The days she’d spent on the white sand beaches, digging her toes in the surf—feeling overdressed and over-pale—had revealed to her one essential truth: Her relationship with Colin had always taken place in her world—in the rural isolation of the little village in Paraguay, and, last week, in the chaos of Bangalore. She suspected Jo had figured out in seven seconds what it took Sarah two days to understand. Colin asked her to come to L.A. to see if their relationship—whatever it was—could be transplanted to his world.
Los Angeles. A strange village filled with tanned blondes and men with chiseled abdomens. Freakishly wide, clean streets stretched in all directions, rumbling with shiny new cars. In Gatumba, if someone was seen marching alone down the road talking to himself, the villagers would treat him kindly but with fear, for madness was considered a kind of oracle. Here everyone sported ear antennas like Jo’s, and they all talked to themselves, loudly, even among company. Too many times she caught herself staring at the women. Some looked so smooth-limbed and strategically swollen that the only thing that distinguished them from the fashion dolls she’d played with as a child was the lack of leg and arm seams.
When she could delay no longer, she borrowed the old Volkswagen and drove it to the office address Colin had given her. She parked it in the lot of a sleek, mirrored building. She squinted up to the winking windows, against the beating of the southern-California sun. Behind one of those windows, Colin sat in his office in a white coat, ministering to his patients. Somewhere in there, Colin sat in his everyday world.
The front doors whooshed open to a blast of air conditioning. Her plain rubber-soled sandals made no noise as she walked through the vaulted lobby. A guard sat behind a low, shining counter, very far away. She’d been in L.A. a few days now, but she couldn’t shake the dislocation she experienced whenever she returned to the States. It was sensory-deprivation shock. These buildings had no odors, little color, so much shine and stone, so very few people, and so little exuberant chaos. All was so calm here, so open, so… clean.
Even the guard had a well-scrubbed look.
“I’ve come to see Dr. O’Rourke.” She leaned over the massive leather-bound guest book, which he then gestured her to sign. She unwound the hemp purse from her shoulder, noticing, as the guard gingerly searched inside, that it was gray with dirt, and that unraveled fibers stuck out at strange angles. Pushing it back toward her, the guard handed her a name tag and directed her toward the elevator banks. There she stepped aside as a bevy of not-so-natural blondes wearing huge glasses breezed past her, as if they’d stepped right out of Baywatch on a sixty-two-inch flat-screen television set.
She gazed at them with curiosity worthy of an anthropologist. Surely, this sort of female decoration was no different from the scarification tattoos of the Nigerian tribes, or henna patterns on Indian brides, but to Sarah, the stream of nearly identical blondes looked impossibly exotic.
The office of Colin and his partners covered half of the top floor of the building. The elevator opened to the sight of a tall sheet of glass. Colin’s name, along with his partners’, was stenciled in big black letters, below the words “Center for Reconstructive Surgery.” As Sarah slipped through the door, a slim young woman raised her head from her work. The scarlet frame of the receptionist’s glasses matched her button earrings and string of oversized beads.
“I’m Sarah Pollard. I’m here to see Col—Dr. O’Rourke.”
The young woman frowned. She searched a blue-inked appointment book on her desk. “I’m sorry. I don’t see your name.”
“I don’t have an appointment.”
Those eyelashes—they couldn’t possibly be real. Neither could the breasts stretching the odd word BOTOX in rhinestones across her chest.
“I’m terribly sorry,” the young woman began, “but none of the doctors can see you unless you make an appointment.”
The receptionist took in, with one glance, Sarah’s batik cotton shirt, loose flowing skirt, and unpainted fingernails. Sarah ran her thumb under the strap of her bag and recognized the kind of scrutiny that took place all over the world: Sarah was being assessed for importance—and she was coming up short.
“He’ll be expecting me,” Sarah added. “We were in Bangalore together, just last week. I know he’s only been back a day or two. Perhaps he forgot to tell you I was coming.”
With some reluctance, the young woman tilted her chin toward a plush leather couch. “Have a seat. He’s with a patient now, but when he’s free, I’ll let him know you’re here.”
Sarah perched on a couch with her back to the receptionist. She didn’t need to see the odd glance the BOTOX girl shared with the nurse who checked in moments later. The whispering was bad enough. She didn’t know why it bothered her, since she spent most of her time as a pale curiosity in the refugee camp.
She perused the tastefully framed posters advertising chemical peels and laser refinishing. She’d never heard of either of those techniques and briefly wondered if she was falling behind in her medical knowledge in reconstructive surgery. She fingered the magazines scattered across the glass coffee table—Glamour, Vogue, Condé Nast Traveler, People, Cosmopolitan—and was soon lost in a fascinating perusal of advertisements that mostly involved, to the best of her discernment, freakishly bony pre-pubescent girls.
She lifted her head from the pages when a perfectly proportioned blonde breezed into the office. The receptionist leapt from her seat, fluttered and squealed, then shuttled her straight through to an examining room. That’s when Sarah began to worry. She began to wonder if Kate hadn’t been right, and Colin had only been polite in his invitation. Sarah began to worry that Colin was back there in his office fretting about how to get rid of her, before his fiancée showed up for lunch. Perhaps that perfectly proportioned blonde was his fiancée. Sarah wondered if she’d spent Jo’s money fruitlessly, chasing a one-sided dream clear across the world.
“Sarah.”
There he was, looming before her, all clear eyes and astonished smile. No stethoscope hung from his neck, and the lab coat she expected he’d be wearing was, instead, a very well-cut lightweight business suit.
He grasped her hand and pulled her off the couch. “I’m so sorry you waited so long—I had no idea you were here. When I’m with a patient, I don’t like to be interrupted—”
“You don’t have to explain.”
“Well.” He dropped her hand, then ran those fingers over his head and grasped the back of his neck. “Yeah, actually, I do.” He didn’t have to glance at the receptionist; Sarah knew that they were being watched. “Come into my office, Sarah. We’ll catch up.”
She followed him past the receptionist’s desk, past the nurse in full white-capped regalia, past rows of closed doors and quiet murmurings behind them, through a lemon-antiseptic scent, to the end of the hallway, into a corner room luminous with southern-California light. He clicked the door shut behind him, then wandered to one of the floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out on a fantastic view of greater Los Angeles.
Sarah stepped deeper into the room and clasped her hands. Her gaze slipped over the shiny wooden surfaces, the abstract print on one wall, the raw silk curtains discreetly tucked on either end of the windows, billowing in pools on the patterned carpet. She felt like a dust mote caught in the sun.
Then she stopped abruptly. On his desk stood two medical models: one of a woman’s breasts and another of buttocks.
The truth didn’t come immediately. Sarah stared at those medical models, not believing her own eyes. She kept thinking she must be mistaken—maybe they were oversized models of a palate, or a jaw, or some interior facial organ. That’s what Colin specialized in, wasn’t it? Face and jaw surgery. They couldn’t possibly be models of… tits and hips.
She slipped her fingers over the back of the chair that faced Colin’s desk. The leather sucked heat from her skin. She struggled to absorb the strange broken pieces of information now just swirling together. In most tribal communities, the elders wer
e honored. Their arthritic fingers, the bow of their shoulders, the gray in their hair, the darker spots on their faces, and the stretched sag of their breasts—all these things stood as a tribute to how many years they’d survived in the sun, as well as a lifetime of knowledge and experience. Those youthful Cosmo images assaulted her now, and the parade of blondes, and the Vogue advertisements for creams and anti-aging unguents, and she began to comprehend a new and terrible meaning for the phrase “reconstructive surgery.”
Colin stood like a soldier with his back to the window, watching her, until he saw the first glimmer of realization dawn on her face.
“Colin.” She tightened her grip on the back of the chair. “I don’t understand.”
“I know. But maybe, if I explain, you will.”
She stood silent, barely able to breathe.
“This all started in Paraguay. With Werai, and the surgery I’d performed to save his leg.”
She’d helped in the surgery. She’d watched with awe. She’d sensed in him a powerful need to succeed, an emotion so fierce that for six hours it emanated from him in waves. It enveloped her in its intensity, made her blind with a primitive sexual need she’d never known before.
“I was so proud I’d fixed it that day.” He reached for a ball sitting on his desk, a black leathery thing that he squeezed in his hand as he talked. “I was so proud I’d succeeded in front of you, too. But as the weeks passed and Werai started to walk again, I saw how grotesque his leg looked, how crude my handiwork had come out, despite all my efforts.”
“Colin—it’s a miracle he lived.”
“Maybe. But I should have done better.”
Sarah remembered Colin’s growing frustration in the weeks after the surgery. She’d attributed it to his overwhelming desire to improve the living situation for the villagers. His frustration had spilled over into other things, such as annoyance over supplies delivered late, and irritation over the village’s resistance to the measles vaccinations. She’d kept telling him, Tranquilo. Werai is alive and walking. Tranquilo. The supplies will come. Colin hadn’t yet accepted, as so many of the Corps workers had, that you just can’t change everything. That’s what made him different, she’d thought. She admired how hard he strived.
“I’d proven to myself that I could make a difference, but it was a crude difference. My surgery skills were rudimentary.” He flexed open his hands, balancing the ball in the hollow of one palm. “I wanted more than to just save a life or fix a limb. I wanted that limb to be as perfect when I was done with it as it had been before the accident. That’s why I left, Sarah. I went back to the States and did my two-year residency in plastic surgery. I spent another year in craniofacial surgery. And then…” He squeezed the ball. “It was a path. Stretched out before me. I took one step at a time—each one a little higher and a little harder—and then I looked up, and here I was.” He laughed, shortly and without humor. “Nose jobs and cheek implants.”
“And correcting cleft palates,” Sarah said, “for kids whose faces are so malformed they can barely eat.”
“Two weeks a year. On training junkets where I spend seventy-five percent of my time in bars and only about twenty-five percent in the OR.” He planted the ball back on the desk, then clasped his hands behind his back. “Though it’s just like you to make it more than it really is. That’s what I always loved about you.”
Love.
“Here’s the difference between us—you haven’t changed, Sarah.” He took a few steps toward her but paused at the side of his desk, trailing a finger over the shiny surface. “When I saw you in that hotel in Bangalore, I thought I’d conjured you right up out of thin air. I mean, there I was, out in the wild again. Bringing the cutting edge of medical technology to the hinterlands. Feeling the way I used to feel, when we both were young and working for the Corps. Feeling generous—like I was really making a sacrifice with my two weeks abroad. Like I was really making a difference in the world, fixing a couple of kids’ mangled faces—”
“Success,” Sarah said, huskily, hearing the echo of the same words she had spoken to Kate, “comes one patient at a time.”
“And in the middle of all this—you appear.” He looked at her as if he didn’t dare to reach for her. “Do you have any idea what you do to me? You’re so pale—it’s like you’re made out of some angelic stuff. None of the troubles of the world have ever touched you. All these years, and the places you’ve been, and the things you’ve seen—the suffering and the insanity and the whole wretched world of problems that cannot be fixed, no matter how much money you throw at them—and there you are, standing there in the flesh, like the dream of something I gave up a long time ago.”
Sarah went very still, because the man standing in front of her, the man talking like he couldn’t get the words out fast enough, was the Colin she remembered from Paraguay. The Colin who grappled every night with the big questions of what they were doing, and what good they were doing, when what the people really needed was a decent sewer system and a road through to the city, not a couple of health-care workers who’d fix broken bones and hand out some pain reliever and do no long-term good. How she loved to listen to him then, hear his determination to make the world a better place.
“You stood there like my conscience. I had no business touching you. For more than one reason.”
The major reason, Sarah figured, was pictured on his desk in that gilded frame she could only see the back of.
He swiveled, gesturing to the broad expanse of the bright and airy room. “I couldn’t tell you about this, Sarah. I couldn’t look in your eyes and see the disappointment. Then I wouldn’t be your heroic savior anymore. I’d be just another guy who sold out.”
She took a sudden interest in the straight, even stitching of the leather armchair. She shouldn’t be thinking this way, but she couldn’t help herself. What a waste it was for all of Colin’s surgical talent to be put toward giving wealthy women bigger, firmer breasts, fuller butts, clearer skin, and smaller noses. All that talent frittered away on the ridiculous perfectionist goal of chiseling vain women into somebody else’s version of beauty. What kind of goal was this, when the world was full of women suffering post-natal complications, and children dying of appendicitis, and farm laborers suffering from strangulated hernias gone gangrenous?
“I never was a hero.” He unbuttoned his suit jacket, sweeping it aside to plant a fist on his hip. “I couldn’t deal with the bureaucracy and the ugliness of it all, the great heaping weight of the problems. You know what they are. Some organization is set up to deliver the needed services. You go out there and talk about the issues and solicit money for them. Then the organization becomes a monster of its own that swallows a good part of that charitable giving. Even the fraction that goes through, what is it used for? You know. You’ve bribed dockworkers. You know the transportation rules that require high-cost carriers to foreign countries. You’ve mollified warlords with cash. You’ve seen whole truckloads of grain stolen by the very military that is causing half the problems the populace is facing—”
“Tranquilo, Colin.” Her voice was whiskey-soft, and tears pricked in her throat. “No one can save the world alone.”
“Yeah, well, that’s my arrogance. If I couldn’t do it myself…” He gestured to his corner office and all its gleaming furniture. “Then why bother doing it at all?”
Sarah wandered to the windows. Los Angeles sprawled as far as she could see, a series of neat, compact buildings and long paved roads, and in the distance, the brown of gentle hills.
It usually took about a year and a half for charity fatigue to set in among relief workers. They all came into the job so fired up and so excited and a little scared of what they were going to face. Eager for the gratitude they were sure was going to be rained down upon them. Determined to change the way things were done. Like puppies, overexcited and proud of their schoolroom multicultural knowledge. It was no wonder so many people overseas couldn’t stand Americans. Everyone knew puppi
es needed a few whacks to the head with a rolled-up newspaper before learning how to behave with the proper humility.
Why didn’t she recognize that in Colin when they were in Paraguay? She supposed she’d been new to the experience, too. Fresh and excited and not afraid to admit she was scared. But, yes, now, standing here in his fancy office and thinking about their conversations, those long talks naked in a mud hut in the jungles of Paraguay, thinking about his growing annoyance with the mothers who refused to have their children vaccinated, thinking about the impatience which she’d taken—or mistaken—for dedication, for passion, for drive. Now she saw, all too clearly, that he’d had all the signs of charity fatigue a long time ago.
She’d blinded herself to it. To admit it would be to destroy the perfectionist image she’d come to love, of the heroic surgeon saving a boy’s life in a mud hut in a rain forest.
He approached behind her. Carefully. Close enough that she could feel his warmth and the swelling aura of his personality. “I’m not proud of the way I treated you after Paraguay. I should have made a clean break. But it wasn’t so easy. I liked the way you looked at me. I held on to the knowledge that, somewhere in the world, someone I respected still considered me a hero.”
And you are, for Werai, at least.
“What made it harder was that I knew you didn’t feel the same way I did. Even all those years ago, I knew you’d stay in the business. You wouldn’t leave the work, disillusioned like everyone else. You never saw charity as work. For you, charity was a state of mind.”
“I get paid, like everyone else.” She swallowed a growing lump in her throat. “And I haven’t been any angel. I’ve traded whiskey for safe passage. And I’ve allowed worse—”
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