Dessine Moi?
UnderWoman decides that it’s best to proceed along the lines of Saint-Exupery’s Le Petit Prince, who truculently demands, dessine-moi un mouton….”
In Central Park, just north of Caricature King, armed with all the tools of her trade and a few work-for-hire forms, she will beseech strangers to draw their versions of she and her entourage.
Things do not exactly go as planned:
Brisk-It, her Attention Deficit Disorder dog, runs off in all directions. Pig-It, the three-legged one, hops and limps along in sporadic bursts. And Risk-It faints whenever excited or scared…which is always. The progress is slow. No people have been approached. No portraits have been drawn.
Risk-It faints yet again in the enthusiasm of entering Sheep’s Meadow…when Brian Liebman, the amnesic neuro-anatomist, UnderWoman’s co-star from myasthenia gravis night out…and so much more…comes running over.
As usual, he is brilliant, enthusiastic, and a little “off.”
It is as if they have not missed a beat…as if it has not been months since UnderWoman’s sudden disappearance from their intense but brief scene, narrated through the senses, with Central Park as sundial, meeting each other at every gate they could name…and at some that had not yet been named.
“Those are a lot of pencils in your pocket,” he says. “You weren’t going to write me off, were you?”
She laughs.
“I would have called if you’d had a phone number or a phone, a name you could remember or one I could pronounce.”
She hands him a doctor’s note — a drastically shrunk-down top-line summary of her precipitous flare’s progression — from ocular symptoms that made it hard to see to bulbar ones that made it hard to speak, and then to swallow, and then to breathe, and that ultimately led to UnderWoman’s intubation / ventilation and her Maryland “vacation.”
“I asked after you as soon as I could talk again,” UnderWoman assures. “But nobody knew: Where where you?”
“Missing,” he says mournfully, shrugging his shoulders.
Brian hands her his notebook.
It brims with pieces of poem, snippets of songs, favorite math equations, and drawings that take her breath away.
Brian and UnderWoman incline their heads towards each other. Both cry….
And then, Brisk-It pees on Brian’s pants leg again.
And the animals of Delacorte Music Clock strike up their march.
