Fever

Abstract

FEVER /Moira Crone ON DAVID WHEELOCK'S FRONT WALK, beside his sagging sago palm, was someone who made him feel a little dizzy. She had rung his doorbell some minutes before. Now she was leaving. "Hello," he called out. "Dr. Wheelock," she said, turning rapidly. "It's me!" He nodded, neutrally. Then he said, "Yes," too loudly. It was a young woman, maybe twenty-five, lots of makeup, in a longsleeved beige fitted tunic that flipped out over her black leggings. "The other day I gave you something that wasn't yours." He knew the voice. He knew this was a person who sort of did things he asked her to do. There were fewer and fewer such girls around, he remarked to himself. But he had no idea in the world who she was. "Uptown Insta Print? Ahnh?" she said. She took a lock of her hair and twisted it with her finger. "Yes," David said, nodding. "You are the ..." "Over on St. Charles?" He couldn't afford a fax machine right now. At least not the one he really wanted. So he used the copy shop's. David was writing an as-told-to for a Texas politician, Kleinert. This was the girl he sent the pages through, the one who collected his electronic mail, which was composed almost entirely of insults from Kleinert. The book was a soap job, but the guy wanted whipped cream. It was low work, not something David had ever seen himself doing, but he kept at it. "The other day, I mean right, before Christmas, when you came in and I gave you that big stack from Austin? All those? I think I gave you papers of mine, xeroxes—" His daughter Charlotte started to wail from her highchair in the kitchen. Never leave infants unattended while seated in this device. He sidestepped rapidly down the hall. "By mistake," the girl called out, coming in. He returned with his baby. The girl was standing there, in his foyerless little bungalow. Right inside. He hadn't asked her in. "A bunch of lyrics. I was with Larry that day, and he's got the group together finally, Desire. They want a woman vocalist." She took an index finger and stabbed the bony white indentation at The Missouri Review · 89 the V of her dress. His wife Gwen used to call that place between her breasts "my swimming pool," in the long ago days when she was deprecating about her body. "Me," the girl said, closing her eyes a little longer than needed. "I got my hair done like this." The only thing David could think to do was to ask her to spell it. "I look that different hanh?" she said. "Camille, C-A-M-I-L-L-E, ?-bare, H-E-B-E-R-T." He became conscious the baby clothes he'd washed were spilling out of a big basket on the fireplace seat. Charlotte started to squirm in his arms. Camille followed him down the hall to the kitchen saying, "I was named for the hurricane," and put one of her pastel lacquered fingernails in Charlotte's pink overalls. "The one nobody ever thought would hit Biloxi. Did I tell you that before?" She offered to change the baby, but he said he would do it. "You are really something, Dr. Wheelock," she said, watching him handle the moist towelettes. "I'll get the folder," he said, when he finished taping the new Huggie. He had talked to her, he had. About his work, once, maybe more than once, about being an author. That was the word used. Author. Camille opened her arms and took Charlotte just like that. David went to his study, a little room beyond the kitchen. The wood floors were buckling and there was a leak in the back that was ruining the wallpaper Gwen had put up. She'd done as much of the work as he had, even when she was pregnant. He always figured there was something agitating his wife, she overcompensated. For a long time he thought it was that they couldn't seem to have a child, but she finally did, and...