Driving on the Rim (16 page)

Awareness of larger themes was something we didn’t much go in for where I lived. We tampered with ignorance to keep our lives miniaturized; the Internet made us feel like ants. We worried that we would no longer care about weather. I treasured my most rural and ignorant patients for the way other humans loomed for them. When someone died, they never said, “
Poof!
” It was always a good-sized tree that fell.

Jinx said that a special meeting of our board of directors had been convened in the wake of the attacks, and that our board chairman had made some remarkably inane remarks. “He told us it was a day that would live in infamy.” Al Hirsch had said, “That rings a bell, Mr. Wilmot.”

I asked her, “Is this like Pearl Harbor?” Jinx’s hot water tank had failed and help from the plumber was several days off, so she was using my bathtub and if she couldn’t get to it until late in the day, she stayed over in my downstairs guest room. It was probably not the best arrangement, as it fueled gossip, but more importantly it kept either of us from getting a good night’s sleep because we talked late into the night. She sat at my kitchen table, a towel wound around her thick, damp hair, her face scrubbed clean of any makeup so that her green eyes seemed brighter.

“Pearl Harbor was the beginning of a war we knew was coming,” she said. “We didn’t know this was coming.”

“I don’t think we knew Pearl Harbor was coming.”

“We knew war was coming. I think we knew that war would require a great effort but that it would be elsewhere.”

“But is ‘war’ the right word? My father was in a war, but it wasn’t consciously directed against civilians.”

“I think in religious warfare differentiating between soldiers and noncombatants is considered a nicety, something superfluous. Look how the Christians went at it in the Thirty Years’ War.”

“The victims in New York were well outside the zone of conflict. It’s hard for me to understand why anyone would do something like this. I hope you’re not making excuses for these people.”

“No, I’m just trying to picture the advantage they might see in waging war this way.”

“Which is what?”

“It’s cheap.”

I was at once impressed by her objectivity and disturbed by her detachment, a perception that faded as we watched television and observed terrible scenes of suffering. We saw older, seasoned firefighters in a sheltered area shudder violently at the sounds of bodies falling on the pavement outside. Jinx covered her face, and when she uncovered it I saw that all her detachment had dissolved into terror. I didn’t question it when she crawled into bed beside me that night, shaking, and I held her in my arms until morning, when we arose with averted eyes, dressed, made coffee, and went to work. She didn’t come back, and though she must have had to make do with cold water at her place, I didn’t ask. But when I saw her around the clinic I was aware of some slight new tension.
It wasn’t much, but there it was, and quite mysterious too. It was everywhere.

Mortality is something people in medicine accept more readily than the general population, just through familiarity. I have, however, known doctors who have been diagnosed with fatal diseases and they didn’t do much better than everyone else. Between every individual and the rest of the world is a stupendous firewall breached only by saints. For example, my mother’s antic and superficial style, which I miss. When I say “superficial” I don’t intend it in its usual belittling way; my mother’s gift was to absorb the details and uproar of an ordinary day for what they were and no more—from boiling oatmeal to returning phone calls, from assaulting cobwebs with her broom to humoring my father, talking to her sisters with the phone tucked in her shoulder as she adjusted the curtains over the sink, telling my dad to jump-start her car because she’d left the key on, running out in summer, palms up, to greet a rain shower, doing her taxes, or feeding the cat who never hunted mice because of all the food she gave him—everything was exactly as it seemed, and nothing annoyed her more than the search for hidden meaning.

Her simple belief in God relieved her of a good deal of agitation, and I realized I’d missed an opportunity when I failed to quiz her about the nature of Him, Her, or It. My own conviction that life is somehow purposeful could have stood a little specificity, and my father’s “God is crazy” was not what I had in mind. I’ve tried imagining it: a deity who fails to understand the consequence of His own actions and is unable to understand the difference between right and wrong. Unfortunately this smacks of a criminal defense. Or “crazy” like Patsy Cline, a concerned deity: “Worry. Why do I let myself worry?” There’s a God I could understand. But my mother’s God was a witch doctor; you could talk to Him only in tongues. And you crossed her God at your peril. Over a decade ago, my father renounced religion and promptly had a heart attack which looked like it might be fatal. Sitting next to him in his hospital room, my mother, worried but objective, said, “Soon you’ll be with the devil.” He recovered, though her failed prophecy did nothing to weaken her belief. And my father went obediently back to his imitation of faith.

The attack in New York felt more like a death in the family. A death in
the family was something rarely experienced as an event. It was experienced as a change of seasons like the end of summer, or a spell of weather. A death in the family moved us closer to death ourselves. Religion had not made death less ominous: it remained a world we preferred not to enter. My mother’s death not long after I began my career had the effect of removing a sort of white noise from my father’s life and mine, a very pleasant white noise that I thought maybe only women could provide. It was the sound of life, unlike the logic of silence that appealed to men: women sought God while men sought Euclid. I wished they were the same.

I went over these things this way because I realized I’d been making myself out to be a solid citizen with the customary remorse and job weariness of anyone of my age and occupation. That was actually misleading. The temptation to claim common cause with the secret lives of everyone had its basis in fear.

My mailman, Spenser Hooper, had always taken an interest in me. Walking around and delivering mail in all weather had aged Spenser, who having been a couple of grades behind me in school had watched my transformation from nincompoop to physician with kindly fascination. He was very much aware of my troubles at the clinic and, standing in my doorway with a wad of mostly junk mail, he brought it up. “Well, Berl, this is awful, isn’t it? You can’t work, can you? How will you survive? You didn’t actually do that to the lady, did you?” Never mind the assault of Al Qaeda on America.

“Why, that’s the question, isn’t it?” I said. Spenser found this as unsatisfactory as everyone else did, but he merely raised one eyebrow in exaggerated skepticism and handed me the letters. The bafflement of my mailman and onetime schoolmate sharpened my solitude. I saw it as something of a hardened position, neither willfulness nor indifference; and it combined a profound need to learn how I was judged with a disinclination to glorify the proceedings against me. I’m not sure why I was uncomfortable confusing my mailman.

I could tell that Spenser was out of ideas as to how he might continue with me when he said, “I’ll still bring your mail” when he left, “unless your address changes.”

I found this bland remark to be curiously ominous. It reminded me of
my earliest school days when teachers would order me to “pay attention” and I would gaze all around the room looking for a suitable object for attention, which the teachers mistook for insolence.

I have always believed that it was my great good fortune to spend the first part of my life as a nitwit, and to have stayed in my hometown, where my limitations and peculiarities would always be in the air. The feeling you got by such persistence, of enlargement and occupying space, greatly outweighed the disadvantages of whatever you were known for. I could tell when I ran into my old teachers that they still viewed me as a dunce. Though I had become a good student by the end of my high school years, you never get a second chance to make first impressions.

Jinx was clearly more grounded than I. I didn’t mind this discrepancy because I seemed comfortable at my own particular altitude believing as I did that a certain lack of attachment to the world yielded its own benefits. For example, sometimes Jinx and I cooked for each other: I got out a cookbook and followed the dotted line; Jinx looked into her refrigerator and winged it. She didn’t know why I made a federal case out of cooking a meal; I didn’t know why she set out on a course prone to failure, or at least lacking the authority of a cookbook. In short, Jinx was a real cook and I was not. Also, human beings were less mysterious to Jinx. When she found one of them up to no good, she simply took note without surprise. Injecting drama into the everyday was not her thing. As my mother’s son, I felt that we are always swept by a mighty wind.

We were taking our lunch in the city park. Jinx ate a sandwich with one hand, holding her binoculars in the other to watch some hawks that in turn were studying the pigeons collected around the waterworks. I sat at the base of a tree, carefully prying open my sandwich to study its contents. It bothered me that I couldn’t remember what I had put in there that very morning. It turned out to be some kind of processed ham and Swiss cheese, also processed, with Miracle Whip and a piece of iceberg lettuce.

She said that this internal investigation of possible malpractice had been instigated by the board of directors.

“Wilmot?” I asked.

“What’s his problem with you?” Jinx asked.

“I wish I knew.”

“Wasn’t he your patient?”

“Yes. He still is. He was married to a wonderful girl, Adrienne.”

“Is that it?”

“Well, sure.”

“I get it,” said Jinx. “He’s embarrassed.”

“You think?”

“I do. He’s extremely vain. With your usual shirker’s style, you rarely come to the board meetings. Wilmot is really onstage. One time he had a pince-nez and a hankie in his sleeve. The other board members are somewhat afraid of him: he’s quite vindictive. Wilmot has little to do, and what little there is he finds beneath him. Perhaps you are his project.”

Wilmot knew of Adrienne’s indiscretion with me. It was hardly an accident and came out of strong feeling on both our parts. I really wish it hadn’t happened, but it occured at a time when their marriage seemed to be ending. I was besotted with Adrienne for good reason, and if they had divorced at the moment it looked likely they would, our relationship, which was based at the very least on tremendous affection, might have ripened into something quite significant. But they patched things up, and even though Wilmot knew what had occurred between us, he didn’t appear to mind; in fact it seemed to point toward a friendship. But two years later when they did divorce, our very brief affair became public knowledge, and from then on, Raymond Wilmot had it in for me. He took a very traditional view of his situation and by all reports threw himself into a cuckold’s rage. After the divorce, when I’d see him, I knew what was on his mind, but the way he kept his distance and theatrically projected a burning gaze, made me think of of Rudolph Valentino in eye makeup.

“And now Niles Throckmorton is calling me up and telling me I need to be ready for trial.”

“What? I think Niles is well ahead of himself. No one goes to trial out of someone’s ill will unless it’s the Khmer Rouge. I hope you’re not taking this seriously.”

There was no point in telling Jinx that I had done enough in my life to
acquire all the culpability I’d ever need and that, at least in low moments, it didn’t really matter what I was accused of as long as I was accused. She wouldn’t have gotten that: she wouldn’t have tried to get it.

I knew most of our local law enforcement, some of whom I had gone to school with. People ending up in law enforcement were not likely to take a warm view of anyone as weird as I was when I was young. Curtis Seaver and I had an especially awkward relationship because his family went to the same church as my parents and he knew that I told anyone who would listen that they were all crazy. In school, Curtis was the scourge of immorality and reported anyone he suspected of wrongdoing, whether it was shoplifting candy, smoking dope, or engaging in heavy petting. He was known to make citizen’s arrests in traffic matters. The police department at that time and the local judge considered him at best tiresome and at worst a pain in the ass. Curtis Seaver was over six feet tall by the time he got to high school and never weighed less than two hundred pounds. Always prepared to enforce his judgments, he stalked the corridors solemnly, the archetypal frowning Christian. Twenty years had changed him little, though the uniform, the straps and badges, made him seem only more intractable. Unfortunately, Curtis also had a Realtor’s license and was a shirttail associate of Wilmot’s. Surely that was behind his paying me a visit and questioning me with surprising aggression.

“When did you first meet Miss Larionov?”

“Miss Larionov? What does she have to do with it?”

“Answer the question, please.”

“I don’t know, twenty years ago.”

“And you’ve known her all this time?”

“I
did
know her. She’s dead.”

“But you knew her all that time?”

“No. We’d lost touch.”

“Are you aware that Miss Larionov kept a diary?”

“No. I don’t think she kept one when I knew her.”

“I’m afraid you’re not correct about that.”

“Okay, she kept a diary when I knew her. Who gives a shit?”

“It may be important.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“It may be you will know in the future.”

“Thank you, Officer Seaver. And, as a courtesy, can you tell me what this is all about?”

“In due course. Shall we continue?”

“Go for it.”

“When you were with Miss Larionov, were there relations?”

“I believe she had an aunt and uncle in Great Falls.”

“I don’t think this is any time to be clever, if you understand your situation. Our records indicate you made obscene phone calls to Miss Larionov.”