Trouble

by Jesse Kellerman

  At moments he regretted his inability to deny her—Monday morning, while sleepwalking through his presentation, drawing puzzled stares from Yokogawa, schadenfreude glowing behind Nelgrave’s eyes; or on Tuesday night, when she made him come five times in the space of an evening, and it hurt to walk to the bathroom.

  But how could he say no? She provided exactly what he needed: release. Release from the pressures of being good all the time. Being smart all the time. Being watched. Being sued. In the brief time since they had met, summer had banged closed, a mousetrap, and he could sense the days shortening. Three weeks of coming and going to work in the dark had begun to take its toll on him; he had entered a world with no sun.

  In the midst of this whirlwind, his time with Eve acted as a tether to reality, a reminder that the insanity of the surgical floor was not how most people lived, a fact so easy to forget when you spent all day under the thumb of your superiors.

  Sex helped, but mostly he relied on her as a confidante. The intensity with which she drew him out made him feel as though she’d plugged one end of a cable into his brain and the other into hers, direct downloading. He had never been the one in the room to attract attention by running off his mouth, but around her he burst with words, and the more he spoke the more he needed to speak, confessions snowballing. He felt like a teenager, storing up all his witty thoughts and observations over the course of a day in order to share them with her in the evenings, as they lay spent and laced up in sheets.

  He admitted that he didn’t know what kind of medicine he intended to practice. He had always been sure he wanted to cure cancer. Then, after Hannah got sick, psychiatry had appeared a natural fit—a Duty, the hand of God reaching down to orient him in the correct direction (not that he believed in God, he told her, and she said she didn’t either, so there was yet another thing they had in common). Was he being ridiculous? Was it possible to choose what you wanted to do with the rest of your working life based on a few weeks of desultory apprenticeship? Really, he complained, medical education had some screwy ideas about how people made decisions.

  Eve did not judge him, did not press her opinion on him, did not tell him he was being petty. She listened and said You’re very hard on yourself. And he said I guess. And she said You are. And he said Okay.

  He admitted that he often felt so angry at Hannah that it terrified him. He sometimes wanted to hit her, as though that would show her that he meant business: no more fooling around now. Get with the fucking program. The nicer he had to act, the harder it was to control his temper; and the angrier he got, the guiltier he felt. The whole cycle had gone bad. Of course she said; one can only repeat one’s lines so many times before they ring hollow. You’re not an angel, Jonah Stem. You weren’t sent here on a Heavenly Charge. Unless it was to save me. He laughed. He said I’m not an angel. She said I know, I know you’re not.

  He did not stop to question whether it was Eve in particular he wanted to talk to, or simply another human being. To him the question was academic; it was enough to know that he felt better. For once he decided not to torture himself with excessive self-awareness.

  She acted like white noise, masking the more disturbing frequencies in his head: the first time he saw a patient die, for instance, which had happened on Friday and left him with a weekend of bad dreams, in which the corpse rose up from the table—lines trailing, monitors going berserk—and crashed back down—up down up down up down—on some ascents with Raymond Iniguez’s face, and on others his own. Poor Jonah Stem. That was what she said: my poor poor Jonah Stem. She knew when to speak and when to be quiet. He reminded himself that she was in real life a therapist (although not a dance therapist; Christopher Yip had gotten that wrong; she was a drama therapist, whatever that meant; and he didn’t want to betray his ignorance—or to condescend—by asking what the hell she did all day), so it made sense for her to understand how to comfort him.

  One week of honesty. He wasn’t eighteen anymore; he no longer took honesty for granted, and could appreciate its rarity and value.

  “I’m starting a new service next week.”

  It was Friday, September 10. They were on the roof again, slumped against a tar-paper pyramid that rose near the east edge of the building, his head in her lap, his fingertips lightly tattooing his bare stomach.

  “Jolly,” she said.

  He smiled. He had decided that her quirks of speech were genuine, rather than an affectation. “I have to see what my schedule’s like. We’ll have to play it by ear.”

  “Jonah Stem, I know you can fit me in somewhere.”

  “I don’t know how much longer I can last with three hours of sleep.”

  “Well,” she said, “one day at a time.”

  He nodded.

  “Speaking of which: tomorrow. I had a splendid idea.” When she said the word she revealed her teeth, her tongue. “What say you to this: we can—uh-oh. Already methinks you’re not so keen.”

  He said, “I have to go visit Hannah.”

  A silence.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “It’s perfectly all right.”

  “I’d much rather spend the day with you, believe me.” She said nothing, so he added, “I would.”

  “…all right.”

  “Listen—”

  “Jonah Stem. I find that statement somewhat disingenuous.”

  “What, I would.”

  She looked down at him. “Then you should.”

  “Eve…”

  “I am merely pointing out that you’re not under threat of imprisonment if you don’t go out there.”

  “I know that.”

  “You’re a free man.”

  “I know.”

  “With free will.”

  “I know, Eve.”

  “All right. Then as long as you know. You’re free to make your own decisions.” And she sat back against the tar paper, tilting her head up at the stars.

  Another, longer silence passed.

  He said, “I can’t back out on them.”

  She nodded faintly.

  “I told George I’d be there.”

  “Of course,” she said. “Duty calls.”

  “Knock it off.”

  “I’m serious, Jonah Stem. One of the many things I admire about you is the way in which you follow orders.”

  “I am not following—”

  “Even if you’re the one who’s issued the orders,” she said.

  “Eve.” With difficulty, he sat up, got on his knees facing her. “Stop that.”

  “Stop what.”

  “I promised them I would go out there.”

  “Then you promised. You can’t have it both ways, Jonah Stem. Either you promised, in which case you don’t have to make excuses to me, or you have misgivings, in which case you don’t have to make excuses to yourself. Either way, stop waffling, it’s very unbecoming.”

  He stared at her, waiting for her to make eye contact. She did not. He got up and walked around in circles. “It’s September eleventh tomorrow,” he said.

  “I’m aware.”

  “What’d you want to do? You can’t have a party on September eleventh.”

  “Not a party.”

  “I wouldn’t feel right.”

  “Jonah Stem. Are you telling me that September eleventh will be a black day for you for the rest of your life?”

  “Yes,” he said, disliking the defiance in his own voice.

  “Even the Greatest Generation got over Pearl Harbor. You don’t imagine, do you, that they continue to spend that day draped in mourning? Limits, Jonah Stem. Limits.”

  “For crissake, I just asked what you had planned.”

  Now Eve looked at him. “So you’re interested.”

  “Of course I’m interested—”

  “Excellent.”

  “No. Listen. I can’t do it. I’m interested in knowing what you had planned, but I can’t do it.”

  “Then I don’t see why I should tell you.”

&
nbsp; “It’s a secret?”

  “Yes. Yes, Jonah Stem, it is.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I share myself with you on the understanding that you have a certain level of commitment to me, and if you—”

  “Eve—”

  “—if you can’t be bothered to break your date—a date which we both know is not good for you, except insofar as it reconfirms to you your extravagant sense of rectitude—then I’ll wait until you can.”

  “It’s one afternoon. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  She said, “My point exactly.”

  ALL THROUGHOUT THE following day she kept asking Isn’t this fun? as though worried he would change his mind and go to Great Neck after all. He reassured her, smiled and put his arm around her, giving onlookers, he imagined, the convincing impression that they were an item.

  Truthfully, he was more worried than she. (Surgery had taught him well how to feign coolheadedness.) In the end he had chickened out, not calling George to cancel. While he and Eve ate a leisurely breakfast at The Mudspot, he kept reaching for his inside pocket, touching his cell phone as if to assuage it: don’t ring.

  By noon he began to relax. Maybe George was more reasonable than he’d thought. Surely he understood that Jonah would not visit every weekend for the rest of his life. Surely he understood that Jonah had to develop normal relationships with normal girls. He and Hannah had talked about getting married; but that wasn’t the same as being married. Until now, admitting that had seemed like an acceptance of failure, not to mention a pretext for his mother’s carping. But at some point, expedience trumped pride. Besides, where was the pride in denying himself? He wasn’t a monk.

  Not to mention that by keeping up the charade, he had fostered in Hannah a terrifically unhealthy dependence. With him around all the time, babying her, serving her memories, how could she achieve even a moderate level of independence? This wasn’t Hollywood. He couldn’t love her back to health. She was sick, and getting worse, and probably never going to get better. She might have brief peaks, but the troughs that followed would always be deeper, and by presenting himself to her—reparting his hair—he gave not love but a facsimile of love, a wobbly bubble of misleading romantic postures, and one that would pop if she ever found the wherewithal to reach for it. He could not fool himself, and he wasn’t a good enough actor to fool her—if she was fooled. Real courage, he told himself as he paid the check, was the ability to say no.

  So he wasn’t caving in to his mother; he was growing into himself. The harder she had pushed him to reintegrate, the more recalcitrant he’d become. He was in this way a typical youngest child, politely obstinate, less outwardly aggressive than his sister but the only one who dared resist a parental command. His mother had never experienced what he went through; he had over her a certain kind of wisdom, which he had used to justify his refusal to leave.

  As Eve led him to the uptown ©C, though, the real reason dawned on him. He was afraid. He needed Hannah as much as or more than she needed him; clung to her because, without her, his future was a complete blank. He needed a cause.

  But now there was an alternative.

  The alternative had lips and hips and breasts and a smile like sunlight on water.

  The alternative was holding him around the waist and making jokes about the number of bacteria residing in one square inch of subway-car pole.

  The alternative was kissing his Adam’s apple and leading him aboveground at 168th Street.

  The alternative was describing what she knew about the neighborhood. You see these row houses? They’re built to look old. They’re in fact a recent project, an enclave of white yuppies in what is otherwise East Harlem. The same thing has happened all up the West Side, and in parts of Washington Heights. The same thing happened in Brooklyn while I was living there. You could accuse me of being part of the problem and you’d be correct. How do I know so much about this? It’s our City, Jonah Stem. Don’t you take an interest in civic affairs? The Museum of Human Frailties, writ large. Get in line, marvel, throw a coin into the fountain.

  Not far from the station, they came upon a quaint, tree-lined square that Jonah at first took to be a park. Then he saw the towering outline of a white colonial house, situated on the diagonal to the wrought-iron gates demarcating several acres of untended lawn. He was agog. “What is this place?”

  “The Morris-Jumel Mansion,” she said. “The oldest standing house in Manhattan.”

  The brick path to the entrance was in bad shape, missing pieces and covered in foliage. An obese man with a ponytail and a devilish goatee, his Parks and Recreation Department shirt dark with sweat, scraped a rake across the front steps. He looked at Jonah and Eve as if they had landed in a giant flying toaster.

  “Good afternoon,” Eve said. “May we?”

  He let them in and sold them tickets. They were the first visitors in weeks, he said. “Nobody cares about history.”

  “Jonah does,” Eve said. “He well-nigh lives in the past.”

  They read the placards. Built in 1765, the house was more accurately described as Palladian in style. Its original estate had stretched clear across the island, from the East River to the Hudson, the hilltop location affording a cool summer retreat for the builder, a British colonel named Morris. With the Revolution, Morris decamped for the Motherland, and the house briefly quartered General Washington (although Eve said isn’t that what they say about all these old houses, George Washington slept here) before being converted to an inn. In 1801 a wealthy Frenchman and former Caribbean plantation owner named Stephen Jumel bought it, leaving the property to his American wife, Madame Eliza, upon his death in 1832. Herself possessed of a suspect past—in her youth she had been a prostitute—Eliza had a knack for picking notable, if not wholly well-disposed, husbands, choosing a second partner in aging former vice president and duelist Aaron Burr. Their union lasted less than a year, ending formally with the serving of divorce papers on Burr’s deathbed.

  Eve said, “Rather an obstreperous lot.”

  The house changed hands once more before the City of New York decided to put an end to its tumultuous history by turning the place into a museum. Someone in the bureaucracy had had the good sense to leave the interior intact, and much of Eliza Jumel’s attention to interior design remained in evidence: antique glass, pristine French Empire furniture, grandfather clocks, and a small but lavishly adorned bed.

  “Purported to have belonged to Napoleon,” Eve read.

  “Oh come on.”

  “That’s what it says. Museum placards are never wrong, Jonah Stem. They have the brilliance of gospel. The Jumels lived in France for a time, where they insinuated themselves into the Emperor’s circle.”

  “So he gave them a bed?”

  “Étrange, mais vrai, Jonah Stem. Are you aware of what that means? It’s very likely the oldest bed in New York. It has experienced more than you and I ever will.”

  Jonah spun on his heel, causing the floorboards to creak. “What do you think this place is worth?”

  “Oodles.”

  He rubbed at the molding near the door. They were on the second floor. The house was otherwise empty, and he imagined for a moment what it would be like to have so much money and idle time. What would he have done? Been a doctor, probably. Or perhaps a Man of Discovery, a Benjamin Franklin type. He wistfully imagined a time when a single person could shove all of science forward with one moment of experimental serendipity—unlike today, the age of specialization, when researchers’ primary efforts went into writing grant proposals.

  He turned around to share some of these thoughts with Eve, but his mind went instantly blank. “What are you doing.”

  She had her skirt up around her waist. “Let us join the ranks of history.”

  “Get off the bed.” The window behind her showed a landscape warped by the old, uneven glass: rippling lawn; rippling wrought-iron gate; rippling sidewalk, buckled further by surfacing roots. The Parks Department guy was out of sigh
t. He might be around the other side of the house; or letting in more visitors; or coming to check on them.

  “Get up. Get up.” Jonah stepped over the velvet rope, and she responded by reaching for the back of his head and pulling him face-first into her woolly sweater. In the ensuing struggle he knocked what he believed were several three-hundred-year-old embroidered pillows to the ground. Hell she was strong. And laughing, too, laughing hysterically, like a loon, whispering in his ear to stop being such a mop. He tried to look over his shoulder, at the doorway, where he expected to see a big fat Parks Department employee coming at them with a rake and handcuffs—did they carry handcuffs?—sitting on them until the police arrived to bust them for defilement of a historic artifact, and Eve wrenched his face toward her, kissed him as though she wanted to suck up his stomach. Her hands inside his pants, her tongue between her teeth, so pretty and wicked and laughing and he grabbed between her legs, he was possessed. The bed croaked awfully, as though it was going to collapse in a pile of chiffon and velveteen and lace edging and oak and goosedown. He went as fast as he could—which was very fast, given that he had both fear and Eve’s thumb encroaching on his hyenas—and as he neared the end she curled his fingers around her ponytail and showed him how to give her hair a good hard yank, and when he did she made an unearthly noise, like a whale song. Then he fell against her, both of them panting and sweating, Eve giggling, her face eraser-pink. In his ear she said Vive le roi, Jonah Stem.

  • 10 •

  THAT MONDAY HE started a new service, euphemistically known as Blue Team but more cruelly (and accurately) referred to on the floor as The Fatties. The St. Agatha’s Bariatrics Clinic provided one of the department’s main sources of lucre, and its doctors were renowned for their ability to get patients OTL. In Jonah’s opinion, a tad more post-op TLC would have been nice, or at least helpful in preventing the kind of complications he’d witnessed on the Night of the Exploding Formerly Fat Lady.

  That was the least of his concerns, though.

  The shock of recognition must have been evident on his face when he showed up to meet his new chief, because Devon Benderking PGY-2—he of the harelip—said, “What’s wrong, shitmouth? You aren’t happy to see me again?”