The Antidote for Everything

by Kimmery Martin

  Her first two patients were routine. She saved the best for last: Mr. Fogelman.

  Anyone exiting the bank of elevators would be able to tell which room contained Mr. Fogelman as soon as they set foot on the second floor, because he personified an unabashed confidence common to a certain kind of older man: booming voice, untended clouds of tufty ear hair—in short, total imperviousness to embarrassment. You had to love him.

  “I got a new one for ya, Doc,” he said, enthusiastically grasping Georgia’s hand as soon as she came within grasping distance.

  That was another thing about being a female urologist: you were confronted with a lot of penis jokes. Most of them were terrible, but occasionally one was right on the money. You might think patients would be reluctant to share such jokes with their own urologist, but you’d be wrong. Georgia heard them all the time.

  “Hit me, Mr. Fogelman,” she said, dragging a chair next to the bed with her free hand. Next to them, in an orange pleather cube appearing only slightly more comfortable than a block of cement, Mr. Fogelman’s tiny wife lay asleep with her mouth open. Georgia resisted the urge to check a pulse.

  “What’s that insensitive thing at the base of the penis called?”

  She’d heard this one before but she didn’t let on. “Tell me.”

  “The man!” He chortled. His chest shook as he laughed: it was impossible not to laugh with him.

  “Aw, Mr. Fogelman,” she said. “I’m sure you personally are among the most sensitive of men.”

  “I’m actually kind of a jackass, Doc. According to my better half.” He gestured to Mrs. Fogelman, who, miraculously, opened an eye and croaked, “Yes, dear.” Without opening her other eye, she eased out of the chair, tottered over to the bed, lowered the bed rail, nestled against Mr. Fogelman, and fell instantly asleep again, looking for all the world like a jumble of stick-covered skin. He lowered his lips to the top of her wispy white head and kissed her, winking at Georgia. “Isn’t she a beauty?” he asked.

  “She is,” she agreed, trying not to think about the fact that Mr. Fogelman was dying of bladder cancer. Later today, he would be taking his final trip home from the hospital, this time aided by hospice. Both of them knew this was the last time they’d see each other, but neither of them wanted to acknowledge it; Georgia because she was afraid she’d cry, and Mr. Fogelman because there seemed to be no circumstances in which his natural bonhomie deserted him. Even now he was beaming through the pain and the drugs, his hearty face split by wrinkles of joy. He pointed at her.

  “You’re married, yes?”

  “I’m not.”

  “You’ve got a fella, then.”

  “No,” she said, and some compulsion toward honesty prompted her to add, “Not after today, anyway. I’ve been dating someone but he lost interest.”

  Mr. Fogelman’s beam dissolved into outrage. “What? He’s lost his damn mind. Who breaks up with a woman like you?”

  “Plenty of people,” she said, grinning, although in truth she was generally the dumper, not the dumpee. The downside—one of the downsides—of being a single thirty-six-year-old surgeon was the parade of people trying to fix you up with an ever-dwindling pool of single professional men, most of whom were single not because they hadn’t met the right person but because of a glaring personality flaw. Possibly it indicated an abundance of pickiness on her part, but Georgia was perfectly comfortable being picky. She was not perfectly comfortable dating someone who said snide things about the pants size of the cashier at the grocery.

  Mr. Fogelman, summoning up an uncanny ability to read her mind, nodded. “Don’t even think about settling,” he said. “A gal like you deserves to be cherished.” Without disengaging her hand, he shifted in the bed to more directly face her, adding in a voice considerably more gentle than his usual, “You’re the best, you know that, honey?”

  “So are you,” she said, redirecting her gaze toward Mrs. Fogelman in an effort to diminish the ache rising in her throat. “Call me right away if you need anything from my office. Don’t go through the phone service, okay? Your wife has my cell number; just call me directly. I can come to you if I need to.”

  “I will, Doc.” He traced the path of her gaze to the frail woman beside him. “I’m a lucky man: forty-eight years with an angel by my side. I know it’s not going to be any better than this in heaven.” Again, he brushed his lips against the snowy cloud of his wife’s hair, and this time, finally, his voice cracked enough to reflect his age and his health. “Leaving her—” he started.

  Georgia waited.

  “Leaving her—” he tried again, his face still resting against his wife’s head. He closed his eyes and cleared his throat, a harsh, haggard sound. When he spoke again, she could hardly hear him. “Leaving her is the only reason I’m afraid of what’s coming.”

  * * *

  —

  The remainder of the day passed in the slightly surreal haze accompanying an epiphany. She did all the usual things: she performed a vasectomy on a grimacing man; she employed a green-light laser to photo-vaporize the prostate of a hedge-fund manager with trouble urinating; she spoke with a college soccer player and his weeping father about surgery to remove his cancer-ravaged testicle. She gave each of them her full attention, focusing not only on the questions they asked but also on the ones they failed to ask, taking care to give the floppy-haired soccer player her special-patient email address so he could, at his leisure, write the questions he could not bring himself to consider now. She placed a nerve-stimulating device in a painfully shy elderly lady, contemplating the yawning gap between social ease and the dysfunctional hell of being unable to control your bladder. Sure, people lauded their adorable pediatricians and their lifesaving cardiologists and the heroic last-ditch efforts of their oncologists, but you’d never experienced gratitude until you’d given someone the gift of continence. Not to mention the profound indebtedness of a man who could have sex again.

  But throughout all of this, she kept reverting to an image of the Fogelmans, entwined in one another’s arms, pressed by the narrow confines of the hospital bed up against the metal safety bars. Here death, the ancient, great, primordial fear, had been eclipsed by love. Her patient feared not dying, not pain, not a cessation of form and life and thought, but separation from the human being he loved above all others. What would that be like, she wondered, for another person to love you that much? And Mrs. Fogelman: Georgia imagined her face as she watched the sentience leave her husband’s eyes, as his vital mind, so full of verve and dazzle, switched itself finally and irrevocably off. How did you withstand such a loss?

  How did you find that kind of love in the first place?

  2

  THE TELL OF A LIE

  Georgia stepped outside into a blast of warm air and an explosion of color. Reminiscent of Charleston’s famous Rainbow Row, the stucco buildings comprising the clinic had all evidently been designed by a passionate admirer of tropical fruit, and they ranged in color from kiwi to papaya to banana. On top of that, someone had gone hog wild in the floral department, lining every walkway with a riotous profusion of ground-cover blooms.

  An outgoing swell of hospital workers flooded the sidewalks, most of them striding with spry purpose toward the parking garages, a few trudging more slowly, burdened by exhaustion or a rough day or aching joints or who knew what. For once, Georgia moved alongside the slower crowd, lost in her thoughts of the Fogelmans. And Ryan, the guy she’d been seeing.

  Ending things with Ryan was no tragedy—he was hot but dim, an ember of a human being. She’d known, subconsciously and probably consciously, that he offered no promise of long-term companionship, let alone the kind of epic soul-melding she’d witnessed in the Fogelmans. Still, it stung. The closest Georgia had ever come to marriage had been a passionate but dysfunctional engagement to a bartender named Angus, who turned out to be a serial cheater. Suddenly, she found herself craving an
escape from the intensity of the day: a drink, some music, maybe something stupid and mindless on Netflix. She wanted to shut down.

  She’d almost reached her car when she remembered: Jonah.

  She’d just picked up her phone to call him when it rang. “George!” it squawked as she answered. She felt herself relax even as she brightened at hearing Jonah’s voice. “Where are you?” he asked.

  “Parking lot,” she huffed, stomping up the final flight of stairs to the seventh level.

  “Parking lot?”

  “Doctors’ parking garage at the clinic. I’m leaving work.”

  “That’s sad. I’ve been done for hours.”

  “No, you have not.”

  “Fine. I’ve been done for minutes. Meet me out?”

  She ignored this suggestion. “What was going on earlier? Why did you say you thought you’d be fired?”

  “Momentary panic. It was nothing.”

  This was probably a lie—something was going on and he’d decided to ignore it—but there was no distress in his tone, so she let it slide. “Glad to hear it. But I have to get home.”

  “You want to go out and party. Got it.”

  “I need to be home to pack,” she said. Jonah, endowed with galactic energy, was perfectly capable of working all day and going out half the night without suffering any apparent consequence the next day. Georgia was not.

  “I guess you have to save Fun Georgia for Amsterdam,” he said.

  “Aw, Jones,” she said. “Don’t say that.”

  As a primary care doctor, Jonah made less than some physician assistants. He also staggered around under a hideous trifecta of debt: hundreds of thousands of dollars of student loans, the unbelievably costly expenditure of in-home medical assistance for his beloved grandmother, and a self-inflicted credit card issue stemming from his days as an underfinanced medical student. Georgia knew he couldn’t justify the expense of an international trip without the stipend, and he knew she wasn’t going to cancel because he couldn’t go.

  She tried a different tactic: “I’m very tired today.”

  “You can be very tired when you’re forty. A single thirty-six-year-old person needs to mingle.” At thirty-two, Jonah relished his status as the younger, hipper one, pointing out her elderly status at every opportunity.

  “I don’t—wait,” she said, suspicious. “How did you know I’m single again? As far as you know, I’m still dating Ryan.”

  He laughed so loudly she had to hold the phone away from her head.

  “Thanks for the sympathy.”

  “I’d be oozing sympathy if you needed it, you know that, but look at it this way: at least it wasn’t a slow fade. You dated Surfer Dude for five minutes and it was obvious you weren’t into him. You’re just used to being the one who ends it. This . . . this is a blessing, George. Here, now. Let me see if I can put this in terms your generation would understand—that guy was a doofus.”

  “So, everyone knows, huh?”

  “Surely you didn’t imagine a story that good would stay confidential? Tout l’hôpital.”

  “All of it? You heard all of it?”

  He cackled again. “Don’t worry, I hear the natural look is coming back.”

  “How would you—never mind.” Suddenly, the conversation inspired her. “Anyway, I need to get home so I can mourn in private.”

  She figured Jonah would respect this: eating ice cream in unattractive pajamas, or whatever lame thing people did when they’d been dumped, but he was having none of it. “Nonsense. I’ll see you in an hour and we’ll discuss dating options for you.”

  “That’s a hard no for me, Jones. I just want to pack and then crawl in bed. Alone.”

  “You gotta get back on the horse, George.”

  “It’s been five minutes! No one gets back on the horse the same day they’ve been dumped. I’m in a refractory period.”

  A smug chuckle. “My refractory period is literally five minutes.”

  “No it isn’t.”

  “Fine. You’re the sexpert. I’ll see you in a few.”

  “Do people like this? When you pester them nonstop?”

  He played his ace. “It’s the last night for karaoke before you leave me.”

  “Jonah!”

  Both of them loved to sing. Georgia had a good voice, a kind of raspy smoke overlaid with honey, especially suited to bluesy songs. Even speaking instead of singing, her voice garnered plenty of attention from men, who seemed to associate it with a certain wanton quality: red lips blowing a stream of French cigarette smoke, black lace bras, sultry waves of hair, that kind of thing. When they realized it instead belonged to a physics- and machinery-obsessed, seventies-wannabe nerd, they tended to react with disappointment, even before they made the discovery that she was—literally—a ballbuster. You could appreciate why she had romantic problems.

  “Dammit.” She folded. “I’ll be there.”

  “Excellent!” A clicking sound: the patter of a keyboard. He must have lied about having already left work. “Be ready to wail.”

  “I’m staying one hour,” she said. “Max.” She ascended the last flight of stairs, emerging onto the unroofed portion of the garage, which blazed with the heat of a thousand suns. Fanning herself with the edge of her white coat, she headed toward the far end of the deck. “Hey, Jonah?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Tell me why you said you might get fired.”

  The clicking sounds stopped. For a moment she thought he might have hung up, but then his voice puffed into her ear, hale and disingenuous. “Nothing. Some hassle from the suits.”

  “What kind of hassle? From who?”

  He ignored the first question but answered the second. “The Cheerio.”

  She stopped walking. John Beezon was the chief human resources officer for the clinic. People referred to him as The Cheerio because he signed all his emails with his job acronym—CHRO—rather than his name. This nickname was a bit of a misnomer: Beezon was about as cheery as a tarantula.

  “Jonah. What did he do?”

  “Don’t worry about it.” He still sounded untroubled. “I’m going to stop by before I go and see if I can get this sorted out.”

  “Get what sorted out?”

  “Nothing. I don’t know. A bunch of patient no-shows for appointments.”

  “Wait, what?”

  “I’ll handle it. You go get gorgeous and I’ll see you soon.”

  She reversed course, spinning on one heel to face the stairwell again. A low pattering of voices emanated from Jonah’s end of the phone, followed by the sound of him greeting someone, muffled as if he had his hand over the phone.

  “I’m coming to his office too. I’ll be there in five minutes,” she said, but it was too late: he’d already hung up.

  * * *

  —

  Swanning into the HR offices, where everyone still seemed to be working, she put her game face on. Nodding with regal composure at a couple of agitated reception people as they tried to wave her down, she bypassed a little cluster of cubicles. Fact: if you assumed an air of authority, people often wouldn’t challenge you. Plus she still wore her white coat, potentiating the notion that she was very busy and important. After a short chase, the reception people gave up, and she entered the depths of the HR department, heading for Beezon’s lair.

  Revealing the utter lack of imagination of its owner, Beezon’s office had been decked out in time-honored middle-management style: a desk veneered in faux-oak laminate; a creaky utilitarian swivel chair; an uncomfortable couch composed of right angles. A framed portrait of Beezon resided on the desk in a prominent spot. After one glance at it, you recognized his kind: a classic underdog prone to short-sleeved dress shirts and an occasional experimental mustache.

  Neither Beezon nor Jonah was in the room, so Georgia plunked down
in the swivel chair, idly leafing through the books and magazines. These ran the gamut from the boring gibberish of financial journals to the pontificating bureaucratese of HR manuals. Did he ever read anything for fun? On the one hand, one should not judge a man based on his taste in workplace reading materials—he undoubtedly kept the good stuff at home—but on the other hand, she was talking about Beezon here. She tried and failed to imagine him engrossed in a copy of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad or Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns or Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. She couldn’t even fathom Beezon having the intellectual curiosity to check out internet porn, let alone literature.

  She turned from the small stack of books and nudged the mouse of Beezon’s computer. To her surprise, the black screen of the monitor instantly gave way to the white background of an email: Beezon’s computer was not password-protected, a striking lapse for a human resources officer in possession of sensitive material about employees. Any thoughts she might have had about not reading the document vanished when she saw the words typed across the top: Confidential: re Jonah Tsukada, M.D.

  One sentence in, Georgia realized a showdown of epic proportions loomed in the future, because someone—the as-yet-unknown author of the email—was trying to make the case that Jonah was a substandard physician. This was bullshit; Jonah’s clinical skills were exemplary. Even his patient satisfaction scores—the dreaded Press Ganey surveys, which were often utilized as revenge by patients for factors beyond a physician’s control—were top notch. The key, Georgia thought, was his authenticity: he loved his patients with the kind of fervor that wasn’t easily faked. People knew when someone was shining them on and when someone genuinely cared. Jonah genuinely cared.