by Steven Clark
“You always see things differently.”
“I’m a nurse; you’re a doctor. I mean, we do the care and providing.” I finished chopping the onions and tomatoes. “Look, in a hospital, docs are transients. They admit patients, diagnose diseases, and see cures are carried out. Since you’re a surgeon, you use it as a body shop.”
Doc laughed and I sighed as his hands pressed into my waist. I only wore a halter, so I enjoyed his soft fingers as they moved to my shoulder blades.
“Are we that bad?” he whispered.
“I’m merely observing, Daktari. To all of you, it’s a way station. We nurses treat it as home. We practically live there.”
“Thank God for that. For you, Lee.” He set out the guacamole dip. “I recall Mrs. Krone.”
“Yes,” I nodded, “the metastatic breast cancer.”
“The cancer was just too advanced, but the family wanted to keep fighting on.” He took the bottle and poured two glasses of Lambrusco. “I discussed new experimental therapies. It was sheer fantasy, of course, but easier to do than face reality.” He and I clinked glasses. “They call you the angel of death. At first it confounded me, but you were able to explain things to them. In a way I couldn’t. Can’t.”
I noshed on a tomato, enjoying the siren call of cicadas somewhere.
“When I was in critical care, one of our patients had open heart surgery. He was out of the hospital for a month, then had to be rushed back. The wife wanted ‘everything’ done. Drugs, ventilator … we tried to insert a tracheotomy tube.” I crunched salad. “His kidneys gave out. He puffed up, skin waterlogged …”
Doc stared at his glass. “He went into a coma, didn’t he?”
I nodded. “It was over. But she wouldn’t let go. After I’d finished my shift, I went to the room. It always feels like you’re in a fish tank, that closeness, silence except for the drips and oxygen, the lights low and centered. And the watching. When death starts, we seem to go back to our origins.” I shrugged.
“His name was Harvey. It was hopeless, but his wife had to decide for herself. We began talking about the marriage, the kids, shared photos. Jama was in her cutesy-poo stage, Pierce starting to be a heart breaker. I told her how nice Harvey was to all of us on the floor. Her eyes tried to follow me, but they kept darting back to him. She asked me if he was going to get better. Over and over.”
Doc’s intent eyes waited. My God, the man really listened. Outside, the first shadows crept across the patio. I remember smelling pizza from a nearby apartment. Imo’s, of course, with that tell-tale whiff of Provel cheese. “I told her Harvey wasn’t there anymore. It was the machines keeping his heart going. They were his life, now. If they were shut off, he would die in a few minutes.”
“And?”
“She stared at him for a long quiet moment and then rose and went out the door. I heard her blow her nose and shuffle around the hallway. I’ll always remember that shuffling. A couple of minutes later, she reentered and asked me to call the doctor. She wanted Harvey off.”
I paused as shadows grew, leaving daylight at the treetops, snared in the sunset. “Twenty minutes later, he died peacefully. I gave her what she needed. No medical jargon, no fantasies. She understood.”
We ate in silence that night as the first evening breeze flowed through the window. Torrid, the usual for August, offering only the suggestion of relief. Doc cleared his throat and ate.
“I was frightened when you told me you’d had cancer of the cervix. Of it recurring.”
“It’s not invasive. We know that.” I took his hand.
“Sure,” Doc said “but cancer always seems to be an ‘if’.”
“Sorry. I’m used to making cancer my war story. It helps when I talk to people.”
Doc’s laugh almost purred. Under the table, his foot stroked my leg. My toes replied in kind.
It was time to flirt, listen to jazz, then go upstairs. Pierce was away at a science fair in Indianapolis, and Jama was with Sky and his kin in Iron County riding horses and learning too much about relatives in the marijuana biz. It was past time for that conversation.
“The news,” I began slowly, “another nine people were killed in Soweto. It’s growing.” His eyes became defensive, used to another attack on South Africa. He peeled a peach, the knife feathering the skin, leaving a smooth orange globe that glistened in the light. He cut slices.
“Ah,” he said, “the problem. We must talk about the problem. Enough of cancer and medicine. Now we must be serious.”
“I am curious. It seems—”
“What? ‘Seems’ what?”
I slouched, leg up. “We talk about the countryside. Your family. The fruit. Your life and times, but never ‘it.’”
Doc didn’t tense up like a caged man. Sweat stains darkened his sides, a reminder for us to bathe together after lovemaking, not that I needed to be reminded.
“You’re right. It’s time for that talk. Of course I’m against Apartheid. Most of us are, you know. It is time to move on, but it’s complicated.” His shrug weary; not annoyed, just burdened. “Yes, you keep hearing that. Everyone in the world does, and they don’t want that. They want a cure. An immediate cure, as though South Africa were Harvey writ large.” He offered me a peach slice. I bit. “Look. We’re deluged with blacks coming south for work because where they live, their ‘democracies’ chased out investment. Then come strikes, boycotts. They put people out of work. Schools are empty, when children should be getting an education. Blacks are extremely tribal, and they’ll—”
“Doc, look—”
“Please, let me finish. “They’ll be at each other’s throats while their agitators will seek to build their power base. They’ll kill each other and the world. The frightfully concerned buggers in drawing rooms and newsrooms won’t care, because when blacks kill blacks, that’s acceptable. Much like your lot in East St. Louis and north of here.”
“You can’t make that judgment. South Africa is their country.”
“I’m also an African. My descendants were there before many blacks who came from the north. The press tells you in the West what you want to hear. North of us, in ‘democratic’ Africa, it’s one man, one vote, one time.”
I was struck, perhaps saddened by Doc’s calm manner. He wasn’t wrong or right. He was one man caught in history. My response was calmly dutiful. “Apartheid has to end.”
“Of course. It must. But it’s a cancer. Do we cut it out? Can you cut out history without unforeseen repercussions? I’m not countering what you want. I’m genuinely curious.” To my relief, Doc laughed in his mild, bemused way as I mopped up my plate. “Really, Lee. I want things to change. I’m not some lout in the Broederbund talking of all the loving kaffirs happily laboring under him.”
I didn’t want to quarrel, and wasn’t in the mood for a panel discussion of the problem. When I rose to collect the plates, Doc joined me at the sink.
“Don’t see me as a political symbol. How did D.H. Lawrence put it? ‘Poor Richard Lovatt saw the problem in himself and called it Australia.’”
When he held me, my sigh was long and restful. “We’ve been sniffing each other for ages. Look, I want you, but it’s not just the politics.” I enjoyed my hands wrapping around his waist. “I’m not meant to be married. I failed twice. Just now, Sky and I had a row over child support. It reminds me how quickly an amiable divorce can tumble back into all the shambles the marriage was.”
A hearty laugh fluttered from Doc as his arms wrapped around me. “So, the wise nurse has uncertainties. Look Lee, come with me. See for yourself. I’ll show you my home.”
“Visit South Africa?”
His fingers closed in, soft and massaging. “Share it with me. Bring Pierce. He’s a clever lad. Would do him good. And Jama.”
“Oh God,” I muttered, “the Childe Fantastical.”
“There are plenty of elephants. She’d be right at home.”
Back in the Desouche mansion, the room darkened in its wintery wa
y, a growth of shadows that covered and dulled the delicacy of its beauty. It recalled the emptiness of Saul’s Persepolis. Winter can take away the living, entice them that the barrenness of what is before you is all there is. The sick die so easily in these months of the solstice hangover. I sighed.
“I remember laughing at that, at Doc’s comment about Jama and the elephants. He was so understanding. So kind. Generous. And when we slept together that night, the words of Sara’s poem whispered to me as the moon glowed in the window: Oh are you asleep, or lying awake, my lover? / Open your dreams to my love and your heart to my words …
I turned to Margot. She had fallen asleep sometime during my reverie. I looked at her weary face and its wrinkled valleys. There were traces of me, of what I would become. She was my mother. But it was hard to say the word, to call her mother because I was also her nurse, and I had to help her die.
For a moment, I felt my breath shorten; a slow beginning of tears. It wasn’t Margot I was almost ready to cry for, but Doc. I’d lost him, and he’d come back for just a moment—decent, urbane, compassionate. He was dead. Killed. He had become his own Australia.
I blinked as the lights came on. Looking up, Rainer sternly stood by the switch.
“Mrs. Bridger. It is time to go home.”
I slowly pulled myself to my feet.
The next day I went about my business, trying to be optimistic, as St. Louisans need to do in January. You see the days grow longer as light peeps around buildings, the sun at rooftop level where two weeks ago it sunk without so much as a goodbye. Winter light here is bleak or blinding. Your natural clock anticipates more sun, like a kid does seconds. That’s because St. Louisans are southerners at heart. We like one good snowfall at Christmas, a nippy spell a week after, then bring on spring.
The snow receded and was shoveled into piles of gray slush. I walked briskly.
“Hey there!”
I frowned and turned as the man, smartly decked out in a fedora and camel’s hair overcoat, closed in. His face beamed with a Denzel Washington confidence.
“Hey there back,” I said, and kept walking. He marched alongside me, making us a parade of two.
“You’re Lee Bridger, right?”
“Sure am.”
“I knew it! Lucky day.”
My smile and frown made a civil shield. “Do I know you?”
He stood tall, hands jauntily thrust in pockets. “Me? I’m nobody. Mr. Nobody. This is for you.”
He pressed a stiff white envelope into my hand.
“Got to say you were an easy one,” he winked. “Sometimes I gotta run ’em down. You’re okay. Hey, gotta go.”
I frowned and ripped open the envelope. Its official paper like the kind a butcher wraps chops in, making you expect to find a scorpion in legalese.
I read it and my jaw dropped. I’d just been subpoenaed.
19
Angles on Pizza
The City Courts building is a 386-foot tower of civic gravitas. It’s called the St. Louis Pyramid because the summit of its milk carton like sleekness is a replica of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. Sphinxes guard its west and east approaches, its 1923 completion another example of King Tut’s magic upon our fair city. I admire it, but not as I glumly walked to its pillared entrance and bas-relief statues of justice, because today I was summoned.
“She issued a restraining order against me,” I complained to Tad Woloziak, my attorney, walking beside me. I clutched my purse, looking at the swastikas girdling the building’s waist, built when they were still totems of luck, not Hitlerian claws.
“It’ll be short and sweet,” he said as we entered.
The interior’s black pillars matched the security desk, a shiny bunker flanked by electronic barriers, all a quasi-Egyptian temple. Tad nodded to the guards as he led me to the elevator, our footsteps echoing on the marble and high ceilings. The Mummy Man would have loved to have been on display here. It was made to order for him.
“Come on, Lee. Relax.”
“I feel like one of those nuts my ex dates. The waitress from Pascagoula who kept bugging me. Sending orders of pizza to the apartment, telephoning and hanging up. As if I was trying to hold onto Sky.” I blinked at that sordid memory.
Tad nodded, an attorney’s usual dutiful empathy. “We got Judge Fosdick.”
“Is that his real name?”
“What?”
“Don’t you remember Lil’ Abner? Fearless Fosdick?’”
His frown meant I was dating myself.
“I’m post baby boomer, so it’s ancient history to me, but might not be to Fos. I’ll do the talking.”
The elevator doors swished open. We glided past a squad of jurors. People slouched on wooden benches like commuters waiting for an overdue train. The letters to the courtroom stood before us in black and white titles, like Class A Hollywood credits. Division 26. Judge Henry Fosdick.
“Okay, Lee. Say nothing. Look blank as Velveeta. Fos is not a happy camper when the defendant tries to sing an aria. If you try to argue, that means time, time means money, and Terri and Pierre have deep pockets. They can afford a few weeks of justice. How much can you afford?”
I bit my lip. “I’ll be a good girl.”
He opened the door. “It’ll be short and sweet.”
“Bittersweet,” I muttered.
The charges were read. I’d been rude, intrusive, stalked Ms. Praxos, etc., and so forth. Said Velveeta look kicked in, and I held my face as impassive as an empty canvas. It reminded me when patients accuse you of causing pain, stealing, refusing to come quick enough to the buzzer. You shrug and accept. Terri was, after all, a kind of patient in need of a cure.
I was dutifully admonished to keep eighty feet away from Ms. Praxos, and only to consult her through my attorney. I was thankful there was no crowd except two print guys from the Fourth Estate, dutifully scratching in their pads, disappointed there was no judicial cat fight. One bored retiree urged his chum to come on, they were going to miss the murder trial next door.
The gavel pounded, and there it was.
Terri sat through all this, stern and wounded. After justice was served she glanced at me, her contented smile meaning she’d put Big Sis in her place. Tad and I ducked the reporters as they homed in on Terri. We hurried to the elevator. I had things to do.
On the tattered border of the near south side lies what was once Billie Goat Hill. When the circus came to town and was on its way out, it was where the elephants turned to lead the departing parade onto the trains. Now it’s an urban Sahara, with a bar here and there as a neon oasis. Except for today, because the show must go on.
I made my way past a vast caravan of trailers huddled together as if bracing for an attack from the natives. The city block, a wasted quarter of abandoned shops and shoe-box factories, was lined with props and cables crisscrossing the street like a python convention and teeming with techies dressed in grunge and toting lights while trying to navigate around girls decked out in fashionable skank-and-skinny with cell phones clamped to their ears while they ticked off lists on clipboards. Every other person had a radio, all squawking at once.
Bloodwreck was on location, and I ducked a prop dude toting a ladder. Then a second duck as a girl brushed past with a clutch of plastic flamingos. Twelve feet ahead was Dickie, and I aimed for him.
Dickie Keach does it all: from onstage spear carrier to roadie, and last summer his Parolles was one of the delights of our Shakespeare in Forest Park. His soft leather jacket wrinkled like a second skin. Dickie’s cheeks sprouted the obligatory three-day stubble and coffee steamed from his Styrofoam cup. He nodded to a clipboard girl, then saw me and shook his head.
“Hey, Lee. Closed set.”
Dickie shot off quick orders to a set guy holding up something scrawled on pasteboard. I closed in.
“I need to see Jama.”
“No can do. Her scene’s coming up.”
“Come on. You owe me.”
“Christ, what’s that, our national motto?”
“I think E Pluribus Unum got outsourced.”
What Dickie owed me for was the gig I got him a couple of years ago at the med school at Washington University. They need actors to do symptoms for med students. I tipped Dickie off, coached him. Now, he’s always in demand, especially for liver disease and the tertiary stages of bursitis. Those are real Olivier roles, and the paycheck is good. I blocked him and he sighed.
“Fucking Jama. She missed the cattle call two months ago, just bops in to the Sheraton where Metrovski’s holed up, gets to him, and comes out with eight lines. Since she’s SAG, she makes the rate.”
“What can I say? My lovely daughter majored in gate crashing.”
Only a few hundred feet away the urban death continued unabated, but this block was a one-day beehive.
The leading man and woman had assembly line beauty straight out of the soaps. My heart jumped as Jama walked up, wearing a long leather coat, knee boots, hair semi-bunned with loose strands. She played a hooker. I hoped it wasn’t an ominous prepping for a future part in Rasheed Productions.
A brief huddle as Metrovski, the director, gestured his wants, and Jama stepped back into an entrance whose faded brass doors once opened into a restaurant. Metrovski picked up his radio. The camera readied themselves.
“Okay,” Dickie shouted. “Camera! Background action!”
Extras came to life and filled the street with a hustle it hadn’t seen in decades.
“Action!”
The clapper slapped like a wooden guillotine.
The man and woman walked together. I couldn’t make out their lines, but body language meant a lover’s quarrel. Jama slinked and edged between them, her lines with the leading man gave the leading lady a case of the green-eyed shits. Jama’s smile showed a sidewalk victory. She tossed her head and catted away.
“Cut!”
The scene was repeated over and over. After each cut, make-up babes streaked out like medics on the battlefield, daubed the actors, and retreated as if under fire.
I didn’t mind the cold. It was moderately sunny, light and shadow adding a dimension of sadness to the block. The film was on a shoestring budget, and St. Louis is a cheap shoot. Our saving grace is our awfulness. All the decades-old, rundown housing is perfect for a Depression era film, with alleys only mobsters could love. If you want to relive your bad dreams, come here. Our crowning achievement in film locations was Escape From New York, when St. Louis filled in for a rotted Big Apple of the future. Take eight concluded.