Bethel's Meadow (9 page)

After my last swig of coffee I tapped on the table.

“More coffee, Mr. Smith?” she asked as she stood to render service. I motioned her to sit back down. She did.

“First,” I said, “thank you for breakfast.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Second, I’d like to answer your question from last night. You were asking if I was suicidal.”

She gave me that serious look of hers again. But it was more than just the doctor being in. Samantha really wanted to hear what I had to say. Because I now knew her husband had committed suicide himself, I hoped my answer would bring her some measure of comfort.

And so I offered her this: “I have a fear of God. There are just some things I would never contemplate. I’m not a hundred percent certain that God exists, mind you, but if He does exist, I want to have my ass covered when Judgment Day arrives. Specifically, I have this fear that God would send me back to the planet and make me live another life as a lower life form. I would have to prove myself as an amoeba and work my way back up through the ranks: through being a worm, a squirrel, a magpie, a sloth, a dog, a gorilla, back again to being a human, where we all ultimately have to prove ourselves. I believe we have to convince the Big Man that we can gut it out, all the way from amoeba to human. Only then do we gain passage to His Kingdom. So I’ve come this far. Ain’t no way I’m starting all this shit over again.”

“So you have a fear of reincarnation,” she said. “That’s not uncommon, but I’ve never heard anyone put it quite the way you just did. So you don’t believe there is a hell?”

“We’re in hell already,” I said. Samantha laughed, but I wasn’t joking. “No, really, it is in hell where we have to make the grade. We have to defeat the evil forces on this planet before we can collectively ascend into Heaven. It is in how we treat each other that we are judged, both in our personal relationships and between communities and nations. It kind of goes without saying that right now we aren’t doing too well by any measure.”

Samantha turned serious again, steepling her hands as she asked, “But what would you do if you were
really
tested? What would you do if you sank into a deep fit of depression? What if you were out of money and you were about to lose everything? What if humiliation of the worst sort was about to come down on you like a thick, black fog? What would you do then?”

“Your son told me about your husband,” I said. My statement elicited little reaction from her—it only seemed to darken her eyes for a second. “Honestly, I don’t know what I would have done in his shoes. I think there a lot of people who carefully plan their suicide, but I tend to think that most do it during an episode of profound depression. Some leave notes behind and some don’t. But all I can say to answer your question is that I learned a long time ago that, especially as a manic-depressive, you have to live your life one day at a time. It sounds trite to say it, but they are words that I live by. Well, I try, anyway.”

“Have you ever tried?” she asked. “I mean, to kill yourself?”

“No,” I answered. “I have to be alive in case someone needs me. It’s as simple as that.”

“Who? Who needs you?”

Maybe Miranda does
, I thought.
But probably not
.

“Maybe
you
do,” I said, trying to shake off memories of the one I’d left behind over a decade ago. “Hell, I don’t know. I could be the factor in someone else’s life that prevents them from doing evil, from doing something that could bring harm to themselves or to others. I want to stay alive so I can be counted on.”

“You’re a romantic, then?”

“Yeah, I believe I am.” Until this day I’d never really articulated these beliefs to anyone.

“Devin said you were still mad at his father,” I said. “Is that true?”

“He’s a son of a bitch for what he did,” she said acidly. I could see she was trying to control her anger. I quickly tried to make light of the situation.

“You know what?” I said. “I used to work with this woman who had been widowed twice. The first husband died in a car wreck, the second had cancer or something. Anyway, she would just always tell me about how wonderful these men were, how they had been the salt of the earth, pillars of their community, men of high moral character. Each marriage had lasted less than five years.”

“So what’s your point?” Samantha said impatiently. “I don’t like long stories. Get to it.”

“I never said this to her but I will tell you: I think this woman was proof of the fact that death can be a good career move in marriage. If that first husband hadn’t been in that car wreck,
maybe
they would have made it to their seventh year. But maybe not. Most marriages nowadays don’t even make it for six years. If he had lived, he probably would have started fucking around on her, picked up a cheerleader type that he’d really wanted all along, bought her a Corvette and hidden her in some lakeside lodge up in North Carolina. The wife would have figured it out eventually—maybe a call from her accountant to alert her to some suspicious expenditures—and that would have been it. They would have divorced and they would have hated each other until their dying day.”

“I have to admit,” Samantha said with a wan smile, “that’s a decent theory you have there. Depressing, but it makes a certain amount of sense.”

“Damn right it does,” I said, slapping the table. “If Elvis had lived and not died on the toilet, he’d have ended up like most other rock stars or actors: a has-been with a really awful comb over.”

Samantha laughed heartily, and doing so seemed to relax her.

“I have a concern I would like to voice with you,” I said.

She sighed and made a moue. “What’s that?”

“Well, what happened last night kind of caught me off guard a little. Normally, after I break up with a girl, I go to the doctor and have a full series of labs run on my pecker. I get checked for AIDS, genital warts, any kind of STD, the works. I call it my
Clean Pecker Guarantee
. It provides some assurance to my next lover that I am not inserting into her vagina an instrument of disease and death.”

“That is very commendable of you,” Samantha said. She started laughing again, and then she howled, “Whooooo! You are something else.” She got up and collected my dishes. “You’re full of shit, but you’re still something else.”

I offered to help but she refused it. She ordered me upstairs to take a shower in the master bathroom and to then hop into bed.

“We’re not finished yet,” she said.

…

Following three hours of the most incredible sex ever, during which time I engaged in sexual maneuvers I had never contemplated nor even imagined, Samantha transitioned into doctor mode yet again. We were still in bed.

“I think you’ve made the right decision regarding your meds,” she commented. “I believe every man should be his true self, and that he should have to manage his true nature. Psychiatric chemotherapy is a crutch used by both patients and doctors. It shields both patient and doctor from having to deal directly with the underlying problems.”

“But that’s how you make your money these days, isn’t it?” I asked, perplexed. “You’re contributing to the problem.”

“Honey, I’ll say it again. Money has no mother.”

“There’s your own brand of bullshit, Dr. Fleming.”

“But it’s true.”

“Why did you scale back your practice?” I asked. “Why do only the rich and famous deserve your counsel?”

“Because I think it’s all bullshit,” she said. From her back she nimbly flipped over and straddled me. “Why don’t you just shut up and fuck me.”

“No,” I said, carefully returning her to her back. “I understand you’re the top dog in pharmaceutical sales around here. But can that possibly be more profitable than charging seventy or eighty bucks every five minutes for med checks? And just how many rich and famous people are around here anyway? Do you have the entire PGA tour contingent from Isleworth and Bay Hill coming through here to secretly obtain meds and counseling from you?”

“Mr. Smith, I’ll tell you why I’ve scaled back my practice, but you have to tell me something about yourself that no one else knows.” She tried to get back up but I kept her pinned down. She must have enjoyed the physical force I was exerting, because she was purring like a kitten.

“You want a quid pro quo here?” I asked. She nodded. “Okay, I’ll go first. I wrote a book.”

“Really?” she said. That seemed to rev her up a bit more. “I always wanted to fuck a writer, but only a really good one. Are you a good writer, Mr. Smith?”

I shook my head. “Apparently I’m not. I’ve sent query letters to fifty or sixty agents and none of them were interested. I got nothing back but form rejection letters. Agents are worse than bad dates when it comes to doling out rejection.”

“Can I read it?” she asked. “What’s it about?”

“I’d rather not say more about it than that,” I said. “At least not for now. I guess I should tell you that I am unemployed.”

“Yeah, I know that,” she said flatly. “Wally told me what happened with you guys getting replaced by the Indians.”

“Well, anyway, that’s how I found time to write. I even hid what I was doing from my girlfriend—my ex-girlfriend, that is. She would have just laughed at me.”

“I might know some people that could help get your book sold,” she said. A kind offer, but it sounded dubious to me.

“No, thanks. If it gets picked up, I want it to be because I put in the work to get it done myself. I’ve revised the manuscript three times since the last rejection I got. If I get to a point where I think it’s close to being ready, I’ll let you and other friends of mine read and critique it. But I’m not ready yet.”

“Okay,” she said, nodding. “But I will get your book published one day. You’ll have to learn to trust me. I’m the kind of woman who can get things done.”

“Well, I gave up a secret,” I said. “Your turn.”

“Okay,” she said, “here we go: After Marty died three years ago—that was my husband—I just couldn’t carry on with a full-time practice anymore. I was totally burned out from it. I’d only done it for eight years but it had seemed more like
twenty
to me. We owned three houses and a yacht, and his construction business somehow ate up a lot of our money. Especially when you consider the laundering of cash to obscure his gambling activities, it was the biggest financial black hole you could ever see. I had to work double the hours of other psychiatrists, sometimes working more than that, including weekends and holidays. Things were that bad.

“Finally, after Marty died, I had to settle his gambling debts using
all
of the life insurance proceeds. I just couldn’t go back and effectively start over. It took over a year to settle his gambling debts, and I lost two of the houses and had to have a fire sale on the yacht to finally even the score with those lunatic mobsters. And now, this house is all we have left, and I’m just barely making payments. We had taken out a second mortgage on it before he killed himself, the rotten bastard.

“Anyway, I’m just burned out, baby. I am burned, burned, burned out. Devin wants to go to an expensive college in two years, and the only way I can see to do that and to still keep this house is to do whatever it takes to get more money in my bank account.”

“So just go back to practicing full time,” I said. I shouldn’t have said it. Good thing I still had her pinned down or she would have decked me.

“Listen up,” she said angrily. “I’m done with doing that bullshit full time. So-called manic-depressives and schizophrenics are just the most pathetic people God ever put on the planet. It is such fucking bullshit. There’s no blood test or MRI or anything of the sort to truly identify a manic-depressive. We have only the whining and self-pitying accounts of their sorry lives to go by.

“No, baby, I’m getting my money some other way. I’m going to find a man, a good man, a wealthy man who can take care of me. I’m almost forty, baby. I’m not going to start over again. No fucking way.”

After that diatribe I let her go. She turned away from me and curled up into the fetal position. It was really odd. She didn’t say a thing for five very long minutes. When I finally touched her shoulder, she flinched and told me to leave her alone.

“That’s a hell of a way to begin a new relationship,” I said to her. “I think I’ve worn out my welcome. I really didn’t mean to upset you.”

She turned over and smiled. It was a sad and tender smile. It really got to me.

“Before you go,” she said, “you have to do one thing for me.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Fuck me.”

10

I
WAS READING PAGE 750 of
Atlas Shrugged
as I lay on my living room couch. I wasn’t buying into all of Rand’s philosophical views, but it was still an inspiring read. I was ready to get off my ass and do something with my life. No more of this bullshit of feeling victimized because an Indian had taken my job. After all, the higher-ups at the banking company were only trying to bolster their profits by cutting back on expenses. Why pay a hundred and twenty grand a year to an American citizen when you can get a really hungry foreigner to do the job for a fraction of that amount? I convinced myself to just accept it and move on. I resolved to get back to work again, doing anything I had to do to make money.