Listening to Billie (5 page)

•  •  •

From shortly after Daria’s wedding, that August, until late January, she worked in the research annex of a hospital, in a room labeled “Cardiac Data Retrieval.”

Late January in San Francisco, which sometimes includes the week of Chinese New Year, can be and often is insane. Ferociously cold days of lashing rains are abruptly succeeded by sunny days of summer temperatures, when unnaturally bright grass grows suddenly in all the parks, as if overnight—when no one knows what to wear and everyone feels more than a little crazy, and crazy people feel much crazier than usual.

In Eliza’s office, a small fierce girl, the head of that office, the “supervisor,” stood beside the huge open window, violently inhaling the sultry outside air and cursing the world. Kathleen Mooney, twenty-six, with bright yellow-brown hair and a pale, wide, often open mouth, and a truly encyclopedic knowledge of the human heart: its functioning, possible anomalies and lesions, and the probable corrective operations. She also remembered everything about every patient whose files had passed through her office during the past two years of her employment. And all this with no medical training; she had an extraordinary “scientific mind,” and Eliza had more than once thought how Josephine would dislike Kathleen—had even imagined their confrontation: Josephine’s ice versus the rage of Kathleen.

Kathleen’s general reaction to the universe, to being alive and to most other living beings,
was
rage, simple and pure and not concealed. And the untimely heat, of course, made her worse. “Drop dead of an aneurism, or a myocardial infarction,” she audibly mouthed in the direction of the chief heart surgeon, Dr. Gilbert Branner, who was then crossing the street from the research building to the hospital. And then, turning back to the room, to her audience of two co-workers, “Lord!” she said. “He’s always touching his hair. Lord, what an old peacock that man is.”

Next to Kathleen’s desk was Eliza’s. The third desk, nearest the door, was Miriam’s. Miriam, a tall very black girl
with thin legs, a big stomach and big breasts. Eighteen years old, still living with her mother and her brothers in a nearby ghetto called “the Project.” Her face was very black; she hated its color. Actually it had wonderful and complicated shades of brown; that was what Eliza thought of Miriam’s face—not Miriam.

Eliza, though young herself, was the “older woman” of the group; also, since she only worked part-time, mornings, she was regarded as being of another, superior class. By Miriam she was regarded as rich: she owned a house; she went out with a lot of men, sometimes to expensive places.

Actually, Eliza at that time was in a curious phase that neither Kathleen nor Miriam knew about: she who indeed had gone out with a lot of men, who for a time went from one love affair to another, precipitously (she sometimes had an unpleasant vision of someone playing leapfrog), had not been going out at all. Having broken, finally, with her most recent lover, The Lawyer, her improbable choice for a brief fling at monogamy (she broke with him on the night she returned from Daria’s wedding), she stayed at home with Catherine. She read a lot. She finished two new poems. But she did not need to discuss any of that at work; it was much easier to maintain her prescribed (by Kathleen) stereotype: sexy, impractical, bright but lazy. Rich.

Kathleen’s sexual pattern, too, had just undergone a sudden change; for the first time she had “fallen in love.” Before that she had had tidy arrangements with married men; encounters that were brief and emotionally unencumbered. “Well, let’s face it, I like to screw” had been her explanation. “And I don’t dig a lot of emotional mess.” Eliza envied the practicality of that view, as she sometimes envied Kathleen’s trim and tidy athletic body; her own voluptuousness seemed messy.

Kathleen fell in love with a boy of about her own age: Lawry, a sometime guitarist. And she, who often spoke harshly of her lovers, spoke only praise of Lawry. But Lawry, for whatever reasons (to Eliza they were very suspect), insisted that
Kathleen continue with her singles’ bars and married men, and so she did. “Christ, sometimes I feel like some kind of an exhibition fucker,” said Kathleen.

All three of those women smoked too much, especially Kathleen, who exhaled with furious gusts.

In the heat, that day, they were all wearing summer dresses. Kathleen’s was a floral print, too bright, overwhelming her light coloring—but she had made it herself; she liked that dress. Miriam wore a black linen sheath, loose-fitting, which she hoped concealed her breasts. Eliza’s dress was a faded blue chambray from some past and plumper time of her life; it rather hung about her, giving her a look that was both lost and provocative.

All day, every day, Kathleen talked, almost nonstop. Now, with no transition from her cursing of Dr. Branner, she began to talk about Lawry, who had recently moved down to Los Angeles. “His card said ‘See you soon,’ ” she said. “
Soon
could very well mean this weekend, couldn’t it? I’d better bake some bread, and I’ll get some beef and make a stew. Lawry really loves my bread, and that good stew.”

Miriam and Eliza did not exchange looks, but each felt the other’s reaction; it was sadly clear to both of them that Lawry did not love Kathleen, that he had probably moved down to Los Angeles to get away from her. Their feelings, Eliza’s and Miriam’s, were often similar; for Kathleen they both felt a combination of affection and annoyance—she talked so much—and fear; Eliza and Miriam were both women who would do a great deal to avoid anger, a scene.

“Tomorrow night I’ll bake some bread and wash my hair,” said Kathleen.

“You want the things from the cath lab now?” asked Miriam, stretching and yawning.

“What? Oh, sure, you might as well.” Kathleen sighed, feeling interrupted. And then, as Miriam ambled out, she
muttered to Eliza, “Honestly, she’s half asleep. I don’t know what she does at night.”

“Insomnia, maybe.” Eliza was made nervous by Kathleen’s reactions to Miriam. Kathleen was an army brat, her father a master sergeant who lived in Fort Bragg, North Carolina; supposedly, statedly, she was in rebellion against army attitudes, and Southern ones, but about Miriam she could be small-minded, mean.

“More likely chasing around the joints on Fillmore Street,” snorted Kathleen. “Honestly, the belle of the Amazon.”

Eliza had understood for some time that Kathleen was jealous of Miriam, jealous of the fact that many men were after Miriam, phoning her, following her on the street. Eliza even pointed this out to Miriam, trying to explain some of Kathleen’s anger. But Miriam could not accept that theory: a white girl, with an apartment, and a car, too—jealous of
her?
Somebody’s got to be kidding.

“Oh, it’s so hot,” said Eliza then, and she went over to the window to stand with Kathleen and observe the street, and the hospital across the way.

Dr. Branner was standing on the steps talking to someone in a lab coat—an intern, or a research fellow. It was true that he was vain, Eliza thought, but who would not be? A man looking like that, at his age (fifty—fifty-five?). He was tall and thin, with thick white hair, a year-round tan (he sailed) and startling light green eyes. Sea eyes, Eliza thought, from some remote northern sea. He was married, very rich and said to be promiscuous. A few of his affairs were notorious, had involved “socially prominent” and beautiful young women.

“I wonder who he’s crawling into bed with now,” mused Kathleen. “I’m sure he’s too much of a snob for nurses.”

“I wouldn’t”—Eliza began, and then she changed the end of her sentence—“have any idea,” she finished, having realized with horror that she had been about to say: I wouldn’t mind.

•  •  •

An important fact about that office was that almost nothing was actually done in it. The walls were covered with books containing loose-leafed data on patients who had had some form of heart surgery. And at intervals patients came back for checkups, and more data was added to the files. Or they died: an additional fact. Sometimes a doctor or a research fellow would come to the door, first cautiously knocking (everyone was a little afraid of Kathleen), and say that he was working on a paper, and wanted a specific piece of information. How many ASDs among female patients over forty? Kathleen always understood the question—Eliza often did not, nor did Miriam. And a couple of days later Kathleen would send the list, by Miriam, and often the researcher phoned to express gratitude.

But the list only took Kathleen half an hour to pull together. Eliza, who contrary to Kathleen’s view was neither lazy nor inefficient (nor was Miriam), had calculated that instead of two and a half people in that office, so to speak, one half-time person could easily do all the work. But Kathleen and Miriam seriously needed their full-time jobs, and Eliza needed her job.

Eliza had made that same calculation in other offices, at other jobs. What they all needed, of course, was “meaningful work,” and an income. But her own meaningful work, her poetry, provided no income at all, and it was hard to imagine much better solutions for Kathleen or for Miriam.

She even, sometimes, in moments of paralyzing boredom, imagined complaining that they had not enough to do, but to whom would she complain? Dr. Branner? This, of course, was unthinkable. Her relationship with him was almost nonexistent, but still curious; he addressed Kathleen, the supervisor of that room, as “Kathleen,” whereas he sometimes addressed Eliza, the part-time underling, the Medical Secretary, with a murmured “Mrs. Quarles.” He was never known to show any awareness of Miriam, the File Clerk.

Kathleen was highly aware of his distinctions. “Social class, that’s all he cares about. He digs your Eastern accent,
Mrs.
Quarles. The fucking old snob.”

•  •  •

On Fridays, wearing lab coats and carrying efficient-looking clipboards, on which nothing was ever written, Kathleen and Eliza crossed the street to the hospital; down a maze of halls—sometimes passing white-sheeted patients on gurneys, waiting for something—they came at last to the rear entrance of the amphitheatre. There they found seats, from which to observe what was called the Surgical Conference, a presentation and discussion of patients who were possible candidates for surgery.

The front seats were traditionally taken by the surgeons, on the right, and on the left were the cardiologists. Behind them sat interns, fellows and med students.

The surgeons arrived as a group, behind Dr. Branner, who, with his swinging, leisurely, but athletic saunter, always led the rest. They were often spoken of as a team, and Eliza saw that they had indeed that look; they could have been heading for a football bench. And the others seemed to imitate Gilbert Branner’s walk; like him, they all sauntered, with a swing to their gaits. The cardiologists came in separately, or in groups of two or three, and as a group they were less easily defined, except that most of them were Jewish. None of the surgeons was Jewish; to Eliza, a very suspicious fact.

An intern came up to the lectern, and in a soft Southern voice he began to speak. He reminded Eliza of Evan; lately she had been thinking too much of her dead husband—a part of her unnaturally celibate condition, she had decided. The intern described a white female of fifty-seven, a heavy smoker. Dypsnea on exertion, some angina. A history of rheumatic fever.

Eliza’s attention to what was being said had gone, and she began to watch gestures instead. Gilbert Branner (Gilbert?) was inattentively stretching his long legs; he already knew that they should operate, and that a woman of fifty-seven had a “pretty fair chance,” as he liked to put it. Dr. Stern, the chief cardiologist, was avidly listening, storing up information to be used in
argument; he would want to continue with a course of medication, and to postpone surgery for as long as possible.

“A young woman, slightly overweight, occasional attacks of anxiety, some insomnia, a smoker, sexually somewhat promiscuous—” They were talking about her, Eliza; she was vividly hallucinating the presentation of herself. And they continued; they decided that something must be done about her heart. In the ensuing debate, Dr. Branner won out over Dr. Stern. Gilbert was going to cut into and open up her heart. (Gilbert!)

Of course they were not talking about Eliza. They were looking at some X-rays, illuminated on a large screen next to the lectern. “Some calcification, possible shunting, a clear mitral.”

Dizzily, Eliza decided to attend fully to the next case, a two-year-old boy with Down’s Syndrome—which, on the way out, Kathleen explained fully to her: a Mongoloid, he will die anyway; they won’t operate.

Eliza more or less took in what Kathleen said, but she still felt agitated, uncertain and upset. In the increasing, powerful heat, as the day moved toward noon, she and Kathleen slowly crossed the street to the research building, where their office was. A block farther on there was an open grassy park, raised up from the street, where a dark young man, bearded and in shirt sleeves, was sitting at ease in the sun. Eliza imagined running down to him and saying—saying what? Inviting?

Dr. Branner and his retinue of surgeons hurried past the two young women. Passing, their white lab coats were stiff and resistant to the heat. Dr. Branner’s fine white hair was all in place—all beautiful.

Just then Eliza came to an understanding with herself. She recognized that she did not want an “affair” with Gilbert Branner, an exploitive married man; she had been through that already with The Consul. She wanted to go to bed with Branner once, and not again. A one-night or one-afternoon stand. She smiled, thinking that such an impulse was supposed to be a
man’s prerogative. And she considered a further, corollary fact about men: they do not like to be dropped after one encounter; they like it even less than women do. Once Eliza had done this—to, of all people, an Iranian banker, partly under a misapprehension that he was leaving the next day for Switzerland, for good. The next day he telephoned, not going to Switzerland, after all, and was furious at her refusal to see him again. (This helped to confirm his view that all American women were whores, and the following year he married a distant cousin, a decent Persian girl.)