Best Friends (23 page)

Still, I wasn't a hundred percent sure. So I was very aware when, during a week Ted was out of town, between Monday when I was admitting officer of the day and Thursday when I covered for Hank Smalley, a new nasty magazine appeared under the others, beneath the torn
Penthouse
s and
Playboy
s.

So, I thought, it wasn't Ted. I should have been relieved, but instead I felt agitated, wondering if it was Neil Youngman, who was always so proper, or nice married Harold Kennedy, or Strindburg with his mustache and leather pants, or dorky Grant Grant. It could be any of them, I realized. Any of them could be men whose thoughts ran toward inflicting pain on women. All the tiny slights I'd suffered at their hands became ominous. Strindburg had laughed when I'd mixed up the lab values on two patients. Grant had said that my latest haircut looked like I'd been run down by a lawn mower. Kennedy had called me a princess. God knew what any of them really thought of me. God knew how many of them used this drawer.

 

 

 

IN MAY, THE PENULTIMATE month of my residency, I was hit with an overwhelming fatigue, the worst I'd suffered since my spell in med school when I didn't have the energy to eat. Each day I got home from work, flopped on the sofa, and didn't move. Ted was used to my making dinner—I would at least heat something up and improve it, like sautéing onions to add to jarred spaghetti sauce—but now I didn't do a thing. “There's a Hungry-Man in the freezer,” I'd say. “Put it in yourself.”

“Okay,” he'd say, and I'd know by his tone of voice that he wasn't going to heat up a Hungry-Man but instead one of the frozen meals his mother had made, ostensibly for both of us (because we were both working and I was so busy) but really for Ted, as sabotage.

“Are you ever going to eat again?” Ted asked one night.

“I don't want one of those dinners, thank you.” We both knew what “those dinners” meant.

Still, Ted stayed cheerful. “Should I get you some Lean Cuisines?” (Ted did our grocery shopping.) “Some Hungry-
Woman
meals?” His grinning face leaned over me.

I didn't smile. “I'll have a yogurt.”

“That's not dinner.”

“Who are you to say what's dinner? A bowl of rice is dinner in lots of the world.”

“You want a bowl of rice? We have rice. I can do rice.”

I couldn't stand it. “How can you be so happy all the time?” I screamed. “How can you always act like everything is fine? Are you really totally oblivious to the pain and suffering in the world? And you're a doctor, a doctor of all people should know. It's like you're wrapped in a happy cloud or something. You're spooky. You're depressing. I can't believe you ever lost a brother.”

When I was done yelling, I closed my eyes and felt smothered with sleep.

Then I had a thought and smiled. Weren't fatique and emotional lability frequently unrecognized signs of early pregnancy?

 

 

 

ROGER WAS BACK. Toxoplasmosis in the brain this time, and only weeks after his cryptosporidia had been controlled. Toxoplasmosis is a parasite found in the feces of cats; litter boxes are a common source. “I told Herbert I hate cats,” Roger complained. “I know they're always cleaning themselves, but . . .” He rubbed his fingers in a gesture of disgust. The mention of Herbert was my first hint that Roger had become monogamous. “
Feh,
as my friend Morry would say.”

“You knew there was a risk,” I pointed out. I had told him explicitly during his last hospitalization to stay away from feces.

“Everywhere's a risk. It's amazing! Last week I met a man who got a fungal infection from a potted cactus he brought back from Arizona. A two-inch cactus in a ceramic Indian moccasin. He scratched himself watering it under the faucet, and the next thing you know they're threatening to amputate. And he doesn't even have AIDS. A little potted cactus! I mean, some things seem guilty and some seem just plain innocent, if you catch my drift.”

“Nothing's innocent for you,” I said.

Roger ran his hand through his thinning hair in a gesture of impatience. “Damn it. I hate this fear.”

 

 

 

MY PERIOD CAME on a Monday, and so heavy it leaked through to my skirt. I stood in my slip in one of the hospital's public restrooms and rinsed out the skirt. I would have used the sink in the senior residents' call room, but that would have involved an elevator ride and two walks through the hospital halls. A woman with a cigarette dangling from her mouth came in clutching a baby and pushing a toddler in a stroller. “This ain't no Laundromat, you know,” she said.

“I'm sorry if this disturbs you,” I said, “but I'm a doctor and I just had a miscarriage in my clothes.” This was extremely unlikely, but I wanted to punish her. “Would you like to see it?” I asked. She gave me a horrified look and backed out the door.

THE NEXT WEEK there was another new magazine. I came upon it on a slow and sunny Sunday afternoon when the team on call was sitting outside on benches. I was the admitting officer of the day, and the ER didn't need me at the moment, so I went to the senior call room to get away. I opened the drawer purely out of custom. I'd noticed that none of the magazines affected me anymore. The new ones were too rude, and the established ones were full of tired scenarios. Also all of them, I thought, were disrespectful of women. I hadn't really thought of this before, but now it was obvious.

The fresh magazine in the middle of the pile had a very odd cover. A woman's naked upper torso stretched diagonally across it, a rope knotted around her neck. Her head was tilted back so you couldn't see her face, her breasts were askew, and strands of blond hair fell over her shoulders. She did not look totally conscious. What now, I thought, irritated, what new sicko thing has someone left here to be discovered? I flipped open the magazine to the centerfold. Two men in cowboy boots and jeans were crouched over a naked woman with a branding iron.

I couldn't breathe.

I didn't want to, but I leafed through other pages. Other scenarios, other pictures.

I flipped back to the table of contents. “Branded, Our Cowboys Leave Their Mark.” “Sexual Suffocation, ‘Tie One On for Me.' ” “Female Genital Mutilation, an African Custom ‘Comes' to America.”

I am not one hundred percent sane. I have my neuroticisms, my borderline eating disorder, my competitiveness, my fear of intimacy, my tendency to emasculate men who want me. Still, I'm normal. And there was nothing in this magazine a normal person could respond to with anything but repugnance. My God, I thought, who looks at this stuff? And there must be an audience (clearly there was, even among my colleagues). There must be someone in a store who sells this stuff, another someone who buys it, who leaves it hidden in a public place, titillated by the thought of someone finding it. And perhaps the person who finds it is titillated too. A depraved chain. What goes around comes around. I read through the titles again. I'd thought I was so worldly. I'd thought seeing a boyfriend snuggling up on a hospital bed next to the woman whose nose he'd broken was the worst thing a person could see. The notion of sin, not a familiar one, floated into my mind. “They put all sorts of garbage into the environment,” I could hear my mother saying, irately, “and why? Because of greed, money, because they just don't care.” What kind of cynical businessman would publish this stuff? I glanced at the small print at the bottom of the title page. Crown Communications, Los Angeles, California.

I left the call room and wandered down the hall. I could be one of those magazine women, battered, dazed, naked, not quite human anymore, stunned into an abject meekness. The magazine burned in my hand; I almost dropped it. Instead, I punched the elevator button, pulled myself together, rolled the magazine up and stuffed it in my pocket. I would take it to my locker and lock it away. I would save it to show Sally.

Could Sally know?

Alone in the elevator, I realized that when the doors opened, I'd walk out into an essentially rearranged world, a world in which Sally and her family were no longer benign, California no longer wondrous and expansive and mine, a world in which money was indeed, as my mother always said, a reflection of evil. The ache of this was more than I could stand, and as the little bell rang and the elevator doors slid open, I thought of that night on Sally's patio, years ago, when in my euphoria I almost plunged into the warm dark air.

I exited the elevator and stood frozen in the hall. People in scrub suits and white coats bustled past me. Where could I go? What could I do? My strongest urge was to go back to the call room, walk inside, and slam shut that evil drawer. But it was too late. The drawer was open, and I'd opened it.

YOU CAN DIVIDE your life by decades, by duties, by passions, by fortunes, by griefs. Especially by griefs.

I didn't phone her.

I couldn't.

Sid's magazine, flat and studied, sat beneath the paper liner in the bottom of my underwear drawer, where Ted would never find it. The branding iron was surely real. The scar was real, the pain was real, the fear was real. The “dead” woman on pages thirty-four and thirty-five was faked, or she'd better be faked, for if she wasn't, this was more than I could stand.

Was it possible Sally didn't know?
How
could that be possible? “He has to have plenty of lawyers, in his business.” She had to know, had to. She knew and she didn't want to tell me.

But maybe not.

I saw, a week or two later, a new patient in the residents' clinic. Her name was Selina Gilbert. She'd been referred from the emergency room, where she showed up a week before with a head laceration requiring twenty-six stitches. She mentioned to the med student who stitched her up that she couldn't stop peeing, and he checked her blood sugar and found it was three times normal. The med student told Selina Gilbert to stay away from sweets and booze and to show up at my clinic, and, surprisingly enough, she did.

Selina Gilbert was a hooker and a drug addict, and her head laceration was from her pimp. A month before, I wouldn't have recognized this, but a whole dark world was newly visible to me, as if my eyes had adjusted to night. Astonishing how naïve I'd been, how eagerly I'd accepted everybody's explanations. Never again.

“Anybody in your family with diabetes?” I asked.

Ms. Gilbert didn't know her parents. She'd been raised by an aunt. A veiled reference to the aunt's boyfriend: probably abused, I thought.

With new-onset diabetes, you look for an infection. Sugars go higher with the stress of an infection, and a tendency to diabetes can be unmasked. I asked her the usual infection questions: head congestion, rash, fever, cough, abdominal pain, burning with urination, vaginal discharge. She did have a discharge, she said. What was it like? It's nasty, she said.

I did her basic exam, then went off to find the clinic nurse, Lillian, to help me with the pelvic. “I know that girl,” Lillian said, peering at me from behind her curtain of bangs. “I've seen her on the street up by my sister's.” Lillian had been the medical residents' clinic nurse for twenty years; she was notorious for disliking the female residents and for embarrassing male residents with unwanted gifts—rock paperweights she painted herself, tie clips made of safety pins and beads.

“Really?” I said. “She's got new-onset diabetes. And she has a vaginal discharge. I'll need help to do her pelvic.”

Lillian shot me a look. “Hadn't you better be sending her to gynecology clinic? We don't hardly do those here.”

“Come on, Lillian,” I said. “Just call down to the emergency room and get a Pap smear kit and a gonorrhea culture plate. Please. Knock on my door when you have them.”

I saw my next three patients, and Lillian didn't knock on my door. Selina Gilbert, bored, had left her exam room and was leaning against the wall. My last patient didn't show. Selina Gilbert's pelvic was my final task of the day in clinic.

“She's soliciting our patients,” Lillian hissed.

I looked at Ms. Gilbert. She was back in her street clothes, a cropped T-shirt and shorts and sandals with straps that wrapped around her ankles. I'd seen Daphne in sandals like hers. “You've actually heard this?”

“She doesn't have to to say anything,” Lillian retorted, stalking away.

“Ms. Gilbert, I'm going to the ER myself,” I told her. “You go back in the exam room and take your bottoms off.”

When I got back from the ER, Lillian was sitting in her smoke-filled office, handbag already hanging from her shoulder, leafing through a
Family Circle.
I stood in her doorway.