Coe Review

It was another year before Lloyd had the money to get there. He had a
year to think of possibilities, and one of them was Dr. Renard.
It makes me ashamed to think of poor Lloyd in Los Angeles, getting
honked at and half run-over. Getting lost, asking for his first hotel room. If
I had known he was there in the city, perhaps I would have offered my aid.
I doubt he would have accepted it.
When Lloyd took the elevator up to Dr. Renard's office, which was on
the fourteenth floor of a glass building on Venice Boulevard, he suffered
from vertigo. The elevator was glass too, on all sides, such that he could
see the slender cables over his head, the floor disappearing under his feet.
Something about it made him utterly disoriented, like when he was out in a
squall on Gut Bay, everything white all around him. He clenched his eyes
closed until he made it to the top.
The receptionist, her face gleaming and pink from a recent chemical
peel, tried to take Lloyd's name, tried to glean the reason for his visit. He
sat down for a minute on a white leather sofa with silver legs, his back to
the glassed view of downtown Los Angeles, but he did not relax or pick
up a magazine. He observed the situation long enough to see the door to
the hall where patients entered and later left, their faces raw and red and
sometimes blue and partially wrapped in bandages. Then he stood up and
walked toward the door.
You can imagine the ruckus which followed, the receptionist chasing
after him in her five inch pumps, grabbing at his arm. Finally she gave up
and ran back to her desk where she pressed a button and shouted things into
the enormous black phone.
The office door was open a crack. From all the commotion, Lloyd
expected Dr. Renard to lunge at him, to try to run past him, but he was
just sitting there in his swivel chair, his hands calmly folded in his lap, as if
he had been waiting for Lloyd all afternoon, as if he had known he would
come.
"Lloyd, good to see you again. You've come a long way."
Sometimes I imagine their conversation. Lloyd, you see, is not a man
of details. When I asked him what happened that day on the porch, he told
me, but he didn't talk about what Dr. Renard said, or what he said to Dr.
Renard. It is hard to imagine what those two men had to talk about, what
they possibly could have had in common, except Dora, of course.
She wasn't living with Dr. Renard; that would have been a problem since
the doctor was married and had been to one of his patients for ten years.
But he had helped her find an apartment in Encino—it is amazing I never
ran into her there myself, as my wife and I live in Sherman Oaks—and they
were, Dr. Renard said, quite close in a way Lloyd could never understand.
Elizabeth Eslami 109