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'No, I don't,' said the surprised leather girl, with a look right through me.
'No, no,' I said to her. 'Not you.' Now the child stared at me. 'I mean you,' I said to her, pointing. 'Do you go to school?' The child was embarrassed and felt threatened; obviously she had been told never to talk to strangers. The young girl in leather regarded the child-molester icily.
'Your mother will be right back,' Tulpen told the little girl.
'She's got blood in her pee,' the child informed us. The nurse swiveled into view, with a quick look at me which said that my brain must be stuck shut too.
'Oh, your mother will be all right,' I told the child. She nodded, bored.
The stunning young girl in leather looked at me as if clearly to inform me that she did not have blood in her pee, so don't ask. Tulpen stifled a giggle and pinched my thigh; I examined the roof of my mouth with my tongue.
Then the old man who had been so silent made a strange sound, like an oddly suppressed belch or a pinched fart or a massive, creaking shift of his whole spine, and when he tried to stand up, we saw a stain the color of burned butter spreading on the loose stomach of his shirt and making his pants cling tight to his skinny thighs. He lurched sideways, and I caught him just before he fell. He weighed nothing at all and was easy to hold upright, but there was an awful reek to him and he clutched at his belly; there was something under his shirt. He looked grateful, but terribly embarrassed, and all he could say was, 'Please, the bathroom ...' flopping his bony wrist in the direction of Vigneron's inner office. Against the stain which his shirt soaked up like a blotter, I could see the outline of a curious little bag and a hose.
'The damn thing is always spilling,' he told me as I steered him as fast as I could to the nurse, who was just swiveling out of her chair.
'Oh, Mr Kroddy,' she said scoldingly, plucking him out of my arms as if he were a hollow doll. She muscled him down the long hallway, waving me irritably back to the waiting room and continuing to reprimand him. 'You simply have to empty it more often, Mr Kroddy. There's just no need to have these little accidents ...'
But he kept crooning over and over, 'The damn thing, the goddamn thing! There's just never any place to go, people get so upset, in men's rooms you should see all the looks ...'
'Can you unbutton your shirt by yourself, Mr Kroddy?'
'The goddamn fucking thing!'
'This isn't at all necessary, Mr Kroddy ...'
In the waiting room, the child looked frightened again and the tight-assed, snotty girl in leather stared straight at her paper, smug, superior and harboring what awful secret between her legs. No one would know. I hated her.
I whispered to Tulpen, 'The poor old guy was all hoses. He had to go into this little sack.' That damned girl in leather looked coolly up at me, then down at her paper while we all listened to what sounded like the nurse flushing old Mr Kroddy away.
I looked straight up at that aloof leather lady and asked her, 'Do you have the clap?'
She didn't look up; she froze. But Tulpen gouged me hard with her elbow and the child looked up gratefully. 'What?' she asked.
Then the young woman looked hard at me. But she couldn't hold her fierce expression; for the first time something human broke over her face - her lower lip curling under, her teeth trying to hold her lip still, her eyes suddenly aswim - and I just felt cruel and awful.
'You shit, Trumper,' Tulpen whispered, and I went over to the girl, who now held her face down on her knees, rocking in her chair and crying softly.
'I'm sorry,' I told her, 'I don't know why, really, I said that ... I mean, you seemed sort of insensitive ...'
'Don't listen to him,' Tulpen told the girl. 'He's just crazy.'
'I just can't believe I've got the clap,' the girl said, sobbing. 'I don't go doing it all around, you know, and I'm not dirty ...'
Then Vigneron came back, returning the mother to her swollen child. He had a folder in his hand. 'Miss DeCarlo?' he asked, smiling. She stood up quickly, wiping her tears.
'I have the clap,' she told him, and he stared at her. 'Or maybe I don't have it,' she added hysterically as Vigneron peered into the folder.
'Please, in my office,' he said to her, guiding her quickly past us. Then he looked at me, as if somehow I'd given this girl her disease while she was in the waiting room. 'You're next,' he said, but I stopped him before he could move.
'I'll have the operation,' I said, shocking both him and Tulpen. 'I don't need to see you. I just want an appointment for the operation.'
'But I haven't examined you.'
'No need to,' I said. 'It's the same old thing. The water didn't help. I don't want to see you again except for the operation.'
'Well,' he said, and I was delighted to see that I'd ruined his perfect record - he wasn't ten for ten with me - 'ten days or two weeks,' he said. 'You'll probably want some antibiotic in the meantime, won't you?'
'I'll stick with the water.'
