In the Land of the Living

In the Land of the Living by Austin Ratner Read Free Book Online Page B

Book: In the Land of the Living by Austin Ratner Read Free Book Online
Authors: Austin Ratner
him about the puppet show in front of the fire and her black pants and how she’d ignored the heat because, well, the show must go on! Then she’d had to peel off the dressings and the dead skin for weeks after and the fire had left a pattern of pale welts on her thighs as if it had touched her with evil fingers and left behind an anarchy of faint fingerprints like a Seurat.
    Her healed injuries, the wine, and the major key of the Vivaldi made him believe with a total sincerity, without sentimentality, or romanticism, or self-delusion, or desperation, that things could be healed.
    “Why not?” she said.

4.
How Isidore, Arrayed Like a Poor Knight, Came to the Demesne of Laura’s Father, Leo Neuwalder, Lord of the Eerie Lake, and How the King Would Fain Gird Isidore Betimes with the Sextant of Sir Oliver Hazard Perry
    LAURA TOOK A heavy course load that year so she could graduate early, at the same time as Isidore would graduate, just in case there would be some need for that, and kept quiet about having done so with a shrewdness unknown to most women in regard to the male psyche. And by the time the mild air of spring came around and began to revive the dead world of Boston, Isidore knew what he would do.
    On Labor Day weekend of 1967, the last weekend before medical school was to begin at Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, they went out to South Bass Island to join her parents and her sisters. As they waited on the roof of the ferry, Isidore kept saying they were late, and it was a shame to be late, and Laura kept saying it didn’t matter and why was he in such a weird mood.
    “You can control what you can control,” she said. This was yet another distillation of her father’s Confucian wisdom, and it only made Isidore more nervous. He knew all her father’s sayings from Laura’s frequent quotations: my father says you must respect a patient’s denial; that most things get better by themselves; that a peach is best slightly underripe; that McCarthy stripped the State Department of all the brains on the Far East and that was why they got into Vietnam; that the key to life is recognizing what you can’t control, which is everything.
    “Sorry,” he said, “I have a bug up my ass today. I don’t mean to.”
    Isidore’s ass literally itched like there was a family of bugs up in it. He’d in fact bled from his hemorrhoids that morning.
    “I think you’ll like our house,” she said. “It’s not Martha’s Vineyard, and it’s kind of ramshackle, but it’s a nice place to sit by the lake and have wine.”
    Isidore watched the clouds over Lake Erie, aloft like airships high above their own shadows.
    When they arrived, Dr. Neuwalder’s other two daughters and their boyfriends cheered and disentangled themselves from the picnic table in the yard. They came with red wine in paper cups, and Dr. and Mrs. Neuwalder came from their Adirondack chairs with books. There was still light in the sky.
    “Let me get a good look at you,” Mrs. Neuwalder said, and put her glasses on. “What's wrong with him? He looks ill.”
    “The famous Isidore Auberon,” Dr. Neuwalder said. He was gray at the temples, tall, with tan arms that were naked of hair, and chapped lips. The boyfriends called him Doc.
    Isidore could barely stop himself from uttering some hosanna about how Doc had cured sickle-cell anemia in a test tube and invented gene therapy, which was the entire future of medicine. He had never seen Dr. Neuwalder outside the lab, and it was a little like seeing one of your teachers outside class in elementary school.
    “Would you like bourbon? Or some ice wine?” Doc said. “It’s nothing special, but they make it right here on the island. No, you need the bourbon, I see. Evelyn, get him some bourbon, would you?”
    Evelyn Neuwalder brought him some bourbon in a Mason jar. She was a child psychoanalyst.
    “I always take my bourbon in a Mason jar, served by a psychoanalyst,” Isidore said. “How did you

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