“No one has ever asked,” I say. This is true. To my friends, “I met a guy” had sufficed, largely because the news had so astounded them that they then pestered me with questions about John himself rather than the details of our courtship. They were overjoyed, too. My dearest friends, who had never quite accepted that I was happy on my own.
I take a deep breath. “A new patient came in, a ten-year-old boy who’d been born with a lump on his forehead. They determined it was a benign mass at birth, and the family didn’t have insurance for what was considered elective surgery, so the boy just lived with it. I saw pictures. It wasn’t that noticeable when he was very young. Or when he wore his hair in bangs later on. But by the time the boy was nine, other lumps—they were tumors, to be precise—began growing all over his face. They brought him to me, to ensure these tumors really were benign. In fact they were hemangiomas, benign tumors of the endothelial cells that line blood vessels. Since they were beginning to interfere with the boy’s functioning—his breathing and his eyesight—the insurance would now cover removing them. He had the surgery. But the poor boy was horribly disfigured due to a careless surgeon.
“I began calling around for a plastic surgeon who might do some pro bono work for this boy. I’d heard of John’s clinic, of course. It’s well known in medical circles, especially among pediatric specialists. I put in a call, got the forms, and began the tedious process of filling them out and documenting the case with photos and lab reports. Then, a colleague told me that John was actually here at UCLA on an adjunct professorship teaching a seminar on facial reconstruction after burn trauma. So I emailed him directly, and surprisingly, he got right back to me. And since he was already in the hospital, agreed to come by my office that day.”
“What was your first impression?” asks Deborah. “I’m curious.”
“He had clearly once been handsome, but I remember thinking that he was going to seed: overweight, and with a red face. I immediately thought of hypertension, or vasculitis, or perhaps alcoholism. But the redness subsided after a few minutes and I realized he had been blushing. A man of sixty, blushing to meet me!
“I had pulled the patient’s file, and we went over the photos together, and right away he said he could help this boy. No hesitation. We scheduled the surgery. The boy and his family were terribly nervous, and for some reason, so was I. There seemed to be a lot riding on the outcome of this operation. I wanted it to be successful. I needed it to be successful. I was invested.
“In the meantime, we exchanged a series of businesslike emails. Yet I understood it was a courtship of a kind. He called me several times to discuss the techniques he was planning to use—taking skin from the boy’s thigh and grafting it onto his face over the scars, rebuilding the shape of the face with borrowed cartilage. At one point I asked him if I could observe the procedure. He warned me it would take a long time—six to eight hours—but I was welcome to stay for as much of it as I liked. I was rapt during the whole thing. I positioned myself in the observation room above the operating theatre in such a way that I could see John’s hands.
“Whatever slovenly habits he had in civilian life, none of this passed the threshold to the OR. He was gentle and delicate. I stayed for seven and a half hours. I hadn’t realized how tense I’d been until John completed the last suture, and turned to his team members and gave a triumphant thumbs-up. Then he looked up at the observation room, where I was getting ready to leave, and pointed to himself, then to me, then made a drinking motion. I nodded.
“In the waiting room I still felt tense. I was feeling . . . how can I describe it? Like I was about to see my beloved after a long absence. I remember a quotation my father recited when he saw my mother enter the room, a kind of inside joke between them. ‘Who is this that cometh out of the wilderness like pillars of smoke, perfumed with myrrh and frankincense, with all powders of the merchant?’ My beloved, he’d exclaim.
“Those are the words that came to mind when he finally approached me, his hair still slick from his shower. I saw his face was crimson again. Another blush, deeper than the first. He said, and it amazed me how close our thoughts had been. ‘I had to succeed on this one. ‘I had to win the hand of the princess in her tower.’ No other explanation. We didn’t go for a drink. We went straight to my place with very little more discussion.”
Deborah doesn’t say anything. I hadn’t looked at her while I was speaking, and turning to her now, I’m surprised to see that her eyes are closed. She is leaning against the back of the chair, her hands clutching the ends of the armrests, and that’s what tells me that she isn’t asleep—the tendons showing white from stress on the backs of her hands.
59
MJ