The Unprofessionals (14 page)

T
he
BOY'S FATHER
had performed with this talent the night of the photo-book dinner. After the dinner, we'd all taken a bunch of taxis up to Washington Square. He sat squashed into the front passenger seat next to the Arab driver. The driver looked like the kind of man we see on the news rioting against our country. The boy's father had already told me that every New Year's Eve, at an annual dinner of surgeons, he was the one who predicted, “The greatest threat to world peace is extremist Muslim fundamentalism.” But I was the one who always said the cabdrivers in Boston looked like Arab terrorists.

In the back so-called seat, I sat with my husband and, somehow, also my friend the now less-intoxicated landscape designer, and the boy, who was squeezed in somewhere too. People stand for this in New York—filthy, cramped taxis, all their knees crunched together into the hard back of the front seat. Yes, people love New York. They put up with it without mentioning the goings-on of this kind.

The cab ride took place before the worst era of turbaned drivers and the increasing evidence of their lowering standards of personal hygiene. But the regime of filthy cabs and drivers had been in place for a while and was in David Letterman's storage of jokes to use every week. It was before the world event that made everyone pretend to love everything about New York. Our taxi had the odor of cigarette butts and general dirtiness.

The surgeon said he had to fly off somewhere the next morning to give expert testimony at a malpractice trial. He started telling us about the last case in which he'd been called to give testimony.

Two doctors had been employed by a new multibillion-dollar fertility clinic. The condition of their employment was this: If they left the clinic before their two-year contract was up, they couldn't open their own clinic. “They're okay doctors, but in a year they quit and opened their own clinic,” the surgeon said without surprise. He'd heard of everything.

A patient decided to sue one of the doctors after an expensive technological attempt at the clinic failed to result in pregnancy. One doctor ratted on the other doctor, and the facts of the ratting were these: The doctor in charge had placed the syringe of live embryos down on a table in order to say a prayer over it.

“They were some kind of Christian fundamentalists, and they believed that pregnancy couldn't be successful if the doctor doing the procedure was guilty of certain sins—adultery, stealing, murder, of course, homosexuality—probably being a Jew, too, but they didn't mention that,” the surgeon said in his deep, knowing voice. His voice had a quality that seemed to show he knew about everything in the world—except that one thing, who Keith Richards was.

It turned out that one of the two doctors in the new clinic was actually known to be guilty of one of the sins, known around the clinic and the town.

The defense lawyer stood before the surgeon to question him. The surgeon told us, “The lawyer was a sixty-five-year-old short, fat Christian fundamentalist dressed in a brown suit with a brown vest, a white cowboy hat, and white cowboy boots. He had a head of thick white hair and wore a giant gold cross that hung around his neck, down over the brown vest.

“The lawyer said, ‘You know, Doctor, about saying the prayer over the syringe of embryos?' I said, ‘No, I don't know about any prayer.' ‘Well, you know that a prayer is always said to keep the demons out of the embryo,' the lawyer said.

“‘I never heard of any demons getting into the embryo,' I said,” the surgeon told us.

By then we were all laughing in the backseat. Each sentence made us laugh harder. The word “conniptions” was used for this kind of laughing at one time in the history of the world. By the time he said “demons getting into the embryo,” someone was laughing so hard it sounded like crying. We were all wearing thick, sound-buffering winter coats, scarves, and gloves, so the hysteria was muffled.

As the surgeon continued in his serious, deep, and low voice, the group laughter reminded me of crying I'd heard before—quiet sobbing at funerals in cemeteries. The boy was silent and smiling—he'd heard the story before and he was watching his father's telling of it.

The gist of the case was a question: If the syringe of embryos was placed on a table for the time it took to say the prayer, would that hamper the chances of successful impregnation?

“The lawyer said, ‘You know that the procedure is to place the syringe down on the table to say the prayer over it to prevent the demons from getting into the embryos?'

“I said, ‘No, I don't know about any prayer.' Then he asked me, ‘Do you believe in demons?' I said, ‘No, I don't believe in demons.' And his next question was ‘Then you don't believe that demons can get into the embryo?' I said, ‘No, I don't believe that.'

“Then he tells me, ‘Well, we're in the part of America that knows that there are demons and that they can get into the embryos if the doctor is a committer of adultery or other sins. Did you know that?'

“He held up a white flip chart with a list of the sins—the ten ways demons could get into the embryo. I said, ‘No, I never heard that.'”

Then the surgeon was asked whether putting the syringe down on a table could weaken the embryos during the transfer.

“‘Well, maybe if they put it on a radiator, that would be bad,' I said. ‘But not if they just put it down on a table for a minute.'

“I was dismissed,” the surgeon said. “But first the lawyer said to me, ‘Dr. Loquesto, you have a very strange way of thinking.'

“I said, ‘There are millions of people on the East and West Coasts who think the same way.' Then I got out of town.”

The whole time, I was worried about what the driver was thinking. I was always worried about what these Arab drivers were thinking, and time and history have proved that I was right to be worried. Then we were at Washington Square.

 

IN CONTRAST
to the evening of the demon performance, when I returned home from the borderline-symptoms-description dinner, a few years later, I felt ill from hearing the description and how it might fit in with my life story.

I immediately drank some peppermint tea. Then the narcissist called to talk about a bamboo-lemongrass massage treatment. I told her my fear of the borderline diagnosis. “I'm afraid I'm one, too,” she said, sounding disturbed by some secret knowledge.

We exchanged each symptom we knew of and said to each other, “You never do that,” after each one. We tried to convince each other that we weren't borderline personalities, but because of her narcissism, she couldn't listen, and because of my narcissistic personality disorder, any bad description would fill up the place of emptiness. Inside the emptiness there was a magnet that attracted anything negative in the air and attached to it.

T
HERE WAS
a message on my answering machine from the boy's father. He'd left his home phone number for me to call him back. I knew that the man, the world-renowned reproductive surgeon—professor, dean, and expert witness—would never be home on a weekday. It had to be something really serious for him to be away from work.

Maybe the boy was back in rehab, or this time in the hospital for an overdose—maybe in a coma, maybe in jail. I started to panic as these thoughts came speeding together while I pushed the buttons of the phone number. All these calls back and forth with the boy, and I had never figured out the speed dial.

His mother answered. I could tell from her voice that there was no time for chitchat. “I have a message to call Arnold,” I said.

She said nothing but called him calmly, saying my name, “on line one.” Whatever it was, she must have been all cried out.

His father said, “Hello.” Just like that. Hello.

I said, “I have a message to call you.” I knew I was saying it in a trembly voice.

But still, this is what his father said, and this is all:

“He killed himself.” He said it in a shouting style. Not too loud. Lower than his usual shouting.

I tried to understand the sentence, but I couldn't. An empty space took over, and it quickly filled with those things the boy liked to discuss—love and pity. Love, pity, horror, and then the usual—disbelief.

I was using the wall phone in the kitchen. I found that I was bent over, leaning on the counter part of the old wall cabinet. In front of my eyes was a white antique bread box from 1930, but I couldn't quite see it. If I can't be outside, I always want to be looking out a window, but I forgot to move over to one. I stood leaned over, facing the bread box filled with vitamin bottles.

Into the silence I heard his father say my name with a question mark, as if he thought I'd fainted, or even died.

 

HE WAS
another one who avoided addressing people by their first names, and when referring to anyone in the third person, including women, he used only last names, as a form of disrespect for all human beings, especially female ones. But on the day of this news, when I couldn't speak, he said my name again, this time with an urgent medical sound. The only feelings I'd ever heard in his voice before this were impatience and anger.

“Yes,” I said.

“Are you there?” he said.

Was I there? Not exactly. I was nowhere, vanished, dissolved, completely gone from the human form I'd previously inhabited.

“I have to call you back,” I said. “I can't talk right now.”

“Why not?” he said matter-of-factly.

“Because I can't believe it,” I said. I started to cry as I said the sentence. The crying didn't sound as if it would go with talking.

“But it's true,” he said.

“It was an accident,” I said. By then I was crying hard enough to have embarrassed my friend the boy. But as I pictured him and heard the words “it's true,” I cried harder. I cared about him even more, along with all the sentences I'd heard him say since he was eleven, and the sadness of his whole life. With that came the thought of how he must have felt during the last weeks of his life.

I thought I had defended myself against this kind of crying after my mother died and then my father. And, before that, President Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Elvis Presley. That was it. I'd used it up. I was dead myself—inside, anyway. I was the walking dead.

The boy's father continued saying words to me in a coldhearted style he'd learned in medical school and then practiced throughout his career.

“It wasn't an accident,” he said. “He bought a rope.”

He named the method of suicide. “It was premeditated. He was a heroin addict. He loved heroin. He couldn't give it up. He knew I'd get the credit card bill with the cash withdrawals soon. He'd have to go back to rehab. He'd rather be dead. Now he is.”

Now he is, I tried thinking. “He didn't mean to do it,” I said in between crying and speaking. “He loved life.”

“He didn't love life!” his father said, ready to argue. “He loved heroin.”

“He was entertained by life,” I said in a state of remembering what that meant. “He was interested in everything,” I tried to say. “He couldn't end his life.”

“He did end it. We went out to dinner. He was in a good mood. He told stories. We came home and he went upstairs. I went up ten minutes later and I found him.”

Every word he said was a blow. Not just to me but a triple blow, as I pictured it, to him and the boy's mother, too. Especially her. No, both of them. The scene, the calling of 911. Every word made me cry harder. Then I couldn't stand hearing the crying. The sound of it shocked me and spread the heartbreak around and out into the room.

I felt sorry for the boy's father, having to listen. But underneath the cruel seconds of the moments, I was realizing that he liked listening to it. He didn't interrupt. He took it in. He needed it. He was a man who needed women to cry in his place, like designated drivers or proxy voters. There must be men who need women around for expressions of all the feelings they can't manage for themselves. It was like one of those book titles—
Men Who Can't Cry and the Women Who Cry for Them.

“I tried to resuscitate him,” he said in his matter-of-fact way.

“Did you call 911?” I asked in my pitiful state of seeing the scene and trying not to see it at the same time. I had somehow moved into the living room, where I leaned on the back of an old armchair slipcovered with faded pink flowers on a spilled-tea-colored background. The chair seemed too beautiful to be used this way. I was looking through the French doors out to the trees and the empty sky as I asked my pathetic questions.

When the design of the roses was printed on the fabric, I couldn't help thinking, when these particular flowers were chosen long ago in England—when the designers assembled to choose this rose and this green for the leaves—when discussions took place over this shade of pink or that—did anyone imagine their faded old roses would end up on a chair here in the USA, where the drug laws are such that a precocious boy would become a drug addict, buy heroin in the street, give up on his life, and buy a rope and kill himself in his parents' house in Beverly Hills, and that one of his remaining friends, a hollowed-out person without a soul, would lean on the rose-covered chair and look out the window and cry?

Only the loveliest plans must have been envisioned for the flower-printed linen on the curved arm of the beautiful old chair. But probably the British know all the terrible things in life that can happen on their rose-covered chairs and they take them in stride.

 

“I CALLED
911,” his father said. “I tried to save him myself. It was too late. He was gone.”

I couldn't get the word “rope” out of my mind, or into it, either. I thought of the Alfred Hitchcock movie
Rope,
a creepy and least-favorite one I could never watch through to the end.

“It was an accident,” I had to say again. I was pleading, I was begging. “He meant to be found,” I begged.

“Maybe,” his father said. He sounded tired. Tired and sad.

“He was unique,” I said, remembering the ways in which he was. Then I felt the beginning of giving up. “He was out of this world,” I said most pathetically.

“That, he was. All those things. But now he's gone.”

“How could this happen?” I said as I tried out believing the facts.

“He thought the world was a terrible place,” his father said.

“It is,” I said. “But he was always working on a way to avoid the most terrible part.”

“Well, he found a way now,” his father said in that low, deep style he had.

During this conversation I was understanding the meaning of the word “brokenhearted.” Because when you cry that hard, you can feel the sensation of the heart physically splitting apart and breaking into pieces inside the chest. There must be a medical explanation of how that works, I thought. It must take its toll on the organ. I made a mental note to look it up if it didn't kill me right then.

In my brain I heard the sentence “He thought the world was a horrible place”—it was what Teresa Wright says about her uncle Charlie, Joseph Cotten, the strangler, at the end of the movie, when she tries to explain his criminal behavior to herself and to the detective she's fallen in love with—and he with her, as the boy liked to say. “He thought the world was a horrible place. He couldn't have been very happy ever, he didn't trust people, he hated them, he hated the whole world,” she says.

“The whole world's hell, what does it matter what happens in it?” he says to her.

Those who find the world a horrible place—some must kill others, some themselves. But the boy hadn't watched the end of the movie that night. The drug had knocked him out and put him to sleep.

And what bad manners, I thought in my narcissistic-personality mode, to promise to call back, to confide, to listen and advise, and then to do this. He took me to the brink with him, then he jumped off. How rude.