A Night at the Operation

by JEFFREY COHEN

  Sharon considered my lunch proposal. “Monday. I’m not sure. Yeah, I guess Monday will be okay.”

  “Don’t be too enthusiastic, or I’ll think you’re harboring feelings for me,” I said.

  “Keep dreaming,” Sharon said. She knocked on the door of the exam room next to her and walked inside before I could think of a witty response, but then, she could have stood there waiting for an hour. I had nothing.

  Sharon and I had divorced when she’d decided she’d rather be married to Gregory, a choice I’ve never fully understood, but came grudgingly to accept. She had since come to her senses, and was now in the process of divorcing Gregory. But Sharon and I had remained friendly. One night, a couple of months before, we’d gotten very friendly, but that had only reminded us of some of the reasons we’d divorced to begin with, and it hadn’t happened again.

  Not yet, anyway. A man can dream.

  The following Friday, eight days hence, would be the ninth anniversary of our wedding, and even though we were no longer married, we’d decided to get together that evening. It makes more sense to us than celebrating the day we were divorced. We’d had a better party when we got married, after all, and that was worth remembering.

  Lennon led me to the reception area, where I could pay my bill and kibitz with Betty, the unbearably attractive receptionist. Betty is the kind of woman whom many men would find attractive, assuming they were heterosexual and breathing. But Sharon has always been an equal-opportunity employer, and talked her partners into hiring Betty despite her being almost unbearably hot. I recall it taking less persuasion with Lennon Dickinson than Toni Westphal. Lennon, in fact, had offered to pay Betty’s salary entirely from his own pocket.

  Alas, Betty wasn’t in her traditional seat. “She must be in the ladies’ room,” Lennon said, displaying a habit for conveying too much information whenever it isn’t requested. “I’ll take care of it. Let me see your insurance card and a credit card.”

  I reached into my back pocket for my wallet and fished out the insurance card. I never use a credit card, and only carry one for identification purposes, so it took longer to find, but I managed. While Lennon was doing whatever it is one does with such items, someone to my left said, “My god, they’ll let anybody in here these days, won’t they?”

  I didn’t have to look. “Hi, Grace,” I said. “Still carrying a torch for me, eh?”

  “Only to burn down your house.” Grace, the head nurse for the practice—about fifty, attractive, and somewhere between thin and heavy—gave me a quick kiss on the cheek by way of greeting. An older gent in the waiting area gave me a dirty look, like I was getting attention that was rightfully his. “How are you, Elliot?”

  “That’s what I’m here to find out,” I told her. “Ask Lennon.”

  “He’s fine,” Lennon said, rapier wit at the ready. He handed me back my ID and my credit card.

  I saw Betty come out of the restroom and knock on an exam room door. Betty is studying to become an RN, and sometimes observes or helps out on simple exams. Sharon let her into the exam room. My luck, I’d have to keep looking at Lennon.

  I turned to Grace, but she had an odd look on her face, and I didn’t say anything. I wondered whether I’d forgotten to zip up after the exam, but couldn’t think of a discreet way to check.

  Grace looked around me at Lennon. Her voice dropped a number of decibels. “Have you asked him yet?” she hissed at the doctor through the glass partition.

  “I was just about to,” Lennon hissed back, and then set his gaze on me. It didn’t have the effect on me that it would have had on, say, women.

  “Ask me what?” I wondered aloud.

  Too loud, apparently. “Shh!” Grace said, drawing more attention from the crowd in the waiting room than my innocuous outburst had. “Keep your voice down!”

  Okay, I could play that game. “Ask me what?” I whispered.

  They didn’t have time to answer, because Toni Westphal had walked over, apparently having completed the exam she was performing on a patient. Toni, who’s around forty and exudes a maternal warmth despite having no children, threw one hand over my shoulder and the other over Grace’s, as if we were in a football huddle.

  “What’s going on?” she whispered. “Are we planning a surprise party?”

  “We were just about to ask Elliot,” Grace said.

  Toni looked confused. “Ask Elliot if we’re planning a surprise party?”

  Lennon gave her his most serious look, which is just a little more serious than that of a funeral director on a busy day. I’m only his patient because Sharon won’t treat me and she thinks I should have a male doctor, but Lennon’s bedside manner would be enough to cause most patients to burst into tears. I guess the women he treats just look at him and don’t worry about medicine too much. “We were going to ask Elliot,” he echoed.

  Toni’s eyes narrowed. “Oh. Yeah.”

  I looked from face to face, and found no answers. “Okay,” I said, “Let’s pretend that I just got out of an ESL class, and speak slowly and clearly. What are you people talking about?”

  Lennon gestured for me to move closer to the glass, which had a window in it for communication and commerce. “What’s been bothering Sharon?” he asked.

  I knit my brow. It’s not hard to do, but the needles sting like crazy. “Bothering Sharon?”

  Grace, leaning over to hear, pouted out her lips. “Damn,” she said. “We thought it was you.”

  “A lot of people think it’s me,” I agreed. “What’s me?”

  “The thing that’s bothering Sharon,” Lennon answered, with a tone that indicated I was a fool for asking.

  “Are you speaking in code?” I asked. It was worth a shot.

  Toni shook her head. “Sharon’s been on edge for a few days, maybe a week,” she began.

  “Five days,” Lennon corrected. I think he has OCD.

  “Okay, five days,” Toni went on. “She’s not exactly snapping at people, but she’s distracted. And she won’t talk about what the problem is.”

  “Distracted? Doesn’t answer you quickly? Seems to be thinking about something else?” I asked, exhausting my definitions for “distracted.”

  They all nodded.

  I smiled. “It’s something to do with a patient,” I said. “When she’s deep in thought about a problem that’s puzzling her, she goes to another planet mentally. I’m surprised you guys didn’t know that already. Is there a patient whose case has been bothering her?”

  They exchanged a knowing glance, but Grace said, “You know we can’t tell you that, Elliot.” And of course, she was right. Doctor/patient confidentiality, you know.

  “Well, I’m guessing . . .”

  I was stunned into silence by a sound from down the hall. Far down the hall. And I could hear it clearly.

  Sharon, shouting in anger.

  “Good lord, Betty, do it right or get out of the room! NOW!”

  The door to the examination room opened, and Betty walked out with an absolutely astonished expression on her face. Toni looked at Betty and said, “What was that all about?”

  Betty, her lovely face streaked with tears, just shook her head. She pushed open the door to the restroom and walked in. I heard the lock click behind her.

  There was a long silence at the desk where I was standing.

  “Okay, so something’s bothering Sharon,” I said.

  2

  “SHARON is missing,” Gregory repeated.

  His oval face was drawn and sallow, even for him. “I mean, nobody’s seen her since yesterday afternoon,” Gregory said. “She didn’t come home last night. She’s not answering her cell phone or the phone at the house.”

  “If she has caller ID, that could just be a sign that she doesn’t want to talk to you,” I suggested. “You want me to call her for you?” I picked up the desk phone. The office at Comedy Tonight isn’t exactly what you’d call state-of-the-art, but we do have a telephone.

  “I don’t need yo
u to call her; she’s missing,” Gregory lamented. So I put the phone down. That had just been a ploy to annoy him, anyway. “We have to call the police.”

  I avoided the “what’s this we stuff, Kemo Sabe” line and said instead, “She hasn’t been missing twenty-four hours yet, and she’s a grown woman. We don’t know that she’s even missing at all. The police won’t get involved. Go put people to sleep for a while and see if you hear from Sharon tonight.” Gregory is an anesthesiologist.

  “You don’t understand,” he sniffed. “I should have expected this from you.”

  I went back to my game, trying to knock off virtual bricks with a virtual ball and paddle. “It’s truly amazing that you didn’t,” I said as Gregory slunk out of the office.

  Once he was out of sight, I reached for the phone and pressed Sharon’s button on speed dial. The phone rang a number of times, and I got transferred to her voice mail. That wasn’t unusual, if she was working, but my guess was that Gregory would have checked with Betty at the practice first.

  “This is Dr. Sharon Simon-Freed.” I took some pleasure, I admit, in the fact that Sharon had added my name, and not Gregory’s, to her own. She kept it that way, even after we divorced, and even when she was married to Gregory. Not that I’m petty. “I’m not available right now. Please leave a message, and I’ll get back to you.”

  I waited for the beep, and said, “Hi, it’s me.” The stupidest statement a person can make. Does anyone ever leave a message that says, “Hi, it’s someone else”? “Gregory thinks you’re missing. Give me a call and let me know you’re not.” I hung up.

  It was an hour and a half before we’d open the theatre for the evening. My staff was just starting to trickle in. Anthony Pagliarulo, the projectionist, was already upstairs in the booth, doing whatever magic it is that he does to keep our ancient projection equipment running. I don’t question Anthony’s mechanical brilliance—I just quiver at the very thought that one day he’ll graduate from college and leave me alone with the man-eating monster in my projection booth.

  No need to worry about that now, however. Anthony was still an undergraduate at Rutgers, majoring in film. He’d actually made a movie of his own, a remarkably gory Western called Killin’ Time, which had come dangerously close to being distributed by a real company only a few months earlier. Luckily, someone at the studio had actually watched the movie first, and had therefore passed on it, and now Anthony was back in my projection booth, tending to the dinosaur.

  I had a favor to ask of him, though, so I went upstairs to the refurbished balcony (which was much sturdier than when it had been originally furbished) and knocked on the projection booth door. I own the place, but one time I had entered without knocking and had almost put a permanent dent in the back of Anthony’s head with the door. It’s not a large projection room.

  “Come in,” he said, so I did.

  Anthony was threading up the first feature for the night, a personal favorite of mine. (We run the classic first and the contemporary comedy second.) Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels is a masterpiece about a director who discovers that making people laugh is at least as important as making a Statement. It’s only after he goes through hell that Joel Mc-Crae (playing John L. “Sully” Sullivan) realizes comedy is the thing that can get us through our most difficult moments. The title of his intended “important” project, O Brother, Where Art Thou? became the title of a Coen Brothers film starring . . . But, I digress.

  “Can you do me a favor?” I asked Anthony. I handed him a VHS videocassette I had brought up from the office. “Take this back to your editing suite at school and transfer it to DVD for me, would you?”

  He took the cassette from my hand and examined it as if it were a relic from King Tut’s tomb, which is silly. Everybody knows the Boy King was into Beta. “Can’t you do it at home?” Anthony wasn’t trying to shirk the job; he was curious about why I’d asked.

  “I could, but the picture quality would suffer on my cheap home machine,” I told him. “You can get a better transfer.”

  Anthony nodded, and put the cassette in his backpack, which was lying on the floor. “What is it?” he asked as an afterthought.

  “The video from my wedding,” I told him.

  His head swiveled. You’d have thought I’d told him it was a film of my recent sex-change surgery. “Really?”

  “Yeah. Our wedding anniversary is coming up next week, and I thought I’d give it to Sharon as a gift. So, on second thought, make two copies, okay?”

  Anthony was staring at the spot directly between my eyes, seemingly trying to decipher the strange dialect I was speaking. “You know you’re divorced, right?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “But you still give your ex-wife a present on your anniversary?” Anthony and his girlfriend Carla were so far from thinking about marriage that considering life after divorce was beyond his comprehension. He thinks every divorce is like the ones in movies like War of the Roses, ending in acrimony and, usually, violence.

  “Yes, Anthony, I do,” I told him. “Sharon and I try to keep up a civil relationship, and one of the things we do is continue to celebrate our wedding anniversary. Besides, I know the only copy she has is on VHS, and I’m willing to bet she’d like something that won’t deteriorate over time.” Symbolic, no?

  Okay, so maybe sentimental anniversary gifts that feature our wedding vows go past the concept of “civil,” but we still have feelings for each other. And besides, a woman who pays you alimony every month deserves at least a token, doesn’t she?

  He didn’t answer, but shook his head and went back to threading the projector with a grin on his face that spoke volumes about his crazy boss.

  I was that boss, so I exercised my authority and went back to playing MacBrickout. It’s a dangerous little game, seemingly simple, that will grab you in its tentacles and steal your time away. And it always gives you just enough hope to make you think it’s worth trying to win again. In many ways, MacBrickout is like my ex-wife Sharon.

  Whiling away my remaining life force with the game took another twenty minutes or so, until Sophie Beringer, the snack bar attendant/ticket taker, and Jonathan Goodwin, the usher/ swing man, entered the theatre, mooning at each other, as had become their habit. They were high school students, they were dating, and it was close to unbearable how happy they were.

  I left them alone. Unbridled joy is something I have a hard time with: I always want to bridle it with a dose of reality. Sophie actually mussed Jonathan’s hair as they walked by the door to my office, which led me to wonder if she’d been replaced with an android that only looked like Sophie. Before they started dating, Sophie was about as bubbly as Coca-Cola that’s been left open. For a week.

  Jonathan, for his part, had undergone something of a metamorphosis once Sophie smiled upon him. He started actually looking me in the eye when I spoke to him, began wearing shoes that covered his toes (he had previously favored sandals that gave a view of his feet that I believe helped keep Comedy Tonight’s crowds smaller than they should have been), and although he continued to wear T-shirts with images from great comedies (today’s was a simple moustache-and-eyebrows caricature bearing the phrase “Just tell ’em Groucho sent you”), they were now clean, frequently changed, and mostly the right size for Jonathan’s tall, skinny body.

  I ignored this flagrant happiness and turned back to the task at hand. Before I realized the time had gone by, another thirty minutes of my life had been eaten up by MacBrickout. I looked up at the clock and frowned. Okay, now it was strange that Sharon hadn’t called back yet, if only to mock Gregory for worrying that she hadn’t called back.

  The scene from the day before was starting to seem ominous. It wasn’t like Sharon to yell at anyone (she never even raised her voice at me during our divorce), particularly Betty, for whom she has a great deal of affection. Whomever the patient was whose case was worrying her must have been very special.

  I was suddenly glad Sharon was not m
y doctor, or I’d have to include myself on the list of possible doomed people.

  Maybe I should walk over to her office. Sharon’s medical practice was only four blocks away, and I had a little time before we really had to be ready to open the theatre. I stood up and walked out the office door, but didn’t make it any farther than the edge of the lobby.

  Sophie’s parents, Ilsa and Ron Beringer, burst—there is no other word for it—through the front doors of Comedy Tonight, both with the wild-eyed demeanor of Moe Howard after Curly hit him over the head with a bowling ball. Ilsa clutched in her hand what appeared to be an e-mail printout.

  “Sophie!” she screamed. “Where are you, Sophie?” Sophie was perhaps fifteen feet away, at the snack bar, in direct view of her mother. Jonathan should have had the good sense to look alarmed, but the fact is, he doesn’t really live on the same planet as the rest of us, and he simply kept studying Sophie with a serene grin on his face. Jonathan was still amazed that she ever went out on a date with him in the first place.

  Sophie’s face took on the expression of every teenage girl who hears her mother’s voice: she immediately looked annoyed, and turned toward Ilsa as if her mother were an especially persistent type of mosquito.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked. No, demanded.

  “They came!” Ilsa cried, thrusting the paper toward her daughter with a vehemence normally reserved for reprieves from the governor.

  “What came?” Sophie intoned.

  “Your SAT scores,” Ron said. Ilsa pivoted and stared at him. Her husband appeared amazed that he had gotten a word in edgewise. But his pride in himself was matched by Ilsa’s expression of fury. “You got . . .”

  He stopped once he saw Ilsa’s expression. Clearly, he was not supposed to be the one to tell his daughter about her test scores. This was reserved for her mother. But Sophie took perhaps a quarter of a second to go from completely impassive to laser-focused. She snatched the e-mail printout from her mother’s hand before Ilsa could get so much as a number out of her mouth.