Men Seeking Women

by Po Bronson

  I’ve known her for half a day and already I’m thinking, Shit! Shit! I have to go to Montreal in two days.

  She wants to know what it’s like to be around so many people dying all the time.

  “I’m a research doctor, not a clinician.”

  “No fair.”

  “What?”

  “Answer the question.”

  All right. It is a dark master, perversely supple in its slaveries, adept in its addictions. It makes the heart a knot that only gets tighter when I try to unwind it.

  “Don’t be cryptic,” she insists.

  “I keep people at a distance,” I say.

  But I can’t seem to keep her at a distance. The knot is loosening.

  We make love holding hands, looking into each other’s open eyes, chest to chest. Sensation comes from everywhere, from my thighs on her thighs, my feet wrapped in her feet.

  “I don’t do this on first dates,” she feels the need to tell me.

  “It’s only because we have so little time,” I say.

  She rolls on top and asks me to lie still so she can kiss on me. I can’t do it. I have to be reciprocating. She kisses my chest. I try to massage her foot, but she slaps my hand away.

  “Just lie still, honey.”

  I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.

  She drapes the ends of her hair over my belly.

  Now I really can’t. Oh god.

  “Just lie still, baby.”

  Now I’m starting to cry. She’s being too nice to me. I can’t take it. I’m groaning and moaning and practically hyperventilating. She’s being too soft, too nice.

  She just keeps her tongue on my belly, right under my ribs, just this side of tickling me, just that side of taking a bite out of me. Oh god.

  “Do you do this to every man?”

  “I’ve never done this before in my life.”

  I’m a horse being broken. Five, ten minutes, until I finally can just lie there and let her touch me. She puts my arms over my head and runs her fingers through my armpits until I stop jerking. I’m a new man. I’m ruined for other women.

  “Now let’s do it right,” she says, and I find out what she means.

  I look at the clock. Three hours just went by. Time stands still. We’re lying there, she’s stroking down my damp sweaty hair, kissing my shoulder. We’re going to lie here all night.

  She says, “My father was in your trial.”

  The next morning I tell Linda I’m thinking of not going to Montreal.

  “But your work—”

  “Seven years is enough.”

  “Take a vacation.”

  “I met a woman.”

  “Bring her to Montreal.”

  “Jo is there.”

  “So?”

  “We were going to move in together.”

  “So don’t.”

  “I can’t even imagine telling Jo.”

  “You’ll have to tell her.”

  No. It’s unimaginable. I will never, ever be able to let her down like that.

  “Who is this woman?”

  I mention Jennifer walking down the hall yesterday.

  “Her! Her! You just met her yesterday! You don’t give up your life’s work for a woman you met yesterday!”

  “I think she’s wonderful.”

  “Are you crazy!?”

  “I’ve never felt like this.”

  Linda rips into me. I’m a stupid jackass with blinders on. Can’t I see that I’m just vulnerable right now because seven years of work is coming to a head? Can’t I see that I’m afraid of failing and just looking for something else to hope for? Can’t I see that I’m entertaining thoughts of throwing my life away to prepare for the possibility that the panel will reject my application? No woman has cracked me open. My work has cracked me open, and the first woman to just walk down the hall fell into the crevasse.

  I bring up my intuition. This is a big mistake. Intuition = wish fulfillment, in Linda’s book. I’m just scared of what’ll happen with Jo.

  Linda brings me to my senses.

  “We’ve got a presentation to make tomorrow,” she says. “Let’s get focused.”

  We spend several hours on spinning the results of the European trial, where what is mild and what is moderate was lost in the translation. Too many patients from this column ended up in that column.

  On that alone, I’ll lose the vote of Dr. Victor Santana, who’s a stickler for statistics.

  I’ve already lost the vote of Robert Ozols, who could care less about quality of death.

  And Krook and Nerenstone usually vote with Ozols.

  That’s four votes. I lose two more and my application will be denied.

  What is mild and what is moderate? That’s all I’m thinking about.

  But that’s not a connection a man can forget.

  I start thinking about Jennifer. I haven’t slept and I’m a little hallucinatory.

  “Do we have those big red patient binders?” I ask Linda.

  “In the boxes,” she says.

  “Will you look up a patient?”

  “Which trial?”

  “Thirty–forty-nine.”

  She goes to the box. We’re eating little turkey sandwiches brought in by the hotel caterer and drinking ginger ale we snuck in from the drugstore. The room smells like dry-erase marker.

  “Which patient?”

  “Last name Boudreaux. That’s e-a-u-x.”

  “Phillip?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Died 8/6/99, age sixty-four. Test site was Duke.”

  “Did he get Ethyol?”

  “He was in the control group.”

  “Xerostomia?”

  “Severe.”

  I’ve been in Montreal a week now.

  I keep seeing Jennifer in crowds. Jo takes me to Trudi, an incredible restaurant in the gay part of town. The meal’s incredible. There’s truffle oil in everything. On a warm night like this, Montreal is Europe in the best of ways. I haven’t heard English for hours. Everyone’s clothing is skin-tight. We hail a taxi back to her flat.

  It’s been a week, and she’s earned the right to ask if I’m making a commitment here.

  Everything I can say is the wrong answer.

  When she looks in my eyes she can see the wrong answer, right there, plain as day.

  I ask for some time. I’m new to town, a little culture-shocked, et cetera.

  She tells me that in the real world, you don’t get to make things wait. If your kid gets sick, you can’t say “This isn’t a good time right now.” If you get in a car accident, you can’t say “Hold on, I have to deal with some issues.”

  She’s right. She’s right. But I just need a little time.

  “Whatever you’re dealing with, you have to deal with it and love me at the same time,” she says. “Whatever it is, I don’t care. Just don’t stop loving me.”

  She needs me to make love to her. She’s thinking, If we just make love, he’ll remember or he’ll wake up from this and it’ll all be fine.

  We lie in bed with the window open, listening to the car alarms.

  “You’re going to be fine, sweetie,” she says.

  “I’m going to get better. It’s just going to take me a while.”

  “I know.”

  I’ve been in North Carolina for six weeks.

  I took the first job offered to me in order to look strong and independent to Jennifer. I’m a vice president of clinical research for Bristol-Myers Squibb—there are six more layers of bureaucracy above me, and five below. I am thrown onto a team overseeing the development of a protein that we hope will regrow cartilage in worn-out knees. The trial is a mess; the MRI cross-sectionals are inconclusive. I’m in meetings all day long. I work from 7:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. to stay out of Jennifer’s hair.

  When we make love, everything is great again.

  The rest of the time, it’s almost love. Still.

  I do her grocery shopping and she makes me Cajun meals from her
childhood. She has me buy things I can’t spell. Melatons. It’s some sort of green squash. She asks for chives and I bring home chives and she asks “What’s this?” and laughs at me. Those are chives. It turns out she means green onions, but she refuses to call them anything but chives. I adore her.

  I never want the lovemaking to stop. Every other night, she needs to sleep alone. So after lovemaking I go into the second bedroom and sleep in the bed her daddy died in. She’s not over it yet. Clearly.

  I’ll wait. I have to. I made my choice.

  I’ve known her for three days. The plane to Montreal is in five hours. What do I do?

  I wake up. Time has started again. I want to tell her I love her. Tell her, you fool. My mouth is sewn closed.

  “What are we going to do?” she asks.

  “I can see loving you,” I say.

  “I can see loving you, too.”

  It’s not the same and we both know it. Now we cemented it.

  “You really want me to bear witness?” she says.

  “It could make a big difference.”

  “And if the drug is approved, you’re going to Montreal?”

  “My flight’s in five hours.”

  “I’m going to give a speech that sends my lover to another woman.”

  “If it’s a good speech.”

  She healed me. She taught me to love again. We shower, dress, go downstairs, share a bear claw.

  “Tell me why quality of life can’t be measured again?”

  “It can be measured. But only in milliliters.”

  “How much time will I have?”

  “Fifteen minutes.”

  I advise her that the two swing votes will be Kathy Albain, from Loyola University in Illinois, and Richard Simon, from the National Cancer Institute. Do not talk to them. Doctors don’t like to be confronted. Pretend you’re talking to the audience.

  Seven years, fifteen minutes, two hundred million dollars.

  At 9:30 we are called to order. Linda presents data on how quickly Ethyol is purged from the system. In other words, it poisons you, but not for too long. The incidence of hypotension trends toward control in seventy-two hours. . . . I present data on why a dose of this dangerous magnitude is nevertheless necessary to prevent long-term Xerostomia. Half the patient population received radiation doses in excess of sixty-five hundred cycles. . . . None of it matters. The panel’s faces are blank.

  We’re talking quality of death.

  You wake up. Your mouth has been sewn closed. You’ve swallowed a two-by-four. You can’t talk.

  What we mean when we say hypotension is, you pass out.

  When I inject Ethyol into the salivary glands, radiotherapy kills the tumors but not the glands. You’ll pass out off and on for three days and vomit for a week. But you’ll be able to talk until you die anyway.

  There are all these other cancers to study its use in: ovarian, rectal, colon.

  Jennifer is up on the stand, sending me to another woman.

  “My father was Richard Boudreaux, identified in the case files of trial 30–49 as patient number 005-513—

  “He did not receive Ethyol—

  “For the last two months of his life, my daddy could not talk—

  “Every morning I’d come into his room and his eyes would plead with me—

  “One time he tried to talk and he ripped the roof of his mouth off and had to receive twenty-two stitches—

  “He spent the last two months of his life on the computer, writing me letters—

  “He felt like there were all these things he never got to explain—

  “Such as why he had to leave Mom—

  “Or why my stepmother wanted him to cut us off—

  “All he wanted was to be able to explain himself—

  “He wrote these gorgeous letters—

  “He signed them all, ‘I’ll carry my love for you to the other side, and it’ll be waiting for you when you get there.’—

  “I thought it was a lyric from a song, but I don’t know which song. He died before he could tell me.”

  Richard Simon is unimpressed. Kathy Albain votes yes. Seven votes to approve, five against. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the FDA will accept the panel’s recommendation.

  I’ve been in Montreal a month now. I started working again. I’m injecting Ethyol into the lymph glands of ovarian cancer patients for a safety profile. Jo is a nurse in an organ-transplant center. I’m getting better. I found out how to love again. For a long time I couldn’t find the romance in my relationship with Jo. It was too raw, always fighting, the long distance, the disappointments. When you fall in love, you’re supposed to get a halcyon period. You’re supposed to save up goodwill for the battles to come later. Even Jennifer and I got that for three days. With Jo, it’s been a battle since day one.

  And then one day Linda e-mailed me and asked me to tell her the story of my relationship with Jo. How did we end up together anyway?

  I started writing it all down.

  How I broke up her marriage. How I lost friends. How she was across the country. How we got in the car accident. How we broke up, got back together, broke up. There were other women in there, like Jennifer, and other men for her.

  And Linda e-mailed back, “That’s the most romantic story.”

  “It is?”

  Until then, I didn’t see it. We made it, despite all that.

  Linda wrote, “If you two can make it through all that, I can definitely get over my boyfriend’s snoring.”

  Sometimes I thank Jennifer for teaching me to let people get close again. I think there’s a person inside all of us who’s capable of great love. We’re not as broken as we think.

  I’ve known Jenny for three days, and the plane to Montreal leaves in an hour.

  We’re on the way to Dulles.

  At check-in, I declare the drugs I’m carrying. Amifostine, Doxyrubicin, Paclitaxel. I get a long look from the agents.

  “What you did was brave,” I tell Jennifer.

  “Are you going to get on that plane?”

  “I think it’s the right thing to do.”

  “You can come with me.”

  If it was love, I would.

  “We just didn’t have enough time,” I say.

  “Make time. Come with me.”

  “My work is too important. And I don’t think you’re ready for me. I’m kinda high-maintenance.”

  I get my boarding pass and we sit down at the Burger King for a last supper. We can’t eat our cheeseburgers. We feed each other the french fries. She starts to cry, and I start to cry.

  I give her my corduroy coat.

  She says, “I can take you being with someone else. But just please, please, don’t forget about me. That’s all I want now. I just don’t want to be forgotten.”

  You will never be forgotten.

  I get on that plane.

  About the Contributors

  ERIC GARCIA is a twenty-eight-year-old writer from Miami whose novels include Anonymous Rex, Casual Rex (March 2001), and the forthcoming Hot and Sweaty Rex. He attended Cornell University and the University of Southern California, where he majored in creative writing and film. He currently lives outside Los Angeles with his wife, daughter, and chubby dachshund, and splits his writing time between novels and film/TV projects, slaving over a hot computer for eighteen hours a day with little time for food, water, or skinny-dipping. On the rare occasion that he is allowed by his editors at Random House to venture away from the home, he enjoys a good game of racquetball, or a nice pastrami on rye, whichever is closer. He can be reached on the Web at www.casualrex.com.

  GARY KRIST is the author of two novels, Chaos Theory and Bad Chemistry, and two short-story collections, The Garden State and Bone by Bone. A recipient of the Stephen Crane Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he also writes regularly for The New York Times, Salon, The Washington Post Book World, and other publications. He lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland, wi
th his wife and daughter, and can be reached via www.garykrist.com.

  CHRIS OFFUTT is the author of Out of the Woods, Kentucky Straight, The Same River Twice, and The Good Brother. All have been translated into several languages. His work is widely anthologized and has received many honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting Award. He currently lives in Iowa City, where he is a visiting professor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

  DAVID LISS is the author of A Conspiracy of Paper. He is also a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at Columbia University, where his work centers on how the mid-eighteenth-century British novel reflects and shapes the emergence of the modern idea of personal finance. He has presented numerous talks on his work, published on Henry James, and received several awards, including the Columbia President’s Fellowship, an A. W. Mellon Research Fellowship, and the Whiting Dissertation Fellowship. Liss grew up in south Florida, but escaped, and currently lives with his wife in New York City. He can be reached through his website, www.davidliss.com.

  RICHARD DOOLING is a writer and a lawyer. His second novel, White Man’s Grave, was a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction. He is also the author of Critical Care, Blue Streak, and Brain Storm, a novel. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the National Law Journal. He lives in Omaha, Nebraska, with his wife and children. His next novel will be published by Random House. His website can be found at www.dooling.com.

  BRUCE STERLING already has three women in his life (a wife and two daughters), not counting his agent and most any number of his editors and assistant editors. Bruce Sterling is not actively seeking any more women at the moment. He has every confidence they will show up entirely on their own, probably through e-mail. Bruce Sterling’s home page is well.com/conf/mirrorshades/ where one can find, among many other digital goodies, a list of his fourteen books and his innumerable magazine articles.

  PAUL HOND is the author of The Baker. He lives in New York, where he is currently at work on his second novel.

  ROBERT ANTHONY SIEGEL’s short fiction has appeared in Story magazine and on the website Nerve.com. His first novel, All the Money in the World, was published by Random House in 1997. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and teaches fiction at New York University’s School of Continuing Studies. He can be reached at rasiegel1000@aol.com.