I'm Glad About You (28 page)

“Well, there are certainly masses of people down at Pediatrics West,” Houndstooth Woman observed. “Everybody’s still out there having babies.”

“That they are,” Kyle interjected, with a finality meant to settle this line of argument. Alison was moving ahead, though, pushing straight toward the coming train wreck. It was her worst failing, and her greatest virtue, this recklessness. Kyle had loved and hated her for it, back in the day.

“It’s just not what you said you wanted to do.”

“What did he say he wanted to do?” Van was looking at her now like she was insane.

“He wanted to go to Ecuador to set up health clinics. Didn’t have to be Ecuador.” She waved her wineglass in the general direction of somewhere else, both insisting on her point and dismissing Kyle’s past with an insouciant social flare. “Could have been anywhere that they needed him. He was studying Navajo at one point so he could go work at the Navajo Nation.”

“Navajo?” Van was beyond astonished at that one.

“You know how they say ‘I love you’ in Navajo?” Alison asked. “They don’t have a word for it, really. Because they don’t believe in possession. You can’t possess another person. You can’t possess anything. So they say ‘I’m glad about you.’ That’s how you say ‘I love you.’ I’m glad about you.” She looked over at Kyle, who was seriously about to kill her. She didn’t care. “Look, he still has the book,” she noted. And there it was, on the shelf,
Navajo Made Easier
, in with all the other books they had wrangled over. Learning Navajo, another complete delusion, long since tossed aside.

“How charming.”

“It’s not anything, Van.”

“The dream of your youth? That’s not anything?”

“It wasn’t a dream. It was nothing.”
Did he actually say that?
The hours Alison had spent listening to him describe the need for doctors in developing countries, the call to social justice, the hope to work for WHO. The whole problem between them, his missionary’s heart and her selfish vision of being an actress. They had never even talked about getting married and it wasn’t the Catholic church that was the problem. What was a Doctor Without Borders going to do with an actress wife?

But what was he doing with this one? What was he doing with a nice house in the suburbs and a pretty wife and a charming toddler and a baby upstairs? What was the name of the place he worked?
Pediatrics West
? That’s what he gave it all up for? This wife and this house and Pediatrics West?

He knew what she was thinking; of course he did. At least that was clear, they still tracked each other’s inner lives with alarming specificity. It wasn’t Alison’s careless reference to their long-buried romance. He was embarrassed before her, the accusation that she had abandoned her dreams had doubled back on him with devastating accuracy.

Why had they given up everything for so little? And if they were going to give up their dreams anyway, why not give them up for each other?

Questions that didn’t have to be answered. Blessedly the door opened behind them; another guest arrived, and another. The blanket of civility descended. It was a dinner party! No one had to account for their souls.

sixteen

“I
’M HAVING DINNER
with Dennis tonight,” Kyle informed Van with casual indifference. He was still at the office, in front of his computer, his eyes bleary from the hours of emailing his practice now required. It was so much cheaper to consult with patients online, there was no way the insurance company would allow him to require office visits when a few keystrokes would do. It didn’t mean less work of course—it meant more patients, given less care. His rage at the failures of the medical system got filed into another corner of his brain while he waited for Van to respond to his announcement.

“You’re having dinner with Dennis? When did this happen?”

“He called this afternoon.”

“And you didn’t think to ask me?”

“I’m asking you now.”

“You’re not asking me, you’re telling me.”

“I’m asking you, that’s why I called, because I’m asking you.” A peeved silence bloomed on the other end of the line. This had been the norm for weeks now, ever since he had, according to Van, “humiliated her” at the dinner party he had insisted on throwing for “his old girlfriend.” The endlessly circular arguments went nowhere, no matter how many times he reminded her that the idea of the dinner party had been
hers
,
she
was the one who thought it would be fun, she wanted her friends to meet the baby and she was bored, that was really how the whole thing had come to pass—no part or whole of any discussion or argument mattered.

And he could not, finally, dismiss the spirit if not the letter of her indictment. It wasn’t the fact that he had gotten into an argument with his old girlfriend. It was what they had argued about. The swift if fleet eruption of accusation between himself and Alison had carried too much information, finally. Van could forgive the social faux pas—they had in fact gotten so heated that they were all but yelling at each other—but what Van couldn’t forgive was the fact that Kyle had never told her, even once, of the missionary dreams of his youth. That he had once wanted to go to Ecuador, or Nicaragua, the mountains of Peru, to work in a health clinic. That Alison knew an essential truth about Kyle’s soul that he had never even mentioned to Van. That she had blurted it in front of their peers. These facts informed every corner of their lives now.

They ticked away, unspoken, in the silence of the phone. He managed to keep his voice impersonal and cheerful. “Is it a problem?”

“Would it matter to you if it was?” He could hear the baby gurgling in her arms, and behind, Maggie chattering away with the cooler tones of Van’s mother, who was in town. The happy contentedness of the life he was providing for all of them breathed through the airwaves. If he had come home for dinner, everyone would tense up and hide and burst into tears over nothing, and she was complaining because he figured out how to give them all a night off?

“Of course it matters, Van, come on,” he said, allowing his voice to sound suitably conciliatory. “I just thought you’d like to have the time with your mom.”

“So what’s the plan, Dennis is going to
cook
for you?”

“No, we’re going to meet downtown, maybe at La Cucina or something.”

“Maybe? You don’t know?”

“Yes, we’re meeting at La Cucina, he was going to call ahead and get us a reservation.” This of course now sounded like a lie, because that’s what it was. He opted for more conciliation, rather than ratcheting things up. “I can come home,” he said. “You sound upset. Did something happen?”

“It’s fine. It’s fine,” Van announced, clipped.

The gurgling happiness of background noises had been silenced by all this. “I’ll come home if you want me to,” he said. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“No. You should go out. One of us at least should have a life.”

“Well,” he said. “I won’t be late.” She hung up without saying good-bye.

How had it come to this? He no longer even tried to sort it out and simply pulled up his calendar to get a sense of his late-afternoon workload. You couldn’t cure everything online; the insurance company still allowed Pediatrics West to offer evening hours twice a week. Sometimes kids get sick at night, and a number of parents were juggling two careers and daytime appointments were impossible to schedule when Mommy’s real estate practice was taking off while Daddy had to go to a conference in Dubai. He glanced at his appointment sheet; ten patients back to back, no breaks. Some of them you’d be able to get in and out in less than a minute, but no parent was going to stand for that after sitting out there in that waiting room for more than an hour.

The kids, honestly, were great. Sniffling, feverish, lethargic at one end of the spectrum and bursting with life at the other, they all seemed preternaturally present, their innocence and energy presenting its own kind of wisdom. You wouldn’t suspect that these adorable creatures were going to evolve into the greedy and largely dim-witted race which had spawned them, although there was a creeping arrogance which showed itself when they got a little older.

His next appointment, luckily, was a four-year-old, Caleb. Wide brown eyes and a yogi-like slouch. Red curls. He looked up at Kyle with mournful expectation.

“Am I going to have to have a shot?” he whispered.

“I don’t know, what’s wrong with you?” Kyle asked him, matter-of-fact. He touched the kid’s forehead lightly. Definitely hot.

“We think it’s the chicken pox,” the mother announced. A slender woman in a skirted suit, she pocketed her iPhone quickly and gave Kyle her full attention. This one wouldn’t be snarling about a short appointment, she clearly wanted in and out. “Or at least that’s the hope.”
Oh, boy
, he thought.

“Then can I assume Caleb has not had his immunizations?”

“Okay, I know some of you don’t approve, but this is an ethical issue for my husband and I,” the mother announced. “We don’t want that stuff in him.”

Kids dying all over the world, and she thought vaccinations were unethical. Caleb looked up at him with those eyes. “I don’t want a shot,” he informed Kyle. His little cheeks were flushed, and now that he had gotten a second look, Kyle could see that the poor kid’s collapsed posture was probably due to muscle pain. Kyle had to resist the urge to pick him up and cradle him. The little boys, especially, seemed so vulnerable.

“No shots,” he said, trying to sound neutral, although he really hated the careless way these people endangered their children, and everyone else’s too. How not to judge that. Yet another mystery. “Let’s see if we can just make you feel better.”

After two hours more of this, he finished, poured himself into his car, and drove over to the back streets of Clinton, the site of Dennis’s elegantly crumbling apartment building. There were plenty of high school cronies who had settled, over time, in Cincinnati, but none of them somehow had the staying power of his pal, who had self-destructed in such a spectacularly public way. Dennis’s excessive drinking had cost him his job at Procter & Gamble, and to “teach him a lesson,” his father had told him in no uncertain terms that he was “on his own.” That meant that the monthly allowance Dennis got was really not anywhere near as large as it could have been. It was also not small enough to force him to get another job. Instead, he invented his own peculiar brand of thrift. His Victorian apartment was small—eight hundred square feet—and because it was in the back of the building, inexpensive. The place was crumbling, but it was not a dump; instead, he had managed to choose a few pieces wisely, culling them from attics of relatives and family friends. A gorgeous bedspread, an antique lamp, leftover pieces of Limoges china, the detritus of weddings long gone by. He lived in two rooms which were, truth be told, elegant and fluid with the touches of decadence. The only thing he had paid for in the whole place? A sixty-two-inch TV.

This spectacular appliance was one of the lures which drew Kyle repeatedly back into Dennis’s sphere. There was little or no television watching in the Wallace household, as Van had never moved off her determination that it was bad for the children. No
Teletubbies
, no
SpongeBob
, not even any
Sesame Street
; there was something in the pixels and the light which apparently seared their little brains and gave them autism. The fact that Kyle was even vaguely resistant to this notion undermined him even further in her eyes. He begged her to show him the studies around children and television watching so that he could perhaps provide a calming perspective on the whole thing. Also, he was hoping she might let him watch the news once in a while if he could prove that there wasn’t in fact radioactivity blasting at them and infecting the whole house, even when the kids weren’t in the living room. No go.

Of course, the underlying suspicion breathed through the house: The real reason Kyle wanted to watch television “occasionally” was that he wanted to see the completely trashy show his ex-girlfriend was on. And in point of fact, Kyle
had
once or twice watched Alison’s show over at Dennis’s apartment, although he would never admit as much to Van. The thing was stupid, but given the larger questions of his own life—a wife who disliked him, daughters who were afraid of him, a medical practice that was drowning him in paperwork, a God who appeared and disappeared at will—he found its inanities cheerfully soothing. Particularly since Alison has shown up, out of the blue, and reminded him that she still lived on the planet.

“You missed a good one last week,” Dennis informed Kyle, upon his arrival. “Alison making out with a naked police officer. In a swimming pool. It was riveting.”

“I thought she was back together with what’s his name.”

“Rob. They are back together, yes. Last week was a repeat. Well worth repeating, too, I must say.” He handed Kyle a whopping glass of scotch and refreshed his own. Dennis still went to AA, but mostly for the amusement factor; he took perverse pleasure in getting those chips while drinking on the side. Kyle had registered his protest—really, as a doctor, he couldn’t be expected to think it was a good idea for Dennis to destroy his liver—and Dennis had shrugged him off. Alcoholism was in the eye of the beholder, he supposed. And in fact Dennis had a point: Why didn’t those people at AA even suspect? Or did they? If they did, why did they keep giving him those chips?