The Water-Method Man

  It was nearly midnight when I convinced the nurse that I simply had to call Tulpen. The phone rang and rang. When Ralph Packer answered, I hung up.

  (169: Sync sound. Close-up from dissolve. At her bathroom mirror Tulpen brushes her teeth; her shoulders are bare; presumably, so is the rest of her)

  PACKER (offstage): Do you think the operation will change him? I don't mean just physically ...

  TULPEN (she spits, looks in the mirror, then talks over her shoulder): Change him how, then?

  RALPH (o.s.): I mean psychologically ...

  TULPEN (rinses, gargles, spits): He doesn't believe in psychology.

  RALPH (o.s.): Do you?

  TULPEN: Not for him, I don't ...

  (170: Sync sound. Medium shot of Tulpen in the bathtub, soaping her breasts and underarms)

  TULPEN (with occasional looks at camera): It's a very simplistic whitewash to attempt to cover very deep and complicated people and things with very easy generalizations, superficialities - you know. But I think it's just as simplistic to assume that everyone is complex and deep. I mean, I think Trumper really does operate on the surface ... Maybe he is a surface, just a surface ...

  (She trails off, looks warily at camera, then at her soapy breasts, and self-consciously slides down in the water)

  TULPEN (looking at camera, as if Ralph were the camera): Come on, let's call it a night.

  (The phone rings offstage and Tulpen starts to get out of the tub)

  RALPH (o.s.): Shit! The phone ... I'll get it!

  TULPEN (looking offstage after him): No, let me - it might be Trumper.

  RALPH (o.s.answering the phone; Tulpen, listening, freezes): Yeah, hello? Hello? Hello? goddam you ...

  (The camera is jerky; it tries to back up awkwardly as Tulpen steps out of the tub. Clumsily embarrassed, she wraps herself in a towel as Ralph steps into frame with her. He wears a light meter around his neck and points it at her, then down at the tub)

  RALPH (irritably, he takes her arm and tries to steer her back to the tub): No, come on. We'll have to shoot this all over again ... the goddam phone!

  TULPEN (pulling away from him): Was it Trumper? Who was on the phone?

  RALPH: I don't know. They hung up. Now, come on, this won't take a minute ...

  (But she wraps herself tighter in the towel and moves away from the tub)

  TULPEN (angry): It's late. I want to get up early. I want to be there when he comes out of the anesthesia. We can do this tomorrow.

  (She looks up, exasperated, at the camera. Suddenly, Ralph looks angrily at the camera himself, as if he just realized it was still running)

  RALPH (shouting at camera): Cut! Cut! Cut! Sweet Jesus, Kent! Stop wasting film, you royal fuck-up!

  BLACK OUT

  Early in the morning they came and emptied the pots, hoses and receptacles of all kinds belonging to the man beside me. But they did nothing for me; they wouldn't even feed me.

  At eight o'clock a nurse took my temperature and gave me a numbing shot in both legs, high up on the thigh. When they came to wheel me down to the operating room, I couldn't walk very well. Two nurses supported me while they made me take a leak, but I still had feeling down there, and I was worried that the shots hadn't worked the way they were supposed to. I remarked on this to the nurse, but she didn't seem to understand me; in fact, my voice sounded strange even to me and I couldn't understand what I said either. I prayed I would be lucid in time to stop them from cutting.

  In the operating room there was a stunning, full-bosomed woman in a green uniform like the kind all the surgery nurses wear, and she kept pinching my thighs and smiling at me. She was the one who stuck the needle leading to the dextrose jug into my vein; then she bent my arm in a special way, taped the needle to it, and then taped my arm to the table. The dextrose running down the yellowy hose was gurgling into me; I could follow it right down to my arm.

  I had a thought about Merrill Overturf: If they had ever operated on him, they wouldn't be able to use dextrose, would they, since it's mostly sugar? What would they use?

  With my free right hand, I reached over and pinched my penis. I could still feel everything, and this frightened me a lot. What was the sense of putting my thighs to sleep?

  Then I heard Vigneron's voice, but I couldn't see him; instead, I saw a short, genial, spectacled old geezer who I guessed was the anesthetist. He came over and poked at the dextrose needle, then slid a jug of Pentothal alongside the dextrose jug and ran the hose from it right alongside the dextrose hose. Rather than stick the Pentothal needle in me, he stuck it into the dextrose hose, which I thought was very clever.

  The hose to the Pentothal had a clamp on it, and I saw that the drug wasn't running into me yet. I watched it closely, you can bet your ass, and when the anesthetist asked me how I felt, I boomed in a great loud voice that I still had plenty of feeling in my prick and that I hoped they were all aware of it.

  But they all just smiled as if they hadn't heard me - that anesthetist, the green nurse and Vigneron himself, now standing over me.

  'Count to twelve,' the anesthetist told me. He started the Pentothal running then, by unclamping the hose, and I watched the stuff trickle down until it mingled with the dextrose in the main rubber vein.

  'One two three four five six seven,' I said very fast. Only it took forever. The Pentothal changed the color of the dextrose running down toward my arm. I watched it run right up to the hub of the needle, and when it entered my arm, I cried, 'Eight!'

  Then a second passed, which took two hours, and I woke up in the postoperative room - the recovery room, whose ceiling looked so much like the ceiling in the operating room that I thought I was still in the same place. Hovering over me was the same stunning green nurse, smiling.

  'Nine,' I said to her, 'ten, eleven, twelve ...'

  'We'd like you to try to urinate now,' she said to me.

  'I just went,' I said. But she rolled me over on my side and slid a green pan under me.

  'Please just try,' she coaxed. She was awfully nice.

  So I started to go, even though I was sure I had nothing to pee. When the pain came, it was like an awareness of someone else's pain in another room - or even more distant, in another hospital. It was quite a lot of pain; I felt sorry for the person enduring it; I was all through peeing before I realized that it was my pain, realized that the operation was over.

  'OK, OK, OK, now,' the nurse said, smoothing back my hair and wiping the sudden, surprised tears off my face.

  Of course, what they had spared me was the double pain of anticipating peeing that first time. But I couldn't see it that way. It was a betrayal; they had tricked me.

  Then I went away again into dizzy sleep, and when I came back I was in my hospital room, Tulpen sitting there beside the bed, holding my hand. When I opened my eyes, she was smiling at me.

  But I pretended that I was still drugged senseless. I stared right through her. There's more than one who can play the tricks and surprises, you can bet your ass ...

  32

  Another Dante, a Different Hell

  THE DRIVER HAD worked for the limousine service for about three years. Before that, he'd driven a cab. He liked the limousine service better; nobody tried to stick him up or maul him, it was more leisurely, and the cars were elegant. He'd had the Mercedes for the past year and he loved to drive it. Occasionally, he'd gotten out of the city - once as far as New Haven - and he loved the feel of the car on the open road. That was what he thought the 'open road' was: driving to New Haven. It was as far as he'd ever been out of New York City. He had a family and three kids, and every summer he talked with his wife about taking his vacation out West, driving the whole family out there. But he didn't own a car himself; he was waiting until he could afford a Mercedes, or until the limousine service let an old one go cheap.

  So when he contracted to drive Bogus to Maine, the driver undertook the journey as if someone had told him to drive to San Francisco. Maine! He thought of men who hunted whale
s, ate lobster for breakfast and wore rubber boots all year long.

  He talked for two hours before he realized that his passenger was either asleep or in a trance; then he shut up. His name was Dante Calicchio, and he realized that this was the first time since he'd stopped driving a cab that he was spooked by a passenger. He thought that Bogus was crazy, and he put the hundred-dollar bill in his jockey shorts, right in the pouch where he could find it. Maybe he'll give me another one, he thought. Or try to take this one back.

  Dante Calicchio was short and heavy, with a salad of black hair and a nose which had been broken so many times that it appeared to flap. He'd been a boxer; he liked to say of his style that he always led with his nose. He'd been a wrestler too, and had cauliflower ears from that. A lovely set, all folded and swollen and lumpy, like two unmatched wads of dough slapped on the sides of his face. He chewed gum loudly, a habit he'd developed years ago when he gave up cigarettes.

  Dante Calicchio was an honest man who was curious about the way other people lived and what other places were like to live in, so he was not unhappy to be driving this nut to Maine. It was just that when they got north of Boston, and it was dark, and the traffic thinned out and almost disappeared, he got a little scared about driving off into this wilderness with a man who hadn't opened his mouth since they'd passed Shea Stadium.

  The toll-booth attendant at the New Hampshire Turnpike looked at Dante's chauffeur uniform, stared into the plush back seat at Bogus in a trance, and then, since there were no other cars in sight, asked Dante where he was going.

  'Maine,' Dante whispered as if it was a holy word. 'Where in Maine?' the attendant asked. Maine, in general, was only twenty minutes away from his daily life.

  'I don't know where,' Dante said, as the attendant handed him his change and waved him on. 'Hey, sir?' he said, turning to Bogus. 'Hey, where in Maine?'

  Georgetown is an island, but in Trumper's mind it was even more of an island than it really is. It's the sort of island that might as well be a peninsula, because it's connected to the mainland by a bridge; there are none of the inconveniences of a real island. But Trumper was thinking of the lovely isolation Couth contributed to the place. But then Couth could probably give you a sense of isolation in Kennedy Airport.

  Bogus wondered how he might best approach Biggie, realizing only now how much he missed her. She'd never stay in Iowa during the summer. At this moment she was probably in East Gunnery, helping her father and letting her mother help her with Colm. It was even conceivable that her abandonment had inspired an I-told-you-so sort of negative invitation from his own parents, but surely Biggie would have declined those helping hands.

  In any case, she certainly would have written to Couth to ask if he knew where his friend Bogus was, and Couth would know where she was, and what her feelings were about her runaway husband. Perhaps Couth had even seen them and could tell him how Colm had changed.

  'Hey, sir?' someone was asking him. It was the man in the front seat in the doorman's uniform. 'Hey, where in Maine?' he asked.

  Trumper looked out the window; they were coming through the deserted rotary by Portsmouth Harbor, crossing the bridge to Maine. 'Georgetown,' he said to the driver. 'It's an island. You'd better stop and get a map.'

  And Dante Calicchio thought, An island! Sweet Jesus, how am I supposed to drive to an island, you frigging crazy bastard ...

  But Dante got a map and saw there was a bridge from the mainland at Bath, across a tidal inlet of the Kennebec River, to Georgetown Island. As he crossed the bridge some time after midnight, Bogus rolled down the back windows and asked him if he could smell the sea.

  What Dante smelled was too fresh to be the sea. The sea Dante knew smelled like the docks off New York and Newark. The salt marshes here smelled tangy clean, so he rolled down his window too. But he didn't like the driving any more. The road across the island had loose, sandy shoulders, was narrow and winding and didn't have a median stripe. Also, there weren't any houses, just dark black pine trees and stretches of high salt grass.

  Also, the night was alive with sounds. Not horns and mechanisms, or tires squealing or unidentified human voices or sirens, but things - frogs and crickets and sea birds and foghorns out at sea.

  The lonely road and the terrible sounds scared the shit out of Dante Calicchio, who kept sizing up Bogus in the rear-view mirror, thinking, if this nut tries anything, I can break his back in two places before his friends jump me ...

  Trumper was calculating how long he'd stay with Couth, and whether he'd phone Biggie or just go see her when the time seemed ripe.

  When the road suddenly turned to dirt, Dante slammed on the brakes, locked the two front doors, and then the two back ones, never taking his eyes off Bogus for an instant.

  'What the hell are you doing?' Trumper asked, but Dante Calicchio sat in the front seat with one eye on Trumper in the mirror and the other roaming the map.

  'We must be lost, huh?' Dante said.

  'No,' Trumper said. 'We've got five miles to go.'

  'Where's the road?' said Dante.

  'You're on it,' Trumper said. 'Drive on.'

  Dante checked the map, saw that this indeed was a road and drove on with trepidation; that is, he inched the car forward as the island narrowed down around him. A few unlighted houses appeared, solemn as moored ships, and he saw the horizon open on both sides of him; the sea was out there, the air felt colder, he could taste the salt.

  Then a sign told him he was on a private road.

  'Drive on,' Trumper told him. Dante wished his tire chains were beside him on the seat, but he drove on.

  A few hundred yards further on a sign said PILLSBURY, and the road dipped so close to the water that Dante thought the surf would break over them. Then he saw the magnificent old house with its barn-red wooden shingles, a high gabled house with a connecting garage, a boathouse and a tidy cove of the sea to itself.

  Pillsbury - Dante thought he probably had one of them in the back seat. The only Pillsbury he knew was the competition for Betty Crocker. He peeked in the rear-view mirror, wondering if he was chauffeuring the crazy young heir to a cake-mix fortune.

  'What month is it?' Trumper asked. He wanted to know if Couth was still alone in the place, or whether the Pillsburys would be here for the summer. They never came until the Fourth of July.

  'It's the first of June, sir,' said Dante Calicchio. He stopped the car where the driveway ended, and sat listening to the shrieking night - to what he imagined were whistling fish and great birds of prey, bears roaming the deep pines and an insect world of jungle ferocity.

  When Trumper hustled up the flagstone walk, his eye on the one lit room in the house, the master bedroom upstairs, Dante hustled after him uninvited. He had grown up in a tough neighborhood and felt perfectly comfortable going out for a late-night six-pack when no one else would venture abroad in less than gang numbers, but the stillness of the island really threw him and he had no intention of facing the teeming animal potential singing and scuffling in those bushes and trees all by himself.

  'What's your name?' Trumper asked.

  'Dante.'

  'Dante?' Trumper said. A shot of light flickered down a hall of the house; a shaft stretched downstairs; a porch light went on.

  'Couth!' Trumper yelled. 'Heigh-ho!'

  If there's just two of them, Dante thought, I can handle the mothers. He felt the hundred-dollar bill in his crotch for reassurance.

  *

  I could recognize old Couth through the porch door, coming to let us in: that floppy bathrobe he wears which is cut from a patchwork quilt; the way he squinted through the screen at us. It must have given him a shock to see that hairy brute chauffeur in a doorman's uniform swatting at the mosquitoes as if they were carnivorous birds, but it must have been even more of a shock to see me.

  I could tell as soon as you let us in, Couth, that you'd been dallying with a lady when we interrupted you. You wore her many perfumes like a bathrobe under the bathrobe you wore;
and from the way you stepped back from the chill of the open door, I could tell you were coming from some place warm.

  But what's it matter among friends. Couth? I hugged you, picked you right up off your feet, you scrawny bugger! You sure smelled good, Couth.

  Trumper lugged Couth into the kitchen, waltzing him around until they collided with a shiny new vinyl kiddie raft moored by the sink. Bogus didn't remember the Pillsburys having any small children. He sat Couth down on the butcher's block, kissed him on the forehead and left him gawking while he boomed affectionately, 'Couth, I can't tell you how glad I am to see you ... Here you are saving my life again ... You're the one fixed star in the heavens, Couth! Look - my beard's nearly as big as yours, Couth ... How are you? I've been awful, Couth, you probably know ...'

  And Couth just kept staring at him, and then looking at Dante Calicchio, a squat monster in uniform trying to keep politely out of the way in a corner of the kitchen and holding his driver's cap in his big-knuckled hands. While Trumper skipped around the kitchen, opening the refrigerator door, peering into the dining room, poking into the laundry alcove - where to his mischievous delight, he saw a wooden clothes rack with some lady's silky bras and panties hung up to dry.

  Plucking up the nearest bra, he waved it with a leer at Couth.

  'Who is she, you sly bugger?' he crackled, and once more he couldn't resist tickling his fingers playfully in the chin of Couth's long beard.

  But all Couth said was, 'Where have you been, Bogus? Where in hell have you been?'

  Trumper was quick to catch the accusing tone and knew that Couth had heard from Biggie. 'You've seen her, huh?' he asked. 'How is she, Couth?' But Couth looked away from him, as if he were going to cry, and Trumper quickly added, quickly scared, 'Couth, I've behaved rather badly, I know ...'

  He was twisting the bra in his hands and Couth took it away from him. Then, when he saw the bra in Couth's hands, Trumper suddenly thought, That's a mauve bra, and he remembered buying a bra so purple - a bra so big. He stopped talking; he watched Couth slip down from the butcher's block like some slow-moving meat which had been de-boned there; Couth went into the laundry alcove and put Biggie's bra back on the clothes rack.