Chapter 4
The Finest Medical Attention
Anna has two close friends, Celestine and Jill, women she has known since childhood, the three of them from families with live-in housekeepers and feuding parents and assorted, neglected pets. They have gone through periods of intense closeness as well as bouts of jealous competition, which, in one case, resulted in Jill not speaking to Celestine for almost a year because Celestine began dating Jill’s ex-boyfriend two days after he had broken up with her.
It is Celestine’s and Jill’s lives that often have the air of a siege, not Anna’s, at least as she perceives their confessions and self-mocking admissions. Both of her friends are prone to spending too much money on clothes they might wear only once, to dating more than one man at a time, and to having sex with their bosses, or even, in one case, a boss’s wife. They confide in Anna often, despite how busy she has been with medical school over the past four years, how tired but often exhilarated she feels when she’s at the hospital, following around the attending physicians she and the other fourth-year students have been assigned to. Dr. Glass, one of the attendings for her internal medicine rotations, is her favorite. She guesses that he is in his mid-forties, though he looks younger, his face turning especially boyish when he smiles. His credentials make it clear, however, that he has been out of medical school for close to twenty years.
She began working with him in the spring of her third year, when clinical rotations began, and now, a year later, with her coursework finally finished and a full-time summer residency under way, she is with him for nine or ten hours at a time, five days a week, unless he alternates with the other attendings she has been assigned to for the internal medicine rotation, Dr. Fitch and Dr. Kaczmerski, who are older and often humorless. Dr. Fitch also has a wandering eye and on some days, bad breath; Dr. Kaczmerski snaps when he is impatient and favors the male interns.
“The hospital is full of the busiest, most important people in the world,” Anna has joked to Jill and Celestine. “Nowhere else on the planet is anyone’s work as important.”
“If you start acting like your bosses,” Jill said, “we’ll have to kill you.”
Anna laughed. “You can’t kill me. I’m too important. You’d have to call it an assassination.”
But Dr. Glass is not, as Anna has told her friends, a stuffed shirt. He is thoughtful and handsome, and his temper doesn’t fray easily. “I have a long temper,” he said soon after they started working together. “But that doesn’t mean I never get mad. I just prefer to handle problems without a flare-up. My expectations are that you will also be on your best behavior and do the most rigorous work you have done so far in medical science.”
Two weeks into her summer rotation, Anna realizes that she thinks about him more often than anyone else in or outside of the hospital, and twice she has had dreams about him, both leaving her with a sexual ache that lasted for an entire day. When she is choosing a carton of strawberries at Von’s or deciding which blouse to wear or else lying restless in bed despite how exhausted her body is, she finds that her mind is running a series of impressions and images that all feature Dr. Glass. She sees his curly black hair, which he had cut very short the week her summer rotation began, his newly shorn head alarming her for days. The curls had suited him, and their removal had struck her as too aggressive, as if instead he had cut off an ear or a finger. More than once she has pictured the clipped curls being swept from a salon floor and dumped without ceremony into a trashcan, his hair forced to commingle with strangers’ clippings, this anonymous intimacy oddly troubling to Anna. There is silver visible on his head now, these strands spikier than the dark brown ones. Many times she has wondered what he would do if she reached up to touch one of these bristling hairs. She thinks that he likes her too, not necessarily in the same way that she likes him, but he seems to keep his gaze on her longer than on any of her classmates. And every morning when she presents herself to him, his face changes a little, as if someone has opened the blinds in a room dark with night.
But he isn’t free. He has a wife and two sons, both of them teenagers, one a soccer player, the other a talented pianist. He rarely talks about his personal life, but with all the time she and the other students in her rotation spend with him, they do sometimes speak about their lives outside of the hospital. He has only mentioned his wife once, to say that she had asked him to pick up a dozen quail’s eggs for a dinner party, and did anyone know where he might find a store that sold them? Jim Lewin knew, because, in part, he knew everything. Anna did not know where to buy quail’s eggs and couldn’t imagine what Dr. Glass’s wife planned to do with them. She went home that night and looked them up on the web and found two stores that sold them, both within an eight-mile drive of the medical center. She sent an e-mail to Dr. Glass with the store names and addresses, but he didn’t respond, not even to thank her, until an entire week had passed. In the days preceding his belated thank-you, she hadn’t dared to ask if he had received her message.
The quail eggs had come up in the spring of Anna’s fourth year during a six-week internal medicine rotation—six whole weeks with Dr. Glass Monday through Thursday and Dr. Fitch on Friday and Saturday. Dr. Kaczmerski hadn’t yet been assigned to her group. After this rotation, she spent four weeks in ob-gyn, her attending Dr. Hlvacek, who was from Bratislava, but at twenty-one had moved to Boston to study medicine at Tufts—fiercely homesick and barely proficient in English, she had confided to Anna with a sheepish smile. Her English was now nearly flawless, and she was also beautiful, but not, it seemed, overly preoccupied with the power this beauty imparted her. Anna often caught herself wondering if Dr. Glass had a crush on Dr. Hlvacek, as most of the male doctors whose paths they crossed seemed to. When they discussed Anna’s performance on the last day of her obstetrics rotation, Dr. Hlvacek had startled her by saying, “What is the expression? A double threat, brains and beauty? Whatever it is, you will be just fine, Dr. Ivins. I am sure of this.” For days afterward, Anna had replayed Dr. Hlvacek’s words in her head, not certain if she was more happy to be called pretty than intelligent, though she knew which one she should value more.
Her family and friends are impressed that Anna is studying to become a doctor, but on the phone, when her father called her after the Cannes festival, where Bourbon at Dusk had done well but the Palme d’Or had gone to Ten Pretty Girls, an Israeli film about a child prostitution ring, he asked if she was sure that she wanted to make a career out of giving people bad news. She couldn’t tell if he was kidding, knowing that he has bragged many times to his friends and acquaintances about her chosen career.
“Most of the bad news is given by specialists,” she told him. “Potentially serious problems get farmed out.”
“But won’t you get tired of doing immunizations and physicals?”
“I don’t think so. They’ll be a relief because I’ll have to do other things like lancing boils and stitching split lips.” She laughed. “No, seriously, what I want is to have real relationships with my patients, like a lot of doctors used to before the insurance companies took over and made everything so bureaucratic.”
“Those insurance companies are your bread and butter,” he said. “Or they would be if it weren’t for, well, if it weren’t for me.”
If Dr. Glass knows who her father is, he isn’t interested, or else he refuses to show it. She can’t see him asking her the usual questions: What was it like to grow up with a movie star as your father? Why didn’t you go into acting too? Or did you and it didn’t work out? Which of his movies is your favorite? Is he a decent guy? For real? Come on, you can tell me.
She does know that Dr. Glass likes movies, that he sees them when he has time, though he has said that he stays away from films about doctors because they often contain errors, or else some important element in them has been altered in order to keep a mainstream audience happy. “Contrary to what Hollywood might tell us, there are no perfect doctors,” Anna remembers him saying the day he appeared at work with his very short new haircut. “Just like there are no perfect people. You’ll make mistakes; everyone does. Thankfully, most of them can be corrected. Your duty, however, is not to make the same mistake twice.”
“What if we do make the same mistake twice?” asked Jim Lewin, who, despite having the highest grade-point average in the class, had confounded many of his professors and classmates by declaring, like Anna and a dozen or so others, a family medicine concentration rather than a specialization like oncology or neurology.
“You could lose your malpractice insurance,” said Dr. Glass. “Because you’re likely to get sued, if you haven’t been already. Small mistakes. Those are the kind you want to make.”
“I don’t want to make any, big or small,” said Jim.
“Of course you don’t. No one does. That’s the spirit, Dr. Lewin.” Dr. Glass looked at Anna and smiled. “What about you, Dr. Ivins? Are you planning to make any mistakes?”
She hesitated. “No, but I probably will. I keep wanting to knock on wood, but I’d feel embarrassed if anyone saw me.”
Dr. Glass shook his head, still smiling. “You’re superstitious. Almost every new doctor is. A lot of older doctors are too.”
She felt her face redden. “I wish that I weren’t.”
“It’s perfectly normal. We know how fast things can change for any one of us. Aneurysms, heart attacks, strokes—they happen to healthy people too.”
“We have such a hard job,” said Jim, his brown-eyed gaze unnerving in its directness. His upper lip was sweating, something that happened whenever he was excited, which seemed to be most of the time. For the first two years of medical school he had had a crush on Anna but had never found the nerve to ask her out. She is glad that he didn’t because she would have said no and felt bad about it. She does not find him attractive, despite his pleasant face and lean, tall body. If he weren’t so earnest and so intent on knowing all of the answers, she is sure that he would do better with the available women in their class.
Dr. Glass regarded him. “Yes, we do, and not everyone can handle it. You’ll know a lot more about yourself by the end of the summer.”
The first time her path crosses his outside of the hospital is pure coincidence. She is walking past a sandwich shop in Marina del Rey after visiting Jill at her new apartment, her friend having moved from North Hollywood where she had lived since college because, she said, only half joking, that she had used up all of the interesting straight men there. Her new place has a view of the Pacific and is so pleasant and spacious that for a few minutes Anna thought about looking at a unit for sale on another floor, but the effort required to move when she is already so busy makes the idea too daunting. Dr. Glass is sitting by himself at an outdoor table, eating a salad and reading a book, one whose title she can’t see. She isn’t sure if she should bother him and timidly turns her face away, but he looks up at the same moment and calls her name. Her heart begins to beat so forcefully that she wonders if he will see it pounding beneath the thin fabric of her blouse. With her denim miniskirt and hair in two long ponytails, she knows that she doesn’t look professional. She suspects that she might even look silly, hardly a woman to take seriously, let alone to entrust anyone’s life to. At the hospital she always gathers her light brown hair, which is the same color as her father’s and as thick, into a bun.
“I didn’t know you lived in Marina,” says Dr. Glass, motioning for her to sit down. He is wearing a pale green cotton shirt, a color that suits him. His hair is starting to grow out too, and with his dark stubble and wire-rimmed glasses, he looks especially handsome.
“I don’t, but I have a friend who just moved here. She wanted to be close to the beach, and she doesn’t mind the crowds.” She sits in the chair across from him, careful to pull her skirt down as far as it will go, but it stays well above her knees, one of which has a blue-green bruise the size of a quarter.
“But you do?”
Anna nods. “I like it quiet when I’m home. There are too many cars here anyway. It took me fifteen minutes to find a parking spot.”
“There are too many cars everywhere.”
She smiles. “That’s true.”
“Where do you live, if not here?” he asks, dabbing at his mouth with a napkin. His salad is only half eaten, and she realizes later that he didn’t eat any more of it while they were talking. She wonders if he worried about looking graceless, as she does when she eats, especially on first dates.
“Silver Lake.”
“Do you own your own place?”
“Yes. For a few years now.”
“Any roommates?”
She shakes her head. “I rent out the first floor to someone because it’s a big house, but she’s a tenant, not a friend.”
He smiles and shakes his head. “Sorry for all of the questions. I’m not usually so nosy.”
“You can ask me anything you’d like to,” she says, then looks down, embarrassed by her brashness. It is as if she has never before talked to a man she finds attractive. She doesn’t quite understand why Dr. Glass affects her as he does, especially in view of her many interactions with her father’s glamorous friends—some of them among the most accomplished, and the most handsome, actors in the world.
“You’re going to be an excellent doctor, Anna,” says Dr. Glass.
“Do you really think so?” she asks, blushing. “I’m trying to learn everything I can, but it still feels like I’ll never know enough.”
“You’re already very good, and I don’t say that about everyone.”
“Jim’s better than I am,” she says, then cringes inwardly.
He shakes his head. “He’s different, not better.”
“He notices everything.”
“That won’t always be the case. But he is very bright. There are plenty of more experienced doctors out there who aren’t as sharp as you two.”
She wonders if he will remember this conversation later and wish that he hadn’t been so frank. She has no idea if he is flirting or simply being indiscreet. She glances at the hand that rests next to his water glass and sees his platinum wedding band, an intricate ivy pattern etched onto it. “I should let you get back to your lunch,” she says.
“No, no, please stay as long as you’d like to. You’re not interrupting me. It’s nice to see you outside of the hospital.” He pauses. “I know it was a while ago, but I want to thank you again for sending that e-mail about the quail’s eggs. I felt bad about not replying sooner. I didn’t end up needing them. All my wife talked about for a week were those ridiculous eggs, and then at the last minute, she changed her mind.”
She looks at him, surprised. “Really? If you need them in the future, at least you’ll know where to go now.”
“I don’t think we will. No more dinner parties, at least not for a while, if I have my way. They’re always much more disappointing and expensive than my wife thinks they’ll be.”
“I’ve only hosted one. It was small, but it was still a lot of work.”
“I’d rather just go to a restaurant.” He smiles, motioning to his plate. “I guess that’s obvious.”
“I should let you finish your salad,” she says and stands up, wondering if he will see the bruise on her knee. The sudden wild thought arrives: Will he think that she got it during sex? She doesn’t remember how it happened, but it wasn’t from sex. She hasn’t slept with anyone in four months, since an ex-boyfriend visited from Tucson. Because they were both single, she let him stay with her while he was in town for a conference. During medical school, it has been hard to find time to date, and aside from her classmates, many of whom are already attached, she meets so few men she would consider dating. Her mother and brother, both unhappily single, wonder why she doesn’t complain more about not having a boyfriend; what she doesn’t tell them is that she misses having a sex life but not the effort of keeping a relationship from going flat and finding the time and space for a boyfriend in her already crowded life.
Dr. Glass is the first man in a while to whom she has had an immediate visceral response, but the ethics of their situation are undebatable: a professional relationship, nothing else. Even a platonic friendship outside of the hospital would be frowned upon, at least while she is still his intern.
“You were the only one in your group who suggested that the zoster virus Grace Whiting is suffering from might be a sign that her breast cancer is out of remission. Not everyone remembers this possibility.”
She smiles, her eyes on the table. The pleasure of his praise is almost unbearable. And her competitiveness shames her; she hadn’t realized before today just how much it bothered her that Jim Lewin is considered more of a star student than she is. “I hope I’m wrong, for Mrs. Whiting’s sake,” she murmurs.
“I do too, but what’s most important is that you thought of it. I ordered some tests, and we’ll know more in a couple of days.”
She glances toward the street where a group of shirtless boys in swim trunks are walking noisily by. She would like very much to stay with Dr. Glass for a while longer, but she can’t believe that he truly wants her company. There is also the chance that his wife and sons will ambush them, and that he will act like it is the most ordinary thing in the world for him to be sitting at a restaurant with one of his young interns, a woman who also happens to have a crush on him, something he must sense. Something his wife would also be likely to sense. Oh, and by the way, did Mrs. Glass know that the intern’s father is Renn Ivins, the movie star? though Anna and Dr. Glass have never discussed this. She does not want her father’s shadow to intrude on this private area of her life, this guilty but sexy possibility, at least not until she gets to know Dr. Glass better, if she will be given the chance.
And it seems likely that she will be. When she has made up her mind not to linger any longer, he smiles and says in a light tone, “I’m here at this time on most Sundays. You have an open invitation to join me whenever you’re in the neighborhood.” He extends his hand and she grasps it, realizing that this is the first time they have made a point of touching each other, aside from the day they met when they also shook hands. Her palm keeps tingling as she walks to her car, and she nearly forgets where she parked it. It is as if she is in ninth grade again and has just received the first love letter of her life.
On the drive home, she thinks of calling Jill and Celestine, but she knows that they would both tell her to accept his invitation and whatever it implies. Go next Sunday and the Sunday after that. He wants you. Of course he does! Why else would he ask you? If you won’t go, I’ll go in your place. Especially if he’s as cute as you say. Both of her friends have always been a step ahead of her, both having lost their virginity at fifteen, almost three years before Anna did, both pressuring her to loosen up and do it too—what was she waiting for? It was the best thing ever! Obviously she had no clue, otherwise she wouldn’t be sitting around with her legs crossed morning and night. But Anna knew, even then, that neither of them were necessarily happier after sleeping with boys who went on to snicker with other boys about what they had done, Jill angrily defiant about the rumors until she learned to ignore them. Celestine, however, had trouble ignoring them; it was easier to humiliate her, her Catholic mother having indoctrinated her from a very young age with the directive that nice girls don’t. Jill’s response to this had long been: Nice girls do but don’t admit it.
By the time Anna walks through her front door, she has already imagined him leaving his wife for her, introducing her to his surly sons, whom she will quickly win over because her father is a movie star. She can see herself giving up her earlier intention to do a residency in some dangerous and impoverished area of the L.A. sprawl because she does not want to risk being killed or assaulted if she has him to come home to at night. She remembers something her mother once said about Anna’s father during the divorce proceedings, that the brain shrinks to the size of a walnut when sex is in the equation, which, incidentally, is about the size of quite a few animal brains. “Your father can’t think properly because he’s forfeited most of his brain cells. He wants to keep them from getting in the way of his dick.” At the time, Anna was angry with her mother but also unsure if she really understood the insult. She had just turned eleven, and when she later repeated their mother’s words to her brother, he had looked at her and said, “She’s right, but so what? Men are supposed to think with their dicks.” He was twelve, and it wasn’t until several years later that she realized how cynical his response was. She didn’t believe that she shared his cynicism, but having been raised by the same parents who had conferred to them many of the same genes, she wasn’t sure how this could be possible. It wasn’t until medical school that she finally understood how his moodiness, his air of aggrievement and difficulty in yielding to any potentially joyful impulse, were not qualities that she also possessed, ones simply waiting for the proper conditions to express themselves.
The week following their encounter is her last under Dr. Glass’s tutelage until September, and during the five days that he mentors her and her classmates from seven thirty to five, he says nothing about their encounter in Marina del Rey. He treats her no differently than usual, and she feels alternately disappointed and relieved. He is married, she reminds herself. But in the next moment she can’t believe that his invitation was innocent. All week she goes back and forth with her silent, fruitless attempts to determine the definitive reason for his behavior on Sunday. But like baffling symptoms that refuse to yield to a diagnosis, his motives are indiscernible. It is also possible that he didn’t know what he was up to that day either.
Some of the patients she sees during the last week with Dr. Glass before she moves to an ICU rotation—just before, she will come to think of this time of self-recrimination and agonizing anticipation—have embarrassing, messy afflictions. One of them, a Slovenian man in his late fifties, is suffering from what tests will soon reveal to be advanced colon cancer, and Anna and her classmates must examine him, despite the fact his ailing body exudes an odor worse than anything she has come across in her life. She has to try very hard not to gag when she stands close to him, and one of her classmates actually does gag—not Jim Lewin, but Anna thinks she sees tears of pained restraint in his eyes when he gently palpates the man’s abdomen, trying not to cause him more anxiety or suffering.
The man of Sunday’s flirtation seems very remote when they are examining the sickest patients, and Anna views him in the same light that she often perceives her father when watching one of his films—at a distance, almost as a doppelganger, someone who looks intensely familiar but is unapproachable. She thinks that he couldn’t possibly have been serious about the invitation to see him again in Marina del Rey, and in her disappointment over this realization, she understands that she has already made up her mind to meet him.
“Grace Whiting’s cancer is still in remission,” Dr. Glass tells her after she sits down across from him at the same table as the previous week, self-conscious in her pale pink sundress and a strand of small, flawless pearls, a gift from her mother on her twenty-first birthday. She feels overdressed, which she knew would probably happen, but the dress is her favorite and she has only worn it once before today. Everyone else is in shorts and T-shirts, or short skirts like the one she wore last week, but Dr. Glass is wearing a cornflower blue linen shirt and pressed khaki pants. It seems that he too has made an effort.
“I’m so glad to hear that,” she says. “I’ve been wondering what happened with the tests you ordered last week.” In fact, Grace Whiting had slipped her mind, neither she nor Dr. Glass mentioning her case during the past week. Like her father, it seems that she too is susceptible to the walnut-brain phenomenon.
“Her T-cell count was normal and her lymph nodes were clear. I think she’ll be fine. Her immune system is probably still a little worn down from the chemo last winter. The trick is not to let her get addicted to the painkillers we prescribed.” He gives her a sheepish smile. “I need to stop teaching, don’t I. We’re off the clock.”
“It’s okay,” she says, though she already knows the things he has just told her. “I’m so happy that you think she’ll be fine.” She sips from her iced tea, which is weak and too warm, but she doesn’t want to complain at the register and ask for a new one.
“Were you visiting your friend again today?”
“Yes,” she lies. “But I remembered on my way to the car that you said you’d probably be here.” Her palms are sweating, and her underarms, though it is a perfect day—seventy-two degrees and a blinding blue sky.
“Next week if you’re free, why don’t you let me take you to lunch? We don’t have to meet here. If you like seafood, there’s a nice little place a couple of blocks away. Or we could meet somewhere closer to you. I like Silver Lake. It has a couple of bookstores that I used to go to before I had kids and still had time to read.”
“You were reading last week when I saw you here.” She cannot quite believe that he has just asked her on a date. She feels her heartbeat accelerate. Tachycardia, she thinks, the technical term for her condition there without prompting.
“That’s true. I was. Do you like Bellow too? I don’t like his later books as much as his early ones. Ravelstein wasn’t as good as I’d hoped. He never could beat Augie March, which he wrote when he was still in his thirties. I think he must have known he’d never do better, though Humboldt’s Gift is very good and Mr. Sammler’s Planet is too, but it isn’t really much of a story. Bellow probably thought of himself as a philosopher as much as a novelist.”
“I’ve only read Seize the Day and Herzog.”
Dr. Glass nods. “That’s more than most people. Did you like them?”
“I did, but it’s been a few years. I don’t know how well I remember them.”
He regards her, a small smile on his lips, ones she has thought countless times about kissing in the past week. “So, Dr. Ivins, how about lunch next week? We can talk some more about books. No work chitchat, I promise.”
“I don’t mind talking about work,” she says, nervousness like a weight in her stomach. “I think lunch would be nice. If you really do want to come to Silver Lake, there’s a good Indian place near my house. Or I could come out here again.”
“I’ll come to you. Sunday’s the one day a week that I’m usually a free man. My sons are out with their friends, and my wife goes to see her parents.”
She wonders if he has done this before. If he is serially unfaithful—each year a new intern? Is it something his wife knows about but chooses to ignore because she thinks she is lucky to have married a doctor, one whose earnings have made a certain type of lifestyle possible, one that offers other benefits if not marital fidelity? Or is she a doctor too and busy working with her own interns, having her own affairs? Anna has no idea what Mrs. Glass does, if anything, for a career.
What does she really know of marriage anyway, other than her parents’ flawed one, where so often in the years leading up to the divorce she witnessed her mother’s abject fury, her sorrow and fierce sense of personal affront? And then her father’s subsequent marriage: even more disastrous, his second wife a more or less well-meaning and kind person but so cowed by Anna’s father’s whims and will that after a while, Anna realized that they had probably been doomed to divorce from day one. She knows there must be unorthodox marriages that work, arrangements, tacit or no, where one or both parties are permitted to take lovers. The trick, she suspects, is discretion, no flaunting, no sloppily covered tracks. Don’t ask and I won’t tell—this has to be how it’s done.
Nonetheless, the fact that she is considering any of this, she who has only slept with four men in her life, and never a man who had another girlfriend, let alone a wife, is both humbling and a little shocking. When Jill and Celestine call to tell her about their affairs or one-night stands, she advises them to have fun but not to get too serious. What she used to say was not to get involved at all, not to sleep with anyone who had some other woman at home or on speed-dial, because her friends weren’t at all likely to get what they wanted. How many times had they seen it before? The pathetic single girl in tears when the man she witlessly has fallen in love with won’t leave his wife for her? It’s a scenario from countless movies and every single soap opera. Infidelity, along with alcoholism and drug abuse, is ubiquitous, the most prevalent open secret of most Western societies, and it seems almost always to end with something broken.
But Anna’s father, Jill and Celestine have reminded her, is the sort of man who really could have almost any woman he wants, and he left his wife for the other woman, didn’t he? “True,” Anna has conceded, “But look what happened. A second divorce and an ex-wife, who, up until a couple of years ago, still called and yelled at him when she was drunk.”
“Is one o’clock good for you?” Dr. Glass asks her now. “Or is noon better?”
“Either would work. I think I’m off all day.”
Before she leaves, he says, “If you don’t want to have lunch with me, please don’t think that you have to. I only thought that it might be nice. I could invite your classmates too if you’d like me to.”
She tries to keep her face from falling. “Whatever you’d like,” she says. “It’s really up to you.”
“Okay,” he says, his smile as boyish as any she has seen before. “Then it’ll just be you and me. We’ll have fun, I promise.”
She wishes that the memory of her mother’s unhappiness during her prolonged and bitter divorce were enough to keep her from seeing Dr. Glass again, but it isn’t. After a mostly restless night when she resorts to taking two of the Ambien in her medicine cabinet and still can’t sleep for stretches of more than an hour and a half, she calls Jill and tells her what she thinks she is about to do. “Why can’t I stop myself, knowing what my mother went through?” she asks.
“You’re a human being, Anna, not a saint,” says Jill. “It was only a matter of time anyway. How could you not be boning one of the doctors you work with? You’re gorgeous, and they’re all old goats who must be drooling every time you walk by.”
“Dr. Glass isn’t an old goat,” says Anna, wishing she had called Celestine instead.
“No, but he has a dick, doesn’t he?”
“You’re so crass. He’s not like that.”
“How do you know? If you gave them even the slightest encouragement, you’d have so many guys chasing after you that you’d need a bodyguard. I’m sure Dr. Glass is thinking about you when he yanks it in the shower every morning.”
“Stop it,” cries Anna, but the image of Dr. Glass masturbating is now in her head and she can’t send it back. “Tell me that I shouldn’t go out with him because he’s married and has two kids.”
“He has to answer to them. You don’t. Do whatever you want. Let him worry about his family.”
“That’s a convenient way to look at it.”
“You knew I’d tell you to go out with him. Why else did you call me? Did you already call Celestine and ask her what she thinks?”
“No.”
“She’d say the same thing. We’re both whores.” Her sudden burst of laughter is loud and self-mocking.
“No, you’re not,” says Anna.
“Yes, we are. You know it too. You don’t have to lie. I’m over it.”
“Do you think I’m a whore?”
“No,” Jill says quietly. “I think you’re just being honest with yourself. You’re attracted to him. He’s attracted to you. You’re single, and clearly he’s not getting everything he needs at home. You can’t always be good, especially growing up with a father like yours. If he were my dad, I’d have a big crush on him and be totally fine with it. How could I not? He’s still so hot.”
“No, you wouldn’t. That’s disgusting, Jill. I don’t have a crush on my father. I never have.”
“Don’t get your undies in a bunch. I’m just kidding,” says Jill, but Anna knows she isn’t. Both Celestine and Jill have had crushes on her father since junior high. Anna also wonders if one or both of them have had sex with him. She hopes it is only her jealous sixth sense, adding weight and meaning to the glances her two friends have exchanged with her father over the fifteen years she has known them; even so, she has almost no doubt that they would leap into bed with him if he so much as hinted that he’d be willing.
The fact that Jill has joked more than once that Anna must be attracted to him too is something she finds more irritating than perverse because in her private heart, she is unsure if, while watching his films and occasionally seeing him work on the set, her feelings have always been innocent. How not, from time to time, to see him as the man countless others desire? This is, after all, how he has managed to make a life as an actor. He has long been a sex symbol—several magazines over the years having baldly declared this fact on their covers, Anna rolling her eyes over this news even as she quietly wondered if she would grow up to marry a man like him. She does not want to think that Dr. Glass is this man, but he and her father are not very far apart in age, and he has power over her too; in some ways, even more than her father does. When this thought arrives, she hastily turns it away, but its traces remain, like light seeping from behind a closed door.
“Go out with Dr. Heart-of-Glass, Anna. I have a hunch that he’ll give you the finest medical attention you’ll find anywhere. Just go and have fun. If you fall in love with him, then you can worry.”
I might already be in love with him, she almost says.
“I was thinking that I might want to go out with that Jim guy you were telling me about last week. Do you think he’d like me?”
“I’m sure he would, but I don’t know if you’d like him.”
“Will you give him my phone number or e-mail? I really want to meet him.”
“He’d probably drive you crazy,” says Anna. “And I don’t want him hating me if things with you don’t work out. I’d still have to see him all the time.”
“I’ll be nice to him.”
“No, you won’t.”
“Yes, I will. At least for the first date.” She pauses. “Dr. Glass might fall in love with you too. Don’t rule that out.”
Her friend’s words make her breath seize. “I don’t think he will,” she says softly.
“Well, darling, you could be wrong.”
All week during her ICU rotation with two doctors who are related in some obscure way—the spouse of a cousin? the aunt of a nephew’s wife? Anna thinks of her impending date with Dr. Glass and tries to convince herself to call and tell him that her plans have changed or that she simply thinks they had better not. She could say that she really would like to get to know him better, but she knows her feelings for him are inappropriate, and surely he understands that she does not wish to compromise their professional relationship or intrude on his personal life?
But she doesn’t do it, doesn’t want to do it; it has been so long since she has felt as excited about a man, and despite her fatigue each night after the long hours at the hospital, she has gone out to buy a new skirt and blouse, along with a black silk bra and matching thong, these two items alone costing her a hundred and fifty dollars. The night before their date, she hardly sleeps, but in the morning finds that she doesn’t look tired, her anticipation having released floods of endorphins, hormones that keep her awake and almost fresh-faced, her cheeks pink, as if she has been out walking in the sun.
When she arrives at the restaurant at one o’clock, Dr. Glass is already there. He stands up from the table and takes her hand, not letting it go until he has pulled back her chair and motioned for her to sit down. She is so nervous that she has trouble looking at him, but his eyes seem to be steadily on her. “I have to think that you’re a woman of the world, Anna,” he says while they eat vegetable samosas and drink tepid tea.
She smiles, startled. “Why do you think that?”
“Well, in part because of who your father is.”
“You know who he is?”
“Of course. I think most people do.”
She looks down at the table, trying not to let him see her discomfort. She does not want to talk about her father. She does not want him to be present for any part of what she is probably going to do with Dr. Glass—Tom—which he has asked her to call him outside of the hospital. “My mother’s really the one who raised my brother, Billy, and me,” she says. “My father was gone a lot while we were growing up, and he and my mother got divorced when I was eleven.”
“But you still must have seen him when he was in town.”
“Yes, I did.” It isn’t strictly true that her mother did most of the parenting. She and Billy were with their father relatively often because they sometimes went where he was working during their school holidays, and when he was in L.A., they stayed with him on the weekends, Melinda, his second wife, babysitting them until they were old enough to take care of themselves, which was about the same time that he divorced her.
“Why didn’t you want to go into acting too?”
“I guess I didn’t have the guts.”
“You need more guts to be a doctor, I think.”
She laughs softly. “Yes, that’s probably true.”
“It is, Anna. Don’t doubt it.”
“My mother’s a doctor.”
He nods. “I remember you saying that during your first week with me.”
“I did?”
“Yes.”
“Do you mean my first week last year or my first week this year?”
“Last year.”
She looks at him, as pleased by this admission as anything he has previously said to her.
He hesitates. “One thing I feel I should say is that I don’t make a habit of asking my interns out.”
“I didn’t think you did.”
He regards her. “Have you ever dated one of your professors or attendings before?”
“No.”
“They were too shy to ask you, I’m sure.”
“I doubt it. But that’s fine, because I wasn’t interested in any of them.” She glances at his hand and sees that he is wearing his wedding ring. She wonders if he ever takes it off or if he has left it there to remind her that he belongs to someone else.
“But you are interested in me?” he murmurs.
She feels a nervous laugh bubbling in her throat. “Yes, but I know that I shouldn’t be.”
“Why not? Because I’m married?”
“That’s part of it.”
“Because we work together?”
“Yes.”
“I won’t name any names, but attending physicians go out with interns all the time. As long as everyone’s discreet, it’s not a problem. Some of my colleagues have married their former interns.” He pauses. “You don’t have to worry about my wife. She and I give each other a lot of breathing room.”
It seems likely that two or more of these statements are a lie, but Anna doesn’t challenge him. Her heart is beating so hard that she can feel it pulsing in her throat. She barely tastes the food they have ordered, and the sounds of other diners’ conversations filter into her ears but hardly register. She will never be able to tell her mother about Dr. Glass. It would be smart not to tell anyone about him, but she has already told Jill, and the day after their conversation, Celestine. One of the pleasures of behaving badly, she is beginning to realize, is how good it feels to have dirty secrets, and how hard it is to keep them to herself.
After their waiter brings the check, Dr. Glass looks at her (Tom, Anna reminds herself) and says, “If you don’t want to go back to your place today, we don’t have to. But if you do want to, I think that’d be nice.”
Is this how it’s done? she wonders, surprised by how naive she feels, knowing what she does about the rarefied plane her father inhabits, about the things that the people he works with sometimes do, how some of them have lovers in cities all over the world, how some have been treated for sex addiction, which has always seemed to her a surreal ailment to be “cured” of—how can one suppress the libido for the long term? It has never seemed possible to her. Instead, some people seem eventually to lose interest in sex, their hormone levels shifting, their habits and desires becoming uninteresting or possibly unpleasant.
“I’m not like my father,” she blurts. “I’ve never had an affair before.”
Dr. Glass stares at her, laughing a little in surprise. “I would never confuse you with your father, Anna. Please don’t think that. Working with you this past year, I think I have a pretty good sense of who you are.”
She looks at him. “You do?”
“For one,” he says, “you’ve never once mentioned your father or his fame.”
“It’s not something that I usually do.”
“I know.” He takes her hand from where it rests next to her plate and presses it to his lips. “I think you’re very lovely. I’ve never met anyone like you. You have so many things going for you, but you don’t ever seem to need to remind anyone of this.”
She has to look away from his earnest gaze. He is saying everything she wants to hear, but he doesn’t have to. She wants him, unequivocally, and within ten minutes they are at her house, the blinds closed, the radio clicked on so that they won’t have to hear her downstairs tenant walking around or talking on the phone with her windows wide open. Anna’s clothes are in a heap on the floor next to the bed, his draped over a chair. Even as she shivers with nervous desire for him, she can’t shut off her analytical mind. He put his shirt and pants over the chair so that they won’t wrinkle, she thinks. He doesn’t want his wife to wonder what he’s been doing, because of course she will be suspicious.
But then her mind does recede, or at least soften its cynical inquiry. Once his hands are on her breasts, his lips kissing the warm hollow of her neck, murmuring, “You’re so beautiful, Anna,” once the whole hot length of him is pressed against her shivering body, she knows that he is worth it, that whatever will happen, whatever expectations she will eventually have to forfeit, it is worth it to spend this hour with him, maybe two if he has the time to linger. She doesn’t know, can’t yet know, what he will be able to offer her. One of them will make most of the demands, she realizes, and it will probably become a pattern—the one asking, the other sometimes granting but often not. He will arrive at an appointed hour to undress himself and part her legs before getting into his car again and driving away until the next time she unlocks her door, behind which she has waited for him in something lacy and expensive. But right now, there is this first time, and it will always be the first time. She knows that she will remember it long after other details of this summer have faded. She will remember how he stepped out of his shoes and left them side by side next to her dresser, how he folded his pants over the chair before taking her into his arms and falling with her onto the cool, oceanic expanse of her bed.