“If we sit here, we can chat and not bother the actors,” she said.
“Good thinking.”
Lola smoothed her skirt so that it covered her knees. I took my jacket off.
“Are you warm enough?” I asked. “Do you want the jacket?”
“I’m comfortable,” she said.
In the distance, the actors took their places. A woman stood in the middle of the stage, speaking to a man. They talked for a few seconds, then stopped suddenly. The man rushed to the back of the stage and stood against the backdrop, stone stiff as if he were hiding behind an imaginary tree. A second man walked onto the stage. He argued with the woman. Voices raised. Two more women stood in the wings, chatting through the rehearsal. The woman screamed. The first man echoed the scream. The second man, the one who argued with the woman, pulled the foam sword from his belt and stabbed the hiding man. It all looked familiar, but was not instantly recognizable.
I watched as Dr. Benengeli rearranged the actors. She moved the hiding man more toward center stage. She had the woman start from farther downstage. The two women on the wings stopped chatting during Dr. Benengeli’s direction. Dr. Benengeli had them stand so that they actually intruded into the scene. The actors ran through it again. More arguing, the hiding man getting stabbed again. I recognized the scene. My wife had played Gertrude in a small production when we were still early enough in the relationship that I faithfully attended every performance.
I turned to Lola. “Is she doing Hamlet?”
“Something like that.”
“What’s something like Hamlet? Strange Brew?”
Lola didn’t get the joke. She said, “No. It’s a weird play. It all takes place backstage during Hamlet, but not really backstage. It’s like, the whole play is what happens to the characters in Hamlet when the play isn’t really happening, and they’re all confused because no one wrote their lives. If that makes any sense.”
“Of course,” I said. “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. That explains the two women on the side who keep talking through all the action. Dr. Benengeli must’ve cast women in the roles of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Interesting choice.”
“Not really. Not many men sign up for these plays. She has to cast who she gets.”
“Still,” I said, and left it at that.
Lola ran her fingers through her hair. “How do you know this play? Did you read it?”
I shook my head. “Saw the movie.”
“Any good?”
“I liked it.”
“As good as a bunch of crazy people playing crazy people in a play?”
I smiled, declining to answer any more than that.
“You know, it’s crazy here,” Lola said. “You know that, don’t you?”
“I’m in administration. I don’t see much of the crazy.”
“Oh, I see all of it,” Lola said. “I had to leave my room earlier today because my roommate had a psychotic break. Her husband was coming in for couples’ counseling at noon, and at about 11:30, she started going ape-shit. Yelling, screaming, breaking stuff. Breaking my stuff. The psych techs had to come in to restrain her. She’s yelling, ‘Fuck you. You can’t touch me. You’re all a bunch of cocksuckers.’ Everything. The psych techs were black so she started calling them the n-word. It was horrible. She even bit one of the psych techs. Right on his forearm. Nasty girl.” Lola shook her head and stopped talking.
I wanted to hear the end of it but I wasn’t sure if she wanted to keep talking. I gave her a prod. I said, “She sounds nasty.”
“Oh my god.” Lola paused. “And you want to know what the worst of it was?”
I nodded.
“Okay, so she’s going nuts. The psych techs come in. She bites one. They get serious. There were three or four of them. Plus a nurse and a doctor. Because my roommate was not a small woman. She was very large. And she was just wearing a hospital gown, you know, the kind with the open backs? So they flip her over to keep her from biting anyone and her gown opens up and she’s not wearing any underwear and her big white ass is just glaring like a crystal ball. No, like two crystal balls. Like two crystal bowling balls with a hairy crack in between. And the psych techs are all trying to look away, but how can you look away? How can you look away from that big, nasty white ass?”
“How can you?”
“But wait, I’m just getting to the worst of it. They finally calm her down and the nurse gives her a shot of the booty juice…”
“The booty juice?”
“Yeah. The sedative they inject in patients’ asses. They give her a shot in her big white ass and put her in the timeout room. Then, the nurse on duty meets with the husband. She tells the husband that he can either take his wife AMA or his wife is going into lockdown for the next week. You should’ve heard the intern. She was good. Because AMA means ‘Against Medical Advice,’ but to hear the intern, she was all but telling the husband to take that crazy bitch home. At least that’s what one of the charge nurses told me later. She’s Puerto Rican, too. She tells me everything. Anyway, so the husband signs all the paperwork and my roommate finishes her time in the timeout room and she comes back to our room and she’s all acting like she’d planned it all along, like she went crazy just so she could get out of here. She’s the worst.”
“Sounds nuts,” I said.
Lola groaned like there was a grapefruit of anxiety inside her and she was trying to choke it down. “That’s why I went looking for you,” she said. “I needed to talk to someone who wasn’t crazy.”
“Okay.”
“So talk. Tell me about your life. What’s life like on the outside?”
“I don’t know if I’m the right one to talk to. My life’s not exactly the screenplay for escapism.”
“Why not?”
“Well, for starters, my dog died, then I got a new dog and I started feeling better until my wife decided to leave me and she stole my new dog.”
“So you lost your wife and your dog?”
“Two dogs.”
“Hmm.”
“I know. I’m just as crazy as everyone else.”
“You’re not crazy. You’re just a country song right now.” Lola smiled to show she was kidding. I wondered if she really was. She should’ve known it was a touchy subject to tell anyone from Folsom that his life was turning into a country song.
I didn’t bring that up. I didn’t say anything.
Lola said, “I heard about all that, anyway.”
“You heard about my dog?”
“No. About your wife.”
“Who told you?”
“Eric. We’re old friends.”
So it was true. They did all have a history. Eric and Lola and probably even The Professor. I looked up to the stage. The two women who had been on the sidelines when Hamlet stabbed Polonius through the curtains now held center stage. They were talking to one another. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. I knew the play well enough to know that it could’ve been one of any number of scenes. One of the women pantomimed flipping a quarter and catching it. I realized that Dr. Benengeli was rehearsing out of sequence. I remembered that scene from the play, when Guildenstern keeps flipping the coin and it keeps turning up heads, and he and Rosencrantz come to realize that no matter how many times in a row the coin lands on heads the chances of it landing on heads again are still 50-50.
This made me think of The Professor and all of his talk about the past being gone and the future being uncertain, about the possibility that the whole world was just this moment: me and Lola on a wooden bench under a pine tree, watching a play in the distance. Everything else could’ve been a fiction. Maybe I wasn’t a grant writer and Lola wasn’t a patient and that wasn’t Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead up in the distance and it wasn’t crazy people playing crazy people and nothing was as it seemed. Maybe I’d made all of this up just so it would make sense and, if that was the case, why would I make up such a world? Why would I create a fiction in which the beautiful woman n
ext to me was unwell and all the people surrounding me were in pain and my wife was gone and my dog was gone and perhaps the craziest of them all—the blind man with the skinhead muscle—was threatening to kill my new dog and make me bleed internally? Why would I do that to myself?
“Are you okay?” Lola asked. “You didn’t see a ghost or anything, did you?”
“I’m okay. Just thinking about the play.”
“The Professor is going to love this play. L-O-V-E, love it.”
I looked over at Lola, her tongue gliding across her lips, brown eyes searching the sky for something. “Do you know The Professor from the Winfield days, too?”
“I do. Me and The Professor. The two returning veterans of Winfield.”
“Did he actually teach a class here?”
“Oh, yeah. He was great. He was like high priest of this joint. The Big Kahuna. A few hundred professors on campus, but everyone called him The Professor.” Lola kept gazing off, as if the past lingered somewhere in that springtime sky. “I took his Metaphysics and the Mind course. It was trippy.” Her cheeks tensed into pre-smile balls. Her eyes stayed glued to the sky. “I learned a lot, though. He wrote a book, too.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I’m sure it’s still in the archives, if you want to check it out.”
“Hmm.” I rubbed my face. I’d shaved that morning, but already stubble poked through the skin. “Maybe I will.” And, out of the blue, a thought flashed through my mind and words fell from my mouth before I could stop. “So you probably know all about the scandal here, don’t you?”
“I can’t believe you said that to me.” Lola stood straight up. “We were having such a nice afternoon. Why’d you have to say that?”
My jaw dropped. No more thoughts rushed through my brain and out of my mouth. I honestly had no idea why I’d asked that. I didn’t even care, really. I had very little interest in the scandal at Winfield. I hadn’t looked into it. I hadn’t whiled away hours researching it despite the fact that I whiled away hours nearly every day researching one thing or another. It didn’t matter. Yet I blurted out that question and obviously touched a sore spot. Stupid.
Lola brushed the pine needles off her butt and straightened her skirt. She shot me with a dose of electricity from her chestnut eyes. She said, “Rude!” and she stormed off.
14
With ten days to go before I either spilled the beans on Dr. Bishop’s research or the skinhead killed my dog, I took my first steps in the direction of resolving the situation. I went to a downtown pub, got a table on the patio, ordered a beer, and waited. Thanks to the newly appointed Daylight Savings Time, a six o’clock sun still hung in the sky. Warm rays blanketed my legs and feet while my top half remained in the shade of the patio. My own personal yin and yang.
As usual, I arrived early for our meeting. I’d brought a paperback of ’50s poetry, Gasoline by Gregory Corso, to be exact. I’d read it a thousand times but still carried it in my back pocket occasionally to keep me company. People-watching was good enough on this Thursday evening to keep the book in the pocket. I watched a little drama across the street. Three gutterpunk kids dressed all in black, leather, studs, each wearing a t-shirt of a different British early punk band—the Vibrators, the Subhumans, and Crass—sat in the doorway of an abandoned storefront. They had a dog with them, a shaggy mutt with a bit of German Shepherd in its face and a black bandana around its neck. Two middle-aged women stopped to talk to the kids. The women wore clothes and jewelry from the local boutiques. One woman’s outfit alone likely cost more than the sum total of what these crusty kids had made panhandling since the last time they ran away from home. The women stopped to pet the dog. One woman knelt and opened a styrofoam takeout container. She placed the container in front of the dog. The dog buried his nose in it. The three kids stared at the dog’s snout, a choir of sad, hungry faces. The women patted the dog and made their way into the next boutique. The three kids had a quick, animated argument with a lot of pointing at the container and a lot of rubbing of their stomachs. The dog pushed the styrofoam container around with his nose, licking the final drops. That seemed to settle things. The kids sat back down in the doorway, dejected, ratty engineer boots splayed in front of them.
The rest of downtown played out like a parade: hot rods rumbling down Main Street followed by dentists on Harleys, big trucks driven by suburban white kids thumping the bass of urban hip hop, SUVs holding up traffic while they waited for parking spots to empty out, and angry men in sports cars honking their horns in a vain attempt to get the traffic moving again. There was even one young man in a red Mustang convertible, blasting Michael Jackson for all to hear. It didn’t affect me because the song “Baby, Baby” had been lodged in my head since first seeing that Vibrators t-shirt on the gutterpunk kid.
More shoppers, homeless drifters, exercising locals, parents with baby carriages, cruising high school kids, and haggard dayshift employees walked past. I drank my beer. It was thick and malty and very strong, brewed at this particular pub in the vats behind me. Middle age and nearly a decade of clean living had killed my alcohol tolerance so I tried to pace myself. I sipped.
Out of the passing crowd emerged a woman wearing trouser jeans, a baby blue t-shirt with a picture of a big-eyed doll on it, and a navy corduroy coat. I would not have recognized her if not for her exceptionally short stature. I waved. She entered the little restaurant patio and pulled up a chair.
She said, “What’s up, Chuck?”
“I almost didn’t recognize you in your street clothes,” I said.
“That’s part of the point,” Dr. Benengeli said. “I try to look like a doctor at the hospital and not like a doctor when I’m away from it. Life’s easier when you’re not recognized quite so often.”
“Makes sense,” I said, though it didn’t, really. She was a pretty recognizable figure. “I like your shoes. My wife used to wear oxfords like that.”
“With stars on the toes?” Dr. Benengeli’s oxfords had stars on the toes.
“No. She had flames on her toes. But a similar style.” I paused, looking at her shoes, which reached the ground only because Dr. Benengeli sat so far forward in her chair. “I think I like the stars better.”
“I have another pair with kittens at the toes. But I have to be careful.” She pointed at the picture of the big-eyed doll on her t-shirt. “Don’t want to be too precious.”
“I understand.”
The waitress visited our table. Dr. Benengeli ordered a glass of wine. I ordered three grilled vegetable sandwiches and french fries to go. The waitress nodded and headed for the computer to type in our orders. Dr. Benengeli said, “Were you going to eat dinner here?”
“I hadn’t planned to.”
Dr. Benengeli’s glance volleyed between the waitress and me as if she were watching a quick tennis game. The waitress served, I returned, she nailed a baseline volley and I apparently missed. Fifteen-love. Dr. Benengeli said, “Okay.” She set her purse on the table. It had been woven out of seatbelt straps. Jet black. “I notice that you said ‘my wife’ when referring to your ex-wife’s shoes. I thought the divorce was final.”
“It’s final.”
“Still, you say ‘wife’ instead of ‘ex-wife.’”
“Old habits are hard to break.”
“Are you taking care of yourself?”
I shrugged. I didn’t want this to become a therapy session. That’s not why I’d invited Dr. Benengeli out for a drink. “It was a long time coming,” I said. “Kinda like watching a loved one die of cancer. You know, the disease gradually eats them away and everyone does everything they can, but you can’t beat the cancer. The end almost comes as a relief. Does that make sense?”
“It does.”
I thought that would end the conversation. That’s why I’d responded with the whole cancer analogy: because I wanted to end the conversation about my marriage. It didn’t quite work.
“I notice that you still wear your wedding ring, too.”<
br />
I reached down and spun the ring on my finger. “I’ll take it off when I’m ready to start dating again.”
“Half the nurses and secretaries at the hospital are waiting for that day. Did you know that?”
I dodged the question. “We don’t have secretaries at the hospital. We have ‘administrative assistants.’”
“See, now that pisses me off,” Dr. Benengeli said. I knew it did. That’s why I’d brought it up. I’d heard stories about Dr. Benengeli leading the push at the hospital to call the patients “patients.” Apparently, there’d been a big debate as to what to refer to them as: patients or clients or residents. One group even wanted to call them “consumers.” Dr. Benengeli made the strongest argument, though, and patients remained patients. Knowing that, I was able to end this therapy session. Dr. Benengeli said, “Why can’t secretaries be secretaries? What’s wrong with a secretary? Everyone knows that secretaries run most companies anyway. It’s a respectable job. There’s honor in it. There should be prestige in it. But lately, we’ve become condescending to all of these respectable blue-collar jobs. Garbage men become ‘sanitation engineers.’ Janitors are ‘custodial engineers.’ Secretaries are ‘administrative assistants.’ Handymen are ‘maintenance facilitators.’ It’s bullshit. It’s a way of attacking people’s socioeconomic status. It’s saying that blue-collar is not good enough, and we still want you to do blue-collar jobs, but we’ll give you white-collar names so we can pretend we’re not looking down on you. It gives me a headache.”
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