Elevation(2)

Doctor Bob cast the eye of a professional up and down Scott Carey’s seventy-six inches—more like seventy-eight, in the boots. He paid particular attention to the curve of belly over the belt, and the long thigh muscles built up by leg-presses and hack squats on machines Doctor Bob now avoided. “Unbutton your shirt and hold it open.”

Scott did this, revealing a gray tee with UNIVERSITY OF MAINE ATHLETIC DEPARTMENT on the front. Bob saw a broad chest, muscular, but developing those adipose deposits wiseass kids liked to call man-tits.

“I’m going to say . . .” Ellis paused, interested in the challenge now. “I’m going to say 235. Maybe 240. Which means you must have been up around 270 before you started to lose. I must say you carried it well on the tennis court. That much I wouldn’t have guessed.”

Scott remembered how happy he had been when he’d finally mustered the courage to get on the scale earlier this month. Delighted, actually. The steady rate of the weight-loss since then was worrisome, yes, but only a little. It was the clothes thing that had changed worry to fright. You didn’t need WebMD to tell you that the clothes thing was more than strange; it was fucking outré.

Outside, a golf cart trundled past. In it were two middle-aged men, one in pink pants, one in green, both overweight. Scott thought they would have done themselves some good by ditching the cart and walking their round, instead.

“Scott?” Doctor Bob said. “Are you there, or did I lose you?”

“I’m here,” Scott said. “The last time we played tennis, I did go 240. I know, because that was when I finally got on the scale. I decided the time had come to drop a few pounds. I was starting to get all out of breath by the third set. But as of this morning, I weigh 212.”

He sat down again next to his parka (which gave another jingle). Bob eyed him carefully. “You don’t look like 212 to me, Scott. Pardon me for saying, but you look quite a bit heavier than that.”

“But healthy?”

“Yes.”

“Not sick.”

“No. Not to look at you, anyway, but—”

“Have you got a scale? I bet you do. Let’s check it out.”

Doctor Bob considered him for a moment, wondering if Scott’s actual problem might be in the gray matter above his eyebrows. In his experience, it was mostly women who tended to be neurotic about their weight, but it happened with men, too. “All right, let’s do that. Follow me.”

Bob led him into a study stocked with bookshelves. There was a framed anatomy chart on one wall and a line of diplomas on another. Scott was staring at the paperweight between Ellis’s computer and his printer. Bob followed his gaze and laughed. He picked the skull up off the desk and tossed it to Scott.

“Plastic rather than bone, so don’t worry about dropping it. A gift from my eldest grandson. He’s thirteen, which I think of as the Age of Tasteless Gifts. Step over here, and let’s see what we’ve got.”

In the corner was a gantry-like scale upon which two weights, one big and one little, could be moved until the steel beam balanced. Ellis gave it a pat. “The only things I kept when I closed my office downtown were the anatomy chart on the wall and this. It’s a Seca, the finest medical scale ever made. A gift from my wife, many years ago, and believe me when I say no one ever accused her of being tasteless. Or cheap.”

“Is it accurate?”

“Let’s just say if I weighed a twenty-five-pound bag of flour on it, and the scale said it weighed twenty-four, I’d go back to Hannaford’s and demand a refund. You should take off your boots if you want something close to a true weight. And why did you bring your coat?”

“You’ll see.” Scott didn’t take off his boots but put the parka on instead, to the tune of more jingling from the pockets. Now not just fully dressed but dressed for the outside on a day much colder than this one, he stepped on the scale. “Let ’er rip.”

In order to allow for the boots and the coat, Bob ran the counterweight all the way to 250, then worked backward, first sliding the weight, then nudging it along. The needle of the balance bar remained grounded at 240, and 230, and 220, which Doctor Bob would have thought impossible. Never mind the coat and boots; Scott Carey simply looked heavier than that. He could have been off in his estimate by a few pounds, but he had weighed too many overweight men and women to be this far off.

The bar balanced at 212 pounds.

“I’ll be dipped in pitch,” Doctor Bob said. “I need to have this thing recalibrated.”

“Don’t think so,” Scott said. He stepped off the scale and put his hands in his coat pockets. From each, he took a fistful of quarters. “Been saving these in an antique chamber pot for years. By the time Nora left, it was almost full. I must have five pounds of metal in each pocket, maybe more.”

Ellis said nothing. He was speechless.

“Now do you see why I didn’t want to go to Dr. Adams?” Scott let the coins slide back into his coat pockets with another jolly jingle.

Ellis found his voice. “Let me be sure I have this right—you’re getting the same weight at home?”

“To the pound. My scale’s an Ozeri step-on, maybe not as good as this baby, but I’ve tested it and it’s accurate. Now watch this. I usually like a little bump-and-grind music when I strip, but since we’ve undressed together in the club locker room, I guess I can do without it.”