Chapter 10
Every Gift You’ve Ever Given
Mr. Greenbaum, a patient who had been admitted with a severe case of bronchitis during one of Anna’s recent internal medicine rotations, had grabbed her wrist while she was listening to his lungs and said, “On any given day, do you know how much time the average person spends worrying about things he can’t control?”
“No,” said Anna, startled but curious. “I don’t think I do.”
“Neither do I,” said the patient with a smile that featured a chipped front tooth, “but it has to be a lot. Half our lives, don’t you think?”
“I sure hope not,” she said.
“You’re still young,” he said. “You don’t worry that much right now, but it’ll catch up with you.”
After she left Mr. Greenbaum’s room, she kept thinking about his question. Was it an hour a day that the average person fruitlessly worried? Probably more, but she didn’t have much time for worrying during these last few months of her internship year at the UCLA medical center that had been named after Ronald Reagan, which she wasn’t thrilled about, having learned in childhood from her liberal parents that Reagan’s policies had done a lot to put the poor even further behind the rich. (Plenty to worry about there, she thought, wondering if Mr. Greenbaum or any of her other patients had made the same connection.) When she worried, she tried to do it early in the day because if she started to think about the problems in her life, or the potential for new problems, late at night, it sometimes kept her up for a while after she had turned off the bedside lamp, and she needed every minute of sleep that could be wrung out of her short nights. Rising at five thirty in the morning, sometimes at five, did not come naturally to her, and she rarely could get to bed before eleven, even when she left the hospital by seven thirty. On Sunday, the one day that she could sleep in, she did not wake up until well past nine unless the phone rang, but everyone she talked to regularly knew not to call before ten. Except for Tom Glass, who called whenever he wanted to because he was the one person she would willingly lose sleep for, and his free moments were unpredictable. She had been seeing him for close to seven months when Mr. Greenbaum asked his unanswerable question, and sometimes it was as if it were only the first month of their affair—she still felt giddy around him, and a little anxious. He was the one source of anxiety that she might take up at any hour of the day because she could not stop worrying that he would no longer want her if she said or did something foolish.
When they saw each other at the hospital, her desire to be close to him was sometimes unbearable—she wanted to touch his hair, the curls that had grown back from the previous summer’s severe pruning, and it was also difficult for her to stop looking at his mouth, the full lips that had kissed hers and so many inches of her body more times than she would have been able to count. Seven months of clandestine meetings, and he was now talking about moving in with her after she finished her internship year; he would leave his wife and sons for her, but he was certain that his sons would like her once they got to know her and would have little trouble adjusting to his less frequent presence in their lives because they weren’t home that much now anyway, one with his driver’s license and the other with friends who had driver’s licenses. His boys, Trevor and Nathan, would come and stay with them from time to time anyway, though Trevor was going to college in the fall, so it would only really be Nathan who stayed with them, but maybe Anna would ask her downstairs tenant to move out so that she could take over the whole house, if he did leave his wife?
If he left his wife. Despite being such a small word, if had a lot of power.
He was much calmer than she when they worked side by side, doing their daily rounds. It seemed that way to her, at least. He had sworn to her that she was the first and only intern he had ever been romantically involved with, but she continued to wonder if this was true. How was it that he did not feel more nervous when they were at work, especially because if she wanted to, she could have gone to the hospital administrators and made things uncomfortable for him? He must have been confident, however, that she would never do such a thing. And she wouldn’t. She loved him and couldn’t imagine doing him harm even if one day he told her that he didn’t want to see her anymore. People changed their minds; it happened all the time. And if he did dump her, she would not be so lame as to pine for someone who didn’t want to be with her.
From the beginning, however, he had made an effort to see her at least once a week, sometimes twice. He told her that he would have come to her every day if it had been possible, and sometimes when they were in her bed, he said that he had dreams about her at night and was afraid that he talked in his sleep, because on some mornings his wife would hardly speak to him and there was no other logical reason for her remoteness that he could think of.
“Other than the fact you’ve been married for nineteen years?” Anna teased.
“How could she possibly be tired of me?” He laughed, this Dr. Heart-of-Glass, as her friend Jill called him, this faithless wretch, this man she was witlessly crazy about. Her mother, having been left years ago for the other woman, did not know that he was married. Her mother wanted to meet him, having gotten wind of the fact, from Anna’s brother, Billy, that there was a new man in her life, Billy having blurted something about Tom over the phone from his possibly beautiful new life in Paris.
“But if you were talking about me in your sleep, wouldn’t she say something? How could she not?” she asked.
Tom gave her an almost pitying look. “You have no idea what isn’t said in a marriage, especially ones that have dragged on for years.”
This seemed to her a bleak view of couplehood, and so much in step with the many marital clichès that comedians had made their reputations on for years. But a small, mean part of her liked it when he talked so unflatteringly about his marriage. What was keeping them together? Laziness over the upheaval and tedium a divorce would doubtless entail? Worry over how their children would respond? Surely their marriage would give out soon if things were as dull and pointless as he said.
But that’s what every woman who falls for a married man thinks! Her common sense was usually awake and ready to spout off if she let herself hear it. Surely you’re not so stupid/naive/deluded to believe . . .
She did know better, but it didn’t matter. A person would believe anything if she wanted to badly enough. She had seen it in her patients, the wan, ailing souls—inveterate smokers, sweets-addicted diabetics—who did not believe that they were going to die. Every person, no matter how bright, seemed to think that he would be the exception to the rule. “This is the human condition,” one of her other attending physicians had said, Dr. Fitch, who normally she found to be a grouch but on this day had been warmer than usual to her and her classmates. “What you see will break your hearts,” he had said. “But hope is also what saves some of them. We doctors aren’t supposed to say that, but it’s true. Drugs and surgery don’t cure everything.”
Some mornings when she woke before her alarm went off in the predawn hours, it startled her to realize that she had done it—she had become a doctor. All of those years of studying and worrying that she should study even more had at last come to fruition—the innumerable hours spent poring over textbooks, memorizing every muscle and bone in the body, every abstruse biochemistry formula. She had lost so many hours of sleep before her biggest exams, certain that she would forget everything when the test paper was in front of her, but this had never happened. She had done well in her classes and was now doing well in her rotations, tacitly vying with Jim Lewin over who was the quickest to make the most feasible diagnosis (him, usually), who had the most winning bedside manner (her always, though Jim tried), and who told the best jokes to put their patients at ease (neither—it was usually only the attending physician who made the patients laugh, but Anna was getting more confident, knowing that she had made a favorable impression on the attendings with her compassion but also with her brains).
Jim and she were pals anyway, more so than they had been during med school, in part because she had set him up with her friend Jill the previous fall, who seemed to like him for real and apparently was not cheating on him, which was unusual for her. According to Jill, Jim was hot in the sack and was well hung and what more could a girl reasonably ask for? Anna had almost shrieked when Jill told her this; she did not want to know what lived behind Jim’s fly, but now, of course, whenever she saw him, she thought about Jill’s words and wondered if maybe she had been wrong to dismiss his earlier crush on her without giving him a try first.
The thought of having sex with Jim was a little ridiculous though—he was such an earnest dork, and she could only picture him in his doctor’s smock with a stethoscope around his neck, not naked and passion-inflated. Jill claimed that he had done some kinky things to her with this same stethoscope, another disclosure that Anna did not want to consider, but it did make her laugh. She was glad that Jill seemed to have fallen for him and hoped it continued to go well. (If not, poor Jim would be crushed—she could see it clearly.) They both deserved to be happy.
Her own happiness, however, was elusive—when she knew that Tom was coming over because he was in the car and on his way (though even this was sometimes no guarantee), she felt as if she would never again ask for anything else. Even if he wouldn’t be able to see her again for a month or more, it would be all right, as long as she could see him that night for an hour, even a half hour. When he gave her a tiny platinum ring on a fine silver chain for Christmas, saying that she had his heart (but his wife had his balls, Jill and Celestine had later joked), she had thought that she might burst from happiness, and that this happiness would last because he had given her tangible proof of his feelings. Whenever he stashed a note beneath her pillow saying that he already missed her, his initials enclosed in a penciled heart, she believed that she needed only to bide her time and he would leave his wife and move in with her. She knew that this was how Melinda, his father’s second wife, must have felt when she was living through the suspenseful year before he had left Anna’s mother for her. Her father, she had come to suspect, was probably never going to be satisfied, unlike herself, she hoped, even though he was with the extraordinary Elise, who was so young, but Anna liked her and hoped that her father had finally met the woman he would settle down with for good. Why she wished this, she didn’t know, only that it seemed that she would feel better about him if he did.
Because there was something a little strange, possibly sordid, going on with him right now, something she did not want to think about because if her hunch was correct, it would mean that he was having an affair with someone she knew and had previously liked quite a bit. If he was seeing Danielle, her brother’s ex-girlfriend, on the sly, she did not want to get mixed up in it because she knew that she would have to decide whether to tell Billy, and if she did tell him, the two men, their relationship already strained, would probably argue ferociously and maybe not talk to each other again for a long time, if ever. Billy would probably wonder if the affair had started before their breakup and also feel wronged because their father had Elise and he did not.
Danielle had called Anna the day after Valentine’s Day, just to say hello, she claimed, because they hadn’t talked in so long and Danielle missed her. When Anna told her that Billy had moved to Paris, she did not seem surprised to hear this, though she pretended to be, and this, Anna realized in retrospect, was the first red flag, because from what Billy had told her, he and Danielle were not in contact. The second red flag, a much bigger one, was the sudden barrage of questions about Billy and Anna’s father—where was he now? and if he was out of town, how long would he be gone? Danielle had recently crossed paths with him at the Griffith Observatory, where they had both gone for an early-morning hike, and she wanted to send him something in the mail, information about her business for someone that he said might be interested in hiring her to reorganize his home.
Her story sounded as if she were reciting it from a script.
Didn’t she have a website? Anna asked. And couldn’t the potential client contact her himself?
Well, yes, of course, but Renn had asked her to send the brochure directly to him, and she wanted to oblige him.
Then another question, a complete non sequitur: What did Anna think of Elise? Were she and Renn happy?
Anna had hesitated before answering, suspecting that Danielle’s interest wasn’t innocent. “They seem very happy whenever I’ve seen them together,” she said warily.
“That’s great,” said Danielle. “Elise seems like she’s a nice person.”
“She is.”
Her brother’s ex wavered, taking, what sounded to Anna’s ears, a long and shaky breath. “How serious do you think they are?”
Anna faltered. “I’m not sure. Pretty serious, probably. Why?”
“Oh, nothing. Just curious. In that interview in Time last week about Life After the Storm, your dad didn’t say anything about their relationship.” She laughed self-consciously.
“He doesn’t like to talk about his personal life. I’m sure Billy told you that when you guys were dating.” Anna paused. “Look, Danielle, is everything okay? Why are you asking me about Elise and my dad?”
“I’m sorry.” Danielle laughed again. “I guess I’m just in a nosy mood. I’m sure you’re busy. Congratulations on being a doctor now too. I bet you’re great at it.”
“Thanks. I do like it.”
“I’d better let you go. Sorry to bother you with my questions. It’s nice to hear your voice.”
“Yes, you too.”
“Good-bye, Anna. Sorry again,” said Danielle, hanging up abruptly, leaving Anna to hold on to the phone for a few seconds, wondering what was going on.
The next morning Anna called Tom to tell him about the disquieting conversation with Danielle. She managed to catch him while they were both still driving to the hospital, she from Silver Lake, he from Marina del Rey, but he didn’t take her distress over Danielle’s call as seriously as Anna thought that he should have. “Your father can pretty much do whatever he likes and probably has for years,” he said.
“So you’re saying that it’s okay if he’s sleeping with my brother’s ex?”
“No, that’s not what I’m saying at all, but if we’re going to be honest with ourselves, I don’t think that either of us is in much of a position to judge him right now.”
“. . . no, but I still don’t think—”
“I bet your father would say the same thing, sweetheart.”
Normally she loved it when he used endearments, but this one sounded patronizing. “I suppose he would,” she said dryly.
Tom laughed. “Don’t worry so much. Your father’s a big boy, and I assume that this girl your brother used to date is old enough to take care of herself too. I’d do my best to stay out of it if I were you. You don’t have proof of anything, and I don’t think it’d be a good idea to go looking for any either.”
“Sorry to bother you with this, Tom.” She was irritated but tried to keep her voice even.
“It’s not a bother. I’m intrigued. You must have known that I would be.”
Tom had asked her to introduce him to her father a month after they had started seeing each other, but she had waited a few months more before inviting her father over for dinner, during which time she tried to decide if she was more nervous about Renn guessing that Tom was something other than a friend, or about whether Tom was having an affair with her mostly because he wanted to get to her father. She had talked it over with Jill and Celestine, the only two people who knew that she was seeing Tom, and they had both thought she was being paranoid. “I think it’s pretty ballsy of him to want to meet any of your family members, whether your dad’s a movie star or not,” said Celestine. “I also doubt that he’d spend all this time wooing you and risking his marriage just to get to your dad. It’s not like he wants to be an actor, right?”
Jill said, “Unless you think Tom is bisexual and wants to get your dad in the sack, I don’t think you have anything to worry about. It’s probably just a mancrush. No big deal.”
Tom had told her that he been a fan of her father’s films for about twenty years, and after Bourbon at Dusk was released and so generously reviewed, and there was the attendant publicity about the foundation for Katrina survivors that he had started, it was almost like Tom thought that her father deserved to be canonized. But she too loved that he had started Life After the Storm and thought that at some point she and Tom might be able to get involved by volunteering for a week or more in the clinic Renn planned to open in or just outside of New Orleans in the next several months.
Her father, no surprise, had figured out almost immediately after he and Elise had arrived at her house that Tom was Anna’s lover, and he was more upset by this fact than she had imagined he would be. He told her bluntly that she was wasting her time getting involved with a married man, that he would likely disappoint her, that she could do a whole lot better, didn’t she understand what a tremendous catch she was? Beautiful, incredibly intelligent, and also such a decent, down-to-earth young woman? And of course she had money, but her father didn’t mention that. He had to believe that Tom had it too, though probably not as much as Anna did. Why in the hell was she selling herself short by hanging around with this guy who was also so much older than she was?
She had looked at her father, an aging man who was dating a woman almost thirty years his junior. Compared to that, the nineteen-year age difference between her and Tom felt much less egregious. Anna had smiled and said, “Dad, you can’t be serious about the age gap. Come on.”
It had taken a few seconds for this to sink in, but then, to her amused surprised, he had blushed. “I suppose you’re right, but really, Anna, I don’t recommend it. I wish there was only a few years’ difference between Elise and me, but obviously, that’s not the way it worked out.”
And now, despite his prized young girlfriend, it seemed that he was stepping out on her, with his own son’s ex-girlfriend. Danielle had sounded anxious, even a little desperate, when she called. It wouldn’t have taken an experienced psychologist to figure out that there was a subtext to the phone call that could not have been innocent. When Anna called her father after her shift at Reagan ended for the day, he did not pick up. She didn’t say why she was calling, only that he should call her back. By ten thirty that night, he hadn’t yet called back. She tried him again, but he still didn’t pick up, and she resigned herself to brooding until she could question him about Danielle, though she would try to do it in a roundabout way. Nevertheless, she could not see him giving her a straight answer no matter how she phrased her question.
Tom was right that she should not get involved, and that given enough time, it would all blow over, if anything was going on in the first place. Her father would eventually tire of Danielle, and provided that she didn’t do anything drastic and brainless, the affair would simply end and neither Elise nor Billy would have to find out about it. Anna didn’t really understand why it bothered her so much, but she thought it might be because she was involved in something dishonest herself, though as Jill had said not long before Anna had started seeing Tom, it was he who had to answer to his wife and children, not Anna.
A convenient way to see things, certainly.
And not Anna’s usual way of going about her business either. How much she had learned about herself in the past several months, how many previously held assumptions about her character now had to be revised! Before she had met Tom Glass, affairs had always sounded to her like puerile self-indulgence, the most common adult cliché. There were plenty of single men and women to go around, weren’t there? Who really needed to get involved with someone who was married? She could not imagine falling for a man who lied to his wife on a regular basis, especially if the lie was told so that he could go off and have sex with another woman. How could she love a liar? How would she ever be able to trust him not to do the same thing to her? And if he had kids, wasn’t it just the most lowlife, selfish thing in the world to be risking their well-being and happiness by keeping a mistress? How could it possibly be worth it?
Ah, self-knowledge. She really had had no idea what lay beneath the veneer of her good intentions and good opinion of herself before she had started her internship. In more ways than one, Tom Glass was educating her.
The next morning around nine, when she was already two hours into her workday at the hospital, her father called her back. She could feel her phone vibrating in her lab coat’s pocket, and knew that it was him. As soon as she could get away from her group with the excuse that she needed to use the bathroom, she went into a visitors’ bathroom and called him back.
“Is everything all right, Anna?” her father asked. “I would have called you back last night, but I was out so late that I didn’t want to wake you up.”
Hearing the concern in his voice, she nearly lost her nerve. “I’m fine, Dad. I’m sorry if you were worried about me.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yes,” she said, pausing. “I was just wondering about something. A couple of days ago Danielle Dixon called me, Billy’s ex-girlfriend. You remember her, I’m sure.”
There was a distinct pause before he said, “Yes, I remember her.”
Other than the pause, there was nothing telltale in his voice. She had to keep in mind that he was an actor, that he was probably capable of bluffing his way out of anything. “Have you seen her lately?”
“No,” he said. “Not since that night at Sylvia’s more than a year ago.”
“Really? She said you ran into each other at the Griffith Observatory not long ago.”
He was silent for a moment. “I haven’t seen her at Griffith. Why would she say that?”
“I don’t know. Is there any reason that you think she would?”
“Why was she calling you?”
“She said it was because she missed me.” Anna paused. “She had a number of questions about you too.”
“Anna, that’s strange. I have no idea why she’d be calling to ask you about me.”
“Don’t you want to know what her questions were?”
“No, I don’t.”
“She wanted to know where you were and how long you’d be gone. She asked if you and Elise were happy, which you can imagine I found rather odd. She also said that you had a friend who might be interested in hiring her. I guess she’s still doing that job where she organizes people’s homes.”
“I don’t remember telling her that I had a friend interested in hiring her. Maybe it’s something we talked about that night at Sylvia’s.”
He was not convincing her. She could hear something in his tone now—vagueness or guilt, maybe both—that made her feel almost certain he was lying to her.
“Dad, it sounded to me like she’s seen you recently and that she wants to see you again. It was like she expected you to call her on Valentine’s Day or something, but you didn’t.”
He laughed. “That’s absurd. I hardly know her. Why would I call her on Valentine’s Day?”
She was getting irritated with the way that he kept turning her questions back on her, and she needed to rejoin the other interns, who were probably wondering what had happened to her. She asked him one more question: “Is something going on between you two?”
“Anna, you can’t be serious,” he said, laughing again. “You know that I’m with Elise. I just asked her to marry me.”
“You did?” said Anna, taken aback. A third marriage? It seemed a foolish move on her father’s part. Elise was bound to get restless, if he didn’t first. “Did she say yes?”
“Not quite. She wants to stay with the status quo for now, but I think we’ll probably get engaged and wait a couple of years to marry.”
“Well, congratulations, Dad. I have to get back to work, but maybe we can talk tonight if you’re free.”
“That could work, but I might fly down to New Orleans later to check on a few things for the foundation. Janice wants to move us into the rest of the building where our offices are because the other tenant is about to move out. I’m not sure it’s necessary, but she’s convinced it is. Our rent would nearly double, and I think for now that it’s best to stay where we are.”
Janice was the woman, a longtime heavyweight in nonprofit development, whom her father had hired to oversee his fledgling foundation. Anna had met her once the previous fall when she was first hired and thought that Janice seemed nice enough, if not also a little sycophantic around her father. It was nothing that she hadn’t seen dozens of times before, but it still made her uncomfortable, as if someone she had just met was walking around, unaware that his pants were unzipped.
“You could just tell her no. You’ve raised most of the money so far, haven’t you?”
“I have, but I feel like I should go down there so that at least she knows I considered it.”
This seemed a little ridiculous, but Anna didn’t say anything. If he didn’t want to rent the whole building, he need only say no and Janice would of course have to demur. She had not known her father to be hesitant about such things before. Was he having an affair with Janice too? It wasn’t likely, but it also wasn’t impossible.
When had she become such a paranoid, as Tom had said yesterday? Her own transgression had to be responsible for this new and troubling desire to police her father, which was a preposterous undertaking. And it was not her place to police him anyway. Elise could do it, if she even had those tendencies, which she probably did. Anna could not think of any woman she knew who would have felt comfortable sharing her husband or lover. It was the same with her lesbian friends. Jealousy was a universal human weakness, though maybe it was sometimes a strength, in that it was supposed to help you hold on to what or who was important to you.
“Well, if you do go down there, Dad, I hope you won’t let her rope you into anything. You’re the boss.”
“Yes, I know. Don’t worry about me. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
When she rejoined the other interns in her group in the neurology wing, Jim Lewin raised his eyebrows and said, “Everything okay, Dr. Ivins?”
“Yes,” she said, glancing at her watch. She had been gone for almost ten minutes. But their attending physician was missing now too.
“Dr. Gutierrez excused himself a minute or two after you left us. You’re off the hook,” said Jim. He paused. “Do you know if Jill likes Beethoven? I was thinking of getting tickets for the symphony. There’s a matinee on Sunday, and they’re doing Eroica. I’d really like to go if you think she’d like it too.”
“She’d love it,” said Anna. “That’s sweet of you.” The symphony was one of the many things that she and Tom could not do. Too public, he had told her apologetically, as most things were. People knew him—his patients, other doctors, his and his wife’s friends, some of whom seemed to hold season tickets to every sporting and cultural event within a hundred-mile radius of Los Angeles. Even if they could have escaped up the coast to San Francisco or Napa, Tom would have still worried that he might run into someone who knew him and his wife. His wife was a realtor and knew as many people as he did, possibly even more.
When Anna had told Celestine about how narrow the possibilities for their dates were, her friend had said, “Just make sure the next guy you have an affair with doesn’t have any friends.” She laughed. “But isn’t the whole point of an affair the sex? I’ve always thought that it was.”
Unlike Jill, Celestine had not asked to be set up with one of Anna’s doctor friends. She preferred to date athletes and actors, and working as a media escort for a PR firm with dozens of clients, she met quite a few. Celestine was pretty, charming, and fit, though she had suffered on and off since age fourteen from bulimia, and had never been very confident about her looks or intelligence (despite having graduated cum laude from Loyola Marymount), even after the athletes and actors she was attracted to had started noticing her.
Celestine’s comment about affairs, flippant as it was meant to be, had made Anna wince inwardly. Despite the ring pendant and the hypotheticals about moving in with her and having his sons visit, she wondered sometimes what Tom was really doing with her. Maybe it was just the sex that he wanted. And the cachet of having met Renn Ivins in person, of having successfully romanced his daughter, a competent new physician and very easy, as it turned out, to seduce.
If she were to talk with her mother about Tom and admit that he wasn’t exactly a boyfriend, nor was he truly available in any traditional sense, she knew that her mother would be gravely disappointed. If only Billy had kept his mouth shut! He thought that she was stupid for seeing a married man, but he was hardly one to judge. Aside from her mother, no one in her nuclear family had any right to pass judgment on anyone else’s love life. Billy with his futile crush on Elise while he pretended to want to move in with Danielle; her father with his long, storied history of philandering; herself with her married lover. In the sixteen years since her parents’ divorce, it wouldn’t have been inconceivable if her mother had dated a married man. Or else had wanted to date a married man, but had chosen not to. Her mother had been single for the past two years, as far as Anna knew, and although she probably had the occasional offer, she seemed to prefer to remain alone. It sometimes bothered Anna that Lucy had not remarried or at least found someone with whom she wanted to live, while at the same time their father went from wife to girlfriend to wife as easily as if he were changing his socks.
Since Billy had slipped up the previous week, their mother had called her three times and left messages, saying in a wounded voice in the last one that she knew how busy interns were, but couldn’t Anna find two or three minutes to call her back? Or was she too occupied with her new boyfriend in the off hours to talk to her mother?
After this third pitiful message, Anna returned her call. It was almost nine thirty, and her mother didn’t like her nonwork phone to ring after nine p.m. because she said that it made her think that someone was calling with bad news, but Anna called then anyway. Tom had come home with her at seven thirty and had stayed until nine fifteen, a rare event because when he visited her on a work night, he usually couldn’t stay for more than forty-five minutes to an hour. Tonight they had had sex, as they always did, and then eaten dinner, a pizza that Tom had ordered before they took off their clothes, requesting that the delivery person not arrive for forty minutes. He beamed at her after he had made the call and said, “See how organized I am?”
“You’re great,” she said, not really meaning it, but he didn’t appear to notice. He was looking at her breasts, which were still encased in her bra, a lacy white one that she had bought several months earlier and taken care to keep from turning a dingy gray, which she could only do by hand-washing it.
“I try,” he said, snaking his arms around her back, unclasping the bra. He pressed his face to her breasts and kissed one, then the other. She wished that she could resist him. When he was in her bed, this was the only time her fear that he would leave her ever fully dissipated.
He was a strong man of average height, with silver hair on his chest to go with the sprinkle of silver on his head. He had hair on his back too, but none of it was gray. Tonight his back was smooth when she put her arms around him, and she liked that he had gone to the trouble to shave it off. His chin and cheeks were rough though, the day’s whiskers chafing her breasts. She shivered and pulled at the curls on his head, whispering that she wanted him to enter her right away, but he rarely ever would. He liked to make her wait, to plead with him a little. It was something he was very good at.
“When do I get to meet him?” her mother asked. “What’s his name?”
Anna sighed inwardly. What if her mother knew him and knew that he was married? “Tom,” she said, hoping she wouldn’t ask for his last name.
“Is he a doctor too?”
“Yes”
“Is he one of your classmates?”
There was no point in lying. She knew that Lucy would find out the truth one way or another. “No, he’s one of the attendings.”
Her mother faltered. “Really? Anna, I hope he’s not one of your attendings.”
“He is.”
“Oh, God. You should not, under any circumstances, be dating him.”
Anna said nothing.
“Anna, really, it’s a terrible idea. You’ve worked so hard to get where you are. If something happened to you because of him, I’d have to report him. Or kill him.”
“Mom, nothing’s going to happen.”
“Are you in love with him?”
“I don’t know,” she lied.
“Oh, Jesus. You are.”
“I said that I don’t know.”
“At least tell me that’s he’s not married.”
She felt the pressure of anxiety in her chest. But was it really any of her mother’s business? “He’s not.”
“Good,” said her mother. “I guess it’s not as bad as it could be.” She paused. “You’re sure he’s not married?”
“Mom, please, let’s talk about something else. How are you?”
“Isn’t there someone else you could date?”
“I’m sure there is, but I’m dating him. Are you thinking of going to see Billy? He said that you said something about it when you talked to him the other day.”
“I might. I haven’t been to Paris in about five years, and I’d like to see how he’s doing. He sounds happy on the phone. I think it was probably a smart idea for him to go over there for a while, but I do wonder what he’ll do next.”
“Maybe he’ll be a boulevardier for the rest of his life. There are worse things.”
Her mother laughed. “What a word, sweetie. Did you learn that in college?”
“I don’t know. Probably,” she said. “Mom, I’m sure Dad would tell you this himself, but I know you don’t talk to him that often and it might leak into the papers. He told me a couple of days ago that he asked Elise to marry him.”
There was a long pause in which Anna could hear a bird singing; several mockingbirds lived in her mother’s neighborhood, and a few of them sang day and night. Finally she said, “He did?”
“Yes,” said Anna.
“Did she say yes?”
“No. But he thinks he’ll get her to agree to a long engagement.”
“God, that man will never learn. Why can’t he see that the girl doesn’t want to marry him?”
“Because he doesn’t want to believe she’s rejected him. No one rejects him.”
“Oh, Anna.” Her mother sighed.
“What? You’ve said it yourself about a thousand times.”
“I know, but it’s different when I say it.”
“It is?”
“Yes, you know it is.”
Before they hung up, her mother said, “I want to meet Tom. Would you bring him over for dinner next Sunday? That’s your day off, isn’t it?”
“He’s going out of town for a few days. It’ll have to wait.” Another lie.
“Then the Sunday after next.”
“I’ll ask him, but I don’t know if he’d feel comfortable. He already thinks that you wouldn’t approve because we work together.”
“You’ve talked about me with him?”
“Yes, of course.”
“I want to meet him. If I have to come to the hospital when you’re both working, I will.”
“That would not be a good idea.”
“Then bring him over to meet me.”
“I will when he feels more ready.”
“Has your father met him?”
“Mom.”
“Has he?”
She exhaled. “Yes, he has.”
“Oh, Anna, and you haven’t brought him over to meet me yet? He wanted to meet the movie star but not me?”
“No, that’s not it at all.” Though it was, and her mother knew it. Anna had only been willing to introduce Tom to her father because she hoped that her father’s glow would burnish her too, and the two men had gotten along well, Renn saying when she spoke to him a few days later that even though he hated to admit it, he thought that she and Tom seemed happy together. But of course they hadn’t been seeing each other very long and affairs were different from other relationships and Tom had a wife and kids and if Anna could walk away now, she should. The conversation had ended shortly thereafter, Anna feeling like her father had jinxed her. But she felt that way about so many things that happened now: the affair was turning her into an obsessive-compulsive.
“You’re breaking my heart,” her mother said. “Both you and Billy. He has a girlfriend in Paris now, but he won’t tell me much about her other than that she’s an American too.”
“If you go to visit him, I’m sure you’ll meet her.”
“Maybe. But he might not want to introduce me to her either.”
“He will.” She hesitated. “Mom, Dad met Tom because he stopped by to see me one night when Tom was over for dinner.”
Her mother was silent for a moment. “Really?”
“Yes.” There were many ways that her mother could find out that this wasn’t true, but it was a mercy lie and they were sometimes necessary. This, at least, was what Anna told herself.
“Oh. Well, okay,” said Lucy, the relief in her voice obvious.
“I’d better go, Mom. Another busy day tomorrow.”
“They’ll be like that for as long as you keep working.”
“Yes, I’m sure they will.”
She could not sleep that night and lay awake for two hours before she got up to take an Ambien. She was lying to her mother because of Tom. Her father was lying to her because he was having an affair with Danielle—Anna could not help but feel convinced of it. She was making a muddle of her life right now, and her father was doing the same with his. Yet she wondered if her mother was any better off, sitting alone in her big house, worrying too much about her and Billy and the ex-husband who had cheated on her and left her for someone else after fifteen years of marriage.
When she was finally feeling the sleeping pill’s effects, Mr. Greenbaum and his question about how much time people wasted worrying drifted into her consciousness. He reminded her of a friend she had had in college who had since disappeared from her life. He was someone she had briefly dated, but he had turned out to be very religious, and after a month, she knew that they would probably always be incompatible. Nonetheless, he had made one vaguely religious comment that she still thought about from time to time. They had gone to a birthday party for a mutual friend, and on the walk home, he had said, “Don’t you wish that you could go into a room and see every gift you’ve ever given set out on a table? If you’ve given a lot of presents in your life, think of how cool that would look. All of those gift-wrapped packages, the bows and the cards too. I’d love to see that. Maybe that’s what heaven is, a place where you get to see all of the nice things you’ve done for other people. You’d get all of the thank-yous that you should have gotten when you were still alive too. That has to be what heaven’s like. Forget the angels playing harps and the white robes and hushed voices. I want to see a lot of colors. I want to relive the best parts of my life.”
Anna wondered where he was now, this boy who had considered joining the Catholic priesthood. Maybe he had become a priest; maybe he was living an honorable life, one without much private tension or disorder and few lies or dark secrets. Maybe he was happy wherever he was now, but she doubted it. Other than Jim Lewin and Jill (though how could she be sure?), she couldn’t think of anyone she knew who was happy, not for more than an hour or two at a time.