Rhoda

by Ellen Gilchrist

  Anyway, this doctor was recently widowed. He was the head of obstetrics for Emory University Hospital and he fell in love with my article and the airbrushed photograph of myself I was putting into magazines at that time. I guess I was still having a hard time admitting I was pushing the envelope of the senior citizen category. Anyway, I kept putting this soft, romantic photograph into magazines and I still think it was that goddamn photograph that caused all the trouble and cost me all that money. I figured up the other day what my affair with the widowed physician cost me and it is upwards of ten thousand dollars. Do you know how many articles I have to write for magazines to make ten thousand dollars?

  Back to the letters from the doctor. They were full of praise for my writing and “an intense desire to have you come and speak at our hospital enrichment program. We are very interested in keeping our staff in touch with the finer things in life and have a series of programs featuring writers and painters and musicians. We could pay you two thousand dollars and all your expenses and would take good care of you and see to it that we don’t waste too much of your valuable time. Anytime in April or May would be fine with us. If you are at all interested in coming to light up our lives with a short reading or lecture please call collect or write to me at the above address. You could read the fine piece from Southern Living. And perhaps answer a few questions from the audience. Yours most sincerely, Carter Brevard, M.D.”

  Can you imagine any fifty-year-old woman turning that down? I could read between the lines. I knew he was in love with me before I even got to the second paragraph. I’ve fallen in love with writers through their work. And here’s the strangest thing. You don’t care what they turn out to be. If you fall in love with the words on the page, you are hooked. They can be older than you thought they were, or messily dressed or live in a hovel. When their eyes meet yours all you hear is the siren song that lured you in.

  Of course this doesn’t work for romance or mystery writers or people whose main objective is to get on the New York Times best-seller lists. This only works for writers when they are singing the song the muse gives them. I don’t sing it all the time, like my cousin Anna did, but sometimes I do. Sometimes I trust myself enough to “know the truth and to be able to tell the truth past all the things which pass for facts,” and when I do, people who read it fall in love. Re: Carter Brevard, M.D. Actually, if you subtract the two thousand dollars he paid me, I guess he only cost me eight thousand dollars. Which isn’t all that much, considering the fact that I was living in an apartment and eating dinner with my parents every night. I guess I could afford eight thousand dollars to remember how nice it is to come. Have an orgasm, I suppose I should say, since this might make it into a magazine. But not Southern Living. They don’t publish anything about what happens after people leave the porches and go to bed. It’s a family magazine.

  So I gave Doctor Brevard a date in April and his secretary called and made travel plans and sent me a first-class airline ticket, which is an absurd waste of money between Jackson, Mississippi, and Atlanta, Georgia, and made me a reservation for a suite of rooms at a four-star hotel and in short behaved as though I were the queen of England coming to pay a visit to the provinces. It was “Doctor Brevard wants to be sure you’re comfortable,” and “Doctor Brevard will meet your plane,” and “Oh, no, Doctor Brevard wouldn’t hear of you taking a taxi.”

  So now there are two people in love. Doctor Carter Brevard in love with an airbrushed photograph and a thousand-word essay on porches and yours truly in love with being treated like a queen.

  My parents were very interested in this visit to Atlanta. “You ought to be thinking about getting married, Sister,” my father kept saying. “It would be more respectable.”

  “It’s against the law for me to get married,” I would answer, wondering how much money someone made for being the head of obstetrics for Emory University Hospital. “I have used up my allotment of marriages.”

  February and March went by and unfortunately I had gained several pounds by the time April came. I trudged down to Maison Weiss and bought a sophisticated black three-piece evening suit to hide the pounds and an even more sophisticated beige Donna Karan to wear on the plane. I was traveling on Friday, April the sixth, leaving Jackson in the middle of the morning and scheduled to speak that night to the physicians of Emory University and their significant others. I was an envoy from the arts, come to pay my respects to applied science. I put on the beige outfit and high-heeled wedge shoes and got on the plane and read Denise Levertov as we sailed through the clouds. “The world is too much with us . . . Oh, taste and see. . . .”

  He was waiting at the gate. A medium-sized white-haired man with nice eyes and a way about him of someone who never took an order and certainly almost never met planes. I could tell I was not exactly what he had ordered, but by the time we had collected my luggage and found a skycap and started to the car he was taking a second look. Letters can always win out over science. Letters can articulate itself, can charm, entice, beguile. Science is always having to apologize, is hidden in formulas, statistics, inexact results, closed systems. An obstetrician can hardly say, “I saw a lot of blood this morning. Pulled a screaming baby from its mother’s stretched and tortured vagina and wondered once again if there isn’t a better way.”

  He tried. “I did three emergency C-sections in the middle of the night. I’m going crazy with this AIDS thing. I’m trying to protect an entire operating room and I’m not even allowed to test the patient. It’s the charity cases that scare me. Fourteen- and fifteen-year-old drug addicts. My sons are doctors. I was covering for one of them last night. Sorry if I don’t seem up to par.” He opened the door to a Lincoln town car and helped me in.

  “I know what you mean,” I answered. “I haven’t been laid in fourteen months I’m so afraid of this thing. My friends call from all over the United States to talk about it. We’re all scared to death. I don’t think there’s anyone in the world I would trust enough to fuck.” Except maybe a physician, I was thinking. I don’t suppose a doctor would lie to me. He got behind the wheel and started driving, looking straight ahead. “My wife died last year,” he said.

  “That’s too bad. What did she die of?”

  He took a deep breath. He went down a ramp and out onto an expressway. “She died of lung cancer. You don’t smoke, do you?”

  “I haven’t smoked since the day Alton Ochsner told my mother it caused cancer. She was visiting them one summer and came home and told us of his findings. I don’t do things that are bad for me. I’m too self-protective. I’m the healthiest person my age I know and I’m going to stay that way. I can’t stand to be sick. If I got cancer I’d shoot myself.” There, that should do it, five or six birds with one paragraph.

  “I hope you enjoy the evening. It’s at the University Club. The staff will be there and the resident physicians and their wives. They’re all very eager to meet you.”

  “I hope I won’t disappoint them.”

  “Oh, I don’t see how that could happen.”

  He delivered me to the hotel and three hours later picked me up. He was wearing a tuxedo and looked very handsome. I began to forget he was of medium height. In the last few years I have decided such concerns limit the field too much for the pushing the senior citizen category. After all, I don’t want to breed with the man.

  The dinner and reading went well but there were two incidents that in retrospect seem worth noting. Two things I did not give enough weight to when they occurred. There was a woman with him when he picked me up. A thin, quasi-mousy woman about my age who introduced herself as his interior decorator. “I’m doing his country house in English antiques,” she told me.

  “I used to have a house full of antiques,” I answered. “Then one day I hired a van and sent them all back to my mother. I couldn’t face another Jackson press or bearclaw chair leg. I like simple, contemporary things.”

  “He likes antiques,” the woman said. “In furniture, that is.” She and
Doctor Carter Brevard laughed and looked at each other with shy understanding and I felt left out. Later, in the ladies room at The University Club she made certain to tell me that they were not “lovers.” Did he tell her to tell me that, I wondered. Or did she think it up for herself.

  Later, while we were drinking wine and eating dinner I was telling the people on my right about my father. “He’s a heroic figure,” I was saying. “He has never told a lie. He’s too stuck up to lie to anyone. And he’s very funny. When he was about seventy-five he decided he was getting impotent. He told everyone about it. He told my brothers the minute that he noticed it. They said he came down to the office that morning shaking his head and laughing about it. ‘I can’t do it anymore,’ he told them. ‘Imagine that.’”

  “What?” Doctor Brevard said, turning fiercely toward me. “He told your brothers that? He thought that was funny?”

  “He’s a great man,” I answered. “He doesn’t have to worry about his masculinity. It’s grounded in stuff much more imperishable than whether he can get it up or not.” I was laughing as I said it but Doctor Carter Brevard was not laughing. Maybe this is Atlanta society, I decided. Or what happens when people climb into society on their medical degrees.

  So that sort of soured the evening, although I partially made up for it by making the doctors laugh by reading them a story about a woman who tries to stop drinking by going to live in the woods in a tent. It’s a really funny story, a lot funnier than you’d imagine just to hear me tell about it.

  Anyway, after the reading the doctor and his quasi-mousy interior decorator friend drove me back to the hotel and he walked me through the lobby to the elevator and stood a long time holding my hand and looking sort of half-discouraged and half-sweetly into my eyes. Then, suddenly, he pulled me to him and gave me a more than friendly hug. “I have a check for you in my pocket but I’m embarrassed to give it to you.”

  “Give it here. I’m embarrassed to take it, but what the hell, I have to work for a living like everybody else.” I kept on holding his hand until he withdrew it and reached into his tuxedo pocket and took out the check and handed it to me. “You were marvelous,” he said. “Everyone was so pleased. I wish we could have paid you more.”

  “This is fine. It was a nice night. You were nice to want me here.”

  “Maybe I’ll come and visit you sometime. I’d like to see where you live.”

  “Come sit on the porch. I’ll take you to meet my parents.”

  “Your father really said that to your brothers?”

  “He did indeed. Well, I guess I better go upstairs. Linda is waiting in the car.”

  “She’s only a friend. She’s my decorator.”

  “So she said.” I left him then and went up to my suite and turned on CNN and C-Span. Then I took a Xanax and went to sleep. What a prick-teaser, I was thinking. Is this what I’ve come down to now? Flying around the country letting aging doctors flirt with me and give me terrified hugs in hotel corridors? I stuck my retainer in my mouth to keep my capped teeth in place and went off to sleep in Xanax heaven. I only take sleeping potions when I’m traveling. When I’m at home I don’t need anything to make me sleep.

  Well, I didn’t forget about it. When you haven’t been laid in fourteen months and a reasonably good-looking doctor who makes at least two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year hugs you by the elevator, you don’t forget it. You mull it, fantasize it, angelize it. Was it him? Was it me? Am I still cute or not? Could you get AIDS from a doctor? Maybe and maybe not. All that blood. All those C-sections on fourteen-year-old girls. There is always nonoxynol-9 and condoms, not that anyone of my generation can take that seriously.

  So I was mind-fucking along like that and five or six days went by and I was back to my usual life. Writing an article on Natchez, Mississippi, for a travel magazine, exercising all afternoon, eating dinner with my parents. Then, one afternoon, just as I was putting on my bicycle shorts, the phone rang and it was Carter calling me from his office.

  “I’ve been thinking about you. How are you? Are you all right?”

  “Sure. I’m fine.”

  “You were a big hit. You did the series a lot of good. Several people told me they’d attend more of the events if all the speakers were as entertaining as you were.”

  “That’s nice to hear. That cheers me up and makes my work seem worthwhile.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d like to come and visit me. I mean, visit in the country at my country house. It’s very nice. I think you’d like it.”

  “The one with the antiques?”

  “Oh, you really don’t like them?”

  “I don’t care if you like them. I just don’t want to have to dust them.”

  “Oh, I see.” Was I actually having this scintillating conversation? Was I actually going to buy an airline ticket to go see this guy and have conversations like that for three days when I could pick up the phone in Jackson, Mississippi, and talk to writers, actresses, actors, television personalities, National Public Radio disc jockeys, either of my brothers, any of my nine nieces and plenty of other people who would have talked true to me and gotten down and dirty and done service to the language bequeathed to us by William Shakespeare and William Faulkner and Eudora Welty.

  You bet I was and that was not the worst of it. I was going to a wedding. “I’ll tell you what,” he proposed. “I’m having a wedding for my daughter in June. Would you come and be the hostess? She’s a lovely girl. I have four children. Two are my wife’s from a previous marriage. Two are my own, also from a previous marriage. It’s going to be a garden wedding in my country house.”

  “With the antiques?”

  “Very old-fashioned. The girls will all wear garden hats. The gardens will be in bloom. Some other famous people are coming. You won’t be the only famous person there.”

  “I’m not famous.”

  “Yes, you are. Everyone here has heard of you.”

  “Well, why not. Okay, I’ll come and be your hostess. I won’t have to do anything, will I?”

  “No, just be here. Be my date.”

  “Your date?” I started getting horny. Can you believe it? Talking to this man I barely knew on the phone I started wanting to fuck him?

  Oh, yes. After the wedding, after the guests went away singing my praises, we would go upstairs and with his obstetrical skills he would make me come. Oh, life, oh, joy, oh, fecund and beautiful old world, oh, sexy, sexy world. “With everything either concave or convex, whatever we do will be something with sex.”

  The next morning two dozen yellow roses arrived with a note.

  I tried to lose a little weight. Every time he would call and do his husky can’t-wait-to-see-you thing on the phone I would not eat for hours. Remember, it was late spring and the world was blooming, blooming, blooming, “stirring dull roots with spring rain.”

  I had my white silk shantung suit cleaned and bought some new shoes. It is a very severe white suit with a mandarin jacket and I wear it with no jewelry except tiny pearl earrings and my hair pulled back in a bun like a dancer’s.

  “I want you to have gorgeous flowers,” he said on the phone one afternoon. It was raining outside. I was sprawled on a satin comforter flirting with him on the phone. “What are you going to wear?”

  “A severe white suit with my hair in a bun. All I could possibly wear would be a gardenia for my hair and I’m not sure I’ll wear that.”

  “Oh, I thought you might wear a dress.”

  “I don’t like dresses. I like sophisticated suits. I might wear a Donna Karan pantsuit. Listen, Carter, I know what looks good on me.”

  “I thought you might like something like a Laura Ashley. I’d like to buy you one. Let me send you some dresses. What size do you wear?”

  “Those tacky little-girl clothes? No grown woman would wear anything like that. You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “I thought. That picture in that magazine.”

  “In that off-the-shoulder blouse? I o
nly had that on because I was in New Orleans and it was hot as hell. Then that photographer caught up with me. It was the year I was famous, God forbid.”

  “I wish you’d wear a flowered dress from Laura Ashley. I’ll have them send you some. I know the woman who runs the store here. She’s a good friend of mine.”

  Wouldn’t you think I would have heard that gong? Wouldn’t you think that someone with my intelligence and intuition would have stopped to think? Don’t you think I knew he was talking about his dead wife? A size six or eight from smoking who let him go down to Laura Ashley and buy her flowered dresses with full skirts and probably even sheets and pillowcases and dust ruffles to go on the antique beds and said, Oh, Daddy, what can I do to thank you for all this flowered cotton?

  Listen, was I that lonely? Was I that horny? Right there in Jackson, Mississippi, with half the old boyfriends in my life a phone call away and plenty more where they came from if only I could conquer my fear of AIDS and quit eating dinner every night with my parents.

  “All right,” I said. “Send me one or two. A ten will do. I can take it up if it’s too big.”