At that moment, Doug's phone started ringing. He picked it up and Meredith crept out of his office.
For the rest of the morning, Meredith ran through arguments in her head to defeat any complaint Ben may have about her refusal to kiss in front of her building. “Let’s keep this low-key. It’s nobody’s business. It’s unprofessional. For you especially. What if we break up? It’ll be harder if everyone knows about it.”
Ben stopped by her office at lunch, bringing oranges and deli sandwiches. He had bottled water. Kira passed by and eyed the spread. “Quite the charmer,” she told Meredith, matter-of-factly.
Don’t I know it, Meredith thought. She was moved by his gesture. With her office door closed, they sat on the floor, munching away. Her arguments were loaded and ready, but Ben didn’t make any gripes. When she couldn’t stand the suspense any longer, she said, “Wouldn’t you feel uncomfortable to have people talking about us?”
Ben raised his eyes in surprise, then understanding. “I don’t,” he began. “But I can see that you do.”
“It’s unprofessional. Especially for you. You’re a doctor.”
He put down his sandwich. “There are a lot of couples in this department. People here are used to it. And being a doctor doesn’t mean anything. It’s not like you’re my patient.”
“There’s a hierarchy in medicine. A class system. You’re dating below your class. I’m dating above.”
“Oh, please!” Ben protested.
“The other couples here are all doctors,” Meredith argued. “No one’s going to have a problem with that. But I’m a computer programmer who used to be a secretary. People are going to perceive me as a gold digger.”
Ben started to laugh. “I don’t have any gold, but if I did, you could have it.”
Meredith split open an orange, sending a spray of juice across her lap. “I don’t like people gossiping about me. And I’m going to get the brunt of the bad gossip.”
“People will gossip about you no matter what. Hiding behind this door won’t protect you.” He gestured to the office door she’d shut and locked after Kira had passed.
Meredith knew he was right. But he was being naive about the hierarchy in place. “No one’s going to fault you. But I’m going to look like an opportunist - after a doctor.”
“No one thinks that way anymore.”
Meredith ate her orange.
“Listen,” he said finally, leaning in, “we’ll keep it low key. We won’t advertise, but I’m not going to lie.” He reached up with his right hand and caressed her cheek. “Heck, I’d like everyone to know.”
Meredith was touched. Deeply. And it wasn’t a bad compromise.
They left work together that evening, walking side by side without touching. Ben stopped at home for fresh clothes and then they spent the night at Meredith's house. He fed Mendra while she made dinner. They made love in her futon, which wasn’t nearly as comfortable as his iron bed. But afterwards, lying wrapped up in each other, Ben said, “I love your bed. Its austerity makes me want to make wild love to you, like we’re monks with just this one allowed pleasure.”
That night Meredith dreamed she was standing on top of a peak in the Sandias. When she bent to look over the edge, she’d get a vertiginous thrill as the world spun around her. As she stepped back, the ground around her began caving in under her feet. The faster she stepped back, the faster the ground collapsed from underneath her.
Because of Mendra and because Ben liked her rented house, they spend the bulk of their nights together in the South Valley. In their first two weeks together, they saw each other eleven days out of fourteen.
Sarah and Ben didn’t hit it off. Meredith had wanted to put off their meeting for a few more weeks, perhaps indefinitely, but Sarah was like a terrier with her mouth on the pants leg of a mailman.
“How about tonight?” Sarah suggested.
“We have tickets to a play at Popejoy.”
“Does Loverboy have an extra?”
“I’m sure he doesn’t.”
“Well, call and ask.”
“Sarah, why would he have more? It’s a date, not a Super Bowl party.”
“How about tomorrow night?”
“He’s on call.”
“Let’s do breakfast.”
“He goes in at six.” Meredith felt like she was volleying with Serena Williams. She sank into the rocking chair in her living room and closed her eyes. Mendra immediately jumped up and balled herself into Meredith's lap.
“Sunday night.”
“I’ll have to check with Ben. He may not be up to it, depending on how busy his call night is.”
“Why don’t I call him?”
“What are you, my father?”
“It’s only polite. I want to invite him personally to my house for dinner.”
“No. He’s shy. I’ll invite him. And why don’t we meet in a restaurant?”
“Absolutely not! I’m making dinner. Is he a vegetarian?”
“No,” Meredith told her. She felt defeated.
The day before their dinner together, Meredith stopped by Sarah's apartment to drop off some CDs she’d borrowed. Sarah was cooking. The countertop was lined with seven cans of chicken stock, a bag of potatoes, two dozen tomatoes, and ten zucchini. In the sink, a pork loin was defrosting.
“What’s all this?” Meredith asked.
“It’s for dinner tomorrow.”
“Are you feeding Ben and me or an army?”
Sarah was chopping an onion. She picked up her cutting board and scraped the onion bits into a heavy cast iron pan on her stove. The pot made crackling noises as the onions hit oil and the kitchen filled instantly with the scent. “I invited a few other people.”
“Who?”
“Oh, the usual.” She began peeling garlic cloves. “Eli, Annette, Patty, Michael, Joel...”
“Who’s Joel?”
Sarah gave her a conspiratorial look. “He’s that angel you wouldn’t let me set you up with.” As Meredith started to protest, Sarah raised her hand. “Just to remind you that there are plenty of men out there.”
“Who else is coming?” Meredith asked, eyeing the quantities of food in her kitchen.
“Hard to say. I don’t have a lot of firm commitments. Somewhere between seven and eighteen.”
“Sarah, why do you do stuff like this to me?”
“Like what? What stuff?”
“I’m not like you. I can’t show up at a party and have a good time. You invited Ben and me to dinner. We were supposed to have just a nice quiet evening. Now you’ve turned it into Mardi Gras.”
“Calm down. It’s not a big deal. Probably there’ll only be seven of us. You’ll be fine.”
Meredith picked up her pocket book off the floor and hooked the strap over her shoulder.
“Where are you going?” Sarah asked tiredly.
Her tone cut Meredith to the quick and made her cut back. “This was supposed to be a nice, simple dinner with three people. Now you’ve recast it as a play starring you. So go ahead, Sarah, be the star. But I’m not coming.” The tears came with the last sentence and Meredith turned abruptly and propelled herself to the door.
By the time she reached her car, the tears had dried up. She felt the way air felt after a good hard rain: empty, calm, refreshed. As she climbed into her car, she caught her reflection in the rear view mirror. Her face looked calm but mildly surprised. Sarah knocked at her window. Meredith jumped. She hadn’t heard Sarah’s approach.
“Sorry,” Sarah told her, referring to the jump.
“No, I’m sorry for screaming at you,” Meredith told her. She couldn’t believe she was apologizing, but she couldn’t seem to help herself.
“Stop. You were absolutely right. It was just supposed to be the three of us. I’m going to call everyone else and cancel.”
“No. You don’t have to cancel. You’ve got too much food up there. Have your party. We’ll just reschedule.”
“You’re much better in gro
ups than you give yourself credit for,” Sarah told her. Sarah seemed to have taken Meredith's outburst in stride, while guilt for yelling was filling Meredith’s insides.
Meredith shook her head. “No. I’m horrible. I get all clammed up. And with Ben there, it will be worse. I don’t know him that well yet.”
“Meredith, all my friends love you. Every time there’s a get together, they ask about you.”
Meredith didn’t believe that for a second.
“They don’t just ask about you,” Sarah continued, reading her expression accurately. “They ask for you. ‘Where’s your friend Meredith? She’s always so much fun.’ They love your humor.”
This was news to Meredith and she digested it carefully, weighing each word for validity before choosing to accept it. “Really?”
“Really. Even if you don’t feel assurance, you project it. Eli always says, ‘Your friend Meredith. The one without any neuroses.’”
“Really?”
“Really! Now it’s fine if you don’t want to come tomorrow night. Totally fine. But I wish you would.”
“Fine,” Meredith sighed. “We’ll come. But I’m not staying long.”
“Okay. What are you doing today?”
“I’ve got a lot of important little errands to do.”
“Do you want to come in and help me cook?”
“I don’t have the time.”
“Just an hour? Just prep work: chopping and grating.”
“Okay. One hour.”
Ben was fine about the party. “Great. I love parties.”
“You do?”
“Sure. Who doesn’t?”
Meredith scowled on her end of the phone. “You won’t know anyone but me.”
“That’s what’s so fun about it. A room full of new people to meet.”
This relationship probably won’t last past Ben getting to know the real me, Meredith thought as she hung up.
They arrived at Sarah's on time, but the party was already in full swing. Her crowd was never late for a gathering. From the moment Sarah set her eyes on Ben, Meredith felt she took an instant dislike to him. Sarah introduced herself by saying, “Hi, I’m Sarah Youngblood. I’ve been dying to meet the reason that Meredith never calls me anymore.” The situation worsened when Ben put his left hand on her shoulder while he shook her hand. Sarah didn’t like being touched by people, but while alarms were going off in Meredith's head, Ben was obliviously asking her about her corporation.
“There’s a lot of legislation out there to support women in business. Do you know about all that?” Meredith could feel rather than see the hairs raising on the back of Sarah’s neck. Her reaction was two-fold. One, of course Sarah knew about programs for women-owned businesses. Two, she assiduously avoided any assistance of that kind.
“Being a woman doesn’t make me a charity case,” she told him lightly, like she wasn’t offended. “I started my company with $50,000 and today it’s worth ten million.”
Ben nodded his head. “Sometimes I make stupid comments,” he said. “That was a good example. You obviously know much more about business than I do, yet here I am trying to give you advice. I’m sorry.” He smiled. “You must get that from people a lot.”
“Only from men.” She replied. Then she walked away.
Ben turned to look at Meredith. “That went well,” he commented as he drained a glass of wine. “Aren’t you glad now that this is a party instead of the three of us?”
About an hour later, Sarah returned to give Ben a second chance. She swung by with a tray of stuffed mushrooms. “Have you tried these? They’re wonderful.”
Ben declined by telling Sarah he didn’t like mushrooms. Meredith took two. “They’re incredible,” she told Sarah with a full mouth. Sarah set the platter down and directed her full energy at Ben. Her eyes said, “This is war.” Sarah was a pro at honing in on people’s insecurities and then using them in supposedly innocent conversations to make a person feel defeated and worthless. Meredith looked around the room for something to distract them.
“So what made you choose Family Practice as your specialty, Ben?” Sarah began innocently enough.
“I like the continuity of care,” he replied, unsuspectingly. “It’s great to be able to see the same patient for years and years - watch them have a family or grow up. And I like working with kids. I have a special interest in kids with Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity.”
“With managed care, doesn’t every specialty have to refer back to you instead of referring patients on to the appropriate clinic?”
Ben nodded. “In some situations. And it can be a real pain. You send a patient for a hearing test and if they’ve got an ear infection, the audiologist has to send them back to us instead of to an otologist.” Ben was warming up to his subject. “But on the other hand, it means there’s one person, a gatekeeper, who’s coordinating all the referrals. That aspect of it really increases the quality of patient care.”
“So...a general surgeon has to refer back to you before sending a patient on to an orthopedic surgeon?”
“Sometimes.”
“I bet they hate that!”
“No doctor likes having to give up control.”
“But isn’t there a disdain for Family Practice from some of the older, more established specialties?”
Meredith balked at Sarah's knowledge. It was true that Family Practice was a new concept, developed in the ‘60s and scoffed at for years by many. But how did Sarah know?
“Yes, that still exists. You see it in some doctors, but not most.”
“Even Harvard Medical School has a Family Practice program now,” Meredith piped in. “And UNM’s Family Practice Residency is rated higher than theirs.”
Sarah forged on. “But doesn’t it make you wish sometimes that you’d gone into a more prestigious area? Like surgery?”
“Never.” Ben smiled at her. “I prefer to have a life.”
“But the pay is more.”
“Not worth the hours. I want to have a family someday. See my kids grow up. I don’t want to miss a single soccer game because I’m working.”
For a moment, Sarah seemed defeated. But she was only stepping back for the big wind-up. “I guess it’s a lot harder to get in to surgery, too. What do you have to be, like in the top five percent of your class?”
“Ten percent. Five for really good programs.”
“I guess that makes a lot of people’s decisions for them.”
“For some, yes.”
“Sarah, Eli is waving you over.”
Sarah paused, not wanting to stop after all her leg work. She looked over at Eli and back to Ben. Ben smiled at her and Meredith feared he was about to put his hand on her shoulder. He didn’t. “I’m impressed by your knowledge of the medical field. You must know people in it.”
“I know people everywhere. That’s how I stay in business.” She hadn’t gotten the victory she’d wanted, but Ben's compliment had softened her, so she graciously gave him a reprieve and headed over to Eli.
Later that night, safe at home in the South Valley, Meredith said to Ben, “If Sarah made you feel defensive, you hid it well.”
Ben was rocking in her chair, with Mendra curled up in his lap. His fingers were idly stroking the fur behind her ears. Meredith was standing in the doorway in flannel pjs, toweling her hair dry.
“Defensive? No, not at all.”
“But she kept needling you about surgery.”
“Did she? It just seemed like she was trying to make conversation by talking about what I do for a living.”
“She was saying that every other specialty looks down on you and implying that you weren’t smart enough to get into a surgery program.”
“No, she wasn’t. She was just discussing managed care.”
Meredith sat down on the overstuffed chair and Mendra promptly hopped off Ben's lap and repositioned herself on Meredith's. This move created a substantial amount of glee for Meredith; she had to suppress a grin. “What w
as your rank in medical school?” she asked Ben.
“Second.”
“That explains a lot.”
But, while Ben slept, Meredith laid awake, still angry. So Sarah had missed her mark. This time. Insecurity about not getting into a more competitive specialty was not Ben's weak point. Sooner or later, Sarah would figure this out and move systematically through social class, looks, family, and ex-girlfriends until she found a vulnerable point.
How dare she? Meredith seethed. Ben was breathing gently, in and out, in and out. Meredith's own chest was tight, her body coursing with rage. She felt like she might start to glow from the anger, a pulsating red form in the dark next to Ben.
I won’t put him through that again, she decided. The next time Sarah invites us out, I’ll tell her, ‘No thanks.’ Her chest loosened a notch, so she took it a step farther. I’ll tell her, ‘I’m sorry you hate Ben so much, but since you’d only known him for ten seconds before you decided, I couldn’t care less.’ She could picture Sarah in front of her, denying she hated Ben.
Oh yes you do. So you devoted all your energy to tearing him apart. Meredith was breathing easier. She shook her head scornfully in the dark, picturing Sarah standing in front of her. I’m sorry you’re so insecure with yourself, but you can do it alone from now on. It didn’t really fit with the conversation, but Meredith decided to make Sarah demand that she choose between her or Ben.
That’s a no-brainer, Sarah. Nice knowing ya. She pictured Sarah's face filling with the shock of defeat. Suddenly, Meredith felt sorry for Sarah. She was being unforgivably harsh. Her chest tightened back up she rolled over to her side. “Go to sleep,” she ordered herself. But sleep didn’t come for several more hours.
Chapter Seven
Searching For Meredith Love Page 10