Another You

by Ann Beattie

  Ever,

  Your devoted M.

  12

  “WE’VE ONLY MET briefly,” she said. “There’s no reason you’d remember me.”

  The attractive young woman standing in front of him, clasping his hand, was Jenny Oughton, Sonja’s busy friend he’d intended to meet with the day he found himself, in another hospital waiting room, holding Sonja’s hand as they awaited word from Evie’s doctor.

  Jenny Oughton had called to him as he came off the elevator in something of a fog. He had been heading toward the nurses’ station, as the woman at the patient information counter had told him to. Jenny had given him the shocking news that McCallum was back in surgery: internal bleeding—apparently a complication, and they suspected, also, a problem with his spleen. They might be removing McCallum’s spleen. She had said all that without realizing that he didn’t know who she was. “Oh, of course,” he had said, but he was sure she saw through him. Then he wondered what she was doing there, this attractive woman with auburn hair and heavily outlined blue eyes, younger than he’d imagined, and nowhere near as cool as she’d been on the telephone. He found himself apologizing a second time: once, disingenuously, for not immediately recognizing her; again, for not keeping the five o’clock appointment he had set up with her days before. He suddenly remembered McCallum, late at night, in the living room, after he had thought of rescheduling the appointment he’d missed with Jenny Oughton—the moment when he had said to McCallum that they needed to go on the record with someone about Livan Baker’s lies, McCallum looking at him, slightly bemused, saying, “ ‘The record’? What is ‘the record’? Is it like ‘the Force’?” Jesus: McCallum was back in surgery. Still, his eyes darted around the waiting room as if McCallum might suddenly appear, as if all this weren’t really happening.

  Jenny Oughton gestured to the sofa. He sat beside her in a chair. He realized Jenny Oughton was focusing on him and forced himself to assume a less alarmed expression. She seemed quite young to be a doctor, though increasingly everyone seemed younger: gas station attendants; airplane pilots. So: he had apparently met her once before, a face smiling as he came into the house after his night class, while Sonja’s book discussion group was still meeting. “I know he’s a very good friend of yours,” she said now, her hand on his wrist. “I’m very sorry.”

  He had arrived at the point where he’d decided not to question this repeatedly. Also, although the assertion continued to perplex him, it didn’t seem the time to disclaim any feelings for McCallum.

  “But I assume since you’re here, he must be your friend, too.”

  She smiled. “When I was still practicing, he was my client.”

  “Client?”

  “In the old days ‘patient’ was the term, I believe.”

  There was something he could identify with; her sense of irony, though in her case she was obviously using it to put him at ease.

  “Well, that’s amazing, because when I suggested he and I”—he faltered—“I mentioned, or maybe I didn’t mention, your name, and he agreed to consult with you, but he never said he knew you. I mean, that would have been bizarre. If we’d walked in and he’d been your former patient.”

  What did that quixotic smile mean? That he was somehow the odd man out in this situation, that there might be no end to the number of things she might fill him in on?

  “You had been coming alone that day, I thought.”

  “I guess I had been coming alone,” he said. “It seemed …” What had it seemed? What had that whole tedious episode with Livan Baker been about when obviously the real threat to McCallum had been his own crazy wife? “He didn’t tell me he knew you,” he said simply.

  “Well,” she said, just as simply, “if you didn’t use my name, I suppose he didn’t know it was me you’d be seeing.”

  “Yes, but I don’t see why he didn’t just call you about this problem to begin with.”

  “We terminated a couple of years ago. He was seeing one of the M.D.’s about the medication he was taking.”

  “Forgive me,” he said, “but he didn’t give me the impression he knew anyone at student health, except that he knew of someone who had apparently upset a student who had certain … who believed, rightly or wrongly, that McCallum had done certain things to her. I thought that student needed help, but the therapist had, well, the therapist had apparently not been the picture of compassion when… ”

  That smile again, but slighter. “I know the situation you’re referring to,” she said. “I’m aware of the determination regarding the therapeutic approach.”

  “Therapeutic approach?”

  “Yes,” Jenny Oughton said. “The student came for therapy.”

  “I know she came, went, for therapy, but are you aware that she was extremely upset following her first session and that she didn’t return?”

  “I did hear she didn’t return. Yes,” she said.

  “Am I missing something here?”

  “I don’t think you’re missing anything, per se.” She looked at him, no smile. “I understand your confusion,” she said. “I should add that I found myself with a conflict of interest when I was called in to consult. I no longer see clients privately, but I was called in as someone the therapist thought might offer some insight. I realized, then, that the client being discussed was describing a problem she felt had been caused by my former client. That might not have been definitive, in terms of my bowing out, except that more recently, Susan McCallum had been to see me. Susan McCallum was in treatment with someone else. Because of my going into research.” The smile, again. “I’d appreciate your keeping confidential my mention of Susan McCallum as a client. The situation was naturally very puzzling to you, so I told you.”

  “Puzzling. Yes. Well. It was puzzling, yes,” he echoed. He was deliberately stalling for time, yet he wasn’t sure what might ideally happen: she might suddenly tell him everything about everyone, including, through her always infallible, omniscient view, what was true and what was a lie? Not a chance—and quite possibly, she didn’t know. She might give him, at the very least, some clue as to why, by implication, the puzzle had been in large part resolved by what she’d said? Did she think he saw things more clearly after what she’d told him? Had McCallum, in effect, set him up, knowing full well that it was not in his best interests that Livan Baker’s problem be analyzed at student health?

  He watched as a heavy woman in a red coat walked down the hallway carrying a vase filled with red roses. He had begun to feel like someone pulled into an ongoing mystery, a passenger who’d happened to book a seat on the train the night an audience-participatory mystery was being staged. Or as if he were sitting in the front row, watching a bizarre comedy routine, and suddenly he had been pulled into the comic’s routine—exactly what had happened to him years before, at a comedy club in Portsmouth, with a spotlight on his face as he tried to appear good-natured about the comic’s insults. More bad-dream stuff: the anxiety dream of walking naked; the irrational conviction that he, alone, might be McCallum’s child’s savior; his obviously secondary position to Jenny Oughton and her world of what’s-taken-for-granted/what’s-helpful-to-know.

  “What about this makes you feel genuinely helpless?” she said, her voice level, eyes filled with concern. My God—he must have spoken to her. She prompted: “The only person not part of the plot on the mystery train?”

  “You know those games,” he said lamely.

  “Yes. You feel that involving you in this, McCallum has tried to take away your autonomy?”

  “I feel awkward about getting a freebie,” he said.

  “Who’s giving you the freebie?”

  He said: “Did you mean to send a bill?”

  “No, I didn’t,” she said. “I thought I was paraphrasing what you’d said, so I could be sure I understood. I wasn’t entirely sure if you were speaking literally or metaphorically. I was trying to understand, not to offer an opinion.”

  “You know, this is going to sound really st
range, but I just realized that something I do to keep my distance from people is just what you do when you mean to communicate,” he said. “Conversationally, I mean. I often try to—it’s not paraphrase, exactly, it’s more a honed-down version of what the person has said. To see if the person still agrees with the statement in the simpler, or the starker, form.”

  This caused a frown. “Aren’t those two rather different things?” she said. “I wouldn’t think of simplicity and starkness as being the same.”

  “This is really a very strange conversation to be having in the waiting room of a hospital,” he said.

  “You don’t want to address my observation.” Her eyes sparkled. She meant it mischievously, a satire of the shrink playing shrink.

  “You don’t seriously want to keep this up,” he said.

  “You think I’m so different? You don’t think it’s possible I ever find myself in the middle of things without having anticipated everything?” She shrugged. “I have a problem managing my intensity sometimes,” she said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Do you want to know simply, or starkly?” she said. He hesitated.

  “I mean that we might have locked into a conversational mode that has more to do with personality—our specific personalities vis-à-vis one another, and my intensity, in particular—than with any externals. We might be speaking this way regardless of the situation, is what I’m suggesting.”

  “Do you think we would have talked this way if I’d kept our five o’clock appointment?”

  “No,” she said. “I’m on my second wind.”

  This made him laugh spontaneously, it was so little what he expected she’d answer. When he laughed, he was aware of the huge weight he had to lift off his chest to get more air into his lungs. That awareness took him back to the moment in the car when he had sat looking at the hospital; that had been the first moment he had registered the crushing weight, and suddenly he could remember how painful it had felt—his wondering how he would get out of the car and proceed, and the thought, as if perfectly logical, that he need not button the four buttons of his coat, but instead he could grab each side and close it over his front. All the better an image: the huddled man, braced against the wind, tears shaken from his eyes a response to the frigid wind, not tears of emotion.

  This time, when he looked at her, he was convinced he had been speaking when he had not. He was convinced that he had let her in—ridiculous, but he meant it literally, not metaphorically—that she had been some airborne particle, and his coat had not been tightly held against him, so that she worked her way inside, the way mice find their way into walls in winter, the way cobwebs sometimes flutter onto your fingertips. He was thinking of her as a mouse? A cobweb? She was a real person, who must be contended with. Looking at him, as if they’d come full circle, with her eyes again narrowed so that he knew she saw him in sharp focus, and that she was waiting for something. He also knew what he wanted: he wanted her to be what she was not, a prophet, someone who could tell him, definitively, that McCallum would not die, the invincible authority figure he had always secretly questioned whether any therapist could be. Confronted with a smart, complex person, he had tried to make her a small, gray annoyance. Failing that, he had tried to see her as drooping tendrils of dust.

  “Just between you and me. McCallum isn’t going to die, is he?” he said.

  “Whew,” she said. “That’s a slight departure from what we were talking about.”

  “You’re a doctor,” he said. “If they take out a spleen—they can remove a spleen without its being a big deal, right?”

  “It isn’t a good sign that when they’ve operated and things have stabilized, there’s sudden internal bleeding.”

  “I wouldn’t imagine,” he said.

  “I hope we find out he’s all right soon,” she said. She looked at her watch. “My son’s picking me up in another five minutes.”

  “You have a son who drives?”

  “Learner’s permit. You can get them at sixteen. His father’s giving him a lesson.”

  “They dropped you off?”

  “I don’t live with my husband. I took a bus, but my son and his father are going to pick me up and drop us at home.”

  “Ah,” he said.

  “He turned sixteen a week and a half ago, and already he’s volunteering to pick me up because he knows he can hit his father up for the car, and his father will feel like he’s doing a good deed to let him drive, then deposit us both safely at home.”

  “That’s nice of him,” he said.

  “My husband and I divorced because he was an alcoholic, but for the last three years he has been sober, married to another woman who has given birth to two of their children, and he’s very, very sorry and wants me back.”

  He stared at her. Such complexity, everywhere. For what seemed an eternity, he had been sitting in an orange plastic chair, talking to a pretty young woman who sat on the corner of a sofa covered in material that looked as if a cat-clawing contest had been held atop it. Some doctor, some nurse, must have brought the sofa from home—the sofa with the clawed arms, the nearly threadbare material, a bulge of foam rubber from the far cushion, one leg propped up—he now saw—with a cinder block, in place of a gold-tipped peg leg.

  “That sounds peculiar?” she said.

  “Not that so much—the sofa. You’re sitting on a deteriorating sofa that looks like it’s been used after hours for a cat fight.”

  “McCallum used to miss his own sofa,” she said. “His son is hyperactive, and he jumped one too many times, and he wouldn’t replace it. He put the old sofa with the broken frame by the curb for the garbage pickup, and then there were just the uncomfortable ladder-back chairs.”

  “It’s a lot to have to deal with,” he said. Which, to his mind, meant all of it: the hand you were dealt, fate, unpredictable meetings in anonymous buildings, even. The alcoholic who reformed too late. The sofa frame not built to withstand repeated impact.

  He was so agitated that he did not expect the doctor to be walking toward them, up to the last second, when he looked up and understood that they, alone, were the focus of the man’s attention. He asked if Jenny Oughton was McCallum’s wife. Didn’t he realize why McCallum was a patient? You always heard that doctors and nurses did nothing but gossip—could this doctor have no idea of the particular circumstances surrounding McCallum’s admission? Or could he have thought McCallum’s wife was out on bail, cooling her heels until her husband got out of surgery?

  Jenny Oughton said she was not; she was a friend. Marshall said the same thing, because, again, it did not seem the right time to qualify anything.

  The doctor told them the surgery had gone well. McCallum was in the recovery room, the internal bleeding stopped. He seemed to be searching their faces to see if he needed to elaborate. Then, in their muteness, he must have decided he could walk away. Marshall had risen, Jenny had not. Still, the doctor seemed more focussed on her, shaking Marshall’s hand as he looked through him. The guy’s just tired, Marshall thought. What havoc McCallum’s wife had caused. What misery and pain.

  “Well,” Marshall sighed, sinking down onto the chair again as the doctor left. “Who would have thought we’d cross paths once when I walked in on a book discussion group, and the next time in the hospital? Did whatever you were discussing that night clarify anything about this?” He was mocking himself, repeating one of Gordon’s annoying assumptions: that books did not pertain to real life.

  “That was probably in October, wasn’t it?” Jenny Oughton said. “As I recall, we were discussing The Scarlet Letter.”

  He shook his head. Only fair that his inner-directed sarcasm had been mistaken for serious thought. This woman did not seem frivolous. She probably heard very few tossed-off comments during the course of any day.

  “It was interesting that a lot of us who thought we remembered the book had forgotten the husband,” she said. “We remembered her punishment by the community, but not by
Chillingworth. It must have been wonderful to be able to give characters names like that. No writer could get away with that now.”

  She’d caught his interest. “What were you discussing about Chillingworth?” he said.

  “That he returned to haunt her, and it turned out we’d all forgotten. I guess you grow up and you want to forget there can be real bogeymen. And the way Hawthorne presented him, he was so … well, chilling. Old and ugly. Absent. He’d wanted her youth and then deserted her, really. That’s not terribly different from what Susan McCallum was protesting, I suppose. In the book, your sympathy is all for the one who’s been abandoned: Hester Prynne. It’s not as easy to see what the transgression was with McCallum, obviously. And he isn’t old and ugly. He’s actually quite attractive. But she thought he’d withdrawn, and then when he reacted the way he did about her pregnancy, I suppose Susan thought everything was going to be worse. I’m not sanctioning stabbing him. I’m just saying that when you don’t see the thing that’s stalking someone, often you forget to factor it in. But that thing can be as real as a person.”