The Pursuit of Alice Thrift (20 page)

“You'd think so,” Leo murmured.

“Are you saying you
won't
be a fabulous dad?”

“I'm saying . . . only that I would have liked to have been consulted first.”

I recognized that this was a moment, unlike any ever seized by the Dr. Stephanie Crawfords of the world, to express solidarity and sisterhood. “Is that logical?” I asked. “How do you consult someone before a birth-control accident?”

Leo unscrewed the nipple of a tiny bottle labeled with Tyler's name, then headed toward the microwave. “Not to embarrass you with technical contraceptive details, but let's just say she was a firm believer in a method that is touted as being as effective as pharmaceuticals.”

“Such as?”

“Don't make me say it. Let's just say that the character of one's vaginal secretions rules the day.”

“Not that mucus method?”

“Bingo,” said Leo. “Do you believe I put my faith in that earth-mother crap?”

I asked if there had ever been a study done.

“Yeah, right. A study where no one knows whether she was testing her mucus or inserting a diaphragm.”

Leo rarely employed sarcasm. I said, “Sorry. I didn't know I was asking such a stupid question.”

“Didn't mean to snap,” he said. Then: “I got your note. What's up?”

I said, “I don't know exactly.”

He asked when I was free.

I said, “Sunday, Tuesday, or Thursday nights. After seven.”

“Let's do Sunday. Your place? Because there's an occupancy issue at mine.”

I said 11G, north tower. Right through the tunnel. If he could get away.

“Seven-thirty on Sunday. Do I eat before I come?”

I said no. We'd have dinner. I didn't own a table yet, but we could improvise.

“Let's go out,” he said. “Ever been to Pho Saigon?”

I said no. But I'd like to.

“Good. Unless you hear otherwise, I'll pick you up at seven-thirty.”

A baby emitted a near-soundless mewl and another joined in. An alarm sounded. Leo headed for it, reassuring me that it was all in a night's work—that these little ones forgot to breathe sometimes, but a firm prod was all it took.

20.
Saturday Night

I HAD NO PLANS. RAY HAD LEFT A MESSAGE ON MY ANSWERING
machine saying that he had to go to a wake. Kind of sudden. Long story. Would call later.

So at approximately eight-thirty
P.M.
I was alone, enjoying the newly discovered phenomenon of restaurant delivery beyond the pizza genre (Greek salad and moussaka), when I heard cries from across the hall—male groans and expletives, followed by what sounded like a woman's shushing.

I turned off my radio. I couldn't make out what was being said, but the man seemed enraged. The woman was pleading. Or was she crying? Was it Sylvie?

I walked across the hall and rapped on the door. When no one answered I said, “Sylvie? Is everything okay in there?”

“Go away,” said the male voice. “She's fine. Mind your own business.”

Any good 911 operator knows that the voice one obeys is not that of the man claiming that his victim is fine.

Call security, I wondered? Enlist Anthony the pathologist in 11F? Adrenaline and fear and perhaps too many newspaper accounts of passersby ignoring the stabbed and the mugged propelled me to turn the knob of 11H. And though a chain barred my entrance, an obstructed and narrow slice of the scene revealed Dr. Charles Hastings, naked and writhing in apparent agony on Sylvie's sateen sheets.

“Sylvie? Are you all right?” I called.

“Oh, fuck,” said Hastings.

Sylvie, whose leopard-print bra matched her leopard-print bikini underpants, came into view. “He thinks he ruptured a disk,” she said through the crack in the door.

“Hi, Dr. Hastings,” I called in his direction.

“Go away,” he moaned.

“Maybe this is a good thing,” Sylvie told him. “Now the two of us can get you into a wheelchair.”

“I can't sit down,” he yelled. “What the hell good is a wheelchair going to do?”

Sylvie unfastened the chain. Once inside, I asked her guest if he could walk at all.

“We tried that,” said Sylvie. “His right leg is numb.”

“You need an MRI,” I said.

“Oh, really?” Hastings said. “You think I needed you to tell me that?”

“Shut up, Chuck,” said Sylvie. “She's trying to help.”

“I thought someone was raping you,” I said.

Sylvie pulled the sheet up to Dr. Hastings's waist. “It was only histrionics,” she said. “Only the howls of the man with the world's lowest pain threshold.”

“I . . . am . . . in . . . agony!”
he roared. “I need something for the pain!”

Sylvie said, “You can't walk. You can't sit. We have two choices here: We call an ambulance or we get a gurney.”

“No ambulance! I want to go directly to X-ray. And I don't want any goddamn first-year resident reading my MRI. I want Klein or Coughlin, period. I don't care who else is on call.” He looked at me directly, sourly. “Don't I know you?” he asked.

Imagine: After all his flayings in public, all the injuries to my career and my soul, Charles Hastings didn't have the courtesy to put my name with my face.

I said, “I'm Alice Thrift. You tried to throw me out of the program.”

“I. Am. In. Agony!” was his reply. “You idiots don't seem to understand that.”

Sylvie gave the frame of the Murphy bed a shake, as if reminding him of its potential to right itself and wreak worse lumbar damage. “And where do you think you're going without us two idiots? Home? In your imported leather low-slung driver's seat?” She pantomimed the shifting of gears with a whiplash-worthy thrust.

She turned to me. “I think we should let the punishment fit the crime. Idiot Schwartz will get dressed and find a gurney, while Idiot Thrift will stay here and keep Chuck company.”

I said, “Let me—”

“No. It's my problem. If anyone's going to hijack a gurney, it's going to be me.” Sylvie wriggled into jeans, found shoes under the bed, grabbed the first sweater that her bureau drawer rendered, and left.

Hastings glared and I said nothing. After another minute I offered, “She probably has an anti-inflammatory in her medicine cabinet.”

“I can't take aspirin or ibuprofen. I have reflux.”

I sat down on the farthest corner of the bed. After another silence I asked, “Did this come on suddenly?”

He curled his lip and turned his face away.

“How did it happen?” I tried again.

“Fucking your friend!” he yelled. “Is that what you're angling for? Some salacious details that you can incorporate into your fantasy life?”

I asked, with much dignity, “Do you think that was called for?”

“Do you understand what this pain is like? Have you ever had a ruptured disk? Have you ever even taken
care
of someone who ruptured a disk?”

I said, “For the record, I haven't rotated through orthopedics yet.”

“Get my clothes,” he barked. “You can do that much, can't you?”

I rose slowly and took my time collecting his boxer shorts, his socks, and his undershirt, which I then dropped on his chest.

“Now dress me,” he said.

“I'm sorry,” I said, “but that's out of the question.”

“You're going to get me dressed, or I write this up.”

“For what?”

“For refusing to help me.”

I said, “I wasn't born yesterday. There is nothing reportable in feeling squeamish about putting underwear on your attending.”

“Squeamish? Over what? A man's body? That's pathetic.”

I said, “I didn't mean
squeamish
in the personal sense. I meant, you yell and scream at me when you're feeling fine, so I'd be very stupid to go near you with a suspected herniated nucleus pulposus.”

With much grimacing and sighing, he lifted his arms and scraped his undershirt over his face, down to his neck.

“Please,” he whimpered.

Just in case he was right; just in case I was violating some footnote to my Hippocratic oath, I took the boxer shorts from his chest and walked to the foot of the bed.

There was no way to oblige without lowering the blanket, so I did—past Dr. Hastings's proud genitalia, his thighs, his bony knees, his hairy legs, all the way to his ugly feet.

“Easy. Easy. Easy,” he sniped as I shimmied his boxers up his legs. I looked away for the final journey up and over his pelvic region. I looked back at his face when it was over, and tried to see past the bluster and fury. I thought, Maybe I could summon the skills I'd read about under “The Doctor-Patient Relationship.” He's injured and in pain, possibly frightened. I could summon a phrase or two that expressed goodness and mercy. Maybe, when he gets back to work, he'll mention my humanity to Dr. Kennick.

Just then, just when I might have pronounced one therapeutic sentence that recognized the absurdity of our situation and his extracurricular mortification, his fingers clasped my wrist. “I remember now! The botched cholecystectomy. Well, don't think there's any capital in this for you. Because if you ever tell a living soul about this, I'll have your ass in a sling, missy. This night never happened, understand?”

“Let go of me,” I said.

“I don't even like the fact that you're friends with Sally, and I'm not afraid to make that abundantly clear to her.”

I answered forcefully and eloquently. Unfortunately, the speech never left my head.
Surely you recognize that you are in no position
to put anyone's ass in a sling. Surely you realize that you are a man
who herniated his disk having relations with a woman half his age in
violation of his marriage vows and of the hospital's sexual harassment policy. Does that arrogant brain of yours understand that if
Sylvie—her name is Sylvie—knew what you'd said about not approving of our friendship, she'd laugh in your face? Tell me that you recognize that you're at our mercy. That everyone within the sound of your
voice, in case you were thinking of yelling for help, is another resident
who will be witness to your transgressions. Chuck.

“Get me my cell phone,” he ordered.

I pointed to his jacket. “There?”

“Look in the pockets, for God's sake. Is that so hard?”

His camel-hair jacket hung over the back of a kitchen chair. The first bulge I found was his wallet.

“What are you doing in there?” he called.

I walked a few steps closer, wallet wide open. “Is this your wife?” I asked.

“Give me that!”

“What's her name?”

He tapped his cranium, above his right ear. “I'm taking notes. Up here. Every impertinent word you've uttered since you burst in here.”

I turned the wallet face out. “Is it my imagination, or does she look a little sad?”

“Shut up! Either you make yourself useful or shut the fuck up. And where the hell is your friend? I want my phone. I asked for my phone a half hour ago!”

I found his wafer-thin phone, which I tossed in the direction of his lap. He caught it with a yowl of pain, and snarled into its mouthpiece, “Hospital operator.”

I took a gulp from an abandoned wineglass that I hoped was Sylvie's, then remembered my moussaka fondly.

“Who are you trying to reach?” I asked.

“I'm trying to page Schwartz. Goddamn it. I'm in call-park. Now what do I do?” He looked up, saw me at the door, and asked forlornly, “Where are you going?”

“Be right back,” I said. I slipped out, grabbed my take-out containers, and returned. I added more wine to a glass and sat down, purposely out of view. Sylvie's kitchen had a window that mine lacked, an accompanying bird feeder, and a view of an inner courtyard with a lamppost illuminating a wooden bench.

“Where the hell is she?” he asked again. “And where the hell are you?”

“Right here. I'm finishing my dinner. I'd offer you some but I don't think you should eat supine.”

“Fuck you,” he said.

“It's delicious. Greek food. Sylvie recommended this place: Mykonos. I think I taste mint in the dressing.”

“I'm thirsty,” he answered. “And I'm cold. Where's the thermostat?”

I heard the ping of the elevator down the hall. A few seconds later the door opened and Sylvie announced, as if she'd rehearsed on her way up, “Look. The gurney didn't fit, which makes perfect sense when you think about it because these are residential elevators—”

“Did you get a gurney or not?”

Sylvie called over her shoulder, into the hall, “Aaron?”

An enormous man with a shaved head, wearing the green scrubs of an orderly and with the biceps of a serious gym regular, stepped inside the apartment. “Hi, doc,” he said. “How's it goin'?”

“The gurney's downstairs,” Sylvie explained. “We just have to get you to the lobby. He bench-presses . . . what did you tell me? Five hundred pounds?”

Aaron laughed. “Close enough: around two-fifty on a good day.”

“In any event, it'll be a cinch for him to lift you,” said Sylvie.

“When I can't sit up? Are you crazy?”

“What's your choice, doc?” said Aaron. “Sliding down the banister?”

Sylvie turned to me and said, “We have a plan. How's
your
lower back?”

I didn't want to miss the spectacle of the hospital's biggest bully queuing up for what would be seen on a busy Saturday night as nonlife-threatening, i.e., take a number, Dr. Full Professor Hastings. I said fine, count me in.

Sylvie crossed to the broom closet. After stabilizing an avalanche of grocery bags, she returned dragging an ironing board.

“Have you lost your mind?” asked Hastings.

“What we got here is a creative emergency solution,” said Aaron. “What's the big deal? You lie on an ironing board for two minutes? Ever been in combat? You think the wounded make a fuss over what kind of slab carries them to a helicopter?” He grinned. “Well, maybe they would if the slab was covered with orange Teflon daisies.”

“I won't fit. It's too narrow and too short.”

“We'll tie you on,” said Sylvie.

“Got any rope?” Aaron asked.

“Rope
belts,
” said Sylvie.

“Like terrorists being subdued on a plane,” I said.

“Get me a couple,” said Aaron.

Sylvie produced three belts—one with replicas of ancient coins decorating it, one a leather braid of autumn colors, one black suede with silver-tipped fringe.

“Got any bungee cords?” Aaron asked.

“Not a one,” said Sylvie.

“Neckties?”

“Just his,” she said.

Aaron said, “That's nice, doc—you arriving all dressed up for your date.”

I could see Hastings straining not to dislodge another expletive.

“I myself like a nice jacket and tie when I take a lady out—”

“Does anyone understand what I'm going through?” asked Hastings.

“Do we need rope?” Aaron mused.

“I have some that the previous tenant left behind,” I said.

“Nah,” said Aaron. “We'll wrap him good with an extra sheet, like a mummy. We can keep him immobile for the ride down. Right, ladies?”

“This is Dr. Thrift,” said Sylvie. “Maybe you've seen her around.”

From the opposite side of the bed, I offered my hand to the enormous Aaron. “Please call me Alice,” I said.

AFTER INSULTING THE
fourth- and third-year residents and insisting they bypass the attending on call for the chairman of the department, Hastings was admitted to a private room. Sylvie and I didn't stay.

I stood outside a phone booth while Sylvie called Mrs. Hastings. “Is this going to be a confession?” I asked her.

“Absolutely not,” said Sylvie. “This is all business. This is ‘Hello, Mrs. Hastings. Dr. Schwartz here. Your husband has been admitted to the orthopedic service with severe lower-back pain. . . .' ”