MR.DICKIE DYLAN was sitting at the end of my exam table, shrunken and puckered as an old zucchini. His deceased wife had been one of my first patients. “I’m an impossible woman,” she used to announce from her wheelchair. When she knocked her pills to the floor, Mr. Dylan crawled around and picked them up. “Married fifty-six years,” I’d told Jeremy. “The amazing power of habit.”
“Oh, Dr. Toledo . . .” Mr. Dylan looked embarrassed, but pleased. “To your house? I couldn’t do that, I’m boring.” I’d just invited him for dinner.
“Oh, come on. My daughter will be there. I bought a piece of meat last night that’s too big for the two of us.”
He agreed, finally, and I wrote out instructions. “Did you really ask that man to dinner?” Lindy, the receptionist, asked me as she headed home. “Aren’t you a sweetheart.” I mentally replayed Lindy’s words, checking for sarcasm, but even in repetition I heard none. Lindy was a thirtysomething divorcée who shared clothes with her teenage daughter and seemed to have a soft spot for Howard. I was never sure about Lindy.
T HAT EVENING, Claudia was tearing up romaine lettuce when she startled me. “I wonder if it’s a luxury,” she said, “for you and Mick not to have to see each other every day.”
“A luxury? I don’t think of these days as a luxury,” I told Claudia. “I think of these days as just busy.”
Where would Mick and I live, in our fantasy years of retirement? We never talked about marriage or sharing a home, but we joked about the days after we both retired in a way that implied we’d be together. “Santa Fe?” he’d say. “Too many people doing yoga.” “Sarasota, no way,” I might complain. “Half of Ohio retires to Sarasota.”
Eleven more years until Mick turned sixty-two. We were halfway there. Not that I had any idea what Mick would do about Karn when that time came. Her actual absence when he retired seemed about as likely as a passenger in his car disappearing in a puff of smoke.
“Detra says it’s a luxury,” Claudia said. Detra, Claudia’s worldly friend. “Detra says she’s never going to move in with someone again. She says men like you better if they think they’re free from you.”
“That may be true at your age. As men get older their needs change. They don’t want to run around having sex with everyone. They settle down.”
ANITA HARDMAN: WEIGHT UP SEVEN LBS
“Maybe I’m scaring him,” Claudia said. “Maybe it would be better if I just”—she made a quick gesture with her hand—“flitted in there and flitted away.”
Was I hearing things? “Who?” I said. “Who’s him? Is there someone you’re interested in?” Other than Giles, Tessa’s nightmare offspring, whom Claudia had dated for eight months, Claudia had never had a serious boyfriend. I had not long before asked Tessa how she’d figured out that her own daughter was a lesbian. “You’d know,” Tessa had said quickly, reading my mind. “Trust me, Claudia isn’t Sapphic, she’s shy. Giles says she’s almost pathological.” That’s interesting, I wanted to say. I think Giles is pathological too. But Tessa was my friend, and I didn’t want to hurt her. She had to be much more unhappy about Giles than I was.
“It’s a guy from my statistics class,” Claudia said. “I could be good for him. I can see it.”
“He’s not married, is he?”
Claudia made an odd noise. “Mom. Of course not.”
“Any children?”
“No! Mom . . .”
I glanced at Claudia, at her dreamy, nestling look, and I could see as clearly as reading a road sign that there was a curve ahead. Claudia and a decent boyfriend! This could be exciting. I reached for my phone as I waited for more details. Anita Hardman had chronic heart failure; she probably needed extra doses of her diuretic.
“His name’s Toby Polstra,” Claudia said. “Detra says he’s every mother’s dream.”
It turned out Toby was the teaching assistant. He wasn’t in her class, he helped teach her class. He had an undergraduate degree in math and a master’s in environmental studies, and he was filling in time while he decided on his career. There was a family hardware store in Indiana, and he was thinking of moving back. On the other hand, he was thinking of starting his own environmentally friendly business, maybe a consulting service for businesses that wanted to go green. He’d told Claudia that, for him, living lightly on earth mattered. Living ethically mattered. They could be no more than friends so long as Claudia was his student.
“That’s reasonable,” I said. “A very conscientious young man. Mr. Perfect.” I was surprised at the edge of anger in my voice. Claudia must have heard it too, because she didn’t tell me more about Toby.
Mr. Dylan didn’t show. I called his house at about eight but there was no answer. I got Claudia to eat, which she did half heartedly, and I phoned Mr. Dylan again at nine. He’d come all right, he said, his speech slurred, but nobody was there. It turned out he’d arrived at five instead of seven, and after a spell waiting he’d gone home.
“Maybe he thought you were mocking him,” Claudia said when I put down the phone. “Maybe he thought you invited him knowing you wouldn’t be home.”
“Claudia,” I said, “he knows I’m not an ogre.” Claudia nodded, looking unconvinced, and it disturbed me that she imagined someone distrusting me so profoundly. Does she think I’m an ogre? I thought. When Claudia left she almost tripped over a bouquet of flowers left on the stoop, the green paper twisted and torn. She had come in through the garage, so we’d both missed them.
“I feel terrible,” I told Mick when he called later. “I wanted to do something good, and I only hurt him.”
“Welcome to the club,” Mick said.
OTHER THAN THE QUICK GLIMPSE when he dropped me off that first night, Mick had never seen my house. I had never seen Mick’s house, either, although I’d visited, once, anonymously, the place the Turkman Warriors called “our house,” the arena where they played. Mick didn’t want me coming there—he had an unreasonable fear that Karn, who came to all his home games, would somehow scan the crowd and sense a threat.
The town of Turkman was tucked into a valley. Roads crept like vines up its hillsides. The university was near the entrance to the valley, in the flattest part of town. I went to a game on a Saturday afternoon in February during Mick’s and my second year. I had the day perfectly planned. I’d arrive in the town of Turkman, a three-hour drive, late Saturday morning, walk around downtown to see the people in their maroon-and-gold Turkman State regalia, eat a fast-food lunch in my car, then sneak into the arena early to watch Mick and his team warm up. As it happened, that morning a spring broke in my garage door, and my car and I were stuck inside. By the time I got to the Turkman Arena the game was nearly half over. I had to park in an overflow lot, and my feet scuffed the icy dirt as I walked through a ghost town of cars. The city of Turkman lived for basketball, Mick said, and when I opened the arena door the heat and noise almost knocked me backward.
I had never been in a basketball stadium before. It surprised me to find myself, at ground level, almost halfway up the seats, the court at the bottom of a sloping hole. I walked past concession stands, framed portraits of coaches and players, elderly male ushers spaced along the ground floor walkway. The lights over the crowd were dimmed, but it was clear the place was packed. The attendance that day was almost thirteen thousand—average, I learned later. Hanging from the rafters were banners stitched with the names and years of tournament wins. The usher read my ticket by flashlight and pointed up, and I climbed to the next-to-last row. The arena’s roof was an inverted peak, so everyone’s view was forced down to the court, brightly lit and golden-shiny, like hot lava.
The Turkman Warriors were playing a team dressed in green. I sat down during a time-out. Mick was at the far side of the court in a cluster of players. I took my place next to a large woman eating popcorn, and reached for the binoculars in my pocket. As I focused on Mick’s group I was stunned by the thought that that man—that man, his minions bunched around him—was someone whose eyes lit up when I walked through the door. In the binoculars I could just make out the whorl in the crown of his hair. I thought of Mick’s eyes, his bitten left thumbnail, the distinctive red-brown color (unlike the color anywhere else) of the hair on his inner thighs—and my knowledge made the cavernous arena seem as intimate as a den.
Turkman State was down by one at halftime, and Mick and his team left the court to frenzied music from the PA system. The lights went up, and I looked at the people around me. The woman to my left was with two large men who had to be her relatives; to my right a group of boisterous young men kept sending off the same guy (the only one with an ID, I suspected) to buy them beers. There were two elderly couples in front of me and a mother with a baby directly behind me and four small children of uncertain parentage climbing on and off the back row of chairs. Lots of people wore maroon and gold, and one man three rows ahead wore a T-shirt emblazoned on its back with Turkman’s former, politically insensitive mascot, the Turk, wrapped in a turban and holding a scimitar in his teeth.
There was a halftime show featuring Frisbee-catching dogs, and then the pep band played as the current mascot, a maroon-and-gold eagle unofficially called the Hot Hen, shook its tail. “You’re hot, baby!” one of the young guys beside me screamed.
The lights went down and the music stopped and the teams reappeared from their tunnels, and the ball started moving back and forth, back and forth. At some point it struck me that my behavior was no longer independent, that I was one jostling molecule in a pot of boiling water. In the tagged-red-cell nuclear medicine studies, the heart is a hot spot in the center of that body, the place where the red cells get together, the place, it would appear, where red cells want to be, and it wouldn’t have surprised me if someone outside reported that the Turkman Arena was throbbing. Outside was cold and gray and barren; inside was alive. The boys beside me were starting to fall over, and one of them ended up in my lap. I laughed and propped him up and stood cheering with everyone in that arena (not quite everyone—there was a section of green team fans a few rows down) because one of Mick’s boys had stolen the ball and ripped it down-court and through the net. In the last five minutes, Turkman pulled ahead to win by fifteen points. The crowd, buoyant and contented, started for the exits, scattered shouts and war whoops whizzing above us like bottle rockets.
I made my way down the steps. Mick was standing at the entrance to a tunnel talking with someone who was writing things down. I moved with the crowd along the walkway. Mick headed toward two male radio announcers seated at a table behind one of the baskets, ready for the postgame show. It was a thrill to see Mick looking so comfortable and masterly, an even bigger thrill, perhaps, to know he didn’t know I was there. I’d tell him about it later, when we could laugh about his fear that Karn might see me. I’d report to him my theory of the water molecules, my image of the arena as Turkman’s heart. I’d say he’d made me feel like busting my buttons; maybe, our next Thursday, I’d show up in my new shirt with the snaps and actually bust them. Then it hit me, what I hadn’t yet imagined: how different this arena must be when the Warriors lost, the sullen silence and the shuffling to the doors.
ON T V, in the suit and tie he wore for games, Mick looked like a boy who’d been padded and stretched and dressed to look, not totally successfully, like a grown man. His ties were loud and made of shiny fabrics, like my father’s ties. By the end of a close game his jacket was off and his rolled-up shirtsleeves flapped around at his wrists. But the rare times I’d seen him in public—the sports banquets where we met, an American Heart Association dinner we’d both attended—it was startling to see the power of his presence. Women sipped their drinks and glanced his way. Men shook his hand and at the same time gripped his arm, as if the contact of a handshake wasn’t enough.
Part of Mick’s and my attraction, always, was the glamour of each other’s competence. I found the things Mick had to deal with—reporters, parents, teenagers, all the complex dynamics of a group of kids and coaches sharing buses and hotels and meals and games—almost frightening; I couldn’t imagine being part of, much less enjoying, such an aggressively social enterprise. But until that season, ’99-2000, when Eluard’s brother found trouble and my daughter found Toby, Mick seemed to clamber like a monkey around the ropes holding people together, finding footholds and pathways I wouldn’t recognize were there. “We’re a team, that’s the main thing,” Mick had said several years before in the Turkman paper, when—despite his best rebounder dislocating his shoulder and his center spending a night in jail—the Warriors had come in second in their conference and won the conference tournament. That was what hurt Mick about the ’99-2000 season: his team, even when it won games, never had the feeling of a unit.
I had never been part of a team. Howard and Jeremy and I were three cardiologists in group practice, but other than sharing our billing and profits we functioned like individual practitioners. In the square of our office suite we each had our own hallway and our own nurse and our own ways. The three of us passed on necessary information about patients and held a monthly meeting, but beyond that we barely spoke.
To Mick I would always be, despite his disavowals, a woman who held beating hearts in her hands, who accepted a part in the ceremonies of aging, rejuvenation, and death. Mick, although he didn’t go to church (his wife and kids did), was a believing man, and he had a great respect for death. When I talked to him about a dying or dead patient he’d fall silent and watch me with his lips tightened, as if I were a tightrope walker whose balance and concentration he’d never threaten with a word. “The things you go through,” he’d told me more than once, his lips constricting until their billows became a line.
I know that people like talking about gazing into their loved one’s eyes, but it was never exactly Mick’s pupils I looked into. The inner canthus is the notch in the eye next to the nose, and there was a dip in the arc from Mick’s inner canthus to the top of his eyelid that moved me. No matter how widely Mick smiled, he still had that aching arch. That visible ache made me trust him. Without it, he might have seemed too perfect.
Mick liked my back, what he smilingly called—running a big hand down my spine—my bird bones. He lived in a world of mus cled, bruising men, and I was his little woman. There were instants I knew he imagined me small enough to curl up in his palm; there were instants I imagined I could.
We made sense, we told each other: Mick worked in sports and I in medicine, both professions ruled by the body. “You heal me, doc,” he used to say. “You teach me, coach,” I’d say back.
THATTIME OF YEAR AGAIN, March, when the doctors’ lounge buzzed with talk about betting pools and seeding. “The committee wants Duke to win,” one of the surgeons complained. “They gave them the easiest bracket.” Raj, a little defensive because of his personal Duke connections, ignored that comment and weighed in about the mid-seed battles in the Midwest, as one of the ENTs piped up with his opinion of Oklahoma and a urologist started talking about rebounding statistics as the best predictor of NCAA tournament success. “You can’t forget foul-shooting,” Jeremy, my intelligent partner, said. When we first got together I used to run these comments past Mick, learning to my astonishment that some of them made sense.
Turkman State was the number 6 seed in the West—way too high a seeding, Mick said, after the season they’d just had. “What do you think of Turkman?” I asked Jeremy. Somehow they had managed to win their conference tournament.
“You like them, don’t you?” Jeremy said. “I remember that from last year. They’re a decent team. They have a chance.” The sort of studiously neutral statement that maddened his more anxious patients: This angioplasty could work, yes. I’d say the odds are you’ll survive the surgery.
I asked Raj the same question. “I knocked them out in the first round,” he said, referring to his betting-pool sheet. “I didn’t want to, because Flitt’s a great guard and they’ve got that big center, but he holds back some”—Raj winced, as if it hurt him to admit this, and I was glad to see he’d gotten some doubts about Eluard—“and Sierra State, who they’re up against, Sierra’s been looking good.” Mick was worried about Sierra State too. He would have preferred for Turkman to be seeded lower, to face almost any other team. “And that’s a weird conference placement,” Raj added. “Why’d they put them in the West?” I eyed Raj with renewed appreciation. I sent him all my pulmonary referrals. “He’s very smart,” I always told my patients.
CLAUDIA AND I WERE in a mall department store, Claudia searching for a dress to wear to the wedding of a friend of Toby’s. It’s not a date, Claudia had said, it’s just that he needs a companion—and I wondered at this convenient hairsplitting, this willful disguising of the fact that Claudia was dating someone who was almost her professor. Eight years older, the survivor of not one but two broken engagements, Toby made me nervous, although we’d never met.
“Do you think you’ll ever get a real boyfriend?” Claudia asked, trailing me into the Better Dresses department. “You know, one you could spend a lot of time with?”
Toby rode a bike to work. He had installed a special water-saving device in the toilet in his apartment, and used only expensive energy-saving lightbulbs. He’d persuaded his landlord to let him start a compost heap and garden in his building’s back yard. I couldn’t understand the antipathy I’d developed for him, other than my sense that for Toby to be so picky about the environment, he must have in him something metallic and vaguely threatening. I thought of him as a sort of industrial juicer, an implement to press the sweetness out of Claudia within seconds. When I finished a cath and looked around at the mass of throwaway sheeting and instruments and supplies, I half wanted Toby to walk in on the sight.
“It’s not the amount of time you spend together, it’s the intensity of feelings you share,” I said, answering Claudia. It hurt that she was questioning me, however indirectly, about Mick. “Remember when you first met Detra?” During a medical staff picnic, Claudia and Detra had sat under a honeysuckle bush for hours. “Compare that to how much time you spent with your Girl Scout leader. Remember all those weekends? Well, is Mrs. Toscadides one of your best friends?”
“It’s not the same.” Claudia reached deep into the rack and extracted a dress in yellow chiffon. My beeper went off:
M. L. HOPKINS: LOST HER PILLS
“Too bridesmaidy,” I said, reaching for my phone. I’d had hundreds of hours with Mick, surely. Thousands of hours. Well, at least one thousand. “You have to admit the time you spend with different people isn’t equivalent. For me, every moment with Mick is a peak moment. Every moment I feel alive.” Oh boy. Some things are true enough but they shouldn’t be said out loud.
“I guess you don’t drift off to sleep on his shoulder,” Claudia said, turning to another rack. “Waste of time.”
“M.L.?” I said into the phone. “What happened?”
M.L. was only thirty-one but had the stretched-out, irritable heart of an old alcoholic. Her heart choked up her lungs with fluid; her heart burst into her sleep, rap-tap-tapping like a demented drill team. In an ideal world I would have her on a blood thinner to prevent a stroke, but I didn’t want to risk her taking it. Drunks fall and get hurt. Drunks irritate their stomachs and get GI bleeds.
When M.L. was sober, or at least near-sober, she decorated houses for rich people. She had shown me a photo, her last office visit, of herself with a stately-looking woman in the living room of a villa in Slovenia. In the picture, M.L.—wearing an odd green shift and her usual Buddy Holly glasses, her shock of black hair tipped in pink—was beaming. “I love Europe,” she said, and then, in a bizarre accent: “Europe understa-a-ah-nds me.” She crossed her eyes and raised her eyebrows, her typical stupid-me gesture. There was a small smolder ing fire of self-hatred in M.L. I could see it, but I couldn’t stomp it out.
Now M.L. was home in Ohio, and I gathered that she’d had to leave in a hurry wherever it was she’d been staying. I got the number of her pharmacy and a list of her meds. M.L. didn’t have insurance, but she found ways to pay me. She was the one who’d painted my private office and arranged the furniture in my home.
“What’s gotten into you?” I said, turning toward Claudia. Not exactly the question I wanted to ask, which was When did you stop being on my side?
“Oh, Toby and I have been talking. As friends.” Claudia hesitated, pointed at a distant mannequin. “What about a suit?”
“A suit would be fine. You didn’t tell Toby about me and Mick, did you?”
“Not exactly. I mean, he knows he’s a college basketball coach, but he doesn’t know where.” We were walking down a central aisle toward a mannequin.
“But Claudia!” I heard myself almost sputtering. “Toby’s a man!”
Claudia gave me a look. Surely she knew what I was saying. To a man with any interest in college basketball, any few details, however inadvertently spilled, would give Mick away. Mick’s record being 20-5; his team having a hot freshman shooter and a big center and an assistant coach who was a graduate of the program; even a mention of Turkman State’s opponents. Especially with the NCAA tournament going on, it would be a miracle if Toby didn’t figure out Mick’s identity.
“I talk with Toby, okay? We’re getting to know each other. You talk about life with someone, information bleeds out.” We had reached the suits.
MORGAN KINSOLVER: “NOT RIGHT,” HEART PATIENT DEBRA STEIN: SWELLING IN GROIN
Damn. Morgan Kinsolver was a patient of Jeremy’s who was on the heart-transplant list and in and out of the hospital almost weekly. Debra Stein was a recent angiogram patient of mine who could have a problem at her puncture site. These calls couldn’t wait. “But I’m not talking with Toby, Claudia. There’s no reason you have to bleed my information.”
“You can’t rule me anymore, okay?” Claudia snatched two outfits off the circular rack.
“How about the blue?” I said. “You look wonderful in blue.”
ROGER COOPER: CHEST HURTS, CAN’T BREATHE
“Claudia!” I called. “Try on the blue at least.” But Claudia was already disappearing into the dressing room, carrying the black suit and the beige. I reached into my handbag for the phone.
VIA MY SATELLITE DISH, I could pick up the West Virginia and Maryland TV stations that followed Mickey’s team. They wouldn’t carry all of his remarks from the pre-NCAA news conference, but I could count on them to run a quote or two on their evening sports. I used to have to choose between the two stations’ news programs, but then I got a second VCR and attached it to my bedroom TV. Now I could record the evening and bedtime news shows from both stations, and lately I’d been recording Mick’s games. I watched the tape of the evening news when I first got home at about eight-thirty. I watched the bedtime news shows in the morning when I first woke up. Technology was a wonderful thing.
It was Wednesday evening. Mick’s team would be playing their first NCAA tournament game the following afternoon. The next night, no matter what happened, would be a Thursday Mick and I spent apart. “In terms of the NCAA, I don’t see the benefit of winning the conference championship,” Mick said on TV. A blue curtain with the tournament logo hung behind him. “Did it get us a better seed? No. A better first-game placement? No. A better first-game time? No. They’ve got us playing two time zones away on the tournament’s first day.” There was a forced hardness in his voice; his chin jutted out in a pugilistic, hopeless way. A sick feeling came over me. “Come on, Mick,” I said to the screen. “Buck up, babe. It’ll work out.”
Later that day, he phoned me from the tournament. “It’s a crummy practice gym too,” he said.
“The whole thing’s just shitty,” I said, rolling onto my bed and taking pleasure in the word.
Mick had his battery of oaths—shoot, gosh, freakin’—but not even “damn” or “God” crossed his lips. “I’m not against it,” Mick said about cursing. “I just can’t do it. It sounds like some alien is inside me.” When he was growing up, his family had all sworn. He told me his sisters swore and drank and were generally chips off the block. Mick had never even tasted any alcohol. “I’m afraid I might like it,” he said.
“Don’t you agree?” I asked him. “Shitty.”
But he would not say it. That day I found his persnicketiness embarrassing. He was trying too hard, I thought. He wasn’t sounding real.
I HATE MARCH MADNESS,” Tessa said. It was a Friday night at our favorite restaurant, a Chinese-Thai place. “I hate it when Herbie takes over the big TV.” At one time it hurt me when Tessa expressed such disdain for basketball. I used to think that if Tessa had a long-term relationship with a conductor, I would at least pretend to like music. But Tessa was married, her second marriage, and this marriage was working. Ultimately, despite our friendship, Tessa’s primary allegiance was with The Wife. She had realized after her divorce that the power in the world lay with the coupled, that there was a brutal reality in the expression “odd man out.” She thought that was one reason Mick stayed married. He was clearly a team player, and what was society but a team of couples? Also, staying married was itself an accomplishment, one Tessa routinely associated, oddly (but possibly not, her husband was a dentist), with good dental hygiene. “Herbie sees some oldster with all his teeth, he knows they’ve done something right.” Staying married, in Tessa’s mind, was much like keeping your teeth. A compliment a day was simply flossing.
“How many colleges do they start with again?” Tessa asked now. “It’s a bunch.”
“Sixty-four. Sixteen teams in each of the four arms. By the time this weekend’s over they’ll be down to sixteen. And after next weekend they’ll be down to four, and the next weekend they weed it down to two, and those two play Monday Night.” Monday Night, the college national championship game, was huge. Every college coach and player dreamed of Monday Night.
“Herbie bets on it, I know. He’s always talking Valparadise and Gonzalo and colleges I’ve never heard of. Like Turkman State, honestly.” Tessa shook her head, which had the effect of shaking her long brown hair. Tessa was the only middle-aged woman I knew who could pull off having hair past her shoulders. She spent a huge amount of time on it, puffing and smoothing. She liked to say Herbie loved her hair more than he loved her. Seeing it draped over his exam chair had been the start of their romance. The next step was Herbie bending over to examine his patient and having the transgressive thought (Herbie loved this story) that he’d much rather kiss those lips than stretch them out to check the healthiness of the gums.
Valparaiso. Gonzaga. I wondered if Tessa was misnaming these on purpose. Probably not. There was nothing calculated about Tessa. “Did he have Turkman going far?” I asked.
“Genie. I worry about you.”
“Of course you do. It’s entertaining.” Once, I went with Tessa to her Classics and Future Classics book club. The book was Anna Karenina, and the book club ladies attacked Anna for her affair with Vronsky so ferociously that I left the meeting feeling flayed. “She deserved to die, basically,” one of the women had said. I told Tessa I wasn’t going back. “Too much on your plate,” Tessa had said, wrinkling her nose in understanding.
But we had been friends forever, since I was a cardiology fellow and Tessa, already divorced from a man she never talked about, lived in the apartment next door with her two young children. No one could have been more angrily supportive when I tired of my spouse. At that point Tessa was working as a personnel manager for an accounting firm, and she had been dumped by a lawyer who told her that with twenty pounds off she’d be attractive. This was before Dr. Herbie Swensen noticed her hair and lips.
Through the years, Tessa recommended me to any friend or acquaintance who needed a cardiologist. She once referred to me a woman she met in a supermarket line. There had been times in my career when every patient in the waiting room knew Tessa. But for years my life itself had been letting Tessa down. I could almost hear her: “She’s really smart and intuitive with patients, but her personal life . . .”
Tessa lit a cigarette, blew the smoke defiantly outward. If she quit she wouldn’t live longer, she said, it would just seem longer. I wondered about the effect of cigarettes on her teeth, but this was an argument I’d let Herbie make to her. “So the Claud’s rebelling,” Tessa observed, returning to our earlier topic of conversation. “Good for her. I’m glad Giles didn’t leave her as a puddle. Listen, rebelling is a child’s life. You think you were going to get off easy?”
In a way, I already had. Until now—and Giles—Claudia had left her decisions up to me. Did she need to pack a sweater for band camp? Should she sign up for honors or regular algebra? Should she keep playing soccer? Well, why not? I said. Soccer was good exercise and maybe it would toughen her, make her less dangerously herself. But before I knew it Claudia was staggering off the field, her face as twisted as her arm, her sullen teammates (those girls were monsters) rolling their eyes. She didn’t reproach me. In the emergency room she told the doctor she’d slipped on wet grass.
In contrast, Giles, Tessa’s son, before and after he broke Claudia’s heart, had required—was still requiring, although he was holding a sandwich shop job now—rehab and antidepressants; Tessa’s daughter, now a social worker with a tidy house and a bossy female partner and two adopted daughters, had once pierced her own labia. At times I envied the willfulness of Tessa’s children. One night when Giles came to pick up Claudia she asked me which movie they should see. “You and Giles decide,” I told her, but Giles already had.
“She’s not coming home smelling like pot yet, is she?” Tessa asked.
“Giles didn’t have that much influence,” I said, smiling tightly and not looking Tessa’s way. I hadn’t really smiled since the day before, not since Mick’s team was tossed out of the tournament in the first round. Raj was right. Beaten by seventeen points, although Eluard Dickens had had a career-high day of scoring. “Frederick did what I asked him to,” Mick had said wearily on the phone. “He got the ball to Eluard even though he didn’t want to. I probably won’t call again till Sunday. Love you, babe.”
“You’re a very dominant figure,” Tessa said. “Remember what that shrink told me: How would you like to be your child?”
BUT SHE’S HANK’S CHILD TOO, I thought as I undressed that night. I wasn’t sure what this told me, what precautionary bells it should ring. I clipped my beeper to my nightgown, then remembered this wasn’t my weekend on call. Claudia’s father and I met in college. Hank liked to play the piano in the dorm lobby, and once I complimented him on “Rhapsody in Blue.” We got married just before I started med school. My father was not alive to give me away. “He grows on you,” I remembered reassuring my mother about Hank, “like a fungus.”
He did become quite fungus-like. By the end of my cardiology fellowship, I was getting home at nine at night to find no supper fixed and an unmade bed with Claudia conked out on it, Hank having spent his day talking sports with the Super Duper Dads group, whose children ran amok in the indoor playgrounds of fast-food restaurants. I was in the hospital, some weeks, up to 150 hours. After a while I started commiserating with the other cardiology fellows, particularly with Judd, the elegant Kentuckian whose wife offered him the choice of Grape-Nuts or Cocoa Puffs for dinner.
“What do you mean I don’t do anything?” Hank said. “I’m doing the most important job in the world!”
My lawyer was worried we’d be assigned a female judge who’d deny me custody, but in the end we got the perfect judge for my purposes, an older man whose daughter was in med school. Hank’s and my custody arrangement was highly traditional: I had Claudia all the time and Hank got her every other weekend. At first it was terrible—“You don’t know me!” Claudia wailed; “Daddy knows all of me!”—but eventually I found a good live-in sitter and things settled down. Hank remarried and had two more children, diverting much of his attention from Claudia. I actually came to like Hank’s new wife, a teacher’s aide who wouldn’t think of Hank as not working. Hank taught piano lessons now at a music shop. He had come, I often thought, full circle: he was what he was, and nothing more. Soft.
I’m not soft, I thought. I’m a grown-up, I’m dutiful, I see things clearly, and I’m capable of change.
My phone rang—Mick’s number on the display—and I scampered to it.
MICK HAD LEFT the door cracked open with a section of newspaper and was lying on the bed fully clothed in a pullover sweater and trousers, looking at nothing. “I don’t know, muffin. Sometimes you’ve got no choice but let them go out there and suffer.” There were more NCAA games on TV tonight, but the TV wasn’t on. Mick snapped his fingers. “Boy, we were out of there fast. A week ago today and it was over. Did I tell you Maguire was crying in the locker room?” Maguire was one of the seniors. “I felt like crying with him.”
I tilted my head in sympathy, sat down on the edge of the bed, and stroked Mick’s hand. He said, “You see Art Quinlivan’s column in the paper Sunday?”
Occasionally, if Mick’s team had won a really big game, I did go online to look up articles in the Turkman city paper, but I hadn’t done that for weeks. Next year. Next year would be better for everybody. I shook my head. “What’d Quinlivan say?”
Mick nodded at a folded newspaper on the nightstand, and I moved it to my lap to read. At first I thought the column must have made Mick happy. There were quotes from Mick’s recent interviews, comments he’d made about haphazard play and players who seemed to be sleepwalking. One of Mick Crabbe’s classic strengths, Quinlivan went on, one of the things every fan had to admire about him, was his enthusiasm for coaching. “In the past, talking with Crabbe, you knew that he loved working with his team. But these days he seems tired of his team.” Haphazardness, sleepwalking: didn’t Crabbe’s players, Quinlivan asked, deserve some credit for a winning season? “You get the feeling the Warriors can’t win even if they win,” he wrote. “Every career has a burnout point. Every coach, like every player, has a shelf life. Maybe, for the sake of his beloved Warriors, Coach Crabbe should make room for new leadership. Maybe the Warriors are crying out for something positive. Maybe the Warriors need a coach who’ll say he loves them—even if they win.”
“Who put rocks in his socks?” I cried, setting the paper down.
“I went insane when I saw it,” Mick said. “I almost broke my foot on the kitchen door.”
“You didn’t,” I said, trying to chuckle, but the sound stuck in my throat.
“I did. You’ve never seen me really mad. I’m not a nice fellow when I’m mad.”
Sunday morning. I wondered if Mick had read it sitting in his kitchen with a cup of coffee, Karn at the counter fiddling with the toaster oven. “I know where Quinlivan has brunch every Sunday,” Mick said. “I almost went there.”
I raised my eyebrows and looked at Mick askance. “I hope someone talked you out of that.”
Mick’s mouth gave a bitter twitch. “You think I’m kidding! I’m not kidding. How do you think a column like that makes me feel? I have my pride.”
“What does it matter what Quinlivan thinks? You don’t even like him. You thought what he said about Morgan was baloney.” Mick liked his player Corey Morgan, but he had laughed out loud when Quinlivan, early in the season, had referred to him as the Warrior’s new soul.
“I’ve never thought of quitting! We had a winning season! We went to the NCAA for the second straight year! I don’t know where he gets the nerve.”
I thought, It’s Quinlivan’s business to have nerve. I thought, Isn’t that just like a commentator, cutting people down to make themselves look important? Mick was already negotiating a new contract with Turkman, to replace one that would expire this summer: Quinlivan, I thought bitterly, must know about the contract too. I thought, Maybe if what Quinlivan said upsets Mick that much, it’s because Mick is scared it’s true. I didn’t say anything. I felt an inner agitation that reminded me of certain patients’ descriptions of the way they felt before a heart attack, and this frightened me, not for myself (I was fit, I was female, I was premenopausal and had an enviable cholesterol) but for Mick, because my inner feelings might well be his feelings too.
“I don’t know,” he said, sighing. “Who am I kidding? I’m not going to be a legend. I’m no John Wooden.” He shook his head. “I thought we’d have a great team this year, my center and my point guard together at last. And all I got from Eluard was anger.” He fell silent a moment. “It was arrogance, thinking I could take it to another level.” Beneath his frown, his eyes searched out mine. “I’m not a kid anymore, okay? I’m not promising. By this point in my career, I should be delivering.”
In all our years together, I had never heard Mick sound hopeless. I was silent a moment, waiting for him to burst out with his mantra. It’ll work out. Mick’s eyebrows were looking bushy, and at that moment—wildly, inappropriately—I pictured getting out scissors and a tiny brush and grooming them.
Aren’t you going to say it? I felt like asking.
“People love you!” I said, looking around as if there were a hundred fans surrounding us. “Your players love you—well, except for Eluard. The president of Turkman State loves you. So what if your players aren’t happy every year? Is it your job to make them happy? You’re not some counselor at a summer camp, you’re a coach. You’re trying to make positive changes. So what if you get knocked out early in the NCAA? You’ve got Roger Fenster calling you for advice” (Fenster had gone to the NBA); “you’ve got Darren Collingwood telling you you turned him around” (Darren’s brother was in prison). “You found Korshak a job!” (Korshak was a former assistant coach whom the Turkman athletic director had seen fit to fire without consulting Mick.)
“Okay,” Mick said, his eyes shifting away from me. “It’s nothing to sneeze at. But a coach sets the team’s atmosphere, and this year, this year . . . Of course I’m happy when we win! Does Quinlivan think I’d rather lose?”
“Oh, Mickey.” I stroked his arm. Above his inner wrist his veins protruded; I pressed on one with my finger, felt the sweet tube give way. In everyone, I loved a healthy vein—its rubbery toughness, its resilience—but Mickey’s veins I loved with special fervor. “What am I? I’m nothing special. I’m not the best doctor in the country or the state or even the county. I’m just a ho-hum cardiologist.”
He smiled slightly, and his breathing got calmer.
“Come on,” I said. “You’re Mick Crabbe. It’ll work out.”
He rolled on his side toward me, and I faced him lying down. The blue of his eyes got a little paler each year, as his aching arch got redder and slightly rheumy. Ah, aging. “There are always personalities on a team,” he said, “but you hate to see dissension.”
“How many coaches would use the word ‘dissension’? See? I knew you were a cut above.”
“I don’t know what I can do with Eluard next year. He just looks right past me.”
“Don’t worry about next year.” I took a finger and traced his right ear. “Don’t think about next year.”
“You should see Eluard and Kennilworth now.” Mick pressed his thumb and his forefinger together. “Big buds.” Kennilworth was still angry about Mick’s attempt—ultimately unsuccessful—to change his tutor. Mick shook his head. “Sometimes I think the only players I’m losing are the ones I like. Except for Flitt. And Frederick Flitt’s not doing himself any favors sticking up for me.”
“It’ll work out,” I said, watching his face, but he showed no recognition that I’d said anything significant. “It always does. You’re tired. You need some stress relief.” This was more talking before sex than usual; I wouldn’t say I felt impatient, but I could feel Mick’s warmth through our clothes, and that warmth always pulled me to it. I pushed up Mick’s sweater, untucked his polo shirt, moved my fingers through the bald spot on his belly down to the thicker, coarser hair. He was already starting to rise; I was already starting to vibrate.
“Ho-hum,” Mick said, smiling.
