The Pursuit of Alice Thrift (14 page)

Sylvie said she'd invite us in for a drink but her place was a mess and she was going to hit the hay in about ten seconds.

“You, too, huh?” said Ray, grinning. “Same line of work?”

“More or less. We're all house staff in this building. I'm in medicine,” said Sylvie. “Third year.”

“Intern,” I said. “Surgery.”

“Hideous,” said Sylvie. “How'd you happen to get five minutes off tonight?”

“It's not all that bad,” I said. “I mean, it works out to about—”

“Do you have a boyfriend?” Ray asked Sylvie.

“No, I do not,” Sylvie said. “But I think whatever the subtext of your question is, Ray, I'll be a very nice neighbor who can lend Alice a cup of sugar with the best of them.”

“Hey, no offense,” said Ray.

“Knock on my door anytime you're ordering takeout,” she said to me. “I'm always happy to share a couple of dishes rather than eat one Kung Pao chicken by myself.”

“Me, too,” I said.

“Okay, then: Welcome to the biosphere. Thanks for making the overture.”

The grouchy man opened his door, a new journal in hand, and barked, “Would you folks mind taking your conversation inside?”

“We're winding this up,” said Sylvie, “so we won't be disturbing you any longer, Anthony. Sir.”

“Who does he think he is?” I muttered when the stranger had retreated.

“Chief resident, clinical pathology,” Sylvie whispered. “And chief wet blanket on eleven-north, if not the entire hospital campus.”

I uttered a silent prayer to the gods of personality: Please don't let me usurp Anthony's title.

“
WE NEED ANOTHER
scouting trip,” Ray said when my door was closed behind us.

“For what?”

“Finding you a friend.” He cocked his head toward the hallway. “This one's too aggressive. If she took you under her wing, she'd break a couple of ribs in the process.”

“But I liked her. Not only does she get what my life is like, but she lives alone and likes Chinese food.”

“I'm not saying you have to drop her like a hot potato. I'm just saying our work isn't done.”

I said, “Please, no more door-to-door solicitations.”

“Do you mean tonight, or not ever?”

I said, for the sake of diplomacy, “Tonight. Next time I talk to you, I'll give you a head count of how many new girlfriends I've acquired.”

“Next time?” Ray repeated. “Are you calling it a night? Because according to my body clock, this is when the fun begins. We can go to Harvard Square if that's what you want to do. I know a couple of bars over there frequented by professor types.”

I knew I was breaking my promise to Dr. Shaw vis-à-vis sleeping versus living, but didn't I have an obligation to my patients and my career to stave off sleep deprivation and its resultant catastrophes? I informed Ray that a fatigued brain functions the same as an inebriated one. “Do you mind very much?” I asked in what I hoped was a benevolent manner.

“Actually, I do. I've got a parking space until midnight, so I'll stick around. You can get into bed if you want to. I can watch TV.”

“I don't have a TV.”

“Then I'll find something to occupy me. Anything need fixing around here?”

I said the management had been too self-conscious about the previous tenant to leave one single thing unfixed.

“Do you have a bathtub?” Ray asked.

I said I did. Why?

“Because one of my vices is long soaks in a steamy bathtub. I only have a fiberglass shower at my place, so I try to sneak baths in whenever I see porcelain.”

“No,” I said. “Sorry.”

“Doc, let's just say that you had a washer and dryer and I didn't. Would you consider it inappropriate if I brought over a load of laundry?”

I said, “I think you know the difference.”

“I know what you're getting at but you're taking a big leap. This is me soaking in your tub, as advertised, period. This is not me using a bath as an excuse to undress inside your apartment and then oh-so-casually appearing with a hand towel covering my privates and my butt hanging out the back.”

I said, “I'm not squeamish about that. I see naked men every minute of the day. It's a question of routine. I take my shower at bedtime, and I'm not used to having company while I bathe.”

He looked around. “I could make up the bed for you while you're in the shower. You can go directly from bath to bed. Fall into it. Ahhh, picture that: no fuss, no heavy lifting. Like a chambermaid had slipped in.”

“Maybe some other time.”

“You had a guy for a roommate, like, twenty-four hours ago. How was that different? Is it that I strike you as the kind of lowlife who'd spy on you through the keyhole?”

I said, “Not only is there no keyhole, but that kind of behavior wouldn't have occurred to me in a million years.”

“Me, neither,” said Ray.

To apologize for impugning his motives, I relented. I told him I was trusting him to be a perfect gentleman and not let history repeat itself.

“And what history would you be referring to?”

I said, “I'm sorry to bring up your late wife, but I can't help remembering that the first night you showed up at her door, you ended up having intercourse.”

“That was Mary,” he said. “You're you. We're talking about a different species of human animal here.”

I said, “But really. How well do I know you? Am I letting a sex offender take a bath in my new apartment?”

Ray said, “No, you are not. And thanks for reminding me.” He took the phone from its box, plugged a wire into the base and another into the wall. He picked up the receiver, listened, frowned.

I confessed that I hadn't called the phone company yet, but would do so ASAP.

“No matter. You've got two neighbors as eyewitnesses. They could finger me so fast that I'd be picked up before I crossed Park Drive.”

“That's reassuring,” I said.

He smiled. “Sheets and blankets anywhere I might find them?”

I pointed to the linen closet.

Armed with a towel and my one intact pair of pajamas—a gift from my sister, who judged puppies and dog biscuits to be a proper motif for flannel—I slipped into the bathroom and locked its door. Soap? Leo had always attended to the purchase of soap. A search under the sink rendered five bars of sandalwood soap and an unopened four-pack of toilet paper. Poor Dr. Gale, buying in bulk in happier times.

I showered quickly; wet my hair, washed it with soap due to an absence of shampoo. Five minutes later, my teeth were brushed and my pajamas were covering every inch of my skin from larynx to ankle.

Ray was slipping my pillow into a pillowcase in expert fashion. “Snazzy pj's,” he said after a glance over his shoulder.

“They were a gift.”

“A joke gift?”

I said I didn't think so. They were from my sister, a sincere dog lover.

He plumped my pillow and centered it mathematically against the headboard.

I said, “No shampoo, but there's soap. Did you find a towel?”

“I found
the
towel.”

He took a few steps toward the bathroom but came back. “Doc? Do you think you'd manage your life any better if you didn't work a hundred hours a week? I mean, if you were a schoolteacher or a secretary, do you think you'd have towels and shampoo and more than one set of sheets?”

I said, “I honestly don't know.”

“What about before this? Like in medical school? Did you live without furniture and food and small appliances?”

I said I did, but those things just seemed to appear without me.

“You must've had a pretty good-natured roommate. You probably used her stuff and she didn't mind because you were paying for half of it anyway.”

I said I thought that was correct. I'd had two medical-school roommates, so the shelf in the shower held multiple bottles of hair products. Leo and I had had that arrangement, too.

“What about when you're done? I mean, finished being a resident. Do you think you'll be able to function?”

“I function. I may not have every single personal-grooming product I might need, but who does on the first day in a new apartment?”

“You're right,” said Ray. “It's just that your place feels kind of bare-bones, which would be pretty goddamn depressing if I thought it was going to be permanent.”

I said, “I'm going to buy a magnet to hold a shopping list. Leo had one on our refrigerator.” I pointed to the bathroom. “Water's running and I don't want any floods. I'm going to sleep.”

Ray leaned toward me. It wasn't what I expected from someone raised on the mean streets, who'd been married explosively to a brazen woman half his age. The kiss, when it landed, was soft, careful, and brief.

DESPITE MY INITIAL
wariness and the astringent new-mattress smell, I fell asleep immediately. It might have been minutes or an hour when a sound woke me—my name combined with a moan. “Doc?” I heard, with a follow-up, louder, “Alice?”

I had to orient myself: Home? Hospital? Pager? Person?
Ray,
I remembered. Bathtub. I turned on my bedside sconce and followed the noise to the bathroom. “Ray?” I said. “Are you all right?”

“Doc,” he said. “I think I fainted. I think something's wrong.”

“What happened?”

“I don't know. I soaked for a good long time, then I sat on the toilet and I got dizzy.”

I had no choice. I said, “I'll get my sphygmomanometer. Maybe you have low blood pressure and the combination of that and the heat—”

“You don't think I had a stroke or anything?”

I said, “No, I don't. Hold on. I'll get my bag.”

“The door's open,” he said in a voice weak enough to frighten me.

I returned in seconds and opened the door. He was standing up and he was naked. He had a hairy body, mottled, overheated skin, a tattoo, a penis. “I never fainted in my life,” he said, “and I'm talking, like, a thousand baths that were at least this hot.”

I threw his towel in the general direction of his pelvis, and took his wrist.

“You can do that without a watch?” he asked.

I shushed him, and after fifteen seconds pronounced his pulse slow-normal.

“What do I do now?” Ray asked.

“You'll sit down somewhere and I'll take your blood pressure.”

He took my arm and walked slowly. I said, “You could have concussed falling out of the tub, or worse. Bathroom accidents are the number-one cause of home injuries.”

“I must have crumpled into a nice neat pile or else I'd have split my head open.”

I opened my deluxe black alligator bag, my parents' graduation present, unreturnable because of the monogram. I wrapped the cuff around his bicep and its tattoo—a crown that was either a religious icon or a beer logo. After two careful readings I announced, “Ninety over sixty. Fainting can happen even when the systolic is at seventy.”

“I don't care what they say at that hospital of yours,” said Ray. “You're
good.
”

“How hot was the water?”

“As hot as I can stand it. Not a good idea, huh?”

“There's another possibility,” I said. “Unrelated to the bath.”

“What's that?”

I hesitated before saying, “Straining at stool.”

“Guilty as charged,” he said happily. His towel had slipped into loincloth position. “Want to take it one more time, Doc? Make sure it's not going to happen again?”

I agreed because it was putting me in my most professional light at the same moment that—despite a possible vasovagal and my head-to-toe flannel pajamas—his penis was asserting itself against the terry cloth. Still, I have to give Ray credit for propriety. He seemed genuinely embarrassed. He gestured downward in case I hadn't noticed. “Sorry, Doc.”

Apparently my silent shrug looked like ignorance, prompting clarification.

“My boner? I assumed you noticed. Sorry. I promised I wouldn't disturb you, and then this stupid thing has to happen.”

“As long as you didn't hurt yourself when you fell off the toilet—that's all I'm concerned about.” And because I didn't want him to think I was an inobservant clinician, I added, “I did notice your erection, but I wasn't fazed. The human body has a mind of its own, so there's no need to apologize. And it's nice to have confirmation that a vasovagal faint can be followed by a compensatory rise in the systolic pressure.”

“You think so?”

I thought no such thing. I was only employing words that distanced me from the ongoing situation in Ray's nearby lap.

“Doc? I'm not getting fresh, but I think you should give yourself a little credit here. Honest. Sometimes when this happens . . . it has a personal meaning.”

I looked down, at him, at my own properties. I wondered if my bare feet or the smell of perfumed soap had betrayed me. I murmured something medical, something about the male sexual response, about contextual misinterpretation.

“He's the judge of that,” said Ray. “Maybe he's saying that you here, in your pajamas, on your bed . . . well, we have ourselves a context.”

I look back and see that moment as a crossroads. I can imagine freezing the scene, wherein I might have pronounced him cured and dischargeable. “You're fine,” I might have said briskly. “Your pulse and blood pressure are normal. Everyone faints once in a lifetime and this is nothing to worry about. Good night and good luck.”

Have I mentioned that I've seen a lot of genitalia in my professional life, belonging to men of all ages in hospital beds with nothing between me and them but the occasional threadbare johnny? And, empirically speaking, not all penises are created equal?

So at this juncture at which I might have stopped, considered the consequences and complications of responding in kind, I didn't show Ray the door. I, Alice Thrift, allowed one and eventually both of Ray's hands to roam unchecked over my pajama top. Further, I accepted those caresses and participated—willingly if not obligingly—in the fits and starts and flannel-free gratifications that inevitably ensued.