Little Known Facts: A Novel (10 page)

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.