by John Irving
Kit was about to speak but Ronkers said, "I would really appreciate that, Mr. Bardlong. And we'll just have to take our chances with our rain gutters."
"Those are new windows," Kit said. "They won't leak. And who cares about water in the old basement? God, I don't care, I can tell you.
Ronkers tried to return Bardlong's patient and infuriatingly understanding smile. It was a Yes-I-Tolerate-My-Wife-Too smile. Kit was hoping for a vast unloading from above in the walnut tree, a downfall which would leave them all as hurt as she felt they were guilty.
"Raunch," she said later. "What if poor old Mr. Kesler sees it? And he will see it, Raunch. He comes by, from time to time, you know. What are you going to tell him about selling out his tree?"
"I didn't sell it out!" Ronkers said. "I think I saved what I could of the tree by letting him have his half. I couldn't have stopped him, legally. You must have seen that."
"What about poor Mr. Kesler, though?" Kit said. "We promised"
"Well, the tree will still be here." "Half the tree "Better than none."
"But what will he think of us?" Kit asked. "He'll think we agree with Bardlong that the tree is a nuisance. He'll think it will only be a matter of time before we cut down the rest."
"Well, the tree is a nuisance, Kit."
"I just want to know what you're going to say to Mr. Kesler, Raunch."
"I won't have to say anything," Ronkers told her. "Kesler's in the hospital."
She seemed stunned to hear that, old Kesler always having struck her with a kind of peasant heartiness. Those men must live forever, surely. "Raunch?" she asked, less sure of herself now. "He'll get out of the hospital, won't he? And what will you tell him when he gets out and comes around to see his tree?"
"He won't get out," Ronkers told her.
"Oh no, Raunch
The phone rang. He usually let Kit answer the phone; she could fend off the calls that weren't serious. But Kit was deep in a vision of old Kesler, in his worn lederhosen with his skinny, hairless legs.
"Hello," Ronkers told the phone.
"Dr. Ronkers?"
"Yes," he said.
"This is Margaret Brant." Ronkers groped to place the name. A young girl's voice? "Uh ..."
"You left a message at the dorm to have me call this number," Margaret Brant said. And Ronkers remembered, then; he looked over the list of the women he had to call this week. Their names were opposite the names of their infected partners-in-fun.
"Miss Brant?" he said. Kit was mouthing words like a mute: Why won't old Mr. Kesler ever get out of the hospital? "Miss Brant, do you know a young man named Harlan Booth?"
Miss Brant seemed mute herself now, and Kit whispered harshly," What? What's wrong with him?"
"Cancer," he whispered back.
"Yes. What?" said Margaret Brant. "Yes, I know Harlan Booth. What is the matter, please?"
"I am treating Harlan Booth for gonorrhea, Miss Brant," Ronkers said. There was no reaction over the phone. "Clap?" Ronkers said. "Gonorrhea? Harlan Booth has the clap."
"I know what you mean," the girl said. Her voice had gone hard; she was suspicious. Kit was turned away from him so that he couldn't see her face.
"If you have a gynecologist here in town, Miss Brant, I think you should make an appointment. I could recommend Dr. Caroline Gilmore; her office is at University Hospital. Or, of course, you could come to see me. ..."
"Look, who is this?" Margaret Brant said. "How do I know you're a doctor? Someone just left a phone number for me to call. I never had anything to do with Harlan Booth. What kind of dirty joke is this?"
Possible, thought Ronkers. Harlan Booth had been a vain, uncooperative kid who had very scornfully feigned casualness when asked who else might be infected. "Could be a lot of people," he'd said proudly. And Ronkers had been forced to press him to get even one name: Margaret Brant. Possibly a virgin whom Harlan Booth disliked?
"You can call me at my home phone after I hang up," Ronkers said. "It's listed in the book: Dr. George Ronkers ... and see if it's not the same number you have now. Or else I can simply apologize for the mistake; I can call up Harlan Booth and tell him off. And," Ronkers gambled, "you can examine yourself for any discharge, especially in the morning, and see if there's any inflammation. And if you think there's a possibility, you can certainly see another doctor and I'll never know. But if you've had relations with Harlan Booth, Miss Brant, I..."
She hung up.
"Cancer?" Kit said, her back still to him. "Cancer of what?"
"Lungs," Ronkers said. "The bronchoscopy was positive; they didn't even have to open him up."
The phone rang again. When Ronkers said hello, the party hung up. Ronkers had a deplorable habit of visualizing people he had spoken with only on the phone. He saw Margaret Brant in the girls' dormitory. First she would turn to the dictionary. Then, moving lights and mirrors, she would look at herself. What should it look like? she would be wondering. And perhaps a trip to the rack of medical encyclopedias in the library. Or, last, a talk with a friend. An embarrassing phone call to Harlan Booth? No, Ronkers couldn't see that part.
He could see Kit examining her walnut bruise in the multi-imaged mirror that was suspended beside the inverted cone -- also suspended -- that was the flue for the open-pit fireplace in their bedroom. One day, Ronkers thought, I will fall off the sleeping platform into the open-pit fireplace and run screaming and burning through the bedroom, seeing myself times five in that multi-imaged mirror. Jesus.
"One walnut sure makes a lot of bruises," Ronkers said sleepily.
"Please don't touch it," Kit said. She had wanted to bring up another subject tonight, but her enthusiasm had been stolen.
Outside, the doomed tree -- the would-be amputee -- brushed against their window the way a cat brushes against your leg. In that high room, the way the wind nudged under the eaves made sleep feel precarious -- as if the roof might be suddenly lifted off the house and they'd be left there, exposed. The final phase of achieving perfect interior space.
Sometime after midnight, Ronkers was called to the hospital for an emergency. An old woman, whose entire urinary system Ronkers had replaced with bags and hoses, was suffering perhaps her last malfunction. Five minutes after he left the house, Kit answered the phone. It was the hospital saying that the woman had died and there was no need to hurry.
George was gone two hours; Kit lay awake. She had so much she wanted to say when George got back that she was overwhelmed with where to begin; she let him fall asleep. She had wanted to discuss once more whether and when they would have children. But the night seemed so stalked by mayhem that the optimism of having babies struck her as absurd. She thought instead of the cool aesthetics, the thin economy, which characterized her leanings in the field of architecture.
She lay awake a long time after George fell asleep, listening to the restless rubbing of the tree, hearing the patternless, breakaway falls of the walnuts hurtling down on them -- dropping into their lives as randomly as old Herr Kesler's cancer, as Margaret Brant's possible case of clap.
In Ronkers's office, waiting for him even before his receptionist had arrived, was a bird-boned girl with a yogurt-and-wheat-germ complexion who couldn't have been more than 18; her clothes were expensive-looking and conservative -- a steel-toned suit her mother might have worn. A cream-colored, softly scented scarf was at her throat. Ronkers thought she was beautiful; she looked as if she'd just stepped off a yacht. But, of course, he knew who she was.
"Margaret Brant?" he asked, shaking her hand. Her eyes were a complement to her suit, an eerie dawn-gray. She had a perfect nose, wide nostrils in which, Ronkers thought, hair would not dare to grow.
"Dr. Ronkers?"
"Yes. Margaret Brant?"
"Of course," she sighed. She eyed the stirrups on Ronkers's examining table with a bitter dread.
"I'm awfully sorry, Miss Brant, to have called you, but Harlan Booth was not the most cooperative patient I've ever had, and I thought -- for your own goo
d -- since he wouldn't call you, I should." The girl nodded, biting her lower lip. She absently removed her suit jacket and her English buckle shoes; she moved toward the examining table and those gleaming stirrups as if the whole contraption were a horse she was not sure how to mount.
"You want to look at me?" she asked, her back to Ronkers.
"Please relax," Ronkers begged her. "This isn't especially unpleasant, really. Have you had any discharge? Have you noticed any burning, any inflammation?"
"I haven't noticed anything," the girl told him, and Ronkers saw she was about to burst into tears. "It's very unfair!" she cried suddenly. "I've always been so careful with ... sex," she said, "and I really didn't allow very much of anything with Harlan Booth. I hate Harlan Booth!" she screamed. "I didn't know he had anything wrong with him, of course, or I never would have let him touch me!"
"But you did let him?" Ronkers asked. He was confused.
"Touch me?" she said. "Yes, he touched me ... there, you know. And he kissed me, a lot. But I wouldn't let him do anything else!" she cried. "And he was just awful about it, too, and he probably knew then that he was giving me this!"
"You mean, he just kissed you?" Ronkers asked, incredulous.
"Well, yes. And touched me, you know," she said, blushing. "He put his hand in my pants!" she cried. "And I let him!" She collapsed against the bent-knee part of one stirrup on the examining table and Ronkers went over to her and led her very gently to a chair beside his desk. She sobbed, with her little sharp-boned fists balled against her eyes.
"Miss Brant," Ronkers said. "Miss Brant, do you mean that Harlan Booth only touched you with his hand? You didn't have real sexual intercourse ... Miss Brant?"
She looked up at him, shocked. "God, no I she said. She bit the back of her hand and kept her fierce eyes on Ronkers.
"Just his hand touched you ... there?" said Ronkers; he pointed to the lap of her suit skirt when he said "there."
"Yes," she said.
Ronkers took her small face in his hands and smiled at her. He was not very good at comforting or reassuring people. People seemed to misread his gestures. Margaret Brant seemed to think he was going to kiss her passionately on the mouth, because her eyes grew very wide and her back stiffened and her quick hands came up under his wrists, trying to shove him away.
"Margaret!" Ronkers said. "You can't have the clap if that's all that happened. You don't often catch a venereal disease from someone's hand"
She now held his wrists as though they were important to her. "But he kissed me, too," she said worriedly. "With his mouth," she added, to make things clear.
Ronkers shook his head. He went to his desk and gathered up a bunch of medical pamphlets on venereal disease. The pamphlets resembled brochures from travel agencies; there were lots of pictures of people smiling sympathetically.
"Harlan Booth must have wanted me to embarrass you," Ronkers said. "I think he was angry that you wouldn't let him ... you know."
"Then you don't even have to look at me?" she asked.
"No," Ronkers said. "I'm sure I don't."
"I've never been looked at, you know," Margaret Brant told him. Ronkers didn't know what to say. "I mean, should I be looked at? -- sometime, you know. Just to see if everything's all right?"
"Well, you might have a standard examination by a gynecologist. I can recommend Dr. Caroline Gilmore at University Hospital; a lot of students find her very nice."
"But you don't want to look at me?" she asked.
"Uh, no," Ronkers said. "There's no need. And for a standard examination, you should see a gynecologist. I'm a urologist."
"Oh."
She looked vacantly at the examining table and those waiting stirrups; she slipped into her suit jacket very gracefully; she had a bit more hardship with her shoes.
"Boy, that Harlan Booth is going to get it," she said suddenly, and with a surprising authority in her small, sharp voice.
"Harlan Booth has already got it," Ronkers said, trying to lighten the situation. But tiny Margaret Brant looked newly dangerous to him. "Please don't do anything you'll regret," Ronkers began weakly. But the girl's clean, wide nostrils were flaring, her gun-gray eyes were dancing.
"Thank you, Dr. Ronkers," Margaret Brant said with icy poise. "I very much appreciate your taking the trouble, and putting up with the embarrassment, of calling me." She shook his hand. "You are a very brave and moral man," she said, as if she were conferring military honors on Ronkers.
Watch out, Harlan Booth, he thought. Margaret Brant left Ronkers's office like a woman who had strapped on those stirrups for a ride on the examining table -- and won.
Ronkers phoned up Harlan Booth. He certainly wasn't thinking of warning him; he wanted some right names. Harlan Booth took so long to answer the phone that Ronkers had worked himself up pretty well by the time Booth said a sleepy "Hello."
"You lying bastard, Booth," Ronkers said. "I want the names of people you've actually slept with -- people who actually might have been exposed to your case, or from whom you might even have gotten it."
"Oh, go to hell, Doc," Booth said, bored. "How'd you like little Maggie Brant?"
"That was dirty," Ronkers said. "A rather young and innocent girl, Booth. You were very mean."
"A little prig, a stuck-up rich bitch," Harlan Booth said. "Did you have any luck with her, Doc?"
"Please," Ronkers said. "Just give me some names. Be kind, you've got to be kind, Booth."
"Queen Elizabeth," Booth said. "Tuesday Weld, Pearl Buck
"Bad taste, Booth," Ronkers said. "Don't be a swine."
"Bella Abzug," Booth said. "Gloria Steinern, Raquel Welch, Mamie Eisenhower
Ronkers hung up. Go get him if you can, Maggie Brant; I wish you luck!
There was a crush of people in the waiting room outside his office; Ronkers peered out the letter slot at them. His receptionist caught the secret signal and flashed his phone light.
"Yes?"
"You're supposed to call your wife. You want me to hold up the throng a minute?" "Thank you, yes."
Kit must have picked up the phone and immediately shoved the mouthpiece toward the open window, because Ronkers heard the unmistakably harsh yowl of a chain saw (maybe, two chain saws).
"Well," Kit said, "this is some tree outfit, all right. Didn't Bardlong say he'd fix us up with a good tree outfit?"
"Yes," Ronkers said. "What's wrong?"
"Well, there are three men here with chain saws and helmets with their names printed on them. Their names are Mike, Joe, and Dougie. Dougie is the highest up in the tree right now; I hope he breaks his thick neck.
"Kit, for God's sake, what's the matter?"
"Oh, Raunch, they're not a tree outfit at all. They're Bardlong's men -- you know, they came in a goddamn BARDLONG STOPS YOU SHORT truck. They'll probably kill the whole tree," Kit said. "You can't just hack off limbs and branches without putting that stuff "on, can you?"
"Stuff?"
"Goop? Gunk?" Kit said. "You know, that gooey black stuff. It heals the tree. God, Raunch, you're supposed to be a doctor, I thought you'd know something about it."
"I'm not a tree doctor," Ronkers said.
"These men don't even look like they know what they're doing," Kit said. "They've got ropes all over the tree and they're swinging back and forth on the ropes, and every once in a while they buzz something off with those damn saws."
"I'll call Bardlong," Ronkers said.
But his phone light was flashing. He saw three patients in rapid order, gained four minutes on his appointment schedule, peeked through the letter slot, pleaded with his receptionist, took three minutes off to call Bardlong.
"I thought you were hiring professionals, " Ronkers said.
"These men are very professional," Bardlong told him.
"Professional shock-absorber men," Ronkers said. "No, no," Bardlong said. "Dougie used to be a tree man."
"Specialized in the walnut tree, too, I'll bet."
"Everything's fine,"
Bardlong said.
"I see why it costs me less," Ronkers said. "I end up paying you"
"I'm retired," Bardlong said.
Ronkers's phone light was flashing again; he was about to hang up.
"Please don't worry," Bardlong said. "Everything is in good hands." And then there was an ear-splitting disturbance that made Ronkers sweep his desk ashtray into the wastebasket. From Bardlong's end of the phone came a rending sound -- glassy, baroque chandeliers falling to a ballroom floor? Mrs. Bardlong, or some equally shrill and elderly woman, hooted and howled.
"Good Christ I Bardlong said over the phone. And to Ronkers he hastily added, "Excuse me." He hung up, but Ronkers had distinctly heard it: a splintering of wood, a shattering of glass, and the yammer of a chain saw "invited in" the house. He tried to imagine the tree man, Dougie, falling with a roped limb through the Bardlongs' bay window, his chain saw still sawing as he snarled his way through the velvet drapes and the chaise longue. Mrs. Bardlong, an ancient cat on her lap, would have been reading the paper, when ...
But his receptionist was flashing him with mad regularity, and Ronkers gave in. He saw a four-year-old girl with a urinary infection (little girls are more susceptible to that than little boys); he saw a 48-year-old man with a large and exquisitely tender prostate; he saw a 25-year-old woman who was suffering her first bladder problem. He prescribed some Azo Gantrisin for her; he found a sample packet of the big red choke-a-horse pills and gave it to her. She stared at them, frightened at the size.
"Is there, you know, an applicator?" she asked.
"No, no," Ronkers said. "You take them orally. You swallow them."
The phone flashed. Ronkers knew it was Kit.
"What happened?" he asked her. "I heard it!"
"Dougie cut right through the limb and the rope that was guiding the limb away from the house," Kit said.
"How exciting!"
"Poked the limb through Bardlong's bathroom window like a great pool cue ..."
"Oh," said Ronkers, disappointed. He had hoped for the bay....
"I think Mrs. Bardlong was in the bathroom," Kit said.
Shocked at his glee, Ronkers asked, "Was anyone hurt?"
"Dougie sawed into Mike's arm," Kit said, "and I think Joe broke his ankle jumping out of the tree."
"God!"
"No one's badly hurt," Kit said. "But the tree looks awful; they didn't even finish it."
