by T. C. Boyle
The enigmatic physician turned out to be an ordinary enough man of medium height, with a dark slash of slicked-down hair, waxed mustaches and a monocle clenched in his right eye with what seemed an amazing effort of muscular control. His accent was thick, but had none of the harshness Eleanor associated with German speakers—he didn’t talk so much as purr. He was dressed in tweeds and there was a faint smell of wood smoke and licorice about him. She liked him immediately.
Dr. Spitzvogel showed them into a sitting room done up in the Aesthetic style of the late seventies, replete with a gilded and ebonized floor screen in a Japanese pattern and a matching curio cabinet by the Herter brothers. They sat round a low table and chatted over bran wafers and a musky-scented herbal tea that tasted of exotic soils and faraway places, making small talk. After a while, Lionel got up and excused himself. Once the door had closed behind him, Dr. Spitzvogel took up a pad and pencil and questioned Eleanor regarding her condition—in general terms at first, but becoming progressively more probing and intimate as the dialogue advanced. She told him of her sudden rushes of emotion, how the sight of a three-tined fork or a tatted collar filled her with an unbearable overbrimming joy or corresponding sorrow, how she awoke trembling in the night and ran barefoot through the dew, told him of her mother’s death and her husband’s troubles and how she felt that beauty and truth and the pursuit of the physiologic life were the only things worth dedicating oneself to.
He understood her completely. “You poor woman,” he murmured, pulling at his lip and gravely nodding the brilliantined bulb of his head as her litany of woes mounted. When he’d satisfied himself, he gave her a wink so broad and sympathetic it threatened to dislodge his monocle, and then stepped behind the screen. He emerged a moment later in the white jacket of the conventional physician, though the tweed trousers fell away incongruously beneath it, and Eleanor wondered that he would bother to change his jacket and not his pants. “Will you step this way, please?” he asked, placing a peculiar buzzing emphasis on his s’s.
A door to the rear of the screen led to his offices proper, a pair of sedate, wainscoted rooms so softly lit it took a long moment before Eleanor’s eyes adjusted. There was a desk, several straight-backed chairs, the usual physician’s paraphernalia. Through the open doorway to the back room, she could dimly make out a padded examining table and the dull glint of the oil paintings that decorated the walls. Suddenly her heart was pounding. To say something, anything, she commented on the framed credentials displayed on the wall behind the desk, not a word of which was legible in this light. “You’ve had your training in Germany, I presume?” she said, gesturing at the display.
“Oh, yes,” he buzzed, and then he was purring and buzzing at the same time, “at the Universität of Schleswig-Holstein and at Württemberg, too. But not in medicine, dear lady, which as you know is so constrained and narrow a field, but rather in the Philosophy of Physiological Systems, and, of course, Therapeutic Massage—Die Handhabung Therapeutik, in particular. But please, allow me,” he purred, taking her lightly by the arm and escorting her into the back room.
Here the odor of licorice she’d recognized earlier was pervasive, as if the air-itself had been spiced, and the room was noticeably warmer than the one that adjoined it. The only light derived from a pair of flickering sconces and there were no windows, not even a bit of stained glass to admit the light of day, and that was odd. And yet it lent an atmosphere of privacy and retreat to the place, a sense of security untouched by the rolling day, and it lulled her. The effect was instantaneous—she felt languid and her heart slipped back into its accustomed rhythm. In the meantime, Dr. Spitzvogel had crossed the room to pull open the wardrobe in the corner, and as she followed his movements she glanced up and the paintings above the wainscoting came into focus. They were pastoral settings mostly—stretches of lowering sky, sheep in their folds, nymphs, fauns, hovering cherubim, fairies melting into woodland shadow—and they added to the air of unreality that hung over the room. Unaccountably, the word “seraglio” fluttered in and out of her head. And what was she doing here?
“Please,” Dr. Spitzvogel was saying, and he stood before her now, the sheen of his hair and mustaches gone dull in the candlelight, the ghost of a pale silken garment held out in offering. “You will remove your clothing and slip into this—the wardrobe is here for your convenience. And then, please to lay yourself on the table and relax, dream, think nothing but beautiful thoughts.” He smiled—was he winking again or was this a trick of the light.?—and then he was at the door. “I return presently, and then we will begin, ja?”
She changed hastily, afraid he’d come back before she finished, feeling a little foolish for having gone without underwear—she could have worn an iron corset for all anyone would have known. The garment the doctor had given her was open at the sides and she felt it against her bare skin as she’d felt the blouse, a sheet of sensation. She lay back on the padded table, her head on the pillow, eyes closed, and waited. It was no good. She was too tense. What would it be like? What would he do? She concentrated on relaxing her muscles, one by one, beginning with her toes and working her way up. By the time she reached her hips she was so relaxed, what with the heat and the incense and the languor of all those perennially bathing nymphs on the walls, that she didn’t notice he was in the room with her till she felt his hands on her abdomen.
His hands simply lay there—there was no movement, no compression, no attempt at massage—and they were hot, fiery, just as Virginia had said. Eleanor kept her eyes closed, fought to remain still, calm. An eternity dragged by. Nothing happened. But then, as if magically, his hands had migrated to her breasts, her nipples, his hands like smooth river stones heated in the fire, and there was the faintest distant movement of his fingers.
Later, much later, so much later she didn’t know if she’d been lying in that room for hours, days, weeks—if she’d been born there, melting into the padding, through the table, the floor—she became aware of his touch in a place where she’d never been touched before. So delicate, so painstaking, so exquisite in its patience and deep probing wisdom, this was a touch she could never have conjured or imagined. There was no question of resisting it. She sank beneath it, dreaming of those sylvan glades, of men and women alike gamboling through Bavarian meadows, as naked as God made them, and she felt herself moving, too, the gentlest friction of her hips against the leather padding, moving forward and downward and ever so therapeutically into that firm sure touch.
Chapter 4
Rigid Control
and Other
Matters
Eleanor wasn’t eating. Now that she’d switched her affiliation more or less permanently to Will’s table, he had an opportunity to observe her at meals, and he was alarmed to see that she never did much more than stir the food with her fork, as if she were an artist mixing paint. She’d grown thinner, and that was alarming, too. Her cheekbones, always prominent, were stark against her eyes now, and the flesh fell away from them to the corners of her mouth with the harsh tympanic tension of hide stretched over a last. Her wrists were two pairs of thimbles bound together with a cord of skin and her eyes were haunted, growing bigger and more luminous by the day. One evening at dinner he noticed that she wasn’t wearing her wedding ring, and he was mortified, but didn’t mention it at the table with the others present. When he took her aside in the corridor and asked about it, she fished the diamond band from her purse and showed him why: it would no more fit her finger than it would a pencil.
“But what’s the matter, El?” he asked her then. “You’re here to gain weight, not lose it.”
She shrugged, looked up at him sheepishly, and her eyes drank up her face. “I’m eating,” she said.
“You’re skin and bone.”
“You should talk.”
“All right, granted, but I’ve had stomach problems, you know that—and at least I’m eating solid food now, even if it is bran mush or wet pasteboard or whatever it is they serve up around her
e, but you’re eating next to nothing, as far as I can see.”
She was leaning into the wall, pouting, playing with her necklace. “I’m not hungry,” she murmured and smiled past him, showing off the full complement of her even white teeth to an elegantly dressed couple passing by.
“Not hungry?” Will was incredulous. He was pained, outraged. “But you’re the biologic liver, you’re the vegetarian princess, you’re the one who thinks mock oysters and Sanitas fricassee are the height of culinary art—”
She was already moving, her face composed, sweeping serenely along the hallway as if she hadn’t heard a word he’d said. But she had. Because she stopped before she’d gone ten paces and swung round on him. “It’s temporary, I assure you,” she said. “I’m not feeling hungry right now, that’s all. Can’t you give me a moment’s peace?”
Later that night, after shuffling round the halls in his slippers by way of exercise and trying, unsuccessfully, to get through the first page of The Awakening of Helena Ritchie (it was putting him to sleep), he confided in Irene. “I’m worried about Eleanor,” he told her, lingering over his ablutions in the bathroom while she tidied up his room and turned back the bed for him. “She’s not eating.”
Irene appeared in the doorway. “Yes, I’ve noticed it myself,” she said, watching as he dredged his molars with the toothbrush, “and I’ve seen this sort of thing before in other strong-willed women. Women like your wife, that is.”
Will paused, removed the toothbrush from his mouth. “You’ve seen it before? What do you mean?” He gargled, talking around a froth of tooth powder before bending to rinse his mouth. If Eleanor had lost weight in recent weeks, Irene had gained it, rounding out gloriously where it counted most. She’d always been robust, but now she was fairly bursting at the seams, big-shouldered and -bosomed, her thighs standing out in vivid relief against the pale firm clutch of her uniform.
“It’s not pathological, I don’t think. She’s not vomiting, is she? Purposely, I mean?”
“No, of course not. Or not that I know of.”
Irene was on the far side of the room now, arranging things that had already been twice arranged, never really at ease alone with him in the room anymore—though the door was always left open for the sake of propriety, and in accordance with the Chief’s mandate. Since that long-ago evening of the kiss, she’d shied away from physical contact with him, unless it was for strictly medical purposes—monitoring his condition, administering grape, lactobacillus and enema, nursing him through his postoperative trauma. They were friends, certainly—he felt more warmly toward her than ever—but there were no more gifts, no more kisses. He wished there were. “You know, Mr. Lightbody,” she breathed, turning round as he entered the room, settled himself in the armchair and idly lifted The Awakening of Helena Ritchie from the table, “the physiologic life takes tremendous courage, a real effort of the will—”
He smiled. Crossed his legs. “Who should know better than I?”
Nurse Graves returned the smile, and it was a smile that acknowledged the magnitude of his own sacrifice in his personal war for physiologic equilibrium—he bore the battle scars on his abdomen, after all. “Of course you do,” she said in her husky whisper of a voice, “it was just a rhetorical figure … but what I mean is that a very strong-willed person can sometimes take the struggle too far, from engaging in sound eudaemonic practices to the point of denying the body its essential needs. If one conquers the urge for meat, tobacco, alcohol, coffee, tea, pharmacopoeia of any kind, then perhaps the will clamps down even further, do you see?”
Will didn’t see. Not at all. He’d given up a whole world and what had it gotten him? A partially ruined stomach instead of an utterly ruined one. And for what? To be able to eat corn pulp and gruel?
She tried a new tack. “Women are particularly suggestible. If dietary control can cure autointoxication and neurasthenia, as well as practically any other malady you can think of, then it follows—to the overreaching mind, that is—that the more rigid the control over the appetites, the more complete the cure.”
Will lifted his eyes from the first paragraph of the novel, a paragraph he’d read over at least eight times in the course of the past hour without registering a word of it, and wondered aloud if this was what was wrong with Eleanor—and, if so, what was the cure?
Irene was moving briskly now—she had other patients to irrigate and put to bed, and in any case, she was no great friend of Eleanor, who’d tried to have her removed from all contact with Will until Will got wind of it and overruled her—and at first she didn’t answer. Her brow was furrowed with concentration as she measured out the ingredients for the enema, and Will just sat back and admired her. He’d been feeling increasingly randy of late—in fact, he’d had to cut back his use of the Heidelberg Belt to three hours a night, rather than wearing it straight through till morning—and Nurse Graves excited him more than ever. Especially given the new lushness of her figure and the sad fact that Eleanor showed no interest in him whatever—all he had to do was poke his face in the door and she would put her hands to her temples and mutter, “Not now, Will, please—I’m a shattered woman.”
Irene turned to him with the venerable tool and an official smile and he felt his bowels loosening at the sight of it. “I’ll speak to her doctor,” she said finally in her puffiest, breathiest, tiniest little scratch of a voice. “And now”—and the soft soothing whisper of the words made him tingle as if it were seltzer water and not blood percolating through his veins—“are you ready for your irrigation?”
Another meal.
Yet another.
And how many meals constituted a life, Will wondered, picking at his Protose hash and macaroni cutlets, how many four-and-a-half-ounce servings of mush, paste, gruel and boiled oats? Outside, it was a day of insistent beauty—the angels spoke on the breeze, every bud on every tree, shrub, flower and weed was firing perfume into the air, every bird singing—while here, in the dining hall, biologic living went on with a vengeance. Oh, it was elegant enough, well-to-do gentlemen with facial hair and English suits, ladies in the latest fashions from New York and Paris, a warm murmurous undercurrent of chitchat and higher discourse, but was it life, life as it was meant to be lived, raw and untamed and exhilarating, or just some glassed-under simulacrum? Will lifted the fork to his mouth, inserted a tasteless lump of roughage and sighed.
Eleanor sat to his left, insouciantly poking at a yogurt-drenched mound of fava beans and brightening only to the conversation. Mrs. Tindermarsh was seated beside her, and Badger in Miss Muntz’s former spot. Hart-Jones, brick-faced and obtrusive as ever, sat at Will’s right, and their new dining companion occupied Homer Praetz’s old place. But that was all right by Will, that was just fine—Mrs. Hookstratten was like a letter from home. Better. She lived and breathed and spoke of the one place in the world he most wanted to be. She’d filled him in on everything from his father’s health (vibrant) to the quality of the loaves at Shapiro’s bakery (declining) to the status of the Peterskill Yacht Club’s forthcoming season (ambitious). Peterskillian society had suffered in their absence, she assured him, but everyone was hoping for his and Eleanor’s speedy recovery and return—at least in time for the theater season. The duration of her own stay was indefinite—she didn’t like to be away from her flower beds—but, of course, Dr. Kellogg would be the final arbiter there.
She was telling him about a new shop that had opened on Division Street when Hart-Jones distracted her and she fell prey to the general conversation. Will let her go. Lost in a fugue of Peterskill, he stared down at his plate, fork poised over his water-lily salad, remembering how the late-afternoon sun would reach through the windows of the parlor in the house on Parsonage Lane, and how, in happier days, he would sit there in the golden shower of it and browse through Collier’s or The Saturday Evening Post while the small comforting sounds of the household ticked round him and Dick the wirehaired terrier sat at his feet. And how was Dick holding up?, he wondered. The p
oor dog. Left in the company of servants, no one to rub his belly or throw a ball to him on the great rolling emerald tongue of the lawn.
“The Sinclairs?” Mrs. Hookstratten suddenly exclaimed, and Will came back to the moment to see her throw her hands up in a gesture of shock and amazement. “They were here? Truly?” She was a small woman—smaller than Will had remembered her—with shrewd slicing eyes and a complexion that was bathed in milk. She was sixty if she was a day, and there wasn’t a line in her face. “Oh”—and she clasped her hands at her breast now—“I can hardly believe it. What was she like, Eleanor?”
There followed Eleanor’s description of Meta Sinclair, a description that lauded her beauty at the same time that it undermined it, adjectives like “gypsyish,” “Arabian” and “exotic” applied to her various features and body parts, while her wardrobe was simultaneously admired and dismissed.
“Well, you know, of course, what a scandal they caused in New Jersey,” Mrs. Hookstratten confided, lowering her voice, “in that colony or commune or whatever they called it.” This was gossip, high and delicious, and she set her fork down in her Nut Ragout to concentrate on it.
Hart-Jones, who knew nothing of the subject and wouldn’t have recognized the novelist and his wife if they were sitting in his lap, broke in with a braying and typically asinine comment, but Badger cut him off in a voice of high dudgeon: “I was there at Helicon Home, and I can assure you, madame, that the experiment in communal living was a noble and progressive one.”