by Steve Tesich
Although I was not a scientist myself, as a diseased layman I applauded these findings.
The story of the S-gene rekindled my hope that my many diseases had a common, genetic source.
Even if a cure was never to be found for my genetic disorder, merely knowing the true cause of my many diseases would almost be a cure in itself. Armed with this information, I could warn others, my son, for example, not to expect certain things from me, because I had scientific proof that they were not mine to give.
I turned the page.
An article about the lemurs on the island of Madagascar caught my eye, when I heard the receptionist call my name:
“Mr. Karoo.”
I went up to her desk.
“Room three.” She pointed down the corridor.
6
The corridor was lit by overhead fluorescent lights hidden behind a lowered ceiling.
I had no reason to question Jerry’s reassuring description about the kind of perfunctory physical exam I would have, but even so, I felt this tiny bit of anxiety in the pit of my stomach.
When I opened the door and stepped into room three, it was so bright inside that I had to shield my eyes.
Everything was white. The walls, the floor, the cabinets, the two white chairs, the venetian blinds in the windows, even that adjustable contraption on which you lay down to be examined was white and had a white disposable paper cover on top of it.
In the midst of this whiteness stood a young woman wearing a white nurse’s smock and white pantyhose, holding that clipboard with my filled-out questionnaire in her hand.
She had big blue eyes and a fluffy pillow of thick, shiny, blond hair. She was in her early twenties, a little overweight, and had enormous breasts.
I knew, of course, that I shouldn’t be gaping at her breasts, but I couldn’t help myself. Mesmerized, like a rabbit in a python cage, I had not a single thought in my head other than: My God! Would you look at those things.
She wore a little name tag on her left breast, which read: E. Höhlenrauch. The name tag looked as lost on her bosom as a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean.
When at last I managed to pry my eyes away and look up at her face, I saw no hint of displeasure in her big blue eyes for my having gaped like a fool at her breasts.
She understood. With a contented smile, she looked down at her breasts and then up at me again, and the expression on her face was one of lazy sympathy. Who can blame you, her smile seemed to say. They really are magnificent, aren’t they?
“Hello, my name is Elke. Dr. Kolodny will be with you shortly. But first there’s a few little things we have to take care of. Strictly routine.”
She spoke slowly, as if she were on drugs, or recovering from a very gratifying orgasm.
I detected what to my ear sounded like a trace of Austrian or German accent in her voice. Completely rattled by the size of her breasts, I seized upon her accent and her name as the opening gambit with which to launch my attack. I saw it all in a twinkling of an eye. I would seduce this Elke Höhlenrauch with my sense of humor and I would bring her with me to my dinner with Cromwell at Cafe Luxembourg. He might show up with a younger girl, but it was inconceivable that he could find one with bigger breasts. Elke’s breasts would put me in a position of power even before I went into my harangue.
“Elke Höhlenrauch,” I said. “What is that, French?”
Without so much as a smile, Elke answered, “No, I am German.” And then, while my humorous opening lay there on the floor like a piece of lox, and before I could think of another opening with which to replace it, she told me: “Would you like to strip down to your underwear, please?”
“Yes, I would. Very much so. Would you?” I laughed.
Elke either didn’t hear my reply or chose to ignore it. It was hard to tell.
I began taking off my clothes, trying to undress in a manner of some sophisticated elder statesman who was, despite the shambles of his body, still sexy in his own, worldly way.
The more clothes I took off and the more times I glanced at Elke’s mangnificent breasts, the more a breast-induced listeria within me threatened to explode. It was all I could do, as I hopped on one foot, trying to get out of my trousers, to keep from screaming out loud, or laughing out loud, or strumming on my lower lip with my index finger like an imbecile. I could think of no other banter with which to engage her, humorous or otherwise. Only names of movie stars I had met over the years, in my role as a rewriter, came to mind. It was hard to keep myself from ululating their names, rending the air with movie stars, as a way of making an impression on Elke Höhlenrauch.
Dustin Hoffman, Elke. I’ve met Dustin. Meryl Streep. Robert Redford. Yes! Robert Redford. Three meetings, Elke. I’ve had three meetings with him. Paul Newman. Dinner with Paul Newman. Lunch with Richard Gere. Bill Hurt. Robin Williams. Sigourney Weaver. Kevin Costner. Kevin Kline. You want stars, Elke? I’m a rewriter for the stars. Jay Cromwell, the superproducer? Friend of mine. He knows Vaclav Havel. You want to meet Vaclav, Elke? I can arrange it.
I was down to my boxer shorts, socks, and a sleeveless T-shirt.
“Please,” Elke said, and gestured with her soft, plump hand, each finger a French dessert, toward a stainless-steel doctor’s scale standing against the wall.
She walked on ahead. I followed. The inside of her thighs rubbed as she walked, and the material of which her white pantyhose were made caused static electricity to be heard underneath her smock. Like the sound of one of those electric bug zappers, killing bugs in the night.
Ever so gingerly, I stepped on the scale, as if stepping on the gallows. I hated being weighed. I hated weighing myself, but I especially hated having somebody else weigh me. It always made me feel as if I had been suddenly abducted from a country with a constitutional democracy and dumped into some totalitarian state.
Elke’s hand moved the gleaming stainless-steel tumblers inexorably toward my right.
To my complete horror, I saw that I weighed two hundred and twenty-five pounds.
My mouth dropped open.
What!
I have never, in all my life, weighed two hundred and twenty-five pounds. Even fully dressed and wearing heavy shoes, with a lot of loose change in my pockets, I had never, ever, gone beyond two hundred and five pounds.
Dumbfounded, I stared at the total. It was like staring at some trumped-up charge of crimes I never committed.
I wanted to protest, but before I could get over the shock, Elke Höhlenrauch chuckled.
“You’re a bad boy, Mr. Karoo.” She wagged her cream-filled index finger at me. “It’s not nice to fib.”
Breasts or no breasts, I suddenly felt grim and in no mood for games.
“Fib? What fib?”
She pointed with her ballpoint pen to the spot on the questionnaire where I had entered my weight. Then, as if in a nightmare of some Stalinist or Third Reich show trial, she crossed out the figure I had entered there, 198 lbs., and before I could stop her, wrote over it, in large lurid figures, 225 lbs.
Her presumption, without even knowing me, that I could lie about something as petty as my weight, infuriated me. I knew, of course, that I was quite capable of lying about anything, and had in fact lied about all kinds of things on this very questionnaire. But not about my weight! That she would single out one of the few truths I had stated and attack it as a lie, while ignoring all my other lies, allowed my indignation to assume a self-righteous character.
“Look, Ms. Höhlenrauch,” I said, putting a heavy and semi-sarcastic stress on Ms., and an equally heavy and slightly derogatory emphasis on the umlaut in her last name, “I’ll have you know that I have never in my life weighed over two hundred and five pounds and the one time that I did, I was fully dressed and wearing Timberland boots because it was winter.”
In her lazy, detached manner, she cut me off and said: “These things happen.”
“These things? What is that supposed to mean? These things happen. What things?” I started to get of
f the scale, but with a firm little push on my chest with her soft little hand, she gestured for me to stay where I was but turn around and face out. She walked behind me, her smock rustling, the bug zapper of her thighs sizzling.
“Erect, please,” she said.
“What!”
“Erect. Stand erect, please.”
I thought I was standing erect, but I tried to comply with her request and invent some new supererect posture for myself. I heard a sound behind me, like the sound of a ceremonial sword being pulled out of its scabbard, and then felt a flat metallic object land on the top of my head.
She was measuring my height.
Never had I tried to stand so erect before. I was barely breathing. It felt like I was in a gulag or a Nazi concentration camp.
“You’re such a bad boy,” Elke chuckled behind me. “You really are.”
“What!” I shrieked. “What now!”
She came around to my side and showed me my questionnaire, pointing with that infernal ballpoint pen of hers to where I had entered my height. Before I could so much as squawk, the nightmare repeated itself. She crossed out what I had written, 6 ft., and over it wrote 5′10½″.
Whatever composure I had, if any, vanished. I began screaming at her.
“Just hold on, Elke! Just hold on a goddamn minute! What the hell do you think you’re doing, anyway?”
“I’m just bringing you up to date,” she smiled, her dimples deepening.
I felt like punching her in the mouth. Right in her sensual little mouth.
“Oh, yeah!” I shrieked. “We’ll see about that.”
I jumped off the scale and ran to my trousers, which were draped over the back of one of those white chairs. I whipped out my wallet, and then I whipped my driver’s license out of my wallet. I stormed back and shook the license in her face.
“Do you see this, Elke? Do you know what this is? This is an official document of the State of New York. And here”—I pointed—“if you can spare the time to observe, you’ll notice that it states that I am six feet tall! I have been six feet tall since I graduated from high school.”
“I’m sure you have, Mr. Karoo. It’s just that you’re not six feet tall now and never will be again. You’re five foot ten and a half now. These things happen.”
“These things again, Elke. These goddamn things you keep on about. What are these things?”
“People, they shrink,” Elke said.
“People, they shrink!”
“Yes. The spine, it contracts.”
“The spine, it contracts!”
“Oh, yes. By all means. It’s like an accordion, Mr. Karoo, the spine is.”
She demonstrated, as if playing one.
“First you grow and grow”—her arms went out—“and then the little vertebrae in your spinal column start to press closer and closer together and you shrink and shrink.”
She seemed delighted with her little demonstration. I was either hyperventilating or not ventilating at all, it was hard to know which. To have this double-breasted Brunhilde standing there in front of me and cheerfully playing an accordion with my spine was like having an image out of Dante’s Inferno come to life.
But, to be still transfixed by her breasts, to be still erotically aroused by the same white-smocked mädchen who was so blithely annihilating me, surely deserved a special little circle of its own in the Inferno.
I felt a harangue coming on.
“This is all a little too Teutonic for me, Ms. Höhlenrauch,” I barked at her. “This is America, not Germany. We don’t reclassify people in this country just like that. Actually, Elke, we don’t classify people period, not according to their physio-racial traits at least. I mean, why don’t you measure the size of my cranium while you’re at it, like your ancestors did to my people? I mean, just because I’m a Jew …”
I wasn’t, of course, but having a blond Elke in front of me made me feel that I was. And not just a Jew, but a self-loathing anti-Semitic Jew who still yearned to take Aryan Elke out to dinner.
My harangue (“Germany is the vampire of Europe, etc., etc.”) went on for a bit more. Elke listened, blinking occasionally, secure in her awareness that I adored every cubic inch of her breasts and that, my harangue notwithstanding, I was still trying to sell myself to her. Her crime, her great crime, her unforgivable crime, was that she wasn’t interested.
“Dr. Kolodny will be with you in a minute,” she told me when I paused to catch my breath.
Her smock rustling, her thighs rubbing, her pantyhose making that sizzling sound, she then left the room, breasts and all.
I stood there in my boxer shorts, socks, and sleeveless T-shirt, still holding my driver’s license, feeling in a state of shock.
According to Elke, I had not only expanded horizontally, I had contracted vertically as well.
The spine, it contracts.
These things happen.
It wasn’t so much the weight; although two hundred and twenty-five pounds was quite a blow, I could always lose the weight. But the one and a half inches I had lost could not be regained.
I was five foot ten and a half inches again. The last time I was five foot ten and a half, I was a sophomore in high school. Smoking Lucky Strikes.
When, I wondered, was the last time I was six feet tall? And how was it that I could lose a whole inch and a half without being aware of it? What was I doing that was so engrossing at the time that prevented me from realizing that I was shrinking?
I sat down on the white chair with my trousers across my lap, to wait for Dr. Kolodny.
It was too late for a complete physical. I wasn’t complete anymore. There was an inch and a half missing.
On the other hand, there were twenty-five extra pounds.
Down and out, the two simultaneous directions of the journey of my body.
And to think, I thought, that all this was caused by losing my health insurance and wanting to be insured again.
Insured against what?
I had been insured all my life and what were the results? The results were that I was riddled with diseases. I had lost a full inch and a half while being fully insured. And yet here I was, slumped pathetically in my chair, with my trousers in my lap, petitioning to be insured again.
Only this time, in addition to the premiums, there was another price to pay. A terrible price. I had walked into this room, this goddamned gulag number three, as a strapping six-footer, and if I wanted to walk out as an insured man, I would have to accept my new classification as that of a fat man of medium height.
The choice, it suddenly seemed to me, was mine. There were no armed guards outside the door. If I was confined to this room, it was a voluntary confinement. Voluntary submission. Voluntary compliance with being reclassified.
But if I didn’t want to be insured by GenMed, I didn’t have to accept the results of my reclassification. I didn’t necessarily dispute Elke’s figures. As a free man, I simply didn’t have to accept them.
To be free, I thought, and felt my blood heating up, to be free is better than to be insured. To be truly free is to be uninsured!
I rose—that’s how I saw it, I didn’t just stand up, I rose—and got dressed as quickly as possible. Already I felt better. Taller. Defiant. Free. Free in the Dostoyevsky and Hannah Arendt meaning of the word. Rebellious. A rebel in the Camus meaning of the word.
I stormed out of the room, not walked, I stormed out of there, and as I stormed through the waiting room where some of those poor, helpless souls were still sitting and waiting, I could not help but think of myself in the third person.
He was a man who would not give an inch. He had walked in as a strapping six-footer and by damn he was walking out as a strapping six-footer.
CHAPTER SIX
1
THREE DAYS LATER, Friday, I have lunch with Guido in the Russian Tea Room.
I am early, as always. I sit in his booth (it’s the third booth to your right as you enter), smoking my cigarette and drinking
my Bloody Mary and waiting for him to show up. Neither the drink I’m drinking nor the drinks which, I know, will follow will have any effect on me, but it will please Guido, my last friend and a confirmed alcoholic, to see when he arrives that I’ve started drinking already.
It’s a strange thing to be down to one last friend. It’s hard to decide while I sit there if this predicament is something I enjoy or not. It’s hard even to find the basis for deciding. My mind oscillates between two polar opposites. I enjoy it. I don’t enjoy it. It keeps on oscillating like a metronome, the oscillation precluding any need to decide one way or the other.
But something about the phrase, “my last friend,” something about the very sound of those words, is compelling. It’s as if I had a whole, ever-growing list of lasts, and the last remaining measure of my personal growth as a human being is to be found in this ever more bountiful list of my depletions.
I light another cigarette and turn to more pressing questions. Where in the world am I going to get a date for my dinner with Cromwell? I need to come armed with a beautiful woman when I have my dinner with him.
2
Every restaurant I frequent in New York has its own sound which, were I blindfolded and led inside, I could recognize. The musical pitch of the plates and the silverware is different in each, and so is the tempo, the tone, the din of the crowd. I think I could distinguish the din of the Russian Tea Room from the din at Orso’s the way more discerning ears could distinguish if a piece of music was recorded live at Carnegie or Avery Fisher Hall.
I see Guido coming toward me.
He’s a big man, almost as tall as my Billy, but beefy. A jock with a strong pitching arm, he was drafted out of high school by the Chicago White Sox and ruined his arm on their farm team. The rotator cuff, or something like that. A snappy overdresser, the way former jocks tend to be when they become successful in another line of work, he still retains, despite the booze and the years and the excess weight, an easy athletic grace and lightness of foot, which makes it seem he’s dancing through the Tea Room toward me. He knows a lot of people and touches a lot of shoulders on the way, never once stopping, scattering remarks over his shoulders like New Year’s confetti. He is wearing a huge grin. It wraps around his head like the grin of a porpoise.