The Practical Navigator (3 page)

“What's that?”

“A shrink.”

 

4

The clock on the waiting room wall reads quarter after twelve. Michael sits alone, thinking he should have known better. Doctors—even
loqueras
—always run late. The room is the first floor of a narrow, old two-story wooden cottage built into the hill, several blocks above Coast Avenue. It is comfortable and tastefully decorated with what to Michael's mind look like real antiques. There is Middle Eastern art on the walls and on the sideboard. There are back issues of magazines neatly arranged on the heavy wooden chest that serves as a coffee table—
Psychology Today, Spirituality & Health, Yoga Journal.
It makes Michael ponder if there aren't any other people who, like him, read
Sports Illustrated
and have the quiet desire to steal the couch. He looks up as the door to an inner office opens. A timid-looking middle-aged woman comes out. The woman following her is dressed in a fashionable skirt and jacket, her thick black hair pulled up and back off her face. The middle-aged woman has obviously been crying and now the dark-haired woman, at least a decade younger, folds her into a maternal embrace. They hold each other quietly and tenderly in the way, Michael thinks, that women sharing an emotional connection often do. The middle-aged woman forces a grateful, trembling smile and turns away. She doesn't look at Michael as she passes. The outer door closes behind her. The woman in the doorway regards Michael for a moment, her carefully made-up eyes as dark as her hair.

“I'm sorry to keep you waiting, Michael, please come in.” There is just the trace of an accent. Michael rises. The woman waits to let him pass and then follows closely behind him into the inner sanctum. She smells of sandalwood and jasmine.

Entering, Michael takes in the bookcases filled with psychology and self-help tomes, the diplomas on the wall. He has never understood why doctors, even simple Ph.D.s, feel a need to showcase all their books and diplomas. People wouldn't come to them if they didn't think they were smart. A rectangular writing table substitutes as a desk. Two overstuffed chairs face each other across the small, bright room. A handwoven rug is on the floor between them. The dark-haired woman closes the door behind her. She moves past Michael toward the single picture window. Beyond rooftops and an apartment building there is just a sliver of the sea. Putting down the file, she draws the curtains. She turns back, taking off her jacket.

“Get undressed, pleased.”

Taken aback, Michael is silent. The dark-haired woman glances at him. She frowns slightly. “Your clothes, please. Take them off.”

“Here?” says Michael. As if the small, comfortable office might have eyes.

The dark-haired woman gives him a cool, authoritative look. “Is there a problem?”

“No. No problem.” Nonplussed, Michael starts to unbutton his shirt.

“Wait.” The woman reaches back behind her head, pulls a pin and shakes. Her dark hair falls in a thick tumble, framing her face, turning it from severe to sensual. She kicks out of her high heels and, suddenly inches shorter, moves toward him. “I'll do it.” Crossing, the woman reaches out with both hands and slowly and carefully unfastens the top button of Michael's shirt. She glances at him, softly biting her full lower lip, and then her fingers drop to the second button, then the third. Parting his shirt, she leans forward. Michael gasps as her lips brush first one nipple, then another. In a bizarre, out-of-body moment, he flashes back to a skinny kid in high school, Fred Galloway, who had such a big dick, guys would joke that he probably passed out when he got a hard-on due to loss of blood to the brain. It seems possible. Even with standard-issue equipment, Michael is feeling decidedly dizzy.

“I thought you were a shrink.”

It's a silly joke but the woman giggles, sending exquisite tingles through his sternum and into his spine. Raising her head, she presses close and kisses Michael on the lips. “Happy birthday, Michael,” she whispers.

“And many more,” Michael says. He takes Fari Akrepede, his unexpected lover of the last six months, gently to the floor.

*   *   *

The cottage is off the street, the entrance to the office in the back, and Michael and Fari come down the brick steps to the sidewalk and walk toward Michael's truck together. It's free parking here, a short stroll to the village proper, and each parking place is filled. Michael was lucky to find a space.

“Does this mean we're no longer on for Saturday night?”

Fari's dark hair is once more pulled up and back. Her makeup is perfect again. She might have spent the last thirty minutes giving dictation. Michael, who can feel the raw spots on his knees and elbows from making love on the coarsely woven carpet, feels disheveled in comparison.

“If you're not fully recovered, we can always go to a movie,” says Fari. She seems prim now, almost formal.

Michael is not nearly so disciplined. His pleasure with her company is in his voice and on his sleeve. “I'll manage,” he says. His hand grazes hers but does not clasp. She doesn't like or tolerate public displays of affection.

“Something is on your mind,” Fari says. He glances at her. How she should know this, be right about it, is beyond him. Perhaps it's training. Professional clairvoyance.

“My mother might have Alzheimer's,” Michael says.

“Oh, Michael.”

“No, it's okay. With her, Alzheimer's might be an improvement.”

“That's not funny.”

“I know. But it does mean I may have to start looking for a new babysitter.”

They're at the truck now. They stop. She turns to face him. “We'll cross that bridge when we come to it,” she says firmly. She is big on crossing bridges. She is big on taking baby steps. Michael assumes it's a Psych 301 thing.

“Among others,” he says, teasing her. He turns and moves to the driver's side of the truck. He's left it unlocked. In the back of his mind is the hope that someone will steal it. In the back of his mind is the hope for a lot of things, most of them unformed and unspoken. He opens the door and turns back to Fari.

“Thanks for the birthday present.”

“You're very welcome.”

“I can hardly wait to give you yours.”

“Mmm.” She glances up and down the sidewalk, suddenly nervous. He is much less reticent in public than she is. Careful, she seems to say.

“Did I mention you have the most gorgeous ass in the entire world?”

“Surely you exaggerate.”

“I could lick it like an ice cream cone. And suck on your beautiful, big tits for dessert.”

He's made her blush red. It's the color of her nipples, the color of her sex when he goes down on her. Pleased and feeling vindicated, Michael gets into the truck. He starts it up and backs out of his spot. Another car is already waiting for it. Michael smiles, waves, and blows a kiss as he drives away.

 

5

It's dusk when Michael leaves the office, having returned to transform the blueprints for a deck into a sunroom and to sign the checks Rose has waiting for him. He drives south down the boulevard. North of Birdrock, he turns up the hill and then turns yet again, up and into a cul-de-sac of neat, well-tended older houses. Toward the top of the hill, he stops and gets out in front of a house where an English garden has gone mad. Behind a picket fence and a trellis gate wrapped in climbing roses—
BEWARE OF DOG
, says the small sign—flowers of various colors and blooms grow indiscriminately and everywhere. Shrubberies sweep over herb-planted beds and one could lie down and disappear in the dense shin-high bunches of fescue and grass that constitute the lawn. The overall effect is both bizarre and wonderful at the same time. Michael opens the gate and, closing it behind him, proceeds along a crumbling stone path toward the rear of the house.

*   *   *

Unlike the front of the house, the backyard is a tree-shaded fairy garden, the ground an abstract checkerboard of aging flagstone and green pennyroyal. There are hanging topiary, ferns, and everywhere, on the fence and ground, the tea table and its chairs, potted plants.

“Almost done, Nana!” Jamie calls. Naked as a cupid, he is happily watering a large flowerpot full of bare dirt.

“Yes, Jamie, lovely, and when you finish, there's a pot for you to water over here, my dove.”

Penelope Hodge is at a gardening bench, repotting orchids. She is an eccentric woman, knows it and enjoys it. A fat, old golden retriever, the dog to beware of, lies panting on the potting discards, moss, bark, and perlite attached to her shaggy coat. Penelope frowns with disapproval. “Abigail, do move. You drag all that into bed with us at night and it's most unpleasant.”

The dog's ears perk up as Michael comes around the side of the house. It rises stiffly and moves toward him, its whole body wagging.

“Well, look who's finally here,” says Penelope.

“Hi, Dad!” calls Jamie.

“Looks like you lost your clothes there, little man,” says Michael as he bends to pet the dog. Jamie is still watering the pot and now has it to overflowing

“They got messy so we took them off you're late,” says Penelope. His mother, Michael knows, never says hello, rarely says good-bye, and always runs her sentences together, segueing from the innocuous to what's really on her mind without so much as missing a beat.

“How would you know, you don't keep track of time.”

“No, but my stomach does and I'm hungry.”

The dog now has her nose sunk firmly into Michael's crotch and, as he scratches her ears, croons with ecstasy.

“I didn't know you were making dinner tonight.”

Penelope Hodge pushes a strand of gray hair that isn't there out of her face. She wears her hair short like an aging pixie. Pixies don't cook and, unless forced to, neither do the English.

“Don't be boring, Michael. However, I did splurge for lamb chops and if you're nice I'll let you grill them for us.”

“I'll think about it,” says Michael, knowing it's a done deal.

“Hey, Dad!”

Michael turns. An arc of gold just catches a ray of evening light. Jamie, grinning back over his shoulder, has gone from watering a flowerpot to peeing in one.

“Help me water!”

Jamie giggles. The sound, Michael thinks, is as sweet as the backyard's wind chimes.

*   *   *

If the front yard of Penelope Hodge's house is an English garden gone amok, then the inside is the same motif carried forward as interior design. Upholstered chairs and couches, frayed silk-covered duvets, wooden side tables and antique lamps, all having nothing to do with one another, and all softened by age, use, needle, thread, and furniture polish, have been thrown together to somehow create something wonderful. The bookcases are triumphs of disorder, and on the walls, the picture frames are more interesting and certainly more valuable than the prints and paintings they hold within.

Jamie, still naked but with a quilt around him, is sitting on the floor with the dog, watching a Raffi tape on the TV. Just because he likes it, he is holding a silver-framed photo of a much younger Penelope in a wedding dress. She stands posed with a handsome if distant-looking naval officer in dress uniform. Jamie's been told the good parts of the story a hundred times. His grandparents met on the island of Crete. She was a thirty-six-year-old schoolteacher on a group tour and Thomas Hodge, five years her senior, was a surface warfare officer on furlough from a ship docked in Athens. In three days of ouzo, grilled fish, and stuffed grape leaves, they fell in splendid infatuation with each other and were married a year later in a typically English town in the Cotswolds, the landlocked, rolling green countryside from which Thomas Hodge couldn't get away fast enough. Their honeymoon was a weekend in Virginia Beach, and the Monday following, Thomas left for six months of sea duty and Penelope went home to Devonshire. Michael was born five months later, at eight-plus pounds either one of the largest premature babies in medical history or, more likely, the reason that two essential loners had decided to marry in the first place.

Penelope likes to say that her husband spent half their married life at sea and the other half wishing he was. “A misanthrope, Michael. Absolutely lost when he wasn't out on his ships with all his instruments, telling people where to go.”

When Michael was fifteen, his father, now stuck behind a desk at the naval base down on Coronado, went swimming in the ocean late one afternoon. An expert swimmer, Thomas Hodge did this several times a week. Only this time, he didn't come back. All that was found on the beach was a towel and his old Rolex with the leather strap.

“Well, of course he's in Thailand, darling. Sipping a cool drink, laughing about it with us.”

But both she and Michael knew Thomas Hodge didn't like Thailand any more than he liked San Diego. The only place he was ever truly happy was on a boat.

“Jamie, dinner's getting cold,” Michael calls from the adjacent dining room. Jamie doesn't answer. It's as if he doesn't even hear. Michael turns back. Penelope is at the heavy dining room table. It is formally set with linen napkins, china, and silver. After her husband's death, life insurance, pension, and a small nest egg bought the house in Upper Hermosa and Penelope found a job working in a village bookstore that was as energetically eclectic as she was. As always, she sits upright, fork in the left hand with the tines pointing down, knife in the right. Her bite of lamb chop comes to her, never she to it.

“Let him be. He had a good half pound of cheddar when he got home from school.”

“All that cheese isn't good for him,” says Michael, sitting down.

“You did just fine on it.”

Michael sits. He takes a sip of red wine, six bucks a bottle at Trader Joe's, not bad. He hesitates, then, as casually as possible broaches the unbroachable.