The Pursuit of Alice Thrift (9 page)

“Nope. That would have been way too obvious. What I
planned
to do was offer her a tour of the plant.”

I said I didn't know he had a plant. Where was it and how many workers did he employ?

“It's not my plant per se. But let me finish. When I introduced myself as the guy at the fudge booth who helped her wipe the shit off her boots, she asked if the check had bounced, and even though I hadn't thought of that angle, I said yes, unfortunately it had. And where I usually charged a twenty-five-dollar fee for a returned check, I'd waive that if she'd have dinner with me some night.”

I asked why he lied and why he'd let someone think her check had bounced.

“I hadn't cashed it yet when I called her, but, believe me, knowing Mary as I do now, it would've bounced without any help from me.”

The waitress, with a ketchup bottle squeezed between her bicep and her rib cage, was approaching with Ray's meal. His oval platter overflowed with French fries, the version I liked, long and thin and still wearing their skins. I took one without asking permission, prompting him to say, “I hope you realize that tasting food from the plate of a member of the opposite sex without asking is an act of intimacy. Here,” he said, tilting half of the fries onto my place mat, “have as many as you want.”

I said, “I don't see how taking a French fry is an act of intimacy.”

“Yes, you do! You wouldn't help yourself to a French fry on a stranger's plate.”

“Maybe an act of familiarity,” I said. “Or hunger.”

“Whatever.” He held the ketchup bottle at a perfect 90-degree angle over his hamburger and waited patiently for something to flow. “Where was I with Mary and me?” he asked.

“Dinner in exchange for a fictional returned-check penalty.”

“Right. So she agrees to have a drink with me the next night, a weekday. I negotiate for the weekend. We settle on Friday and a place in Central Square because she lives on the Red Line.” He replaced the top half of the bun with a twist and checked the sides for oozing. “But wait. The rest is definitely
not
history: She didn't show. However”—and he grinned broadly—“I not only had her phone number on the check, but her address. So I get in my car and I drive over to Davis Square. No one's home. I wait outside. She pulls up around eleven, eleven-fifteen. Someone else is driving. But I don't get too upset because he just drops her off and she doesn't give him a backward glance. First thing she sees is my Porsche—two cars ago—and I'm waiting on the sidewalk, leaning against it, nice and friendly. I say, ‘Miss Ciccarelli. I think you forgot our appointment.' ”

He paused to take a gleeful bite from his burger, as if expecting me to pronounce his mating behavior clever and audacious.

“I would have called the police,” I said.

“Except, Doc, you don't understand the world the way I do. Mary knew that a guy who dresses like me and owns the kind of cars I do is not a stalker. He's a guy on a romantic mission, like in a movie when the hero's waiting for the girl when she gets home from work, exhausted and a little down in the dumps. Did I mention I was holding a single red long-stemmed American Beauty rose?”

“No, you didn't.”

“I was pissed, but I figured, what the hell? What do I have to lose? She stands me up, so I'll give it one last try. So what do you think happens next?”

I asked if this narrative really required audience participation. I didn't say that his Socratic method reminded me of rounds, of interns being called upon to recite, to provide answers and differential diagnoses, and of constant failure on my feet.

Instead of answering, I poised the ketchup bottle over my own fries, inducing a few drips. He asked if I was sure I didn't want anything else. I said yes. I didn't want him to call the waitress back, delaying his consumption of his hamburger, prolonging the night.

“Okay! I love this part: Mary sees me on the sidewalk. Well, sees
someone.
It's dark, so how could she recognize me when she's only laid eyes on me once, and plus it's too dark to see the rose. But this is one tough broad. She doesn't flinch, doesn't make eye contact. I say, ‘Mary, it's Ray Russo. We had a date to meet in Central Square.' She said, ‘Oh, shit. Didn't the bartender tell you that I had to work and couldn't make it?' I say, ‘Gee, Mary. No. And you must think I'm a fucking moron to believe that one.' You know what she said? I'll never forget it. I even told this at our wedding reception in a little speech I gave: She goes, ‘Well, you don't have a choice, asshole, because if you don't get the fuck off my property, my next phone call is to nine-one-one.' ”

I blinked. I tried to remember how this man and I had ever intersected and what possible turn of events had led me to this table and this conversation.

Ray said, “Excuse my language. I wanted to quote her accurately so you'd get the full flavor. So anyway, I laughed, which was exactly the right thing to do. It cut the tension and showed her I had a sense of humor. Before you know it, we're sitting on her front porch having a pretty good conversation. About forty-five minutes later, maybe an hour, we were . . . how should I say this? Getting to know each other even better.”

I waited for some exposition. When none was offered, I asked if he meant they had sexual intercourse.

Ray blotted his bulging mouth with his napkin, nodding emphatically. “Like you wouldn't believe.”

“Safe sex?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said. “I'm always prepared. And so was Mary, as it turned out. She bought condoms at Costco, like a dozen gross at a time.”

I answered as best as I was equipped to on this topic. “There must have been some extremely strong chemistry if you had sex after a forty-five-minute conversation.”

“You could say that. You could also say that Mary was a highly physical individual.” He picked up the salt and pepper shakers and made them face each other. “Like you and I have a conversation? To communicate and maybe pass the time? Not Mary”—and here the salt and pepper shakers went horizontal—“she might have been a sex addict if I hadn't come along.”

“Wasn't anyone home?” I asked.

“She didn't care! She had a couple of roommates, but everybody minded their own business when it came to entertaining guests.” He picked up his mug, nodded firmly, and swallowed a few gulps.

I said, “I'm fairly speechless.”

“Over what aspect?”

“Mary. I have to reconfigure my mental picture of her.”

“From what to what?”

“From . . . I don't know. I used to picture you were grieving over someone very sweet and wifely. But now she reminds me of the fast girls in junior high I was afraid of, the ones who smoked and drank and had boyfriends and beat people up behind the tennis court.”

He looked puzzled. “I never talked about Mary before?”

It was my turn to signal to the waitress for a beer. I said carefully, “I don't understand why her sleeping around would come as a shock. I mean, if she had sex with you the first time she ever spoke to you—”

“Second time.”

“Okay, second time. Doesn't that say she had, at the very least, an extremely erratic moral compass?”

“I didn't try to change her,” said Ray. “In fact, I kind of liked it as it applied to me.”

Our waitress brought me Ray's choice—Valentine's Day Pale Ale—and asked if I wanted my pie now. I said no thanks, just the bill. Ray added, “She's playing shrink, asking me the tough questions. Which is just what I need right now—tough love. Face the facts. Who's to say I wasn't in denial from the first time I laid eyes on her?”

“Who?” asked the waitress.

“Mary!”

“His late wife,” I said.

“Oh, right. Sorry. The one who died.”

“Don't be sorry,” said Ray. “She was a slut.”

The waitress dragged her astonished gaze from Ray to me.

Ray gestured, an introduction. “Which is why I'm here with Alice—this is Alice, by the way—and why my values and my morals have changed, like three hundred and sixty degrees.” He reached across my grease-spotted place mat to squeeze my hand.

Did this constitute an emergency? I thought so. As soon as his eye contact wavered, I withdrew my hand, found my beeper, and induced several insistent and nonnegotiable chirps. “Damn it,” I said, getting to my feet, grabbing my jacket by the scruff of its neck. “Gotta run. You stay.”

“I thought you weren't on call,” he said.

“Disaster drill,” I answered.

“I told you,” Ray said. “She's a slave to her profession.”

I surprised myself when I hesitated beside the table. “I'm thinking of quitting. It's not making me happy. In fact, it's making me miserable.”

“You do look pretty catatonic,” said the waitress.

“What about your dreams of helping people?” asked Ray. “What about all those deformed children in the jungle who need operations? Are you gonna bail on them because you're a little miserable?”

“Can't talk now,” I said, taking a manly swig of ale. “Duty calls.”

“Need a taxi?” the waitress asked.

I said no. It was faster to walk—ten minutes tops; seven if I jogged. Thanks.

“Don't jaywalk, and watch the ice,” Ray called after me. “And,
número uno,
no more nonsense about quitting, agreed?”

I stopped at the threshold between restaurant and bar to wrap my scarf around my neck. The crowd had not thinned. The patrons looked up, but only long enough to see that it was the woman in Gore-Tex and Thinsulate, leaving alone. Once again, my hand went to my pager, which announced that I was needed, desperately, somewhere else.

10.
I (Nearly) Kill Someone

LET ME BEGIN BY SAYING THAT IT WAS MY THIRTIETH HOUR OF
duty, every one of them on my feet. The sun had risen, set, then risen again when I was summoned to the OR for the lowly job of holding a retractor during a gallbladder operation. Defensible or not, I dozed off—I swear, for one second—and lost my grip. My rebounding retractor hit the surgeon's hand, causing damage I don't particularly want to discuss. Blood spurted everywhere. The surgeon screamed. He swore. He threw something sharp across the operating field, missing me, everyone claimed, on purpose. The patient didn't exsanguinate or die. But it was bad. I wanted to flee, but the surgeon ordered me to stay so that he could narrate, in the most sarcastic and derisive tone imaginable, every remedial step; how he was obliged to insert, painstakingly, a T-tube into the previously unnicked and profoundly important common bile duct,
Dr. Thrift.

Perhaps, if I had been a star, his pet, he wouldn't have carried on so. Now wide awake and gripping the retractor with two hands, I felt the surgeon's antipathy in every inhale and exhale, every glare above his mask.
Thank you, Dr. Thrift.
Thank you for the damage control ahead. Thank you for sabotaging me; thank you for making me look like a goddamn incompetent and liar—I who predicted that Mrs. Romanowski would have clear sailing and a complete recovery will now spend hours I can't spare justifying her lifelong complications.

Did I mention that this ogre was president-elect of the American College of Surgeons? That I'd failed to impress him in the past, on rounds, in situations that now seemed utterly benign and inconsequential? Even in the best of circumstances—delivering good news from pathology to a post-op patient—Dr. Charles Greenleaf Hastings could render me nervous and blank.

He was right: I'd been assigned a minor, practically janitorial job, yet had started a chain reaction with results far out of proportion to my lowly responsibility. If I clung to the bottom line—live patient versus dead one—I suppose I could consider myself lucky. And perhaps someone else, someone cocky and capable—someone who just two days before
hadn't
inserted a central IV into an accident victim's artery instead of his vein—would shake this off as sleep deprivation or God's will. But I took these traumas for the signs that they were, that the near-murder of two people in the same week should spare future patients from my lethal ministrations.

I didn't call home, or consult my fellow interns, nor did I run into the arms of the sole surgeon on staff who had a heart and a daughter my age. I went to the gift shop in the lobby, still bloodsplattered, ignoring alarmed glances, and borrowed a box of ecru stationery, promising to pay later. The saleswoman grasped that it was a matter of great urgency. “Take it,” she said, retreating behind the cash register. “Just take what you need and go.”

I washed my hands, found a desk, found a pen. I wrote in a shaky script befitting a woman in shock,

I hereby resign from the program, effective immediately.
Very truly yours,
Alice Jane Thrift, MD

11.
Now What Do I Do?

I STAGGERED HOME, RAN A BATH, FELL ASLEEP IN THE TUB, AND
was startled awake in tepid water by a pounding on the bathroom door. As usual, it took me a few seconds to get to the border of consciousness and remember where I was. “Leo?” I moaned.

“Are you okay?”

I pulled the plug and stood up, shivering and now crying.

“Are you ill?” he yelled. “Can you open the door?”

I said, “I'm not sick. Don't come in. I'm getting out of the tub. I fell asleep. I quit the program.”

After a long pause he asked if I had said “quit.”

I put on my ancient bathrobe—quilted, dingy white polyester patterned with sprigs of blue forget-me-nots—wiped my face on its sleeve, and finally opened the bathroom door. He opened his arms, whereupon the shriveled, failed, limp, damp, medically hazardous me walked into them. “I had no choice,” I told him. “I made a horrible mistake today, on top of a pretty bad mistake on Monday that I didn't even tell you about because a senior resident caught it and fixed it—”

I saw him glance at the water, then turn over my left wrist.

“Don't be ridiculous,” I said.

He guided me down the hall and sat down next to me on the couch. “Now tell me what happened,” he said.

I provided the plainest and most self-recriminating account of having fallen asleep holding a retractor.

Leo didn't gasp, didn't look horrified, hardly reacted.
“And?”

“First let me say that the patient was obese, so the surgical field was down there pretty deep. I couldn't see anything, so it was unbelievably boring. And I hadn't slept for days. Next thing I knew—chaos.”

Leo blinked and asked calmly, “Did the patient die?”

“No, but—”

“What was the surgery?”

“Cholecystectomy. But wait—”

“I know what you're going to say: The surgeon nicked something.”

“Common bile duct and the hepatic artery. Lacerated.”

“Which surgeon?”

I coughed out, “Hastings. Charles.”

“Ay,” said Leo and flopped back against the sofa.

“First he yelled, ‘Out, out, get out of here. And don't ever show your stupid face in my OR again, missy.' But then he said, ‘No. You stay and you listen to me, because you're never going to make this mistake again.' ”

“Like that? In that tone?”

I said yes, but worse—louder, meaner. I went deaf and blind. I hung on to the retractor for dear life, frozen to it for what seemed like hours. And as soon as he stalked out of the OR, and I was free to go, I went. For good.

I expected to be anointed with everything Leo was famous for—empathy, compassion, commiseration—with extra credit for having amputated the rotting and putrid limb that was my surgical career. He said, strangling the words, “ ‘Missy'? He called you ‘missy'? In the OR?”

“That was the least of it. He lectured as if he were talking to a kindergartner: ‘This is what we call a Penrose drain, Dr. Thrift. This is a surgeon's knot. This is the anesthesiologist, who will now extubate the patient—who, by the way, will soon need the name of your lawyer.' ”

“What a fucking nerve,” said Leo, now on his feet and pacing around the living room. “What a son of a bitch.”

“Why did it have to be him?” I wailed. “Why couldn't it have happened on someone else's watch?”

“He'll be sorry,” said Leo. “Mark my words.”

“No, he won't! This was war. He's probably proud of himself. He's probably hoping this lives on as a Hastings legend, passed down through generations of surgical interns.”

“He had no right to treat you like that! I don't care how many arteries got nicked. You didn't do anything worse than let a retractor slip, which could have happened to anyone.”

I swallowed whatever tearful
mea culpa
was on its way and asked, “Really?”

“I'm sure it happens every day,” he said. “I mean, not necessarily here but somewhere, in some OR . . . definitely.”

“But he said there would be months of chronic problems now because of scar tissue, and he had to put in a T-tube—”

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. So that happens. Accidents happen. No one died. Did you do it on purpose? Did you volunteer to assist and then screw up, or did you get dragged into the OR, exhausted, and given a sleeping pill by the name of ‘hold the retractor for a few hours'?”

“This isn't the reaction I expected,” I said.

Leo pointed toward the front door. “First thing tomorrow morning I want you to march back to the hospital and tell them that you are
not
leaving. You'll explain that you dashed off a letter of resignation in the heat of the moment, but after speaking with your lawyer—”

I clamped our one throw pillow to my face and said from behind its matted fringe, “No way.”

He sat down again. “Not only do I want you to march over there, but you're going to demand that Hastings apologize to you and to every person who witnessed his tirade.”

I lowered the pillow. “Are you crazy?”

“He bullied you! He not only insulted and humiliated you but he discriminated against you. Luckily, we have an OR full of witnesses.” He considered that for a few seconds, then asked enthusiastically, “Any nurses get an earful of this?”

I said if he thought he could assemble a team of people willing to side with me against the all-powerful Dr. Hastings, well, lotsa luck. Besides, wasn't it his considered opinion that I should quit and end the misemployment misery? Wasn't that the subject of a recent Green Line career-counseling session?

“Not like this,” said Leo. “I wanted you to walk out the door with your head held high.”

“That's impossible,” I said. “And I guarantee that whoever opened my letter of resignation tonight took his wife out to dinner to celebrate.”

Again Leo stood up. “This could take some intervention on my part.”

“What would that be? A picket line of nurses? Leo's Ladies for the Ethical Treatment of Interns?”

He said with great dignity, “Not at all. I was thinking of blackmail.”

My head-shaking stalled mid-objection. “Blackmail?” I repeated.

“Creative blackmail. I've got the goods on Hastings.”

Something—a prick of hope? a cc of revenge?—made me ask, “What
about
Hastings?”

“An indiscretion. Caught red-handed. By me. In the film library.”

“When?”

“A year ago, maybe more. But I'm a patient man. I knew it would come in handy.”

“I find it a little suspicious that you're only telling me this now.”

Leo said, “Alice. Be serious. I didn't know you a year ago. And besides, do we have the kind of relationship where I'd come home and tell you a juicy story, let alone use
blow job
in a conversation with you?”

I said, “I'm not naïve. I know about hospital affairs. I wouldn't have been shocked.”

“Ha,” said Leo. He went into the kitchen, came back with two tall cans of Budweiser, and handed me one.

Enunciating as if I were a novice lip-reader, Leo said, “We want to embarrass Hastings.”

I asked what the actions of two presumably consenting adults had to do with my sorry state.

“He created that sorry state,” said Leo.

“With my help,” I said.

“Stop seeing everything so objectively! Do you think there's a hospital rule that if you make a mistake, you have to leave?”

“No?”

“I've made plenty of mistakes,” said Leo. “Everyone has. If you're lucky, you don't kill or maim anyone and your supervisor says, in effect, ‘Go and sin no more.' ”

I asked if Hastings was a married man.

“Absolutely married. With kids.”

“Who was he fooling around with in the film library?”

Leo said, “Does that matter?”

“A film librarian? A radiologist?”

“No one you know,” said Leo.

“Doctor or nurse?”

“It doesn't matter,” he repeated. “What matters here is that Hastings was violating our sexual harassment policy and his marriage vows.” Leo took a swig of beer, crossed his arms defiantly. Finally he said, “Okay. I have two words for you, which will put this transgression into perspective. And those two words are
cleaning woman. Que solamente habla español.
So I think we can say with reasonable assurance that he used a little sign language or high school Spanish, or force, or, most likely, his wallet to achieve his desired goal.”

I asked Leo if he'd reported what he'd seen.

He said, “I was afraid it might backfire and end up punishing the woman. Neither one saw me. I opened the door and backed right out again. I stood guard outside so no one else would burst in on them.”

“That's a little odd,” I said.

“She'd have died of embarrassment. I figured one day I'd have my moment alone with him—maybe side by side at a urinal—and I'd lean over and say, ‘Doc? I saw you in the film library, with your fly open and your eyes closed, and if you ever ask anyone else in this hospital for sexual favors who doesn't ask you first, I'll beat the shit out of you.' ”

I said, “Leo! I'm shocked. I can't believe you'd threaten someone with physical violence.”

“How do you think we handled things at Saint Columbkille's High School? By filing grievances or beating kids up?”

“Did you ever get your moment alone with him?”

“I did. In an elevator. I said, ‘Morning,' when he got on. No answer. So after a few floors I said, ‘Saw you in the film library a couple of weeks ago.' ”

“No!”

“More or less. His head jerked around. I said very cordially, ‘Leo Frawley, RN. I don't think we've formally met.' ”

“Did he answer?”

“His whole body froze, then he said, ‘I have no idea what you're talking about, and if I were you, I'd be a lot more careful about how you speak to your superiors.' I said, ‘Are you saying I have the wrong guy? Or I'm lying? Because I'll raise my right hand and swear to it at the hearing.' ”

It must have been the effect of the alcohol entering my bloodstream because I heard myself saying, “If a pollster calls me tonight and asks me to name my most admired American, I'm going to say,
‘Leo Frawley.'
”

“Now, that,” said Leo, “is an extraordinarily winning and gracious statement.”

“For me, you mean?”

“For anyone.”

I would have liked to generate another winning and gracious statement, but nothing suggested itself. I fished an old tissue out of my pocket and blew my nose.

He asked if I was hungry, and I nodded. He went into the kitchen. I heard the refrigerator door open, some shuffling of our lamentable provisions, then, “How about eggs?”

I said that sounded perfect. Could he do soft-boiled?

“Walk me through it,” he said.

I joined him in the kitchen and narrated: Boil the water, add the egg with a metal spoon so the egg wouldn't receive the full assault of the boiling water, time it—I'd had success with four and a half minutes—then remove.

He nodded. “You sit. Toast?”

“If we have any.”

He supplied a shot glass for an egg cup. Everything—eggs, butter, grape jelly, toast—was from his larder. As I ate, I caught him smiling at something. “What?” I asked.

He said it was the incision I'd made, slicing the top half-inch off the egg with my knife. “What's that all about?” he asked. “I've seen people do that on TV, but never in real life.”

“Habit,” I said.

“But why? Doesn't it waste part of the egg, which is a pretty skimpy meal to begin with?”

I said, “It's a way in, that's all. Instead of peeling the top and having a jagged border, you get a nice clean edge. You don't burn your fingers. Plus it's faster.”

“Now I know,” said Leo. “Thank you for that.”

I sprinkled salt on the exposed yolk and dipped in. “Perfect,” I said.

“Eggs for supper are always therapeutic,” said Leo. “Especially when consumed in a comfy bathrobe.”

I looked down at said garment. The stitching that formed every rhomboid was unraveling, and two of its transparent plastic buttons were missing. A powder-blue ribbon, once a bow at the neck, was in shreds. “It used to be pretty,” I offered.

“First,” said Leo, “I see ratty bathrobes with peepholes all the time, so you don't have to apologize for missing buttons to a professional such as myself.”

“And what's second?”

“Nothing's wrong with you that a good night's sleep and a pep talk and maybe, somewhere along the way, a little fun wouldn't have fixed.”

Not that again, not from Leo. I said, “I've heard it all. Lighten up, Alice. Smell the roses, Alice. Carpe diem, Alice. As if that's what's wrong with me: not enough fun. As if I can change that by—what's your prescription? Take tango lessons? Go on a picnic?”

Leo said, “You're right. I apologize. I guess I was suggesting that you could find ways to enjoy life more, not that the essential Alice Thrift would have to change. Just her outlook.”

I spread jelly on my toast and swilled some more beer to show that I wasn't all business. “How in the world, if I follow your advice and go back to work, would I find more opportunities to enjoy life?”

“You could socialize with people in the same boat, such as your fellow interns, for example.”

“I've tried that. No one wants to socialize with someone who's bad at work and bad at play. No one except Ray Russo.”

Leo stood up, found another beer in the refrigerator. “What's up with that relationship?”

I said, “That's an upgrade—
relationship.
”

“What would you call it?”

I shrugged. I explained that each time I left Ray after a . . . get-together? a quasi-date? I thought I was saying Good-bye, No more, The end. But then he'd turn up again.