Best Friends (64 page)

Thanks to my patients, who've made me proud to be human.

Love and special thanks to my husband, the wittiest and kindest man I know.

Keep reading for a preview of Martha Moody's next novel
The Office of Desire
now available

Brice once said that if you understood our office, you understood the world. I thought that was extreme, the sort of thing you'd expect from a guy who'd show up some mornings and say, “My mother was drinking my blood again last night.” But now that our office is gone I see things differently. I might even agree with him, on certain evenings when my leg aches and the howlers are going at it and I can't for the life of me settle back to sleep.

At the height of his raving—that is, after things had gone south with Jesse—Brice said that our office was a hive of greed and lust and tenderness, held aloft by (“Who's that guy that holds up the world? Ajax?”) the twin arms of pain and power.

See what I mean? Too much. The sort of thing I used to think driving home from a sad movie or when I was alone at a football game and everyone but me seemed to have friends. But that was Brice. I miss him. I miss everyone, but especially Brice.

Now that I'm in another life. Another country.

There were three employees, Alicia the nurse; Brice the money guy and manager; and me, Caroline, the “uber-receptionist,” as the doctors always called me. Brice referred to us as the office ABCs. It was unusual for a busy, two-doctor internal medicine practice to have only three employees, but since we sent our claim tickets to a billing service for collections and used the hospital lab for most of our testing, three employees in our office were plenty. We worked together, and each of us was flexible. I answered the phones and set up referrals and did scheduling, and Alicia took the patients to the exam rooms and phoned patients back to answer questions while Brice did payroll and dealt with insurance pre-authorizations and problems and filled in whenever Alicia or I needed help.

We were happy. I remember back in '97 when I flew to Atlanta for my high school boyfriend's wedding. Alicia and Brice thought I was crazy. “She thinks he's going to look up the aisle and say, ‘Caroline, is it really you? Let's run away,' ” Alicia said.

“Maybe she's planning to go with them on their honeymoon,” Brice said, “hand in hand in hand.”

Our office was a frame one-story across the street from the Midburg mall. A converted house near a mall in a medium-sized Ohio city—you can't get more ordinary than that. Brice used to say that General Foods should test-screen their products in our waiting room. One of our elderly patients remembered when the place was a 60s ranch house (the basement still had that rectangle), before the homeowners improved it by adding a family room that jutted into the backyard. Zoning changed when the mall was built and the house was snapped up by a dentist, who shelled out the place and reconfigured it with a lobby and a staff area and exam rooms, tacking on a second addition (an X-ray suite) in the front. In a satellite photo, our office building would have looked like a capital T pushed onto its side by another, bossier letter. The upper bar of the T, perpendicular to the road, held the exam rooms, while the stem of the T contained the lobby and the business office. Patients walked from the parking lot in back around to the front door.

When our docs bought the place they added doors to the exam rooms (dental offices don't need them); changed part of the X-ray suite into Dr. Strub's private office (Dr. Markowitz took the former dentist's office, in the back); split the crown and root canal room into an exam room, break room, and bathroom; put in dusk blue industrial carpeting; and repainted the mint green walls cream. Dr. Strub's then wife picked out the lobby furniture and art. The chairs were upholstered in floral prints and the paintings were fuzzy gardens and bright seascapes. Around Christmas, because of the mall traffic, you couldn't turn left out of our parking lot, but our patients knew to turn right and circle the block. We were worth the trouble, they said.

A few years ago, the only disagreement between staff and bosses was what we thought of our basement, where we kept our records. Alicia and Brice and I said the basement was damp and horrible—a
Night of the Living Dead
basement, as Brice put it. The docs said, What are you talking about? We put in that portable dehumidifier and it's fine. Of course, they didn't have to go down there. At the bottom of the steps the metal cabinets that held the charts sat on a remnant of the dusk blue carpet from upstairs, which masked the grey-painted cement floor. On this side of the basement, there was wood paneling on the walls. The far side of the basement was unfinished and not closed off, so that you looked straight from chart racks into dimness. Its only decoration was a white Peg-Board hung with an assortment of tools: a hammer, a wrench, a pair of pliers, and, most impressively, a wicked-looking axe with a huge handle, the implement Brice used two or three times each winter to chip ice off our back entrance steps because our roof dumped water directly on the landing and salt alone didn't work. Brice spent his last days in the unfinished part of this basement, although none of us knew it at the time.

“Do you think I'm a normal person, Caroline?” Brice asked me once a few years before, something plaintive in his voice. I studied him in surprise. He was attractive; slight, with thick, dark curly hair, blue eyes, and pale, lightly freckled skin. An Irish look, I thought. Skin that was sensitive to sunburn and rashes.

It was lunchtime, and we were sitting in the linoleum-floored break room eating sandwiches we'd packed from home. Alicia wasn't with us that day, probably because she had some son-of-hers business going on (teacher conference, orthodontist visit). For some reason Brice and I were talking about how the docs always said “healthy” instead of “normal.” A priest might call someone normal, or a psychiatrist, but not our Drs. Markowitz and Strub.

“As normal as I am,” I said, whacking my fake leg (I lost the real one to cancer at age twenty) against the table leg, because both of us were unattached (although he had his mother) and work-obsessed and what some people might refer to as “odd.” I spent my free time hanging out with whatever boyfriend I had at the moment; Brice spent his watching movies.

Brice said, “Well,
that
makes me feel better.”

My leg isn't wooden, by the way. Modern prostheses aren't. It's made of metal and plastic and has heft to it, like a real leg. It could hurt you.

I'm not much of an observer. I see the big picture, sure—life, death, survival—but, other than the physical characteristics of certain men (Evan, for example, I can still describe down to his toenails), I miss a lot of detail. There are things about other people of which I am totally unaware. I was astonished, for example, when Alicia said that she was worried about the sort of weird philosophers her son was reading for the debate team. You're afraid of ideas? I thought. You're afraid of what Jesse
reads
? But of course she was, and maybe rightly it turned out.

I remember the first shipment we got of individually wrapped alcohol pads that were clearly generic, which said ALCOHOL PAD in big black letters. It was the winter of 2002-2003, just after Dr. Strub's divorce became final, when he was spending a spooky amount of time in the office, staying late at his desk to eat Chinese delivery food straight from the carton. It was when all of a sudden everyone in the government was talking about Saddam Hussein and Iraq and UN weapons inspectors, a time when normally Dr. Markowitz would be reminding Dr. Strub about the foolishness of rash action and the inconvenient but essential value of free speech, when Dr. Strub would be railing about 9/11 and American values and his villainess of choice, Hillary Clinton. That year, though, Dr. Markowitz tread gently, about politics and everything else—he didn't have the heart, he told me, to torment his partner with Bushisms.

A lot happened in the news, actually, in the time our office fell apart. There was the Iraq invasion (“At least that's over,” I remember Dr. Markowitz saying the day after the TV showed people knocking down Saddam Hussein's statue); there were photos of cheerful young women who resembled the daughters of our patients pointing at naked Iraqi men in Abu Ghraib prison; there were—for philosophical reasons, apparently—planes and trains and buses blown up in Russia and Spain and (of course) Israel; there was John Kerry running against George Bush for the presidency. A lot went on, but I'm not sure we even noticed it. Our own traumas were too big to let the world's traumas in. In that way, I suppose, we were lucky. Oblivion could be a sort of blessing.

“Cost savings thirty-five cents per hundred,” Brice said cheerfully, flicking an alcohol pad packet across my desk, while Alicia, behind me, made a comment about generic beer getting her as drunk as Bud. “Is that enough to care about?” I said to Brice, and Brice said, “But of course!” in his airy John Malkovich-inspired way. Not long after this, Brice unpacked a new batch of envelopes I was supposed to stamp with the return address myself—a ridiculous waste of time, but Brice said Dr. Strub insisted that this way was fifty-five percent cheaper. It was also about this time that I noticed Dr. Strub saying Alicia's name in a new way:
A-leee-sha
, as if he wanted the name in his mouth as long as possible. And Alicia had started showing up with her hair loose instead of in a ponytail, wearing white uniform dresses and white nylons instead of scrubs, with a new pair of shoes that had a Mary Jane strap. Then Dr. Markowitz was standing at the entrance to the staff area, staring into space, before striding quickly toward Brice's office. “Have you noticed Will and Alicia?” I heard him say as he shut the door.

“She's such a slut!” Brice said later that day about Alicia. He sounded anguished. “That's what kills me, I never thought she could be such a slut.” I was surprised, because it was almost as if Alicia had betrayed him, when, for years, he'd talked about his friend Iris, with whom he went to movies and flea markets, referring to her at times as “my girlfriend,” although she looked like one of those Louise Brooks lesbians to me.

Was it paradise, that office? It wouldn't have looked that way, with the stained trail of carpet leading from the front door into the first chairs of our lobby, and the dent made by the doorknob in the wall in Exam Room 3. But thinking about the old days there now makes me want to weep. We took turns dealing with scary Mr. Esposito, our patient in waste management whose company's name kept bobbing up like a dead fish in the local paper. There was never any fighting about who brought back the patients, or whether Brice and I were competent to check a blood pressure (technically, we didn't have the training for it), or who was wasteful and overexuberant in unwinding the exam table paper. Concordance; there's a word. We ABCs formed a sort of concordance, and I suppose it's no surprise that the thing that first discorded us was lust.

It must have been the February of that winter. There'd been snow that morning and the day's patients were arriving in the waiting room in boots and puffy coats. I was alone in the break room finishing my turkey-and-cheese sandwich, and I knew that Brice was just outside the break-room door, lying in wait for Alicia.

When patients came into our waiting room, the wall hiding the business office was to their right, and, through a sliding window in that wall, they could see me. Alicia sat with her back to mine, her desk facing the outside wall. Brice's office, an old bathroom, jutted out from the wall to Alicia's left, and his door opened into a vestibule facing the back door where all of us came in. The break room was on the opposite side of the building, between two exam rooms, so where Brice was standing now was way out of his area.

Alicia burst through the break-room door, Brice trailing her. “So what are you and Dr. Strub up to?” Brice said, stuffing his hands in his pant pockets in a fake casual way as Alicia stopped and dipped quickly to open the small refrigerator, her brown hair fanning her shoulders.

“Up to?” Alicia echoed. Our break room was tiny, smaller even than the bathroom down the hall. We had a round table with three chairs, no windows, and a clock from a pharmaceutical company hanging on the wall. The doctors ate lunch, when they ate it, in their private offices at the ends of the hall.

“Is there a relationship besides a professional one?”

Alicia's right hand hovered above several yogurts. She frowned, said, “Coffee, I need the energy,” and pulled out a container. “Of course there is,” she said, standing and looking straight at Brice. Brice was short, and they were almost eye to eye. “We're friends.”

Brice's gaze went distant; he pursed his lips and nodded like a bobble-head doll.

“Is friendship illegal now?” Alicia asked, snapping off the yogurt's lid. “For two single people, friendship is forbidden?” She glanced my way and made a bothered face.

Brice said, “This is your job, you know.”

“I've been here six years and I've never gotten less than a superior evaluation. I've gotten a merit raise every year.”

“Why would you want to jeopardize that record?”

They were talking so seriously. They were saying “superior” and “merit” and “jeopardize,” as if our evaluations weren't tables Dr. Strub had xeroxed from some management textbook and completed with check marks each January. The three of us always got superiors. Anything different, we would have had to punish Dr. Strub. Anything different, we would have been devastated.

I popped the last piece of sandwich in my mouth, stuffed my garbage in my lunch bag, and stood up to leave. I'd spent seven minutes eating, although I'd declare I'd taken a break for half an hour. Did I ever feel taken advantage of, hurrying back to work on my own time? No, I never did. “I should warn you,” Brice was saying, “Dr. Markowitz came to my office this morning to ask about you and Dr. Strub.”