Mimi Page 6

  Today it was “Heiliger Dankgesang” though, the piece Beethoven wrote in response to a terrifying illness of his own (one of my choices), but the irony was lost on this crowd. Even if they’d wanted to, nobody could’ve heard the violins over the incredible din being produced by one family—various children, parents and a grandma. The main source of boisterousness was a little girl of about two and a half, who was racing around the room talking to herself. One of her arms was in a cast, but it didn’t stop her being feverishly active. The adults seemed united in trying to ignore her—but why didn’t one of them take this itchy kid out to a playground or something? They couldn’t all need cosmetic surgery.

  The child was in a world of her own and her restlessness was troubling. It was maniacal. I watched as she approached the decorative column in the middle of the waiting room that our designer had persuaded us looked “Grecian” (though it seemed straight out of Star Trek—when they beam themselves onto some planet that looks beatific but proves to be an illusion, really just hot rocks and craters). The kid was no aesthete: she embraced this stupid plaster pillar passionately and started humping, grinding her hips against it in mock-ecstasy. She was doing a very professional-looking pole dance in our waiting room! She knew all the moves. Somehow, I didn’t think this was the kind of “fun” Andy had in mind.

  The child kept looking behind her for approval—not from everybody, just her dad—she was looking his way the whole time she pumped and twirled. I caught the guy’s eye and could see it all immediately: he had made this tiny kid watch porn and act it out for him at home. He was the one who’d taught her this stuff. He looked guilty as hell, pretending not to notice what she was up to. You could tell this wasn’t his customary stance, since the kid seemed so surprised by his indifference to her porno efforts. She was obviously used to getting more of a rise out of him than this. And what was with the broken arm? Had he done that to her too perhaps, when she refused to play the game?

  The next time I caught his eye, he’d governed his shame and stared back at me with defiance. I retreated to my office, shaking. I tried to calm myself by thinking of Bubbles. What was she doing right now? Probably sleeping on the window seat in the sun, dreaming of the bad old days with Styrofoam Santa, incarcerated in her bike igloo. I had tried to make up for all that by keeping her warm and well fed ever since, giving her a life of coziness and Fancy Feast (a life I kind of envied right now).

  My reverie was interrupted by Cheryl bringing in my next patient, the pole-dancer’s mother, who sat down and didn’t say anything. This happens a lot. Patients seem to expect me to point out to them what their particular eyesore is: they’ve worried about it so much that, by the time they come see someone, they think it’s obvious (even if it’s penile dysfunction!).

  “Well, what can I do for you today?” I prodded.

  She shrugged.

  “Is there something specific you came to see me about?”

  “Well, look at them!”

  “Um, at… what?” I asked.

  She indicated her breasts. I waited. It really wasn’t my job to preemptively decide what the patient’s particular area of self-doubt was. Finally, she gathered herself and said, “They’re too big. My husband said so.” (Of course they’re too big for him, lady—the guy likes little girls!)

  I dutifully did some measurements of her small, symmetrical breasts, as if studying the problem from a medical point of view, then announced authoritatively, “Your breasts are not too large. They’re perfectly in proportion to your body. Now, if they were causing you back pain, or—”

  “My husband wants me to get something done,” she replied dully.

  “No ethical practitioner would advise surgery under these circumstances,” I told her. This wasn’t strictly true. I did unnecessary boob-jobs all the time! Changing already acceptable breasts into breasts that were equally acceptable, but slightly different, was my forte. Nonetheless, I tried to weed out the ones who were just doing it because they hated themselves.

  Now she seemed on the verge of tears, and gestured dismissively at her chest. “But I can’t… keep… looking at these things!” I offered her a Kleenex and let her cry. With that husband, she was entitled to it. Then she asked again, “But couldn’t you do something?”

  I stuck to my guns about the surgery but finally asked, “Have you considered therapy?” Adding, “For your husband.”

  She looked blank. “Oh, he doesn’t have time for that… ” (Don’t be so sure, you dope—he has time to train his own kid to be a geisha girl!)

  I told her I’d need to consult one of my colleagues about her case, and got her to go back to the waiting room. The truth was, most of my colleagues would happily take on this breast reduction. Hell, they’d do a female circumcision on their own mothers if they were paid enough. Bit heavy on the scalpels, light on the scruples, I sometimes felt. I didn’t consult any of them. I went straight to the receptionists’ private office instead and told Cathy to call the cops. Cheryl got all excited.

  “Why? Why?!”

  “Don’t ask,” I told her, feeling that if I went into the whole thing right then, I might throw up. “Just get them over here and keep that family in the waiting room until they come.”

  I limped back to my office, wishing I had a bucket of cold water to pour over my head. Boy, great to be back! But my next patient made me feel better—a young woman in a miniskirt and spaghetti-strap top, who strode in and started joking around.

  “Nice office,” she remarked. “See you’re keeping the flower thing going in here.”

  “Flowers!?”

  I swiveled my chair around and found that somebody (Cheryl?) had shoved a whole basin-load of tiger lilies on the window sill behind me. I hadn’t even noticed before, but now the perfumed stink of them was dizzying. I turned back to the girl with a look of perplexity and she laughed. But what could her problem be, I wondered. She looked confident enough, though I thought she must be cold. Why do women have to display so much bare flesh these days, as if advertising constant sexual availability?

  “When I was a kid,” I told her, “we dressed up to go to the doctor. Now it’s like everybody’s off to the beach—in midwinter!”

  “You sound like my dad. I do have a coat, you know.”

  “And a very healthy metabolism, I guess.”

  “What about you? You’re wearing sneakers! Call yourself a doctor in that getup?”

  “You win.” I liked her. Sassy patients are the best. “Anyway, what can I do for you today?”

  She slowly pulled up a portion of her minuscule top, to reveal a long straight scar cut diagonally across her middle. How could a girl this savvy and sophisticated have gotten herself knifed?

  “Yeah,” she said, in response to my questioning look. “My very dumped boyfriend did it to me.”

  “Why? I mean, how did it happen?”

  “I stayed out too late, or didn’t fold his newspaper right. I don’t even remember. The guy was impossible. The trouble is, I can’t wear half my clothes anymore. I can’t let people see this! So I, uh, wondered if there’s something you could do about it. Can you hide it or something?”

  What is it with women? Pole dancing at two, and by twenty they’re running around half-naked getting stabbed. And now, she was at a great social disadvantage, since more and more surface area has to be provided, blemish-free, for public view. Even the midriff, always a tricky area, is now subject to scrutiny. It took all the plastic surgeons of Manhattan to keep up with the midriff demand: muffin-top lipos were selling like hot cakes, and this poor kid’s social life might dry up if I didn’t disguise her scar.

  Cheryl burst in as planned.

  “Cheryl,” I said sternly. “Don’t just barge in when I’m with a patient.” What a ham. This was a well-rehearsed routine of ours, designed to make the patient feel more important. Except, this time it was for real: the police had arrived. So I booked Miss Back Talk in for a pre-surgery checkup and joined the cops, who looked none to
o thrilled by their nebulous task. They were already skeptical about finding any evidence, and probably despised me for making them fill out forms. But they took a statement from me at least, and talked briefly to the dad in an empty consulting room. He gave me the gimlet eye as he left with them for further questioning at the station, with his family trailing along behind. I wondered if anything would come of it. But so what if they couldn’t prove anything? At least the guy had had a scare.

  As a result of my firing Jed, calling in the cops, and using a cane, Cheryl’s crush had now taken on a note of fawning. I teased her a bit, saying, “Ah well, Cheryl, not everything can be cured with a nip and a tuck, you know. Sometimes we have to call in the big guns.” Then, in a cloud of glory, left for my lunch with M. Z. Fortune, my corpsing advisor. I’d never been so thrilled to escape the office.

  In the taxi, my thoughts drifted back to Rosemary. I hadn’t known what I was doing. I ignored all the bad omens, persevering against the odds (and the eggs) in service to my hare-like lust, blithely copping a feel in front of the German Expressionist paintings she took me to see, or horsing around under hailstorms at the beach in Montauk, where Rosemary’s troubled parents had a summer place. I’d been impressed that Rosemary played the cello, until I realized she wasn’t just out of tune but couldn’t count to save her life. The poor girl had no sense of rhythm at all! She could sort of disguise her difficulties when playing Bach solo cello suites, since she was on her own with them (though she played them like exercises—no sign of any exquisite melancholy). But you have to be able to count if you want to play Beethoven and Brahms cello sonatas: I would try to accompany her on the piano but she’d always come in too early or too late and then bust out crying.

  She had no notion of time. Very late for assignations too. In the end, I suspect the late and the punctual will never really hit it off. Opposites attract, sure, and couples sometimes compensate for each other’s deficiencies, but a few similarities come in handy too. The tidy and the messy just grate on each other’s nerves until one of them dies. You need at least some agreement on vital issues, like a shared interest in wine, and how much of it to drink a night, or beach versus museum vacations, or what time to go to bed. And punctuality. (I also insist that my girlfriends share my nostalgia for the labels on Epicure cans, those polished, inedible-looking fruits set against a black background: exquisite melancholy! The images may look unappetizing, but Epicure cans have seen humanity through many tough times.)

  Rosemary’s mom was an alcoholic; it was the dad I was fascinated by. For a man whose wife spent half the year in the Betty Ford Clinic, he seemed remarkably affable, and very welcoming towards me. In response, I exhausted myself trying to show him what a good guy I was. I worked hard as a start-up surgeon more for Rosemary’s father’s benefit than my own or Rosemary’s. I tried to please her; I tried to please him. Somehow it wasn’t enough to impress a girl, I wanted to impress a man too! Then, just when I had her dad where I wanted him, coming at me with the cigars and the bonhomie, Rosemary with her usual lack of timing turned against me (maybe that was why she turned against me?). I knew something was up when I was relegated to a position lower than an egg.

  But it was the loss of that family that really hurt. Even the mom had an appealing side, or so I told myself. I was all ready to start cashing in on security, stability, fidelity, coziness, a place in this family (a place in Montauk too), a million fried-clam dinners, my wines chosen for me by a real connoisseur, a whole plausible future of efficient Thanksgivings and Christmases in the bosom of a family whose traumas seemed less excruciating than my own… and it was all snatched away. Kaput! No more clams and climaxes, no more canoodling in the dunes with my colleen, or meditative strolls on the beach with the sozzled ma. No zone of warmth…

  These ruminations were forcibly interrupted when the cab in front of mine stopped so suddenly we rammed right into it. The drivers jumped out to wrangle. I was irritably extracting myself and my coat and hat and briefcase from the back when someone came up behind me and stole my cane! I turned around and saw a broad running up Broadway, waving my cane in the air, yelling something like, “You bastard, you come back here!” at some guy disappearing into the crowds of Union Square. I lumbered after her, making slow progress due to the wintry terrain and my faulty ankle. But she wasn’t that fast herself. I caught up, and then she turned on me!

  “Are you following me?” she asked.

  “Well, yes! Yes, I am.”

  “What the hell for?” She sure was steamed about something.

  “That,” I said, pointing at the cane in her hand.

  She looked at the thing as if seeing it for the first time, and without ado dropped it on the ground, leaving me to make a clumsy dash for it before it rolled into unscooped poop.

  “Jeez,” I couldn’t help remarking.

  “What’s with the limp?” she asked.

  “The limp’s why I need the cane!”

  We looked fiercely at each other for a second—and then we recognized each other. She was wearing a different kind of coat, a gray one this time, and no Eskimo hood, but it was the gal who saved my ass on Christmas Eve.

  “It’s you!” she observed.

  “Hey, you saved my life on Christmas Eve!” I said. And remembering that I had never thanked her, I started babbling, “I guess I really should have thanked you… but I had no way of getting in touch.”

  “It was nothing,” she said. “I mean, what I did was nothing, not that your life is nothing… ” She was blushing, quite becomingly. We started walking to our respective cabs. “That was John, my ex,” she said, nodding back toward Union Square. “His mother wears army boots.”

  So, not a crackpot in the Gertrude sense maybe, but a crackpot nonetheless. I thought this might be all the explanation I needed, we could say our friendly farewells and scoot. But she was determined to fill me in on why she’d sprung from her taxi like that when she caught sight of this John character on the street—leading to our collision. It was all John’s fault too that she’d run off with my cane.

  “You realize you almost caused whiplash in the guy you just saved a month ago?” I asked mildly.

  “I had to get hold of him.”

  “Still gone on him, huh?” Though she wasn’t my type, I kind of liked the look of her: strong bone structure, nice lips, tender brown eyes, and a mop of brown curls peeking out of her hat. A curious mixture of the erratic and erotic. She stopped dead. I was scared she was going to hit me!

  “Gone on him? You gotta be kidding. The guy’s a criminal! He stole my quilt.”

  “Your… uh, what?”

  Our drivers had settled their differences and were now honking at us. But before ducking into her taxi, the crazy dame shook my hand, with a notably firm grip, and said, “I’m Mimi.”

  “I’m just me,” I clowned.

  And she was gone, whisked away down Broadway in a cloud of snow and steam. I exhaled my own cloud. As kids, Bee and I pretended to be sophisticates smoking cigarettes in weather like this, waving our twigs around as if brandishing cigarette holders. (Who uses cigarette holders anymore? Who even smokes?) I watched the steam rise from my mouth and suddenly had a sensation of utter happiness.

  There was an old soldier

  Who had a wooden leg,

  Had no tobacky

  But tobacky he could beg.

  There was a little duck

  And he had a wooden leg,

  Cutest little duck

  That ever laid an egg!

  The skin on his tummy

  Was as tight as a drum:

  Every time he took a step,

  A rum-a-dum-dum!

  Despite the car crash, I was right on time when I got to Kelley & Ping, and bounded up the steps, my bad ankle temporarily cured, perhaps by the cold. I went to the counter and got a big bowl of duck and noodle soup, and sat down at a little wooden table to await M. Z. Fortune, whose book I had obediently bought and attempted to read. It sure wasn’t Dickens, b
ut it wasn’t as turgid as Hobbes either, or an electrical appliance manual. In fact it was pretty snappy, with touches of humor, and covered every kind of oral presentation, from small, difficult business meetings to weddings and after-dinner speeches. It was all laid out for you, clearly and succinctly—the style of delivery the author recommended for a speech. But the more I’d read about manipulating the audience with your tone of voice or timbre (“as lumberjacks would say”), and swaying people with your authority and your credibility, your jokes and your anecdotes, your charm and charisma (just being a doctor apparently wasn’t going to swing it), the more I quailed. To impress an audience, I had to project a friendly, folksy (but not too folksy), brave, down-to-earth, and expressive demeanor (rather than just my usual nauseous one), and make expert use of “benchmarking”, “hooks”, “nutshell endings”, and “limited-opportunity windows”. What’s more, according to M. Z. Fortune, a speech should break down into chunks, with no more than three ideas per chunk, and no more than three chunks per speech. Nine ideas? I didn’t have one!

  “Every speech, like every dog, has its head, middle, and tail.” Where was the rest of the dog, I wondered—and what do you do if your dog of a speech lifts its back leg in the middle of your peroration? Another piece of M. Z. Fortune wisdom was, “Take fresh breaths whenever opportunity allows.” This was something I felt I’d been doing all my life without being told. After reading his book, I dreamt my speech was a hot dog that I had to eat in three bites: chomp, swallow, breathe, chomp, swallow, breathe, chomp, swallow, breathe—I thought I was going to choke! (When I told Bee this, she said she’d seen me eat a hot dog in two bites.)