As a child he’d been told by both his parents, “You better not get any cavities. I better not hear you need any fillings. You better brush those teeth and floss them and keep them clean.”
A cavity would be like a hole in his soul, a dark mark on his white angelic teeth; he’d had a nice set of white teeth people complimented, until he got the braces off—nine fucking cavities.
The dermatologist’s was in Chelsea. He’d chosen it from the insurance list to be close so he could go directly from there to the rehab unit to see Perry. He felt guilty about taking the time away from Perry, but Perry encouraged him to go: “You need to get that taken care of, darling.”
Perry was never afraid of going to the doctor, throwing off his youthful Christian Science.
The office was what he supposed New Yorkers would feel more comfortable referring to as a “space.” It was new and clean and lit like a museum version of a tiki hut, with lots of plants in earthy planters, their soil covered in smooth stones. There was no drywall, only walls of glass with vertical blinds that could be drawn for privacy. He filled out the usual form. He sat there in a stew of thoughts. It was a rare disorder, maybe. He heard a song from the eighties he’d liked.
The doctor was a tiny Central American whose otherwise bald head, with its high healthy pinkish color, boasted a resplendent horseshoe of thick and curly dark hair he kept immaculately and expensively sculpted to the nape and around the ears. He was friendly and said, “Now, Mr. Mason, yes Mr. Scott Mason, I see you have melanoma in the family. Something to stay on top of, obviously. Something to check every year,” he went on, nodding at the file. “So tell me …”
He had a Queens or a Brooklyn accent, incurious Scott had never learned to distinguish a difference, had never taken the time. Worse, Scott was smiling in amusement and said, “Yes?”
“Tell me why you’re here? What’re we doing today? Appointment for dermabrasion?”
“I’m fine,” said Scott, “except I’m under a lot of stress, which might be why I’m here.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. The skin can be a powerful presentation of all kinds of stress.”
“That’s what I was thinking, exactly. I have this pimple-thing near my left nipple.”
“Let’s see it. Uh-huh. Yeah. That’s nothing to worry about actually. Take off the shirt?”
“Sure.”
“When was your last full-body exam?”
“Well, it would have to be two years ago when I had a mole removed from my back.”
“And I see you’ve had others removed in the past. There, there. Lots of moles cut off.”
“We sort of went into high gear in my family after my dad had his melanoma.”
“He made a full recovery?”
The doctor was touching him delicately, palpating but not humming like Santayana—the Argentinian who’d treated him and his father back in Florida when Scott was a teen. There was no plastic surgery at the time mentioned. The moles on Scott’s back had been a Big Dipper and Santayana had connected the dots with scars describing the scoops and scalpel lines and stitches. Years to heal over, and he’d consumed vitamin E until they’d faded, the beginning of his faddish relationship with nutritional supplements to which he still clung. Nothing was ever malignant in Scott, but his father’s melanomas were a close call, though he was fine until they’d found cancer in his right middle lung lobe and sucked that out in a quick surgery. He’d gone in for a “routine” CT scan for his heart, because of difficulty breathing, and a technician had spotted the capsulized malignancy. Scott had seen his once great-seeming dad dwindled and yellowish and swaddled in his hospital bed, looking not unlike a jaundiced infant, excess chest fluid draining into a bucket.
Scott replied, “We’re always on alert. Over the years—”
“Now this,” said the doctor, touching the top of his left shoulder, “this is worrying. When was your last full-body exam, two years ago? Did you notice this before? So how long ago?”
“A few months ago,” said Scott, remembering the moment in the bathroom. “I never take off my shirt except when I shower, because I’m so vain. I haven’t exposed my chest in years.”
“You’re hilarious,” said the doctor. “Crack me up. Lie back? Let’s see what else …”
So all those B vitamins and minerals and antioxidants—Scott was fucking frightened, but then he got this way often, a regular hypochondriac. First it was cancer then it was MS. A friend of his from the bar claimed to go into high dudgeon with his doctor whenever a spot he found on himself turned out benign: “Don’t tell me it’s benign! I know when I’m dying! This is cancer!”
The doctor touched and looked on with a specially lit scope strapped to his forehead. The lamp threw a bluish-gray light onto the subject and the area it trained on became a lunar surface.
“Yeah, it’s really important for you, someone fair like you, with a family history …”
The doctor swept up and down his body, examining from a range of six inches.
“I had a second cousin named Marie. My grandmother found a mole under her bra line.”
“Uh-huh?”
“They were getting ready for a wedding. Mamaw said, ‘Marie!’ Then she died from it.”
The doctor tisk-tisked. “Here’s another one,” touching Scott’s right lower abdomen. “It’s irregular in shape, color, everything. These are what to look out for. Okay, that’s two. For you a yearly full-body exam, the rest of your life. Pull up the hems of your shorts so I can see the legs? Now the bottoms of your feet, take off your sneakers. Now the tushie? Looks good, the rest, but those other two—okay, here’s the plan. I’ll do a shaving and send those two off for biopsy.”
“You’re serious,” said Scott. “It’s that worrying?”
“Shape and color, for starters. Those are two of the warning signs—better to be safe.”
When he’d first seen the mole on his left shoulder, standing in front of the big bathroom vanity mirror, it had stood out like a fat juicy period on a sheet of blank paper. Then he looked at it and it seemed small though yes, dark. He’d let himself go in recent years and pledged to return to the gym before he saw anyone about it. The one on his flabby waist he’d never noticed. Most of his exercise he got walking around town in spring and summer and early fall weather. He left the office now, not feeling the excisions because of the Lidocaine local anesthesia. Crack me up.
He crossed town and began thinking about Perry’s swift progress, the odd miracle of that.
Again the day was beautiful, the sky a clean blue linen he imagined smelling of lavender. He needed to stop thinking in terms of healing plant medicinals—the world was trying to kill all of us. It was nature, nothing to do with God: that part he’d at least been able to cut out mentally.
He’d thought that he could help protect Perry well into his old age. He’d thought.
He stopped thinking about it. The lovely day was an antidote, and he still had so many of his plans. He could pull this one out of the fire, too. He recalled the gallows comedy of Hannah and Her Sisters, Woody Allen thinking he had a brain tumor. Teenagers didn’t get death. In fact, no one got death, not Perry, not Scott’s father, until the curved blade came swinging low for you.
On the ninth floor, he got off the elevator, sanitized his hands with disinfectant foam from the dispenser, one of dozens mounted on the walls everywhere, and arranged his contented face.
“I’m getting out Friday,” said Perry, grinning and sitting up straight. He did look fitter.
“Perfect.”
“Darling, what’s wrong?” said Perry, parodying sudden fright. “Are you all right?”
“Sure. Did they move Andy?”
“No, but they’re going to. It’s too cold for him. This used to be an MS unit and they kept it cold for some reason having to do with the nerves and muscles. How was your appointment?”
“Not what I expected. The one thing was harmless, but he found two worrying moles.”
Perry w
as back to his cheerful, usual self. He wasn’t to be daunted, for either of them.
“Darling, if it’s anything, and it isn’t, I’ll take care of you the way you take care of me.”
“I know.”
“When are the results?”
“Later next week.”
“Oh, surely you don’t think it’s serious? You had the thing with your dad and he’s okay.”
“I know.”
Watching uncut Woody Allen movies on cable growing up, Scott had wanted a nice view of the Chrysler and Empire State buildings. And of course now he had his two skyscrapers, right outside there, without any idea of what to do with them. What did you do with everything you’d ever wanted and then gotten, and which you might possibly be about to lose?
lack
The dining hall was large and at one end taking over several of the long tables sat the high school kids who’d invaded the campus. They were doing their freewriting exercises. A teacher, or coach he looked more like in his shorts, polo shirt, and sneakers, strolled among the tables and stopped whenever a hand was raised, then knelt whispering his answers to put each kid’s mind at ease about their assignment. A barn, practically. I was reminded of nearly thirty years ago when I was in college—the last time I’d been on a meal plan, when I was still the breakfast kind.
At the center were all the stations, the sundae station, the brightly signaged Spice It Up! station, the one where an Asian woman took orders for omelets then went to work with her pan and range of ingredients. It was nine in the morning, but I ignored even the do-it-yourself waffle station where you extruded batter from a dispenser like frozen custard onto a hot waffle iron and waited while deciding what to top your pastry with—peanut butter, say, jam, or dried cranberries.
This was New England, a college tucked between green mountains in a highland full of highly educated people, and cranberries seemed to accompany everything. Here, they were also big on recycling. In my dorm suite, I couldn’t find a single trash can to throw wrappings or used Band-Aids in, but there were plastic recycling receptacles everywhere—blue for one kind, green for another, and gray for yet another. My little room was the Puritan-simple usual, scrubbed of all adornment, the mattress on the bed crackling with its waterproof mattress cover under starchy sheets, and the blanket was of a stiff texture you might find in a correctional institution. Outside, just before the rise of another green hill, light the color of baby aspirin flooded in from high industrial lamps. I felt, trying to sleep the previous night, as though I were in a low-end hotel chain placed safely off the interstate. During the day, the school busied itself doing what universities did in the summer off-season, sponsoring self-improvement seminars and workshops, and hosting enormous groups of chattering teenagers from all over. On the dozenth sunny lawn, a discussion group of retirees was ringed Indian-style in the shade of an old maple. Their gray or else bald heads described an archipelago of no doubt hard-lived life stories afloat in a green sea of idealism-planted lawn. A grad student—hunched, his head packed with equations or summer-stipend findings—moped at a jag past them reporting to his research job in the concrete brutalist lab building just beyond. I was only slightly nostalgic. In the dining hall I got a conventional breakfast of eggs and hash browns from an Eastern European woman who bade me please to bring her a plate. I realized I needed to locate plates, utensils, napkins, plastic glasses—everything kept in separate places in this bland utilitarian expanse. Nothing looked particularly appetizing or inviting, but filling up here was an ordinary daily mortification before the day’s higher duty of personal mental development. I was here for a purpose, supposedly—and if I haven’t already conveyed this, quite happy being there.
A food service worker older than the usual undergraduate sat in a booth away from all the high schoolers eating his breakfast. He wore a dark two-piece uniform and a tight, brimless cap. The cap wrapped around his head as though he were a Western Union messenger or bellhop. He looked at me as I passed, smiling pleasantly. I went back for more coffee or juice that was a syrup you extruded into a glass of water then stirred. Each time I returned to the table, now with more silverware, then with a plate of blueberries and dried cranberries, he smiled around at me.
I’d felt unsexy in my scratchy, crinkly bed the night before, and he was a fast inspiration. I went off in my brain. I was here to abandon one quadrant of it, light up another quadrant of it.
He was used to ambient summer amateurs like me. I romanticized his life thinking it was the stuff of fiction, his quiet lonely life. I was expected to produce something in workshop about two profoundly just-missed souls in just such a soulless scenario. He wore Frankenstein boots. I was here to write in workshop about experience in medias res—us grown-ups’ first assignment.
I was trying to sit with different people at every lunch in the University Club, not wanting to be a snob or fall into a known clique. I’d made that mistake in the past whenever I fell into a group situation. All my life I strove to insert myself into a group paradoxically, being insecure, and yet abhorring cliques. I made a joke about it, and a nice young man called Stanley across from me at the table in the Garden Room looked earnestly back at me, forked steak in midair, and said, “Oh, is that how it’s pronounced, clique?—like it rhymes with geek, or freak?”
The others laughed, either at his not having known, or his choice of rhymes.
He was innocent and looked like a farmer’s son, guileless, with cornflower eyes that took everyone in gladly and almost drunkenly. He added, “I thought it was like the sound, click.”
The first girl, Meredith, had let him run on a bit. She was very pretty and lithely built and her mouth drooped drolly on either end, disabused of all illusion. Her petulant top lip lifted from the thinner lower one when she spoke in a way that warned of bitchiness as she looked directly at Stanley and said, mournfully, “Yeah, unfortunately he’s right about that.” Meaning nameless me.
The second girl, Clarissa, was fairer and had her strawberry-blond hair pinned up in back to show off the gentle snowdrift-curving nape of her neck. She was like the quietly witty beauty everyone admired around the punchbowl in a Jane Austen scene, and she said, “Oui, c’est ça.”
No one laughed at her perfect pronunciation, which would have spoiled the dry fun.
I could tell none of them remembered my name. Middle-aged, I kept listening, gleaning.
Bombastically, pretentiously, I secretly felt for cute, nerdy Stanley. He’d grown up not on a farm but was the son of a hardware store owner and he’d gone to Dartmouth, I found out. They were all half my age, and trying to ignore that embarrassment I said, “See, when I was in college, Rickie Lee Jones was big, and now to me all these years later everybody starts to sound like her.”
I was referring to the hip music, a hip sound track, they played there at lunch every day.
Dully, Meredith said, “Totally.” She wrapped her interesting mouth around what she was about to say and rolled her eyes and said, carefully, puffing her lips, bored, “Yep, Cat Power.”
It was impressive and lovely watching her lips pop and flap about her consonants.
I’d heard the name of this musical act and said, searchingly, worriedly, “Cat Power?”
“Cat Power,” Clarissa assured me, but not looking at me, lifting a forkful of salad.
I’d once thought my generation had invented irony, but theirs had reinvented it virally, a quiet and inexorable epidemic. Cat Power sounded as deliciously depressed as old Rickie Lee.
Stanley smiled gamely. He wasn’t going to be daunted or one-upped—he didn’t care.
I sliced at my chicken cutlet, which was juicy and I knew tasted good. I said, “It’s sort of a four a.m. voice, like she’s tired and wants to go to bed but for some reason can’t.”
Meredith snickered, which I thought meant I was had, I’d just hanged myself in front of her. She drank her ice water with lemon. And Clarissa smiled with ambiguous delight at me.
Meredith put down he
r cutlery and picked up her paper napkin, dabbed her mouth with it, and said, steadily and forbearingly, “Oh, wait.” She did her finger like a metronome tocking out one note (like her mom?). “Wait, it can’t be her four a.m. voice, because it’s her New York booze voice.”
No one challenged that it could be both. We snickered and waited, dabbing our mouths.
It was safe to do so, even though I didn’t know what the hell Meredith had meant, quite.
Writing was something different for these younger folks but I could not figure out how. They were all clearly invested in it. I’d seen a lot of their generation’s films and Meredith and Clarissa squarely fit the Mean Girls mode. They were what we used to call Too Cool for School—now, with girls.
It was not a John Cheever or Richard Yates enterprise for them. No quarter for realism. I guessed as Americans we were all romantic in some ways. Fame was more important than craft.
Yet fame infected me from an early age. If Salinger was taught in every high school and if he was still famous then something was either going very wrong or very right. Fame was God.
As I got to know them a little more, sharing the lunch table with them often, I heard them talking about mood, how a word put them in mind of a friend’s fuck-up, or a parent’s maddening habit of being always wrong or misguided—something they’d observed since infancy. They did all seem committed. They talked about their odd dreams in their scratchy, crinkly beds the night before, how dreams could be improved on, to make them even weirder, to say more about them.
“You know what would be even better? If the bartender already knew about my tattoo!”
Little Reef and Other Stories Page 22