by Lucy Ellmann
But I could call Bee. Bee would help me. Bee always had an answer and she was usually right—except for that time she made me dress up like Little Lord Fauntleroy and drag her through the hot streets of Virtue and Chewing Gum, while she sat in splendor on our little red wagon: our contribution to the Fourth of July parade. Bee was Fauntleroy’s mother, I was the truth-telling, charity-giving goofball. We really killed that day—killed a lot of patriotism anyway.
“Why would you want to talk to those bozos?” was Bee’s first question, once I got hold of her.
She was in a bad mood. Her Canterbury patrons had pulled the plug on one of her Coziness Sculptures. Bee, the least “cozy” character I ever came across, had started making these emblems of domestic calm and peace she called Coziness Sculptures some time back: they consisted of assemblages of found or bought materials which she housed in tamper-proof Perspex boxes and displayed in public spaces, to work as subliminal mood-enhancers for passers-by, “a salve for anxiety and despair.” She’d discovered that the English populace was in particular need of cheering up, and as soon as she got to Canterbury, had made it her mission to comfort them. So it was a blow to be told her efforts were not deemed worthwhile.
The latest (rejected) Coziness Sculpture was a peaceful fireside scene involving a comfy armchair, a glass of wine, foxed leatherbound book lying open on an antique table, small Persian carpet on the floor; everything suffused in a warm, soft yellowish light supplied partly by the (pretend) fire and partly by an art deco lamp on the table. But her patrons (through their representative, some guy Bee couldn’t stand) were quibbling about the cost. They wanted her to use a paperback or no book at all, a junk-shop table covered by a fake lace tablecloth, a cheap ugly armchair, a mat painted to look like a Persian carpet, and no lamp—she was supposed to light the whole scene with hideous low-energy bulbs. In Bee’s opinion, no “coziness” would result.
“I saved them money on the fireplace!” she said, referring to some sort of clever hidden flickering-light effect she’d been working on, suggestive of a log fire just out of sight. “The whole point was to have a nice old copy of Our Mutual Friend lying open at my favorite bit, when Eugene knocks Mr Boffin’s recommendation of bees as role models.” And she ran to get the passage so she could read it to me over the phone (when was she going to deal with my problems?). “‘I object on principle, as a two-footed creature,’” recited Bee, on her return, “‘to being constantly referred to insects and four-footed creatures. I object to being required to model my proceedings according to the proceedings of the bee.’?”
“I know, it’s great,” I agreed (thinking of Bette’s scary mother in Now, Voyager who mockingly remarks, “Are we getting into botany, Doctor? Are we flowers?”).
“This is the bit I really like…,” Bee continued. “‘Conceding for a moment that there is any analogy between a bee and a man in pantaloons (which I deny), and that it is settled that a man is to learn from the bee (which I also deny), the question still remains, what is he to learn?… They work; but don’t you think they overdo it?… And are human labourers to have no holidays, because of the bees?… And am I never to have a change of air, because the bees don’t?’ The guy’s a genius!” Bee said. “The only good thing about being here is that Dickens spent a lot of time in Kent.”
“I’ll beat him from top to bottomus,” I said, trying to cheer her up with our old Bert Lahr game.
“Who, Dickens?”
“No, your hippopotamus of a patron,” I said. “They commissioned you, right? And now they’re making trouble about it.”
“Yeah, I know. If you don’t like my peaches, don’t shake my tree! … But their minion’s more like a crocodile.”
“I’d add him to the woodpile!”
“Or maybe a gnu.”
“I’d show ’im the ol’ one-two!”
“Canterbury’s such a dump.”
“I’d give it a big red lump!”
“Did I ever tell you about the water?”
“I’d take it to the slaughter!”
“No, Harry, listen! It’s full of white stuff. It leaves white rings on all your glassware. Scum forms on the top of my tea that looks like tectonic plates!”
“Try a cup.”
Bee finally attended to my dilemma and came up with an idea: look in the phonebook, maybe I could find an evening class in public speaking or something. This was quite a concession on her part, since I’d driven her nuts as a teenager by reading phonebooks for pleasure (sometimes out loud!). But once again she was right. There were millions of people in the Yellow Pages who claimed to be experts in public speaking, after-dinner talks, wedding speeches, PowerPoint pontification and corporate presentations: a whole hierarchy of coaches, consultants, professors, presentation maestri and mentors, trainers, gurus, shamans, and lamas were gathered there, all pretty eager to present themselves if nothing else. But I finally settled on a guy called M. Z. Fortune, because he held seminars in New York (everybody likes a “seminar”) and had a sideline teaching firemen how to give presentations. (What did they give speeches about? Dalmatian care? Maybe they were much in demand at arsonists’ conferences.) I’d always had a soft spot for firemen (and their vehicles). Firemen seemed much superior to cops. Firemen are noble—and so tidy! All they do is rescue cats and people, comfort them, and establish order out of chaos. They make nice. Even without the 9/11 massacre, you can’t beat firemen for heroism. I think I now felt that even being indirectly connected to firemen might somehow help me with my speech, so I emailed this M. Z. Fortune for an appointment.
Then I sat down to play the piano. Lately I’d been playing Smetana, Ligeti and Scriabin, but now I tried Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s “Collage-Montage,” a piece that reminded me maybe too much of Gertrude: it’s a medley of explosions, confusions, disagreements, rifts, sulks, and slammed doors, all of which Aimard (like Berlioz!) seems to have a terrible time bringing to an end (just as I did with Gertrude). I worked my way toward the finish now with all due vigor and determination.
Fortune soon replied. We arranged to meet for lunch at Kelley & Ping (my choice) on Groundhog Day, which was only a couple of weeks away. He suggested I read his book in the meantime, The People’s Guide to Presentations, and bring it to the restaurant so he’d recognize me. I was in deep now: reading a self-help manual? Dickens, I imagined, it was not.
Actually, Bee doesn’t always know everything in the Ant and Bee books. In Ant and Bee and the Rainbow, it’s Bee who gets all bent out of shape… He can’t keep up with Ant in this one at all. They agree on how to paint the old tire to look (a bit) like a rainbow (“So Ant and Bee happily began to paint the rubber tyre with the colour called… RED”, etc.), but it soon emerges that Ant’s got a better color sense than Bee. Ant paints his ping-pong bat VIOLET, while Bee paints his a hideous BROWN! A brown bat hardly compares with a violet one, but nobody says anything.
I learned most of what I know about mixing colors from this book. But you have to feel sorry for Angela Banner. The woman never saw sunshine in her life! England had continuous cloud cover, according to Bee. No wonder Banner knew nothing about color—you’ve got to go to the French Riviera like Matisse, or just be Italian. The lack of sun explains the melancholy muted light in all Ant and Bee books—and why Ant and Bee have to create their own rainbow in the first place, painting that tire they find half-buried in the unreal earth.
GROUNDHOG DAY
LIST OF MELANCHOLY
– the pigeon couple on the parapet outside, one dying, the other standing helplessly by
– continuous cloud cover
– the penny-pinching English, who wouldn’t give Bee her art deco lamp
– artist-in-residence posts
– phonebooks
– the word, “churlish”—Bee had giggled when I said it might be churlish of me to refuse Chevron High’s invitation
– people who attempt to dissuade other people from using words like “churlish”
– balloon
animals
– self-conscious ten-year-olds
– accordions
– crapholes of the famous (Bee had given me a coffee-table book for Christmas)
– whale eyes, cow eyes, elephant eyes
– Velcro
– returning to work after a period of intense inactivity
Living in New York you cannot fail to notice millions of people heading godknowswhere, and this cannot fail to fill you with melancholy. They eat, they sleep, they shit, they stink, they speak. Some speak only to themselves, and I was getting like that too. It was time to go back to work.
The girls in the office made a big fuss of me and my limp and my cane, and cooed over all my other assorted ailments too—I spared them the burned tongue but owned up to the sore thumb. Cheryl, our trainee nurse, said just thinking about my thumb injury made her feel faint. Some nurse! (In her defense, her professionalism was compromised by infatuation: she had a wholly unrequited crush on me.) Soon it felt like I hadn’t been away for a month at all, like I hadn’t been away for a moment. The receptionists, Jean and Cathy, saw me as a welcome depository for all the office gossip they’d been stewing over alone, and kept rushing into my office every ten minutes with a new ice pack and tidbit of news, keen to get me up to speed on my colleagues’ every bout of public drunkenness, their displays of impatience, the sniping, the griping, the fits of crying, the secretiveness… One intern had seen about ten patients in a row with his fly open, but it seemed to have been a genuine mistake, not a sign of some poignant aberration. Jean told me which patients had croaked, either before or after treatment; Cathy, that a sweet doorman had died in my absence, shot dead near his home trying to stop a fight; a fund had been set up for his wife and kids. Some workman had slipped on the newly waxed floor by the elevator, surfed on his stomach down the hallway and broken his nose, but he’d been offered a free nose-job to stop him suing.
All the stuff of office life. If it weren’t for the adoring Cheryl though, I might never have heard about the antics of Jed Stockton, MD, a preppy junior doctor who’d not only participated in a weekend of tag-teaming with a bunch of fellow med students, but filmed the whole episode on his cell phone, and was now offering to show it around the office to anyone who’d look. I asked Stockton to come into my office—but not in order to check out his directorial debut.
“How you doing, Harrison?”
“Who was the girl involved, Jed, may I ask?”
“You heard, huh?” He seemed pretty pleased with himself. “She’s a nurse. You know what they’re like. She doesn’t mind, she likes it! We’re always going over to her place when there’s nothing else happening. She’s keen. Well, you know, keen on me, and if she wants me, she’s got to put up with my crowd. That’s the deal.”
“Refer to the manual, Jed,” I suggested, when he finally shut up. “This isn’t how doctors are supposed to behave.” He seemed truly perplexed: never had his camera work been received with so little enthusiasm. “Jed, I’m afraid you’ll have to take your questionable bedside manner elsewhere. I’m letting you go.”
Sure, there were plenty of ties hung on the doorknob when I was a med student, the stuff you do to prove you’re a red-blooded American male. And cadaver fun of course—finding body parts in your bed or your beer. But we did draw the line at gang rape. I even got over my little propofol habit pretty fast—I didn’t need Michael Jackson to die of it to know I had to stop (or did he die of plastic surgery?): I got tired of waking up not knowing who or where I was (and I was priapic enough, I felt, without any help from “milk of amnesia”). Martinis, Bloody Marys and sleep became my chosen forms of oblivion from then on.
None of us was particularly focused on chivalry at the time. Until Rosemary, my first love, my policy had been to dump (or be dumped) before anything got too serious (a strategy, come to think of it, that I immediately resumed, post-Rosemary). Three weeks was my standard contract, two months tops, sooner if there was any sign of sexual waning in either party. I developed a fine technique for keeping women at bay: always imply there’s something much more important than them going on, even if it’s just gloating over your mechanical pencils or attending yet another HMO meeting. What matters is that you Keep the Supremacy.
I had no trouble finding women (everybody likes a doctor), and I don’t think I ever hurt anyone—though I feel some chagrin over the girl I dropped because her mother got cancer (after I’d badgered the kid for months to go out with me and screwed her silly several times). A real operator.
But everything changed when I met Rosemary. She had the most beautiful curvy shape but didn’t know it: the girls all hated their bodies according to the requirements of our era (self-doubt from which my profession has infinitely benefited). Rosemary came over one night for a party my roommates were throwing and she never left. We talked and walked and ate and slept with each other for the next three years. This was the first time the whole male–female combo made sense to me. Sex had a purpose at last: pleasing Rosemary! I relished her softness, her smoothness, her curves, her verticals and horizontals. She made sense of New York for me, its verticals and horizontals, its highs and lows. Everything suddenly became sensual, the heat on the street, birds, shade, rain, reflections, strange liquors: for some reason, Rosemary and I took to ordering side-cars (the first to do so since the 1940s).
The essence of a thing runs through it: tomato leaves smell of tomato, coriander seeds smell of cilantro. Every mouse smells of mouse, every house of house. What I loved about Rosemary was her smell—not a rosemary smell, though that would have been apt. No, she was no plant, she was my honey. And yet—those eggs of hers! Rosemary had an obsession with eggs, real or fake, eggs of all shapes and sizes: ceramic eggs, china eggs, glass eggs, marble, wooden, paper, plastic, gold or silver eggs, eggs with scenic views inside, tiny eggs, enormous eggs, eggs that wouldn’t open, eggs that wouldn’t shut, furry eggs, flowery eggs, feathery eggs, eggs in glass cases, voodoo eggs, comical eggs with flashing lights and steam coming out, a big cloth egg she liked to take to bed with her, egg earrings, egg mobiles, egg-shaped place mats, egg-shaped egg timers! She collected every picture of an egg she could find. She even had a large ornamental egg covered in opals and rubies, and I tolerated it. But, really, what is the point of a jewel-encrusted egg?
My first patient on Groundhog Day was an egg-shaped woman. Or maybe she was groundhog-shaped. She was some kind of egg and groundhog hybrid, so fat it was impossible to detect any expression in her face.
“My little boy’s about to start school,” she told me, “and I’m worried he’ll be bullied.”
“Why would that be?”
“Because I’m fat,” she said flatly.
She was fat, but her reasoning seemed thin. I sensed there was more to this maternal concern than met the eye and, sure enough, when I examined her, I found badly healed burn scars that must have been causing her great discomfort. She’d put on all this weight since the burning incident, so the stretched skin was pulling at the scars and irritating them. After she got dressed, I sat her down and asked about the scarring. Without much hesitation, as if bursting to admit it all, as if all that fat was just layer on layer of smothered trauma and protest, she told me the ghastly thing that had happened to her. She’d been married to a guy who continually raped her, sometimes at gunpoint. When she became pregnant, he flipped completely and doused her with kerosene while she slept, setting the bed alight. Nice guy. Her little boy was born unharmed, but she was badly burned. And when she started divorce proceedings against her husband, the lawyer tried to rape her too!
So the whole thing about the kid, her anticipation of his being bullied, was really a side issue—the woman was sick of being mistreated herself. She needed a full-time shrink! Not my field. My training only equipped me to alleviate her physical symptoms. In recognition of what she’d been through, I offered to fix her scars for free. (My colleagues would grouse about it, but so what? I too could be compassionate.) But she didn’t care a
bout the scars, she said, she was only interested in protecting her boy from ostracism. Reluctantly, I then suggested a gastric band (not something I could do but I could find a friend who would, and I’d gladly pay)—but she objected to this too.
“There isn’t time. He starts kindergarten in March.”
Lipo was what she wanted and lipo was what she insisted on getting. This too was outside my province. My patients are rich, and the rich are rarely fat these days. The poor are fat, and the middle classes are the ones you see jogging everywhere: the thinwardly mobile. But I gave her the name of a lipo guy and told her to come back afterward and we’d see to those scars. She said she’d think about it. Then, with the assistance of my cane (which Cheryl found so sexy), I limped out to the foyer with the woman to prevent any chance of her being bullied, mistreated or ostracized on her way out.
I’d forgotten the dreariness of our waiting room, despite our marketing advisor Andy’s extensive efforts to de-medicalize it. What we needed to establish, he’d informed us before the revamp, was a calm, clean, cozy atmosphere, so that as soon as they stepped inside the door, our prospective clients would get the feeling that plastic surgery’s no big deal. “It’s not like buying a house, or a car!” he said. “You’ve got to make it… fun. It could all be fun!” So the place had been done up to look like a kind of luxury holistic therapy center or relaxation and meditation spa, with minor elective procedures on offer—rather than the sadomasochistic, money-grubbing, life-endangering torture chamber it really was. Under Andy’s direction, an interior decor consultant installed thick creamy carpets to break any shaky patient’s fall (and muffle the whimpers), and indirect lighting that glowed kindly on post-operative abnormalities (as kindly as energy-saving bulbs can glow). We were also advised to position fresh flowers everywhere to mask the smell of piss and pus and disinfectant. Casual attire was the agreed look; no suits, no ties, no white coats, just a loose shirt and jeans, even a baseball cap. We all looked like we were on vacation, or still children! In fact, everything was done to alleviate fear except sparing people painful, invasive surgery. We even had classical music piped into the waiting room so the old trouts could listen to the “Trout Quintet.”