Bread to the Wise--Book I of The Libertine

by Angus Brownfield

  “The real question,” I said, “is what I’m going to do after I shut down this project.”

  “Shut it down? Why don’t you just finish it?”

  I said, “Cause, the way it’s set up, it’s a fool’s errand. I am a bit of a fool, but I’m not a great big fool.”

  “But if you tweaked the way it was set up and it produced a draw with Dr. Katz, you’d be my hero.”

  “I’d also be meretricious.”

  “That’s an awfully big word for a bureaucrat. And if that’s how you feel, why don’t you get on with the real business, like Jake says.”

  ‘The real business’ shut me up. There it was again, evidence that people talked about me when I wasn’t around.

  A little later she added, “You score a moral victory over Stu Katz and end up a janitor the rest of your life, that would be worse than meretricious.”

  I looked at her for a moment but couldn’t come up with a rejoinder. So I thanked her for the insight and went back to my homework.

  *****

  The next Saturday, quite early in the morning, I answered the phone to hear Jake’s voice sounding strong and a little excited. I was not excited, I was sleepy. I’d been dreaming about a beautiful black cat. Jake called just when I was going to learn the relationship of the black cat to an orange and white kitten who came yowling into my subconscious.

  “You’re not to win,” Jake said.

  “Can’t?” I said, trying to make sense of his declaration.

  “Mustn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  He said, “Come in and see me as soon as I comb all the medical care folk out of my hair.”

  I showered and, though not originally planning to, shaved, but put on Levi’s and scruffy moccasins and a convict gray tee shirt that read Caution on the front and San Quentin Alumnus across the back.

  I walked into Jake’s room saying, “I assume you mean the fight with the University—why shouldn’t I win?”

  “Why do you want to?” Jake asked. I sensed he was no longer being loaded up on narcotics. Graying, craggy, an aging terrier ready to jump the bear.

  “Two reasons, at least. The first, exoneration.”

  “Naw,” he said, “you really want to beat Stu Katz. Don’t bother; it’s bad business.”

  “You’re talking Japanese,” I said.

  “On purpose. I’m about to suggest trying Aikido.”

  I ran that through my onboard computer. “You mean,” I said, “like anticipating the increased flow of foreign-trained physicians into California?”

  “Better,” Jake said. “Kick it upstairs. Make it a given that medical education is a national concern, not a California concern. Certainly not exclusively a University problem.”

  Mary Clare had listened to this last, having come in from the corridor after visiting the bathroom. She looked from one of us to the other, both smiling, and said, “Supply and demand. You partition them, so that you’re only talking about demand, the University’s only interested in supply. The escape from between the rock and the hard place is insisting the two are separate issue.”

  I said, “I’m making potato salad for ten. I need three pounds of potatoes. I don’t give a damn if they come from Safeway or Lucky Stores. I don’t care if either retailer had a warehouse full of rotting potatoes, as long as I get mine.”

  Clare said, “You sound like you’re John Wayne, and you got the repeating rifles just in time.”

  I said, “I want red potatoes. I also need celery and mayonnaise. And in terms of doctors, I might want to specify how many generalists are needed in the North Bay as opposed to the East Bay or the Peninsula. But I’m not going to say whether the University ought to graduate ten or ten thousand MDs. That is a huge bag of worms. I don’t know how many out-of-state enrollees go back to Newark or Portland and how many settle in California. I don’t know where the physicians practicing in Daly City came from. I don’t give a damn.”

  Mary Clare said, “Then you’ve got the problem whipped.”

  Jake said, “He’s got the repeating rifles, now he needs some cartridges.”

  It occurred to me at that point that the analogy was not apt for the hospital room of a guy with a gunshot wound. I changed the subject abruptly. “Jake, when are they going to let you out of here?”

  “As a matter of fact, laddie, I’m going home first thing Monday.”

  “Bitching,” I said.

  I realized Mary Clare might not know that term from my high school days.

  “‘Fantastic’ is a rough translation,” I said.

  “Is Amanda going to let us visit you?” she asked.

  Jake said, “It’s my house, too. My name’s on the deed.”

  “Bitching,” said Mary Clare.

  six

  I cajoled Howie Manheimer into meeting with me early Monday mornings. Howie was enough of a bureaucrat to dig the idea of starting the week with an eight-thirty meeting. So the next Monday we met and I asked him if the project had some kind of advisory committee.

  “Nominally, ABAG’s research committee,” he said.

  “How many folks on this research committee?”

  “Too many,” he said, pulling open a desk drawer and leafing through a well-thumbed file. “Seventeen.”

  “Shit. I need an advisory committee.”

  “Are you nuts?”

  I said, “Not if I want to co-opt some folks.”

  “Listen. You haven’t even told me if this thing is going to fly.”

  I said, “It will fly if I don’t have to explain to ABAG’s research committee how it will fly before I’ve co-opted these folks.”

  Howie said, “Who are the folks you have to co-opt?”

  “Just the deans of the medical schools from Palo Alto to Sacramento.”

  Howie pulled his glasses down his nose and stared at me.

  “You think, because my predecessor couldn’t find the men’s room, I can’t get my fly unzipped?” I asked.

  “I never said that.”

  “Let me tell you,” I said, and did. I told him about the illogic of positing a supply of physicians in an area as small as the Bay Area.

  “And what has that got to do with an advisory committee?”

  “First off—and incidentally—I’m pretty sure it will give me access to some data about physician productivity. More importantly, I’m going to get them off on a methodological nicety which will keep them licking their chops for a while. And then, when I hand them the final report, which will not say a word about how many physicians they will need to graduate, but which will clearly say that somewhere, beyond the blue horizon, someone has to set a goal; when I give them the report, some may feel impinged upon by this verity, but they will nonetheless have to sign off on it.”

  Howie’s eyes darted up and to the right while he digested this. “How can you lose?” Howie said at last.

  “I can lose right up front. If they won’t be my advisory committee I cannot co-opt them. They must not smell a rat. Rather, it must seem like a privilege, or at least an important duty.”

  Howie said, “How many people can I let in on this?”

  “Your wife; pillow talk.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  I said, “Get our president to call their presidents or chancellors or whatever and have them pass the word down to cooperate.”

  He shook his head. “When you start the talk at the top of the food chain, what you do is, you alert everyone that there’s a rat to smell. I’ll have the chairman of our research committee call the deans and ask them to sit as a committee.”

  “They won’t do it,” I said.

  “Of course they won’t,” Howie said, “you’ll get an associate dean or an assistant dean or somebody like that. And we’ll need a couple of consumers.”

  “Consumers?”

  “I mean a mayor or county supervisor who sits on our research committee. And get hep: consumerism is the coming thing.”

  “I’ll keep that
in mind,” I said, cocking an eyebrow at him.

  On the way to see Jake at home that evening, I explained all this to Mary Clare. When I was through she pointed to our right, going along the freeway, at the last wave of managers and technicians from San Francisco, in their summer suits, carrying their leather briefcases, disgorging from the BART train under the bright lights of the Orinda station. If you squinted, they looked like denizens of an Edward Hopper painting. She said, “How many of those would understand what you’ve just told me?”

  “Who knows?” I told her about my dad, who, after going broke in the supermarket business and ending up a grocery clerk, battled back to being a Federal bureaucrat and left for work every morning in his suit and tie, wearing one of his three fedoras, carrying his briefcase. In the winter he left before the sun was up, to come home after the sun was down, and my appreciation for what he did worked up from our needing money to eat to the awareness that different dads had different jobs. “Then one day I asked him what he did, and he told me the mission of his employer, the Department of Labor, and I could have, by age ten, given you the employment bulletin description of his job. But I still never knew what he did.

  “You know what?” I concluded.

  “What?”

  I said, “I just figured out what my father did.”

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “He read the law and the regulations and correspondence with the companies he was auditing, he talked to his boss about sticky wickets, and he had staff meetings. Hopefully he had a friend or two to help him work through dilemmas, and then he tried to turn words into a reality more than just words. That’s what my father did.”

  Clare said, “Isn’t that funny. I’ve known what my father did ever since I plunked down the first dime for the first candy bar.”

  “Your problem is, mi mujer, you grew up after candy bars started costing a dime.”

  We rehashed some of this with Jake, but we spent more of our time talking about Mary Clare getting a sponsor, someone enthusiastic about snooping around China in a grand way, who would then become her enthusiastic proponent. When we finally got around to the job again it finally came out, so simply that Mary Clare and Jake wondered where it had been lurking all this time—what I really wanted (Jake said it) was redemption.

  “You want Stu Katz to swallow his personal prejudice and deal with you only as a competent, ethical human being. Forget it; that’s a separate battle.”

  Clare added, “Of course it is. Bobby can lose it by screwing up the project, but he can’t win it by doing a good job.”

  I couldn’t keep from smiling when she said this. I looked over at Jake, who was bobbing his head up and down slowly, as if to say, ‘Listen to the lady; she’s talking sense.’

  He said, “She’s saying to let go, laddie. Let someone else swing the axe that fells the righteous. Give up any thought but predicting the need for doctors. If you do that, a whole lot of persons who’ve secretly missed you since you dropped out will come around, asking where you’ve been.”

  Amanda, who had been conspicuously absent the whole time we chatted, stuck her head in and said hello. It was actually a signal that we’d best depart—for the good of the patient. Before we left, Clare wanted advice on her curriculum vitae: how to label the hiatus of three years in her education. So far, at Berkeley, she’d been talking to academics, and it hadn’t come up, but one of these days she’d have to talk to administrators, and they would want to know.

  “Tell them it’s none of their business,” Jake said.

  She said, “Oh yeah. Whose business is it when I file an application for admission? Officially, I flunked out of Brandeis’s graduate school, you know.”

  “Then deal with what to do about the F’s, like get them turned into incompletes; just don’t get off on you.”

  She had a promise from the dean at Brandeis which so far had not been translated into any transaction that was reported to Mary Clare.

  Jake said, “They put your back to the wall, turn ‘em, like a boxer in a corner. Make the administrators at Brandeis your wedge by intimating they took you back too soon after the traumatic end of your marriage.”

  She said, “Good point; I never thought of that.”

  Jake said, “I have lots of time to think these days, which is why I did.”

  *****

  New job (old nemesis), new abode with new cohabitant (i.e., main squeeze), new best friend I almost got killed: a lot going on inside me. I took off work a couple of hours to take said new best friend to be checked out by the medicos after a week home: an injection of a dye-contrast solution and a CT scan to check for leaks.

  “Like checking for leaky grease seals or manifold gaskets,” I said, cheerily.

  “Pretty much,” Jake said.

  I mentioned I thought my recent stay in the hospital was a lark compared to his.

  “Bushwa,” he said. “Everyone they get in their clutches gets their dignity violated. The only difference is, you were a lot more certain of being discharged alive.”

  “That’s not such an insignificant difference, Jake; it’s no joke.”

  “Was I joking?”

  “I’ve thought a lot about this, Jake. I worried.”

  “Listen,” Jake said, “different folks have different ways of jumping off the merry-go-round. Mine was a little dramatic, I admit.”

  “I’d have done anything to keep you from being shot; anything.”

  He snickered. “There is something I’d like you to do for me.”

  “Anything.”

  “I want you to really go through my stuff at work.”

  “What am I looking for?” I asked.

  “Letters.”

  “Letters?”

  He said, “I’ve been seeing someone. She likely won’t, but Amanda has every right to go through my desk. After all, she’s paying my bills these days. I don’t regret what I’m doing, I just don’t want to be a bastard about it.”

  Somehow it was like discovering your father is cheating on your mother. I didn’t know what to say.

  Jake said, “Don’t look so pained. I recall you slept with a married woman—or was it two or three?”

  “I’m not judging, Jake, I’m getting used to the idea. I probably would too, if I were married to Amanda.”

  He said, “The lady’s name is Beatrice.”

  “For real?”

  “For real: Beatrice Hennessey. She was a nun before I met her.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Her most volatile oath. Get her letters. Put them somewhere safe. Burn them if I should die.”

  I said, turning off the freeway, “She knows about your being shot.”

  “She visited me in the hospital.”

  “You live dangerously,” I said.

  “When you feel the hand of death on your shoulder, laddie, you tend to live without reprieve.”

  “This ain’t no Hemingway novel, Jake. Don’t you die on me.”

  “Hey, I will not go around being careful what I say in front of you. We all gotta die; it’s no big deal.”

  “It is a damn big deal. You’ve become my conscience. I need you.” His words left me numb. As I pulled up to the patient entrance I said, “How about I hang on to the letters and give them to Beatrice if she wants them—should that be necessary.”

  He said, “That would be a beholden kindness.”

  “If you’re beholden to me, then, goddamit, don’t die on me. There’ll be no way to pay me back.”

  Jake said, “You know, the Buddhists might be right. I might come back.”

  The Not-So-Simple-Pretty

  one

  After checking him for leaks, they wouldn’t let Jake go home right away. Because there was, indeed, a leak, a rather troublesome one. An hour’s visit stretched into two. The chief of surgery joined the post-exam parley. Amanda entered a half hour through, to come out fifteen minutes later, stone-faced.

  “They want to go back into my chest, but they don’
t think I’m up to it just yet.” Jake also looked stone-faced—not resigned, exactly, and not depressed, exactly. When I asked if he had a choice in the matter, he shot me a look as if the choices were firing squad or gas chamber.

  We were in traffic on Highway 24, traffic mysteriously thickened before commute time. Jake closed his eyes. He didn’t speak for more than a minute.

  “I am in the hands of the gods, my friend. Leaking can lead to clots. Avoiding clots can lead to anemia, not the best condition for recuperating from another major operation. They wanted to put me back in the hospital. Instead they’ve paroled me to Amanda.”

  “How could this happen?” I asked.

  “Remember, repairing the aneurism was a decision made on the fly. If they were doing it electively, they’d have done a whole lot of testing before they operated. Even so, it could be something as simple as I’m allergic to the suture material they selected. Simple, yes, but they didn’t have the luxury of time to deliberate. The aneurism was big enough there was a fifty-fifty chance it would rupture within a year, meaning tomorrow or next January.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to urge Jake to fight on, fight for his life. But this was far removed from a fight in which grit and a sense of humor could win out over impending disaster in his chest. The grim look on Jake’s face invested mine as well. It was as though the gods whose hands he was in were smirking at me behind the clouds. As I tried to absorb an ultimate rock-slash-hard place dilemma I had slowed down (I was driving Jake’s car) and a big-rig’s air horn on my back bumper jolted me back into the world of autos and drivers. I sped up in time to glide off the freeway at the Orinda exit.

  “What does Amanda think?” I asked.

  “Other than offering to keep me in line until I’m cleared for surgery, she’s staying out of it.”

  When I grunted he said, “Put yourself in her place, laddie—I’m not just another patient.”

  “Sounds like she has an idea of the risk—do you?”

  “I doubt there’s a lot in the literature to date—the procedure they used to repair the aneurism is fairly new. Right now I’m not inclined to run off to the library.”

  I asked, “What do your organs tell you?”

  “They tell me to be afraid.”

  “Are you leaking enough the blood’s likely to squeeze something it’s not supposed to?”

  He said, “Just the aorta itself.”

  “Shit.” We were at his house by this time. “Could it possibly self-correct?”