As I bawled out my forlorn and embittered hopelessness, Jinx listened attentively — I’m really embarrassed by this; I honestly don’t know what inspired me to put it down — and it might have been this quiet attention that encouraged me to lavish my story with details. I told her about Jocelyn’s airplane accident and recovery at the clinic in White Sulphur Springs, and the growth of my infatuation. I described how I missed all the signs of Jocelyn’s exploitative nature and how my adoration kept me from ordinary self-protection. With lugubrious thoroughness, I depicted the heartache and love blindness that led me to overlook such quirks as her burning down her own home and lying about the death of her father. Worse, the recitation had the effect of reawakening Jocelyn’s malign romantic appeal. I may have even smiled as I recounted the passionate adventures with decorative hints as to the erotic attraction. Nevertheless, nothing in the world could have prepared me for Jinx’s response. She told me to go fuck myself. The cat was out of the bag.
“Jinx, what could you possibly mean?”
“I mean, why on earth would you think I’d want to hear about you and your castrating harpie?”
“Have you even met her?” On recollection, this question would appear to be at the heart of my inanity.
“Good God, why would I want to do that? So I could kneecap her?”
“Oh, Jinx.”
“She must have seemed so cuddly in her little airplane.”
“Jinx, please stop.”
“And this Womack, he sounds like a real treat. You’ve got a little Womack in you, too, don’t you, Cuddles. Can all three of you get into the tiny airplane? But let little Jocelyn do the driving or you might crash!” At this, she burst into tears. I attempted to sit quietly holding my teacup, but Jinx’s sobbing didn’t seem to be abating. I got up from my chair and went around to her side of the table. For some reason, my eyes fell on the untouched egg salad sandwich. I put my arms around Jinx’s shoulders and asked her what the problem was. Her answer startled me. She said, “I don’t know why you don’t love me.” In the face of these words, my towering self-absorption stood in a kind of glare, but I didn’t hate myself. I was just tired of myself. I seemed to be an unbearable weight. I seemed quite useless. Somehow, I continued to fan a glimmer of self-worth, possibly in vain.
I thought if I could re-imagine all the forces that had acted upon me in my life — my parents, my nympho aunt, Dr. Olsson and my professors, the lawyers, colleagues, neighbors, Jocelyn, even my patients, my most unreasonable dreams, my love of the earth, roadside hard-ons, experimental churchgoing, and work — I would finally find myself by implication. I had left Jinx off this list because to comprehend her I would have to step out of the shadows of all those things telling me who and what I was and try to emerge as an actual human being. This seemed not unlike twisting in the wind, and it came with a kind of dread. Jinx set out in my direction quite alone; why couldn’t I have had her courage?
She abruptly pulled herself together, wiped her eyes with a napkin, got to her feet, and walked out the door. I went to the window, where I saw her mount her bicycle and ride up Custer Street; she may not have been entirely composed because the two pedestrians she passed stopped and turned to watch her. I hurried out onto the sidewalk to better see her progress, which was steadily to the north and, I supposed, out of town. I ran home and got my lucky 88, but at first I couldn’t find the keys, neither under the seat nor in the ashtray. I went wild. The macaroon-averse neighbor waved from his window and I gave him the finger. I found the keys, after a ripping search, under the porch glider and ran to my car, where I saw the neighbor advancing from his stoop in battle mode; but I was already behind the wheel and on my way to Custer Street and northward progress out of town.
I went out through an informal trailer park, past the packing plant, across the river and into undulant sagebrush hills. I pressed on because she would have had to come back the same way she left, and after a long rise that seemed to end at blue sky and cumulus clouds, I saw her, a speck in the distance. I flattened the accelerator, and the 88 responded with its signature twisting lurch. In less than a mile I overtook her, but by a glance over her shoulder I could tell she did not intend to stop. I blew the horn and immediately understood that the honking seemed to express everything that was the matter with me.
I passed Jinx very slowly, but she never looked in my direction and it was clear a roadblock was my only hope. I pulled ahead twenty yards, swung the 88 across her path, and got out. She rolled to a stop before me and climbed off her bicycle, holding it upright by one handlebar. She asked me if this was necessary. She swept her hair off her face with one hand, letting go of the bicycle with the other. It clattered to the ground. I went to her and put my arms around her. I meant to comfort her, but something else was going on.
Business, if that’s what you want to call it, was picking up. I would have to get some help. I probably needed a nurse, but I didn’t want to move out of my house and I wasn’t sure where I could put her. The battling couple across the way continued to disturb my sleep. I must have been able to stand it because I didn’t think of moving and I was getting more of my former patients, the ones who felt that I had over the years acquired some valuable familiarity with their problems. Patients for whom depression was a component of their condition were loyal to me out of embarrassed reluctance to add to their anxieties by explaining them to someone new. The twins Olan and Darwin Ickes, farmers in their seventies with the biggest hands I had ever seen, fit this description: they had been raised to put their lives into “the place” and had only gradually realized that their grueling existence had resulted in a grudge against both life and “the place.” In short, they were depressed. I knew they wouldn’t see a counselor, so the counselor, a very effective practitioner named Joyce Erikson, and I visited the twins from time to time on “the place” and I think she might have helped them some. Olan and Darwin continued to see me.
A rancher from over near Shawmut, Kurt Merrill, was willing to talk to Joyce and try some medication as well. He was in bad shape. His only son, Terry, had committed suicide over a girl who was not his wife, and since they had always been close, Kurt could not believe that Terry had not communicated with him. Kurt had trained his grief into an obsession with cell phone records and was certain the phone company had lost a final message from Terry. I was very worried about Kurt and so was hugely relieved when he consented to be put into better hands.
I really didn’t know why anyone would want my advice on such things unless they were so needy as to want the inside scoop from a fellow nut. I wasn’t being modest: people in some circumstances will only trust a misfit, and that is where my long life in this town had its uses. My shabby past and the reputation of my family for shiftlessness were assets of which I could finally be proud. My former nurse Scarlett summed it up when she said, “If an idiot like you can be a doctor, anybody can be a doctor.” Even an insult had its uses. Scarlett had left nursing to write a novel and despite her contempt for me, she once asked me to read it. I vividly remember a line introducing the heroine: “Using her ball gown to prop up the toilet seat, Annette turned her thoughts to the evening.” Scarlett never had much in her pretty head. It was only a matter of time before she ran for office.