15

AT THE END OF THE DAY THAT FRIDAY, EDWARD paid his customary visit to Dr. Fields. Since it was nearly five o’clock (or at least demonstrably after four-thirty), Dr. Fields sent the nurse home and fetched an ice tray from the refrigerator that housed his vaccines and specimens. He put the ice into a beaker and fetched two Dixie cups from the water cooler and set them on his desk, from whose bottom drawer he then extracted a bottle of scotch whisky. He dropped an ice cube into each cup and poured from a great height so the liquor slopped and lapped into the cups.

“Like water with that?” Fields asked. “Pneumanol?”

“Pneumanol would be redundant. And water’s always contraindicated.”

“Exactly my counsel, too.” Fields took an ashtray from a drawer, pulled a pack of cigarettes from his lab coat pocket, and lit one, dragging deeply. “Can’t smoke in front of the patients anymore. It wouldn’t do, not nowadays.”

“I ’ve given it up. Mostly. I didn’t want my kids to start.”

“Well, of course you don’t. All things being equal.” He drew again, and both he and Edward drank. “And of course, all things being equal, you will die. On account of something you did. Or didn’t do. On account of your history. On account of having lived. If it happens to be specifically because of this, that doesn’t change the outcome.”

“It might hasten it.”

“That’s an imponderable that can’t be calculated.”

“Actually, it’s a probability.”

“You’re going to start, aren’t you? You can’t help yourself, I suppose.” Fields refilled his cup and motioned with the neck of the bottle over Edward’s and Edward nodded. “Anyway, what is a fact rather than a probability is that tobacco has been one of the great consolations of my life. And that is that.” He drank again and so did Edward. Then Fields said, “So, by the by, how are those children of yours?”

“Well enough. Susan’s finished her first year at the U. Now she’s working all summer as a camp counselor. Emily has a job at Dayton’s. And a boyfriend.” Edward took a sip from his cup and coughed lightly.

“And this gives you pause?”

“The boyfriend? Oh, some, I suppose. Emily’s only sixteen.”

“More than nubile, though. I suspect you had a girlfriend by that age. I suspect your wife—”

“Virginia.”

“Virginia. Wonderful name. And with such a name surely she had boyfriends by that age too.”

“I suspect,” Edward said.

“You suspect? Surely you know all about each other in that regard. After all this time.”

“Yes, I do. And she did. But with Emily, it’s different. With kids today, it’s different.”

“I doubt it,” Dr. Fields said, and ground out his cigarette in the ashtray.

“I’m also not sure if I like the kid she’s seeing.”

“He’s a thug? Or a lout?”

“He’s not a thug. Too mild. Mild but determined, somehow.”

“Determined to ravish your daughter?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think Emily would let herself be ravished.”

“So she’s rather determined too.”

“I suppose. He’s been over. Twice. Just last night, in fact. And it’s as if he still hasn’t come through the front door. Like he’s watching us without being observed.”

“He’s probably just shy. Or very nervous. After all, he knows that you know what he’s come for.”

“Which is?”

“To ravish your daughter.”

“That’s a little extreme. And anyway, there’s nothing knowing about him. That’s part of what’s odd.”

“And what do they do?”

“They just sit. On the lawn. Or last night, on the porch steps. Doing nothing in particular.” Edward looked into his cup and saw it was empty. “And sometimes—I said this to Virginia—you have to remind yourself that they’re not just playing together.” Dr. Fields poured for them both again. “Because that’s all they would have been doing a couple of years ago, and I wouldn’t have had the slightest concern if they’d been down in the basement or up a tree or in the bedroom together.”

“Whereas now . . .”

“I’d be a little alarmed. I mean, they seem young—Emily seems a little younger than other girls, than her friends—but of course they’re fully capable of . . .”

“Reproduction?” Fields asked.

“Reproducing themselves. Yes. I guess,” Edward said. “Although it’s hard to think they’d even know what to do. Not technically, I suppose. But to go from playing house to—”

“Playing doctor. I’ve been doing it for years.”

“—or jacks or whatever, and then to imagine them . . .”

“Making the beast with two backs?”

“Yes. More or less,” Edward said.

“But really, the knowledge is already there. Built into the species. Surely no one needed to tell you what to do.”

“On my wedding night? Or . . . whatever.” Edward seemed to sigh. “I’d had other experiences. Before. While I was in the service. But as far as my own kind were concerned, I was rather a virgin when Virginia and I got married.”

“With your own kind. That’s a charming distinction. The others were . . . marsupials?” Fields coughed into his fist. “Never mind. I won’t ask—since we’re gentlemen.” He lit another cigarette. “As regards your daughter, the point is, they don’t simply know how, any more than they know how to breathe. It’s much more elemental—more of the essence. They could find each other, blind, one hundred miles apart, in total darkness, and manage it.”

“Because it’s instinctive . . .”

“Because it’s the end for which we are made. Not that I’m all that Darwinian. I think I’m more Pavlovian,” Fields said, and let the smoke drift from his mouth in a languorous stream. “I don’t think it’s all constant sex and survival, screwing and fighting. I really do believe we can address ourselves to other things. Finding food. Study. Even truth and beauty. We can really quite totally concentrate on them. But then a bell rings, and we are called to this other business.”

“Salivating.”

“Yes, but it’s not that crude. Because I think it’s not just one bell, but a series of cues that fall together, like a very particular chord one hears. And it might be formed of previous memories and associations. Or it might be there from birth, and we’re simply waiting—completely unwittingly—for the signal, to hear it. I don’t know. But anyway, there you are, doing what you ordinarily do, and, say, a girl comes down the street on a bicycle with her hair behind her, wearing a skirt of a certain color, and there’s the whir of the bicycle and maybe the sun at a certain angle to her and the smell of lilies and there you go. You would pretty much follow that girl to the ends of the earth, that particular one, for no particularly apparent reason.”

“Powerless against it.”

“Nearly. You can thwart it, but oh the misery involved—madness, tears, murders, war. Years of pining and second-guessing and melancholy.”

Edward had finished his drink and was conscious of feeling his liquor. He held his hand over the top of the cup when Fields started to pour him another.

“Oh, that won’t help,” Fields said. “Abstinence. Trying to look the other way.”

“I was just thinking of trying to drive home in one piece. To avoid temptation and trouble.”

“That you might do. But this other thing is irresistible. Irresistible, yet voluntary.”

“How so?”

“I can’t say. It’s only a theory. But surely it is something we want, something we desire. We’re waiting for it, listening for it, even while we think we’re doing other things. That sounds like volition to me.” Fields tamped out his cigarette.

“This irresistible, preordained thing?”

“Well, no one wants to be born, never mind to die. But, as I said, that—along with this—is the end for which we are made.”

“I think you lost me back there during the second drink,” Edward said. “And as a practical matter”—he was trying to think what point he was attempting to put his finger on—“I see . . . seven or eight nurses a day, and maybe three of them are quite pretty. And in fifteen years on this job I have never felt the least bit . . . compuncted . . . ?”

“Compelled?”

“Compelled to follow . . . up . . . on any of them.”

“Not even tempted?”

“Oh, tempted. Sure. But temptation is just ordinary life. It’s just bread and butter. You just shrug. Confess whatever you yield to. Maybe avoid the occasion.”

“The occasion?” Fields smiled. “Like birthdays, weddings, testimonial dinners?”

“The occasion of sin. The situation that gives rise to the temptation.”

“And I thought we were doing so well keeping Mother Church out of the discussion.”

“I’m sorry. But it’s useful, really. You learn to stay out of the line of fire.”

“So you wouldn’t trust yourself alone in the autoclave room with one of the three pretty nurses.”

“It’s not a matter of trust. It’s a matter of avoiding . . . steering clear of potential trouble.”

Fields put his hand on the bottle, shook his head, then shrugged, and withdrew it. “But suppose you think that all this time you’ve been dodging bullets quite nicely, when in fact you haven’t really been fired upon at all. That you just haven’t heard . . .”

“The irresistible chord. Then I thank God I’ve been spared. I don’t need that. Not at my age.”

“Which is . . . perhaps forty-five?”

“Forty-four.”

“And you talk like an old capon. When you’re scarcely middle-aged. When you could sire an entire brood in a couple of afternoons.”

“It’s not what I want. And you said it’s volitional.”

“Sometimes it wants us. And becomes what we want.”

“I’m happy,” Edward said, and added, not as an afterthought but a conclusion, “I love my wife.”

“Of course you do. I loved my wives. Both of them. Truly. I miss them. Especially now. In my dotage. In which I don’t mean to harass you.”

“Of course not.”

“But these are things worth speaking about, don’t you think? With a good drink, at the end of our labors. At the end of the day.”

“Indeed,” Edward said. “It’s a good way to amuse oneself. Human folly.”

“Oh, but it’s sad,” said Fields, without a trace of apparent sadness. “At least I always feel that way about it, after the fact. So melancholy and sadly earnest, the whole business. Deadly earnest, I suppose.”

Edward was not thinking of these things as he drove to one hospital and then another the next morning, but his mind came back again to the boy and Emily. Midway between St. Luke’s Hospital and Miller Hospital, he seemed to recollect that once he had stood in the dark outside a girl’s house, and he had done this because she was an extremely pretty girl—even prettier than Virginia, he had to admit—and he had wanted to see her come out and possibly approach her.

As he remembered this, Edward waited at the stop light at the bottom of Ramsey Hill, and recalled her and felt something in his midriff that could only be called a pang, although, try as he might, he could not remember the girl’s name at all.

The light changed, Edward drove on, and wondered if this boy was having pangs for Emily. He marveled at the recurrence of this sensation in himself after so many years. It struck him that it was almost exactly like the feeling he had when he recalled something from the past that was lost to him and the combination of sweetness and futile longing catalyzed into something that went uncomfortably beyond nostalgia or sentiment; that if gone into deeply enough could turn to grief and even despair, not so much for any one person, but for everything he had wanted and that had failed to be. Not pangs of love, but of mourning, the one pretty much indistinguishable from the other, except by the time of life in which they struck you.

Edward drove into the Miller Hospital parking lot, contemplating the absurdity of this boy’s having pangs for his daughter and of the pangs being a kind of precursor or proxy of what amounted to grief. And this seemed to Edward, as he got out of the car and went around to the trunk to get his cases, to be both ridiculous and dangerous: this boy feeling things toward his daughter that rightfully appertained to the old and the dead; his love wish that contained a death wish.