twenty-one
New York, New York, five months ago
A FEW DAYS LATER, while I was still trying to get back on track, I suddenly remembered the detail that had eluded me while listening to Julie’s audio-files: “(…) he gave me that book, The Waves. Virginia Woolf was his favorite author and he was always quoting her. I think he knew all her books by heart …”
And I read again the last paragraph of her goodbye letter: “Remember that quote from that book you love so much? ‘I’m not one and simple, but complex and many.’”
I checked online: the quote she’d mentioned was from The Waves. I’ve never been a big fan of Woolf’s and I’d never discussed books with Julie, except for The Divine Comedy.
She hadn’t given me too many details about that man, one of her ex-boyfriends. She’d only mentioned his first name, David, two or three times during our conversations, and told me that they’d had a casual relationship shortly before we met. Nothing notable, nothing important. Just an impulsive thing, she said.
Susan Dressman called me a couple of days later, after St. Patrick’s Day. I’d spent that weekend all by myself at home, thinking about what had happened and writing a long report addressed to the Office of Professional Medical Conduct.
After a few pleasantries she got to the point.
“I couldn’t stop thinking about our last meeting … I was absolutely livid with you, but afterwards I realized that maybe I made a mistake. I was looking into your eyes that day, watching you talk about Julie, and I couldn’t help but think you really did care about her.”
“I didn’t care about her. I loved her. But you’re right, I was wrong and now I know what I have to do.”
“Yes, maybe you do, but …”
There was a brief pause while we both waited for the other to speak again. She eventually went on.
“I lied to you that day. There’s something you should know about Julie and her goodbye letter. It wasn’t for you, but for a man named David Heaslet, who now lives in Detroit. They were lovers, but he broke up with her before moving to Michigan. I knew the truth, but I was outraged because you’d taken advantage of her, or that’s what I was thinking at the time, and I wanted to punish you. So I suggested to her parents that the letter was addressed to you so they could use it as evidence in the future inquiry carried out by the police … That’s what I wanted to tell you. Well, I wrote you a note today and sent it to your office. It was easier that way. I wanted to make sure that you still practice at the same address and that you’ll get it.”
I confirmed that I had the same address and thanked her, bringing the conversation to a close.
I received her note on Wednesday, but I didn’t open the envelope. Instead, I sent the report I’d written over the weekend to the OPMC. Professor Atkins, who was the vice-chairman of the board, called me after two days, first thing in the morning. He was stunned and confused. After my graduation, we’d made a point of getting together every now and then, but over the past few months we hadn’t seen each other.
“It’s the first time I’ve ever heard of a doctor who files an ethics charge against himself,” he said. “What do you think you’re doing?”
I told him that I’d been thinking a lot over the last few months and I’d come to the conclusion that there was no other way. We met for a drink that very afternoon and had a long talk.
“Why are you doing this to yourself?” he asked me. “Have you had a breakdown? You could lose your license for life, do you realize that? Having sexual relations with a patient is automatically considered malpractice, whether the treatment had something to do with her decision to commit suicide or not. Yes, you were deeply wrong, and I wonder how on earth you could do something like that. But if I were you, I’d try to find another way to punish myself.”
“George, with all due respect, I don’t think you understand. I’m not punishing myself, I’m trying to save myself. If I don’t do this now, if I don’t take responsibility for what I’ve done, this thing is going to destroy me, as it has already done to some extent. I met some people who spent their entire lives alone, hiding from themselves, because at a certain moment they hadn’t been capable of assuming the responsibility for something they’d done or just thought they’d done. And I don’t want to make the same mistake.”
It was a warm Friday evening and we were sitting at a terrace in Tribeca, not far from the Rockefeller Center. The sky was the color of latte coffee and the sun was about to set behind the skyscrapers. Endless streams of people were pouring down the streets, like a secret procession.
“You’re the best psychiatrist I’ve ever met,” Atkins said. “You’re intuitive, cultured, and you like healing people, you care about them, and this must be the first quality of a doctor, in my opinion. I was hoping that sooner or later you’d consider a career in academia and come join me at Columbia. Believe me, they’ll crucify you. Are you sure you really deserve to go through something like this? Is there no other way?”
“Yes, there’s no other way. I should have been there, with her, to help her out of the ring of fire, no matter what. But I wasn’t, nobody was, and she just sat there and burnt, because everybody had left her behind.”
“What ring of fire are you talking about?”
“It’s a long story. I’ll tell it you someday.”
We kept talking for another half hour. In the end, he walked me to a cabstand, shook my hand goodbye, and promised me that he’d summon a review board of peers as soon and as discreetly as possible. That evening, I had a long discussion on Skype with my parents in Kansas, trying to explain to them what was going to happen over the next few weeks. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done—it’s always excruciatingly painful to hurt the people you love.
I didn’t know Julie’s stepparents’ address, but I’d included Susan Dressman’s contact information in my statement. To my surprise, the Mitchells refused to file a lawsuit against me. However, the DA’s office reopened the case, given the new information that had come to light, in order to determine whether I’d breached the duty of reasonable care or whether I’d failed to conduct a proper suicide risk assessment, with lethal consequences for my ex-patient.
Somebody leaked the information to the press and another nightmare began. The malpractice attorneys started hounding Julie’s parents and a number of my female ex-patients, offering their services pro bono and promising them multi-million-dollar compensations if they agreed to sue me.
The reporters pursued me around the clock for a couple of weeks. Mrs. Kellerman, my sixty-five-year-old assistant, was asked by one of them if she’d had sexual intercourse with me. Some friends stopped returning my calls and one of my ex-girlfriends was interviewed by a popular blogger, describing my sexual preferences in small detail. A magazine nicknamed me “Dr. Strangelove.” I had to close my Twitter account and my website was hacked and stuffed with porn.
My life was gradually falling apart, peeling off layer after layer, but I experienced a strange sense of relief. Fortunately, there’s something named “the pain principle”: our brains are designed in such a way that we can’t feel two or more pains simultaneously.
But then one million other things happened and the reporters forgot about me. For the press, there’s always a bigger fish to fry in this city.
As the first step, the review board decided to suspend my license for ninety days, so I had to transfer my clients to other doctors and close down my practice. Suddenly, I had a lot of time on my hands, which I didn’t know how to kill. In the meantime, the spring slowly turned into summer and the dog days descended on the streets.
The board concluded that I’d acted unethically and I’d violated the boundaries between doctor and patient, but I was found not guilty of failure to warn. Julie had committed suicide a year after we’d stopped seeing each other and the medical treatment she’d received was considered proper and necessary. The prosecutor stood by that view, so the legal action for malpractice went on without tha
t count. Eventually, my license was suspended for three years, and there were no other legal charges. During the suspension, I was allowed to practice on modified qualification only, as a medical assistant. So I called New York Harm Reduction Educators and at the end of June I started working as a part-time assistant at a small rehab facility in Hunts Point, Bronx.
On the 7th of July—Julie’s birthday—I woke up early. Out of the window, the sky was like an immense swath of blue cotton. I got dressed and went to a nearby florist’s, where I bought twenty-nine yellow tulips, arranged in a bouquet.
I caught a cab and headed for Queens, slicing through the serene morning air, amid the hundreds of cars crossing the bridge. The cab took me along Queens Boulevard and then onto 58th Street, before dropping me at the Calvary Cemetery. I paid the driver and lingered for a few moments in front of the wrought iron gates before entering.
I walked down the central lane and turned left at the Johnstone Mausoleum. It was sprinkling, and my shoes left dark wounds in the flesh of the grass. The screech of a stray bird shattered the silence with its tidings.
Julie’s grave was plain—a small stone inscribed with her name, date of birth, and date of death. In front of it there was a bench. I laid the bouquet by the headstone and sat down. The light raindrops settled down one by one on the flowers, like diamonds.
I took Susan’s letter out of my pocket and placed it next to the grave. It was Julie’s secret and she had the right to keep it. I lit up a lighter, fired the paper, and watched it burn. Josh was right: some long-gone stories should never come to light, because once they do, they shrivel up like flowers. Their shapes have changed, and their meanings have vanished. But you always have to take responsibility for what you’ve done; there’s no other possible ending to such stories. That was what I’d forgotten, lugging a briefcase stuffed with books around the city, rummaging in strangers’ haunted attics.
I left the cemetery and took a cab back downtown. It had stopped raining. The deep blue sky was like a window to another world, and steam rose from the river. I lingered for a while in Central Park, looking at the passersby and wondering about their hidden stories, which seemed to vibrate in the air, mysterious and untold. And later still, when the light had become so faint that I could no longer make out the people’s eyes, and the shadows that followed them were those of giants, I went away.
In heaven and earth, Horatio.
New York, New York, today
I framed the photograph Josh sent me and now it hangs on a hallway in the rehab facility where I’ve been working for two months now. Almost all the patients notice it and ask me who those people are. I tell them that it’s an old memory from Paris, but that I can’t remember either the people’s names or their stories, and that maybe it’s no longer important. I ask them to use their imagination, to make up their own story about them, to study their attitudes, their postures, and their expressions.
And without realizing it, almost all of them begin to unfold their own stories, hidden among the patches of light and shadow.
acknowledgements
Well, this one was tough.
I wrote the first draft five years ago, while living twenty-four miles northwest of London, in Hemel Hempstead. I wasn’t happy with the result, so I wrote a second draft a year later, in Reading, Berkshire, where I had moved house in the meantime. I finished it within three months, but kept it stashed away in my computer for another two years or so. During that period, I published two non-fiction books and continued to polish The Book of Mirrors, the novel that was to change my writing career, turning me almost overnight into an international writer published in over forty countries. A whole cluster of projects was rolling in my mind at the time, but this one particular book was like a nine-inch nail lodged in my head. I felt that unless I managed to squeeze the best I could out of this story, it would continue to lour over me like a dark cloud. So I decided to give it another shot, eventually doing so in the summer of 2016. Ten months later, Bad Blood was finally done and ready for submission.
My thanks go to Marilia Savvides, my agent; her advice was priceless, as usual. To Cecily Gayford, my editor, who believed in this project from the very start and helped me to see it through to the end. To the wonderful people of Serpent’s Tail, who didn’t march me to the gallows for splitting infinitives or starting the occasional sentence with a preposition. Thank you, guys. To my good friend Alistair Ian Blyth; he kept an eye on me, so as not to injure myself too seriously while swinging with the English language. Finally, to my wife, Mihaela, the main (or perhaps the only) reason why I haven’t picked up sticks and gone back down the rabbit hole yet.
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Bad Blood Page 23