Mimi (7 page)

But I could call Bee. Bee would help me. Bee always had an answer and she was usually right—except for that time she made me dress up like Little Lord Fauntleroy and drag her through the hot streets of Virtue and Chewing Gum, while
she
sat in splendor on our little red wagon: our contribution to the Fourth of July parade. Bee was Fauntleroy’s mother, I was the truth-telling, charity-giving goo
f
ball. We really killed that day—killed a lot of patriotism anyway.

“Why would you want to talk to those bozos?” was Bee’s first question, once I got hold of her.

She was in a bad mood. Her Canterbury patrons had pulled the plug on one of her Coziness Sculptures. Bee, the least “cozy” character I ever came across, had started making these emblems of domestic calm and peace she called Coziness Sculptures some time back: they consisted of assemblages of found or bought materials which she housed in tamper-proof Perspex boxes and displayed in public spaces, to work as subliminal mood-enhancers for passers-by, “a salve for anxiety and despair.” She’d discovered that the English populace was in particular need of cheering up, and as soon as she got to Canterbury, had made it her mission to comfort them. So it was a blow to be told her efforts were not deemed worthwhile.

The latest (rejected) Coziness Sculpture was a peaceful fireside scene involving a comfy armchair, a glass of wine, foxed leatherbound book lying open on an antique table, small Persian carpet on the floor; everything suffused in a warm, soft yellowish light supplied partly by the (pretend) fire and partly by an art deco lamp on the table. But her patrons (through their representative, some guy Bee couldn’t stand) were quibbling about the cost. They wanted her to use a
paperback
or no book at all, a junk-shop table covered by a fake lace tablecloth, a cheap ugly armchair, a mat painted to
look
like a Persian carpet, and no lamp—she was supposed to light the whole scene with hideous low-energy bulbs. In Bee’s opinion, no “coziness” would result.

“I saved them money on the fireplace!” she said, referring to some sort of clever hidden flickering-light effect she’d been working on, suggestive of a log fire just out of sight. “The whole
point
was to have a nice old copy of
Our Mutual Friend
lying open at my favorite bit, when Eugene knocks Mr Boffin’s recommendation of bees as role models.” And she ran to get the passage so she could read it to me over the phone (when was she going to deal with
my
problems?).
“
‘I object on principle, as a two-footed creature,
’
” recited Bee, on her return,
“
‘to being constantly referred to insects and four-footed creatures. I object to being required to model my proceedings according to the proceedings of the bee.’?”

“I know, it’s great,” I agreed (thinking of Bette’s scary mother in
Now, Voyager
who mockingly remarks, “Are we getting into botany, Doctor? Are we
flowers
?”).

“This is the bit I really like. . .
,
” Bee continued.
“
‘Conceding for a moment that there is any analogy between a bee and a man in pantaloons (which I deny), and that it is settled that a man is to learn from the bee (which I also deny), the question still remains, what is he to learn?. . .
They work; but don’t you think they overdo it?. . . And are human labourers to have no holidays, because of the bees?. . .
And am I never to have a change of air, because the bees don’t?’ The guy’s a genius!” Bee said. “The only good thing about being here is that Dickens spent a lot of time in Kent.”

“I’ll beat him from top to bottomus,” I said, trying to cheer her up with our old Bert Lahr game.

“Who, Dickens?”

“No, your hippopotamus of a
patron
,” I said. “They commissioned you, right? And now they’re making trouble about it.”

“Yeah, I know. If you don’t like my peaches, don’t shake my tree! . . .
But their minion’s more like a crocodile.”

“I’d add him to the woodpile!”

“Or maybe a gnu.”

“I’d show ’im the ol’ one-two!”

“Canterbury’s such a dump.”

“I’d give it a big red lump!”

“Did I ever tell you about the water?”

“I’d take it to the slaughter!”

“No, Harry, listen! It’s full of white stuff. It leaves white rings on all your glassware.
Scum
forms on the top of my tea that looks like tectonic plates!”

“Try a cup.”

Bee finally attended to my dilemma and came up with an idea: look in the phonebook, maybe I could find an evening class in public speaking or something. This was quite a concession on her part, since I’d driven her nuts as a teenager by reading phonebooks for pleasure (sometimes out loud!). But once again she was right. There were millions of people in the
Yellow Pages
who claimed to be experts in public speaking, after-dinner talks, wedding speeches, PowerPoint pontification and corporate presentations: a whole hierarchy of coaches, consultants, professors, presentation maestri and mentors, trainers, gurus, shamans, and lamas were gathered there, all pretty eager to present themselves if nothing else. But I finally settled on a guy called M. Z. Fortune, because he held seminars in New York (everybody likes a “seminar”) and had a sideline teaching firemen how to give presentations. (What did they give speeches about? Dalmatian care? Maybe they were much in demand at arsonists’ conferences.) I’d always had a soft spot for firemen (and their
vehicles
). Firemen seemed much superior to cops. Firemen are noble—and so tidy! All they do is rescue cats and people, comfort them, and establish order out of chaos. They make
nice
. Even without the 9/11 massacre, you can’t beat firemen for heroism. I think I now felt that even being
indirectly
connected to firemen might somehow help me with my speech, so I emailed this M. Z. Fortune for an appointment.

Then I sat down to play the piano. Lately I’d been playing Smetana, Ligeti and Scriabin, but now I tried Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s “Collage-Montage,” a piece that reminded me maybe too much of
Gertrude
: it’s a medley of explosions, confusions, disagreements, rifts, sulks, and slammed doors, all of which Aimard (like Berlioz!) seems to have a terrible time bringing to an
end
(
just as I did with Gertrude). I worked my way toward the finish now with all due vigor and determination.

Fortune soon replied. We arranged to meet for lunch at Kelley & Ping (my choice) on Groundhog Day, which was only a couple of weeks away. He suggested I read his book in the meantime,
The People’s Guide to Presentations
, and bring it to the restaurant so he’d recognize me. I was in deep now: reading a self-help manual? Dickens, I imagined, it was not.

Actually, Bee doesn’t
always
know everything in the Ant and Bee books. In
Ant and Bee and the Rainbow
, it’s
Bee
who gets all bent out of shape. . . He can’t keep up with Ant in this one at all. They agree on how to paint the old tire to look (a bit) like a rainbow (“So Ant and Bee happily began to paint the rubber tyre with the colour called. . . RED”, etc.), but it soon emerges that Ant’s got a better color sense than Bee. Ant paints his ping-pong bat VIOLET, while Bee paints his a hideous BROWN! A brown bat hardly compares with a violet one, but nobody says anything.

I learned most of what I know about mixing colors from this book. But you have to feel sorry for Angela Banner. The woman never saw sunshine in her life! England had continuous cloud cover, according to Bee. No wonder Banner knew nothing about color—you’ve got to go to the French Riviera like Matisse, or just
be
Italian
. The lack of sun explains the melancholy muted light in all Ant and Bee books—and why Ant and Bee have to create their own rainbow in the first place, painting that tire they find half-buried in the unreal earth.

GROUNDHOG DAY

LIST OF MELANCHOLY

– the pigeon couple on the parapet outside, one dying, the other standing helplessly by

– continuous cloud cover

– the penny-pinching English, who wouldn’t give Bee her art deco lamp

– artist-in-residence posts

– phonebooks

– the word, “churlish”—Bee had giggled when I said it might be churlish of me to refuse Chevron High’s invitation

– people who attempt to dissuade other people from using words like “churlish”

– balloon animals

– self-conscious ten-year-olds

– accordions

– crapholes of the famous (Bee had given me a coffee-table book for Christmas)

– whale eyes, cow eyes, elephant eyes

– Velcro

– returning to work after a period of intense inactivity

Living in New York you cannot fail to notice millions of people heading godknowswhere, and this cannot fail to fill you with melancholy. They eat, they sleep, they shit, they stink, they speak. Some speak only to
themselves
, and I was getting like that too. It was time to go back to work.

The girls in the office made a big fuss of me and my limp and my cane, and cooed over all my other assorted ailments too—I spared them the burned tongue but owned up to the sore thumb. Cheryl, our trainee nurse, said just thinking about my thumb injury made her feel faint. Some nurse! (In her defense, her professionalism was compromised by infatuation: she had a wholly unrequited crush on me.) Soon it felt like I hadn’t been away for a month at all, like I hadn’t been away for a
moment
. The receptionists, Jean and Cathy, saw me as a welcome depository for all the office gossip they’d been stewing over alone, and kept rushing into my office every ten minutes with a new ice pack and tidbit of news, keen to get me up to speed on my colleagues’ every bout of public drunkenness, their displays of impatience, the sniping, the griping, the fits of crying, the secretiveness. . . One intern had seen about ten patients in a row with his fly open, but it seemed to have been a genuine mistake, not a sign of some poignant aberration. Jean told me which patients had croaked, either before or after treatment; Cathy, that a sweet doorman had died in my absence, shot dead near his home trying to stop a fight; a fund had been set up for his wife and kids. Some workman had slipped on the newly waxed floor by the elevator, surfed on his stomach down the hallway and broken his nose, but he’d been offered a free nose-job to stop him suing.

All the stuff of office life. If it weren’t for the adoring Cheryl though, I might never have heard about the antics of Jed Stockton, MD, a preppy junior doctor who’d not only participated in a weekend of tag-teaming with a bunch of fellow med students, but filmed the whole episode on his cell phone, and was now offering to show it around the office to anyone who’d look. I asked Stockton to come into my office—but
not
in order to check out his directorial debut.

“How you doing, Harrison?”

“Who was the girl involved, Jed, may I ask?”

“You heard, huh?” He seemed pretty pleased with himself. “She’s a nurse. You know what they’re like. She doesn’t mind, she likes it! We’re always going over to her place when there’s nothing else happening. She’s keen. Well, you know, keen on
me
, and if she wants me, she’s got to put up with my crowd. That’s the deal.”

“Refer to the manual, Jed,” I suggested, when he finally shut up. “This isn’t how doctors are supposed to behave.” He seemed truly perplexed: never had his camera work been received with so little enthusiasm. “Jed, I’m afraid you’ll have to take your questionable bedside manner elsewhere. I’m letting you go.”

Sure, there were plenty of ties hung on the doorknob when I was a med student, the stuff you do to prove you’re a red-blooded American male. And cadaver fun of course—finding body parts in your bed or your beer. But we did draw the line at gang rape. I even got over my little propofol habit pretty fast—I didn’t need Michael Jackson to
die
of it to know I had to stop (or did he die of plastic surgery?): I got tired of waking up not knowing who or where I was (and I was priapic enough, I felt, without any help from “milk of amnesia”). Martinis, Bloody Marys and sleep became my chosen forms of oblivion from then on.