The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove

the famous oath that Val had uttered twenty years ago on that sunny summer day inAnn Arbor when she graduated from med school: "I will use treatment to help the sick according to my ability and judgment, but I will never use it to injure or wrong them. I will not give poison to anyone though asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a plan-"
    The oath had seemed so silly, so antiquated then. What doctor, in their right mind, would give poison to a patient?
    "But in purity and in holiness I will guard my life and my art."
    It had seemed so obvious and easy then. Now she guarded her life and her art with a custom security system and a Glock 9mm stashed in the nightstand.
    "I will not use the knife on sufferers from stone, but I will give place to such asare craftsmen therein."
    She'd never had a problem with that part of the oath. She wasloathe to use the knife. She'd gone into psychiatry because she couldn't handle the messy parts of medicine. Her father, a surgeon himself, had been only mildly disappointed. At least she was a doctor, of sorts. She'd done her internship and residency in a rehab center where movie stars and rock idols learned to be responsible by making their own beds, while Val distributed Valium like a flight attendant passing out peanuts. One wing of theSunriseCenter was druggies, the other eating disorders. She preferred the eating disorders. "You haven't lived until you've force-fed minestrone to a supermodel through a tube," she told her father.
    "Into whatsoever houses I enter, I will do so to help the sick, keeping myself free from all intentional wrongdoing and harm, especially from fornication with woman or man, bond or free."
    Well, abstinence from fornication hadn't been a problem, had it? She hadn't had sex since Richard left five years ago. Richard had given her the bust of Hippocrates as a joke, he said, but she'd put it on her desk just the same. She'd given him a statue of Blind Justice wearing a garter belt and fishnets the year before to display at his law office. He'd brought her here to this little village, passing up offers from corporate law firms to follow his dream of being a country lawyer whose daily docket would include disagreements over pig paternity or the odd pension dispute. He wanted to be Atticus Finch, Pudd'nhead Wilson, a Jimmy Stewart or Henry Fonda character who was paid in fresh-baked bread and baskets of avocados. Well, he'd gotten that part; Val's practice had supported them for most of their marriage.
    She'd be paying him alimony now if they'd actually divorced.
    Country lawyer indeed.He left her to go toSacramento to lobby the California Coastal Commission for a consortium of golf course developers. His job was to convince the commission that sea otters and elephant seals would enjoy nothing better than to watch Japanese businessmen slice Titleists into the Pacific and that what nature needed was one long fairway fromSanta Barbara toSan Francisco (maybe sand traps at the Pismo andCarmel dunes). He carried a pocket watch, for Christ's sake, a gold chain with a jade fob carved into the shape of an endangered brown pelican. He played his front-porch, rocking-chair-wise, country lawyer against their Botany 500 sophistication and pulled down over two hundred grand a year in the bargain. He lived with one of his clerks, an earnest doe-eyed Stanfordite with surfer girl hair and a figure that mocked gravity. Richard had introduced Val to the girl (Ashley, or Brie, or Jordan) and it had been oh-so-adult and oh-so-gracious and later, when Val called Richard to clear up a tax matter, she asked, "So how'd you screen the candidates, Richard? First one to suck-start your Lexus?"
    "Maybe we should start thinking about making our separation official," Richard had said.
    Val had hung up on him. If she couldn't have a happy marriage, she'd have everything else.Everything.
    And so had begun her revolving door policy of hustling appointments, prescribing the appropriate meds, and shopping for clothes and antiques.
    Hippocrates glowered at her from the desk.
    "I didn't intentionally do harm," Val said."Not intentionally, you old buggerer. Fifteen percent of all depressives commit suicide, treated or not."
    "Whatsoever in the course of practice I see or hear (or even outside my practice in social intercourse) that ought never to be published abroad, I will not divulge, but consider such things to be holy secrets."
    "Holy secrets or do no harm?" Val asked, envisioning the hanging