by Ward Just
He looked up suddenly and saw her. His face betrayed nothing, was composed behind a slight wan smile. Nothing to attract the attention of the others. Carruthers was talking hard and Hartnett was listening. Bill placed his finger aside his nose, the con man’s signal of Work in Progress. He wanted her to wait in the corridor a minute. She smiled back and nodded her head, but he was no longer looking at her; he was listening to Carruthers, and blowing a smoke ring.
She felt a hand on her shoulder and turned.
“Hello, Elinor.”
She looked at him. “Brian.” It was Bill’s doctor.
They stood a moment watching the three men.
He said, “What is it, some kind of summit conference? I know Hartnett. Who’s the other one?”
“State Department consigliere,” she said.
“How long has he been out of bed?”
“I just got here,” she said.
“That’s a wonderful atmosphere for him. I’m surprised they didn’t bring him a pitcher of Martinis.”
She rattled her bag. “I’ve got those.”
“They’re bad for you.”
“What are they, fattening?” She moved away from the open door and they stood looking at each other. She had known Brian Fowler for twenty years. Bill said he had the worst bedside manner of any doctor he had ever known, with the possible exception of Brzezinski. Brian Fowler was always harried, pleading overwork, though whenever you needed him he was at Burning Tree or in London for a medical conference, or on an island in the Caribbean with his thirty-year-old third wife, a former stewardess—“flight attendant,” she styled herself—for Cathay Pacific Airways. He was a great favorite of the CIA, which was how Bill came to know him. He wore a beard in those days and was believed to use grass, very visible in Georgetown, a voracious womanizer. The deputy director had set up an appointment after Bill’s African adventure. Brian Fowler, the DD had said, best in the business, utterly reliable, discreet, thorough, and aboveboard. Let him check you out at Sibley, his connections are terrific. In matters of health, never trust the Jerries, particularly Jerries who practice on the Third World. She and Bill often saw him around. He ran with agency and State Department people and he’d show up here and there, at a dinner party or embassy affair, usually on the prowl. One night when Bill was out of town—abroad, actually—she had allowed herself to be taken to dinner by Brian Fowler, and allowed herself to drink too much, and allowed herself to be charmed and offered a nightcap, knowing exactly where she was headed—and at three in the morning she found herself naked on his living room floor, him looming over her, a triumphant smile on his bearish face. Why? An accident, “a happening,” as it was called then. He had thrown down a challenge and she had accepted it. A dare, in other words, and he was a man of some charm and not at all bad-looking, despite the childish beard. He liked women. And Bill was being a shit and her work was going badly and her thirty-fifth birthday was a week away and Bill could not, or would not, get back in time. So when Brian Fowler came sniffing around the drinks tray at the Brazilian embassy she sniffed back. It had been more fun than she thought it would, and they had a fling for a week. An overnight in Baltimore, lunches in Bethesda, dinner at his place. He was a wonderful raconteur, a connoisseur of CIA stories. That week he was treating a man for a strain of VD not seen since the fourteenth century. At the end of the week he announced that he had to leave for a medical conference. Raised eyebrows: CIA business. The next day, Bill returned, contrite; he hated missing her birthday. He had bought her a three-foot-high warrior’s mask in Botswana, a peace offering; she hung it in her studio, where it remained, and would always remain.
She said, “What’s new, Brian?”
“Nothing much. What about you, El?”
She said, “I mean Bill. About Bill.”
He glanced in the direction of the solarium. “Can’t you keep them away from him?”
She smiled. “No, I can’t.”
“He needs rest, some of the tests we’re giving him are really—exhausting.”
She said again, “What’s new, Brian?”
“He’s got something interfering with a nerve. That’s what I came down to tell him. You want the technical jargon?”
She thought a moment, standing very still. It didn’t sound too bad. It didn’t sound like cancer. She said, “Without the jargon.”
“Remember, couple years ago, we took a piece of iron out of his ass? The tumor we thought might be malignant until we saw it. And then when we analyzed it we found a chunk of iron, must’ve migrated. That shrapnel he picked up in Czechoslovakia.”
“Africa, Brian.” She wondered who it was that had taken shrapnel in Czechoslovakia, and when.
“Africa, that’s right. We think he’s got a piece of iron in his neck, resting inside the spinal column, on the spinal cord. That’s what we think. Impossible to be sure. But we’re going to have to go inside to find out. It’s what the CAT scan says. But you never know. It’s a tiny little piece, an itty-bitty thing, if that’s what it is. Smaller than a pinhead. It's going to be a son of a bitch to get. The chief resident here is going to do it, but I’ll assist.” He opened his cigarette case, took out a Marlboro, tapped it, and lit it. He studied the silver box, weighing it in his hand. “He’s got that stuff everywhere, it leaches out of him.”
“I know that, Brian.” When they were together in the shower she regularly picked pieces out of his back. They looked like little blackheads. “When are you going to operate?”
“Day after tomorrow, I hope.”
She took a step back from him, to put some distance between them, and to see his whole body. “And what are the chances for success, do you think?”
He cocked his head, calculating. She had the impression that he was thinking of something else, searching his memory perhaps; she had not seen him in a year or more, and then it was across the room at a party. When she visited Bill, he was never around, she assumed by design. In any case he was not the man she remembered from fifteen years back, a week in which she had more fun than she thought she would. He wore his hair long now, carefully styled, and, she thought, dyed. It was attractive salt-and-pepper hair. The beard was long gone. Still, he was a good-looking man with an athletic appearance. He was the sort of man who looked ten years younger than his age; that is, he did not look forty but ten years younger than fifty. It was obvious he was fifty, or thereabouts. His neck gave him away. He took good care of himself, unlike Bill, who looked fifty-five, not a day younger; not five years older than his age. She had always looked her age exactly; she was now forty-nine, one more significant birthday in a month’s time. But on this birthday she and Bill would be together. He said, “Pretty good. It’ll work, don’t worry. And don’t let him worry. Useless emotion, worry. We have every confidence. When it’s over, he’ll feel a lot better . . .” The doctor let the sentence hang.
And she finished it, knowing exactly what he was going to say. “Until it happens again.”
He shrugged. “It’s possible.”
“ ‘Pretty good?’ Is that the official estimate, or the unofficial?”
“Better than pretty good. We don’t know everything. There are not only the unks but the unk-unks.” When she looked mystified, he smiled. “Sorry. That’s airplane jargon. An unk is an unknown. An unk-unk is an unknown unknown, something out there in left field that you never knew about; it’s impossible to allow for something you’ve never conceived of.”
She said, “That’s encouraging.”
He dropped his cigarette on the corridor floor, and ground it under his heel. He looked at her directly. “What’s your assessment of his mood?”
She thought that in Washington even the doctors sounded like public relations men. She said, “He’s been better.”
“Seems jumpy.”
“He doesn’t like hospitals, Brian.”
“No. I think he doesn’t like me.”
“You’re his doctor,” she said, “not his buddy.”
“Doesn’t have to be that way, because a man’s a doctor doesn’t mean he’s a shit. I always thought we were friends.” He added, “Known each other a long time. Go back a long way.” He waved his arm. “Too old to make new friends. Got to keep the ones I’ve got.”
“He’s nervous, Brian. And when he gets nervous, he gets surly.” God knows that was true. But she was nonplussed at this turn in the conversation. What was he trying to tell her? “What do you think? Maybe we ought to go in there, break up the summit conference.” She suppressed a smile; his face was as troubled as a teenager’s.
“It’s important for him to go into this in the right frame of mind. He’s got to feel good about himself.”
She almost laughed out loud. The idea of Bill feeling “good about himself” was ludicrous. She wondered if he had told Bill to feel good about himself; she hoped not. She said, “Bill always rises to the occasion. He’s very good in adversity.”
“I asked him if he wanted a—Valium, or whatever, take his mind off things, and he said no, Christ, bit my head off, as if I’d offered him cocaine.”
“He’s never liked tranquilizers.”
“They can be very useful, Elinor. Very useful, they’re a tool, nothing more. They don’t have a—moral weight.”
“He likes to go into things straight.”
“Bill’s a snob. Do you know that? And a reactionary.”
“Because he doesn’t like tranquilizers?”
“Not only that,” Brian said obscurely. “It’s modern science, for Christ’s sake.”
“I think that’s the point, Brian.”
“That’s exactly what I mean,” he said. He nodded at a nurse passing in the corridor. “Well, they’re here if he wants them.”
“I’ll tell him. But he won’t want them.”
He cocked his head again, distracted. “And you, El. How about you?”
“I don’t use them either. I have an addictive personality and they frighten me.” This was not true, but she wanted no alliances with Brian Fowler. The figurative nudge in the ribs, You and I, we’re adult, we understand the uses of modem pharmacology, morally impartial. Her mood began to lift. The important thing was that it wasn’t cancer, an enemy within; this was a foreign body, shrapnel or gunshot. Finite, specific. Bill would be all right after all, until it happened again; and there wasn’t anything to be done about that, Africa’s calling cards.
Fowler was shaking his head. “No, I mean in general. How are you getting on? What are you up to?”
She got it then, or thought she did. He had forgotten, the son of a bitch. In those days there had been so many women; that was his reputation, anyway. Fowler the Prowler. Probably he couldn’t keep them all in his memory, like an expert bridge player forgetting a casual afternoon’s rubber. It was extraordinary about men, the way they edited their memories. It must be wonderful living with an edited past, one triumph after another, never anything sloppy or cruel or stupid; it would be the reason men slept so noisily. Their sleep was important to them and a vivacious sleep depended on a virtuous past. Virtuous, error-free, seamless, and active. The thought amused her, and now she wondered how to answer his question. She did not want to discuss her painting or anything about her life, how she felt or what she thought about. So she smiled.
He looked at his watch, nodding, still distracted.
No harm in having a little fun, though. She said, “Brian? Bill likes you fine. It’s just that he’s nervous, not knowing what’s wrong with him. It doesn’t have anything to do with you.” A double edge there, she hoped.
He looked up, a broad grin on his face. He truly did appear ten years younger than his age, and in Excellent Health. “Really? I hope so, El. We go back so damn far, way back to the Kennedys. Only a few of us still around.” He had conjured an image of the tsar’s household guard, valiantly struggling with the Bolsheviks at the gates. “Hell, that’s so long ago, I was with the agency then, though I kept the connection pretty quiet. No one knew anything.”
With his mysterious comings and goings he had been about as inconspicuous as Allen Dulles. She said ambiguously, “1 know, Brian.” It was a cachet, having been with the CIA in the nineteen sixties. It was like having been with Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Stein in Paris in the nineteen twenties, raising hell. She wondered suddenly what had happened to the man with the fourteenth-century VD, if he recovered, or if it fell off, or what.
He said, “They were swell days, weren’t they?”
“Dandy,” she said.
They were silent a moment. The doctor lit another cigarette. She wondered if he had heard her sarcasm. Probably not. He was not the sort of man who listened carefully. He raised his eyebrows when he heard his name on the public address system. Dr. Fowler . . . Dr. Fowler . . . Dr. Fowler . . . He smiled apologetically. Time to go.
“I’ll be back,” he said. “I’ll talk to Bill tonight. Give him the word.”
“The sooner the better,” she said. Then, “Tell him everything.” She wanted to say, Tell him you haven’t told me. But she didn’t. An argument would delay him, and she wanted to see Bill.
“There’s one more thing, El. Is he worried about Bill Jr.?”
“Why would he be worried about Bill Jr.?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it was something I heard somewhere. Or something he said. Everyone worries about their kids.”
“What did you hear, Brian?”
Perhaps it was something in her tone, low, serious, almost seductive, but he looked at her queerly, shrugging.
“About Bill Jr.,” she said.
He shook his head, the memory apparently out of reach.
She said, “It could be important, the stories that float around this town—”
Fowler said, “It was something in my mind, I’ve got this ragbag of a memory.”
She said, “Yes, you do.”
“—here today, gone tomorrow.”
She was silent, looking at him evenly.
“As I said, it’s important for him to go into this in the right frame of mind. A confident, constructive frame of mind. I wish you’d talk to him about the tranquilizers. If something’s bothering him . . .” He smiled and moved off, waving his cigarette like a wand. Suddenly he stopped and turned back to face her, his eyes changing expression, dark to light. He looked like a cartoon character who suddenly got it. She waited. “And did I tell you, El? You’re looking marvelous. That’s an exceptionally pretty outfit. Bill’s a lucky, lucky man. I’d have to say. You don’t look a day over thirty-five!” And then he turned, a kind of stately pirouette, and still smiling brilliantly—it was the smile of a film star, or male model, or talk-show host—strode away down the corridor.
“I didn’t know what happened to you. When you didn’t come in I thought you’d gone back home, that I’d pissed you off. That you’d said, Nuts to this. Nuts to husbands. Nuts to hospitals. Nuts to visiting hours. Nuts to us. Nuts.”
They were alone at last, Carruthers and Hartnett having made their good-byes. There was no one else in the solarium. It was dark outside and the rain had stopped, but the atmosphere was damp. It was a dispiriting room, without heart; she closed her eyes, trying to revive her spirits. She emptied the glass ashtray, then spread a napkin on the low table and took out the pâté and the shaker, ice cold to the touch and sweating. The napkin was white with blue initials, a wedding present. Looking at it made her feel better.
“I was talking to your sawbones.”
“Fowler the Prowler? Where is he now?”
“They paged him. He’ll be back. He said he’d be back later on.”
“He has news then?”
She struggled with the can opener until he took it from her, testing the blade with his thumb, then working it around the edges of the tin. The rasp of the blade was the only noise in the room. He looked ghastly, and the fluorescent light didn't help. He had lost his Vineyard tan. His skin had a yellowish look to it and he was breathing hard, levering the blade. She opened the shaker and poured
gin into the two metal cups.
She raised her cup. “Confusion to the enemy?”
He looked at her and smiled. “Massive confusion.”
“What did they say, those two? Carruthers looked embarrassed, as if I’d interrupted something. Or is he always embarrassed?”
“You did.” He took a sip of the drink and sat back; the plastic chair sighed. “And I wish you’d come in sooner, if you had maybe they’d’ve stopped talking. Christ, I hate it when people talk at me. Got so I could concentrate only on the smoke rings, and when they saw that, it didn’t make them stop, only try harder. They started talking at once, as if there were no time. Dumb of me. When I saw you in the doorway I should’ve waved you in. That would have stopped them, seeing you. It’s a hell of a disadvantage, being in pajamas and a robe and feeling like hell when they’re in suits and ties, feeling great. But they’re gone now. And you’re here.” He paused and shrugged, as if he’d lost his train of thought; she observed him move inside himself, and wait. “What did Prowler say?”
“Says you have some shrapnel in your neck and it’s pressing on the nerve. Says they’ll operate day after tomorrow.”
“Difficult operation?”
“Pretty difficult.”
“Well, he’s not going to do it.”
“No. The chief resident’s going to do it. Prowler’s assisting. I was waiting for him to say that the chief resident was the best in the world or on the East Coast, but he didn’t. He said he was good, though.”
“That’s not bad news. Could be worse.”
“It’s good news, Bill.”
“I guess it is,” he said.
“Except for the unks,” she said.
He looked at her.
“And the unk-unks.”
“Is that CIA horseshit or what?”
“Airline jargon. You want to hear more?” She explained to him about unks and unk-unks. It took a moment to get him laughing, but it didn’t last long.
