Private Practices (18 page)

“Cora called me.”

“Really?” He sounded annoyed.

“She said you'd said you were going to fire her.”

“That's true.”

“Whatever for, Sidney? She's been with you and Ben so long.”

“She doesn't follow instructions.”

“But you always said—”

He cut her off. “It's none of your business.”

“It was something to do with insurance forms,” she persisted.

“You want to get laid?” Sidney said harshly. “Then don't start fights just before bedtime.”

She pursed her lips. She did want to make love.

He got up off the bed and bent over her on the chaise, putting his lips to her hair. “Take off your nightgown,” he suggested. “And lie down on the floor.”

“The floor?” She didn't like making love on the floor. It always seemed so barbarous to her. But she went along with the suggestion, stripping off the negligee and sliding down on the carpet. If she argued with him he might retreat from her. Then once again they would sleep on opposite sides of the bed. She would have to masturbate in the morning after he left for the office, and feel the terrible emptiness that masturbation always brought with it. No matter how it physically satisfied her.

Of course, even if they did start to make love, she had no assurance he would come inside her and make her come that way too. So often lately he didn't. Instead he would deny her his penis, preferring to make her bring herself off just the way she did when she was alone. Except that when she was alone she could lie in bed under the concealing covers. When she did it for him, he made her stand in front of him while he sat and watched her with cool, abstracted eyes.

“Kiss me,” he was saying. He was squatting over her on the floor, his fingers fondling her clitoris and plunging in and out of her vagina. He looked massive, leaning over her, but so did the bed, the chaise, the bureau. With her back pressed down against the bedroom rug, she felt dwarfed. “Kiss me,” he repeated, but he didn't bend toward her at all.

She tried to raise the top of her body up toward his face so that she could oblige him but he moved his head away just as hers came up. He laughed then and lowered it toward her, but every time she tried to kiss his mouth, he turned his head and she brushed his ears or his hair or his nostrils but never his lips.

“If you kiss me, I'll come inside you tonight, baby. I really will.”

She kept trying to catch his mouth with hers.

“Beg me,” he said. “I like when you beg me.”

“I can't,” she groaned. Nothing embarrassed her so much as his demanding that she beg him for sex, tell him she was hungry for it, greedy for it.

“Then I won't go on.” He sat up on his haunches.

“Please,” she said, swallowing her pride. “Oh, please. I need it. I need it so badly.” She spoke by rote. He had given her the words with which to beg him years ago, along with all the other rituals and incantations that excited him. But at the time the words had had no meaning for her. They did now. She really did want him. “Please,” she went on. “Please, oh please.”

“Okay,” he said. “Sure, baby. Sure.”

She felt encouraged, glad that she had played her role, however humiliating it had been. And then he turned her over and entered her rectum and pushed into her so hard she felt a cramp high up in her stomach, and after he had come she lay there, still hurting a little and wondering anxiously whether having sex that way was bad for the baby.

“You okay?” Sidney said. “You okay, sweetheart?”

She kept silent.

He kissed the back of her neck. “Don't be mad. I did it for your own good. You'll stay turned on till tomorrow and it'll give you something to look forward to.” When she didn't reply he touched her earlobe with his lips and whispered, “It's good to need things. It makes life worth living, because you just might get what you want the next day.”

She lay under him, pondering his words. He had a way of stoppering her anger by suggesting that whenever he had most deprived her or most insulted her, he had done it for her own good. It was part of his cleverness, part of what she so admired about him. She could never be certain of his motives in being cruel to her.

“Okay. Get mad at me,” he said as she continued to brood. He rolled off her and helped her sit up. “Come on. Get mad. It'd be good for you.” But once he demanded her anger, she couldn't give it. He reached for her nightgown and began helping her into it, manipulating her arms as if she were a small child. “Poor baby, poor Claudia,” he said as he helped her get dressed. “I make you so mad and you don't let it out.” He put his arm up to her mouth. “Here. Bite me. Go ahead.”

Although he was teasing her, he was gentler now than he had been before they had had sex. She decided to let her anger go. It was easier for her to quash it than express it. Self-control had been her birthright. “I was just worried about the baby,” she said at last in a bland voice. “Whether that kind of fucking's still okay now that I'm pregnant.”

“Let me be the judge of that,” Sidney said. “Don't you trust me? Don't you know I love you and I wouldn't ever really hurt you?”

She wasn't sure, but she wanted to trust and believe him. Thinking to herself that at least he had come inside her and hadn't rejected her altogether, she finally let him cajole her into getting up and keeping him company while he had a drink. He hadn't had any dinner, he told her. But he wasn't hungry. He just wanted a drink. She walked in front of him into the kitchen, glad they hadn't quarreled, either before sex or after. At least now he might talk to her, confide in her, share some of his thoughts and adventures with her.

In the kitchen he sat at the glass table and she poured him a bourbon and handed him a glass of ice water. He got out his sleeping pills and took two, as he always did before bedtime, and sipped the bourbon slowly. “Actually, I'd love to get drunk tonight,” he said. “I've been jumpy all day. Edgy.”

“I heard.”

He smiled. “You mean Cora? That was nothing. I nearly struck a woman. One of my former patients.”

“Why?”

“She got me furious. Following me around with her insurance forms. Checking up on me. You know I can't bear to be checked up on. It drives me up the wall.” He smiled at her again. “But you wouldn't understand. Rage isn't an emotion you know anything about. It's banned in New England.”

“I've felt it,” she said, eager to show him that she understood.

“Have you? God knows I've been trying to teach it to you.” He drank his bourbon and reached out his glass and she got up and poured him another drink, leaving the bottle on the counter alongside the sink.

When she sat down again she said, “But why have you been so upset? What's wrong?”

He shut his eyes for a moment and then opened them wide, studying her face as if he had noticed but not yet been introduced to her and was wondering what language she spoke. “I told you,” he said. “I told you about Neville's allegations.”

“Oh that,” she responded, relieved. She was afraid it had to do with her. “But he's wrong. I'm sure he's wrong. You told me so yourself.”

Sidney shook his head, then smiled in a quizzical way. “You really do believe in me, don't you?”

“Of course I do.”

“Because you want to?”

“Of course.”

He frowned and polished off most of his bourbon. “Because you have to,” he said. Then he took out another of his pills and swallowed it with the last of the amber whiskey.

“You shouldn't do that,” she said. “Not when you've had all that bourbon.”

“Why not?”

“You know why.”

“You know I never take too much.”

“I know you never have.”

“Don't tell me how to live my life,” Sidney suddenly shouted, rising out of his chair. “I'm sick and tired of having people tell me how to live my life. If it isn't Ben, it's you. If it isn't you, it's Cora. For Christ's sake, just get off my back.”

“I'm sorry.” She pursed her mouth and got up and went into the bedroom. His moods were growing worse, just as Cora had said. She sat in front of her dressing table and brushed her hair and cried a little and then after a while forced herself to wipe her eyes and go outside and say goodnight to him. She was always the peacemaker, the apologizer. Someone had to be.

He was sprawled on the living room couch. She thought he was asleep at first. But his hazel eyes were open, the pupils wide and glittering. “Would you really care if I took too many pills?” he asked her as soon as she came up to him, as if he had been lying there in the dim lamplight, waiting for her to appear and continue their earlier conversation.

“Of course I would.”

“I wonder.”

She wanted to insist that certainly surely absolutely she would care but she couldn't get the words out of her mouth. She stood close-lipped and watched him as he shut his eyes. He fell asleep right in front of her, seeming to experience no passage at all between awareness and unconsciousness. She tiptoed out of the living room quietly, unsure for the first time since she had known him whether she was sorry or glad that he had gone to sleep and left her all alone.

Ben too began to notice the change in Sidney. In the office he was perpetually irritable and even at the hospital, according to the gossip Ben overheard at the nurses' station, he was edgy and querulous. Worse, he had even begun making errors, minor things, tiny miscalculations and minuscule misdiagnoses of the sort that other physicians and surgeons made all the time. But they were unusual for Sidney.

“Sidney's not himself lately,” he observed worriedly to Naomi one night over dinner in a restaurant in Chinatown.

“That's nice,” Naomi commented, deftly maneuvering her chopsticks.

“No, no. Be serious.” Whenever he mentioned Sidney to her, she made sarcastic remarks about him.

“Okay. What do you need him for?” she said. “There, is that serious enough?”

Disconcerted, he dropped a piece of lobster from his chopsticks midway between the serving dish and his plate and as he tried to retrieve it, Naomi went on, “Why don't you practice on your own? Get your own office. You're just as good as—no, better—than he is.”

He shook his head. She could never understand how counterfeit such statements always sounded to him. “Sidney's a genius,” he said.

“Not in my book. In my book, he's poison.” It made Ben uneasy about saying anything more about Sidney's disturbing new moodiness and carelessness. Naomi would only use whatever he said to push her argument about Sidney's not being worthy of his adulation. She would take off on the topic, insisting that in her opinion, he could manage perfectly well without him. He kept silent, concentrating on his food, and when Naomi asked, “Anyway, what did you mean about his not being himself?” he answered, “Oh, nothing,” and changed the subject. “Remember that doctors' tour of China I once mentioned? I think it's in September. Do you want me to look into it?”

“God, that would be exciting!”

The waiter removed the lobster and produced their next dish, tiny birds served with their heads and beaks still attached. Naomi, her dark eyes bright, said, “Just being here makes me feel stimulated. Imagine what it would be like to actually be in China!” and throughout the rest of the meal they talked enthusiastically about the trip. But the next day Ben began looking in on Sidney in the operating and delivery rooms whenever he could spare the time.

He was uncertain of what it was he hoped to see or why it was he was so curious about the change that was coming over Sidney. But he
was
curious. That much he knew. Putting on a lab coat, cap and mask, he would casually enter the rooms in which Sidney was at work as if while on his way to do his rounds he had remembered something he had to discuss with him. Then he would pose a few questions and Sidney would answer and he would linger awhile, as if fascinated by watching his brother in action.

Sidney didn't object or even find his presence odd. He hated being checked up on, as he announced with great frequency, but his dislike of scrutiny didn't apply to being watched at surgery or obstetrics. At these, he felt powerfully secure. Often he had a coterie of invited observers standing behind him, medical students or residents or younger doctors or even, occasionally, a nonhospital acquaintance discreetly disguised in appropriate costume. The hospital had a number of surgeons like Sidney, men who thrived on being observed at the operating table. They considered themselves artists and, like all artists, craved an audience.

On the first few occasions that Ben watched his brother at work, he saw nothing to justify his concern. With a forceps or scalpel in his hand and residents at his elbow, Sidney, for all his irritability, was authoritative and in full command of himself. But one morning as he stood just behind Sidney, Ben saw him do something quite uncharacteristic.

Sidney had raised his scalpel, ready to cut an episiotomy between the legs of a woman straining to deliver an overly large baby, but instead of making his usual cautious, angled incision, he cut straight down, a clean-edged hurried red line dangerously close to the woman's rectum. The woman strained again, the baby's head appeared, and a split second later Ben heard a sharp popping sound.

“I went through,” Sidney said matter-of-factly, pulling out the baby. Ben had often seen other obstetricians make such fourth-degree lacerations, had even made one once himself, but had never known Sidney to do so.

“She'll be all right,” Sidney said. “Good as new in a week.”

Listening, Ben at first experienced a deep, unbidden feeling of satisfaction. He was pleased at catching Sidney at being less than perfect. But a moment later, his satisfaction vanished. Sidney was preparing to sew up the long cut and was reaching for a needle laid out on the sterile tray behind him. He dropped it as soon as he got it between his gloved fingers. He grabbed another and at last began sewing. But as he tied each of his swift knots, his hands shook.