The Doctor's House

by Ann Beattie

  “I’m really sorry,” I said sincerely.

  “I know,” she said. “I know. I don’t see why it had to end this way.”

  “I don’t know where he is,” I said. It was a half-truth. I knew he had been seeing some woman from work on the side, but I didn’t know her name. I hadn’t realized he hadn’t been living in his apartment.

  “I didn’t have very warm gloves,” she said, beginning another story somewhere in the middle, “and he came home that snowy, miserable day with a bag from Lord and Taylor with very nice gloves inside, and in one of them—you already know this, but you don’t know everything—inside one finger was the ring, and I knew what it must be the minute my finger touched it. It took a few seconds to find the ring, and while I was doing that his expression changed from a—what would you call it?—from that sly smile of his to outright grinning, but then when I couldn’t get it out right away, he grabbed the glove back and said, ‘It’s a sign that everything is wrong.’ He shook it. The ring fell onto the floor. Then he started to cry.”

  This was not what I wanted to hear—that my brother had become so unhinged. Also, her story was too long in the telling—she was telling it to good effect, but she was making me suffer, just the way she had.

  “I met you the same afternoon you got engaged,” I said. “You both seemed very happy.”

  “We were! Iwantedto marry him. But I’d never seen him so distraught. I thought: Does he really believe that a ring getting stuck in the finger of a glove is an omen, or was he worried all along? And don’t you see—I was right. I should have taken it more seriously, but I pretended . . . oh, I don’t know what I pretended. That I’d ruined his surprise in some way, by being clumsy. He was embarrassed about getting so upset. We kissed and made up. Then nothing would do but that I put on the ring and the gloves, and a jacket, and we visit you. He was like a kid who’d made something in school, running home to show it to Mommy.”

  I realized that she was speaking metaphorically. Neither Andrew nor I could stand our mother, so her analogy wasn’t a good one. More likely, we would have dropped our drawings in the trash.

  “Do you know how he broke up with me? He left a note, coward that he was. He moved out while I was at work. All he said was that I would be happier without him—which decoded meant: he’d be happier without me—and that in big ways, and small ways, there was just too much sorrow between us.” She stopped. “You wouldn’t have an aspirin, would you?”

  I rummaged in my bag, glad to provide something. She shook two pills from the little bottle and went to the counter to ask for a glass of water. When she came back, she said simply: “Thanks.”

  We sat there. For a few seconds I felt it was urgent that I think of some way to respond, and then for another few secondsI did my old trick of imagining myself floating above the scene. I peered down into the corridor of intensive care. In all the time I said nothing, she fiddled with her espresso spoon.

  “I have no idea what goes on inside his head,” I said. I couldn’t resist: “Does the psychologist have any perspective on this?”

  “I haven’t gone back,” she said.

  “Maybe that would be someone to ask,” I said gently.

  She pursed her lips. She shifted, sat up straighter. “Right,” she said.

  “That was stupid of me to say. Cowardly, like my brother,” I added.

  “Right,” she said again.

  “I really don’t understand it. Even if I asked, I can’t believe he could account for himself in any way that would make sense.”

  She looked at me. This was an intensely unhappy person. “I’m sure there’s no simple explanation,” she said, “but do you think that because your mother was so passive, he assumes women are just there to be acted upon? Do you think this might be some baroque way of getting even?”

  “I don’t . . .” I had been about to repeat what I’d already said to her. I thought of our mother buying clothes that she intended to wear to night school, where she planned to study nursing. How uncharacteristic that she had once done something that might have brought her closer to our father. Or maybe our parents had been closer in a time I couldn’t remember. Maybe he had wanted her to work in his office. She had not even finished the first year of school. I was notsure whether the drinking made it difficult for her to study, or whether her inability to focus on the work had made her pick up the bottle. Andrew maintained that he remembered a fight in which my father screamed at her, over and over, that one did not learn nursing by sitting in a movie theater. Andrew went down the hall. Our father had our mother cornered. “This is notthis,” Andrew remembered him saying, pantomiming a silly dance step, then pantomiming giving an injection. “This is notthis,” he had apparently said, kissing an imaginary lover, then touching his ears with an invisible stethoscope to listen to a heartbeat. He took himself so seriously. Maybe Andrew’s problem—or part of it—was thathedid, too. At the very least, he eventually made sure, in every significant relationship, to do something that would necessitate the other person’s taking him entirely seriously.

  “I’m going back to England to work in my family’s business,” Serena said. She unzipped the fanny pack she wore around her waist. Perched on the stool, she looked vulnerable, her silky hair falling in front of her face, her mouth set in determination. She took out a business card. “That’s where you can reach me if you ever come to London,” she said. “I’d like to see you. I didn’t exactly get around to saying all I came here to say, but I don’t want to take any more of your time. Don’t give the card to him—it’s just for you. I enjoyed our friendship, even though it was just beginning. And the other thing—and then I’ll go—is that I have to confess to at least one person that I am the stupidest woman on the planet. I’m going from here to a clinic to have another abortion. You’re going to die from shock, I’m so full of bad news. I’m sorry. It’s unbelievable how stupid I was. But your brother, I haveto tell you, is a monster. I know I’m overstepping my bounds, but I had to say it to someone, and I don’t know where Andrewis.”

  I didn’t know where he was, either. At his job, with its flexible hours, where he was valued so highly? His job at the computer company, where he always said they liked you more, the less you liked them? Playing handball with Hound at the gym? Pumping himself up to look great in another woman’s arms? He had a way of being omnipresent, though he was almost always somewhere else. That was Andrew: on the way from something, on the way to something. He gave the impression that his life happened in the transitions between activities, in his movements from person to person.

  Serena put her hand on my shoulder as she walked away, and under the light touch I felt so heavyhearted, so flatfooted that even though my impulse was to follow her, even though I debated running after her long after she’d left, I only sat there, eventually taking up the same spoon she’d fiddled with and placing it in the empty espresso cup.

  Outside, people crowded the sidewalk, hurrying wherever they were going. A glum-looking teenage girl in platform shoes clomped along on spindly legs, coltish and unsteady, her eyes as black-rimmed as a raccoon’s.

  As I walked home, I tried to think what I wanted to say to Andrew, but the more I obsessed about it, the foggier I became about whatshouldbe said. I’d told her the truth when I said I couldn’t read his mind. No one can read anyone’s mind, except that certain people can have a pretty good idea of what goes on in certain other people’s minds when they’veknown them all their lives. So I guessed that she was right—that he had been trying to atone for the past by reenacting it as part of the present. He did have an impulsive streak, I decided.

  Though he’d never prefaced the story by saying that he’d dropped everything to do whatever he’d done, or that the idea had struck him like a bolt of lightning, eventually I came to realize that on the day he’d flown off to reunite with a girl from high school he’d been at work in the morning and halfway across the country by dinnertime. He presented these rendezvous as somewhat harried and
comic, as if he were a clown stooping to scoop up his hat, instead of boarding a plane and disembarking to rent a car and drive to the home of someone who was for all intents and purposes a stranger. He was strange, but so was Serena. I began rationalizing Andrew’s behavior, but reminding myself of the very things I’d said to her: that there were two sides to every story; that if asked, I doubted whether he could shed much light on his actions. Stronger rationalization set in later: I wondered if there wasn’t something problematic about a woman who got pregnant twice by the same man, when she did not want his child. And really: swept off her feet? No difference whether they married first or the pregnancy preceded the marriage? She was as impulsive as he was.

  By the time I put the key in my door, I was better. Shaky, but calmer. But I should have left a window open: the sharp smell of burnt bread still permeated the house, and my headache resumed immediately.

  A month or so after Serena’s departure Andrew began dating a woman he said was very special. I always got confused, unable to remember whether she was Jeannie or Janey. If I’d been able to put a face with a name, I might have remembered, but he hadn’t brought her by and, frankly, I wasn’t very interested. I had met a lot of his girlfriends over the years, and with the exception of his wife—whom I knew less well than some of the women he’d dated—he’d never had a long-term relationship with any of them. Then he dropped into conversation that Janey was the sister of Miriam Pendergast, with whom we’d gone to high school. I was two classes behind my brother, and Miriam was my age but had skipped two grades, so that as a fourteen year old she was in my brother’s tenth grade class. She didn’t quite fit in with the tenth graders, but she was so intelligent that she had little in common with the eighth graders, either. She sort of went back and forth between the groups, like a messenger confused about where to deliver her message. It was a surprise to everyone that she didn’t get into her first-or her second-choice college. I forget where she did go, but in any case, she wasn’t there long. She flunked out after a year, or maybe it was a semester, and there were rumors that she’d been hospitalized. I remember being in the room when our mother asked our father what he’d heard about Miriam. Because he was a doctor he tended to know about any disasters that befell people in the community, even if they happened in absentia—but his version of things was only that Miriam had decided to take a year off to decide what she wanted to major in. Even if he’d known otherwise, our father tended to make assertions that would end conversations, rather than further them.Now Andrew had found Miriam, many years later. She was unmarried, living in a house in the Hudson Valley with several other women. He assumed she was gay, though none of the women seemed to be her companion. He had gone to see her not long after he and Serena parted. Her younger sister, Janey, had been visiting that weekend, and the three of them had gone out for dinner at a Chinese restaurant. At the end of the evening, he had kissed Miriam on the cheek, but he’d palmed her sister his business card. “Listen,” the sister had said to him, as the business card slid into her hand at the end of dinner, “I don’t do things behind my sister’s back. If you want to see me again, maybe we’ll get together, but this isn’t the way to go about it.” She had held the business card up like someone flashing her paddle at an auction. Miriam, he said, had seemed more embarrassed than he was. So he had been very surprised when, later that night, Janey had called his motel room and invited herself over—it was the last thing he thought would happen, though he did remember having mentioned the name of the motel. Janey had come there after midnight with a pint of Courvoisier and a box of chocolate truffles, wearing a raincoat with only underpants underneath. It had frightened him—if I was to believe his story. He had insisted that she tell him what was going on, and it had all spilled out: her sister’s two hospitalizations; the family’s constant worry that Miriam would stop taking her lithium; the crazy childhood they’d had, being beaten by their mother and coddled by their frightened father. Janey herself (so she said) was the only child who’d emerged unscathed. She presented herself as someone up for having a good time, while her sister aspired only to further repression,and their brother, the baby of the family—well: that was a story for another night.But listen, she’d told Andrew,you can’t choose favorites in front of her, because it makes her crazy. Paranoid crazy. So keep the business cards with your condoms: don’t bring them out unless you’re sure.

  I was amazed—I was often amazed—by Andrew’s stories. He seemed to move in a world that only vaguely resembled life as I knew it. I was willing to believe all the clichés: that it was a jungle out there; that nobody worthwhile was ever available at the time you were looking; that all the men with any sensitivity were gay. I’d married young, and then been so traumatized by Mac’s death that for years I had to force myself to leave the house. I wouldn’t date, and when I eventually did I was so explicit about wanting nothing, and offered so little, that men quickly drifted away. I lost friends because of being so defended. One friend who was always curious about new men I’d met got angry when I lectured her about the futility of all the nonrelationships, as if she, herself, had been my suitor. She thought I had no perspective on how lucky I was, being attractive and not having to go to a job every day. She had bad skin and was always on a diet, and only married men would have anything to do with her, and then not for long. She saw me as a Cinderella who preferred to go barefoot, unescorted. In her view, I could have had a fairy-tale life, and I’d chosen to exchange that for sequestering myself and disdaining would-be princes. This was a figment of her imagination, of course. She was angry and depressed and, worse yet, not wrong about herself and her chances. Another friend, who was her exact opposite—girlish, optimistic about the right people finding each other in the world—stoppedbeing optimistic when her husband slept with their baby-sitter, and the baby-sitter’s family sued for statutory rape. She faded away from my life—as she faded away from her own—with no exit line, optimistic or pessimistic. I suspect that if her children hadn’t already been old enough to speak, they would have learned very little language from their mother. I did get depressed, seeing what was going on around me. I’d had my share of wildness when I was younger. I smoked pot, dropped acid, and when I was in college I thought the most interesting aspect of dating was finding someone inappropriate. But the moment I met Mac, I had no more desire to act out. I only wanted to be by his side. As silly as it sounds, being with him was so comfortable that it seemed inevitable—a kind of closure, as well as a beginning. While he studied, I read detective novels; while he played basketball, I watched from the stands. When he went out with the guys, I sat in his chair watching TV or reading until he returned. Andrew joked that I would take up knitting next, and I did.

  I had not been as close to my brother as I became during the years I was married to Mac—and we married six months after we met. It was Mac who used a cousin’s connections to find Andrew his first job in Boston; Mac who liked Andrew so much, himself, that he asked him to be his best man. One of the ways Andrew and I became closer was through being Mac’s coaches; we would stay up late at night to quiz Mac on highlighted passages in his medical books, while Mac would want to digress, asking Andrew and me to tell him stories about our childhood. He couldn’t believe we were serious when we told him how much we disliked our parents. It wastrue, though we realized the tendency to want to top the other’s stories only made us monstrous and humanized our parents. Well, yes, Mac had an uncle who’d been alcoholic, and he could understand how if one’s mother. . . . Or: Mac’s own father had been absent from the house much of the time, but didn’t we believe that that generation thought differently about parenting? We never agreed with him. We would insist that our mother was drunker than other drunken mothers, and have the story to prove it; we would name my father’s girlfriends, getting sympathy from Mac by enumerating the cruel ways other kids let us know that our father wasn’t loyal to our mother, since the mere fact of his philandering didn’t much impress Mac. “But you both came out of
it intact,” Mac would say. And secretly pleased that he thought so, we deferred to his opinion, felt better because of it. We both very much wanted him on our side, always, so we would only make moderate protests: my insomnia, Andrew’s lack of motivation to focus on a career, my tendency toward passivity, Andrew’s tendency to take our father as his role model where women were concerned.

  Except for their noticing us perfunctorily, often just long enough to punish us, we had sensed before we could articulate it that we were extraneous in our parents’ lives—drunken accidents, for all we knew, or more likely symbols of our father’s sexuality. They missed our graduations; they never gave us a birthday party; they pretended to be poorer than they were as a way of insisting we couldn’t have the things other kids had, when the truth was that both of them preferred their private pursuits to their children’s, so that they did not enjoy shopping for us. They disliked each otherand that dislike extended to what each had produced with the other person: devious children (as my father always said); two self-absorbed piggies (my mother). “But you see, you proved themwrong!” Mac would say. He was five years older than I, three older than Andrew. He was an only child, raised by an aunt after his parents died in a fire. He had gone through college on athletic scholarships. Family life fascinated Mac. He insisted upon seeing our pranks as necessary childhood rebellion; he interpreted our poor schoolwork as meaning that two obviously bright children had been failed by the system. He was, I suppose, the dream parent any child might wish for, though of course we could tell him more than we would ever have dared tell our parents. We even told him stories we didn’t quite have a fix on ourselves, such as the story of Patty Arthur.