Travel Writing

by Peter Ferry

  “Maybe they all say that,” I said.

  We looked at two other psychiatrists on the staff. They had entirely different areas of specialization. “Let me look at something else,” said Rosalie. “Listen to this. According to the Illinois Department of Professional Regulation, Dr. Albert Decarre has been reprimanded for professional misconduct.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “Don’t know,” Rosalie said, “but it could include having a relationship with a patient.”

  “So he may have done this before?”

  “Possibly. He’s done something. What you really need to know is whether Lisa was his patient.” She said that she couldn’t help me with that because that information would be in the doctor’s records, not the hospital’s. When I told her Decarre had a stiff back and asked if she could find out about it, she said only if he’d had surgery, and then depending on where the surgery had been performed. She said she’d try. Her eyes swept by me like spotlights at a grand opening. “If this guy,” she said, “if this guy. . . .” Then she focused on me. “What else are you trying to find out?”

  I told her I needed to know Lisa’s mother’s maiden name and Lisa’s Social Security number.

  “Dr. Kim’s maiden name is Sam. The Social Security number I don’t know, but I might be able to find out. Lisa stayed with us for two weeks when she was between apartments and left a lot of stuff. Let me look at it; I might find a check stub or something.”

  I told her I didn’t understand the line, “You can say that our little friend helped . . .” I was afraid it might be a reference to drugs. “What else could it be?”

  “Maybe the megavitamins, and those are prescription. I bet you this guy was writing scripts for her.”

  There was a time when Charlie Duke could have stepped off that bus as if it were a Learjet, but this day he looked about like everyone else who had come from Topeka by Greyhound, and that wasn’t very good. His linen slacks were badly wrinkled, his guayabera shirt could not hide that he’d grown thicker and softer in the middle, his gray hair had a yellowish cast to it, and there was a road map of fine red capillaries on his nose. Then, when he smiled, I saw that the long white roots of his teeth were exposed. “Periodontal disease,” he would say. “Awful stuff. Going to lose them all. Oh well.” But that was later.

  Charlie tossed one long arm around my shoulders and kissed me on the forehead; there was a time when he could have pulled that off, too. “You poor kids,” he said. “I just can’t imagine. You’ll have to tell me all about it.” I never did, and he never brought it up again.

  I gave him the Cook’s tour of the city: Printer’s Row, University of Chicago, the Adler Planetarium with skyline view (Charlie took several pictures with an ancient-but-immaculate Instamatic camera), the Loop, the lakefront, and Millennium Park. Charlie made a big deal about having to visit “the legendary Billy Goat Tavern,” and I knew what that was about. He needed a drink. He’d been drinking when I picked him up although it was barely noon, and I grimaced at the thought of Charlie on a bus with a pint in a brown bag.

  The Billy Goat is underneath Michigan Avenue and the Tribune Tower surrounded by loading docks. It claims to have once been the hangout of writers and reporters from the city’s newspapers, and their autographed photos are all over the walls, but these are old and faded now, and its customers are mostly tourists who know the place from John Belushi’s “cheeseborger, cheeseborger” skit. Charlie had a shot and a beer; I was able to negotiate my way down to a beer alone. When I kidded him about “riding the dog,” he said it was better than Flecha Roja.

  “Flecha Roja?” I said. “Don’t tell me you took buses all the way from Mexico City.”

  “From Cuernavaca. Actually from Tepoztlán. Father Dick was at a retreat, and Mr. John Handy (Charlie’s name for his twenty-year-old Ford) needs a new clutch at the moment, so I even rode the local into town.” Twice during his years in Mexico, Charlie had used hard work and good investment to accumulate some modest wealth, but each time he had awakened one morning to discover that the peso had been devalued while he slept, and his money was worth a fraction of what it had been worth the day before. It is the plight of the Mexican middle class which always seems to pay the price for the greed, corruption, and mismanagement of those in power. The very wealthy aren’t much bothered, and the very poor haven’t much to lose (staples such as beans, rice, corn, and the diesel fuel that powers the old school buses poor people ride everywhere have traditionally been subsidized), but the always-fledgling middle class takes it on the chin every time.

  Charlie and I met Lydia at our old place. He put his arms around her and held her to him for several moments; she smiled at me beneath his arm. The apartment seemed bare to me, although I couldn’t identify a single thing that was missing or changed. It smelled a little different. We had a drink, and Lydia and Charlie talked. I watched Lydia. She had a new haircut that was stylish and looked expensive. She was tan. Odd. I had always owned the sun and Lydia the shade. She had lost a little weight.

  Charlie insisted on treating us to dinner, so we went to La Choza because it was nearby, inexpensive, Mexican, BYO, and the BYO was just beer and wine. By dinnertime Charlie was half in the bag, and I was confused about how that was happening in front of me; he must have been sneaking drinks when he went to the bathroom. We sat in the garden of the restaurant beneath the El tracks and the twinkling, year-round Christmas lights, drank cold Tecates against the heat, and ate enchiladas and arroz con pollo. Charlie told funny stories about the local men he had hired to dig a small swimming pool in his garden. After three years of frustration, he gave up and converted it into a septic tank. He told a troubling story about how he had discovered a method for converting grain alcohol into vodka, and another about two village boys named Pedro and Pablito who had taken to hanging out at the ranch, doing Charlie’s chores and running his errands. He spoke of them several times and quite fondly, so that a suspicion hatched in my mind that they might be doing other things for him, or at least stealing from him. And, of course, he told his usual quotient of improbable tales about unlikely characters doing barely believable things. In one of these an over-the-hill Mexican soap-opera star had lost her luxury villa in a backgammon game but not its detached garage, which had a separate deed. All she had left was her ’68 Mercedes convertible, so she married her chauffeur and they were living in the car in the garage. To the chagrin of the municipal government, no one could find anything illegal with the arrangement.

  Then there was “Arturo, the lout, a BMW Bolshevik if there ever was one. Everyone knew his father bought him the position at UNAM to begin with, and of course Sylvia left him years ago, sick to death of his philandering. So, after all those years of ranting and raving about the revolution ad nauseam, guess what? They threw him out of the university, and guess why? Not lefty enough. Now, isn’t that just a hoot?”

  “Charlie,” I said, “I don’t have any idea who you are talking about and never have. I just don’t know any of these people.”

  “I don’t know half of them myself,” he said. “It doesn’t really matter. It’s just talk.” If you sifted through Charlie’s palaver and listened carefully enough, you could almost always find some small truth, and this was one of them: “It’s just talk.” I laughed aloud.

  We had emptied our cooler of beer, and I asked for the check and went to the bathroom, but when I got back, Charlie had somehow produced a bottle of red wine and was in the process of opening it. It occurred to me as he madly popped the cork that he had built the evening to this pinnacle of artificial gaiety primarily so he could drink some more. Walking back to Lydia’s car a bit later, Charlie was unsteady on his legs and went on and on about “what a marvelous evening” it had been.

  As soon as we stumbled into the apartment, Charlie put on blue cotton pajamas with navy piping and went to sleep on the couch. Lydia and I had a discussion about whether or not I should drive, although we both knew we were really talking about
something else. I think we were feeling the closeness that divorced parents feel when they have to deal with a wayward or ill child, and we were hoping that it was something a little more.

  “Stay,” she said. “Don’t take the chance.”

  “I would, but for the dogs.”

  “When did you walk them?”

  “Just before we came over.”

  “They should be fine until morning. And if they aren’t, so what?” We went to bed, but it didn’t work. Lydia did all the things I had always wanted her to do, but it still didn’t work. It was too hot, we were too sticky, and Charlie began to snore. I said I was self-conscious. Lydia said she was, too. I made the Macbeth joke about drink: “It provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance.” Lydia was defiantly cheerful. We tried to just hold each other. We were all wrong-handed.

  Finally I said, “Listen, I’m feeling guilty about those dogs. I don’t think I can sleep. I think I’d better go.”

  “Well, sure, I mean, if you can’t sleep.” I went down the stairs as fast as I could. I was still a little drunk and already a little hung over. I sat in the car trying to think of a moment in my life when I had felt worse. I wondered if Lydia was feeling this awful. God, I’d never wanted to want someone so much in my life. “Christ,” I said out loud, “Jesus Christ. What have I done? Can this possibly be about Lisa Kim?” I had stepped outside for just a moment just to look around, and it seemed that the door had closed and locked behind me. I had an uneasy feeling, which I wanted very much to deny, that I had entered a new part of life, one in which everything was not a beginning; there were now some endings. Everything was not falling in love, there was now falling out of love. I had never really known that was possible.

  When I picked Charlie up the next day to take him back to the bus station, he was rooting around in the kitchen cabinets. “Any idea where Lydia keeps the hooch?” he asked. “I need a tiny bracer, hair of the dog.”

  I showed him the hutch in the living room where the liquor was, and he had a large, quick drink.

  “There. Much better.”

  At the bus he held me as long and as hard as he had held Lydia the night before. I could feel his heart beating, or mine; I knew that I’d probably never see him again. It wasn’t a premonition or anything like that; it was just a bit of knowledge: Our time had passed. Our stars had crossed—his and Lydia’s and mine—and I was very happy that they had, but that was all over. Our vectors were speeding away from each other. As had happened so often lately, I had a sense of transition and inevitability. There is so much that is beyond our control, all you can really do is deal with that which isn’t. That which wasn’t seemed to be Lisa Kim.

  “Were you in love with her?” asks the girl, whose hair is now pink. “That is, if she ever really existed which, of course, she didn’t, blah blah blah.”

  “I guess I was, in some way,” I answer.

  “That’s pretty weird,” she says.

  “Why?”

  “She doesn’t exist, and then she died, so she doesn’t exist squared.”

  “But she did exist,” I say.

  “Not for you. Might as well be fiction,” says Nick.

  “People fall in love with fictional characters all the time.”

  “Fourteen-year-old girls with rock singers,” says Nick.

  “No, everyone. All of us. I’ll give you an example. When I was your age, a little older, I was in college, I fell in love with a beautiful tomboy named Elena, and she fell in love with me, or so I thought, and it all happened one spring day in the backyard of one of my professor’s houses on a hilltop overlooking the university. White clouds were moving fast across a blue sky, our bare feet touched in the new grass, and it was thrilling, truly thrilling.”

  “Oh boy, Mr. Ferry got lucky.”

  “Spare us the details, please,” said the girl with pink hair.

  “No,” I go on, “this wasn’t about sex. This was about love. I told her everything that was in my heart, and she listened to me intently; I knew she did, and I fell in love. A year later, I bought a ring, and the night I was going to give it to her and ask her to marry me and spend the rest of her life with me, I evoked the memory of that spring afternoon that for me was the very foundation stone of our relationship. And you know what she remembered of it?”

  “What?”

  “She remembered being chilly. She remembered that the grass was damp and she got cold. That was it. I probed and probed, but that was it. I never gave her the ring. I kept it in my pocket.”

  “What’s your point?” asks the dog-faced boy.

  “My point is that I’d fallen in love with a fictional character. I’d made her up.”

  “I think that your love was fictional,” says the pink-haired girl. “I think that had you really loved her, you would have forgiven her. I think that what you felt was infatuation, rather than love.”

  “Maybe. Probably,” I say, “but didn’t someone in here once say that infatuation is a form of love?”

  “I think it’s a stage of love,” says the pink-haired girl. “An early stage.”

  “My point is that love is like sex; some big part of it is in your mind.”

  “I refuse to believe that,” says someone.

  “He might be right,” says the dog-faced boy. “I read an article on a survey someone did that said for some high percentage of people—most of us, if I recall correctly—no actual sexual experience has ever lived up to what you thought it would be before you ever had sex at all.”

  “That’s pretty scary,” says the pink-haired girl.

  “But isn’t that true of anything?” says Nick. “Wouldn’t it be true of anything, I mean, like cheeseburgers or whatever? You never think of a cheeseburger that’s dry and cold, do you? Just hot and juicy. I think you’re really talking about the real versus the ideal.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, love or sex or whatever, if you imagine it, you’re going to imagine it in its most perfect form. I mean, if I say ‘summer day,’ you think of the perfect summer day, not a chilly, rainy one.”

  “Okay. What is ideal love, then?” I ask.

  “The love of a dog,” says the pink-haired girl without hesitation.

  “Oh Christ,” says someone.

  “No, I’m serious. You can laugh at old ladies with cats, but think about it.”

  “Think about what?”

  “Think about the love a pet gives you,” says the pink-haired girl.

  “Okay, I’ll think about it. It’s submissive and extremely limited,” says Nick.

  “Of course it’s limited. I’m not being sappy here—”

  “Okay, it’s unconditional—”

  “It’s unconditional, and it doesn’t change,” says the pink-haired girl. “It’s static. It doesn’t evolve. A pet and its master don’t grow apart and don’t go their separate ways. A pet doesn’t have a friggin’ midlife crisis and run off with his friggin’ sales assistant . . .”

  “Oh Christ,” says someone. “I thought this is where we were headed.”

  “Well, I can’t help it. The only time a pet hurts you is when it dies.”

  “Which it will do about seven times in your lifetime,” says the dog-faced boy.

  “Also, a pet doesn’t grow up and need to reject you like a kid,” says the pink-haired girl.

  “You’re going to be one of those people with a home full of dogs they call the health department on,” says Nick.

  “I know I am.”

  “But what about real love?” asks someone.

  “What’s that?” asks the pink-haired girl.

  “Romantic love. Love between a man and a woman.”

  “Or a man and a man or a woman and a woman,” says someone.

  “Case in point,” I say. “Now we make sure to include and honor homosexuals. A hundred years ago we chased them out of town or killed them. Fifty years ago we put them in hospitals, and sometimes they killed themselves. Now we have parades for
them. What’s changed besides perception?”

  “Yeah,” says Nick cautiously, “but there’s a difference between perception and fantasy. I mean, this Lisa Kim is pure fantasy.”

  “I put it to you that many of the most celebrated loves in literature were at least partly fantasy. Romeo and Juliet. How many days did they know each other? How many total minutes were they together? ‘I was a child and she was a child,/In this kingdom by the sea,/But we loved with a love that was more than love—I and my Annabel Lee.’”

  “Who’s that?” asks Nick.

  “Poe. Take Lenore, for that matter,” I say.

  “But those are lost loves,” says Nick. “They at least existed. There’s a difference between the remembered and the imaginary.”

  “How about ‘The Lady of Shalott?’” I ask. “Do you guys know ‘The Lady of Shalott’? Nick, grab Sound and Sense behind you. Is it in there?”

  “No.”

  “Grab the Norton. I know it’s in there.”

  “Here it is.”

  “Run across the hall and make some copies, would you?”

  “How about Odysseus?” says someone. “He’s gone for twenty years, during which time he says no to immortality, says no to living with a beautiful, sexy goddess on a desert island because he’s so in love with his wife, and when he finally gets home she doesn’t even recognize him.”

  “But who does?” asks the girl with pink hair. “Do you remember who does? His old dog does. I rest my case.”

  “Yeah, but then the old dog dies on a pile of shit,” says the dog-faced boy.

  “So he’s gone twenty years,” says someone. “He’s home one night, and then he says he has to go see his father and then he has to take another journey, for God’s sake. What about Penelope is Odysseus in love with? And what is she in love with?”