Lie Still (35 page)

“Oh, you know . . . where else can you fuel up for a week at a time?”

“C’mon to the table, man.”

“Oh, I don’t think I—”

“Aw bullshit. Anybody survived internship is a life member. C’mon.”

I trailed Gene to the back and joined a half dozen of the regulars. They were eating the usual combination plates oozing enough oil to heat a small home for a night. I picked at some chips and salsa.

Being back among the brethren felt surreal, despite the baseline bonhomie apparently carrying over from year to year. Ed Bonderant, a senior resident in Family Practice, was imitating his physiology professor from med school in Seattle. Ed was a local hero: Stories abounded about his ability to maintain an amused equanimity in the face of the worst hospital firestorms: rampaging residents passing shit down the totem pole, cirrhotics hemorrhaging simultaneously from both ends of the alimentary canal, and physically combative psychiatric patients being carried to rubber rooms by mass assemblages of doctors, nurses, and students. Ed credited both his meditation practice and having grown up in a large and dysfunctional family. His vision of medicine was holistic, especially primary care: Western pills liberally spiced with bits of Oriental philosophy selected strictly on the basis of what he liked. That evening it occurred to me I should study his ways.

Ed had his head tilted back so he was looking down his nose. He wagged his index finger in random arcs, saying with tunnel-mouthed diction, “Ah, um, would you explain, um, to us, for us, for all of us, here assembled, the

‘Bonderant-Altoona reflex,’ um?”

Alex Bass, an Internal Medicine resident, said, “That’s William F. Buckley, Jr.”

Emily, Ed’s wife and apparent soul mate from several previous lives, if that’s karmically allowed, said, “No, that’s Dr.

Porter. We had him
forever
during first year. Ed has him LIE STILL

261

down
.” Ed and Emily had been classmates in medical school. The story went that they had fallen into bed together during their orientation and taken up a new version of tantric love: They
never
separated, except for work. They married just before third year.

Emily was in her third and final year of Pediatrics, and had decided to sign on for two years of Pediatric Oncology.

Anyone who can do Kids-with-Cancer—about as depressing as medicine can get—has the unspoken awe of the rest of us. She was also an adventurous and studious cook who enjoyed doing up big meals for weekend gatherings. She had a broad bosom and long dark hair. Part gypsy, part Madonna. Having the thing closest to a home and hearth that any of us could see, Ed and Emily became sometime parent surrogates for any of the tribe prone to shifting living situations and occasional heartbreaks.

“Okay, I’ll bite,” Gene said. “What’s the Bonderant-Altoona reflex?”

Emily said, “First, you have to know that Altoona is my maiden name.”

“Oh, this will be good,” Gene said. “Something sexual, for sure.”

Ed, changing his adopted speech style to East Indian, said, “Ho, Nho, nuh-ting like daht. Nho. Nho sex. Never.”

“Okay, what then?”

He said, “Schtooping,” rolling a Yiddish lexicon into his Indian accent. “Yahh.”

Emily said, “Ed says his blood pressure and pulse are lower after sleeping with me than after sleeping alone . . .”

This brought hoots.

“No, wait, not after sex . . .”

“Schtooping, yahh,” Ed said.

“No! Not that. Just sleeping together. Even if we sleep in the call room at the ’Copa.”

“You have sex in the call room?” someone said.

“No,” Emily said.

“Nho,” Ed said. “Nho sex. Schtooping.” His grin was pure Cheshire Cat.

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D AVID FARRIS

Emily said, “Not in the call room!” A pause. “Well, not often. Anyway, Ed says it’s unhealthy to sleep alone. He says when he’s with his ‘proper mate’ he feels some kind of brain waves that—”

“Hippocampal-septal slow waves,” he put in, in his Dr.

Porter– William F. Buckley, Jr., persona.

“Right,” she said. “Like maybe sex is not the basis of the pair bond. It’s the brain waves.”

“No. It’s schtooping,” Gene said. They all laughed.

Gene said, “So you guys will live to a hundred and eight with pair-bonded slow waves. The rest of us will be dead at forty.”

I thought of my personal litany. It was going from bad to hideous: Aborted residency. Career hinging on improb-able appeals to unsympathetic academics. Robin, what I had for a love interest, now the acute salt in a chronic sore.

A neo-nemesis. A walking, talking, kissing, cock-sucking, internal contradiction. Any warm glow I might have kindled from our night together had been put out cold.

The conversation around me had suddenly stopped. I realized they were all looking at me. I raised my eyebrows. Ed said, “How ’bout it, Malc? Surely you got a significant woman hidden away somewhere?”

I laughed. “Yeah. A couple of ’em, in fact.”

Emily said, “What do you think, Ed? Medically Arrested Development?”

“Yhess! Egzellent!”

“What?” came a chorus.

Emily said, “Ed’s into creative diagnoses. He calls this one ‘MAD.’ It’s a common condition.”

Ed, as Dr. Porter, said, “The cost of becoming a doctor, it is often said, is your twenties. Some, um, would say the prime decade. So. Simple math. Lose ten years. Thirty-year-old doctors acting like, um, twenty-year-olds. Arrested development.”

“We’re collecting lots of data,” Emily said. “Most of our friends. Ed’s going to write up an article and send it to
The
New England Journal of Medicine.
”

LIE STILL

263

“Great,” I said to Ed. “We’ll all be over to your clinic in the morning to get registered. Get our IDs and our pictures taken.”

Gene said, “Great. Yeah, I want to be a case study. My fifteen minutes of fame and I’ll have to be photographed in front of one of those measuring grids, naked, with a black rectangle covering my eyes.”

Alex said, “You know, I think my mom suspects I’ve got a character flaw. Maybe having a diagnosis will help. You know, I can say, ‘Oh, it’s just my MAD acting up again.’ ”

Emily said to me, “Malc, I don’t think you’re a textbook case, though. I think you’re in love with your roommate but won’t admit it to yourself.”

I said, “Nah. My roommate isn’t all that interested in philandering ex-doctors with no prospects.”

She said, “You’re not an
ex
-doctor. And maybe you have to give up the philandering first.”

“She knows me like she knows how to manage kids with diarrhea. And I’m not going to walk the straight and narrow for its own sake. You need a reason.”

“Like that slogan from the sixties,” Ed said. “‘Chastity is its own punishment.’ ” He held up his hands. “Personally, though, I wouldn’t know.” He grinned.

The salt was stinging in my open sore. Robin was all di-chotomy. While my personal radar told me she was on my side, the printed materials called me a fool. She—at least one side of her—still owed me a huge explanation. Despite the halfhearted mutual defense alliance between Sally Marquam and me, I was clearly the one standing on the trapdoor.

And with my earlier performance in confronting Robin inside the Glory Hospital, I was likely as good as gone.

Still, even more than I needed that job, I needed at least a passable reputation. If I wanted to overturn Robin’s por-trayal of me, I needed some idea why she’d made it. I had little to lose by trying again, presuming I could stay out of another
mano a mano
inside the walls of the Glory ER.

Maybe I could still get something sensible from her. Or at least something I could use.

264

DAVID FARRIS

I made an excuse to the Oval Table and drove back out to Glory.

The nursing shifts were due to change, so I waited in my parked car. I saw the night nurse go inside. Twenty minutes later Patty Kucera came out and headed for her car.

I rolled down my window and called a hello.

She walked over but eyed me suspiciously. She said,

“Hey, Doc.”

“Is Robin around? I thought she was supposed to be on.”

“She was, but she had to go home after a couple’a hours.

She was feeling sick. Cramps and nausea. They called me in.”

“That’s too bad.”

“Yeah, she looked pretty bad. Claimed it was her period, but I think she’s pretty stressed, what with that kid coding on her the other night and now all the questions. I heard your date might not’a gone so well, either.”

“Actually, we had a nice time.”

“Uh-huh. Anyways, I told her to get some rest.”

“Did she go home?”

“Well, I hope she did. She better have. I gave up a night off.”

“You don’t have her address, do you? I really need to talk to her, and I could see if she needs anything.”

“No. I don’t.”

“Well, I can probably find her house again. She drove me there last night.”

“Yeah. If you find her, tell her I hope she’s okay.”

“Yeah, I will.”

She turned to go, but turned back. “You know,” she said, locking together the fingers of both hands and stretching her wrists, “my arms got really sore from all the CPR the other night.”

I smiled, but she wasn’t joking. I said, “Well, maybe if you get more practice . . .”

She smiled back.

With only a few wrong turns and several lucky guesses, I found Robin’s house. The neighborhood was shut down, LIE STILL

265

though a late-night dogwalker passed as I got out of my car.

Her house was totally dark. I knocked at her door, waited, called her name and knocked again. No answer.

I backtracked from her door. Her key was just where she had promised. I went in quickly and quietly, shut the door behind me, then called her name again.

I had a sudden creepy feeling to watch behind myself for clubs, knives, and guns, but that was silly. So far I’d been attacked only with a pen. I was also nervous about neighbors and maybe the police, but I reminded myself I had a legitimate reason to be there and, for that matter, an invitation.

Still, I didn’t want company. I waited a minute for my eyes to accommodate, then edged my way from the entry to the kitchen. I called her name again. I turned and bumped something, creating a crash behind me as the metal salad bowl and a wineglass hit the floor, the glass shattering. I said, “Oh fuck,” and groped for the light switches.

With the place lit I made rounds. Her bed was not only empty, it was neatly made. She was not in the bathroom, not asleep on the couch, not in the house, period. In fact I found no jacket on her couch, as she had promised. Nor was it in the kitchen, nor the bedroom.

I bent to the mess, picking up the larger shards, being careful not to cut a finger as I did so. I found a broom and dustpan and cleaned up the broken glass, but even after sweeping up I made no move to leave. My quest for explanations had created only more mystery.

The kitchen was only partly cleaned from our supper: dirty dishes in the sink, the wok still on the stove, the empty wine bottle next to it. I checked the refrigerator: half a car-ton of milk, bread, cheese, a brown banana, most of another bottle of white wine. There was little on the counters: sections of the
Arizona Republic,
half a glass of water, a blank scratch pad by the phone. The cupboards held a predictable array of dishes, glasses, pots, and pans. It all looked as if the owner was due back any minute.

Her bedroom gave the same impression: a bath towel in a heap on the floor, beside it a pair of slacks. In the dresser were 266

D AVID FARRIS

socks and panties in one drawer, sweaters and jeans in others.

I found a few blouses and dresses hanging in the closet. The bookcase was still full of books, neatly arranged by size.

There was a gap, though, where her “toy box” had been.

I sat at the kitchen bar where we had eaten. It flashed in my mind to call Mary Ellen, see if she had any ideas. That was a laugh. What would I tell her? My latest choice of lover had, after our first sexual encounter, declined my request for a second date, dumped on me at work, then left home, sex toys and contraceptives in tow? I could just imagine the chuckling “Hey, Don Juan” that would bring.

I stared at the phone. It seemed contaminated. Maybe there was some kind of evidence there. Fingerprints. A secret phone number. Memory of clandestine conversations.

I told myself I was being superstitious. Beyond the fingerprints none of that was possible. I got a napkin and picked up the receiver. For the full duration of the dial tone I stared at the keypad. A recording came on: “If you’d like to make a call, please hang up . . .” I looked at the “Program”

and “Redial” buttons. I interrupted the whining voice by pressing the receiving cradle, got a fresh dial tone, and pressed “Redial.” The phone spat out its quasi-musical notes, then the tone of a phone ringing. A woman’s voice:

“Providence of Glory Hospital. How may I help you?”

“Who is this?” I asked.

“This is the hospital operator. How may I help you?”

“I’m afraid I have the wrong number.” I hung up.

I played with the “Program” button, too, but all I got regardless of sequence or digits was a dial tone.

My eye fell on the notepad there. Though the top sheet was blank, it was imprinted with the image of widely looping handwriting I recognized as Robin’s. I found a pencil.

Laying it nearly flat, I swept a light layer of graphite over the scratches. A phone number emerged.

I mentally rehearsed another “Sorry, wrong number,” and punched in the number.

The same woman’s voice: “Providence of Glory Hospital.

How may I help you?”

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267

“Oop. Sorry. Me again.”

“Better check that number.”

“Right. I will. Sorry.”

I wanted a shot of Scotch but settled for a glass of wine from the refrigerator. I handled the bottle through my napkin and figured I’d take the glass with me. Whatever Robin was up to, professionally and socially, did not include me, at least not on her side.

Papers,
I thought. I checked every wastebasket I could find.