The Age of Cities Read Online Free PDF Page B

ought to realize, and mouths to fill. “They knock at my door and invite themselves in, so they have to play by my rules,” she would never fail to retort. Her statement was a winning strategy.
    The doctor withdrew a pencil from the breast pocket of his smock. “Well, you’ve come a long way, pilgrim,” he said, and then told Winston he would try his best to get to the root of the problem. After quizzing Winston about his “medical history” (he’d embroidered needlessly: “that means the physical problems and operations you’ve had so far, basically”), the podiatrist squatted in front of his patient. He wrapped two warm hands around the bare foot so that the thumbs lay parallel on the veined surface. Winston looked at the man’s thick black hair, so carefully parted. It shone with pomade.
    Applying steady pressure to the inflated flesh, the specialist compressed it into normalcy, and then, leaning back a few degrees, created a vantage so they could both watch the glacial elastic return. An albino garden slug, Winston thought. Blue eyes beaming through thick lenses, the doctor joked, “Okay, we know you’re not pregnant. Otherwise your ankles would have ballooned.”
    Standing again, the doctor smirked and gave assurances that Winston did not have gout, and then guffawed—“Priceless! Gawd!”—over Alberta’s procession of home cures. He smiled with the doctor even though he found the man’s familiar joviality at his mother’s expense just a touch presumptuous. When Winston could not remember hurting his foot in any way, the doctor explained that it was possible to break one of the tiny bones there without ever guessing, and that in such a case a plaster cast was needless, a self-indulgent luxury. “Time heals all wounds,” he announced vaguely, his voice on the edge of jokiness again, eyebrows half way to Groucho Marx innuendo.
    â€œBesides, you should see some of the things that can really go wrong with feet,” he said, suggesting that he felt a patient ought to put his lot into perspective. He made notations in the notebook. Winston watched as he wrote metaplasia? and heavily circled the word. He wondered whether this young specialist—he couldn’t be much older than thirty—had taken a course in modern bedside manner. The man simply glowed with professional confidence.
    Winston agreed to visit again after six weeks if the symptoms persisted. The doctor said, “I’ll leave you to your socks,” and softly closed the door when he left. As he tightened his shoelaces, Winston felt a twinge of annoyance because he’d taken a day off work and made such a large effort for advice he’d already heard. He had imagined in choosing to become a podiatrist the young man would know each and every condition that could blight his patients—and have its cure at hand. At least Alberta had taken measures to remedy it; a saintly waiting for time’s healing properties to take effect seemed so pointless: you either got better as a result of medicine or you were defeated. Winston recalled the packages sitting on the dresser in his hotel room. Returning home with Chinese tea, English candies, and Belgian embroidery thread in hand, he thought, there would be three grateful women who would not consider his day in the city completely wasted.
    Back in the foyer, the doctor broke away from his breezy conversation with the receptionist and gave Winston’s hand a firm shake. Winston liked his heartiness as much as his grooming—he was combed, pressed, and polished with a truly military precision.
    Leaving the gleaming black stone foyer of the medical building, Winston wandered and inspected the contents in shop windows, enjoying the Sunday afternoon leisure surely he alone felt on this bustling Friday. He was astonished at the flow of faces and traffic—steady eyes fixed on responsibilities, every man