Bethel's Meadow

by Shultz, Gregory

  In college, for example, during times when nothing being taught to me made a damned bit of sense, as was often the case with calculus, I simply ceased my lithium intake, and within twenty-four to forty-eight hours I always experienced a dramatic intellectual turnaround. Instead of feeling ordinary and dull, my brain was soon able to retain and process mathematical formulas with the greatest of ease. Grades in all of my subjects improved markedly during my med-free periods. And when I felt myself beginning to turn in the wrong direction emotionally, I’d get back on the lithium.

  I had told my psychiatrist about this strategy just a few months following graduation. With a look so grave I’ve never forgotten it, he said, “Manipulating your condition like that is a very, very dangerous thing to do. A time will come that when you tempt fate by deliberately inducing mania, you could jeopardize all that is important to you, and you risk losing the most precious thing you have: your life.”

  And so it was on this March morning that I was once again tempting fate. On a daily basis for the past several years I had subjected my mind and body to the soporific and stupefying effects of the two pills I’d been taking: the white pill for manic depression, the green pill to combat anxiety. Although I felt nauseated and had a rather annoying headache, I was ready to hit the town. I had places to go and things to do.

  There was one problem, though: it was still before eight o’clock in the morning. Orlando isn’t like New York or Chicago. Orlando is a city that goes to sleep every night at a reasonable hour, and when it finally wakes up it does so with the doldrums. It needs a strong cup of coffee or two to get it going for another day. But I had lain awake all night counting the short dark hairs on Caitlin’s head. Just a few hours after missing my last dose of meds I was a live wire, the liveliest goddamned wire in the entire world. I was ready to roll.

  …

  Caitlin showered while I was getting dressed. I stepped out of my walk-in closet and saw her undergarments and pink medical outfit spread across the bed. To supplement her Disney income Caitlin worked as a medical assistant for an urgent care walk-in center (a doc-in-the-box). A few years ago she had gone to a trade school to gain certification in the field. She had often spoken of wanting to become a nurse, which would have required even more training. I was amused when I had first heard her express this desire because I knew she’d have a terrible bedside manner. If I were to have sought first-aid from her because I had a limb hanging loose from its socket or if I had been damn near bleeding to death, she would have just said to me: “Quit crying, you big sissy. Rub some dirt on it.”

  I heard the shower cut off just as Caitlin began to curse the burst of cold water she’d received while washing her hair.

  “Sorry, baby,” I said, “but I had to pee.”

  “You’re a lying sack of shit,” she yelled. “You flushed the commode on purpose.”

  I was guilty as charged.

  “Quit your bitching,” I said. “I fixed your lunch for you: brand new potato chips and the tuna salad I made yesterday. You know I make the world’s best tuna salad, right? I don’t use inferior tuna product—only white albacore, baby!”

  Caitlin slammed the bathroom door open and glared at me like an angry hound.

  “You didn’t open a brand new bag of chips, did you?” She was standing naked in the bathroom doorway—she’d let the towel drop to her feet. She had both hands on her hips. Damn, I loved that little fireplug body of hers. Her firm and medium-sized breasts still defied gravity. I noticed that her hot pink nipples were erect and pointed in an upward trajectory. Not bad for a thirty-something.

  I stepped forward to kiss her.

  “Are you turned on, baby?” I asked flirtatiously.

  Caitlin glanced down at her breasts and then quickly back at me again.

  “It was cold as a well digger’s ass in there, you rotten son of a bitch.” She brushed past me on her way to the bed. As she slipped into her panties, Caitlin said, “Smith, there’s a quarter bag of perfectly good potato chips in the pantry. You’re such a wasteful person.”

  We always argued about the potato chips. And also about which way to place toilet paper on a dispenser: I argued it should come from the bottom; Caitlin preferred that it feed from the top.

  “Well, you know, the chips that are whole—”

  “Don’t start that business again about big potato chips tasting better than broken ones.”

  “Cait, when you start buying the potato chips in my house, then you can start eating all the damned potato chip crumbs you want over here.”

  She had her own apartment that she shared with two other Disney employees. She kept a drawer full of panties and brassieres at my place, as well as a little space in the closet to hang her work clothes.

  Caitlin scowled at me as she snapped on her bra. “You always sleep until the cows come home. Are you off your meds or something?”

  I ignored her and walked out of the bedroom.

  “Smith,” she called out. “Don’t you walk away from me when I’m expressing concern about your well-being.”

  I stopped halfway down the hall, took a deep breath, and then returned to the bedroom. I was now ready for a fight, if that’s what she wanted.

  “Cait, if you cared so deeply about my well-being,” I said, “then why did you rack my nards just a while ago? Huh?”

  “Oh, you big baby. You’re so damn horny all the time. I have to defend myself somehow from your rape attempts.” Her concern for my health had vanished; she retreated to the bathroom. “Besides,” she shouted, “you need to learn that when it comes to sex, it’s all about quality over quantity.”

  “Quality over quantity?” I shouted back. “That’s absolutely the lousiest thing I have ever heard any human being say about the physical act of love. Whoever came up with that cynical and asinine bullshit was a much colder fish than you.”

  Caitlin stepped out of the bathroom as she ran a brush through her hair. She shook her head in frustration. “You’ll just never understand, will you?”

  “I don’t know why you can’t give it up more than twice a week,” I said. “What’s wrong with showing a little love to your partner between the sheets, where it really counts?”

  Caitlin poked me hard in the chest. “You know what it is about you? It comes from your being an orphan. You confuse sex with intimacy.”

  “Well isn’t that a brilliant assertion, coming from one orphan to another.”

  Caitlin continued to poke me in the chest. “I at least had a drama coach who took care of me growing up, Smith. I wasn’t bounced around from foster home to foster home like you were.”

  “That drama coach of yours must have been a spinster with padlocks on her knickers,” I said.

  “Well,” Caitlin said while dismissively waving her hands, “you’re always welcome to venture out and pay your respects to the town pump. But the town pump will never love you as much as I do. She’ll never give you what you really need. I’ll be with you until you’re old and gray, when no one else will take you in.”

  Caitlin was trying to disarm me. She knew I was a manic-depressive and she had always said she completely accepted me for it. There really aren’t many women that are that understanding. But Caitlin’s sexual frigidity and lack of spontaneity were beginning to amount to a great source of frustration in my life. I am just a man who needs to have frequent sex. Why should a man ever have to be ashamed of that? But I wasn’t in the mood to argue the point with her.

  “And what about your meds, Smith?” she asked. “You’ve told me your old war stories about what happens when you go off of them. You’re surely not going to subject me to a horror show like that, are you?”

  I kissed her cheek and then walked out. I’d had enough of her bullshit, and I was itching to get out of the house. I figured I’d drive around town until the library or the bookstore opened.

  “Where are you going, Smith?”

  Before slamming the front door behind me, I shouted, “To visit the town pump
.”

  3

  I LOVE BOOKSTORES AND LIBRARIES, and I enjoy nothing more than reading fiction. When things aren’t going the way they should, literature provides me an escape from reality that movies and television cannot. Caitlin was right about the television: it really is a mind sucker. And I think the same of a movie screen. Trading a book for a movie is akin to piloting a plane and then handing the controls over to someone else. It’s the difference between being a participant and being a spectator.

  But as I browsed the titles in the fiction section of the local public library, I stopped and realized that in my current condition I wouldn’t be able to read more than a couple of pages without aggravating my headache, which was getting worse with each passing moment. And the euphoria that I’d hoped to experience by withdrawing from the meds (self-induced mania) wasn’t really happening. I was already coming down from the little bit of a high I’d started the morning with. I was, in fact, experiencing some things that weren’t normal for me in the first several days following withdrawal. Instead of feeling elated and intellectually invincible, I felt irritable and cranky. Instead of wanting to conquer the world, I just wanted to repeatedly bash my head against a steel pole until my brains mercifully blew out of my ears.

  But I was here and I wasn’t going to leave empty handed. I removed an Ayn Rand title from the shelf, and then my pal Wally Sidebottom popped up from out of nowhere.

  “Hey, Smith,” he shouted as he slapped me on the back. “Whatcha reading there, bubba?”

  Sidebottom’s biggest problem in life was that he bore a disturbing resemblance to Newt Gingrich. He was five-nine, a tad on the chubby side, and had dirty blond hair that went all over the place like a damned mop. His nose was reminiscent of actor Owen Wilson’s misshapen beak. His eyes were a dull gray, yet there was a certain playfulness about them that made him tolerable, on the whole. And because of recent teeth-whitening treatments, when Sidebottom smiled it damn near made me snow blind.

  “Atlas Shrugged,” I answered softly as I glanced at the end of the aisle. I was certain someone was coming to shut us up. “And Sidebottom, how about turning the volume down a tad? We are, after all, in a library. Not to mention the fact that I have a head—”

  “Shhhhhhush.”

  It was one of the librarians. She appeared at the end of the aisle and stood there giving us a reproving glare that we fully deserved. I was going to apologize to her but Sidebottom beat me to it.

  “Sorry, honey bun,” he said with a wink, followed by the most winning smile I had ever seen him flash.

  I’d never even think about calling any woman “honey bun,” but as of the past couple of weeks such patronizing monikers were rolling off of Sidebottom’s tongue with alarming frequency. He was usually very shy and awkward around women, but now he was acting like he had just been to a Dale Carnegie seminar, without adhering exactly to the spirit of Mr. Carnegie’s principles.

  “It won’t happen again,” he said to her. “But I haven’t seen my buddy Smith here in a month of Sundays.” He was lying—we had just seen each other yesterday.

  “Well, okay,” she said with a tender smile, seeming somewhat disarmed. “Just make sure that in the future you contain your enthusiasm.”

  Perhaps in her late twenties to early thirties, the girl didn’t look anything like the stereotypical librarian. Her long, luxuriant, wavy red hair framed a face with a clear, milky white complexion. She had captivating big blue eyes that whipped up a massive swarm of butterflies in my belly. She wore white slacks and a pink blouse that highlighted the goods so well that my mouth dried up and my knees went weak. At about five-eight, she had a deliciously lithe figure that included absolutely perfect breasts—not overstated, done just right by the Creator.

  But what my eyes finally settled upon were her feet: she had on brown high-heeled loafers and white bobby socks. It didn’t diminish her beauty one bit; instead it lent her an air of approachability that she otherwise wouldn’t have had.

  She had an angel’s face, a Hollywood actress’s body, and geeky feet.

  Still smiling, the librarian gaily marched away. Sidebottom turned to me and softly whistled his approval of the girl’s assets.

  “You’re the man,” I said to him. “You’ve recently acquired that indefinable trait that just makes the women melt right where they stand.”

  “Yeah,” he said with a mischievous smile. “I’ve been doing a lot of reading up on the ladies of late. I’m still in the early stages of my training, though.” Sidebottom then held up a black leather-bound book with gilded pages.

  “The Bible?” I asked.

  “Not the Bible, bubba, but a bible. Look a little closer.”

  I took it from him and quickly thumbed through it. It was a true story about a journalist who had infiltrated a cult of pickup artists. I laughed and handed it back to him.

  “I think I’ve heard about this book,” I said. “These guys go around the country giving paid seminars on how to seduce women right in the middle of a nightclub or a bar.”

  “Don’t be so judgmental,” Sidebottom said. “Not every man has your looks or your easy way around women.” He sounded bitter, not complimentary.

  “If you’d just relax around women you’d never have trouble getting on with them,” I said. “You don’t need to resort to shit like this to get into a woman’s pants.” I was trying to build him up a little and maybe convince him to shelve that damned book.

  “That’s easy for you to say,” he said. “I’ve seen this time and again when I’m in your presence.” He walked to the end of the aisle, peeked around the shelves, and sighed. “If only that smile just now had been for me.” He whistled again and shook his head. “Damn, that is one sexy librarian. They don’t get that way for me, bubba.” He walked back and poked me in the chest. “It’s you. Yeah, I get women, but not of the caliber you snare. You’re eye candy to women, Smith. Don’t smirk like that—you really are. You date eight to tens. Me? I only get five to sevens. I’m going to master these field-tested methods to upgrade the quality of woman I get. I’m tired of eating your crumbs, Smith.”

  “Wally,” I said, brushing past him, “you and I haven’t been to a hardcore nightclub or bar together in at least three years—just the occasional happy hour. Don’t blame me for your dating woes. Besides, I don’t exactly fetch the cream of the crop when it comes to hotties.”

  Sidebottom followed me to the electronic checkout stand.

  “That’s bullshit, what you just told me,” he said. “All you have to do is smile at a girl—and boom—you’re done. She’s eating out of the palm of your hand and buying all of your bullshit. You have special, God-given powers. The rest of us have to do things to compensate for our lack of looks and the signature killer smile that guys like you have.”

  “Yeah? Well, my special powers aren’t keeping me from having a killer headache right now.” I quickly passed my library card and book through the scanner. As I waited for the receipt to print, Sidebottom offered a suggestion.

  “The surefire cure for a headache is a round or two of beers,” he said, “which will all be on me if you meet me tonight for drinks.”

  “You don’t understand,” I said as the receipt printed. “This is the headache from hell. I never get sick like this.”

  “It’s only stress,” he said. Dr. Sidebottom was in. “Your girlfriend Cathleen is enough—”

  “Caitlin,” I said. “Her name is Caitlin.”

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  I took the receipt and headed for the exit. Sidebottom kept following me while yapping about my personal life.

  “I know you love her and everything, bubba. But dammit, Smith, the woman treats you like absolute shit.”

  “She’s an orphan, Wally.” Whenever anyone lectured me about the way Caitlin treated me, I always blamed it on her childhood.

  As I passed through the anti-shoplifting detectors the alarm went off.

  “Dammit,” I cried in pain. I grabbed my
forehead with my hand, as if my head were a bell I could somehow silence.

  “Sir, please come over here and I will scan that properly for you.” It was the redheaded librarian again. I walked to the counter and handed her the book.

  “Oh, Atlas Shrugged,” she said as she passed the book through the scanner behind the counter. “I keep meaning to read that one. You’ll have to tell me if it’s any good or not.” She smiled as she handed the book back to me. “I just finished reading Slaughterhouse Five. I’m trying to read all the classics, now that I work here in the library.”

  “You don’t look like the typical librarian,” I said. I wanted to kick myself for saying something so stupid. But then she smiled sunshine right into my heart, the kind of smile that makes you feel like you are the best thing to happen all day to the person giving it.

  “Thank you!” She was really happy now. Her smile was so genuinely warm that I didn’t want to ever leave. I could have just stood there all day looking at that face without thinking about anything else.

  “I think you’re really cute,” she said.

  I felt my stomach drop the way it always does when I become infatuated with a woman. I wanted to thank her for the compliment, but instead I just smiled stupidly.

  I then closed my eyes as the pain I had momentarily forgotten returned.

  “Damn, my head.”

  With the same concerned expression that a mother offers to a child, she said, “I’m sorry about your headache.” She reached below the counter and withdrew her purse. “I have some aspirin I can give you. There’s a water dispenser out in the hall.”

  “No, that’s okay,” I said. “Thank you.”

  And then I went into total idiot mode. I stared lasciviously at her chest and admired how the swell of her breasts was fighting against the support of her C-cup bra. With my eyes I slowly traced a path upward, from her modest display of cleavage, to the soft pale skin of her neck. I then studied every feature of her angelic face, including the blue eyes that had earlier pumped my stomach full of butterflies.