Do No Harm (7 page)
Authors: Gregg Hurwitz
10
THE men with their tattoos and glistening muscles worked among the weight machines, pretending not to notice the onlookers, who clustered with their Muscle Beach T-shirts, shooting pictures and herding children. The first weight of dusk had settled through the air, but storefront lights illuminated the men through the chain-link fences that set the weight area apart from the Venice Boardwalk and the beach beyond.
Clyde watched from the anonymity of the crowd, a face among other faces, another body sweating in the August night. He had only recently begun to emerge from his apartment again, and he still found the brief stirrings of breeze to be invasive. Inside the pen, a bald man with a pointed goatee and two hoop earrings broke protocol, turning to the onlookers and spreading his massive arms wide. The prongs of his triceps gripped the undersides of his arms like claws. The crowd erupted with noise; cameras flashed.
Clyde looked down at his own arms. White and fleshy. In front of him, an overweight little boy with a cardboard-stiff baseball cap pushed up on tiptoes. Kobe Bryant slam-dunked in faded purple and yellow on the back of his T-shirt. The boy's hands, red and sticky with the remnants of some summertime snack, pushed and clutched at the shirts in front of him, leaving colored smudges.
An enormous black man lined large metal disks on each side of a weight bar until it bowed under the weight. He sat on the edge of the bench press, crossing his arms in front of him. The crack of his shoulders was audible even over the noise of the crowd. He leaned back, taking the bar from the cradle, bringing it to his chest, and hammering it back up in the air with triumphant grunts.
Standing in the crowd, a face among faces, Clyde watched the man labor and imitated his grunts, softly at first, then growing louder. He didn't realize he could be overheard until a blonde in front of him turned, eyes aglitter with sparkling makeup, and stifled a giggle with a hand. He looked quickly away from her eyes, staring silently at the gum-dotted pavement, and she whispered something to a friend before turning her attention back to the muscular men. Clyde's hand found the key around his neck, his thumb working it over like a rabbit's foot.
Gradually, his eyes lifted from the pavement, studying first the blonde's straw-bottomed clog that raised her foot so her ankle flexed, then the split sheath of her capri pant leg, which embraced the pink cylinder of her calf. Her bottom, firm and rounded, protruded abruptly from beneath her blouse. He leaned forward until he could smell her hair spray. He leaned forward until he was pushing up against her full behind, a face among faces in the press of a crowd.
Her thin shoulder blade pushed back ever so slightly into his soft chest as she jockeyed for space, not yet aware that his jostling was directed. Ahead, the weights clinked against each other; the men strained and flexed. His breathing quickened, taking on a faint groaning. Her neck firmed with realization. Her head started to pivot, slowed with shock.
Before the eyes could reach him, Clyde turned and pushed through the crowd, head lowering on the wide stalk of his neck, hands sinking into his pockets. People spread and closed behind him.
"Fucking pervert!" she yelled from somewhere in the crowd. She yelped, a short hiccup of disgust and fear. "You fucking sicko! Goddamn it!"
Clyde left the lights of the boardwalk behind and threaded through the darkening streets and alleys. The ocean breeze had left a staleness on everything--cardboard boxes slumping curbside, rusting hoods of abandoned cars, the soft, rotting wood around doorjambs. He slid his thumb across his filmy fingertips, the motion growing quicker and quicker until his hand was a blur.
He stepped onto Main Street and joined a current of people at a crosswalk. An old blue Civic had pulled too far into the intersection, blocking the crosswalk, and the woman sat foolishly at the wheel as the stream of pedestrians split around her car. His footsteps grew firmer as he approached, the bustle of people flowing all around him. With a grimace, he altered his step when he reached the car.
His hand flew forward, smashing palm down on the blue hood. The woman jerked back in her seat. He stood perfectly still, leaning toward the windshield, glowering, the front license plate hitting him midshin. Fear replaced shock in the woman's face, and she opened her mouth, but then caught a closer look at his red-rimmed eyes, the angry heaving of his chest. Her mouth dangled open, like that of a broken doll's.
The crowd continued to move around the car, people glancing and then moving on or not even noticing him at all. And suddenly he was gone, a dying whisk of movement, the sweaty imprint of his hand slowly evanescing from the metal of the hood.
11
SHIFTING the stack of files in his lap, David lay back on the exam table he'd adjusted like a chaise longue, propping his feet on one of the gynecologic stirrups. He continued with his paperwork, enjoying the quiet serenity of Exam One.
Diane barged in, startling him. "Oh sorry. Didn't realize you were . . . What are you still doing here?"
David checked his watch: 21:25. He hadn't realized he'd been there for an hour and a half after his shift ended. He was accustomed to working late, preferring the excitement of the ER to the solitude of his too-large house, but it alarmed him how quickly the habit had grown. Arriving a few hours early, leaving later and later, shouldering extra days on call--anything to avoid reconstructing a personal life without Elisabeth. His house was quickly becoming a million-dollar stopping place between shifts.
He looked at the paperwork before him. Nothing important, nothing pressing. Exhaustion pooled through him all at once, jumbling his thoughts. He squeezed the bridge of his nose. When he released it, he was touched by the concern in Diane's eyes.
"I don't know," he said. His stomach grumbled so loudly both he and Diane glanced at it.
"Come on," Diane said. "Let me buy you dinner."
A hospital cafeteria is a depressing place at night. Spouses with vacant, grief-haunted eyes, children pulling IV poles, parents slurping inconsolably on tepid coffee, the sleepless hours gathering in half-moons beneath their eyes. Their lethargy draws a sharp contrast with the bustle of the interns and nurses in scrubs. But even the grieving and the dying have to eat.
David stared at the food on his tray--a Milky Way, a half-eaten chicken sandwich, a small container of apple juice. Diane bit into an apple and shrugged. "What did you expect on a resident's salary?"
"This is perfect," David said. "I wouldn't have made it any farther afield without falling on my face." He studied his reflection in the back of a spoon. "Jesus, maybe I should check myself in."
"You don't look that bad. Mrs. Peters still swooned when you checked her eyes this afternoon."
"She's ninety years old. With glaucoma."
"She told me she thinks you look like George Clooney."
David pursed his lips to keep from smiling. "And what did you say?"
Diane twirled her straw in her Coke. "I told her no one looks like George Clooney."
"True," David said. "True."
Diane cocked her head slightly, amused. "I'd bet you were a great womanizer before you got married."
He shook his head.
"No? Why not?"
He shrugged. "I guess I liked women too much." He fished a crumb of some sort from his apple juice and wiped it on the tray. "And I married young."
"What did your wife look like?"
A web of images entangled him. A white snowball smudge on her winter sweater. The first movement of her face in the morning, sleep-heavy and gentle. His hands lifting her wedding veil. He imagined her the night of their fifteenth anniversary. The twin strokes of her hips beneath a sleek black dress. They'd gone to a gallery opening in Venice where Elisabeth, as the LA Times art critic, had been fawned over by dealers and struggling artists alike. After a few hours, David had snuck her off to Shutters in Santa Monica, where they'd sat out on the balcony of their hotel room, holding hands, listening to the waves rush the shore in the darkness.
"Her smile made me weak," he said.
"David . . . " --Diane looked away-- ". . . am I delusional in thinking there's something going on between us?"
"Positively schizophrenic. It must be your Yale education."
"It's a tough question to ask. Why don't you answer it seriously?"
"You're right," he said. "I'm sorry." He pried at the hard bun of his chicken sandwich as if he'd developed a sudden intense interest in baked goods.
"The few times we've been out . . . " Diane squeezed one hand with the other. "For the life of me, I can't figure out if they're dates or just an attending and a resident talking shop outside work. I mean, we're alone . . . we're at dinner . . . but we're talking about lesions and contusion fractures."
"An attending and a resident," he repeated.
"Well?"
"We've worked side by side, hands in the mud, for--what?"
"Almost three years."
"Three years now. You're one of the best residents I've ever had the pleasure to train. I consider you a colleague. Not a resident."
The glimmer of a smile cut through the discomfort on Diane's face, just for a moment. "I didn't know that," she said. "But it still doesn't answer my question."
"Look . . . " David realized his voice was shaking ever so slightly. "I've definitely thought about . . . but we can't. . . . I can't. . . . "
"Why not?"
He leaned back in his chair, trying to find what he wanted to say. "Diane, I'm almost twice your age."
"I'm thirty-one and you're forty-three. That's nothing. Elizabeth Taylor has married men twenty years younger."
"She doesn't have the same performance anxieties, I'd imagine."
Diane played with her straw some more, poking at ice cubes. "All right," she finally said, with a slight hint of humor. "Why don't we make a deal? I won't call you on your lame-ass excuses, but when we do overlap socially, no more talk of lesions and contusion fractures."
She extended her hand across the table and he shook it, mock formally, before settling back in his chair. He crossed his arms and fought off a grin. "So what's your middle name?" he asked.
"Allison."
"You like dogs or cats?"
"Dogs."
"What's your favorite kind of lesion?" She scowled at him, and he held up his hands defensively. "Just kidding. What do your folks do? Are they doctors?"
"We don't all come from high-powered medical families. Not all our fathers have grand rounds auditoriums named after them."
"It was named for my mother, actually," David said.
Diane whistled. "What was it like growing up in that house?"
"A lot of pimping at the dinner table. Name the eight bones of the wrist. The twelve cranial nerves. The five components of the Apgar score." He tilted his head. "My mother was chief of staff here at the NPI from '60 to '71, and she recruited a lot of the world's preeminent physicians--in all fields--to come lecture and teach at the Med Center. It wasn't uncommon for a few Nobel Prize-winning physicians to show up for dinner. The instructors and department heads that came through . . . it was truly amazing."
"Who was the better doctor, your mother or your father?"
"It's tough to say. They were in pretty divergent fields. My mother was a psychiatrist, my father a neurologist. My father passed away when I was young. Prostate cancer."
"That's why you asked Pinkerton about a prostate checkup today even though he was only thirty-nine?"
"We all have our pet illnesses, I suppose." David's mind followed some flight of reason, and he found himself saying, "My mother just went in '99."
Diane nodded, and he was grateful she didn't offer any platitudes. He'd wanted to share the information with her, not elicit sympathy.
A man in a wheelchair rolled slowly past, tray cradled on his atrophied knees.
"My mother was a tough woman. All fire and ambition. I never saw her crack. Not once." David drew his hand down across his face, like a window blind. "When she was in her late sixties, she headed up the Disciplinary Review Board here. She had to call a young male nephrologist into her office to confront him about a claim made against him by a young woman. When she reprimanded him, he rose, locked the door, and beat the shit out of her. Broke two ribs." He watched Diane's slender eyebrows rise and spread. "The only thing my mother was upset about afterward was her lack of medical judgment in not being able to predict she was dealing with an unstable man." He set both hands on his tray and pushed it slightly away. "That was my mother."
"A lot to live up to?"
"A lot of people spend their lives trying to overcome their upbringing. I spent mine trying to fulfill it."
"And have you?"
"My mother was pretty disappointed when I decided to enter Emergency Medicine."
"Why's that?"
"If a surgeon is a glorified carpenter, an ER doc is a glorified carpenter with an inferiority complex." He laughed. "As you know, it's generally not considered the most cerebral field."
"Your mother might have thought different if she'd seen you in action," she said. Her eyes quickly lowered. "Pardon my schoolgirlish fervor."