The Beginner's Goodbye (12 page)

I didn’t say anything direct to either one of them. I accepted a glass of Nandina’s juice, sat talking with them a few minutes, let Gil present his report on that day’s work. But underneath, I was extremely alert, and I saw how Nandina continued to hang
around even though his report concerned some antiquated wiring they’d discovered in my living-room wall
—not
an interesting topic, and certainly not one that called for her opinion. I saw how their hands happened to brush when he passed her his empty glass. How she leaned against the doorframe and tipped her head alluringly as we were seeing him out at the end of the meeting.

Then she hurried back to the kitchen to start supper preparations, not giving me so much as a glance, allowing me no chance to question her.

I didn’t pursue it, of course. She was a fully grown woman. She had a right to her privacy.

Everything I knew about Gil so far had made me like him. He seemed to be a good man—honest, reliable, skilled, kindhearted. He may not have finished college, but he was clearly intelligent, and I imagined that he and Nandina could operate on a more or less equal footing. So I had no objections.

But I couldn’t help feeling, oh, a bit wistful as I watched them together over the next couple of weeks.

It was April, by then—early spring. Although the weather was still coolish, the daffodils were in full bloom and the trees were starting to flower. Gil and Nandina began to go out openly on what I guess you might call dates. The first date, shortly after the juicer episode, Nandina informed me about obliquely by announcing that she wouldn’t be cooking supper the following evening. Gil had suggested they try this new café in Hampden, she said. I said, “Oh, okay, maybe I’ll reheat some of that beef stew”—as if food were really the issue here. The next evening, I sat reading the newspaper on the couch, and when Gil rang the
doorbell I let Nandina answer. He stepped into the living room to say, “Hey there, Aaron,” and I raised my head and said, “How you doing, Gil.” He looked sheepish but determined, his face gleaming from a recent shave and his short-sleeved shirt carefully pressed. How long had he been coming to this house in clothes too fresh to have been that day’s work clothes? Almost from the start of our dealings together, I realized. So he may have felt attracted to Nandina all along.

I was genuinely glad for them, I swear. And yet, after they had taken their leave, when I turned in my seat to watch them through the front window, I felt stabbed to the heart by the sight of their two figures walking side by side toward Gil’s pickup. They were almost touching but not quite; there was perhaps an inch or two of empty space between them, and you could tell somehow that both of them were very conscious of this space—acutely conscious,
electrically
conscious. I thought of a moment early in my acquaintance with Dorothy, when she had offered to show me around her workplace. She stood up and went to her office door, and I jumped to my feet to follow, reaching past her and over her head to pull the door farther open. I guess it must have confused her. She stepped back. For an instant she was standing under the shelter of my arm, and although there was not one single point of contact between us, I felt I was surrounding her with an invisible layer of warmth and protection.

Even that early, I loved her.

We met in March of 1996, during
The Beginner’s Cancer
. Byron Worth, M.D., was our writer—an internist who had already supplied
the material for
The Beginner’s Childbirth
and
The Beginner’s Heart Attack
. These books were not particularly technical, you understand. They were more on the order of household-hint collections: how to sleep comfortably in the advanced stages of pregnancy, how to order heart-healthfully in restaurants. For the cancer book Dr. Worth had already turned in the chemo section, which included some delicious-sounding recipes for calorie-rich smoothies, but in radiology he fell short, by his own admission. He said we probably needed to consult a specialist. And that’s how I came to make an appointment with Dr. Dorothy Rosales, who had treated Charles’s father-in-law after his thyroid surgery.

She was wearing a white coat so crisp that it could have stood on its own, but her trousers were creased and rumpled, in part because they were too long for her. They buckled over the insteps of her cloddish shoes and they trailed the ground at her heels. This made her seem even shorter than she actually was, and wider. She was standing by a bookshelf when her receptionist showed me into her office. She was consulting some large, thick volume, and since her glasses were meant for distance she had pushed them up onto her forehead, which gave her a peculiar, quadruple-eyed aspect that caused me to start grinning the instant I saw her. But even in that first glance, I liked her broad, tan face and her tranquil expression. I congratulated myself for perceiving that her unbecomingly chopped hair was—as they say—as black as a raven’s wing.

I said, “Dr. Rosales?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Aaron Woolcott. I called you about consulting on our book project.”

“Yes, I know,” she said.

This threw me off my stride for a moment. I hesitated, and then I held out my hand. “It’s good to meet you,” I said.

Her own hand was warm and cushioned but rough-skinned. She shook mine efficiently and then stepped back to lower her glasses to their proper position. “What’s wrong with your arm?” she asked me.

It’s true that when I extend my arm to shake hands, I tend to aid it slightly by supporting my elbow with my good hand. But most people don’t catch that, or at least if they do they don’t comment. I said, “Oh, just a childhood illness.”

“Huh,” she said. “Well, have a seat.”

I sat down in a molded plastic chair in front of her desk. There was another chair next to it. I imagined that two people generally came for the initial consultation—a married couple, or a grown son or daughter with an aged parent. This office must have seen some very distraught visitors. But Dr. Rosales, settling behind her desk now in a deliberate, unhurried way, would have made them feel instantly reassured. She placed her palms together and said, “I’m not certain what you want of me.”

“Well, no actual writing,” I told her. “We have an internist doing that for us, Dr. Byron Worth.”

I paused, giving her time to react if she recognized the name. Instead, she just went on watching me. Her eyes were pure black through and through, without a hint of any other colors behind them. For the first time it crossed my mind that she might be a foreigner; I mean more foreign than a mere descendant of someone Hispanic.

“Dr. Worth is trying to give our readers a few tips for handling the day-to-day obstacles confronted by the cancer patient,” I said.
“He’s discussed the emotional issues, the doctor-patient transactions, the practical aspects of various treatment options … except for radiation, which he hasn’t had any experience with. He suggested that an oncology radiologist might walk us through that—tell us what the patient can expect, in the most concrete terms.”

“I see,” she said.

Silence.

“Of course we would pay you for your time, and acknowledge your assistance in the preface.”

I considered going on to tell her that, after
The Beginner’s Childbirth
, a doula who’d been mentioned by name had tripled her client load. But I wasn’t sure that physicians actively sought out business in quite the same way. Especially this physician. She seemed to need nothing. She seemed entire in herself.

She seemed fascinating.

“Say,” I said. “It’s almost noon. May I take you out to lunch so that we can discuss this further?”

“I’m not hungry,” she said.

“Uh …”

“What,” she said, “you just want to know the process? But the process is different for each type of tumor. For each individual patient, even.”

“Oh, well, we wouldn’t have to go into great detail,” I told her. “Nothing excessively medical, ha ha.”

I was acting like an idiot. Dr. Rosales was sitting back and watching me. I started racking my brain for some sample questions, but none came to mind. Supposedly I was there just to make the arrangements. Then Dr. Worth would take over.

No way was I going to let him take over Dorothy Rosales.

“All right,” I said, “here’s a plan. I will make up a written list this very afternoon of what we need to know. Then, before you decide either way, you could look through it. Maybe over dinner; I could buy you dinner. Unless … you have a husband to get home to?”

“No.”

“Dinner at the Old Bay,” I said. I had to struggle to keep the happiness out of my voice. I’d already noticed that she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, but nowadays that didn’t mean much. “As soon as you get off work tonight.”

“I don’t understand,” she said. “Why does this have to involve food?”

“Well … you’d need to eat anyway, right?”

“Right,” she said, and she looked relieved. I could tell this was the kind of logic that appealed to her. “Fine, Mr.—”

“Woolcott. Aaron.”

“Where is this Old Bay place?”

“Oh, I can drive you there. I’ll swing by and pick you up.”

“Never mind,” she said. “Our lot has a punch-clock.”

“Excuse me?”

“Our parking lot. We pay by the hour. No point forking over any more money than I have to.”

“Oh.”

She stood up, and I stood, too. “I won’t be finished here till seven,” she told me.

“That’s okay! I’ll reserve a table for half past. The restaurant is only about fifteen minutes from here.”

“In that case, a quarter past would appear to be more appropriate,” she said.

“Fine,” I said. “A quarter past.”

I took a business card from my billfold and wrote down the Old Bay’s address. As a rule I would have written it on the blank side of the card, but this time I chose the front. I wanted her to become familiar with my name. I wanted her to start calling me “Aaron.”

But all she said when we parted was, “Goodbye, then.” She didn’t use any form of my name. And she didn’t bother seeing me out.

I could tell she must not be from Baltimore, because anyone from Baltimore would have known the Old Bay. That was where all our parents used to eat. It was old-fashioned in both good ways and bad. (The crab soup, for instance, was the real thing, but the waiters were in their eighties and the atmosphere was gloomy and dank.) I had chosen it for geographical reasons, since it wasn’t far from Dorothy’s office, but also I wanted a place that was not too businesslike, not too efficient. I wanted her to start thinking of me in a more, so to speak, social light.

Well. Clearly I had my work cut out for me, because she arrived in her doctor coat. Dressed-up couples dotted the room, the women in the soft pastels of early spring, but there stood Dorothy beside the maître d’ with her leather satchel slung bandolier-style across her chest and her hands thrust deep in the pockets of her starched white coat.

I stood up and raised a hand. She headed for my table, leaving the maître d’ in her dust. “Hi,” she said when she reached me. She took hold of the chair opposite mine, but I beat her to
it and slid it out for her. “Welcome!” I told her as she sat down. I returned to my own chair. “Thank—thank you for coming.”

“It’s awfully dark,” she said, looking around the room. She freed herself from her satchel and set it at her feet. “You’re expecting me to read in this?”

“Read? Oh, no, only the menu,” I said, and I gave a chuckle that came out sounding fake. “I did phone Dr. Worth for a list of questions to ask you, but he said what he would prefer is, we should arrange a time when you can walk me through your facility. See the process from start to finish, as if I were a patient.”

In fact, I had not mentioned a word of this to Dr. Worth, but I doubted if he would object to my doing some of his research for him.

Dorothy said, “So … we came to this restaurant just to set up an appointment?”

“But then also we need to discuss your terms. How much would you propose to be paid, for one thing, and—what would you like to drink?”

Our waiter had arrived, was why I asked, but Dorothy looked startled, perhaps imagining for an instant that this was another business decision. Then her expression cleared, and she told the waiter, “A Diet Pepsi, please.”

“Diet!” I said. “A doctor, drinking artificial sweeteners?”

She blinked.

“Don’t you know what aspartame does to your central nervous system?” I asked. (I’d been heavily influenced by
The Beginner’s Book of Nutrition
, not to mention my sister’s anti-soft-drink crusade.) “Have a glass of wine, instead. A red wine; good for your heart.”

“Well … all right.”

I accepted the wine list from the waiter and chose a Malbec, two glasses. When the waiter had left, Dorothy said, “I’m not very used to drinking alcohol.”

“But you’re familiar with the virtues of the Mediterranean diet, surely.”

“Yes,” she said. Her eyes narrowed.

“And I know you must have heard about olive oil.”

“Look,” she said. “Are you going to start telling me your symptoms?”

“What?”

“I’m here to discuss a book project, okay? I don’t want to check out some little freckle that might be cancer.”

“Check out
what
? What freckle?”

“Or hear about some time when you thought your pulse might have skipped a beat.”

“Are you out of your mind?” I asked.

She started looking uncertain.

“My pulse is perfect!” I said. “What are you talking about?”

“Sorry,” she said.

She lowered her gaze to her place setting. She moved her spoon half an inch to her right. She said, “A lot of times, people outside of the office ask me for free advice. Even if they’re just sitting next to me on an airplane, they ask.”

“Did
I
ask? Did you hear me ask you anything?”

“Well, but I thought—”

“You seem to be suffering from a serious misapprehension,” I told her. “If I need advice, I’ll make an appointment with my family physician. Who is excellent, by the way, and knows my entire medical history besides, not that I ever have the slightest reason to call on him.”