My Education (38 page)

But little by little, until fatally, Dutra's enemies at the hospital had come to outnumber his admirers, in a process having little to do with his jokes. It had never helped him that his most passionate admirers were his patients and their family members, who, because he did so well by them, dispersed. While his enemies—the surgical colleagues whose judgments he actively questioned or whose glory he passively, inevitably stole; the workaday inferiors whose lapses in hygiene protocol, and mishandlings of crucial equipment, and countless other health-endangering manifestations of incompetence or laziness he tirelessly reprimanded—stayed on, nursing grudges into vendettas. It had been remarkably easy, Dutra had discovered this morning, for Feshbach to find employees who were willing to swear, in signed but confidential statements, that Dutra had sexually menaced them, with lewd demands and plausible threats. Dutra's signature style—his big mouth—was not the crime so much as circumstantial evidence.

“You have to fight this,” I begged him, for somewhere in the course of his telling I had seen him see himself: outmaneuvered, but above that, unloved. His face had gone gray with fatigue. A barely perceptible scrim—like the chic window shades that our waitress was now lowering, which did not shade the windows at all but did turn outside forms vague and dull—had come over his eyes.

“No point. They never charged that I fucked anyone. They know I could dispute that. This, I can't dispute without looking more guilty. A Chinese finger trap.”

“You
can
dispute it,” I said. “They're ruining your reputation. Smearing you.”

“Yeah. I'll try. I made a call to a lawyer.” But the effort of telling me this seemed the most he would make. Drained of his story, his bile, he was growing inert, though perhaps inertia was not overtaking him, but being willed from within. After we both had been silent a moment he reached for his wineglass and I saw his hand trembling.

“Wouldn't trust me with a scalpel,” he said.

From the restaurant we went to a bar farther down the same block, my answer to his question, “Where can we keep drinking?” He'd never noticed he was drinking alone. I called Matthew clandestinely from the women's bathroom. “I need a huge favor. I'd never ask if it wasn't important, but I need you to come home and take over from Myrna. She leaves at two-thirty so you'll have to come now.”

“What's going on? Where are you?”

All duplicity failed me. “At a bar. With Dutra.”

“Jesus, Regina. You're asking me to cut short my workday so you can sit in a bar? With
Dutra
? You're not drinking, are you?”

“Of course not! What would make you say that? I'm sitting with him because he's been fired. I can't leave him alone. I'm afraid what he'll do.”

“So take him with you to our house. For fuck's sake, Regina. I have meetings today.”

“You have meetings
every
day, and every day, at two-thirty, I drop whatever I'm doing, and I go home to Lion—”

“Oh, is that what this is about? Is that what we're talking about?”

“Don't ask me to bring a blind drunk potential suicide who's been fired
and
is
getting-divorced-by-the-way
home to play with our child! Can't you please just get here? Have I ever once asked you to do this?”

After a pause Matthew said, through a locked jaw, “I'll be there.”

“I'll get home as soon as I can. Maybe you can get back to the office by four—” I began to appease, but he'd already hung up on me.

At the bar Dutra said with impatience, “Tell the guy what you want. We've been waiting for you.”

“I'm just drinking seltzer,” I reminded him pointedly, as if this placed a limit on not just libations but time. Still, one hour passed, and then two, and we entered a third, discussing I no longer even knew what. I finally said, “Dutra, what happened with Nikki? Was there any connection?”

“With this?” He stared blearily. “No. Of course not.”

“Then what happened?”

“She just wasn't the person I thought she was.”

“Like she assumed a false identity? She was a criminal? She had a sordid past?”

“No. No. Just—she was disorganized. She wasted money. She made stupid decisions.”

“But what do you mean? What sorts of stupid decisions?”

“Like that trip to Tunisia. She did most of the planning. The bookings and stuff. She was a travel agent for a while, before I met her. It was her idea we honeymoon there. I figured she must be savvy, know all the secret places. The good deals. The stuff it's worth traveling for. But the place she booked us, it was cheesy. So, okay, maybe Tunisia hasn't got something better. Then the next month I look at my credit card bill, this mediocre place she booked cost like four thousand dollars a week. She just—she hadn't even
tried
to find something good. She just took the first thing she found. And she's like that with everything.”

“The pizza like cake.”

“The everything. This is a woman who worked as a travel agent, real estate agent, jewelry maker, hair cutter, art-gallery sales whatever, publicist whatever, event planner whatever, lived in Tucson, Fort Lauderdale, Miami, Key West, Houston, L.A., San Diego, I don't even know where the fuck else, just randomly doing whatever. No choices. No thought.”

“Just randomly choosing, say, you.”

He shrugged. “Who the fuck knows.”

“Dutra, Nikki pursued you from the far side of the continent. Two years after she met you. That wasn't random. She was crazy about you.”

With head flung back he drained his pint glass. “I'm not divorcing her because she doesn't love me.”

“So it's you, divorcing her?”

“She knows it's not working.” He had summoned the bartender. “Double shot of Maker's Mark, rocks, and another pint of whatever this was. And whatever she's having.”

“I'm having seltzer,” I reminded him, and of his order, “Wow. The more things change.”

“It's been a long time since I've had the freedom to drink to the full extent of my abilities.”

“Maximize your potential.”

“Finish what I've started.”

“Why not do that with Nikki?”

“Because,” he said, demolishing his bourbon, “she can't do that with anything.”

“That's just a waste of ice, the way you're drinking.”

“The next one I'll get neat.”

“Have your feelings about her so totally changed?”

“Why are we talking about this? Even if I'd wanted to stay married this morning, this afternoon it would still have to end.”

“Because this is the nineteenth century? Because you have to support your poor helpless wife in the style to which she's grown accustomed?”

“Nicely said.”

“Why can't she support you?”

“That's an awesome idea. Can you guess how much debt she brought into the marriage? No? I couldn't either. It was really nice. I got to be surprised.”

I called home clandestinely again from the bathroom, interrupting Matthew giving Lion his dinner. It was a pleasure Matthew rarely if ever enjoyed on his own—on the weekends we did it together. I could hear from the dilation of his voice, its rare musical lift, that he'd boxed up his anger at me. He would not let it spoil the windfall of a long afternoon with his son. “So,” he said, between a stream of asides on the subject of carrots to Lion, “job loss
and
divorce?”

“And more. They got him on a bogus charge of sexual harassment. I'll explain it all later. I think he's coming to dinner.”

Matthew loudly deflated. “That's not ideal. We've got steaks. Two of them.”

“Can you cut them some way to serve three?”

“Jesus, Regina. They're T-bones.” A dark pause. “I'll try. I'll make extra potatoes.”

“It's just I get the feeling he's afraid to be alone.”

“I think at this point you could forgivably hand him off to someone else for the rest of the night.”

“There is no one else. I'm actually the only friend he has.”

Through the phone I could almost hear Matthew's mind register this—a fact he would have never conceived on his own, but that was of course indisputably true. It explained a great deal.

“Bring him on then,” Matthew said with exaggerated weariness, the degree of exaggeration a peace offering to me. And so I felt the relief of his forgiveness, and envisioned, once we'd hung up the phone, the parallel tracks of dismay and determination scored onto his brow as he embarked on our dinner. Matthew's annoyance at having two steaks and three people was a very separate thing from his habitual coolness toward Dutra. It would have arisen regardless of whom I'd brought home. Perhaps a legendary hostess of a previous age had transmigrated into Matthew, bringing with her a horror of impromptu or “make-do” arrangements, and an ardent desire to furnish each guest with precisely his keenest desires. Now that Dutra was coming, Matthew was annoyed that he didn't have a standing rib roast, or a contrasting first course, or exceptional wine, or an unopened bottle of rare Armagnac he could set before Dutra once dinner was cleared, for Dutra alone to deflower the seal. Matthew's lavish fastidiousness frequently came in conflict with my exactly opposed tendencies, my miserly attempts to make a meal for five stretch to eight, my noninterest in matching place settings, my “first courses” of olives served out of the plastic tub bearing the price tag, but little by little, in the years we'd been cohabitating, I'd found some of my impatience with him converted to admiration, and some of my admiration even to feeble emulation, so that, steering Dutra back onto the street, I stopped into the deli to buy bread and olives and cheese, and imagined preslicing the bread and the cheese, and presenting the olives in one bowl, with a second nearby for the pits.

I realized how eager I was to get home. The abrupt desolation of Dutra's existence felt threatening, as if it might spread. Where was my own generosity, my own tenderness toward him? I was less caregiver than captive, wondering, as I stole sidelong glances at him pacing stone-faced beside me, just how long it would last—and I remembered, as I hadn't in years, the girl who'd fainted off her feet at our party, and how cheerfully Dutra had hefted her into his arms.

At the corners I told him, “Let's cross,” or “Let's turn,” as if leading a blind man. Otherwise we had stopped talking. Dutra less followed me than was impelled by my movement, like a bit of detritus aligned with my slipstream and drifting along. Perhaps he less feared aloneness than had somehow forgotten about it. Coming into our apartment he received a glass of wine, a plate of food, a snifter of brandy, Matthew's undivided attention, and even, to my silent gratitude, Matthew's sympathy, as if it had all been arranged weeks before; and to my surprise Dutra did talk, relating to Matthew everything he had already told me, but with an altered, more remote and knowing style. It was possible for him to discuss with Matthew the disintegration of his professional life much as he might have discussed the malfeasance of the Bush administration or the financial collapse of the recording industry. But his persistence at our table, and the swiftly dwindling brandy, told the truth. I began to think I'd have to bed him down on the couch. Near one in the morning Matthew excused himself, rounding the table to shake hands with Dutra, which connection turned into a clumsy embrace and a clap on the shoulder. Then it was Dutra and I and a near-empty bottle beside Dutra's glass and Dutra still didn't move. “I've got to go to bed, too,” I asserted at last, and like a paraplegic Dutra planted his palms on the table and hauled himself onto his feet.

“You have a cigarette?” he asked.

“You know I don't smoke anymore.”

“Bodega near here?”

“On the way to the train.”

In fourteen hours he'd consumed with no assistance at all four bottles of wine, ten pints of beer, and a liter each of bourbon and brandy, yet he perfectly bisected the doorframe and hallway. Feet neither wandered nor hands braced the wall. He only threatened to plunge through the floor with the force of a meteorite, as if he were made of cast iron. I'd find him smoldering in the subbasement, sunk to the neck in the poured-concrete floor. Outside he dropped onto the steps leading up to our entrance while I stood, debating. Sitting as well might suggest he was welcome to sit there all night, but standing was too dictatorial. I might have already told him I needed to sleep, but I wasn't some bartender tossing him out. I sat. The warm night was silken, its tenderness almost unwelcome; sharing the secret of such nights as this seemed a part of my youth I would never regain, this night and my discomfort in it the proof. All the numerous kindnesses Dutra had done me, those many occasions on which he'd maddened me with his arrogant competence, now presented themselves to my mind. I couldn't think of one kindness I'd done in return. Perhaps my acquiescence in his dogged belief that our friendship was deathless, at least not to be killed by betrayal or any other such finite cataclysm of feeling, had been my kindness to him. My declining to swear or hang up when he'd called that night almost a decade ago, what had seemed like so many years later, and what now was nearly twice that many years in the past. “Hey, Gin,” he'd begun without the slightest preamble. “Didja know there's
five
Regina Gottliebs in the book, and you're the fifth one I called?” Having missed him so much I'd thought, All right, I'll play. I'll play along and pretend it's all right, and in this way obtain reckoning. But who had been playing—deluded—and who simply stating the facts? Hadn't Dutra, in calling, asserted the fact of our friendship, and in that way pried me loose of a chimera? For I never had stopped loving Martha, but Martha herself had been leached of reality for me, and Dutra far more than the passage of time deserved credit for that. The passage of time, left alone, burnished her and concealed her flaws. Dutra jettisoned her and forbade recollection. If I'd asked him, that first night in years that we spoke on the phone, “Have you also found Martha?” his reply would have been “Martha who?” But of course I did not even mention her name. I accepted the premise he offered. He embodied those years of my life, and if he didn't know her, she didn't exist.