The Water-Method Man

1

Yogurt & Lots of Water

Her gynecologist recommended him to me. Ironic: the best urologist in New York is French. Dr. Jean Claude Vigneron: ONLY BY APPOINTMENT. So I made one.

You like New York better than Paris? I asked.

In Paris, I dared to keep a car.

My father is a urologist, too.

Then he must be a second-rate one, Vigneron said, if he didn t know what was wrong with you.

It s nonspecific, I said. I knew the history of my ailment well. Sometimes it s nonspecific urethritis, once it was nonspecific prostatitis. Another time, I had the clap but that s a different story. Once it was just a common germ. But always, nonspecific.

It looks very specific to me, Vigneron said.

No, I said. Sometimes it responds to penicillin, sometimes sulfa does the trick. Once, Furadantin cured it.

There, you see? he said. Urethritis and prostatitis don t respond to Furadantin.

Well, there, I said, you see? It was something else that time. Nonspecific.

Specific, Vigneron said. You can t get much more specific than the urinary tract.

He showed me. On his examination table I tried to be calm. He handed me a perfect plastic breast, as lovely a one as I ve seen: realistic color and texture, and a fine, upstanding nipple.

My God

Just bite on it, he said. Forget about me.

I clutched the rare boob, looking it straight in the eye. I m sure that my father employs no such up-to-date devices. When you re erect, the nasty glass rod goes in a bit easier. I recall I pulled a muscle, trying not to cry.

Very specific, said Jean Claude Vigneron, who responded in sly French when I told him it was at least unusual to hold a breast whose nipple one could bite without reserve.

Vigneron s diagnosis of my ailment is best understood with some historical perspective. Odd and painful peeing is not new to me.

Seven times in the last five years, I have suffered this unnamable disorder. Once it was the clap, but that s

John Irving has been nominated for a National Book Award three times winning once, in 1980, for the novel The World According to Garp. In 1992, Mr. Irving was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma. In 2000, he won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Cider House Rules a film with seven Academy Award nominations.

Three or four times as funny as most novels. The New Yorker

John Irving, it is abundantly clear, is a true artist. He is not afraid to take on great themes. Los Angeles Times

Friendship, marriage, and family are his primary themes, but at that blundering level of life where mishap and folly something close to joyful malice perpetually intrude and distrupt, often fatally. Life, in [John] Irving's fiction, is always under siege. Harm and disarray are daily fare, as if the course of love could not run true. . . . Irving's multiple manner . . . his will to come at the world from different directions, is one of the outstandint traits of The World According to Garp, but this remarkable flair for . . . stories inside stories . . . isalready handled with mastery . . . and with a freedom almost wanton in The Water-Method Man [which is Garp's predecessor by six years]. Terrence Des Pres

Brutal reality and hallucination, comedy and pathos. A rich, unified tapestry. Time