The Water-Method Man

Biggie frowns and dials on.

'How about, "How are you? Is the tide in or out?"'

Grimacing over her fast fingerwork, Biggie says, 'At least we'll know, for God's sake ...' and hands me the ringing phone.

'Yes, at least we'll know all right,' I say into the mouthpiece and it echoes back as if it were being spoken to me by some operator of uncanny perception. The phone rings and rings, and I give Biggie what must be a relieved look: A-ha! He's not at home! But Biggie points at my wrist watch. Back East, it's after midnight! I feel my jaw slacken.

Biggie says sternly, 'It'll serve the prick right.'

Far from groggy, my father curtly answers the phone. Of course doctors are used to being called up in the middle of the night. 'Dr Trumper here,' he says. 'Edmund Trumper. What is it?'

Biggie is balancing on one leg as if she's got to pee. I can hear my watch tick, and then Daddy says, 'Hello? This is Dr Trumper. Is anything wrong?'

In the background, I hear my mother murmur. 'The hospital, Edmund?'

'Hello!' my father shouts into the phone.

And my mother hisses, 'You don't suppose it's Mr Bingham? Oh, Edmund you know his heart ...'

Still teetering on one foot, Biggie glares at me, appalled by the cowardice she sees in my face; she grunts fiercely at me.

'Mr Bingham?' says my father. 'Can't you get your breath again?'

Biggie stamps her foot, utters a small-animal cry.

My father advises, 'Don't try to breathe too deeply, Mr Bingham. Listen, you just hold on. I'm coming right over ...'

Scurrying in the background, my mother calls, 'I'll get the hospital to send the oxygen, Edmund--'

'Mr Bingham!' my father yells into the phone as Biggie kicks the stove, emitting a snarl from her curved mouth.

'Bring your knees up to your chest, Mr Bingham! Don't try to talk!'

I hang up.

Convulsed with something almost like laughter, Biggie lunges past me, into the hall, into the bedroom and slams the door. Her sucking sounds, her crazy lip noises sound like choking, something like poor Mr Bingham with his real and faltering heart.

Unnoticed by the night watchman, I spent the night in the Iowa Library PhD thesis alcoves, in one of a long fourth-floor row of cubbies which are usually crammed with sweaty scholars, each with his Coke bottle. A dollop of Coke in each bottle, honey-thick, with several cigarette butts floating. You can hear them hiss when they're plunked in, several cubbies down from your own.

Once, his thesis near the finishing point, Harry Petz, a graduate student from Brooklyn, who was reading documents in Serbo-Croatian, heaved himself backward in his chair on casters and shot out of his cubby in reverse; pedaling his feet faster and faster down the aisle, he whizzed past all of us, the entire length of the cubby row. He smashed against the fourth-floor thermopane at the end of the aisle, cracking both the glass and his head, but not careening four floors to the library parking lot below, where Harry Petz must have had visions of himself splattering on the hood of someone's car.

But I would never do such a thing, Biggie.

There is a touching scene in Akthelt and Gunnel when Akthelt is dressing and arming himself to go out and fight the ever-warring Greths. He is donning his shin pads and shoulder pads and kidney guards and tin cup, ritualistically shielding and spiking his vital parts, while poor Gunnel is wailing at him not to leave her; ritualistically, she is taking off her clothes, unbraiding her hair, unbuckling her anklets, unsheathing her wrists, unthonging her corset, while Akthelt goes on collaring his throat with chains, fastening his coccyx-spikes, etc. Akthelt is trying to explain to Gunnel the object of war (det henskit af krig), but she doesn't want to listen. Then Old Thak, Akthelt's father, bursts in on them. Old Thak has been arming and dressing himself for the war too, and his chest zipper, or something, is stuck and he needs help with it. Of course he is embarrassed to see his son's lovely young wife all distraught and half nude, but he remembers his own youth and realizes what Akthelt and Gunnel have been arguing about. So Old Thak attempts an ambiguous gesture; he wants to try to please them both. He gives Gunnel a lusty goose with his thorny old hand, at

the same time saying wisely to Akthelt, 'Det henskit af krig er tu overleve' ('The object of war is to survive it').

Which struck me as the object of graduate school - and possibly my marriage. Such comparisons struck me hard in those days.

Walking through the library parking lot in which Harry Petz tried to land, I spy young Lydia Kindle lurking for me near a sea-green and arklike Edsel. She wears a pear-colored suit, snug, short-skirted and rather grownup.

'Hi! That's my Edsel there!' she says. And I think, This is much too much.

But there's a kind of safety at the midthigh of her skirt and I know her knees, so they don't frighten me. It's a relief to feel her leg rise and fall under my head, her foot busy at the brake and accelerator.

'Where are we going?' I ask in a doomed tone and turn a little in her lap, which there's so little of.

'I know,' she says, and I look up her suit-front, past her slight breasts to her chin; I see her teeth gently holding her lower lip. At the throat of her suit, her blouse is a deep rust-yellow; it gives that tint to her jaw, like a buttercup. And I remember Biggie and me in a field below the monastery at Katzeldorf, with a bottle of the monks' wine in the buttercups. I held a handful of the flowers to her nipple; it turned her vivid orange and made her blush. Then she held a cluster under my own sunny part. I believe it turned me strictly yellow.