The Age of Cities (4 page)

He pulled the door open and walked into the veined black marble foyer. Seeing no attendant, Winston found himself excited to be pressing 7 and DOOR CLOSE inside the elevator car. He thought of telling Alberta about it and then chastised himself for playing the country hick. “Cripes, it's only an elevator,” he said to no one but himself.

The office receptionist was near Alberta's age, though her years of service had rendered her yielding and grandmotherly. An automatic smile hinted at her beneficence. Her familiarity with the room and her job seemed so established that for a moment Winston was gripped by the certainty that this woman was the doctor's mother. She asked him questions gently and filled out the requisite forms with a confident hand, then showed him to a room and requested that he remove his shoes and stockings after indicating the squat leather stool for patients. Winston crossed his legs, but changed his mind and placed both feet firmly on the cool linoleum floor. Instantly tense in the sterile broom closet of a room, he began to count the mottled tiles.

The doctor arrived holding a black wire-spine notepad in his mouth. He nodded to his water glass to mime that he needed the spare hand to open the door. His hopeful raised brow prompted Winston to think of the beleaguered door-to-door salesmen his mother shooed away only after allowing them in to fully pitch their
truly invaluable, Madame
wares. Regardless of what was being sold, she'd inform him, “We had a visit from the Fuller Brush man today,” and regale Winston with her story of the threadbare underdog's earnest attempt to scrape together a living. She'd never purchased so much as a pencil.

At times, Winston thought that Alberta seemed little different than a cat that has caught some hapless mouse; she'd draw out the game for as long as it kept her amused. He reminded himself to bring up her vindictiveness the next time she got on her high horse about civility and man's unqualified march of progress. When in the spirit to banter, Winston wagged his finger and asked her to see the bigger picture: that the man had a family to support, she ought to realize, and mouths to fill. “They knock at my door and invite themselves in, so they have to play by my rules,” she would never fail to retort. Her statement was a winning strategy.

The doctor withdrew a pencil from the breast pocket of his smock. “Well, you've come a long way, pilgrim,” he said, and then told Winston he would try his best to get to the root of the problem. After quizzing Winston about his “medical history” (he'd embroidered needlessly: “that means the physical problems and operations you've had so far, basically”), the podiatrist squatted in front of his patient. He wrapped two warm hands around the bare foot so that the thumbs lay parallel on the veined surface. Winston looked at the man's thick black hair, so carefully parted. It shone with pomade.

Applying steady pressure to the inflated flesh, the specialist compressed it into normalcy, and then, leaning back a few degrees, created a vantage so they could both watch the glacial elastic return. An albino garden slug, Winston thought. Blue eyes beaming through thick lenses, the doctor joked, “Okay, we know you're not pregnant. Otherwise your ankles would have ballooned.”

Standing again, the doctor smirked and gave assurances that Winston did not have gout, and then guffawed—“Priceless! Gawd!”—over Alberta's procession of home cures. He smiled with the doctor even though he found the man's familiar joviality at his mother's expense just a touch presumptuous. When Winston could not remember hurting his foot in any way, the doctor explained that it was possible to break one of the tiny bones there without ever guessing, and that in such a case a plaster cast was needless, a self-indulgent luxury. “Time heals all wounds,” he announced vaguely, his voice on the edge of jokiness again, eyebrows half way to Groucho Marx innuendo.

“Besides, you should see some of the things that can really go wrong with feet,” he said, suggesting that he felt a patient ought to put his lot into perspective. He made notations in the notebook. Winston watched as he wrote
metaplasia?
and heavily circled the word. He wondered whether this young specialist—he couldn't be much older than thirty—had taken a course in modern bedside manner. The man simply glowed with professional confidence.

Winston agreed to visit again after six weeks if the symptoms persisted. The doctor said, “I'll leave you to your socks,” and softly closed the door when he left. As he tightened his shoelaces, Winston felt a twinge of annoyance because he'd taken a day off work and made such a large effort for advice he'd already heard. He had imagined in choosing to become a podiatrist the young man would know each and every condition that could blight his patients—and have its cure at hand. At least Alberta had taken measures to remedy it; a saintly waiting for time's healing properties to take effect seemed so pointless: you either got better as a result of medicine or you were defeated. Winston recalled the packages sitting on the dresser in his hotel room. Returning home with Chinese tea, English candies, and Belgian embroidery thread in hand, he thought, there would be three grateful women who would not consider his day in the city completely wasted.

Back in the foyer, the doctor broke away from his breezy conversation with the receptionist and gave Winston's hand a firm shake. Winston liked his heartiness as much as his grooming—he was combed, pressed, and polished with a truly military precision.

Leaving the gleaming black stone foyer of the medical building, Winston wandered and inspected the contents in shop windows, enjoying the Sunday afternoon leisure surely he alone felt on this bustling Friday. He was astonished at the flow of faces and traffic—steady eyes fixed on responsibilities, every man and woman heading somewhere with what looked like important business in mind, opportunities knocking for everyone to hear. Passing by the Granville Street cinemas festooned with midway bulbs, he decided that Mr. Hitchcock and Elizabeth Taylor—or some Technicolor Treat in the distance—would have to wait. The hubbub was wearying. He stepped outside the commotion. Back resting against the white glazed brick theatre, he turned his face southward. The huge vertical signs that jutted out—

 

CAPITOL

PARADISE

PLAZA

ASTOR

ORPHEUM

VOGUE

 

—brought to mind the plans he and Alberta had made for visiting Las Vegas or Reno. Winston wanted to see desert cacti in bloom and Alberta said she had a yen for some sin: drinking and gambling and Hollywood crooners. Maybe Dean Martin or that little Negro fellow with the glass eye. Failing them: Liberace.

Unlit now, the signs were potent and talismanic, promises for untold thrills once the sun had set. Even the cackling clown's head that invited patrons into the bowling alley arcade below it offered Winston a moment of temptation. He'd never bowled a game in his life. Those run-down lanes in the Bend were for the lowest common denominator. The cigarette smoke alone, he'd heard, could choke a coal miner.

Winston watched as the street's determined throng—business-suited men, errand-running secretaries, lady shoppers with lists to check off—strode with purpose, appearing to have no time for idleness till their tasks were accomplished. Winston thought of ant farms and cooped chickens. In a sense, only the down-on-his-luck rummy he'd passed a few blocks past could be his boon companion. No one else took a minute to dawdle. Winston felt depleted from standing witness to the noise and the city's antic style of living. A catnap would settle his nerves, he decided: he felt brittle as a wood chip. How many blocks would he have to walk? He surveyed the stretch with dismay. Or else—the sudden notion sparked like inspiration—a cup of tea with marmalade and a baking powder biscuit in some quiet corner. He stopped at the White Lunch cafeteria, an establishment that advertised its hospitality with typical city gaudiness: floating above the entrance was an immense yellow neon cup and saucer from which rose strands of white neon steam that flashed bright and then subsided into long periods of dullness. Who could deny its tout's pitch? “‘When in Rome,' I guess,” Winston muttered. He walked through the double doors.

 

 

The hotel's beer parlour was cavernous, but as familiar as any he'd experienced in the Valley—lustrous panels of wood punctuated with mirrors and low lights, the dull murmur of talk, stains, laughter, tobacco, yeasty swill, clatter. Winston knew that he could become a teetotaler with no effort; drink was a social glue for which he'd found little use. He supposed that working men in their Sunday finest had been streaming into this basement to purchase their amber-coloured ticket to bonhomie and oblivion since the days of gas lighting and horse-drawn wagons. Spent years and replenished barrels: as cyclical and enduring as the seasons.

He stood at the entrance and peered into the murky room. At a nearby table, a broad-shouldered man pointed two fingers at his companion sitting directly opposite. Menace was unmistakable in the gesture. Another typical sight, Winston noted. He walked toward an empty stool at the bar and sat at the polished oak counter. As he waited for a harried bartender's “Yes, sir, what'll it be?” Winston grimaced for a moment with discomfort. Out of habit, he'd run the nail of his index finger along a seam in the wood. This reflex test for cleanliness had dredged up a tarry paste that was in fact nothing except accumulated soil from who could say how long ago. He rubbed his fingernail on the side of the stool's mushroom cap cushion. In the mirror he could see that no terrible row had broken out and that the two pals had resumed their drunk-loud banter. In this murky light, he observed, his silhouette was indistinct, one strand in the vast fabric of the crowd.

Ordering a glass of beer, he wondered what gremlin had whispered in his ear to convince him that a drink in a basement filled with men would be a pleasant way to pass the evening. Alberta told him now and again, “Go out and make yourself some friends, it'll do you a world of good,” and whenever he went to one of the Bend's watering holes, he returned home in a sour mood, vowing to never again heed Alberta's sibylline advice. She had no idea. The men's easy talk—of sport, work, weather—eluded him. Nor did its slow-witted nods of agreement and platitudinous conclusions truly interest him. Time and again, he concluded that for him such superficial fraternity could serve no valuable purpose. Watching the bartender speedily towel dry a tray of beer steins, Winston calculated that one glass would not take long to finish.

“Hello, sailor. Are you new to port?” The man on the neighbouring stool leaned toward Winston like a straw-stuffed scarecrow. He smelled bracing if sweet from aftershave.

“I'm from the Valley.” Winston remained wary and impassive, catching the man's muted reflection. He hadn't anticipated conversation.

“Surely you have a name?”

“Wilson.”

“Richard Williamson. But if you're so inclined, call me Dickie like everyone else.” The man swiveled to shake Winston's hand. He smiled: “That's quite a fetching get-up, Mr. Wilson. Is that what they're wearing out in the Valley these days?”

Winston thought to upbraid the stranger for his cheeky innuendo. Turning to address him, he saw a newborn bird for an instant, a hatchling cheeping with hunger, fear, and panic, its eyes blind though calculating. He studied the translucent expanse of Dickie's forehead and noticed shadowy veins. The man appeared delicate and vulnerable, someone with a skull that could be as easily crushed as an egg. Yet Dickie acted any way but frail. He'd have a peacock strut, Winston was sure of it. The uniform sombre suits of the tavern-goers stood in sharp contrast to Dickie's camel coat and radiant silk tie. The man kept his hair—corn silk pale, fine, and thinning—slick with pomade and combed straight back. His eyebrows had been thinned into graceful arches. The man was strange but harmless. Trying to place him, Winston decided that Dickie was dapper, like a preening and silly though possibly malevolent English aristocrat in a Waugh novel, a creature with station and refinement, if no money. He'd have quite the collection of stories, Winston guessed, and not one about sports or weather.

The conversation between the two men progressed with a sporadic rhythm. Dickie asked elaborate questions laced in suggestion. Winston offered terse answers, occasionally wondering with mild alarm whether Dickie was some kind of con man who planned to bilk him. He pictured his wallet and smiled at the minute pay-off it would give to any misguided swindler. When silence loomed Dickie grabbed for fresh topics—his favourite cocktail, the criminal past of the burly waiter carrying the beer tray, his fondness for sunny Doris Day. He apologized for being
chatty
and yet made no obvious effort to stop. From time to time Winston thought about saying he was tired and needed to return to his hotel room. The man's determination won him over.

“Are you a friend of the Queen?”

“Am I a monarchist?”

“No, that's not exactly what I mean.”

There were moments when Winston was reminded of the podiatrist with the jokes in his voice. The nervous man's puzzling speech ran in different directions, making one declaration while insinuating that there were other matters that
could not be made public
, as though Dickie were an anxious spy or an underworld kingpin in some hard-boiled novel with a lurid cover. Trying not to stare at the man's remarkable features, Winston let his eyes wander the room, booming and festive now with sodden conversations. Snatches of song burst from a distant table. He briefly considered that Dickie might be soft in the head, an example of that odd breed of men who sit at bus depots and café counters and in barbershops and ramble on about nearly anything to anyone within listening range.

After smoothing down his hair with his palms—a completely unnecessary gesture since not a strand had broken free—Dickie made a sudden announcement: “I've got a sight you
do not
want to miss. C'mon.” He raised and lowered his eyebrows in quick succession, jokingly and yet persuasive.