'How? Maybe like in the camps: survive to bear, witness, to record the ones who didn't survive.'
Later, after the fury of sex had given way to the tenderness of a caress, I began to talk about Gilheeny, Quick, and Cohen. I started to laugh, Berry started to laugh, and soon the bed, the room, the world itself was one gigantic mouth and tongue and tooth engaged in one ellipsoid laugh, and Berry said, 'They sound incredibly bizarre. I mean, they really talk like that? Like textbooks? How did they get that way?'
'They say it's from hanging around the House E.W. for twenty years and talking to smart guys like me. They've absorbed every tern's liberal?arts education for the last twenty years:'
'You love them; don't you?'
'Yeah, they're great. They're keeping me going.'
'And you're puzzled and interested by Cohen.'
'Yeah. You know what he told me?he never touches bodies. If I didn't have to touch 'em, I'd like listening too, what the hell.'
'You mean he doesn't blow into his stethoscope at the gomers?'
'He doesn't own a stethoscope. He wears jeans to work.'
'Well, how does he communicate with the gomers?'
'He doesn't.'
'He doesn't?' Berry asked in a tantalizing tone.
'Damn! He doesn't. Maybe I should be a shrink!'
Well, at that, peals of laughter rang out again. A resident in psychiatry, a psychiatrist? No gomers, no rotting twats, no vagitch, no itchy blotchy penises, no leg ulcers, no rectals, not much on?call. Just the old chit? fuckin'?chat. That's what most of them needed anyway, these ones sucking on doctors for what doctors couldn't give. I could throw away my stethoscope and wear a pair of jeans to work.
Berry and I got dressed to go to the Leggo's Christmas party. She put on slinky black, and I, since I had to report to the E.W. at midnight, House white. Berry excited at meeting the Fish and the Leggo, said, 'I'm anxious to see how much of what you've told me is transference.'
'What's transference?'
'The distortion of the real relationship by unconscious forces. Maybe you hate the Fish and the Le because they remind you of your father:'
'I love my father'
'How about your mother?'
'The Fish and the Leggo remind me of a woman who keeps kosher?'
The party was at the Leggo's house, on the edge the suburbs. A grand circular drive led up to a regal mansion. There was money in urine. We were greeted in the foyer by the Leggo, whose eyes went immediately to my House name tag and to Berry's boobs. When I said Hello, sir, the horny little guy looked puzzled, and I knew he was trying to remember whether or not I'd ever been in the military. In the hour before I went to the E.W. I decided I'd try to drink as many champagnes as I could, and soon I was bubbly and high, and stood there when Chuck arrived. He was dressed in his dirty whites, having come directly from ward 6?South, and was covered in the usual ward excretia. The Leggo gave Chuck a big Oh, hello there, uh . . . and then, searching out the name tag, he said . . . uh . . . Charles: Er, have you been at work? and Chuck said, Naw, I always look like this, Chief, you know how it is.
The party went on. The Leggo's wife was about as sexy as a catheter. The talk was, on the part of the doctors, all medicine; and on the part of the spouses, mostly women, all about how hard medicine was on them. Chuck and I fell in love with a woman and couldn't figure out why. As I got more loaded, it seemed that Berry's face was getting more and more incredulous. She met the Leggo, she met the Fish. After forty minutes she came up to us and said she was leaving. I'd never seen her so ripped, and Chuck and I asked her why.
'You two are drunk,' she said, 'and I can see why. I'd get drunk too if I had to deal with these schmucks. It's not transference, it's obsessive?compulsive neurosis. You spill something, they have an attack of diarrhea. No wonder doctors have the highest rate of suicide, divorce, addiction, alcoholism, and premature death. And probably premature ejaculation too. In two hours here, nobody asked me anything about me. It's as if I were only an appendix to you.'
A keeper, I thought to myself.
'Roy, I've never had a more degrading time. You know what these people are? Cocksuckers. So long.'
Kissing each of us on the cheek, she got her coat and left. After as many bubblies as we could get down, Chuck and I drove back to the House.
'Damn, that Berry's sumthin' else.'
'Yeah, she's great. Hey, try and stay on the road, huh? You know, she's worried about you.'
'Well, man, what all is she worried about?'
I was drunk enough to tell him. I told him how she'd noticed he'd gotten so much fatter, so out of shape. How he'd wolfed down his food, how he'd stopped caring about his body, and how he was beginning to drink.
'No foolin'. I used to be in great shape, and look at the mess I'm in now. Pitiful, man, pitiful.'
'She says it's anger, that all of us are so pissed off we're beginning to do strange things. With you, she says it's all oral. She's worried that you're turning into an alcoholic.'
He parked the car like an alcoholic, orthogonally to the House white lines. We got out and in unspoken defiance peed on the House lot. The two clouds of steam were a comfort.
'So Berry's a little worried about me, huh?' asked Chuck.
'Yup. More than a little. Hey, I'm worried about you too.'
'Well, Roy, tell you a little secret: so am I, man, so am I.'
The alarm went off. I separated myself from the hothouse under the covers with Berry. I groaned. Potts's father had died and Potts had left for the funeral in Charleston and Eat My Dust Eddie was covering the ward for Potts and I had to cover for Eddie in the E.W., a twenty?four?hour shift. The morning was so cold that despite my bundling, when my ass hit the seat of the car the chill made me shake and chatter, and as I shivered my way down to the House I thought about Wayne Potts.
The strange thing about Potts was that he wasn't acting strange. Perhaps he'd grown more quiet, more withdrawn. One night I'd found him sitting in nursing station with a dazed look on his face, like that of a child at a funeral. 'Oh, hi, Roy,' he'd said. 'You know, I just went to see the Yellow Man I could have sworn he looked right at me and knew me, but then, when I looked again, he was the same as ever, eyes closed, comatose.'
Potts plodded along. With his wife having multiple orgasms of power as an MBH surgical intern, Potts spent a lot of time alone. We'd get together, and I'd grown to like him. His Southern roots resonated with my love of the rootedness of England, of Oxford with its cameo pieces of strawberries and cream and champagne served on the smooth lawns in the fifteenth-century courtyards. We became friends partly through a shared contempt for the competitive Slurpers of the North, and a shared longing for permanence, for a solid past. We'd sit at his house talking and listening to blues and gospel, Potts's favorite ballad being Mississippi John Hurt, on dying:
One day we'd talked about how we'd gotten into medicine.
'Well, I remember one summer at Pawley's Island, I was about twelve. Mother had kicked Daddy out, and that summer my brother and my mother and me went to the shore. One day I spilled hot oil all over my hand, burned it real bad, and Mother rushed me back into Charleston to our family doc. His office was just these two big old rooms all mahogany?paneled with brass knobs and fixtures, apothecary drawers, urns, you know? He dressed my burn and said, 'Boy, you like fishin', don't you? 'Yessir.' 'What do you like to cetch, boy?' 'Sea bass and bluefish, sir.' 'Are the bluefish runnin' yet?' 'No, sir.' 'Well, you see if we don't have you back fishin' by the time those bluefish are rennin', eh?' So I went to him every couple of days for him to change the dressing. He used some special ointment on it, and I remember once, after a week or so, he said to me, 'Well, I've run outta that ointment, and I called up the company that makes it, New Jersey, but they say that some government bureau has banned its use in human beings, 'cause it harmed some white mice. Now, there ain't nothing wrong with that ointment, boy, and I
