Clint hadn’t replied, just waited.
“Last week, I was at Miranda’s. She’s the woman I’ve been sleeping with. We did it in the kitchen. We did it in her bedroom. We almost managed a third time in the shower. I was happy as heck! Endorphins! And then I went home, and we had a good family dinner, and played Scrabble, and everyone else felt great, too! Where is the problem? It’s a manufactured problem, is what I think. Why can’t I have some freedom here? Is it too much to ask? Is it so outrageous?”
For a few seconds no one spoke. Montpelier regarded Clint. Good words swam and darted around in Clint’s head like tadpoles. They would be easy enough to catch, but he still held back.
Behind his patient, propped against the wall, was the framed Hockney print that Lila had given Clint to “warm the place up.” He planned to hang it later that day. Beside the print were his half-unpacked boxes of medical texts.
Someone needs to help this man, the young doctor found himself thinking, and they ought to do it in a nice, quiet room like this. But should that person be Clinton R. Norcross, MD?
He had, after all, worked awfully hard to become a doctor, and there had been no college fund to help Clint along. He had grown up under difficult circumstances and paid his own way, sometimes in more than money. To get through he had done things he had never told his wife about, and never would. Was this what he had done those things for? To treat the sexually ambitious Paul Montpelier?
A tender grimace of apology creased Montpelier’s wide face. “Oh, boy. Shoot. I’m not doing this right, am I?”
“You’re doing it fine,” Clint said, and for the next thirty minutes, he consciously put his doubts aside. They stretched the thing out; they looked at it from all sides; they discussed the difference between desire and need; they talked about Mrs. Montpelier and her pedestrian (in Montpelier’s opinion) bedroom preferences; they even took a surprisingly candid detour to visit Paul Montpelier’s earliest adolescent sexual experience, when he had masturbated using the jaws of his little brother’s stuffed crocodile.
Clint, according to his professional obligation, asked Montpelier if he’d ever considered harming himself. (No.) He wondered how Montpelier would feel if the roles were reversed? (He insisted that he’d tell her to do what she needed to do.) Where did Montpelier see himself in five years? (That’s when the man in the white sweater vest started to weep.)
At the end of the session, Montpelier said he was already looking forward to the next, and as soon as he departed, Clint rang his service. He directed them to refer all of his calls to a psychiatrist in Maylock, the next town over. The operator asked him for how long.
“Until snow flurries are reported in hell,” said Clint. From the window he watched Montpelier back up his candy-red sports car and pull out of the lot, never to be seen again.
Next, he called Lila.
“Hello, Dr. Norcross.” The feeling her voice gave him was what people meant—or should have meant—when they said their hearts sang. She asked him how his second day was going.
“The least self-aware man in America dropped in for a visit,” he said.
“Oh? My father was there? I bet the Hockney print confused him.”
She was quick, his wife, as quick as she was warm, and as tough as she was quick. Lila loved him, but she never stopped bumping him off his mark. Clint thought he probably needed that. Probably most men did.
“Ha-ha,” Clint had said. “Listen, though: that opening you mentioned at the prison. Who did you hear about that from?”
There was a second or two of silence while his wife thought over the question’s implications. She responded with a question of her own: “Clint, is there something you need to tell me?”
Clint had not even considered that she might be disappointed by his decision to dump the private practice for the government one. He was sure she wouldn’t be.
Thank God for Lila.
3
To apply the electric shaver to the gray stubble under his nose, Clint had to twist his face up so he looked like Quasimodo. A snow-white wire poked out from his left nostril. Anton could juggle barbells all he wanted, but white nostril hairs waited for every man, as did those that appeared in the ears. Clint managed to buzz this one away.
He had never been built like Anton, not even his last year in high school when the court granted him his independence and he lived on his own and ran track. Clint had been rangier, skinnier, stomach toneless but flat, like his son Jared. In his memory, Paul Montpelier was pudgier than the version of himself that Clint saw this morning. But he looked more like one than the other. Where was he now, Paul Montpelier? Had the crisis been resolved? Probably. Time healed all wounds. Of course, as some wag had pointed out, it also wounds all heels.
Clint had no more than the normal—i.e., healthy, totally conscious, and fantasy-based—longing to screw outside of his marriage. His situation wasn’t, contra Paul Montpelier, a crisis of any kind. It was normal life as he understood it: a second look on the street at a pretty girl; an instinctive peek at a woman in a short skirt exiting a car; an almost subconscious lunging of lust for one of the models decorating The Price Is Right. It was a doleful thing, he supposed, doleful and perhaps a bit comic, the way age dragged you farther and farther from the body you liked the best and left those old instincts (not ambitions, thank God) behind, like the smell of cooking long after dinner has been consumed. And was he judging all men by himself? No. He was a member of the tribe, that was all. It was women who were the real riddles.
Clint smiled at himself in the mirror. He was clean-shaven. He was alive. He was about the same age as Paul Montpelier had been in 1999.
To the mirror he said, “Hey, Anton: go fuck yourself.” The bravado was false, but at least he made the effort.
From the bedroom beyond the bathroom door he heard a lock click, a drawer open, a thump as Lila deposited her gunbelt in the drawer, shut it, and clicked it locked again. He heard her sigh and yawn.
In case she was already asleep, he dressed without speaking, and instead of sitting on the bed to put on his shoes, Clint picked them up to carry downstairs.
Lila cleared her throat. “It’s okay. I’m still awake.”
Clint wasn’t sure that was entirely true: Lila had gotten as far as unsnapping the top button of her uniform pants before flopping on the bed. She hadn’t even climbed under the blankets.
“You must be exhausted. I’ll be right out. Everyone all right on Mountain?”
The previous night she’d texted that there was a crack-up on the Mountain Rest Road—Don’t stay up. While this wasn’t unheard of, it was unusual. He and Jared had grilled steaks and polished off a couple of Anchor Steams on the deck.