by Chris White
“It’s true. Never cured anybody. Never saved anybody’s life. Never made a brilliant diagnosis. I rarely even get blood on my hands.” These aren’t admissions, they’re facts. “I knew I’d never do those things. I deal exclusively in the avoidance of pain. That’s what matters to me. And the alteration of consciousness. I make it possible for braver doctors to work,” he says, simply. He glances at her out of the corner of his eye, but her head’s inclined, looking up at the stars. “I’m not brave, but I am precise.”
He can smell the gas sloshing around in the can in the back seat.
“And humble too,” she says, without a trace of sarcasm. “I’m with you, about the avoidance of pain. Morphine’s my manna from heaven.”
People often use religious metaphors when talking about opiates.
“My patients tell me all about their spouses and kids and grandkids and great-grandkids,” Deborah says, sliding her hands between her thighs to warm them. “Sometimes, when I’m alone with them, when their spouses or kids are at the grocery store or taking a walk, taking a minute to themselves, they tell me what they wish they’d done different in their life. They tell all these old stories in supersonic detail. Then at a certain point, they get so bad off they can’t make sense of any of it anymore. That’s when they need the focus to go soft. So they can move toward the light, you know what I’m saying, without the distractions.”
“And by distractions, you mean their lives.”
“Right. Their lives. Their regrets. Losses. Attachments. Loves. That’s where the morphine comes in. We’ve got a lot in common, actually, me and you. We both make the hard shit easier.”
When she’s getting out of the car, she flashes another one of those toasty smiles and says, “You’re the greatest. Thanks, Doc.” She tosses the empty cough-syrup bottle onto the passenger seat from the floor, startling him, then says, “Get well soon,” and opens the back for the gas can.
Adrian jerks into action, unfastening his seat belt, unlatching his door. “Let me do that.”
She tells him it’s fine, she’s got it.
“No, come on.” He reaches her, and they wrestle gingerly with the handle of the can, the flammable liquid gurgling again inside.
“If it makes you feel better,” she relents, wryly.
Adrian cheerfully empties the gas into her tank, while Deborah stands by, arms crossed and one leg extended.
• • •
Zander and Michaela are watching America’s Funniest Home Videos in the den when Adrian gets home. A young man in Bermuda shorts zips along on his banana-seat bike and crashes into a riding mower.
“Dad,” Zander calls over his shoulder. “You missed tacos. Mom’s got rehearsal.”
Adrian can hear the sound of banter punctuated by musical starts and stops from the front living room. He had sort of expected Stella would be waiting for him.
Crouching with his bag over his shoulder, he kisses the kids, but their eyes are plastered to the flat screen. A scrawny teenager leaps from a toolshed roof onto a trampoline, then catapults into an empty wading pool.
Adrian ambles along through the hallway. The sounds swell louder as he approaches, pausing by the curtained French doors.
“Drummers don’t eat!” Stella declares in a high-octane voice. Adrian recognizes this woman. The one with a sense of humor. The flirt.
Then a male voice: “I know, then he was like, ‘Food is fuel to me, nothing more.’ ” Maybe that guitarist from Denver.
Two male voices laugh along with Stella.
“Well, he’s a friggin’ athlete, basically. He’s a machine,” Stella counters.
“But he’s kind of an ass,” says the second man—that Asian violinist, probably. “You’re just too nice.”
“I am not,” Stella faux whines. “That’s a terrible insult.”
“Doctor’s wife,” the guitarist says, like it’s an old joke.
“Stop!” Stella says. “Not that.”
“Five, six, seven, and—” Frantic guitar strumming joined by purposefully squeaky violin. They all laugh.
“Hey, wait a second!” Stella bellows. “Wasn’t I supposed to solo over that?”
Again, the boisterous laughter. The guitarist says, “I’m going to solo over something here in a minute . . .” Something knocks against something else and Stella squeals.
Adrian’s head has been pressed against the wall, and he draws back.
“All right, let’s do this,” declares the violinist, and there is general agreement and the rustle of pages and throat clearing.
“Two, three . . .” The music begins again, straight as an arrow—the timing, perfectly in sync, everything subtle and unrushed.
Adrian’s heard enough.
He is on a straight trajectory to the bedroom, mouth pursed, when Michaela swerves down the hallway and thrusts out her arms like a traffic cop.
“Stop! I’m going to be on the swimming team.”
Adrian obliges, pauses, swallows the bile in his throat. “Hey. You are? I thought you were a little bit afraid of the water, no?”
“Not really.”
“Well, good. I think that’s great. Wanting is half the doing.”
Michaela puts down her arms, saying, “Go!” and Adrian continues on to the bedroom.
She trails him. “Mommy says I’m a water girl. Because I was born in the water.”
“Ah. That’s true,” he says, tossing his robe from the bed to the chair.
“And I have to go to bed early. ’Cause I have a swimming test tomorrow.”
“I guess you’d better.” Adrian holds out his hand in the air, and she slaps him a high five. “You should get in the bath and practice holding your breath.”
“Yes!” She runs away. Easiest bath he’s ever talked her into.
Adrian climbs onto his bed and sits with his hands over his belly, then picks up his laptop, waiting for the woman he’s been avoiding since morning, the one he’d been waiting for all of his life.
• • •
Summer of 1996. Adrian sat at a desk in a classroom in CU’s Old Main with his knees jutting out, pink from his early-morning bike ride, waiting for the workshop instructor on Western Raptors. Up to that point, there had been no surprises, just the usual bird nerds of varying ages with their bright eyes and dull hair who always found their way into ornithological gatherings, a trio of hippies who looked like they’d smoked a joint on the way over, a couple of fit lesbians in belted shorts, shining with health and solid as rocks. So when the ancient mahogany door creaked open and a tall, ashy blond–haired, graceful young woman entered carrying a tray of muffins with a sunny expression on her face, Adrian was delighted.
She set down the tray on the middle desk of the front row and spoke warmly into the sleepy, fractured group. “If anybody wants any, I made some banana-nut muffins. So, help yourselves.”
This gesture of goodwill automatically changed the uncertain, careful aura around the small assemblage, and individuals became couples and groups of three, lifting crumbling confections out of their tins and hypothesizing about the day ahead.
She sat down a couple of rows from the back, took out a book, and began reading. Adrian cocked his head to see the cover, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and surmised she was probably a graduate student. He edged his way over, awkwardly standing while she finished a muffin she’d made, licking the sweetness from her fingers.
“That was nice of you.”
“People feel better when they eat something.”
He waited a moment, hoping for something else to say. “Thomas Mann, is that for a class?”
“Hah! I’m way past that phase. It’s just an incredible book. Have you read it?”
“I don’t get as much time to read as I’d like to. I’m a doctor so I’ve got a crazy schedule.”
“You don’t look old enough,” she said. “Maybe it’s just the setting, with the desks and everything.”
Adrian laughed. “Right.” They both looked down
at the floor like teenagers.
“I’m Stella,” she offered.
He held out his hand, told her his name, then gave a firm squeeze.
“You’re not a student,” he said.
“Just interested in observing . . . life. Wildlife, night life . . . life life.”
“An artist.”
“I play the oboe. In the orchestra. Give lessons. I do a little studio work but of course I don’t make any money.” She placed a finger between the pages of the book to hold her place. “Are you married?”
He shook his head, grinning.
“I just figured, doctor, big house, wife, and kids.”
He chuckled, “You’ve been reading too much fiction.”
A tall graying man entered the room with an urgency that seemed to say, I am your leader.
Stella said, “This must be the guy,” and after a half-hour lecture, the group moved outside to a couple of waiting vans that drove them in search of a Prairie Falcon or Golden Eagle.
Adrian and Stella hung together all day like pants on a clothesline, blowing in the breeze, soaking in the sun. They each saw the eagle at the same moment as it flew over their heads and away, screeching in that way that obliterates time but not place.
• • •
The café where they went for dinner smelled like cinnamon, and Adrian found himself confiding in her about the inherent loneliness of his work. He asked her where she was from, and she said nowhere, that her mother was from Germany and her father had been an American military man. He’d died when Stella was ten, falling from a pier during a fishing trip in Michigan, off duty. When she talked about her father, her duty-bound, good-hearted father, Adrian took Stella’s hand, pressed her fingers against the table, and stroked them with the belly of his thumb. They both sat and stared at their hands touching.
“It was just my mom and me forever after that,” Stella finally said. “She lives in town here now. Drives me nuts with her five-minute eggs and her hand-painted Bavarian trash cans.”
“My mother’s messed up too,” said Adrian simply.
They kissed after dinner in front of Stella’s Honda. She had parked on a dark street along the backside of the campus protected by the cottonwood trees and the solid structures of the university. Adrian felt his mouth yield as it never had. She asked if he wanted to come with her.
When they got into her car, she told him, “Look away. Close your eyes.”
He did as he was told. He could hear her rustling, climbing over into the back seat, making an occasional exclamation, the seat creaking.
“Hold on,” she said. “Just one more minute,” and when he was permitted to open his eyes again, she had on a little black silk dress and sandals, reclining across the back seat as if it were a limo.
• • •
Twenty minutes later, she was leading him into a basement club called the Upright Grand, carrying a case she’d taken from her car.
The place was dimly lit with pools of maroon and blue light, and people stood around a snaking bar with drinks in their hands while a thirtysomething bearded man played a sort of jazz-classical hybrid on piano. Stella and Adrian sat on the same side of a booth tucked into the corner of the back wall and ordered drinks. There they were, the woman in the black silk dress and the guy in shorts and hiking boots, talking animatedly about the books they’d read in college and the places they’d lived and the reasons they did the work they did.
People clapped lightly as the bearded musician finished an upbeat piece, then he took a mic out of a stand, pointed toward the back wall, and said, “You’re on, Stella for Star.”
While people applauded again, Stella said, “Be right back,” and walked up to the little stage with her case, which turned out to be an oboe case, and assembled the instrument right there on stage, saying, “Thanks, Jack. Good evening, everybody. It’s a great night, isn’t it?” while the pianist went to order a drink at the bar.
Soon Stella held the oboe in both hands as the pianist began to play. She opened her lips to take the slim reed in her mouth, and the next thing you know, they were playing a jazz duet. Who knew the oboe could even be a jazz instrument, Adrian thought, but Stella sure as hell made it sound like one, and it was a miracle, the acrobatics she was doing, with the most intoxicating mixture of precision and abandon—the one he had never himself achieved in life—making the night seem festive and full and Adrian feel drunker than he was, forget what time period he lived in and what he had to do the next day.
When Stella came back to the table amid robust applause, she dismantled her oboe and packed it in pieces again like an automatic weapon she’d used on his heart. He told her she had been wonderful, and she thanked him and took up her wineglass.
“To the bald eagle,” she said, and they toasted.
She finished her wine in that one gulp and moved closer to him. They were suddenly intimate in a way they hadn’t been before—now that he’d seen what mattered to her, now that he knew what she had devoted the hours of her life to—and they began talking as though they were going to be together, stay together, and Stella said they should make disclaimer lists of all their faults, so as not to surprise the other down the line. They would get it all out in the open now, before it mattered so much. They would tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—laughing, touching, jostling each other like old pals, drinking, eyes twinkling in the club lights the way they were meant to.
They each got a bar napkin and pen and wrote intently, took intermittent sips of their drinks, and pretended to steal glimpses of each other’s lists. It seemed dangerous to Adrian but thrilling.
When they were finished, they traded napkins, looking at each other from under their eyebrows and grinning. Adrian wrote:
Have been called a tight ass. Not true!
Claustrophobic
Owe a load of $ on med school loans
Too neat
Can be freakishly awkward in social settings
A little obsessive about certain things
Can be short with people without thinking (shitty trait)
Sometimes can’t sleep
Probably should not have kids
Would always rather be outdoors
Never even knew what music was until tonight
It was more truth at one time than he’d ever been prepared to tell anyone, much less someone he’d just met. He’d left things out too. Of course he had. It was a cocktail napkin, and there was plenty of time.
Stella’s was written paragraph style and said:
I don’t have any money at all (so sorry), can be emotionally demanding (not that sorry!), don’t clean my sheets for several weeks in a row (occasionally), smoke cigarettes (lights, only sometimes), bouts of insomnia, hate a lot of rock music and almost all of pop, often flirtatious without meaning anything by it (unless I do mean something by it), needy when insecure (trying to get over this), drink red wine when I’m sad/happy/melancholy/celebrating, sometimes pee with the door open.
They laughed at the similarities, joked and commented, and said they actually liked a lot of what the other classified as faults and none of it mattered anyway. It really didn’t.
Adrian said he had something he wanted to show her.
• • •
“This is all so beautiful,” Stella said, when she entered Adrian’s apartment. “Very grown-up. You should see my place.”
A wooden sculpture of a hawk in flight stood on a podium in the far corner of the living room. There was a series of walnut bookshelves, a looped rug, a light-charcoal leather armchair and sofa. The lighting was subtle and warm; the air cool and still.
“Thanks. I like . . . beautiful things,” Adrian said. “I’m going to get us something to drink.” He went into the kitchen and poured wine, calling back, “I bought a whole case of this merlot.”
When he returned, she was lying back against the pillows. “What did you want to show me? I hope you don’t mind I took off my shoes.”
He h
anded her a dog-eared book.
“Should I read it?” she asked.
“If you want to.”
Thumbing through the tattered pages, she saw each contained at least one handwritten entry. Some of the entries were short and concise; others were more intricate, some with sketches, some with bars of color drawn on with marker or colored pencil in small squares at the top corners of the pages. All birds.
#203, Sunday, August 6, 1989, 1:20 pm: Scarlet Tanager, Piranga olivacea female – I saw it in Ragged Mountain Park (southwest of Charlottesville, VA) on a hickory tree near a dry creek. Beautiful sunny day (my first day off in three weeks). Olive green body (thus, the name!) – more yellowish on throat and rump. Wings and tail a deeper green. Pretty face. Clear little tune – “tchuh tcheowee tchuh, tcheeohweet tchee tchwee.” I think that’s close?! Sounds like summer.
The journal continued on, through many years and dozens upon dozens of pages, in blue pen, black pen, red pen, pencil, some hurried, some careful, some water-stained or ripped or turned down or frayed—
#328, Tuesday, May 19, 1991, 6:45 am: Abert’s Towhee (Pipilo aberti), female. – Gila River valley, Arizona (with group). This is a large, plain, dusty-colored sparrow with a long, rounded tail. Black face with much lighter grey bill. Nesting! Unobtrusive. Rare bird now. We are lucky. On our way to the cliff dwellings.
#411, Wednesday, May 23, 1993, 8:15 am: Golden-cheeked Warbler (Dendroica chrysoparia), male. Edwards Plateau, Texas, perching on a live oak. Amazing color, bright-yellow face with black stripe running through the eye to the nape. Black bib, crown, back and bill. Two white wing bars through grey wings, white belly. Very rare now (30,000) . . . Texas is the only place you can see them. Storm coming.
In 1993, the entries stopped.
“I started doing it on computer after that,” Adrian said. “It didn’t end, though. See?” He showed her a section toward the back of the book that continued the list but with only list number, species name, date, and location. “I’m not doing the detailed entries in here anymore, but I still want it to be complete.”
“This is amazing,” she replied, her thumb running along its cracking spine. “And here I thought we were equals earlier.”
