Don't Disappoint - Chapter 2
by Martin Van Cooper
We continue the the third week of our second quarterly PILCROW’s Serialized Novel Contest. Over the next week, we’ll serialize the excerpts of our remaining Finalist’s unpublished novel, and then subscribers (both free and paid) will vote on a Winner to be fully serialized here on the Substack. Finalists are awarded $500; the Winner $1,000.
Our Finalists are:
Vice Nimrod by Colin Dodds
Still Soft With Sleep by Vincenzo Barney
Don’t Disappoint by Martin Van Cooper
While the traditional organs of American letters continue to wither, we recognize the need to forge a new path. If you believe in what we’re doing, PLEASE share and subscribe and spread the word.
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In Don’t Disappoint, amidst a flailing career, a displaced midwesterner in Los Angeles goes home to confront the complications of a mother with advancing dementia, only for a marital sucker punch to leave him questioning what’s left of his family to salvage.
Martin Van Cooper writes the Substack Don’t Read the Dust Jacket
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2
Jessica Driver balanced her bag on top of the toilet bowl and tore open the box and the plastic wrapper, letting both fall to the floor. Less than 10 years ago when she had just moved there, Wilshire Blvd still had a McDonald’s and 7-Eleven close to Westwood, just west of the 405 and the Veteran’s Administration Complex, before the coach level cultural touchstones were pushed back into the Valley and LA LA, south and central and east, where you could just walk into the bathroom through the side door and take care of business without sideways glances from the employees or the need to borrow a key attached to a spatula or a fly swatter or a cut off broom handle from the cash register. She had left her clinic—she did haven’t another case until 3:30—and walked towards the CVS and, for a modicum of discretion, crossed the street and went into the only non-chain coffee shop in Westwood which she knew had no code for the bathroom because somehow the homeless and addicts understood that this place was for writing and yoga comedown and avocado toast and gramming and thus they, the indigent patrons, would not patronize it for their evacuatory and bathing and ingesting needs, instead patronizing the Starbucks or Coffee Bean or Pete’s (Subway’s bathrooms are strictly for employees only). There was only one bathroom and it said Relief on the door, no silhouettes or clothing stereotypes or gender cues.
The door opened in, barely missing the pedestal sink, to the right of which was the toilet bowl. The walls were painted black, ostensibly to cover up copious graffiti, still somewhat visible in tonal outlines, from when the place had been a record store. Someone had written Tuck Frump on the side of the sink she noticed, hunched over and hovering and trying to get some on the stick and keep it off the floor and off her hand. She set it on some toilet paper on the sink and flushed and looked at the mirror: there was a discoloration in the bottom corner that looked somehow like the material was corroding, that some type of improper chemical had come into contact with it. Waiting, she turned around to read the things posted on the corkboard behind her: several dog walkers, one lost Chihuahua (Pedro, of course), a yoga/Pilates instructor, two personal trainers, one freelance writer, one drummer, three spiritual advisors with Instagram contact info, one open mic night advert. Someone had scratched a peace sign into the corkboard with a thumbtack and there was a RVCA sticker stuck on the wood border. There was a small window to the right of the toilet that had also been painted, in this case a hideous mauve, which thus bathed the room with the murky light of a confessional. Narcotizing. Washing her hands, she looked down to see that the stick had rendered its verdict, which she answered by brushing the thing off into the trash can and turning to head back into the afternoon’s sunlight, unfiltered.
They said that every medical student meets the love of their life the summer before fourth year. Because fourth year is kind of a coast but after that it’s serious shit and matching and relocation for residency, followed by matching and relocation for fellowship. In her first year it was as though all her classmates had just discovered what was in their pants for the first time and set about putting it to use fucking the daylights out of other medical students, undergrads, the odd graduate student, even civilians. Half of the girls were in the clinic for UTIs in the second week of classes. Undergrads were particularly decimated as targets of these new powers because they had erections that could tolerate abuse sometimes approaching an hour and were usually good for second and sometimes even third go rounds. Jessica herself left a pretty respectable trail of bodies in the wake of her first semester. This was another reason why social media was a strict no no. She heard horror stories from her classmates at Pilates or synagogue or the gym or walking into their parents condominium complex in Playa del Rey and being accosted by a crazed USC sophomore, convinced she had lost her phone and thus missed all his texts and calls and professing his love for her and unshaven and unshowered and ready to do some pretty convincing and irreversible self-harm to get his point across. None of that for her. She was a proponent of 19th century dating: verbal communication only, preferably in public places, no phone, no text, no email, definitely no social media and if things required privacy, this could be improvised on the fly. Her place was strictly off limits.
Bryant Wilson, III, MD, PhD had the sunburnt, preternaturally weathered appearance of someone of western European descent who spent their formative years on a surfboard. His father was an English Anglican and his mother a Russian Jew. There was a joke in there, he would say, never finding it. That made him an atheist. She surmised the first time she laid eyes on him—in the OR, she was paged in for cardiology consult on his patient, an OD’ing middle-aged white woman from Sherman Oaks who crashed her Mercedes into a wall on the Sepulveda pass—that he was the type of person with flip flop tan lines, a Prius with a surfboard on top, a (female) dog either golden or some kind of mutt named Dylan or Joanie or something, a condo either in Venice or Playa or (less likely) Santa Monica, no attachments and not a goddamn care in the world. The first night she spent at his house, after he had fallen asleep, she had the crazy idea to check his feet, only to find, wouldn’t you know it, the guy actually had tan lines from his Rainbows, two equally worn pairs of which were under the dresser. His teeth were nearly perfect in a way that told you they had always been perfect or had been perfected so early in life that he never knew anything other, personality development wise, than the disarming effect that flashing his mouthful of offensively white teeth had on people. The contrast of these teeth with his bronze skin was almost garish and his straw blond-brown hair looked straight out of an Abercrombie catalog. He was never rank even when she would tryst with him towards the end of a 48 hour shift and he often seemed to have salt haze around his eyes, where crow’s feet should be but weren’t, as though he had just dropped the board and let the sun and wind dry his face before stepping into the OR for a bowel resection or appendectomy or hernia repair. If pushed, she would say he smelled vaguely marine although she couldn’t be sure that was a real memory or one embellished from what she knew of his private life. To the extent there was one.
How is it that some people just coast, able to focus only on the things that matter, she wondered, and to master these things so adroitly, so effortlessly, ignoring everything else? It’s not just that these people can seem to do the impossible from a physical and intellectual standpoint…this wasn’t impossible per se, it wasn’t off the spectrum of what was imaginable. But it was certainly at the far end of the spectrum. But these people never seem to pay bills online, never renew their license plate, stand in line for groceries, waste a weekend repairing a faulty sprinkler system, miss a flight, shop for new pants, check their email. They never get in protracted arguments on the phone with someone who is remodeling their condo or fixing their car. They don’t engage in endless internal debates on the merits of a decision that will have little practical impact on anyone other than themselves and the only really quantifiable outcome of the exercise, if that’s not an abuse of the term, is on their own sense of self-worth. They don’t engage in mental masturbation. They don’t think about solved problems. They don’t have running disagreements with family members that get rehashed on monthly phone calls. They know about news and sports but do not watch news or sports. They never use social media. They have opinions but don’t read opinion pieces. They don’t get emotional, which is not to say they are entirely rational. They just don’t get carried away with things. That he was one of these people didn’t bother her—she was too. On the contrary, it set her at ease. At first. He was not going to come into the hospital screaming over some transgression, real or imagined, no matter how awful. He was not going to start talking over her in social gatherings or making rakish, sarcastic faces when she spoke. He was not going to fly off the handle when she didn’t call. It really wouldn’t affect him at all. There was something totally safe and reassuring about being with a self-absorbed person: he rarely noticed she existed except as a reflection of himself and since he happened to be quite a decent and hard-working person, the reflections others (including her) saw in him tended to be pretty rewarding. And so, you liked to look at him.
He would paddle out before sunrise so as the first beams of light made their way across the sky and the dim dawn spread around the horizon he would be bobbing alone on the point off Topanga. She would sit on the beach with Janice reading or sometimes, after she had been in LA for a while, doing some rudimentary yoga which to her chagrin seemed to improve both her mental and physical state. They did not drive into the hospital together—it was never discussed, they just both understood it, like how from the first date they alternated who paid in a perfect metronome. She remembered hearing the term transactional used around this time in a pejorative manner (it was during the 2008 presidential primaries and Obama refused to be transactional with John Edwards after the former had secured the nomination). That was what their relationship was and why it worked. He would talk almost incessantly on the drive to and from the beach, about his fellowship, his research, the clinical operation and the university and why it was so trammeled in red tape, and she would listen and not be required to say anything and it was a perfect symbiosis during the first year of her residency. On the rare occasion they both had the same day off, they would drive to Santa Barbara and go hiking or stay local and get in the canyons above Malibu and then circle back through Neptune’s and County Line with Janice for mussels and beer. There’s something to be said for when you have a skillset and people are willing to pay for access to it, he said one time, as though he had just been the first person to ever make this realization. To have people pay for access to your brain. He didn’t choose himself from a menagerie of options. He lived de novo. He had a couple of pieces from local Venice artists on his wall: a Jimi Hendrix painted on the side of a shipping pallet, an indescribable cubist nightmare (or so she thought), a kitschy looking wave and beach scene. The only other things in his apartment, save his clothes, seemed to be his record collection, turn table and speaker system which he said cost, when she asked him, about as much as a new 3 series beemer. And she never once saw him pay a bill, or answer an email or clean the apartment or change the oil in the F100 or stand in a line.
He remarked with mirthless, detached scorn at the behavior of his fellow academics. Most people believed the professor to be the reservoir of knowledge, the source of new ideas and moreover the ultimate arbiters of mankind’s wisdom. The ones he knew, by this definition, would come in as charlatans, no more oracles of knowledge than…he would wager that not a single one of his colleagues in a faculty meeting could solve 1/x-dx, let alone recall the basics of evolutionary biology or statistics or frankly even genetics for that matter, certainly not chemistry (his undergraduate major). They were mechanics: when your car breaks down, you don’t want a philosopher. Same thing with your gut or your heart or your liver. The last thing you want your physician doing is thinking. Medicine is recall. And the PhDs were even worse. Professorships were a license to pontificate. To never have to unequivocally prove or do anything for the rest of your career. It was a license to blow hot air, a license not to produce anything, in contrast to the private sector where, as Professor Ray Stanz observed, they expect results. Academia is a passport for your brain that never expires and never has to be renewed and has no proof of (intellectual) residency requirement.
Towards the end she started paddling out with him most mornings. Incidentally she only started surfing as it got colder that year and the mornings dawned later and the beach was breezy and the sand icy and Janice paced around listlessly. Maybe the dog could sense a change was coming. What they don’t tell you about surfing is that sitting on the board waiting for a wave—which you spend 99% of your time doing—is the hardest part to learn. She bought a wet suit and booties and after she got the hang of sitting still and facing the horizon and watching for the next set. Jessica could appreciate the sanguine peacefulness of inactivity—which they also don’t tell you is surfing’s chief attraction, in her opinion, the inactivity that is, and is why she still went out a couple days a month when she wasn’t on call until noon. Most mornings it was the two of them alone at Topanga, Janice on the beach near their towels. They want me to take some clinical chief position, he started. The division is too large and Metcalf is to researchy, the chair is afraid that the clinicians aren’t taking serious the practice building. It’s all about RVUs with this post-Obamacare consolidation. I told him that’s why all these kids want academic medicine in the first place. They don’t want to build a practice and hire nurses and staff and a receptionist, they don’t want to care about billing and rent an office. They’re kids. They never left their parents…they want to live like students, like children the rest of their lives. They have no interest in building a business, in building anything quite frankly. Starting salary in a private group is 450, we start these kids at 175. They don’t care. It’s most of their first jobs. They didn’t work, maybe they had some BS job in high school, most of them not. Parents don’t want them to work, especially these first gen kids. Straight from their parents’ house to the dorm, parents have 529’d their undergrad and so they have no debt, med school loans that pay them an upper middle class salary to be a student. So what we’re giving them is a winning lottery ticket. They walk right into a functioning practice, all the frustration, billing, staff, they just come in 3 days a week, operate, collect a check, attend a grand rounds lecture once a month for CMEs and write a limpdick case report every year for scholarly work for the dossier. He wants a clinical chief to ramp up the partner hospitals, increase RVUs across the board, basically a slum lord position for all these community hospitals we bought up that are doing appendectomies and hernias, the occasional bypass, that’s the big cash cow. Gall bladders. All the complicated quaternary care shit is done at the mothership and it loses money anyways, they just need that for reputation and to support the research enterprise.
They heard Janice’s collar jingle and turned around simultaneously to see someone jogging toward the water down from the parking lot on PCH. He had a BMI>50, long curly black hair, shorts, no shoes and no shirt against the November morning. It was obvious he was cold before he had even hit the water. Around his neck was a flower lei. He hit the water and leapt on his short board, making an audible exhalatory sound and a grimace when his body hit the frigid surf and paddled out until he was basically even with them on the other side of the point. He gave a little nod but otherwise went into his own shivering revelry. Waiting for a wave. It was about 5 minutes later when something stirred in the water in front of this man, all three of them seeing the brief appearance of a dorsal fin, at which point the Samoan or Hawaiian or whoever he was immediately flipped around and paddled furiously toward the sand. In his wake and unbeknownst to him, a dolphin briefly crested to peak a grinning snout, then continued its saunter south, parallel to the shore behind them. After the man had retreated all the way to his car and out of sight, Bryant said we should probably call this thing, don’t you think? Before it gets casual. And she knew without asking he was talking about their relationship and not the surfing, but she didn’t reply and a moment later a set came in and he caught the second wave and she watched him go for a good 10 seconds or so before catching the fourth wave herself and then following him up to the truck and putting the boards in and rinsing off and driving back to his place. There was nothing for her to collect after a year together, really, except for a couple days’ clothes, and that night she left his place for the night shift at the hospital and never returned.
