Just What the Doctor Ordered

Just What the Doctor Ordered By J.M. Snyder The grant letter came to the house a week or so before Memorial Day. I’d just finished posting the last of my grades and tried to convince myself that I wasn’t nervous about my decision to take the summer off. Lee told me, “You can’t work all the damn time, Curt.” He had a point, but we couldn’t really afford for me to take a semester’s break if the grant didn’t come through. So the letter came just in time, on the day of the department convocation and my last day at work until the fall. I spent the afternoon on campus with the other professors in the Richmond College English Department, dressed in black scholarly robes and laughing over what our students had written on our teacher evaluation forms. We pulled ourselves together long enough to look studious for the convocation ceremony, but I managed to slip away from the reception afterward because I was more than ready to put the spring semester behind me. I told the dean my old standby excuse—Lee was on hospital duty this week and I had to get home to wake him up before his shift. Never mind that he was working days at the clinic—by that time I’d had my fill of the graduation festivities and just wanted to go home. With a sympathetic nod, the dean said she understood. As I turned to leave, though, she stopped me with a carefully worded question. “You know the recipient letters went out Monday, right?” Monday. Three days before the convocation and I hadn’t received one yet. Three days…at the end of March I had submitted the first chapter of a novel I began earlier in the year but maybe it hadn’t been good enough and I wasn’t getting the grant. I took the summer off specifically to work on the book, sure that I’d have the grant money to make up for the lack of a paycheck, but three days was an eternity…my heart hammered and I was quite sure that Ellen Hoyle, dean of the College of Arts, could hear it from where she stood with that enigmatic look on her face. Smirk or smile, I couldn’t tell which. My drive home was a blur, with me alternating between gassing my aging Corolla to spurting ahead in anticipation and tapping the brakes in fear of what I might find in the mailbox. Nothing, that would be the worst. Nothing but bills and maybe a postcard from my mother up in Atlantic City, a few grocery store ads. Pulling into the driveway, I noticed that the mail had arrived. I didn’t even make it all the way into the garage. Once out of the car I skirted Lee’s azaleas, took the porch steps two at a time, snatched the mail from the box. I had the same breathless excitement I felt years ago when the letter came from Richard College welcoming me to the faculty. I riffled through the envelopes. Bills mostly, I called that one, but at the bottom of the stack, right up against the advertising circular, I saw the school seal and my heart skipped. This is it, I thought, staring at my name typed in all uppercase letters. Curtis C. Schrivner. Somehow I fumbled my key into the lock and got the door open, but I didn’t bother to shut it behind me. In the hallway I dropped the rest of the mail on the last step of the staircase. I kept the envelope with my name on it, the grant letter, in my trembling hand. I wanted to tear it open but was afraid of what I’d find inside. Yes, no, what? I didn’t want to read the letter so much as I wished I already knew what it said. I wanted Lee with me. The phone sat on a small table in the hall and I snatched up the receiver and punched in the number for the clinic. A ring, two, before an automated system clicked on, an emotionless woman’s voice droning. “Thank you for calling Riverside Immediate Care Clinic, located on—” I hit zero for the operator and waited. The phone began to ring again, longer this time, four rings, five. “Come on,” I breathed, turning the envelope over in my hands. My thumb was already easing beneath the flap but I stopped myself. I wanted to share this with Lee, whatever the letter said. He’d want to know. Finally a live person answered…or rather, as live as they got down there this late in the afternoon. “Help you?” she asked. I pictured a bored nurse, phone wedged between her shoulder and ear as she filed her fingernails. The flap tore and I stopped picking at it. “Dr. Gui, please.” “I’m sorry.” She sounded anything but. “He’s busy at the moment. If I could have your name…” A new girl, I thought. Most of the nurses who work with Lee knew when I was on the phone and patched me right through to his office. “This is important,” I told her. My fingers picked at the torn envelope flap with a dogged determination. “Tell him it’s Curt. He’ll know—” “He’s in with a patient at the moment,” the nurse said. “I can take a message—” My response came out harsher than I intended. “You can tell him Curt’s on the line,” I said and in my hands the corner of the envelope tore completely off. Before she could argue, I added, “He’ll take the call. I’ll hold.” No answer that time, just a frustrated growl and then Celine Dion started to croon in my ear as I was put on hold. I held long enough to hear the end of the song as well as a traffic report and a run of commercials for furniture stores and used car lots and the weekly specials at the grocery down the street. I kept smoothing down the flap of the envelope because my fingers insisted on picking at it. I’d have the damn thing open before Lee ever answered the phone. I began to wonder if maybe Ms. Snit didn’t just park me on infinite hold. Maybe she had no intention of even telling Lee I was on the phone for him. A new song played in my ear and I told myself if I was still on hold by the time it ended, I’d hang up and call back again— The music cut off abruptly, replace by my lover’s brusque voice. “Curt?” he asked. “Hey, Dr. Feelgood,” I purred. Lee laughed. Encouraged, I told him, “I have a bit of a problem. Maybe you can help?” “A medical problem?” I heard the smile in his words. “Or is this something I can take care of when I get home? Two hours, hon. Surely you can hold out ‘til then. What’s up?” With a goofy grin on my face, I tried to sound coy and failed miserably. “I don’t know, Doc. Got something hard and long shoved down the front of my pants. I wondered if maybe you could come by and take a look?” Chuckling, Lee lowered his voice. I could almost see him curled around the phone, speaking low into the receiver so no one would overhear. “Much as I’d love to sit here and let you talk dirty to me,” he said, “I’ve got to cut this short, Curt. I have a little girl waiting to have her arm stitched up. What do you say we wait ‘til I get home to play doctor, alright?” “How much time can you spare me right this second?” In my mind I saw him glance at his watch, the Rolex I bought him last Christmas. “She’s in prep. If you can be quick—” I couldn’t resist one last remark. “If that’s the way you like it. I got an envelope.” I waited while my words sank in. “From the grant committee. Ellen said they were mailed the first of the week.” “And?” Lee asked, excited. “What’s it say?” “I haven’t opened it yet.” Though from all the picking and tearing I’d done, I was almost there. “I thought I’d do it while we were on the phone—” His laughter was boyish and sexy. “I’m not even going to comment on that one. So open it already. Open it, open it!” With his permission I tore into the envelope. Inside was a single sheet of tri-folded letterhead. “Dear Mr. Schrivner,” My gaze wandered over the page as I tried to take in all the words at once. “As you well know, Richmond College offers its faculty and staff the opportunity to receive prestigious grants in the art and science disciplines.” I skimmed through the paragraph. “Yadda yadda, a stipend of twenty-five hundred dollars a month for up to one year, during which time we ask that the recipient focuses his or her creative energy toward achieving success in their chosen field. A lot of jargon, Lee. You know the routine.” “Where’s it say if you got it or not?” I was well aware that he had somewhere else he needed to be. A little girl possibly bleeding to death while I read to him over the phone. “Next paragraph. The candidates for this year exceeded our expectations, but in the end we could chose only five recipients from various departments within the college to receive monetary funding. Please take a moment to recognize these five extraordinary individuals—” My breath caught in my throat as I looked down the short list and saw my own name. “I got it!” I cried. Sandwiched in the fourth position, between Martin Parent from the biology department and Vanda Treese in media studies, my name looked almost foreign to me. In my ear, Lee hooted in delight. “I knew you’d get it,” he said. I nodded to myself, stunned. “Didn’t I say don’t sweat over it?” he continued. “Congratulations, hon. You need this.” I really did. Ten years of teaching freshman comp and advanced fiction workshops left me little time to work on my own writing. The drawers of my file cabinet were filled with abandoned stories, one or two chapters down this path before I lost interest and switched to something else, another few pages in that vein before I took another route. I didn’t have the time to write, I complained. If only I could take off a couple of months, hammer out a story from start to finish, without worrying about how I’d pay my half of the bills or put food on the table, I was convinced I could bang out something literary, something good. Hell, I would settle for something finished at this point. The grant had been Lee’s idea. One day when he stopped by campus to eat lunch with me, he’d seen it on a flyer tacked to the bulletin board outside the English department. “Look into it, Curt,” he said over pizza at the Rattskeller, the college’s own pub and karaoke bar. “This might be just what you’re looking for, you know? Why don’t you submit that piece you worked on after Christmas?” It was as simple as that. With Lee’s encouragement, I edited and re-edited those few pages of what I hoped would become my magnum opus. A heady story, full of passion and angst and emotion, the next Farewell to Arms or Great Gatsby. When I sent that first chapter in with my grant application, I felt that it was definitely my best work, bar none. Staring down at the sheet of paper in my hands, for a second I wondered who else from my department applied but it didn’t matter because it was my name in the letter. Someone read my writing and saw potential in that unpolished gem. I was the one receiving the grant. Reading a little further, I told Lee, “It says the first check should be coming any day now—” “That’s great,” he said again. “I just knew you could do it. I love you, you know that?” I laughed, giddy. My head felt light, as if my brain wasn’t getting enough oxygen or something. I kept forgetting to breathe. “This calls for a celebration. You and me naked in the hot tub, steaks on the grill, a couple glasses of wine to set the mood. What do you think?” “I think—” Lee’s voice sounded muffled and indistinct as he spoke to someone else. When he came back on the line, he told me, “I think I have to go. The girl’s been moved into op and they’re ready for me. Can we get back to this when I get home?” “Are you leaving early?” I asked, hopeful. My mind was already two hours ahead to a time when Lee would slip out of his scrubs and into the hot tub beside me. “How’s steak sound? Some shrimp, a good red wine. Say yes.” He laughed. “Yes. I have to go. I’ll see what I can do about wrapping things up here before five, alright? No promises, though.” “Just as long as you’re home by the time the grill’s hot.” With a suggestive grin, I added, “Unless you want me to wait until you get here to heat things up.” “You’re bad. Congrats again, babe. Love you.” I stared at my name on the recipients’ list. “Love you, too.”