THE NEXT THURSDAy, when I got up to shower, Mick pulled THE NEXTTHURSDAY, when I got up to shower, Mick pulled on his boxers and trousers and followed me into the bathroom, still talking about the physical he’d just had. “And listen to this, my cholesterol was up—230, with a bad cholesterol of 142.” Jessica was great, he said. Jessica was cured.
“So take a pill,” I said, turning on the shower. “No big deal.” I wasn’t in the best mood. Tessa had wondered if I’d feel differently about Mick now that I had met his wife. “Oh, I don’t think so,” I’d said. But I did. Together, Mick and Karn had looked well suited and substantial. My body must seem crushable compared with Karn’s. My legs must look bony and coltish. My nearly nonexistent breasts must feel like pillows with stuffing missing. During sex I couldn’t stop thinking about Mick and Karn towering over me. I hadn’t come.
“But why’s it up?” Mick asked. “It was only 182 a year ago.”
I’ve always thought cholesterol was boring, but when you work with hearts, the questions never end. “Maybe it’s stress,” I said. “Stress can elevate cholesterol. Have you changed your diet? Are you getting enough exercise? Are you getting the blood test repeated?”
I let the water run over me as he answered. It turned out that during a preathletic physical in college, Mick had had a bad experience getting his blood drawn. It wasn’t the needle going in, he said, but glancing down to see his blood going out, filling a huge syringe. What if the nurse kept taking his blood, filling syringe after syringe, draining him dry? At this thought he passed out. When he woke up, the nurse and a doctor both over him, the first thing he did was check his arm to be sure that the needle was removed.
His worry about taking future blood tests complicated his decision about taking a pill for his cholesterol. He got through blood draws, when he absolutely had to, by fixing his gaze on the ceiling. Not very manly.
Also, it turned out his “physical” had been nothing but blood tests.
“Have you thought of getting a real physical?” I called from inside the shower. “Have a doctor examine you?”
He said, “But you examine me.”
When I got out of the shower he was leaning against the sink looking worried, and the simple fact of his trust in me stopped, for an instant, my breathing. He had handed over his daughter to me, truly, and in saving her I’d gone very close to making her a sacrifice. Mick wasn’t that far off the mark when he’d likened me to an Aztec. “Take the pill,” I said, thinking of primary prevention, thinking of long-term survival, of his daughter who had heart disease. “Ask your doctor to give you the pill.” I stood on my tiptoes to kiss him. “And tell him not to let Vampira draw your blood.” His high cholesterol was nothing, a minor flaw that was eminently treatable. Would that all our problems were that trivial.
Mick said, “Listen, I’ve been thinking, why don’t I get a vasectomy?”
Startled, I laughed. “Why now?” I’d complained to Mick the last few months about a low-level headache I was blaming on the pill, and he had suggested I stop it. Almost hubris to be thinking of fertility at my age (forty-eight) but, still, if I stopped the pill, conception would be possible. I’d figured we could just use condoms. I’d wondered if Mick would buy them furtively, or with a sort of pride.
“It’s not a bad surgery. I talked to Marcus about it.”
“You did?” I could hardly believe it. “Would you tell Karn?”
“She had a hysterectomy in ’eighty-five for bleeding.”
“Oh. I guess not. But why now?”
Mick raised his eyebrows consideringly. “You’ve done so much for me. It doesn’t seem fair that you have to take a pill for my sake.”
I nodded. “That’s thoughtful of you, Mick.”
He smiled, dropped his chin, and stole a look in my direction. “You can stop your pill, then?”
Good grief, I thought. As if there’d ever be someone else. “Yes, absolutely,” I said. “I can stop my pill and be a hundred percent safe.”
“Good.” Mick’s face cracked into a beam. “Just what I wanted to hear.”
I snickered in spite of myself. “You should be shot,” I said, poking a finger in his belly.
WE’RE NOT GOING TO SU E YOU,” Mr. Dylan’s daughter said from her chair in my office, as Mr. Dylan’s son bit his lip. “But we thought that you should know that we considered it.”
Fair enough, I thought, nodding. Admirable that they had the nerve to speak about it directly with me.
“But we’re going to switch from you as his heart doctor. Daddy doesn’t want to but we’ve got to have someone we trust. And you probably don’t remember but you stood him up for dinner.”
“I do remember,” I said. “Actually, he . . .”
Mr. Dylan’s daughter cut me off. “We want him to see Dr. Howard McClellan. Right here in this office. We hear he’s superb. Very friendly and he always has time for his patients.”
Howard? I thought. A laugh-or-cry situation. Earlier that morning I’d overheard him in Jeremy’s office. “I’m reading the scans better now!” he’d said. “There’s a learning curve!”
Not that I couldn’t make mistakes. I saw Mr. Dylan in the hospital bed, his smile dissolving as blood erupted from his mouth. I saw Leora Griffiths making a face about her neighbor who blew snow into her yard. I saw the wide and trusting eyes of Mickey’s daughter. I had, at that moment in my waiting room, maybe six patients I had helped, but the only patients I could think of were the ones to whom I’d done, or almost done, harm. “Dr. McClellan would be fine,” I said.
CLAUDIA AND TOBY ANNNOUNCED their engagement, and at the same time told me that at the end of October Claudia would break her lease on her apartment to move herself into Toby’s apartment. “Because we have a committed relationship,” Toby said. “It’s not like we’re just living together.” No, I thought, it never was.
Claudia and Toby’s wedding would be in the spring at Toby’s family’s church in Indiana, where everyone in Toby’s family had been married. Claudia was having Hank walk her down the aisle. She knew I would think that maybe I should walk with her, but Claudia wanted her dad.
“That’s fine,” I said, disturbed by her view of me. “It should be the father who . . .” I’d always been civil to Hank. I thought he was weak and foolish, yes, but denying our years together would be a form of self-hatred. Besides, we saw each other so rarely he hardly mattered.
“I mean, like Toby said, you didn’t exactly raise me,” Claudia went on. She smiled, softening the blow. “You birthed me and you called up your troops.”
But that was absurd. I saw what Toby was steering her toward, some poor-little-rich-girl view of her past. “Claudia. You know what your life was like. Don’t let someone else tell you what you went through.”
Claudia’s eyes shifted away.
Yes, I had hired a live-in nanny; yes, Claudia hadn’t seen her father often (whose choice was that?); yes, I had worked, and worked hard. But so much of my attention and hope had gone into my daughter. Ask my patients. Every one of them had heard about Claudia, seen the drawings and the photos on the walls. I had read to her and tucked her in almost every evening, even if that meant keeping a patient waiting in the ER.
“I know what I went through,” Claudia said, and she started her litany, one so disappointingly predictable I almost cried.
The truth, I thought, must be somewhere in the tangled space between us: perhaps invisible, certainly unreachable. I remembered my own almost desperate attempt to be a good—a conventional—mom. I had taken vacation days for school field trips, sitting alone on buses as mothers around me sat in gaggles and talked about working mothers with disgust. Now Claudia was holding up, like an amulet to ward off danger, a different version of her past. That had to be Toby speaking, I thought, Toby the oversimplifier. Meat was political. There was no other place to be married than a small-town church in Indiana. Claudia had been deprived. The idea that Claudia could have come up with these ideas herself was more than I could bear.
“Nothing’s that simple,” I said, unwilling to enter this argument. I missed your soccer game because . . . My workday started at six, that’s why I didn’t know your favorite cereal. “I’m sure I did things to hurt you, but I never meant to. And sometimes life just hurts.”
Claudia looked confused, as if she’d just thrown herself against a door to break it and found that it was rubber and not wood. I glanced at my watch. But why? It was Sunday afternoon, and I had nothing on that evening. “You want to see a movie or something?” I said. “You want to order pizza?”
We ended up renting Doctor Zhivago and eating meatball subs, sitting together on my sofa. “Don’t tell Toby,” Claudia said, giggling and pointing at her sandwich. It felt, for that night at least, as if Claudia was happy to be hanging out with me.
I WALKED INTO THE EXAM ROOM for Jessica’s two-week office visit.
“No more chest pain? You’re getting up the hill with the stroller?” Stroller! Shocking to associate that vehicle with a stent patient. Usually I was asking about walkers and grocery carts.
“I’m fine.” A quick, eager smile.
“You’re taking your pills every morning? No shortness of breath? No palpitations? No swelling?”
Jessica shook her head. “I do have some stress, though. Could you maybe talk to my mother?”
Her mother wouldn’t give her any privacy. Jessica couldn’t lift up a cup of coffee without her mother hovering. And then her mother was always on the phone with her friends: Oh my poor daughter, oh poor me, how can I stop worrying? That kind of shit. But Jessica was the one with the clogged-up artery, right? Jessica was the one who’d have to be on medicines forever.
Jessica was speaking very loudly. I glanced at the walls, trying to signal that the patients in the adjoining exam rooms might hear her. Poor Karn, I thought, and what surprised me was that this was not a pang, this was a whole wave of sympathy that lifted my feet off the sand and knocked me over. I couldn’t talk for a moment, and when I did it came out in a splutter, as if I were shaking my wet head. “Your artery’s not clogged up now. And I’m sure your mother does worry, any mother worries. You’ll worry about your son when he’s fifty.”
There might have been—was I imagining this?—a shadow of embarrassment on Jessica’s face, and her anger vanished like a magician’s dove. Her voice now was very small. “I know, but I still wish you’d talk to her.”
“Why don’t you talk to her?”
“She’d listen to you.”
“How about to your dad?”
Jessica sighed. “Dad’s great and all, but once his season starts we’re not much competition. I always thought I was lucky to have a birthday in the summer. My brothers were born in January and February. They wrestled. My dad never made it to a whole match.” She gave me a rueful smile.
I said, “Tell your mother I said you’re fine.” But I was stuck on Jessica’s characterization of Mick as a father. Not one whole match? I hoped that wasn’t true. I wondered if talking about how little Mick did with his family was one of Karn’s cherished themes.
Jessica’s brow knit. She asked if she could come back and see me in two weeks, instead of waiting four weeks for an office visit after her stress test.
I called Mick from my office after hours. There was gym noise in the background over the phone. “I told her we’d do a stress test at six weeks,” I said, “but she’s not having any symptoms. She says her mom’s really worried, though.”
“Karn?” A shout in the background, and a thump. “Jesus, you should see Eluard rebound. His brother’s in rehab, I tell you that? Ninety days clean.”
“Get this,” I said, “Jessica asked me to talk to Karn.”
I waited for a moment for Mick’s response. When he said nothing, I continued more nervously. “Mick, you can imagine, if there’s any way for me not to do that I’d . . .”
“Karn worries,” Mick said. “We call her the designated worrier.” The phone went silent for a moment, and I could hear Mick shouting something I couldn’t make out. “Oh, man”—Mick said, returning to me—“Eluard has a confidence this year, an intelligence . . . He’s coaching me.”
“Mick, listen to me. This is important. I told Jessica to tell Karn she was okay.”
“He even found his own job. Eluard’s brother.”
“Well, that’s just super.” I made no attempt to hide my sarcasm.
“Genie, can you call her? If you don’t mind. I told you, Jessica’s fine. But Karn . . . I know it’s awkward, but she really liked you. You could put her mind at ease like nobody. And that would put my mind at ease.”
“Mickey, I . . .”
“As Jessica’s doctor. As a professional. You don’t have to say a word about anything but Jessica.” His voice dropped. “You’re my friend, right?”
“That’s mean, Mickey.”
“Well, aren’t you? You think Karn’s going to listen to me?”
He had a point. I hung up. Just do it, I thought, sitting staring at the phone. It can’t be that bad.
I am insane, I thought as I dialed. I have a God complex. Only I Can Set Things Right! I thought of Howard and his Short Man Complex. Mine might be worse.
Give her five minutes, I thought as the phone rang. Not much payback for the hours I’d had with Mick.
But forty minutes later I was still paying, and I felt, the phone at my ear with the mouthpiece pointed toward the ceiling, as if I were in a theater with my eyes propped open, forced to watch every moment of a rambling monologue whose performer had forgotten she had an audience at all. I was hoping to be beeped. I was hoping I could say, Mrs. Crabbe, excuse me, but I have to call the ER. Could she be drunk? But then Karn said she and Mick never drank at all, Mick’s folks had had a problem, so she and Mick decided early on not to . . . I swiveled the phone down and made one of the grunts I’d made a hundred times. Was she a nutcase? Probably a mild one, but nothing she said hinted at a loss of reality. I had written responses to all today’s patient calls in the charts piled on my desk, I had counted my patient visits and procedures from the week before, and now I was sorting through the drawers of my desk. What a bunch of junk: old Tampax with dirty wrappers, handouts from ancient conferences, drug-rep giveaways, a pair of running shoes splotched with mildew. Thieves of time, I called particular patients, and if Karn weren’t Mick’s wife I would have figured out a way to cut her off. Splat: the shoes went into my wastebasket. Clunk: a heavy plastic paperweight that encased a suspended aorta. Clink: a mug painted with a dark purple heart whose vessels turned red when the cup was filled with hot water. Don’t you ever stop talking? part of me was thinking. But part of me was happy Karn was prattling, because in her stories, in her leaps of topic and choice of words, she was sketching for me a portrait of her marriage.
She didn’t talk a lot about Mick. She didn’t talk a lot about Jessica, either, once we’d gotten past my reassurances that Jessica was really, truly okay. She talked about their friends, who were always Mick’s friends, often other coaches. She talked about restaurants. She mentioned handbags, gourmet coffees, particular beautiful and well-appointed cruise ships, and any number of games—football games, baseball games, tennis matches—to which other people offered Mick and his family tickets. At one point Karn said she’d talked over Jessica’s sickness (that was the word she used) with a priest. “At your church?” I asked, to say something. “Oh, not him,” Karn said, her voice dropping and the pace of her words quickening. “I have a Jesuit friend.”
A Jesuit friend? I knew what Karn was doing: elevating herself with an intellectual priest, a priest who wasn’t even her parish priest, but a friend. I wasn’t unaware of status—I lived in a house with granite countertops and bought special-event clothing at a shop for petites where the owner made a point of “knowing” my taste—but Karn’s status consciousness seemed almost global in its reach, a vast ordering impulse that extended into schools, patio furniture, moisturizers, the fabric used in T-shirts. Peruvian cotton. A new baby formula with added brain-enhancing nutrients. Special-order chocolates from Belgium. “And we looked you up,” Karn said at one point, “and you’re on the list of Best Doctors in America. Of course we knew you would be.”
TOMAS QUESADA: MEDICATION QUESTION
“Mrs. Crabbe?” I said. “I’m sorry but I just got a page.” In my hand was a wooden plaque I’d gotten fifteen years before honoring my service to med students. I no longer had the time to teach med students. When I dropped the plaque into the wastebasket it split the mug with the picture of the heart on it in two. “You broke my heart,” I whispered into the basket, my hand over the receiver of the phone.
“You go right ahead,” Karn said. “Don’t let me keep you.”
Karn wasn’t miserable, I realized as I hung up, and she wasn’t helpless: in a way she was bustling with power and perfectly content. She had made for herself a world where Mick’s salary and standing and connections were payments for his lack of interest and time. It wasn’t clear to me—it might never be clear to me—who had given up on what inside that marriage, but however the estrangement had started, it had evolved into a system of assigned compensations for damages, an unspoken contract as intricate and exhaustive as one written by a Philadelphia lawyer. It was a minor revelation when Karn talked about watching Mick’s cholesterol: she used a butcher, she said (“used” was her word), who could trim the fat off sirloins and make them as lean as chicken, and these steaks were what she gave Mick for dinner, because she and Jessica could eat chicken breasts forever, but Mick, well, he was a real man. In those words I heard (imagined?) a place for me in her life: if what Mick said was true and his and Karn’s marriage was indeed sexless, a real man might be expected, even encouraged, to seek a partner outside. Okay, you can have your little plaything, I imagined Karn saying, but don’t expect to get away with it for nothing. Another diamond, a balcony for all their cruise rooms, money to help Eric open his own sports bar. She would drive a hard bargain, yes, but she would bargain, and a divorce, done on Karn’s terms, might be quite workable. Didn’t Mick see this? Didn’t he realize how beautifully simple getting rid of her could be? I could hear her cackling now, to some unseen friend: You only got the house? I got the house, the cars, the club memberships, the alimony; I got everything!
Still, there was something sad about all this, a loss I had to hope that Karn didn’t recognize. There she was, protected and ensheathed in Lexus and Coach and Hanro of Switzerland, when all she really needed was skin-to-skin.
I PHONED MR. QUESADA and his pharmacy right away, so I would have, once those calls were done, a quiet space to think about what I’d heard. I turned off my desk lamp and leaned back in my swivel chair until it hit the wall, watching the reflections of street-lights in my window. It started to rain.
Slowly it dawned on me what disturbed me about my conversation with Karn. It was her staggering ordinariness. I had thought when I met her at the hospital that there must be something I was missing—some passion or intelligence or wit submerged under the worry about her daughter. But now I saw that Mick’s wife had no depths at all.
Of course Mick was loyal to Karn—loyalty was, after all, the main supporting piece of John Wooden’s pyramid of success—but what about Mick’s loyalty to himself? What did he and Karn talk about, Caribbean itineraries and Ralph Lauren shirts? I had always half believed, I realized, that Karn had mysterious assets—kindness, patience, a talent for mothering—that I simply didn’t have. But what if she didn’t? Why would an exceptional man, a leader, stay with a woman like Karn? Out of some guilt about their children? As a bizarre atonement for seeing me? Maybe Mick was deficient in some way I hadn’t fathomed. Beneath these thoughts lurked another, sickening realization: That’s my competition and I’m losing?
TWENTY-FOUR-HOURAMBULATORY heart rhythm monitoring,” Howard said, twirling his reflex hammer. “That’s got to be our next push. We’ve got three monitors and they’re way underused. We could be doing eighteen a week. Medicare’ll pay if there’s any indication of heart disease, and you know the common thread in all our patients . . .”
“Any heart disease and they’ll pay?” Jeremy asked.
Howard ran through the acceptable diagnoses—a wide range, to be sure. “There’s no reason every patient of ours shouldn’t walk around for one day every year toting our little squeezebox,” Howard said. “Ordering ambulatory monitoring should be like this”—and Howard used his little hammer to jerk his knee.
THAT THURSDAY, Mick thanked me for calling Karn. That Thursday, we had brisk and impersonal sex, as if Mick had slotted time for an exercise session and I was a new machine designed to isolate pelvic thrusting.
“Kennilworth moved in with that tutor,” Mick said afterward, as he sat on the side of the bed tying his shoes. “His wife’s filing for divorce.”
“What do the other guys think?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Personal life. Our practices are going great. I cut back the drills and we’re doing a lot of five-on-fives, because they’ve got the fundamentals. Frederick thinks of everything this year. I’m half tempted to sit back and let him and Eluard take over.”
“You seem confident.”
Mick raised his eyebrows. “We’ve sure got talent. Don’t worry, I’ll be going insane soon. Jeepers, I hope no one gets hurt. That’s the only thing I worry about.”
Dad’s great and all, Jessica had said, but once his season starts we’re not much competition.
ABELL TINKLED as we opened the door to the store, and a floral scent hit my nostrils. “Rosalie?” Claudia said. “I brought my mother to look at the dress. Could you just bring it out? We don’t have time for me to put it on.”
The clerk smiled and disappeared, reemerging with a white concoction displayed with such timid deference I knew the thing must cost the moon.
Awful dress. Pearls, lace, satin panels, tulle sleeves. Almost a female impersonator’s wedding dress. “Isn’t it gorgeous?” Claudia said.
“You really like ruffles,” I said, although, looking closely, ruffles were the one ornamentation this dress didn’t actually have. “I like something simpler, something . . .”
“Can’t you just say You like ruffles, period? Why do you have to say You like ruffles, I . . . and then start in on what you like?” Claudia brought a hand to her mouth and bit at her index finger. “It’s a wedding dress, Mom. It’s supposed to be feminine. I want a traditional wedding, Mom. I want a marriage that lasts forever.” Rosalie had vanished during this speech, leaving the gown hanging on a display hook; I was sure she’d heard many outbursts like Claudia’s, but that didn’t make me any happier. “I’m getting married for keeps, Mom. I’m not you.”
Wait a minute, I thought. You really think I should have stayed married to your father? I remembered Rosalie, listening in from somewhere. “How much is it?” I asked, keeping my voice calm.
An impossible amount, more than a small car. “Look, the pearls are sewn on by hand,” Claudia said, pointing, “and the lace is from . . .”
Rosalie reappeared to unlock a display case of crowns. “It’s a premium dress, of course,” she said. “We have lots more affordable pieces that . . .”
I was watching Claudia’s hand as she traced the embroidered pearls. There were toothmarks on her finger.
“We want it,” I said, resting my hand on Claudia’s back. “We definitely want it.”
MICK TOLD ME, the next Thursday, that he had run into Kennilworth and his former tutor at a pizza place when Mick was picking up his order. Kennilworth barely acknowledged him, but his girlfriend introduced herself and shook Mick’s hand.
“She was very pleasant,” Mick said in surprise.
“See?” I said, pushing myself up on an arm to look at him. “You shouldn’t vilify the Other Woman.”
Mick snorted and shook his head. “You should see her,” he said. “Is she stacked.”
A month before, I would have hit him with my pillow. I would have hit him with my pillow and he’d have grabbed and tickled me and we would have ended in a writhing, happy ball. But since I’d seen and talked to Karn, things were different. This month my voice was sharp: “Not like me, I guess.”
“You have adorable breasts,” Mick said cheerfully, blithely unaware of my tone. “You have breasts like little potatoes.”
Potatoes. I laid my head back down and wondered what else he really thought of me.
“Remember that work I was going to get done?” he asked later, getting dressed, and it took me a moment to realize he was talking about his body and not his actual job. “I see the urologist Tuesday to get things started.”
“Great!” I said. The vasectomy. I shouldn’t be mad at him, I thought. That he was having the procedure done now, of all times, when he was starting with his team, must be a special gift for me. I left first that evening, and as I opened the door to the hall Mick wagged his finger. “If I suffer terribly, it’s your fault.”
For some reason that wagging finger irked me. “Ha ha ha,” I said as I walked down the hall. “Ha ha ha ha ha.” I almost kicked the elevator door.
MOM’S A TON BETTER,”Jessica said at her four-week office visit. “You really helped her. Daddy says once the season’s over we’ll do another cruise.”
“How nice,” I said. How had I ever gotten into this mess? How could I get out?
“But Mom’s got to follow our cruise rules! We wrote out a whole list. She’s not allowed to utter the words ‘the waste.’ She can’t ask Bobby if the dancers make him hot-hot-hot. And especially, especially, she has to let Dad take care of the tipping.”
“Well, Jessica, you’re doing great,” I said, closing her chart. “Wait right here and LeeAnn will be in to schedule your stress test.”
“Oh, Mom’s such a bleeding heart,” Jessica said, seeming not to have heard me. “She can’t believe a waiter can be surly. She thinks he has a sick kid in Tobago or a brother who died or something. One time Mom and the guys and me were heading off the ship from our deembarkation breakfast and Mom slips this grouch-pot waiter an envelope with extra cash. Anyway, he opens it and thinks that’s all the tip there is, he doesn’t realize my Dad’s still sitting at the table with the . . .”
My hand was on the doorknob. “Complicated,” I said, to say something, but Jessica was still talking.
“. . . and he’s chasing us, he’s saying she’s a fat American who eats two desserts, and Mom . . .”
I tried to turn the doorknob but my hand was sweaty.
“. . . and she wouldn’t tell the cruise people because she didn’t want to get him into trouble, and she wouldn’t tell Dad because she didn’t want him to . . .”
What had Mr. Dylan said? I don’t want this information! I don’t need this information!—and in fact, in Karn’s well-intended but disastrous foray with the waiter there was an echo of my asking Mr. Dylan to dinner. “I hope your mother follows the rules this time,” I said, turning the knob and pushing on the door, surprised to hear my voice sound jovial. “For everybody’s sake.”
“You’re so competent,” Mick said to me once. “I don’t have to worry about you at all.” No, I wasn’t wholly competent. If I were wholly competent I’d have a husband and a happy marriage and a daughter who looked forward to my taking her shopping for a wedding dress. If I were wholly competent I wouldn’t be with Mick at all. He must know that. Perhaps his words were not the compliment I’d taken them as. Perhaps he’d meant simply that I was a competent mistress. Good to fuck, he’d say, if he had the guts to use the proper word.
A bleeding heart, Jessica said about her mother, and that dismayed me. I wanted to see Karn as a status-conscious harridan, the sort of woman that couldn’t be described without using the word “clutches.” I didn’t want Mick’s wife to be at all tender, to have any weakness that would make it hard for Mick to leave.
CARAMBA!” I’D SAY. “Look at that gorgeous cholesterol!”
Or: “Trust me, the palpitations you can live with.”
Or: “This new medicine is working fabulously. That and all your exercise.”
Or: “Women’s angina can be very atypical. You don’t need to feel guilty about worrying.”
It was still beautiful to advise, to cajole, to reassure, but sometimes my patients’ swollen ankles and throbbing neck veins hit me like a personal reproach. Sometimes their labs made me angry. For years I had misjudged myself. In truth I was needy, not caring; nosy, not curious; smarmy instead of kind. I had always thought of myself as flying from exam room to exam room, but now my flights felt less like hurrying and more like fleeing.
“Do you want a twenty-four-hour monitor on this patient, Dr. Toledo?” Lindy asked, over and over.
“Not this time!” I kept saying back.
“Forget the Marriott,” Mick said Thursday morning on the phone. “Tonight I’m taking you out to dinner.”
“Dinner? Why?”
“Because I want to, that’s why. Something different.”
I don’t want different! The trees were bare and the air was cold and the doctors’ parking lot was carpeted with broken leaves. That evening I drove my hour and ten minutes downhill through darkness and arrived at the restaurant dazed and filled with foreboding, as if Mickey might send in his place another man. I was relieved the restaurant was dim and almost empty; it was nearly nine.
“Screw it,” Mick said, grasping my upper arm and leading me to a table. “I have dinner with every coach in the state, I can have dinner with you.”
The waiter brought wine for me and root beer for Mick, and we perused the menus, discussed the food, and placed our orders. The waiter brought a basket of rolls, and we found ourselves looking at each other across a vacancy, as if the table itself were a silence to be filled.
“Are you okay?” I asked, but he didn’t answer. “I’m taking Claudia to get her wedding gown fitted this weekend,” I told him, to say something. He’s getting rid of me, I thought. The threat of a vasectomy made him think, Why do I need this? The athletic director fired him, I thought. Eluard’s brother came forward squawking that Mick had had an RA beat him up. Karn figured out where Mick really spent his Thursday evenings. Or something wildly different, something happy: Mick had had enough of cheating. He’d gone to Karn and asked for a divorce.
“I have cancer,” Mick said.
A sound started in my head, a noise that wasn’t really a noise, a static obscuring every other sound in the world.
“What kind?”
“Prostate.”
“Are you sure?”
“I get the biopsy tomorrow, but the doctor’s sure.”
“But if you haven’t had the biopsy . . .”
“He says ninety-nine percent sure. He can feel it.”
“Well, what he thinks is well and good, but without a tissue diagnosis you can’t really . . .”
“Don’t argue with me!” Mick snapped, his voice a glimpse through a speeding train window of a vast and desolate landscape, a wasteland you would never want to stop in. I dropped my head and closed my eyes. I felt like he had just slapped me.
“How did they find it?” I asked after a pause.
“I went to the urologist Tuesday—I told you I was going—and he said fine, he’d do the vasectomy, but he needed to examine me first. And everything was fine up front, but then he got behind and checked my prostate. I knew when he was doing it things weren’t right. He took forever, and he didn’t talk, and all of a sudden he’s asking me these questions. Am I urinating okay, did I see blood, did anyone in my family have cancer? And you know what really got me worried?” Mick leaned forward. “He seemed interested.”
I swallowed. I was sure that there were patients I’d tipped off in the same manner. “He’s the one doing the biopsy?”
Mick nodded. “Dr. Leakey. How’s that for a name?”
But the name didn’t sink in until later. “You trust him?”
“He’s who Marcus went to for his kidney stones. Nice older guy. He says a young doc might not tell me right away what they found, but he wants to be honest with people. And he’s felt over ten thousand prostates.” Mick frowned, toyed with a packet of sugar. “My blood test was up some too. My PSA.” Prostate-specific antigen, a blood test, an indicator of prostatic cancer or other prostate problem.
“Oh, Mick.” I shook my head. I imagined him with his arm out getting his blood drawn, eyes rolled toward the ceiling. “Mickey.” Certainly, I’d seen cancer of the prostate, but only in a peripheral way—male patients who had it, or reports from female patients about their husbands. I wished I knew more about it. In old men it was often no big deal. They’d die of their heart disease, of my disease, before they’d die of cancer. But in a younger man it could be different. Mick was fifty-one. Local spread, spread into the bones, a grading scale (the Berle scale? the Gleason scale?—some old-time comedian’s name). Choosing treatment, especially in a younger man, could be complicated—surgery or radiation or chemo, and the chemo was usually hormonal and made men impotent. Estrogen shots, I dimly remembered from my residency, which made men’s ankles swell and their penises shrivel. But no, they didn’t give estrogen anymore. They gave other shots, testosterone blockers. Suddenly I was hearing Mr. Pelmaster, a patient of mine who’d died two years before: “A beautiful woman can walk past me and she might as well be a Mack truck.” That had been a relief to him, I recalled. Less strain on the ticker.
“Did you ever . . .” Mick winced. “Feel anything down there?”
It broke my heart. “You didn’t want a rectal exam, did you?”
We smiled a moment. “Geez,” he said, rubbing his face with his hand.
“The prostate’s not my area.”
A pause, and Mick gazed past the edge of the table toward the floor. “Well, everybody and his brother has prostate cancer. It’s nothing new.”
“People will be great to you,” I said. “You’ll get so much support from the fans and . . .” I trailed off at his obvious agitation.
“I’m not going to be a poster child,” he said. “I’m not going to be out there doing PSAs for PSAs.”
“I’ll get on the Internet,” I said. “I’ll talk to people. I’ll get you info.” Something concrete I could do, and there was knowledge more up-to-date than textbooks on the Internet.
Mick’s mouth opened slightly. He hesitated. “Uh. Karn’s been doing that. Karn and the kids.”
As if I were being loaded into an isolation capsule. The white noise was already in my ears, and now cotton was being stuffed into my mouth, and soon I wouldn’t be able to see or smell or move, and what did a measly dinner out matter if Karn and the kids were taking over Mickey’s life?
“I’ll get you information from the doctor sites,” I said. “The latest studies. The major centers. Maybe you should go somewhere else for treatment.”
“I’m not leaving,” Mick said. “I’m absolutely not leaving. Listen, I’ve got my center and my point guard this year, and I am going to ride this horse.”
“But you’ll have to get therapy. Surgery or radiation or . . .”
“Listen to me. I’m not going to miss this year. Not one game.”
I thought he was being melodramatic; I thought his staying on without missing a game would never really come to pass. “But you’ll have to miss some of it, you’ve got cancer, you . . .”
“You know what Frederick says? He says he can read my mind. And Eluard? Did anyone else recruit him? Anyone? His high school coach said I was making a mistake. But I saw something, Genie. I saw it.”
“Well, you won’t have to miss a lot of games, but . . .”
“This is my team, okay? I picked it, I recruited it. And I’m not going to let it run the races without me.”
“What about your treatment?”
“It won’t change things,” Mick was saying, and I realized we were gripping hands across the table, “it won’t change things between us.”
The waiter put down our salads.
A desperate grip, as if one of us were about to disappear over the edge of something.
I realized I hadn’t said I was sorry about his disease. “I’m sorry, Mick. Look, I’ll do anything. I’ll go away, I’ll move you in with me, I’ll get a house in West Virginia if you want me to. You tell me, Mickey. You tell me what you need.”
But as we walked to the parking lot later, we’d decided nothing. Everything was different, as if the landscape had been suddenly tilted. It used to be easy to get from this to that, but now it seemed impossible. It used to be unthinkable to go from Mick to despair, but now I rolled there like a marble.
“Maybe the biopsy will be negative,” I said. “Maybe your doctor’s famous finger is wrong.”
He glanced right over me, as if he were looking beyond me for a sensible adult.
“I’ll be able to see you, right?” I said. “I’ll be able to be with you? We’ll still have our Thursdays?”
“Sure,” Mick said, turning to me, but his hands on my shoulders might be pushing me away. “Of course,” he said an instant later, gripping me to his chest. The scent from the smoke in the restaurant clung to him, obscuring his usual smell.
“Aren’t we going to the hotel?” I said, digging my nose into his sweater, trying to muffle the tremor in my voice. “Can’t we just get a few minutes at the hotel?”
“I can’t, babe,” Mick said. “Tonight I’ve got to go home.”
