“You think?”
“I do. He’s extremely vain. With your usual shirker’s style, you rarely come to the board meetings. Wilmot is really onstage. One time he had a pince-nez and a hankie in his sleeve. The other board members are somewhat afraid of him: he’s quite vindictive. Wilmot has little to do, and what little there is he finds beneath him. Perhaps you are his project.”
Wilmot knew of Adrienne’s indiscretion with me. It was hardly an accident and came out of strong feeling on both our parts. I really wish it hadn’t happened, but it occured at a time when their marriage seemed to be ending. I was besotted with Adrienne for good reason, and if they had divorced at the moment it looked likely they would, our relationship, which was based at the very least on tremendous affection, might have ripened into something quite significant. But they patched things up, and even though Wilmot knew what had occurred between us, he didn’t appear to mind; in fact it seemed to point toward a friendship. But two years later when they did divorce, our very brief affair became public knowledge, and from then on, Raymond Wilmot had it in for me. He took a very traditional view of his situation and by all reports threw himself into a cuckold’s rage. After the divorce, when I’d see him, I knew what was on his mind, but the way he kept his distance and theatrically projected a burning gaze, made me think of of Rudolph Valentino in eye makeup.
“And now Niles Throckmorton is calling me up and telling me I need to be ready for trial.”
“What? I think Niles is well ahead of himself. No one goes to trial out of someone’s ill will unless it’s the Khmer Rouge. I hope you’re not taking this seriously.”
There was no point in telling Jinx that I had done enough in my life to acquire all the culpability I’d ever need and that, at least in low moments, it didn’t really matter what I was accused of as long as I was accused. She wouldn’t have gotten that: she wouldn’t have tried to get it.
I knew most of our local law enforcement, some of whom I had gone to school with. People ending up in law enforcement were not likely to take a warm view of anyone as weird as I was when I was young. Curtis Seaver and I had an especially awkward relationship because his family went to the same church as my parents and he knew that I told anyone who would listen that they were all crazy. In school, Curtis was the scourge of immorality and reported anyone he suspected of wrongdoing, whether it was shoplifting candy, smoking dope, or engaging in heavy petting. He was known to make citizen’s arrests in traffic matters. The police department at that time and the local judge considered him at best tiresome and at worst a pain in the ass. Curtis Seaver was over six feet tall by the time he got to high school and never weighed less than two hundred pounds. Always prepared to enforce his judgments, he stalked the corridors solemnly, the archetypal frowning Christian. Twenty years had changed him little, though the uniform, the straps and badges, made him seem only more intractable. Unfortunately, Curtis also had a Realtor’s license and was a shirttail associate of Wilmot’s. Surely that was behind his paying me a visit and questioning me with surprising aggression.
“When did you first meet Miss Larionov?”
“Miss Larionov? What does she have to do with it?”
“Answer the question, please.”
“I don’t know, twenty years ago.”
“And you’ve known her all this time?”
“I did know her. She’s dead.”
“But you knew her all that time?”
“No. We’d lost touch.”
“Are you aware that Miss Larionov kept a diary?”
“No. I don’t think she kept one when I knew her.”
“I’m afraid you’re not correct about that.”
“Okay, she kept a diary when I knew her. Who gives a shit?”
“It may be important.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“It may be you will know in the future.”
“Thank you, Officer Seaver. And, as a courtesy, can you tell me what this is all about?”
“In due course. Shall we continue?”
“Go for it.”
“When you were with Miss Larionov, were there relations?”
“I believe she had an aunt and uncle in Great Falls.”
“I don’t think this is any time to be clever, if you understand your situation. Our records indicate you made obscene phone calls to Miss Larionov.”
“Are you serious? I was cleared of that a long time ago.”
“Really? It’s right here in the records. I’ve never known them to lie, but let’s just let that pass for a moment. Now once more, did you have relations with Miss Larionov?”
“None of your business, cocksucker. And give Wilmot my fondest regards.”
“You clearly have no idea what effect such replies may have on your future.”
“A fair wind to your ass, Curtis. By the way, which hole do you shit out of?”
He just smiled.
I went on working. I treated a farm wife for gonorrhea. She was a plain young woman carrying a leather purse with rodeo scenes carved into it. She sat before me in utter defeat once she’d had the diagnosis but seemed to cling to the hope that if this wasn’t the same thing they called the clap she could live with it. I didn’t tell her it was the same thing they called the clap. Initially, she had presented asymptomatic pelvic pain only, no bleeding, no discharge. I had her in twice because it took a couple of days to culture the cervical smear, and looking for bacteria on a stained slide was inconclusive, as it usually is. I told her I should see her husband as well, since he had every chance of contracting it. This threw her into further panic. “He’ll kill me!” “Well, we don’t want that,” said I in the tones of the medical detachment that had contributed to my going nuts. As I wrote out a prescription for one of the third-generation antibiotics, telling her that I expected good results from them, I questioned her a bit to find out how she had managed to come down with this disorder. Her husband, she told me, was a fanatic about controlling weeds on the farm. Outbreaks of spurge, spotted knapweed, star thistle, and water hemlock had defeated his efforts to control them, and the only hope lay in buying expensive herbicides, which they couldn’t afford. Therefore, he enlisted her in a Billings escort service, and by the end of the first year the weeds were gone but his wife was fighting several sexually transmitted diseases. She did seem to fear violence from him but thought that so long as it wasn’t “the clap” she might have a bit of leeway. Rather than level with her — I’m not proud of this — I told her how she could secretly add antibiotics to his everyday food and drink, thereby preventing him from getting this “ailment”—she couldn’t remember the word “gonorrhea”—and things could go on as before. “Thank God,” she said. “After all, there’s no good reason to upset our happy marriage.”
“All the same, I think you should give up your other occupation in the interest of your health.”
“I told you the weeds were under control. You weren’t listening.”
I did not let this sort of thing make me cynical because then I would have been the casualty of these disorders that I treated, and I had strong survival instincts. Many of the people any doctor sees do not have strong survival instincts; in fact, when I look at their smoking, drinking, obesity, and trauma-prone ways I’m inclined to think they scarcely cling to life. And when I poke around for positive things I could emphasize for them, I often find that they have good reason for submitting to gradual painless suicide. At first glance, there’s nothing really terrifying about a half a million doughnuts or cigarettes, and the exhilaration of driving fast on black ice is anesthesia enough for the casualty waiting in the wings. What I may be cynical about is my wonderment at how all of us are dealt such different hands. This is, of course, religious cynicism, and though for thousands of years mankind has tried to unwind it, it remains as obdurate a conundrum as it was in the beginning. Being a doctor keeps one closer to it than some other jobs do. When I worked in the emergency room it was rare to hear stories beyond the immediate circumstances of the injury. “I missed a turn and hit a tree,” not “My husband made me turn tricks to buy weed spray.”