Anyway, well, I remember this one time she’d just tried to kill him, and I got there and there they were sitting on a bench in the hallway outside the locked door, and he was holding her elbow. You’d think they were turtledoves. Baby! If all lovers could look that way! Well, it takes all kinds. And Catherine’s got enough jabber to fill the whole country. She starts talking about elbows! Just tried to kill the man and talking about elbows.

“You know, you can tell the age of somebody by the skin on the elbows,” she jabbers.

“No. I didn’t know that.”

Ernest glances up, notices me there before Catherine does. The wrinkles in his forehead seem to peel off, then they deepen. When Catherine notices, she winks at me and keeps on talking.

“Yeah. Pinch the skin up and if it goes back down you’re young! Pinch the skin up and if it stays up, you’re old.”

She tested us.

“We’re all old, kiddo!” she chirped.

Naughty Catherine pointed at me. “She wants me to test your pecker!” she exclaimed.

“Stop it,” he demanded.

Catherine’s little finger, still raised at me, wiggles, then drops to pat her knee.

When the doctor came, Catherine, wearing a clown’s grin, disappeared behind the locked door.

Ernest and I gave each other bewildered stares, then he reached into his valise for the doctor’s reports.

2

I’ve got to tell you more about that woman—the one who cut her cunt to threads. I actually saw that broad, before I knew her story. You know how you see people and then learn their story? Then go about wishing you’d first seen them when you knew the shit—all those good things you’d have noticed that you missed. Well, anyway, in fact I’d been sitting on a bench in the hall right beside that woman. It was one of those times when Catherine was “on retreat” in the local “nuttery” (that’s her expression), during the years when I’d rush to her. She was in a session with her shrink (nutcracker?) and I had to wait in the hall for her. I could tell the woman was a patient because she was wearing this gray housecoat and silver-colored slippers. She sat there not saying anything, just wringing her hands—just moving one hand in and out and around the other. Finally, the nurse came and told me that Catherine was back in her room.

“I saw you sitting out there with Gwendola.”

“Gondola,” I’d thought she’d said at first.

Catherine kept shaking her head. “Some species of womankind.”

“What?”

She was sitting on her bed with her back against the wall. I sat in the uncomfortable visitor’s chair.

“What some species of womankind will do. And that’s an intelligent woman too. There are a lot of intelligent people in here. Nuts, but intelligent.”

“What’d she do?”

She scratched her knee, reached back and scratched her behind, then scratched inside her ear.

“You know I told you about the compacts?”