by James Hynes
“Wonderful.” Kevin takes another big bite, grease and salsa rojo sliding down his fingers. Then he swallows and says, “So. The doctor is in. I’m listening.”
Claudia chews for a moment, still making up her mind. She takes one more bite, lifts her tea. Then she sets the glass and the taco to one side and puts her forearms on the table.
“Okay,” she says. “I think I told you, I’m a surgeon.”
Kevin nods.
“Well,” she says, with steely calm, “I’m being sued for malpractice.”
She says “malpractice” with the emphasis on the first syllable. Malpractice. He’s glad his mouth is full. He can’t say anything, so he just nods again.
“Someone died during an operation, and now a lawsuit has been filed.”
Kevin the professional editor can’t help but notice the mistakes-were-made form of her disclosure, the lack of a pronoun, first-person or otherwise. He also notices that his heart has begun to race. This isn’t at all what he thought he was going to hear.
“Against me,” adds Dr. Barrientos.
Kevin plucks a napkin off the stack and wipes his lips and fingertips. She picks up her taco and sets it down again without taking a bite.
“And you haven’t told anybody this?” he says. “I don’t understand.”
“Oh no, everyone knows,” she says. “It’s a matter of public record.”
“Ah.” He’s not sure if he should continue eating, but as the silence stretches again he picks up his taco and takes another bite just for something to do.
“When I said no one else knows,” she says, “that’s not what I meant.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t want to get into what happened.” She pushes her unfinished taco away from her. “That’s not really a mealtime conversation.”
“Mmph,” says Kevin.
By now their gazes are sort of feinting at each other, not really making eye contact, but just checking to see if the other is watching.
“What it is,” she’s saying, “it’s about my family. My father, specifically. He never finished high school, but he’s worked like a bull his whole life, taught himself everything he knows. Never put himself first, but never gave an inch.” She pauses, nodding slightly as if at something only she can see or hear. “He put everything he had into making sure his kids had the chances he never did. Pretty typical story, where I come from.”
“The Valley,” offers Kevin.
“The Valley.” She rewards him with a quick smile, to show that she appreciates that he’s been paying attention. “But the thing about my father is,” she continues, looking away, “the thing you need to know is, he wanted me to be a nurse.”
Their eyes meet for a moment.
“Ah,” says Kevin.
“You see what I mean.”
“I think so.” Though he doesn’t, really.
“Don’t get me wrong,” says Dr. Barrientos. “It’s not that he’s not proud of me. He is. And he’s not shy about saying it. He loves to introduce me as his daughter, la cirujana.” Adding, “The surgeon.”
“Of course.”
“It’s just that…” She lifts her hand, her fingers parted as if she means to pluck the right words out of the air. “Where I come from, or maybe I should say, where my father comes from, a man has to be, well, tough is what people usually say, but a better word is, decisive.” She glances at Kevin. “You have to judge how things really are, how people really are, take their measure very quickly, and then act accordingly. A man like that, once he decides what you are, and what you can and cannot do, he doesn’t change his mind very easily.”
Which is a trait, Kevin suspects, that Dr. Barrientos shares with her father.
“On top of that, a man like my father, coming from that place and time, he saw people defeated more often than he saw them succeed. You see what I’m saying?”
Kevin does, surprisingly. What he sees, in fact, just for an instant, is his own father at the dinner table, looking older than his age, his face sagging in a mask of fatigue and resignation. What his sister Kathleen has called, in retrospect, long after their father died, “one of his Willie Loman moments.”
“What he decided about me, was that I was good enough to be a nurse, but no more than that. So when I told him I was studying pre-med at A&M, we had some… difficulties. They went away somewhat when I got into med school, and I really thought he’d come around by time I graduated and finished my internship and residency.”
Claudia shifts in her chair as if she’s uncomfortable, and Kevin is struck by how vulnerable this makes her seem. He’s never met a woman as physically self-possessed as Dr. Barrientos—not comfortable in her own body, exactly, but in complete command of every inch of it at all times—and there’s something about this restless movement that seems as shocking as if she’d burst into tears.
“It’s just that even now,” she’s saying, “after all this time, after twelve years of being a surgeon, I can still detect a… hesitation in him. Like he doesn’t really believe it. Like he thinks it’s some sort of clerical error. Like I’m not telling him the whole truth.”
“We all think that sometimes,” Kevin says. “About ourselves, anyway.” In fact, he thinks, it’s the story of my life.
“Not me,” says Dr. Barrientos definitively. “I’ve earned everything I have. I’ve worked damn hard for everything I’ve got.”
Just like her father, Kevin thinks, and this time he almost says it out loud. But Claudia has lifted her hand again, and caught her breath.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I don’t mean to…”
“It’s okay.” Kevin’s mouth is dry suddenly, and he wonders if he should reach for his tea.
“It’s just that when I told him,” she says, and stops. “About the lawsuit,” and stops. Her gaze is fixed in his direction, but she isn’t really looking at him. It’s an uncanny look, creepy, even, like meeting the inward gaze of a sleepwalker. It’s what he sees sometimes when he looks at Stella, even when she’s awake. He feels a rush of pity and tenderness for Dr. Barrientos, because he realizes she’d rather die than show vulnerability, and yet she’s showing it to him, a man she hardly knows.
“He didn’t say anything for a long time.” Her voice is taut as a wire. “Not a word. Just looked at me, drilled me with his eyes all the way down to my spine.” She breathes slowly in and out. “Then all he said was, ‘If you’d only gone to nursing school…’ ”
She’s nodding slightly, her gaze directed entirely within. Over the muffled rumble of traffic beyond the fence and the faint beat of Mexican pop through the courtyard door, Kevin can hear her breath hissing through her nose. Then, like a sleeper waking, she shudders, her gaze softens, and she looks at Kevin, sad but utterly dry-eyed.
“That look he gave me,” she says evenly, “that was my father making up his mind. He didn’t have to finish the sentence. I knew what he meant. If I’d only gone to nursing school, I wouldn’t be in this situation.” She breathes in, out. “If I’d only gone to nursing school, that woman would still be alive.”
Kevin says nothing. What can he say? He can hardly bear to look at her, but he can hardly look away. He can feel his heart pounding. What’s more, he’s flooded again with a strong feeling of déjà vu, which only adds to his anxiety, because he has no idea why this moment should feel so familiar. This place, this woman, this situation—she killed somebody, if inadvertently, and an admission like that, only an hour after he’s met her, is sort of new in Kevin’s experience.
She manages a rueful smile. “Have I freaked you out?”
Kevin blows out a sigh. “That’s serious stuff.”
“You don’t have to say anything.” She leans back in her seat. “I’m sorry to burden you with it.”
“And of course I said just the wrong thing, didn’t I,” Kevin continues, just to be saying something, “back by the river.”
“Oh, no no no.” Claudia lifts her hand from the table. “That’s not it. That’
s not why I…”
“I know, I just meant…”
“Oh, no no no. It’s fine.”
“But what I said made you think of it.”
Claudia laughs sharply and looks away. “Trust me, I was thinking of it anyway. It’s pretty much all I think about lately.”
Kevin sits back and says nothing. A little of his anger comes back, just an echo. It wasn’t unreasonable to assume she was a nurse. Can I help it, he thinks, if her father’s a judgmental SOB? But now the déjà vu is stronger than ever, and mainly Kevin’s still puzzled. Why does this moment feel so familiar?
“That’s hard,” he says. “A thing like that. Somebody you love says the last thing you want to hear.”
“Yes.” Her gaze is withdrawing again. Another moment, and they’ll both be casting about for something to do with their hands, looking everywhere but at each other, like a first date gone bad. Gosh, look at the time. Suddenly he’s certain he’s disappointed her somehow—she’s just told him this story that she hasn’t told anyone else, thinking he might understand in a way that the men she usually deals with might not, and the best he can do is offer bromides. No doubt she’s just made up her mind about him as peremptorily as her father would have, and the last thing he wants to know is what she thinks of him, some soft-handed, sweaty, heatstruck, middle-aged white guy from up north. In fact, he suddenly has an unreasonable fear that that’s precisely what she’s about to do, fix him with her gaze across the table, drill him down to his spine, and tell him exactly what he doesn’t want to hear.
“Listen.” Kevin sits sharply forward, rocking the rickety table, sloshing tea over the lip of his glass. Both of them react instinctively, steadying the table with their palms, reaching for their respective glasses.
“Listen,” says Kevin again, and their eyes lock across the table. “I was in love with this girl once. This is, like… twenty-five years ago.”
Now that he says it out loud—twenty-five years!—it feels more like a century. It’s half his lifetime ago, but at the same time it feels like it was yesterday.
“She was the daughter of a professor of mine, a philosophy professor, in the town where I went to college. In the town where I still live, in fact.”
Where did this come from? He can’t believe he’s telling her this. He never told Beth, and certainly not Stella. He’s started speaking, in fact, before he’s even realized that this was what he was going to say. But it was on his mind earlier, in Empyrean, and now he’s sitting up straight in his chair, keenly aware of the muffled rumble of traffic beyond the fence, the tinny throb of amplified music, the tremor of leaves overhead, the black-eyed birds strutting in the dirt, the pressure of the heat all around their table. He’s aware of Claudia’s startled gaze over their never-to-be-finished lunch.
“I didn’t know her when I was in school,” he’s saying, “when her father was my professor. I only met her a few years after I graduated, when she was still in college and she used to share a house with a friend of mine.”
Who also loved her, though Kevin doesn’t say that. Half the guys Kevin knew in Ann Arbor in the mid-eighties were in love with the Philosopher’s Daughter.
“And even then, I didn’t really get to know her until a year or two later, one summer after she graduated from Michigan, and she was living in her parents’ attic, in this big old farmhouse halfway to Saline.” He pauses. “That’s a little town outside of Ann Arbor.” Then he adds, “Michigan.”
Claudia gestures, go on.
“Anyway, this girl, she always had a cloud of guys circling around her, waiting for whoever she was seeing at the moment to go away or be dumped, so they could take their shot. You know what I mean?”
Kevin’s dimly aware of the potential awkwardness of telling a middle-aged woman what a babe another, younger woman used to be—though, actually, she’d be older now than Claudia—but Dr. Barrientos seems to be taking it in stride. She nods, at any rate.
“I don’t know where her parents were that particular summer, but she always seemed to have the house to herself, and she used to have people out there all the time, for cook-outs or parties or whatever.”
One party in particular, thinks Kevin, but that’s not the half of this story that he’s telling right now.
“One night that spring, early May maybe, she had five or six of us out, just her and five or six guys, and we stayed up late watching movies on TV. And these five or six guys, all of us had crushes on her to varying degrees, though only one of us was her actual, official boyfriend at the time. And the thing was, he was leaving in a couple weeks to go to Europe or something, and the rest of us were, you know, circling, angling to take his slot. So you get the idea—five guys and this irresistible girl, all of us in our twenties, more or less, and we all kind of know why we’re there. It’s like a casting call, and she’s playing it very cool, but enjoying every minute of it.”
“Do you blame her?” says Claudia.
“Wait and see,” Kevin says. “So we ordered pizza or grilled hot dogs or something, and we stayed up really late watching whatever we could pull in on her parents’ shitty little black-and-white TV. This was before VCRs, understand. You’d think a full professor at Michigan would have a decent television, and cable, and a color TV, but no, it was a little Zenith black-and-white portable, yay big, with rabbit ears and one of those loops for UHF.” Kevin laughs. “Christ, they didn’t even have a roof antenna!”
Claudia smiles, if only at his enthusiasm.
“So we’re watching Channel 50 out of Detroit, this low-rent station that showed movies all the time, and I can still remember the movies we saw that night, in order.” He ticks them off on his fingers. “Trilogy of Terror, The Snakepit, and The Big Country.” He laughs again. “Trilogy of Terror? Karen Black versus the devil doll?” He crosses his eyes, mimes stabbing with a carving knife, cries, “Ai yi yi yi yi!” loud enough to startle a bird and attract the attention of the two lean guys across the courtyard. Claudia shakes her head—she has probably never wasted her time watching horror movies—but she smiles slightly.
“Never mind. Point is, halfway through The Snakepit, which was this old forties melodrama, I realize I’m not watching the movie. I’m lying on the floor with my head on a throw pillow and instead I’m watching the Philosopher’s Daughter with her boyfriend, Tom or Bill or Gary or whatever his name was, the two of them draped over each other on the couch. I can see the TV light flickering over them, I can even see the little black-and-white reflection of the screen in her eyes. He’s behind her with one hand on her hip, and she’s curled against him with her head on his arm, and he’s, like, half-asleep, bored out of his mind, but she’s absolutely rapt, okay, she’s watching this dopey old picture like it’s, I dunno, Citizen Kane. And I’m watching her, I can’t take my eyes off her, and I’m thinking: I want to be that guy. I want to be the guy with her on the couch with my hand on her hip and her head on my arm. Only, believe me, I wouldn’t look so fucking bored.”
Kevin stares at nothing, reliving the moment.
“Anyway,” he starts up again, abruptly, “one by one, everybody else crawled off to find places to sleep, and it was just me and the Philosopher’s Daughter and her sleeping boyfriend. By now we’re watching The Big Country, which has got to be one of the most overblown, overproduced, boring Westerns I’ve ever seen. Nothing happens for, like, hours. Gregory Peck plays this sea captain who’s engaged to a rancher’s daughter, only he ends up in love with a schoolteacher played by Audrey Hepburn. Or maybe not Audrey Hepburn, but somebody just like her. Point is, for most of the movie, Peck gets insulted, beaten, and abused by all the cowboys, especially Charlton Heston, who all think he’s just the most pathetic”—almost says “pussy,” but says instead—“sissy imaginable. He’s got some sort of Quaker thing going, won’t talk back, won’t fight, unless he’s absolutely forced into it.”
Kevin inches forward.
“Lousy, frustrating, infuriating movie, because you want Gregory Peck t
o deck somebody, or shoot somebody, or at least take the girl he loves away from that bonehead Charlton Heston. Instead, he’s doing Atticus Finch, only with less balls.” Easy, thinks Kevin. “Meantime, I’m half-watching this goddamn movie, and half-watching the Philosopher’s Daughter nestled in the arms of this asshole who has no idea how lucky he is. And the thing is, she knows I’m watching her. She catches me at it, and she doesn’t look away. She doesn’t say anything, doesn’t smile, doesn’t frown, just watches me back until I can’t stand it anymore, and I have to look back at the screen. And that’s the moment I knew I was in love with her, and it’s also the moment when I knew that I was as big a pussy as Gregory Peck in that movie, because I was afraid to do anything about it.”
“So do something,” says Claudia unexpectedly. “Tell her.”
He’s surprised she spoke up, he’s half-certain he’s boring her senseless, but she’s leaning across the table, watching him intently.
“I did!” he says. “Eventually. I mean, even Gregory Peck rode off in the sunset with the schoolteacher. So after her boyfriend left for Europe, I ended up taking her out to see bands two, three times a week. I was working at a record store that summer and I used to get comp tickets, so I took her to see some pretty amazing stuff—U2, before they were really big, okay? But the thing is, these weren’t like dates, per se, it was more like, hey, I’ve got tickets to this thing, you want to go? And she always said yes. We used to go dancing all the time, too, sometimes at clubs, sometimes at parties at people’s houses we knew, and sometimes,” Kevin laughs, “sometimes we’d walk the streets near campus on a Friday or Saturday night until we found a big party, and just walk in. I mean, nobody cared, everybody was usually pretty drunk already, it was…” He’s lost in the memory for a moment.
“God, she was a great dancer!” He sighs. “This is going to sound really stupid, but she danced like Molly Ringwald in The Breakfast Club, back when Molly Ringwald was really something. Do you remember how she danced? She used to toss herself back and forth, like that.”