She Took My Arm As If She Loved Me (3 page)

“Hey?” I inquired.

He raised his left eyebrow. I don't put up with that kind of elegance in a stupid deadbeat dad, so then both his eyebrows suddenly shot up in a much more satisfying kind of surprised inquiry as I grabbed him by the collar, taking fistfuls of cloth and neck, and lifted him forward so I could conveniently yell into his nose: “Far-staysh, Mr. Asshole? Far-staysh?” Suddenly I was transformed into a crazy individual shouting something that made no sense to him.

“Hey, watch it, watch it, don't, I'm sorry.” He was mumbling and white faced.

“Far-staysh means do you fucking understand?”

“I do.” It was like a wedding. “Hey, let go.” He wriggled, he struggled. For some reason I seemed to have lifted him slightly off the floor, a trick of deadbeat levitation. “Hey, come on, please.”

“Do you plan to write a check for your wife and kid—” I released his collar and wiped my hands on my pants. I hate getting deadbeat slobber on my hands. “Okay, calm down. Write the check right now, while we're both thinking about it, okay?”

“Okay, okay, watch it, Mr. Kasdan.”

“I know you're a man of honor, so I won't ask for certified paper, but somehow I just know you're gonna have the check covered by the time I hand it over to your wife. Am I right in that? I trust you, asshole. 'Cause you just know in your heart of hearts it's the decent thing to do and if the check bounces I'll be back.” I grabbed him again. “So you say you far-staysh.” Grabbed him tightly.

“Far…” (Strangled.) “… staysh.”

“Now write. I'll just run a little clean water on my hands while I'm waiting.”

I wash my hands before peeing, because it's a precious object I'm about to handle, a sacramental gift of God, and also after grabbing a deadbeat's neck, because it's a dirty, dirty thing at best. Also helps to cool down.

“Thanks for your consideration, asshole.”

He was fingering the red blotches on his neck, which looked a little like monkeybites from his chocolate bunny. I wondered how he would explain them to her. He caught me looking at him. What else should I do? He pulled a check and started writing.

“Hey, asshole?”

“What?”

“I said thanks, so say you're welcome. You hardly know me and already I'm helping you take care of your kid back in San Francisco.”

He wrote. I pocketed.

“Mr. Kasdan, you didn't need to do that.”

I shrugged and turned out my palms in my Jewishest way. “Maybe not, but in my business a person has to make judgment calls. Time is money and none of us is getting rich off this. You were a case of judgment call, so what can we do?”

“You could have…” It trailed off.

“But I'm sorry if I called you a deadbeat, and for that I apologize, asshole.” I sincerely wanted him to remember me.

*   *   *

I flew home to San Francisco and said to the client: “You married him, but I'm also wed to him now. He accepted my offer not to have him hurt.”

“How much do I owe you, Mr. Kasdan?”

There's the airfare, the Budget rent-a-car, the Motel 6. There's the per diem.

“Mr. Kasdan?”

I was thinking of Priscilla and Jeff; my wife, ex-wife, former wife, love; my son. I answered something.

Chapter 3

When a man breaks up with a ladyfriend or grows older, which seems to happen all the time—and to other folks besides me, and even, I understand, to women—it's probably best to fill the idle hours with a complete physical checkup. One of those things you do when you've got nothing to do. I definitely needed tangible in my life.

My pal Doctor Weinberg, Fred, asked me to blow hard. I blew into some kind of puffer-fish ballooning device. I did this proudly because I don't smoke. I imagined carefree scuba diving off some lovely tropical reef.

Fred frowned. “Do it again.”

I concentrated and this time imagined thrashing against flinty coral, bleeding, gasping, and drowning. Fred performed snapping, putting-away motions. “Okay.” He looked gloomy and depressed.

“Okay? Just okay?”

“Better'n I do.”

I had to be content with doing better than my gray, overweight doctor who was born the same year as I was. It wasn't a whole lot of praise; he wasn't offering gratuitous comfort. I wasn't going to tell him about my hearing (the tintinnabulation of the bells, bells, bells) because I didn't want any useless sympathy or useful suggestions about audiologists.

He took blood. They would run the complete set on me; insurance pays for most of it. “I don't have AIDS,” I told him. He grunted. He and the lab would be the judge of that.

Now he sighed and tried to pretend it was just ordinary breathing he was undergoing. “Bend over, please.”

Hey, pal. But I knew this part all too well. My pants were down at my ankles. (What if there was an earthquake and I had to run?) The snapping sound was not that patriotic one of Old Glory in the breeze; Fred was slipping on his mayonnaise-colored disposable rubber gloves.

“Oh no,” I said.

“Oh yes,” he said.

“It makes me seasick,” I said.

I clutched the edge of the table while my innards objected to the whole interlude. His finger was reaching through my butt toward my prostate. I was wondering what he did when folks were constipated. Oh, I didn't like this; a world that allows such procedures on a totally healthy person is all askew. I lurched in sympathy with myself.

He mumbled explanations. “Smooth is okay. Rough is not so okay. The PSA test is conclusive, plus margin of error.”

“I don't, uh, uh, uh, understand.”

He withdrew. I felt better. Some sort of lubricant was tickling my butt. Next hour, the same finger up a different patient.

“Feels just fine,” he said. “Slightly enlarged is normal. How many times you pee at night?”

“I drink lots of water.”

“How many times?”

“I drink coffee, too.”

“How many times?”

This guy, my pal, my doc, was uncivilized. He demanded the truth. “Well, one time. But then maybe a couple hours later, another time, And if I sleep seven–eight hours, just before my last dawn nap, oh—”

“Yes?”

“Not usually.”

“Sometimes?”

“One more time.”

He was writing. I was repeating myself about drinking one hell of a lot of water and coffee, or soda, beer, other liquids, or diuretic substances, maybe spices in my Mexican food, terrific digestion, eat out almost every night, always thirsty … tried the lite beers but don't really prefer them …

“Any diabetes in your family?” he asked.

“None! Never! Not!”

So I seemed to be getting away without telling him about my hearing loss, probably from an old war wound, too much rock and roll during my ten-year-long summer of love, and my occasional narcolepsy, falling asleep almost without warning when I was depressed, sometimes taking two naps a day—that isn't narcolepsy, it's escapism—and my lack of joy in my love arrangements; and then my wife, my former wife. Some things are none of a person's doctor-and-friend's goddamn business.

He was looking me straight in the eyes. “Have any problems with anhedonia?”

The question exasperated me. “Some people say ‘prostrate.' I get it right. I leave out the
r.
But what the fuck is anhedonia?”

“Inability,” he began gloomily, sighing, “or difficulty … in feeling pleasure.”

“I come okay.”

“I mean pleasure in general. The deliciousness of the morning chill, the smile of a baby next door, the smell of the dew on the flower…”

“So why didn't you say? Yeah, sometimes I wonder if it's all worthwhile. Actually, there are other things I like better, Fred. The smile of a baby next door? Where I live it's more like raccoon doo-doo on the flowers.”

We sat looking at each other in silence, two men of a certain age, divorced, our children escaping into their own lives, the years inexorable. I doubted the entire world-historical import of the smell of morning dew. It was a good thing Fred stuck with medicine because his career as a lyric poet would have been a nonstarter. But I felt certain he too knew what it was like to have history buzzing in his ears, keeping him awake, giving him a bat's nighttime alertness, along with sudden hibernations during the day. Our distant cousins, the bears and bats; my immediate neighbors, the raccoons, fleas, and feral kids from the Projects.

“Old days, when I started out, we used to try thyroid or speed with vitamins, that turned out to be not so good an idea, or advice, the talking cure…”

“Yeah.”

“Now I say: Enjoy your naps. That's not narcolepsy.”

“And enjoy my anhedonia?”

He walked me to the door and made one of those growling Japanesey sighs. “How about a movie and the Early Bird dinner?” he asked. “You name the night, I got nothing on, either.”

We'd have to sit halfway down the aisle at the movies. He was farsighted, liked the rear, but I needed all the help I could get to pick up the sound track. A lot of healthy young folks prefer to sit forward, folks who can sort it all out in their heads, process the music when a Korean cutie is saying “Cling?” but means to ask “Drink?”

Getting old was a full-time occupation. I wasn't sure I still had the time for it.

Chapter 4

“Cling?”

High-energy Susie in her black tights and micro-mini, dictator of Korean pots and barbecue, supreme regulator of fermented cabbage for the masses, bounced impatiently on her toes and shouted her question over the counter of Hann's Hibachi,
cling! cling! cling!
tolling at me on Polk Street in San Francisco like a happy, high-pitched bell while I realized I was still growing older.

“Cling?”

I didn't understand her. I didn't speak Korean, but she looked as if I were supposed to. “Cling! Cling! Cling!”

“Pardon?” I asked, feeling desperate, wanting my garlicked shrimp, rice, tofu, and kimchee, wanting to be in tune with the world's doings.

She too was desperate. She tossed her head back and called out, gargling, “Glug-glug-glug,” and then I knew she had been asking me “Drink?”

“Tea,” I said.

And so over my late-afternoon seafood snack, including shrimp and mixed fish, mostly shrimp and oily sprouts, I faced the fact that my hearing was less acute than it used to be; also my brain processed information at a slower pace; and I didn't finish my plate, either.

The program for today was fuller than usual. This morning I had watched Jeff play indoor field hockey, along with the mothers and a few distracted fathers—he darted like a fish, which should have made me feel good and sort of did. Now I was scheduled for Korean barbecue and a visit with Alfonso; then a serious scrub of teeth with the toothbrush I kept in my pocket (bachelor hygiene); then a visit with Carol.

Alfonso had said not to hold my order for him. He had stupid paperwork down at the station house and you know how the stupid paperwork goes. I was temporarily alone with fermented pickled cabbage and faulty ears, waiting for my friend who was also my police-force resource, personal assault and battery counselor, and fellow bachelor. We didn't play on a level playing field. I was older, less wise, and more discouraged, but he carried the extra weight around his ass and middle.

“For I am the voice of your conscience,” Alfonso was saying, slopping into his chair and reaching for a shrimp from my plate. I hadn't seen or heard him coming, though I would no longer say my buddy moved like a cat.

I greeted him with characteristic enthusiasm: “You're getting fat, Alfons.”

“A healthy conscience knows no limitations to size.”

“Now you've got some kind of barbecue sauce on your face.”

He swiped fastidiously across his mouth with his wrist and then transferred the gunk to a paper napkin. “But a good conscience does keep clear, agendawise,” he said. “You sleeping any better?”

“Lots.”

“But better?”

I shrugged. I was a partisan of grief and complaint but hadn't determined when I crossed the border into maudlin and fanatic. I preferred not to be denounced by my old pal.

I tried a defensive action. “I been seeing this Carol,” I said.

He breathed heavily through his nose. He was struggling and failing to pick up a piece of my leftover tofu with his fingers. It kept mooshing apart, falling to the plate. I handed him a fork; he didn't say thanks. “Lonely nights, cheap grass, and lots of self-pity—hey, you got it made.”

“I don't need you to tell me this.”

He was licking his fingers. He was signaling to Susie for a cling of beer. He said to me, “It's gratuitous. It's a gift, pal, no extra charge. You're my early-warning system, so it's only right I offer you something in return. Someday maybe me, too, I'll gonna be old, skinny, and sorry for myself. And white.” He was grinning and oozing his caramel good nature at me. “Fat chance.”

“This Carol, you'd like her—”

“Good. Good. Stick up for yourself, my man. But I bet she ain't got any meat on her, right? Not anorexic, just a workout lady, right? I'll bet she's a natural-foods, sushi, ethnic-folk-health-munchies person, am I right there? Purple sweats? Runs every morning? Am I right?”

“Wrong,” I said. “Only part right.”

He gazed with longing eyes at my plate. There was a little rice left, one shrimp, a mound of Alfonso-fingered and abandoned tofu, that great spicy kimchee, which meant I had to do a lot of tooth brushing before I went to meet Carol. On a chlorophyll or Binaca scale my breath would still be at the low end of acceptability in contemporary San Francisco. “Didn't leave much for me, did you?” Alfonso asked. “And it's too early to buy dinner, so I'll just finish what you left. So you can tell me about this Carol.”