Travel Writing

by Peter Ferry

  “Nick, pass those out. Everyone read ‘The Lady of Shalott’ for tomorrow. Here’s the question: What’s she in love with?”

  I stopped to get a big tablet of newsprint and then went back to Carolyn’s place to get to work. I put both extra leaves in her big Mission-style dining-room table and pulled it into the middle of the living room beneath a skylight and facing the longest interior wall, from which I removed Carolyn’s artwork. I put the dining chairs in the spare bedroom and brought in Carolyn’s office chair. I set up my laptop and stacked my notebooks and files. Then I started making lists in Magic Marker on the newsprint and taping these to the long wall. I made a list of everything that I knew. I made a list of everything I suspected and a list of everything that I did not know in the form of questions. The first and foremost of these was, “Was Lisa Decarre’s patient?” I made three timelines; one for the day of Lisa’s death, one for the preceding thirty days, and one for the preceding one hundred eighty days. I made a sheet for each of the major players and on it I listed everything I knew about that person. I made a list of all the people I’d encountered with phone numbers, addresses, and e-mail info. When Rosalie called with Lisa’s Social Security number, I wrote that large on its own sheet. I wrote some scripts of imagined conversations—at least, my half of them. Finally, I wrote down a list of things to do and, in the days ahead, I did them.

  I rented a post-office box. I took out ads in the little weekly newspapers up and down the North Shore in an effort to locate other patients of Dr. Decarre’s. I called the Psychology Department at Northwestern University and had a nice chat with the secretary there. I gave her a cock-and-bull story about representing a company that had developed a series of new personality-assessment tools and was looking for grad students to test them “for $35 an hour. Do you think anyone in your program might be interested?”

  “Oh, I think so.” I found out that I could send or bring materials to the office to distribute in student mailboxes, and I found out the names of the two students in the program who had off-campus mailboxes. One of these was all I needed: Geoffrey Hand.

  I called Mike Peoples. He and I had been in the English Ph.D. program at Northwestern, and at one time we had been interested in the same minor Lake District poet; he decided to study the guy, and I decided not to. He became a scholar, and I became a teacher. The absurdities of academic economics being what they are, that allowed me to bow out with a Masters degree so that I could start competing for fairly-high-paying high school teaching jobs, and it allowed him to pay two more years of upper-end tuition and write a dissertation before he could start competing for fairly-low-paying college-teaching jobs. He did have an office in University Library, however, and that was another thing I needed.

  Although some years had passed since we’d been in school together, we seemed always to revert to that particular brand of grad-student repartee that is a lot like shower-room towel snapping. He liked to call me “the common man” and “an unsung hero in the trenches of the war on ignorance and ignominy,” and I liked to ask if he was still masturbating in the stacks. This time I also said, “How’s the book going?”

  “Pretty damn good. I’m almost finished. I read a chapter at St. Andrews last spring, and I’m reading the last chapter at the MLA in December.”

  I asked Mike if I could use his carrel once or twice for private meetings.

  “Of course. No problem. Just call me the day before and buy me a pint of Guinness at your convenience.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  “Anything I can do to help the common man.”

  When Carolyn called, I couldn’t find my calendar in the swirl of papers on my desktop; I was sure I’d lost track of time and she was due home the next day, or she’d aborted the trip for one reason or another. “No, we just got these cheap phone cards, so we’ve been calling everyone, and we thought we’d call you and see how Cooper is. Actually, we’re still in Italy.”

  It was a good thing. Her living space had taken on the appearance of a command post, with furniture pushed to the side and her paintings and prints stacked against the wall. There were piles everywhere—clothing, newspapers, telephone books, some dishes. Now all the walls were covered with taped lists on newsprint, and two big window fans, one drawing air in the front, one pushing it out the back, caused these to ripple and billow like so many sails in my secret little regatta.

  “Everything okay?” she asked.

  “Absolutely!” I told her about the dogs, about our morning walks to the dog beach and evenings on the deck. I told her about Lydia and Charlie. Finally I told her about Lisa Kim and Decarre, that he was a psychiatrist and that he’d been disciplined once before. Then I said, “Now listen to this: He was with her in her car minutes before the crash. Also, the autopsy report shows that she had opiates in her system, and her best friend says no way would she ever use heroin.”

  “Which means what?” Carolyn asked.

  “Codeine or morphine, maybe.”

  “I see. And who has access to morphine?”

  “Right.” Neither of us spoke for a long moment.

  “There’s something that isn’t right here, isn’t there?” she said.

  “I think so,” I said.

  “I’m going to assume that everything you’ve told me here is true and verifiable.”

  “Everything I’ve told you is true. Not quite everything is verifiable, at least not yet.”

  “I’m thinking maybe you should go to the police,” she said.

  “Do you think I have enough?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure. You have something, but I don’t know anything about criminal law. Just go ask the cops. Or go see Officer Lotts.”

  I had finally found my calendar. “Hey, what are you doing in Italy? I thought you were supposed to be in Greece by now.”

  “Well, we met a couple of Italian guys,” she said. “Aldo and Luca.”

  Wendy was in love with Aldo, and Luca was in love with Carolyn. “Zee Irish woman,” he would say, “is zee better woman of zee world.” She told me about bobbing through Siena traffic on the back of a Vespa, about a weekend at Aldo’s family farm in the Tuscan countryside, about visiting some Etruscan ruins so far off the path that they were the only people there, about evenings of candlelight, pasta, and wine.

  “This sounds serious,” I said.

  “Not really. A few weeks and it will all be over.”

  “Are you sad?”

  “No,” she said, “he’s not the guy.” Besides, she was finally tired of traveling, had been away long enough, was anxious to start her new job. “That’s another reason for my call. I think I’ll be home on September 15,” she said.

  We talked some logistics. We didn’t talk about where I would go on September 15.

  Dorothy Murrell’s voice was as plaintive and precise as a stringed instrument, and she spoke with the caution of someone walking on new ice. I told her my name was Geoffrey Hand. “You responded to my newspaper advertisement . . .”

  “Oh, yes. I see. Okay . . .”

  I said that I had a few more questions, and I wondered if I might be able to meet her. She thought not. She thought that she’d said all she wanted to say in her letter. I suggested a public place. “University Library, for instance. I have access to a carrel there.”

  “Are you a student at the university?” she asked.

  “I am a graduate student in psychology,” I lied. I told her I was gathering information for my dissertation, and that her letter was exactly what I was looking for.

  She interrupted. “I won’t identify him. I will not identify him.”

  I explained that unless she did, nothing could really be done.

  “I don’t care,” she said. “I will not do that to him. It would crush him. I cannot hurt him like that.”

  When I finally accepted her terms, she agreed, albeit a bit reluctantly, to meet me in the reference room of the library at 10:00 A.M. on Saturday.

  “I’ll wear a yellow baseb
all cap,” I said.

  I was sitting at the table staring at my lists on the wall when Lydia called. Her car had broken down halfway between Chicago and Milwaukee. “Is there any possible way—”

  “’Course. I’ll come get you. I’ll be glad to.”

  She was sitting on her briefcase working on her laptop in front of the gas station when I pulled up. She was thinner and tanner, and now she had some highlights in her hair. She was wearing a suit and high heels. “My goodness,” I said, “if I didn’t know better, I’d think you were someone important.” It was a joke, but it was a bad one, and I knew it as soon as I’d said it; she treated it as a joke.

  “Shut up,” she said. “My God, what a day!” Her battery light had come on on the highway, and then all the dash lights, and then the car had died going full speed. She had gotten it onto the shoulder, and a nice guy had stopped and tried to give her a jump, but it had not taken, so she had had the car towed and it’s the alternator, but the guy can’t get to it until tomorrow morning. She told it all like that, a bit breathlessly.

  I said that I’d bring her back the next day to pick it up if she wanted me to.

  “Oh God, that would be wonderful,” she said. “I don’t know how else I’ll get out here.”

  I liked that she was nervous; I found it a little titillating. It was as if we were on a little date. I had even showered quickly and put on a clean shirt, one that she had given me.

  Suddenly I realized what I had been doing; I’d been waiting. I’d been waiting for a feeling that I had once had and somehow lost. This made me feel better because it meant that I wasn’t just stringing her along, and I wasn’t just afraid to leave her or hurt her. And if that morning didn’t exactly give me the feeling, it at least gave me hope that it was still within me or within us. I told a dumb joke and she laughed. I told another.

  She told me that she had gotten a nice letter from Charlie that was addressed to both of us. I was a little bothered that it had come to her; I was sure I’d given him my address at Carolyn’s place. “So, what did it say?” I asked.

  “I’ll give it to you when we get home.”

  “Can’t you just tell me?”

  “Not really. You can read it yourself.” She started to laugh.

  “What?” I asked.

  “There’s something in there about a one-legged flamenco dancer named Paco Paco,” she said. She was laughing harder.

  “What?” I was laughing now, too.

  “I loved it when you said, ‘Charlie I’ve never known any of these people . . .’” She was laughing too hard to finish. I was, too. We couldn’t stop for a couple of minutes. When we finally did, she said, “And when he said he didn’t know most of them either . . .” That started us again. We were on the highway doing seventy-five and laughing so hard, I was afraid we’d crash into someone or something. There was a car running parallel to us and a woman in the passenger seat watching us with a look of horror on her face.

  I touched Lydia’s arm. “Look,” I said to her. That started us a third time. When we finally settled down and wiped our eyes, the woman was gone and we were approaching the toll plaza. “She probably thought we were crying,” I said.

  “Oh Lord.” She stopped her laughter this time. “My God.”

  “Hey,” I said. “Have you eaten? I’m starving.”

  “I could eat something,” she said.

  “Burger King okay?”

  “Sure.” For a long time, we’d ordered the same thing: two chicken whoppers, no mayo, one order of onion rings, and a vanilla shake. We’d split the rings, put them on our sandwiches, and share the milkshake. That’s what we did that day. Afterward she was quiet.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Aren’t you going to finish that?” I asked. Her sandwich was half eaten.

  “No. You want it?”

  “Well . . .”

  When I dropped her off, I said, “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” she said. We both forgot about Charlie’s letter.

  “About the third time I saw him, he said ‘Call me Paul,’” said Jeanette Landrow. “Very California, I thought. What a red flag!” She laughed. “Oh God, I should have seen it coming, but . . .” She laughed again. “Anyway!”

  She was a pretty, dark-haired woman with a straight, thin nose, a wide mouth, and very large black eyes who had sent me a timid, tentative letter. We were sitting on either side of and at either end of a picnic table in a park by Lake Michigan. We could see joggers and bikers on the path across the way, but we were alone. There was a breeze off the water, and Jeanette was looking at the big paper cup of coffee I had brought her.

  “So, it was probably in the next session that he told me that the reason I was having problems sustaining relationships was because I had unresolved issues with my father, who had left when I was six and when he was the only man I knew, and it was some form of arrested development. Well, it all made perfect sense to me, and he said he could help me. For a while we had very productive sessions and I was very excited. I was really getting somewhere.

  “Then, about the tenth time I saw him, he said kind of out of the blue not to be alarmed if I started to feel attracted to him, that this is a common phenomenon that happens as trust develops between a patient and a therapist; and that if it were to happen to me, he wanted me to know that it was normal and just not to worry about it. In fact he said it could even be a good thing, that sometimes patients are able to explore their phobias and desires—I remember thinking it was odd that he used the word ‘desires’—in the safety of the therapeutic relationship, that using the therapist as both a guide and guinea pig, they can learn to trust, they can learn healthy ways of sharing and giving and so on, and then the therapist can help them bring the treatment to a conclusion and move beyond it, apply all this stuff in their lives, and so on. The hard part about all of this is that he’s very good at his job. Very, very good. He really helped me—for a while, at least. Helped me to learn how to compromise without setting up resentment. Taught me where the line is between myself and the other person, something I’d always had trouble with. Taught me how to recognize and state my needs. Taught me how to say no in a reasonable, healthy way; all of this seems so ironic now. Taught me how to negotiate. Then,” she took a deep breath and laughed again. “Oh God, this is so hard.”

  “Would you like to stop?” I asked.

  “No, no. I need to tell someone. It might as well be you. By that I mean a stranger. Someone who’s objective. Just do me one favor. Just look that way. Just don’t look at me, okay?”

  “Sure.” For thirty or forty minutes, as she talked, I wrote. I didn’t look up, but later in the parking lot, I did look at her and smile and thank her and say, “May I ask you one question?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you ever thought about reporting this?”

  “Yes. I know I should. I really know that I should.”

  When I got home, there was a message from Rosalie on the answering machine: “Six years ago Decarre had a lumbar fusion at L4 and L5, which would greatly limit the flexibility of his lower back.”

  I had found two more pieces of the puzzle, but I was still missing the one right in the middle that interlocked with half a dozen others: Was Lisa Decarre’s patient? I had a plan for finding out, but it was tricky and iffy, and I’d get only one shot at it. If it didn’t work, I might never find out, and if I never found out, none of this was going anywhere. Again I got up early and took the dogs to the beach. Again I wrote the script in my head and then on paper. Again I opened a Diet Dr Pepper and used the prepaid cell phone.

  “Customer service.”

  “I’m wondering if you can help me with a discrepancy between our records and a doctor’s records,” I said.

  “I’ll do my best. Can you give me an account number?”

  “Will a Social Security number do?” I gave her Lisa’s and identified myself as Lisa’s father.

  “I’m
sorry, but all account information and medical records are confidential. Now if you have Lisa Kim call us, we’ll be happy to help her.”

  “I know this is going to make you feel terrible, but Lisa is deceased. She was killed in a car accident.”

  “Oh gosh, I see it now. I’m so sorry . . .”

  We each apologized a couple of times. I talked about tying up loose ends. I said Lisa had been billed for a doctor’s appointment we were certain she hadn’t kept, and we wanted to know if the insurance company had been billed, too, and paid its portion.

  The woman on the phone said that she would help me, but it was a violation of law and policy; she could lose her job. “All I am allowed to say to any unauthorized inquiry is, ‘I have no information on that individual.’ That’s all I can say.”

  “Are you allowed to not say, ‘I have no information on that individual’?”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Can you just say nothing?” I asked.

  “Well . . .”

  “I mean, suppose I ask the question, and suppose you do have information on the patient; can you remain silent?”

  “Well, I don’t know. I suppose . . .”

  “If I give you a date of an office visit, and you don’t have any information, then you answer that you have no information, right?”

  “Right.”

  “What if I give you a date, and you do have information; can you say nothing?”

  She was confused. She stalled. She asked if I could verify that I was Lisa’s father, and asked me Lisa’s street address, phone number, and mother’s maiden name. I dutifully read these from the sheet of newsprint labeled “Lisa’s Vital Statistics.”

  She paused. “Okay, I’ll try it.”

  “Thank you very much. I really appreciate this. Can you tell me if Lisa saw Dr. Albert Decarre on Tuesday, December 4?” I asked.

  “I have no information on that individual,” she said.

  “How about on November 27?”