“You see, a child doesn’t think about its body. It’s the parents’ job to do that. A child just figures everything is going to work and if they get sick they don’t think about it in the abstract like we do when we grow up. If it itches, they scratch and then go on about their business. What we are trying to do is get the patients back into some semblance of that childlike innocence and trust in their own bodies. Then the energy is freed up to heal instead of terrify. Well, it’s been open for three years now and it’s been a huge success. That’s why you haven’t met Phyladda. She’s in Europe on a lecture tour, talking about Phyladda to foreign investors. If she gets what she wants, we’ll open clinics everywhere. I’m an actor at heart. I don’t want to give up the theater but sometimes I think about making this a career. It’s seductive, knowing you can make a three-hundred-dollar-an-hour lawyer feel better by just telling him he isn’t sick. ‘There’s nothing wrong with you’ are the most powerful words in the world. Except for, well, ‘You aren’t going to die.’”
“God,” Kevin said. They had come to the parking lot of the restaurant and Jodie had turned off the motor. “God, I’m so glad to be part of this.”
Monday morning it was raining. That always boded well for Phyladda. The credit side of the ledgers went up and up, especially if it rained all day. People couldn’t go for walks so they stayed in and thought about what might go wrong with them.
There were two, false, brown recluse spider bite alarms in twenty minutes between nine o’clock and ten. Jodie saw the first one and Kevin saw the second. “We could introduce them to each other,” he suggested when he and Jodie met for a cup of coffee. “The guy I saw has made a science of studying them. He talks on the Internet with a biologist in Arkansas who’s making an anti-serum. How old was the woman you treated?”
“About thirty-five. She had a friend who was bitten in Texas when she was young. The friend lost a piece of her nose. It’s a valid fear but not in L.A. I try to concentrate on telling her we don’t see much of it here.”
“This guy thinks they come in on trucks with frozen chickens. He and this guy in Arkansas are writing an article about it.”
“How old is he?”
“Forty. Good-looking man, short, strong, pretty face. He knows he’s obsessed, but since he’s writing the article he thinks it’s worth the mental pain.”
“When does he think he’s bitten?”
“All the time. Whenever he has a small sensation on his skin. After he sees spiders of any kind or kills one. About ten minutes after he kills any spider or any small unidentified bug.”
“How many does he kill?”
“Anything he sees that moves.”
“God, that must take a lot of time.”
“He’s a lawyer. He works in an air-conditioned office. He only kills them at home or if he’s out in the country. He’s coping, as long as he can come in when he’s scared. Before he found Phyladda he’d take Benadryl but then he couldn’t work for hours and once he fell asleep at the wheel.”
“I think you’d better send him to a psychiatrist. That sounds really bad. My woman was not much better. She’s been to the emergency room three times thinking she was bitten. She’s been here twice. One more bite and I’m getting her some help.”
“Why do you think they believe they’ve been bitten?”
“Bonding issues. Something wrong with the mothering after birth, separation from the mother, it all begins in the early years, it begins at birth. Everything I’m reading tells me it begins so soon, before there is language, so it isn’t easy to cure with language.”
“How would you cure it?”
“With love, Kevin. That’s what Phyladda is for. Listening and love, time and patience. I don’t know. I may never get back to acting. I’m caught up in this now, especially with you here beside me. Working beside me. I think of you all day, so near and so in tune. Sorry, drink your coffee. I’m going mush mush.” Jodie started giggling and Kevin pulled down his scrub suit and flaunted a breast. They started laughing so hard they couldn’t contain it. They put their hands over their mouths and laughed until they coughed.
Cough, cough, cough. Jodie could hear Suellen coming down the hall. He said a mantra. He opened the window to the courtyard. He prepared himself.
“I’m reporting you guys to the government and the press,” she said, as soon as the door was shut and she had Jodie to herself. “How dare you call this a clinic. This is nothing but a scam. You guys are scamming those poor bastards out there to death. Sixty dollars a visit, one hundred for a full history. What a deal. I’m calling this afternoon.” Cough, cough, cough.
“How’s the cold?” Jodie asked.
“It’s better, thanks to real medicine and antibiotics.”
“Are you having any intestinal problems with the medication?”
“Some. I’m eating yogurt.”
“That should help. If it gets worse have them change the antibiotic. And beware yeast infection. I would use some Monistat prophylactically if I were you.”
“Good idea. I meant to do that. So what have you been doing all morning, Doctor Jodie? I mean, what kind of crap have you been shoveling out in here?”
“A woman thinks she was bitten by a spider. I examined her arm and took her temperature and found out her sister was dying of breast cancer. I told an old lady she wasn’t going to have a stroke this week. I drank a cup of coffee with my lover and shared some jokes with him. Are you feeling all right then, Suellen? Except for the cold, which we hope is going away?”
“Yeah, I’m all right. Except I haven’t been laid in months and I wake up in the night and listen to my heart beat and think I’m having a heart attack and I don’t want to take sleeping pills especially with this stuff in my chest. Oh, God, it’s such a vale of tears.” She sat down in a chair and bowed her head and began to cry. She cried and cried and cried. She cried a year’s worth of tears.
Jodie sat very quietly and let her cry. Then he handed her a clean, ironed handkerchief and started writing on his notepad. “Sharon Dotson, Marrili Jenas, Tom Harrold, 555-5668, 555-4578, 555-7799.”
“I want you to get a massage as soon as you’re feeling better,” he said. He very gently reached out and touched her knee, hoping the virus from the cold wasn’t in the tears. “All of these people are good. They all work on the weekends. You are such a lovely woman, Suellen. Anyone would want to go to bed with you and someone will, very soon. I have a nose for these things. I know when something good’s about to happen. I’m almost never wrong.”
“Why are you being so nice to me?”
“I don’t like to have sadness in the world. I don’t want to have people hating me. I want to be loved and cherished. I’m an actor, for God’s sake. I want applause. We’re going to die when this is over, Suellen. We need to be nice while we wait.”
She dried her tears. She sat up straight. She sighed and thought about it. “I won’t call anybody,” she said. “I don’t know why I thought of that.”
“Because it’s raining maybe? We used to have fur. We don’t like it when it rains.”
She got up and took the piece of paper that he handed her. She started to hug him, then changed her mind, remembering her cold. She shook her head and left the room. He watched her walk down the hall, then got out the disinfectant and started cleaning the room. He turned on his pocket tape recorder and recorded the visit. “It’s no rose garden,” he began. “It’s not always easy. Sometimes we are misunderstood. Sometimes we are hated. We do what we can. We climb up on that stage and we show them what we’ve got. We let them know we’re coming. We project and project and project. It doesn’t make us smaller. If we get tired, we’ll rest and get back up there and try again. It’s our job and sometimes we love it and sometimes we don’t. We have to do it. The world cannot be left entirely in the hands of the rational because the world is not rational by any stretch of the imagination but kindness is rational in whatever form it takes. Amen, Doctor Jodie. To be continued.”
II
It was Friday afternoon. Phyladda was crowded. Mrs. Gena Alstairs came in worried sick. She had swallowed a small hard object in the pasta and salmon she had carefully cooked for lunch in an attempt to stop her nervous stomach syndrome. By the time she got to the clinic she was feeling somewhat better about that. She wasn’t certain it was broken glass anymore. Perhaps it was just a small hard thing in the pasta. Perhaps her intestines could deal with it. After all, animals swallowed other animals’ bones and all and didn’t die. Perhaps some of that ability was left in humans. She hoped so. The very sight of the red double doors opening onto the parking lot at the back of Phyladda made her begin to imagine her body as something that might perhaps be able to deal with a small hard object in the pasta. When she got out of the car and approached the doors and saw the fresh, lovely geraniums she raised her head and almost smiled. Kevin and Jodie had groomed the geraniums that morning, taking off every yellowed leaf or any reminder of decay.
“Before I even thought I’d swallowed broken glass I was worrying about this place on my forehead,” she told Jodie, as soon as they were alone in the examining room. “I thought it was the first sign of AIDS, then I remembered the tests you made me get came back negative. So then I decided it was skin cancer but as you can see it has gone away. It was just because I kept rubbing it while looking at it. It’s so pitiful. I’d rather kill myself than live at this level of hypochondria.”
“What happened after you thought it was skin cancer?” Jodie asked.
“I took a bath to calm myself down and found a patch of red irritation on my ankle. I know it’s only a place from where I was wearing socks with elastic but I thought, Oh, God, it’s related to the cancer on my forehead. What will I do, Doctor? I can’t go on like this.”
“Did you call that masseur like I asked you to last week?”
“No. I meant to but I got caught up in getting ready for my grandchildren to come.”
“Please call a masseur. I hate to say this, Mrs. Alstairs, but you need to be touched.” He reached out and put his hand on her arm and kept it there.
“I’m not lonely,” she said. “I’m going to have a houseful of company all summer.”
“Good, well, let me see that place on your forehead.” He caressed her arm as he examined her head. He gave her all the love he had to give. “There is nothing wrong with you,” he said. “Please stop worrying. It will make you sick to worry at this rate. This isn’t good for you.”
“I know, I know,” she answered. “As if I didn’t know.”
They sat in silence for a while. Then Jodie stood up and put his hands in his pockets. He turned to her.
“How much money do you have, Mrs. Alstairs?”
“I guess three million, counting everything, counting the houses I could sell. I should sell the place on the Baja. I never go there anymore because of skin cancer. It’s no fun if you can’t get a tan.”
“I want you to find some people and make their lives better. Some of your family will do but it’s better if it’s a stranger. Someone who really needs you. Who needs something they can’t get for themselves. All of this has to be a secret. Well, you can tell me if you need to tell someone but no one else. This is a secret power thing I read about in a book when I was young. Once or twice I tried it, and it made wonderful things happen. I don’t know how to explain it. It makes you strong. Will you try this for me? We have to try something. You can’t go on like you are.”
“There are some children,” she began. Then she began to smile. “Oh, I know just the ones.”
“It must be a secret even after it’s completed.”
“I’ll do it. I swear I will.” She stood up and gathered her things. She was in a hurry to leave. She couldn’t wait to get started. She had two illegitimate grandchildren in Missouri. They were living in a bad neighborhood in Kansas City. She had been wanting to buy them a house, but had kept herself from doing it. Now she would do it. She would do it that afternoon. No one need ever know. She had old friends in the real estate business there. It would be easy. She would get rid of a terrible weight of worrying about them getting mugged. She had only seen the children once, but she had seen photographs of them. A boy and a girl. She would buy them a home. She was able to and she would do it.
Mrs. Alstairs ran from the room and out the back doors of Phyladda. She had a mission and a purpose. She was a woman on her way to get something done.
“You’re in a good mood,” Kevin observed that evening. They were in Jodie’s kitchen making mock duck from a recipe in the original edition of The Joy of Cooking. It was a complicated recipe with a marinade that had to be tasted over and over again to get it right. Kevin was grating cheese for grits while Jodie worked on the marinade.
“I should have been a research chemist,” Jodie answered. “Cooking is simple chemistry. We should go back to school, Kevin. We may be missing our real callings.” He added a small amount of garlic to the marinade, then a pinch of sugar, then stirred one last time and dropped in the chickens. He set a timer for twenty minutes and washed and dried his hands. “Let’s go for a walk while that sits,” he added. He reached over and plucked a mound of grated cheese from the top of Kevin’s work and popped it in his mouth.
“All right,” Kevin agreed, “but only if you tell me why you’re in such a good mood.”
“I don’t know if I can. I’m doing something secret and the way it gets its power is by its secret nature. Still, I guess I can tell you if you swear not to let it go a person further. I mean, it could ruin the luck and the power.”
“Da, da, da, da, da, da, da.”
“I know it sounds nuts but it’s this thing I know about for getting power in the world. I just remembered it recently. Come on, I’ll tell you while were walking.”
The skies had cleared completely and were actually blue above the tile roofs of the houses on Jodie’s street, not a trace of pollution in the air. Kevin and Jodie walked half a block before Jodie continued talking. “There is this old book of my grandmother’s I first read when I was about twelve years old, about these doctors who got the idea in their heads that if they did good deeds and kept them secret it would give them miraculous powers to heal. This was long ago when there were no antibiotics and surgery was dangerous. There was an older doctor who tried it first and he left his journals to a younger doctor who found out how from them. The books are called Magnificent Obsession and Doctor Hudson’s Secret Journal. I tried it a few times in junior high and strange things happened. Finally, I got what I wanted and it was so big it scared me so I put the whole thing out of my mind. You see, Doctor Hudson believed you had to be a really strong person to fool around with this energy, power, whatever you want to call it, and a skinny little boy in junior high sure wasn’t ready for it.”
“What happened? What did you do?”
“I can’t tell. I can’t ever tell or it might undo itself. This is deep stuff, Kevin. Not something to play around with lightly. You can’t want selfish things for yourself. And of course you can’t prove it’s working. So this morning I was so frantic to help a patient get her mind off herself that I told her about it. She was so excited she ran out of the office. It’s the power of a good idea, Kevin. That’s all it really is, and yet, all day since then I’ve been filled with this elation, this feeling that good things are happening and I’m part of the conduit. Do you think I’m nuts?” Jodie stopped beneath a beautiful old madrone tree. He turned to Kevin and waited.
“I don’t know. What kind of good deeds do you have to do?”
“Well, these books were written during the depression. The old doctor was mostly lending money to people and not collecting interest on it. No, he didn’t get the money back at all. He told the people to give it to other people who were in need when they got the chance. It’s pretty Zen really. Like knowing you are so rich you can share everything without fear. Anyway, that’s why I’m in a good mood, since you ask.”
“I want to do it,” Kevi
n said. “I want to do it tonight.”
“It has to be a secret,” Jodie cautioned. “You can’t even tell me. Also, you have to swear the person you help to secrecy. There won’t be any power unless it’s a complete secret.”
“Good. All right. I see. I can do that.”
“I’ll know anyway.” Jodie smiled. “I’ll be able to tell by what’s happening to you.”
The dinner was divine. Mock duck and cheese grits and homemade bread and green salad and flan for dessert. When they finished eating Kevin helped clean up, then he disappeared until eleven-thirty. When he returned he was glowing with excitement. He had not known where to start. He had just gotten in his car and driven to a secret place and found a secret person in distress and begun his secret life.
As soon as Mrs. Alstairs got home she called the airlines and made a reservation to fly to Kansas City that evening. She made a reservation for a rental car and a hotel room. She called her real estate friend and told her what she wanted. She called her CPA and found out what she could do to help with taxes. I guess that doesn’t matter, she decided. I mean, that won’t ruin the secret, will it? She called the real estate person back and swore her to secrecy. Then she called her CPA back and swore her to secrecy. Then she decided she had done all she could in the secrecy department so she packed a suitcase and put it in the backseat of her automobile and lay down on her bed and began to dream of her little grandchildren in a clean, new house, in a neighborhood with good schools and parks and sidewalks. She fell asleep, and slept for an hour.
When she woke she called the mother of the children and told her that she was coming to Kansas City to buy her a house. “I need the deduction for my taxes,” she told the young woman. “You’ll be doing me a favor.”
“I don’t know what to say,” the young woman answered.
“Say you’ll meet me after work tomorrow and look at whatever I’ve found.”
“I pick up the children at five-thirty. I might be able to get off earlier and meet you. I don’t know what to say, Mrs. Alstairs.”
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