She threw herself across me and said, “Downstairs? Thingamajig? I have got to see this place.”
The bell had rung before the count of ten.
*****
The next day was Saturday. I called ahead and we drove out Shattuck Avenue past Live Oak Park and turned into the Melnik’s driveway. I found the key under the mat and let us in. Mary Clare said, “Is that the penthouse up there?” and climbed the staircase-sans-rails—almost a ladder—and yelled down, “We’d be idiots not to take it.”
After we’d talked a while about where things would go, Abe and his wife came over, followed by a child, young enough to be either an afterthought or an adoptee, who was followed by a Siamese cat.
After we exchanged introductions, Abe said, “I hope neither of you is allergic to cats. He used to sleep out here before we fixed it up, and it’s hard to keep him out.”
Clare bent down and petted the cat, who responded to her. “What’s his name?”
“Just Melnik Cat.”
“Well,” she said, “just as long as Melnik Cat doesn’t sharpen his claws on the Louis Quatorze love seat.”
She saw the Melniks took her seriously, so she said, “Just kidding. I sold the Louis Quatorze love seat in Boston. We have to buy furniture, and it won’t be anything Melnik Cat can’t claw.”
Robert hadn’t seen her like this before, a socially adept Clare with a winning smile and a hand on her hip, almost cute. Mrs. Melnik took her in and went over the place item by item, an informal inventory, and Dr. Melnik took me out to the yard, which was full of trees, including a fig tree that was bearing.
I examined the figs on the closest branch, many nearly ripe, the others green. Abe said, “Tell me about this project you’re doing.”
I told him about the project and a minimum about why I was taking it over. He in turn told me about being a bean counter in the Army and about the classes he taught at the School of Public Health. Could I use a graduate student or two on the project?
“Gee, I don’t know. Give me a few days to figure that out. —Were there this many figs last year?”
“There were so many we couldn’t eat them all.”
I said, “You have to prune fig trees or they won’t bear. Figs grow on new wood.” We talked about what to do with excess figs—besides giving them to Mary Clare and me. It got Abe off the doctor-counting project.
Mrs. Melnik went back in their house and I took the opportunity to ask her husband, everyone being so chummy, if he’d have any objections to my parking my truck in back. He didn’t. We finally got away.
Clare said, as we drove down Milvia, “You better learn to be firm with that woman, Bobby, or she’ll be counting the polka-dots on your boxers.”
four
One day, visiting Jake after work, I realized the man actually thought. He was a thinker. This is a wonderment for someone like me, who thinks only when forced to. I don’t mean solving problems; that engages your brain too. For instance, it occurred to me that a means of saving money on a project where a lot of the grant had already been squandered, was to contract for services when we needed them rather than hiring full time staff. There was this great big resource two miles away, the University of California, possessing mainframe computers, key punch operators and programmers out the kazoo, and they were happy to sell their services. My two trusty data analysts and I were free to do the stuff that took more intimacy with the statistics than technical skills—how to hit upon the best averages of population usage—how many times tots under five see a doctor per year, for example—and productivity—how many patient visits the average pediatrician can conduct in a year.
Imagine me perplexed when, opening the patio door to enter Jake’s room, he greeted me with, “It’s time to get down to business, laddie” (‘laddie’ was a new sobriquet). “You can’t keep doing this technical crap for the rest of your life.”
I said, “What business? This technical crap is my business.”
“But does is sing to your soul? Were you to die tomorrow, would what you’re doing in the ABAG catacombs today be what you want to be remembered for?”
“Shit, Jake, I’m just back from exile. I’ve started my daring co-optation of the university. I’ve created an advisory committee—on paper, anyway—which is going to be the gunstock tomahawk with which I beat the pinfeathers off Stu Katz.”
“Does Stu Katz know about this deadly weapon?”
I smiled. “He’s going to sit on the committee.”
“And do you think he really gives a shit about whether there are enough pediatricians in Sonoma County? That’s not my point. I’ve been lying here thinking about the simple-pretty. I now know what it is. And it’s not counting doctors. Tomorrow the sun will rise and the sun will set and the sun doesn’t give a flare or a spot whether Jimmy Jones of Healdsburg gets his tonsillitis diagnosed by a generalist or a specialist.”
I said, “Okay, you’ve got to tell me. I thought all the time the simple-pretty was just a joke—a metaphor or a myth, like a left-handed widget or a snipe hunt.”
“You mean, like a Divine Accident. No, different people may have different definitions of the phenomenon. Mine may be the same as the definition of sainthood.”
I looked at him and tried to understand whether he was fucking with me or not. I’d been looking at him from the time he was shot, and he hadn’t been barbered since. His beard showed a great deal of white and it made him look much older. And, too, he’d lost weight, and the age lines in his face were more pronounced.
“Can you give me a hint?” I said.
“Creativity is the universal hint. In your particular case, the hint is Mary Clare.”
His eyes twinkled, which was gratifying to see, for it was not mockery; he was not fucking with me.
*****
Here we must consult the tape recordings for an explanation:
What I was talking about, invoking the simple-pretty again, had come to me in the early morning, before anyone had to wake me to measure my vital signs and administer such goodies as stool softeners and laxatives. Besides your dignity, you are robbed of great stretches of uncluttered time in the hospital, but, as you are in bed, it is very easy to doze between assaults on your dignity. Which makes it easy to wake up at, say, four in the morning with nothing to do but think. It struck me, then, the day before I sprung it on Robert, that if there were something in this world that I could pronounce a simple-pretty, it would be leading a creative life while also creating in the sense of writing or composing or playing a Bach cello suite in Carnegie Hall.
That runs counter to the common myth that, to create at the highest level, you must suffer. This simple-pretty, creating while also leading a creative life, seemed to me to be attainable. But, I decided, as the first nurse appeared that day, you ought to start early enough in life. You aren’t going to be a concert pianist or violinist starting at forty-five, not even starting at sixteen.
But you could, possibly, lead a creative life. And what was that, you ask?
Jake Pritchett, even if nothing more goes wrong with his cardiovascular system, may not have enough time left to figure that out. But it’s worth a try. And as I am a fairly articulate fellow who’s spent more time reading and writing than watching television, I may even turn out something literary and readable. Chances are I won’t, but there have been persons older than I who have.
I can’t tell Robert, “Do as I say, not as I’ve done up till now.” He has a big brother to toss that malarkey at him. But I can keep warning him that he made it as far as that arroyo in Nevada without an error that could be attributed to him because he kept expecting to succeed again and again.
But he forgot his own past, how the academic world changed around him, a revolution started, and his bosses, having no better solution, pressed him into fighting fires, the antithesis of creativity. He developed an abiding nausea, discovering that, not only was his time wasted, the whole system of higher education in California was too. He was used to bopping
along saying, “Okay, what’s next?” and after 1964 he stopped being a success in his own eyes. He had a dim yearning for something more tangible and productive and responsive to his feelings and needs.
Instead of taking the opportunity to find out what mattered in life, Robert allowed himself to be diverted.
*****
To tell you the truth, Jake, it didn’t start with the Free Speech Movement. Women and booze were around early in my life; I stumbled into sex the way I stumbled into grants management. The girls at the beach summers, proving they were desirable. The woman who always walked into the anthropology lecture ten seconds after the professor took the podium, turning every male head as she crossed to her seat.
In a sense Lana Hill was a diversion. I stumbled upon her the day she was leaving the employ of the University, and she was just too juicy to let go after one meeting. The future I envisioned with her had details only in the foreground: we would travel through Mexico, down to the Guatemalan border on the west coast, across the Isthmus of Tehuántepec and either go to Villa Hermosa and on to Merida and Cancún, or, if time ran short, up the east coast to Vera Cruz and inland to Oaxaca, Mexico City and Guadalajara. Back in Berkeley we would buy a house and start making babies. That is as far as the details went. Otherwise, I was going to adopt a new attitude towards bureaucracy, lay back and let the shit roll off me, no more incipient ulcer: let the fucking students take over all the parks they wanted, let the FBI make all the files they wanted, fuck the Blue Meanies, too. When the fuss and fury died down, I would try to remember anything I knew about medical education and biomedical research.
This was not in any way a simple-pretty.
Then I bought this grown-up toy which, not through any criminal intent, blew up in my face—or rather in the unsuspecting face of a sap in a grubby blue mackinaw. I tried many times to tell myself it was the moral equivalent of a man buying a motor home he really didn’t need only to drive it off a cliff the first night of his annual vacation.
Problem was, it blew up in Lana’s face, too.
Lana had been married once before. She left her first husband to deal blackjack in Reno because, as she blew out the twenty-eight candles on her birthday cake, she broke down and wailed, “I’m twenty-eight years old and I’ve never done anything in my life.” Fate had me waylaying her as she exited the University on her way to making up for an adulthood of placidity.
I was to be part of her simple-pretty. Her simple-pretty was called “starting over again.”
In a way, that’s what I was doing. I was being a bureaucrat again, but through that regrettable pulling of the trigger, I had shed the label of young hotshot. Was I about to bec0me a caricature of myself?
*****
Woke up one day in Berkeley again. Mary Clare and I had laid tatamis all over the sleeping loft, bought furniture that would fit in it, including a bed consisting of an oversized hunk of foam rubber. We were both pleased with the details, the problems of tininess and modest budget solved in creative ways.
Woke up with the sun coming up in the south. Our bed faced the opposite way mine had in La Morinda though only ninety degrees different from Clare’s. She said the whole problem with her life was she hadn’t had her bed facing the right way since she was thirteen. In the peak of the roof was a little window, directly over our sleeping heads, the sun shining through, which meant it was time I had to jump up and shower, etc., and get to work at an hour I was used to sleeping.
We’d moved in among the usual confusion—(“Where are we going to keep the spices, darling?”)—tired but not too tired to consecrate the new home by making love so passionately I lost myself in a way I never had before.
She wasn’t used to arising at this hour either, but I came out of the shower to the smells of bacon frying and coffee perking.
“You’re supposed to be in bed,” I said.
“I’m supposed to cook your breakfast, man.”
“Are you going to be fucking domestic?”
She said, bustling around in this cute shorty robe that barely covered her ass, “As long as it suits the inner woman.”
“What about when you’re crotch deep in seminar papers?”
“Oh well, then,” she said, “I’ll let you make my breakfast.”
“I will, too,” I said, and kissed her as many places as I could while she bustled around the tiny cooking area we soon called ‘the galley,’ catching my kisses on the fly.
five
I learned a few things during my time away from bureaucracy. It was like the time I was away from boxing, recovering from a hyperflexed CMC joint in my thumb: my first day back in the gym I stepped into the ring to spar with a guy who should have handled me easily—more experience, fifteen pounds heavier. Instead, I handled him. What I’d learned about using the ring, and footwork, and counter-punching, had come together in a new way. An Assistant Vice-President would label the change a “synthesis.”
Likewise, back in the bureaucratic environment, I realized I’d synthesized some lessons. I didn’t have to test Howie Manheimer, I didn’t make a federal project out of everything, I kept the proper balance of humor and distance with my staff. By ten o’clock each morning I was up to my knees in counting doctors, by five I was up to my armpits. —Welcome back, I told myself at the end of the first week.
It didn’t take long to discover the essential dilemma of the project: my predecessor had been too polite (or masochistic) to scream when he discovered himself between a rock and a hard place. The rock was a University that was opening new medical schools and not about to tell the world they might not be needed, the hard place was a council of governments trying, as always, to make itself relevant—possibly even needed—by doing nifty studies while not rocking the boat. Of course they told my predecessor to be absolutely true and faithful to the facts (an ABAG core principal) without rocking anything. I didn’t think Howie expected me to be likewise constrained—I’d played tennis the same cutthroat way he did.
To steepen my learning curve, I made phone calls to former colleagues I thought might still be friends. Many were; I got tips on data sources and also tips on analysis, such as the reminder from my ox-browed friend, Carl Bollinger, that what you put around the perimeter of a matrix is as important as what fills the cells. The calls took time. Many persons had wondered if I were dead or moved to Oregon, and I had to sketch out the history of my hegira. Many had let the incident in Nevada fade from their memories.
I also learned, talking to the University Chancellor’s secretary, the lady who had introduced me to Lana, that the project was born when some loose Federal money tempted ABAG’s CEO, who in turned lured the University Chancellor into sharing the bounty, suckered into thinking good works were important to his employer’s public image.
Those calls to friends were a warm-up. As soon as I felt immersed in the Berkeley landscape, I called my old boss, Stu Katz, Vice President for Medical Education. I couldn’t tell, from the way he spoke to me, whether or not the righteousness that prompted him to throw me to the wolves had dissipated with time. I was concentrating too hard on sounding in control, while in reality my heart was thumping like Gene Krupa’s tom-toms.
“We need to talk, Stu,” I said.
Dr. Katz said, “I’ve heard about that project; what do you think we’d have to talk about?”
“Well, there’s a dilemma inherent in this project—an iatrogenic dilemma, to use a fancy doctor word—but I’m not going to make the mistake my predecessor did, and make this exclusively my dilemma. It’s yours, too.”
Stu Katz sighed and asked when I’d like to meet.
We met that week, Dr. Katz maintaining a resigned indulgence throughout our conversation, letting me know by his body language he didn’t believe for a moment the project had any pertinence in his world, especially since ABAG was its sponsor. He had taken to tapping the temples of his glasses against his incisors, a tic designed to irritate.
Finally I said, “Let’s not beat around the bush,
doctor. I know why the University’s had second thoughts about this project. California will never hurt for doctors, so the University’s blueprint for graduating MDs has more to do with academic values than population need. Persons more tuned-in than the Chancellor wanted to know why the University would lend legitimacy to something that might give ammunition to legislative opponents. I appreciate that. I also appreciate how immoral it would be, knowing the difference between academic need and population need, to let the folks up in Sacramento continue making decisions without appreciating the difference.”
Katz, speaking slowly, picking his words carefully, said, “Just how are you going to convince anyone there’s a difference?”
“I don’t have to. I publish a creditable report and when someone needs a basis for cutting the budget sometime, they’ll figure out how to sell it real fast.”
“When push comes to shove,” Katz said speaking this time with assurance, “it’ll be who you know.”
I said, “Well, I don’t exactly have carnal knowledge of him, but I think I might have enough insight into our present governor to know how to turn him on.”
Katz said, “Just make sure that you can boil your report down to a two page précis. I hear that’s all he can absorb on one subject.”
When Clare and I took a break from our respective homework that evening, I replayed my Katz conversation. She said, “Is that his last word on the subject?”
“It wasn’t mine,” I said. “I reminded him he was author of a study showing that all the determinants of where doctors practice point to their coming to California in droves—at least until the Great Earthquake shakes Parnassus Heights. They’ll come from Omaha and Chapel Hill, and they’ll come from Poona and Karachi as well.”
“You think you’ve got him?” she asked.
“I’m not as smug as all that.”
“But just a little smug,” she said, smiling indulgently.