Christodora

by Tim Murphy

  With a groan of reluctance, Sam stood up, releasing her gently, picking his sweaty running clothes up off the floor. “All right, Aves,” he said. “Hanky-panky time’s over. I gotta go make deals for Donald Trump and you gotta go get everybody healthy. And together we’ll conquer New York.”

  “I’m gonna ask Renny to lunch,” she said, pulling a brush from her bag and re-fluffing her hair wings. “I have about a dozen ideas for streamlining DOH, doing more with less.”

  “Go get ’em, honey,” Sam said. He leaned down and kissed her dutifully, then trudged up the stairs. She stood up, put her clothes back together, and was slipping her pumps back on when Francelle gingerly reentered the kitchen.

  She smiled impishly at Francelle; she couldn’t resist—it was fun to tweak her island sense of propriety. “Good morning, Francelle,” she singsonged.

  Collecting dishes and cups off the table, Francelle gave her a sidelong frown, but Ava caught the frown twisting into an amused, awkward smile as Francelle turned away. “Morning to you, Mrs. H.,” Francelle said. “Aren’t you running late to be downtown?”

  She laughed. “You sound so reproving, Francelle!” She picked up her bulging bag. “No, not too much so. It doesn’t hurt to throw off the schedule a little bit here and there. Would you do that sometime today, Francelle? Would you leave a load of laundry till tomorrow and call your sister for twenty minutes instead?” How bizarre! she thought. She’d never told Francelle to call Jamaica from the house phone before! She liked how it felt: magnanimous.

  Francelle turned, looked at her perplexedly. “I guess I might have time for that,” she finally said, loading the dishwasher, “seeing as it’s Serendipity day. You didn’t forget that, did you?”

  She had forgotten—in her head, she’d been planning her workday out through six o’clock—but she wouldn’t give Francelle the satisfaction of knowing that, not with all the unspoken tension between them over who spent how much time with Emmy and whom, inevitably, Emmy was more attached to, felt safest with. “Of course I didn’t forget that, Francelle,” she said. “Wednesday is Serendipity day. I look forward to it as much as Emmy does.” Did Emmy look forward to it?

  “All right, Mrs. H., have yourself a good day, then. I’ll leave something for you to heat up tonight before I leave at two.”

  “Enjoy your half day, Francelle.” She strode over to Francelle and put an arm around her. Francelle went rigid, taken by surprise—perhaps a touch horrified? “Thank you for all you do for us, my dear. You’re part of this family.” As she walked away, she spied Francelle looking back at her, mouth agape, completely baffled now. Oh, she had ruffled the unrufflable Francelle. What fun!

  The glorious spring day, the flowers blooming on the dividers on Park Avenue, the rough thrill of the 6 train downtown . . . the preponderance of good-looking men on the subway and on the street, which she seemed to notice with a special zeal, even though she’d just had sex with Sam. I could have sex all over again right now! she thought, amazed and delighted, walking down Worth Street, aware of feeling sexier in her scoop-neck blouse, higher-than-usual heels, fluffier-than-usual hair. She was only thirty-eight, for God’s sake! The youngest deputy health commissioner the city had ever had. And maybe the sexiest? she thought with an inner giggle.

  On the way in, she passed Lauren from TB control. They didn’t get along usually. But she surprised herself, exclaiming, “Such a lovely day, isn’t it?” as they passed. She seemed to surprise Lauren, too, who nearly winced. “Yes, it is,” Lauren replied. “I nearly didn’t want to come inside.”

  “I had no choice,” she sang back. “I have a full plate today!” She stopped in the office kitchen for a second cup of coffee, then, carrying it with panache and a certain boom-boom in her step, she thought, swung into her own office. And there was a handsome young Hispanic man in a shirt and tie, square-framed glasses sitting on his face, in the chair in front of her desk with a stack of files on his lap—probably not a day over twenty-five!

  “Oh!” she exclaimed. “Well, hello there.”

  He looked up, startled. “Oh! Hello, Doctor.” He rose abruptly, some of the files slipping from his lap to the floor, and they knelt down to collect them together. “I’m Hector. Villanueva. From Columbia.”

  “Oh, of course.” She smiled. “You’re my intern for the summer. Dr. Ferrer told me about you. Well, hello, Hector.” She extended her hand. “It’s nice to meet you. Please just call me Ava.”

  He looked at her quizzically. “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure I’m sure,” she said. He was certainly handsome, she thought, settling behind her desk, but so shy and awkward! She could already tell. And those glasses! He had such large, lovely brown eyes behind them. Hadn’t he heard of contact lenses?

  “I’m sorry I’m sitting here,” he said, even though he wasn’t sitting anymore, but was standing, nervously, the stack of folders in his arms. “Mrs.—um, Mrs. Conti said it was okay because she didn’t know where else to put me until you came in.”

  “It’s fine,” she said, her mind already thrumming with all the different projects she could put him on . . . and wasn’t this sweet, she already felt a bit maternal toward him! “I came up at Bellevue. I know how to work around distraction. I’m not one of those lab geeks!”

  He laughed—awkwardly, she noted; oops, he probably was one of those lab geeks. “So how’s Columbia?” she asked. “Renny—” She caught herself. “I’m sorry,” she said, all mock contrite. “Dr. Ferrer said you were interested in infectious. I.D.”

  He nodded soberly. “I am.”

  “But why? Infectious is over, everything’s been figured out. Why not cancer or heart? That’s where the big work’s gonna be—and the big money.”

  “Well—” he stammered. He was so nervous! Was she talking too hard, too fast, scaring him? “Well, in the developing world— ­infectious—”

  “Oh, I get it! You want to do I.D. in the developing world. Oh, well, that’s a different story. Lots of work to do there! You’re from—where, the D.R.?”

  “The P.R.,” he said. They both laughed a bit at the inadvertent wordplay. “We came here when I was thirteen.”

  “Ah, sí, muy bien,” she said. “Maybe you can help me with my Spanish, among other things, because it’s not very good.”

  “Sure, I’ll help you,” he said softly. She smiled. She hadn’t even been serious, but he’d taken her seriously. He was sweet. If only he’d lose those dorky glasses—he didn’t know how handsome he was!

  She needed to bring them back on point—her busy day! Her meetings! The outlines and flowcharts she wanted to work through! “Let’s talk about what I’ve got on my plate and how you can help me out,” she began. And just then, speaking of I.D., Blum rapped on her door, came in, and handed her a brief, ignoring Hector.

  “You seen this?” Blum asked.

  She scanned it, eyes widening. “Another Kaposi’s sarcoma report out of St. Vincent’s? In a thirty-two-year-old guy?”

  Blum nodded. “Another homosexual.”

  Ava handed Hector the memo. “Here’s your first task, Hector,” she said. “Xerox this for me.” Hector took the memo and left the office.

  She turned back to Blum. “This is, what? Case seven in the past few months?”

  “Eight.”

  “What the hell do you think this is? This cancer is, like, a few old Jewish and Italian men, once in a blue moon.”

  “I wonder if it’s hep B–related,” Blum said. “It’s rampant in the gay community.”

  “A virus-linked cancer,” she mused.

  “Either that or too much disco or nitrites or sex or something.”

  This bugged her. “Not funny, Blum. You know my brother’s gay.”

  “Hey, I’m serious about the nitrites! What the hell could it be? And you know L.A.’s reporting a bunch of PCP cases in homosexuals.”


  “Pneumocystis, yeah,” she said. “I read about that.” Hector returned with her copy of the memo. “What’s your take on this, Hector? If it’s community based, it feels epi to me.”

  Hector looked down. “I haven’t been following it,” he all but mumbled. God, this boy is uncomfortable in his own skin! Ava thought. Then again, hey, he was, like, twenty-five, he was a kid.

  She told Blum to call a meeting if and when the next KS case came in; she couldn’t spend more time on this today—she had multiple meetings to make, projects to push along, briefs to plow through. And all by three o’clock, then Emmy! She set up Hector in a windowless office—well, frankly, it was a large closet—a few doors down. Then she plunged into her day with gusto. She bore down on her folder, scratching out flowcharts on her pad as she picked through briefs, calling in Rosemary a few times to dictate a memo to her.

  “You’re going too fast for me!” Rosemary complained at one point.

  “I have a lot on my plate today!” she snapped back.

  Then she put in several calls around the office and around town to float various questions and ideas. Where was that old late-morning sluggishness? Her mind seemed to move along, click, click, click, ticking off tasks, making amazing connections that had never occurred to her before. She’d felt this sort of mental efficiency all week, but it really seemed to have hit critical mass today. As she read and worked, she sat in her chair in a manner that felt, to her, provocative, legs crossed, bobbing one foot, one hand pulling back one feathered wing of hair, imagining a shiny barrette there. She was the naughty deputy health czar, like in some Times Square blue movie!

  At eleven, she had the Wednesday briefer with Renny and the other deputies. En route, she pulled Hector out of his glorified closet. “Come on in and listen to the poobahs and learn how the sausage is made, Hector,” she said, taking his arm as they walked toward the conference room. “It’s your internship, after all.”

  “I’m nervous,” he whispered. And yes, his skinny arm was shaking! “I get nervous in groups.” She felt another maternal surge toward him. She’d thought she’d be annoyed to have to find tasks for this intern, this special pick of Renny’s, but she actually already liked having him around. He wanted to go into tropical diseases! How noble! She hoped a summer in the health building wouldn’t drain him of his idealism.

  “You probably won’t have to say anything,” she told him, squeezing his arm. “Just look admiringly at me when I say things.”

  He looked at her, confused. She winked to show she was making a joke of sorts.

  “Oh,” he said. He laughed a little, relieved.

  Lauren led with the latest data on the slow outbreak of drug-resistant TB in the homeless shelters. Lauren fumbled around the truth of the matter, which was that patients weren’t completing the course of drugs they were prescribed. Ava simply had to break in, and she did, summarizing a study she’d just read out of Minneapolis on the efficacy of directly observed therapy—where you hold the meds and make the patient show up daily and take them in front of you, to be sure they’re taken—in wiping out a similar strain of first-line-resistant TB.

  “These are precisely the areas,” Ava said, rushing—there was a certain soberer affect she assumed in these meetings, her voice a bit lower and slower, but today she couldn’t keep the excitement, the speed, out of her voice—“where we could benefit greatly by having a monthly NYC convocation, flying out some of the investigators of these studies in smaller cities for a few nights in New York. Show them a good time, get a block of Broadway seats out of the mayor’s office, let them know they’re in good hands and they’re not going to be knifed on the street, then basically hole them up here during the day—or in, say, a catered meeting room at the Sheraton—and pick out of them how they implemented these programs. Then we’ll figure out how to scale them up for New York–size problems.”

  Renny was leaning in, engaged, but she noted that Lauren had wheeled her chair back from the table a bit, was regarding her in a civil pose but with murderous eyes behind her glasses.

  “The funny thing, Doctor,” Lauren began—and, uh-oh, she was calling her “Doctor” and not “Ava,” which signaled chilliness and maybe a hint of bite, and not collegial warmth—“is I was just about to brief on the Minneapolis directly observed-therapy study and more or less make the same suggestion that we have the investigators come to New York. Or deign to visit them.”

  Uh-oh. She caught Hector’s terrified eyes—though a touch intrigued, perhaps? Renny cleared his throat. Awkwardness hung in the room. “Either way!” Ava finally chirped. “I’ll be happy to throw my beret up to the sky in the middle of downtown Minneapolis.” She smiled sweetly, innocently, at Lauren.

  Everybody laughed. “You’re gonna make it after all, Aves,” Blum cracked. The boys liked her far more than Lauren, she knew that much. Lauren had no choice but to smile along like a good sport.

  “Lauren, talk to the support staff about getting the Minneapolis people here,” Renny said. “And Mary Richards here can decide if we’ll take them to A Chorus Line or Sugar Babies.”

  Everybody laughed again. This was quite a bit of humor for these dry health types! She ducked her head down, smiled. Renny’s crack was a reminder that he liked her, was amused by her. Easily now she could touch his arm after the meeting and set up a lunch date. She managed to be quiet for the rest of the meeting, excepting her own briefings, of course, but her mind was racing. Out of any half-baked idea floated in the room today, she might squeeze a truly great one! And that’s why, whereas before she’d occasionally jotted down a word or two on her pad, today she was sketching out a flowchart of the meeting, graphic style, to try to capture who said what and what it led to and how it all looped back and connected. Blum was sitting next to her, and at one point, she caught him looking at her pad quizzically.

  “What the hell is that?” he whispered.

  “I’m capturing ideas,” she said.

  “Rosemary’s taking notes, though,” he whispered back. His eyebrows scrunched down, toward each other. “You okay, Aves?”

  Oh God, it was because Blum, her best friend at Health, knew; he knew about that period about a year ago, because she’d confided in him, knew about the crying, the anxiety, the inability to concentrate, the insomnia, Sam’s worry over it, Emmy’s fearful sensing of it, the Valium, then the having to roll back on the Valium, the new drug that finally seemed to make things better over the course of a few months. That’s the thing about sharing this stuff with your work friends—they’re always looking out for you and for signs, signs.

  “I’m great,” she whispered. She was!

  He shrugged with his eyes, as if to say, Well, okay, if you say so. She caught Hector peering at them. Nosy Hector! She winked at him. He half smiled, looked away, exquisitely young and awkward. The meeting ended and she took him down to Chinatown for lunch since she had to check in on a restaurant-hygiene drive down there anyway. They made the round of a few restaurants on Mott and Canal. At the ancient Wo Hop, she noticed the lack of DOH hygiene-rule signs on the wall. She strode toward the woman absently nibbling on wontons at a back table, a stack of purchase orders by her side. Hector followed her.

  “Faye! Why no signs? I brought you signs last time. You’re violating health rules.”

  Faye looked up, grimaced. “Kai—” She made a kind of methodical smoothing gesture, then mimed tacking something up.

  “What? Faye, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Kai—” Faye began again.

  Ava turned to Hector. “Kai’s her husband,” she said. “The owner. He speaks good English.” Hector nodded.

  “So to wipe. To wipe!” Faye continued. “To keep clean.”

  “What?” She felt a bit more aggressive and impatient today toward Faye, and she wasn’t sure why, because she considered Faye almost a friend, and Kai, too.

  Fa
ye looked at Hector, shrugged helplessly.

  “Oh!” Hector said. “You mean to laminate the signs? To wipe them clean?”

  Faye broke into a relieved smile. “Yes! Laminate! To wipe them.”

  Hector turned to her. “He took the signs down to laminate them,” he said.

  She frowned at Faye. “They go right back up?”

  “Of course.” Faye said it as though she were an idiot. “They go back up tonight.”

  Ava felt strangely disappointed that she had to let the whole thing go. She’d come down here today weirdly looking for some sort of crusade, perhaps so Hector could see her in action. “Well, okay,” she said. They made a quick round through the kitchen. It looked okay except for some shrimp tails she saw scattered on the floor and an empty soap dispenser over the utility sink. “Pick those up,” she told Faye, who knelt and picked up the shrimp tails with her bare hands. “Fill that.” Faye turned and barked in Cantonese at one of the workers, who walked toward the back, returning with a plastic tub of bubble-gum-pink soap. “Looks good otherwise, Faye.”

  “Thank you, Ava,” Faye singsonged back to her.

  Hector inadvertently laughed. Faye giggled, too. So the minorities were having a laugh at her, eh? Anger stabbed her, then she laughed herself, just as unbidden. “We need to feed this boy, Faye! Two egg-drop soups.”

  “Special for you,” Faye said, leading them out of the kitchen.

  She and Hector sat up front. “Did you see that poor guy in the back?” she asked him. “I wonder how much they’re paying him. Did you know they’re trying to unionize at the Silver Palace dim sum parlor? Good for them. It’s slave labor over there.”

  “They’re scared, though, ’cause they’re immigrants,” Hector said.

  She looked up from her soup at him. “Would you do me a favor?”

  His eyes widened, frightened.

  “Would you take off your glasses for a minute?”

  “Take off my glasses?”

  “Yeah. Just for a minute.”