What I meant to do was drive over to Jinx’s house and get her out of bed, but by the time I got to her door she was up. “I heard that awful car of yours.” Of course, there were a lot of awful cars and it was interesting that she was so attuned to mine that she got up before I could get to her door. She motioned me in.
Jinx was in a bathrobe and barefoot. I noticed what pretty feet she had and was touched that she liked them well enough to paint her toenails, then had the ridiculously inappropriate thought that if I painted my toenails Jocelyn would never speak to me again. Jinx had tied her hair at the top of her head, and it made her face, which always revealed such a play of moods, seem even more expressive.
I sat at the table while she made a pot of tea with the electric kettle. “You couldn’t sleep?”
“I didn’t try. It wouldn’t have worked if I had. Did I wake you?”
“Uh-huh. You don’t want anything in this, do you?”
“No.” I only wanted to talk about myself. Once we sat across the small round table and smiled at each other over our tea, we were comfortable again. I felt at ease in pouring out my passion for the fair Jocelyn. I threw in various ironies including the uncertainty of Jocelyn’s feelings. I hinted at her lovemaking and described her great skills as a pilot. Jinx listened, smiling quietly, occasionally sipping her tea. At length, tears ran down her cheeks and I felt a wave of gratitude that our friendship was so strong she exulted in my happiness. Jinx had her own sort of beauty, which her tears brought out from where it resided in a deep nature. I admired Jinx and in my excited state could easily picture someone — someone I couldn’t quite imagine — falling in love her, in a different way than I loved Jocelyn but love is love is love.
Right?
* * *
I did see Throckmorton once that week. I stopped at the desk of his receptionist, Maida, who had a cake in front of her. She sat there, arms crossed, glowering at me. “He in?” I asked but got no reply. Then Niles emerged and said without emphasis, “It’s her birthday. She’s not speaking. Are you, Maida?” No reply. “See?”
He led me in and I slumped in the special chair that by forcing the client into a degraded slouch allowed Niles to lay down the conditions by which he would stream billable hours into the client’s mailbox.
Niles’s face crumpled in a look of worry and pain. I didn’t like the anxiety it produced in me. He laid his hand across his stomach and stared at me without a word. My anxiety rose in the eternity that transpired before he spoke. He said, “Ribeyes and bourbon don’t mix.”
“Right…?”
“Gotta slip off and pinch a loaf. It’s killing me. Keep talking—” He abruptly crossed his office, entered the bathroom, and closed the door. “Go ahead, I can hear you from here!”
“Jesus, Niles!” A fart and a booming laugh were the only reply. “You want me to come back?”
“Oh, hell no. You’re here, let’s get some work done. Plus, I’ve got news. I went to see Wilmot and the board. What a mausoleum! I think Wilmot has been behind this all along. He’s got a sympathetic audience with a few of the doctors who are not operating on the facts of the case but on a visceral loathing of you and your calamitous lifestyle. Excepting of course Jinx Mayhall, who thinks you’re cuter than a speckled pup.” I didn’t reply but went on looking at the bathroom door as though it were doing the talking. “One thing I bore in mind is that the way you get on hospital boards is by demonstrating a capacity to create and maintain a substantial bank account. This is where I trained my jeweler’s eye for persuasion. Pretending sympathy for these deviant swindlers, I commiserated over the loss of value to the clinic once this malpractice case hit the papers. I suggested that in such a scenario if turkeys were going for ten cents a pound they wouldn’t be able to buy a raffle ticket on a jaybird’s ass. No, I didn’t really say that, but I hinted as much. Thus I began to pave a trail leading to fabulously ignorant and corrupt Judge Lauderdale’s chambers, where a pagan reverence for lucre also obtains. Hey, you don’t have to hang around here, Berl, that’s all I’ve got for today. And no sense sharing the details of my current physical discomfort. But if you need help interpreting the legal niceties with which I’ve showered you, let me say this about that: the news is good.”
“All right, well, I’ll wait to hear.”
“Sorry about this. I may have to turn to the Lamaze method.”
Odd how you adapt to things: I waved good-bye to the door, walked through the reception area where Maida stared past the birthday cake into the middle distance, out into the street, the sunshine, and the welcome faces of a few pedestrians, picturing freedom with Jocelyn. It wasn’t until the next day that I learned that Niles had been having a heart attack. A remarkable number of hard-driving Type A men die on the toilet. It’s almost traditional. Some seem to see it coming, as witness Elvis Presley clutching his Bible. Niles didn’t die, but he was never the same again, and I no longer had a lawyer. But while he was in the hospital, he insisted on having me as his physician, so by this peculiarity, I was employed.
I’m reluctant to admit this level of self-absorption, but standing next to Niles’s bed I was giddy to be back to work, almost hysterical. Alan Hirsch, an actual cardiologist, had briefed me about Niles’s condition, somewhat stablized with the current onboard levels of Coumadin. He grimaced when I told him all the vitamin K things he would need to limit or avoid — beef and alcohol being particularly painful subjects.
“Broccoli.”
“I hate broccoli.”
“Spinach.”
“Hate that too. “Parsley.”
“I throw it on the floor. If I avoid all of those, can I have the booze and beef back?”
“In moderation. This is warfarin. It’s like rat poison.”
“Why do doctors hate lawyers?”
“It’s one of nature’s laws. Now, if you have any sort of unusual bleeding, I want to know about it. I mean like when you’re flossing your teeth. Niles, I want you take this seriously so you can avoid surgery.”
“Berl, let me tell you how seriously I’m taking this: I’m retiring. And not just to avoid seeing Maida’s face or hearing her baleful screeches when a bit of work is required of her. The record shows that I took my job seriously but I never took myself seriously. That’s why I am not a judge like that ignoramus Lauderdale. A lawyer wishing to become a federal judge like slime king Lauderdale does not turn his own home into a notorious fornicatorium. I’m going to get off this rat poison if it’s the last thing I do. I’m going fishing. You and me, we started out as fishing boys, but we strayed. I’m going back. I may have sex occasionally, but I assure you it will be with a girl who if she moves at all moves very little.”
I acted as a go-between for Alan, whose patient Niles really was. It preserved the relationship Niles insisted on having with me and allowed him to conceal his terror of death with the familiar jocularities that had always marked our relationship. He would have felt emotionally naked with anyone else, a state Niles could hardly face. I never gave Niles bad medical advice, I gave him Alan Hirsch advice, which was meticulous, cutting-edge cardiological guidance, guidance which Niles declined to follow. The last time I ever saw him was the middle of the day; he was in his pajamas, mildly drunk; he held up a large can to my view, said, “With this I can glue anything.” He was dead in less than three months, enduring his last myocardial infarction at over eighty miles per hour in the big Audi, Gladys Knight on the sound system and a bottle of champagne on the passenger seat. The woman he must have been on his way to see never, as they say in the papers, came forward. Alan did not take this as a failure on his part, offering the opinion that Niles died not of heart disease but of priapism. Parenthetically, when I next saw Judge Lauderdale he seemed quite saddened by the death of Niles Throckmorton. “We always had such fun,” said Judge Lauderdale. “He’d say terrible things about me to my face and I’d try to do the same back. But I was never in Niles’s league. He was very creative. I bet he’s making them sweat up there.”