Bread to the Wise--Book I of The Libertine

by Angus Brownfield

  In all but a few legal documents my wife is Dr. Amanda Wirth. She is an anesthesiologist who could have practiced any specialty she wanted—except maybe pathology. She does not care for cadavers or “the nasty bits,” as she calls tissue specimens. While Tony was protecting Mary Clare’s rights, my wife put on a dress and did her hair (‘I don’t want to scare the lad’) and took off for La Morinda.

  The Doctor Is In

  one

  Bleary, dry-mouthed, at first I didn’t connect this tall, handsome woman whose touch pestered me awake with anything that happened the night before. Then she started plugging in the lines like an operator at a switchboard, reconnecting me to the world.

  I hurt all over; she said I looked it. She peered in my eyes with a penlight from her black bag, took my pulse while she glanced around the room until she spotted the plastic container of codeine tablets on the kitchen counter and asked when I’d had the last. “No idea,” I answered around a thermometer she’d put in my mouth. She poured a solvent that smelled benign—and was—over the bandage, followed by a large gauze square to keep the excess from running all over me.

  “Where do you hurt most?”

  “My scalp.”

  “Good. Let’s have a look.” She peeled off the bandage and deftly parted my hair without moving the edges of the wound.

  “We’ll just slip on down to the emergency room at Walnut Creek General. That needs to be sewn up before someone has to do some cutting to close it properly. I’ll want a strong light and a magnifying lens. I’ll drive you over there—just the emergency room, mind you.”

  “I don’t want to spend any more time in a hospital bed.”

  She said, “Jake made that perfectly clear. So if you’ll stop fussing maybe we can be back to our house before Mary Clare wakes up.”

  Those words were music a heart could dance to. I shuffled into the bathroom and changed everything but the girdle. Through the door she said, “That brace isn’t custom made, is it?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  As I opened the door she said, “I think I can find you another today. Bienvenida—she’s our housekeeper—can wash this one. Two’s better. And you need to shower—but at our house, after I stitch you up.”

  “It’s chafing,” I said.

  “I’ll bet it is. Did they give you instructions on how to use it?”

  “If they did I don’t remember any.”

  She said, as I hobbled to her car, “I could whack Will Clemens. Surgeons simply don’t make good case managers.”

  In the ER she made me wear a breakaway gown, though I got to keep my boxers on. She examined me from head to foot, noting the bruises where I’d been pummeled by Meany. “That knee hurt badly?”

  “I’ve had worse playing sandlot football.”

  “You’re not a kid anymore, Mr. Gattling.” She called me Mr. Gattling until I made her stop, and then I had to call her Amanda.

  “Not when any staff are around, though,” I said.

  “My, aren’t you proper.”

  “When can I bathe?”

  “You bathe when you get to our house, sir. I’ve got things to do besides wait on you.” She spoke with a soft East Texas drawl, verbal aggressiveness from a woman brought up where being a doctor was a daring thing for a woman, where men ma’amed their womenfolk and brooked no sassing of mothers by their sons. Velvet tyranny, Jake called it. She smelled of mature woman, skin rose petal downy; being around her made me feel better. It made me feel as if I might one day be ready for sex again. It took me a while to appreciate what Jake called the tyranny of beauty, about as long as it took to come back from the trauma of the last day, when I began to realize the serious kind of beauty I was dealing with.

  For Amanda was in the category of ‘none of the above.’ She wasn’t beautiful in the full-bodied way of Lana, nor beautiful with the international zest of a Marta, she wasn’t the rare soul Mary Clare was. She was rare enough, though: women her own age would avoid mirrors until the image of her faded. She used her beauty the way a receptionist uses a letter opener, a handy tool she’d stopped thinking about but simply picked up and wielded. She had sized me up before even meeting me, and knew just how much of her beauty to use to enchant me.

  Her car went with her, a silver Saab convertible that declined to reveal its precise year. It was spotless but smelled like a mature automobile. I couldn’t stop looking at Amanda as she drove—especially her fetching legs. I reminded myself that she was Jake’s wife—each time I looked guiltily away. She wore the sheerest stockings under a yellow dress, pulled up to just above her knees, for ease of driving I’m sure.

  A nurse shaved around the wound while Amanda disappeared into the hospital. She came back and painted on a topical anesthetic and then gave me a local. She went off again, waiting for it to take. She came back in a smock, donned disposable gloves and ordered me to sit on a low stool while above my head she swung a circular fluorescent lamp with a magnifying lens in the center. She picked a swab on a long stick out of a cylinder of disinfectant and probed the wound. She unrolled a gray towel to reveal the tools of suturing.

  “You aren’t squeamish, are you?”

  I said, “Not around beautiful women.”

  She didn’t respond to that. While she was stitching she said, “I seldom get to do this kind of thing. Takes me back a few years.”

  I said, “You’ll forgive me, but I always thought anesthesiology was just about the dullest specialty in medicine.”

  She said, “I’m never bored when I have a person’s life in my hands.”

  I could feel her tying knots even though there was no pain. Amanda said, “I thought for a while last night I was going to have your Mr. Meany’s life in my hands, but he had other ideas. Even with a bullet through his lung he insisted on being helicoptered over to Moffitt.”

  “I’ll bet he got Mulholland, someone like that.”

  “Mulholland’s emeritus now; I believe Eisenstein’s the crack traumatologist these days.”

  “I remember him: a rising star.”

  “Only now he’s the star.”

  At that moment Dr. Clemens breezed into the examining room, greeting her as Mandy, saying to me, “I thought I told you to stay in bed.”

  “My intent was to be out of bed for just a few minutes. Visiting a friend.”

  “And getting in a barroom brawl in the process. You want me to put you back in traction?”

  “’Fraid not.”

  “You don’t seem to appreciate the choices. Maybe you’ll forgive the lecture if I tell you I’ve got a back just like yours. You know how good a surgeon is who can’t stand on his feet for a few hours without his legs going numb? Unless he’s lucky enough to marry a beautiful anesthesiologist, he’s up the same creek you’ll be. You keep it up, kiddo, you’re going to be a stone cripple before you’re forty.” He turned to Amanda. “Maybe you can explain it.”

  She simply said, driving from the hospital to their home in Orinda, “In my home, sir, you’ll follow orders and stay in bed.”

  two

  The day Jake pried Meany off me was an eon ago; here I was, walking down the hall to a door closed between me and Mary Clare—a person with no ogres lurking, no one to whom she owed anything beyond the reciprocities of friendship. I had a cup of coffee in each hand, and luckily they were saucered. From behind me Jake said, “Tell her Tony Arcata’s here in one hour.” I sloshed some coffee out of one cup, remembering the penal code still loomed.

  How would I find her? my shaky hand seemed to say. Had the shot heard round La Morinda changed her? Would taking her destiny in hand set her apart from the rest of us?

  I hadn’t taken advantage of a month’s enforced idleness to toughen up my feelings. I glanced up through the magnifying lens into Amanda’s carefully made up eyes and saw the Fates stitching my destiny. It was beyond my control. Clare had quite possibly saved my life, at least saved me from a terrific brutalizing. Now she held my heart in her hand and I was more frig
htened than when Meany was poised to tear my face off.

  Would she be like me after I shot the drifter in Nevada? Would guilt take the last vestige of her vigor? As I pushed the door open with my toe the thought flickered: she gave Meany the chance I didn’t give the drifter. He could have stopped but didn’t.

  (And my secret was out, I learned later. Tony Arcata knew the story from the Berkeley Bulletin and mentioned it in an offhand way to Jake and Mary Clare: “The UC official who shot some guy up in Nevada after a pot party. What’s he doing these days?”)

  She started to kiss me, but first took the coffee cups out of my hands and put them on the night stand. Then she kissed me, once, twice, three times.

  “You forgive me?” I asked, the tension in me turning to tears.

  “Forgive? You’re the one made me live up to my ideals.” She was crying too. “Remember my motto, ‘Enough?’ Last night I knew what I’d had enough of. Of me waiting for the knight to slay the dragon and ride off into the sunset of his own accord. This time I sent him packing. Big-time. I did it. For me, for me.”

  “Maybe a little for me, too?”

  “You idiot, of course. I chose life and you’re my life.” She grabbed a Kleenex and gave one to me and we both blew our noses and started laughing.

  “I don’t care if I go to jail. —Well, I do. You realize we haven’t made love yet? You can make love, I mean, your back isn’t going to make it impossible, is it? Shit, Bobby, say it won’t.”

  “We’ll find a way. If Kennedy could do it . . .”

  “You think we have time now?”

  “I’m not touching you before I take a shower. And I’ve got to get the blood out of my corset.”

  “Details. Com’ere.” She grabbed me and kissed me until I started to get dizzy. “I’m gonna fuck you silly, mister. I can’t wait.”

  “Hey,” I said, “first the lawyer, then me.”

  “I’m not crazy-mad for the lawyer, jocko. Let him get his own nookie.”

  “My, how you talk, lady.”

  She grinned and picked up a coffee cup. “I’ll behave. But I don’t know for how long.” She drank half the cup and said, “Shame on me. I shot a benefactor and I’m acting like a total hussy. I’m sorry. But I’m so glad to see you. I want to grab E. E. Cummings and recite one of his love poems—balloons and calliopes and daisies.”

  She was in a tee shirt that was probably Jake’s. She started to take it off as she headed for the door.

  “Hey wait.”

  “What?”

  “There’s kids out there. Not to mention Jake and Amanda.”

  “I’ve got to shower before Tony gets here. He and I know some of the same people. He was representing the draft card burners in Berkeley. My kind of lawyer.”

  She put the tee shirt back on. At the door she said, “You won’t ever doubt me again, will you, Bobby?”

  “Me?”

  “Believe me, I’ve changed.”

  “You bet. It’s like when you rub a glass rod with cat fur. You’re all charged up.”

  She put her arms around me very gently and said, “You mend soon. There’s another rod I want to rub with fur.”

  “I can’t wait.”

  *****

  From the tapes Jake made:

  She had watched him for weeks before they met, so offhand about clothes (Levi’s with a torn back pocket) free to charge off on foot with a bearing that said he owned the dark alleys and pool rooms of all the tenderloins across the land, he went where he damned well pleased, under obligation to no person, ideology or neurosis, not even to a road map or schedule. He was Bobby McGee and she wanted to be Janis Joplin waiting for him with bandana and harpoon. Nothin’ left to lose.

  In our house she didn’t seem to notice the halting gait and stiff posture, he was still Bobby McGee. He saw himself as a prisoner of a body that couldn’t do what he told it to. He wanted to caution her, “Hey, wait-up!” but he didn’t dare deter her progress and so hoped she’d read his needs in his eyes and in the halting gait.

  He worked at submitting to recuperation. He slept, more than he imagined possible. Our Costa Rican housekeeper, Bienvenida, converted her humble job into an exciting new one, nursing ‘don Roberto,’ very estimable friend of ‘don Jacobo.’ She also scrubbed his corset, first with salt and then with bleach to get the blood out, teasing him, how he had a more formidable corset than she, stiffer, anyway, and when he joked back that it had to be stiff to be good, she had to consult Amanda to make sure she understood the double meaning and then brayed until tears came to her eyes.

  Bienvenida ironed Robert’s permanent press clothes and made his socks into balls of matching pairs. When I complained, “She doesn’t do those things for me,” Robert said all I had to do was get horizontal for some reason, anything at all, she’d mother me to death.

  With three women around looking after him, Robert said that for once he would resign himself to his fate and, it seemed, he did.

  Mary Clare, on the other hand, took her forced idleness badly, suddenly anxious to get on with life. Life, in turn, diddled her. Idleness, she said, was the Great Accountant in the Sky punishing her for two years of hiding out.

  Tony Arcata fought for her almost too well, and that was what she wanted. She wanted them to bring on the lions, stoke the furnace, fling their stones; she was ready. Those on the other side of the dock didn’t appreciate her convert’s zeal. They offered a deal, and the choice came down to this: Mary Clare could stand trial for assault with a deadly weapon, a charge her lawyer tried to have dismissed as unfounded on the evidence and was convinced he could easily beat if it weren’t dismissed, or she could plead guilty to a Nineteenth Century ordinance as hokey as vagrancy.

  In the end Mary Clare pleaded guilty on arraignment to “discharging a firearm within an incorporated place,” a misdemeanor in La Morinda, given six months in county jail, suspended, and a year’s probation, on two conditions: she would initiate no contact with Meany and promptly report any attempted contact by him to the court through her probation officer; second, that she go back to graduate school posthaste.

  Seemed like justice whipped up with common sense to me, but to Robert the sentence meant Mary Clare would be going away for good—back to the East Coast. He wanted to be happy for her and in a way, her vitality restored, her sense of balance in the Universe preserved through this hardly painful penance for shooting Meany, it was hard not to be.

  It didn’t lessen his apprehension when she went to Berkeley and looked for tutors in Mandarin, checked out the Department of Sociology. From his perspective he was being left behind—primed to get on with life and still paying for what he considered a venial sin, trying to whack Homer a second time. His forced idleness wasn’t the boon it should have been; Clare’s metamorphosis scared him too much.

  And worse, if I understood the signs. Hindsight tells me the signs pointed to jealousy, of one who’d killed and suffered total disruption of his life thereby, now watching a person who’d pulled the trigger without thought to the outcome yet earned her redemption.

  Those around him saw his distress, even if we couldn’t parse it. Our concern hatched a conspiracy as ponderous as the one that shaped Mary Clare’s sentence: a couple of weeks into his stay, Amanda, the DA (her friend of many years) and I contrived that Robert should start going to the DA’s office in Martinez, to help prepare the people’s case against Meany. Dr. Clemens readily agreed: harmony between the physical and spiritual man was more important than the risk to his mending back.

  three

  Until Meany tried to kill me, no one above ground knew what the “V.M.” of his name stood for—except Mary Clare. The night she stopped him from killing me I at least knew what the V stood for. After booking, the world knew that the man in the county jail was Vatche Mamagoosian Meany on the police blotter. What had been a shy gift and a pledge of confidence to his protégé, was now causing heads to wag all over the county and in Oakland, San Francisco and Sacramento as well.
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  On the way to the DA’s office in Martinez the first time, Jake and I talked about Meany’s secret name. Jake had asked Clare where it came from and learned how Meany’s parents came together. His two grandfathers, Virgil Meany, the rancher, and Vatche Mamagoosian, the Armenian tavern keeper who was his rival for the most prominent figure around the pioneer crossroads that would become La Morinda, matched Virgil’s addle-brained son with the tavern keeper’s feckless baby sister from Fresno, a part of the agreement being to name the first male offspring Vatche Mamagoosian Meany.

  “Vatche by itself isn’t so bad, I don’t suppose.” I had a great-uncle named Shirley. Before Meany I thought that was the worst boy’s name in the world.

  “He’s out of the hospital, you know,” Jake said.

  “Being shot through the lung nets a shorter stay than a slipped disc.”

  Jake said, “In his case. He’s as tough as his totem.”

  I said, “He won’t be for long.”

  “You want to punish him.”

  I didn’t, but I didn’t know how to say so. Punish him for taking care of Mary Clare? Punish him for falling in love with her despite his noble intentions? I didn’t even want to punish him for coming after me with a broken bottle. When you’ve been in the ring you come to regard opponents as kin—except the ones that thumb your eye or try to dislocate your elbow. Under the circumstances, trying to efface me with a broken bottle didn’t make Meany the latter kind.

  Jake said, “You’re having a hard time with this, aren’t you.”

  “Mary Clare’s a heroine, I’m a Judas.”

  He left the Interstate at Martinez Vista Road and headed for the county offices. As he drove he said, “I thought you won and he lost. Why the angst?”

  “It’ll be the end of him, you know.”

  Jake said, “I don’t know anything of the sort.”

  “How do you suppose this looks to his cronies—much less his enemies? First off, he cheats on his wife of how many decades and gets caught; La Morinda’s a pretty small town when you’re talking adultery. Next he loses his honey to a janitor. And he’s so uncool as to attack the guy in the hospital—a minor hero, I say immodestly—and gets arrested for it. Scandal and shame. But the topper is, he attacks this janitor again, and this time the honey shoots him with a gun he gave her. From world-beater to Sad Sack in a matter of days,” I said, waving my arms like a soapbox orator.