Garden of Lies

by Eileen Goudge

  Smiling to herself, she recalled what had crossed her mind at their introductory session: Anyone that good-looking has got to be a shit.

  Perfect casting for a doctor on television, with those go-light green eyes, and the sandy hair that dipped boyishly over his forehead, JFK style. Even, heaven help me, dimples, two on either side of his mouth and one planted smack-Cary-Grant-dab in the center of his chin.

  But little by little—and God only knows why he had chosen her—he had won her over, courting her as if she were the starchy schoolteacher heroine in a Victorian novel, bringing her a rose one day, a carnation the next, flowers no doubt salvaged from the rooms of patients who’d checked out. Even a note once or twice in her locker, just like high school.

  And now a baby, she thought with bitter amusement.

  “Good morning, doctors. Sorry I’ve kept you waiting. I had an emergency.” David was breezing to a stop, his gaze was skimming over her, not meeting her eyes.

  Rachel, fearing she meant nothing more to him than the others, felt a cold rush. Then sanity quickly asserted itself. Stupid of her, he was just being discreet, as he had to be. Of course he loved her.

  But she was still so tense, holding herself stiffly, as if the pink lab Report in her pocket were a letter bomb that might explode if she made any sudden moves.

  She fell in with the group as they followed David onto the ward. A long room, painted a sickly yellow-green, with rows of beds separated by dingy tan curtains. And hot, the old steam radiators clanking and hissing. Why hadn’t anyone thought to crack a window?

  David stopped at the first bed. A pale face framed by a tangle of dark hair blinked up. The sheet drawn up to her jutting collarbone, in the hollow of which a tiny gold crucifix twinkled. She looked so young it was pathetic. A mother already, and still a child herself.

  David glanced at her chart, then at Gary McBride beside him. “Yours, I believe, Dr. McBride?

  [113] Gary reminded Rachel of an overgrown Tom Sawyer, with his boyish looks and freckles, his red hair complete with a cowlick. He was a good doctor, though. He cared about the patients.

  Gary didn’t even glance at his notes. “Miss Ortiz. Sixteen. Primipara. She was admitted at two o’clock this morning, four centimeters dilated. Blood pressure normal. But there was some vaginal bleeding, and the fetal heart rate was slow. I consulted Dr. Melrose on it, and he ordered a C-section.”

  “How’s our patient this morning?” David inquired.

  “Blood pressure a little low. Spiking a small fever. One-oh-one-point-two. She was complaining about the pain, so I gave her Demerol.”

  Rachel watched David peel back the sheet and lift Miss Ortiz’s gown, carefully removing the square of Betadine-stained gauze covering her incision. Rachel stared at his hands, feeling such awe. God, they were beautiful. The hands of an artist, a sculptor of living flesh. Broad square palms with long, oddly delicate fingers that tapered into the flat pale half-moons of his nails. Hands capable of performing miracles. She had watched him in surgery tie off the most friable veins without shredding them, seen him draw blood from the scalp of a fetus by reaching into its mother’s uterus, simply feeling his way.

  And wasn’t it a kind of miracle, too, what he had made her feel?

  She remembered, her face growing warm, their first night. Seduction, Hollywood style. His apartment, champagne on ice and soft music (the theme song of “A Man and a Woman” stuck in her mind), then tipping into bed, sheets smelling of English Leather aftershave. The contrivance of it exciting her, and at the same time leaving her a little cold deep down, like a TV dinner that hadn’t quite thawed out in the middle.

  Then, in the middle of their lovemaking, he had stopped abruptly, propping himself up on his elbows to look down at her with a bemused smile.

  “You’re not enjoying this very much, are you?” he had observed.

  Too startled by his candor to lie, she’d replied, “I don’t know how.”

  She’d been with only three men in the years since Mason Gold. [114] And with each one she’d felt more a failure than with the last. And now this. She’d wanted to cry.

  Gently, David had withdrawn and moved down on the mattress until his head was nestled between her rigid thighs. And then, oh God, the flick of his tongue. She had resisted at first, too panicked and ashamed to feel anything. Then slowly, ever so slowly, strange fluttery sensations began to creep through the walls of her defenses, sensations that were surely forbidden and yet thrilling. His tongue was finding Secret spots of pleasure she hadn’t known existed. For hours it seemed, playing her until she quivered, singing out finally in a crescendo so warmly exquisite, she felt surely she would melt with the dazzling heat of it.

  And then he was rising onto his knees, grinning down as he eased himself back into her. “All better now?”

  Was it that night? she wondered now. Eight weeks would make it about right. And there was a sort of poetic justice in it, if you believed in that kind of thing. Getting knocked up the first time you discovered sex could be wonderful.

  Rachel tore her gaze from David’s hands. She was half-afraid she would betray herself, start having vapors, like a character in a Charlotte Bronte novel. She did feel a little faint, as a matter of fact. Maybe because she hadn’t eaten breakfast. Or maybe it was because she was—

  And then it struck her, not just a missed period, or words on a slip of pink paper, but the full hard fact of it: Pregnant. I am pregnant.

  She watched as David palpated the scarred, deflated balloon of the patient’s abdomen. But she watched with a new kind of fascination, totally unexpected. It was as if she had stepped outside of herself for an eerie moment. No longer a doctor, simply a woman, being initiated into the age-old secrets of motherhood.

  Tears came to her eyes, blinding her for a second, as she imagined actually giving birth to this child in her. A tiny miraculous being formed from her own flesh, after seeing the wonder of so many belonging to others. Holding it in her arms, nursing it, her breasts heavy with sweet milk.

  Wrong, all wrong, she told herself. She had no right wanting it. She had no place in her life for a baby. In a few years maybe. But not now.

  [115] She furiously blinked her tears away, and tried to focus on the patient, at the same time reviewing in her mind her own diagnostic presentations.

  “How does that feel?” David asked the girl, who was making a face, biting her lip.

  He beamed his brilliant emerald gaze at her, and immediately the girl grew very still, like a child in school who’s been called on by the teacher.

  Also part of David’s magic, Rachel thought, that look. A look that inspired utter confidence. Dr. Kildare and Ben Casey rolled into one. Rachel was quite certain that if David had told Miss Ortiz to get up and do fifty jumping jacks, she wouldn’t have hesitated.

  “Does this hurt?” David asked, pressing a little harder.

  “A little,” the girl whispered.

  Rachel saw that she had turned even paler, but still didn’t move as David held her gaze and continued probing with his hand.

  David straightened and drew her gown down in one quick movement. He turned to face his audience, addressing himself to Gary McBride.

  “A little fundal tenderness there. Keep an eye on it. Could be septic. And I want a CBC stat, and again this afternoon to see what her white count is doing.” He frowned at the chart. “I don’t see the name of her attending doctor on here. Who took the patient’s history?”

  “I ... I did,” Gary stammered. “She’s Doctor Gabriel’s patient, but I couldn’t reach—”

  “I don’t care if he was on the moon,” David cut in. “I want his name on the chart, along with everything else, even if you do find it irrelevant. Doctor.” He emphasized “doctor” sarcastically.

  Rachel watched in dismay as Gary flushed bright pink, his freckles standing out in cartoon relief, and she saw in his expression how he idolized David, and how devastated he was by David’s disapproval.

  “I’
m sorry, Dr. Sloane. It ... it was inexcusable. It won’t happen again.”

  Rachel ached to step in, to cry out, No, David, not like that. You’re so much gentler than that. She knew him, a side of him the others didn’t. She yearned to make them see what he was really like.

  [116] Then all at once, as if he’d read her mind, David smiled, that brilliant smile, like the sun coming out from behind a cloud, and Rachel felt herself relax. David clapped Gary on the shoulder.

  “I’m sure it won’t. You followed through correctly on the rest. Good work, Doctor. Now ...”

  David was moving on to the next bed, the next patient, leaving Gary McBride grinning in his wake, his relief so obvious it was a little comical.

  Yes, that’s how he’ll be when I tell him, Rachel thought. At first he’ll be surprised, upset, maybe even a little cross. But then he’ll put his arms around me and hold me, tell me he loves me, and that everything will be all right.

  And it will be, she told herself. It’s just got to be.

  Rachel felt herself trembling, and quickly stuffed her hands in her pockets so no one would see. Her fingers brushed against the paper. Now it didn’t seem so terrible, so impossible to accept as something real.

  I’ll tell him tonight, she decided.

  For the first time in twelve hours, since she’d found out, Rachel felt that things might turn out to be okay.

  “The bastard! We had a transverse arrest on our hands, a tachy baby, and he fumbled around like a first-year med student. Christ, the man was blasted out of his skull. The whole DR stank of his breath. ...”

  Rachel watched David pace furiously back and forth across the worn Bergama rug in her tiny living room. This was the latest Dr. Petrakis horror story. David was right, she thought idly, head of Obstetrics or no, the man should have been fired years ago. A raging alcoholic not fit to do the job of an orderly.

  But she was finding it hard to stay tuned in. She couldn’t stop thinking about the baby. And how to tell David. She’d even considered writing him a letter, tucking it in his pocket as he was leaving. Dear David: I have a patient for you. She’s about eight weeks pregnant, and probably a raving psychotic. ...

  But would it be crazy, she asked herself, to keep this baby? Curled on the sofa, Rachel brought her hand to rest against her [117] abdomen. It was too soon to feel anything, of course, but she did. A kind of warmth, a steady glow. The way a lighted window at night lets passersby know there’s someone at home.

  But would he understand? She remembered his telling her once that one of the things he admired about her most was her toughness, that she wasn’t sloppily sentimental like most women. And wasn’t her wanting this baby just that?

  But I didn’t ask for it, dammit. He knows that.

  But as she looked at him now, eyes drawn into green slits, face harrowed with anger, working up little hills in the old rug with his furious pacing, a worm of doubt burrowed into her gut.

  And how could she leave here, go live with him? She loved this crummy Village apartment, despite the five flights of stairs and the postage-stamp-size rooms. And she loved sharing it with Kay Krempel, an RN she’d gotten to know at Bellevue, who was more fun and a better friend than anyone. It had been Mama’s idea—her gift, really, since she’d insisted on paying for and overseeing everything—to strip the cracked and gouged walls layered with paint dating back to the Paleozoic era down to the brick, and to burn the paint off the moldings and leave the woodwork bare. Then bring in plants in Mexican pottery tubs, inexpensive rattan furniture with madras cushions, a ceiling fan in every room. “Early Casablanca” Rachel had dubbed it, adoring it, though she wished Mama would stop hovering.

  Are you nuts? She then lashed into herself. Of course you’d leave this place for David. Who wouldn’t?

  “... the man’s a goddamn maniac. Fuck malpractice suits, he ought to be arrested. If I had any clout with the Board ...”

  She watched David stride to a halt in front of the curtainless window overlooking Grove Street. In the daytime you could smell the marvelous bread in the ovens of the Italian bakery down below, see old armoires being carted in and out of the antiques shop, watch couples holding hands going into Pierre’s Bistro.

  Now the window was dark, and all Rachel could see was the ghost of David’s reflection. A tall well-built man in pressed navy slacks and light blue V-neck sweater, neat hair. Loafers without socks was as far as he’d bent to today’s laid-back life-style. It was almost as if he had stepped right off a page out of Gentleman’s Quarterly. [118] You could almost see the caption below: PRINCETON. CLASS OF ’60. VARSITY CREW. Yet somehow, seeing the contrast of his rigid face, the muscles in his neck working as he fought to bring himself under control, Rachel had the disturbing sense of there somehow being two Davids battling it out under one skin. She felt suddenly, uneasily, as if she was on the verge of discovering something she would be better off not knowing.

  She cut her gaze away, looking down at their drinks nested in little pools of moisture on the small oak table. He hadn’t touched his, and now the ice had melted.

  Rachel uncurled her legs, and pushed herself up. “I’ll get some more ice,” she said with artificial cheeriness. “How about something to eat while I’m at it?”

  After he’s calmed down, then I’ll tell him, she promised herself.

  “What’s on the menu?” David called after her as she stepped around record albums scattered like playing cards in front of the stereo cabinet. She paused, smiling, and picked up the first two. “Surrealistic Pillow” and “Beverly Sills at Covent Garden.” There in a nutshell, the difference between her and Kay.

  Rachel thought of the surreal conversation she’d had with Kay this morning before both of them had dashed off. She, huddled in a chair, puffy-eyed from crying. Kay standing at the sink, taking gulps of her instant coffee like a gunslinger knocking down whiskeys in Dodge City’s Long Branch saloon. All of five feet in her Dr. Scholl clogs, white nurse’s pantsuit stretched taut across her plump bottom, dark hair a halo of curls.

  “I can’t tell you what to do,” Kay had said. “Just whatever you decide, make sure it’s what you want, not what David wants.” She gave Rachel a dark little smile over the rim of her coffee mug. “You know, I’ve always thought there was a tombstone way down deep in each one of us where we bury our own wants under some man’s. Only they can’t seem to stay buried for very long, can they? We never really forget. ...”

  Rachel shivered now, slipping the record albums back onto the pile. Oh, Kay, what makes you so sure that what I want is different from what he wants?

  She watched David carefully as he came toward her, his face smoothed now into easy lines, a smile in place. She relaxed.

  [119] Stepping into the old-fashioned kitchen, Rachel peered into the refrigerator. “Milk. Eggs. Peanut butter. Some leftover chicken lo mein. At least, that’s what I think it is.” She sniffed the contents of the carton. “Better scratch the lo mein. I’d have to carbon-date it to see how old it is.”

  David circled her with his arms from behind, nuzzling her neck. “Let’s skip dinner. I’m not that hungry. I’ll make us an omelette after.”

  “After what?” She squirmed around to face him.

  Her heart, she now realized, was beating very fast. Damn him. He was making her want him, making her wet. One touch, one kiss, and she was ready. Like an alcoholic who, with one drink, is lost.

  David didn’t know the half of it, half the intensity of her passion for him. She’d kept it light. On purpose. The future seemed to be a topic he wasn’t comfortable with, and that was okay. She wasn’t ready for marriage, either. Living together maybe, someday, when they both felt like it.

  But that was before, she told herself. Before the baby. You’ll have to talk about the future now, we’ll have to make some kind of plans ...

  She looked at him, opened her mouth to speak, then stopped herself. He was giving her that look that turned her knees to water, his eyes sleepy, gold lashes over cool gr
een pupils, the corners of his mouth curled up faintly, suggestively. Not Dr. Sloane, efficient, remote. Just David. She could see the veins cabling his neck, one thick one, the jugular, pulsing on his right side, impatient. It made her think of his penis, hard, ropey with veins, the tip soft, dewy, like rose petals.

  Oh dear Christ, she thought. I could probably come right now. Like this, just looking at him.

  She could feel his need, too, as he backed her up against the open refrigerator, its cold wire shelves pressing into her spine, moving his hands up her ribcage to squeeze her breasts gently.

  “Nice. Ripe,” he murmured. “Maybe I’m hungrier than I thought.”

  Rachel wished she’d thought to wear something sexier, more feminine, her silk robe instead of this old tattered shirt of Kay’s.

  Then she realized how silly she was. It didn’t matter. In a minute, she wouldn’t be wearing anything at all.

  [120] Rachel pressed toward him, swinging the refrigerator shut behind her. He was already tugging at her buttons, fiercely, impatiently, ignoring one that popped from its frayed threads and clattered against the scuffy red linoleum.

  “Not in here,” she said and laughed, nervous, her voice fluttering with excitement. “Kay might get back early. Let’s go in the bedroom.”

  He laughed. “I told you. I’m hungry.”

  Jesus. He didn’t care who saw. Would he take her right here on the floor? The thought of it both alarmed and excited her. She felt strangely weak, her breasts—heavier and more tender than usual—tight, throbbing, nipples stiff against the soft underside of her shirt. Heat funneled down through her, like hot sand in an hourglass, settling between her legs. She felt as if a warm, perspiring hand were clutching her there.

  Oh Jesus, sweet Jesus, the table, he was guiding, now lifting her onto the small round table, a little roughly. He was tugging at her pants, wrestling them over her hips, peeling them off her legs, which were dangling over the edge. She felt the varnished pine surface cold against her ass, the rough straw edge of a table mat pressing into her. He was still in his clothes, except that he’d opened his pants, pushed his slacks down a little over his narrow hips.