Taking a break in the doctors’ dining room for coffee, he spotted Angela Rios eating yogurt by herself, walked up to her, made small talk, and asked her to dinner that night.
Amazed at the calm voice that issued from his mouth. Feeling a smile curl around his lips, as if his mouth was being manipulated by a ventriloquist, as he made his play.
No good reason to ask her, other than her beauty, intelligence, charm, and the fact that she was obviously interested.
She said, “I’m sorry, I’m on call.”
“Too bad,” said Jeremy. Could he have misread her that badly?
As he turned to leave, she said, “I’m off tomorrow. If that’s convenient for you.”
“Let me check my calendar.” Jeremy pantomimed page-flipping. The old self-deprecating wit. Angela laughed easily.
Lovely girl. If I was interested . . .
“Tomorrow, then,” he said. “Meet you here?”
“If you don’t mind,” said Angela, “I could use some time to go home and freshen up. I’m off at seven, how about eightish?” She pulled out her resident’s spiral notebook, scrawled, ripped out the page, and handed it to Jeremy.
West Broadhurst Drive, in Mercy Heights.
Probably one of the old clapboard colonials converted to flats. Jeremy’s sad little bungalow was in the Lady Jane district, a short walk from Mercy Heights Boulevard.
“We’re neighbors.” He told her his address.
“Oh,” she said. “I’m not home much, the schedule, you know.” Her beeper went off. She smiled apologetically.
Jeremy said, “As if on cue.”
“As if.” She hung her stethoscope around her neck, gathered her resident’s manual and her notebook, and stood.
“See you tomorrow,” she said.
“Eightish.”
“I’ll be ready.”
Her apartment was on the second floor of a gloomy-looking, three-story structure that shouted boardinghouse. Medicinal smells bittered the creaky hallway—perhaps other interns and residents lived here and brought samples home—the carpeting was tamped down, brown, and stale, and two bicycles were chained to the oft-painted railing.
Angela came to the door within seconds of Jeremy’s ring. She’d tied back all that glorious, dark hair and fashioned a tight braid that trailed down her back. A soft white sweater caused Jeremy to notice her breasts. The sweater ended just above her waist and was bottomed by black, cinch-waist slacks and black high-heeled sandals. She wore pearl earrings and a tiny ruby on a filament-thin gold chain. Unobtrusive makeup.
The tight hair accentuated the olive oval of her face. Her brown eyes were alive with interest, her lips parted in a smile. She smelled great.
“Ready, as promised!” She shot out her hand and gave his a firm, hard shake.
Almost a military maneuver, and Jeremy suppressed a smile.
Perhaps she sensed his amusement, because she blushed. Eyed his topcoat. “Is it really cold?”
“Nippy.”
“I’m a sunshine baby, always cold. Let me grab a wrap, and we’re off.”
He took her to a midpriced, family-run Italian place on the better side of Lady Jane. The gentrified side: storefronts converted to softly lit pubs and bookstores and florists and five-table restaurants. Vestiges of the old days were represented by the painted-over windows of vacuum cleaner repair shops, immigrant tailors, Chinese laundries, cut-rate pharmacies. The rain—the clammy, acid spatter that had hectored the city for four days running—had ceased and the air was sweet and the streetlights beamed as if in gratitude.
Jeremy rushed to open Angela’s door—old habits; the academy had pounded etiquette into him. When she got out of the car, she took his arm.
The feel—the faint clawing—of feminine fingers on his sleeve . . .
The hostess was the chef’s wife. She had bosoms you could rest a dictionary on and a commodious smile. She seated them in a rear booth, brought breadsticks and menus and a small dish of garlic-scented olives. Perfect dating fare.
This was, indeed, a date.
What then, genius?
Angela ordered casually, as if food wasn’t the issue.
They talked easily.
For some reason—perhaps it was her eagerness, or the simplicity with which she conducted herself—Jeremy had guessed Angela to be a high achiever of working-class origins, possibly the first of her family to go to college.
He was wrong on all accounts. She’d grown up sunny and comfortable on the West Coast, and both of her parents were physicians—rheumatologist father, dermatologist mother, each a clinical professor at a first-rate med school. Her only sibling, a younger brother, was studying for a Ph.D. in particle physics.
“Scholarly bunch,” he said.
“It wasn’t really like that,” she said. “No pressure, I mean. Actually I never wanted to be a doctor. My freshman major was dance.”
“You’ve covered a bit of territory.”
“A bit.” Her face grew old for half a moment. As if to cover, she ate a garlic-olive. “What about you? Where are you from?”
Jeremy weighed his options. There was the short answer: the last city he’d lived in, the school from which he’d graduated, the artful digression to work-talk.
The long answer was: an only child, he’d been five years old when Mom and Dad were killed in a twenty-car, New Year’s Eve auto pileup on a sleet-slicked turnpike. At the moment of fatal impact, he’d been sleeping at his maternal grandmother’s house, dreaming of the board game Candy Land. He knew that because someone had told him, and he’d preserved it like a specimen. But the rest of the preorphan years were a greasy blur. Nana had failed soon after and been sent to a home, and he was raised by his father’s mother, a bitterly altruistic woman who never recovered from the crushing responsibility. After her fade to senility, the boy, then eight, was taken in by a series of distant relatives, followed by a sequence of foster homes, none abusive or attentive. Then, the Basalt Preparatory Academy agreed to accept him as a charity case because members of its new board decided something Socially Conscious Finally Needed to Be Done.
His formative years—the period psychoanalysts so absurdly term “latency”—were filled with bunk beds, drills, a full menu of humiliation, uncertainty for dessert. Jeremy turned inward, bested the rich kids at the academic game despite the tutors that flocked to them like remora. He graduated third in his class, turned down the chance to go to West Point, entered college, took five years to earn his baccalaureate because of having to work minimum-wage night jobs. Another year tending bar and delivering groceries and tutoring dull, rich children helped him save up some money, after which he attended graduate school on full fellowship.
Earning his Ph.D. hadn’t been tough. He’d written his dissertation in three weeks. Back then, writing had come easily.
Then: starving intern, postdoc fellow, the position at City Central. Seven years on the wards. Jocelyn.
What he said was: “I grew up in the Midwest—ah, here comes the food.”
During dinner, one of them, Jeremy wasn’t sure who, steered the conversation to hospital politics, and he and Angela talked shop. When they returned to the car, she took his arm. Back at her door, she looked into his eyes, rose on tiptoes, kissed his cheek hard, and retracted her head. “I had a great time.”
Drawing the boundary: this far, no farther.
Fine with him, he had no stomach for passion.
“I did, too,” he said. “Have a good night.”
Angela flashed perfect, white teeth. Clacked her purse open, found her key, and gave a tiny wave and was on the other side of the door before either of them was pressed to say more.
Jeremy stood in the grubby hallway and waited until her footsteps faded before turning heel.
10
Over the next three weeks, Angela and Jeremy went out four times. Scheduling was a challenge: twice, Angela had to cancel because of patient emergencies and a surprise request by the chief of medicine for Jeremy
to deliver a grand rounds on procedural anxiety caused him to offer apologies—he needed the evening to prepare.
“No problem,” she said, and when Jeremy delivered his talk, she was sitting in the fifth row of the hospital auditorium. Afterward, she winked at him and squeezed his hand and hurried off to join the other residents on morning rounds.
The next night, they had their fifth date.
Basic, unimaginative stuff, their time together. No couples-bungee-jumping, no edgy concerts or performance art exhibits, no long rides out of the city, past the harbor and the western suburbs to the flat plains, where the moon was huge and you could find a quiet place to park and consider infinity. Jeremy knew the plains well. He’d spent most of his life in the Midwest, but sometimes it still shocked him.
Long ago—before Jocelyn, when he’d been simply lonely—he’d driven out to the plains often, speeding alone on a soporific highway, wondering how many flat miles you’d have to travel before the earth shrugged itself a hillock.
Their relationship grew in mundane soil: a quintet of quiet dinners at five separate, quiet, serviceable restaurants: two Italian, one Spanish, a quasi-French place that termed itself “Continental.” After Angela let loose her affection for Hunan cuisine, Jeremy found a blue-lit Chinese café that had gotten good reviews in the Clarion. More money than he was used to spending, but the smile on her face made it worth it.
Decent food, earnest conversation, a brushing of fingertips now and then, very little in the way of flirtation or sexual suggestion.
So different from the way it had been with Jocelyn. Jeremy knew comparisons were destructive, but he didn’t care. Comparison was what came naturally, and he wasn’t even sure he wanted a clear shot at something new.
Jocelyn had been sex and perfume, the perfume of sex. The serpentine duet of tongues, moist panties on their first date, hips lifted, a musky delta the gift proffered.
His first date with Jocelyn had ended before dessert. The frantic drive to her place, ripping each other’s clothes off. Someone so petite, but so strong. Her small, hard body had slammed against Jeremy’s with a force that thrilled him and left his bones bruised.
Jocelyn had always left him breathless.
Angela was polite.
On the second date, she said, “I hope this doesn’t sound rude, but can I ask how old you are?”
“Thirty-two.”
“You look a lot younger.”
Not flattery, the truth, and offered as such.
Jeremy had looked twelve at sixteen, didn’t need to shave until he entered college. He’d hated the reticence of his hormones, all those girls he desired regarding him a kid.
By his thirties, he’d ended up with one of those smooth, angular faces that resists aging. His hair was fine and straight, an unremarkable light brown, and no bald spots or gray strands had intruded. He wore it parted on the right, and unless he used some kind of hair product, it flopped over his forehead. He believed his complexion to be sallow, but women had told him he had great skin. One, a poet, had taken to calling him “Byron,” and insisted that his unremarkable brown eyes were well beyond intense.
He was medium-sized, medium weight, not muscular, wore 10D shoes and a 40 regular suit.
To his mind, about as average as you could be.
Angela said, “I mean it. You look really young. I figured you had to be about that because you told me you’ve been on staff at Central seven years. But you could easily pass for my age, or even younger.”
“Which is?”
“Guess.”
“Two years post M.D. means twenty-eight.”
“Twenty-seven. I skipped third grade.”
Same age as Jocelyn. He said, “I’m not surprised.”
Angela said, “I was just a precocious brat,” and began talking about the rigors of residency.
Jeremy listened. You never knew when professional training would come in handy.
The good-bye pattern begun on the first date continued: walking Angela to her door, the silence, the smile, the outstretched hand.
Then: a hard, defensive peck on the cheek and her claim, a bit too emphatic, of having had a wonderful time.
Jeremy began wondering what she wanted.
After the fifth date, both of them filled with Chinese food, she invited him into her compulsively neat but shabbily turned-out apartment, showed him to a secondhand sofa that still smelled of disinfectant, poured wine for both of them, excused herself, and slipped into the bathroom.
Jeremy looked around. Angela had a good eye. Each component was cheap, scarred, and conspicuously temporary. A sorry houseplant struggled for life on a chipped windowsill. Yet the composite was pleasing.
Still, he wondered: two physician parents. Surely, she could have afforded better.
She emerged from the bathroom wearing a long, green robe—silk or something like it—sat next to him, drank wine, sidled closer, dimmed the lights. They began kissing deeply. Moments later, her robe fell open, and Jeremy was inside her.
Being there brought him no tremor of triumph. On the contrary, he felt a cold wave of letdown course through him: She wasn’t moving much, didn’t seem there. He pumped away, hard, steady, detached, thinking irreverent thoughts.
Maybe it’s the Chinese food.
Maybe after five dates she feels obligated . . .
Jocelyn had been . . .
Opening his eyes, he looked down at her face. What he could make out in the ashy darkness was serene. Lying back, accepting him passively, as he thrust himself into her. Her eyes were clamped shut. Would they flutter open, sense his objectivity?
He decided, To hell with it, pleasure myself, and forgot about her. The next time he looked down her face had changed. As if an internal switch had been flicked. Or she’d decided to come alive. Was she just one of those women who needed time—who the hell ever really knew about women? Now, she flipped her head to the side, grimaced, began grinding back at him. Gripped him with heels and hands and bit his ear and quickened her breathing to a hoarse pant as she tightened her pelvic vise and held him fast.
Jeremy’s objective, disinterested hard-on became something else completely as she cupped his balls and kissed him and cried out.
A shout—a bellow of pleasure—escaped from his mouth, and he collapsed, they both did, lying on the stinking couch, entwined.
Later, when thoughts of Jocelyn crept into his head, he shooed them away.
He drove home tingling below the waist. It was only later, hours later, lying fetally in his own bed, alone, aware of every detail in the room, that he allowed the twinges of guilt to temper his pleasure.
11
The day after making love to Angela, Jeremy paged her and drew her away from the wards and took her to his office. After locking the door, he reached under her skirt and placed her hand upon him. She whimpered, and said, “Really?” He rolled down her panty hose and her panties in one smooth swoop, and they connected standing against the door, intermittently aware of passing footsteps out in the corridor.
As she clung to him, she said, “This is terrible.”
“Should I stop?”
“Stop and I’ll kill you.”
They finished on the cold, linoleum floor. Angela dusted off her white coat and straightened herself, fluffed her hair and kissed him, and said, “I’ve got patients.” Her face grew sad. “Guess what, I’m on call for the next twenty-four.”
“Poor thing,” said Jeremy, stroking her hair.
“Will you miss me?”
“Sure.”
She placed her hand on her skirt, directly above the soft spot where he’d just filled her. “Will you do this to me again when I’m off call?”
“To you?”
She grinned. “Men do it to women, that’s what it is.”
Jeremy said, “Again, as in here?”
“Here, anywhere. God, I needed that.”
“Put that way,” said Jeremy, twining her hair around his fingers, “you leave me no choic
e. Easing the schedule and all that.”
She laughed, touched his face. Was off.
Alone, Jeremy tried to work on his sensory deprivation book chapter but got little done. He went over to the doctors’ dining room for coffee. White coats got it for free, one of the few perks left, and he took advantage of it often. He knew he was swallowing way too much caffeine, but why not? What was there to be slow about?
The room was sparsely occupied, just a few attendings taking time off between patients.
And one whose patients didn’t talk back. Arthur Chess sat alone, at a corner table, with a cup of tea and an unfurled newspaper.
Jeremy’s pathway to the coffee urn took him right into Arthur’s sights, but the pathologist gave no sign of recognition. Ignoring Jeremy—if he saw Jeremy at all.
Jeremy found a table at the opposite end of the dining room, where he drank and found himself studying Arthur.
Now he saw why Arthur hadn’t noticed him. The old man was busy observing.
The object of his fascination was a group of three physicians hunched over pie and coffee, two tables over. A trio of men, engaged in what looked to be spirited academic discussion.
Jeremy recognized one of them, a cardiologist named Mandel. A good man, if a bit distracted. He’d thrown a few consults Jeremy’s way, some ill-conceived, all well-intentioned. His back was to Jeremy, and he hunched forward, paying close attention.
The other two men wore surgical greens. One was tan, maybe Latino, with dark, well-groomed hair and a barbered black mustache. The other was white. Literally. His long, drawn face bore an indoor pallor Jeremy had only seen in long-term patients. Clipped yellowish hair topped a domed cranium. His nose was a beak, and his cheeks were sunken.
He was doing all the talking, moving his lips and gesturing with spidery hands that served a surgeon well. Mandel remained rapt. The dark-mustached man’s attention seemed to flag, as if he was put-upon, being there.
The pale man pulled a pen out of his pocket, drew something on a napkin, and gesticulated some more with those long-fingered hands. Mandel nodded. The pale man made a sawing motion and smiled. Mandel said something, and the yellow-haired surgeon sketched some more. Words were exchanged all around. Arthur kept staring.
The Conspiracy Club Page 5