Patient musings

I keep scratching at a nearby chair whose paint is flaking off. It has a soothing sensation. My nail works its way through the brittle envelope and the raw wood is gradually revealed. The noise is drowned into the hubbub of telephone rings, quiet conversations and that boisterous kid running around the low table on which stacks of dog-eared and creased magazines lay. The water fountain in the corner burps the time away with ascending bubbles. The electric light glaring above and the greenish walls compounds my sickly hue.

An elderly couple is waiting. She is reading one of the scarred magazines , feeding upon the lives of so and so a talentless journalist is paid to dissect. He is quiet, swipes a handkerchief under his nose from time to time and sniffles the rest back in. They don’t speak to one another before the secretary calls them up to her counter. She gives them another appointment; the old lady writes it religiously in a notebook. They shuffle out of the waiting room; she is faster and holds the door for him as he slowly makes his way nodding goodbye to the others in the room. I can see her leading the way to the car through the glass doors as he painfully tries to keep up.

 I continue my scratching uninterrupted but I now use a second finger as I tackle the seat. My eyes move back to the secretary. She’s a nice girl and must be in her twenties. Her typing adds to the cacophony. She receives a text and I think I can see sorrow flashing through her piercing blue eyes. What could it be? A break-up text? He will not make it to their anniversary. Everything was ready. The bottle of champagne already stood in the fridge door ready to be popped open, it would have led to light-headedness and passionate love on the kitchen counter. But not tonight. She puts the phone back in her purse looking around as she does so. She is not one to slack on the job. I should walk up to her, talk her into an after-work drink , convince her to forget all about him.

But the brat bumps into the low table and is sent flying over it, nearly missing its fearful corner. Of course, he starts crying and it muffles my increasing scratching. His mother drops her phone and runs to his rescue. Debbie, the secretary -it reads Deborah on her badge, but let’s face it she will let me call her Debbie soon- has started up from her armchair and his offering assistance with a box of tissue. The two women are squatting around the tearful boy. A tiny cut runs from his eyebrow to the middle of his forehead. Debbie notices how my hand is working away at the innocent chair. I’m blushing. “ It’s just a scratch”. The boy’s mother glares at me and leads the boy away from the bogeyman to the safety of their corner of the room shielded by a bland potted plastic plant. He sits on her lap and she gently rocks back and forth as he sniffles back his tears and almost chokes on sobs staring into space. Even though the brat must be between six or seven , she can’t be more than twenty.She looks teen mother all the way. His daddy must be in the joint , probably on a drug conviction or he must have skipped out when she had handed him the pregnancy test with a nice red ribbon tied into a knot around it . I guess I could comfort her when the brat is out of the picture. She could leave him at her parents for the evening and we might take a walk by the pier. Debbie wouldn’t have to know about it. Large flakes of black paint are now seesawing their way down onto the white linoleum. She could call me Jimmy. I would avoid the pool dive that must have been the haunt of the jailbird, settle on a seafront seafood restaurant and numb her with a nice chardonnay to her home before driving to Debbie’s place and surprise her into an unexpected visit.

 On tumbling over the table, the kid has knocked off several magazines that Debbie has forgotten to pick up. Her boss would not like it. For all I know , he might be the mysterious texter who could not come up with a believable excuse he usually gave his wife to celebrate his hopeless tryst with Debbie. I pick up the stray magazines but cannot let go of the chair, my work is almost done. I deftly open one of them with one hand and scan through the items and glossy pictures of glossy people on red carpets. Stolen photos of a corner kiss between two movie stars led to an elaborate article recounting the fledgling romance. It appears that the two met on a movie set. It was a Manhattan love story in which an upstate country girl moved to the Big Apple in search of fame on Broadway while working as a waitress at a downtown diner. Obviously, things did not turn out as they should have and the guy finds her crying into the back alley at night under the halo of a dysfunctional lamp post with a steady rain forming puddles on the cracked-up asphalt. The journalist does not want to give away the rest of the work. It appears the two actors are deeply in love and there are talks of kids. They are both ready and are looking forward to a successful relationship that would help them bury their former disappointing love lives.

  A door opens and I will never reach the paragraph in which the journalist embarks into a depiction of their failures at romance. Debbie calls my name and my scratching stops for a moment, I look up, it faintly starts again as I try to see past the sad blue of her twinkling eyes. But it’s no use. “ Dr. William will see you now”. He’s my oncologist.