Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [16]
When Bobby went back to his desk, Lewis tried to read a poem. He’d been working on a paper about Hopkins’s concept of “inscape” for a Ph.D. seminar in nineteenth-century British literary culture. I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree / Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me. … He was too tired to unravel such syntax. He dozed, woke up to the ancient detox doctor jiggling his shoulder.
“Achy? Shaky? Lacka appetite?” the doctor asked, then grabbed Lewis’s chin and pulled his lower eyelids down with his thumbs. Lewis looked back into rheumy blue eyes in a face of a thousand wrinkles. “Looking good,” the doctor said. “Not so yellow today. Still, we’re gonna keep an eye on that liver, friend.”
Given the doctor’s advanced age and broad body vibrato, Lewis assumed he was a retiree who’d volunteered his antiquated expertise to this shabby institution. The old gent wavered so much that it was like looking at someone through water. Keeping an iron grip on Lewis’s cheeks, he said, “Hear you’re going out to Red’s place.”
“I ’on’t ’ink so,” Lewis said.
The doctor released Lewis’s face and scribbled on a clipboard. “You want Antabuse?”
“I just want a cigarette.”
“Can’t help you there.” He scribbled some more. “You’ll like Red’s. You won’t want to go home after your thirty days are up.”
Lewis didn’t particularly relish going home, period, considering he’d been living in his philosophy professor’s garage, sleeping on a foam pad between the washer and dryer and the BMW. Every morning he’d wait until Sam and his wife went to work, then go into the house and shower, read the paper, and drink whatever coffee was left cooling in the pot. The first month, Amanda—the wife—left him a fresh half-pot and something to eat. “There’s bread in the toaster for you,” she’d call as she climbed into the BMW. “Pancakes in the oven … muffins on the table …” Soon, however, there were no baked goods, and she got into her car ignoring the fact that Lewis was a couple feet from her right-front wheel well. He didn’t know what bent her cross. They used to talk, be close. She’d admired his work, especially a paper he’d published in New History Journal. Without warning, she’d stopped being friendly. Lewis took the hint and steered clear. The last night Lewis was there, Sam had called him into the kitchen for a drink. “We haven’t seen you,” he said. “Are you okay? Staying warm enough out there in the garage?”
In fact, the cement slab was like a block of ice, but before Lewis could answer, Amanda said, “If you get too cold, you can always take a spin in the dryer,” and laughed heartlessly.
Oh, sitting there in detox thinking about how Amanda stopped liking him, and how his mother wouldn’t come and get him, it seemed to Lewis as if everyone who was ever nice to him had pushed him away in the cruelest way possible.
The old doctor’s pencil scratched. His breath whistled, broke into high-pitched chords. “Whaddaya weigh? One forty?” Frowning, gave Lewis an appraising look. “Month of Ernie’s cooking oughta put some meat on those bones.”
IN THE canned-vegetable aisle at Smart and Final, Red heard someone call his name. Julie Swaggart, his ex-secretary, pushed toward him, her dolly loaded with cases of Murphy’s Oil Soap, popcorn, and Tampax. With her rippling hair, shapeless batik dress, and fringed shawl, she looked the same as always, only happier.
Julie once had been a well-known R&B singer, and back then her drugs of choice had been marijuana, red wine, and barbiturates. These substances had so shaped her behavioral style that even after many years clean and sober, her manner was still leisurely, as drowsy and vague as if she’d just pulled herself up off a massage table. “Hey, you,” she said in her just-woke-up voice, giving Red a hug. Her shawl folded around him like patchouli-scented wings. “How’s life at the ranch?” she asked.
“Going all to hell.”
She laughed,