The Pursuit of Alice Thrift (18 page)

“No,” said Henry, and nothing more.

“Sorry,” said Ray. “I only asked because I'm a widower and I like to know what happened to other people's wives.”

Meredith asked Ray when he lost his wife.

“A year ago.”

“A year and a few months,” I said.

“Cancer?” Meredith asked.

“Car accident.”

Everyone murmured his or her condolences. Meredith asked if the marriage had produced any children.

“Luckily, no,” said Ray.

“Why ‘luckily'?” asked Leo.

“Because they'd have lost their mother! They'd be motherless, with me on the road most of the time. Who needs that?”

“Ray's wife was quite young,” I said. “They weren't married for very long.”

“
How
young?” asked Meredith.

“Twenty-eight when she died.” He swiveled his palm from side to side. “Maybe twenty-nine.”

“Statistically,” said Henry, “not that anyone heeds this anymore, but the ideal childbearing age is twenty-four—strictly in terms of what's safest for the mother and safest for the baby.”

“My mother was nineteen when she had me,” said Ray. “And I was her second.”

“My mother was sixty when she had me,” said Leo, and we all laughed.

IN OTHER WORDS
, it was fun. I enjoyed the fact that Meredith was serious and aloof, so for once I didn't take home the trophy for the wettest blanket. We drank red wine with our duck, except for Meredith, who kept covering her wineglass with the palm of her hand as Henry offered refills.

“Sorry,” said our host. “I keep forgetting.”

“On call?” I asked.

“Or just a teetotaler?” asked Ray.

“Temporarily,” said Meredith.

Jackie did a swivel in her seat. “So, Ray. How did you and Alice meet? It can't be like the rest of us—at work, by the vending machines, in the cafeteria.”

“As a matter of fact, we did meet in the hospital,” said Ray. He tapped one flange of his nose. “About this honker. I was thinking of getting a nose job, and she was the one in charge that day.”

“Hardly,” I murmured.

“You were the one I spoke to.” He reached for the whipped cream and added another dollop to his remaining bite of dessert—a hybrid of chocolate cake and pudding. “And she talked me out of it. In like two minutes. I left thinking, Maybe I'm not so hideous after all.”

He looked around for confirmation. Jackie said, “That shows good values, on both sides of the desk. Handsome is as handsome does.”

“My old man used to say that,” said Ray. “Which of course served his own purposes, because his nose made mine look dainty.”

Suddenly Meredith said, “I'm not trying to obfuscate, and I'm certainly not trying to be coy.”

“Huh?” said Ray.

“About the wine.” She smiled modestly. “About not drinking.”

Leo said, “Meredith—”

“Some of you know, and the rest of you probably figured out”—broad, contented smile—“I'm pregnant.”

“Whoa. Not me,” said Ray. “I figured out no such thing.”

“Me, neither,” I said.

“I can't plead ignorance,” said Henry.

“Was it planned?” asked Ray.

“Not that you know me well enough to ask that,” said Meredith, “but I'll answer: It wasn't planned, but we're delighted nonetheless.”

“Goes to show ya,” said Ray. “If you, a nurse, who knows this stuff cold, can have a slipup—”

“I believe you mean
two
nurses,” I said.

Leo said quietly, “People can take all the proper precautions and still have accidents.”

“I thought we agreed not to use the word
accident,
” said Meredith, her hand caressing her abdomen.

“How old are you?” Ray asked.

Meredith hesitated, then said, “I'll be thirty-seven next month.”

“High time,” said Ray. “Because if twenty-four is ideal—”

“Have you told your families?” I asked.

“What do you think?” Leo answered.

“We'll tell everyone when I've made it into my second trimester,” said Meredith.

I asked how far along she was.

“Ten weeks.”

“You know that exactly?” asked Ray.

Meredith smiled.

“If you know when you're ovulating,” I told him, “you can figure out when you conceive.”

“Cool,” said Ray.

“Is it too soon to make a toast?” asked Henry.

“Absolutely not,” said Meredith.

Henry stood and raised his glass. “To a new life. To Meredith's baby—”

“And don't forget her daddy,” said Meredith.

“Her?”
I repeated. “You already know it's a girl?”

“No, we do not,” said Leo.

“A hunch,” said Meredith.

“Ha,” said Henry.

“He, she, whatever,” said Ray. Now he stood. “Good luck to the mother. And to the father. And to her doctor, and to our delightful hostess.”

“Hear hear,” said Henry.

“Are you getting married?” I asked.

Leo banged his fist against his chest, expelling a fake cough. “One monumental life decision at a time, please,” he said.

“Why do you ask?” said Meredith.

“Alice is drunk,” said Ray. “I think this was her first martini. I mean, ever. Then wine on top of that.”

Leo, to my right, said, “Alice got her ears pierced.”

“That's true,” I said. “At home. With no licensed physician present.”

There was silence for a few long seconds.

“Alice made a joke,” said Ray.

19.
The Annals of Surgery

SOMEONE OF MY
scientific temperament, unlettered in social convention, would be prone to do what I did next: make an appointment to speak with Leo in private. I chose not to leave a message, which Meredith might parse on his answering machine. Instead I sent him a note saying,
I'd like to discuss something with you. Please
advise by beeper as to convenient dates, times, and sites. Yours truly,
Alice.
There was no line for
personal and confidential
on the string-tied, multiuse in-house envelope, so I just wrote,
Leo Frawley,
RN, NICU,
and hoped that the famously challenged mail-room staff would find my addressee.

The morning after the dinner, I updated Sylvie. Even though she didn't know the principals, she was captivated by Leo's paternity plight. I had provided the facts as I knew them on what she announced was going to be a weekly bad-weather constitutional between our residence and the hospital along the city-block–length tunnel.

“Duped,” said Sylvie. “Put to use like a withdrawal from a sperm bank. A turkey baster could have done the job without the messy human interchange.”

“You don't know that,” I said. “I think there's some love involved between the parties.”

“She's how old? Forty?”

“Thirty-six going on thirty-seven.”

“Tick-tock, tick-tock,” Sylvie chanted.

“According to Leo it was an accident.”

“With a midwife? Please. They're all
Über
-moms, even the ones without kids. They design a whole career around not just childbirth but childbirth as the crowning achievement of a woman's life. Who do you think invented cutting your own umbilical cord and underwater births and planting fruit trees where you've buried the placenta? Midwives!”

I said I was sure that Native American cultures had been burying placentas ritualistically, or ingesting them, long before midwives—

“You know what I'm getting at: a baby at any price. This Meredith was, first and foremost, in the market for a father.”

I said, “When Leo told me about Meredith, he sounded quite enamored.”

“Bullshit! Leo's furious! One day he's getting it regularly, and all of a sudden he has to start going to Lamaze classes. Believe me, she pulled a fast one.”

This was why I enjoyed Sylvie's company, especially in her cynical mode: She was always happy to accuse and indict perfect strangers until they were proven innocent. It made me thirst for Sylvies in other spheres of my life. I'd long given up hoping that the sole other female intern, the glamorous Stephanie from Manhattan via Penn and Duke, would recognize that we shared a berth in surgical steerage. Sometimes, when I was splashing cold water on my face at five-thirty
A.M.
, I tried to imagine what products and extra time it required to make eyelashes dark and distinct, and lids a canvas of silvery pastels. Even our names separated us: Alice and Stephanie—nomenclature as destiny. Sometimes I would look at her, at the golden streaks in her excess of hair, and imagine that if an alien landed in our hospital, he'd never guess that Dr. Stephanie Crawford and Dr. Alice Thrift belonged to the same species.

And now came Sylvie, who after only a few days' acquaintance sought out my company, lent me clothes, pierced my ears; who yelled out greetings from the far side of the cafeteria and introduced me to any fellow elevator passengers of her acquaintance. I realized that other relationships with roommates in college and medical school were anemic and impersonal compared to the intimacy Sylvie induced on our inaugural hike.

“How long did you and Leo live together?” she asked.

“Six months, exactly.”

“Just friends?”

This was how girlfriends talked as they power walked. Every few lengths of the tunnel, residents waved in collegial fashion. I was beginning to see that she had a high profile inside an institution where most of us blended together into one white-coated blur. Sylvie, with her two-tone hair and her conversation-piece earlobes, stood out. Unlike the rest of us, she didn't appear downtrodden; didn't feel the need to announce how exhausted she felt. I'd been lucky to have landed across the hall from someone who was not only neighborly but immune to my social disorders. I worried aloud on this first Sunday morning, “I hope I'm not too dull a walking partner.”

“You're not a kibitzer,” Sylvie said. “You speak when spoken to or when you have something to say. You're shy. Shy is fine.”

I said I'd hardly ever heard my condition described as fine. Quite the opposite; usually only as a curse.

“I used to be shy,” said Sylvie. “As a kid. But then I made a conscious decision to get over it.”

“How?”

“I'm embarrassed to tell you. It's too lame.”

“Please,” I said. “If anyone needs to hear this, it's me.”

“Okay. The nasty truth is: I took baton lessons. And I was astonishingly good at it. I could do twirls and catch it behind my back—you've seen this stuff. I joined the squad and in one year I was the lead baton twirler—superseding Kimberly Perreault, who never forgave me—to become the one who wore silver boots and tassels and led the parade. I'm not kidding. And this wasn't Texas or Alabama. This was Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.” She smiled. “If you ever tell a living soul, I'll deny it.”

I asked how an external, athletic feat helped her to overcome her shyness. Wasn't it excruciating to get dressed up in a costume, presumably something scanty, and lead a parade through the streets of Pittsburgh?

“Well, this is even more embarrassing because it shows what a shallow little girly-girl I was. When baton twirling got me out of the house and invited to parties generally populated by cheerleaders and jocks, I came out of my shell. Isn't that loathsome? Popularity cured me.” She shook her head. “My mother was torn: Was it better to have a daughter who was a wallflower or a daughter who sashayed across football fields in a short skirt and her midriff showing and who dated Catholics? I had to go to medical school to atone for my shallowness.”

I had known baton twirlers and cheerleaders from afar in high school; none of them, I was fairly certain, had become doctors. I said, “I guess I pigeonhole people. Scratch any doctor and you get someone who was unpopular in high school, except to the extent that he or she ran for offices of clubs that would look good on their college applications.”

“You do
not
pigeonhole people—not if you're dating what's his name, lover boy.”

We had reached the hospital entrance, and did our about-face. Sylvie was right: The brisk walk had made me feel less bedraggled. I said, “I admire the way you can ask personal questions in a lighthearted way without sounding as if you're taking someone's history.”

“Thank you,” said Sylvie. “Now I'll definitely ask if your date slept over.”

I said, “He visited for a while after we got back from dinner, but then he left.”

“I get it,” said Sylvie.

“We've just recently inaugurated that aspect,” I said.

When she didn't ask a follow-up question, I amplified: “I meant the sex . . . it's only started since I moved here. The first time it happened by accident.”

Sylvie laughed.

I said, “No, seriously. It was practically a platonic friendship, but he fainted in my bathroom and one thing led to another.”

“I think it's all for the good and your work will benefit if you have a sexual outlet.”

I shushed her. The tunnel's acoustics made it a less-than-ideal place for confidentiality. “What about you?” I ventured. “Any special friend I should know about?”

She stopped, kneeled down, retied a shoelace that looked perfectly secure.

“Did I ask the wrong question?”

She checked in both directions before saying, “I'm not sure you'll want to know about my ‘special friend,' as you so quaintly put it. Due to aspects that might shock you and other aspects that make it less than kosher.”

I said, “I'm not unenlightened. You'd be my friend no matter what you told me; no matter what category or gender of person your friend is. And I may have mentioned—because I'm so used to it and never give it a second thought—that my sister is a lesbian.”

Sylvie laughed and got back to her feet. “I knew you were leading up to that. I thought I'd let you torture that sentence for a while before I said, ‘Sorry. It's a man.' ” She resumed her brisk pace, but I caught up with her in two strides.

“Is this guy another doc?” I asked.

Sylvie said, “Oh, yeah.”

“An attending?”

“Why did you ask that?”

“Because of what you said about it not being kosher. I mean, if he were one of your attendings—”

“He's married.”

I said, “I don't have any experience in that arena, but from what I've heard, affairs with married men result in unfavorable outcomes.”

“Don't I know it,” said Sylvie. Her elbows were pumping; it was getting harder for me to keep up with her. Suddenly she stopped and said a little wistfully, “Okay, here it is—another sappy piece of autobiography. It began with a very sweet kiss. Remember those? From our youth?”

I said sure I did. Yes.

“And unexpected. That can be nice. So picture this: It's late at night. You're in the film library and suddenly an attractive man is whisking you into an empty fluoroscopy suite.”

“Film library” echoed off an ominous shape I couldn't name. My martinied brain and my residual fatigue were not helping my retrieval. I said, “You're the last person I would have expected to have turned to mush because someone lands a kiss on you.”

She shook her head, pumped her elbows, didn't slow down. “Then I've misrepresented the situation. Said kiss was administered after several months of what I'd characterize as surreptitious meaningful glances.”

I'd heard rumors of affairs. I'd even looked up from stitching or stapling or taking notes to intercept a meaningful glance between a surgeon and a resident, an anesthesiologist and a scrub nurse. But this was firsthand; this was a principal confiding in me. I asked if there had been any follow-up.

“Not much. He's busy, he's married, he's always in a crowd of residents or nurses.”

“Can't he page you?”

Sylvie laughed. We walked a whole length of the tunnel, Sylvie wearing the expression of a woman with a tantalizing secret and me, evidently, looking stumped. “Don't try to guess,” she said, “because even if you hit the nail on the head I'm not going to name names.”

“How long ago was this kiss?” I asked.

“December thirtieth. Which you shouldn't perceive as me remembering it like some maudlin first-kiss anniversary. I only remember it because the conversation opened with him asking me if I had a date for New Year's Eve—”

“Out of the blue?”

Sylvie smiled as if thinking, Poor Alice. She's such a naïf in the ways of impulsive and adulterous displays of affection.

“Was he asking you out?”

“No. Just making conversation. I said I had no date and he said, kind of wistfully and anti-wifely, ‘You're lucky.' ”

“And
then
he kissed you?”

“Among other things,” said Sylvie with a grin.

“In the fluoro suite?”

“Honey child: My bed is, as we all know, approximately a hundred and twenty paces from the hospital through this very passageway.”

“And you weren't afraid that someone would see him entering your apartment?”

“Please. You know our floor. You have to be dead for several days before anyone notices your comings and goings.”

And then I remembered where I'd heard “film library” in a sexual context, and why it was resonating in such nauseating fashion: a cleaning lady first, Sylvie second, or—more likely—fifteenth or fiftieth.

“What's the matter?” Sylvie asked.

“Nothing. Just something Leo mentioned once.”

“Such as?”

I had to decide: Blow the whistle at the risk of bruising Sylvie, or protect a man who was smearing the good offices of the X-ray department. I said, wincing, “About witnessing an act of fellatio in the film library.”

Sylvie laughed. “It certainly wasn't us. We moved to fluoro.”

I wanted to ask, Is this special friend of yours named Hastings? But how would I proceed if her answer was yes? Was I up to the task of delivering a dire romantic prognosis?

“Is it the married-man part,” she asked, “or the unabashed-sex part that's making you green around the gills?”

“Do you know this man well?” I asked. “Because I sense that this relationship is a combination of surreptitious glances and episodic sex.”

She was saved from answering because at that moment, as we approached the double doors to the hospital, I spotted my nemesis, Dr. Charles G. Hastings, waiting for the elevator and checking his watch with his usual glowering impatience. Sunday morning had to mean an emergency, one that had been passed up the ladder from residents to—as he often reminded us—a full professor who should never be bothered at home. My arm went up to stop Sylvie's forward motion at the same moment that hers reached across to stop me in my tracks.

“Quick,” I said. “Turn around.”

We were halfway back through the tunnel before I said, “Sorry. I just didn't want to run into him. He's the one who was wielding the scalpel when I let go of the retractor.”

Sylvie murmured something noncommittal.

Without having had much practice in saying oblique or coy things in my life, I tried a few now: “You probably wanted me to confront him, though, right? March right up in my sneakers and say, ‘Hello, Dr. Hastings. Harassing any interns lately?' Which would be exactly what Leo wanted me to do the morning after my near-firing.”