10 ◆ Joan

JOAN AND THE DOCTOR wandered through the morn- ing city arm in arm, like an old couple looking for a store that might or might not be open anymore. The sunlight glittered on cars and windows. One storefront offered so many cameras it made taking pictures seem hopelessly complicated. It had rained during the night, the air offered unusual depth of field, and down the street they could see the restless water of a big lake.

The events in the hotel room had been a fleeting dream brought on by a lost moth, but walking toward the lake in the light seemed altogether real.

People moved about in shops. A tall man in a canvas apron cranked out the awnings over a bakery, which failed to wake the figure lying on the sidewalk in a dirty sleeping bag. A woman who was smoking carried a bass violin up the steps of a church. It is all here, thought Joan, the beautiful and the unfortunate.

The violinist rested her instrument on the top step and took a last drag before turning a heavy iron ring that opened the oak-slat door. In front of St. Regina’s Hospital, a woman handed the ribbon of a metallic balloon to a child, and the child let the ribbon go. The breeze carried the balloon up and across the façade of a tall building.

“Now what do we do?” said the woman. “We have no present.”

A block down the street, a young man in dark blue sweat clothes with white stripes stood staring thoughtfully into a wire basket of trash. The balloon was a shiny dime in the sky.

They walked on. Dr. Palomino took a raglan hat from his coat pocket and unfolded it and put it on his head. “Cold this morning.”

“Oh, doctor.”

“What?”

“I feel funny.”

He looked around, nodding as if the street had been built according to his specifications. “I could live in this city. Sign on with a hospital, find a townhouse, walk to a store, buy a candy bar and a magazine. I could see it. There’s always a demand for competent doctors.”

“Your luck,” said Joan.

She was wondering whom she loved. Micah. Lyris — she would love her. Children are sponges of love; they can’t help taking up every drop. But to love only children is to withdraw from the adult world in a way that does not feel so good. What she felt for Charles was a hard question. When Lyris came, he started doubting everything Joan said and did. He had suspicions he had not had before. Resentment had crept into their lives. He hated to be misled more than anyone she knew. Everyone was out to fool him, everyone but Joan; he had not thought her capable. When they turned away from each other in bed now, it seemed to be a statement. The chores they had once taken on lightheartedly had become ammunition to be used against each other. Oh Charles, she thought, what happened to the fun couple we used to be? Sometimes life seemed so small she wanted to put it in a ring box and throw it in the tall grass.

“Do my children need me?” the doctor was saying. “I think they need my car. Me, I’m not so sure.”

“I’ve been aching for something like last night,” said Joan. “Now that I have it, I’m still aching.”

They drank coffee in a restaurant with photographs bearing the splashy signatures of local celebrities. Dr. Palomino theorized about how hard it would be to wait tables. He said that removing the vermiform appendix was easier than taking a plate of soup to a table, because at least the customer in the appendectomy was out cold. Joan said she still had her appendix, and the doctor admitted that many people keep them for life. The main thing to remember when removing them was to count the sponges. Two men sitting in the adjacent booth moved to another booth. Then Dr. Palomino asked if Joan would like to meet the doctor he had mentioned last night.

“I thought you made her up.”

“Why would I lie?”

“To avoid saying you came here on my account.”

“That is a good reason. And I did lie. There is no patient with Schatzki’s ring. But there is a doctor. Her name is Mona Lomasney.”

Dr. Palomino called Dr. Lomasney from a pay phone, and away they went, to a neighborhood some distance from downtown. The cab driver smoked a yellow pipe that smelled like burning grapes as he squinted into the sun over a divided highway.

Mona Lomasney had spent her professional life in this city, Dr. Palomino told Joan. St. Regina’s had hired her out of college in Montana, and Women and Infants had stolen her from St. Regina’s. It was at Women and Infants that she became a star, the second woman ever to win the rarely given Golden Pyramid. But when morphine went missing, the hospital had no choice but to confront Mona and the other doctors implicated. They had been providing the drug on the side to patients who, because of a new policy, had been switched to non-narcotic analgesics that didn’t work.

Seeking to avoid publicity, the hospital offered the doctors jobs in an affiliated clinic in the depressed suburb of Hartvale. Only Mona Lomasney accepted the deal, for Hartvale was the sort of place that is a springboard to nowhere. Around this time the news made the papers, which called the doctors the morphine angels. In Hartvale, Mona worked with two other doctors. The clinic took up the ground floor of a former shoe factory beneath elevated railroad tracks, and Mona lived in an apartment upstairs.

The cab driver folded the doctor’s money and put it in a metal box. He opened his door and banged the bowl of his pipe on the door frame. “Listen, young people, don’t be in this neighborhood after dark,” he said.

Mona Lomasney came to the door of her apartment, still in pajamas. She had an angular, high-boned face that must have been amazing in her youth. Even the beautiful have their problems, among them a longer way to fall. Mona held a pair of needle-nose pliers with those slick blue grips that are so satisfying to touch. Charles could not go near needle-nose pliers without getting blood blisters on his fingers. They were the only tool he refused to use.

“My toothbrush fell down the sink,” said Mona.

“This is Mona,” said Dr. Palomino. “Problems follow her.”

Mona laughed warily, pushing her curly brown hair over the shoulders of her striped pajamas. She looked as if she had not gotten a good night’s sleep.

“You follow me,” she said.

“This is Joan Gower Darling. We’ve been out walking already this morning.”

“In the fog. How pretty.”

“There was no fog,” said Dr. Palomino.

“Let’s not split hairs,” said Mona. “I’m really looking forward to getting that toothbrush out.”

“Let me try,” said Joan. “My husband is a plumber, and I’ve seen what he does.”

They crowded into the bathroom and stood with their backs to a clawfoot tub. The toothbrush had fallen with the bristles up, but it was too far down for the pliers to reach. The sink was small; it would hardly hold enough water to rinse your face. A thin wafer of green soap rested on one of the porcelain sides.

“Don’t say I should get one of those strainer things,” said Mona Lomasney. “I know that.”

Joan peered into the drain.

“There is a way,” she said.

“This makes me claustrophobic,” said Dr. Palomino.

Mona put her hand on his arm. “There’s coffee in a pan on the stove,” she said. “I made it a special way I saw in a magazine, and just for you, Stephen. Because I remember what you like.”

“I’ll go get that now.” He left them in the bathroom. Why is it, Joan thought, that a man who is sensitive and comfortable with one woman will turn officious and awkward in the presence of two? She reached behind her neck to unclasp a small silver chain that Charles had given her on some birthday. She lowered the loop of the necklace into the drain. Her fingers trembled. If she jarred the toothbrush before snaring it, it might fall down to the trap. Carefully she pulled the silver chain taut under the bristles and drew up slowly until Mona Lomasney could grab the toothbrush. They had both been holding their breath, and now they exhaled and laughed.

Joan put the necklace back on. “What’s the deal with you and Stephen?”

“We lived together for two years in medical school,” said Mona. “But I pulled ahead of him academically and he couldn’t take it. And he thought I was seeing someone else. Which was true. We were way too young.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Why? You didn’t do anything.” Mona pressed the toothbrush into a holder on the wall. “What’s the deal with you and Stephen?”

There was no reason not to tell the truth. “We slept together last night,” said Joan. “It just happened. And now, you know, we have to spend some time together.”

Dr. Palomino found three cups and poured coffee into one of them from a white metal pan with a red handle. It was exactly the sort of bright and little-used pan that a single person would have. He drank the coffee thoughtfully and called his house. His wife answered. She could be testy on the phone. Mona’s kitchen smelled of coffee beans and cinnamon. The surfaces were not sticky. The doctor’s wife said that she wished he had not put the storm windows on so early, since the house needed more air. She said it still smelled of smoke from the fire in the eaves. The doctor countered with his theory that if he had not told her about the fire, she would not smell anything. In other words, she said, it was all in her mind. Well, no, that was not what he meant, not exactly, only that we notice what we are prepared to notice, this is true of everyone, not just her by any means. He did it himself. It was exactly the wrong thing to say, as if he were offering her the generous gift of his own fallibility.

Mona Lomasney had a globe on her kitchen counter, and the doctor turned it idly to see if it reflected the current geography of the former Soviet Union. His wife spoke softly into the phone, offering a second “in other words” interpretation, which, like the first, suggested that he put little stock in her cognitive skills. A small purple country labeled Belarus seemed to indicate that the globe was fairly recent, but the doctor’s knowledge of the eastern bloc was so sketchy that he did not know, for example, if the very term eastern bloc still held meaning, or why there was no k in bloc. Then his wife was saying that their son had walked in his sleep last night. He had gone up to the attic and tried to bring down his old wooden train set, mounted on plywood. He’d only managed to get it hung up in the stairwell, where she found him disoriented and angry, and this morning he had no memory of any of it. Dr. Palomino’s wife loved to lay the family disturbances on him when he was out of town. The doctor pointed out that their son had not touched the train in years, and she said, That’s the point, isn’t it. He considered this remark as evidence of how his wife was better than he was, more in touch with the things one should be in touch with. But he did not really see the point made by the sleepwalking and the train.

Dr. Palomino hung up the phone, remembering the work he had put into the train set. He glued down the track segments, puttied and sanded the joints so the cars would not derail; he painted green grass, blue water, yellow roads and tracks; he worked into the small hours of the night. The boy had liked it, even though, as the doctor’s wife told him later, he’d had his heart set on a bow and arrow.

“Amazing,” he muttered as Joan and Mona walked into the kitchen. “How people are.”

“And how is that?” said Mona.

“I don’t know.”

He looked at Joan with what he hoped was an expression of affection, as if to say that what had happened between them last night was an example of the mystery of human behavior.

Joan’s lips were finely formed and soft-looking. He liked the way she never wore makeup. She had on a red cotton sweater and a suede skirt. Already he wanted to kiss her again. Stephen Palomino recalled a phrase he had read in a book, back when he and Mona were in college — “the most interesting woman in St. Petersburg” — and he thought that the woman in the book must have looked and acted like Joan. Maybe he was in love with her.

Mona opened the oven and took out a tray of cinnamon rolls. She put the tray on a glass table by the windows. Steam rose from the rolls as everyone pulled and cut them apart and stuffed the torn pieces into their mouths. They didn’t even bother to sit down. Joan licked her knife. They were not embarrassed by their rough manners but seemed to agree that formality was not required, given their variously deficient natures. There is, the doctor thought, a well-known sort of desperation to Sunday morning. The day was too long, the newspaper too large. Also, people might be hung over from Saturday night, as he was, which never helps.

Joan asked to see the award Mona had won at Women and Infants, and Mona said she had taken a train ride to a limestone quarry one day in the spring and had thrown the Golden Pyramid into the water and watched it sink to the bottom.

“Quarries are murky as a rule,” said Stephen.

“Not this one, smart boy,” she said. “And all this success that everybody thinks they want, it only took me away from my work. They want you to speak here, they want you to speak there, they want you to write some introduction . . . To tell you the truth, I’ve never been happier than the day I walked into the clinic downstairs.”

Joan moved her finger around her plate for the icing. “How come?” she said. “Because it was a chance to help people?”

“Well, there was that, but really because it was the end of my trying so hard. I mean, for the patients I try hard, but for me . . .” She waved a hand. “People thought the Golden Pyramid just fell into my lap. It’s not true. I wanted it so bad I dreamed of it. I worked for it, I managed to get my name placed in consideration, I lobbied. I sought the advice of those who could help me. When you’re trying to direct events, you can no longer see them for what they are.”

“Which is . . . what?” said Stephen. “Because I still try.”

“People fear the big downfall,” said Mona. “Because they’re afraid they won’t be able to get up again. Because they don’t think they deserve to get up again. That they’re awful, and now everyone will know. But unless you fall down, you never know whether you deserve to get up. That’s what the morphine scandal taught me. And I would never have found out what I had without that happening.”

“This is not the American Dream,” said Stephen. “This is Mona’s dream,” she said.

Dr. Lomasney got dressed and took Stephen and Joan down- stairs for a look at the clinic. There were lilies on the counter and pictures of other flowers on the wall. One of her partners was on duty, treating a teenager who had been shot at a friend’s house. It was a minor wound, through the leg, no bones involved. The friend who had done the shooting and his father sat in the waiting room, pale, leafing through computer magazines. When the father saw new faces, he tossed his magazine aside and went to the receptionist’s desk.

“Is Brice going to be all right?” he said.

Mona Lomasney nodded. “It would seem so.”

The man shook hands with Mona over the counter. “What about infection? Maybe a little amoxycillin.”

“Have you called the police?”

“That’s what the other doctor said. So you think we should bring them into this?”

“That’s the law in Hartvale,” said Mona. “We’ll record the accident, and they’ll want to know the circumstances, whether the gun is registered and that sort of thing.”

“It’s just a pistol,” said the man. “It isn’t much of a gun. I keep it for protection. We had a clivia taken off our porch that my wife had been growing all her adult life.”

“The police will want to know all these things.”

“As for the gun itself . . .” He turned to his son. “Tell the doctor what we did with the gun.”

The boy put down his magazine and looked at his hands. “Put it in a dumpster,” he said glumly.

“That’s right,” said the father. “We didn’t want any part of it after what it did to Brice.”

“Suppose someone finds it and uses it again?” said Mona.

“That’s what I said,” said the boy.

“You’ve caused enough havoc for one day,” said the father.

“I can’t give legal advice,” said Mona. “But you’d better get the gun if you can. And for God’s sake make sure the chambers are empty.”

“Well,” said the man, “a clip in this case.”

“What’s your name?” said Mona to the boy.

“Andre.”

“Come with me.” She took him to a corner of the waiting room and talked to him. She kept putting her hand on his face to make him look at her.

Brice limped into the waiting room. “I’ve been shot,” he said. “I don’t expect I’ll ever be the same.”

His parents arrived at the clinic. They seemed too old to have a teenage son, and they walked with sagging shoulders, as if they had been pelted with stones while crossing the parking lot.

“Andre shot me,” Brice told them in a tone of wonder. “I’ve been shot, and the bullet’s in the rec room. And everything seems vivid to me now. Even these flowers, I smell them so strongly.”

“I hope this doesn’t ruin the friendship between our families,” said Andre’s father.

Brice’s father screwed up his face as if he were about to sneeze. Joan felt a pang of sympathy. Talking seemed hard for him.

“We have never liked you,” he said. “Not really.”

Mona’s partner took the parents aside and explained how to change the dressing, and the shooter and his father headed for the door.

“Much sorrow, Brice,” said his friend. “I live in shame, man.”

Joan and Stephen hugged Mona and said they would let her get to her work. Mona thanked Joan for her help with the toothbrush.

“What’s happened to the world?” said Joan. “What has it come to that children shoot one another and this is part of the everyday routine?”

Mona smiled sadly. “It’s the same world,” she said. “It’s just the guns. We look everywhere for the solution. We make a show of looking. All this business of is it the movies, is it the games, is it the civilization —”

“All the sociology,” said Dr. Palomino.

“It’s a smokescreen,” said Mona. “It’s TMFG, sis.”

“What’s that?” said Joan.

“Think about it,” said Mona.

Joan thought about it as she and Dr. Palomino left the Hart- vale clinic and walked past a bridge abutment on which all manner of filthy words had been painted, and she thought about it some more as they headed across a playground toward a busy intersection where a taxi might be found. She and Stephen took a moment to sit in swings and push themselves in eddying circles as fallen leaves tumbled and scratched along the asphalt.

“Too many fucking guns,” she guessed.

“That’s it,” said Stephen.

“Charles has guns,” said Joan. “He hunts.”

“He hunts in dreams.”

“Maybe so.”

“Oh, I don’t mean Charles. It’s a poem, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. My grandfather used to read it to me. He was a big Tennyson fan. ‘Like a dog, he hunts in dreams, and thou art staring at the wall, / Where the dying night-lamp flickers, and the shadows rise and fall.’”

Joan pulled herself up by the chains of the swing and stood. “He’s not like a dog.”

“Of course not,” said the doctor. “Listen. Don’t think of what’s happened. Don’t dwell on it. We’re going back home. Are you on the four o’clock flight?”

“No.”

“Meet me tomorrow in Stone City.”

“I don’t know. I have a lot to do.”

“We could have lunch,” he said. “There’s a Marvin Cone show at the museum. You would like his paintings.”

“I’ll try.”

A church stood at the intersection, and she remembered that it was Sunday and she had not gone to church. She never missed and would not miss on this day of days, with her damp and incriminating swimsuit folded over the curtain rod of the Astrid Hotel. So Stephen took a taxi alone and Joan went into the church, where the liturgy was proceeding. She moved sideways into an aisle and picked up the Book of Common Prayer — only for something to hold on to, because she knew the responses by heart. She did not hope for revelation, as once she would have. For years Joan had expected a bolt out of the blue, something new and alarming that would descend, giving shape to her life. This is why she had been an actress, why she had been a proselyte, why she had studied the stars. It was deliverance she had been looking for in the churches and on the stages and in the sky, and she no longer thought it would come simply. If she could tell someone all that was in her mind, maybe she could make a start, but this was not a church that featured confession. After the service, she approached the minister anyway. He said to give him fifteen minutes and then meet him in his office in the basement. She found him talking on the telephone.

“No. That’s fine. That’s fine. In fact it’s good,” he said. “I’m not going. I have no intention. Who said so? If I wanted to go, believe me, I would have been there and back.”

The room had a musty and tomblike smell that made it hard for Joan to breathe, let alone explain her guilt and confusion. She put her hands on the minister’s desk and leaned on it for a moment.

He hung up the phone.

“I don’t know how to begin,” said Joan.

“Don’t,” he said. “I’m sorry, I have to go. I’m very sorry.”