Nurse Debby Hunter sat in the small, concrete “park” which had been built by the hospital only the year before so that the staff might take advantage of the view of the East River. The park was a dismal failure, she thought. Not that they hadn’t tried. There was a fountain with a boy and a dolphin in it that was supposed to be arty but looked vaguely pornographic. What was the boy doing with the fish, anyway? There were flowers in wooden troughs around the edge of the place. But now that fall was coming, they were dying fast and their drooping stems only made the place seem more gloomy than before. What really finished the place were the white concrete benches. Debby always felt the cold coming out of them when she sat down, the cold that ran right up her ass, through her spine, and into her neck. She dreaded the coming Christmas, living alone as she did on 77th Street and York Avenue in a singles’ high-rise. That had been another mistake. She had only come to the city a few months before, after getting the job at Eastern, and the first nurse she met, Rose, had told her that the high-rise at 77th and York was a great place to live. “You’ll never be alone. There are all kinds of professional men there. Hey, one of the Yankees even lives there, some relief pitcher. Anyway, it’s a great place to meet men.”
Debby hadn’t really wanted to meet men as much as she had wanted to avoid being alone her first year in the city. And besides, she thought, coming from upstate (Syracuse—Debby had done her residency work at Strong Memorial), she had wanted to break some of what she knew were her provincial habits. For years she had gone through a tortuous relationship with an incurable playboy surgeon named Mark Schmidt, had put up with his unfaithfulness, his egomania, his ambition, and now she was ready for … well, she was not quite certain what.
Now, as she sat on the cold bench, eating a sandwich she had gotten out of one of the sandwich machines—a tunafish sandwich which tasted like it had been dipped in mercury batter—Debby thought of how easily the past had slipped by her. In a way it was frightening. Only six months ago she had been totally, irretrievably, hopelessly in love with Mark, and now she could barely recall what he looked like. Did that mean she was being turned into some kind of shallow, swinging-singles idiot? She doubted it, but then again, she wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure of anything since she moved to New York. But she was sure that her fear of loneliness would be outweighed by her detestation of all the shag haircuts, hairy chests, Nik-Nik shirts, and golden pendants she had been witness to in the past few months.
Her thoughts were interrupted by noise behind her, and she turned and saw Harry Gardner following Peter Cross into the park. Before she could turn away, she saw Gardner give her the eye, and before she could gather up the wrappings from her sandwich and her empty juice carton, he was springing over to her. It was comical, really. She had just been sitting there, thinking of Mister Swinging Singles, and here he was, in the flesh.
“Hi, Debby,” Harry said, his short, hairy arms hanging out of his green operating coat like those on a baboon.
“Hello, Harry,” she said. “Have a good morning?”
“Yeah,” he said, “a walkthrough, just a little hernia operation and a gallbladder, nothing the kid can’t handle.”
“Which kid are you referring to?” Debby said.
“The kid!” Harry said quickly, pointing to his own chest. “The kid, right here. Who else? Harry, the Kid.”
“I’ve got to go, Harry,” she said. “Lunchtime is over.”
“Yeah, well, listen,” Harry said, “your shift is off at five. So’s mine. Why don’t we go over to the Emergency Room and have a few drinks? I’d like to get to know you a little better.”
“Oh, really, Harry? Get to know me a little better?” Debby said, putting Harry on.
But Harry was beyond irony. “Yeah,” he said, “I would. I think you and I could maybe …”
“Make some beautiful music?” Debby said, overstating her sarcasm as much as possible so that he might possibly get injured and leave.
“Hey,” Harry said, “give me a break.”
“Sorry, stud,” Debby said, “I didn’t realize you were so sensitive.”
“Hey,” said Harry, “I’m not … I mean …”
“Yes?” Debby said. “What do you mean? Hmm?”
Harry stuttered and looked as though he were mortally wounded.
Debby heard a chuckle and looked over in the direction of Peter Cross, who had been left alone on the bench nearest the river. She hoped he might respond. In fact, she realized now that she had purposely delivered the last lines to Harry a little loudly so that Peter might hear her. There was something remote, distant, and brilliant about him. The mere fact that a goof like Harry called him Spaceman (such an unoriginal, fraternity-boy putdown) had made her interested in Peter right from the start. But he had never shown the slightest interest in her. Or, if she could believe the gossip in the nurses’ station, any other woman in the hospital. He was a real loner, which to Debby made him all the more attractive. But even now, she couldn’t be certain he had laughed at her rebuff of Harry, because he was not facing her, but the river, and he seemed to be engrossed in a book.
“Look,” Harry said. “You don’t have to be so damned bitchy about it. Christ! I was just trying to get to know you.”
“Harry,” she said, “I am sorry. I just don’t feel like it. All right?”
Harry recouped quickly. “It’s all right, doll,” he said. “Some other time. Well, I’ll leave you now. Gotta go see some friends. You can stay out here with Dr. I. Q.” He delivered the last line with some vengeance, then smiled and winked at her conspiratorially to let her know that she was a very small fish in his giant pond of guppies. She watched him as he bounded through the door back into the hospital.
Debby knew she should go in herself. She had her rounds to make, but the longer she looked at Peter Cross’s back, the more interested she became. There was something about him that reminded her of a picture she had seen of an artist. No, not an artist, a poet of some kind. But she knew nothing of poetry. She had only thought of poetry because he was reading The Collected Stories of Edgar Allan Poe.
“Hello,” she said softly, feeling terribly self-conscious, afraid that he would treat her as she had treated Harry.
For a second Cross did not look up. It was as if she were invisible. Then he acknowledged her with a nod of his head.
“That was pretty rough in there yesterday,” she said. “I hope they didn’t get on you at the meeting.”
He smiled a bit and shook his head.
“Not too bad,” he said.
Now she smiled and sat down next to him.
“You’re just saying that,” she said, “but I can guess pretty well what happened. Dios and Black probably stuck up for one another. The surgeons always do.”
He put his book down on his lap and nodded.
“Okay. You’ve got me there. But that’s okay. Still it bothers me. I hate to see an old person suffer because some doctors want to test out their technique….
“Do you think that’s what happened?” Debby said, alarmed.
“Well, no, not this time,” Cross said. “But the other times maybe. Do you know how many operations that woman had had in the past eighteen months? Five. And you know, four of them were probably the result of the first one.”
Debby smiled, and shook her head.
“Dr. Cross,” she said, “you are quite an outspoken person … I mean once you start talking.”
“Really?” he said. “I always thought I was the Space Cadet.”
Debby blushed a little. “You’ve heard those dumb jokes?”
“I’ve heard them.”
“They make me furious,” she said. “You know why people call you that? Because you’re a little aloof and you like to read something other than junk. Like Poe.”
“That’s probably it,” Cross said. “Too much for the conservative, soulless mind of science.”
He chuckled a bit to himself, and she laughed with him. He was much easier to talk to than she had imagined. In fact, he was charming. She looked at his book.
“Poe,” she said. “I remember seeing a Poe play when I was a kid. They brought The Black Cat to our high school. Just a local group in Rochester. I watched it, and it didn’t make any real impression on me—at the time, that is. Then later that night I went home and got in bed, and I began hearing the damned heartbeat under my bed. I mean it—it scared the hell out of me.”
Cross looked at her in amazement. The simple story seemed to him a revelation.
“How did you feel?” he said.
“Scared,” she said. “Very scared.”
“Only scared?” he said.
“I don’t see what you mean. No, wait, I do. No, there was something else. It was like I wanted it to stop, but part of me didn’t. Part of me wanted to go right on being afraid. It was terrible, but it was deliciously terrible.”
“Aha,” Peter said, laughing. “Eureka.”
He laughed wildly and touched her shoulder. She broke into laughter herself then and looked at his face. God, he was a handsome man, and strange.
“Poe will do that to you,” he said. “There’s no doubt about it.”
They laughed a little more, but then neither of them seemed to be able to pick up the thread. She sat there for a second, a little nervous, tense, and waited for him to say something more, to ask for her number, but he just sat staring at her, and she finally had to get up.
“I’ll be seeing you, Peter,” she said. “I’ve got to get back to work.”
“Sure,” he said. “See you soon.”
She moved away from him then, and wondered if he was attracted to her. And if he was, why he had blown his chance.