THENEXT NIGHT, I drove my Jaguar and not my Honda to West Virginia. If Mick were to catch a glimpse of me driving away, it would be in the car he’d bought me as a gift. I parked several doors from Mick and Karn’s house, hiding my car behind the arms of a huge fir. The first day of February, a little after nine. The night before, Turkman had had their tenth consecutive win, an away game that wasn’t on TV. Today I’d told Howard, ignoring his smirk and waggling eyebrows, that I was back on my Thursday-off schedule. In the morning before I went to work I’d picked up stones from a driveway at the golf course. A cold front had followed rain the night before, and the stones clung to each other as if they hated to let go.
It was colder than I’d anticipated, and the wind on my legs was brutal. Still, I was happy the ground was frozen. My heels left no imprint as I scurried up the rise of Mick’s front yard, his house to my right across the driveway.
I crept around the garage to the back of the house, imagining an alarm going off, Karn screaming, myself pinned in the lights of a police car: a woman in a black wool coat and pumps and blue Italian leather gloves, clutching a plastic cup full of stones. “You’re a lot stranger than I realized,” Mick told me once when I imitated Howard doing a cath.
I’m strange, I’d say to the police. I almost laughed out loud thinking this, because absurdity was part of the excitement: that a middle-aged woman, a doctor, would go to such lengths! That a woman of my stature (so to speak) would risk such embarrassment! And I was risking, certainly. The risk was what I wanted Mick to see, that and my trust and my insane hopefulness, so that when he looked out the window, when he spotted me in the bushes, it would make him want to cry.
I knew his schedule of practices, generally, and that he didn’t have another game till Sunday afternoon. The odds were high that Mick would be at home and resting. I couldn’t say where Karn would be, but I suspected Mick and Karn didn’t spend much waking time in the same room. By this time Jessica should be putting her son to bed upstairs. I had a moment of terror when I spotted the fence and wooden door, but the knob turned and the door pulled open easily, not creaking at all, and then I was in the back yard.
Yard? No bushes or landscaping in the back, not what I’d imagined. There was no grass for twenty feet from the house, just an apron of brick, and beyond that a flat vacancy that extended a hundred feet to a wood slat fence, almost six feet high, which wrapped around the entire space. The place looked like a plain, windswept and devoid of footprints, with a few clumps of residual snow near the side wall of the garage. Like the stockade of a fort, I thought wildly, and it seemed impossible to infringe upon it: security lights might come on, a dog appear, shots ring out. Worse, a bright family room, surrounded by windows, jutted out from the back wall of the house, and in a floral-upholstered chair with his back to me Mick sat reading the paper (I recognized the top of his head) and across from him, facing into the house, her plump arm and the curve of her upper back irrefutable, Karn was sitting in her own chair, watching TV.
This is nuts, I thought; get me out of here. All the tittering thrill I’d felt a moment before evaporated. I turned hurriedly back to the door in the fence and reached for the knob. It was locked.
Jessica’s son, I realized. Safety features. Childproof doors. I searched frantically up and down the door, sure there was a release catch somewhere. Nothing. The door must simply require a key from inside. I bent over and tried, in the light thrown from the family room, to make out a keyhole in the knob. Couldn’t see. I set down my cup of stones, took off a glove, and felt for it. Yes.
I felt along the horizontal board at the top of the fence, felt on top of a metal box (the electric meter?) on the back of the garage, picked up the stray bricks beside the garage’s door to the outside. If there’s a lock there must be a key. If there’s a lock there must . . . Tried a windowsill. Tried another windowsill several steps closer to the family room. Looked around desperately. Tried again the board at the top of the . . .
If I had something a foot or two high to stand on, I could push myself up and over the fence. My arms were getting stronger with all my exercise, and God knows what boosting power I’d get from adrenaline. I swept my eyes over the yard looking for something, anything, that would give me some height. Nothing. But there was a whole area on the other side of the family room I couldn’t see, and I edged myself left along the fence to where it turned. In front of me as I moved toward the back fence was a wide rectangle devoid of grass—the plot for Karn’s garden, I realized—and I wished immediately that I hadn’t seen so naked and barren a thing of Karn’s. I lifted my eyes to the house.
They didn’t move, Mick and Karn, they sat there not quite like statues but like people who had no energy to care what the other one thought, who each felt alone and—in the dreariest, most ordinary way—at home. Mick folded his paper and reached for a new section; Karn didn’t budge. Is that all there is? I thought, a cry not just for Mick but for the both of them, Mick and Karn together, and then my mind played the music from that lugubrious song, which diminished, somehow, the acuteness of my feeling. That was all there was for them, I realized, a familiarity that had settled itself into sheer durability, a life it would require an effort, like rising from one of their indented chairs, to leave. I’d believed in my selfish way that, for Mick, a life of intensity and desire would trump a life of comfort. Maybe that wasn’t true. Maybe comfort was what Mick wanted over all. At least now.
I followed the border of the yard to the far side of the family room, where a child’s plastic picnic table was sitting near the fence. I was looking straight at Mick in his chair as I climbed on. He shook the paper in front of him and folded it horizontally, extending his arm to make out the print. His lips started moving, as if he were reading aloud. Karn said something. Mick dropped the paper and said something. Karn reached out and patted Mick’s calf.
She patted his calf.
My arms went weak. I couldn’t imagine boosting myself over the fence, and I thought I might be stuck in that yard forever. Any moment they’d look out the window and start talking together about me. I started praying, I guess, and then I started crying, and somehow I got my waist draped over the fence, and then a leg, and I rolled over and fell in a bed of ivy on the other side.
I made quite a thud, and for a moment I lost a shoe, but I tested myself by moving all my extremities and I knew I was okay. The shoe was several feet away, and I crawled to it. Later I discovered I’d torn my pantyhose and scraped the side of my knee. I didn’t feel it then. I stood up and walked as nonchalantly as I could past Mick and Karn’s front door, then down the sidewalk to the driveway and straight to the street. In retrospect, I’m not sure how I pulled this off. But there were no cars driving the street and the front windows of the neighbors’ houses were dark. This was a neighborhood, I realized, of back-of-the-house, secret, favorite rooms.
When I reached my car, my fingers were numb and I could hardly bend them around the padded steering wheel. The side of my knee had started hurting. Still, I told myself, I was glad I’d seen this. This was something Mick could never leave willingly. This was home.
I ’M LUCKY THAT I made it safely back to my house. I had never been so angry with myself. As if I didn’t know that Mick was married! Marriage was all over him, from the ring on his left hand to the predictability of our schedule to his argyle socks. My continuing to see him despite this showed the same disregard of facts that drove me nuts in certain patients. I remembered when Will Sterling came in with his inevitable huge MI, his ruptured heart valve on his echo flopping like a tiny hand waving goodbye. “I told him he needed a bypass!” I said to the ER doctor. “I told him ten thousand times!”
The ER doc said, “Are you calling the cardiac surgeons now, or should I?”
“I will,” I said, and despite my righteous anger the surgeons tried to save him, but they couldn’t.
It wasn’t that I didn’t mourn Will Sterling. There were things I’d liked about him—the way he talked about his daughter, his smile. But part of me hated him for his willful obtuseness—and that same part of me hated myself now. Why shouldn’t I pay a price for being stupid? What made me immune to natural consequence? My own brother had tried to warn me. I rolled over in my bed like I was turning my back for lashes—ready, even relieved, to get what I deserved.
In the morning, during my shower, I decided to take up running—for the pain of it, for the time of it. The runners among my patients said they went into an autohypnosis that made the minutes and miles pass. A run every day, coupled with one of my longer exercise tapes and a weight routine, would eat up a good two hours. I had a patient in his seventies with coronary arteries as ragged as used pipe cleaners who nonetheless ran marathons and trained for hours each week. It was clear to me that his training was an obsession, that it was not quite right, and yet who was I to judge him? He lived on.
“Have you done the flowers yet?” I asked Claudia on the phone from work. She had. We made plans to have another meal out together with Toby. “He’s really starting to like you,” Claudia said.
My runner had been married for ages—he had several children he liked to talk about, explaining how each one resembled him—and yet try as I might I couldn’t picture, despite all the postcath family conferences we’d had together, his wife. The runner rarely mentioned her. I realized I saw the two of them as he might picture them himself: a crude drawing of a colorful giant with a tiny, pallid woman at his side.
Mick and Karn, I thought. Mick and me.
“Any news from Coach?” Claudia said over the phone.
“I realized something,” I said. “He has a wife.”
A silence. “Did you see them together?”
“I saw them talking last night,” I said.
“At a game?”
“No.”
Claudia didn’t ask more.
At lunch, I went to the doctors’ lounge and ate a turkey sandwich. All that day I looked at the male doctors around me—Raj, Jeremy, Howard, Kenneth Lundstrom, Andrew Everly—and tried to imagine them as lovers or loved ones. To me, they were the most ordinary of men, pleasant, not bad-looking, educated, but it was true (I’d heard stories) that for periods in their lives they’d been transformed into veritable tornadoes of confusion and desire. Kenneth, years before, had fathered two sons born less than a month apart. Raj had left an arranged marriage for a patient. To someone other than me, Mick would look as ordinary as these doctors. To someone other than me, my behavior around Mick would seem like a bizarre bewitchment.
I felt that I’d developed, finally, a clear and adult vision, that I was seeing life for what it was. I envisioned myself sitting on a park bench smoking a cigarette (years before, I’d smoked), eyes narrowed as I watched the world. Now I could ignore my e-mails, my phone, everything but the work-related messages on my beeper; now I could do whatever on a Thursday evening. I could act the way I used to act, before Mick, liberated from every sporting season.
I wasn’t on call that weekend, which was disappointing, but after I left the office I went by the video store and picked up two Almodóvar movies, both of which had been recommended by an orthopedics doc, Frannie Juergans, who thrived in a medical environment even more male than mine. I was meeting Tessa and her husband for dinner the next evening. Tessa would be relieved to hear that Mick and I were through; she probably would pop up with someone else for me, maybe a dentist friend of Herbie’s. Sunday I planned to do an Internet Continuing Med Ed activity and read the paper and run one or two miles if there wasn’t too much snow. I had gotten through my weight routine and was doing an aerobics tape at about eight-thirty Friday evening when I heard the doorbell. I thought it was FedEx, because there was a Pilates ring I’d ordered, but when I opened the front door it was Mick. There were snow-flakes on the shoulders of his overcoat. He had a suitcase on the stoop beside him and a white plastic cup in his right hand. “I think you left these,” he said, rattling the cup’s stones.
