You Are Not A Stranger Here (3 page)

I pick up the phone on the bedside table and get the front desk. "This is the Hoover Suite calling. I want the number of an agency that will provide us with a young man, someone intelligent and attractive--"

Graham rips the phone from my hand.

"What is it?" I say. His mother was always encouraging me to ask him questions. "What's it like to be gay, Graham? Why have you never told me?"

He stares at me dumbfounded.

"What? What?" I say.

"How can you ask me that after all this time?"

"I want to understand. Are you in love with this Eric fellow?"

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"I thought you were dead! Do you even begin to realize? I thought my own father was dead. You didn't call for four years but I couldn't bear to find out, I couldn't bear to go and find you dead, and so it was like I was a child again and I just hoped there was an excuse. Four years, Dad, and now you just appear and you want to know what it's like to be gay?"

I run to the refrigerator, where among other things there is a decent Chardonnay, and with the help of a corkscrew I find by the sink I pour us two glasses. Graham doesn't seem to want his but I set it down beside him anyway.

"Oh, Graham. The phone company in Baltimore's awful."

He starts to cry. He looks so young as he weeps, as he did in the driveway of the old house on the afternoon I taught him to ride a bicycle, the dust from the drive settling on his wetted cheek and damp eyelashes later to be rinsed in the warm water of the bath as dusk settled over the field and we listened together to the sound of his mother in the kitchen running water, the murmur of the radio and the stillness of evening in the country, how he seemed to understand it as well as I.

"You know, Graham, they're constantly overcharging me and then once they take a line out it's like getting the Red Sea to part to have it reinstalled but in a couple of weeks when the bicycle patent comes through that'll be behind us, you and Linda and Ernie and I, we'll all go to London and stay at the Connaught and I'll show you Regent's Park where your mother and I rowed a boat on our honeymoon circling the little island there where the ducks all congregate and which was actually a little dirty come to think of it though you don't 19

really think of ducks as dirty, they look so graceful on the water but in fact--" All of a sudden I don't believe it myself and I can hear my own voice in the room, hear its dry pitch, and I've lost my train of thought and I can't stop picturing the yard where Graham used to play with his friends by the purple lilac and the apple tree whose knotted branches held the planks of the fort which I was so happy for him to enjoy never having had one myself. He knew me then even in my bravest moments when his mother and siblings were afraid of what they didn't understand; he would sit on the stool in the crumbling barn watching me cover the chalkboard propped on the fender of the broken Studebaker, diagramming a world of possible objects, the solar vehicles and collapsible homes, our era distilled into its necessary devices, and in the evenings, sprawled on the floor of his room, he'd trace with delicate hands what he remembered of my design.

I see those same hands now spread on his thighs, nails bitten down, cuticles torn. I don't know how to say good-bye.

In the village of Saint-Sever an old woman nursed my dying friend through the night. At dawn I kissed his cold forehead and kept marching.

In the yard of the old house the apple tree still rustles in the evening breeze.

"Graham."

"You want to know what it's like?" he says. "I'll tell you. It's worrying all the time that one day he's going to leave me. And you want to know why that is? It's got nothing to do with being gay. It's because I know Mom left
you.
I tell you it's self20 ish not to take the pills because I know. Because I take them. You understand, Dad? It's in me too. I don't want Eric to find me in a parking lot in the middle of the night in my pajamas talking to a stranger like Mom did. I don't want him to find me hanged. I used to cast fire from the tips of my fingers some weeks and burn everything in my path and it was all progress and it was all incredibly, incredibly beautiful. And some weeks I couldn't brush my hair. But I take the pills now, and I haven't bankrupted us yet, and I don't want to kill myself just now. I take them and I think of Eric. That's what it's like."

"But the fire, Graham? What about the fire?"

In his eyes, there is sadness enough to kill us both.

"Do you remember how you used to watch me do my sketches in the barn?"

Tears run down his cheeks as he nods.

"Let me show you something," I say. Across the room in the drawer of the desk I find a marker. It makes sense to me now, he can see what I see, he's always been able to. Maybe it doesn't have to end. I unhook a painting from the wall and set it on the floor. On the yellow wallpaper I draw the outline of a door, full-size, seven by three and a half.

"You see, Graham, there'll be four knobs. The lines between them will form a cross. And each knob will be connected to a set of wheels inside the door itself, and there will be four sets of hinges, one along each side but fixed only to the door, not to the frame." I shade these in. Graham cries.

"A person will use the knob that will allow them to open the door in the direction they want--left or right, at their feet or above their heads. When a knob is turned it'll push the 21

screws from the door into the hinges. People can open doors near windows without blocking morning or evening light, they'll carry furniture in and out with the door over their heads, never scraping its paint, and when they want to see the sky they can open it just a fraction at the top." On the wall I draw smaller diagrams of the door's different positions until the felt nib of the pen tatters. "It's a present to you, this door. I'm sorry it's not actual. You can imagine though how people might enjoy deciding how to walk through it. Patterns would form, families would have their habits."

"I wanted a father."

"Don't say that, Graham." He's crying still and I can't bear it.

"It's true."

I turn back to the desk and, kneeling there, scrawl a note. The pen is nearly ruined and it's hard to shape the letters. The writing takes time.

*

Though some may accuse me of neglect, I have been consistent with the advice I always gave my children: never finish anything that bores you. Unfortunately, some of my children bored me. Graham never did. Please confirm this with him. He is the only one that meant anything to me.

"Graham," I say, crossing the room some minutes later to show him the piece of paper, to show him the truth. He's lying on the bed, and as I stand over him I see that he's asleep. His tears have exhausted him. The skin about his 22

closed eyes is puffy and red and from the corner of his mouth comes a rivulet of drool. I wipe it away with my thumb. I cup his gentle face in my hands and kiss him on the forehead. From the other bed I take a blanket and cover him, pulling it up over his shoulders, tucking it beneath his chin. His breath is calm now, even. I leave the note folded by his side. I pat down his hair and turn off the lamp. It's time for me to go.

When I'm sure he's comfortable and sleeping soundly, I take my glass and the wine out into the hall. I can feel the weight of every step, my body beginning to tire. I lean against the wall, waiting for the elevator to take me down. The doors open and I enter.

From here in the descending glass cage I can see globes of orange light stretching along the boulevards of Santa Monica toward the beach where the shaded palms sway. I've always found the profusion of lights in American cities a cause for optimism, a sign of undiminished credulity, something to bear us along. In the distance, the shimmering pier juts into the vast darkness of the ocean like a burning ship launched into the night.

23

T H E G O O D D O C T O R

2

A S H E P U L L E D up the drive, Frank saw the skeleton of a Chevy Nova, grass to the windows, rusting in the side yard like some battle-wasted tank. Toy guns and action figures, their plastic faded, lay scattered over the brown lawn. The house, a white fifties prefab, sagged to one side, the chimney tilting. To its left stood a dilapidated barn. From the green spray-painted letters on its door announcing
No Girls
24

Allowed
it seemed clear the building had some time ago been delivered from the intention of its creator into the hands of children.

He cut the engine and watched the cloud of dirt his tires had kicked up drift into a stand of oak trees shading the side of the house. They were the only trees in sight, empty prairie stretching miles in every direction. He rested his hands and chin over the top of the steering wheel, his head weighed down with the sinus ache of his hangover.

One of the reasons he'd taken his job at a county clinic two thousand miles from his friends and family was that the National Health Service Corps had promised to repay his medical school loans in return for three years' work in an underserved area. Last night he'd come back to his apartment to find a letter in the mail: Congress was cutting the program's funding, leaving him the full burden of his debt and a paltry salary to pay it with. He'd spent a year at the job already, and now they were hanging him out to dry. For the first time in his life there was uncertainty in his future. From college to medical school to residency to this job, everything had been applied for and planned. Now he wasn't even sure he could afford to stay. He'd got drunk on a bottle of scotch his friend from back East had sent him for his birthday. The last thing he had wanted to do today was drive two and half hours here to Ewing Falls to evaluate some woman who'd been refusing to visit the clinic for a year and demanding her medication by phone.

Nearly hundred-degree weather had settled over the state for the last week and today was no exception. With each step 25

across the drive, more dirt rose powder dry into the air. By the time he mounted the porch steps, sweat dampened his collar.

A first knock produced no response. He waited a minute before tapping again. The shades in the front room were pulled to the middle of the windows and all he could see was the wood floor and the floral print back of a sofa. He turned to look across the yard and saw a girl standing in the driveway. She seemed to have appeared from nowhere. By the height of her, she looked eight or nine, but her rigid mouth and narrowed eyes suggested someone older.

"Hey, there." As soon as he spoke, the girl started walking quickly away, toward the trees.

"Hey," Frank called to her back, "are your folks home?"

"She ain't a bigger talker," a voice behind him said. Frank turned back toward the door to see a middle-aged man dressed in a sweatshirt and work pants. Spidery angiomas, those star-shaped discolorations of the vessels seen in liver patients, blotched the skin of his rounded face. Hepatitis C, Frank thought, or the end of a serious drinking habit. The man took a drag on his cigarette, holding the filter between thumb and forefinger, the exhaled smoke floating over the porch, tingling Frank's nostrils.

"You're the one they sent up from the clinic," he said flatly. He leaned forward, squinting. "Bit young to be a doctor, aren't you?"

Frank got this all the time: old ladies asking when the doctor would be in--a useful icebreaker, but he wasn't in the mood today.

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"I'm here to see Mrs. Buckholdt," he said. "I assume she's home."

The man looked out across the fields, the horizon molten in air heated thick as the fumes of gasoline. The expression on his face changed from scrutiny to the more absent look of recollection, as though he had suddenly lost interest in their conversation.

"Yeah," he said, almost to himself. "She's in there."

Then he crossed the porch, past Frank, and wandered out into the yard.

" M R S . B U C K H O L D T ? " F R A N K called out, blinded momentarily by the darkness of the front hall.

"Down in a minute," she said, her voice coming from somewhere up beyond the stairwell.

Ahead in the kitchen, a cheetah chased a gazelle over the screen of a muted television. Frank could see the back of a boy's head silhouetted against the screen's lower half, the rest of him obscured by the counter. The house smelled of stale candy and the chemical salts of cheese-flavored snacks. A bookcase stood on one side of the living room and a picture he couldn't make out in the poor light hung on the wall opposite. Two large Oriental carpets covered the floor. He put his briefcase down on a torn leather armchair and took out Mrs. Buckholdt's chart, which he would have read by now if he hadn't been in such poor shape this morning. After getting thoroughly drunk, he'd done the really smart thing of calling his ex-girlfriend, a woman in his pro27 gram he'd dated toward the end of their residency. They had gone out for six months, which, at the age of thirty-two, was the longest Frank had ever been with a woman. If he hadn't seen so many patients with romantic lives more desperate than his own, he might have considered himself abnormal. Anne had flown out from Boston a few times when he first got out here; he'd convinced himself that one day he would ask her to marry him.

"Glad to hear you're still out there saving the world," she said, after he made a few comments he regretted now. She knew he'd come out here with the idea that he'd be given the freedom to practice the way he wanted to, which meant more time to talk with his patients. Wanting such a thing seemed almost renegade at this point in his profession, given the dominance of the biological psychiatry they'd been trained in, a regime Anne had never seriously questioned. They'd argued about it plenty, always ending with her calling Frank a romantic clinging to an old myth about the value of talk. But no words of hers could change the fact that Frank had instincts about what it meant to spend time with the people he cared for, and they involved more than picking a drug. He knew his patients sought someone to acknowledge what they were experiencing, and he knew he was good at it, better than most of his colleagues.

At medical school, they all joked about the numbing: from four months spent dissecting the body of a dead man, cutting into his face and eyes, to seven hours clamping open a woman's chest, only to watch her expire on the table--

whatever the particulars, it didn't take most people long. And 28

then in residency, schizophrenics trembling in psychosis, addicts, manics, beaten children. Frank joked too. But he always felt odd doing it, as if it were a show to prove he was adapting like his peers. The fact was he still felt like a sponge, absorbing the pain of the people he listened to. Privately, he considered it the act of a certain kind of faith. Never having been a religious person, empathy had taken up the place in him belief might have in others.

Trying to ignore his headache, he skipped over the internist's report in Mrs. Buckholdt's chart and went straight to the psych note: forty-four-year-old woman with no history of major mental illness in the family; first presented with depression following death of her eldest son, four years ago; two younger children, boy and a girl. When he scanned the margin indicating course of treatment, he saw how shoddily her case had been managed. A brief course of antidepressants, probably never finished, and since then nothing but benzos--

sedatives--written as needed. No therapy. George Pitford, the shrink Frank had replaced, wasn't about to drive five hours round-trip for a meds consult, so he'd just kept calling in her refills. A cryptic line he'd scrawled at the bottom of the page read,
Injury may be a factor.

"My apologies for not greeting you at the door," Mrs. Buckholdt said, entering the living room, hands tucked in her pockets. She was an attractive woman, slender, taller than her husband, in better physical health, though she certainly looked older than forty-four. She wore tailored black pants, a bit faded, a white rayon shirt, a silver necklace. He'd been expecting a disorganized person, some kind of shut-in. 29

The woman before him seemed almost out of place here, in this house out in the middle of nowhere.

She closed the door to the kitchen, turned a key in the latch to lock it, then crossed the room to join him.

"I'm sorry you had to come all this way," she said. "In this awful heat. Would you like a drink? Water perhaps, or a lemonade?"

"I'm fine for now," he said, "thank you."

She took a seat on the couch and he lowered himself into the leather armchair.

"The reason I'm here is the director thought it would be a good idea for me to check in with you in person. He said you'd had some trouble getting down to the clinic for your last few appointments."

Her gaze rested somewhere over his shoulder. "I take it you're childless," she said.

Frank had patients who asked questions about his life, but they usually didn't come so fast.

"It might be best if we talked about how you've been doing lately. The clonazepam, it's an antianxiety drug. Have you been experiencing much anxiety lately?"

She lowered her glance momentarily to look Frank in the eye. She had a handsome, slightly gaunt face, powerful green eyes, a strong, almost male jawline; her black hair was brushed back off her high forehead. Frank didn't often see female patients with such a self-possessed demeanor. The women who came to him at the clinic usually had the blunt affect of beating victims or the long-untreated ill.

"You're here to write a prescription. Am I right?"

30

Frank was about to respond when Mrs. Buckholdt raised her left arm from her side to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. As she did so, she lifted her other arm from her pocket to rest on her lap. All four digits were missing from her right hand, the skin grown smooth over the rounded ends of the knuckle bones. Frank couldn't help but stare at the fleshy little knobs. Some kind of farm accident, he guessed, the injury Pitford had mentioned. Catching himself, he focused resolutely on her face. Whatever he'd been planning to say had vanished from his mind.

"Maybe I'll have a glass of water after all," he said.

"Yes, do. Just help yourself. The key's in the door."

" H E Y T H E R E , " H E said to the boy in front of the television as he looked in the kitchen cupboard for a glass. Apparently this one wasn't a big talker either. He was slightly older than his sister, twelve perhaps. He stared at Frank with an odd expression, as if he were trying to decide if this man in front of him existed or was merely a passing mirage.

"What are you watching there?"

On the screen, a jackal or wolf fed on the gashed belly of a deer.

"You want some water?"

The boy shook his head.

T H O U G H H E F E LT odd doing it, Frank turned the key again in the door, locking it behind him as he reentered the living 31

room. Mrs. Buckholdt hadn't moved from the couch. She sat rigid, her eyes following him as he crossed to his chair.

"I see you first visited the doctor about four years ago. That was just after your son died. The notes here say it was mostly depression you were coping with at that point. Is that right?"

"I wonder, Dr. Briggs. Where is it that you grew up?"

"Mrs. Buckholdt, I think that in the time we have it's important for me to get a handle on your situation so we can try to help you."

"Of course. I apologize. I just like having a sense of who I'm talking with. You're from the East I take it."

"Massachusetts."

"Whereabouts?"

"Outside Boston."

"I take it you grew up in a rich town."

"Mrs. Buckholdt--"

"I won't go on forever," she said. "But tell me, it's a rich town, isn't it? Tidy lawns. A country club. Kids going to college. Am I right?"

"A relatively affluent suburb, yes," he said, taken in by the gravity of her tone, chiding himself at once for being drawn out on a personal matter.

"Now, is the depression something you're still having an active problem with?" he asked firmly.

Her eyes wandered again over his shoulder, the same look of recollection he'd seen on her husband's face appearing now in hers. He realized she must be looking at the picture on the wall behind him. He turned to get a glimpse. It 32

was a print of a late medieval painting, the image of a bustling town square during some kind of revel, all manner of people--vulgar, refined, youthful, decrepit--praying, eating, wandering through the square, the scene painted in browns and reds.

"It's a Brueghel," she said.

"Right," Frank replied, recognizing the name vaguely.

"
The Fight Between Carnival and Lent,
fifteen fifty-nine,"

she said. She examined Frank's expression, as if for signs of incredulity. "It may surprise you that I studied at one of your Eastern universities for a few years. My father liked to think of himself as a progressive man. Very liberal, always took his daughters seriously. He found pleasure in the fact I took up a thing as impractical as art history; used to drop it in conversation with friends at the Rotary and then chuckle in his way at their bemusement. He died while I was out there, just after I'd started my final year."

With her one good hand, she picked up a box of cigarettes, removed one, and lit it. Almost demurely, she blew the smoke down toward the floor.

"My mother wasn't so liberal. Spending all that money to look at pictures, for a girl, no less--what a waste, hey? So I came home--three years, no degree." She drew slowly on her cigarette. Her thoughts seemed to wander.

Though the shades were half pulled, the air in the front room was stifling. Frank could feel the back of his shirt dampening against the leather of the chair.

"I'm just wondering if maybe you could tell me a little about your symptoms."

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"My symptoms?" she said, leaning forward. "Yes, I can tell you about my symptoms. Some mornings I wake up shaking, and I'm afraid to get out of my bed. If I take some of the pills I can manage to get up and make my children breakfast. Some mornings the fear's bad and I have to grit my teeth to get through it."