T.C. Boyle Stories II: The Collected Stories of T. Coraghessan Boyle, Volume II

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  “Oh, nothing, really,” I said, settling into the chair stationed in front of the desk while he eased himself into the swivel chair behind it with an audible sigh, “and I don’t want to trouble you—” Was that really a boot, a mud-encrusted boot, peeping out from beneath the examining table in the back room? And where were the oil paintings of dories and seabirds and the sun setting over Penobscot Bay Alva Trumbull had left behind when she bequeathed the place to the township?

  “Yes?” He was waiting, his fingers knitted, his eyes roving over me.

  “I’m having pains.”

  “What sort of pains?”

  I glanced away, then turned back to him, indicating, as best I could, the region of my lap. “Women’s pains. A kind of, I don’t know, just pain.”

  “Bloating?”

  I shook my head.

  “Blood? Any discharge at all?”

  I shook my head again, even more emphatically. There had been something, a faint discoloration I sometimes found in the crotch of my panties when I did the wash, but it was ordinary, the sort of thing women my age can be prone to once menopause comes, and I’d thought nothing of it till he put a name to it: discharge. I felt strange all of a sudden, as if I’d gone too far, too deep, and my little fib had come back to bite me.

  He asked the usual questions then, looked at the charts Dr. Braun had left, probing gently about my previous history, and when we got to a point where we could go no further, he rose and said, “If you’ll step inside,” indicating the examining room.

  “But I, I don’t really—” I began, pushing myself up from the chair in confusion, all the while silently cursing Fredericka Granger. Here he was leading me into the examining room without a hint of hesitation, but as far as I was concerned there was nothing to be examined, or no point to it, at any rate, because I was here to check up on him, not vice versa.

  “It’s all right,” he said, and for a moment I saw beyond the beard and the dingy shirt and the tumult of the place, and saw him for what he was—a good doctor, a friend, a man who’d come to fulfill our collective need. I bowed my head and complied.

  Still, as soon as I was inside, in his inner sanctum, I have to tell you I was shocked all over again. Everything I’d heard was true. The paper on the examining table looked as if it hadn’t been changed since Dr. Braun’s time. The linoleum was in serious need of wax, let alone a good mopping, the wastebaskets were overflowing—I saw fluffs of cotton stained with blood, syringes, throwaway thermometers, yet more fast-food wrappers and paper cups—and there must have been half an inch of dust scattered over everything. Worse, there was that muddy boot peeping out at me from beneath the table, and his jacket, his white coat, thrown across the back of a chair like an afterthought.

  “Sit here, please,” he said, indicating the table, and he went through the usual routine, taking my temperature, peering into my eyes, listening to my heart and lungs. “Now, if you’ll just lie back,” he said finally, puffing for breath as if he’d just climbed a steep hill. I lifted my legs to the table and lay back, wondering about that, and then it came to me: he was out of condition, that was what it was, as disordered on the inside as he was on the outside, overweight, sloppy, with an appetite for deep-fried food and no wife or mother to anchor him. I felt sorry for him suddenly, felt as if I wanted to reach out and console him, help him, but then he was there leaning over me, his fingers pressing at my abdomen, roving from one spot to another, liver, kidneys and lower. Was this painful? This?

  I was unconsciously holding my breath, his odor—it was B.O., plain and simple, and I saw myself gift-wrapping one of the spare bottles of Old Spice Wyatt’s sister sends every Christmas and leaving it on his porch in an anonymous gesture—settling over me like a miasma. Listerine. Maybe I’d leave some Listerine too.

  “You understand you’ll have to go to the mainland, to a gynecologist, for a complete exam,” he offered at the conclusion of our little visit. “I can’t really do an exam without a nurse present—for my own protection, you understand—and since we don’t seem to have funding for a nurse . . .”

  “Yes,” I said, feeling nothing but relief.

  He was writing a prescription for some sort of pain medication—or a placebo, more likely—and saying, “Just take one of these every four hours for pain, and if it gets worse, or if there’s any bleeding or unusual discharge, you let me know right away.”

  I smiled as best I could, and then, ignoring everything—the mess of the room, his beard, the fact that his lower teeth were as yellow as a dog’s—I made a leap, envisioning a little dinner party, my shrimp scampi or maybe linguine, Tanya Burkhardt and her mother Mary Ellen sitting across the table from the doctor and Wyatt mixing the drinks. “I was wondering,” I said, as he handed me the prescription, which I was determined to tear up the minute I was out the door, “if maybe you wouldn’t want to come over to dinner again sometime soon? Thursday, maybe? How does Thursday sound?”

  —

  Tanya and Mary Ellen arrived first, and I saw right away that Tanya hadn’t managed to gain back any of the weight she’d lost from the strain of the divorce and trying to manage the twins all by herself (though I couldn’t understand why, since she’d been back nearly three months now and living at home, where she didn’t have to lift a finger and Mary Ellen heaped up enough food three times a day to choke a lumberjack). And her hair. Tanya had always had the most beautiful hair, her best feature really, since it hid her ears and contoured her face, but here she was shorn like a nun. Which only emphasized those unfortunate ears she’d inherited from her father, Michael, now deceased but living on in his daughter’s flesh. Or cartilage, I suppose, in this case.

  Anyway, we were all settled in around the fire, presenting the cozy sort of scene I hoped would awaken some long-forgotten notion of hearth and family in Dr. Murdbritter, when he called to say he’d be late—something about a last-minute patient suffering from an asthma attack, which could only have been Tom Harper, who went around wheezing like a sump pump and should have given up smoking the day he was born—and that put me off my mood. When the doctor did finally arrive, we were just finishing our second cocktail—Wyatt had made up a batch of his famous cranberry margaritas—and I’m afraid Tanya was looking a bit flushed.

  I don’t know if I was overcompensating by getting everybody to the table as expeditiously as possible (yes, the doctor had his drink, white wine, and precisely three of my Swedish meatballs and two slices of cheese folded onto half a cracker amidst a smattering of small talk orchestrated by Mary Ellen and me), but I did really feel that we had to get something on our stomachs. I seated the doctor between Tanya and her mother, across from Wyatt and myself, and served the bread hot from the oven with pats of fresh creamery butter and little individual dipping plates of my own garlic-infused olive oil, which I figured would keep them busy long enough for me to excuse myself and dress the salad. I was in the kitchen, trying to listen to the conversation wafting in from the dining room while I tossed the salad and grated Romano, when Tanya sashayed through the open door and helped herself to a glass of the Italian red I’d set aside for the pasta course, filling it right to the very rim. “It’s a nice wine,” I said absently, but she just put her lips to the glass, shrugged, and drank half of it in a gulp before topping off the glass and drifting back into the dining room to take her seat at the table. Was this a recipe for trouble? I couldn’t say, not at the time, but my thinking was charitable and if I was foolish enough to try to play matchmaker, well, maybe I got what I deserved.

  It seemed that Tanya took a dislike to the doctor right off, asking him all sorts of pointed (rude, that is) questions about his past and why he’d ever want to maroon himself in a craphole (her exact phrase) like this. I tried to intercede, to have a general conversation, but the doctor, chuffing slightly and making short work of the bread, butter and olive oil, didn’t seem fazed, or not particularly. “Oh, I don’t know,
” he breathed, snatching a look at her before dropping his eyes to his plate, “I guess I’d just had enough of the rat race in the city. Know what I mean?”

  “No, I don’t,” Tanya returned, with real vehemence. “People look at me like I’m some sort of wounded bird or something just because I’ve crawled back here to my mother, but I can’t wait to get away again. Just give me the opportunity—give me a ticket anywhere and five hundred bucks and I’m gone.”

  “Tanya,” Mary Ellen said, coming down sharply on the first syllable.

  “But you can’t mean that, Tanya,” I said. Wyatt stared at the paneled wall behind her. The doctor studied her as if seeing her for the first time.

  “Damn straight I do.” Tanya lifted her glass and drained it, and this wasn’t just a run-of-the-mill red but an imported Chianti that cost twenty-two dollars a bottle on the mainland and was meant to be sipped and sniffed and appreciated. She glared round the room, then pushed herself up from the table. “And if you”—she pointed a finger at me—“and my mother think you can shove me off on some man I’ve never laid eyes on in my life just because you’ve got nothing better to do than play matchmaker, then you don’t need his kind of doctor, you need a head doctor.”

  We tried, both Mary Ellen and I, but Tanya wouldn’t sit back down and eat. She wandered away from the table and into the living room, where she sank into the easy chair by the fire, and I was so involved in that moment with getting dinner on the table—the green beans were within ten seconds of being overcooked to the point of losing their texture—that I didn’t notice her slip out the door. What could I do? I put on a brave face and served the pasta and the green beans and we all seemed to find common ground in the vacancy Tanya left behind. The doctor perked up, Wyatt regaled us with a story about the young kayaker killed by a shark that apparently mistook the silhouette of his boat for a basking seal (a story so fresh I’d only heard it twice before), and Mary Ellen used her people skills to bring the doctor out—at least as far as he was willing to come.

  We learned what had become of the oil paintings, which were now stored in the closet on the ground floor (“Too nautical for a landlubber like me,” he said with a chuckle) and discovered that his family name was of Franco-German origin. He had a brandy after dinner, his eyes at half mast and his big hands folded over his abdomen, and he never mentioned Tanya or the scene she’d created. And when his eyes fell shut and his breathing began to slow, Mary Ellen gently shook him awake and he looked at us all as if trying to recollect who we were and where he was, before rising massively and murmuring that he’d a lovely evening and hoped he could repay us someday with an invitation of his own.

  —

  Spring came in a long succession of downpours that flooded the streets and got the peepers peeping and the birds winging in from the south, a spell of nice weather took us by surprise in mid-May, and then it was June and the summer people began their annual migration. I saw Tanya around town with her two boys (three-year-olds, and a real handful), but we didn’t stop to chat because no matter what she’d been through with her ex or how sympathetic and forgiving a person I might be, her behavior in my dining room had been inexcusable, just inexcusable. As for the doctor, I did slip out one evening and leave a few anonymous gifts on his front porch—the shaving lotion and mouthwash, along with a plastic bucket of cleaning supplies and a mustache trimmer I found at the drugstore—but I was busy with a thousand things and hadn’t got round to inviting him over again and, of course, we were still waiting for him to live up to his parting promise and have us over one night in return. Not that I blamed him for putting us off. He had enough on his hands with the influx of summer people and the rash of contusions and snapped bones they suffered pitching headlong over the handlebars of their mopeds or careening down the rocks at Pilcher’s Head without having to worry about entertaining (though certainly it wouldn’t have killed him to host a cocktail party in that magnificent front room of the Trumbull House—if it still was magnificent, that is). In fact, all I knew of the doctor during the ensuing months came to me on the wings of rumor and complaint. Everybody had something to say on the subject, it seemed, and at the next town meeting, sure enough, Betsy Fike, who could hone the knife blade of a grudge for months if not years, stood up and declared that something had to be done about the state of the doctor’s office, not to mention the house, which was common property of the township and needed to be kept up out of consideration for the next generation and beyond.

  Mervis Leroy, who was chair of the meeting, asked if she’d actually been in the house since the doctor’s occupation thereof and could testify to any lack of upkeep or deterioration, and Betsy (she’s five foot one, whip-smart, with two grown daughters and a husband about as expressive as a wall) admitted that she hadn’t. “But I’ve been to his office twice, after that first time when he wouldn’t even answer the door, and I can tell you the place is a pigsty. Worse. Even a pig wouldn’t put up with it.”

  Voices piped up all around her and Mervis pounded his gavel and recognized one speaker after another, everybody supplying anecdotal evidence but pretty much saying the same thing: that Dr. Murdbritter seemed all right as a doctor, neither conspicuously bad nor conspicuously good, but that the way he maintained his office and his person was a disgrace. Someone, I forget who, pointed out that his Volvo had been sitting at the curb with a flat tire for two months now and that when he did make house calls he did it on foot, which was no way to operate if a crisis ever arose. Especially if you were overweight. And then there was the garbage situation and the way the dogs would get into his cans and scatter trash (and worse: medical waste) all over his back lawn and how he never bothered to do a thing about it. Junie Jordan said that while she was in the waiting room Wednesday last she’d peeked in the door at the main room of the house and saw that it hadn’t been touched since the day he moved in, except that the chairs were all covered in cat hair and there were dust bunnies sprouting up everywhere and cobwebs in the corners like in a horror movie, big ropes of them. People looked angry.

  Then came the question: what to do about it? Send him a letter of official condemnation? Tell him to clean up or ship out? Start all over again searching for a replacement, one who was a model of personal hygiene? Do nothing and hope for the best? Finally—and this was my inspiration, because I had so much invested in making this work and could always see my way to a compromise, unlike some of my neighbors, who will go unmentioned here—it was moved that the township should allocate two hundred dollars a month out of the general fund for the purpose of hiring a maid to go into the Trumbull House once a week and straighten up. Betsy Fike seconded the motion. The chorus of ayes was resounding.

  We found a young immigrant woman from Lincolnville and she took the ferry out and marched up the street with her own mop and broom slung like weapons of war over one shoulder. I watched her mount the steps, try the door handle—the door was left unlocked during office hours—and vanish inside. Five minutes later, she was back on the porch, the doctor hovering in the doorway like some dark presence while the young woman—a girl really—seemed to be giving him what for. I only wished I could have heard what they were saying, and I did go to the front door and ease it open, but at that moment a pack of tourists went buzzing by on their mopeds and all sense was lost to the racketing of their engines.

  I waited ten minutes, watching the erstwhile maid head off down the street, the mop and broom dragging behind her in the dirt in the very picture of defeat, before I rang the doctor’s number. He answered on the second ring. “Dr. Murdbritter,” he announced in his official voice.

  “I just wanted to know why you turned that girl away,” I started in without preliminary, and I guess that was a mistake. “We allocated the funds. For you. To help you with, well, to give you a hand keeping the place up—”

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s me, Margaret. Margaret McKenzie.”

  “I suppose you
were watching all along.”

  “Well, I just happened to be in the front yard and I couldn’t help but . . . She’s a good girl, with the best references. And she came all the way out here on the ferry just to—”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, cutting me off, and I was startled by the tone of his voice, “but I just can’t have any interference in my personal life. You people brought me here to establish a practice and that’s what I’m doing. If you find funding for a nurse, you let me know—otherwise, stay clear, do you hear me?”

  Of course, I had no choice but to report this turn of events, not to mention the doctor’s rudeness, to just about everyone I could think of, my phone tied up for the rest of the day and well into the evening so that Wyatt had to wait on his supper, which wound up being leftovers spruced up with a garden salad. We hashed it over at the next meeting, but no one had a good solution beyond giving the doctor his notice and that would have left us in a vulnerable position until we could find a replacement. I took it on myself to try to contact the woman from Burkina Faso in the hope that she’d completed her requirements and received her license in the interim, but a recording told me her telephone was no longer in service and my follow-up letter came back stamped Addressee Unknown.

  We were at a stalemate. The tourists and summer people thronged the doctor’s porch with their blood-stained T-shirts and improvised bandages even as we islanders took our place in line and shuffled into his ever-filthier offices to announce our ailments because we had no choice in the matter. Would you let him put a needle in you? Betsy Fike demanded over the phone one day. Even in an emergency? Or blood—would you want him drawing blood? I felt very tired that day, crushed really, and I could barely rise to his defense and point out that his syringes were disposable and the blood things too. I know, I said finally, my voice ragged and weary, I know.

  Autumn came early, blowing off shore with a cold wind just after Labor Day. The summer people departed, leaves flamed and died, the geese flapped overhead and showed up in roasting pans and crockpots. The first snow fell at the end of October and I felt so low and depressed it might as well have been the frozen white lid of my coffin, and when Thanksgiving rolled round I just didn’t feel up to it. Normally, Wyatt and I opened the house to a dozen or more guests and really made it festive—I baked for a week, served cod chowder, broiled oysters and turkey with all the trimmings, and it was one of the highlights of the year, and not just for Wyatt and me, but for our neighbors too. Yet this year was different, and it wasn’t just because I would have had to invite the doctor—that was a given. Truthfully, I didn’t even realize what it was till Wyatt brought it up.