by Lisa Zeidner
So what did she want with him? Were their immigrant grandparents from the same town in Russia or Poland? Did they recall to each other the bloom of their youth, their hashish and tie-dye halcyon days? Granted, cardiothoracic surgeons are pretty distasteful: imperious, territorial, and ferociously competitive not only at work but at play, as they ski and jog, sail and golf, grunt at the gym, and whack tennis balls at each other. Real Don Juans too, which is sort of a joke. Most of them are hunched-over, balding guys, of below-average height, in unflattering glasses. Duck-toed walks. Hair in their huge nostrils, hair in their ears, hair poking out between the holes of their surgical gowns, beepers bulging out of the pockets of pants that ride too low on their waists, and they still think all the nurses and receptionists should swoon. Believe me, a couple of hundred arrogant cardiothoracic surgeons at a convention is not a pretty sight.
Compared to most of them, Ken would seem dignified, sensitive, suave. Ken is a man who enjoyed his OB-GYN rotation. He would tower over his colleagues, literally and figuratively. He is soft-spoken. He is clean-shaven, with a full head of hair.
So maybe, simply, that’s what Hillary Katzenbach was doing with him: “I may be a surgeon, but I’m still a girl.” And what he was doing with her. If he’d been more disciplined, he could have done pediatric cardiothoracic surgery himself. Or he should have just been a cardiologist, plain and simple; the work was much more interesting, and if he hadn’t been so painfully, neurotically in love with the sound of surgeon he would have recognized that. But now it was too late. Now he was boxed into this practice in Ohio, always arguing with his partners, his take dipping up or down but always in the vicinity of three, four hundred grand a year.
Poor, poor Ken.
“The problem with Ken,” Hillary Katzenbach informed me, “is that he has a heart. He’s just not entirely sure what to do with it.”
Speaking of heart, what did Hillary Katzenbach’s husband do? Neurosurgeon? Civil rights attorney? Mergers and Acquisitions? No. Hillary Katzenbach’s husband was—a poet.
A poet!
She told me his name with a well-trod irony, knowing that I wouldn’t have heard of him, but implying that I would have, if I were literate. There was a hint of apology for her own implication, an acknowledgment that she was tired of having to dutifully express disdain toward people who had not heard of him, because let’s face it, no one had heard of him and no one ever would. Because he was a poet. (And for the record who had heard of her, outside of her field? Who had heard of anyone?)
Well, this was very interesting. If you figure that, of the hundred pediatric cardiothoracic surgeons practicing in the country, twenty, thirty of them are women, then how many of them could be married to poets? She would be the breadwinner, then. Her poet would cook, and clean, and occasionally teach, and do much more than the usual male share of taking care of the kids.
A boy and a girl: Allison (thirteen) and Daniel (eleven). Right sexes, right age spread. Hillary Katzenbach somehow managed to get through medical school and establish a prestigious practice and deliver two children, no doubt without an epidural. (The OB-GYN probably a school chum of hers, another straight-talking woman who brooks no guff, but they would hug each other, warmly laughing, afterward.) “I’m very sorry, but we did all we could,” she would tell the parents of a child she didn’t save, and then go home to find her kids already bathed, duck in to kiss them good night and smooth the sheets that a maid washes and changes, and tell her strong-yet-soft poet-husband about the sadness of her job over the dinner he will now reheat for her. He pours her wine. Expertly massages her back, lifts up her hair, kisses her neck. A poet, as opposed to a cardiothoracic surgeon, would kiss necks. Then he writes a poem about it, about the beautiful tension of his wife’s back. For H. as ever.
Thus, the official version of their blessed life.
But. The facts. What is the finely wrought poem celebrating: her back or his own exquisite perception of its beauty? Lovely language about his lips grazing the tender flesh, but the truth is they barely touch. The tediousness of the marital dialogue: he points out that she is never home. When she does pop in she looks at her children as if they ring a bell, from a previous incarnation. So much money, but vacations are an impossibility. When she goes off to medical conventions—her husband never accompanies her, even to the ones in Hawaii in February, because what male poet could bear being emasculated by the hairy surgeons—he would know what to pack for lunch, know whom to call for play dates. Most of the time he would do it gracefully and most of the time she would remember to be grateful. But now and again he would feel resentful, try to, say, fuck her at two in the morning, in some of the postures of domination suggested by bad pornography, as a way of taming the educated women who really want it like that, will beg for it once you strip them of their intimidating credentials. What are you doing? she says. I’m tired. I’m saving lives all day, whereas you are—writing poems.
To which he would reply, You cunt. That’s the long and short of it then you do not respect me.
“Let’s review what I actually said. All I said—”
“I heard what you said. I do understand the English language. I am not one of your patients.”
“Don’t you think I get tired of you implying I have no imagination?”
“Well, do you? Any imagination, or sense of play, or empathy, or even simple human kindness?”
And so on until she would marvel, What was I thinking? I should have married a surgeon.
Someone who understands.
Enter Kenneth Leithauser, stainless-steel eyes glinting.
For what has Ken been walking around the house squeezing a rubber ball in his fists, if not to make those hands strong enough to heft a woman up against the wall of an elevator and cup her ass.
How proud they must have been, they of the steady nerves and the stellar hand-eye coordination, the long workdays and the tedious decisions about billing and staff, arms scrubbed germ-free right up to the elbow, to be so overtaken with passion.
I’d already tried not to begrudge Ken the elevator scene. Intellectually it made sense. A human being sometimes wants to feel open, wants to glimpse the possibility of transcendence. Sex is one option. It is a good option, because it is almost the only option. Many of the other ones (mountain climbing, hallucinogens, etc.) are just poor substitutes. Both of us had been through an ordeal, and I understood how and why it could happen. However I still didn’t want to know, because it was simply not possible for him to throw me up against that elevator wall the same way. Not after seventeen years. That seemed to be what was required, but I could no more provide it for him than I could take back the mistake he made in medical school, make him satisfied with his life. His confession and apology were, surreptitiously, an accusation: I hadn’t given him enough, held him firmly enough.
As Dr. Katzenbach spoke, I had written her husband’s name on my pad, in capital letters. Then thickened the letters. Then given them serifs. Then drawn a fat, cloud-shaped circle around the name and doodled around the circle until it was an elaborate series of decisive barbs, like a castle moat. The name was shackled inside the circle. I stared at his name while she talked, so that the letters began to break up, not make sense, the way the spelling of any word will when you look at it too long. Why did Michael have an ae? Were any other words like that in English? Archaeology? Why wasn’t it Mi-keel, then? I wondered if she called him Mike. Of course not; poets aren’t Mikes. I tried to imagine how his name would sound in her steak-knife voice. At that moment she happened to say the word call, so the leap from call to Michael was not that large. The l at the end of the word was surprisingly soft, almost swallowed. More like caw. Not quite, but almost, macaw. I knew that unaspirated l, from my sales route.
“Are you from Pittsburgh?” I asked.
That stopped her. “Nearby. Why?”
“I recognize the accent.”
She had been talking steadily, but now she paused. I recognize the accent: it was the s
econd thing I had gotten out in this conversation, I realized, since I’d greeted the news of her helpless love for my husband with that’s quite all right. What could she possibly think of me?
“If you don’t want to hear this,” she suggested testily, “I can stop.”
Of course I didn’t want to hear this. Wasn’t that obvious? The words of course I don’t want to hear this were not on the tip of my tongue; rather I was searching for them on the pad, as if I only had the strength to read them, not take them straight from my brain to my mouth. But she didn’t give me time.
Ken had called her, she went on, after our son died. She had not spoken to Ken for years, though they’d kept track of each other’s careers through friends of friends in medical school. That’s how he knew she was in pediatric cardiology. He wanted to pick her brain. Had faxed her the autopsy. That was when the cause of death was still not absolutely clear, she reminded me: whether it was the accident itself, whether the jolt had caused the belt on the car seat to compress the carotid artery, or whether it was just a classic Anomalous Left Main Coronary Artery that happened to manifest itself during the accident.
“The thing about the Anomalous Left Main,” she told me, “is that it doesn’t present. Little kids don’t know to complain, because they can’t recognize chest pain. That’s the problem. There’s no heart murmur. So it’s going to be just like an ordinary adult heart attack from exertion, but what is going to constitute exertion? Ken didn’t think the force of the jolt, even with the shock of the air bag deploying and all the confusion, should have been enough to trigger it. But really all he needed from me was reassurance. That he shouldn’t have figured it out. That had he known, he could have done something about it. Every doctor’s worst nightmare—that you missed something.
“How could I not feel for him?” she went on. “I admit I got involved. There was one article in The Annals of Thoracic Surgery I faxed over to him. Another in Zeitschrift für Kardiologie. He called me, said he didn’t know German. I translated the salient points. After a while I realized we were just talking. Asking each other stuff about our lives, and that was—you know. It’s hard to make that happen. Your life just kind of—swallows you up. I don’t want to make it seem like—well, Ken’s every bit as wrapped up in the bullshit. The bullshit crushes you and you don’t even know it’s happening because officially you’re the general. But inside—well, there is no ‘inside.’ There’s no room for it. You just gird yourself for the battle. It’s hard for outsiders to understand, which is why it is so refreshing, sometimes, to have a veteran.”
The elevator scene I had conjured before, I thought, was preferable. Ken and Hillary pressed up against the wall of the elevator I did not enjoy, but Ken and Hillary whispering wet-eyed about their souls over my son’s autopsy—this I could not abide.
I was showered, dressed. My shoes were even on. I did not hang up the phone; I simply put it down, carefully, and left the hotel.
The running shoes spring-loaded my steps, so that movement was easier than it had been barefoot, on the plush hotel carpeting. The running shoes were miracles of modern science—the high-tech equivalent of ruby slippers. But the shoes alone could not explain the energy I felt, the clarity. Nor could the nap, or the protein-rich breakfast. I felt single-minded and streamlined, the way nature shows portray hawks honing in on their prey.
Retraced in a kind of trance much of my path from the jog with Zach and found myself at one of those come-hither mega-bookstores—cappuccino bar, lounging nooks, as many bells and whistles as a pinball arcade. Bright, inviting young people circulating through infinitudes of bright, inviting books. At least the illusion of options. We had these chains even in Ohio. Democracy’s shining lie: that you can tread familiar ground and still be surprised as you turn a corner. Excitement without risk. Like everyone else, I enjoyed allowing the soothing evergreen and fake Britishy wood trim to work on me, although I had to stiffen, stifle some distaste, when I passed the self-help sections at which I had spent so much brave time for a while, trying to screw on a new mind-set toward tragedy as you would look up hotels in a tour guide or get clever curtain tips from decorating magazines.
Only on the escalator, calmly ascending, did I notice what I was clutching in my hand: the square of hotel notepad bearing my husband’s lover’s husband’s name.
I went straight to the poetry section.
Found him. No Love Lost. A paperback with—how frustrating!—no dust-jacket photograph.
“For Gavin,” the dedication read, in capital letters. Then underneath, smaller: “And for Hillary. Always.”
In case I’d worried I had found the wrong Michael.
Did that mean for Gavin only sometimes?
I read standing, voraciously, in the aisle of the bookstore. I hadn’t read any poetry since my undergraduate days, when I took far more English courses than your average math major. It had been years, though, so I should not have felt comfortable evaluating the poems of this man who was, according to the flap copy, a New Formalist. Yet I did not feel intimidated by the threat of sonnets or double sonnets.
I’d often heard about how schizophrenics, in certain hyped-up moments, get an adrenaline rush that allows them to bust the locks on their padded cells, hurl to the floor guards triple their size. I seem to have gotten the mental equivalent: my X-ray vision now applied to systems of thought as well as to pure emotions. Poetry was not much of a test, I grant. Would have been better to trot over to the science section and find out if I could follow, even remotely, something from physics. Or skim a carrepair manual, contemplate rebuilding my own transmission. But what I thought, with the poetry book in my hand and my legs striding Zeus-like atop the cloud of each running shoe, the shoes both soft and supportive, al dente, was: show me a man. And I’ll swoop to his still center, no matter how fleet-footed the dodge of his rhetoric.
In Michael’s case, I knew this much, at once. This man had not been faithful to his wife. You didn’t have to be a pediatric cardiothoracic surgeon to figure out that, in matters of the heart, Mr. Mike had been around, and judging by the publication date of the book, relatively recently, with poems like:
ADULTERY
As if on a workday, opening the door for the paper
you find instead, wrapped in plastic, a Vermeer.
One of how many, globally? Twenty? Rare
as it looks, the light so clear
caressing her face in the dark interior
you feel that you’ve already touched her
everywhere, often, yet you just got her
which you (no dolt) know for the thrill: not here
in real life, with fluorescent wife, inferior,
but in the lavish lair of simple desire.
Love is like art. Both need to be made.
But desire’s just delivered, like the paper.
Desire becomes brittle, sour, old news,
while the painted lady remains fresh as dew,
as if Vermeer just this moment drew
the curtain to reveal the true
pleasures of the domestic. You were a fool
to think that’s what you owned. Deluded.
She does not sit in her parlor longing for you:
even the richest donate their Vermeers to museums
where the wives become sluts, strutting their beauty
for all who wish to contemplate desire’s paradox:
It’s always clearer in the mind’s eye.
Yet you always want to take it home, where you can really see.
(Why didn’t “paradox” rhyme?)
(Or, in the following poem, “mouth”?)
MISSING A KISS
What mothers know that others don’t:
want starts in the mouth.
The baby’s sucking is ferocious
though he doesn’t even know he is,
no less exists separate from the breast.
Hunger not a request
but his very essence.
A kiss
is nothing if not oral.
We pretend to know this, but for all
our worldliness
we can’t make sense
of that primal absence.
Can only take its pulse:
I am a big baby. I want you that much.
Kind of liked that one.
It was possible, of course, that these longings dated from his past. Possible, too, that Hillary herself was its object; maybe one or both of them had been married to others, or separated by distance, when they met. But I doubted it. Not if their oldest child was thirteen. One simply could not meditate, as he did in a poem called “The Scuba Diver,” on the underside of the tongue of a spouse of fourteen-plus years as
muscular, silver, iridescent
like the belly of a glimpsed fish—
unless, perhaps, one was a poet. Unless one’s vocation was to dwell on one’s most minute impressions of a life lived. And why not? He was right, after all, about kissing. Built a case in several connected poems that what you lock into is the illusion that you have stopped time, constructed a barrier between yourself and death. You can’t stay locked in a kiss, however passionate; soon the lover’s mouth is like your own, carrying bad taste, decay, etc. (The only physical relationship that stays fresh, he claims, is that with a child, because the child’s body keeps growing, changing, shutting you out.)
So I stood, and read, and had very mixed reactions. For the sonnet sequence on kissing I felt my old Victoria’s Secret lust surfacing. (Sexy stuff. Mikey would need to take some lovers, if for no other reason than Research and Development, once married to Dr. Katzenbach. Unless she was a babe when she stripped off the lab coat, but, Ken aside, I doubted it.) Smugness about my own acuity because he was so close to how I’d imagined him. A tender father, a tender lover and husband, but maybe too proud of his accomplishment in the arena of life: the work brought a whiff of self-congratulation, as if every time he put a Band-Aid on a kid’s cut, or noticed the sky was a nice blue, or stuck his prick in some poetess (his main or at least most recent mistress, I sensed, was a colleague), he had to run out and write a poem commemorating the experience. Though that might be an inevitable occupational hazard: maybe you can’t dish up a poem the way you could pull together a pasta for a late-night dinner, from what’s around, casually. You would have to be ceremonial, as if you’d just invented the sandwich.