Best Friends (65 page)

“So?” Alicia looked at Brice, pulled a plastic spoon out of the pocket of her white dress, and started stirring her yogurt.

“He's worried it could affect your job performance. I told him it didn't, but . . .”

“Jesus Christ.” The plastic spoon that Al was using broke, and she stuck her fingers in the yogurt tub to pull out the pieces.

Brice made a face and looked away. “You're not going to eat that now, are you?” he said.

“Excuse me?” I said, waving my hand back and forth to part them, but neither of them seemed to hear me.

“Sure I am,” Alicia said, tossing the shards of spoon dangerously close to Brice and into the trash. She licked her fingers. “I'm hungry.”

Brice gave a little shiver. “I don't know why I'm talking to you about matters of discretion.”

“Excuse me?” I said again. Alicia and Brice were blocking the door. “Let me out?”

“Oh, is how I eat my yogurt a moral issue?”

All the years Alicia and Brice had worked together, they were fine. They'd laughed hundreds of times about Brice's two-thousand-dollar paper cut (he'd passed out at the sight of his own blood, which led to an ambulance and the ER). They'd psychoanalyzed his nutty mother almost daily, and when he talked on the phone with his worthless plumber (typical of his mother not to deal with this, although she was at home all day), Alicia stood beside Brice and made sure he insisted on a replacement tank, actually grabbing the phone and introducing herself as Brice's angry sister. Brice brought Alicia Kit Kat bars he slipped into the top drawer of her desk (he brought me Reese's cups), and every birthday gave Alicia silly earrings (little cows, dangling bikinis, spooky Mayan faces), and called her “Our Alluring Alicia” in front of the old-man patients. But all the goodwill between them disappeared with that cup of yogurt. I saw it happen.

“I'm trying to warn you,” Brice said. “I'm trying to be your friend.”

“Friend?” Alicia said. “Is that allowed?”

“Let me out, guys,” I said, pushing my way through.

Dr. Will Strub—my medical partner, my longtime friend—said, “Alicia and I didn't
plan
this, Hap.” Will and I had both known Alicia for years. Which one of us hired her? What year? Neither of us remembered. Maybe we did her interview together. A good, fun girl, someone with ambition, someone whose parents and siblings were missing teeth but who saved up to buy herself and her son braces. Someone who had learned not to say “ain't” or “he don't.” Once Will had told his patient Ed Kimble, who drove his own hauler, that he should ask her out. Ed never did, and even if he had, I'm sure she would've said no. Will underestimated her: She wasn't going to be interested in some trucker.

She was very attentive to her kid. She came to us from the hospital—took a pay cut—because working in our office she could have every night and weekend free for Jesse. By the time she started working for us she already had him reading online encyclopedias and writing reports for school with titles like “The Tragedy of Our War in Vietnam.” He was nine. Once I remember him after office hours sitting in Caroline's front-desk chair explaining the Bernoulli principle—which I probably did learn, once—while his mother stocked the exam rooms. The only times Alicia requested off were days she needed to go talk to some teacher. “How's Mama Hen?” Will would say. “How's the baby rooster? He spelling ‘borborygmi' yet?”

It started back in October, Will told me that February, on one of those blue sky, orange leaf days that always show up on calendars. He'd finished his charts (“Hapster,” he liked to tell me, “this documentation shit is hell”) and was waiting for the mall traffic to die down, just wandering up and down the hall outside his office, trying to keep his promise not to call up Mr. Chin's for food. His divorce was almost final, everything over but the signing. All of a sudden Will noticed a splotch on the beige counter in Exam Room 3—he must have turned a note over before the ink was dry—and he rubbed at it with a paper towel but nothing changed. It was late, after seven, and Alicia was standing beside her desk, with her jean jacket on over her scrubs, ready to leave. She was often the staff person who left last, the person who kept things in order.

“Is there some spot remover somewhere?” Will said. “Comet or something?”

“There's some spray stuff under the sink,” Alicia said. “What do you need it for?” Will told her, and she followed his finger down the hall into the room. “It should be in here,” she said, bending over the cabinet under the sink, and, apparently, the spray stuff wasn't visible right away and she kept moving things around to search, Will, a couple feet behind her, and it was just that, he said, that beautiful ass in the air, and, kaboom, he was besotted. Besotted, he said. Insane. Her ass was like some flower, gorgeous and globular and clefted. He traced its shape with his hands in the air for me, his face so avidly lascivious I had to look away.

He didn't rush things, oh no. It took a month until he got inside her. Back when he was studly—remember?—that's how he did things. Some time for things to build, some mornings he stood staring in the closet, thinking about which shirts Alicia had admired. Some evenings when they both stayed late, until Will said, “I've got to go,” and watched her hide her disappointment. Doing Pap smears, all he was aware of was the smell of her beside him. Hadn't I noticed how before Alicia had sometimes been moody in the office, but the last couple months she acted happy all the time?

There was a reason guys our age liked younger women, Will said. We were in our primes and they were reaching theirs. You don't realize, Will said, what loss of collagen does to an older woman's skin. Young flesh had a distinct quality. Young flesh was alive. There was no sin in noticing this. “Even you'd admit it,” Will said.

Will had married Harriet, he said now, because it was the path of least resistance. At the same time all the other residents were marrying, and Janis and I had just celebrated our second anniversary. But Will and Harriet's marriage was never right. As the years passed even Harriet saw how ill-matched she and Will were, until her self-described instinct for spiritual clarity (!) led her to her very own charlatan, the frozen-food heir who did shamanistic healing (she thought he was sublime, he found her practical). Will wanted at least one of his daughers to go into medicine, but when Sarah got mired in premed, Will realized that the best thing he could do is tell her, Sarah, do what you want. She ended up as a massage therapist, and Chloe, her big sister, taught mentally challenged kids in an elementary school near Dallas. They were happy now, Will said. They followed their dreams. Why shouldn't he follow his?

Frankly, I thought Will was in the wrong career, but it was too late. Being a doctor for Will was like wearing a shirt that didn't quite fit: It covered him, he could button the neck, but the armholes were too small and he couldn't move in it. He should have been a coach (he played third base in college). He should have been a motivational speaker. He should have written books about making people happy. A really good doctor, Will and I agreed, was a worrywart, a grouch, the sort of person who doesn't notice his wife wearing a red nightgown. That might have been Will's dad, that might be me (it was me), but that was never Will. He had no idea why his patients tolerated him. Well, he did. People were his thing. He knew to phone people when their cholesterol was good to say, “Hey, Joe, you sure we didn't mix up your blood sample with a sixteen-year-old's?” He knew to call an eighty-seven-year-old “Baby Snookums,” the name her big brother gave her. He knew to ask after all the kids, especially the one in jail. There was nothing magic, Will said, about being a popular doctor. A lot of it was simple baloney. “I leave the tough cases to you,” Will would say, doing that gesture where he pointed at me with both thumbs.

When Will did it, somehow, that gesture was okay. In a movie it would be excruciating.

It always amazed me, the way Will accepted his happy place in the world. I was a good student, but Dr. Carver, our anatomy professor, terrified me, while Will was all “Hey, Dr. C” and “Think I'll make it this year?” and “Golly, I hate head and neck.” In med school, Will called me Brainiac.
Hey, Brainiac, is this cranial nerve five or just some vessel?
Will's father was a doctor, a friend of Dr. Carver's golf partner. Carver was a lousy golfer, Will said. If Carver cut on Will's dissection technique, Will could make a crack about his putting.

“Don't you worry Will's using you?” Katie Wong, my microscope partner in histology, asked me, and I said no because I was ashamed of the real answer. Of course he was using me. I used him back. He elevated my position in the world, making people like the dean's secretary beep at me and wave, making Dr. Carver say things like, “Hap, you keeping Will here on the straight and narrow?” At the Waiting Room, the bar the med students congregated at on Fridays, I walked in and sniffed my way to Will's Old Spice and placed myself roughly in his shadow, and I never had to drink alone.

Clearly, by the time I mentioned Will and Alicia to Brice, their classic doctor-screwing-nurse relationship had been going on for several months. Maybe I should have been angry with Will. Maybe I should have felt betrayed. But in a way I felt relieved for him, and eager to accept that true love could be messy. I had several patient couples, including two gay ones, well suited to each other, devoted, affable, as happy as patients of mine could be, whose relationships I gathered had begun under some cloud. During a prior marriage, in a classroom between student and teacher, behind a restroom in a park. These patients trusted me with their incontinence and breast exams and hemorrhoids, but if I had asked any of them, point-blank, for the details of their first meetings, they would have stammered and blushed and not spit out much of the story. Why? What difference would the truth make, especially now, especially to me? There was an endearingly ridiculous human tendency to sanitize, to dust around the edges of reality, like straightening a room before the company showed up. For example, no teenage girl whose pregnancy I'd diagnosed admitted to having sex more than one time. I never argued about this. “One time is enough,” I said to my pregnant ones, nodding.

“I know what you think,” Will said that winter day in my office. “But we love each other, we do.” I nodded, but Will bit his lips and looked around, as if he hadn't quite convinced himself. I could imagine what he thought I was thinking:
Is it love or lust?
Alicia was a lovely young woman, with shiny hair and a nipped-in waist and a peach-shaped bottom. Both her upper and lower eyelashes were unusually obvious (I asked Janis once if it was possible she dyed them, but Janis said it was probably mascara), and her eyes were narrow, so the effect was slightly caterpillarish, which doesn't sound attractive, but it was. She wore a birthstone, representing her son, on a long gold chain around her neck, and when she bent forward the little guy swung wildly between her breasts.

“Look, Will, I don't care what your relationship with Alicia is,” I said that day in January. “All I'm saying is that if you two are serious, maybe Alicia should take a job somewhere else.”

“We're fine,” Will said. “We have our personal lives, and we have this office, and when we're here we're very, very professional.”

“Just think about it.”

“Oh, Hap.” Will shook his head cajolingly. “You're worried about sexual harrassment, aren't you? That's a nonissue. This is consensual. Alicia's been married two times. She's mature.”

Alicia, mature. She was certainly
ripe
, but that wasn't quite the same thing. I said: “What if you split up?”

“We can cross that bridge. Look, Hap”—and Will gave me the boyish, callow look that had never changed in the twenty-five years I'd known him—“don't sweat your socks off, okay?”

He needed me to argue, I realized. He wanted me to resist him about Alicia. I did what I could. I said, “My socks are feeling pretty clammy.”

We were an internal medicine office—“medicine for adults,” as some national marketing campaign at the time trumpeted—and with all our older, chronically ill patients we had a lot of deaths. I think of the demise of our office as a death itself, and I can say exactly which kind: It was a three-month death.

A three-month death is one where the diagnosis and the end fall within a single season, where people hide from their acquaintances behind hymnals and racks of clothing to avoid having to talk about the things they've been through.

I knew right off when a recent three-month widow or surviving son was standing at my window. Their face would be drawn and dazed, and they wouldn't respond when I first asked if I could help. A sudden death could be comforted by saying that the dead person didn't know, a protracted death by the acknowledgment that it was a blessing. A three-month death was different: The person knew, and it was not a blessing. At some point there had to be a moment—waking up gasping for breath at three AM, legs that on a certain afternoon would not move at all—when a person thought,
My God! This thing's not slowing down!

Shock and awe, the state of everyone involved in a three-month death.

Actually, there were fifteen months between the day in May when Dr. Strub and Al got married and the office's closing down, which, if you think about it, is three months for each of us who worked there. It's ironic, because although lust has improved and permeated my life in countless ways, this particular lust, even at the time, and especially looking back, seems to me like the worst thing in the world.