My Education (37 page)

One hot May morning I awoke three months' pregnant, by the clock I'd set seven weeks back. Matthew's head lay dented in his kingly pile of pillows like a bust made of lead, his breathing magically silent, testimony to the power of the strange nasal tape he applied without fail every night. “Wake up, Tiger,” I said, climbing on him. “Awful news. Lion's getting a teammate.”

“Another one?” Matthew cried sleepily. “God, no. We'll die in the poorhouse.”

Dutra was the crimp in my elation: I realized seven weeks was the same span of time since we'd had him and Nikki to dinner. Had they spent it in bed? As always I called him at his hospital, despite the change in his domestic conditions, despite the fact that he now had an actual wife who might be sitting at that moment on his Italian Modern chaise, blissfully fielding his incoming calls. As always the mellifluous switchboard attendant put me straight through to his office, and as always he answered—“When do you do your lifesaving surgery, anyway?” I demanded as greeting, because the rare times I remembered it was a pleasure to inflict on him the sort of verbal ambush he routinely doled out.

“All the fucking time, Ginny, except I do still allow myself lunch, and you might have noticed that your biannual phone calls to me are always at the lunch hour, because you can't bring yourself to call me unless you're also making a sandwich, so you don't have to feel like you're wasting your time.”

The son of a bitch: I
was
making a sandwich. I stopped mid-scrape of the knife over bread out of fear he would hear it. “For Pete's sake, Dutra, it's you who owes me a phone call. I haven't spoken to you since we had you and Nikki to dinner. Ever heard of ‘thank you'?”

“You didn't get Nikki's note?”

“Nikki's what?”

“Forget it. It's probably still in her purse. Or she put it in the mail without a stamp. Or she never remembered to write it at all. Sorry. I should've just called but she was all into writing a note. I should have known that she wouldn't.”

“How are you guys?” I asked after a moment.

“Divorcing. And you?”

It seemed so certain Dutra must have been aware of my skepticism about his marriage that my first reaction was tainted by guilt. For a moment I could not even lay hold of empathy, so self-regardingly worried was I to sound sufficiently shocked. Yet I was shocked—no less for not being surprised that the marriage had failed. I just hadn't imagined the failure would have the same speed as the marriage itself. “Oh, shoot, Dutra,” I exclaimed. I realized I'd been able to put Dutra out of my mind not despite, but because of his marriage—because his marriage had let me believe, as one always longs to believe of that worrisome parent or sibling or friend, that against all the odds, a lifetime of increasingly lonely cantankerousness had by some miracle been avoided. “I'm so sorry. What happened?”

“Have lunch with me. I don't want to talk on the phone.”

“Of course,” I said, now falling all over myself to accommodate him. “Do you want me to meet you near work?”

“I'll come to you. I can't eat around here.”

Such was his brusque urgency that I agreed to meet him the very next day, at the nicest restaurant in my neighborhood I could think of—“Whatever,” he'd said when I asked him his preferences, “something decent. With wine.” At ten-thirty that morning my phone rang. It was Dutra, barely audible amid an atmospheric howl as if he stood on the deck of a ship. “I'm coming now,” he said.

“What?” I said.

“Now,” he was repeating, almost barking, perhaps only to cleave through the interference, “. . . need to see you now,” and half an hour later we'd converged at the restaurant, an hour earlier than we had planned. It had only just opened for business. The white light of midmorning drenched the farmhouse-quaint room, with its varnished plank floorboards and bare wooden tables and nude brick and undraped windows which amplified and ricocheted the slightest noise, but despite this Dutra's voice didn't scale itself down—when had it ever? “You choose, I could give a shit,” he said with echoing clarity of the tables, all equally unoccupied, which the flustered waitress indicated to us with a sweep of her arm while retreating, her apron not yet tied, to the shelter of a cappuccino station. “Bring us a wine list,” Dutra called peremptorily after her as I led him to a table beside the front window.

“How about ‘please,'” I suggested, as if he were Lion.

“Too hot,” Dutra said of the table. “I can't sit in the sun. It's a furnace outside.”

“How about this one, then.”

“That'll be in full sun in a couple of hours.”

“And we're planning to be here how long?”

“Don't be so eager to leave.”

“I'm not, Dutra, but since you don't care at all where we sit can you please choose a table?”

“So controlling, Ginny,” he admonished as he dropped into a chair at the least sheltered, least intimate, most central and visible table, like planting his flag, in the act grandiosely extending his arm at the opposite chair as if I were the one who was picky—but I saw he took no pleasure in the gibe and might not even realize he'd said it. “I've been fired,” he announced as I sat. “And blacklisted. I'll never operate again. At least not in New York.”

It was possible my mouth was hanging literally open. Since we'd met on the sidewalk outside I'd been trying to ask him, hitting just the right note of alacrity, what had happened with Nikki, for I'd assumed that his crisis with her was the reason he wanted to see me. But the collapse of his marriage was miles downstream, far beneath our attention—not to mention my still-unannounced pregnancy, which I now couldn't manage announcing. “I had a hunch they would do it today,” he went on. “Friday. Traditional day of the axe.” He was deeply agitated. It was only by a Herculean effort of the will that he sat in his chair instead of hurling it and its identical brethren and anything else not tied down through the window. He kept twisting one way, then the other, jutting his long legs to alternate sides, and then twisting to check on the waitress, who'd ducked out of sight. “Excuse me!” he said.

“I'm sorry, you
what
?” I repeated. “How can
you
have been fired? Can they even do that?”

“Of course they can. Hel
lo
,” he greeted our waitress with a psychotic sudden onslaught of charm as she ventured toward us.

“Oh, the wine list!” she exclaimed.

“Y'
know
,” he stilled her with his voice, “you can forget about the wine list if you've got some Beaujolais you can bring us. You
do
? Oh, that's
awesome
. I don't want it warm,” he warned her as she hastened to fetch it.

“What happened?”

“They wanted to get me. Real bad. And they finally got me.”

“Who?”

“All the fucking nobodies. That's what they are. Fucking nobody, no-talent pricks hanging on to their power.”

Friend of his childhood as I essentially was, utterly ignorant of the nature of his actual work, let alone the politicized hierarchies within which it took place, I was either the worst person or the best person in the world to whom he could unburden himself, given how much tutelage I required to follow the story. But in any case I was perhaps the only person. And it didn't make him impatient to have to explain every detail to me, but calmed him, to the extent he could ever be calm.

For years I'd assumed that Dutra, because so highly paid and sought after, must be highly valued as well, by anyone who could matter. This had been, it turned out, only partly true, but his troubles hadn't arisen from the fact that not everyone valued him equally. They arose from the fact that certain people valued him so highly, above everyone else, and that this favoritism coincided with a standing controversy. Dutra's field, like any field of science, was constantly riven by theoretical and practical disagreements, but all these disagreements, and their perpetrators, could roughly be sorted into one of two camps: the camp that left the paradigm of Western medical practice intact, defending it from all outside threats; and the camp that posed the threats—that sought, in other words, nothing less than a paradigm shift. The direction of shift, within camp, was not always harmonious, but by and large it tended east, toward China. I felt only momentary surprise to learn that Dutra not only threw in his lot with the paradigm shifters but was their prize specimen and their chief troublemaker. The surprise I felt because Dutra was, on his surface, so little a crusading world changer. He was a nonjoiner, a prankster and cynic who only recycled for money, who mocked vegans for their pious narcissism, who had never, to my knowledge, cast a ballot in any election because no candidate had ever failed to earn his contempt. But, as I say, all this surprise was momentary, because once he offered this alternate glimpse of himself, I realized what had always been obvious: Dutra was the only true idealist I'd ever known. He was intolerant to the utmost degree of waste, incompetence, disorganization, incompletely implemented knowledge, and wrongheaded priorities—he was intolerant, in other words, of human life, and all human-built systems, including the system of care at his hospital.

The head of Dutra's hospital—Dutra's boss, a category of person I'd not thought existed—was a hidebound Western-style traditionalist who disliked Dutra, finding him a loudmouthed irreverent prick, and was disliked by Dutra in turn, but the animus between the two men only made up a baseline and could have repeated forever. It was a third factor—external and wealthy—that provided the tune. The hospital's board of directors, as picturesque a collection of white-skinned and white-haired rich people as convened to do good anywhere in Manhattan, were for the most part ignorant or indifferent to such controversies of practice as Dutra had begun kicking up—for example, Dutra's declaration that a large percentage of the surgeries performed at the hospital, his included, were profit-driven and unnecessary; or Dutra's insistence that the hospital spearhead American use of supposedly uniquely efficacious Chinese traditional herbs. Either the board members knew nothing of all this, or didn't take sides, but one of them, a well-known philanthropist, got on Dutra's bandwagon and made it her own. She and Dutra twice traveled to China, and grew thick as thieves. At last she announced her intention of endowing the hospital with countless millions of dollars to establish a research institute. Its aim would be the reconciliation of the medical theories and practices of the East and the West, and its director would be Dutra.

“So you might say, Sounds pretty opportunistic, but believe it or not, and it doesn't matter either way, I didn't want her to pull the trigger on the institute. My contract with the hospital was supposed to be up at the end of this year and I knew I was leaving. No way I'd stay, even if I wanted to. I've been saying no to jobs all over the country the whole time I've been chained at that place because, idiot that I am, I didn't want to leave New York. But with the idea for the institute coming together I decided I had to get out. Find a real place, a real way to do this. Not a bullshit way to do this. So whatever Feshbach”—his boss—“wants to say, that I had this board member under my thumb, her going ahead with her gift is the proof that I didn't. Doing that, she signed my death warrant. Feshbach had to get rid of me fast, before my contract came up for renewal and I nailed this directorship. He had to bust ass to hang on to the money and get rid of me.”

“But how could he? He needs you! Without you that woman won't donate.”

“Of course she will. She did. Rich people are like that, they get excited and want to throw money around. She didn't need me to do that. The institute'll bear her name whether I'm there or not.”

“But you're the whole reason for it! Isn't she loyal to you?”

“Shit no. She's putting distance between us right now. By five o'clock she won't ever have met me.”

“But
why
—”

“Because of how they did it, Ginny. Not to mention I've lost all my power. But it's the
way
that I've lost all my power.” His voice faltered abruptly, broke off mid-harangue, and he recrossed his long legs with violence and peered out the window. “They did me so good. The one way that, the more I fight back the more done in I am.”

They'd gotten him on sexual harassment. The accusation and perhaps even the crime seemed equally unthinkable and inevitable, and for a damning moment my voice failed me from my fear it was true. He'd mastered himself again, whatever rivulets of moisture had ventured to travel his tear ducts had been scorched away, and he was watching me closely. “Never happen,” he coldly assured me. “I don't shit where I eat.”

“That metaphor's disgusting and doesn't make sense,” I snapped, hiding my shame with annoyance.

“Then no metaphor: I don't fuck where I work. I don't fuck, I don't flirt, and I sure as shit never harass.”

“I know that you wouldn't.”

“Yeah, sure. But you can
imagine
me doing it, can't you? Come on. I know you can. You've known me a long time, you know me probably better than anyone else. You and Alicia. And you can imagine it.”

“No, I can imagine other people imagining it.”

“Short step. And don't think I'm wounded. I'm an asshole. I shoot my mouth off. I make people uncomfortable. Do I say rude, raunchy shit in the OR to put myself at ease and keep my brain from imploding? Fuck yes, I do. The stress I'm under, most people would die or they'd start killing others. I
save
people and in the process I sometimes crack jokes, fucking send me to jail. Bathroom humor, sex humor, whatever fucking humor I can find in there, they should be grateful—men, women, doctors, interns, patients, janitors, I hassle
everybody
, I fuck with
everybody
, I don't
exploit my position of power
. I don't
create a hostile work environment for women
. All my life I've been a loudmouth, all my career I've been a loudmouth, from the day I walked into that hospital I've been a loudmouth and people might not like it but they have to accept it because I'm great at what I do so tough shit.”