Ask Bob: A Novel

by Peter Gethers

  She laughed, rather harshly. “Do I look like someone who doesn’t know people? I know too many people here.”

  I backtracked immediately. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  That seemed to offend her even more. “You didn’t offend me.”

  “Oh. Good. You just seem kind of angry or hostile or something.”

  “I’m not angry or hostile. I just don’t want to have a drink.”

  I didn’t mean to look quite as crushed as I suppose I did. But maybe my obvious disappointment was a good thing, because when she saw the look in my eyes, she took a leisurely step back, swaying on her right leg, and said, “But I could meet you around eight o’clock if you want to take me to dinner instead. And you’re really going to have to take me because your fee for looking at this fucking cat is pretty much my meal money for the rest of the week.”

  I said that seemed reasonable.

  She tugged at the sleeve of her frilly blouse, something I came to learn was a nervous habit of hers. She tugged and fiddled with anything she could. Her hair. Her fingers. Her clothing. I can’t tell you why, but watching her restless, very elegant fingers made me smile. Their perpetual movement, so incongruous with her tough veneer, hinted at some very difficult-to-reach vulnerability.

  I realized that she was looking me over and studying me as carefully as I was her. Her gaze made me uncomfortable; her eyes had a natural taunt to them. I hadn’t done anything to make her taunt me, at least not that I was aware of. But then I got the overwhelming feeling that this was not about anything specific; this stranger seemed to be challenging my whole way of life. I had a brief flash of Anna: In our entire life together, she had never looked at me in such a way. Nor had Elizabeth. Even when she was in full academic mode, I never got the sense that Elizabeth was judging me, only that she wanted to help and support and understand me.

  I opened my mouth to say to Camilla Hayden, “I just remembered, I can’t do dinner tonight.” I knew that was the right thing to say and do. I should go home, call Elizabeth, who was up in Cornell, and listen to her tell me about her day. Then I should feed the menagerie, take whoever needed walking out for a walk, and read or do the crossword puzzle or watch a DVD. I didn’t need a complication in my life, especially not a complication I found both extremely off-putting and overwhelmingly attractive. So I was a little startled when what actually came out of my mouth was “Do you like Italian?”

  I was even more surprised when she said, “No,” and then waited for me to say something in response. When I didn’t, she laughed again, this time less harshly, and flipped her hair and said, “I’ll meet you here at eight-thirty. Try to come up with something better by then.”

  Then she picked up the cat she didn’t like and was gone.

  Within a minute, Lucy came back to my examining room. She didn’t say anything. She just looked me over and nodded.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” she said. “I just wanted to make sure you were all right.”

  She went back to the reception desk. I was well aware that I hadn’t answered her nonquestion.

  How could I? I wasn’t at all sure of the answer.

  * * *

  I was outside my clinic at eight twenty-five and waited for Camilla Hayden for twenty minutes. At eight forty-five she came careening around the corner, talking on her cell phone, walking fast, kind of barreling down Greenwich Avenue. She walked as if she were playing football (or, considering her nationality, rugby): ready, it seemed, to shove anyone who got in her way onto the sidelines. She looked agitated; she seemed to always look agitated. But when she was about half a block away, she glanced up, saw me, smiled, and waved. Her teeth were brilliantly white, and her smile lit up the whole block. Her wave was not a rugby player’s wave; it was a little girl’s wave. It indicated delight, and her delight filled me with a strange joy. From that moment on, after that one early glimpse of the person beneath the protective veneer, my one overriding desire when I was around Camilla was to bring that person back to the surface and to make it possible for that to be her natural state.

  Thinking back, what I most wanted with Anna was always to be worthy of her. I loved her almost religiously, and I always strove to match her kind of perfection. She, of course, would never have thought of herself as worthy of such devotion, and if she had, she would never have used it to her advantage in our relationship. With Elizabeth, it was more as if I never wanted to disappoint her. She saw things in terms of rules and the need to adhere to those rules. An academician to her very core, she saw life in terms of grades; a slip in standards or a lazy moment or an inability to live up to a promise could damage one’s final report card.

  To my way of thinking, I failed in my attempts to be worthy of both women. Maybe that is the key to human relationships: We pick impossible goals, try to fulfill them, and when we fail we wait to see if the center will still hold.

  Camilla’s flash of delight had dissipated by the time she reached me on the street. Whoever she was talking to on the phone had aggravated it away.

  Standing a foot or two from me, she chattered on for another minute, kept saying into her cell, “I have to go … I have to go … I really must hang up…” When she finally did hang up, she smiled brightly again and said, “I’m starving.”

  “I’ve narrowed it down to Indian or Japanese,” I told her.

  “Japanese,” she said. “Sushi. I’m trying to be healthy. Been drinking way too much, so I’m off alcohol for a few weeks. I love all those dosas and things but too much starch. Let’s do sushi.”

  So we walked to a great sushi place on Sixth Avenue that I’d read about. I could eat sushi every day, but since Anna didn’t like it, we never went to Japanese restaurants. Once Elizabeth came into the picture, I never suggested sushi because … well, it somehow seemed as if I were cheating on Anna. I wasn’t ready for the freedom of going someplace I wanted to go; more accurately, I wasn’t ready for the pleasure it would bring me. (It doesn’t really make much sense, I know, but this is the way it works when your wife dies at age thirty-one.) As a result, it had been nearly thirteen years since I’d gone to a Japanese restaurant, and it was kind of thrilling to be walking casually down the street with a beautiful woman to go eat raw fish. At the same time, I felt sad. And guilty. It was a complicated five-block walk.

  That entire dinner was fairly complicated. There was a fascinating inconsistency to Camilla. As soon as we sat down, she asked if we could order a bottle of sake.

  “Of course,” I said. “But I thought you weren’t drinking.”

  “Oh, fuck it,” she said. “You can’t eat sushi at a place like this without a good bottle of sake.”

  I shrugged agreeably and ordered a good bottle. (I knew nothing about good or bad sake but the waitress seemed to, so I let her pick. Judging from the satisfied look on Camilla’s face after her first sip, the waitress knew what she was doing.)

  I’d never seen anyone eat the way Camilla did. Anna had a superb palate and she understood the science of food—what made something sweet, which ingredients dominated a dish, what seasoning needed to be added to put the food world in perfect harmony. She appreciated food on a high level, but it was not a love of hers—other than her precious grilled cheese sandwiches, which brought her to a nearly rapturous state. Elizabeth was no kind of foodie: She saw meals as a break from daily life rather than a part of life, and she cared less about what she ate than maintaining some kind of order and striking the right kind of balance with where and how she ate. As with most things, Elizabeth saw food in terms of purity and structure. But that first night, Camilla ate with such glee and satisfaction that it was a little bit like stumbling upon an elegant soft-core porn movie on late-night cable. As she bit into her toro and yellowtail and giant clam, she would roll her eyes and moan quietly and lick her fingers and take a sip of cold sake and look at me with a kind of wonder and say, “This is so good!” I think she spoke to me chiefly to remind herself that she was not
the only person in the restaurant. That’s the way she ate: as if no one else was anywhere near her and she was in her own little chamber of sensual delight. But then, in between tastes, she would switch gears completely and go back to having a normal conversation. At least until she’d take another bite of something that really struck her fancy, at which point she’d get distracted and drift off into a few more moments of food ecstasy.

  I watched, a bit awestruck, as she made her way through several courses and, between moans, told me pieces of her life story. That night I heard only the bare bones of the story, as it turned out. That was another contradiction hardwired into her being: She wasn’t just a genuine intellectual who happened to be the most sensual person I’d ever met, she was also reticent to the point of catatonia about revealing anything personal. But she also had a healthy enough ego that once she got going, she held nothing back. And when she did, she demanded full attention and comprehension.

  If Cammy—yes, I did eventually call her that; I got a lot of resistance, but she succumbed with a certain amount of embarrassed enjoyment—told you something about herself that she considered important or personal, run for cover if you either forgot the details or didn’t take the revelation seriously or used it against her to make a point at some later date. The rage that would emerge was both scathing and a bit terrifying. Not terrifying because of the damage she could do to others (although she could certainly do that), but because of the damage you could see she was doing to herself. That was another compelling and bewildering divide in her character: I had met few people who cared as deeply as Camilla did about humanity on both a grand and an individual scale. Yet I had never encountered anyone who could be so hurtful and deadly cold to people she cared about. Her insistence on seeking the truth about others could cut to the bone. Her fear of dealing with certain truths about herself could engender a fierce and often devastating response.

  But that finger-licking, sake-drinking night, I didn’t see rage or contradictions or anything else that might have given me pause. I saw a spectacular woman who enthralled me with her manner and her stories.

  Cam was English, London-born. Her parents were well-to-do but not upper class. They could afford a spacious flat in the city, as well as a small cottage in Sussex, where they spent happy weekends together. That was all I heard about her family that first night. I poked a little, as is my wont, but got no deeper than that. I also listened carefully as she spilled all the details of her academic and professional life. She’d left England—again, no details on the circumstances—to come to New York when she was eighteen. She went to Columbia University and then to Columbia’s med school.

  When Camilla told me she was a doctor, she gave me a funny look. That hint of a challenge came into her eyes, though I wasn’t exactly sure what she was challenging. For an instant her expression made me shrink back; then the look was gone. Reflecting on the moment later, I thought I’d imagined it, because she plowed ahead with her story without hesitation. But I hadn’t. I definitely hadn’t.

  By the time she graduated from med school she loved New York and wanted to stay. She was able to because she got accepted for her residency at Lenox Hill Hospital, on East Seventy-seventh Street. She lived in a tiny studio apartment way the hell out in Brooklyn and spent the next three years learning how to be a doctor. She specialized in family medicine; she wanted to be an old-fashioned GP, helping people who might not have health insurance, healing poor people who might not otherwise heal. Having a purpose in life was important to Camilla (as long as the purpose was outside of England, a place to which she most definitely did not want to return). The passion behind her words as she described her sense of purpose was a wonderful thing to behold.

  When she finished her residency, she felt strongly that she had to get out of New York. She was afraid—although she would never have used that word—of falling into the various traps New York can set: success, status, money, and all the other seductions that didn’t sit well with her desire to have a purposeful life. She wanted to escape New York for personal reasons as well, she said, although when I pressed her about what those were she just waved me away, as if I were interrupting her story for unimportant, meaningless details. That, too, became a familiar trait: Anytime Camilla didn’t want to deal with something, she would simply dismiss it as unimportant.

  She spent a year in the ER at Lenox Hill, a necessary prerequisite to getting a job with Doctors Without Borders, or, as she said in perfect French, Médecins sans Frontières. It was simple, she said: She wanted to help people and figured that MSF would be the best way to do that. So they sent her to North Kivu, in the Congo, where a war had—and has—been raging for several years (that night, I didn’t tell Cammy that I had never actually heard of North Kivu; I certainly had heard of the Congo, although I couldn’t have told you exactly where it was).

  She took a deep breath before continuing with this part of the story, and then she rushed through it.

  “With MSF, they ask what you want to specialize in. You can go to areas with infectious diseases or places where starvation and malnutrition are the most important issues or go to natural disasters. I asked for armed conflict.”

  “Jesus. Why?”

  She waved me off again. It wasn’t important. At least it wasn’t important that she tell me that first night. With Cam, you had to earn the right to hear the important stuff. It was a question of trust: She had to trust you to understand. And she had to trust herself enough to tell the truth.

  “I was sent to the Rutshuru region. They had a hospital there. My first day, seventy-eight people were carried in, and all of them required emergency surgery. The second week, one of the doctors I was working with was killed. Blown up by a grenade.”

  I said her name—“Cam”—and reached for her hand. The move was instinctive; I wanted to offer her a comforting touch, and that was all. It didn’t provide much comfort, apparently, because she quickly jerked her hand away—it was as if I’d burned her instead of gently patted her. She looked down, embarrassed for a moment, then said, “Can we get some more sake?”

  I ordered a half bottle this time, and we drank it fairly quickly while she told me more about her life in the Congo: how she got to love her translators, the people she cared for, and the doctors; how she was caught in several battles and watched people get shot while standing next to her. She told the whole story very evenly but at the same time with obvious anger and a deep, lurking emotion. And just as suddenly as she’d begun, she decided the time for personal revelation was over. The challenge I’d seen in her eyes earlier returned.

  “Why do you do what you do?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure I understand the question.”

  Her anger was under control but still evident, hidden but ever so present. “Why do you waste your talent?”

  “You want to think about phrasing that a little differently?”

  “No. You have all this medical skill, all this knowledge. And all your effort is spent on … creatures. There are all these people in pain and you take care of cats.” The contempt practically dripped out of her when she said the word “cats.”

  I didn’t answer. I was trying to control my own anger. But I was also trying to formulate an answer.

  Before I came up with anything, though, she said, “I can’t be the first person who ever asked you this.”

  “You are, actually,” I told her.

  “Amazing.” For the first time, I heard a vague slur in her speech. The sake had caught up with her.

  “Not really,” I said. “Most people I talk to aren’t as positive as you are that they’re the only ones who know exactly what’s right.”

  “I am right,” she said.

  “You go into the jungle and stitch people up who’ve been blown to pieces. And what happens?”

  “They go on living.”

  “They go back outside and get blown to pieces again. You fix people so they can go right back out and get killed in a different way. You don�
�t think that’s a waste of talent and knowledge? I have respect for what you’ve done. I respect anyone who spends his or her life being unselfish. But everyone has a different reason for doing what they do. I don’t know what your reason is. Maybe you think you’re really making a difference. Maybe you just like to see people blown up. Maybe it’s a lot easier when you don’t have to see people again after you’ve done your job, when you don’t have to see what happens to them.”

  “That’s why you stitch up cute little kittens?”

  “I like cute little kittens. They don’t bullshit themselves, like most of the people I know. But mostly, when I fix them, they stick around and bring a lot of pleasure to the people who brought them to me.”

  She stared at me. Not angry. Mostly just curious now.

  “Do you really believe all that?”

  “No,” I said. “Well, sometimes. I think the reasons people do things are never as simple as what we tell ourselves they are.”

  “Let’s go,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  I walked her home. The apartment she was staying in was on Twelfth Street, almost to the Hudson River. I asked her whose place it was and all she said was “Just someone I know.”

  “The person with the cat.”

  “Yes. The goddamn cat.”

  We didn’t say much else during the walk. She seemed lost in thought. I assumed her thoughts were about her friend who got blown up by a grenade and the people she knew who were shot. Or maybe they were about the people who brought me cute little puppies to be neutered or rabbits to have their ear infections checked out. I was kind of preoccupied myself. Mostly I was thinking about how I’d probably never see her again. But when we got to the front of the apartment building she said, “Thank you. That was an amazing dinner. I loved it.”

  “I’m glad. I did, too.”

  “Even though I was so rude to you?”

  “You weren’t rude. You were just…”