Lie Still (7 page)

The light was fading and the western sky looked like a rain-bow ribbon on fire. The town house I rented was in a typically nondescript development patch with streets that curve around nothing in particular. The grounds were post-bulldozer chic: clumps of boulders and pampas grasses with a lot of cheap little cacti and one stunted or mangled saguaro per acre. The town-house units were staggered along a curve so the adjacent patios were offset from one another. Each unit had a peekaboo view of the big red dog-turd rocks that pass for mountains there, but the back patios were invisible to the neighbors.

There was enough breeze that it would be cool on the patio, so I led her there and brought her a glass of wine for the wait while I showered. When I stepped away to go inside she turned and grabbed my wrist, staring into my eyes.

“Stay a minute,” she said.

I felt my heart detonate in my throat. I could only stare, thinking of nothing to say. Apparently this was going to be educational.

She changed her expression to something like a gentle knowing smile and pulled herself closer to me. She took a long slow sip of the wine and gave it to me. I gulped a longer one. She turned and set it on the armrest of my garage-sale wooden chaise. She turned back and ran both hands up my chest. Her perfume was an expensive-smelling cross between rose petals and come-fuck-me musk.

“I told you I like sweaty men,” she said and pulled my shirt out of my gym shorts, then up over my head. Keeping 46

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her hands on my pecs, she moved her head back to kiss me.

Her lips were like water after a mountain hike: cool, wet, de-licious, and not altogether satisfying. It was a slow, relaxed nibbling. I didn’t know what the protocol response was, so I stood there like an eighth grader, hard as rock in my jock-strap, which I’m sure she felt, pressed against her belly. She teased her tongue into my mouth and ran her hands lightly all around my hips and groin. She slid her fingers inside the waistband of my gym shorts and peeled them down, exposing my arousal poking above the elastic of the jock. Still in my high-tops and two pairs of socks, I tried to think of high school gym class to slow the flutter in my groin.

“It seems you like older women,” she said, eyeing the tumescence, and began unbuttoning her blouse. When she was bare to the waist she stopped to fix me with her stare, then lifted her neck very straight to hold her breasts at their most perfect posture and took another slow sip of the wine.

My mouth was dry. I took a drink, too, but missed the armrest, shattering the glass on a rock among the cacti.

I fell to my knees and she pulled my head to her breasts.

They looked slightly deflated, like those of a woman who had once nursed, but she was sighing and lightly glowing with perspiration. I found her beautifully perfect.

She sat and pushed herself backward up the chaise, drew up her skirt, and shimmied out of her panties. She pulled me out of the jock and squeezed me into her. She locked her legs around mine, scrunched her eyes closed, and rocked. I may have been on top but there was no doubt who was laying whom. Embarrassed, I came.

Obviously she had not participated in that particular cli-mactic moment. Though it was tempting to verbally gush inquiries, apologies, and puppy-dog prattle, I was awed into a better choice—keeping my mouth shut. I think she got exactly what she wanted: proof that despite my relative youth and strength I was absolutely susceptible to her. After about three minutes of nothing but mutual heavy breathing, I pulled out and off of her. “Shower,” I grunted.

Her reply was only, “Bring me a towel.”

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We went to a barbecue restaurant far away on the west side of Phoenix, away from the money side of town. She said it had great food and was sure to have no one in it who would recognize us. There wasn’t much talk over dinner, but she did warn me not to get too full because I would need to show some energy before the night was over.

When we left she handed me the keys to her Mercedes and went to the passenger side. As I started the car she leaned onto my shoulder and began whispering into my ear wonderfully explicit observations about my anatomy, what she especially liked about it, her own postcoital state and how much she enjoyed a certain reminder issuing from her during dinner. Perhaps the single most remarkable thing about my time with Professor Lyle was that I did not crash the car during that excruciating drive to her Scottsdale condo. Naturally her anticipatory pillow talk had the desired effect, and by the time we got there I was a juvenile ball of testosterone, painfully erect but otherwise completely mal-leable to her whims.

Our encore session was unquestionably more satisfying for her, in the usual sense, and for that matter, for me. She conducted us through an extensive repertoire of postures and points of contact, punctuated by two rather vocal peaks from her, followed by brief rest periods and finally a grunting orgasm from me. I ended it with the sleep of the dead.

Her clock radio at 5 A.M. seemed as painful as any hangover I’d ever had. She called a cab for me and gave me a twenty to pay for it. Mimi was explicit: I was to try my very goddamnedest to get to rounds at a normal hour and make not the slightest comment nor facial expression nor untimely erection for that matter to let any of the hospital snoops have even a faint glimmering of a hint of what had happened and, if I had a poker face and any luck at all, would happen again very soon indeed.

I replied softly, “Yes, ma’am.”

4

Here on the plains my work hours come to me via a mother-substitute named Adrienne Salter. Technically my “Liaison”

at Western Acute, Adrienne is virtually my manager. Though
we’ve never met, she has become a friend. We speak often on
Western Acute’s WATS line.

Adrienne’s job at Western is to find work for me and her
stable of semiretired and quasi-reliable doctors like me.

Though it is actually the other way around. Her job is to find
a semireliable doctor able and willing to fulfill Western’s
contractual commitment to these small-town hospitals.

And if the doctor she has available has an impediment—

say, a lack of a license in the state—Adrienne’s job is to fix
it. She is The Mistress of the License. Thanks to her I am officially a Kansas doctor, a Colorado doctor, and, recently, a
South Dakota doctor, too. I got a license there thanks to the
hard work of Adrienne and a willingness by the director of
the South Dakota licensing board to overlook some checker-ing in my record. Doctors aren’t lining up to work in the Little Towns on the Prairie, so the director had a certain
motivation to be broad-minded. I am forever to be beholden,
professionally, to the kindnesses of others.

Western Acute’s usual line, when they want you to sign up
for a weekend commitment, is to tell you it’s a quiet little ER

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49

where nothing ever happens. That was more or less the same
thing they told me when I went to work in the ER in Glory,
Arizona, where Henry Rojelio provided the quick education
still ringing in my ears today. If it’s an ER open for business,
something bizarre will show up. Certainly not every shift,
maybe not even every month, but it’s going to happen. So

“Quiet Little ER Where Nothing Ever Happens” has long
been a joking cliché between Adrienne and me.

A case in point: my first patient in South Dakota. A
ninety-one-year-old woman, all ninety-seven pounds of her,
was pulled down her own porch steps by her dog, an
elkhound, for crissakes, who apparently thought they should
chase, together, the squirrel on her fence. Initially I could
find only soreness and bruises and a wrist broken in the typical way—cocked backwards to break the fall. Interestingly,
though, according to the X-rays I ordered out of sheer compulsivity, she had broken her neck, too. The first vertebra
was sitting a good three quarters of an inch forward on the
second. Looking only at the film, I would have guessed her
to have been dead. She should have cut off all nerve flow
below her chin, including breathing signals.

After gingerly getting her into a medieval-looking neck
brace and arranging ambulance transfer to a serious hospital where her neck bones could be pulled back into line, then
plated, screwed, and wired to keep them there, I asked her
for a second time about any nerve-related symptoms. With
enough leading and prodding questions, she was willing to
allow that there might be, yes, if she thought about it, a little tingling in her fingers. But that was it. And she insisted it
would not bother her, she would just like to go back home.

Before being wheeled away she insisted on access to the
phone so she could contact her neighbor to review the
elkhound’s feeding and exercise regimen.

Maybe the nine-plus decades of life on the prairie had
baked her spinal cord into sinew along with her skin and
muscles.

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T H E B O O K O F M I M I , C H A P T E R T WO

In the weeks following my initiation night with Madame Lyle, she took me on an extended tour of the Land of the Erotic, complete with side trips into pseudo-domesticity. We regularly cooked dinners at her condo: elaborate salads or pasta with a quick sauce. And wine.

I was careful to avoid any sense of occupying her private space unbidden. Inevitably, though, I became at home in her home. It began with my asking if it was okay that I leave a toothbrush and razor there. She laughingly approved.

Her style shunned the trite colors and motifs common in Southwestern homes. She favored the austere: blacks, whites, and grays, with small accents of reds and rusts. In her bedroom, though, was an anomaly: an antique glass and walnut bookcase with a fascinating array of artifacts—a small trophy with a figure of a girl in a cap and baggy pants hefting a softball bat, antique glass figurines and metal toys, some of them rusty, and two rows of very old illustrated children’s books. One night before bed she found me staring into it. I gave her an inquiring look but she shook her head and turned out the lights.

Though it seemed absurd to think that either Mimi or I could be playing for keeps, we did come to know things about each other beyond the anatomic. I believe I could accurately put to rest the gossip among my fellow heathens about why Dr. Lyle left The Mayos of Minnesota.

Her mother died of leukemia when Mimi was eleven, leaving her with a controlling father and the only female in a family of cops. Her grandfather, father, and eventually all three brothers bore the badge. Family outings involved great noise, smoke, and piles of empty casings as they each tried to outshoot her father at the pistol range. When her academic talents became obvious, Daddy began picking for her a college appropriate for entrée to the FBI or CIA.

Mimi, though, from the time of her mother’s illness, found any direction from her father unbearable. She referred to him as The Python.

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For her, rebellion became a creative outlet. She took up with older males while barely pubescent and developed a taste for stopping traffic with her sartorial choices. Her favorite high school ensemble was—imagine it from the ground up—knee-high black patent high-heel boots, shiny white tights, black leather hot pants, a skin-tight and low-cut white leotard, and a studded black patent choker. For variety she sometimes wore a black-and-white-checked leotard instead of the pure white. Mimi had the physical attributes to stop traffic in a housedress and hair curlers, so the vision she painted in detailing that costume was nearly more than I could stand. I asked her to re-create it for me in private but she declined. “It’s all gone to charity except the boots,” she said.

Her brief marriage began with elopement the summer after high school. Her only contact with Tony the Sailor after the one beating was through lawyers.

She said, “Daddy would have taken me back—the Prodigal Daughter—but there was no use in that. Just more suffocation.”

She went instead to a small liberal arts college in Maine on a scholarship. Her father dismissed it as “snooty” and

“pinko.” When she majored in English instead of something “useful,” the rift between them widened. She gradu-ated in three and a half years, with honors, and then, to be certain her father understood her escape from his shadow, she applied to medical schools, something pioneering in the Lyle clan.

She ended up in neurological surgery, she said, “Because there were no other women there. That was reason enough.”

After a five-year residency in Pennsylvania she landed a two-year fellowship at the Mayo Clinic. While there she developed, alongside Ian McWhorten, one of the Grand Old Men of the discipline, a reliable animal model of the breakdown in part of the brain’s self-protective mechanisms that occurs in certain inflammatory conditions. Such work would have been a springboard to a remarkable career.

Trouble arose, though, over a database she set up—with a 52

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very primitive computer—detailing the situations and outcomes of every case of head trauma from child abuse known to have occurred in the three counties around the clinic in the previous twenty years. Naturally this was a large ongoing project that would never be truly finished, but it was certainly a valuable effort. The trouble came when she saw her own data one day in a neurosurgery journal. Without her name. An associate professor whom she would have thought completely unaware of the project, much less entitled to any ownership, had written a paper based on the findings and submitted it for publication under only his name.

Miriam Lyle, MD, daughter of law enforcement, naturally went to war with a righteous vengeance. Letters were sent to first one, then another rung on the ladder. There were heated encounters. The data thief invoked as a defense the notion that she had created the database as a department asset. He, as a member, was entitled to make use of it. Was it his worry that she had not seen the good that would come from publishing the findings?