The Doctor's House

by Ann Beattie

  “Kate,” I said, “I don’t have any control over Andrew, you know. I actually try to stay out of his business.”

  “Oh, I know it has nothing to do with you,” she said quickly. “I didn’t in any way mean to say that his actions reflected on you.”

  When I said nothing, she got up to pour more wine. “Oh, and you’ve got a kitchen table just like the ones I’ve always wanted,” she said. “I really am a petty, envious person. Can you believe it? I invite myself over and dump all my problems on you, and then I even admit I envy you your kitchen table.” She caressed the wood. Then, dejected, she walked back and sat on the sofa. “Neither one of them wants me,” she said. “I knew long ago that it was over between me and Andrew. Henry’s trying to persuade himself that he wants the two of us to get back together, but do you know what that really is? He misses Max.”

  I didn’t feel that I should mislead her. It seemed to me she was probably right. What I really wondered was whether this was the way people talked to each other. Whether, if I’dknown more people, I might have had such straightforward and surprising conversations more often.

  I deliberated giving advice I hadn’t been asked to give. Finally, I said: “Give it another try with Henry.”

  She tucked her legs under her. “I know what you mean,” she said. “I should make more of an effort.”

  I was thinking:The Three Musketeers were a bunch of guys with plumes in their hats.

  “Excuse me?” she said.

  Worse yet, I had mumbled it. The wine had gone to my head. I said: “The Three Musketeers were a bunch of guys with plumes in their hats.”

  She smiled. “A cheap candy bar,” she said. She finished her wine. She was as tipsy as I was. “Can I ask you one last thing?” she said.

  “Fire away,” I said. I thought this response might have some of the braggadocio of a Musketeer.

  “Over there. On that chair.” She tilted her head. “It’s his scarf, isn’t it?”

  My lips parted in surprise. She thought . . . she had jumped to the conclusion that there was something between Henry and me. She had been sitting there all the time she was confessing, assuming that.

  “That’s what I thought,” she said, when I didn’t answer. “But really, why should I sneak around behind his back and not expect that he might do the same?”

  “Kate,” I said, fixing her with my eyes, “we had coffee a couple of weeks ago and he gave me his scarf because I admired it. You know what a nice person he is. It was completely unexpected, but he gave me his scarf.”

  She ran her finger around the rim of the empty glass. Finally, she looked at me.

  “I’m telling you the truth,” I said.

  There was another long pause. Then she said: “Okay. I’m not going to doubt you.”

  “Good,” I said. “In my life, coffee isn’t a euphemism for anything.”

  You have an insight like that—realizing that your life is lived too much on the surface, on too literal a level, and that what you’ve been doing is sipping coffee—and you have two choices: settling for the way things are or seeing if they can change. I phoned Angie the next day and told her I’d decided to fly to New York to discuss the possibility of taking the job. Then I began the process of reinforcement: I told someone else I was thinking of making a move. It was just Mary Catherine, but still.

  When Henry phoned, I said nothing about Kate’s visit. Only that I’d had a real moment of truth and that now I saw more clearly what he and everyone else close to me had tried to convince me of: that I had dropped out of life, and that I needed to find a way back into the world. I couldn’t bring myself to say the words “New York.” He could tell from my voice that something was wrong—that it wasn’t only an enlightening moment I’d had—but he knew better than to press it. I gave no explanation. (Should I have said, “Getting to know your wife, and getting smashed with her”? Or: “Hey: what about Andrew and Kate in the sack? How did that make you feel?”) I told him that if he heard fromAndrew again, I didn’t want to know about it. I was angry at Andrew, and I needed time to sort out my thoughts.Wherever he was, he was probably lobbying some high school girl to come to his side, so he could cheat on Rochelle Rogan. Half an hour after Henry hung up he called again. “I don’t get the feeling that things are going great,” he said.

  “How could they, with a brother like Andrew?” I said sourly.

  “I know. He’s got his faults, but you’ve got to sympathize, because the guy is really his own worst enemy.”

  Amazing; Andrew had found a best friend who thought Andrew was Andrew’s worst enemy, not his own. Even cuckolded, Henry was siding with Andrew.

  I paced around after we hung up, as angry as if Andrew, himself, had called with his double-talk and his self-justifying explanations. I thought again of Serena, who had fallen for him not once, but twice, and of all the high school girls he’d already worked his way through.

  What did it say about me that the person I had been closest to was a rat? I sat at the kitchen table, tapping my foot. I wanted to change my life right that second. I wanted to have an unlisted number that Andrew could not call, even if he was so inclined. I wanted to be in New York, living on the Upper West Side, or in the Village, oranywhere. I hadn’t realized what a symbol it was, my little house in the shadow of the big house. Inadequate, constraining—the house of a person who had given up hope, so that in her forties she was still spreading her papers out on the kitchen table like she was doing her homework, throwing her clothes on the furniture like a messy adolescent instead of using the coatrack. Wasthere even one person whose life he had affected positively? I concentrated, trying to see if I could come up with anyone. Henry, of course, was simply so insecure, or so shell-shocked, he’d come up with an explanation of Andrew that would make things less painful. Andrew had gone to our father’s funeral—the funeral of Dr. X—but now that I thought about it, that had probably been to hit on women. The whole funeral had probably been a big fern bar to Andrew. He had even left my husband’s funeral with a weeping woman, ostensibly helping her into a cab, but probably arranging a date later that night. And if he could impregnate her, so much the better. Instead of tea, I had opened, just for myself, another bottle of red wine, and instead of drinking it from a water glass I was pouring a thin stream into a crystal wineglass. Drinking from a water glass had been our mother’s way of pretending she wasn’t drinking.

  The realization did not stop me from drinking, however. Common sense finally stopped me, because I knew I could not get blitzed two nights in a row. I put on water for tea and went into the living room and picked up the clothes draped over the back of the sofa and hung them up. I moved the sofa to the opposite side of the room, slowly, a bit at a time, careful not to scratch the floor. It was heavy, and I let it down with a thud. Then I rearranged the chairs and fixed the rug and stood back to consider the changed room. I moved the chairs again, so that they were facing the fireplace. It wasn’t a very good place for them, in the center of the room, but it did change the way things looked. When the teapot whistled, I brewed some chamomile tea, thinking that would calm me.

  Eventually, watching some dumb sitcom on TV, I didcalm down. For a while I forgot everyone, Andrew included. And when I started to remember him again, I took a warm shower, put on my favorite nightgown, which I removed from the laundry hamper, and climbed into bed with a Hershey bar and a mystery. The mystery made me agitated, though, and the caffeine in the candy bar made me alert. I had to put the book down, and then take a sleeping pill—I was partial to the same pill Mac had taken in medical school, which a friend of his phoned in prescriptions for when I was running low. I awoke in the middle of the night with a headache and the need to pee. I flicked on the light and went to the bathroom, barely remembering anything I’d thought before I’d fallen asleep. Some bizarre dream about butterflies funneling above muddy ground. I was my own personal Nature Channel. The magazine I’d bought was on the bathroom floor. I glanced at the cover and yawned, eyes
halfclosed, until I realized that a little light show was happening in my bathroom: blue lights revolved around and around near the ceiling, like color tossed off by a rotating wheel. I saw trouble before I heard it: an engine idled outside, and voices were crisscrossing. A two-way radio emitted more static than words.

  An ambulance and a police car had squeezed into the driveway, though the police car was really parked on the lawn. The big house was lit up, and while I stared, aghast, my hand froze on the doorknob so that I lacked the dexterity to open the door. What was it? What was wrong?

  I found myself on the lawn, barefoot, panting rather than breathing, my hands dangling numbly at the sides of my faded red flannel nightgown, on which bears wearing bowties danced around beehives. Blinded by the lights, I looked down at the bears. Then Justin was being thrust in my arms and his father was gone—he said something that was probably important but that I didn’t understand, because the baby was crying; I still thought of him as a baby, even though he’d just turned four. I was standing there holding Justin’s suddenly quite heavy body against mine, saying something that sounded calm and rational, though I had no idea what, exactly, I had thought to say. The policeman was speaking to me: “I assume you’re all right with this?” I answered him, answered yes. What, exactly, had the policeman said when I’d opened my door in the middle of the night so many years before—the policeman who came to tell me that Mac had been hospitalized? I had tried to remember, and I had tried not to remember, so many times. What had he said, beyond asking my name? Why had he come to the house when Mac was not even dead? Didn’t that happen with servicemen killed in a war, not with interns hurt in car accidents? This policeman, too, was asking my name. He had already asked if it was all right to leave Justin with me—wasn’t that what he’d been asking? Because certainly he couldn’t have been asking if I was all right with the fact that something bad had happened to Mary Catherine. Twice, he said her name.

  There was Justin, reaching for me in the chaos. I must have taken him in my arms. That was what had prompted the policeman’s banal question. I was trying to say calm things to Justin, at the same time hardly able to breathe. I’d been fooling myself for years, assuming disaster couldn’t come to my door a second time. Pollyanna, assuming Mary Catherine would be fine. She was thirty-five years old. She jogged everymorning. Most every morning. I found myself alone on the lawn as all the vehicles left in a great hurry, gripping the child as hard as he was gripping me, trying to figure out how many mornings she really did jog, since I knew it wasn’t reallyeverymorning.

  Sound trailed behind the police cars and ambulance—a sound that seemed to flap and flail as it became airborne, like a runaway kite. Voices cried after it, and then everything was gone. The police and the ambulance were gone. There was only a man running up, asking what had happened. He had on pajamas and an unzipped leather jacket and sneakers. His fly was open.

  “His mommy,” I said over my shoulder, jiggling Justin more than was necessary.

  He looked so horrified, I almost went back to reassure him, but I had started toward the house and needed what momentum my shaky legs still had to get there. There was a neighbor I’d never even seen, who obviously knew Mary Catherine? I was light-headed; I needed to blink away dots that floated in front of my eyes. And then I thought, as everyone eventually does: At least it isn’t me. This time. Once I had needed every bit of strength I had to walk to a police car to be driven to a cabstand. Why had they done that? What had the policeman said, what had been the succession of events that led me not into his car but into a cab driven by a sleepy driver who took off, assuring me, as if we were good friends talking about something already well understood, that there would be little traffic between where we were and the hospital. Things couldn’t have been the way I remembered. People didn’t get awakened to get shattering,inconclusivenews, only to have some policeman put them in a cab and send them off, like they were off to the airport to get a flight. I could not remember getting from the cab into the hospital. The hospital I could remember distinctly, so brightly lit in the dark, at once hot and cold inside, warmed by the body heat people gave off in a cave they were used to living in.

  The door to my house was open, and the night air had made the house frigid. The temperature change would not be good for Mac’s plants, I thought, then marveled at what a stupid thought that was. I had actually expressed so many stupid thoughts when Mac died. I think I had tried to coerce Andrew into telling me that there was such a place as heaven, and that one day I would go there to join Mac. The day after Mac died, a whole group of doctor friends had come and knocked on the door, and I had cowered in the bedroom, afraid that letting them in was synonymous with admitting more bad news. I was so relieved when they went away. I think they might have called to tell me they were coming, but I don’t remember. I do know that their knocking became the signal, in bad dreams, for a mysterious group of men who were coming to take me somewhere, and that the way I ran from them in nightmares—the ways I morphed and the superpowers I possessed—couldn’t have been invented by the wildest minds of science fiction. “It’s okay,” I said to Justin. “Sometimes people get sick suddenly, but that doesn’t mean they’re not going to be okay. You know how sometimes things happen very quickly? Like the way there are a few raindrops and then suddenly it’s raining hard? Or firecrackers? You remember last Fourth of July when we looked at myTV and the fireworks got launched and there was that big pink flower?”

  I was talking fast, confusing him even more. He was sniffling, though, looking at me attentively, willing to tolerate whatever I did because in that moment I was all he had. In the hospital where Mac died, I must have listened, wide-eyed, to any number of people. Who had they been? People who knew my name, though I did not know theirs. The beauty pageant nurse—had I seen her before the time she told me Mac was dead, or had that been our first meeting? “Remember the fireworks?” I said to Justin.

  “Fourth of July,” he said warily. He looked up at the ceiling. We both looked, as if expecting explosions. A large cobweb dangled from the corner.

  “Mommy is going to be okay,” I said.

  “Where’s Daddy?” he sniffed.

  “He went with Mommy—to take care of Mommy,” I said.

  He snuggled closer, almost toppling me. I did not know what I was going to do to keep the conversation going. “Do you want a candy bar?” I heard myself say.

  He shook his head no.

  “You don’t?”

  The surprise in my voice convinced him. “Okay,” he said.

  “Okay,” I echoed. “We’re just going to wash our faces and dry these tears first.”

  “When does Daddy come back?” he said, his bottom lip quivering.

  “Soon,” I said, lifting him in my arms instead of holding his limp little hand. “Here we go,” I said, walking in the direction of the bathroom. The light was still on, the toiletunflushed. I flushed it. The pinwheel had stopped turning. It was, I saw by the bathroom clock, 3:30 in the morning. He squinted hard against the washcloth, and shook his head from side to side, trying to avoid the towel. I thought everything he did was eminently sensible. Why wipe tears when there are going to be more? Why cut off what air you’re able to inhale by clapping a towel over your nose? I could remember something I had long forgotten: a tantrum I had had with Andrew, plucking Kleenex after Kleenex out of the box on the table, crumpling them and letting them float to the floor like mangled parachutes. I think Andrew had only just arrived, bringing food. I remembered that he had put his hand on my arm, and that I had recoiled, confused by some thought or memory I couldn’t articulate. I remembered my face in his cupped hands, which seemed much more satisfactory to me than crying into a Kleenex.

  I hiked Justin onto my hip and carried him into the kitchen, trying to remember why I’d decided to walk in that direction. Of course: the candy bar. I looked out the window and saw that the man next door was talking to several other people who had gathered in the darkness. I got the candy
bars out of the drawer one-handed and gave them to Justin to carry, keeping my eyes on the people gathering outside, as if they might look through the window and think I was being frivolous. I took him into my bedroom and turned the light low, sliding in beside him under the covers, eager to open my candy bar just so I would have something to do. I broke it nervously into little squares and pushed them one after another into my mouth. I left the light on and stared into space as he chewed his, thenbecame drowsy and quiet. I remembered that the phone was turned off and very slowly slipped out of bed, so as not to disturb him. I tiptoed into the living room and switched the ringer on, so I could pounce on the phone the second Jack called from the hospital. It would be too terrible to think that anything really serious might have happened to Mary Catherine.

  Amazingly, somehow, eventually, in spite of the suspense, I fell asleep. I had terrible dreams in which silver mountains crumbled, and I rushed after the liquid silver, trying . . . but what was the problem? What was I trying to do? Outrun a river? Be the boy who put his finger in the dike? In my crazy dream, I found myself back in the corridor of intensive care, staring at the polished floors, knowing that below them flowed silver. There was no one to tell. I woke up parched, but fell back asleep without water, confused because—halfdreaming, half-awake—I thought all the water had turned to silver. Justin and I had fallen asleep by the time his father returned and knocked on the door, calling my name and saying over and over, “She’s okay. It was some awful allergic reaction, if you can believe that. Nina,open the door.”

  I grabbed Justin tightly, sliding lower in the bed, utterly terrified until I sorted out that it was Justin’s father’s voice. That Jack stood at the door, waiting for us.

  It was Cambridge outside, not some wilderness with spooky silver mountains.

  At eight o’clock in the morning, in blazing sun, Justin was carried home.