I'm Glad About You (2 page)

“Where was that?” Seth the OCD word fanatic asked.

“Where was what?” Alison asked, confused again.

“Where’d you do your undergrad?”

“Undergrad?” she repeated. “Oh, I went to Notre Dame.”

As soon as she had admitted this, she wished she hadn’t. Having arrived in New York only five months before, she was already acquainted with the eagerness with which those interminable Ivy Leaguers pried into the facts around your college education just so they had an excuse to bludgeon you with their own. And she had stepped into his trap! “Let me guess. You went to Harvard,” she said, beating him to the punch line. She tilted her chin at him, aiming for charming defiance.

“Well, yes, actually,” Seth admitted with a nod. Unfortunately, the charming defiance didn’t manage to outshine the leaden fact of Notre Dame. He glanced over her shoulder, to see if anyone more worthy of his attention had drifted into view behind her. She hated New York at times like this, so full of intellectual phonies desperate to take any opportunity to assert their superiority in ways that, honestly, would have been considered just rude in the Midwest. “Guess they weren’t supposed to let girls from Ohio into this particular corner of the demimonde,” she told him tartly. “A Harvard boy who writes for
Vanity Fair
, how on earth did you get stuck talking to a loser like me?”

“Just lucky, I guess.” He shrugged, playing the double negative now. “And what do you do, Alison?”

She looked him straight in the face. “I’m, actually, I’m an actress.” She tried to keep her confidence up but she knew how idiotic this would sound to him, or anyone, in point of fact.

“So how is that going for you?” he asked, with deliberate disinterest.
Too bad
, she thought.
I thought he was kind of cute.
He was already someone she had known in the past. “I’m going to get another glass of wine,” she told him.

“Terrific,” he noted flatly. It was so dismissive she blinked a little, and took a step back. He had turned away, and was saying hello to some other loser friend of Lisa’s, a girl with an eager smile and enormous breasts. Alison felt her heart constrict with a tinge of fear and disappointment.
Whatever, he’s a creep
, she told herself. Then she pushed through the bitter little crowd of young professionals who had gathered for a fun evening in Lisa’s ugly and overpriced apartment, trying to get to that table in the corner where people had dumped the wine bottles they’d delivered as party gifts.

“You met Seth!” Lisa exclaimed, sticking her head out of the closet-sized kitchen and raising her eyebrows with smug, conspiratorial glee. “He’s so fabulous. Really it is ridiculous how successful he is, he has his own column for
Vanity Fair
and he’s had pieces everywhere, I think he’s doing something for
Vogue
right now. Maybe
GQ.
Or that piece maybe already came out, I can’t remember. He’s very prolific and he knows a ton of people plus
I
think he’s really hot, he’s so
tall.
His family has buckets of money, his father is something huge at Goldman Sachs and you should
see
where he lives in Tribeca.”

“Goldman Sachs is like the institutional version of the anti-Christ, Lisa,” Alison reported with an air of sincere regret that this fact had somehow escaped her friend’s notice.

“I’d put up with people calling me the anti-Christ if I had money like that,” Lisa tossed back at her.

“Yeah, well, I think your friend mostly wanted to get laid, so it’s fine. I’m from the Midwest, we don’t do that on a first date,” Alison reported. “Plus he’s an asshole.”

“No, he’s great!” Lisa insisted, pretending that Alison’s position on sex with strangers was so outdated and ludicrous she didn’t even have to acknowledge it. “He’s juggling a lot of different commitments, magazine people have to have so many things going on that sometimes it takes them a little time to unwind and just be themselves. Plus he told me he just got here from a big meeting with the
Times
Sunday magazine, which he’s been really worried about . . . So he’s probably still just thinking about that; he’s under a lot of pressure because so much is happening for him right now. And tomorrow he’s running out to the Hamptons, his parents have a place in Amagansett and there’s some big family party he has to go to.”

Alison could not for the life of her understand why going to a party in the Hamptons tomorrow might be considered an excuse for lousy behavior today, and she sincerely wished that she might be asked to care more about the young man’s character than his résumé. But Lisa’s attention had moved on to other subjects. Alison watched as her friend found herself caught in a web of arms and hands reaching desperately for the half-empty bottles of cheap wine, which cluttered the table behind her. Lisa was an elegant, slender blonde who moved with an amused grace through the center of it all. The apparently ravenous young professionals who surrounded her were consuming a simple tray of grapes and cheeses in mere seconds in a piranha-like frenzy. Blonde Lisa laughed with delight and threw her hands up in a gesture of mock despair. “I never get enough food,” she admitted happily.

In the Midwest, there’s always enough food
, Alison thought. She thought of her mother’s housewarming parties, where neighbors who had known one another for thirty years would gather on the back porch and talk about golf scores and school functions and the weather. Her mother would serve hot hors d’oeuvres, sesame chicken with a honey-mayonnaise dressing, toasted cheese rounds, and everyone’s favorite, sausage balls, a spectacular concoction made of grated cheddar, Jimmy Dean sausage, and Bisquick all mashed together and cooked in the broiler. Then Mom would load the dining room table with platters heaped with sliced ham and turkey and roast beef, alongside a breadbasket filled with miniature sandwich rolls, around which she had curled lovely little dishes of ketchup and mustard and even more mayonnaise. And down there at the far end of the table, a big bowl of salad for anyone who was maybe thinking of trying to eat healthy. After everyone had gorged themselves on sandwiches and finger food and a few bites of salad, there would be plates of cookies and brownies and, if Aunt Sis was coming, a chocolate sheet cake, or an extra plate of those crazy peanut butter cookies with an entire Hershey’s Kiss shoved into the middle of each.

Beside the memory of this plenty, the one platter of Brie, Swiss, crackers, and seedless grapes that Lisa had bought at a deli two blocks away looked exactly like what it was—lame. It was already finished off a mere thirty-five minutes after the first guests had arrived; the piranhas had swept it clean and moved on to the consumption of more wine and booze, of which there was a river.

Lisa picked up the empty platter and held it over her head. “Go back and talk to Seth,” she ordered Alison.

“We didn’t like each other, Lisa,” Alison said clearly, hoping this would put an end to the discussion.

“You talked to him for three minutes! You have to try harder, I mean it. I’ve been in New York a lot longer than you and I know what’s out there. Trust me. He’s the only guy in the room smarter than you.” Having delivered this pronouncement with definitive finality, she sailed off into her minuscule kitchen.

He’s not smarter than me,
Alison said to herself. Which, she admitted in her proud and lonely heart, was the problem.

two

“N
O, HE
DOESN’T
have a temperature but he’s been extremely fussy for five days, it’s been five days and his nose is running non
stop
,” the determined woman announced. She clutched a miserable two-year-old on her knee and talked over the kid’s head impatiently, like he was some kind of unmanageable ventriloquist’s dummy, although he was really quite patient, Kyle noticed. Not listless, just tired. Slightly heightened color in the cheeks but no tears or frustration, no fussiness whatsoever. “I saw Dr. Grisholm last week and
he
said that it was a virus and there’s nothing anyone can do for a virus but this has been going on much too long and he needs an anti
bio
tic. I don’t know why you people can’t just prescribe that stuff over the phone, it’s not going to hurt
anybody
and we
need
it and I’ll tell you I know you make us come down here to pick up the prescription just so you can charge us for the office visit and it’s ridiculous, the way you are
gouging
us when all we need is an antibiotic! He’s sick! He’s really sick! And I’m tired of all this messing around with the insurance company. If there was someone to complain to I would, I would really complain but, well, you’ve fixed that, haven’t you, no one is even allowed to have an
opinion
without being
charged
for it.”

Kyle reached out his hands with a gentle confidence, holding them open toward the child with a simple gesture. “May I?” The bottle-blonde mother was only too willing to get the kid off her lap. She handed him over abruptly. The baby looked up with mournful brown eyes as Kyle swung him through the air with a breezy lift—that always made them grin or giggle, no matter how bad they felt—and set him on the edge of the stainless steel counter, rather than the examining table. They liked that too.

“Is that safe?” the dreary mother asked.

“It is when you have a big boy, like Joseph, who’s not reeeeally sick,” Kyle observed, ruffling the kid’s curls easily, like he was some kind of pet dog. He floated his fingers under both sides of the boy’s jaw, palpating the glands so gently the kid thought he was being petted. The little boy looked up at Kyle with contented adoration while Kyle carefully wiped his nose with a Kleenex. “Let’s just take a peek into your brain here, Joseph, just for the heck of it,” he said.

“I don’t care what you do ‘just for the heck of it,’” the mother snapped, refusing to fall for the young doctor’s charms. “As long as I get a prescription.”

Kyle cupped his left hand around the child’s chin, to hold his head steady, while he gently inserted the otoscope into the tiny ear. It took only seconds to record the tinge of pink around the drum and the suggestion of a clear discharge; it wasn’t much but it did put forward the possibility that the cold might be moving into the ears, and he might in fact assuage the woman with a scrip for Zithromax without completely compromising his principles. Even as the thought passed through his consciousness, he regretted the impulse. There was no question that antibiotics were still rampantly overprescribed in children, they rarely did any good, and the consequences both immediately, in terms of diarrhea and other digestive disorders, and in the long run—ever more refined strains of bacterial infection which increasingly resisted these previously effective treatments—were not insubstantial.

“Has he been pulling at his ears?” Kyle asked, hoping the hideous mother might provide him with more reason to just do what she wanted, so that he could be done with this.

“I don’t know. Maybe. Why can’t you tell if he even has an ear infection? Isn’t that what that thing is for?”

The woman was awful, no question. That didn’t mean he could do something his medical training warned him would be potentially damaging to her child.

“There’s some indication of a slight infection but honestly I’m not convinced this is bacterial,” he started, cautious. “Unless it develops further there’s really no indication that an antibiotic is going to do anything more than give him a stomachache, on top of the cold. I’m inclined to agree with Dr. Grisholm; it’s probably viral. In a couple of days I think you’ll start to see some improvement.”

The horrible mother didn’t go for it. He had known she wouldn’t. “I came
down
here,” she informed him, her voice rising. “I came all the way down here and all you can do is tell me he’s sick? That’s ludicrous. And you know I’m going to be charged for this, there will be a
co
pay, or a de
duc
tible, and I didn’t want to come
anyway
, I
said
, ‘Just give me the prescription!’ And your nurse—whatever her name is, on the phone, she was the one who in
sis
ted he had to be seen by a doctor and now I came all the way
down
here to be charged for
nothing
? Are you kidding me? I mean, seriously, are you kidding me?”

“I’m giving you my best advice,” Kyle began again.

“Your best advice is not what I want,” she informed him. She took a step forward, reaching out to snatch her child back from Kyle’s now-suspect care. Startled by the suddenness of her move, he took a step backward and relinquished the boy without argument. “I want to see another doctor,” the woman announced. “I want another doctor!”

She had not yet made it out the door, but her voice was loud and had already breached the privacy of the examination room. Kyle knew that she was well within her rights to ask for a third or even fourth opinion on this matter, and that as soon as she had stepped out into the hallway with her impatience and her complaints, the nurses and aides on shift would scurry about and do her bidding, avoiding his gaze as they bowed to the patient’s right to usurp his authority. He also knew there were two other doctors present in the building who would have little trouble issuing a scrip for Zithromax, which is the easiest thing in the world, without even examining the child.