You couldn’t buy, beg, or steal insect repellent. There was a run on it. It was more precious than a rhinoceros horn in an Asian bazaar. Clendon was so preoccupied with his marital problems that he scarcely noticed the mosquitoes, but they were all I could think of. There are nearly two thousand species of them and I think most blew in for the big convocation. Mosquito Woodstock.

I hated to watch my brother grovel, the children irritated me, and so I holed up in the guest bedroom with the air conditioner on full blast and a satchel full of medical journals. Victoria had the gall to insist I confine my cigarette smoking to the bedroom. “What kind of doctor has a two-pack-a-day cigarette habit?” she says.

“Smoking is good for you; it makes your heart merry,” I say.

“Oh bullshit,” she says. “It’s such a juvenile habit.”

If you were my wife, I thought, you would be a splat on the wall.

Clendon had given me a number of literary magazines to read including stories of his own. I’m a reader, I read them but it was always some boring crap about a forty-five-year-old upper-level executive in boat shoes driving around Cape Cod in a Volvo. I mean you actually do finish some of them and admit that “technically” they were pretty good but I’d rather go to back-to-back operas than read another story like that. It was with relief that I returned to the medical journals.

Boy, that Victoria was a cool one! Chilly. Even with the kids. I made a few points when obese little Jason fell and lacerated his knee. I numbed the knee with lidocaine, debrided the cut, and did a first-class job of suturing the wound. All jokes. No tears. The kids thought Uncle Bob or Doctor Bob was great and loved it when I took them out in the Jag V-12 convertible and drove them on the swervy back roads, cutting swaths through the dark clouds of mosquitoes. Victoria didn’t like the Jaguar. It was too ostentatious, too L.A., for her blue-blood sensibilities but, hey! I worked like hell to buy that car. And second gear in a V-12 Jag has got more juice than anything short of an Apollo 10. Va-rrroom!

What really put a frost on the visit was the night I took the kids out to see The Exorcist III and they came home to vomit hot dogs and ice cream and then Jason woke up the whole house with a screaming nightmare. The “Bonecrusher” had been after him. “There, there, baby, Mommy’s here and everything is going to be just fine.” Fucking little Jason tells Victoria that Uncle Bob punched the V-12 up to 130 m.p.h. and the telephone poles were looking like a picket fence. Fucking little Jason tells Victoria how we fishtailed onto a gravel road, spun around, knocked over a mailbox, and blew out a rear tire.