How It Ended: New and Collected Stories (20 page)

Dr. McClarty makes the first official phone call of the day, to a pompous ass of a psychopharmacologist to get an opinion on Caruthers's medication—not that McClarty doesn't have an opinion himself, but he is required to consult a so-called expert. McClarty thinks Peganone would stave off the seizures just as effectively and more cheaply—which, after all, is his employer's chief concern—whereas Caruthers's chief concern, quite apart from his seizures, is catching that Klonopin buzz. Dr. Withers, who has already talked to Caruthers's lawyer, keeps McClarty on hold for ten minutes, then condescendingly explains the purpose and methodology of double-blind studies, until McClarty is finally forced to remind the good doctor that he
did
attend medical school. In fact, he graduated second in his class at the University of Chicago. Inevitably, they assume that a prison doctor is an idiot and a quack. In the old days, McClarty would have threatened to reach through the phone and rip this hick doctor's eyeballs out of his skull, ask him how he liked that for a double-blind study, but now he is content to hide out in his windowless office behind these three-foot-thick walls and let some other fucker find the cure for cancer. “Thank you very much,
Doctor
,” McClarty finally says, cutting the old geek off in midsentence.

Emma announces the next patient, Peters, the MoonPie-loving diabetic, then slams the door in parting. A fat man with a jellylike consistency, Peters is practically bouncing on the examining table. Everything about him is soft and slovenly except his eyes, which are hard and sharp, the eyes of a scavenger ever alert to the scrap beneath the feet of the predators. The eyes of a snitch.

McClarty examines his folder. “Well, Mr. Peters.”

“Hey, Doc.”

“Any ideas why your blood sugar's up to four hundred?”

“It's the diabetes, Doc.”

“I guess it wouldn't have anything to do with that stash of candy found in your cell this morning?”

“I was holding that stuff for a friend. Honest.”

Another common refrain here in prison, this is a line McClarty remembers fondly from his drug days. It's what he told his mother the first time she found pot in the pocket of his jeans. The guys inside have employed it endlessly; the gun in the shoes or the knife or the stolen television set always belongs to some other guy; they're just holding it for him. They never cease to profess amazement that the cops, the judge, the prosecutor, didn't believe them, that their own court-appointed lawyers somehow sold them out at the last minute. They are
shocked
. It's all a big mistake.
Honest. Would I lie to you, Doc?
They don't belong here in prison, and they're eager to tell you why. With McClarty, it's just the opposite. He
knows
he belongs in here. He dreams about it. It is more real to him than his other life, than Terri's breasts, than the ailing lawn outside these walls. But somehow, inexplicably, every day they let him walk out the door at the end of his shift. And back at Live Oakes, the guards wave him through the gate and inside the walls of that residential oasis as if he really were an upstanding citizen. Of course, technically he is not a criminal. The hospital did not bring charges, in return for his agreement to resign and go into treatment. On the other hand, neither the hospital administrators nor anybody else knew that it was he, McClarty, who had shot nurse Marcia De-Vane full of the Demerol she craved so very dearly less than an hour before she drove her car into the abutment of the bridge.

Terri calls just before lunch to report that the caretaker thinks the brown spots on the lawn are caused by cat urine. “I told him that's ridiculous; they're not suddenly peeing any more than they used to—oh, wait, gotta go. Kiss kiss. Don't forget about the Clausens, at seven. Don't worry, they're friends of Bill.” She hangs up before McClarty can tell her he might stop off at Unity Baptist on the way home.

Toward the end of the day, McClarty goes over to Block D to check the progress of several minor complaints. He is buzzed into the block by Santiago. “Hey, Doc, what you think about Aikman straining his ankle? Your Cowboys, they gonna be hurtin' till he come back.” Santiago labors cheerfully under the impression that McClarty is a big Dallas Cowboys fan, a notion that apparently developed after the doctor mumbled something to the effect that he really didn't pay much attention to the Oilers. McClarty has never followed sports, doesn't know Cowboys from Indians, but he is happy enough to play along, amused to find himself at this relatively late stage in life assigned to a team, especially after he heard the Cowboys referred to on television as “America's team.” Like eating at McDonald's, it makes him feel as if he were a fully vested member of the republic.

“Hey, Doc—that strain? That, like, a serious thing?”

“Could be,” McClarty says, able at last to offer a genuine opinion on his team. “A sprain could put him out for weeks.”

Santiago is jovial and relaxed, though he is the only guard on duty in a cell block of twenty-four violent criminals, most of whom are on the block this moment, lounging around the television or conspiring in small knots. If they wanted to, they could overpower him in a minute; it is only the crude knowledge of greater force outside the door of the block that keeps them from doing so. McClarty himself has almost learned to suppress the fear, to dial down the crackle of active malevolence that is the permanent atmosphere of the wards, as palpable as the falling pressure and static electricity before a storm. So he is not alarmed when a cluster of inmates moves toward him, Greco and Smithfield and two others, whose names he forgets. They all have their ailments and their questions and they're trotting over to him like horses crossing the field to a swinging bucket of grain.

“Hey, Doc!” they call out from all sides. And once again, he feels the rush that every doctor knows, the power of the healer, a taste of the old godlike sense of commanding the forces of life and death. This truly is the best buzz, but he could never quite believe it, or feel that he deserved it, and now he's too chastened to allow himself to really revel in the feeling. But he can still warm himself, if only briefly, in the glow of this tribal admiration, even in this harsh and straitened place. And for a moment he forgets what he has learned at such expense in so many airless, smoky church basements—that he actually is powerless, that his healing skills, like his sobriety, are on loan from a higher power, just as he forgets the caution he has learned from the guards and from his own experience behind these walls, and he doesn't see Lesko until it is too late, fat Lesko, who is feeling even nastier than usual without his Valium, his hand striking out from the knot of inmates like the head of a cobra, projecting a deadly thin silvery tongue. McClarty feels the thud against his chest, the blunt impact, which he does not immediately identify as sharp-instrument trauma. And when he sees the knife, he reflects that it's a damn good thing he isn't Terri, or his left breast implant would be punctured. As he falls into Lesko's arms, he realizes, with a sense of recognition bordering on relief, that he is back in the dream. They've come for him at last.

Looking up from the inmate roster, Santiago is puzzled by this strange embrace—and by the expression on McClarty's face as he turns toward the guard booth. “He was smiling,” Santiago will say afterward, “like he just heard a good one and wanted to tell it to you, you know, or like he was saying,
Hey, check out my bro Lesko here
.” Santiago will tell the same thing to his boss, to the board of inquiry, to the grand jury and to the prosecutor, and he will always tell the story to the new guards who train under him. It will never cease to amaze him—that smile. And after a respectful pause and a thoughtful drag on his cigarette, Santiago will always mention that the doc was a big Cowboys fan.

1996

Getting in Touch with Lonnie

Jared let his parched eyes slide across the soothing green lawns, watching the impeccable houses sail past the cab window. Colonials, mostly—the indigenous style here in Protestant-refugee country, some dating back to the exodus from the Old World. The twisty roads, paved and widened deer paths, the old stone walls, the deep green shade of oak and maple—all this was second nature to him. After two years, he wondered if he would ever become comfortable with palm trees and the architectural miscegenation of Los Angeles. In fact, he was thinking of moving back East. A town like this, maybe. He didn't have to live in Manhattan any more than he had to live in L.A. They would come to him now. Send a car (with a bar and a phone, please). He regretted not hiring a car and driver in Manhattan for the round-trip, but he had thought Laura would consider it ostentatious. He could've made some calls on the way up. One thing he had to do was call Lonnie. That was one thing you got used to in L.A., car phones. The phone he could live without, but this cab he'd picked up at the train station seemed to date back to the Frank Capra era. Jared felt he was suffering some kind of serious chiropractic malpractice, between the springs sticking through the backseat and the potholes, whose regular shocks seemed to travel directly up his spinal column without being even faintly absorbed.

Laura had tried to persuade him to move out to Connecticut a few years back, to the kind of place they'd both grown up in. And now she's finally made it back to the suburbs, he thought, feeling clever for just a moment, then guilty. The cabdriver kept looking up into the rearview mirror. Jared was becoming familiar with, but by no means tired of, that particular look.

“Hey, excuse me—but aren't you that actor?”

Jared nodded, his manner at once shy and weary.

“Yeah, I thought you were. Don't tell me. What's your name?”

Jared told him.

“Right, that's it. All right. You were in that movie.”

“Been in a few,” Jared noted.

“How about that? This is great. I woke up this morning, I had a feeling something was gonna happen today. You know what I mean?”

“I had the same feeling,” Jared said.

“So, you checking into the Valley?” the driver asked.

It took Jared a minute to understand the question. Then he said, “Me? No, I'm not checking in. I'm just visiting my … I'm visiting someone.”

“Hey, no offense. Lots of famous people come through here. In fact, this place is kind of famous for that. Of course, they come here so they can, you know, have their privacy. No publicity. I could tell you some names, man.”

“I'm just visiting,” Jared said.

“Okay, sure. Listen, do you think you could sign your autograph for my kid?”

They pulled up a long tree-lined driveway to a cluster of buildings that once might have composed the estate of a prosperous gentleman farmer, or a small New England prep school—a Georgian mansion surrounded by white clapboard satellites on several acres of blue-green lawn. Hard to believe this haven was just over an hour from the city. After only a day and a half back in Manhattan, he remembered how compressed and accelerated life could be. Exhausting. Living in New York was like being on location for a movie that never wrapped.

God, I'm wiped, he thought, which reminded him that he needed to call Lonnie. Of course he wasn't sure if Lonnie was even in town.

Signing his autograph on the back of a taxi receipt, he heard his name called out. Laura was waving from the door of one of the houses, a large black woman beside her. Jared strode across the striped lawn, the two women coming out to meet him. Thinner than ever, Laura threw her arms around him and squeezed as hard as she was able. When she finally came up for air, he saw that the worry creases across her forehead had deepened. It had been three months since he'd seen her. She was still beautiful in her distress, a tall and elegant, if rather too angular, brunette. Her eyes fastened on his, tugging at him, asking for answers to all of her questions. As a kid, Jared had been terrified by an old, supposedly bottomless quarry near his house, and that image often came to mind when he thought about the depth and vastness of Laura's need. She required so much love, her childhood stunted by some sort of emotional malnutrition, and he'd grown more and more unhappy and, finally, angry as he discovered his inability to deliver enough of it. Somehow, the worse he felt, the worse he behaved.

“This is Dorene,” Laura said, drawing back to indicate the companion at her elbow. “Dorene's my special.”

“Your what?”

“She's like my nurse. She stays with me.”

Jared shook Dorene's hand, then glanced back at Laura. “All the time?”

“No, of course not. She's with me from seven to three, and from three to eleven another nurse comes on. Then there's the night shift.”

“You have somebody sleep with you?”

“She sits in the chair beside the bed.”

“This is all so …” Jared halted, then nodded and tried to smile.

Laura nodded and shrugged. “They think I'm still suicidal. I don't know. Some days I am.” She looked down at the ground. “Sorry,” she said. “I know it's tremendously expensive.” Though her face and her voice had been animated for a moment with the excitement of seeing him, she spoke now in the barely audible monotone he had come to know over the phone this past month.

“Forget it,” Jared said, happy that there was something he could feel noble about. The fact he was paying for this made him feel a little less guilty about everything that had happened. She had said it wasn't his fault, really, that all of the demons of her childhood had broken out of their cages at once, that it went back way before him. Her sadness over the dissolution of their marriage was just one more thing—not the sole cause of this acute depression, which had finally required hospitalization. Meanwhile, his friends told him that no one can be entirely responsible for the happiness of another human being.

Jared felt he should lighten the mood, particularly with a stranger hovering a few feet away. “You know, Dorene,” he said in a phony-sounding drawl, “ever since I was a kid I've always thought I was kind of special. But it must be nice to
know
you're a special.”

It was weak, he knew, but she rewarded him with a smile anyway.

“You want to see my room?” Laura asked.

“Great,” he said, and together the three of them started across the grass back to the house. Suddenly remembering, Jared reached into the pocket of his jacket and handed Laura a small gift-wrapped package.

“I'm afraid I'll have to open that,” Dorene said, reaching for it quickly. Suddenly she smiled a little sheepishly and returned the box to Laura. “Sorry, it's just rules. But I don't suppose just this once …”

“Thanks,” Jared said, looking her in the eyes.

“I sure liked that movie of yours.”

Laura stopped walking, bringing them all to an abrupt and awkward halt. “Take it,” she said, holding the box out to Dorene. “Go ahead, take it. Rules are rules.” Reluctantly, Dorene reclaimed it.

“This is my tiny little part of the world,” Laura said to him. “It's not much. But the funny farm's all I've got right now. You have the rest of America. So please don't try to charm everyone right off the goddamn bat, okay?”

Laura had decorated the room with her old stuffed animals, a number of framed photographs, including two of Jared, and several painted baskets he'd never seen. Two windows overlooked the woods and a stream. A hospital bed with metal railings provided the institutional note.

Sitting on the bed beside Jared, Laura opened her gift, a bottle of Chanel perfume. “It's No. 19,” she said.

“Your fave,” he said.

“I can't stand No. 19. It's No.
5
I like.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I'm sure. I hate No. 19.” She threw the bottle down, and Dorene quietly retrieved it from the carpet.

“I'd swear it was No. 19 you liked,” he said.

“One of your other girls,” Laura said.

Jared had bought her the stuff for years, and couldn't believe he would forget. But there had been several Chanel purchases since he and Laura were together.

“Wait a minute, for Christ's sake. Remember a week ago, when I told you I was flying to London for that awards thing and we discussed how I should call Tony and Brenda and Ian and Carol and on and on, and when I called a couple nights later, you said,‘What are you doing in London?’ After we'd talked about it for half an hour?”

“So? I'm sorry, my short-term memory's not so hot. The doctors said it was a symptom of the depression.”

“So maybe you forgot what number perfume you like.”

“Jared, you're unbelievable. You could talk yourself off death row and steal the warden's wife on your way out.”

“Never worked on you,” Jared said, wondering if the nurse was used to witnessing these sorts of scenes.

“Unfortunately, it still does,” Laura said. “I want you back.”

“What are you, crazy?” he said, unsure if he was trying to deflect the sudden seriousness of this meeting by hamming it up.

She held out her palms, indicating the room. “It would appear so.”

“This is Wharton House,” Laura said, stopping in front of one of the largest houses in the complex once they were back outside. “The substance-abuse facility.”

Jared nodded.

“I wanted you to see it. It's modeled on Hazelden, and supposedly it's a really successful program. You'd like a lot of the people in there. Writers, actors, professors. There's this one guy I really want you to meet. Rob—amazing guy. He's made a fortune on Wall Street—”

“Why in the world would I want to meet a
stock
broker?” Jared said, gently tugging at Laura's elbow in hopes of accelerating their tour of the grounds.

“I don't know, I just thought of you the minute I met him. He's got these eyes like yours. Anyway, he's in for cocaine. Used to deal to all these stars, besides running his own investment firm. He's had an incredible life, lived with that model who's on the cover of
Cosmo
all the time and then—”

“You hate people like that, Laura.”

“Eventually he started going to Colombia to buy quantity himself, so he gets busted and put in jail in Cartagena. But within two weeks he has these mercenaries blow up the jail and smuggle him out of the country. Anyway,
I
think you'd like him. He's really smart.”

“If I told you about this guy, you'd say he sounds like an asshole.”

“He's charming. And besides, I admire his courage in coming here. That takes even more guts than breaking out of jail.”

“Sounds like love.”

“No,” she said. “Except insofar as he reminds me of you.”

“That's one of the things I've missed about you,” Jared said. “The way you use
insofar as
in conversation. Or
ergo
. We don't get that out in L.A. much. Anyway, I've never been to jail or to Cartagena, either one.”

“'Bout time we headed up for lunch,” said Dorene.

On the walk up the drive to the main house, they were joined by some of Laura's housemates. Eric, whom Laura had mentioned several times on the phone, was a gentleman of sixty and a professor of religion at Yale. He was not visibly depressed or sedated.

“Has Laura told you she's our best basket maker,” Eric asked.

“I'm an arts and crafts hero,” Laura said. “I'm thinking of opening up a crafts boutique after I get out of here. Call it the Basket Case.”

After they moved through the cafeteria line, Laura introduced Jared to those seated around the table.

“Just arrive today?” said Tony, a young man with a scimitar-shaped scar across his throat.

Jared nodded, his mouth full of cold, tough veal.

“Where are you, Wharton House?”

“I'm just visiting,” Jared said.

“He's my husband,” Laura explained.

“Oh, I see.”

Jared wondered if the man was perhaps making a point by pretending not to know who he was.

The talk around the table was of the food and pharmacopoeia—prescribed dosages of antidepressants and lethal dosages of self-administered medication. Connie, a recently admitted middle-aged housewife—blond and seemingly cheerful—had tried to kill herself with Valium, thirty of the five-milligram yellows. But she threw up, and everyone told her it wouldn't have done the trick anyway.

“Thirty of the blues might possibly have done it,” Jared added, eliciting a fairly general agreement around the table. “Thirty Seconals would do the trick. But for real sledgehammer results, Dilaudids are your best bet. Thirty of those would kill you and your two best friends, plus their household pets.” That got a laugh. “Three thousand in the water supply would take out a medium-size city.” Then in Ronald Reagan's voice, he said, “The hell with nuclear weapons, you damn Commies, we got the neuron bomb.”

Everyone laughed except Laura, whose eyes he avoided.

Jackson, a Unitarian minister, told how he had closed his garage door, climbed into the Oldsmobile, inserted a tape in the cassette player and hit the ignition. When the tape turned over for the second play and he found himself still conscious, if nauseous, he gave up and went back into the house.

“It was a new car, a 1988,” he said. “The new emissions-control systems are so good, you can't even kill yourself.”

“What was the tape?” Laura asked.

“Pachelbel.”

“Good choice. I love his chaconne.”

“Thank you, Laura.”

Laura's approach to the world had always been slightly skewed. Was that a function of the imbalances that had landed her here, or just her charming eccentricity? Jared loved her, was still unable to divorce her after almost two years of separation. Sometimes he suspected he was afraid to let go because she was the only person who wouldn't allow him to reinvent himself completely, turn himself into something bright and shiny and superficial. So many old friends had been replaced by new ones. Laura was perhaps his last chance to remember and preserve the best of what he had been. On the other hand, was success such a crime? Everybody changes, so why did she insist that he was both selling and destroying his soul? At worst, he was just visiting Babylon on a round-trip ticket. Which reminded him.