* * *
—
The cafe, of course, was modern in design: backless leather stools, bright pools of light spilling onto blocky white tables, an ascetic-appearing tile floor. Georgia held her glass aloft and considered the swirl of caramel-colored bourbon. Having grown up in Kentucky with her father, a bona fide genius and a stern bourbon aficionado, she took drinking seriously. This was good stuff; she was impressed at the depth of this little bar’s bourbon reserves. If someone had told her yesterday she’d be toasting with a shot of Weller in a random airport bar with a recovering poisoned man after saving his life on an airplane—well, she could not quite imagine what her reaction would have been. Delight? Amazement? Confusion?
If Mark’s face was anything to judge by, he was similarly taken aback by the turn of events. Catching her studying him, he tilted his water in her direction. “Cheers,” he offered. “Or maybe I should say ‘prost.’”
“Proost,” she said agreeably.
“This has to be one of the strangest days of my life.”
“Mine too.”
“Okay,” he said. He took a giant swig of his water, so she downed a correspondingly large swig of her bourbon. Maybe not the best idea, but she’d earned it.
The Weller tasted fabulous; smooth and warm, with an ass-kicking little jolt at the end, even better than the surprisingly good pastry she’d ordered along with it. This was airport food? “I misspoke a bit when I said I had a question,” Mark was saying. “I’ve got several, actually, and I’m ashamed I’m just now asking the first one, given that you rescued me on the plane.” He paused.
“Proceed.”
“This is awkward, but it’s only going to get worse as time goes on.”
“With a buildup like that, you’ve definitely got my attention.”
Mark’s clear eyes shone with something that looked suspiciously like mirth. “I realized I already know a lot about you—you’re a doctor, you’re a bookworm and a science geek, you’re a bit of a rogue but you’re lonely, you—”
“Whoa,” she interrupted. “Hold up. Obviously you’re aware I’m a doctor, but how do you know those other things?”
“I’m paying attention. You have not one but two novels and a biography sticking out of your shoulder bag. Only a dedicated book junkie would carry that much weight around.”
“Okay.”
“The science part: the biography is Nikola Tesla, and there’s a novel by Neal Stephenson. And then there’s your tattoo.”
“You saw my tattoo? Which one?”
He nodded. “A delta. I saw it on the plane, when your pants leg rolled up a bit.” He paused, adding, “I wasn’t purposely staring at your ankles or anything.”
She must have looked dubious, because he went on. “Okay, yes. I was looking at your ankles. They’re very nice.”
“No, it’s just most people think I have a tattoo of a triangle. Or if they recognize it as a delta they think it’s a sorority thing.”
“The Greek letter delta,” he said. “The scientific and mathematical emblem of change.”
“Correct. And it’s the differential operator given by the divergence of the gradient of a function on Euclidean space.”
He stared, his mouth slightly ajar. “The Laplace operator.”
Her turn to be impressed; she’d never met anyone who didn’t look at her strangely if she started babbling math jargon, let alone anyone who could actually comprehend what she was talking about. “You know about the Laplace operator?”
“I was a math major; how do you know about the Laplace operator?”
“My father was a college math professor. So, yes, I have a lot of reasons for liking the delta symbol. What about the rest of it?”
“The rest of the Greek alphabet?”
“No, the rest of what you said.” She waited, embarrassed, but he still looked puzzled. “That I’m a rogue or whatever.”
“Ah,” he said. “Well, it’s no great feat of deduction to figure out you like bucking expectations. You’re a doctor but you’ve got a tattoo, and—”
“Lots of physicians have tattoos.”
“Be that as it may, you’ve got a tattoo and you dress like you’re in a folk band, and—”
“Not a folk band, a—”
He held up a hand. “But the real clue,” he said, “is that.”
He pointed to a round button pinned to her shoulder bag, which sported a picture of Will Ferrell dressed in a wig, makeup, and a weird outfit. Printed across it were the words ANTI-ESTABLISHMENT: SO HOT RIGHT NOW.
“Ah,” she said. “yes.” They each had another sip of their drinks. The silence suddenly felt oppressive; she was still burning to know what it was about her Mark had identified as the tell of a lonely person. Did it waft off her like the stale odor of the bread she’d found in the back of the pantry last week? Were her aging ovaries emitting a man-repelling sonar ping? No, she decided. All of that was ridiculous. First, she hated when people yammered on about ovaries, and second, she wasn’t the kind of person who conveyed—or even felt—desperation, even when perhaps she should. She tended to err more on the side of overconfidence.
But that didn’t mean she wasn’t lonely.
“That last bit,” he said, in a softer tone, “about you being lonely. I made that up.”
“Why?”
“Possibly it was projection.”
She considered this. “Are you lonely?”
“Well, sure. Sometimes. I work too much. But I was mainly glad you’re not with anyone.”
A fine flush of pleasure crept up her neck. “I see. What sort of work do you do?”
Two identical and longitudinal rents appeared in his cheeks as he smiled. “I’m the CFO of the European branch of a venture capital firm based in California. Most people find my job to be incomprehensible or boring, so I usually don’t bang on about it too much. How about you?”
“Back up a second. I don’t even know your full name.”
“Mark McInniss.” He held out his hand, and she set down her glass to shake it. “Expat American, math dork, and reader, so as you can see, we have a few things in common. Okay, now that we’ve been formally introduced, on to my question: what kind of doctor are you?”
“Nope,” she said. “I’m gonna make you guess my specialty.”
He chewed thoughtfully. “Hmm,” he said. “I’m a great guesser, so I’m likely to get it right on the first try. Give me a second.” He set his fork down and massaged his forehead. “Pediatrician.”
“What? No. Why would you think that? Because I’m a woman?”
“Yes. But not because I’m sexist. I mean, I hope it’s not because I’m sexist. It’s logical; there are more pediatricians than most other specialties, and most pediatricians are female.”
“Yeah, but no. Try again.”
He stared at her, with the same intent look he’d worn on the airplane. “ER doc.”
“No. But that’s a good guess, because deciphering what was wrong with you was very ER-ish. I’m still impressed with myself.”
“Proctologist.”
“No! And they’re called colorectal surgeons. But you’re getting warmer.”
“Proct—wait, colorectal surgeon is warmer? I think I give up.”
“I’m a urologist.”
“Neurologist?”
“No, UR-ologist.”
“Georgia Brown the urologist,” he said. “What an interesting job.”
She straightened, gratified by this approval. Most people tended to detour down a predictable conversational path at this point, wanting to know why in the world she’d chosen to be a urologist, or if it bothered her patients that she was a woman, or most commonly, an incredulous appraisal of her tattoos and her nose ring and the fiery halo of her hair, followed by a couple unsubtle questions about whether or not sh
e’d found medical school to be difficult. Mark’s mind, though, had wandered down a different track. He settled back in his seat, his arms across his chest.
“Did you ever consider another field? Something nonmedical?”
“Sure,” she said. “Architecture, physics, even divinity school or philosophy at one point. I also worked as a car mechanic in college.”
“That’s quite a range of interests. You don’t often see science geeks pondering a religious career.”
“That’s a widely held misconception, that science and religion are incompatible,” she said. “And if you’re Southern and religious, everyone assumes you’ve got the brainpower of an amoeba and you fit in socially somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun.”
“Am I to take it that you’re smarter than an amoeba and to the left of Attila?”
“Yes,” she said.
“That’s intriguing,” he said, giving away nothing of his own beliefs. “And you wound up as a doctor instead of a theologian or a car mechanic.”
Even though he hadn’t inquired directly, a compulsion to explain her specialty choice took hold anyway. “I went into medicine because I liked the idea of alleviating suffering. But I didn’t know which specialty to pick, and the thing is, urology was a process of exclusion. I knew I wanted to be a surgeon of some sort; in surgery you can actually fix things, and I love fixing things. But I didn’t really dig on intestines, so that let out general surgery; and all those dainty little tweezers they use in head and neck surgery struck me as too doll-like; and orthopedics made me feel like a construction worker. I even tried to wear a hard hat to the OR one day to rod a femur, but my attending at the time had an underdeveloped sense of humor.” To illustrate, she assumed an expression incorporating both vapidity and hostility. “Transplant and cardiovascular are cool as all get-out, but the lifestyle can be grim. By the time I sorted through it all, only urology was left, and I thought it was the most interesting of the bunch anyway: it incorporates both medicine and surgery to treat a wide range of illness. Plus I kind of like being a woman in a dude’s world; there are only about a thousand female urologists in all of America.”
“I imagine you must mourn the loss of your ignorance in some respects.”
“Wha—oh, you mean I know too much about men?”
He jerked his chin: a portrait of mock gravity. “The loss of the masculine mystique.”
“Well, you’ve got that right. Mystique is in short supply when you do what I do. And actually, romance is in short supply when you do what I do. Some dudes are not anxious to date a woman who interacts with penises for a living.”
“Occupational hazard, I suppose,” Mark said diplomatically, adding, “and are you traveling for business?”
“Yes. You?”
“Yes. I go back and forth between the states and Europe frequently. California and the research triangle in North Carolina, mainly. This is not exactly going to heighten my appeal, but I often work seven days a week. I haven’t had a decent date in so long I can’t remember the last one. I’ve never had a date with anyone who saved my life before, or with a doctor, or, for that matter, with a smart redhead.”
She thought about this; it was rare for a man to acknowledge he was on a date, even one that was more clear-cut than this one. She decided she liked his lack of pretension. “Does that mean,” she said finally, “you’ve had a date with a dumb redhead?”
“I’ve had a date with every dumb redhead in Europe. Please don’t deny me the opportunity to improve on that. Let’s have dinner tonight in Amsterdam.”
The words dinner tonight in Amsterdam held an undeniably exotic ring. “Yes,” she said. “Okay, yes. I’ll have dinner with you tonight in Amsterdam.”
“That’s perfect.” He took down the last of his water, setting it back on the little table with a clunk, before glancing at his watch and then at her. “I should vomit on women more often, apparently.”
She grinned. “I’ve been barfed on by worse people.”
6
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ATTRACTION
By the time they reached Amsterdam, after what surely had been history’s most epic conversation between two strangers on a train, Georgia realized two things: first, it had been years, if ever, since she’d met someone to whom she felt such an instant attraction, and second, she had a strong desire to cancel her hotel reservation. She was in the midst of a mental rearrangement as they waited at the station for a ride—maybe they’d just skip dinner, maybe she’d abandon the conference registration altogether—when Mark picked up her hand and said, “You’ll come with me?”
She’d been booked into a depressingly American-sounding hotel with attached convention facilities, so she’d been pleased to hear Mark lived in a posh and ancient area of town called the Jordaan. It wasn’t his apartment, he explained as they got in the car; the flat belonged to the head of his company, a guy named Rolly who apparently traveled so often he had apartments in several European cities. Amsterdam, obviously, but also London and Munich and Basel, Switzerland. She hadn’t thought of any of those places as biotech hotspots, but Amsterdam alone housed many such companies, including one of the first to launch a gene therapy product.
They stopped in front of an old building overlooking the canal, its brick facade dotted with windows. “It’s gorgeous,” she said.
“I moved here from California for what was supposed to be two months and now I’ve been living in this flat for two years,” he said, unlocking the front door and stepping into a vestibule dominated by an intricately carved staircase. “And it never fails to impress me. It’s light and airy and full of horrendously expensive modern art. The one drawback”—he grasped the handle of her suitcase and started up the first flight—“is that it lacks an elevator.”
A seemingly endless number of stairs led them to the top floor, where he flung open the door to the flat and stepped inside. “Home sweet home,” he said, looking over his shoulder. “Welkom in Amsterdam.”
But she didn’t follow him in. To her surprise, somewhere between the first floor and the fifth floor, following his tall form up the stairs, she’d turned into a walking cliché of lust: weak-kneed, flushed, gripped with an all-encompassing desire. She studied Mark, the entire length of him, ending at his face, which had turned quizzical as he waited for her. “Come here,” she managed, leaning against the grayish green wall of the landing, her voice rasping into the stairwell.
It took him only a second to understand, and even less than that to cross to her. He had to lift her in order for their faces to line up; his eyes, looking right into hers, had gone dark. He held her around the waist, his hands spanning her hipbones and her ass, her hands grasping the sides of his face.
Georgia had long been interested in the psychology of attraction, her mind a repository of useless research conclusions about what cranked up the dial on the sexometer. She knew about the impact of an easily visible ocular limbal ring on the perception of attractiveness (good), what color women should accessorize with if they want to attract men (red), and the impact of internet porn on the relationships of newlyweds (bad). She understood symmetrical faces connote beauty, so much so that you could measure the distances and the ratios between certain facial features on a woman and predict, without ever looking at her, whether or not men will find her desirable. She knew about pheromones and how sociocultural status impacts relationships and whether or not people are attracted to people who looked a lot like them (they are). But some chemistries were indefinable. Mark’s face, which you might or might not regard as handsome, was to Georgia compelling beyond all measure. His scent almost knocked her out; she nearly lost her mind at the angle of his jaw. Why this man? What did he possess that so many others did not?
Whatever it was, it rivaled some form of induced chemical ecstasy. She’d never tried cocaine or heroin, not wishing to become one of the unfortunates who suffered an arrhythmia or an overdos
e, but Jonah’s friend Jace—one of those people whose threshold for stimulation was considerably higher than average—had tried everything there was to try. He’d reported back: a really good drug was like really good sex. These words didn’t do justice to either drugs or sex, she thought now, as her overwrought senses verged on meltdown. Mark ran his hands through her hair, pausing over a tangle near the back of her scalp, and then he pulled her inside and she forgot everything.
* * *
—
Afterward, as she lay on her side, cocooned against him in a limp daze, his words drifted over to her. “How was that?” he asked.
With effort, she flopped over to face him. “Fishing for compliments?”
“Yep.”
“I’ve had better.”
“You have not. Try again.”
She laughed. “Well, then. I’d say it was like the earth shuddered on its axis and the heavens screamed in ecstasy and the universe immolated itself in a great celestial ball of flame and a chorus of angel voices cried out as everything faded to black. How was it for you?”
“I’ve had better.”
She thwacked him with her pillow. “You have not.”
He closed his eyes, granting her the opportunity to study his face in the bright wash of light from the windows opposite the bed: the fine, long bridge of his nose; the curving fringe of his eyelashes; the black arc of his eyebrows against the cool white of his skin. He opened his eyes, drinking in her absorption. “I’m certain I have never known anything better,” he said softly.
A thrumming kicked up in her chest, low and sultry, like the bass note in a blues song. Sometimes—many times, actually—when she found herself relaxing into unguarded happiness with another person, some perverse part of her psyche would kick in, alerted by the opportunity to throw shade on her bliss: her own personal little relationship troll. When things were going well, this troll would stick a quivering snout out of his lair, assuring her This won’t last or Something will go wrong or You’ll be sick of him in a month. She didn’t understand it; she was not a cautious person. It was a mystery why she often deliberately stalled out of relationships before they began.
The Antidote for Everything Page 6