by John Decure
“What do you want, Hil, a drumroll?”
She shrugged and polished the rim of her martini with smiling lips.
“So, I’m enjoying myself a little, so have a cow. Know what he said?”
“Jesus, Hil, knock it off already.”
“He had a message for you: you’re on your own.”
I wanted to smack that cocky grin right off her gently lined but still pretty face. I half raised an open palm, which she eyed with prejudice.
“Touch me, and I’ll break your arm at the elbow.”
My hand slid back down in defeat. “I’m going to win this case. My lawyer says we’ve got ’em right where we want ’em.”
She laughed as if only she knew what a dunce I’d been, but I was now about to find out. I felt a sudden urge to turn and run, and had I not run up a bar tab that was yet to be settled, I’d have bolted.
“Perhaps your lawyer is merely telling you what you want to hear, Donnie.” Her brow had wrinkled and her dark eyes were shiny with hate. “I look at you, Doctor, I see a man who doesn’t even know that everything he’s gotten wasn’t earned, it was handed to him. Even that little tootsie tonight. She was here based on entirely false pretenses, a grand, skillfully executed artifice. You couldn’t attract a girl like that on your own merits, not in a million years. Not even a screwed-up freak, the likes of which you cherry-pick from your practice, you goddamn heel. No, Donnie, you’ve got to cheat your way in. It’s your signature move, your métier.”
“You’re drunk, Hilary.”
“I like a martini, so what? But you! You are a bamboozler and a confidence man. A limp-dick. A fraud.”
She pushed away from the bar and stood up, surveying me like I was excrement lying in her path, to be skirted cautiously. For all the bluster she’d issued, her eyes were rimmed with tears. I grabbed her before she could walk away. She turned on me viciously.
“Let go of me. Now!”
“Do as the lady says,” the beefy bartender told me. Apparently he’d been shadowing our confrontation the entire time. I let go of Hilary.
“Such a bully,” she said. “Right to the bitter end. When they expose you for what you are, toss you out of the medical profession on your ear, I won’t be there to dust you off. By God, I rehearsed a good line or two for this moment, but… I think my dear brother put it best. Donnie, at long last you are on your own.”
Ten minutes later I was upstairs, fulfilling Hilary’s angry prophecy. Dining alone at a nice little table. Not so bad, not so bad at all… I’d had another drink in transition and needed sustenance to absorb the alcohol sloshing around my gut, so I ordered an appetizer the description of which I didn’t even hear. No matter—the mood of this place, so warm and calming, was like an embrace, keeping my spirits from bottoming out entirely. My waitress, Kim, was bright and sexy and cute as a button. I chatted her up vigorously, feigning endless fascination with her pursuit of a degree in fashion design, her part-time work in some crummy little Koreatown clothing mill. Her skin, those flawless cheeks, and that perfect nose, now this was where my true interest lay! The quiet dignity of this soft-spoken daughter of boat people, this exotic, delicate flower of femininity! The industriousness, to hold down two jobs while putting herself through school! Swooning, I finished that fateful appetizer—a dish so fishy and spicy I may as well have eaten a box of thumbtacks, because my system never had a chance of processing it. God—could it be? I was in love, in love again, locked in waitress Kim’s thrall…!
What they told me later, the two policemen, was that I’d lost my balance, passed out, and fallen onto my food server, briefly subduing her on impact. Mr. Chee, the bartender, had helped me back to my feet and taken me outside to cool off. Although another patron had a differing account, describing a swift, punishing scuffle, Mr. Chee insisted that everything was fine and the waitress involved was still working her shift. Customers faint. Heat rises, and the air upstairs can get too warm. No trouble tonight, no trouble at all.
My left cheekbone and eyebrow were mildly swollen and tender to the touch. My rib cage felt funny, too. I took a deep breath, crying out in pain.
Thankfully the police seemed indifferent to the travails of a lonely psychiatrist. One of them, a mouse-eared redheaded guy that recognized me from TV, even said it was a pleasure meeting me. Offered to call a cab, but I said I could do that myself. When they left, I checked my pants pocket and fished out my wallet. I always put receipts inside, just behind the bills. But there was no Chai Tanya receipt for dinner or drinks tonight.
Mr. Chee was waiting for me at the door when I tried to re-enter.
“I want to square my debt.”
Mr. Chee remained immovable. “We do not want your money, sir.”
“But… please, it wouldn’t be right.”
Carved into his big, black war mask of a face was a frown grim and unyielding. “You Americans think it’s always about money. You are wrong. Go home.”
“But—”
“Go home. Do not return.” He folded his muscular arms like a noble sentinel.
What could I say—that he’d suggested an impossibility? That I had no real home to return to? He turned and melted back inside, enveloped by the ambient dining splendor I’d utilized to my advantage so many times, it was like a part of me, a valuable working component of the devastating Dr. Don persona. Losing it was like experiencing a death, and I don’t know if it was that sense of loss, plus the booze, my internal injuries and the wingding appetizer that hit me so hard all at once, but I crumbled.
A turban-wearing cabbie with bushy black eyebrows came to scoop me up. Retching on the street curb, I hid my face from him.
“Sir!”
“No, no, please.” I was not yet done with my tragic wallowing and waved aside his strong helping hands.
“Sir—”
“My tears are cried for no one but myself,” I explained.
The cabbie stood back and posted himself beside his car, politely waiting, but I could sense his confusion. I took a deep, painful breath and straightened up in search of a scrap of dignity. Used my palms to wipe away the tears—of which… there were none. What the hell? My eyes, my cheeks, my face… all bone dry. What could this mean? I tilted back, sucking in a deep breath of night. The sky above was vast and indifferent to my miniscule problems, and studying its black expanse was like staring into the bottomless, uncharted riddles of the mind.
A single thought came to me.
No, no, it couldn’t be…
Persisted.
No tears. No real emotion. No kidding, Donnie…
Jiminy—I’d faked myself out.
28
RUE LOBERG
The place had only one entrance and exit, so I marched right up, my feet working fine but my head in a fog; wondering about what my daughter was doing in here, how I was going to approach her, what she might say—that is, if she decided to start speaking to me again.
The doorman was easily as wide as the door he guarded. He had a braid of dark hair, sunglasses, and an earpiece, and he stuck a hand the size of a catcher’s glove out to halt my passage. It worked.
“Step back, please.”
I hadn’t even noticed he was there, to be honest. That’s how long it’s been since I went out to have fun at a night spot like this. A searchlight twisted in the dark parking lot behind a murmur of voices, bunch of young people no doubt wondering what the middle-aged lady with the lumpy curls and flat heels was doing, trying to push her way in without waiting like the rest.
“Ma’am, I said step back.”
That line over there had to be half a block long, but it was midnight and I was dead on my feet. Worse than that, the pain in my abdomen was coming on again. It had started two months ago, a tightness I felt leaning over as I made the bed. For a week or so I just ignored it, but then, the tightness changed, like a closing hand scrunching into a fist. Knew it was trouble when my primary care doc got on the phone as I sat on the high table in my gown, made a call
to have me scheduled for a ton of tests that same day. Seems if medical people decide they got to rule out cancer, you go to the front of the line.
No such luck with the line here, tonight.
I held up the slip of paper my daughter Mindy’s boyfriend, Ian, gave me an hour ago. My head still hurt from all the begging and borrowing I had to do to get Ian to even tell me where I could find Mindy tonight. Like almost everybody else in my life, Ian had his own special list of grievances, and he took his sweet time trotting them out, one by one. My regrets were listed in kind.
Sorry about that time I was tipsy at your parents’ barbecue, Ian. And that, uh, stuff about using Mindy’s ID when mine was suspended and then getting pulled over? No excuses, and I do thank you for paying her fines, you’re such a kind, generous young man. I’ll ask Mindy’s father to send you a check right away. Oh, and, uh, the birthday dinner at that Japanese steakhouse? I know I was wrong, dead wrong, to party crash, I just missed her so, and sure hope you can understand how I….
That teeny piece of paper tingling between my fingers cost me what little dignity I might have had left, but I’m not sure what’s the difference there, anyway. That well is pretty empty these days.
I told the doorman the God’s-honest truth: I wasn’t feeling well, had a recent medical setback, and didn’t think I could stand in line. He suggested that would be a waste of time at this hour anyway, that as of now maybe the front half of the line would make it in before last call. Everyone else would be asked to disperse.
Again I implored him that I had to see my Mindy. His shades were only semi-dark, so I could see his eyes travel down to the cold concrete I was standing on, then back up.
“You got another problem, ma’am. We have a dress code.”
I surveyed my attire with dread, like when you’re in a dream and forget you’re naked. Glad there was something there, but he was right: I wasn’t exactly turned out for a night on the town. Then again, those kids in line were hardly decked out. Torn jeans. Scooped blouses with bra straps showing. Spiky jewelry. But they were all young and good-looking and able to strike up cool poses there behind a red velvet rope, for one thing, making like this little delay didn’t faze them at all. And here comes the ex-housewife divorcee, alone and none too hip and smelling of desperation. It was dawning on me that I cut a ridiculous figure in more than one regard—and that this refusal had nothing to do with my clothing.
“My daughter works here,” I said. “See the paper her boyfriend gave me?”
The paper I handed him said two words: the Factory. The man read it and shook his head no.
“Those are the rules. I don’t make ’em up, I just see that they get followed. Step back, please.”
“But I have to talk to her. It’s… urgent.”
“Ma’am—”
Urgent. The word gave me pause. For a person in my condition, everything ought to feel that way; but since I got the news, the hurry-up mode I expected to kick in really hadn’t. I was still dealing with the day-to-day matters of living more or less the same way. If anything, time seemed to be slowing down. What it was, I think, was that for the first time ever, I was noticing the world, paying it full attention. Not stopping to smell the roses, or any such nonsense—not hardly, because these days my life isn’t exactly a rose garden, nor has it ever been. What I mean is, I’d started losing my self-consciousness and finding a new perspective, taking a view of my life far enough outside of my petty worries and fears to really see things and people for what they truly were. I guess mortality has a way of waking you up to cold realities.
But more and more, my body was sucking me the other way, away from clarity. My insides hurt, my abdomen felt bloated, the treatment was sapping my energy, and the pain just grew and grew.
“I j-just need… a minute please.”
My head got fuzzed-up and woozy and I shut my eyes to block the sensation, which instead made the ground tilt sideways, so I opened them again quickly. The man was guarding a door painted black, and as we stood there, a thick hum of voices floated through space and slid in through my ears, settling in me like a colony of bees building a new hive. And then came the music, thumping and pounding away so hard, I could feel it in the soles of my aching feet, a vibration, bum-ba-bum, coming up through my knees and thighs, punching at my half-eaten organs until I was bent over, staring at my crooked shadow. Nausea gripped me and I tasted bile behind my teeth, had to suck in a breath and hold it to fight off the urge to throw up. That long line of young people was barely of drinking age, I bet, and the thought of the watered-down liquor they’d soon be chugging down made me sicker. Talking and laughing, some of them staring right through me with those who-the-hell-are-you look kids practice all through their teen years just for moments like this. I wanted to die, would have welcomed the relief from this pain, but I had to see Mindy. Somehow, I found my balance again and straightened back up.
The doorman had put up two fingers like making a peace sign and another stout gentleman in dark slacks and a sport coat pulled aside the rope. Two girls in slinky tops and short skirts at the front of the line strode right on by me, slowing a bit as they passed and giggling, like I was a joke they just heard and, ha-ha, they just got it.
Guess I should feel ashamed, I thought, if I had a reason to even care.
I thought back on the night they gave me the news. The oncology team, a collection of specialists, coming together like they were planning my funeral. Very professional. Took their time showing me the slides, explaining the pathology reports on the multiple biopsies, the x-rays, MRI results, white blood cell counts, and all that stuff that led to the same conclusion. “It began here, Mrs. Loberg, in the ovaries. They have to come out, later tonight. If cells break off and invade other organs in the abdomen, the chest, possibly the liver… it would not be good.”
They took out the ovaries, thought they got it but couldn’t be sure. It’s not like they could just keep removing my insides to check. All I could do was pray it wouldn’t spread. Then… well, a trouble zone popped up in the lower abdomen. When they made a pitch for chemo, I had to laugh. Why be sick as a dog with whatever time was left? I asked. Makes no sense. They told me this was my decision, of course, but I might want to talk it over with my family. A 40 percent chance of full recovery wasn’t so bleak; with luck, I’d make it all the way back.
Luck—me? When I laughed at the notion of me being lucky, they stared at me as if I was crazy.
Seemed it was easier for me to deal with the question of my mortality then, several weeks ago. I was still worried about the trial and having to testify, couldn’t really wrap my brain around dying. It didn’t seem real. The thickness I felt down below, the lack of appetite, it was different and a little uncomfortable, but not even painful. Like feeling bloated after eating too much. So what? The doctors asked me again, and I said no, again, to more chemo. Didn’t want to go through all that just to tack on a few more months. Especially if there wasn’t any hope.
But there is hope, they kept telling me. You’ve made strides already. Still, I would not believe it. I’m just not lucky that way.
But now, tonight, at the worst time possible, this thing I’d pushed out of my mind had decided to push back, and hard. How I got back over to the doorman I can’t even say, but my jaw felt like melting wax as I worked him a second time.
You see, here’s the thing. I didn’t know this was a nightclub. I was told my daughter worked at the factory down on Pine Avenue. So, what do you know? I thought she had the night shift in an actual factory. Isn’t that funny?
He failed to see the humor.
“Otherwise I’d have buzzed on home to change into something more, um, appropriate than these old rags.”
My brightest smile didn’t crack his shield.
“Please, ma’am. The fire marshal won’t allow persons to congregate where you’re standing. It’s the law. You have to step back.”
A foghorn moaned somewhere in the LA Harbor. The beehive in my head
buzzed louder. The man was paid to be cold and hard and turn folks away when he had to, and I hadn’t given him a reason to make an exception. I started to go into my purse, to dig for a picture of Mindy; maybe if he knew her, or thought she was cute and wanted to know her, he’d make an exception. But as my hand went down, the whole right side of my body followed, like diving down a rabbit hole. It was dark in there, but quiet and still, so maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to duck in for a rest, I thought. My eyes slammed shut, and a peaceful calm came over me, and when I opened them again, I was staring up at the doorman and five or six other faces framed by a night sky. One of those faces was Mindy’s.
The doorman reached into his pocket and handed me a tissue, which I used to wipe my mess of a face and blow my nose. Sitting up, I concentrated on breathing slowly, normally. That line of snotty kids may have been back there, behind us, but I chose to imagine that they had relocated to a floating glacier in Antarctica.
I came around in time to talk them out of calling an ambulance. Food poisoning. Too little sleep. I’d have said anything to talk to Mindy.
The doorman’s bear chest heaved as he helped me up. We went inside, down a hall and into a tiny room with a table and two plastic chairs and a bunch of electronic equipment and speakers and lights piled in the corner, covered in a film of dust, like someone spilled milk all over the pile. He handed me a plastic water bottle. I thanked him profusely before he shut the door behind him.
“You okay?” Mindy asked. “You look like death.”
Her outfit was flesh-toned and revealing; almost made her look nude, in fact. The logo of a popular brand of tequila was stamped across her very low-cut top. Maybe I was staring at it the way a concerned mother would.
“I’m better now.”
She looked over her shoulder at the door, then at me with a jaded, unbelieving expression. Her skin was whiter than I remembered, but her soft nose and doll’s eyes were the same as when I pushed her on the swing out back, when she was a little girl full of fear and wonderment.