The Unprofessionals

by Julie Hecht

  The boy and I had once agreed about this, both saying into the phone at the same time, “I hate Ambien!” His father used to yell, “I hate Harold Pinter!” the same way whenever I recommended The Birthday Party.

  The boy said Ambien didn’t help him sleep at all, and when he’d told his doctor, the doctor said, “Take two more. Take six.”

  All of us in the anxiety club knew about seizing the moment for sleep, but some would keep talking; they’d make no sense and fall asleep talking.

  I’d say, “Let’s talk tomorrow,” or, “Let’s go to sleep,” or, “Your medicine has taken effect.” And they’d say, “No, let’s talk now,” as they fell asleep.

  These are my friends, I’d think. This is where I am.

  The day after the boy ended his life, I realized that I might have been on the phone talking about him when he was committing this act.

  I should have kept calling him, not talking to my friends about why he wasn’t calling back. This is the flaw of many women, I was learning—talking instead of acting. I should have told him again the answer to his request “Tell me two things that make life worthwhile.” I should have told him right then instead of postponing the talk. I should have quickly made up a list of more things.

  But maybe he’d turned the phone off once he’d made up his mind. But maybe in haste he’d left it on and he would have seen the vibration feature of the phone in his jacket pocket.

  Just the thought of his jacket was unbearable—his jackets, which were so important to him in high school. He’d shown me how he’d organized his closet in his room at home when he was fifteen. All the jackets hung neatly with big spaces between them. He explained which jacket was for which purpose: one for school, one for lectures, one for dinners out, one for dinner parties. He tried on one or two and walked around. Some of the jackets were hand-me-downs—one from his father, a navy pea coat from college. One was black faux fur, from a cousin.

  “Don’t wear that one,” I’d said.

  “But it’s warm,” he said, “for the icy-cold weather when I go to night classes in Cambridge.”

  “It looks like something Liberace wore,” I said. “You should get rid of it.”

  “I’ll bring it back down to the basement storage closet,” he said.

  The sport coats were of greatest importance to him, especially his navy blue blazers. They gave him the most investment-banker confidence. A khaki one had a slight safari look. I suggested that he bring that to the basement while he was making the trip down there.

  Then I asked if he would come to our house and organize our three closets.

  “People have requested this of me before,” he said. “You’d have to agree to get rid of eighty percent of everything.”

  I agreed, because our closets were down to twenty percent already. The problem wasn’t the clothing but the tiny closets in the old house. Things fell onto one another and onto the floor.

  There was one shelf in my closet. Nothing fit onto the shelf but an old torn white nightgown.

  “Our house was built during the Depression,” I explained.

  “That can be a problem,” he said. “Why doesn’t your husband try to make more money?” the boy asked when he thought about the closets. “He’s in the real world.”

  “We forgot about money,” I said. “We were from the sixties.”

  “He could have made money afterwards. And you could take photos in Hollywood.”

  I explained that in the sixties people didn’t know how much money would be necessary to live decently in modern times. But that discussion led to feeling middle-aged, so we changed the subject to Mel Tormé. He led me over to his two hundred Mel Tormé CDs and LPs.

  I pointed out the small pudgy hands of the singer on one of the CD covers. I’d never looked carefully at the man before.

  As I took in the overall appearance of Mel Tormé, I said, “Maybe you like him because he’s the same physical type as your father.”

  “You think?” the boy said, willing to consider this seriously.

  Then I said, “No, he looks something like a gay guy.”

  The boy didn’t agree. But he managed to say, “I never noticed his hands.”

  Usually he noticed everything. He sounded surprised that something like pudgy hands could have gone right by him. When he was twelve he told me about a man his father knew. “The man has an apple-shaped head on a body of long sticks. He’s Greek. He dresses in all different shades of blue—light, dark, all clashing with each other. Even his hat is blue. He wears them all together.”

  WHEN HE was fourteen, he’d told me about a physics professor he’d met at a party he attended with his parents in Cambridge. I’d met the man once or twice. He said this about the man: “He’s a depressed upper-middle-aged man with nothing to look forward to in his diminishing career. At parties he becomes more morose.” Then he asked, “Did you ever notice how his teeth are all slanted towards each other and pointed to the back of his mouth?” I said no.

  “He’s going through some kind of serious breakdown where he talks about the dumplings his mother cooked when he was a boy—that and the striped mittens she knitted for him. He’s almost crying when he gets to the dumplings and the mittens. No one knows what to do about him at the university.”

  In a phone call the same year, he’d described another party: “You go in, there’s one lamp in the whole huge living room. The hors d’oeuvres are a tiny potato on a toothpick. They’re both doctors, the hosts, but she’s the more ambitious one. He does the housework and takes their kids places.”

  They let the boy go into the kitchen and see all the other trays of food. “They had these little meringue dessert cakes and I happen to love meringue,” he said. “Do you?”

  “You know how I feel about eggs or animal products of any kind.”

  “It’s egg whites, I thought,” he said.

  “The idea of the egg, not just the health part,” I said.

  “Well, I suggest it would be worth your while to get over that and try some meringue,” he said. “They told me I could have all the leftover meringue cakes to take home. So we’re leaving with the box of cakes and I just want to get home and get it into the refrigerator before the meringue melts into the dough, but the mentally collapsed professor is still telling me about the mittens his mother knitted for him.”

  “It sounds so sad. Don’t you feel sorry for him?” I said.

  “Not really. Those crooked inward-pointing teeth are too distracting for me to really pay attention.”

  “What will happen to him?” I asked.

  “No one knows. They all have their own problems. The doctor husband of the ambitious doctor wife is sitting in a chair drinking and singing Irish songs to himself, his face lit by the one lamp in the whole dark, potato-filled room.”

  “There must have been some other hors d’oeuvres besides potatoes on toothpicks,” I said. “Maybe there was another ingredient on the toothpicks you couldn’t see.”

  “No, believe me, it was just a potato on a toothpick,” he said. “I swear.”

  They gave him another big box of meringues as he left. “They were, like, ‘Would you want some of the hors d’oeuvres, too?’ And we’re all, like, ‘Thank you, we’ve had too many as it is.’”

  NOT ELVIS PRESLEY

  HE LOOKS PUDGY and unhealthy,” I said when I studied the Mel Tormé CD covers. “He should change his diet and get some exercise.”

  “You think that’s a toupee?” the boy asked.

  “That or a bad spray style,” I said.

  He didn’t care about that or the pudginess. “The Velvet Fog, he’s called,” he said. “Don’t you agree?”

  “Well, you know how much I love Elvis Presley. They’re opposites,” I said.

  “I forgot about that,” the boy said. “But it’s an obsession of another order.”

  When I pictured his little jacket with the phone in the pocket, I would sink down into the black abyss of thought.

  Maybe
he was so nihilistic he would have enjoyed ignoring the phone vibration in those last moments of his life. That was one of the thoughts.

  But his jacket wasn’t little anymore. He had grown to be five-foot-ten and had such good posture that he looked even taller. Unlike some guys who are five-foot-ten and insist they are six-foot-two or ones with bad posture who look five-foot-eight.

  The list of loss, including and especially Elvis Presley, was growing. Also on my mind I had an additional list, of other people I didn’t personally know whose passing I couldn’t accept, starting with Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison, Ricky Nelson, John Lennon, Otis Redding, Peter Sellers, Andy Kaufman, Jacqueline Kennedy, John Candy, Princess Diana, and Joseph Heller. The final, most recent Kennedy was completely unacceptable to many, who haven’t faced it to this day.

  WE LEFT for our trip as if nothing had happened.

  THE SAME KITCHEN IN NANTUCKET

  SOMETIMES THERE WOULD BE a message on the machine from the boy’s father, calling from his office at the medical school. Sometimes there would be more than one message. In California three-thirty was his phone hour, but it was six-thirty in Nantucket, when there was the best of the last light shining on everything.

  The boy had left a list of people to notify in the event of his death. “You’re on the list,” his father told me. He said he’d had to call the people on the list in addition to calling relatives and friends.

  “They all say they have to hang up and that they’ll call back. I don’t let them hang up. I want to hear what they say about him.”

  “Maybe they need time to collect themselves,” I said.

  “I don’t care. I don’t want to wait. I want to hear it right then.”

  All day the doctor performed surgeries, taught fellows, gave lectures, and helped people bring babies into this world, where the babies could grow up and become addicts. The time span from babyhood to drug addiction now seemed to me to pass in a few years. I knew how busy the doctor was, and if he called more than once, it meant I had to call him back no matter what the light was outside.

  Every time I talked to him, he had a new mood. Sometimes he was angry and said he hated his dead son. “I’m cutting him out of my life,” he’d say. “He was selfish to do this to us all. I’m going to forget all about him.”

  “He didn’t know what he was doing,” I said. I told him that I’d read that heroin addicts had opiate molecules clinging to their brains.

  “How long does it stay in the body?” he asked.

  “You’re the doctor,” I said. “I don’t know any medical facts.”

  In the days when I’d first gone to photograph the surgeon in his hospital, we were walking across an interior bridge that connected an old part of the hospital to a new modern wing. The bridge wasn’t as hideous as others I came across later on, for example, the one in Boston connecting a department store to a mangled nest of steel and concrete—other stores—what’s known as a mall.

  Yet at the surgeon’s hospital, as we crossed the interior bridge in the afternoon light, I saw that gardens had been planted outside—not the best gardens, but mound-shaped gardens of santolina and other clumps of light green, mixed with medium green, and rocks and what appeared to be desert flowers. How did some landscape designer get anything as good as this approved, I wondered as we walked along and the aroma of institutional food from the hospital cafeteria wafted up to the bridge. I’d seen the food with my own eyes: creamed soup, American cheese, canned fruit with Jell-O under plastic domes, cottage cheese, and even maraschino cherries.

  “I wish I could work here,” I said to the surgeon as I looked out at the green plants. I’d never worked in a place where intelligent, white-coated women and men worked hard and said friendly things to one another all day in long corridors. Two researchers were making popcorn in a lab I passed by one afternoon. Most likely they were having an affair in a broom closet somewhere nearby.

  When I said I’d like to work there, the surgeon said, “Go speak to the dean.”

  “But I have no medical knowledge,” I said.

  “That hasn’t stopped him before,” the surgeon said.

  I’d heard a research doctor ask a lab technician to come see his slides of something, and when I asked the surgeon who the man was, he said, “We think he’s a doctor. We’re not sure.”

  “How can that be?” I asked.

  “He’s not allowed to see patients,” the surgeon said.

  I SHOULDN’T stay in these conversations, I’d think as I saw the light changing outside the window. They were bad for both of us, I could tell. Every angry word he said did some damage. By then I’d read the book titled Anger Kills, but maybe the surgeon was the exception to the rule. Maybe his anger could kill me and leave him fine. The boy had told me that his father didn’t even know his own cholesterol. When I asked the surgeon about this, he said, “Why do I need to know?”

  THE NIHILIST CHEFS

  WHENEVER I TOLD my husband what the boy’s father said, he didn’t say anything. “No Response” was the title of a photograph I’d taken of his face some years before this.

  After we’d missed the light, we’d ride our bikes and go over how we had missed it.

  Then we’d walk into the town for dinner at the diner-restaurant where our friends the chefs might be out in the alley smoking and also drinking beer, or wine out of a bottle they passed back and forth. Because they were in the restaurant drug world, they had used and abused many substances in their younger days. The sous-chef was still very young, not even thirty, though he pretended to be thirty when he was trying out seduction techniques on older women. He was so young that he didn’t understand that thirty was as young as twenty-eight. Girls loved him because he looked like a boy in a comic strip and he had a forlorn expression when he wasn’t laughing, smoking, or cooking. One night when he was looking worried, he told me two bad dreams he’d had the night before. He was like the lieutenant who told his dreams at dinner in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, but even funnier, telling dreams while cooking.

  The way he looked when he cooked counted for a lot. He’d place micro greens on top of the salad and then flick his hand away as if he were doing a magic trick or conducting an orchestra. Next he’d stand back like a boy magician and look at the tiny statue of leaves. “There!” he looked as if he was thinking. He’d have a little smile on his face when he stood back. He didn’t think anyone was watching him, because all the diners were engaged in merriment and loud conversation. He could have any girl he wanted in the whole town, just like Elvis Presley, and he could cook. He would never order a bowl of gravy with dinner, the way I’d read that Elvis liked to do.

  One night he said to me, “Why don’t you ever come for breakfast?”

  “We can’t eat those big breakfasts they serve here,” I said. “I don’t understand going out for breakfast.”

  “Well, what do you have for breakfast?” he said.

  “Steel-cut oats,” I said. “Or kamut flakes with soy milk in warm weather.”

  “I’ll cook oatmeal for you,” he said. No man had ever offered to cook oatmeal for me. He probably went around offering to cook anything for any girl he liked and it had turned into a reflex. Every day I had to face the fact that there was a new generation and that those for whom I’d babysat were taking over.

  “But what are the camus flakes? Is it Albert Camus?” he asked. He was a chef—he really wanted to know the answer.

  “It’s existential cereal,” the other chef said as he took a puff of his cigarette. We all laughed, but then I remembered the photos of Camus smoking. This ended the fun.

  Both chefs were wearing their white chef’s jackets over shorts and big rolled-down socks and basketball sneakers. The younger one put stuff in his hair to make it stick out all over. The other one didn’t bother with the sticking-out part but kept his hair slicked back in some other new style I hadn’t yet been able to grasp. He had many girls in love with him, too.

  I’d encountered one
of these young women when I’d gone to the photo lab one night the year before to pick up some prints I’d taken of the cranberry bog. When the girl saw my name, she said that she recognized it from the book of photographs. “I didn’t think people actually looked at the book,” I said.

  “Well, I used to go out with a chef who took it with him whenever we went on a trip off-island. He’d always read it on the ferry.” When she said the chef’s name she smiled, and I couldn’t help seeing that her tongue was pierced. This pierced tongue ended the moment of happiness at the thought of the talented nihilist chef carrying the book around with him.

  “It must be quite a feat to be his girlfriend,” I said without thinking, and because I hadn’t read Letitia Baldrige’s etiquette advice in time to absorb and practice all the manners. The pierced girl blushed and said, “Yes, but I’m over it now.” She was a member of the lucky generation that got over things.

  I stopped by the restaurant on the way back to show the chefs the new photos of the cranberry bog. Everyone in Nantucket was interested in the colors of the bog. The sous-chef was there scrubbing the grill behind the counter, and I mentioned the meeting in the photo lab and what had just transpired.

  “Oh, I know her,” he said. “I like her.”

  “But what about the pierced tongue?” I said.

  “I like that,” he said.

  “How could you like it?” I said.

  “Guess,” he said.

  I tried guessing silently.

  Then I said, “I don’t see why they have to mutilate themselves.”

  “I believe in advancements in technology,” he said. I looked at him and tried to take in the philosophy of those in his generation—the smoking, drinking, drug-using pierced young people.