Lapham Rising (11 page)

“How could I resist?” he says, completing his deposit. “Did you get a whiff of this tree?”

The Jack Russell, who has now parked himself in front of the toy store, lets fly again. Hector balances upright against the taut leash, then takes off after him, pulling free from my grip. I pursue him to the Jack Russell, reaching him just as Medusa emerges from the shop and starts yelling at me, her finger pointed like a pistol at my face.

“You stay away from here! And what are you doing to this poor creature?” Hector rushes up to her and wags his tail desperately.

“I’m going to kill Fairy Tale Dora and my little dog too,” I tell her, snatching back the leash. Back at the sweet gum, a small crowd has gathered to study Hector’s gift to the town. Some are absorbed in the sight like paleontologists unearthing a fossil. The others are glowering at me. They concern me more than Medusa. In Southampton, the crime of not cleaning up after one’s dog makes pedophilia look like a misdemeanor. I really need to get home.

Traffic is supposed to stop for pedestrians at the crosswalk, so I pay no attention to the approaching cars as Hector starts to lead us to the far side of Main Street, where we will
catch the bus back to Quogue. He trots along with a merry gait. Nothing seems to bother him for long; I don’t know whether it’s because dogs have short memories or if it’s simply the way he is.

Out of the corner of my eye I glimpse an apple-green Rolls-Royce Corniche convertible heading toward us. Something tells me that it is not going to stop at the crosswalk, and I am soon proved right. Hurriedly I yank Hector’s leash and pull him out of the way of the careless automobile. As I do, its right front tire clips my right big toe.

So shocked am I by this illegal discourtesy that I do not yelp, though a sharp pain shoots up my leg. Even Hector is taken aback. “Did you see that?” he cries. “I could have been killed!”

Despite my horror of making a spectacle of myself, I fall to the ground and lie there on my side in the middle of the street, glaring after the hit-and-run. I can see only the back of a man’s very large head on the driver’s side of the convertible. He is wearing one of those wide-brimmed straw plantation owners’ hats, and he never even looks over his shoulder to see what he has done. I note the rear license tag, a vanity plate. It reads APHMS.

The policewoman who earlier conferred with Medusa hustles over to where I am lying to ask grimly if I am all right. She looks as frolicsome as a catcher on an all-girls’ professional softball team, and young enough to have received her badge
and uniform on the same day as her First Communion. A crowd of six or seven coalesces, then disperses. A nun wearing aviator sunglasses reaches down to press a dollar into my hand. “Poor man,” she says. I pull myself up, refusing the officer’s help. Naturally, she did not see what happened and knows only that I fell in the street. I assume she thinks I am looped.

“Was that who I think it was?” asks Hector, staring after Lapham’s Rolls as though it were a chunk of roast beef on wheels.

The policewoman insists that I be checked at Southampton Hospital, a few blocks away. I try to protest that I’m perfectly OK, but my limp betrays me. She half ushers, half pushes me and Hector into the backseat of her patrol car.

“I wasn’t askin’,” she says. “And by the way, I understand you were behavin’ like a creep in the toy store. You’re lucky I’m only takin’ you to the hospital.”

I grasp my toe and feel it throb. “Hector! You’re the bomb!” someone calls from the street.

“That’s me, all right,” I tell the policewoman. “Lucky.”

I
s it you?” She studies my face in her rearview mirror, through the black wire mesh that separates her seat from the one reserved for us child molesters. I flinch. The siren splits open my head, exposes my brain, then commences drilling. Hector sits beside me in the New York Public Library lion position. The toe begins to bulge out of my Teva like a quick-ripening plum.

“Yes.” I am more certain of my answer than of her meaning.

“I had you in high school,” she says. I do not bother to offer a cute reply. “We were made to read one of your stories. It was about a couple who had sex during a wake. I didn’t get it. You still writin’?”

“No, I’m boning up for the Police Academy.”

“Yeah. Funny.” She turns off Main Street toward the hospital.

“This is ridiculous. Just let me off anywhere. Thanks very much.”

“It wasn’t me lyin’ in the middle of Main Street holdin’ my toe. This is for your own good.” She turns to me. “And this is for mine.” She reaches back through a small window in the wire mesh and hands me a ticket for Hector’s dump. I hand it to Hector, who bites it.

“Is the siren really necessary?”

“You don’t want the siren? No siren.” She turns the thing off.

“I like the siren,” Hector says to me. Now he is up on his hind legs, his front paws braced against the left rear window. I check the hour. Five o’clock approaches. “I
love
the siren,” he corrects himself.

“Too bad you can’t make your wishes known to the nice police officer.”

“I’m praying for you,” he says. “You can never tell how serious a toe injury might be. The poor crushed little fellow might shoot a blood clot straight up a vein into your heart, in which case you’ll die in a matter of seconds. You’ll be gone. Then what?” He pretends to weep. “What will happen to poor little Hector then? Where will he go? A foster home? An orphanage? The North Shore Animal League? And how long will little Hector be kept alive there, with no nice family to come along and see him whooping up the wood chips and fall
in love with him on the spot? How long before little Hector is deemed expendable, and they use that euphemism about ‘sleep’? Oh…” Now he is keening. “Oh, is there no one on this great wide earth who will rescue little Hector?”

I am grateful when we pull into the emergency entrance. Hector adopts his Save-My-Master tilt. An orderly or whatever they are called these days—a physician’s mobile assistant—trots out to the driveway to meet us. I crawl out of the police car, refuse his help, and drag my wounded foot toward the door.

“Don’t thank me,” says the policewoman, who is standing by her car, arms folded in front of her. “I was just doin’ my duty.”

“In the time you’ve wasted on me, you could have caught two serial killers and an arsonist.”

“I’d have preferred their company.” Hector finds her hilarious. She gets back into the driver’s seat, puts the patrol car in gear, and begins to pull away. “And stay out of toy stores,” she calls.

“You’re a doll.” I wave good-bye.

“No dogs in the E.R.,” says the orderly.

“Where I go, he goes.” I repress a sigh. “This is a waste of time,” I inform him. “Entirely unnecessary.”

The orderly takes down some basic information, fills out a form, then insists that I climb onto a gurney to take the
weight off my toe. A doctor will look me over shortly, he assures me. It had
better
be shortly. He reaches into his pocket and produces a Band-Aid with a yellow smiley face on it. “Sorry,” he says. “It’s all I have.” My toe smiles up at me.

Later and later. If I fail to find some usable material…“Say, you don’t happen to keep any horsehair around the hospital, do you?” He regards me clinically, as if wondering if he has made too superficial a diagnosis. His eyes loiter on my bandaged ear.

“O Lord,” Hector begins to pray, “I come to You on bended knee in spirit because, as You know, I am unable to bend my knees, and still I come to beg You for the life of my master. Make him whole again, O Lord. Heal him in mind and in toe, so that he will abandon his bootless acrimony and pursue a life of virtue and quietude, from now on and evermore, attending faithfully to his little Westie, Thy servant, Hector. Amen.”

“Beautiful,” I tell him. “Inspiring.” He howls a gratingly sharp version of “How Great Thou Art.”

Ten minutes pass, then twelve. Flat on my back, I can see only the ceiling, which I am persuaded is lowering toward me. On a table beside the gurney sits a stack of publications by area authors:
A Celebrity Guide to the Hamptons (With Addresses and Phone Numbers); Hedges I Have Known; Baking Halibut for Fifty
; a coffee-table book of photographs of sunglasses and lip balm; and a copy of
Envy
, a glossy magazine
with pictures of movie stars who live in the Hamptons attending the East Hampton premiere of
Love Hamptons Style
, in which they make cameo appearances.

The toe hurts, but not so badly as to prevent me from hoisting myself up onto my forearms and elbows. I have to get out of here. Stealthily, I inch toward the edge of the gurney.

“Is it you?” A whiny male voice is aimed at my head. Suddenly I am looking up into the lemon face of Dr. Whatshisname, of Sag Harbor, by whom I have been accosted before. “It
is
you!” he says. “This is great.” He must be referring to my hospitalization. “I was thinking of you only this morning.”

“Why was that? And while you’re telling me, could you give me a hand and help me off this contraption?”

“You all right?”

“Sure. I came in after an attack of persiflage, but I’m cured.”

“You’re lucky,” he says, not listening to a syllable. “My acid reflux gets worse every day. I come here twice a week. Had a terrible bout today, which is why I was thinking of you.” I won’t ask, but it will make no difference. “I got another rejection. That’s five this month. Can you beat that?”

Regrettably, I know what he is talking about. Whatshisname used to be a nip-and-tuck plastic surgeon in New York, but he lost all his patients because he forced them to listen to him read excerpts from his unpublished novels before they
went under the knife. In fact, after hearing him read, several patients walked out, deciding that they liked their original looks after all. He then moved to Sag Harbor, where he committed himself to his art full-time. When his efforts were rejected by every mainstream house in New York, he became a self-publisher. He writes to me every so often to complain of this outrage, which he terms a conspiracy, and to ask if I will intercede on his behalf. I tried to pass him off to Vandersnook, but the great man wanted to charge Whatshisname a fee for the service.

“Don’t worry,” I tell him, as I do every time. “I’m on the case.”

“And while you’re at it,” he says as he helps me to my feet, “see if you can find out why I am not invited to speak at writers gatherings around here. Why am I forced to give readings on my own sunporch? Is that fair?”

“Another outrage,” I assure him.

“You bet your ass it is.” He hugs me, and in doing so steps on my injured toe. I groan. “That’s the spirit,” he says, and he departs, leaving me clinging to the gurney for balance.

“I like him,” says Hector.

I transfer my weight to my working foot, pull myself back up, and wait for the renewed pain to subside. I wonder when the real doctor will appear and if he will turn out to be Lapham himself, ready to anesthetize me with his conversation, then
operate and remove both my legs. From my lower depths, I hear, “Is it you?”

This time the question is asked by a woman whom I do not recognize. A cloud of white hair encircles a face so fiercely coy that it appears to be peeking out from itself. “Yes!” she exults. “It
is
you!” She introduces herself as the chairperson of the benefit committee for the Endangered Turtles Ball, a perennial gala held for and by the slow.

“We’ve been trying to contact you all summer”—her tone wavering between delirium and emergency. She clings to her vowels. “And here you are! On the very same day I’m conferring with Dr. Brouhaha, another committee member. Wait till I tell him that I saw you right here in the hospital. It’s destiny!”

“God’s will,” Hector whispers.

“Well!” she exhales, as if the word constituted the entirety of a conversation. She is a coliseum of merriment. “Well! Here’s what we’ve been wanting to ask you.” Hector, imitating her hopped-up fervor, wags his tail wildly and tosses her the rescue-me look. “What a charming dog!” she says. “What’s her name?”

“Hermione.”

He growls.

“Well! All of us on the committee would be thrilled if you would lend your name to the ball this year. Thrilled! You
wouldn’t have to actually
do
anything, of course. We’re asking for contributions of one thousand dollars each from ‘House Pet Turtles’ and twenty-five thousand from ‘Golden Turtles.’ It would mean so much if we could add you to our list.”

“Sorry,” I tell her. “My religious convictions prohibit it. And then there are the dietary laws.” She seems confused, though she says she understands perfectly.

“Well!” she says again, her voice not flagging. “As long as I have you here, Mr. March, I wonder if you might glance at the manuscript of my first novel.” She reaches into her tote bag, which has a weeping turtle painted on the side, and under it the words “Save Me.” “It’s about a woman who lives in Water Mill, as I do, who comes upon a turtle named Sweetie on the beach near her home. Sweetie is dying, but the woman nurses her back to health, and the two of them become great friends and have many adventures together. Would you read it? I’d be thrilled!”

“No.”

“Well! I also have my husband’s first novel with me.” She is not kidding. “It’s about a rat named Ebola who escapes from Plum Island and swims all the way to Water Mill, where he causes the horrible deaths of all the women in town. Would you read it? He’d be thrilled!”

“No.”

“Well, take this little darling anyway,” she says. She reaches into her bag again and pulls out a fuzzy toy turtle the size of a deflated football that she thrusts into my arms. It wears a pink tam-o’-shanter and has a satin teardrop sewn beneath its right eye. When I give it a squeeze, its tiny voice pleads, “Save me.”

“It must be wonderful,” says Hector as the woman departs in a hailstorm of hand waves. “It must be wonderful, the literary life. To be a literary lion, as you are. I’m a literary dog, you know.” I look away. “Oh yes. Our church library has an event every year to honor the literary lights, mostly dogs who write how-to books and celebrity autobiographies. It’s quite a night!”

“I’m sure it is.”

“Is Mr. Lapham a literary lion?” he asks.

“Definitely.”

“He has an awfully nice car. Do you suppose he might give me a ride someday? He must miss his dear departed Westie.”

A TV monitor is broadcasting the news, giving me no choice but to listen. “And from our culture corner,” a frantic young man is announcing, “that great old series
Murder She Wrote
is completely going off the air. They finally ran out of repeats, Charlie. Back to you.”

To his credit, and my surprise, Hector says nothing.

“Excuse me,” I call to a woman passing my gurney. “Do you suppose you could help me off this thing?”

“Is it you?” she says. I acknowledge the local gossip reporter, Parrot Light, so nicknamed because she reports anything anyone tells her. She has the face of Natalie Wood, though without the dolorous depth. In the 1980s she worked as a correspondent in the Middle East but was dismissed after filing a story in which she revealed that Yasir Arafat was preparing to drive every last Israeli into the sea. Arafat’s third in command had told her so himself.

“Sure,” she says, extending her hand. I sit up, stare, and wait for the only question she ever asks me.

“Because I ran out of Bic pens,” I tell her this time. She jots that down.

“All of them?”

“That’s a follow-up question.” I pat her on the head and move toward the door.

“Oh, Mr. March,” Parrot calls after me. “I’ve always wondered, where do you live?”

“On Noman,” I am able to say at long last, a tremor of small satisfaction hovering on my horizon. She asks what I know she will ask. “Noman is an island,” I inform her, and I await her reaction.

“Oh. OK,” she says. She makes a note to herself and walks off.

“We’re out of here,” I say to Hector, and we are but a few feet from freedom.

“Is it you?”

I turn to face a young man with copper-colored hair, wearing blue-and-green scrubs. He looks like a lollipop. “You’re not leaving, are you? I haven’t examined your toe yet.”

“I’m fine,” I promise him. “Thanks all the same. But I really must get home now.”

“I ought to take a look, just to be on the safe side. We don’t want to lose a citizen like Harry March to a damaged toe.” He hacks up a laugh and forcibly guides me back to the gurney. “You know,” he says, in enough of a drawl to suggest that what is about to follow is going to be horrendous. “You know, I’m something of a writer myself.” Hector looks up at him, feigning avid interest. “Of course, I’m not a writer the way
you’re
a writer. But I know I have a book in me.” I do not say, Why don’t you leave it there? “A book about my life as a Southampton physician.”

“Is that so?” I find myself missing Whatshisname, Light, and Mrs. Turtle. He squeezes my toe to see if it hurts.

“Yes. I’m going to call it
Hamptons M.D.: The Life of a Country Doctor
.”

“Fantastic title,” I tell him. “But I must be off.”

“You wouldn’t believe the stories.”

“I’d love to hear them,” Hector says.

“I’d love to hear them,” I say to the doctor. “But I must get back to my wife. She swore she’d turn to stone if I wasn’t home in time to help her with our dinner party.”

“Tell me about it!” he says. I do not. “Nothing broken. So off you go. But try to stay off that toe.”

As we are about to exit the E.R., Medusa is wheeled in on a gurney of her own. “She’s hyperventilating,” explains the orderly who earlier put the smile on my toe. “A pervert attacked her in her store.” I attempt to avert my existence, without success.