Equipped with my diagnosis (as I thought, sprained ankle), bandages, ice packs, a pretty premature physiotherapy advice sheet, and the few shreds of dignity that had survived all the doctor-as-patient jokes in the Emergency Ward, I slunk around my apartment like Smokey the Bear, weakened, depleted, a-prowlin’ and a-growlin’ and a-sniffin’ the air. That I, Harrison Hanafan, an eminent New York plastic surgeon with a drawer full of affidavits from admiring patients attesting to my ingenuity and aesthetic awareness, should find myself floundering, crawling on the ground! I was one of them now, the hapless, helpless, needy greedy unwell.
It suddenly seemed clear that I would never ascend Everest, or abseil down the Empire State Building, or fly to the moon—not soon anyway. I’d never be asked to pitch for the Yankees, never carry a bride across a threshold (unless quite a diminutive bride and a very straightforward threshold), I’d probably never be the President of the United States and/or a matador, might never manage to possess a fully equipped toolbox, or conquer athlete’s foot once and for all, and my castration complex. Hell, I didn’t even have the guts to order my usual Szechuan dishes from the take-out! My whole being was now focused on avoiding discomfort.
Half the man I was, I stuck close to home, further injuring myself, in a cruel cycle of fate, one incapacity leaving you peculiarly susceptible to others. Standing on a low shelf in my closet on my one good foot, in search of my sickbed hat (which has seen me through many a minor cold), I fell, wrenching my shoulder and incurring a cascade of shoeboxes upon my bare head. Having never cooked before (unless Eggnog and microwaving count), I incautiously boiled a baking potato, burnt my tongue tasting the half-raw result, then tried to purée the potato and mangled my thumb in the blender I’d never used before, necessitating a splint of my own devising. A Christmas repast worthy of Scrooge himself! With one functioning hand, one serviceable foot, aching shoulder, and burnt tongue, I called my big sister, Bee, in England.
“I boiled a baking potato, Bee.”
“How’s the foot?”
“Elevated. So is my thumb. And I’m wearing my sickbed hat. I look like some kind of crazed hitchhiker.”
“This would never have happened if you rode a bike, Harry.”
Cycling was Bee’s solution to everything, and she was the business: Lycra, latex, Playtex (who knows?), helmet, water bottle, pump, puncture-repair kit, banana, raisins, energy bar, GPS, the whole deal.
“Oh, come on,” I said. “Those guys don’t last long in New York. They bus a new bunch in every day to make up for the ones that got flattened because they rode on the wrong side of the street and never used their lights. Anyway, it’s snowing outside, Bee! Heavily.”
“Where’s Gertrude? Hasn’t she turned the whole place into a sanatorium yet?”
“We broke up.”
“When?!”
“A few weeks ago. But I’ve been working on it for some time.”
“You dumped her?” she asked, struggling to picture my long-awaited rebellion.
“Dumped her, yes.”
“Wow. Great!”
“And now she wants to Talk About It. She wants to review all the ‘misunderstandings’. Ingratitude has been mentioned. Don’t you hate break-up lingo? At first, it’s all so merry: copping a feel, cutting me off a slice, perch and twirl, baby, bumping uglies, my main squeeze. Then all changes to: I’m dumping you. She’s history. Creep. Slut. Asshole. Slimeball.”
“Hey, does this mean I can call her an asshole now?” Bee asked sweetly. Bee had always been repulsed by Gertrude. And Bee was always right.
On hearing of my crippledom, Gertrude had indeed offered to desert her Connecticut crowd and come take care of me. But the fact that Claude, her son by parthenogenesis, had probably mastered English primarily in order to object to Gertrude’s perpetually proffered nipples made her offer to come “nurse” me somewhat unenticing. There was actually nothing she could say that would have induced me to see her again voluntarily: in my head was a list about a mile long of things that woman did that bugged me.
REASON NO. 1: She’s like a slug in your bed.
REASON NO. 2: Those teeth! It’s like opening a freezer: you’re blinded and chilled at the same time. Nobody ever jokes around with Gertrude for fear of eliciting that smile.
REASON NO. 3: That menagerie of hers. She’s got pets climbing on the counters, hauling themselves up curtains, throwing their weight against closed doors, cantering across the walls, hibernating in the toilet, hanging upside down from clothes rails—and that’s just the goldfish, desperate to escape their dank tank. Just think of the stink that emanates from a whole nuthouse on the Upper East Side stuffed with cats, dogs, birds, reptiles, marsupials, amphibians (and their accompanying microbes), all of whom would gladly eat each other if left alone for a single moment. (Probably had an iguana in there too somewhere, inching his way towards my neck with savage claws.) One maid was employed solely as zoo-keeper, mopping the vomit and shoveling up a vast variety of turds. It was like a safari, just going over there for lunch. I had to bring my own food, my own paper plates!
REASON NO. 4: Her fake hips. You might see her from behind, as I did, sauntering up 42nd Street, and think she had magnificent womanly hips, but you’d be wrong. Check her out from the side, bud: there’s nothing there!
REASON NO. 5: Embroidery. There ain’t world enough nor time to embroider cushions, honey, especially ineptly. Gertrude adorns handkerchiefs with mottoes, sews garish flowers on pillowcases, and issues plaques to commemorate joyous American holidays and baby names. The worst was a heart-shaped pincushion she made me sporting the date of our first encounter—the fact that this occurred on September 11th (2005), didn’t deter her from celebrating it, but it did give me an excuse to hide the obscenity from public view. She also darns, and batiks without irony.
REASON NO. 6: She balls my socks, though I repeatedly begged her not to. Give the woman a sock and she’ll stretch and twist it within an inch of its life. Her sock balls gave me the heebie-jeebies.
REASON NO. 7: Gertrude as a mother. Poor Claude (her latest pet) would have been called Sweet Pea if I hadn’t intervened. But even I couldn’t save him from the maniacal breast-feeding. A fine 8 lb. baby at birth, but Gertrude was so worried he’d starve to death, she emergency-crocheted a sort of harness that positioned the kid firmly against her chest, and this she wore, nonstop, for months. Okay, I too spend most of my days staring at the breasts of rich Manhattanites, but that baby-bra seemed detrimental to Claude’s cognitive development. My opinion counted for nothing though—Gertrude was an expert on parenthood: she’d read an article in Vogue.
REASON NO. 8: Gertrude’s perforated eardrum, caused (in her opinion) by me, all because I phoned her one day when she was getting out of the shower and she ran to answer the phone with a Q-tip in her ear. Was it my fault she’d arranged a doggy play-date that day and the place was awash with even more hairy hounds than usual tearing from room to room? (I bet there was a chinchilla involved somehow too—those little guys get around!) So Gertrude fell, the Q-tip perforated her eardrum, and I’m in the doghouse, even though I rushed to her aid and got her the best ent guy in the business! Okay, it was painful, but that doesn’t entitle her to warn everyone who’ll listen: “Anybody dumb enough to be Harrison’s girlfriend shouldn’t use Q-tips.” It is not up to Gertrude to dissuade people from sleeping with me, nor from removing ear wax.
The final straw, REASON NO. 9: Her job as an arts administrator. Gertrude’s one of those rich women who suddenly decides she needs a job, so she steals one off somebody who really does need a job. Once installed high up in the New York arts hierarchy, she proceeded to exert unwarranted power over the lives and work of people she never undertook to comprehend. A staunch proponent of the caprice, Gertrude saw to it that handsome librettists had it made, while other, less “fabulous”, writers, musicians, composers, artists, and film makers had their progress slowed or halted—especially if they were female and no fun to flirt with. The woman sought power, and executed it, with philistine zeal.
So why did I ever suggest to my sister, a sculptor, that Gertrude might be able to help her? It was I who invited Bee up to Connecticut for one of our painful weekends. Bee had never been before and had never wanted to go, but came this once, to sleep an uncomfortable night in a pre-Revolution four-poster and endure the sight of Gertrude knee-deep in the ivy grove. Gertrude would always jump straight into a billowy dress as soon as we arrived and go get some grass stains on it to prove how in tune with nature she was. The whole place was maintained by a fleet of full-time gardeners but Gertrude always made a big show of wandering dreamily through the dawn to fetch me something “real” for breakfast, usually coming back with one malformed carrot she’d picked up somewhere. She wouldn’t have known where her fruit trees were if you asked her, and wouldn’t have been caught dead feeling for an egg under one of her prize hens. But she could talk burdock, dandelion, and lovage soup at you all day if you let her.
By the time Bee asked that evening about the possibility of any grants or public projects she could apply for, Gertrude had spent an ecstatic afternoon among the ferns and the fairies, and answered in full Marie Antoinette dairymaid mode: “But why do you need a grant, Bridget? Why not just live more simply? You could grow vegetables. . . Who needs fancy stores when you can grow your own asparagus? That grows really well, once you get it started, which only takes about five years. And flowers from the garden are just as good as florists flowers.”
“I don’t think buying flowers’ is Bee’s major concern, Gertrude.”
“We have everything we need here, don’t we, Harrison?” she went on.
“Huh?”
“Olallieberries, juniper berries, jicama, fiddlehead ferns. . .” (I think she might even have mentioned those chickens, the hypocrite.)
“Bee doesn’t own any land, Gertrude.”
“But even in an apartment, you could have a window box!” she told Bee delightedly.
Pushed near the limit of endurance, Bee replied, “How self-sufficient am I supposed to get with a window box?”
“In Queens?” I added.
“Oh, herbs grow really well in window boxes,” Gertrude assured us, and there followed an endless monologue on every herb Gertrude had ever grown, every wild flower she’d ever picked, watercress this and water mint that, and the infinite culinary uses to which they had been, or could have been, or should have been, put—except in dishes containing fish of course, for Gertrude had never really cared for fish. . . “I can eat a little tuna sometimes, if it’s cooked just right, but they so often overcook it! You wouldn’t dare overdo a steak in a good restaurant but there seems to be no consensus on how to cook tuna. It’s a real gamble.”
Was she being deliberately obtuse, or just plain dumb? I could never be sure.
REASON NO. 48: Gertrude’s efforts as a conversationalist (which at first I took as a sign of insecurity). Everything you say is just an excuse for Gertrude to issue some rambling amplification, meditation, or digression of her own. Mention coffee and she’ll give you a rundown of every cup she ever drank, and where. Her favorite conversational gambit is the foods she hates, and there are a million of them. But so what if Gertrude doesn’t like pot roast? (Who likes it?!) She also insists on reducing every topic to the most banal level: if somebody brings up Rembrandt, Gertrude will start jabbering on about some hat she once had that resembled Rembrandt’s in a self-portrait but she lent it to somebody who never returned it and therefore will never lend anything to anyone again or not a hat anyway. . . and other goofy ruminations totally unconnected to Rembrandt. She has no idea what conversation is, the give-and-take of it. She never listens to anyone else, in fact seems to think she’s doing everybody a favor by holding the floor. I tentatively suggested to her once, in private, that she should give no more than two opinions at a time before waiting to see if someone else had anything to add. But she never tried it—she probably never even heard me say it, she was too busy trying to find a way to interrupt me.
REASON NO. 49: Insecure, my ass! The woman has the ego of a colossus.
Later that night, you could have seen the berserk figure of my sister Bee running pell-mell from the house, screaming, “You idiot! You idiot!”—like Beethoven when some prince he was counting on suggested he might make do with two bassoons instead of three for a rehearsal of Fidelio. I think what finally flipped Bee over the edge was Gertrude’s bright idea that she should work smaller, do stuff in clay, use “inexpensive materials”, or maybe give up sculpture altogether and get a dog. Gertrude’s answer to everything is for people to become more like Gertrude: a nincompoop with a pumpkin patch who can speak coherently only about coffee and cat food. (REASON NO. 81.)
So Bee took up some dopey residency in England, and I, through superhuman efforts, finally extracted myself from Gertrude’s clutches, and thus was all alone on Christmas Day, free at last—to rearrange my cds and dvds. Not alphabetically, that’s for zhlubs. My cds I effortfully shelved by composer, performer, and ensemble: solos, duets, trios, quartets, quintets, sextets, septets, octets, small chamber groups, orchestras, jazz and. . . Bluegrass (my weak spot—not so much the yodeling as that “high lonesome sound”). Dewey wouldn’t have liked my system, but Dewey wasn’t there. The movies I did by era: the 1920s, the ’30s, the ’40s, the ’50s, the ’60s, the ’70s, etc., each decade (after the ’40s) more redolent of cinematic decline. I never got to watch these movies when Gertrude was around. She was always jumping up and rushing around the room for no reason, or talking all the way through. So, examining them now was like retrieving a treasure trove. I turned out to have a whole bunch of Bette Davis movies! I decided I would revive my psyche, post-Gertrude, by watching Bette Davis—her weirdness would be my therapy.
But first I had to organize my cartoon collection, this time alphabetically: Alvin and the Chipmunks, Betty Boop, Bugs Bunny, Crusader Rabbit, Donald Duck, the Flintstones, Fritz the Cat, Goofy, Heckle and Jeckle, Hercules, Huckleberry Hound, the Jetsons, Mickey Mouse, Mighty Mouse, Mr Magoo, Penelope Pitstop, Pingu, Popeye, Porky Pig, Road Runner, Rocky and Bullwinkle, Screwball Squirrel, the Simpsons, Sylvester and Tweetie Pie, Tom and Jerry, Tom Terrific and Mighty Manfred the Wonder Dog, Top Cat, Wally Gator, Woody Woodpecker, and Yogi Bear. Well, what of it? What’s a plastic surgeon supposed to do after a hard day’s work realigning human flesh, if not chill out to scenes of imaginary animals getting punched, stretched, bounced up and down, steamrollered, blown to smithereens, and reborn good as new? Brutal, I know, but optimistic! Claude and I had bonded over episodes of Yogi Bear, and had watched Olive Oyl deliberate over which size roller skates to rent about a million times: “I usually take a three but an eight feels sooo gooood!”
Hidden among all the dvds I found some old Ant and Bee books (being about the same size): Ant and Bee and the Rainbow, and One, Two, Three with Ant and Bee. Now there was a true nut: Angela Banner. Puts ol’ Bette in the shade! Pondering the perversity of these little books, I realized I’d always sort of associated my sister Bee with Angela Banner’s Bee—not his authoritarian side exactly, but because he seems older, wiser, and more on the ball than Ant. Bee’s the sensible one, almost parental, the one who holds everything together while Ant gets himself into scrapes. Bee knows what time it is, for instance, when to go to bed. . . Bee’s always telling Ant what to do, and he’s always right.
But when I called up my Bee to fill her in on this ancient confusion of mine, she objected to the comparison: I’d forgotten how much she hated being compared to a bee. She deflected all my well-meant attempts to flatter her by praising Bee, and cited as evidence of his dopeyness: Around the World with Ant and Bee.
“What about that madcap hunt for Bee’s lost umbrella?” she asked. “That’s not sensible, it’s insane! At Bee’s insistence, they travel the world asking people if they’ve seen his stupid umbrella. Big surprise, nobody’s seen a microscopic umbrella belonging to a bee.”
“But Bee’s mobile. That’s the great thing about him!”I pleaded. “Ant just hitches a ride on Bee’s back when they go to the store, then manages to drop all the groceries on the way home. One little tart, two little apples—”
“Yeah, yeah. Six little eggs. . . Look, Harry, I’m kind of in the middle of something here. . .”
“And then, and then,” I babbled, finding new relevance in Ant and Bee the more it irritated Bee, “after dropping all that stuff, Ant falls too and hits his head and has to stay home for three weeks—he’s a shut-in like me! Doctor’s orders.”
“Ew, I always hated their doctor. He’s two hundred times their size, and human, and makes house calls to insects? He really freaked me out.”
“Freaked you out?” I said. “What about me? You’re the one who was always reading those books to me! You showed no mercy. I think we both permanently depressed ourselves reading those things. How’d we get hold of them anyway? Nobody else in America was reading Ant and Bee. They’re so. . . English! Hey, you want me to send them to you?”
“What would I do with them here? I’ve got England right outside the window.”
Poor Ant, poor Bee. I’d have to give them to Claude instead. But first I had to read them myself—to remind me of the olden days. Also, I felt a certain affinity with Ant right now, as a fellow shut-in. But when he’s sick in bed, he receives get-well parcels from everyone in England, and Kind Dog. Where were my parcels? Bee and I always wanted to know what was in these parcels of Ant’s, especially the biggest one, labeled, “Do not open until Ant is better,” which turns out to contain two wind-up tin motorboats, the SS ANT and the SS BEE. Ant and Bee launch them immediately. We longed for similar boats! But it was the labels that really got me. I found some at the dime store one day and labeled every piece of furniture in the house, forgetting to take them off before my dad came home and realized what a corny goofball he had for a son.
My study of Ant and Bee was interrupted by Gertrude, who called to ask what I was doing.
“Nothing,”I said warily. “What are you doing?”
“Oh, trying to source some cucumbers for the punch,”she replied. “But all the markets are out of cucumbers! Can you imagine? I don’t know what else to make. Well, que sera sera.” (This was really about Eggnog, because my absence had forced her to rustle up a substitute beverage: “punch”. It sounded godawful.)
REASON NO. 224: Gertrude’s philosophy of que sera sera. Gertrude likes to come across all scatterbrained and laid-back, like she was just some simple goose girl who leaves things to chance. Like hell. I never saw a person take fewer chances. She doesn’t even take a chance on her kind of sun cream being available in the Hamptons, but packs the car with thirty gallons of the stuff. She never took a chance on me either (my loyalty or love); instead, imprisoned me in bookings, duties, organizations, and five-year plans. The box at the Met, wines that won’t mature for a decade, the pigs of Piedmont already scouring the land for truffles in anticipation of our next autumn trip. . . And her putrid musical ventures, those kooky salons and soirées she put on, where the tanned and the toned tried to talk learnedly about Schubert or Mozart or Dohnányi. I once heard a whole bunch of them discussing who knew Dohnányi best—none of them knew Dohnányi at all! A few may have glimpsed him coming down a shady path at some music camp. Much was made of that shady path. As for Schubert, it was his death they liked best. They acted like he only wrote that stuff so we could think about syphilis the whole time it’s being played. no more! No more entanglements at Tanglewood, no more glimmers of hope at Glimmerglass.