“Do I keep you awake?”
“I eavesdrop a few minutes, then nod right off. Maybe that’s selfish, huh? Should I wake you?”
“Why both not sleep?”
“They say if you talk talk talk a troubling thing out, you might make all sorts of connections. I suppose that’s Freud in a nutshell. But you know what I mean.”
David knew the connection between Dr. Steenhagen and the Buick. He regretted not informing Maggie about it then and there. (He thought: What kind of choice was that, either not sleep or talk in your sleep, on one’s honeymoon? Did Maggie now think she was in for a lifetime of this?) After his parents’ divorce, he started having what Dr. Steenhagen called “nervous stomach.” It kept him awake at night. His mother made an appointment. When asked what she thought might be the source of the problem, she said, “Well, I think one culprit’s David’s cursive example.”
Students worked on their “cursive example” every Thursday morning. Blue, wide-lined notebooks were handed front to back down the aisles of standard Canadian school desks, pencils were distributed, and then David’s fifth-form teacher, Mrs. Dhomhnaill, would say, “Here is today’s paragraph. It’s from The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens,” or some other famous book. She’d read the paragraph with glacial deliberation, allowing the students to take dictation, the entire class transformed into stenographers. “You have two minutes by the clock to hand in your examples.”
In Mrs. Dhomhnaill’s view — she sent home weekly reports — David’s l’s looped too widely, his b’s were erratic, his z’s shopworn. David admitted that she had an inventive vocabulary when describing flaws in a student’s handwriting. She didn’t regularly single David out in her critiques, though once she flapped his open notebook in midair, saying, “Now this is a cursed example!”
“What are the symptoms again?” Dr. Steenhagen said.
“Stomach clenches up. Headaches, sometimes. Can’t sleep the night before, like I said.”
“Have you discussed this with his teacher?”
“I don’t wish to embarrass my son.”
Dr. Steenhagen turned to David in the examination room. “Son,” he said, “there’s nothing to be embarrassed about. You can’t be good at everything. You’re very good with a camera, your mother tells me. Look at my handwriting.” He showed David a scribbled notation on a prescription pad. “See, I’ve done all right in life, and my handwriting’s like barbed wire.”
Humiliated as he was, this made David laugh. He looked out the window at the family car in the parking lot. He wanted to take a nap in it. Dr. Steenhagen followed David’s gaze. “Isn’t that your Buick, Mrs. Kozol?” he said.
“Yes, it is.”
“Beautiful automobile. Smooth ride, I bet. It’s what, about ten years old? Let’s go out and have a look, shall we?”
Puzzled, they followed him through the waiting room and out to the lot. He had his stethoscope around his neck. When they got to the car, he opened the passenger-side door and leaned in. He whistled appreciatively at the plush interior, then took note of the word “Dynaflow,” which moved in elegant silver-metal cursive across the dashboard. “Just as I thought,” he said, as if making a diagnosis. “David, do me a favor. Sit in the front seat here.” David looked to his mother for permission; Ardith smiled and nodded yes. David slid into the front seat. “Now, David, close your eyes,” Dr. Steenhagen said. “That’s good. Now, I’m going to lift your hand to the dashboard. Okay, feel the metal writing? That’s Dynaflow”—he elongated the word like a TV sales pitch. “You must’ve read it a million times, right?” He let go of David’s hand. “You run your pointer-finger over it a few more times. Then open your eyes.”
When David opened his eyes, he stared at the word, really seeing it for the first time. “Since your son’s nemesis seems to be his cursive example,” Dr. Steenhagen said, “well, practice makes perfect.” David got out of the car. Dr. Steenhagen put his hands on David’s shoulders, looked him straight in the eye. “Here’s some advice from your family doctor, young man. When you get home, sit in the front seat of this car and take out a pencil and paper and copy out the word ‘Dynaflow,’ oh, let’s say one hundred times. You saw how perfectly it’s written on the dashboard. I guarantee, if you do this every day for a week, you’ll get a tenfold improvement in your cursive example, maybe twentyfold.”
It did not strike Ardith as plausible advice, but it was doctor’s advice, and David took it to heart. This appointment was on a Friday. As it happened, between Friday evening and the following Wednesday evening David wrote “Dynaflow,” by his own count (using
The problem was, “Dynaflow” was rooted so deeply in his mind that when that week’s cursive example took place, David unconsciously inserted it midsentence in a dictated paragraph from the Book of Genesis. Reviewing the collective examples while the students did arithmetic problems, Mrs. Dhomhnaill was duly impressed to see how much David’s handwriting had improved. On the other hand, she was perplexed by his inclusion of “Dynaflow” (whose common usage was unknown to her). She decided not to address it with David but to subtract half a grade. He received an A-minus.
The swans had settled down. Back in the guesthouse, David percolated coffee. He wrote in his notebook, If I’d been devoted to my marriage, I would not have—, stared at the page until the coffee was ready. He sat on the porch sipping coffee. He went back to the kitchen, closed the notebook, took up The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard. His headache spiked in intensity two or three times but otherwise was manageable, and it disappeared by 5:15 in the morning, just as he finished the novel.
He then stood at the open screen door and stared out at the darkness, now filtering a little dawn light through the mist. He reached into the back pocket of his khaki shorts, removing the photograph the doorman had taken of him and Maggie together in front of Durrants Hotel the first morning they spent together, more than a year ago. In the photograph, David looked disheveled, harried; he was touching Maggie’s hand, not holding it; Maggie’s eyes were somewhat squinted up; she looked breezy, alert and pleased. They were more huddled together than embracing, but definitely out in public together, in the sunlight after a night of rain.
David slid the photograph back inside the transparent plastic pocket, set the wallet on top of the peaches, pears and apples in a bright yellow bowl on the kitchen table. This was where he always put his wallet, in that bowl. It had become habit. Now, which one next? he thought, approaching the stack of novels on the counter. He ran his finger along the spines, then pulled Manuscript of a Country Doctor out, immediately balancing the others in their column. Maggie told me this was one of her favorites.
Room 334
THE DOORMAN WHO had taken their photograph was named John Franco. That morning, Maggie handed him her pocket-size tourist camera. John Franco snapped a picture, then opened his palm for a tip. “Joking,” he said when Maggie narrowed her eyes and took back the camera. Ever alert, he turned to another couple getting out of a taxi; the trunk popped open and John Franco lifted out two suitcases. Maggie put her camera in her Dutch schoolbag. She and David went back inside the hotel to have breakfast.