kinetic, and primary each was, and they evoked in me sentiments usually tapped only by top forty hits from the fifties. I love art. Each painter had captured the look of death on a game fish face, and yet he left the viewer one small bright hope: the fish might get away.
Then the nurse came and took me to Story, dressed by now, and we watched the television monitor and the X-ray scan of Story’s secret chambers. It was, by far, the best program I’ve ever seen on television. Story’s tubes were clear and symmetrical, the shadow swelling at the end of each tube a bit like an antler in what the technician called the fibrililium, a word I had him spell.
We drove halfway home, up Route 8, before we understood that we felt bad. It was one of those half raw March days, the wind warm where it came around the sunny corner of a building and cold everywhere else. It blew Story’s hair in her face as we came out of DeRusso’s after a late lunch of hot Italian sausage for which they are famous. When she pulled her hair back, I could see that she was crying. In the car she said: “There’s nothing wrong with us.” She was right. She’d done the progesterone count twice and hers was slightly low, but nothing was wrong. My sperm count was slightly low, but still there were millions. Story’s uterus was slightly tipped, but it shouldn’t, in the doctor’s words, present a problem. Science, I thought. Now there’s a word. Science. We stopped at Outskirts, the little package store on the edge of Winstead for a roadkit of cold Piels light.
“Here,” I said, handing Story a beer. “No ice, no twist of lemon, but a woman who is thirsty has nothing for tears.” It was an old joke of ours and she smiled. But the rest of the way home, we felt bad. There was nothing wrong with us and we felt bad.
FOUR
I HAD class the day Story went down to New Haven for her cervical biopsy. I told her I’d cancel, but she insisted on driving down alone. It was the final day of watercolors, before we went on to Life Class with pencils and acrylics, and I had to put up with Mary Ann Buxton gushing about how much she had loved the medium and ya-da, ya-da about her plans to explore it further on her own this summer at her parents’ place in Maine, the light there was so delicate and terrific, and la-di-da. I had to walk three easels away to get her to let up. I had to admit, however, she had done a fair job on the four birches that grew beside the Dean’s garden. I see the four birches that grow beside the Dean’s garden almost twenty times in a year in every possible medium, especially watercolor, and they have almost cancelled my ability to enjoy trees at all. Simply: I hate them. If I stay at Bigville, there will certainly come an evil night when I make their final rendering with a chainsaw.
By the end of class, I’d grown glum, worrying about Story, and I sulked through the easels like a panhandler. It makes you feel funny sometimes as a teaching artist to see your students march through their paces, their work not great, not bad, but work anyway: finished paintings. I went back to the four birches. I helped Mary Ann Buxton add a little more light to the upside of a dozen leaves, but I felt like a phony anyway. I needed to paint.
I was home by two and my funk had me nailed to a chair in the dark living room, unable to blink. Luckily, Billy Wellner came by. He’d been to lunch with Ruth and had three beers and didn’t want to write any more policies that afternoon. We took off our shirts and played the World Series of one on one in my driveway: best of seven. For an insurance agent, Billy has a good jumpshot, but he rarely drives for the basket and he’s all right hand. I beat him four straight and walked him to his car.
Across the street, Mudd Miller himself came onto his porch and began bellowing the names of his children. There were long pauses followed frequently by a name he’d already called.
Billy threatened a rematch and said,
Then the nurse came and took me to Story, dressed by now, and we watched the television monitor and the X-ray scan of Story’s secret chambers. It was, by far, the best program I’ve ever seen on television. Story’s tubes were clear and symmetrical, the shadow swelling at the end of each tube a bit like an antler in what the technician called the fibrililium, a word I had him spell.
We drove halfway home, up Route 8, before we understood that we felt bad. It was one of those half raw March days, the wind warm where it came around the sunny corner of a building and cold everywhere else. It blew Story’s hair in her face as we came out of DeRusso’s after a late lunch of hot Italian sausage for which they are famous. When she pulled her hair back, I could see that she was crying. In the car she said: “There’s nothing wrong with us.” She was right. She’d done the progesterone count twice and hers was slightly low, but nothing was wrong. My sperm count was slightly low, but still there were millions. Story’s uterus was slightly tipped, but it shouldn’t, in the doctor’s words, present a problem. Science, I thought. Now there’s a word. Science. We stopped at Outskirts, the little package store on the edge of Winstead for a roadkit of cold Piels light.
“Here,” I said, handing Story a beer. “No ice, no twist of lemon, but a woman who is thirsty has nothing for tears.” It was an old joke of ours and she smiled. But the rest of the way home, we felt bad. There was nothing wrong with us and we felt bad.
FOUR
I HAD class the day Story went down to New Haven for her cervical biopsy. I told her I’d cancel, but she insisted on driving down alone. It was the final day of watercolors, before we went on to Life Class with pencils and acrylics, and I had to put up with Mary Ann Buxton gushing about how much she had loved the medium and ya-da, ya-da about her plans to explore it further on her own this summer at her parents’ place in Maine, the light there was so delicate and terrific, and la-di-da. I had to walk three easels away to get her to let up. I had to admit, however, she had done a fair job on the four birches that grew beside the Dean’s garden. I see the four birches that grow beside the Dean’s garden almost twenty times in a year in every possible medium, especially watercolor, and they have almost cancelled my ability to enjoy trees at all. Simply: I hate them. If I stay at Bigville, there will certainly come an evil night when I make their final rendering with a chainsaw.
By the end of class, I’d grown glum, worrying about Story, and I sulked through the easels like a panhandler. It makes you feel funny sometimes as a teaching artist to see your students march through their paces, their work not great, not bad, but work anyway: finished paintings. I went back to the four birches. I helped Mary Ann Buxton add a little more light to the upside of a dozen leaves, but I felt like a phony anyway. I needed to paint.
I was home by two and my funk had me nailed to a chair in the dark living room, unable to blink. Luckily, Billy Wellner came by. He’d been to lunch with Ruth and had three beers and didn’t want to write any more policies that afternoon. We took off our shirts and played the World Series of one on one in my driveway: best of seven. For an insurance agent, Billy has a good jumpshot, but he rarely drives for the basket and he’s all right hand. I beat him four straight and walked him to his car.
Across the street, Mudd Miller himself came onto his porch and began bellowing the names of his children. There were long pauses followed frequently by a name he’d already called.
Billy threatened a rematch and said,
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