Spirit of the Place (9781101617021) (18 page)

“
Grazie, grazie,
” Sellers said, for some reason speaking only mock Italian. “
Por
della granda apprecionissimo del'arte.
I am feeling so good, but not at all well,
dottore.
So overwhelmed,
così confuso!”

Back at Miranda's house they stoked the woodstove and sat together on the couch in the low-beamed living room, sipping brandy. They stared at the glowing grate and talked over the boneheaded production. Orville stroked her neck and shoulders, her face taking on a glow as he did. With both of them still dressed up, Orville felt like a teenager at a prom, wanting her desperately but worried about going too far too fast. She, too, now that the physical was so present between them, felt shy. But she also felt that if they didn't get naked soon she would burst.

Their words took on the false tone that words carry when the sensual world starts to take over. As they finally kissed, a spark bit both their lips—the static electricity in the dry room—and they laughed together. Gingerly, like chastened but diligent students bent on completing what they had begun, they kissed again through the diminishing static, their alonenesses giving way to their hungers.

Miranda rose and took Orville's hand and led him toward the narrow stairway. Unused to drinking, she tipped a little. He, also tipsy, steadied her, his arm quickly around her waist. Face-to-face, bodies pressed together, they saw the yearning in each other's eyes and then their lips were on each other's lips, tongues on tongues, with a sudden tenacity. A bolt of excitement zinged up from his toes to his skull and bounced back down. He unbuttoned her blouse and slid it from her shoulders and, the stairs too much to think about, helped her gently down to the rug, his dim sense of her lameness bringing a nurturance to his passion. He took off his clothes, she her pants. Nuzzling her neck he reached around and undid the clasp of her bra and helped her shrug it off and was lifted by the swell of her breasts in the almost-dark of the neglected fire. His fingers felt the silky roll, and then his lips, as lightly as in imagination, the plumped-up tips. Putting his arms around her, his palms against the strong
latissimi
of her back felt a murmur—she was telling him that she was losing herself fast and wanted to prolong, savor, hurry.

Hands around his neck, Miranda felt the curly hair of his chest against her breasts. She felt him with her, the
with-
ness catching her up like on a curl of a wave in the Gulf. But then he stopped.

His hand was on her withered leg.

Under his fingers he felt the sharp shin bone and the wasted muscle mass, and couldn't help but sense the story of this person he was beginning to love and the sadness of that story and the anger at that sadness. He felt as if he were facing the juxtaposition of the body and the human, the doctoring and the loving, which he'd been trained to split apart from the first cadaver on.
God, this child's withered leg!
Despite himself, his doctor's mind attuned not just to the person but the patient, not just to the beloved body but its history: symptoms, diagnosis, treatment, years of bereft parents doing everything for her and her trying hellishly hard, brave beyond belief, the physical therapy and fear of never walking again, the electron micrographs of the virus itself and the photos of Dr. Jonas Salk.

Miranda sensed his shock. She took his hand, still resting like a question on her shin, and brought it gently to her lips, then to her breast—an answer, of sorts, to her first suffering. Her other hand caressed his cheek, sought out his lips.

“Shouldn't we talk about it?” he asked.

“No. Not yet.”

“I want to.”

“I don't.” She nuzzled his ear, rolled his fingers on her nipple. She kissed him again, his mouth more hesitant now. She stroked his belly.

“I may, uh, need to,” he said.

Her touch went lower, onto his penis. “Uh, well, Dr. Rose, I happen to know that you don't.”

He laughed, and, relieved, clicked pretty much into the erect sexual, though her fragility stuck in his mind like an allergy warning stuck in the front of a patient's chart. He balanced between his sexual power and that brittle tibia and fibula passing in X-rays before his eyes.

But Miranda had spent a good part of her life living that X-ray and learning to gauge the limits of that fragility, learning to read the fear of it in others. So she took the initiative and tried to tell him by her touch that she was holding on to that X-ray a lot tighter than he ever could and that she wouldn't fracture anything—not a bone, not her son, not her soul—for pleasure. She took his hand and moved it over her good hip and down along her inner thigh to that moist pungent place so ready for him after all the weeks of foreplay. Then she straddled him and rose up and with a sigh began to move, riding that curling wave.

“Oh God,” she whispered, “hurry!” She started to stifle a cry but then realized what she was doing and shouted, “Cray's not here! No one can hear us!”

“Yeah!”

She rocked on him harder and screamed happily, lustily. He, too, let go, screaming. They howled like two animals, the two caged finches answering. And then she settled down on him feeling as if she were settling into a warm bath of just plain love.

He felt her settling as if she were two people: one, on his chest, a strong, pliant, firm-breasted, vibrant woman; and the other, on his leg, a spare and fragile girl. With a rush of tenderness he had started to think he was too worn-out for, he took the woman and girl to his breast, to his life.

Just as they were dozing off, she spoke. “Great whales, eh?”

“Yes, sweetness, great wet whales.”

His beeper roused him at two in the morning—the delivery ward, something urgent. Miranda hardly stirred as he rose and searched out his clothes and nuzzled her good-bye. In the low glow from the embers his eyes made out her alabaster face and firm shoulder and he filled in that blaze of hair and the red grape nipple. He sighed happily and walked out into the icy night that couldn't touch him—not until his butt hit the ice cube seat of the Chrysler, making him cry out with shock, happy shock, because just then it was merely a part of being alive.

The nurse had paged him for a delivery of twins. He'd been tending the couple through the pregnancy, her first. They were poor and black, a man and woman he'd known vaguely as a girl and boy, friends of Hayley and her son, Whiz. They'd lived their lives smack up against the railroad tracks in the shantytown between the North Swamp and the Hudson River. Bill had never bothered with insurance, and by this time Orville had also given up dealing with that evil. This was charity.

As he arrived, the labor was stalling out. What was going on? He had delivered hundreds of babies in Dublin, at the National Maternity Hospital on Holles Street. A baby an hour, the whole year 'round. Get drunk with the other medical students in O'Dwyer's across the street, get pushed out the door tanked and cursing at the eleven thirty closing time, stand there wobbling in the night damp staring up at the building, and ask each other “Shall we pull out a few babies or just go to bed?” They'd take the rickety elevator to the top floor, deliver a baby or two, and bed down on the horsehair mattresses on the first floor behind reception.

Orville understood births, but this one required thought. Should he use a pitressin drip, as they did routinely at Holles Street? Do a C-section? “You make one hundred percent of the decision,” Bill always said, “on fifty percent of the evidence.” Orville made sure that the fetal monitor was working and left the delivery suite in the newly dedicated (by Henry Schooner) Maternity Wing of Selma Rose, Founder of the Women's Auxiliary. He got the chart again, lit up a Parodi, and sat in a room overlooking the town to think it through.

“Hi, boychik.”

There she was, bobbing up and down gently outside the fourth-story window as if wearing a flotation device. Dressed in an Amelia Earhart khaki flight suit complete with leather cap with earflaps and goggles perched jauntily on her head. “Oh, God.”

“Not God,
me!
” She did a peregrine swoop. “Second Lady of the Air!”

“Go away.”

“I am away. You're not. I am. Happy Chanukah.”

“Merry Christmas.”

“Don't do that to me don't you dare. We're Old Testament, remember?”

“You're Old, I'm New. At most, New.”

“Jesus? The Bible Lite?”

“You'd prefer ‘an eye for an eye'?”

“You betcha. On this issue I stand with Penny and that cute Plotkin! Never again! I keep asking up here to go back down as a sabra. Those Israeli gals are tough. Chevy-truck tough.”

“Not as tough as you.”

“Me, hell,
you!
Have you cried for me? Have you shed even one teensy-weensy tear? I am your mother. I am dead, and you're too selfish even to cry for—”

“Dr. Rose?”

“We're boarding, honey-bunny. Catch you later.”

“Yes?”

“There's something wrong,” the night nurse was saying. “Come quick.”

Wrong big-time, he realized. The tap of death on a baby's shoulder. He explained that he'd have to do an emergency C-section. The couple agreed. He scrubbed in fast and did the section. Twin boys. One was well-formed, robust, squawling. The other was microcephalic, its head the size of a doll's but with lips and nose and eyes crammed together and with no forehead—giving it a froglike look. Trunk and legs normal but for a remnant of tail. It was horrible to see, yet transfixing, like something you see in a bottle of formaldehyde in a medical museum.

The obstetrics nurse was more accustomed to seeing Columbian babies with a panoply of birth defects, at a rate soaring high above the national average, which everyone figured (and those responsible denied) was the result of the PCBs and other toxic shit dumped in the river by General Electric and sprayed on the fruit trees and soaking the rail bed with all the creosote of childhood. And the sempiternal cement dust. Abnormal APGAR scores were the norm. Orville wasn't yet used to this.

The nurse took the healthy baby to the father, leaving Orville to wait for the other to die. Luckily, and quietly, by the time he had gotten done with closing the groggy new mother's abdomen, it did. Orville went out to the father. He was still holding the healthy baby, in that awkward way that new fathers do. The nurse had told him the other had died.

“What happened?” the man asked, in shock.

“The other baby lived only a few minutes. It was deformed.”

“Can I see him, Doc?”

Orville hesitated. The older doctor in him, the good old Doc Starbuck pushing Starbusol and paternal sense, would've patted him on the shoulder and said, “No, son, better you don't.” The younger doctor applauded his wish, though knowing that once seen, it would be indelible.

Orville said, “You can, sure. I just want you to know that you'll never forget it.”

“
Him.
I want to see him.”

The nurse took the healthy baby, and Orville and the father went in together to see the other son. He had been cleaned up, so he looked better, less frightening. The father reached out a hand and touched the perfect shoulder, and then the squashed head. He bowed his own head and crossed himself.

“In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.” He looked up at Orville. His eyes were wet, sorrowful. He said, “Thank you.”

“And you,” Orville said, feeling in this man the power of facing into, in a world that as a rule turns away.

“I think she will want to see him, too.”

“Fine.”

The father picked up the dead baby to take him to his mother.

Orville got beeped away to tend to a drug overdose from the Bliss Towers Housing Project and a stabbing victim from a happy household and a car crash and several Christmas specials, including a shepherd from Austerlitz sure he was picking up Radio Free Europe through a metal plate recently placed in his skull.