Bread to the Wise--Book I of The Libertine

  In a moment Meany had his breath. “My own daughter throws it up to me, no warning.” He spoke to the assemblage in the room—and there were more now, including the supervising nurse—but he spoke directly to me when he said, “You think you’re so goddam smart.”

  I said nothing and didn’t twitch a muscle.

  Still puffing, Meany said, “Well, can’t you say anything?”

  “In front of all these people?”

  “That’s okay,” he said, his eyes narrowing, “I don’t care who hears me say it, I can’t straighten this thing out with Clare, I’m gonna get you—understand? I’ll fix your wagon. I know what you’re up to, and it won’t work.”

  The little man in my head said Shut up; don’t mess. As when I was little, I imagined lying motionless and as flat as possible under the covers made me less visible.

  He came towards me again, making one doctor yelp, but it was only to pick up his sunglasses, which were lying on my blanket. Meany stomped out of the room and was gone.

  The older doctor exclaimed, “My God!” on behalf of the assemblage, while the younger one grabbed my chart, scanned it, and said, “Do you feel any pain?”

  I was surrounded by faces of persons who expected me to be in pain. There was something comic in the sameness of their expressions—frozen in suspense and fear. I told them, a giggle escaping me, I felt fine.

  The doctor with the chart said to one of the nurses, “Phone Dr. Clemens; he’d better examine Mr. Gattling right away.”

  Turning towards the door, Jake announced he was calling the police.

  The older doctor said, “Who the hell are you?”

  “Obviously, Mr. Gattling’s friend.”

  “Is it really necessary to call the police?”

  Several in the room spoke at once: “That was a serious threat he made;” “He was totally out of line;” “Don’t you think you’re overreacting?”

  Jake said, “What I saw was assault—maybe aggravated assault.”

  I didn’t need any more of this. “Hold it!”

  Now the kibitzers’ expressions reminded me of a troop of backyard raccoons looking though a French door. I pointed and laughed. The laugh told me something my body hadn’t yet, a premonition of pain, for it came out shallow, like the way some dogs bark.

  Faces turned sheepish.

  “Nurse,” I said, “do please get my doctor over here. Doctors, thanks for all the help, but I think I can take it from here. Jake, please stick around.”

  The older doctor said, “Are you going to call the police?”

  I said, “He comes back and does it again, there might not be so many of you around.”

  “But Mr. Meany isn’t a criminal.”

  Jake said, “Would you like him to beat you up like that? Don’t worry, he can get Melvin Belli to defend him if it comes to that.”

  “Listen to reason, Mr. Gattling . . .” the younger doctor began and I cut him off.

  “Jake, how do you throw doctors out of a patient’s room?”

  “Same way as anyone else,” he said, and started herding everyone, including a nurse who might have had legitimate business with the man in the next bed, who was swearing softly but steadily from behind his green curtain.

  Jake closed the door and said, “Where do you hurt?”

  I shook my head. “Thank God for the open air kimonos they give you around here.” It came through to me, I might have been really hurt. “Jesus!” escaped my lips.

  “I’ll be back,” Jake said.

  I lay there reflecting: I was a turd. In spite of his dog-in-a-manger act with Mary Clare, I liked Meany. What he had that I didn’t was certainty, a clear vision of what things meant to him, a belief in himself and his values that left no doubt what to do and when. It allowed him not only to grab power but to enjoy its use and benefits.

  My roommate finally spoke up: “He did what any man ought to, goddam it.”

  He was so right I had nothing to say in response.

  Jake found Rutledge in his office, catching up on paper work. My orthopedist was out on the Bay, sailing, but his partner would be in directly. An assistant administrator, a woman almost Meryl’s size but without her superb bearing, came in and apologized profusely. The supervising nurse came back and wanted me to know her staff were there for me. Through this Jake hung around like a guard dog among the sheep after a coyote attack.

  When Rutledge came in the first thing he said was, “I told you, wise guy,” which caused Jake to face him and say, “Hey, none of that shit,” fists doubled and teeth clenched.

  Afraid of Jake landing in jail, I shouted, “Stop!”

  My roomy, who was named Fred and had broken ribs and a collapsed lung, besides many lacerations and contusions, resumed his swearing, louder than before, so that I spoke in a stage whisper and Jake and Rutledge followed suit.

  “How long do I have to file a complaint with you?” I asked Rutledge.

  Jake said, “It’s a felony. There’s no choice.”

  Rutledge said to Jake, “Stay out of this.”

  Jake said, “I’ll go to the district attorney.”

  “Get the fuck out of here before I arrest you,” Rutledge barked.

  Jake went into the hall, but I’m sure he heard Rutledge say, “Talk to your doctor, find out what damage he did. I’ll have someone take your statement Monday. Meany won’t be back, I’ll guarantee it.”

  I shrugged in agreement and Rutledge left.

  Clemens’s partner ordered X-rays, but confessed he couldn’t tell for sure what damage Meany might have done my ailing spine without taking me off my meds.

  “Do it,” I said.

  I told him, Jake listening in the background, that I probably moved my back more dodging Meany’s initial attack with his fists than from his shaking me.

  “You’re unmarked,” the doctor observed. He came in wearing tennis shorts and shoes and a striped polo shirt. I explained I’d been a boxer and knew about slipping punches. Still, he had a portable X-ray unit brought to my room. He said he’d read the X-rays that afternoon, but still thought taking me off meds, to look for indirect evidence of neurological damage, was called for. He thought Monday morning they would be able to find such evidence.

  *****

  I grew gradually more twitchy over the next twenty-four hours. Despite what Rutledge said, another detective came in Sunday afternoon to take my statement. He was younger than Rutledge, blonde and prematurely balding, affable. I could see him being chief of police in a city like La Morinda someday. He asked me few questions, letting me talk into a portable recorder. When I ran out of words he said, “Do you know why Mr. Meany would do a thing like this?”

  Embarrassed, I said, “Rutledge knows.”

  “I was told to ask you, to help decide if we should arrest him right away.” Jake was there. He said, “You mean you haven’t already?”

  The detective, whose name was Andy Bolles, said, “We have his word his attorney will surrender him Monday morning.”

  Jake said, “That beats all,” but I waved him off.

  I said, “I don’t think he’ll come back at me again, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “That would be it,” Bolles said.

  “If you arrested him today, couldn’t he get someone to authorize his release today?”

  Bolles said, “Not for a felony.”

  I thought a minute. “Let him turn himself in.”

  Jake swore and walked out into the hall.

  When Bolles left Jake came back in. I said, “Odds are he went right from here to Mary Clare’s. She’ll calm him down. He has to think out what to do, what to tell his family. From what he said, his daughter must have seen the article before he did and teased him about that protégé bit. He’ll weather it. And, it wasn’t such a big deal, anyway. I’m fine—I think.”

  Jake was still pissed. “He have to beat you with a two-by-four before it’s a big deal? He makes two of you, goddamit.”

  “Calm down, J
ake.”

  He did calm down. He paced around the room once and said, “You got to him, though. He’ll have to clean up his act now.”

  I said, “Let’s hope he doesn’t make a bigger mess in the process.”

  three

  Late Sunday, on the second shift, they moved Fred, bed and all, to another room and replaced his bed with an empty one. As he was wheeled by he said, “Can’t say I’ll miss the racket, but I’m damned if I don’t want to know what happens.”

  Later the night shift nurse came in and sat with me. This was nothing new; she’d done it each night since I was admitted, talking softly in the half-light. In the second night’s conversation she told me she wished she were Mary Clare.

  “Huh?”

  “How unencumbered she is. I’m putting a husband through medical school and I have two kids. There’s nothing but tedium, not a ripple of excitement or surprise.” When she went off duty there was enough light to see she was a strawberry blond with a timid face and an incredible figure. Her name tag read “Sandy Pillsbury, R.N.”

  In the half light of the Sunday they were phasing out my meds, she asked me, “Why did you do it?”

  “You mean, give the story to the newspaper?” I tried to explain. The explanation wasn’t as convincing as when Jake and I first discussed it.

  She said, “You’re going to bring that girl great shame.”

  “She has no ties here; she’s been living like a hermit. If she moved over the hill tomorrow, no one would remember her the day after.”

  “You’re a tie; you’d miss her.”

  “You bet, Sandy,” I said, remembering her name tag, “but to her I’m like wine to an alcoholic. When push comes to shove, it doesn’t matter if I’m a Fifty-three Chateau Lafite or jug wine. If I were the main man in her life she’d do the same with me as she did with Meany. It’s time she finds out no man is the solution any more than he’s the problem.”

  Sandy said, “It sounds to me as if everyone’s in limbo. I mean, you’re not going anywhere, and obviously Mr. Meany has a problem with his home life, or he wouldn’t take a mistress, and that poor girl probably doesn’t know what she’ll do next.”

  Too much reality. I asked if I could have some aspirin. When I’d taken two extra strength I asked if she could give me a massage. She didn’t remind me I couldn’t be turned, she just stroked me the way a mother would a child, on the brow and cheek and the back of my neck. I couldn’t remember a more sensitive touch outside of a passionate embrace. I didn’t tell her that, I said, “You’ve sure got great hands.”

  She said, “It’s my one gift.”

  “It’s what nurses did in the olden days,” I said, “before all the drugs.”

  When she left she said, “You won’t cause that girl any more pain, will you?”

  In the depth of the night my own pain became harder to tolerate. I asked if adding weight on my traction device might help. Sandy consulted a physician in the emergency room. He didn’t hesitate to wake Dr. Clemens, who said it probably wouldn’t help but it wouldn’t hurt either. (So much for the placebo effect, I muttered to myself.) Sandy added a two hundred, fifty gram disc to the device and said, “There,” as if everything was taken care of.

  I couldn’t sleep, waiting for Clemens to come in and tell me Meany’d miraculously done no further damage. Brusque, a surgeon through and through, he did the arcane things doctors do but, I suspect, that for an orthopod they meant different things. He looked again at the X-rays his partner had ordered and asked me if I was up to a CT scan.

  I said, “How much certainty will a CAT scan add to your findings, doc?”

  He allowed as how it might increase his certainty by one to five percent.

  “I’m not going to sue you, Doc. Fuck the CAT scan. Something else eventuates, we’ll tackle it.”

  “Bless you, brother. You’ll get written up as patient of the month.”

  “Really?”

  “Hell no, I just made that up. Let’s shoot you up with something to make you sleep. You want to eat first?”

  “Just make the pain go away.”

  *****

  Jake was there when I came to. “I feel bad,” I told him.

  “Pain?”

  “Dr. Clemens gave me some wonderful stuff. No, it’s deeper. I feel so bad about Mary Clare.”

  He said, “I recall a time you assuaged her pain. Remind her, if you get the chance. Maybe she’ll remember and not hate you.”

  He was talking about an anecdote I once related to him. One night, after I first met her, I was in bed reading when I heard a knock on the door. I slipped into a pair of Levi’s and, suspicious of the hour, took a pipe wrench with me to the door. Not to worry, it was a waif. It was Mary Clare in a trench coat and bare feet.

  She walked past me into the room. “I couldn’t be alone. Do you hate me?”

  “Of course not. Need a cigarette?”

  “I’m frightened, Bobby.”

  “Of what?” I asked.

  “Just frightened.”

  She was shivering, hands thrust deep in her coat pockets. Her hair was in a queue. Her face was not pretty to look at, screwed into a grimace of a child who had cried herself out. It was as if, looking past my shoulder, she felt the presence of a phantom I couldn’t see.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  “Just hold me, Bobby,” she replied, “I need to be held.”

  I put my arms around her and the cold coat against my skin made me shiver also. She reached between us and opened the buttons and belt, so that we could slip our arms about each other under the coat and share the warmth. She wore cotton baby dolls; she buried her nose in my chest. Her wet eyelashes brushed my skin. I had this pang, wishing I could be so direct, asking for human warmth when the whim-whams got to me.

  At last I said, “We can’t stand here all night.”

  “Let’s go to bed,” she said.

  She held the covers back while I lost the Levi’s and climbed in. Then she burrowed into me like a puppy or a piglet, shivering and rooting until we were plastered to each other and the shivering stopped. I could feel her muscles relax by degrees. I could smell shampoo, bath oil, lipstick; it made me want her so badly, but I knew I mustn’t. If I wasn’t to be just any warm body, if I was to be the man no man had ever been to her, I knew I mustn’t, even if I didn’t sleep for the rest of the night.

  I mustn’t.

  She could tell I was aroused and she said, “Just hold me, Bobby. I promise I’ll make it up to you someday, but right now just hold me, please. Please?”

  I freed the hand pinned under her and stroked her hair and then her cheek and gradually she passed into a shallow sleep. Just before I fell asleep she woke long enough to say, “It’s all right now, it’s gone.”

  I never did find out what demon was after her. She couldn’t describe it, it was like a terrible nightmare from the past, something she had no name for, it came from a time when the little blue light in the hall, shining through the bedroom door ajar, could be squinted into the shape of the guardian angel Lupe told her watched through the night, and as long as it was lit there was nothing to fear from the dark.

  Just before dawn we woke at the same time, trying to move apart to spare the other’s sleep but realizing the other was awake.

  What do you feel like?

  I don’t know.

  Want to sleep more?

  No.

  Want to go home?

  Do you want me to?

  No.

  “Want to drive the Jag up to the top of Mount Diablo?” she asked.

  We jumped up and turned on the light, laughing at each other. I gave her a pair of chinos and, despite our far different builds, they fit. From waist to mid-calf, every cubic millimeter of trouser was filled. They were stretched taut at the widest point of her hips, but they fit and she followed me into the kitchen while I made coffee, wearing just the pants, wearing her beautiful breasts like a fancy shirt. While we drank coffee she found a sweater and a pa
ir of high-topped moccasins, the only footwear of mine that would stay on her, and we ran out to the car, hand in hand, put the top down and I drove along the windless, sleeping Diablo Valley to Danville, turned east and headed up the mountain, to gain the summit before the true dawn reached La Morinda, to look down the back side of the mountain at California’s Central Valley crawling out from under blankets of fog and saw the Sacramento River Delta still dark like mangrove roots upon the land, and sat on a wall of the observation tower and kicked our heels and laughed and laughed.

  Going Home

  one

  A day came I left the hospital. I talked turkey with Dr. Clemens, who had to admit I was a very expensive charity patient.

  “But,” he said, “I justified it because I considered you an experiment. If I’d been able to keep you flat on your back and stretched for six months, I bet your back would have come out A-one. Now we’ll never know. You’ve set orthopedics back twenty years.”

  “Listen, doc: In six months I’d have had the muscle tone of an eighty-year-old, plus pre-senile dementia. I’ll risk the backache, thank you.”

  I wasn’t demented, but I was nursing a broken heart. Every two or three days of my hospital stay I’d ask Jake if the Jag was still parked at the apartments. When he told me it was, I hoped and despaired in equal measure. Mary Clare hadn’t moved out so just maybe I could still make my case to her. On the other hand, she must still be under Meany’s “care.”

  As I was wheeled out to Jake’s car, the nursing staff said their goodbyes, one wishing me luck with “that Morrison woman.” I told them I loved them all but I was bored to the point of tears with hospital life. One laughed and said if ever there were a next time, they’d be sure to make things a little more lively.

  On the way home I said to Jake, “One thing lying flat on your back will do for you, you have time to figure out what a waste your life’s been. I’ve been marking time for years.”

  He said, executing a high speed lane change, we all had to do that sometimes.

  I ticked off the days in my head. My stay had lasted twenty-seven days, maybe a record for someone my age who hadn’t been totaled in a car accident. That might be a small price to pay for realizing I’d never had a plan in life, I’d stumbled on, somehow surviving childhood and adolescence, high school and college. I’d never bought into anyone else’s plan either, not succumbed to the University’s bureaucracy, for instance. I just stopped my life on a dime the first time it didn’t meander in its usual, painless way.