Summer House with Swimming Pool: A Novel (3 page)

The third episode was on TV last night. The emperor consolidates his power. He changes his name from Gaius Octavius to Augustus, and sidelines the Senate. There are ten more episodes to come. There has never been any suggestion of canceling or postponing
Augustus
just because its star is dead. Ralph Meier is formidable in his role, the only Dutch actor in a cast of Italians, Americans, and Englishmen, but he outplays them all.

Last night, I believe I must have been the only one who watched the series in a different way. Through other eyes, perhaps that’s the way to put it. The eyes of a doctor.

“Can I go, anyway?” he’d asked me at the time. “It’s a two-month shoot. If I have to pull out halfway through, it would be a disaster for everyone involved.”

“Of course,” I told him. “Don’t worry. It usually doesn’t amount to anything. We’ll just wait for the tests to come back. There will be plenty of time afterwards.”

I watched the Emperor Augustus as he spoke to the Senate. It was an American-Italian coproduction, and they hadn’t cut any corners. Thousands of Roman soldiers, entire legions
cheering from the hillsides around Rome, tens of thousands of swords, shields, and spears raised high, fleets of hundreds of ships before the port of Alexandria, chariot races, gladiatorial contests, roaring lions, and mangled Christians. Ralph Meier had the illness in its most aggressive form. It was something you had to act on immediately; otherwise it was too late. Radical intervention: a first strike, a carpet bombing to knock out the malignant cells at a single blow. I looked at his face, his body. Inside that body, in all likelihood, the main force had already begun its offensive.

“Senators!” he said. “From this day forth I am your emperor. Emperor … Augustus!”

His voice carried, as always—at least it still did then. If there was anything wrong with him, he didn’t let it show. Ralph Meier was a real trouper. If need be, he could upstage anyone and anything. Even a fatal illness.

Over the years, one by one, the normal people have disappeared from my practice. By which I mean: people who work from nine to five. I still have a couple of lawyers and the owner of a fitness club, but most of my patients work in what are called the “creative professions.” For the moment, I’m not counting the widows. There are quite a few of those. One could refer to a widow surplus. The widows of writers, of actors, of painters … The women hold out longer than the men; they’re made from other,
sterner
stuff. You can reach a ripe old age standing in the shadows. A whole life spent making fresh coffee and running to the wine shop for the geniuses in their studios. Fresh Norwegian salmon for the writers in their studies, where you always have to walk on tiptoe. It looks like a real chore, but of course it’s a cakewalk. The widows grow old. Old as dirt. As soon as their husbands die, they often enter a brief, second bloom. I’ve seen them here in my office. They’re sorrowful, they dab at their eyes
with a hankie, but they’re relieved as well. Relief is an emotion that’s hard to hide. I look with the eyes of a doctor. I have learned to see through the tears. A prolonged illness is not an easy thing to endure. Cirrhosis of the liver is a drawn-out, painful affair. The patient is often too late; he goes for the bucket beside the bed, but the blood is already welling up. Changing the bedclothes three times a day, sheets and blankets heavy with puke and shit—that’s more demanding than fixing coffee and making sure there’s enough gin in the house. How long is this going to last? the prospective widow wonders. Will I be able to hold out till the funeral?

But then the day comes at last. The weather is beautiful, blue skies with fluffy clouds, birds singing in the trees, the smell of fresh flowers. For the first time in her life, the widow herself is the center of attention. She’s wearing sunglasses, so no one can see her tears; this is what everyone thinks. But in fact the dark lenses serve to hide her relief. His best friends carry the coffin to the grave. There are speeches. There is booze. Lots of booze. No watery coffee at an artist’s funeral, just plenty of white wine, vodka, and old gin. No slices of cake or almond pastries with the tea, but oysters, smoked mackerel, and croquettes. Then the whole club goes to their favorite haunt. “Well, here’s to you, old boy, wherever you may be! Old bastard! You old goat!” Toasts are made, vodka is spilled. The widow has taken off her sunglasses. She smiles. She beams. The puked-on sheets are still in the hamper, but tomorrow they’ll go in the washing machine for the very last time. Life as a widow, she thinks, will always be like this. The friends will go on proposing toasts for months (for years!). To her. To their new center of attention. What she doesn’t know yet is that, after a few courtesy calls, it will all be over. The silence that
will follow is the same silence that always falls after a life in the shadows.

That’s usually the way it goes. But there are also exceptions. Rage makes for ugly widows. This morning there was suddenly a ruckus at the front door of my office. It was still early; I had just ushered in my first patient. “Doctor!” I heard my assistant call out. “Doctor!” There was a sound like a chair being knocked over, and after that I heard a second voice. “Where are you, you piece of shit?” the voice shrieked. “Are you scared to show your face?”

I smiled broadly at my patient. “Excuse me for just a moment, would you?” I said, and stood up. Between the front door of the practice and my office is a corridor; first you have to walk past a desk where my assistant sits, then past the waiting room. It’s actually more of a waiting area than a waiting room; there’s no door separating it from the hallway.

I glanced over as I went by. As I said, it was early, but there were already three patients flipping through old copies of
Marie Claire
and
National Geographic
. By that point, however, they had stopped their flipping. They had lowered their magazines to their laps and were staring at Judith Meier. Judith had not become any prettier after her husband’s death, and that was putting it mildly. The skin on her face had reddened, but not everywhere, making it look spotty. Behind Judith’s back, my assistant was gesturing that there was no way she could have stopped her. Farther back, behind my assistant, a chair was lying on the floor.

“Judith!” I said, opening my arms as though I were pleased to see her. “What can I do for you?”

For a couple of seconds my greeting seemed to stun her—but no longer than a couple of seconds.

“Murderer!” she screamed.

I glanced over at my patients in the waiting space; I knew all three of them by sight. A film director with hemorrhoids, a gallery owner with erectile dysfunction, and a no-longer-so-very-fresh-faced actress who was expecting her first child—albeit not from the blond, hulking, and permanently unshaven actor she had married seven months earlier in a Tuscan castle, all paid for by the society program on the commercial TV channel that had been granted exclusive broadcast rights to the entire ceremony and after-party. I shrugged and winked at them. An emergency case—that’s what the shrug and wink were meant to say. A typical case of acute hysteria. Alcohol or drugs—or both. Just to be sure they’d seen, I winked again.

“Judith,” I said as calmly as possible. “Why don’t you come with me, then I’ll see what I can do for you.”

Before she could reply, I turned and strode back into my office. I placed my hands on my patient’s shoulders. “Could I ask you to go to the waiting room? My assistant will write out a prescription.”

Judith Meier was sitting across from me at my desk. I looked at her face. The red blotches were still there. It was hard to tell, in fact, whether her face was white with red blotches, or red with white.

“You’re finished,” she said. Then she went on: “This whole flea circus is going to shut down so fast it will make your head spin.” She nodded toward my office door, with the full waiting room behind.

I put my elbows on the desk. Then, forming a tent with my fingertips, I leaned forward slightly. “Judith,” I said—but suddenly I didn’t know how to go on. “Judith,” I tried then, “isn’t it a bit early to draw such drastic conclusions? Maybe I did diagnose Ralph’s illness incorrectly at first. I’ve admitted that possibility already. And that will come up tomorrow at the hearing. But I never intentionally—”

“Why don’t you just save it and see how the Board of
Medical Examiners reacts when I tell them the whole story myself?”

I stared at her. I tried to smile, but my mouth felt the way it had the time I broke my jaw in a cycling accident. A pothole. Men at work. A little barrier had been set up to alert oncoming cyclists to the hole in the road, but some joker had removed it. At the emergency room they wired my upper and lower jaws together; for six weeks I could neither talk nor consume anything but liquids, through a straw.

“Are you going to be there, too?” I asked as calmly as I could. “That’s not exactly custom—”

“Yes, that’s what they told me. But they thought the charges were serious enough to make an exception.”

This time I really did smile. Or at least I succeeded in twisting my mouth into something that could be said to resemble a smile. But it felt as though I was opening my mouth for the first time after remaining silent for a whole day.

“Wait, let me check with my assistant for a moment,” I said, rising from my chair. “I’ll get together all the test results and the files.”

Now Judith started to her feet, too. “Don’t bother. I’ve said everything I have to say. I’ll see you tomorrow at the hearing.”

“No, really, I’ll only be a moment. I’ll be right back. I have something that might interest you. Something you don’t know about, either.”

She was already almost upright. She looked at me. I tried to breathe normally. She sat down again.

“One moment,” I said.

This time, without so much as a glance at the patients waiting outside the office, I went straight to my assistant’s desk. She was on the phone.

“Is that only the ointment, or is it the cream, too?” she was saying.

“Liesbeth,” I said, “could you just …”

“Just a moment,” she said, placing her hand over the mouthpiece.

“Could you send all the patients home?” I said. “And call the others to cancel their appointments? Come up with some excuse; it doesn’t matter what. And then I need you to leave, too. Take the rest of the day off. Judith and I have to … It would be better if I had a little more time …”

“Did you hear what she called you? You can’t just do—”

“I’m not deaf, Liesbeth,” I interrupted her. “Judith is extremely upset. She doesn’t know what she’s saying. Maybe I underestimated the seriousness of Ralph’s illness. That’s bad enough. First I’m going to … I’m going to do something with her—go out, grab a cup of coffee somewhere. She needs a little extra attention. That’s understandable. But I don’t want the patients to see me going out with her. So send them all home as quickly as possible.”

When I came back into my office, Judith Meier was still seated.

She turned her head to look at me. She looked at my empty hands and then, questioningly, at my face.

“I think that file must be in here somewhere,” I said.

A medical practice like mine has its drawbacks. You get invited to everything. The patients think you sort of belong—with the emphasis on “sort of.” Vernissages, book launches, movie and stage premieres—not a day goes by without some invitation arriving in the mail. Staying home is not an option. When they send you a book, you can lie and say you’re only halfway through it, that you don’t want to express an opinion without finishing it first. But an opening night is an opening night. And when it’s over, you have to say something. It’s what they expect, for you to say something. But never tell them what you really thought.
Never
. What you thought is your own business. For a while, I tried to make do with being noncommittal. Things like “I thought there were some really good parts” or “What did the rest of the actors think?” But such inanities aren’t enough, not for them. You have to say that you thought it was amazing, that you’re grateful for the opportunity to have been present at
this historic occasion. Movie premieres are usually on a Monday evening. But even so, you can’t just rush off afterward. You have to put in an appearance. You don’t want to make it too late; after all, you’re the only civilian there, the only one who has to start work at a normal time the next morning. You stand with the star or the director and you say that you thought the film was amazing. An excellent alternative is to say that you found it “compelling.” That’s what you say about the end of the movie. You have a glass of champagne in your hand and you look the star or the director straight in the eye. You’ve already forgotten how the film ended, or rather, you’ve succeeded in suppressing any memory of the way it ended. You adopt a serious expression. “I found the ending entirely compelling,” you say. Then you’re allowed to go home.