Tooth and Nail

by Linda D. Dahl

  Unable to stay focused on all that the fight lacked—action, competition, brutality, bravery—my mind wandered. Between the boos of the unsatisfied crowd, I thought of other things I might want to do with my time: things void of violence and blood and sweat. It was strange, roaming through that peaceful landscape. I couldn’t imagine a life without fighting.

  I thought back to my conversation with Dr. Marsh. Replaying his words, I sensed an undercurrent. What if the rumors were true about his negotiating a return to the hospital? He was spending an awful lot of time with the chair. There was no way they were just talking about music. He had mentioned that they had even spoken about me. Now that I reconsidered, maybe his compliments weren’t just compliments. Maybe they were meant to liberate me from more than my internal prison. He could be preparing me for something else.

  The idea seemed so preposterous I shook my head. There was no way he would close one of the most successful private practices in Manhattan. No one did that. It would be a step backwards, and he had no reason to give up. And now that we had an understanding, I was starting to feel like I belonged on the Upper East Side. I needed him. More important, I trusted him.

  The fight ended after thirteen tedious rounds. Klitschko won by unanimous decision. In boxing, there are always winners and losers. But for some, all they had to do to win was show up.

  14

  “There’s a fight coming up next week. I’m having trouble getting someone to cover it because it’s in the Bronx. Can you make it up there?” the Chairman asked. He rarely gave me assignments outside Manhattan, so although my initial reaction was a resounding no, I felt bad refusing. The two of us had come to a kind of understanding. He still had occasional lapses—a stray comment on my hair or outfits—but for the most part he treated me like one of the guys. And most important, he kept assigning me fights.

  “Um, uh, yes, I think I can work that fight. I’ll have to look at the train schedule,” I said, recalling with dread what traveling was like in the Bronx. Because most of the borough was inaccessible by public transportation, I would have to walk some distance to reach the fight. I thought back to the night my stolen car had been recovered, before the luxury of GPS, when I had had to make my way down Webster Avenue in the dark to pick it up. I had shown up to the parking lot in running shorts and mascara-stained tears, so scared of getting lost or accosted I was delirious. After that, the way I moved through the Bronx changed. I became an aggressive participant, crossing the street when I noticed someone behind me or dramatically turning to look them in the eye so they knew I knew they were there. “On second thought, I’ll just take a car service,” I said, remembering that attackers like easy prey. I couldn’t run in heels.

  It was late fall, and I was in the car, admiring the last gasps of sunlight peeking over the horizon. I hadn’t been to the Bronx since residency, because I’d had no reason to return. The driver took me by Yankee Stadium and onto the Grand Concourse, passing bare-faced brick buildings with eroded whitewash and alternating storefronts of unisex salons and Caridad restaurants.

  During the last month of my internship, I had learned a lot about this part of the Bronx. It was June, and the pediatric surgery service was slow. Instead of sitting around waiting for babies in need of emergency hernia repairs, our attending, Dr. Feinberg, had decided to take us on a historical tour of where he had grown up.

  He had driven us down a broad, double-wide road, separated by stands of trees. Recalling its heyday, he explained that the Grand Concourse had been originally modeled on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, stretching from 138th Street to Mosholu Parkway. By the mid-1930s, it had become an enclave of upwardly mobile Italian and Jewish immigrants. Some even called it the Park Avenue of the Bronx. The five-and six-story Art Deco apartments, labeled in engraved concrete with names like Majestic Court and the Commodore, had central heating and private bathrooms—coveted luxuries at the time.

  “See all these buildings? That block over there is where I grew up,” he had said, pointing as he drove. “See that church? Santa Maria something or other? Now, look up at the top. The Star of David—you see that? And the engraving: Tremont Temple Congregation Gates of Mercy. All these churches used to be synagogues.”

  I had been shocked. Beneath the erosion caused by crime and poverty, history was hidden in plain sight.

  “And here is where I took my first date,” Dr. Feinberg said, pulling up in front of a large, stone building. “This here is the Paradise. It was the largest movie theater in the city at the time and so fancy! We got all dressed up for our big night out—what were we seeing?—I can’t remember. Look at those carvings—you can still see the detail. And the clock! That’s how I knew when to get my dates home.”

  Until that tour, I had hated everything about the Bronx. All I had noticed along its streets were used condoms and loose trash. Grocery stores carried food I didn’t eat, and bodegas served coffee that tasted like syrup and diabetes. But Dr. Feinberg had shown me that things weren’t always what they seemed on the surface. If you knew where to look, you could find beauty beneath the devastation.

  My car service pulled to a stop in front of a stone building. I looked up, past carved figures standing at attention, at the huge blue sign. Parts of the words Loew’s Paradise Theatre glowed in red neon, with sunbeams stretching behind them.

  * * *

  “Dahl, you’re late!” Tom said, standing at the front of the theater, the empty stage at chest-level. It was a strange venue for a fight. The audience could only watch from the front, making it more of a bloody stage play than a theater-in-the-round.

  “You said 5:30. I—I got here as fast as I could with the traffic—” I stammered.

  “Nah, just kidding. The other guys aren’t even here yet. You’re in back tonight, so you can start hunting down the fighters. There aren’t any commission tables, as you can see, so you get to hang with the crowd.” Then, snickering to himself, he added, “You get to be with your people again.”

  “Yes, indeed,” I said, wondering how much of me still felt like one of them.

  I walked to the back, nearly bumping into Jorge Teron, one of the young fighters I had gotten to know from all the prefight physicals. He was a local favorite and hadn’t yet lost in the two and half years he had been fighting professionally. Tall, lanky and usually dressed in ironed jeans, button-up shirts and sweaters, he looked more like a college student than a boxer.

  “¡Hola, doctora¡ ¿Cómo estás? You working up here tonight?” he asked, understandably surprised. He had never seen me outside of Manhattan.

  “Yeah, the Chairman needed a favor,” I said, using the simplest explanation. It was ironic that after working some of the biggest fights in New York, I had ended up right back where I had started. “Why are you here?”

  “My friend is fighting. I’m here to support him. We’re both from the same hood. We grew up together in the Bronx.” His voice was so soft spoken I had to lean in to hear what he was saying.

  I remembered after one fight, while I was sewing him up, I had asked him why he had become a fighter. “I needed to be a man for my family,” he had said. It was a surprising response for a twenty-year-old, until he explained that when he was fifteen, his mother had been hit by a car. She was crossing a busy street with him and his two younger brothers, and the car had come out of nowhere. Throwing herself in front of her children, she saved their lives but was now a paraplegic and was wheelchair-bound. She could no longer care for her children alone. And, since their father wasn’t much help, the burden was left to Jorge’s grandmother. And to Jorge.

  I knew that street—Broadway, just west of Van Cortlandt Park. I had crossed it many times, walking to the bodega after my runs in the park. It was very dangerous, cars speeding through with no crosswalks or streetlights for hundreds of feet. He and his brothers would have easily been killed had it not been for his mother. I had heard so many sad stories in box
ing, and they all had the same thing in common: fighting only became the option when there were no other options at all.

  An hour later, the crowd began trickling in, bringing with them flashbacks of the Bronx the way I remembered it, filtered through my residency. The exaggerated swaggers of small-time drug dealers. Dr. Haven’s huge diamond ring. Blown-out eye sockets. Ear-to-ear lacerations. Dr. Davis’s greasy contentment. Pizza and black-and-white cookies with Mosley and De La Hoya. My tiny sense of self.

  That was the night you decided to fight. What you had done until then was survive. But that night, you decided you wanted to live.

  That night, something had changed inside me. I had wanted to give up, but that fight had made me start fighting for myself. And here I was, back where it had all begun.

  The bouts commenced, moving with the same cadence and players, but they felt entirely different. Three-minute rounds and one-minute breaks. Tiny featherweights and huge heavyweights. Judges and referees and inspectors.

  Instead of circling the ring between rounds, the Bronx’s version of ring girls stayed on the floor with the rest of us. They were so far from the surgically enhanced Manhattan girls that, were it not for their outfits, I wouldn’t have guessed they were professionals. One woman, barely eighteen, was dressed in high-top sneakers, a lacy bra and shorts so short there was only enough fabric to cover half of her perfectly round buttocks. Another woman, several years older and much heavier, wore another version of the same outfit—a lesson in ratios, with twice the fabric providing only half the coverage. Together, they taunted men in the crowd, eliciting catcalls and a version of vulgarity that defied interpretation.

  “What you lookin’ at? What the hell is wrong with you?” the larger one screamed at onlookers as she walked by, her bra straining against the pull of gravity.

  “Hey, girl. Ooohweee! Yo ass is fiiiine!” a tiny, stringy man hooted, encouraging a group of men around him to nod and squat to get a better view.

  “Yeah? You like this shit? Then you gotta pay, mutha fucka! Git yo ass outta ma way!”

  Even though I had never been in her shoes, I felt for her. Without sleep, or safety or personal boundaries during residency, I remembered the rage that came from that kind of vulnerability. A rage that had forced me to choose between playing the victim and taking charge. A rage that had given birth to my Dom. Watching the spectacle in front of me, I remembered the first time I had heard the Dom’s voice. It had been tiny at first, echoing my own repressed feelings, but it had become louder through the years, even after I left the Bronx. She had been with me all along, talking in my ear. Daring me to be more than I thought I could be.

  * * *

  After the fight, I joined the other guys from the commission for drinks a few blocks from the theater. Exhausted from the night’s revelations, thankful that so many battles were behind me, I collapsed into a seat next to Frank. I wanted nothing but the relief that came from the bottom of an emptied glass. Then the Chairman took the seat next to me.

  “Good fights tonight, don’t you think? It’s not so bad outside the city.”

  I didn’t know how to answer, so I sipped on my drink, hoping he would grow bored with me.

  “Can you believe Tyrell, man?” Dr. Rosenberg said. “When he went down in the fourth round, he was totally faking it! I was, like, dude, he didn’t even hit you!”

  “Yeah, I know,” Dr. Gonzalez said. “When he was on the ground, I asked if he was okay. And he was, like, ‘I promised them three rounds, and that’s what they got.’” He shook his head and laughed.

  I remembered overhearing Tyrell in the back, relaying the rest of the story to his manager as he was changing to leave. “I need to keep my shit intact. I got a wife and three kids. Ain’t no one gonna take care of them if something happens to me.”

  “Do you wanna get out of here? We can share a cab,” the Chairman said, nudging me on the shoulder. He never acted this casually, so I thought it was his way of calling a truce.

  “Yeah, I need to get home. I have to work tomorrow,” I said, draining the last bit of my vodka.

  “Why don’t you just come home with me? Don’t worry—we don’t have to have sex. We can just hold each other and cuddle,” he said, in full voice, loud enough for the whole table to hear.

  I was stunned and disgusted, and there was nothing I could say. Any response on my part, defensive or otherwise, would make it seem like sex and cuddling were things that really happened between us. My colleagues snickered in the background, their lack of surprise belying their true sentiments. I looked at the Chairman, shook my head, stood and walked out the door.

  Outside I fumbled with my coat, praying for the very illegal cabs I had avoided when I lived there. Yellow cabs with predictable fares and bulletproof windows never traveled that far north.

  “Linda, come on. Why are you so angry?” It was the Chairman again, slightly out of breath from running outside to catch up to me. The cool air formed a vapor around his lips.

  “Listen, I’m sorry about some of the things I said to you, about wanting to be with you.” He sounded sad and small, like on the night of our dinner. I just wanted to get away from him, but there were no cabs in sight. Bracing for his impending emotional dump, I rolled my eyes and stared down the street, listening as he talked to the back of my head. “I thought you’d see that I’m a good guy, and you’d want to be with me. I’m getting older, and I’m starting to wonder what I will leave behind when I’m gone. I have no children, and most of my family has passed. You can’t blame me for wanting to be with you. You’re a good person, Linda. I thought together we could have something real.”

  He was apologizing for the wrong thing, but it was still an apology. Through our time together, I hadn’t considered his perspective or even cared to. All I knew was that he was a man who couldn’t take no for an answer, even if that persistence meant invading my personal space. I turned to look at him. In that moment, he seemed like the loneliest person in the world. Even lonelier than me. And he had already wasted so much time, I doubted he would ever be able to give his life meaning.

  * * *

  “Dr. Marsh, I need to tell you what happened last night! I went back to the Bronx!” I said, nearly tripping through his door the next day. Since our little heart-to-heart, he often asked about the fights, wanting to hear gruesome details, but cringing when I delivered them. When I got to his office, I was surprised to find Dr. Marsh’s partners seated in chairs across from his desk. They rarely congregated and, when they did, they usually preferred the larger and more comfortable kitchen area. Why they had squeezed into this room was beyond me, but I could tell something was wrong.

  “How was it?” Dr. Marsh asked when he saw me, feigning interest. He was clearly focused on something more important.

  “What’s going on? You guys all look so serious.” The door was open, so I didn’t think I had walked in on anything secretive, but by the somber looks on their faces, I could tell they were discussing something more pressing than vacation schedules. I paused, instinctively scrolling through the prior week, trying to recall if I had done anything wrong. Nothing stood out.

  “We’re discussing the practice. The future of the practice, actually.” Dr. August spoke first, the most rapacious of the three. He and I had rarely had private discussions and, when we did, it was always about money. When I had first taken the job, he was the one who had negotiated my salary and, after three years, he was also the one who had finally agreed to my small raise. The future of the practice, where Dr. August was concerned, could be anything from wanting to add more patients to my schedule to asking me to buy into their partnership.

  “We’ve been in talks with the hospital, and they want to hire us to be part of the faculty practice. Negotiations have been going on for some time, and we’ve finally made a decision,” Dr. Marsh said, revealing his denials for the lies they had been all along. Apparently, th
e devil had made a deal that was too good to refuse.

  “So, what are you trying to say? They are going to take us over and give us all raises?” I said, trying to make light of the situation. No one laughed.

  “We are closing the practice, Linda. The hospital has agreed to hire us as individual faculty,” Dr. August said. The most confrontational of the three, I appreciated that he never minced words.

  “But why? And what does that mean for me?” I assumed they would have at least negotiated something on my behalf, a comparable salary or benefits package. After over three years with them, they couldn’t possibly abandon me. Dr. Marsh would never let that happen.

  “The hospital is willing to meet with you for an interview to see if they have a position that’s suitable. You can negotiate directly with them.” Dr. August looked straight at me when he spoke, making it clear that it was everyone for themselves. Or, at least, every woman for herself. The three of them had already made deals, and they hadn’t advocated for me at all. I would have to start all over again, like I had at the end of residency.

  Panic rushed in. “When is this going to happen?” I asked, trying to maintain composure but failing, my voice growing louder and more high-pitched as I spoke.

  “The practice will shut down at the beginning of the year,” Dr. August said. “I suggest you start making plans right away.” It was already mid-October, which meant D day was only ten weeks away.

  I turned to look at Dr. Marsh, needing something from him, anything. He was my one ally, the person who had given me hope on the Upper East Side. But he just gazed out the window, refusing to look at me or anyone else.

  * * *