22 April 2014
1156 hrs
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Dear and Patient Reader,
Yes, two posts on the same day. I have another installment of Fonda and the Cunning Fennec Fox. So without further adieu, I shall let y'all have at it. Are you ready?
Splendid!
Fonda and the Cunning Fennec Fox
Part IV
Fonda was
old hat with the hospital scene. Her
Greek and Latin, as was mine early on, was mined from the shafts of medicine,
and she could translate both like a Pope; as priceless and mysterious as ore to
the alchemists.
That first day she read
the embroidered word “Neurophysiology,” and asked me what it meant, knowing full well what it meant. She was coy like that.
And those
kids. She made them forget they were
patients in a hospital. I simply cannot
stress that enough. As far as I am
concerned, kids are just squirming bundles of noise. At a certain point, they are very sticky,
too.
I was there to be a neurodiagnostician. I can get your kid repaired- I just figure
out what’s wrong and send them to the appropriate people for the appropriate
treatment. They’re YOUR kids . . . you
hug them. You give them the "there theres" and the pats on the hands. You tell them everything is going to be OK when perhaps they won’t. You
feed their denial. I think medicine and hospitals would be much better if we got rid of the whole Patient Thing.
You are the ones who, when asked
what medicines they are on, answer me with, “Well . . . uh . . . the orange one . . . and the . . .” Your job is to be stupid, I guess. When I am stupid then others’ quality of life
plummets, and my average goes down. That
is why I am never wrong. YOU leave your kids’ meds at home, a
long four-hour drive away, even though their next dose is due in an hour. I’ll be sure to, at the very least, make you
remember you forgot.
Yet they loved and hugged me,
too. My neck was wrung dry by many a
youngster’s elbow crook. To this day I don’t
understand why.
The younger kids could not name the
coiled, crouching darkness in the corner, patient as a statue and waiting. But they could sense its ominous nature in
their parent’s thinly-veiled horror. The
teens knew what was up. But they watched
Fonda. They saw her live and see her
twentieth birthday. And her
twenty-first. They saw her not
dying. Each and every one of us loved
her for that.
I would watch Fonda in those
moments. Eidetically, I saw and remember
the happy sadness, the melancholia of her joy, as she gazed upon her adopted
brood, knowing full well her fallopian tubes were ravaged and she would never
have children of her own. If she did
think about that pram forever as empty as her womb, she dared not show that to
anyone but me. And I only saw it because
I am the Bodhisattva of Wisdom . . . am
I not?
I was the Fly to her Pitcher Plant.
A hundred years earlier, Fonda
would have never made it out of grade school.
Oddly, had she been a hobbled horse or a dog wrapped, caught in barbed
wire, a bullet would have been fired into her brain without a second
thought. Since she was human, well, that
would have just been cruel.
We had a standing date, she and I. I would get to the hospital at 0400 hrs,
every Monday of that third week, and I would wait for her car as I sat in the
lobby, giddy as all get-out. Yes,
Patient Reader, there was a time I actually felt giddiness . . .
I would see her beat-up Plymouth
pull into the parking terrace and I would hoof it up to the mezzanine where the
entrance to the covered pedestrian overpass was, welcoming as a soft and warm
mouth. I would meet her halfway, and we
would stand there in the longest of embraces, suspended above the deserted
street, her scalp smelling of warm apples.
No words were to be exchanged for some time. There could be nothing said that would say
more than the way we held us.
One early afternoon she appeared in
my office. “We’re going on a field trip,”
she said. “You’re taking the rest of the
day off and we’re going to spend it together.”
I looked out my window and saw a beautiful central-Alabama Spring day,
and I told my secretary to reschedule my appointments. Fonda and I were going on a field trip.
She got a free glimpse as I changed
from my scrubs to my street clothes. Old
and faded blue-jeans and a white cotton button-down. This shirt was Fonda’s favorite; soft as
angel’s breath, and she loved to rest her face against it. Loved to hold it and my chest beneath it
against her beautiful face; against the bright thunder of my pounding heart.
I was sure to keep that shirt handy when she was visiting.
Fonda was not tall; just over five
feet, she fit neatly, and rightly so, under my warm wing. She knew no harm would befall her when she
was protected so. She knew this,
allowing me my role, this role of many others that I portrayed.
She pretended to browse over the
things in my office, the objet d’art that made that office mine, as I changed
clothes. Her presence was awkward to
neither of us.
She looked from my bare chest to
the bed I used for EEGs, and back at me as I dropped my scrub bottoms. I saw her blush. She did not see me see her.
“You’re taking me to the Botanical Gardens,”
she declared, explaining to me that the pollen should not be too bad and that
she had her inhaler. Her pulmonologist
OK’d the excursion, and I acquiesced to her desire.
I remember her framed by dogwoods
in front of the Yellow Lady’s Slipper display.
She was all pinks and yellows and I was in a dream. Her back was to me, and I embraced her, her
firm breasts resting on my forearms. I
dared to place a kiss gently on her neck.
Y’all know the spot; just where the neck and shoulder meet; just beneath
and behind the ear; just behind the tiny blue vein that traced back to her
heart.
She felt right then and there, soft
and warm in my strong arms, her scent more powerful than the fragrant flowers
filling, like the lover she was meant to be.
For a moment, the very sweetest of
moments, she was free of her bonds, turning her head and letting me place that
kiss, softer than a wish.
In that all-too-brief instant, I
learned a universe of knowledge about my Sweet Fonda:
In the way she softened, I learned
that she dreamt of, as did I, this tender dream.
I learned from her blush that she
was awakened and wanting. Her breath quickened and I felt her warmth on my lips;
palpable as a heartbeat. I learned that
Fonda knew that I could be her man.
She stiffened and turned to me, her eyes gazing so very deeply into
mine. For the first time I saw fear in
Fonda’s eyes, and it frightened me. I also
saw sadness and desire, as I see them right now in the scribblings of my
memory; on the movie screen that is my mind.
I felt a stirring so strong that my heart cracked a little and spilled
warm. Then the moment was over.
She broke her gaze; the doorway
closed. She laid her head upon my chest
and listened yet again to that bright, racing thunder that was my
heartbeat. She heard the caged tiger
pacing.
She was searching for the same
words I was, and all she could say was my sad name. “Fox . . .
Fox . . .”
She would taste my name before she said it, pleasing to her it
seems, for she let it out with great reluctance. From her mouth it was new to me, my own name,
bouncing around the abyss that is my soul.
She colored it with the color of her eyes, that bright blue born of
wishes.
After some moments, she spoke, and
I listened with great care:
“I was in love once, with a boy
named Steve, back in Red Bay. And I think
he loved me . . . Anyway, I kept waiting
for him to pop the question, and when I finally worked up the courage to ask
him why he was taking so long . . .”
And here she paused, and I waited
through it. Everything Fonda told me was
the most important thing I would ever hear.
Listening to her words was handling her heart. Something most profound, something that would
alter our lives was coming, and I tried in vain to prepare for it.
Her soft and warm lips, pink as
life, trembled. Had I been a lesser man
I never would have seen it. Had I been a
greater man, I would have stopped it.
She sighed.
“Steve said, ‘Well . . . how much longer do you have?’”
And then she showed to me what her
broken heart looked like. It was
shattered and ugly and twisted and it hurt so much to lay my gaze upon it. Its sickly glow was my death ray; my
kryptonite. I shuddered beneath the
weight of tears, my back creaking from the burden of her sorrow.
This horrible heart hurt her; made
her weep so. I held her as she broke
apart, my arms struggling to their limits as I tried to keep the pieces of her
from scattering. They could only keep
her from falling. But they could not keep
her from falling in love with me.
Years later, Shmaren*, my wife,
threw away that soft shirt in which Fonda had wept. She did not ask me if it was okay, because
she knew what I would say. Though I
never wore it again after the day at the Gardens, Shmaren felt threatened by a
shirt hanging in my closet with another woman’s mascara on it. She assumed that it was a souvenir of some
passionate rendezvous . . . a tryst I would never want to
forget. She did not know, nor did she
ask, that it was Fonda’s tears that put that mascara stain there. Those tears were all I had left of my friend. Those tears were alive, as alive as my memory
that lies beyond that bright blue door, that Sheltering Sky. That woman, Fair as the moon; clear as the
sun; terrible as an army with banners.
End of Part IV
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