'I should think,' Tulpen whispered, 'that you've had enough of this.'
'Enough of what?' I said too loudly. The mother tensed; the girl flapped her paper; the old man shifted uncomfortably in his chair, his terrible insides sloshing.
'This,' Tulpen hissed, tapping her fist in her lap. 'This,' she said with a careful gesture taking in this collection of the urinary-wounded. There's always a rare fraternity in doctors' offices, but in the office of a specialist the intimacy is worse. There are clubs for veterans, for people with high IQs, for lesbians, for alumni, for mothers who give birth to triplets, persons in favor of saving the elm, Rotarians, Republicans and Neo-Maoists, but here was a forced association; people who have problems peeing. Call us Vigneronists! We could meet once a week, have contests and exhibitions - a kind of track and field meet of urinary events.
Then Dr Jean Claude Vigneron came into the waiting room from the secret innards of his office, wafting over us the swarthy smell of Gauloises. We Vigneronists sat in great awe: Which of us would be called?
'Mrs Cullen?' Vigneron said. The mother stood up nervously and cautioned her child to be good while she was gone.
Vigneron smiled at Tulpen. The untrustworthy French! 'You waiting to see me?' he asked her. An outsider among these assembled Vigneronists, Tulpen stared back at him, unanswering.
'No, she's with me,' I told Vigneron. He and Tulpen smiled.
When the doctor went off with Mrs Cullen, Tulpen whispered, 'I didn't think he'd look like that.'
'Look like what?' I asked. 'What should urologists look like? Bladders?'
'He doesn't look like a bladder,' Tulpen answered, impressed.
The child sat there timidly listening to us. If her mother was the patient, I thought, why did the child look so swollen and yellow? I determined that her appearance was the result of not being allowed to pee. About Colm's age, I thought. She was worried about being alone, and restless too; she peeked at the nurse and watched the old man. She was getting upset, so I tried some reassuring conversation. 'Do you go to school?'
But it was the stunning young girl in leather who looked up. Tulpen simply stared at me and the child ignored the question.
'No, I don't,' said the surprised leather girl, with a look right through me.
'No, no,' I said to her. 'Not you.' Now the child stared at me. 'I mean you,' I said to her, pointing. 'Do you go to school?' The child was embarrassed and felt threatened; obviously she had been told never to talk to strangers. The young girl in leather regarded the child-molester icily.
'Your mother will be right back,' Tulpen told the little girl.
'She's got blood in her pee,' the child informed us. The nurse swiveled into view, with a quick look at me which said that my brain must be stuck shut too.
'Oh, your mother will be all right,' I told the child. She nodded, bored.
The stunning young girl in leather looked at me as if clearly to inform me that she did not have blood in her pee, so don't ask. Tulpen stifled a giggle and pinched my thigh; I examined the roof of my mouth with my tongue.
Then the old man who had been so silent made a strange sound, like an oddly suppressed belch or a pinched fart or a massive, creaking shift of his whole spine, and when he tried to stand up, we saw a stain the color of burned butter spreading on the loose stomach of his shirt and making his pants cling tight to his skinny thighs. He lurched sideways, and I caught him just before he fell. He weighed nothing at all and was easy to hold upright, but there was an awful reek to him and he clutched at his belly; there was something under his shirt. He looked grateful, but terribly embarrassed, and all he could say was, 'Please, the bathroom ...' flopping his bony wrist in the direction of Vigneron's inner office. Against the stain which his shirt soaked up like a blotter, I could see the outline of a curious little bag and a hose.
'The damn thing is always spilling,' he told me as I steered him as fast as I could to the nurse, who was just swiveling out of her chair.
'Oh, Mr Kroddy,' she said scoldingly, plucking him out of my arms as if he were a hollow doll. She muscled him down the long hallway, waving me irritably back to the waiting room and continuing to reprimand him. 'You simply have to empty it more often, Mr Kroddy. There's just no need to have these little accidents ...'
But he kept crooning over and over, 'The damn thing, the goddamn thing! There's just never any place to go, people get so upset, in men's rooms you should see all the looks ...'
'Can you unbutton your shirt by yourself, Mr Kroddy?'
'The goddamn fucking thing!'
'This isn't at all necessary, Mr Kroddy ...'
In the waiting room, the child looked frightened again and the tight-assed, snotty girl in leather stared straight at her paper, smug, superior and harboring what awful secret between her legs. No one would know. I hated her.
I whispered to Tulpen, 'The poor old guy was all hoses. He had to go into this little sack.' That damned girl in leather looked coolly up at me, then down at her paper while we all listened to what sounded like the nurse flushing old Mr Kroddy away.
I looked straight up at that aloof leather lady and asked her, 'Do you have the clap?'
She didn't look up; she froze. But Tulpen gouged me hard with her elbow and the child looked up gratefully. 'What?' she asked.
Then the young woman looked hard at me. But she couldn't hold her fierce expression; for the first time something human broke over her face - her lower lip curling under, her teeth trying to hold her lip still, her eyes suddenly aswim - and I just felt cruel and awful.
'You shit, Trumper,' Tulpen whispered, and I went over to the girl, who now held her face down on her knees, rocking in her chair and crying softly.
'I'm sorry,' I told her, 'I don't know why, really, I said that ... I mean, you seemed sort of insensitive ...'
'Don't listen to him,' Tulpen told the girl. 'He's just crazy.'
'I just can't believe I've got the clap,' the girl said, sobbing. 'I don't go doing it all around, you know, and I'm not dirty ...'
Then Vigneron came back, returning the mother to her swollen child. He had a folder in his hand. 'Miss DeCarlo?' he asked, smiling. She stood up quickly, wiping her tears.
'I have the clap,' she told him, and he stared at her. 'Or maybe I don't have it,' she added hysterically as Vigneron peered into the folder.
'Please, in my office,' he said to her, guiding her quickly past us. Then he looked at me, as if somehow I'd given this girl her disease while she was in the waiting room. 'You're next,' he said, but I stopped him before he could move.
'I'll have the operation,' I said, shocking both him and Tulpen. 'I don't need to see you. I just want an appointment for the operation.'
'But I haven't examined you.'
'No need to,' I said. 'It's the same old thing. The water didn't help. I don't want to see you again except for the operation.'
'Well,' he said, and I was delighted to see that I'd ruined his perfect record - he wasn't ten for ten with me - 'ten days or two weeks,' he said. 'You'll probably want some antibiotic in the meantime, won't you?'
'I'll stick with the water.'
'My nurse will call you when we've set a time at the hospital, but it will be at least ten days or two weeks, and if you're at all uncomfortable ...'
'I won't be.'
'You're sure?' Vigneron said; he tried to smile.
'Still ten out of ten?' I asked him, and he looked at Tulpen and blushed. Vigneron blushed!
Matter-of-factly I gave Vigneron's nurse the phone number for Ralph Packer Films, Inc., and the number at Tulpen's. Recovering, Vigneron handed me a packet of some capsules, but I shook my head.
'Please, no nonsense,' he said. 'It's better to operate when you're free from any infection. Take one of these a day and I'll have to see you the day before we operate, just to check.' Now he was being strictly businesslike. I took the capsules from him, nodding, smiling, waving over my shoulder, and walked Tulpen out of there. I think I must have swaggered.
And I didn't think, until I was out on the street, about whatever happened to old Mr Kroddy. Was he having a hose replaced? I shivered, drew Tulpen up against my hip and jostled her along the sidewalk, warm and bouncy, her breath close enough to smell, sweet with candy mints, and her hair whipping my face.
'Don't worry,' I said. 'I'm going to have a fine new prick, just for you.'
She slipped her hand in my pocket, rummaging through change and my Swiss Army knife. 'Don't you worry, Trumper,' she said. 'I like the old prick you are.'
So we abandoned work for the day and went back to her apartment, though we knew that Ralph expected us at the studio. It was always a touchy time for Ralph when he was dropping one project and picking up another; we noticed late salary checks and signs above the phone: PLEASE ENTER IN THE FUCKING BOOK (|) YOUR LONG-DISTANCE CALLS!
Tulpen might have guessed that there was more involved in skipping work than my want of her. I didn't care for the subject of Ralph's new film, the subject being me. A tedious outline of interviews with Tulpen and me, and a little gem later in which Ralph planned to include Biggie.
'I must tell you, Ralph, that my enthusiasm for this project is not what it might be.'
'Thump-Thump, do I have integrity or do I not?'
'It is your point of view which remains to be seen, Ralph.'
For weeks we'd been handling some dull distribution for other film makers, and giving special showings of Ralph Packer: Retrospective! for film societies, student groups, museums and the Village matinees. It was better to be on a project again, even this project, and the only really nasty argument Ralph and I'd had so far was the title.
'It's just a working title, Thump-Thump. I often change the title when we're finished.'
Somehow I doubted his flexibility about this one. He was calling the film Fucking Up. It was a common utterance of his, which made me suspect that he liked it far too well.
'Don't worry, Trumper,' Tulpen told me, and in that long afternoon at her apartment I didn't. I changed the record stack; I made Austrian Tee mit Rum, swizzled with a cinnamon stick and heated on a hot plate by the bed; I ignored the phone, which woke us once at dark. Vacuum-sealed from the city, we didn't know whether it was supper, a midnight snack or an early breakfast we were hungry for; in that kind of timeless dark which only city apartments can give you, the phone clamored on and on.
'Let it ring,' Tulpen said, scissoring me fast around my waist. It occurred to me that this line should be a part of Fucking Up, but I let it ring.
18
One Long Mother of a Day
IT BEGINS, ACTUALLY, the night before, with an argument, wherein Biggie accuses Merrill Overturf of childish, escapist pranksterism and further claims that I have been able to heroize Merrill only because he has been missing from my life for so long - implying, harshly, that the real Merrill, in the flesh, would even put me off, at least at this moment in my life.
I find these accusations painful and counterattack by accusing Overturf of courage.
'Courage!' Biggie hoots.
She goes on to imply that I am no reliable authority on courage, having no courage myself - having cowardice to spare, in fact. The example given for my cowardice is that I am afraid to call my father and have it out with him about my disinheritance.
Which witlessly prompts me to bluster that I will phone the old prick, anytime - even now, though by the dark Iowa night around us, I vaguely suspect that it's a poor hour for a phone call.
'You will?' says Biggie. Her sudden respect is frightening. She gives me no time to change my mind; she's thumbing through papers, looking for the one on which we once wrote down the Great Boar's Head number.
'What will I say, though?' I ask.
She is starting to dial.
'How about, "I called to ask you if your mail was being delivered."'
Biggie frowns and dials on.
'How about, "How are you? Is the tide in or out?"'
Grimacing over her fast fingerwork, Biggie says, 'At least we'll know, for God's sake ...' and hands me the ringing phone.
'Yes, at least we'll know all right,' I say into the mouthpiece and it echoes back as if it were being spoken to me by some operator of uncanny perception. The phone rings and rings, and I give Biggie what must be a relieved look: A-ha! He's not at home! But Biggie points at my wrist watch. Back East, it's after midnight! I feel my jaw slacken.
Biggie says sternly, 'It'll serve the prick right.'
Far from groggy, my father curtly answers the phone. Of course doctors are used to being called up in the middle of the night. 'Dr Trumper here,' he says. 'Edmund Trumper. What is it?'
Biggie is balancing on one leg as if she's got to pee. I can hear my watch tick, and then Daddy says, 'Hello? This is Dr Trumper. Is anything wrong?'
In the background, I hear my mother murmur. 'The hospital, Edmund?'
'Hello!' my father shouts into the phone.
And my mother hisses, 'You don't suppose it's Mr Bingham? Oh, Edmund you know his heart ...'
Still teetering on one foot, Biggie glares at me, appalled by the cowardice she sees in my face; she grunts fiercely at me.
'Mr Bingham?' says my father. 'Can't you get your breath again?'
Biggie stamps her foot, utters a small-animal cry.
My father advises, 'Don't try to breathe too deeply, Mr Bingham. Listen, you just hold on. I'm coming right over ...'
Scurrying in the background, my mother calls, 'I'll get the hospital to send the oxygen, Edmund--'
'Mr Bingham!' my father yells into the phone as Biggie kicks the stove, emitting a snarl from her curved mouth.
'Bring your knees up to your chest, Mr Bingham! Don't try to talk!'
I hang up.
Convulsed with something almost like laughter, Biggie lunges past me, into the hall, into the bedroom and slams the door. Her sucking sounds, her crazy lip noises sound like choking, something like poor Mr Bingham with his real and faltering heart.
Unnoticed by the night watchman, I spent the night in the Iowa Library PhD thesis alcoves, in one of a long fourth-floor row of cubbies which are usually crammed with sweaty scholars, each with his Coke bottle. A dollop of Coke in each bottle, honey-thick, with several cigarette butts floating. You can hear them hiss when they're plunked in, several cubbies down from your own.
Once, his thesis near the finishing point, Harry Petz, a graduate student from Brooklyn, who was reading documents in Serbo-Croatian, heaved himself backward in his chair on casters and shot out of his cubby in reverse; pedaling his feet faster and faster down the aisle, he whizzed past all of us, the entire length of the cubby row. He smashed against the fourth-floor thermopane at the end of the aisle, cracking both the glass and his head, but not careening four floors to the library parking lot below, where Harry Petz must have had visions of himself splattering on the hood of someone's car.
But I would never do such a thing, Biggie.
There is a touching scene in Akthelt and Gunnel when Akthelt is dressing and arming himself to go out and fight the ever-warring Greths. He is donning his shin pads and shoulder pads and kidney guards and tin cup, ritualistically shielding and spiking his vital parts, while poor Gunnel is wailing at him not to leave her; ritualistically, she is taking off her clothes, unbraiding her hair, unbuckling her anklets, unsheathing her wrists, unthonging her corset, while Akthelt goes on collaring his throat with chains, fastening his coccyx-spikes, etc. Akthelt is trying to explain to Gunnel the object of war (det henskit af krig), but she doesn't want to listen. Then Old Thak, Akthelt's father, bursts in on them. Old Thak has been arming and dressing himself for the war too, and his chest zipper, or something, is stuck and he needs help with it. Of course he is embarrassed to see his son's lovely young wife all distraught and half nude, but he remembers his own youth and realizes what Akthelt and Gunnel have been arguing about. So Old Thak attempts an ambiguous gesture; he wants to try to please them both. He gives Gunnel a lusty goose with his thorny old hand, at
the same time saying wisely to Akthelt, 'Det henskit af krig er tu overleve' ('The object of war is to survive it').
Which struck me as the object of graduate school - and possibly my marriage. Such comparisons struck me hard in those days.
Walking through the library parking lot in which Harry Petz tried to land, I spy young Lydia Kindle lurking for me near a sea-green and arklike Edsel. She wears a pear-colored suit, snug, short-skirted and rather grownup.
'Hi! That's my Edsel there!' she says. And I think, This is much too much.
But there's a kind of safety at the midthigh of her skirt and I know her knees, so they don't frighten me. It's a relief to feel her leg rise and fall under my head, her foot busy at the brake and accelerator.
'Where are we going?' I ask in a doomed tone and turn a little in her lap, which there's so little of.
'I know,' she says, and I look up her suit-front, past her slight breasts to her chin; I see her teeth gently holding her lower lip. At the throat of her suit, her blouse is a deep rust-yellow; it gives that tint to her jaw, like a buttercup. And I remember Biggie and me in a field below the monastery at Katzeldorf, with a bottle of the monks' wine in the buttercups. I held a handful of the flowers to her nipple; it turned her vivid orange and made her blush. Then she held a cluster under my own sunny part. I believe it turned me strictly yellow.
'Actually, this isn't my Edsel,' says Lydia Kindle. 'It's my brother's, but he's in the service.'
New perils everywhere I turn. Lydia Kindle's strapping brother, a punchy Green Beret, coming after me with deft chops to the clavicle, his terrible vengeance brought down on me for defiling his sister and his Edsel.
'Where are we going?' I ask again, feeling her hard thighs bounce under my head on what must be a rough road. I see dust swirl by the windows; I see a flat sky not bent by a single tree, not laced with any powerlines.
'You'll see,' she says, and her hand strays off the wheel to brush my cheek - with the faintest, most innocent perfume at her wrist.
Then into a low ditch and out again; I can tell that we've even left the dirt road because there's no dust at the windows and the car dips deeper on a softer surface; occasional snapping sounds, which in Iowa can only be corn stubble or hog bones. We're headed in a different direction too, because the sun warms my kneecaps from a new slant. Then there are some tire-slipping noises, like a squeegee on wet grass. I fear we'll be stuck miles from anywhere, that overnight we and the Edsel will settle forever in some soybean bog. 'With only the ducks to cry over us,' I say, and Lydia peers down at me, looking slightly alarmed.