Vigil (3 page)

Beth was already there, sitting on one of two chairs set up in front of the doctor’s ornate, antique desk. As Carter came in, Dr. Weston, wearing not a white lab coat, but a sleekly cut dark suit, stood up to shake his hand; the only thing in the office that even suggested medicine was a light box mounted on one wall, where, presumably, X rays were sometimes viewed.

Carter felt distinctly underdressed.

“Your wife was just telling me a little bit about her work at the gallery,” Dr. Weston said, sitting back down in his high-backed, red leather swivel chair. He was a lean man, who looked to Carter like one of those guys he’d see running laps around the reservoir. “I collect art myself, as it happens.” He gestured at a huge, and hideous, abstract oil hanging beside the door; Carter knew it was just the kind of thing Beth would detest.

“It’s a Bronstein,” he added, proudly.

Carter stole a glance at Beth, who had a pleasant, but cryptic, smile on her face. Her black hair was pulled straight back, into a tight ponytail, and the look in her rich brown eyes remained noncommittal. “I’m afraid our gallery specializes in much older pieces,” she said. “For us, Renoir is cutting-edge.”

“Still, I’d like to see what you’ve got sometime. You never know what might catch my eye,” he said, now returning to some notes he’d been taking. “And Carter, I see here that you’re a . . . scientist?”

“Paleontology, chiefly.”

Dr. Weston dipped his head, as if in professional acknowledgment. “You teach, then?”

“At NYU.”

“Very good. I did my internship at NYU-Bellevue.”

Weston kept his head down, glanced at a chart in the open folder on his desk. For a few seconds he was silent as he studied the information. Carter assumed the chart contained their personal stats, ages, medical histories, and so on. He’d already answered some of these questions with a nurse over the phone. Carter reached over and squeezed Beth’s hand.

“Was I late?” he murmured.

“Not for you,” she said, smiling. “Your lecture go okay?”

“It’d be hard for it to go very wrong—I feel like I’ve delivered it a hundred times already.”

“And you’ve been trying to conceive for how long now?” Dr. Weston interrupted without looking up.

“About a year,” Carter replied.

“Fourteen months and counting,” Beth said.

Weston made a correction in the chart. Then kept reading.

“Want to go to Luna’s tonight?” Carter asked Beth.

“Can’t. We’ve got a private reception for some clients.”

“What time’ll it be over?”

Beth shrugged. “If it looks like they’re in a buying mood, it could go late. Eight-thirty, nine.”

Weston looked up at them now. “During these fourteen months, how often have you had intercourse on a regular basis?”

Even if Carter
was
supposed to be a fellow scientist, the question kind of took him by surprise.

“Four or five times a week,” Beth answered.

Was that right? Carter had to think about it.

Weston noted it down.

Yes, that did seem about right, now that Carter thought about it. But was that the usual rate for married couples? You could never really know.

“Okay, then,” Dr. Weston said, sitting back in his chair and pulling on his cuff.

Carter couldn’t help but notice that he wore gold cufflinks.

“You’re both young, so unless we find some difficulty down the line, I believe we have a very high probability of success here.”

“But why haven’t we succeeded so far?” Beth asked. “I mean, what kind of difficulty do you think we could find, somewhere down that line?”

Dr. Weston brushed it off. “A lot of things can impede conception, from a blocked tube to a low sperm count, but the good news is we have ways of getting around nearly all of the problems now. Here’s what I suggest we do.”

And for the next ten or fifteen minutes, Dr. Weston outlined a number of steps for them to take, from keeping a record of their sexual intercourse activities to changing the positions they used in order to maximize the possibility of conception; Carter, specifically, was advised to switch to boxer shorts instead of briefs—“they keep the temperature in the scrotal sac lower, which in turn produces more, and more motile, sperm”—and to make an appointment with the office for a count.

“So, you’ll want me to come in and . . . leave a sperm sample?” Carter said.

“Yes. We’ll want you to refrain from any sexual intercourse—more to the point, from ejaculating—for twenty-four hours before coming in. Mornings are the best time.”

Beth was advised to make her own appointment for a complete examination, and suddenly Dr. Weston was standing up and offering his hand across the desk again. “I think we’re going to have an extremely successful outcome here,” he said.

“I’m not looking for triplets,” Beth said. “One will do.”

“Fine. Then that’s how we’ll do it—one at a time.”

On the way out, Carter had to leave a credit card imprint with the nurse at the front desk, and then he and Beth were back outside, standing on a windswept corner of First Avenue. He put his briefcase down on the sidewalk between his feet, then began fastening the buttons of Beth’s long olive-green slicker.

“So what time does that reception start?” he said.

“Not for a few hours,” she said, glancing down as he wrestled with a reluctant button. “How about you? Do you have another class?”

“No, just a few papers to grade. But they can wait.” Carter smiled and leaned in so close the ends of their noses touched. “Maybe we should put this time to some good use.”

“What did you have in mind?”

“Homework?” he said, suggestively. “I mean, we wouldn’t want to let the good doctor down, would we?”

Beth furrowed her brow, as if she were trying to make up her mind about a particularly thorny problem. Then she said, “Maybe you’re right. It’s never a good idea to put things off, is it?”

“We’ll be on the ground in just a few minutes,” the pilot
said over the cabin speaker. “Flight attendants, please prepare for arrival.”

Ezra Metzger opened his silver pill case and took out another tranquilizer, swallowed it with the last of his Evian water. He’d made it this far, he reminded himself. Now he just needed to stay calm for the next hour or so.

“Please buckle your seat belt,” the attendant said, reaching for his empty plastic cup. He gave it to her, then heard her say the same thing to the young woman who’d been sniffling in her seat behind him for the entire flight. Everyone had seemed very solicitous of this girl, and Ezra had wondered what it was all about. Was she some TV actress who’d suffered some public heartbreak? He knew he was pretty out of it when it came to popular culture. It wasn’t that he was so old—he’d just turned thirty. But he’d been living at the institute in Jerusalem for the past three years, almost around the clock, and even when he’d been living in New York he’d been more inclined to attend lectures at the Cooper-Hewitt than watch TV or go to the movies.

As the plane descended, he closed his eyes and tried to stay relaxed. He knew that he had to appear perfectly at ease when he passed through the customs desk, that he had to look unruffled by any delay or question or request. He reminded himself to look the customs inspector straight in the eye, not to look away, or touch his nose, or rub his jaw, or do anything else that might betray his nervousness or anxiety. And if indeed he was unlucky enough to have his bags inspected, or to be interrogated at any length, to react with equanimity and unconcern. The secret, he told himself for the hundredth time, was to pretend he had nothing to hide, that he was just another American citizen happy to be home after an extended stay abroad.

Even if nothing could be further from the truth.

Once the plane had touched down and taxied to the gate, the girl behind him—pretty, chestnut brown hair, early twenties—was again given preferential treatment. While Ezra and the other first-class passengers waited, she was whisked off the plane first, and down the ramp. She still didn’t look familiar to Ezra, and he asked the well-dressed woman waiting in the aisle next to him who she was.

“I don’t know her name, but I saw something about it in the
Herald-Tribune
. A honeymooner, from a nice family. Her husband was killed in a boating accident or something like that, near Naples.”

Ezra took it all in, then realized the woman was looking at him, as if expecting him to react. “That’s very sad,” he said, dutifully.
Focus, Ezra, focus.

“Yes,” she said, “isn’t it,” before moving as far away as the narrow aisle would permit.

As the people ahead of him shuffled toward the exit, Ezra took his cardboard tube out of the overhead bin and cradled it under one arm.
Act normal.

“Thank you for flying with Alitalia,” the attendant said with a heavy accent, as he made his way off the plane.

Moving slowly, so that he’d gradually be caught up in the bigger crowd of passengers from the coach cabin, he followed the signs to Immigration and Passport Control. A woman in a blue uniform said, “Foreign national?” and touched him on the sleeve to direct him to the line on the far right.

He jerked his arm back at her touch, and she seemed surprised.

“Are you a foreign national, visiting this country?” the woman said, slowly, deliberately.

“No, sorry, I’m not,” Ezra said. “I’m an American.”

“Oh, then you can go to the lines on the left.”

He nodded his thanks and moved toward the lines on the left, but he thought he could feel her eyes on him as he walked away. He had to get hold of himself. But he could see why she’d made the mistake—he was dark and intense, his clothes were of foreign manufacture, even his haircut probably looked wrong somehow. In his travels, he was often mistaken for everything from a Spaniard to a Greek, and when he ran a hand over his jaw, he felt the stubble that had grown in over the long flight. If only he’d thought to shave in the airplane bathroom . . .

The passport inspector was an elderly man with wire-rimmed glasses who studied his passport silently, flipping the pages idly back and forth for a few seconds.

“When were you last in the United States, Mr. Metzger?”

“Approximately three years ago.”

“You were working abroad?”

“Yes, in Israel.”

“What kind of work would that be?”

“I was a fellow at the Feldstein Institute.” This was at least partly true—and Ezra had already decided to stick as close to the truth as possible.

The inspector looked at him intently through the top of his bifocals. He seemed to be waiting for more.

“It’s a research institute. They use modern technology in the dating and analysis of archaeological finds.”

The inspector nodded. “Must be a lot of those in that part of the world.”

“Yes, yes, there are,” Ezra readily agreed.

“Is that why you were back and forth so much between”—and he stopped to glance at the passport pages again—“Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Lebanon?”

“Yes, that’s why. Sometimes I did field work.”

The inspector became silent again, and Ezra feared he’d already said too much. He was trying to leave out the important stuff, but at the same time volunteer as much of the rest of the story as he could. The cardboard tube rested carefully against his leg.

The inspector lifted his stamp and rocked it back and forth on the back page of Ezra’s worn passport. Ezra breathed a sigh of relief.

“Welcome back,” the inspector said, handing him back the passport. “Baggage claim and customs are straight ahead.”

As Ezra walked down the aisle past the desk, thinking
One obstacle hurdled, one more to go,
he heard the inspector call out after him. “Mr. Metzger?”

Ezra stopped and turned, his heart in his mouth.

“If you plan on doing a lot more traveling, you may want to apply for a new, duplicate passport. That one’s pretty far gone.”

Ezra smiled, tilted the old passport toward him. “I’ll do that.” Then turned back toward the luggage area.

His bags were some of the first to come off the conveyor belt—one more advantage to flying first class—and as he dragged them toward the customs counters, he tried to make a quick assessment. Which customs officer looked the least alert? Which one had the longest line of people already impatiently waiting to get through?

He chose a stocky inspector who seemed to be more interested in joking around with one of her fellow workers than in inspecting the bags passing before her. When his turn came, he smiled at her and nonchalantly passed her the customs declaration he’d filled out on board.

“Long flight,” he said, casually stretching and looking around.

She smiled back, glanced down at his paperwork. “You came in on the Alitalia flight from Rome?”

“Yes.”

“Connecting?”

“Pardon?”

“You connected there from somewhere else?”

“Yes. I left from Tel Aviv.”

“On what airline?”

“El Al.”

Why was she asking all this? Ezra hadn’t expected it. When had she suddenly decided to focus on her job? The other inspector, the one she’d been kidding around with, had also settled down.

“Has anyone else been left in charge of your bags?”

“Other than the airline, no.”

“Did anyone else pack these bags for you?”

“No, I did it myself.”

“Please place them on the counter and open”—she deliberated for a second, as if waiting to see which bag his own eyes might flit to—“this one.”

Ezra placed the bag flat on the counter, then unzipped it. My God, he’d picked wrong—he
was
going to be inspected.
Stay calm, stay calm,
he told himself. Even if they found what he was carrying, they wouldn’t know what to make of it.

She pulled the flap back and began sifting through the contents of the bag. Black cotton turtlenecks, khaki cargo pants—the very outfit he was wearing now—socks, underwear, a couple of books that he didn’t trust to the mails and had decided to carry back with him. The other books—several hundred—he was having shipped.