The Doctor's House

by Ann Beattie

  “You know why my parents cleared out when you came over to my house?” she said suddenly. “Because they wanted to prove that they trusted me.” She was smirking. “Because you were such an upstanding fellow, being born into such a good family. My parents thought they were lowlifes, and there you were: the doctor’s son.”

  The doctor might have been there himself, the words came out so sarcastically. I grabbed her wrist, then realized she had not meant to upset me. I loosened my grip, expecting her to get up and run out of the apartment. That, too—the inevitability—increased my desire. Instead of rising, she frowned and looked at her hand. Her fingernails were a little dirty. There was a bruise, or a smudge of dirt, on one knuckle. “What?” she said, hiding her hand. “What’s the matter with you?” In silent reply, I slid my hand up her arm, stopping at her elbow. Then I lay on top of her. We never left the living room. We were momentarily distracted by a fire truck shrieking by, but except for that, we had sex—rough sex—without speaking. Nothing about it was familiar. The lyrics of the songs the neighbor was blaring were familiar, but I could locate nothing of Patty in the person whose body I touched. It was her smell—something about the softness of her skin—the silkiness that emitted a slight scent of jasmine, mixed with a more familiar odor of sweat and soap—that made me bury my head in her shoulder. Her enticing aroma was almost overwhelmed by the smell of freshly dripped coffee, which by now seemed like the most ludicrous substance in the world.

  Dazed at how quickly everything had happened, as if once into it, both of us were ready to devour each other, I got up and went into the kitchen and poured two mugs of coffee. Icarried them into the living room where she lay. “Glad you didn’t feel like apple juice,” I said. I put the mug of coffee on the floor beside her. She curled toward it, like a camper edging in on a campfire.

  I went into the bedroom and pulled the blanket off the bed. I carried it into the living room, where she remained at the foot of the chair, the coffee steaming, untouched. “You just slept with a pregnant woman,” she said, grabbing an edge of the blanket and pulling it over her. “Yeah,” she said. “Off on the next adventure.”

  It took awhile for what she said to register. She’d managed to stun me, though it didn’t quite make sense. “If you’re pregnant,” I said, “I assume you just decided we should practice safe sex?”

  She frowned, and I could tell my words caused some inner twinge of pain. For a few seconds, she said nothing. Then she said: “I don’t like to shower in other people’s places. It’s a phobia of mine. The same way I can’t stand height.”

  Height. I had recently taken the twenty-year-old receptionist to the top of a skyscraper for Irish coffee. My fingers had brushed the back of her neck. I had asked where the sweater she was wearing came from; she had me pull up the label to read it, allowing me to peer at the pale skin of her long, lovely neck.Made in Ireland.

  Height. Nina, dressed as a scarecrow for Halloween, having me walk behind her in case she faltered on the stilts she’d practiced on for weeks. My earnest, childish version of Prince Philip.

  Height. I had spread my arms as wide as they would go.This much, Serena. This is how much I love you. What I had reallybeen demonstrating—unbeknownst to me—was the size of the love that got away. Love became a remarkable fish, back in the water, off for a swim.

  Patty never touched the coffee. She was either very quiet, or she had fallen asleep. Eventually, I sipped mine, looking around the apartment. I had furnished it long ago with things from my parents’ house, though I’d bought the cherry bookcase, and been given some freebies, as well as a chopping block I’d found curbside that I propped on an iron log holder and used as a coffee table. Most often, I sat in Hound’s old leather chair that Kate made him get rid of because he always fell asleep the moment he sat in it. The end tables had been left in the apartment by the previous tenant. There was an Oriental rug, bleached by sunlight, that Serena and I had bought together on a whim, at a country auction we’d stumbled into at a fair. A Gabbeh, it was called. Little pieces of color were scattered against the blue background like software icons, waiting to be clicked on.

  Patty turned onto her side and said, almost too quietly for me to hear her, that she should go. I leaned forward and kissed her back, moving my lips up her spine, then waited silently while she grabbed her clothes and walked off to the bathroom. I insisted on walking out with her and I also took the parking ticket off her windshield, folding it and putting it in my pocket without comment. “A guy like you could be very useful if I move back to the city,” she said.

  “Call me about being useful,” I said. “I’m more than willing.”

  “Useful,” she echoed. “That’s a good way to think of the afternoon.”

  Then she closed the door and rolled down the window. “If you don’t hear from me,” she said, touching my shoulder lightly, “you can know it’s because they cut off the phone.”

  “Call collect from a pay phone,” I said.

  “Hey—I just might. I might see if you’ll disappear with me,” she said.

  Disappeared, I thought, as I walked back to the apartment, had recently become a euphemism for dead.

  In the time I was gone, the light had changed and the rug was even paler. I went into the bedroom and closed the blinds. Sitting back on the bed and covering my face with my arm, I felt too confused to sleep, so I was surprised when I woke up hours later and it was dark. I went into the living room and put on a light. It was a table lamp that had sat on my mother’s dresser. The same light under which she’d held photographs, examined notes,taken my hand in hers, in the guise of inspecting my fingernails, because as I grew, she was wary about how to touch me. Nina made things easy on her by always being elsewhere, by slipping through the cracks. Those times she could not physically escape, her disdain transported her, and our mother was left to confront a chrysalis.The doctor’s son, I heard Patty saying. I understood that she had been mocking her mother for being naive, and even that she might have been angry at her mother, though when she first said the words, they’d seemed like a slap in my own face. Downstairs, Huey Lewis and the News was playing. Time was moving right along.

  I looked at the phone. I looked at my watch. There was no way she could already be back in P’town. Even if she was, what was I going to do? Call and get her husband?

  It would be convenient to think that I escaped that moment of perplexity by moving straight into a new relationship, but that wasn’t the way it happened. The woman I saw later that night was someone I’d seen once before, briefly, for a quick drink after work. Nina would have been gratified to know that she was not a woman I’d pined for for years, that she wasn’t married, and that I had turned her down a few days before when she’d called and asked me out. She had come in as a consultant to the company where I worked; we’d joked at the Xerox machine, she’d given me her card in the bar, ostensibly so I could get in touch with her if I had additional thoughts about the problem she’d been called in to solve. Somehow, I knew that if I didn’t call her, she would call me. I also had the feeling that the date probably held the possibility of no more than that: an extra ticket to a preview at the MFA.

  It must have meant something that, fumbling for my key to let Patty and me back into the apartment, I had pulled her card out of my pants pocket with my keys. I remembered that Lauren—her name was Lauren—had said she was about to turn thirty. I had a frozen Sara Lee chocolate cake in the freezer and thought I’d see if she might want to come over on the spur of the moment. If she didn’t stand on formality, and if it wasn’t a matter of pride, she might be happy I called, if she wasn’t otherwise occupied.

  “Steve?” she said.

  “No. It’s Andrew. From the other night. But I have the distinct impression you expected to hear from someone else.”

  “Well, yeah,” she said. “What can I say?”

  “But if he hasn’t called,” I said, “I was wondering if you’d like to come over and have a piece of cake.”r />
  “Really?” she said. “It’s eleven o’clock at night.”

  I looked at my watch. It was just after nine. The clock on the stove corroborated it. I said: “I think your watch is fast.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said hazily.

  “Well, in any case,” I said, “chocolate cake.” I hoped it was still good; it had been in the freezer since Hound put it there months ago.

  “I have to go,” she said. “See you in the morning.”

  I was slow; it had taken me too long to realize that something was wrong with her. “Lauren?” I said. “You don’t sound good. Are you sick?”

  She was crying, but the sound came from far off. “I took medicine,” she said. She hung up. Jesus Christ: I had called somebody when they were OD’ing. “Lauren?” I said, much louder. “Lauren, can you hear me?”

  I called her name several times before I realized I should hang up and call 911. I felt terrible hanging up on her, but I needed a dial tone. The truth is, I didn’t really think: I just hung up the phone, then picked it up again in my instantly sweaty hand. I had forgotten her last name and had to fumble for the card on the table; she might be dying, and I knew only that she was named Lauren. All the card said wasLauren, in big italic letters. There was a phone number, a fax number, and e-mail. There was no street address. Great: Lauren, who thought a first name was enough, like Oprah, or Cher. I explained the situation calmly to the 911 operator, told her I’d just happened to call a person whose last name I didn’t know. “Don’t worry, I’m on a search,” the operator said. “Conover?” she said. I heard her repeat the name to someone else with morecertainty.There was already someone else on the line. “Sir, where are you calling from?” the operator said. I gave her my address in Cambridge. I could still see the frying pan in the hallway, the dirty pan Patty and I had walked past, after which she’d said, “Nice” and walked into my apartment. This sort of flashing on a pointless detail made me crazy: it was my version of an anxiety attack—that something inconsequential would intrude, and the image would paralyze me temporarily, prohibiting me from speaking a word. I took two deep breaths in and out and a word came to me. It was a single word: “Overdose?” “I understand,” the operator said, but someone else—a man’s voice—was talking to her at the same time. “They’re on their way,” she said. I saw the white puddle of Patty’s slip, her legs, kicking free of it. Nina, in shock, trembling so hard she might have been kicking. Should I think of this as being in the right place at the right time, or the wrong place at the wrong time? I was afraid both things were the same. That the flip side of one was always the other. She was a woman I’d hardly even flirted with—just a glass of wine in some greenhouse of a bar, an impulse to see her again at nine o’clock, it wasstilljust after nine o’clock. I couldn’t bear it, the way women could make time stand still.

  Someone was coming to my apartment. Why, I didn’t know. It was just the way things were when something was taking its course. Instead of an evening getting to know someone, a cop would probably appear at the door and get to know me. But what did I have to do with any of it? I hadn’t even envisioned what our evening would be like. We might not have gotten along. She was a person I hardly knew. Therewas no story I had to tell; because of what she’d done, the story would be all hers—when she was able to recount it.

  So I didn’t wait around. I could imagine some cop coming over . . . why should I be obliged to talk to him, why should I have to erase any suspicion some stranger might have just because he wore a uniform, or enumerate facts while he filled out what would surely be form after form? It wasn’t my problem. I hadn’t done anything wrong, and furthermore, I had done the right thing. She would be getting help. I needed to quell my panic as I threw on my coat and hurried out without locking the door. I told myself that they didn’t know what I looked like, so even if they drove up, even if they saw me running—and I was winded because, after all, it was the second time I’d gone running in one day—they’d have no reason to stop me. Everybody ran, all the time. When they weren’t sculling, when they weren’t rollerblading, when they weren’t biking.

  I turned the corner and went one street over, to be safe. I heard no sirens, but still, I kept up the pace. I could have been running a race, the way I flew to Nina’s. I was almost there before I realized where I’d intended to go.

  Iam going back to fairyland and no one can come with me. Fairyland is beautiful. The whole kingdom is like a big jeweled pillow and everything sparkles. Even the air is pink but before you arrive you have to pass through a long hallway with the doors shut that is like a tunnel and not even ghosts are allowed to go with you. You must take care when you walk alone in case there is a strong wind. Even fairies are sometimes blown about though people might be surprised to know the strongest part of a fairy is its wings. They keep the fairy up no matter how much the wind blows. They also work even if they get bruised. The remedy for hurt fairy wings is as follows. Wet them with tears and roll in sunbeams to dry them. Good-bye.