“Really?” I said, impressed, and then, after a pause, he said no.
“I mean, I’ve always liked to cook. Never got paid for it. Sorry.” We looked out at the water. It was the second lie, and it was clear, from the tone of his takeback, that he had surprised himself with it. For whatever reason, it seemed we couldn’t help but lie to each other. It didn’t even feel like a big deal to me at first, but like an unexpected shift in weather, as the food came out of the basket his mood collapsed. When he removed pieces of a roasted chicken from the container, and handfuls of green grapes, they were almost like apologies, for something he had committed long ago and I would never understand. Certainly he had no reason to apologize to me, me who was so ready to love him. He handed me a charred chicken leg, and a bunch of grapes, and refilled my champagne. “It’s lovely,” I said, about five times, but he wriggled under the compliment, and the way he sealed the remaining food back into its containers, with careful palm and thumb, made me feel badly, as if I’d done something wrong, or as if we both knew, in the future, that we would wrong each other irreparably. The seagulls approached. I ate the chicken and grapes, peeling stripes of chicken from the leg, but everything tasted a little off. Not like poison, but just not fulfilling, and Adam was striking me now as very difficult to know.
“Why’d you want that book?” I asked, as I peeled the skin off a grape in slippery little triangles, and I understood then that I would be undressing every item of food I could because my clothes would be staying on.
“I like war books,” he said, out to the ocean. “Of wars people don’t read. I like to remember the forgotten wars.”
For dessert, he brought out oatmeal macadamia cookies that he had baked himself, but I could hardly eat them, my mouth felt so dry, and without thinking, I threw a few sprinkles to the seagulls, who stepped closer on their webbed feet. Adam and I walked to the water and held hands and touched our bare cold toes to the foam. I felt like crying, then, with those seagulls invading our perfect picnic behind us, eating the cookies and the chicken, stepping all over the napkins, cackling, shoving each other out of the way.
I touched his arm again, and my eyes filled with tears.
“I know,” he said. “It isn’t right.”
When we finally kissed, it was clear that it was our last. His lips pressed gently against mine. I felt that kind of wrenching in my heart, and as I turned and walked the other way, I could hear him packing the picnic back into his basket. It took some effort to shoo away the seagulls, but finally they squawked and flew over us. A flock of seagulls. As a child, I’d found them so wonderful, seabirds, with their curving yellow-orange beaks and funny strut. They lived at the ocean, and anything that lived at the ocean I felt I could love forever. But they turned, in my mind. Sometime around adolescence, after hitting the critical mass of beach picnics, after seeing them come over again and again, pushing each other out of the way, squawking so loud, eating chicken and turkey sandwiches without pause, I found them repulsive.
At the snack bar I ordered a basket of onion rings and sat on the green-painted ocean bench, watching the water. The clouds were thick, and the water took on a metallic gray sheen that settled my mind. When Adam passed by, with his picnic basket all packed up, I nodded, and he nodded. The look he gave my onion rings was that of a betrayed lover. But I have always liked onion rings. They were the thickly cut kind, each ring the width of a wide plastic bracelet, dipped in golden brown crumbs. I ate almost the whole basket, licking the bits off my fingers, and when I was done, I threw the remaining few to the trio of waiting seagulls, who, after all, were only hungry. Opinions change.
Francine Prose
Dear Doctor X, if I may call you that:
Perhaps I should introduce myself. I am an attorney, currently employed by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. Relax, Doctor. Let me assure you. This is not that kind of letter. I mention my work only preemptively, anticipating what you might say: For just as it is your business to diagnose the physical and psychic pain of your patients, so my job requires me to be a bit of a student of human nature. To be good at what I do, I have had to learn to read the minds of criminals and innocent men, witnesses and jurors.
So, at times, my work requires me to leave my own skin and enter the skins of others. Yours, for example, Doctor. I should be able to take one look at a man like yourself and know what you are thinking and feeling, perhaps even begin to figure out why you do what you do. That is how we win cases, Doctor.
Which is why I am writing this. Sometimes we hit a wall. We cannot imagine what is going through someone else’s mind. Which is what happened with us, Doctor X—that is, you and me—just before noon this past Wednesday on the Fifth Avenue bus. And so I am writing this open letter in the hope that you will recognize yourself and come forward and give me a hint.
I notice that I have written: take one look at a man like yourself. Maybe that is my problem. I never saw your face. I only overheard you talking on your cell phone, from which I gathered that you are a highly respected family doctor with a subspeciality in adolescent eating disorders and that you have many friends who are also doctors, to one of whom you were speaking. I realize that men like myself—middle-class, married, reasonably healthy specimens with all the expectable anxieties but, believe me, nothing abnormal—are probably not what get you out of bed in the morning, raring to get to the office.
So excuse me if you feel that I am sounding like one of your patients: that is to say, confessing. Like most people, I’m a little scared of doctors. Especially shrinks. Maybe I am worried they will recognize some symptom, unsuspected by me, that means I am crazy, or fatally ill. So, when I’m around a doctor, say, at a dinner party, or even my own internist, Dr. Mike Mulvaney, an exemplary human being, I often find myself saying things that I might not normally say, preemptively confessing before they find out on their own.
So I confess. I’d been having a difficult morning, before you got on the bus.
I’d like to think it began in the museum. But it must have started earlier, with the fact that I was in the museum, instead of at work. I’ve been calling in sick lately, taking mornings off. Playing hooky. Depression, you’re thinking, Doctor. But it was hardly as if I were shuffling around in my pajamas. I was doing interesting things. I’d spent the morning at a museum show of masterpieces of photojournalism.
The museum was nearly empty. I glided across the polished floor from one disaster to another. Hiroshima, the Spanish Civil War. Ethiopia. Sarajevo. I moved from image to image. The diamond mines, Iraq. The Sudan. I was distracted, wondering, How am I supposed to feel? I was glad that someone was doing something, that people were taking those pictures. Then I thought: that’s how bad things are, if those photos are cheering me up.
If I had seen you, Doctor, perhaps I could picture you leaning across your desk and telling me that’s how adults live: with disturbing thoughts, confusions, with an uncertain future. I can hear your voice, saying, “Bill, that defines an adult.” I know that, Doctor, trust me. A man in my profession understands that the world we have is not the world we would like.
But lately it has occurred to me that every human being, even the ones who seem to have no trouble putting one foot after another, many of these people are actually gyroscopes, Doctor, spinning on nothing, on air. And one little push, one breath, can knock them off course forever. I don’t mean gyroscope literally. You understand that, I hope. Does this sound crazy, Doctor? I don’t think so, really.
I’m not saying it was the museum’s fault. But something sent me into a tailspin. I felt as if I were watching myself on a security camera, stuck there, like a tethered ox, in the middle of the last gallery. I was actually standing in place, taking little steps forward, then back, like a very sick caribou I’d seen once when I made the mistake of looking behind a partition at the Central Park Zoo. Thank God there was no one there to see me and call one of your colleagues.
I recovered, eventually. I don’t know how much tim
e passed. People use the expression snap out of it, and it was actually a snap that rubber-banded me onto the street, where I made it as far as a bench along the edge of the park.
I sat on the bench with my head in my hands awaiting another snap. I know it must try your patience, Doctor, to hear your patients talk about their symptoms in the unscientific, maddening language ordinary people use. All I can tell you, Doctor, is that every cell in my body felt soggy, as if my soul had been used as a paper towel to mop everything up. Mop what up, Bill? you must be asking. But if I knew that, Doctor X, clearly I wouldn’t have been there.
Possibly, you’re thinking, I’d had a series of small strokes. You might order the appropriate tests, whipping pages off your prescription pad, one for each procedure.
But wouldn’t a stroke have dulled me? It wasn’t like that, Dr. X. It was more like diving. An underwater descent and then the bob into the brilliant light. I was very clear by the time the Limited came, and I stood and got on the bus. The bus seemed like a great idea. Instead of taking the subway, I would take the bus down to Forty-second Street and get off and have a delicious steamy roast-pork wonton-noodle soup at the noodle shop off Madison, and then take the train the rest of the way to the office. By then I’d be feeling fine.
I dipped my MetroCard the right way, on the first try, and found my favorite spot, a single seat, halfway back. Better yet, on the park side. It was a sunny day in late April, the yellow-green grass glowed beneath the pastel flowering trees, an Impressionist painting or a landscape from a picture book I used to read my daughter. Perhaps you know it, Doctor. It’s a story about a little-girl pig who outfoxes a wolf.
I concentrated on the landscape, ignoring the passengers who filed past me. That was when you must have gotten on. Or perhaps you were already seated in back when I got on the bus, and I didn’t notice you until I heard your voice. By then, we were still on upper Fifth Avenue, sailing down the channel between the luxury buildings, the museums, the limestone mansions, the park.
Even then, when the whole bus could hear, it took me a while to focus. I’ve lived in Manhattan all of my life, during which time I have learned to screen out anything short of a taxi speeding in my direction. As loud as your conversation was, there was nothing in it for me, since as far as I could tell it concerned some fine points of medical billing seen from the physician’s point of view. Complaints about the insurance companies, the hoops they made you jump. Matters of that sort. Many people on the bus could have told the same story, at least from the patient’s side, and we were the lucky ones, the insured, though perhaps not as lucky as you. So we listened with part of our brains, just enough to find out which side you were on: the patient’s, or Big Money’s. And Doctor X, you sounded fine. Your heart was in the right place, though that may be another expression that you find annoying. In any case, the whole bus was on your side. We were right there with you. Though maybe I am imagining this, maybe no one else was listening. But how could they not have heard you? Your voice carried through the quarter-full bus: the perfect audience size.
I think it was the word menses that finally caught my attention.
You said, “With the girls, it’s easier. Three menses, and you’re in. Bingo. Check the box. Let the bastards go through your charts.”
Doctor X, I hope you’re not thinking that I have taken the long way round to one of those anti-cell-phone rants. The rudeness, the banality! Oh, the quiet cars on Amtrak! Everyone on the bus probably had his own cell-phone story. One evening, at a Japanese restaurant, Doctor, my wife and daughter and I sat beside a young couple, obviously on their first date. When the girl went to the bathroom, the boy called whoever had set them up and said, “I’d rate her six, maybe seven on a scale of ten.” I found it especially painful to have him say this within earshot of our daughter. A young attorney I work with claims to have heard a mafioso ordering a hit, loud, from the next table in a restaurant. I know my colleague exaggerates, but the reason I think it could be true is how often the rest of the world disappears for the cell-phone user.
Doctor, you were one of those. There is no way not to say it. If any one us had been real to you, could you have announced, so loud, over the noise of the traffic and the occasional siren: “With the boys it’s trickier. The kid was five-eight, Jerry. He weighed a hundred and ten. This was serious borderline shit. And he had a girls’ disease! Jerry, you can’t imagine what a tightrope I was walking. But I handled it, I handled it. I don’t mean to boast, but Jerry, dude…”
The fact that you called your colleague dude was not lost on us, Doctor. But we couldn’t linger on that, because of the speed with which you went on to tell Dr. Jerry, or dude, about the consummate sensitivity and expertise with which you had faced this professional challenge.
You said, “Two minutes, I knew I had to break up their little trio and talk to the kid separately from the parents. Together they were so strangling, no one knew how to begin, except that there was this skinny kid, slumped, not looking at any of us. Alienated affect, Jerry, does not begin to describe it. It was clear I had to isolate them, I had to start with the kid.”
It’s a funny thing, Doctor, that I have often observed. You might think that overhearing the inappropriate cell-phone conversation would cause the overhearers to roll their eyes, exchange glances, looks, whatever. But you know, that rarely happens, perhaps because each listener is trying so hard not to be there. We were models of politeness. A perfectly orderly, well-behaved bus. We didn’t turn to look, or glare at you, we didn’t look at each other, so I have no way of knowing how many of my fellow passengers were leaning forward, as I was, to hear what happened when you got the skinny kid alone.
“I got nowhere with him, either. I couldn’t get him to make even minimal eye contact. We could have been in different rooms! The only thing he said was that his parents had no sense of humor. Which was true, so we could have bonded on that, it could have made me like him. Another kid, I would have laughed. It would have been a risk I’d have taken. But I’ll tell you something, Jerry. It’s not supposed to happen, but you and I know, it happens, sometimes you meet a kid, and who knows what it is, something chemical, something physical, who knows what, maybe he reminds you of some kid you knew at school, but you want to haul off and smack the little creep, you can see why the parents have a problem. It doesn’t happen often, thank God, but there it was. It wasn’t the kid’s fault, it was me, but it was better for both of us if I admitted it to myself. Everything got a lot harder. I just wanted to be out of there. I asked the kid if he would mind if I talked to his parents without him.”
If everyone on the bus had a different cell-phone horror story, perhaps they all would have featured that moment when the listener cannot believe what he is hearing. That was it for us, Doctor, or anyway for me. Maybe everyone else had music streaming into their earplugs. My daughter is never without her iPod from the minute she gets up till the time she goes to bed. My wife says it is her fault, because when Nina was a baby, she’d put one of those early baby monitors in her cradle. My wife says Nina fixed on that like a baby duckling. I think, but don’t say, that whatever problems Nina has have more to do with my wife’s worry, the reason for the monitor, than with the little plastic box transmitting the baby’s even breaths.
So, Doctor, let me speak for myself. I was amazed that you would say this so loud to an audience, and a captive one, at that. Weren’t you worried that one of us—me, for example, Doctor—might sensibly wonder how much you had charged this family whose little creep you would have hauled off and smacked, if not for your professional training? It was hardly the sort of remark guaranteed to revive our declining confidence in the medical profession. Did you know that we were there? But that is the question underneath every cell-phone horror story.
So let me add another element to the question I am asking. To sum up: you were having a conversation about a troubled teenager. And my daughter, Nina, has had some problems. Not an eating disorder, as it happens. But to employ the
shorthand you would probably use, she has been, at times, “a cutter.” It disturbs me to use the word. Just saying it seems complicitous in some trendy diagnosis for the oily slick that surfaced out of nowhere into our golden family life.
What had we not noticed? The long sleeves? There was that. But it was a point of pride with us to let Nina wear what she wanted, dye her hair in spikes. They grew out. Mostly she looked like any scruffy jeans-wearing New York kid who did reasonably well in school and who had friends whose parents we knew. We were relaxed, Nina liked us, she felt she could talk to us, and we mostly let her be.
That was why, we flattered ourselves, Nina never got pierced or tattooed, so when the long sleeves started, it did cross my mind that she maybe had a tattoo and was hiding it. On that morning, when my wife found the blood all over the bathroom, I had been trying to come up with some joke that would make it clear to Nina that her mother and father were cool, we would forgive that little rosebud or dragonfly on her arm. What I wouldn’t have given, Doctor, for it to have been a tattoo.
After something like that happens, you see things differently. Or perhaps you realize how little you see. Which is why it may make no difference, Doctor, that I never actually saw you as you asked, “How many years have we been in practice? Right.” I assume that you and Jerry went to medical school together. How attentive we were, how attuned to the mystery of you, which is why I am writing this letter. In that way, Doctor, the bus trip was like a love affair, and you were the beloved, or like a prayer meeting, with you as the distant God whose nature we speculated about. But you never thought about us as you said:
“Over fifteen years and I’ll never get used to the kinds of things people think are normal. The kid had totally fetishized food. He went on these crazy diets. Nothing but radishes and butter for two weeks, then hazelnuts and papaya. The hazelnuts had to be unshelled. Wait. It got worse. He did these…science experiments. Grew mold on stuff and ate it. Natural penicillin, he said. He ate it and threw up. And that was the stuff they knew about. I got this all from the mother. The father didn’t say a word. From time to time, he snorted. Every time he snorted, the mother cried. Of course they despised each other. Of course she was in love with the kid. The father hated her for it. The usual family romance, Jerry. You’ve seen it a million times.”
This Is Not Chick Lit Page 3
