Soon after, Annie and Michael went home in separate cars. When Christina left they cleaned up the kitchen in silence. Annie put the leftover dishes in the dishwasher while Michael took Molly out. Later, in bed in the dark, he asked her, “What happened back there, Annie?”
“We got lost,” she said, without turning toward him.
“I was worried about you.”
Now she looked at him. “I’m sorry.”
“I was thinking we could take a trip together. Sort things out.”
“What things?”
“Us. You and me.”
“I didn’t know we needed sorting out.”
“What’s with you lately,” he said, angry. “You seem . . .” He hesitated.
“Seem what?”
“I don’t know. Distracted.”
“I wish I were distracted.” She turned on the light and looked at his face, an older version of their son’s. “I don’t know if you noticed, Michael, but you’re never home. We hardly see you anymore.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t help that.”
“Celina sees more of you than I do,” she complained, sounding like a jealous wife.
They lay very still in the silence of the room.
“We’re drifting,” he said finally.
“I know.”
“I don’t want to drift. I want to be still.” He brought his face to hers, whispering. “I want to be right here.”
Annie lay awake for a long time. Her mind reeled back to the party and her strained conversation with Joe Rank. She was embarrassed, now, that she had drunk so much. She remembered her journey with Simon into the woods, how he’d pushed the cold grape into her mouth and then kissed her.
A whirling desire went through her.
She felt tense, guilty. Twisted up in knots. It wasn’t right, she thought. It wasn’t something she should be doing.
The next morning she stayed in her office, correcting papers and drinking coffee. At noon she discreetly entered the cafeteria, grateful that it was crowded. She hurried through the line and chose a salad. Just as she was filling her cup with coffee, Simon came up behind her and placed his hand on the small of her back. It made her jump and spill. “God, you scared me, Simon.”
“I’m sitting with Felice. Come join us.”
It was more of a command than a request. I’ll go over and say hello, just to be polite, she decided, but when she arrived at the table and began exchanging pleasantries with Felice, she felt him tugging on the back of her sweater. “Sit,” he said. And she did.
“How goes it in the South Cottage?” Felice said brightly. “Any rumblings from Joe Rank this morning?”
“He’s been keeping his distance. He’s not so bad.”
“Yes he is,” Felice said, sipping her coffee. “But I admire your diplomacy.”
“A man of passion and substance?” Simon teased.
“No comment,” Annie said, amazed that he’d remembered their conversation in the pool.
Felice glanced at her watch and stood up. “Oops, I’ve got a one o’clock. Ta ta.” She picked up her tray and hurried off.
Simon smiled at Annie. “You okay?”
“Fine.”
“You don’t look it.” He touched her hand and she quickly pulled away.
“Please don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
Touch me. “Your hand. There are people around.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Look, about last night. I can’t do this.”
“Do what?”
“This. Us.”
He gazed intently into her eyes. “I want you, Annie.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“You’re making it complicated.”
“I’m married,” she hissed under her breath. “I thought we agreed.”
“I’m not asking you to change anything about your marriage.”
“It will change. It already has.” She got up. “I have to go.”
He hastily gathered his things. “I’ll walk you.”
Outside it was cold, the wind rushing through the bare trees. They walked quickly, wrapped in their coats.
“It’s not like I’ve ever done this, Annie.”
“Bullshit! You’re notorious for it.”
He stopped where he was on the path, the wind in his face, his eyes tearing. “Never.”
He’d unraveled her, and now he was winding her toward him like wool. She stood in front of him with the wind in her ears. “I’m sorry.”
“I have something I’d like to give you,” he said.
“What?” she said a bit impatiently, angry with herself for being curious. “What is it?”
“It’s in my office. Won’t take a minute.”
“We’d better hurry, then,” she said, “because that’s all you’ve got.”
He grunted at her, disbelieving, and she knew he could see right through her.
The building smelled like sawdust, linseed oil, turpentine. They went through the large studio, where students had displayed their work on the walls. Simon unlocked the door to his office with a skeleton key. The small bulletin board on the door was covered with notes from his students, some of which seemed boldly flirtatious: Let me show you my etchings, Professor Haas and I need an anatomy tutorial ASAP. He caught her reading the notes and offered, sheepishly, “I don’t know what Joe Rank is talking about. These Catholic girls are witches. Witches, I tell you.”
She laughed in spite of herself.
His office was small, cluttered with papers and canvases and his students’ portfolios. He offered her an old chair, the sort of chair you pull off the curb, ripped and bursting. She dropped down into it, gasping with surprise—the springs were busted.
“Keeps my students in their place. They’re all so damned cocky if you ask me.”
“I see your office is impeccably organized.” His desk was piled with an array of junk: stacks of papers and books. A dying plant. An old leopard-print toilet seat, suspended from the wall, served as a basketball hoop. He picked up a rubber handball and tossed it in. “It’s quite a good system, actually. Once you get the knack of it.”
Annie noticed a canvas leaning against the wall. It was a strange painting; it didn’t look finished. “That’s Lydia, isn’t it?”
“Oh, that? It’s awful. Don’t look at that.”
“It’s not awful, Simon. Nothing you paint is awful. And your wife is too beautiful.” He gazed at the painting with a glimmer of longing.
“I wish I’d never stopped at that house. I wish I’d never seen her.” A blizzard of leaves fell outside, distracting them. He looked at her then and she could feel something between them, a kind of heat that made her almost desperate for air. “People think I exploited her. She exploited me. She’s ruined my life.”
“What happened at the party?”
“Look, Annie, my wife has an emotional disorder. She tends to get violent. Sometimes I have to use force to restrain her. I don’t expect you to understand. We’ve been together for a long time. It’s something I’ve grown accustomed to.”
“Which part? Her behavior, or your so-called force?”
He didn’t answer her for a moment. Finally, he said, “Both.”
She looked at his face. His eyes were red; he looked exhausted. “Help me up,” she said. “I’ve got a class in five minutes.”
He pulled her up but didn’t let go. “I have something for you,” he told her.
“What is it?”
He kissed her then, deeply, and she kissed him back, she couldn’t help it. “I have to go,” she said, in no particular hurry. “I have a class.”
“I’m sorry.” But then he kissed her again, slow and deep.
“I have to go. I’m going. Right now.” But she did not go anywhere.
PART THREE
Need
21
SOME PEOPLE called him a workaholic, some called him an arrogant son of a bitch. He didn’t care. Get the job done right was hi
s philosophy. It wasn’t always pretty. Go in and clean up the mess. As the weeks passed, Michael found himself growing more and more involved in the world of the clinic. Working with Celina had sharpened his view. He realized that he’d grown complacent over the years, passive to the system. She had challenged him to do more, to be proactive, and he’d responded.
At home, they’d begun to get prank phone calls. The calls would come late at night and emit the sound of a crying baby. They were upsetting to Annie. She called the phone company and had their number changed to an unlisted one, but within a week the calls returned. When he made his rounds at the hospital, he’d begun to get nasty looks from some of the other doctors. A few of the nurses refused to help him. One nurse anesthetist, a devout Catholic, had herself removed from all of Michael’s cases. On his rounds one morning Michael saw a young woman who had shown up in the emergency room with an obstructed bowel, a result of a mangled abortion at another clinic. She now suffered with a host of other complications. That morning he found her in terrible pain.
“Didn’t you get your pain medication?” he asked.
“The nurse wouldn’t give it to me,” she told him. “She said I deserved to be in pain. She said God was punishing me for what I’d done.”
Michael had the nurse removed from the service and asked the head nurse to consider having her fired, but he knew the hospital wouldn’t let her go. There was a nursing shortage for one thing, and the nurse had been employed at St. Vincent’s for nearly thirty years. “I know I don’t have to remind you that we are a Catholic hospital, Dr. Knowles,” the head nurse stated, peering up at him over her bifocals.
His patient’s case prompted him to research the other abortion providers around Albany, of which there were few, including the office that had so severely damaged his patient. He was shocked to discover that these clinics offered patients only a local anesthesia during the procedure, instead of the preferred intravenous drugs, like Versed and fentanyl, which not only obliterated pain but also quelled the emotional stress of the event. It seemed to him a decisively punitive omission, and he likened it to having root canal without novocaine. When he raised the issue at a gynecology conference on medical ethics, a doctor from one of the big hospitals upstate snorted and said, “I have no sympathy for women who get themselves into this situation.”
On any given Wednesday afternoon, Michael performed sixteen abortions in four hours. The way he saw it, he had thirty seconds to make a connection with the patient, to make her feel like she wasn’t just a hunk of flesh. Most of the cases were routine, but there were also stories that made his hair stand on end. Once, after examining a thirteen-year-old girl who’d been raped by both her brother and her father, on separate occasions, and was twenty-five weeks pregnant at the time, he’d excused himself and gone into the men’s room to vomit.
How to process these acts he could not say. He stored them up like mementos of a nightmare. The most pathetic aspect of his work was the reality that the majority of his patients who came in to terminate a pregnancy were hardly able to take care of themselves, let alone an infant. A doctor’s role was to decipher the cause of an illness. But there was no easy remedy for sexual misconduct or apathy. It was an enormous ugly mess and it oozed into every corner of society. It was easy to practice war from the high tower, he realized. But when you were down on the ground, getting blood on your hands, you saw things differently.
One night, before leaving the Medical Arts Building, Michael found a strange pamphlet in his mailbox. Cheaply produced, it looked like a comic book, its characters rendered in blue and black ink. The main character, the Abortionist, was a short, disorderly man with a five o’clock shadow and a nose that resembled a dill pickle. They’d dressed him in undershorts and a T-shirt with his beer belly sticking out. His dirty white coat had pockets crammed with whiskey bottles and cigarettes. A fat cigar protruded from his huge, salivating lips. The Abortionist is unclean. The Abortionist is a whore chaser, a bumbling alcoholic, a filthy embarrassment to the medical profession. He put on his coat and stuck the pamphlet in his pocket.
He noted the time; it was six o’clock. Anxious to get home, to spend some time with the kids, he grabbed his coat, but Finney stopped him on his way out the door. “Michael! Got a minute?”
Here we go, he thought. “Of course.”
They went into Bianco’s office, the walls of which were covered with pictures of the infants he’d delivered over his thirty-year career. Bianco was sitting behind his desk with his bifocals on, dictating charts into a microphone. He turned off the tape when they walked in and stood up, extending his hand to Michael for a shake. Bianco had a stout build and long sideburns framing his bald head. The nurses joked that he had no fashion sense. Everyone gave him ties for his birthday, one more outrageous than the next. Today’s tie had Bugs Bunny on it. “From my kid,” he explained. His “kid” was thirty-two. Finney, on the other hand, projected a good-old-boy image in his khaki pants and striped shirts and little bow ties. His freckled skin and red hair gave him a wholesome innocence, but the man was no pushover. The younger married women gravitated toward him, Michael had noticed. Bianco’s patients were on the older side, women he knew from the club.
When Michael had joined the group, his partners had made it clear to him that they were both Republicans. “Vote for Nash or your job is hash,” Finney had said to him once, jokingly, but Michael knew he wasn’t really kidding. Earlier in the year, they’d asked Michael to contribute $10,000 to the Republican Party. “They’re looking out for the docs, Mike,” Bianco had pressed. “Do us a favor and throw some money their way.”
Michael had done no such thing.
“Take a seat, Mike,” Finney said, and Michael sat down.
“What’s up?”
“Just wanted to catch up.” Bianco shrugged, hypercasual. “How are things going?”
“Things are going great.” Already Michael felt defensive.
Bianco squinted at him. “You seem just a wee bit unfocused of late.”
“What gives you that impression?”
Bianco patted the stack of charts. “I believe these are your charts I’m dictating. I have to admit, it’s a bit tricky reading your handwriting.”
Michael began to apologize, but Bianco cut him off. “No need to apologize. We’ve all been under stress from time to time. And I don’t mind helping you out if that’s what’s necessary.”
“I guess I am under stress,” Michael admitted. “My wife and I . . .”
“No need to go there,” Finney said. “Been there, done that.”
“You know, Michael, we were hoping to get you over to the club this weekend, join us for a round of golf before winter kicks in?”
This weekend he would be helping Celina at the clinic, but he didn’t dare tell them that. “I’m not much of a golfer.”
“We’ve got a terrific pro over there. This guy is just incredible. Let him give you a couple of lessons. You know, it’s good for a young doc like you to get out on the course once in a while.”
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