Right of Thirst (3 page)

I'd met Rachel three weeks after I'd left home for my residency in Chicago. It was the annual hospital fund-raiser, a black-tie affair. The estate was a few miles north, by the water.

The owner of the estate was a spry old woman with piercing blue eyes and a silver wave of hair. She invited the interns and residents because she liked young men in tuxedoes in her house, or out on the flagstones of her veranda overlooking the lights of Lake Michigan, where ships passed, and foghorns could sometimes be heard, and she liked young women in evening gowns beside them. I knew this because she told me so, as I stood with a glass of wine in the corner. She had been circling the room, and spotted me.

“I'm Mary Spruance,” she said, advancing with her hand outstretched. “And you are…?”

“Chuck Anderson,” I replied.

“Dr. Anderson?”

“I just started my internship.”

“Congratulations,” she said, with enthusiasm. “What are you going to specialize in?”

“Cardiology, I hope.”

“A cardiologist! Well, good for you. Where are you from?”

I said that I was from Atlanta, Georgia.

“Atlanta!” she said, as if the city evoked wonderful things in her mind. “I've never been there. Of course now I'm too old to travel. It tires me out.”

I said that she didn't look too old to me. I thanked her for the party, and I told her that her house was beautiful.

“So,” she said, looking me over with approval, taking a sip of wine. “Dr. Anderson, did you bring a date?”

I said that I hadn't.

“Why not?”

I reddened. I said something about being new in town and not knowing anyone.

She thought for a moment, studying me carefully.

“Then why don't you come with me,” she said, taking my arm. “This is why I really give these parties, you know,” she added, in a conspiratorial whisper. “I like young people. I'm tired of all these rich old farts. Even though I'm an old fart myself, I can remember when I wasn't. That was much more fun, believe me.”

When we reached the middle of the room, she stopped.

“You wait here,” she said. “Don't move a muscle.”

She laughed, and though it was early in the evening I realized that she was a little drunk.

 

Rachel had gray eyes and short black hair, tapered at the back, and brushed forward across her forehead toward her cheek. She seemed both dismayed and amused as she allowed herself to be led over to me, but she looked exactly as she must have intended nonetheless, a figure from the twenties, tall and languorous in her long blue dress, with a slender neck, and a glass of wine in her hand.

“Chuck, this is Rachel Adams, my art teacher,” Mrs. Spru
ance said firmly. “Rachel is a classically trained artist. She paints the most wonderful portraits. Rachel, this is Dr. Charles Anderson, the cardiologist.”

She gave me a wink.

“Rachel, that's a lovely dress,” she continued. “Where did you get it?”

There were tiny black beads woven into the fabric. The beads caught the light, and the effect was shimmery—at first, the dress looked like ordinary blue cloth.

“At a thrift store.”

“I had one exactly like it years ago. How much did you pay for it?”

“Twenty dollars, I think.”

“Ha!” Mrs. Spruance said. “Good for you.”

Then she patted me on the arm.

“Excuse me,” she said. “I have to go cheer up that poor man over there.” She pointed to a severe elderly figure standing alone with his drink, staring moodily out through the windows toward the water.

“He's so rich I have to invite him. He always comes, and he always does exactly what he's doing now. Doesn't he look absolutely miserable?”

She laughed, then turned to face us.

“You two get to know each other,” she said. “It's a lovely night, don't you think?”

“I'm sorry,” I began, when she was gone. “She just grabbed me. You can go back to your friends if you want.”

“We have to talk a little,” Rachel replied. “Otherwise she'll be offended.”

She made a show of waving at a group of old ladies across the room who were studying us keenly. They laughed, and waved
back, but then one of the group said something to the others, and they all elaborately looked away.

“They're my students,” she said, shaking her head. “She invited the whole class. First they made me wear my flapper outfit and now they're giving me a hard time.”

“So you are her art teacher.”

“She doesn't take it seriously. She's just there to have fun with her friends.”

“And are you really a classically trained artist?”

She rolled her eyes.

“I went to art school. That's all she meant. Are you really a cardiologist?”

“No,” I said. “I'm just an intern.”

 

It might have been awkward. But over the next few minutes of our conversation I felt as if my rented tuxedo was speaking for me—my tuxedo, and a few glasses of wine. I had nothing to guide me, and did not yet understand how radiant real money can be, how it can infuse everything around it with a sense of promise and significance.

Place settings were assigned for dinner. She sat with her students, and I was with a group of residents, most of whom had partners. I hardly knew them, and throughout the pleasantries, the introductions and the various courses, the flurry of speeches before dessert, I was aware of her sitting a few tables away. I watched her profile out of the corner of my eye, and once she looked over and gave me a quick ironic smile before turning her head.

But later, after dinner, I lost her in the crowd, and thought she might have gone home. I'd only spoken to her for a few
minutes, but I felt an acute sense of loss nonetheless, as I wandered out onto the veranda with a glass of whiskey. I leaned on the heavy stone railing overlooking the water, feeling the cool air against my face, sipping my drink and watching the lights. I didn't want to go back to my studio apartment in the city, with its street full of sirens, and I felt very far from home. I thought of my father and mother, standing together on the driveway as I drove off in the car they had given me.

“There you are,” she said, appearing out of the dark. “I was looking for you.”

“I thought you'd gone,” I replied, unable to hide my delight.

“No,” she said. “I usually hate parties like this. But I'm having a good time tonight. My students are fun. They sent me out here to find you.”

She lit a cigarette, and I sipped my drink. For the first time there was a strained silence, and then I asked her about her family, her parents and all the rest, and where she was from.

“I grew up here,” she said. “My father teaches art history at the university. They're in Europe right now on sabbatical.”

“Are you going to go visit them?”

“I've been before,” she replied. “But I have a few commissions right now and they take a lot of time.”

“Commissions for what?”

“For portraits,” she said. “That's what I really do. I just teach the watercolor class on the side.”

She paused.

“What about you?” she asked. “Is your father a cardiologist?”

For a moment I was tempted to lie to her, and invent grander circumstances for myself. But I didn't. Instead I told the truth.

“No,” I said. “He's a pharmacist, but he's been out of work for a while. My mother's a schoolteacher. To be honest this sort
of thing”—I gestured to the house behind us—“makes me a little uncomfortable.”

“I wouldn't have guessed,” she said. “You fit in fine.”

“I do?”

“Yes,” she said. “You do.”

“Well,” I replied, thrilled by her words. “So do you.”

“I know,” she said calmly. “That's why Mrs. Spruance introduced us. But I only came tonight because of my class and because I'm hoping she'll ask me to paint her husband's portrait someday. Plus it was an excuse to dress up and I was bored.”

“Isn't her husband dead?”

“Lots of my subjects are dead. I use photographs.”

“What do you do if they were unattractive?”

She laughed.

“That can be awkward,” she said, “but the first rule of portraiture is kindness.”

 

Later, we walked down the steps and out onto the lawn leading to the water's edge. She took off her heels, and held them in her hand. I'd had another glass of whiskey by then. The lights of the house cast our shadows out onto the grass, and her necklace—tiny triangles of linked stained glass, green and blue and dull orange, framed in pewter—sparkled as she turned her head.

“The grass feels good,” she said.

“It's beautiful, isn't it,” I said. “This place. It doesn't seem real.”

She thought for a moment, looking at the house behind us, shining like an ocean liner in the dark, with a quarter mile of private beach stretching in either direction.

“For people like us, it isn't. It's out of reach. Mrs. Spruance is a nice woman, but I only get to come because of the watercolor
class and because my father is a professor at the university. You get to come because she likes young doctors and she likes giving money to hospitals. We're the decoration.”

“Nothing seems real tonight,” I said, looking at her.

She smiled.

“I'm just an art teacher,” she said. “Don't be fooled.”

“Maybe you'll be a famous artist someday.”

“I'm a woman,” she said, with a hint of bitterness. “And portraits are always out of style.”

“You could paint something else.”

“I could,” she said. “But I like portraits. They matter to people. They mean more than other kinds of paintings.”

We reached the dock.

“Okay, then, it's your turn,” she said, as we stepped out onto the wooden planks. “What do you want?”

“It's nothing complicated. I want a better life than my parents had, I guess. And I want to make a contribution.”

“To what?”

“To cardiology if I can. A lot of specialties don't do very much. But cardiologists actually make a difference.”

“So you're ambitious.”

“Yes,” I said. “I guess I am. Maybe it sounds silly.”

At the end of the dock, where I might have kissed her, she stopped suddenly and looked at her watch.

“Oh, no,” she said. “It's late. I have to leave.” My heart sank, but then she turned to me.

“You're easy to talk to, you know,” she continued. “I like you. You don't sound silly. You sound honest and you have a real job. It's refreshing. Plus you're not bad-looking and you're not too old. That's always a plus.”

With that, she reached for her purse, withdrew a card, and handed it to me.

“Here's my number,” she said. “Call me if you'd like to.”

I held it up in the dim light. Rachel Adams, it read. Artist. Portraits and Private Classes.

“Are you sure you have to go?”

“I really do,” she said. “I'm sorry. I have to take my class home. None of them can drive at night.”

She hesitated, her eyes on my face, and she must have seen how disappointed I was, because she stepped up and kissed me lightly on the cheek.

“Good night,” she said, simply. “It was nice to meet you. I hope I'll see you again.”

I watched her walk away down the dock. As she stepped out on the grass, she turned, and gave me a friendly wave, her pale arm leaping out of the dark, and then she disappeared into the heavy shadows cast by the veranda on the lawn. But a few moments later I saw her again, slim and elegant on the well-lit stairs leading up to the veranda, and I realized that she'd put her heels back on.

For her, that night can't have meant very much at the time. It was only another party, after all, and I was only another young man. But I think I realized right then that I had a chance to become someone else.

I'd seen the announcement in the local paper. The lecture attracted me, and I must have been doing better that night, and I hadn't drunk too much wine, because I shaved, and dressed, and got into my car, and drove the thirty minutes to the university campus just past the hospital. The first of the summer classes were in session, the students were out in the warm evening, and the air was full of honeysuckle from the flower beds along the old brick building where the lecture was held. I'd been to lectures there before, and I knew that many in the audience would be my age or older. The college kids had better things to do on a Saturday night.

The hall in the basement was half full. I took my place high up by the projectionist's booth, and looked down at the podium below me, hoping for a few minutes' respite. The talks were held weekly, on a wide variety of subjects.

The speaker stood waiting. He was in his early forties, trimly muscled, lean as a long-distance runner, with well-cut salt-and-pepper hair, a black T-shirt, loose tan cargo pants, and an erect, military air. He wore rubber sandals with burnt orange straps. He looked tanned, sternly athletic, and impatient, as if he had work to do.

He tapped the microphone a few times to make sure it was on.

“Let's turn down the lights,” he said, after a minute or two, “and get started. First slide, please.”

The projectionist, an elderly gray-haired woman who I knew volunteered her time, turned down the overhead lights from inside her booth, and lit up the podium where the man stood. An image appeared behind him on the screen—an emerald green valley, deep between snow-covered mountains. A village stood in the center of the valley; mud homes, an orchard, with trees rising above the brown walls. Around the village, a ring of delicately terraced fields.

“My name is Scott Coles,” the man began. “I'm going to talk to you tonight about an earthquake.

“This village was over three hundred years old,” he said, pointing to the screen. “It hardly changed at all during that time. The people there have much more in common with the ancient past than they do with the present.”

He paused.

“Next slide, please.”

There was a click from the projectionist's booth behind me.

It was a photograph of a damaged Japanese city. Sheets of broken glass, whole structures moved off their foundations, tangles of black wire coiling everywhere, though many of the office blocks seemed intact. The photograph must have been taken shortly after a rain, because there were puddles on the black asphalt streets, which were strangely empty, and the glass sparkled and shone.

“This is what a big earthquake will do to modern steel buildings,” he said. “Next slide.”

It was the mountain valley again. The fields remained, but the village itself was gone. The whole of it was a low pile of earth and stones, like a burial mound. Only the trees in the orchard were undamaged, though the walls around them lay in pieces at their feet. No human figures were visible.

“This is what a big earthquake will do to a mountain village made of mud-brick and stones,” he said, pausing for effect.

“It happened early in the morning,” he said, “when everyone was asleep. More than one hundred and fifty people were buried here. Only a handful escaped, and most of them were injured. They tried to dig out the survivors. But they had no tools. It was cold. They used their hands. By the time help arrived, pretty much everyone trapped in the rubble was dead. Imagine what that must have been like.”

He paused again.

“There were hundreds of villages like this,” he said. “And now they're all tombs. Tens of thousands of people are gone. We don't even know their names. Whole extended families were wiped out.”

He began to pace, his voice grew louder, and even from the back of the lecture hall I could see the cords of his neck standing out, yet I was sure he'd given this lecture many times, working his way across the country, stopping at college towns and rotary clubs and libraries, while the audience sighed and wrote handfuls of modest checks when he was done. Watching him, I wondered what it was, exactly, that filled him with such outrage and intensity. It was a tragedy, certainly, even an unimaginable one, yet another cataclysm neglected by the papers of the West, but the world is full of such events: tidal waves, earthquakes, and the fires of illness, sweeping back and forth across continents like the light of the sun.

The content of the lecture was, I thought, predictable. The earthquake had come and gone many months ago, but thousands of survivors remained, high in the mountain country, with nowhere to go and little to eat, with winter approaching, and these were deaths that could be prevented. The paths were blocked; the roads were shaken away down the hillsides, and there were
not enough helicopters. Camps were needed, resources, awareness, money most of all. The world's attention was elsewhere.

After a while, as I watched him from my perch high up in the back, the content of his words began to fade away for me. I knew what he was saying and what he'd say. I knew what slides he would eventually show—a blackened baby pulled like a plum from a hole, an outstretched grasping hand protruding from the earth. I knew all of that, and yet the man himself, clipped and incantatory, on and on—he compelled me nonetheless. I watched him, as he paced a few steps one way, then the other, delivering his sermon, and I envied him his certainty and his righteous anger that washed up over the rows of seats against my face like the heat of a campfire. How nice it would be to have such conviction, I thought, like a revivalist, a man with passionate knowledge, as opposed to knowledge alone.

It was a short talk, and he concluded, as I knew he would, with an appeal for donations. Perhaps forty minutes had passed before the flutter of applause, and his sip of water from the glass on the podium, and his request for questions.

A hand went up. Something about other relief organizations.

He shook his head.

“Most of them are hopeless,” he said. “They've put in some large camps near the cities, where it's easy for them, but the problem is that people can't get out of the mountains. They have to walk. We need smaller temporary camps in the high country to help them along, where they can rest, get food and medical attention, then continue. That's what we're trying to do right now.”

Another hand, no doubt a student. Did they need volunteers to help out? In the summer?

He smiled, took another sip of water. His hair, black and gray, sparkled under the lights.

“No,” he said. “We don't do disaster tourism. I'm sure you mean well, but unless you have a particular skill we can't use you. We can't assume the responsibility.”

The young man persisted. What kind of skill?

“We need doctors and nurses,” he said. “We also need contractors. Carpenters. People who know how to build things. People who really come to work, not just travel. This is serious business. Lives depend on it.”

His tone was self-righteous, superior, and I knew that he was borrowing the significance of the event. I could see it because I'd done the same thing more times than I could count, as Dr. Anderson, the rigorous one, pausing on rounds in the doorways of the sick, turning to the medical students and residents beneath me.

At the end of the talk, just after the collection plate had gone through the rows and he was packing up to go, I found myself descending the stairs toward him. I wasn't alone; an old woman was praising him effusively for his efforts, her voice thin and quavering, and he glanced at her abstractly, as if he'd heard her words a thousand times before and had little use for them. A few others handed him last-minute checks. He smiled and pocketed them without looking at the amounts. The room was nearly empty by then. I hesitated, a few feet back, waiting, but then he saw me, and before I could retreat he spoke.

“Did you have a question?” he asked.

“I enjoyed your talk,” I said. “But I didn't bring my checkbook.”

“We have a Web site where you can contribute.”

“I'm a physician, actually,” I said, which caught his attention.

“Are you interested in volunteering?”

“I'm not sure,” I said. “Maybe.”

“We could probably use you,” he said. “Let me give you my card. Please contact me anytime.”

He pulled it from his shirt pocket, and handed it to me.

“How did you get into this work?” I asked, taking the card. It was thick cream, embossed with gold letters, like something a banker might offer, or a lawyer.

“That's a long story,” he said.

“When are you going back?”

“Not any time soon,” he said. “It's where I belong. But I'm much more useful here. Someone needs to raise the money. That's what keeps us going.”

I was about to reply when the projectionist, who had descended from her booth, touched him lightly on the shoulder.

“I don't usually do this,” she said, shyly. She was a small, thin woman in her late seventies, and I'd seen her before, from a distance, at other lectures. Standing beside her, I realized that she had a fine tremor in her left hand. It leapt out at me like a flag: she had early Parkinson's disease. I knew it at a glance, and I was sure that no one around us, least of all Scott Coles, had any inkling of this fact. I've had that experience many times over the years, the sense of secret knowledge that my profession has given me, and yet, as she opened her checkbook, I found her affliction unexpectedly moving. She hunched over the podium, and wrote a spidery sum carefully on the line, the final check of the evening.

He thanked her sincerely, and smiled, and then she turned away and filed out with the others. I waited as he picked up his bag.

“Where are you going now?” I asked.

“I was going to get something to eat,” he said.

“Let me buy you dinner,” I said, impulsively, though I'd already eaten. “I'd like to hear more about what you're doing.”

He gave me a quick, assessing look.

“All right,” he said, after a moment. “If you're serious I'd be happy to talk about it. But I can't stay long. I need to get an early start tomorrow.”

“I understand,” I replied.

“I didn't catch your name,” he said, extending his hand. “I'm Scott.”