The Carlton Club (4 page)

Finally his patience faltered.

“How many buttons?” he asked.

“Too many,” she answered. “Chic but not practical.”

“Maybe I’m hurrying too much?”

“I think we’re both in a hurry,” Kathleen said. “No time to think about it.”

“I have thought about it,” Mark said. He had made his decision.

“You have?”

“Yes. But, still, will you help me with these damned buttons?”

“With pleasure.”

Mark’s bed was a double-bed mattress without box springs that lay on the floor. The sheets were a slightly rough, cotton blend and the pillows were lumpy.

It didn’t matter.

He held her lovely naked body against his slender strong one, kissing her, tracing paths all over her with his tongue, touching her, moving her, moving with her to the rhythm of the music he loved, whispering her name.

“Kathleen.”

“Mark.”

They smiled at each other with open eyes and closed mouths until the desire they saw in each other’s eyes made them close their eyes and open their mouths. They moved together lost in the warmth of their bodies and the mood of the music and the strength of the passion.

“Oh, Mark!” she whispered urgently when the wonderful sensations began to crescendo.

“Kathleen.” He felt her quickening breaths, the pounding of her heart and the rhythm of her hips. The force of her desire was as demanding as his own, under the cool silkiness of her skin.

After they made love the first time, his breathing slowed and he reluctantly moved off her so that she could breathe without his weight.

Mark whispered, “
Kitzy
.”

“You’ll pay for that!”

“Really? How?”

“I’ll show you in a minute. After I recover.” She rolled toward him and touched his hair. “Or should I go now? It’s late.”

“I don’t want you to go.” Ever.

“I have to go, sometime. My parents worry if I’m not home by dawn,” she said, smiling into his thoughtful brown eyes. “OK, let’s see how I did.”

“You know how you did. Sensational.”

“No. With name-that-tune.
Scheherazade
. Then
Sleeping Beauty
. Then
Swan
Lake
. Then whatever’s playing now. I recognize it, but I can’t name it.”

“
Giselle
. It’s my ballet suite. Sort of the old standbys but my favorites,” he paused, then he said, “I can’t believe you were paying attention.”

“Listening, yes. Subliminally. Paying attention, no. How could I? You had my undivided attention.” You still do. I want to do it all over again. And again.

“If you promise that’s true, I’ll go turn the stack.”

“It’s true. The music is nice. Sensual.” He could probably make the national anthem sensual, she thought as she watched him walk, naked, into the other room. Tall. Dark. Handsome. Naked. The missing necessary adjective. It completed the perfect picture.

When he returned, she said, “This is for Kitzy. Hold still and enjoy.”

“What?”

“Sensory overload.”

“This will be punishment.”

“You’ll see. You have to hold still, and you’ll want to move. You’ll want to touch me.”

“And you won’t let me?”

“No. Never. Not after Kitzy.”

“OK.”

Kathleen did what he had done to her, kissing his entire body, tracing little circles with her warm, moist tongue and her velvet, soft fingertips over his nipples, along his thighs, between his thighs. She kept her body away from his, but her silky hair caressed his face, his chest, his abdomen and his legs as she moved, slowly, lovingly. As she kissed him in places that Janet never had. In ways that Janet never had.

When he wanted her, her whole body next to his, part of him, Kathleen came to him, eagerly, willingly. Because she wanted him, too. She didn’t want to play games. Not with him.

At three o’clock she said, “This time I really am leaving.”

She had tried, halfheartedly, at one. And at two. Each time she had gotten as far as the stereo, flipped the stack and, at his urging, returned to his bed.

“I don’t want you to.”

“I don’t want to, but I have to. Besides, you’re on call tonight, right?”

“Right.”

“So I’m leaving.”

“OK. Not really, but OK.” As she dressed, he asked, “How old are you, Kathleen?”

“Twenty-seven. How about you?”

“Twenty-seven.”

She kissed him, a long, deep goodbye kiss.

As she turned to leave, he asked, “What do you do?”

“What you mean? What do I get paid to do?”

“Yes.”

“Nothing,” she said. “Absolutely nothing.”

Mark was suddenly aware that his shower water had turned ice cold, rudely interrupting his reverie.

Damned apartment, he thought. Although, despite its many other drawbacks, ample hot water had never been a problem.

Mark shivered as he returned to his bedroom. He glanced at his clock and learned the reason

for the cold water. He had been in the shower for thirty minutes, lost in the magnificent memory of Kathleen.

The ice-cold water, the still disconnected phone, the fact that he would be late for rounds—something he didn’t tolerate in others—brought Mark abruptly back to the reality of his life.

As he rushed to get ready he thought about Janet. Now he had been unfaithful to her; something else to add to her list of things he had done to destroy their marriage.

He had never been unfaithful before. Until last night, he had never even made love with anyone but Janet. Mark had only kissed a few girls, and they had been girls. He was sixteen when he met Janet, and after he met her there had been no one else.

Until now. Now he had been unfaithful to her. But was infidelity really an issue during a trial separation? Was it really a violation of the same magnitude? More new terms and definitions. More confusion.

More fog, he thought as he ran through the unseasonably, still thick fog that lay in his path while he made his way finally, late, from the apartment to University Hospital.

As he breezed through the revolving door into the hospital’s main lobby, Mark forced himself to forget about Janet and Kathleen. He had trained himself to do this. It was necessary. At work, he had to focus, without distraction, on his job, on his patients. The personal problems had to be put aside, banished from his thoughts. It was something else Janet complained about, his ability to turn his emotions off and on. His cool objectivity.

But it was something else that made him good at what he did, at being a doctor. It allowed him to give his patients undivided attention. Mark was certain that Leslie Adams had the same ability to disassociate the personal from the professional. Leslie was always professional, and she was very good at what she did.

Leslie Adams was the one woman he could think about in the hospital. Thinking about Leslie made Mark smile. He smiled then, despite the fact that he was twenty minutes late, as he ran up the eleven flights of stairs two steps at a time. Mark never used the hospital elevators. He was impatient with their slowness and knew the exercise, the only exercise he got, was good for him. In a thirty-six hour, on call period, Mark traveled repeatedly between the eleventh-floor ward, the seventh-floor intensive care unit, the ground floor ER, the basement level morgue, the fourth-floor lab and the third-floor radiology suite. It gave Mark ample exercise. It showed. He was in good shape.

Leslie Adams, M.D., Mark mused.

She was a terrific intern. The best. In any other profession Leslie might have been considered compulsive to a fault, but not in medicine. In medicine compulsion was the key—compulsion balanced by good judgment—the ability to focus on the important and de-emphasize, but never ignore, the apparently trivial.

Too many interns couldn’t see the forest for the trees. But not Leslie. She saw the big picture, but she compulsively paid attention to the details.

If she didn’t know what something meant, what to make of a slightly abnormal lab value or a patient complaint that didn’t seem to fit, she

asked for help. For another opinion. For Mark’s opinion.

“Mark,” she would say, her brilliant blue eyes frowning earnestly at the patient lab data sheet. “Mr. Rolf’s LDH is still elevated. It doesn’t make sense. He’s not hemolyzing, and his other enzymes are normal. I’ve checked all his meds, and none of them can do this. In every other way, he’s improving.”

“So what’s your plan?” Mark would ask, knowing that Leslie had a plan. But knowing, too, as good as she was, as solid as her judgment and instincts were, she was unsure of herself. It was something else that made her good. She listened, she learned and she asked questions when she didn’t know.

Leslie Adams wasn’t afraid of saying those three words that had been verboten in medical school: I don’t know.

Leslie would make mistakes. They all would and did. That was the trickiness and vagary of medicine. But Leslie would never make big mistakes, never careless ones. Her mistakes would be slight errors in judgment due to inexperience or because she was fooled or misled by a symptom or sign or lab value that didn’t fit and turned out to be important. Leslie’s mistakes would never cause harm to a patient. They would be little errors that would damage her confidence, make her examine herself even more critically and remind her, if she would admit it, that she was human after all.

Leslie’s compulsive, careful attention to detail would probably protect her from making the kind of mistake that was so serious it would drive her away from medicine. Even if she alone knew about it.

As Mark reached the sixth floor, he slowed his pace a bit.

He was late, but everything would be under control. Leslie had been on call. Everyone would be safe and sound.

Mark shook his head slightly as he thought about her, the hospital watchdog, pacing the halls all night long, warding off trouble. He guessed that was the real reason for her sleeplessness, because she believed, somehow, it would help. She had to do it. It was part of her compulsion.

Mark also knew that Leslie’s calm cheeriness, almost too much at times, was only a facade. It had to be. Inside she was a bundle of nerves, anxiety and fatigue just like the rest of them. She probably had the same critical opinions about her colleagues, the nursing staff, the call schedule and the soft hits that they all did. She just withheld comment. They were all critical, hypercritical, of themselves and of each other. They were all perfectionists at heart, suddenly confronted with the imperfect, imprecise, nonscientific realities of the practice of medicine.

Leslie and Janet were friends. Mark wondered what Leslie thought of him. Of course she knew what had happened between him and Janet. And why. Leslie probably had more insight into his marriage than he did. Did she think he was as despicable as Janet did? Probably. Compulsive, critical Leslie wouldn’t be very tolerant of the sort of behavior Janet attributed to him.

But if Leslie felt only contempt for him as a human being it didn’t show. In fact, in the past month, she had seemed almost sympathetic, as if she knew, understood, and didn’t judge. Or was she just overcompensating because she felt guilty about her real critical feelings?

She probably doesn’t think about it—me—at all, Mark decided. Leslie, the true professional.

As he rounded the corner onto the ward, Mark saw his team—two medical students and two interns, Leslie and Greg—circled around the chart rack. Mark saw Leslie before she saw him. She was looking at her watch and frowning, concerned but not annoyed.

Then Greg saw Mark and said, “Chief, ho!”

Leslie looked up quickly and smiled. Her blue eyes sparkled with a look of relief above the dark circles, the telltale signs of her sleepless night.

Janet Louise Wells was born at noon on Christmas Day. She was born in her parents’ small, snowbound farmhouse five miles west of Kearney, Nebraska, and one hundred thirty miles west of Lincoln where six months earlier her future husband, Mark David Collinsworth, had been born on a hot humid day in July.

Janet was a perfect baby, then a perfect child, then a perfect teenager. Her cheerfulness and serenity were pervasive and genuine. Everyone liked her. It was impossible not to like the pretty girl with the spun-gold hair, clear, gray eyes and ready, flawless smile. Janet made friends easily because she smiled and was so pretty.

And because she shared her toys. Possessiveness was not in Janet’s nature. Generosity was. She was noncompetitive. She threatened no one. Janet spent the first sixteen years of her life genuinely content with her life on the tiny farm, attending the small rural school, baking with her mother, sewing with her grandmother and playing with her friends.

And singing.

Janet loved to sing. No one knew how much she loved it. They heard her sing in the church choir and admired her clear, lovely voice. There were no music classes at her school, no choral groups, no band.

It didn’t matter to Janet. She preferred to sing by herself anyway. She didn’t need or care about an audience. In the late afternoon, after school and before dinner, she would run to the far corner of her father’s cornfield, and she would sing.

Janet sang anything and everything. She learned the songs by listening to records and to the radio. She learned the tunes instantly and the lyrics after listening only a few times. Janet preferred musicals. She would sing every song in order. Telling the story. Living the story.

If Janet was possessive about anything it was her private time in the cornfields. Without it she would not have been so content. Or so generous. Or so happy.

During the same summer when Mark David Collinsworth celebrated his sixteenth birthday, Harold Wells told his fifteen-and-a-half year old daughter and his twin thirteen year old sons that they were selling the farm, they had no choice, and were moving to Lincoln.

Janet entered Lincoln High School that fall as a junior. She left her class of sixteen students, her best friends in Kearney, and entered a class of three hundred students in which the groups and cliques had been firmly established since winter of the sophomore year.

Janet was an outsider because of timing and because of who she was: a country girl in a city.

Janet wouldn’t have minded being alone, being an outsider, if she had been able to have privacy, but her new home was an apartment with no yard. She had no cornfields. She had no place to escape.

No place to sing.

Janet met Mark on the first day of school. If Mark hadn’t been junior class president, and if he hadn’t appointed himself in charge of orienting the new juniors, he and Janet would never have met. Mark’s crowd, the achievement oriented, scholar athletes and their aggressive, confident female companions would have been inaccessible, and probably unknown, to Janet.

There were twenty new entering juniors. Mark led them around the three-story, brick building through the cafeteria to the study halls, the gym, the student lounge and the library. Mark gave the tour cheerfully, enthusiastically, trying to make them all feel comfortable and welcome. But his mind was on Janet.

Mark had never seen eyes so clear or so big or so gray. Or hair quite so blond and silky. Or a smile so demure and beautiful.

“I’ll show you to your home room,” Mark said to her after the tour was over.

“Oh. OK. Thank you,” she said quietly, her eyes meeting his directly without embarrassment.

Janet walked silently beside Mark, not fidgeting, not anxious, not even, apparently, trying to think of something to say. Mark found Janet’s silence strangely peaceful.

Except that he wanted to find out about her.

“You’re from Kearney?”

“Near Kearney.”

“Do you like Lincoln?”

“No. Not really,” she said calmly without breaking her stride.

Her words made Mark stop. Lincoln was his home. He loved Lincoln.

“You don’t? Why not?”

Janet stopped when Mark stopped and looked up at him with her smoky eyes.

“No cornfields,” she said. “I miss the cornfields.”

“Lincoln is surrounded by cornfields!”

“I miss our cornfield,” Janet replied simply.

Within two months, Mark had retrieved his class pin from Sara, a smart pretty cheerleader, and was dating Janet. Mark couldn’t tell how Janet felt about him. He was used to girls flirting with him, teasing him and sending him clear, interpretable signals.

Janet sent no signals; but she always said yes when he asked her out, and she always seemed happy when they were together. Janet spoke little, smiled a lot and listened attentively when Mark spoke.

Being with Janet made Mark realize how hard he and his friends were trying. They were all trying to prove, beyond a doubt, that they were what they believed themselves to be: the best student, the best quarterback, the best actress, the best looking or the best personality.

The Best.

Janet didn’t try. She didn’t care about being the best. Janet was Janet. And Mark loved being with her.

After a while he stopped trying to impress her. He didn’t need to. She knew who he was, and she liked him.

Janet made things for him. He would find chocolate chip cookies in his locker. Or a handknit muffler. Or a handmade card, cleverly decorated, a thank you for a special date. Mark loved Janet’s presents. They were reminders of Janet, of the peace and happiness he felt when he was with her. That peace, the peacefulness of being with Janet, balanced the relentless pressure of the rest of his life.

Pressure. Pressure to be the best. Pressure to be a doctor—to be the best doctor. Pressure not to disappoint anyone, especially his father, and pressure to live up to his magnificent potential.

Janet’s life, briefly filled with an unfamiliar turmoil of its own when her family moved to Lincoln, became peaceful because of Mark. And because of her music. Janet discovered that although she no longer had her own private stage, her father’s cornfield, the big city offered intriguing new outlets for her singing.

There were music classes. Janet took as many as her schedule would allow. And the choral groups. Janet joined them all. The music teachers instantly recognized her talent. Raw, untrained talent. They were intrigued by the pretty, blond girl with the lovely, haunting voice.

The other girls in the school who sang and acted and vied for solos in the choral groups and for leads in the school musical productions promptly recognized Janet as a foe. She was another competitor in an already overcrowded, competitive group, a group in which everyone wanted to be the best.

Janet didn’t want to compete, but she wanted to sing. She was unruffled by audiences and unflattered by the praises of the teachers.

The strong loveliness of her voice—so rich, so sensuous, so moving—amazed Mark when he heard her sing, finally, in January. Always before, her singing engagements had conflicted with one of his many commitments.

Mark kissed her after the performance that night. It was their first kiss although they had been dating for almost four months. When Mark kissed her, Janet put her arms around his neck, stretched her fingers into his dark brown hair and pulled his mouth deep into hers.

After that they kissed often. Long, quiet, passionate kisses that filled Mark with great peace and made him forget, for a moment, the pressures of his life.

Mark wanted Janet to sing for him when they were alone.

“Find me a cornfield and I’ll sing for you anytime.”

Mark found a cornfield for them five miles outside of Lincoln. They found a private distant corner where they could lie together, holding each other, kissing each other, and where she could sing just for him.

Mark’s competitiveness, his need to be the best, was so inbred that he couldn’t stand to see anyone bypass a chance for success. A chance to be the best. A star. So, it was his fault that Janet auditioned for the lead in Lincoln High School’s production of
South Pacific
that spring. It was her fault, because of her talent, that she won the part. As Nellie, Janet got to “wash that man right outta my hair,” to be as “corny as Kansas in August” and to sing a lovely, romantic, moving duet about “some enchanted evening.”

Janet was a sensation. The standing ovations, the rave reviews in the Lincoln newspapers, the sellout performances were all testimony to her marvelous, captivating talent.

But Janet’s success made some people squirm. Who the hell does she think she is? the girls who dated Mark’s friends, who considered Mark one of theirs, wondered. It was amazing enough that the quiet, country hick could seduce Mark into leaving lively, vivacious Sara. “She has to be putting out!” they hissed. And now Janet had virtually stolen the lead from another one of them.

It was too pushy. Too nervy. Didn’t the country girl know her place?

Janet’s success also made Mark’s parents squirm. From the beginning they hoped this unfortunate liaison would pass, that Mark would outgrow Janet’s country naiveté or get bored with her passivity. As the months passed, they were afraid he wouldn’t. For the first time in his life, Mark countered their incessant plans for his future with plans of his own.

“Won’t it be wonderful when you finish your residency and return to join your father in practice? You’ll probably want to live nearby. In the country club, maybe.”

Mark had been hearing plans like that for years. Usually he made no comment, silently acknowledging his parents’ words with a taciturn nod. Now, because of Janet, he had plans of his own, and his parents didn’t like what they heard.

“Janet and I are going to live outside of town. In the country. I won’t mind commuting.”

That made his parents squirm. As they watched their maybe future daughter-in-law prance around the stage in skimpy outfits, they squirmed even more. It was all so undignified. So improper.

Of course they hadn’t minded watching Sara Johnston, daughter of Lincoln’s best general surgeon, leading cheers at the football and basketball games. They wouldn’t have minded having Sara as their daughter-in-law. In fact, that was what they had planned.

Janet detected the Collinsworths’ disapproval of her immediately.

“Why don’t your folks like me?” she asked. She did not say, “I don’t think your folks like me,” or, “I wonder if they don’t like me.” Janet asked, as a matter of fact, why they didn’t like her.

“They had plans for me and Sara,” Mark said. “Daughter of leading surgeon and son of leading internist, himself destined to be the leading internist. That sort of thing.”

The best with the best, Janet mused.

Janet didn’t like Mark’s parents, either. She knew, although she and Mark never discussed it, that his father was the driving force behind Mark’s obsession with success and achievement. Janet resented Dr. Collinsworth for it. She resented the pressure on Mark.

Mark loved Janet’s performance in
South Pacific
. Janet loved it, too. She learned that she loved something more than just the singing. She loved performing. She loved the audience. She loved sharing her talent and her joy.

During the last month of their junior year in high school, Mark was elected student body president and give Janet his class pin and his letter sweater. And he kissed her breasts for the first time.

They lay in their cornfield on a balmy spring night, softly lighted by the vernal moon. They had kissed, without talking, for an hour. Slowly, Mark lowered his hand over her blouse, then gently slipped his fingers between the buttons, touching her soft skin. Then he carefully unbuttoned a button, trying to sense her reaction, hoping she wouldn’t resist, knowing he would stop if she did.

Janet didn’t resist. She moved closer to him. She helped him unbutton her blouse and unfasten her bra. Then she lay beneath him, her naked chest silhouetted in the spring moonlight.

Mark looked at her beautiful breasts waiting to be kissed, gently, roughly, every way, for hours and hours. Wordlessly Janet pulled him to her.

A year later, after they had both been accepted to the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, after Mark had been named class valedictorian and after Janet had triumphed as Maria in the school production of
The Sound of Music
, they made love for the first time.

They had never discussed it. They had spent the past year holding each other and kissing each other. Bare chested. Nothing more. But that night, in their secluded cornfield under the same springtime moon that had shone on them a year before. Mark removed all her clothes. Then his. He watched the clear gray eyes that squeezed tight for a brief moment as he entered her, then opened, smiling, as she wrapped her legs tightly around him and moved quietly, quickly with him.

“I love you,” he told her afterwards. It was the first time he had told her that. He repeated joyfully, “I love you, Janet.”

“I love you too, Mark.”

During the four years at the University of Nebraska—home of the Cornhuskers—in Lincoln, Mark lived in the Phi Delta Theta fraternity. It was the same fraternity his father had pledged. Mark got A’s in all his courses. He took the required premed courses: biology, physics, inorganic and organic chemistry and calculus. But he majored in English. Mark’s favorite course was English literature.