The Pursuit of Alice Thrift (15 page)

17.
Venues Not Available to Me

I'D READ ABOUT ORGASMS, OF COURSE, BUT HAD BEEN SKEPTICAL
about whether their notoriety was deserved, and whether I'd ever be among the subscribers. Manifestation, in my case, was a surprise: One second I was noting pleasant physical sensations, and the next I was not myself. In other words, on my first night in the north tower, I emitted sounds that may have alarmed or annoyed my new neighbors.

“Was that what I think it was?” Ray asked after my symptoms had decrescendoed and his own had subsided.

I nodded and said only “My goodness” until I caught my breath.

“Look at you,” he said. “All red and sweaty and grinning from ear to ear.”

I said, “I doubt whether that's completely accurate.”

“Well, I'll say it: Wow. One minute I'm in a heap on your bathroom floor, and the next thing I know . . .” He gesticulated—arms waving, legs seizing, hands flapping.

“What?” I asked. “Next thing you know,
what
?”

He turned serious, exceedingly so, and touched my face with his knuckles. “What happened here. You, me, us. My cock, your snatch, the bombs bursting in air . . . Do I have to spell it out?”

I said no. I'd been to countless lectures on human sexual response. I reached for the blood pressure cuff and stethoscope and motioned for his upper arm. After the proper interval I announced, “One-ten over seventy. Perfect. You should have no fears about operating a motor vehicle.”

“Who's operating a motor vehicle?”

I reminded him about the midnight parking deadline and my own personal sleep requirements, already breached.

“I know this by heart,” said Ray. “You're exhausted. You tell me this every time I see you. But we're past that now. Something really important happened here tonight. Maybe I'm a little old-fashioned, but I don't take sex lightly.”

Which reminded me of Mary Ciccarelli and sex at its most casual, less than an hour into her acquaintance with Ray. I said, “There's no need to inflate this and attach sentiments to it, because I'm perfectly comfortable with recreational relations.”

“I bet,” said Ray.

I tucked the frayed quilt up to my armpits and secured it before I asked, “Ray? I want to ask you a question and I want you to be honest: Did you actually faint, or was that a ruse?”

“Ruse? Like I was faking it? I swear to God, Doc. I sat on the toilet and next thing I know I'm on my ass on the floor. I didn't know where I was at first, and then I remembered, so I called your name. Maybe it was God's way of putting us on the same page.”

I asked what that meant—“putting us on the same page.”

“Getting us together. Getting you to see me as something other than a guy who tries too hard and keeps turning up like a bad penny. What I'm saying is, maybe God maneuvered me into a medical emergency without any clothes on in order to get me on your radar screen.”

I asked if he really thought God concerned himself with the social lives of people like us, given the billions of diseased and dying in his purview.

“Good point,” said Ray. “I guess it was just a figure of speech. I come from a religious family where God was thanked for every good thing that happened, no matter how dinky.”

I said politely, “I understand that perspective,” and I truly did, thanks to Leo, who had explained after dinner at his house that my scientific, irreligious, textbook views of life and death sounded like heresy to his mother, whose belief system could be summarized as “He's got the whole world in His hands.”

“Do you believe in God?” Ray asked.

I said, “I believe in science. So one could advance the argument that belief in science is tantamount to a belief in order, and there could be a larger force in the universe that is the architect of that order.”

“I like calling it fate,” said Ray. “I like thinking about how I won a teeth-bleaching, which got me looking in the mirror, which made me walk into plastic surgery and there you were. Then a couple of months go by and I faint and who comes running when I call for help?” He grinned and gestured as if I were waiting in the wings for my cue. “The very same Dr. T.!”

“Dr. T. is exhausted,” I said. “And fate is decreeing that you depart the premises to prevent her killing any innocent patients tomorrow.”

“Hey!” he snapped. “That's stinkin' thinkin'! You're not going to kill anyone—tomorrow or ever. You just need some confidence and some practice. One of these days, it's all gonna click—like learning how to drive a stick, or hitting a golf ball. Practice makes perfect, but you can't get the yips every time you pick up a club or get behind the wheel.”

I dismissed his advice as the cheerleading of an outsider who meant well but didn't understand the difference between swinging a golf club and resecting a colon. I told him I appreciated the pep talk, but he was proving my case. If he stayed, we'd talk. I had to sleep. Thank you and good night.

“I was kinda hoping to spend the night,” he said.

I shook my head. “I have to get up at five-thirty. I only have one pillow. Your car is illegally parked. Maybe another time.”

He sat down on the edge of my bed. “Is there time in your busy schedule for a good-night kiss? I'll make it quick.” When he leaned in for the actual compression of lips, my arms went up and circled his neck, causing a lingering farewell and inducing a near-reluctance to part that was unanticipated.

DR. SHAW'S SECRETARY
could have been hired for her soothing voice and maternal susurrations alone. She explained that Dr. Shaw wasn't taking on any new patients, but that partners Goh and Garfinkle—excellent doctors both—were. Should she get their books?

I said, “It's really just to follow up on a conversation Dr. Shaw and I began last night in the cafeteria. I'm a surgical intern—”

“Does this involve one of his patients?”

I said no; it involved me, and the subject was social rather than gynecological.

This appeared to stump her momentarily, but she recovered in time to ask if it was a pressing matter, or could he return the call at the end of the day.

“Any chance I could run up and talk to him between patients?”

“You're house staff?”

I said yes. Alice Thrift, MD. I didn't want to leave things up to the vicissitudes of our schedules, but I supposed I could simply wait until I bumped into him again in the cafeteria.

She lowered her voice. “Can you run over at noon? The office closes for lunch until one. He usually takes a snooze on his office couch, but doesn't mind being interrupted.”

I said, “I'm on a very short leash, so if I don't turn up today, I'll try to make it tomorrow. Or the day after.”

I could hear another line ringing and an intercom buzzing. “Got a pencil?” she asked.

“Why?”

“I'm giving you his private line.”

“That's awfully nice of you—”

“And his home phone number, just in case.”

I winced. “Should you do that?”

“It's my home number, too,” she said.

I HAD BEEN
unable to answer the first three questions posed during morning rounds—about the patient's symptoms, about her history, and about her pending tests. My fellow residents answered smartly on all sides, with no sidelong apologetic glances for their role in pounding the dunce cap into the vertex of my skull. The sole sympathy emanated from the patient—herself in pain—a college student who would turn out to have appendicitis, the diagnosis of which was obscured by her mobile cecum. Whereas a week earlier I might have observed the emergency appendectomy, might have snipped off the offending organ or stitched her up, I was not even invited to scrub.

Truly, it was a test of my gumption: How high could I keep my chin up and for how long in the face of a campaign to rid the surgical world of Alice Thrift? Here is where the true champ digs deep and discovers reservoirs of fortitude, brains, and ambition. Here is where she shakes her fist and—as her pager beeps and the chief resident barks—vows to be better and to prove all her detractors and tormentors wrong.

Not me. I'd lost my character somewhere in this hospital, ground under the heels of a few attendings and carried off in the squalls of their tantrums. All I needed was one person to come along and say, “It's not skill. It's not native talent, or brains, or hands, or a gift from God. It only takes practice and a little more confidence. Next time you'll get it right; and if it's not the next procedure or the next suture, it'll be the one after that. Hasn't anyone pointed that out to you?—‘See one. Do one. Teach one.' Medicine's motto? Surgery's subtitle?”

Looking back, I wonder how I missed that aphorism. Perhaps it was something that generations of senior residents have passed down to junior residents after work, over pizza and beer, in venues not available to me. When Ray Russo advised, in effect, “Practice makes perfect. Give it a chance,” I ignored it as the sunny outlook of someone whose ups and downs involved fudge sales and box scores—not continual worries about life and death.

EVEN THOUGH I
called at a very decent eight-thirty
P.M.
, I woke up Dr. Shaw. I apologized for disturbing him, and for being in possession of his phone number.

“Jackie gave you the number with the full expectation that you'd use it,” he said. “Now tell me how you are and how your Monday—is today Monday?—went.”

Suddenly I felt ridiculous and tongue-tied. The presumptuousness of waking up a nearly retired obstetrician, who also happened to be a near-stranger, to confide anything at all made me question my state of mind.

“I'm listening,” he prompted.

“It seems so silly—to bother you at home about trivial matters. Your answering service is probably trying to reach you right now.”

“I'm not on call,” he said. “Tell me what's going on.”

I said, “Well, as promised, I called up the man I've been seeing—marginally seeing—but for the most part ignoring, and he came over within minutes.”

“Obviously glad to hear from you,” Henry said, unable to stifle a yawn.

“Well, here's the part I needed to discuss with someone: I did a very foolish thing.”

“You probably didn't.”

“I gave him a tour of my new apartment, which is quite devoid of interest, but for some reason he was rapturous over my bathtub.”

“Go on,” said Henry.

“He made a very good argument for indulging himself before he left.”

“Indulging himself?”

“Taking a bath in my tub. He only has a stall shower.”

“And this foolish thing? Would that have been unprotected relations?”

“Absolutely not!”

“Good. I had to ask. What's your question?”

I said, “I guess it would be in the area of where I go from here.”

There was a pause, during which I detected the amplified sound of a palm sliding over a mouthpiece and a muffled conversation behind it.

A woman's voice said, “Alice? It's Henry's roommate, Jackie. From the office? Can I be of any help?”

“Roommate?”

“Longtime companion? Girlfriend? But trust me, this is no scoop. We've lived together since our respective divorces, a hundred years ago, way before bosses couldn't take up with their secretaries.”

I said, “I'm so embarrassed, calling your number as if it were a relationship hotline.”

Jackie laughed. “You're not the first miserable intern to call after hours and pour her heart out to Henry. That's where I come in. He hands the phone to me when it gets personal. You must have touched on sex, which has been known to give him the heebie-jeebies.”

“Me, too.”

“Tell me what you're worried about,” she said firmly.

I didn't know exactly, so I came up with a slight overstatement. “I'm worried,” I told Jackie, “that the man I had sex with last night will think we're engaged.”

“Trust me,” said Jackie. “No man in America thinks that having sex is tantamount to proposing marriage. Not in the last two centuries, at least.”

“He's a widower,” I said. “He's been celibate for a year out of respect for his wife, so this was a momentous occasion. He said as much. But I'm confused by the fact that we had, to the best of my knowledge, in the vernacular, great sex.”

“And this is a problem?”

I said, “Not on the face of it. But there isn't much else to recommend him.”

“In twenty-five words or less . . .?”

I summarized: traveling salesman, bad grammar, rough-hewn, had an unlisted number, a swagger; was transparently impressed with my being a doctor while not even using anatomically correct names for body parts.

“Being rough-hewn and a traveling salesman aren't fatal flaws.”

I said, “I know that.”

“Because I hear something in your voice that sounds as if you're asking permission to fall in love with someone who might be less than your parents' ideal son-in-law.”

I objected. I said that successful sexual congress was one thing, but falling in love was not applicable, especially with Ray Russo.

“If Henry weren't listening,” Jackie confided, “I'd tell you about a few crushes I had in my youth on boys who had to pick me up at the corner because they weren't allowed within a hundred yards of my house.”

“Ray is lonely,” I said. “Various friends of mine have pointed out that men who were once married know the actuarial tables and want to remarry as soon as possible.”

“But I'm guessing that he wouldn't want to marry someone he didn't love, life expectancy or no life expectancy,” said Jackie.

“If you met him, you'd understand what my reservations are.”

“Bad grammar isn't fatal. And as for swaggering, I refer you back to my high school crushes. Maybe you're having a delayed adolescent rebellion, dating bad boys with no college prospects.”