Mimi (9 page)

“When I was a kid,” I told her, “we dressed
up
to go to the doctor. Now it’s like everybody’s off to the beach—in midwinter!”

“You sound like my dad. I do have a coat, you know.”

“And a very healthy metabolism, I guess.”

“What about you? You’re wearing sneakers! Call yourself a doctor in that getup?”

“You win.” I liked her. Sassy patients are the best. “Anyway, what can I do for you today?”

She slowly pulled up a portion of her minuscule top, to reveal a long straight scar cut diagonally across her middle. How could a girl this savvy and sophisticated have gotten herself knifed?

“Yeah,” she said, in response to my questioning look. “My very dumped boyfriend did it to me.”

“Why? I mean, how did it happen?”

“I stayed out too late, or didn’t fold his newspaper right. I don’t even remember. The guy was impossible. The trouble is, I can’t wear half my clothes anymore. I can’t let people see this! So I, uh, wondered if there’s something you could do about it. Can you hide it or something?”

What
is
it with women? Pole dancing at two, and by twenty they’re running around half-naked getting
stabbed
. And now, she was at a great social disadvantage, since more and more surface area has to be provided, blemish-free, for public view. Even the midriff, always a tricky area, is now subject to scrutiny. It took all the plastic surgeons of Manhattan to keep up with the midriff demand: muffin-top lipos were selling like hot cakes, and this poor kid’s social life might dry up if I didn’t disguise her scar.

Cheryl burst in as planned.

“Cheryl,” I said sternly. “Don’t just barge in when I’m with a patient.” What a ham. This was a well-rehearsed routine of ours, designed to make the patient feel more important. Except, this time it was for real: the police had arrived. So I booked Miss Back Talk in for a pre-surgery checkup and joined the cops, who looked none too thrilled by their nebulous task. They were already skeptical about finding any evidence, and probably despised me for making them fill out forms. But they took a statement from me at least, and talked briefly to the dad in an empty consulting room. He gave me the gimlet eye as he left with them for further questioning at the station, with his family trailing along behind. I wondered if anything would come of it. But so what if they couldn’t prove anything? At least the guy had had a scare.

As a result of my firing Jed, calling in the cops, and using a cane, Cheryl’s crush had now taken on a note of
fawning
. I teased her a bit, saying, “Ah well, Cheryl, not everything can be cured with a nip and a tuck, you know. Sometimes we have to call in the big guns.” Then, in a cloud of glory, left for my lunch with M. Z. Fortune, my corpsing advisor. I’d never been so thrilled to escape the office.

In the taxi, my thoughts drifted back to Rosemary. I hadn’t known what I was doing. I ignored all the bad omens, persevering against the odds (and the
eggs
) in service to my hare-like lust, blithely copping a feel in front of the German Expressionist paintings she took me to see, or horsing around under hailstorms at the beach in Montauk, where Rosemary’s troubled parents had a summer place. I’d been impressed that Rosemary played the cello, until I realized she wasn’t just out of tune but couldn’t count to save her life. The poor girl had no sense of rhythm at all! She could sort of disguise her difficulties when playing Bach solo cello suites, since she was on her own with them (though she played them like exercises—no sign of any exquisite melancholy). But you have to be able to count if you want to play Beethoven and Brahms cello sonatas: I would try to accompany her on the piano but she’d always come in too early or too late and then bust out crying.

She had no notion of time. Very late for assignations too. In the end, I suspect the late and the punctual will never really hit it off. Opposites attract, sure, and couples sometimes compensate for each other’s deficiencies, but a few similarities come in handy too. The tidy and the messy just grate on each other’s nerves until one of them
dies
. You need at least some agreement on vital issues, like a shared interest in wine, and how much of it to drink a night, or beach versus museum vacations, or what time to go to bed. And punctuality. (I also insist that my girlfriends share my nostalgia for the labels on Epicure cans, those polished, inedible-looking fruits set against a black background: exquisite melancholy! The images may look unappetizing, but Epicure cans have seen humanity through many tough times.)

Rosemary’s mom was an alcoholic; it was the dad I was fascinated by. For a man whose wife spent half the year in the Betty Ford Clinic, he seemed remarkably affable, and very welcoming towards
me
. In response, I exhausted myself trying to show him what a good guy I was. I worked hard as a start-up surgeon more for Rosemary’s father’s benefit than my own or Rosemary’s. I tried to please her; I tried to please him. Somehow it wasn’t
enough
to impress a girl, I wanted to impress a man too! Then, just when I had her dad where I wanted him, coming at me with the cigars and the bonhomie, Rosemary with her usual lack of timing turned against me (maybe that was
why
she turned against me?). I knew something was up when I was relegated to a position lower than an egg.

But it was the loss of that family that really hurt. Even the mom had an appealing side, or so I told myself. I was all ready to start cashing in on security, stability, fidelity, coziness, a place in this family (a place in Montauk too), a million fried-clam dinners, my wines chosen for me by a real connoisseur, a whole plausible future of efficient Thanksgivings and Christmases in the bosom of a family whose traumas seemed less excruciating than my own. . . and it was all snatched away. Kaput! No more clams and climaxes, no more canoodling in the dunes with my colleen, or meditative strolls on the beach with the sozzled ma. No zone of
warmth
. . .

These ruminations were forcibly interrupted when the cab in front of mine stopped so suddenly we rammed right into it. The drivers jumped out to wrangle. I was irritably extracting myself and my coat and hat and briefcase from the back when someone came up behind me and stole my cane! I turned around and saw a broad running up Broadway, waving my cane in the air, yelling something like, “You bastard, you come back here!” at some guy disappearing into the crowds of Union Square. I lumbered after her, making slow progress due to the wintry terrain and my faulty ankle. But she wasn’t that fast herself. I caught up, and then she turned on me!

“Are you following me?” she asked.

“Well, yes! Yes, I am.”

“What the hell for?” She sure was steamed about something.

“That,” I said, pointing at the cane in her hand.

She looked at the thing as if seeing it for the first time, and without ado dropped it on the ground, leaving me to make a clumsy dash for it before it rolled into unscooped poop.

“Jeez,” I couldn’t help remarking.

“What’s with the limp?” she asked.

“The limp’s why I need the cane!”

We looked fiercely at each other for a second—and then we recognized each other. She was wearing a different kind of coat, a gray one this time, and no Eskimo hood, but it was the gal who saved my ass on Christmas Eve.

“It’s you!” she observed.

“Hey, you saved my life on Christmas Eve!” I said. And remembering that I had never thanked her, I started babbling, “I guess I really should have thanked you. . . but I had no way of getting in touch.”

“It was nothing,” she said. “I mean, what I
did
was nothing, not that your life is nothing. . . ” She was blushing, quite becomingly. We started walking to our respective cabs. “That was John, my ex,” she said, nodding back toward Union Square. “His mother wears army boots.”

So, not a crackpot in the Gertrude sense maybe, but a crackpot nonetheless. I thought this might be all the explanation I needed, we could say our friendly farewells and scoot. But she was determined to fill me in on why she’d sprung from her taxi like that when she caught sight of this John character on the street—leading to our collision. It was all John’s fault too that she’d run off with my cane.

“You realize you almost caused whiplash in the guy you just saved a month ago?” I asked mildly.

“I had to get hold of him.”

“Still gone on him, huh?” Though she wasn’t my type, I kind of liked the look of her: strong bone structure, nice lips, tender brown eyes, and a mop of brown curls peeking out of her hat. A curious mixture of the erratic and erotic. She stopped dead. I was scared she was going to hit me!

“Gone on him? You gotta be kidding. The guy’s a criminal! He stole my quilt.”

“Your. . . uh, what?”

Our drivers had settled their differences and were now honking at
us
. But before ducking into her taxi, the crazy dame shook my hand, with a notably firm grip, and said, “I’m Mimi.”

“I’m just
me
,” I clowned.

And she was gone, whisked away down Broadway in a cloud of snow and steam. I exhaled my own cloud. As kids, Bee and I pretended to be sophisticates smoking cigarettes in weather like this, waving our twigs around as if brandishing cigarette holders. (Who uses cigarette holders anymore? Who even smokes?) I watched the steam rise from my mouth and suddenly had a sensation of utter happiness.

There was an old soldier

Who had a wooden leg,

Had no tobacky

But tobacky he could beg.

There was a little duck

And he had a wooden leg,

Cutest little duck

That ever laid an egg!

The skin on his tummy

Was as tight as a drum:

Every time he took a step,

A rum-a-dum-dum!

Despite the car crash, I was right on time when I got to Kelley & Ping, and bounded up the steps, my bad ankle temporarily
cured
, perhaps by the cold. I went to the counter and got a big bowl of duck and noodle soup, and sat down at a little wooden table to await M. Z. Fortune, whose book I had obediently bought and attempted to read. It sure wasn’t Dickens, but it wasn’t as turgid as Hobbes either, or an electrical appliance manual. In fact it was pretty snappy, with touches of humor, and covered every kind of oral presentation, from small, difficult business meetings to weddings and after-dinner speeches. It was all laid out for you, clearly and succinctly—the style of delivery the author recommended for a
speech
. But the more I’d read about manipulating the audience with your tone of voice or timbre (“as lumberjacks would say”), and swaying people with your authority and your credibility, your jokes and your anecdotes, your charm and charisma
(
just being a doctor apparently wasn’t going to swing it), the more I quailed. To impress an audience, I had to project a friendly, folksy (but not
too
folksy), brave, down-to-earth, and expressive demeanor (rather than just my usual nauseous one), and make expert use of “benchmarking”, “hooks”, “nutshell endings”, and “limited-opportunity windows”. What’s more, according to M. Z. Fortune, a speech should break down into chunks, with no more than three ideas per chunk, and no more than three chunks per speech. Nine ideas? I didn’t have
one
!

“Every speech, like every dog, has its head, middle, and tail.” Where was the
rest
of the dog, I wondered—and what do you do if your dog of a speech lifts its back leg in the middle of your peroration? Another piece of M. Z. Fortune wisdom was, “Take fresh breaths whenever opportunity allows.” This was something I felt I’d been doing all my life without being told. After reading his book, I dreamt my speech was a
hot dog
that I had to eat in three bites: chomp, swallow, breathe, chomp, swallow, breathe, chomp, swallow, breathe—I thought I was going to choke! (When I told Bee this, she said she’d seen me eat a hot dog in
two
bites.)

M. Z. Fortune would have his hands full getting a speech out of
me
. But before I had a chance to look around for him,
Mimi
appeared again! My shadow, my familiar, my very own New York nut-job, clutching her own bowl of soup on a tray. Who was following whom? And without asking, she sat down at my table and started ripping her clothes off, her coat anyway, which she dumped on the only other available chair. Where was old
Fortune
going to sit?

“What’d you get?” was her only remark, as she peered into my soup.

“Duck and noodle.”

“Oh, I got duck.”

“Well, that’s great,” I said. “But, uh, actually, I’m meeting someone. . . ”

“So’m I,” she answered, unfazed. “A client.”

What was she, a
hooker
? She seemed too sweaty to be a hooker—she kept mopping her brow.

“So, as I was saying, John—” she began, as if our conversation on Broadway had never been interrupted by separate cabs and a total change of location.