The nurse unwrapped some rolls of gauze. “Folks,” she said, to try to clear the room. I had to back up to let Feeney pass. He knew me from dealings at school, and gave me a friendly nod, like, “Look who’s here, one of our depraved faculty members.”
He taught marine bio and gave tours of the lab he helped run, out on the shoals—I went my first year here, forty-five minutes by boat, in the rain. His students warned us about the dangers of overfishing the Hamanausett Bay, then Burt got up on a milk crate and talked for two hours about the seals he tagged, a steady stream of water running off his hat, and I wanted to shoot him with a tranquilizer gun and implant a radio in his head. He’d actually been born in this town, and was tall and stooped with a gray beard and the accent of some Nova Scotian cod farmer. His wife, Edna, gave lectures every summer on heightened feeling in paintings of the late rococo period, and had a gonzo Afro like Phil Spector’s, which was probably fine if you lived here year-round.
The nurse yanked back the curtain again, and another nurse, a tech, brought in a machine. The doctor spoke in a voice so gentle he seemed to be pretending. “What I’ll do now,” he said, “is administer the local.” Then he gave Amy an injection right at the point of the break, the needle hunting inside, the doctor angling the syringe athletically, and I almost puked. I stood beside Burt, just beyond the curtain. Amy sighed, and moved her tongue around as her eyes bopped across the ceiling. He loaded up the syringe and did it again, a little higher.
Then he left, and the tech set up her machine while the nurse complained to the tech about how far away she lived, on a military base an hour inland. The tech was slower, quieter, with purple-powdered eyelids. They were waiting for the lidocaine, five more minutes. Then they walked out and stood down the hall.
“She slipped on second base,” I told Burt, “because nobody nailed it down.” Behind my words was the threat of litigation, but he didn’t care. He wore a faded T-shirt with a turtle on it, with the name of his environmental alliance, and the biggest green shorts you ever saw, army surplus, with the fly not completely zipped.
“You don’t have to stay,” I said. “I can do it.” I’d come to rescue her. He took out a red bandanna and blew his nose so it honked.
“Okay.” He put away the hankie and went down the hall, tilting to one side like an old seaman. At the end of the hall he met the doctor, who put an arm around Burt’s shoulders. I felt dizzy and alert.
Despite the local color—smelly artists who lived in unelectrified dune shacks, transvestite parades, stores selling cock rings—the town itself had the narrowness of an isolated colonial fishing village. The locals hated you, the annual scourge, the six-day summer renter in search of local flavor. You could see it in the backs of their eyes when you asked them what time high tide was, or between their teeth when you walked across the dunes through the plover habitat. Somewhere around Memorial Day the streets became too crowded for a car to pass, and every week after that the town’s population doubled, and by the time I got here the locals were in retreat and droves of idiots were going around in those funny lobster hats with claws and jiggly eyeballs or trying to kill you in their avocado-colored Mercedes-Benzes on some crooked side street laid out in 1690 and not much wider than a bridle path; they strode in and out of restaurants and stores selling overpriced crap nobody on earth could actually afford. I bet Burt was sick of the whole thing. I didn’t blame him. I’m saying I understood.
Then he came back down the hall and asked how I planned to get her back to campus. I said I didn’t know. He smiled like he didn’t care either way, and leaned through the curtain and called out, “Feel better, Amy,” and said he’d see me at the fundraiser that night, one of those cocktail parties that all faculty were required to attend.
Up close, she looked a little loopy. I took the stool the doctor had been sitting on and brought it to her bedside.
“How is it?”
“Eh.” Her voice had that nasal breaky tone of a drugged person not exactly keeping it together.
“I was worried,” I said, as though I’d walked through a blizzard, calling every hospital within a hundred miles. Her cheeks were red, like those of a kid who’d woken up from a deep sleep under heavy blankets. “You’ll be relieved to know that I’m a doctor, although unfortunately I did my training in cartooning. Now, what seems to be the problem?” I touched her knee. “Does this hurt?”
“Will you cut it out.”
“You’re not left-handed by any chance?”
“No.”
“Hey, how many more bones were you planning on breaking this week? Because if this keeps up, I’ll have to find someone else to play the accordion.”
Her face twitched. “I’m going home.” She wiped her eyes. “The nurse had to zip me up when I went to the toilet.” Tears ran down and hung on her nostrils. “I can already see my kids going pooey if I can’t string beads for Pretty Pretty Princess.”
The bracelet sat in a blue velvet pouch, inside a white paper bag, on my lap.
“Stay. You can still go to class.”
“And do what?”
“Listen. Soak it in.”
“I’m not really a painter. I just pretend. You’re the artist.”
“Well, your kids will survive without you. Your nanny can handle it.”
“Yeah, except it’s hard to get good help from eight thousand miles away.” Her sister had the kids until Tuesday. Amy had sent Perlita back to the Philippines to see her own kids. Then she sniffed her tears in, and I started to feel responsible, entangled, whatever. I held out the box of Kleenex, took the wet tissue when she finished, and threw it away.
“It’s a clean break?” She nodded. “And you don’t need surgery?” She said no. “Did you want to call anybody?”
“No.”
“Did you leave a message at home?”
She shook her head. “The only one who’d get it would be me.”
“But what do you do in an emergency?”
She looked at me as if that had never occurred to her. “I call his assistant, and she contacts him, then relays a message back to me if there is one.”
“So did you call his assistant?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
She had to think. “He’s in Frankfurt.”
From the second I’d met her I was assigned to hate him, so no surprise there, but still, I wondered, why did she marry him unless she wanted to be ditched?
“It’s okay. I have people helping me. It’s all pretty seamless.”
“Cool.”
“What you don’t understand is, I work for him. And they work for me.”
“Sounds good.”
“Oh, fuck you.”
“I’m just glad to hear your marriage still stinks. It’s not any better?”
“No.”
The nurse came in and tapped her arm once, twice. I tried not to look. She did a few things behind us. On the wall beneath the light box, a computer monitor and keyboard were bolted to swinging metal arms. The nurse left.