Pirates You Don't Know, and Other Adventures in the Examined Life: Collected Essays

Crocodiles

34 Crocodiles I like stories about shifting impressions. In Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog,” Gurov returns home after a quick affair at a resort, and everything is beautiful: He returned to Moscow on a fine frosty day, and when he put on his fur-lined overcoat and thick gloves, and sauntered down Petrovka Street, and when, on Saturday evening,he heard the church bells ringing,his recent journey and the places he had visited lost their charm for him.He became gradually immersed in Moscow life, reading with avidity three newspapers a day, while declaring he never read Moscow newspapers on principle. Once more he was caught up in a whirl of restaurants, clubs, banquets, and celebrations, once more glowed with the flattering consciousness that well-known lawyers and actors came to his house, that he played cards in the Medical Club opposite a professor. He could once again eat a whole serving of Moscow Fish Stew in a pan. I don’t even like chowder, but that fish stew served in a pan makes me crazy with hunger. Contrast that scene with Gurov’s impression of the very same place and people, just three paragraphs later. His rage is comic: What savage manners, what people! What wasted evenings, what tedious, empty days! Frantic card-playing,gluttony,drunkenness,perpetual talk always about the same thing.The greater part of one’s time and energy went on business that was no use to anyone, and on discussing the same thing over and over again, and there was nothing to show for it all but a stunted wingless crocodiles 35 existence and a round of trivialities, and there was nowhere to escape to, you might as well be in a madhouse or a convict settlement. (Garnett translation) Chekhov writes the prose equivalent of Monet’s paintings.After a while, you begin to see that variations of mood and tone—not haystacks or water lilies or card players or fish stew—are the real subject. r Mrs. Churm fell twice when she was pregnant with Starbuck, from a combination of inner-ear disturbance, shifting center of balance, and “ligament laxity,” a loosening of the joints caused by new hormonal levels. The first time, she slipped on our front stairs, and we rushed to the hospital to see the midwife on duty. Davie was a thin, low-talking Englishman with a ginger ponytail and a closely cropped beard. He was married and had his own kids, whom he took cycling and rock-climbing, and he volunteered at a shelter for at-risk pregnant teens.The only male midwife at our hospital, he wore a button on his scrubs that read, “Listen to the woman.” He knew all about women’s bodies and what would happen to them, while all I knew was enough to get us to this point. There was a group of former patients called “Davie’s Girls” who gushed over him as if they were in junior high and he was the resident hottie. Davie sent us for an ultrasound, checked Mrs. Churm inside and out, stripped off his gloves,washed up,and sat on a rolling stool directly in front of her. Speaking so softly that I had to strain to be included, he explained to her how a fall could shear the placenta from the uterine wall and starve the baby of food and oxygen. “But really,” he assured my wife, “you seem to be fine. Anyway, it’s so early, it’s not like we could take heroic measures.” Because I’m deeply in touch with my feelings, I can tell you that I was above all terrified for my wife and unborn child. I was also grateful to the point of tears for Davie’s care and honesty. And when he said so matterof -factly that my son wasn’t viable I felt some evil crocodile rise from the swamp of my brain until its snaky eyes were just visible above the gray matter . It thought: You’ll pay for that comment, you ponytailed son of a bitch. 36 crocodiles r It was a damp, drizzly semester in my soul. The young men were in love with violence. One said in class that he was getting aroused just thinking about actress Jennifer Garner punching him in the face. A young woman lectured us that no one had ever given birth alone; she knew...