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"Raunch," Kit whispered.
"Yup ..."
"Were the warts actually in her vagina?"
"In it, on it, all around it.
"Seventy-five! Oh, Raunch, I can't imagine it."
They lay in bed dappled by the late summer sun, which in the early morning could scarcely penetrate the thick weave of leaves fanned over their window by the black walnut tree.
"You know what I love about lying here?" Ronkers asked his wife. She snuggled up to him.
"Oh no, tell
"Well, it's the tree," he said. "I think my first sexual experience was in a tree house and that's what it's like up here...."
"You and the damn tree," Kit said. "It might be my architecture that makes you like that tree so much. Or even me," she said. "And that's a likely story -- I can't imagine you doing it in a tree house, frankly -- that sounds like something one of your dirty old patients told you.
"Well, actually it was a dirty young one."
"You're awful, Raunch. My God, seventy-five warts..."
"Quite a lot of surgery for such a spot, too."
"I thought you said Tomlinson did it."
"Well, yes, but I assisted"
"You don't normally do that, do you?"
"Well, no, but this wasn't normal."
"You're really awful, Raunch.
"Purely medical interest, professional desire to learn. You use a lot of mineral oil and twenty-five percent podophyllin. The cautery is delicate.
"Turds," Kit said.
But summer soon ends, and with the students back in town Ronkers was too busy to lie long abed in the mornings. There are a staggering host of urinary-tract infections to be discovered in all corners of the globe, a little-known fringe benefit of the tourist trade; perhaps it is the nation's largest unknown summer import.
A line of students waited to see him each morning, their summer travel ended, their work begun in earnest, their peeing problems growing more severe.
"Doc, I think I picked this up in Izmir."
"The question is, how much has it gotten around since?"
"The trouble," Ronkers told Kit, "is that they all know perfectly well, at the first sign, what it is they've got -- and, usually, even from whom. But almost all of them spend some time waiting for it to go away -- or passing it on, for Christ's sake! -- and they don't come to me until they can't stand it anymore."
But Ronkers was very sympathetic to his venereal patients and did not make them feel steeped in sin or wallowing in their just rewards; he said they sho
uld not feel guilty for catching anything from absolutely anybody. However, he was tough about insisting that they inform the original hostess -- whenever they knew her. "She may not know," Ronkers would say.
"We are no longer communicating," they'd say.
And Ronkers would charge, "Well, she's just going to be passing it on to someone else, who in turn
"Good for them!" they'd holler.
