”
As he heads back to the kitchen, he says, “It cleans the palate.”
When he returns, I stare at the salad: red lettuce, sliced red cabbage, paper-thin radish discs, and pomegranate seeds, all dressed with balsamic vinaigrette. “Is it an allusion to some lyric or something?”