Private Practices (28 page)

One night Sidney took so many pills that he was completely unintelligible at dinner and shortly afterward began to urinate right at the kitchen table. Ben helped him out of the kitchen and into the tiny hall bathroom and then, waiting outside the partly closed door, heard the telephone ring. He answered it on the hall extension.

The call was for Sidney. One of his pregnant patients had arrived at the hospital and would, the resident who called predicted, be ready to deliver in about an hour.

Glancing at the bathroom door, Ben decided not to tell Sidney about the call but to go to the hospital himself and deliver the patient without Sidney's agreement. He went into his own bathroom to shave and put on his suit jacket.

Before he finished, Sidney appeared in the doorway, his own jacket donned, although it hung unbuttoned and loose across his ever-diminishing chest. “Where do you think you're going?” Sidney said. “That call was for me, wasn't it?”

Ben answered truthfully, “Yes,” and started to explain that he would go in Sidney's stead. Sidney turned and pushed out of the bathroom doorway, stumbling.

“Don't go,” Ben called out. “Don't! Look at you!”

Sidney, his face unshaven, was still wearing the trousers he had dampened. He ignored Ben and slammed out of the apartment.

Ben finished dressing and raced to the hospital after him. Forty minutes later, while he was pacing up and down outside the delivery room, Sidney emerged in a scrub suit and mask and said sarcastically, “I did fine. And I looked fine too.”

A nurse was wheeling Sidney's patient out through the corridor and the woman, awake and cheerful, called out to Sidney, “Thank you, Dr. Zauber. Thank you for my lovely little girl.”

Ben went home, but even though the delivery had gone well, that night he couldn't cease his pacing. Long after Sidney had come in and gone to bed, he continued to walk up and down in the living room, his feet aching.

“You've got to get Sidney to move out,” Naomi lashed out at Ben in bed in her loft the next night. “It's not doing him any good, being with you. And it's having a rotten effect on you.”

“I can't let him live alone,” he answered her. “And Claudia won't have anything to do with him.”

“Maybe if you didn't coddle him he'd get frightened and sign himself into a detoxification clinic and get help.”

“Not Sidney.”

“How can you be so sure?”

He shrugged and his gesture made Naomi even angrier. “I can't stand not knowing if I'm supposed to be moving in with you next month or not,” she complained. “Can't stand not seeing you except for the hour or two you steal from Sidney in order to come down here and fuck me. Yes, that's all it is. All you want to do is fuck me. We haven't been anywhere together all month. Haven't seen anyone. Haven't even gone out to dinner. One of these days I'm going to get the idea that what you want, what you really want, is to have me leave you.”

As soon as she said it, he began wondering if it was true. Perhaps he no longer needed her. Perhaps he had learned from her all the rudiments of relationship she was equipped to teach, and was ready now for more sophisticated instruction. But he would never have suggested to her that they break up. He felt terribly grateful to her. She'd done so much for him. “Sweetheart. Baby. What a rotten thing to say,” he chided her and ran his fingertips along the curve of her breast. Then denying her charge that his having less time for her had anything at all to do with wanting to stop seeing her, he said, “Let's have dinner out on Saturday. I guess I could leave Sidney alone for three or four hours. Read him the riot act. Make him swear he'd check with me first if he got a call to go to the hospital. Do you think he'd listen?”

Naomi pulled away from him and sat up, her curls shaking. “Sidney, Sidney, Sidney,” she fumed.

“I thought you just said you wanted to go out to dinner.”

“Yes. Yes, I do. But not just when Sidney gives you permission to take me.”

“It's not a matter of permission from Sidney. It's a matter of my deciding he can be left alone.”

“It amounts to the same thing.”

He couldn't get her to see his side of the situation. After a while he gave up trying and made love to her distractedly.

On Saturday night he knew as soon as he entered the restaurant she had picked that the food would be bad. It was a little Italian place in the Village he had never heard of before and although there was a handful of men drinking at the bar, none of the tables in the dining area was filled. Still, he tried to look forward to the meal. Naomi was wearing her backless yellow sundress and it made him think nostalgically of the Caribbean. He ordered a rum and tonic. She asked for a martini.

“What'll we eat?” he questioned her. “What are they famous for here?”

Naomi sipped her martini and kept ominously quiet.

“What made you pick this place?” he persisted. “What's their specialty?”

Naomi tilted her martini glass to her lips and drank so hurriedly that he realized even before she answered him that trouble was brewing. “I have something to tell you,” she whispered as soon as her drink was half-consumed. “That's why I picked this place. I knew it would be quiet.”

“Oh?” He waited while the waiter handed them food-specked menus.

“I've been having second thoughts about us,” she said as soon as the waiter was gone. “I wanted to discuss them in some neutral sort of place.”

He closed his menu and shoved it against the wall. “I've had them too,” he said quietly. “But I wasn't planning to act on them.”

“That's the difference between you and me,” Naomi said, finishing the rest of her martini and warming to the subject. “That's what's causing the trouble. You're so passive.”

He looked away, hurt. He had never insulted her by naming her deficiencies. She said quickly, “Oh, I don't mean sexually. That's fine now. I mean about Sidney. The way you let him dictate to you. Run your life. Run me out of your life.” She brushed a hand across her forehead, pushing back her hair. “You do everything for him and nothing for yourself.”

He didn't think it was true. “He's not running my life. In a way, I'm running his.”

“You're not,” Naomi insisted. “Take
us.
You were happy with me. You wanted me and Petey to move in with you. But just because Sidney barges in and takes over your place, you let him destroy your relationship with me.”

“Destroy? I don't see that at all. We'll be living together soon. You just have to be patient for a while.”

Naomi shook her head stubbornly, the gin making her at once courageous and flushed. “But that's just it. He is destroying things. He's destroying my feelings for you. I can't feel the same pride I felt about you when I feel you have no pride. That you're his lackey.”

He looked away from her again, his thoughts in turmoil, and this time caught the waiter's eye and signaled him to bring Naomi a refill. He didn't believe he was Sidney's lackey anymore; he was looking after him, but he was no longer in thrall to him. He acted like a servant, but he didn't feel like one. Ironically, Naomi herself had been a factor in helping him achieve this new emotional freedom from Sidney. He was in her debt. He'd
always
be grateful to her. But watching her gulp down her second martini, seeing how the gin made her dark skin flush and her curls slip rakishly out of place, he knew that although he could live with her and make love with her, he could never love her.

“Look, Ben,” she was saying. Her voice had grown huskier with emotion. “I didn't decide this overnight. I've been thinking about it hard. You've got to get Sidney to move out.”

He acted distressed. He shook his head in despair. Then he said very sadly, “I can't do it, Naomi. I would if I could. But I can't do it. Sidney needs me.”

It infuriated her, as he had known it would.

“He doesn't need you. He doesn't need anyone. He's incapable of need. He's just using you.”

He shook his head again. “I love Sidney. He's my brother. I've got to rescue him.”

“It isn't love when you want to rescue someone. It's self-aggrandizement.”

“Call it what you want. But in any case, I can't abandon him. Sidney's part of me.”

“Then I'm not going to see you anymore,” she announced impulsively. “I can't stand the feeling of being in love with a man who lets someone else push him around, dictate to him all the time. Make Sidney move out and I'll come back.”

“I can't.”

Her eyes filled with tears but she had gone too far to retreat. “You poor bastard,” she said.

He felt sorry for her, but he took refuge in the fact that she, not he, was causing their breakup. It was her doing. He had done nothing. “I still want you,” he said. “It's not that I don't want you. I'm horny all the time.” Reaching out for one of her hands, he kidnapped it below the table to press it against his unruly penis.

His expression of desire for her at so emotional a moment simply offended her further. “I don't care,” she said, snatching her hand away. She looked at him as if she no longer recognized him, her eyes distant, and then she slid out of her chair in a sudden swirl of movement. She dropped her pocketbook, bent for it, scooped it up, dropped her sunglasses, bent for and retrieved them and was gone from the table a moment later, scurrying through the bar, blurring.

Just as she neared the door he had a moment's change of heart and thought of running after her, taking her arm, turning her around and talking her into one last farewell-time in bed. But what was the point? He would just have to part from her sooner or later, and this way he had allowed her the dignity of feeling it was her own decision. Of course, it might have been more amusing to have demolished her dignity … deliberately. The thought surprised him. He had never allowed himself to think a thing like that, much less do anything so frankly cruel. He was interested. And, a moment later, horrified. He called the waiter, asked for another rum and tonic, and ordered roast veal. But by the time the food arrived he had no appetite. Pushing the plate aside, he told the waiter to wrap the meat up in tinfoil for him and, leaving, took it home, where he offered to share it with Sidney.

He was with Sidney constantly after his parting from Naomi, with him in the office, in the hospital, at home. Most of the time they were alone. He had always, before Naomi, been an isolate and Sidney had had not friends but admirers, colleagues and sycophantic junior staff members who put up with his brusqueness because of his reputation. But as he continued to deteriorate, many people began to ignore him. He had always been arrogant, self-absorbed and mocking. But he had had power and prestige. Now that he was losing these, his personal traits, which had once impressed people as interesting, struck them as irritating.

One morning Ben was walking into the hospital with Sidney when he saw James Herron coming toward them. Herron had for years been trying to woo Sidney to his house for one of his cocktail parties, but Sidney had always claimed to be too busy to attend. Now Herron turned on his heel as soon as he saw the two brothers approaching and headed in the direction from which he had come.

A few of the junior men, slower to recognize a fall from authority, still tried, occasionally, to stay in touch. Diehl left several messages for Sidney, inviting him to come to his apartment to toast his fiancee, and one ambitious young intern stopped him on his way out of the OR several afternoons in a row and proposed they have a drink together. But Sidney wasn't drinking. In his only effort to reduce the ever-present danger of his overdosing and falling into a brain-destroying coma, he had asked Ben to clear out his liquor cabinet. He rejected the offers of companionship that the young men made by telling them gruffly that he no longer drank.

Ultimately Ben and Sidney saw no one socially but each other.

Toward the end of July, Miss Viviani quit. She lumbered into Ben's office, her obese body moving more swiftly than he had believed possible, and told him in a voice simmering with indignation that Sidney had just thrown a bottle of alcohol at her. “I can't stay here,” she sputtered. “Not a day longer. Not with him.”

Ben had been sitting at his desk, a set of X rays balanced on his lap, another propped up in front of him against his books. He slid from his chair, the X rays on his lap slipping onto the floor, and hurried to Miss Viviani, putting his arm around her shoulders. The front of her uniform was soaked. “Please. I need you. I'm sure you realize that my brother is not always fully aware of what he's doing. He's not well.”

“You said it,” she barked. “He shouldn't be allowed to practice.”

He patted her arm. “That isn't up to you or me. There are department chiefs and administrators who decide these things.” He stroked the cloth on her sleeve. “Please stay. I need you.”

“It isn't you,” she said. “You're a dream to work for. But I can't stay here. Not with him the way he is.”

“Please,” he pleaded, humbling himself. “The patients need you.” He couldn't face the trauma of hiring yet another new receptionist. “Please just stay on for a month or two. You can do that, can't you?”

She softened a little, leaning heavily into his arm. “Well, okay. I'll stay a little longer. Maybe they'll take away his license next Tuesday anyway.”

His arm dropped to his side. “What do you mean? What are you talking about?”

“The Department of Professional Conduct,” Miss Viviani said. “They've been writing him letters. About his not signing health insurance forms. And the last one said that if he didn't come to a hearing they're holding next Tuesday, they'd start an action to take away his license.”

For a moment, he almost laughed. Here he had been guarding his brother against disaster at the hospital and yet disaster was looming from a direction he hadn't even thought to consider. Miss Viviani's information struck him as stunningly incongruous. But a second later he realized the seriousness of the situation and said tersely, “Let me see the letters.”