He watched Ardena Guntersaun scurry across the street, being careful not to look back. Stupid woman, he thought. And then, as if he decided to let the empty room in on his thoughts, he said, “Stupid woman.”
Doc Gimley was familiar with Mrs. Guntersaun, in the same way he was familiar with many of San Grila's leading women... if you could call them that. None of them had accomplished much in this world except marry the right men. Men with the right combination of money, ambition, and sheer stupidity who were foolish enough to assume they were the ones running everything. Not the old doctor really cared WHO was running things, since anyone would, in all likelihood run with the same level of ineptitude. San Grila had a municipal government, of course... a town council, aldermen, and the like … but it was the various cadres and cabals of Women's Committees that really got things done. The Women's Temperance League – which was, to a member, the same group as the 75th Anniversary Committee – had managed, though scraping and scrapping and yelling and drum thumping and brow beating, to clean away the “rude and rustic country elements” in San Grila and had an eye on making it the next New York of the Midwest. They imagined themselves cosmopolitan, though none of them had ever gone to a real city, not even Chicago; the farmers in the unincorporated parts of the county would have none of it, of course. But that didn't matter. Mrs. Guntersaun would have her way. She always got her way.
So they want to rename the town, he thought. “What do you think of that?” he asked the empty room. “They want to rename the town in time for the new century.” He laughed and shook his head. Then he turned and walked out of the examination room and into the small sitting room that also served as his bedroom. The room was narrow and sparsely furnished – a single bed, a wash table with his meticulously clean and sharp shaving blade, soap, and a simple bowl and pitcher; a comfortable red padded high back chair, worn from years of use, sat facing the window that looked down on the same street as the windows in his examination room. There was a small mirror hanging on the wall above the wash table, and a picture of the Thames River in London hanging over his bed. Off to the left, there was a wardrobe where he kept his clothes, and beyond that, the water closet – which he had paid to have installed. (That had caused no small amount of commotion in town and cemented his favor among the local busybodies as a man of culture.) On the second shelf under of the small bedside table that was also within reach of the chair – on which was an oil lamp and an ash tray with a half spent 50 cent cigar – was a photo album. He sat in the red chair, put the cigar in his mouth and carefully lit it. After extinguishing the match, he took in a mouthful of smoke, exhaled, then reached down and pulled the photo album off the small shelf.
If anyone in town – especially a busybody like Ardena Guntersaun – saw the contents of the album, it would create a scandal. The album was full of pictures of nude women. Well, one woman to be precise. Her name was Rachel.
Doc Gimley first met Rachel about month after he had settled in his rooms above the barber shop overlooking Main Street. She was a regular girl at the Mandarin Supper Club for Men, San Grila's brothel and the meeting places for every prominent and not-so-prominent man in town. Rachel had been young, maybe 18, when he met her. At first, the age difference made him nervous. He was nearly 40 when he first went to see her; he had moved to San Grila more than a decade ago to get set up his office because he wanted to get away from the memory of his dead wife in Chicago. She was trampled by the police and a mob during a labor protest in Haymarket Square; Gimley himself, who leaned sympathetically towards the Haymarket 7, could not reconcile his grief, the outcome of the trials, and the listing of his wife – who was perhaps the only perfect person he had ever met – among the trouble makers.
Going to the brothel was only his way of dealing with his occasional need to feel a woman's touch. He had no illusions about falling in love again; for Gimley, there was one person for everyone and his was gone. Rachel made no demands, had no expectations, and was, like the preeminent among her trade, very professional. And she didn't mind if he wanted to talk. She was beautiful – long auburn hair, deep blue eyes, with spatterings of ginger freckles at different places around her body. He was surprised to find that, in addition to her supreme professional talents, she was also an avid reader of Jules Verne. Sometimes when he visited her, he took books for her to borrow: Emerson, Shakespeare, Spenser, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Dickens. She liked Doyle, but preferred Mark Twain to Spenser and Thoreau to Emerson. It was all fun and games, and never did Gimley think it was much more than a young prostitute preening the ego of an old man.
Eventually she expressed an interest in another one of Gimley's hobbies – photography. She poured over his picture books full of nudes, nature scenes, men on the street.
“These are dirty pictures,” she teased him, pointing to a particularly stunning nude wearing an Indian head dress and moccasins.
“They are not,” he tried explaining to her. “They are art, my dear. Artists have been drawing and painting nudes for centuries.”
“Then why is she wearing them shoes?”
“I don't know,” he said, getting a little impatient. “I suppose they go with the head dress.”
Rachel laughed. “It's to remind people she ought to have clothes on.”
Gimley offered to take pictures of her to prove that it was art. At first she objected, saying that people wouldn't pay for the real thing if they could get a picture of it for free. He assured her he would share them with no one but her – and he offered pay her usual fee plus a small gratuity.
It wasn't until he saw her on film that he felt himself falling in love with her.
Just a little. And it wasn't the same love he'd felt for his wife; he knew there was no spiritual connection, no exclusivity to his relationship (He wasn't sure when he started to think of it in those terms) with Rachel. She was a beautiful girl in person; but the camera did something to her that, for the doctor, bordered on transubstantiation. Rachel seemed to notice it too, and she started looking forward to the sessions as much as he did. He always gave her copies of the pictures to keep, and put a copy in the photo album for himself. And he never showed the pictures to anybody. Not ever.
Things went on this for months. Gimley had established a routine. He saw patients in the morning and into the late afternoon, and he saw Rachel twice a week before supper. The fog he had been in was starting to lift. He was starting to feel... well... happy again. He never asked for more from Rachel, and she never seemed to want more. There was a balance and symmetry to it. He knew that she had other clients, but it never bothered him. How many of his female patients did he ask to disrobe? It would have been foolish of him to feel jealous and he didn't.
And then the night of the fires happened. The RTPSA – undoubtedly being prodded by their wives – set fire to the Supper Club, burned out the girls, and forced them out of town. The ones that survived, anyway. The ones who did took over a deserted farm 10 miles out of town and set up shop there; but Rachel was not among them. She died in the fire, after the customer she was with that November night had punched her out in order to keep her from telling anyone he was there. The customer in question had been Shirley Guntersaun, Junior – the only and very spoiled son of Shirley and Ardena. Gimley knew it was him because he stopped by offering to selling him a photo album full of “anatomical” pictures. They were the pictures Gimley himself had taken of her.
He bought them so that no one else would see them. It was bad enough that young Guntersaun had had his fingers all over them.
Doc smoked his cigar and looked at the pictures of Rachel, thinking. He sat until nearly 4 in the afternoon.