The Beginner's Goodbye

by Anne Tyler

  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.”

  “I already said I was sorry.”

  She took off her glasses and polished them on her napkin, still keeping her eyes lowered. Her eyelashes were thick but very short and stubby. Her mouth was clamped in a thin, unhappy line.

  I said, “Hey. Dorothy. Want to start over?”

  There was a pause. I saw the corners of her lips start to twitch, and then she looked up at me and smiled.

  It makes me sad now to think back on the early days of our courtship. We didn’t know anything at all. Dorothy didn’t even know it was a courtship, at the beginning, and I was kind of like an overgrown puppy, at least as I picture myself from this distance. I was romping around her all eager and panting, dying to impress her, while for some time she remained stolidly oblivious.

  By that stage of life, I’d had my fair share of romances. I had left behind the high-school girls who were so fearful of seeming freakish themselves that they couldn’t afford to be seen with me, and in college I became a kind of pet project for the aspiring social workers that all the young women of college age seemed to be. They associated my cane with, who knows, old war wounds or something. They took the premature glints of white in my hair as a sign of mysterious past sufferings. As you might surmise, I had an allergy to this viewpoint, but usually at the outset I didn’t suspect that they held it. (Or didn’t let myself suspect.) I just gave myself over to what I fancied was true love. As soon as I grasped the situation, though, I would walk out. Or sometimes they would walk out, once they lost all hope of rescuing me. Then I graduated, and in the year and a half since, I had pretty much stuck to myself, taking care to avoid the various sweet young women that my family seemed to keep strewing in my path.

  You see now why I found Dorothy so appealing—Dorothy, who wouldn’t even discuss the Mediterranean diet with me.

  I went to her office a few days later to tour her treatment rooms, asking what if a patient had this kind of tumor, what if a patient had that kind of tumor. I went again with a list of follow-up questions that Dr. Worth had supposedly dictated to me. And after that, of course, I had to show her my rough draft over another dinner, this time at a place with better lighting.

  Then a major development: I suggested we go to a movie the following evening. An outing with no useful purpose. She had a little trouble with that one. I saw her working to make the adjustment in her mind—switching me from “business” to “pleasure.” She said, “I don’t know,” and then she said, “What movie were you thinking of?”

  “Whichever one you like,” I told her. “I would let you choose.”

  “Well,” she said. “Okay. I don’t have anything better to do.”

  We went to the movie—a documentary, as I recall—and then, a few days later, we went to another one, and after that to a couple more meals. We talked about her work, and my work, and the news on TV, and the books we were reading. (She read seriously and pragmatically, always about something scientific if not specifically radiological.) We traded the usual growing-up stories. She hadn’t been back to see her family in years, she said. She seemed amused to hear that I lived in an apartment only blocks away from my parents.

  At that first movie I took her elbow to usher her into her seat, and at the second I sat with my shoulder touching hers. Leaning across the table to make a point to her over dinner, I covered her hand with mine; parting at the end of each evening, I began giving her a brief hug—but no more of a hug than I might give a friend. Oh, I was cagey, all right. I didn’t completely understand her; I couldn’t read her feelings. And already I knew that this was too important for me to risk any missteps.

  In April I brought her a copy of The Beginner’s Income Tax, which was not really about taxes but about organizing receipts and such. She was hopelessly disorganized, she claimed; and then, as if to prove it, she forgot to take the book with her when we left the restaurant. I worried about what this meant. I felt she had forgotten me—easy come, easy go, she was saying—and it didn’t help that when I offered to turn the car around that minute and go retrieve it, she said never mind, she would just phone the restaurant later.

  Did she care about me even a little?

  Then she asked why I didn’t have a handicapped license plate. We were walking toward my car at the time; we’d been to the Everyman Theatre. I said, “Because I don’t need a han
dicapped license plate.”

  “You’re bound to throw your back out of whack, walking the distances you do with that limp. I’m surprised it hasn’t already happened.”

  I said nothing.

  “Would you like me to fill in a form for the Motor Vehicle people?”

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  “Or maybe you’d prefer a hang-tag. Then we could switch it to my car if I were the one driving.”

  “I told you, no,” I said.

  She fell silent. We got into the car and I drove her home. By this time I knew where she lived—a basement apartment down near the old stadium—but I hadn’t been inside, and I had planned to suggest that evening that I come in with her. I didn’t, though. I said, “Well, good night,” and I reached across her to open her door.

  She looked at me for a moment, and then she said, “Thank you, Aaron,” and got out. I waited till she was safely in her building and then I drove away. I was feeling kind of depressed, to be honest. I don’t mean I’d fallen out of love with her or anything like that, but I felt very low, all at once. Very tired. I felt weary to the bone.

  Pursuing the theme of let’s-see-each-other’s-apartments, I had planned next to invite her to supper at my place. I was thinking I would fix her my famous spaghetti and meatballs. But now I put that off a few days, because it seemed like so much trouble. I would have to get that special mix of different ground meats, for one thing. Veal and so on. Pork. I didn’t trust an ordinary supermarket for that; I’d have to go to the butcher. It seemed a huge amount of effort for a dish that was really, when you came down to it, not all that distinctive.

  I gave it a rest. I told myself I needed some space. Good grief, we’d gone out six evenings in the past two weeks—one time, twice in a row.

  She telephoned me on Wednesday. (We’d last seen each other on Saturday.) She didn’t have my number and so she called Woolcott Publishing, and Peggy stuck her head in my door and said, “Dr. Rosales? On Line Two?”

  She could have just buzzed me, but clearly she was wondering what a doctor could be calling me for. I refused to satisfy her curiosity. “Thanks,” was all I told her, and I waited till she was gone before I picked up the receiver.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Hi, Aaron, it’s Dorothy.”

  “Hello, Dorothy.”

  “I haven’t heard from you in a while.”

  This was more direct than I was comfortable with. I felt partly taken aback and partly, I have to say, admiring. Wasn’t it just like her!

  “I’ve been busy,” I told her.

  “Oh.”

  “A lot of work piling up.”

  “Well, I’d like to invite you to supper,” she said.

  “Supper?”

  “I would cook.”

  “Oh!”

  I don’t know why this was so unexpected. Somehow, I just couldn’t picture Dorothy cooking. But trying to picture it made me see her hands, which were very smooth across the backs in spite of her raspy fingers, and golden-brown and chubby. I was swept with a wave of longing. I said, “I’d love to come to supper.”

  “Good. Shall we say eight o’clock?”

  “Tonight?”

  “Eight tonight.”

  “I’ll be there,” I said.

  Later—much later, when we were making our wedding plans—Dorothy told me all that had gone into that supper invitation. She began with her reason for issuing it: how she’d grown aware, in the four days when I didn’t call, of the extreme quiet and solitude of her existence. “I saw that I had no close friends, no family life; and at work they were always complaining about my failure to ‘interact,’ whatever that means.…” She described how she’d rearranged her apartment before my arrival, frantically shoving furniture every which way and stuffing books and papers and cast-off clothes into closets, into bureau drawers, wherever they would fit; and how she’d racked her brains over the menu. “All men like steak, right? So I called the Pratt Library’s reference section to see how to cook a steak. They suggested grilling or broiling, but I didn’t own a grill and I wasn’t all that clear about broiling, so they said okay, fry it in a pan.… And then the peas, well, that was no problem; everybody knows how to cook a box of peas.…”

  But did she give the same amount of forethought to what we would talk about?

  Oh, probably not. Probably that was just happenstance. After all, it was I who started things, when I commented on the size of her apartment. “This place is huge,” I said when I walked in. It was shabby but sprawling, with an actual dining room opening off the living room. “How many bedrooms do you have?”

  “Three,” she told me.

  “Three! All for one person!”

  “Well, I used to have a roommate, but he moved.”

  “Ah.”

  I accepted the seat she offered me, at the end of a jangling metal daybed covered with an Indian spread. On the coffee table she had already set out wineglasses and a bottle of wine (Malbec, I saw), and she handed me the bottle along with a corkscrew. Then she sat down next to me. This close, I could smell her perfume, or her shampoo or something. She was wearing a scoop-necked black knit top I hadn’t seen before, along with her usual black trousers. I wondered if this was her version of dressing up.

  It seemed her mind was still on her roommate. She said, “He moved because I wasn’t … doctorly enough.”

  “Doctorly.”

  “For instance, one time he said, ‘Everything I eat tastes too salty. Why do you think that could be?’ I said, ‘I have no idea.’ He said, ‘No, really: why?’ ‘Maybe it is too salty,’ I said. He said, ‘No, other people don’t think so. Is there anything that could be a symptom of?’ I said, ‘Well, dehydration, maybe. Or a brain tumor.’ ‘Brain tumor!’ he said. ‘Oh, my God!’ ”

  I missed her point at first. She stopped speaking and looked at me expectantly, and I said, “What an idiot.”

  “He would ask me to palpate a swollen gland,” she said after a pause, “or he’d wonder what his backache meant, a perfectly normal backache he got from lifting weights, or he’d want me to write a prescription for his migraines.”

  “Well, that’s ridiculous!” I said. “He was your roommate, not your patient.”

  Another pause. Then she said, “Actually, he was more like a … We were more like a couple, actually.”

  This shouldn’t have come as a shock. She was a woman in her thirties; you would wonder what was wrong with her if there’d never been a man in her life. But somehow I had flattered myself that I was the very first one to appreciate her properly. I said, “You were a serious couple?”

  She was following her own tack. She said, “I see now that he probably thought I wasn’t enough of a … caregiver.”

  “Ridiculous,” I said again.

  “So I said to myself, ‘I have to learn from that experience.’ ”

  She still wore her expectant look.

  This time, I got it.

  I said, “Oh.”

  “I wouldn’t want a person to think that I’m not … concerned.”

  I said, “Oh, sweetheart. Dearest heart. I would never need you to be concerned for me.”

  And I cupped her face and leaned forward to kiss her, and she kissed me back.

  I could tell that people found Dorothy an unexpected choice.

  My father said she was “interesting”—the same word he used when he was confronted with one of my mother’s more experimental casseroles.

  My mother asked how old she was.

  “I haven’t the slightest idea,” I said.

  (In fact, Dorothy was thirty-two. I was twenty-four and a half.)

  “It’s only,” my mother said, “that I was thinking Danika Jones would have been closer to your own age.”

  “Who?”

  “Danika at work, Aaron. What do you mean, ‘Who?’ ”

  Danika was our designer, the designer preceding Irene. My father had hired her as his final act before handing over the business, and a
ll at once I thought I saw why. I said, “Danika! She wears toenail polish!”

  “What’s wrong with that?” my mother asked.

  “I always feel uneasy about women who polish their toenails. It makes me wonder what they’re hiding.”

  “Oh, Aaron,” my mother said sadly. “When will you understand how attractive you are? You could have any girl you wanted; someday you’re going to realize that.”

  My sister said Dorothy was okay, she guessed, if you didn’t mind a woman with the social skills of a panda bear. That just made me laugh. Dorothy was a bit like a panda bear. She had that same roundness and compactness, that same staunch way of carrying herself.

  Only I knew that underneath her boxy clothes, she was the shape of a little clay urn. Her skin had a burnished olive glow, and there was a kind of calm to her, a lit-from-within calm, that made me feel at rest whenever I was with her.

  We were married in my family’s church, but just in the minister’s private office, with my parents and my sister as witnesses. Surprisingly, Dorothy had told me that it would be all right with her if I wanted something fancier, but of course I didn’t. The simpler the better, I felt. Simple and straightforward. And we didn’t take a honeymoon, because of Dorothy’s work schedule. We just went back to our normal lives.

  It was early July when we married. We had known each other four months.

  My cousin Roger once told me, on the eve of his third wedding, that he felt marriage was addictive. Then he corrected himself. “I mean early marriage,” he said. “The very start of a marriage. It’s like a whole new beginning. You’re entirely brand-new people; you haven’t made any mistakes yet. You have a new place to live and new dishes and this new kind of, like, identity, this ‘we’ that gets invited everywhere together now. Why, sometimes your wife will have a brand-new name, even.”

  Dorothy still had her old name, and we were living temporarily in my old apartment, but in all other respects, what he said was true. Everything we did together in our new life was a first-time event, as if we had been reborn. On weekends, especially, when we didn’t go to work, I felt almost shiny, almost wet behind the ears, as we ventured forth upon the day. We ate breakfast together, we went to the supermarket together, we discussed whether we could afford to buy a house together. Could this really be me? Gimpy, geeky Aaron, acting like a regular husband?