The Thanatos Syndrome

the seat, with the smell of hot Chevy metal. We’ll sit there for a while, then we’ll—
    She touches my arm. I give a start. She is leaning toward me. “Are you all right?”
    â€œSure. Why?”
    â€œYou’ve been sitting there for five minutes, not saying a word.”
    â€œI’m all right.”
    â€œMy God.” She has made a sharp cluck in her teeth, pulling back the corner of her mouth like a country woman, leaned over, and taken hold of the lapel of my jacket. “Did they give you that suit when you got out of jail?” With a curious rough gesture, like a housewife fingering goods, she rubs the seersucker between thumb and forefinger, gives it a yank and a brush back. “You’re very pale. I’d like to have a look.”
    â€œA look?”
    â€œWith this.” She’s taken her ophthalmoscope from her breast pocket. “I’ve gotten very good with eyegrounds. I can tell more about you with one quick look than with a complete physical.”
    â€œI believe you. All right.”
    â€œNot here. Too much sun. In my office.”
    Her office in the hospital has a small desk, two chairs, and an examining table. I sit on the table, knees apart. With me sitting and her standing we’re of a height. I make as if to get my knees out of her way, but she’s already between them. She examines my eyegrounds. The lance of the brilliant blue-white light seems to probe my brain. When she changes from my right eye to my left, we are face to face. Her coat rustles. I feel the radiation of heat from her cheek and once the touch of down. She doesn’t wear perfume. Her breath is sweet. She smells like a farm girl, not a doctor.
    â€œAll right,” she says, with a slight blush, I think, and backs away. “Your arteries look good. No narrowing, no plaques, no pigment, no hypertension, I would suppose.”
    â€œDid you think I’d had a stroke?”
    â€œYou were absolutely motionless.”
    I look at her. I don’t think I’d ever taken a good look at her before. I used to think of her as a convent-school type, St. Mary’s-of-the-Woods, good-looking in a hearty Midwestern way, good legs, black bobbed hair, handsome squarish face with a bruised ripe freckled effect under the eyes—the sort who might become a nun or marry a Notre Dame boy, and live in Evanston. But of course she’s not. She’s none of these. She’s old local Episcopal gentry. She went not to St. Mary’s in Indiana but to St. Elizabeth’s in Virginia.
    A lot happened to her. She married, not a Notre Dame boy, but Buddy Dupre, Ed’s brother, a pleasant Tulane DKE, not merely pleasant but charming, the sort of Southern charmer who drinks too much. He had that sweetness and funniness which alcoholic Southern men often have, as if they cannot bear for the world not to be as charming as they are. He farmed a little at Pantherburn, Lucy’s family’s place, charmed everybody, got elected to the state legislature, began to spend most of his time at the Capitol Motel in Baton Rouge, did not so much separate from Lucy as drift pleasantly away, got investigated by the house ethics committee for taking a bribe from a waste-disposal contractor, got exonerated by the legislature ethics committee, which has never found a legislator unethical, drifted farther, to New Orleans, where he divorced Lucy and married the contractor’s daughter, leaving Lucy high and dry at Pantherburn, but intact, herself intact, and Pantherburn and its two thousand acres intact. She farmed it herself, planted and harvested soybeans in the not so rich loess loam, with only day labor. Then out of the blue and in her late twenties she went to medical school. She still farms Pantherburn, not with the two hundred slaves who used to pick the indigo or cut the sugar cane, or the one hundred sharecroppers who used to pick the cotton, but with two tractor drivers and two John Deeres and a leased combine for harvesting the soybeans.
    I take a good look at her. She’s sitting at her desk, clicking thumbnail to tooth, not looking at me. She is somehow both stronger-looking and more feminine. There’s this odd dash of gamin French about her face, bruised cheek, and almost black boy’s hair. She reminds me of Southern women in old novels: “a splendid vivacious girl, not beautiful, but full of teasing, high spirits.”
    It is as if she had only just now