“You must discover for yourself the rare mind, eye and artistic hand of Willy Fleet, before it is gone forever and we start anew!” she cried, unbuttoning her voluminous coat.
“It isn’t really”
“Merely,” she said, and flung her coat wide.
The doctor was somehow not surprised to see that she was stark naked beneath her coat.
He gasped. His eyes grew large. His mouth fell open. He sat down slowly, though in reality he somehow wished to stand, as he had in the fifth grade as a boy, during the salute to the flag, following which three dozen voices broke in an awed and tremulous song:
O beautiful for spacious skies
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain
But, still seated, overwhelmed, he gazed at the continental vastness of the woman.
Upon which nothing whatsoever was stitched, painted, water-colored or in any way tattooed.
Naked, unadorned, untouched, unlined, unillustrated. He gasped again.
Now she had whipped her coat back about her with a winsome acrobat’s smile, as if she had just performed a towering feat. Now she was sailing toward the door.
“Wait-” said the doctor.
But she was out the door, in the reception room, babbling, whispering, “Willy, Wiffy!” and bending to her husband, hissing in his tiny ear until his eyes flexed wide, and his mouth firm and passionate dropped open and he cried aloud and clapped his hands with elation.
“Doctor, Doctor, thank you, thank you!” He darted forward and seized the doctor’s hand and shook it hard. The doctor was surprised at the fire and rock hardness of that grip. It was the hand of a dedicated artist, as were the eyes burning up at him darkly from the wildly illuminated face. “Everything’s going to be fine!” cried Willy.
The doctor hesitated, glancing from Willy to the great shadowing balloon that tugged at him wanting to fly off away. “We won’t have to come back again, ever, Good Lord, the doctor thought, does he think that he has illustrated her from stem to stem, and does she humor him about it? Is he mad? Or does she imagine that he has tattooed her from neck to toe-bone, and does he humor her? Is she mad?
Or, most strange of all, do they both believe that he has swarmed as across the Sistine Chapel ceiling, covering her with rare and significant beauties? Do they both believe know, humor each other in their specially dimensioned world?
“Will we have to come back again?” asked Willy Fleet a second time.
“No.” The doctor breathed a prayer. “I think not.”
Why? Because, by some idiot grace, he had done the right thing, hadn’t he? By prescribing for a half-seen cause he had made a full cure, yes?
Regardless if she believed or he believed or both believed in the Masterpiece, by suggesting the pictures be erased, destroyed, the doctor had made her a clean, lovely and inviting canvas again, if she needed to be. And if he, on the other hand, wished a new woman to scribble, scrawl and pretend to tattoo on, well, that worked, too. For new and untouched she would be. “Thank you, Doctor, oh thank you, thank you!”
“Don’t thank me,” said the doctor. “I’ve done nothing.”
He almost said, It was all a fluke, a joke, a surprise! I fell downstairs and landed on my feet! “Goodbye, goodbye!” And the elevator slid down, the big woman and the little man sinking from sight into the now suddenly not-tab-solid earth, where the atoms opened to let them pass. “Goodbye, thanks, thanks … thanks …”
Their voices faded, calling his name and praising his intellect long after they had passed the fourth floor.
The doctor looked around and moved unsteadily back into his office. He shut the door and leaned against it. “Doctor,” he murmured, “heal thyself.”
He stepped forward. He did not feel real. He must lie down, if but for a moment.
Where? On the couch, of course, on the couch.
1961
The end
