It was one of those cramped rooms, those rooms that make you wonder, probably the leftover of a lobby cut in half. To Lewis’ right sat a petite Asian woman fingering through a magazine, with her oblivious daughter crouched on the floor playing with her mom’s shoelaces. Across from him was an elderly yet very handsome man wearing a sweater and a beige fedora, on whose lap sat a bagel on a plastic plate, but he didn’t touch it. He sat stiffly like he had been in the army some decades ago and wanted Lewis, the Asian woman, and especially the little girl to know it, and would even salute should that prove necessary. The waiting room was shaped like a small V and opened into a wall with a glass barrier, behind which were two blonde women at their desks. The room was so tiny it had the aura of an elevator, just like the one Lewis had rode up, except there was no movement; in the waiting room nothing is moving and it seems senseless. It is just a matter of the doctor being for a long while not ready to see you and then suddenly ready to see you. For those unfortunate sick people, this process resembles their disease: vexing, uncommunicative, invisible and, whether healing or getting worse, always taking its sweet time.
Over sixteen minutes later – Lewis kept time because he was trained to do so – a woman with an enormous chart-board walked into the room from the hallway and announced, “Lewis Davidson?” He walked toward her with a smile yet as he passed the old soldier, who had been waiting there longer, he felt the man’s hot enmity on his back; the gentleman even let go a soft harmless curse which, Lewis imagined, had once been a roaring death-knell to a Jap in an overwhelmed bunker, but had faded with time. He followed the rather tall blonde woman into the empty sterilized exam room. She announced, “Dr. Reonalds will be here in a minute. You can get undressed.” As she shut the door Lewis lifted his striped button-down shirt out of his pants, then undid the upper buttons in an automatic way with his thumbs, meanwhile extracting that minimalist sinful pleasure one feels in pushing a button through its tiny slit.
There was no mirror in the room but the bottom of the exam table, which could have been less horribly named a couch or a bed or even a divan, was reflective. Lewis had a face that was “too pretty for radio,” as Donny, his not-too-bad-looking-himself colleague, had once told him; because, actually, Lewis was a radio-newscaster for the medium sized station PMWR, delivering the news a couple dozen times a day with slight modifications, a few sentences or clauses more or less, for every successive rendition. He continued to undress. He caressed his dotted red abrasions, the small irritated markings on his sensitive wrist-skin, and up to his forearms and elbows, like how a man’s beard scruff blemishes the child’s cheeks given to him by his mother; and, inevitably, the man will develop the habit of fingering his scruff, in the way divers are drawn to a good wreck, the same way Lewis fondled his semi-mutilated wrists. Besides, there was nothing else for him to do. He did this while mulling over a decently worded description of his disease. Because of course he would be asked.
Lewis was in this office, among the thousands of doctors’ offices in the city, since he and “Dr. Reonalds” – that is, Jeff – had been roommates in college for three semesters. It had probably been almost two years since they saw each other (there was, for sure, Brittany’s catastrophic wedding) and yet nothing changed, it was obvious that nothing could change; as far as they were concerned, the other one was still and always in college with them. Even at that last meeting, which was admittedly drunken, they had seen each other with their outdated eyes and classified it that way, just as a mother will find a stray photo of her son or daughter at around age five and rush to catalogue it in the album at the right spot with the other photos of age five, as if it had never been separated, because that’s where it belonged; so each time Lewis and Jeff met after college, which is now at thirteen years ago, it was filed as a college memory and no progress was possible. It didn’t help, in this particular instance, that Lewis was now clad dorm-true in his underpants.
Jeff walked in and called out in his too-loud chuckling voice, “Lewis! Hey, how are you doing?” He was short and appeared even shorter than he actually was, since his white doctor’s coat extended very far down, threatening the floor, and his stethoscope hung past his torso to the half-zipped fly’s beginning. What used to happen was that Jeff woke up early every morning and would interrogate Lewis, or Lewis’ blanketed AM corpse, what shirt should he wear, this one or that, look, this one right? Ok, and which pants? Lewis would respond with his inhuman throat-rattle picking an outfit at random, and somehow Jeff assigned to this process a ritual significance; he was certain he dressed sharper for it. Without a doubt, Lewis mused, his wife must now be the morning clothing oracle. Such rituals tend to perpetuate themselves.
“Hey, Jeff, nice to see you.” Lewis smiled generously, forgetting for a moment the room’s chill, as well as the unpleasant sad imprint his aged body was making on Jeff, who had seen him naked and in his prime. “Funny to be in your office. So you’re a real doctor, after all, huh?”
“You better hope I am, or else why would I even dream of poking my fingers in your butt?” Jeff said in a mock terseness which was somewhat alarming, though it didn’t hurt the joke. In usual settings Jeff was a jovial and rowdy man. He advertised his own reckless streak and had a way of making his voice jump like a cricket whenever his sentence reached a string of meaningless profanities. And yet, Lewis always puzzled, he was an extraordinary studier who took his classes to heart, and his ambition eventually brought him through the arduousness of med school. There was a tricky coexistence in him. In everything he was forceful and winning but often, like most of us perhaps, he was moved by intangible chance notions that had a way of sticking.
“So what’s wrong?” Jeff asked, transitioning into a more or less professional posture and squinting slightly. He motioned for Lewis to sit on the exam table, which he did with a boyish exuberance. Lewis put his hands on his knees and slouched on the table so his belly changed form and became very expressive, acquiring several layers of meaning.
“Well,” Lewis began, looking down at the series of cartoonish cherry-bump hives across his hands’ and arms’ undersides, which apparently itched badly since the evidence of his scratching was right there in a few dozen miniature scabs, “I have a pretty bad rash. See?” and he presented his open palms like an accused man protesting his innocence of a crime, petty or brutal, in this case brutal because of the dried blood.
“Oh my,” remarked Jeff, and he took Lewis’ hands to inspect and feel the hives for himself. “When did this start appearing?”
“A little less than a week ago.”
“Hm, look at that.” He was still playing with Lewis’ forearms feeling out the logic of the bumps. One doubts whether he was stroking in an amateurish curious way, as happens when a friend buys a new sweater and orders you, “Feel this,” or whether there was actually some type of decipherable rash code, like braille. In either case the stroking went on. It was palm against wrist except for the thin anti-flesh coolant of Jeff’s wedding band, whose icy movement Lewis could track on his skin. “Do you have any known allergies?”
“Uh, I’m a bit allergic to kiwi and melon, but I didn’t have any recently. I’m positive.” Lewis looked up at Jeff, who was somewhat absorbed in the texture of the rash, and saw that he was biting on his lower lip. That used to be his worried cue, or preface, of an approaching midterm, or a date – he bit on himself so severely (the structure of his teeth was literally indented into the lip, it was that bad) that Lewis wondered what kind of female dinner companion, exactly, wanted to kiss him goodnight; she would have to make out less with lips than with an orthodontal mold. But Jeff’s dating life was mostly impenetrable to him anyway, on still more technical grounds.
“You didn’t eat anything strange, did you?” Jeff finally released his arm and leaned back in his doctor chair, which was basically a rolling stool.
“No, I don’t think so. But–” here Lewis tried not to hesitate – “the night before I took home a guy from a bar, and…literally by the next afternoon I had this crazy rash, so I’m a bit concerned it could be some kind of infection.” Jeff swiveled closer on his short stool.
“Well um, it doesn’t look like an STI. But why the hell didn’t you use protection? You’re still screwing around like that? I can’t believe it, for God’s–”
“I don’t know. It was stupid, yes, I’m aware, but he’s married so I guess figured he can’t have too serious a–”
“Jesus, Lewis.”
“Okay, I know. I learned my lesson.”
“Listen, I can give you the name of a clinic to get bloodwork and a swab, and I think you should get tested anyway, but I still believe this is something you ate or were exposed to somehow. It doesn’t really look like the symptoms of an STI. Give it a few more days, it’ll probably go away.”
“Thanks.”
“And you have to stop screwing around like that. I’m serious – it’s dangerous.”
“I know. Don’t worry,” Lewis said with hidden confidence. He thought of that man, the toxic man, slightly mustached and totally bald. As old as he was (definitely over 50) he had an extraordinary wellspring of vigor. The veins on his head were almost literally popping. This man, who when asked had given his name as Theodore, his occupation as in finance, and his body as in devotional sacrifice – could he have infected him? Lewis debated. He certainly had not appeared to be in any manner at all physically defective.
Lewis sat on the exam table for a few minutes as Jeff was jotting down information on a paper affixed to a clip-board. Lewis thought to ask, perhaps in vengeance for the humiliating revelations and scolding just past, and while still wearing only his underpants, “Hey, by the way – how is Lauren doing?”
“She’s good. Same old,” Jeff replied. Then, after a pause in which the pen stopped moving but his posture remained as if writing, he said, “Listen – she’s cheating on me, you know.”
Of course Lewis knew (see: Brittany’s wedding). The fact of Lauren’s liaisons or affairs or protracted and overlapping episodes of sexual freelancing (combined with total disinterest in Jeff’s overtures) was so well established it was almost documented. There were legends. Her career beddings were, they said, literally calculable on a bell curve of normal distribution in which the majority of accomplices were virile males between ages 28 and 51, but including two standard deviations in both directions. Just the muscle memory in her thighs could probably raise a marching army in one night, if need be. Of these foot-soldiers and cavalrymen it was estimated that Jeff knew of a third, but what an impressive and damning third! All of that by way of rumor, so in actuality she may have had only 3 or 4 lovers spread out over ten years; though by the same token there may be a whole other as-yet-undiscovered militia. So the question “How is Laruen doing?” implied an oblique but radiant counterpart, like the sun warming the backside of a cloud, which carried the more vulgar sense of doing. Basically it was a cruel thing to ask. And here Jeff once again bit his lip.
“But you know what,” he added, “that’s just who she is.”
“What do you mean that’s who she is? So you’re okay with it? Jeff!” He inserted a garish blast of air through his nostrils which signified a kind of rage or pity so immediate and unrefined it actually evaporated itself before coming into existence. Lewis’ expressions often had difficulty in coming to be.
“Well–”
“Obviously it’s hurting you. I can see that clearly enough.” His voice now assumed its chiseled resonance and beat which would be familiar to the radio listeners of nearly all Maryland.
“It’s not about whether it hurts me, it’s not about that. The thing is – we want to have another child and, you know, I just have to be sure.”
“But, why do you put up with it?” mystified Lewis asked.
“I can’t change any of that. That’s really just who she is. But I have to be sure that our child is mine, you know – mine and hers. That’s what actually matters, in the end of the day. That my genes get passed on. Because really,” Jeff now looked him in the eyes, “our genes are the only vestige of permanence to emerge from love’s bosom.” This last phrase having obviously been prepared in advance, perhaps even actually recited out loud in a shower or in traffic, Jeff could not suppress a look of pleasure at executing it masterfully, though the appropriate look would have been either meekness or devastation or blend of. Lewis for his part was not that impressed, and instead regarded his friend with a stunned face, as if wondering, “Where is his head?”
Jeff had married for love, so he married badly. She was physically persuasive. Her brows on top of grey or green eyes were, like the rest of her, feats of grammatical symbolism: shoulder blades being quotation marks, navel inlaid on the abdominal sheet, crisp apostrophe, her twin intrepid hemispheres below the collarbone, parentheses, teasing commas. A fine rhetorical body. When her sun-heated skin was even thinking of sweating it was basically an argument for something, hardly mattering what, and Jeff was swayable. She wasn’t bookish or what could be called sharp, but she enjoyed her conversations. So did everyone else. To his great disadvantage Jeff loved her. Perhaps the characterization being formed is one of a vainglorious soul-sucker demon whore, and that must be corrected: Lauren was actually a virtuous person, in her way. Not virtuous in the biblical fashion, as in toward the destitute or hungry or barren women, and respecting her husband least of all, but she was extraordinarily giving of herself. Just mostly to other men. Encased within all the mess of her trysts was the profound righteous will to heal, to replenish and revivify the spirit of a desperate beaten-down man, a man necessarily tortured because he is a man, and grant him entry over and over to a piece of actual paradise. She didn’t have to verbalize or even semi-cognize those noble motives; her body was plenty articulate.
Jeff was determined, having what is called drive, and so his love was driven and powerful. But the wandering lusts of his wife became a charged obstacle, like a rivulet dammed for hydroelectric purposes. The energy needed transfer. So naturally he had no choice but to reorient his heart to a chromosomal nano-love. With no room for souls or bodies, his resourceful affections took hold of the pure genetic material and ran from there. It became a chemical thing. Involving helixes. They would have a child who, composite of parents, would by all true measures constitute their literally undying love. What else could he do? Happily, this notion was corroborated – even trumpeted – by the most up-to-date branches and specializations of evolutionary biology. Hence Jeff’s need to “be sure” about the fatherhood of his next child. Hence his remark about love’s bosom. Hence his anguish.
When Lewis had already gotten dressed and said goodbye to Jeff and held in his hand a piece of paper with the address and phone number of a clinic near his work, he walked back out to the cramped waiting room shaped like a V. Incredibly the elderly maledicting soldier was still sitting in the same seat, legs crossed at the knee, though his bagel had disappeared and was survived by a slew of crumbs spread over the sweater. He was alert. Lewis walked by him in the most self-conscious manner, though luckily he seemed to have forgotten him altogether. New people had entered the room to wait, of course, and the old man was now entirely focused on this second or perhaps third wave of waiters. He apparently liked doing that.
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It was one of those bars, those bars that make you wonder, Do all of these people actually exist elsewhere? The group could not have been more random. It wasn’t such a big place, and because of the hard-thumping music it felt smaller and fuller than it probably was. But the effect was one of being almost compelled into the arms of the three or four men near you, pretending to dance. Because of the partial darkness and the refusal of anyone to stay still I couldn’t even see what they looked like. I could guess at their ages by their clothing but the margin of error is enormous; in places like that, boys still with a pubescent afterglow gyrate alongside silvery great-uncles on the brink of senility. You may not believe this but it wasn’t until I was actually kissing Theodore, an inch into his mustache, that I realized he had about fifteen years on me. The marker was the scent and elasticity of his skin. Someone else was exploring my thigh but I didn’t bother to follow the hand.
At the beginning of each of my segments I recite a lead-in with this formula: “Good morning/afternoon/evening! It’s [time o’clock] and you’re listening to PMWR Maryland’s News Headquarters, I’m Lewis Davidson and This Is Happening Now [usually an ‘actuality’ here].” Donny, who I almost always see wearing his black jaw-hugging microphone headset, operates all the recorded sound bite material, and I follow his cues. He is only 25 and yet skilled and brilliant, the type who was called by everyone in school a “genius.” Somehow he remains disarming beyond belief. Perhaps I am infatuated with him because he is everything I am not: radically handsome (thin, yes, but his face repays anyone lucky enough to look), youthful, extremely devoted, almost painfully sincere, and straight. I know it is paradoxical, maybe, that opposites should attract me, since that rule does seem repudiated by my one-sided, wholesale, eager general preference. Nonetheless I am attracted to him. He is also very serious about work. As far as I can tell he has no social life, and I’m quite certain no girlfriend. Yes, I’m aware there is no chance. Nonetheless I always hope to see him in one of the bars, which, yes, I select sometimes by their nearness to his home, sometimes the furthest one from there.
Theodore woke up before me this morning and was already fully dressed. I believe the actual sound that nudged me awake was his pants zipping up. I remembered who he was and why he was in my apartment, but this is the point when the etiquette is ambiguous. Was there any need for breakfast? Phone numbers? You had to work off of the echo of nighttime, try to retrospectively interpret a cadre of whispers and spasms and grunts, and see if there was anything substantial to them. Something to justify more. In his case I thought there was; I still had the fire in my morning belly for a few light amorous maneuvers. But we were mock lovers, really. Even we couldn’t take ourselves seriously. His bald head was so lustrous it seemed like a parody of something, like it was ready to issue forth a light-bulb as a cartoon gesture of inspiration. And technically our business had concluded; I noticed he had even cleaned the mess off the floor.
And then I remembered that he was married, which I had discovered already at night by the pallid centimeter-wide curve around his left ring finger, which implied the curve of a wife. It also implied that his hand was often exposed to the sun; perhaps he dangled it out the window while he drove, as I have seen men with mustaches do disproportionately. I watched him delicately button his shirt. I asked, “What would your wife say if she ever found out about this?”
He reacted very badly, or at least irrationally. It was as if my question set off a chemical response inside him which altered him physically; his breathing halted, his powerful chest contracted; the veins on his head rose up; and I could swear his head’s luster multiplied its wattage. He plunged his hand into his pants pocket, but since the pants were very tight and his movement violent he couldn’t get out whatever he was trying to get out. Like recoiling from an electric current, he extended his torso and shook his leg, nearly hopping, revealing once again the vigorous fifty-year dynamo he had lately proven himself to be. This afforded me a few seconds to watch and unfreeze, but also to think that perhaps he was pulling out a gun. Instead he finally liberated his phone which he flipped open and began to dial, saying, “Hm, that’s an interesting question,” and continuing to dial, “let’s call her and find out, heh?” He stared at me with moist, hostile eyes. Holding the phone to his large ear, he declared, “It’s ringing.”
It was true; I could hear the feint ring. I was still sitting in bed with only the blanket covering me. I had been gripping it so stiffly that I felt the discomfort of sweat droplets there, as well as coldness due to uncirculated blood. My insides cringed as if my own wife were on the phone, and when I heard the muffled feminine voice say “Hi” I wanted to yell, Hi honey, it’s me. Everything’s fine. Go back to bed, I’ll be home soon! because I knew that my wife, whoever she is, would be devastated and wouldn’t recover, or else why would she have married me? But I didn’t scream; I was too scared. He said, “Hi,” and then peeled the phone off his cheek and whispered “Here” as he tossed the phone at me like a football. I have always been shit at sports. Since elementary school I’ve been teased and embarrassed whenever I got (usually by accident) near a ball, and I worried that this fact would expose the façade of my masculinity. This time was no exception; because I was in complete shock and because I can’t catch anyway, my helpless hands missed the phone and it bounced off my bare chest where my heart had just ceased beating. “Why don’t you tell her what’s going on here, heh?” he said sharply, like an inquisitor extracting a confession; he knew what sort of torture this was. But I could see that he was also almost in tears. Not knowing what to do, I picked up the phone, I think just to see if she was still on the line. But then I had it in my hands.
It was a very clever conceit, but I can’t say I totally planned it. In part it was just the lines I was so used to saying that they existed, as they say, on the tip of my tongue. It was basically thoughtless. I just put the phone’s mic to my mouth and said, “Good morning! It’s 7:30 and you’re listening to PMWR Maryland’s News Headquarters, I’m Lewis Davidson and This Is Happening Now!” She must have assumed her husband was playing some kind of joke with her, pressing the phone to the radio (which isn’t totally false: I am the radio) – which was believable because he really did seem like a joker, as just then I remembered how playful and frankly funny he was in bed; he developed a subtle comedic rapport with my body, how he would pinch my skin here and smile, pinch my skin there and smile, which was insanely sensual and hilarious. Actually, it was partially that very kidding which put me at ease enough (so I thought) to ask him the question about his wife in the first place – which, I gather, is the discrepancy between sex and marriage, because he found the first funny and the second apparently not at all.
But before I hung up I added something. I said what I have thought about a lot, and rehearsed alone: “My heart beats for you, Donny.” How much I’ve wanted to say that on air! If those words could be broadcast and transmitted as radiowaves, in my honest voice, then they could maybe make an impact. At least they would be permanent, and they would be huge. They’d literally permeate the bodies of every man on the planet, across cultures, receptive and hospitable, and inside everything else too, and then stretch out into infinite space without stopping. That would be real. My words or waves becoming – via my lips, via the radio tower – an incontestable fact, and gently, imperceptibly, boldly winding through and around everyone – this is what I found myself wanting, knowing still that it would not make Donny less straight. (And yet, really, why doesn’t he have a girlfriend?) That simple phrase, which I had practiced quite a bit, I said it to Mrs. Theodore. Out loud, on the phone, this morning. And then I hung up.
I tossed the phone back to Theodore – he caught it, obviously – and he put on his jacket and left, slamming the door, cursing me. I haven’t really recovered from the episode; I took the day off. And this afternoon I noticed little red dots on my wrists, a whole bunch of them which itch like hell. They seem like hives, so I wonder if it has to do with Theodore or with my nerves. But, actually, a stranger thought comes to mind: maybe it’s because of what I said? I said it in Mrs. Theodore’s ear, but those waves were transmitted via cellular towers. My sentence is loose, spreading, a fact, maybe (likely) infectious. Is it possible to be allergic to your own love? And hence the rash? For the rash, at least, I should see my old roommate Jeff, who is a doctor. I’ll make an appointment.
