by Ann Patchett
“Have you tested your sugar?”
“Jesus, you’re going to start asking me questions about my blood sugar? Stick to the topic. What are you going to do about Celeste?”
“I could marry her over the summer.” I had meant it to sound snappish because she’d snapped at me, but as soon as I said it I had a surprising glimpse of the practicality. Why not? A clean apartment, good food, loads of sex, a happy Celeste, a level of adulthood I hadn’t yet imagined. I repeated the words just to feel them leave my mouth. It sounded worldly somehow. I could marry her over the summer. All the various scenarios I’d played out in my mind up until now involved disappointing Celeste—she’d be hurt and I’d feel guilty, and then, after it was over, I would miss the naked girl in my bed. But I’d never considered the possibility of saying yes, of simply seeing this as one inconvenient time in a long string of inconvenient times ahead. Maybe marrying now wouldn’t be worse. Maybe it would be better.
Maeve nodded as if this was what she’d expected me to say. “Do you remember when Dad and Andrea got married?”
“Of course.” She wasn’t listening to me.
“It’s strange, but my memory always conflates their wedding and the funeral.”
“No, I do that, too. I think it has to do with the flowers.”
“Do you think he loved her?”
“Andrea?” I said, as if we could have been talking about someone else. “Not at all.”
Maeve nodded again and blew a long stream of smoke out the window. “I think he was tired of being alone, that’s what I think. I think there was this big hole in his life and Andrea was always there, telling him she was the person who could fill it up, and eventually he decided to believe her.”
“Or he got tired of listening to her.”
“You think he married her just to shut her up?”
I shrugged. “He married her to end the conversation about whether or not they should get married.” As soon as I said it, I understood what we were talking about.
“So you love Celeste and you want to spend your life with her.” She wasn’t asking me a question. She was just making sure, finishing things off.
I wouldn’t get married in the summer. The idea slipped off as quickly and completely as it had arrived, and the feeling I was left with was everything I had imagined: sadness, elation, loss. “No, not like that.”
We sat with the final decision for a while. “You’re sure?”
I nodded my head, lit a second cigarette. “Why don’t we ever talk about your love life? It would be a huge relief for me.”
“It would be for me, too,” Maeve said, “but I don’t have one.”
I looked at her square on. “I don’t believe you.”
And my sister, who could outstare an owl, turned her face away. “Well, you should.”
* * *
After I came back from Jenkintown, Celeste decided everything was Maeve’s fault. “She tells you to break up with me three weeks before finals? Who does something like that?”
We were in my apartment. I had told her not to come down, that I would take the train up to her and we could talk there, but she said that was ridiculous. “We’re not going to talk in front of my roommate,” she said.
“Maeve didn’t tell me to break up with you. She didn’t tell me anything. All she did was listen.”
“She told you not to marry me.”
“She did not.”
“Who talks to their sister about these things anyway? Do you think when my brother was trying to decide whether or not to go to dental school he came out to the Bronx so we could hash it out together? People don’t do that. It isn’t natural.”
“Maybe he wouldn’t talk to you.” I felt a quick gust of annoyance and I let it turn to anger, anger being infinitely preferable to guilt. “And maybe that’s because he knew you wouldn’t listen to him. Or maybe he would have talked it over with your parents because you have parents. I’ve got Maeve, okay? That’s it.”
Celeste felt her advantage tipping away and she changed her tack like a little sailboat on a windy pond. “Oh, Danny.” She put her hand on my arm.
“Just leave it alone,” I said, as if I was the one who was about to be hurt. “It’s not going to work. It doesn’t have to be anyone’s fault. It’s bad timing, that’s all.”
And for that small conciliatory sentence pulled from the air she went to bed with me one more time. Afterwards she said she wanted to spend the night, that she would leave first thing in the morning, but I said no. Without any more discussion we packed up what was hers and sat together on the train back up to the Bronx, each of us with a bag in our lap.
Chapter 10
I did especially well in my surgical rotation. I was as conscientious as anyone else in my class but twice as fast, which just goes to show that basketball had served me well. Fast was how hospitals made their money, so while accuracy was very much appreciated, speed got you noticed. Just before graduation, the attending pressed me to take another three years for a subspecialty in thoracic surgery after my residency. I had spent the last two hours assisting in a right lower lobectomy and he admired the deftness of my knots. We were sitting in a tiny room with a set of bunk beds and a desk, a place we were meant to sleep for twenty minutes between cases. I kept thinking I could still smell blood and I got up for the second time to wash my face in the small sink in the corner while the attending droned on about my bankable talent. I wasn’t in much of a mood, and as I dried myself with paper towels I told him I might have talent but I had no plans to use it.
“So what are you doing here?” He was smiling, anticipating the punch line of what he was sure was the setup to my joke.
I shook my head. “It’s the rotation. This one’s not for me.” There was no point in explaining. His parents had probably come from Bangladesh so that one day their son could be a surgeon in New York. His entire family had doubtlessly been crushed beneath a load of debt and didn’t need to hear about the effort it took to liquidate an education trust.
“Listen,” he said, pulling off his scrub top and throwing it in the bin. “Surgeons are the kings. If you can be a king there’s no point being a jack, am I right?”
I could see every bone in his rib cage. “I’m a jack,” I said.
He laughed even though I’d failed to make the joke. “There are two kinds of people who come out of this place: surgeons and the ones who didn’t make it as surgeons. Nobody else. You’re going to be a surgeon.”
I told him I’d think about it just to shut him up. My twenty minutes were down to fourteen minutes and I needed every one of them. I was exhausted beyond anything I could remember. I wanted to tell him I wasn’t going to do a residency, or an internship for that matter. Medical school would finish and I would crack the code on real estate and sail out of this place without so much as a backwards glance.
Except I didn’t. I tried and failed and tried again and failed again. Buildings lingered on the market for years and then sold for a fraction of their worth. I saw buildings in foreclosure go for as little as $1,200, and even when they were burned-out shells covered in graffiti, even when every pane of glass had taken a brick, I thought I was the one to save them. Not the people, mind you, the ones who might have lived in those buildings. I had no grand ideas that I was the one to save the men and women who lined the hallways of the ER, waiting for a minute of my time. I wanted the buildings. But then I would have to settle up the back taxes, buy the doors, fix the windows, pay the insurance. I would have to dispatch the squatters and the rats. I didn’t know how to do any of that.
Despite every promise I had ever made to myself, I went into the internship program at Albert Einstein in the Bronx. Not only was there no tuition for internships (“Okay,” Maeve said, “I didn’t know that”), they paid me. At this point, the trust was obligated only to cover my rent and give me a small amount for expenses, which I banked. I was no longer bilking Andrea in any meaningful way, not that I ever had. I was no longer avenging m
y sister. I was, in fact, finishing my training in medicine. I got along with the people I worked with, impressed the faculty, helped my patients, and every day reinforced the lessons I had learned in chemistry: you don’t have to like your work to be good at it. I stayed at Albert Einstein for my residency, and while I still made the rare trip to the law school at Columbia where I stood in the back of the hall to take in a lecture on real estate law, those trips were few and far between. I followed the real estate market the way other men followed baseball: I memorized statistics and never played the game.
Dr. Able still kept an eye on me, or maybe, as he would have said, we had become friends. He invited me for coffee every three or four months and kept at me until we locked down a date. He would talk about his students, I would complain about my workload. We talked about departmental politics, or, when we were in the company of our better selves, science. I didn’t talk to him about real estate, nor did I ask him if chemistry had been the thing he’d wanted to do with his life. It wouldn’t have occurred to me. The waitress brought our coffee.
“We’re going to London this summer,” he said. “We’ve rented a flat in Knightsbridge. Two whole weeks. Our daughter is working there, Nell. You know Nell.”
“I know Nell.”
Dr. Able rarely mentioned his family, either in deference to my own situation or because that wasn’t the nature of our relationship, but on this particular spring day he was too happy to keep his personal life to himself. “She’s doing art restoration. She went over there three years ago for a postdoc that turned into a full-time job. I don’t think she’s ever coming back.”
There was no point in mentioning that Nell Able and I had exchanged a champagne-soaked kiss one New Year’s Eve in his apartment years before. She had come into her parents’ bedroom while I was digging through a pile of black coats on the bed, looking for the black coat that belonged to Celeste. The room was dark, a million miles down the hallway from the music and raucous laughter. Nell Able. We had tipped into the pile of coats for a couple of minutes before righting ourselves.
“We haven’t been to see her a single time since she left,” her father went on. “We always make her come home to us. But Alice finally secured the major gift for the Health Sciences Building campaign. Five years she’s been chasing that money down. Alice told them she’d quit if they didn’t give her the time off.”
Alice Able, who had so kindly set a place for me at her table all these years, worked in the development office at the Columbia Medical School. I wondered if I had ever known any more about her job than that. I wondered if Dr. Able had been telling me this for years: his wife’s job was to raise money for a new Health Sciences building. I wondered if Alice had told me this herself and I had just failed to register it. I used to run into her every now and then, walking across campus. She would ask me about my classes. Did I volley back a question in order to fulfill the tenets of polite conversation, or did I merely answer and wait for her to ask me something else?
“They do some kind of x-ray of the paintings now,” Dr. Able was saying, “to find out if there’s another painting underneath. Pentimento without all the guesswork.”
“Where?” I asked. I could sense what was coming before I could fully comprehend it—my future, this moment.
“The Tate,” Dr. Able said. “Nell’s at the Tate.”
I took a sip of coffee, counted to ten. “Where will they build the new Health Sciences building?”
He waved his hand as if to indicate up there, north. “I have no idea. You’d think that would be the first order of business, but until they get that major gift they don’t make any commitments. I imagine it has to be somewhere near the Armory. Do you know about the Armory? What a disaster that’s going to be.”
I nodded my head, and when the waitress brought the check, I caught it. Dr. Able fought me, and for the first time since I had known him, I won.
I stopped by the Columbia bookstore to get some maps of the Medical Center campus and Washington Heights before heading back to the Bronx. The undergraduates I passed could have been boys of fourteen, shaggy-haired and barefoot on their way to the beach. I sat on the steps of the Butler Library in front of South Field and unfolded my purchases. Like Dr. Able, it seemed to me the area near the Track and Field Armory was inevitable, even if the medical school had yet to come to this conclusion. The Armory was about to be converted into an 1,800-bed homeless shelter, which would doubtlessly lower the price on surrounding parking lots. They weren’t hard to find. By the end of the week I had two under contract with a six-month due diligence period. After all those years of banging on a locked door, I found the door wide open. The seller was a man long convinced he had no options. He had fired his broker and wore a collared shirt and tie to our meeting, hoping to take care of things himself. He was tired enough to take the deal I offered. I told him I was a doctor and doctors had no safe place to park. I made him laugh when I said that was why none of us had cars. He liked me enough to feel sorry to be sticking me with two parking lots that had been for sale for three years. He thought I was cutting my own throat when I asked for a specific performance clause in the contract: he would surrender the right to change his mind and I would surrender the right to change mine. We were locked in this together. The seller was promised he would walk out of the deal with money in hand in six months. The buyer promised to find that money and claim the parking lots. In retrospect, it looked perfectly obvious, but at the time I might as well have been standing with my back to a craps table, throwing dice over my shoulder. I was buying two parking lots next to a massive homeless shelter. I was betting money I didn’t have on the assumption that I would own the land underneath a building that had yet to be placed. I was banking that the decision about the placement of the building would be made before I had to get a loan I’d never qualify for.
Five months later I sold the parking lots to the College of Physicians and Surgeons, and with the considerable proceeds I paid off the seller, got a loan from the Housing Fund, and put a deposit on my first building on West 116th. Most of the eighteen units were occupied, the storefront on the ground floor was split between a laundry and a Chinese takeout—both businesses in good health. According to the comps, the building was undervalued by twelve percent. I was finally pursuing opportunity beyond my resources. I was not a doctor. I was, at last, myself. I would have dropped out of the residency program on the day I signed the escrow papers, but Maeve said no.
“You could still get a doctorate in chemistry,” she said on the phone. “You liked chemistry.”
I didn’t like chemistry, I just wound up being good at it. We’d had this conversation before.
“Then think about business school. That would come in handy now, or law school. You’d be unstoppable with a law degree.”
The answer was no. I had my career, or at least the start of one. It was as close to insurrection as I ever came.
“Well,” she said, “There’s no point in quitting now. Finish what you started.”
Maeve agreed to keep my books and handle the tax exchange codes while I went back to Albert Einstein with less than six months on the clock. I didn’t regret it. Those final months were the only part of my medical training I ever enjoyed, knowing that I was just about to walk out the door. I bought two brownstones in foreclosure, one for $1,900 and another for $2,300. They were disasters. They were mine.
Three weeks later I went to Immaculate Conception back in Jenkintown to attend the funeral of Mr. Martin, my high school basketball coach. Non–small cell lung cancer at the age of fifty, having never smoked a day in his life. Mr. Martin had been good to me in those storm-tossed days after my father’s death, and I remembered his wife, who’d sat in the bleachers for all of the games and cheered the team on, a mother to us all. There was a reception afterwards in the church basement and when I saw a girl in a black dress with her blond hair neatly pinned, I walked over and touched her shoulder. As soon as Celeste turned around I remembered every sin
gle thing I’d ever liked about her. There were no recriminations, no distance. I leaned down to kiss her cheek and she squeezed my hand, the way she might have done had it always been our intention to meet there in the basement after the funeral. Celeste had been a friend of the Martins’ daughter, a detail I’d either forgotten or had never known.
I’d learned a lot about Celeste in the years she’d been gone: I came to see her willingness to not be a distraction as something that took effort. I didn’t even know to be grateful for it until I was with other women who wanted to read me articles from the paper in the morning while I was studying, or read me their horoscope, or my horoscope, or explain their feelings to me while crying over the fact that I had never explained my feelings to them. Celeste, on the other hand, would sink into her giant British novel and stay there. She didn’t slam the plates trying to get my attention, or walk on her toes to show how thoughtful she was about not making any noise. She would peel a peach and cut it up in a dish, or make me a sandwich and leave it on the table without comment the way Sandy and Jocelyn used to do. Celeste had been so adept at making me her job that I hadn’t seen her doing it. It wasn’t until after she left that I realized she’d stayed those Sunday nights because Sunday was when she washed the sheets and did the rest of the laundry, made the bed, then got back in it.
She and I picked up where we’d left off, or picked up in that better place where we’d been a couple of months before the ending. She was living back at her parents’ house in Rydal. She taught reading at the public grade school. She said she missed the city. Pretty soon she was taking the train on Friday nights and going home on Sunday, the way I had always wanted her to. She worked on her lesson plans while I made rounds at the hospital. If her parents questioned the morality of the arrangement, they never said a word. Celeste was closing the deal, and they were going to let her do it her own way.
In all the years I’d known her, going back to that first train ride and the chemistry book, I’d never told Celeste anything about my plans. She knew I didn’t have parents without having been told the details of what that meant. She didn’t know about Andrea or the trust, or that we had ever lived in the Dutch House. She didn’t know that I had bought two parking lots and sold them to buy a building, or that I would never practice medicine. I hadn’t even made a conscious decision to exclude her from this information, only that I didn’t make a habit of talking about my life. The residency program was almost over and the rest of my classmates had finished their interviews, accepted their offers, and put deposits on moving vans. Celeste, who prided herself on not asking too many questions, was left to wonder where I was going and whether or not she would be coming with me. I could see her pressing herself down, remembering what had happened the last time she’d presented an ultimatum. I knew that the uncertainty was terrifying for her and still, I made love to her and ate the dinners she’d prepared and put off talking to her for as long as I could, because it was easier.
