The Amateur_An Independent Life of Letters

by Wendy Lesser

  “Especially Tosca lovers,” I hazarded.

  “All opera lovers,” he said. “Very passionate people. I admire that. I wish I felt equally passionate about something. But I don’t—at least not at the moment.”

  I decided this was a good place for the conversation to end. Turning my head back toward the screen next to my bed, I closed my eyes. But even with them closed I could still sense the light in the room and the comforting presence at the desk.

  When I was ten I stayed overnight in a hospital after an operation to remove my adenoids. (“Largest pair of adenoids I ever saw,” the doctor remarked to my mother.) What I chiefly remember from the experience, and what I remember noticing most at the time, was the extraordinary comfort of lying asleep in a bed while outside my room, visible through the glass, a nurse stayed awake all night at a lighted desk. I was only ten years old, but I was already conscious of how pleasurable it was—and how rare a pleasure—to be watched over by impersonal, protective forces while I slept.

  While I was recalling this I heard someone come to the door of the First Aid room. “Oh, are you alone?” she said in a normal conversational tone, and then, on spotting me, “Oh, sorry!” in a whisper.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “You can come in.”

  I kept my eyes shut and breathed as if asleep. I couldn’t quite distinguish her whispered words at first, but soon, in her agitation, she grew louder.

  “I’m just so upset,” she said. “No one even told me, and then I go to look on the chart for next week, and I’m only On Call. No regular shifts at all. And the rent is due, and I’ve had a lot of expenses this month, and I really need the money. And I hate to be On Call because you’re supposed to be by the phone all day, but I go to class every morning, and in the afternoon I like to go to the library. Like today I was at the library until five-thirty, and then I got here at seven. But what really hurts me is that no one said my work is bad or anything, they just gave me that schedule. So I don’t know why, or if I’m going to lose the job, or what.”

  “I can see you’re very upset,” he said. “Now, I don’t really know how things work around here, because I’m not actually part of the staff. But I think that if you talked to someone you trusted—do you know Zooty?”

  “Yes, I know Zooty. I can talk to her. She’s always been straight with me. But she’s not around tonight.”

  “Well, if you look on the schedule you can see when she’ll be in—tomorrow or the next day—and then you can just go up to her and say, ‘Zooty, I have to talk to you about this.’ And that way you’ll at least find out, one way or the other, what it means. I can see a large part of what’s bothering you is the uncertainty.”

  “Yes, the uncertainty, and no one told me about it. I mean, if they had said, do you want this shift or that shift, I could be flexible, but just to read on the chart that I’m On Call … I don’t want to lose my job here. I mean, it’s not just the money. I like it much better than any other job I’ve ever had. Much better than McDonald’s—a whole different atmosphere, with all the rich people acting polite. And much, much better than telemarketing. That was my last job. You never meet any of the other people working there, you’re just in a little room by yourself with a telephone, you go in, you go out. Here it’s such a nice, friendly group and we all talk together, and I don’t want to leave.”

  “Well, would you be willing to do any kind of work here?” he asked. “Because if you say to Susan—do you know Susan? she runs the kitchen—if you say, ‘Susan, I’m willing to work in the kitchen when you need people,’ then that’s another place they could put you, if they don’t have a regular shift available. You should talk to Susan and Zooty. And when you talk to Zooty, here’s my secret advice: Zooty cares a lot about education, so let her know you’re going to school in the morning, and I think she’ll respect that.”

  “Yes, I need for people to respect my goals. I need for people to respect me. That’s what really hurts me about all this.” There was a moment of what might have been silent sniffling.

  “I certainly understand why you’re feeling hurt,” he said. “I can see that. You just need to get some clarity. So just resolve that you’ll talk to them and that way, tomorrow or the next day, you’ll at least be able to settle your mind, one way or the other. And then you’ll know where you are, and what you have to do next.”

  “Yes,” she said. I heard her chair scrape as she got up. “Thanks,” she said. “It really helped to talk to you about it.”

  “My pleasure,” he said.

  Someone went by the door then. “The doctor is in,” I heard a voice say, somewhat mockingly. Or maybe it was just a standard greeting. That voice passed quickly out of range, and the first confessor left the room. I cracked my eyelids and peered through my lashes at this surprising person, now alone again at his desk, apparently reading.

  So this was where all the action was at the opera. Forget the rusty plot proceeding on stage; this was the locus of the soul-searing story, this the place where real emotions were bared and acted upon. I thought about my guardian angel’s gentle manner and friendly advice. What a story, I thought—it’s like The Barber of Seville (remembering that barbers, several centuries ago, were also doctors of a kind); he’s like Figaro, fixing up everybody’s life, dispensing advice and plans. How could I do this as a modern Barber, with the plot translated to a contemporary opera house? Let’s see, we could have an older man in the audience—a regular opera patron, one of those rich, elderly guys, a judge, say—and his young ward, whom he was secretly planning to marry. No, people don’t have wards these days. Let’s make him the head partner in a big law firm, and she’s a young associate. She’s not interested in him—she only came to the opera for business reasons—but he’s threatening to oppose her partnership if she doesn’t give in and sleep with him. She has a terrible headache and comes down to the First Aid room, and ends up telling the owlish little guy all about her problems. And he figures out a way that she can trick the old guy and marry the public defender of her dreams …

  No, it wouldn’t work. I was missing the heavy-moral-code dimension. What, in modern-day San Francisco, could possibly substitute for the Church in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Europe? Nobody would be interested these days in the power, or the corruption, of the moralistic old regime. Religion was a dead issue. My plot foundered.

  “Hey, have you ever read the Bible?” said a new voice from the doorway.

  I kid you not. I have not made this up. This is the exact order of events.

  “No, that’s not really my sort of thing,” said my reliable friend. “I know a lot of people find it comforting, but I just can’t get around the unscientific basis. I can’t believe in stuff like that.”

  “No, I don’t mean as religion. I mean just as literature, as something to read.” The new voice was much louder and more confident than her predecessor’s had been. She was striding into the room as she spoke. “Oops!” she said when she caught a glimpse of me.

  “That’s all right,” he said, evidently convinced by now that I could sleep through anything.

  I heard her heave herself into the chair. “I mean, there’s some incredible stuff in there. You should really read it.”

  “I’m afraid this is more my speed,” he said.

  “Death Be Not Cautious. A murder mystery, huh?”

  “Yeah, I like them.”

  “But you should see what they have in the Bible. The Book of Revelation, for instance. That’s scarier than anything in Stephen King. I was reading it aloud to my young cousins once, in Ireland—they didn’t have anything else to read in the house—and they got really scared. All sorts of monsters with weird faces and stuff. And Samson and Delilah! That’s one of my favorites. Have you read that one?”

  “No,” he said politely. “It’s the one about how a lot of hair makes you powerful, right?”

  I myself might have been hesitant to push this line of conversation with a man who was prematurely balding, bu
t she soldiered on. “Yeah, and then Delilah cuts all his hair off. But you don’t really feel she’s being unfair. It’s really interesting.”

  There followed some desultory conversation about how well or badly they had done in high school English classes, and how they had taken years to discover what they liked reading on their own, due to the misconceptions instilled in them by boring teachers. I believe there was a reference to a Robert Frost poem; I know there was some slighting discussion of Moby-Dick and The Scarlet Letter. I was less interested in the content of the conversation than in its tone. My medical man had transformed himself—from the gentle, knowledgeable dispenser of advice to the friendly, untutored amateur, eager to learn from another. His therapeutic consulting room had become an impromptu literary seminar.

  “Oh, the intermission’s about to start. I’ve got to go. See you!”

  “Yeah, see you later,” he answered.

  It was only a few minutes before I heard the familiar sound of my husband’s footsteps. He paused by the doorway.

  “I think my wife …”

  “You must be Mr. Lesser,” said my faithful attendant. They were speaking simultaneously, as in an Altman film.

  My husband, who has a different last name, is used to confusion. He finished his sentence, “… came in here to lie down?”

  I sat up in bed and smiled. My husband was amazed at my transformation: I had been in a foul humor since before the Caribbean restaurant.

  “The patient is fine,” said my medical friend, smiling as well. “Did you have a good rest?”

  “Excellent,” I said, climbing down and reclaiming my shoes. “Thank you for letting me use your nice bed.”

  “Vintage 1932,” he told my husband. Then he turned to me: “And you, Mrs. Lesser, should watch what you eat for the next twenty-four hours or so. No coffee, if you can help it, and no spicy foods.”

  “Okay,” I said cheerfully, not necessarily intending to comply. At the door I turned back and waved. He gave me a big grin and a thumbs-up sign.

  “Quite a bedside manner he has,” said my husband.

  “You don’t know the half of it,” I said.

  RALPH

  t is commonly observed that people resemble their pets—that they acquire cats and dogs who look like them in the first place, and that animal and owner become ever more alike as the years pass. I have noticed the phenomenon, but I think the etiology is slightly different. It is not that we really look like our pets, but that we come to understand our own characters by observing theirs. This may not even be a matter of resemblance, since the qualities one admires in an animal may be precisely those one lacks rather than possesses. Still, I think it is true that, over the years, pet owners increasingly define themselves in relation to their animal companions. However blindly you may have chosen your cat or dog in the beginning, his presence forces you into a certain degree of self-awareness, or at the very least self-examination. Animals make a good mirror in this way because they provide such a smooth, unbroken surface, a kind of living tabula rasa on which we can project our narcissistic perceptions and imaginings. So we may come to resemble our pets—or think we do—without actually borrowing their physical appearance.

  I had a cat without a nose.

  This was the only extraordinary thing about Ralph. He was intended from the beginning to be a merely normal cat. I called him Ralph to signal that—to reflect his ordinariness, and to ensure it.

  Before Ralph I owned a cat named Melanctha, named for Gertrude Stein’s wandering black heroine. My Melanctha also wandered. She would take up residence for days or weeks with neighbors, and I too would have to wander in order to find her, knocking on the doors of strangers who lived one street over.

  “Does she lie on your chest and lick your neck when you’re going to sleep?” I would ask, to make sure this was the right black cat.

  “Yes!” the children of the household would always say. So I would take her home, without looking back at them.

  I think she did this licking thing because she was the runt of the litter, and never got enough of her mother. But what does it matter? Do we reject love because its intensity stems from early childhood deprivation?

  When Melanctha wasn’t wandering, she sat beautifully on my kitchen windowsill, a perfect Egyptian figurine. She sat very still and stared out the window at nothing I could see.

  My friend Katharine and I spent many hours in this kitchen, sitting catty-corner from each other at the built-in table, talking about our hopeless boyfriends. At one point we were both seeing musicians in the same rock band—I the bass player, Katharine the lead guitar. These two were part of a series that included a chess-playing mathematician (mine), a left-wing construction worker (hers), and two aspiring filmmakers (one for each of us). Each of these men had to be discussed in detail, over time, with many repetitions of the same sorry tale. “I have no idea what goes through his mind,” Katharine would say. Once she added, looking at the cat, “It’s like trying to read the inside of Melanctha’s mind.” “Melanctha’s mind” became our shorthand for the whole subject of the obscurity of men.

  One day Melanctha wandered too far. Or perhaps I romanticize the safety of home.

  She was missing for weeks, and none of the neighbors had seen her. I would fall asleep at night thinking about the sandpapery scratch of her tongue on my neck. I found her body decaying in the bushes outside my house. “She must have been hit by a car,” said my downstairs neighbor, who had run outside in response to my cry. “At least she came home to die,” he added.

  This made me weep harder. The children who lived next door, happening to be at that moment in their front yard, were embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” I told their mother. “I’m all right,” I told the children. “It’s okay for grownups to cry.” I made my downstairs neighbor take Melanc-tha’s body to the SPCA for me. While he did it, I scrubbed the grout between my bathroom tiles with an old toothbrush. This is the only time I have ever done such a thing.

  Ralph was explicitly Melanctha’s replacement. Katharine was not reticent in her comparisons. “Well, he’s certainly not the cat Melanctha was,” she would say. “Look at those ridiculous white leggings. He looks like an amateur Shakespearean actor whose tights are falling down.”

  “Yes,” I would admit. At first his shortcomings irked me—that he was not all black, that he lacked dignity, that he was male. (All my childhood cats had been female. In fact, in the household I shared with my mother, my sister, and a succession of various and often multiple pets, even the guinea pigs were always female. Males were considered a mere biological necessity, introduced for breeding purposes and then returned to the pet store, or wherever they had come from.)

  I did not choose Ralph, as I had Melanctha. He was assigned to me randomly, the only remaining kitten in a litter owned by my sister’s soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend, a sweet ne’er-do-well who disappeared from our lives, leaving my cat as his only trace. At first this seemed yet another example of Ralph’s inadequacy, his failure to replace Melanctha fully. But eventually I began to feel that the randomness, the ordinariness, was the whole point. I, who was not (to say the least) good at dealing with the unplanned, had unexpectedly been given an easy example of it. Ralph was my chance to learn to lend myself to circumstances. His name, which had begun as a kind of insult, became a term of endearment.

  A decade later Ralph was still essentially the same personality: affectionate to friends and strangers alike, happy with his small portion, unassuming. By this time I had married a man who was, among other things, allergic to cat hair. After a long period of resistance, I agreed to convert Ralph into an outdoor cat. Ralph was, as always, accommodating.

  Friends who were slaves to their pets deplored but also admired my harsh decree. “We’d like to get our cats outside, too,” they said. “We’re trying to Ralphicize them.” His solid name supported an exotic yet useful verb, halfway between “rusticate” and “ostracize.”

  My husband, who had been married bef
ore, already had a son when I married him—a boy of five when we first met. Once, shortly after his father and I had started seeing each other, they came to my house for dinner. “Make hamburgers or hot dogs,” said the father, my not-yet-husband. “He won’t eat anything else.”

  “Nonsense,” I said. I cooked cheese soufflé. The boy wouldn’t eat. Very politely, he touched nothing.

  Instead, he watched Ralph eating. We were all clustered in that same little kitchen where Melanctha had once adorned the windowsill. Ralph attacked his kibble ravenously and incompetently, spilling it in a mad circle around his dish.

  “Soon you’ll meet my sister,” I told the boy conversationally. “She’s coming up here for a visit.”

  “Is she a messy eater too?” he asked.

  “Too?”

  “Like Ralph. I wondered if everyone in your family is like Ralph.”

  My stepson is now twenty-four, an adult with his own apartment, girlfriend, cat. I have my own son now. It is on him that Ralph’s noselessness had its effect.

  It began with a bleeding sore in 1990, the year my son turned five. I waited for the sore to heal, as even the most severe cat scratches eventually do. But this didn’t. As one always does in such cases, I correctly suspected the worst.

  My regular vet, Dr. Berger, a charming man who spends half the year trekking with wolves, was away. His replacement was a young fellow with excellent diagnostic skills and no tact.

  “We’ll have to do a biopsy to be certain,” he said, “but I’m almost sure this is an extremely aggressive form of skin cancer. We see a lot of it here in California—the sun causes it. If you leave it alone he’ll be dead in two months. It eats ’em up.”

  “What are my options?” I said, affecting rationality.

  “Well, radiation is our top-of-the-line recommendation, but it’s hard on the animal, and it costs a lot.”

  “How much?”

  “Oh—this is only ballpark, you know, I couldn’t make any firm estimates—but somewhere in the $1500 to $1800 range.”