Side Effects (1984)

by Palmer, Michael

  Kate turned to him, hands on hips. “Are you trying to undermine my authority?”

  “Always side with the overdog. That’s my motto,” he said brightly. “I even voted for Mattingly in the Sixth Congressional race. I mean who would want to waste his vote on a sure loser like the other guy?”

  “A two-point defeat when you started out twenty-two behind? Some loser. Slide on down here, big boy, and I’ll give you our traditional Sunday morning kiss.”

  “We have a traditional Sunday morning kiss?”

  “Not yet.”

  Jared surveyed the embankment and then chose a safer, albeit much longer, route than Kate had taken.

  She stifled a smile. Never lift up your left foot until your right one’s firmly planted was a favorite saying of Jared’s father, and here was the scion—the disciple—embracing the philosophy in its most literal sense. Someday, Jared, she thought, you are going to lift up both of your feet at the same time and discover you can fly.

  His kiss was firm and deep, his tongue caressing the roof of her mouth, the insides of her cheeks. Kate responded in kind, sliding both her hands to his buttocks and holding him tightly.

  “You kiss good, Doc,” he said. “I mean good.”

  “Do you think the ducks would mind if we started making dirty snow angels?” she whispered, warming his ear with her lips.

  “No, but I think the Carlisles would.” Jared pulled free. “We’ve got to get going. I wonder why they keep inviting us to play with them when we haven’t beaten them once in two years.”

  “They just love a challenge, I guess.” Kate shrugged, tossed out the remaining bread, and followed him along the safe route to the road.

  “Did someone call this morning?” he asked over his shoulder.

  “Pardon?”

  “While I was in the shower.” Jared turned to her as he reached the MG and leaned against the perfectly maintained canvas top. “I thought I heard the phone ring.”

  “Oh, you did.” A nugget of tension materialized beneath her breastbone. Jared hadn’t missed hearing the phone after all. “It … it was nothing, really. Just Dr. Willoughby.” Kate slid into the passenger seat. She had wanted to choose carefully the moment to discuss the pathology chief’s call.

  “How is Yoda?” he asked, settling behind the wheel.

  “He’s fine. I wish you wouldn’t call him that, Jared. He’s been very good to me, and it sounds so demeaning.”

  “It’s not demeaning. Honestly.” He turned the key and the engine rumbled to life. “Why, without Yoda, Luke Skywalker would never have survived the first Star Wars sequel. What else could I possibly call someone who’s three feet tall, bald with bushy eyebrows, and lives in a swamp? Anyway, what did he want?”

  Kate felt the nugget expand, and fought the sensation. “He just needed to discuss some twists and turns in the politics at the hospital,” she said evenly. “I’ll tell you about them later. How about we use the little time we have to plan some kind of strategic ambush for the Carlisles?”

  “Don’t poach. That’s all the strategy we need. Now what was so important to ol’ Yoda at eight-thirty on a Sunday morning?”

  Although the words were spoken lightly, Kate noted that he had not yet put the car into gear. From the beginning of their relationship, he had been somehow threatened both by her career and by her unique friendship with her aging department head. It was nothing he had ever said, but the threat was there. She was certain of it. “Later?” She tried one last time.

  Jared switched off the ignition.

  The mood of the morning shattered like dropped crystal. Kate forced her eyes to make and maintain contact with his. “He said that tomorrow morning he was going to send letters to the medical school and to Norton Reese announcing his retirement in June or as soon as a successor can be chosen as chief of the department.”

  “And …?”

  “And I think you know already what comes next.” Deep inside her, Kate felt sparks of anger begin to replace the tension. This exchange, her news, her chance to become at thirty-five the youngest department chief, to say nothing of the only woman department chief, at Metro—they should have been embraced by the marriage with the same joy as Jared’s election to Congress would have been.

  “Try me,” Jared said, gazing off across the lake.

  Kate sighed. “He wants my permission to submit my name to the faculty search committee as his personal recommendation.”

  “And you thanked him very much, but begged off because you and your husband agreed two years ago to start your family when the election was over, and you simply couldn’t take on the responsibility and time demands of a department chairmanship—especially of a moneyless, understaffed, political football of a department like the one Yoda is scurrying away from now—right?”

  “Wrong!” The snap in her voice was reflex. She cursed herself for losing control so easily, and took several seconds to calm down before continuing. “I told him I would think about it and talk it over with my husband and some of my friends at the hospital. I told him either to leave my name off his letter or wait a week before sending it.”

  “Have you thought what the job would take out of you? I mean Yoda’s had two coronaries in the last few years, and he is certainly a lot more low key than you are.”

  “Dammit, Jared. Stop calling him that. And they weren’t coronaries. Only angina.”

  “All right, angina.”

  “Do you suppose we could talk this over after we play? You’re the one who was so worried about being late.”

  Jared glanced at his watch and then restarted the engine. He turned to her. There was composure in the lines of his face, but an intensity—perhaps even a fear—in his eyes. It was the same look Kate had seen in them when, before the election, he spoke of losing as “not the end of the world.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Just answer me that one question. Do you really have a sense of what it would be like for you—for us—if you took over that department?”

  “I … I know it wouldn’t be easy. But that’s not what you’re really asking, is it?”

  Jared shook his head and stared down at his clenched hands.

  Kate knew very well what he was asking. He was thirty-nine years old and an only child. His first marriage had ended in nightmarish fashion, with his wife running off to California with their baby daughter. Even Jared’s father, senior partner of one of Boston’s most prestigious law firms, with all the king’s horses and all the king’s men at his disposal, couldn’t find them. Jared wanted children. For himself and for his father he wanted them. The agreement to wait until after the election was out of deference to the pressures of a political campaign and the newness of their marriage. Now neither was a factor. Oh, yes, she knew very well what he was asking.

  “The answer is,” she said finally, “that if I accepted the nomination and got the appointment I would need some time to do the job right. But that is the grossest kind of projection at this point. Norton Reese has hardly been my biggest supporter since I exposed the way he was using money budgeted for the forensic pathology unit to finance new cardiac surgery equipment. I think he would cut off an arm before he would have me as a department chief in a hospital he administrated.”

  “How much time?” Jared’s voice was chilly.

  “Please, honey. I’m begging you. Let’s do this when we can sit down in our own living room and discuss all the possibilities.”

  “How much?”

  “I … I don’t know. A year? Two?”

  Jared snapped the stick shift into first gear, sending a spray of ice and snow into the air before the rear tires gained purchase. “To be continued,” he said, as much to himself as to her.

  “Fine,” she said. Numbly, she sank back in her seat and stared unseeing out the window. Her thoughts drifted for a time and then began to focus on a face. Kate closed her eyes and tried to will the thoughts, the face away. In moments, though, she could see Art’s eyes, glazed and bloodshot; see them as
clearly as she had that afternoon a dozen years before when he had raped her. She could smell the whiskey on his breath and feel the weight of his fullback’s body on top of hers. Though bundled in a down parka and a warm-up suit, she began to shiver.

  Jared turned onto the narrow access drive to the club. To Kate’s right, the metallic surface of the Atlantic glinted through a leafless hardwood forest. She took no notice of it.

  Please Art, don’t, her mind begged. You’re hurting me. Please let me up. All I did was take the test. I didn’t say I was going to apply.

  “Look, there are the Carlisles up ahead of us. I guess we’re not late after all.”

  Jared’s voice broke through the nightmare. Dampened by a cold sweat, she pushed herself upright. The assault had taken place the day after the second anniversary of her previous marriage, and only an hour after her husband, a failure first in a pro football tryout, then in graduate school, and finally in business, had learned that she had taken the Medical College Admission Test, and worse, that she had scored in the top five percent. His need to control her, never pleasant, had turned ugly. By the evening of that day she had moved out.

  “Jared,” she pleaded quietly, “we’ll talk. Okay?”

  “Yeah, sure,” he answered. “We’ll talk.”

  The ball rainbowed off Jared’s racquet with deceptive speed. A perfect topspin lob.

  From her spot by the net, Kate watched Jim and Patsy Carlisle skid to simultaneous stops and, amidst flailing arms, legs, and racquets, dash backward toward the baseline.

  The shot bounced six inches inside the line and then accelerated toward the screen, the Carlisles in frantic pursuit.

  “You fox,” Kate whispered as Jared moved forward for the killing shot they both knew would not be necessary. “That was absolutely beautiful.”

  “Just keep looking sort of bland. Like we don’t even know we’re about to beat them for the first time ever.”

  Across the net, Patsy Carlisle made a fruitless lunge that sent her tumbling into the indoor court’s green nylon backdrop.

  Kate watched the minidrama of the woman, still seated on the court, glaring at her husband as he stalked away from her without even the offer of a hand up. Husbands and wives mixed doubles, she thought: games within games within games. “Three match points,” she said. “Maybe we should squabble more often before we play.” A look at Jared’s eyes told her she should have let the matter lie. “Finish ’em with the ol’ high hard one,” she urged as he walked back to the service line. Her enthusiasm, she knew, now sounded forced—an attempt at some kind of expiation.

  Jared nodded at her and winked.

  Kate crouched by the net. Eighteen feet in front of her, Jim Carlisle shifted the weight of his compact, perfectly conditioned body from one foot to another. A successful real estate developer, a yachtsman, and club champion several years running, he had never been one to take any kind of loss lightly. “You know,” he had said to her on the only attempt he had ever made to start an affair between them, “there are those like you-know-who, who are content to tiptoe along in Daddy’s footsteps, and those who just grab life by the throat and do it. I’m a doer.”

  The reference to Jared, even though prodded forth by far too many martinis, had left an aftertaste of anger that Kate knew would never totally disappear. When Carlisle sent the Samuels for Congress Committee a check for five hundred dollars, she had almost sent it back with a note telling him to go grab somebody’s life by the throat. Instead, out of deference to her husband, she had invited the Carlisles over for dinner. Her hypocrisy, however honorable its purpose, continued to rankle her from time to time, especially when Carlisle, wearing his smugness like aftershave, was about to inflict yet another defeat on team Samuels/Bennett.

  At last she was beating the man. Not even a disagreement with her husband could dull the luster of the moment.

  Through the mirror of Jim Carlisle’s stages of readiness to return serve, Kate pictured Jared’s movements behind her. Feet planted: Jared had settled in at the line. Hunching over, knees bent: Jared was tapping ball against racquet, gaining his rhythm. Just before Carlisle began the quick bouncing which would signal the toss, she heard Jared’s voice. “The ol’ high hard one,” he said.

  Kate tensed, awaiting the familiar, sharp pok of Jared’s serve and Carlisle’s almost simultaneous move to return. Instead, she heard virtually nothing, and watched in horror as Carlisle, with the glee of a tomcat discovering a wounded sparrow, advanced to pounce on a woefully soft hit. The serve was deliberate—vintage Jared Samuels; his way of announcing that by no means had he forgotten their argument.

  “Jared, you bastard,” Kate screamed just as Carlisle exploded a shot straight at her chest from less than a dozen feet away.

  An instant after the ball left Carlisle’s racquet, it was on Kate’s, then ricocheting into a totally unguarded corner of the court. The shot was absolute reflex, absolute luck, but perfect all the same.

  “Match,” Kate said simply. She shook hands with each of their opponents, giving Jim’s hand an extra pump. Then, without a backward glance, she walked off the court to the locker room.

  The Oceanside Racquet Club, three quarters of an acre of corrugated aluminum box, squatted gracelessly on a small rise above the Atlantic. “Facing Wimbledon,” was the way the club’s overstuffed director liked to describe it.

  Keeping her hair dry and moving quickly enough to ensure that Jared would have to work to catch up with her, Kate showered and left the building. The rules of their game demanded a reaction of some sort for his behavior, and she had decided on taking the MG, perhaps stopping a mile or so down the road. As she crossed the half-filled parking lot, she began searching the pockets of her parka for her keys. Almost immediately, she remembered seeing them on the kitchen table.

  “Damn!” The feeling was so familiar. She had, in the past, slept through several exams, required police assistance to locate her car in an airport parking garage, and forgotten where she had put the engagement ring Art had given her. Although she had come to accept the trait as a usually harmless annoyance, there was a time when visions of clamps left in abdomens concerned her enough to influence her decision to go into pathology rather than clinical medicine. This day, she felt no compassion whatsoever toward her shortcoming.

  Testily, she strode past their car and down the road. The move was a bluff. Jared would know that as well as she. It was an eight-mile walk to their home, and the temperature was near freezing. Still, some show of indignation was called for. But not this, she realized quickly. At the moment she accepted the absurdity of her gesture and decided to turn back, she heard the distinctive rev of the MG behind her. There could be no retreat now.

  It was a game between them, but not a game. Their scenarios were often carefully staged, but they were life all the same; actions and reactions, spontaneous or not, that provided the dynamics unique to their relationship. There had been no such dynamics in her first marriage. Put simply, Arthur Everett decreed and his dutiful wife Kathryn acquiesced. For two destructive years it had been that way. Her childhood programming offered no alternatives, and she had been too frightened, too insecure, to question. Even now there were times, though gradually fewer and farther between, when dreams of the farmhouse and the children, the well-stocked, sunlit kitchen and the pipe smoke wafting out from the study, dominated her thoughts. They were, she knew, nothing more than the vestiges—the reincarnations—of that childhood programming.

  Unfortunately, much of Jared’s programming was continually being reinforced, thanks largely to a father who remained convinced that God’s plan for women was quite different from His plan for men.

  “You have a wonderful behind, do you know that?” Jared’s voice startled her. He was driving alongside her, studying her anatomy through a pair of binoculars.

  “Yes, I know that.” She stiffened enough to be sure he could notice and walked on. Please don’t get hurt, she thought. Put those silly binoculars down and watch
where you’re going.

  “And your face. Have I told you lately about your face?”

  “No, but go ahead if you must.”

  “It is the blue ribbon, gold medal, face-of-the-decade face, that’s what.”

  “You tried to get me killed in there.” Kate slowed, but did not stop.

  “It was childish.”

  “And …?”

  “And it was dumb.”

  “And …?”

  “And it didn’t work.”

  “Jared!”

  “And I’m sorry. I really am. The devil made me do it, but I went and let ’im.”

  He opened the door. She stopped, hesitated the obligatory few seconds, and got in. The scenario was over. Through it, a dram of purulence had been drained from their marriage before it could fester. Energy no longer enmeshed in their anger would now be rechanneled, perhaps to a joint attack today on the pile of unsplit wood in the yard and later to a battle with the Times crossword puzzle. As likely as not, before the afternoon was through, they would make love.

  Eyes closed, Kate settled back in her seat, savoring what she had just heard. I’m sorry. He had actually said it.

  Apologizing has been bred out of Samuels men was yet another teaching from the philosophy of J. Winfield Samuels. Kate had suffered the pain of that one on more than one occasion. She thought about Jared’s vehement reaction to the possibility of her taking over the chairmanship of her department. The morning, she had decided, had been a draw: Dad 1. Wife 1.

  “Now, Dr. Engleson, you may proceed with your report.”

  Tom Engleson’s groan was not as inaudible as he would have liked. “Your patient is still bleeding, sir. That’s my report.” During his year and a half of residency on the Ashburton Service at Metropolitan Hospital of Boston, Engleson had had enough dealings with D. K. Bartholomew to know that he would be lucky to escape with anything less than a fifteen-minute conversation.

  Dr. Donald K. Bartholomew held the receiver in his left hand, adjusted the notepad in front of him, and straightened his posture. “And what is her blood count?”