The New World: A Novel (11 page)

 

Jane lay in bed for an hour, not exactly waiting out the dark, though lately she preferred to rise in the light. She’d been getting up in darkness for most of her life, and had never been troubled by a dead stillness in a house, or the quivering gray static she saw when she stared long enough at absolutely nothing in a dark room, but now those things made her feel almost more lonely than she could stand. Her mother, whenever she sensed her awake and abed, encouraged Jane to sit outside on the terrace, so she might witness the remarkable transformations of the dawn and let some light into her
soul
. She never asked Jane if she and Millicent should go back home to Northampton, and Jane never told them to leave. But it was another advantage of waiting for the sun to come up before she got out of bed, that her mother would take Millicent for her long early-morning walk, leaving Jane to herself. They were always gone at least an hour, unless the weather was very bad, since Millicent had to examine every little thing as they went along, lingering with her eyes over flowers, light posts, and garbage cans the way a dog might linger with its nose.

Jane took her time making her morning tea, staring awhile at her mother’s extensive traveling collection before finally selecting a tiny can of matcha. She had no plans to become one of those ladies with bitter tea breath who sit around the house in an oversize cardigan with a giant mug in her hands, setting her face in thoughtful poses over the steam, someone who seems to turn tea into a
companion
. Even if she was wearing one of Jim’s cardigans, and permitted herself to look very thoughtful or sad standing by the kitchen window waiting for the water to boil, she knew this was an indulgence as temporary as her withdrawal from work, or her mother’s tenure in her house. She wasn’t going to become a
tea lady
. But for twenty minutes or so, it was nice to pretend she could actually enjoy a little shallow contemplative wonder.

She took the water off the flame just before the boil could really start to roll, having already measured two precise scoops of bright green powder into a cup with the long-handled wooden spoon that her mother sometimes wore in her hair. She poured the water (and lingered, yes, over the steam), then attacked it with the bamboo whisk, deliberately restraining herself from picturing a particular bearded face held still in a vise so she could attack it with vigorous zigzag scratches.

She drank the second cup down like a shot of liquor, then got back to work. Alice was there immediately when Jane clicked her icon (this made Jane think she must be running always in the background of the computer’s
OS
, watching and listening to everything Jane did, and so she started borrowing her mother’s laptop to talk with Hecuba). Alice’s eyes darted more slowly this morning, as if she were watching a very sluggish game of Pong.

“Good morning, Dr. Cotton. It’s seven thirty-five a.m. on April 7, 2013. Shall we continue your application?”

“Where do you go when I shut the computer?” Jane asked.

“I don’t understand your question,” Alice said. “Shall we ask for help?” She summoned up a Polaris chat box, but Jane dismissed it.

“No,” Jane said. “Would you like some tea?”

“I would not like some tea,” Alice said. “Shall we continue your application?”

“By all means,” Jane said.

“Very well,” Alice said. “Please tell me the story of the worst thing you’ve ever done.”

“Excuse me?”

“Please tell me—” Alice began, but Jane cut her off.

“Why would I tell you something like that?” Jane asked, raising her voice and taking great pains to enunciate. “Why do you need to know that?”

Alice paused, though her eyes kept moving. “I understand your question,” she said. “May I refer you to
FAQ
217.7 in the Polaris Applicant’s Handbook?”

“May you?” Jane asked wearily. “You may.” The box appeared next to Alice’s chin:

Q: Are you trying to make me feel ashamed?

A: Of course not. In the future, there won’t be any shame. We ask these questions not because we are looking for people who have never done anything wrong, but because what you tell us will help us know you better. And we want to get to know you very well indeed.

“Oh, Jesus,” said Jane. She considered various easy anecdotes—a neglected goldfish, a cruel playground taunt—but suspected Alice would blink away those stand-ins. Polaris already had her husband. They’d already taken away the meaning of her marriage; now—of course!—they wanted everything that was left of it, the secrets and memories that were its substance.
I’ll give it to you
,
all right
, she thought.
Just wait.

“Shall we begin?” Alice asked, after thirty seconds of silence, and then after thirty more she asked again. “Wait!” Jane said. “I’m thinking!” Then Alice waited two minutes before she asked again, but still that could hardly be time enough to consider an answer, unless you were one of those people who walked around barely able to restrain yourself from telling people how terrible you were, or one of those people who had done so few terrible things in her life she could pick the worst one in a snap. But finally she responded, “Sure. Yes.”

“Voice input or keyboard?” said Alice, but Jane had already started typing.

 

She hadn’t particularly
meant
to cheat on Jim, but neither was it something that
just happened
. Part of finally figuring out how they were going to make it together was them both committing to tell the other if one of them felt suddenly compelled to try to destroy the marriage. This was almost never a confession of desire for some (essentially random) other person, but a confession of the perverse desire to be fundamentally alone, to withdraw from their shared life, with all its benefits and obligations, to an easier loneliness they each sometimes preferred but neither really wanted.

There was nothing wrong with this. It was, in Jim’s annoying chaplain parlance,
allowed
. You might even, as they both sometimes did, announce that you were thinking of taking a
vacation
, and (after some back and forth on the nature and duration of the trip) be wished a
bon voyage
, and then retreat for a few days, or maybe even a week, into a kind of sullen impersonal detachment. That was fine. You just had to let the other person know what you were doing. But this time she didn’t tell Jim what she was doing. She barely even let herself know. And so the promise she broke was much bigger than a mere contract of sexual fidelity. And that, Alice
,
was the worst thing she had ever done.

But Alice didn’t need the details. She couldn’t possibly comprehend them. Polaris couldn’t possibly comprehend them. In fact, Polaris was the very antithesis of those details, which only convinced Jane more and more that Polaris was hiding something from her, that they had tricked Jim into signing up, or that he had signed up with them long before he and Jane had ever met—because he was always better at holding up his side of the bargain than she was at holding up hers. This kind of total withdrawal was something that he simply wouldn’t ever do to her.

So she didn’t even mention the promise, or the baby funerals. Instead she wrote,
His name was Ben.

They met in the
or
, over a frozen section. Or they might have one day said that was how they met, if she had run away with Ben into a different life, into some kind of temporary happiness that would (she did not doubt) congeal into a permanent and familiar unhappiness, an unhappiness that would look just like the one that had motivated her to cheat in the first place, except it would be worse. Because now she would no longer have Jim to help her manage it. Or because now she wouldn’t get to enjoy any longer the sovereign remedy of helping Jim with his own constitutive and situational unhappiness, which sometimes was the only remedy that ever really helped with hers. So running away with Ben was never really an option, though she wrote to Alice as if she had actually been tempted to do it.

It was his eyes,
she wrote, though of course it wasn’t really his eyes that attracted her. Maureen had actually flirted with him first, but they both had
or
crushes on him, and when she came to Jane’s office to prove her point about what color Ben’s eyes were by Googling
cornflower blue
, Jane saved the image on her desktop and let it sit there, one little square among a hundred others. She moved the image around, a marker denoting exactly how important Ben was in the daily sum of her thoughts and feelings—she supposed it reinforced her feelings of control over things, and helped delude her into thinking that there wasn’t anything to tell Jim
yet
. But by the time she and Ben were fucking in his office twice a day she’d made the cornflower her wallpaper, and though she sat in front of it for half of every afternoon she barely saw it anymore.

It was Jim and his pathetic baby funerals,
she wrote, adding (but only in her head),
he cheated on me first with those grieving almost-mothers.
Of course it wasn’t really that, either, but that was what she and Jim talked about, once it was already too late to talk about it. She had sex with Ben for the first time the day after the evening that Jim came home and told her, in excruciating detail, about the service he had performed for a stillborn baby on the tenth floor of the children’s hospital. He said it was like
his pain came out of him
to mingle with the pain of the almost-parents. Except that he told them, of course, that they
were
parents. “And when I pronounced them parents,” he said of the dead-baby baptism he’d been waiting three years to perform, “for just a second I thought the baby was going to start
crying.
”

“That’s really great,” Jane said, and she cried with him, though she wasn’t crying for the reason he thought she was crying.

She never met with Ben outside of the hospital—in the six weeks it lasted, the relationship never progressed that far. But the hospital covered twenty square blocks of Washington Heights, so there were all sorts of places to go and even people to see, if you counted security guards and volunteers and patients as people, since they avoided nurses and other physicians and especially the gossipy chaplains. There were lovers’ vistas to enjoy, gorgeous views of the river or the downtown skyline from empty rooms, and twice they even had a sit-down dinner, with real napkins, at the strange little restaurant on the eighth floor, attached to the
vip
unit, which had once been patient rooms. “It’s like the French Laundry,” Ben said, “but with patient smell.”

“The French Stroke Unit,” Jane said. She wanted to spend the night with him, but they never did that, even though Ben spent the night in his office all the time. He practically lived there—Jane hadn’t ever known a pathologist who worked so hard. If he’d had a bed in his office, she might have dared. She spent the night in call rooms all the time, after a long case, or even when she had a little patient whose post-op management she didn’t totally trust to the
icu
. Jim wouldn’t have thought twice about that kind of absence from her. But the nearest she came were the postcoital naps, on a couch that didn’t really leave any room to cuddle, so she had to sprawl on top of Ben like a dog. That’s when she came closest to asking for what she really wanted, an intimacy more obscene than any sexual experience they pursued. She meant to burst into tears on top of him in the middle of the radically uncomfortable cuddle, so that, without even finding out what was wrong, he could tell her he was sorry, that he loved her, and that everything was always going to be okay in the end.

“I can’t believe,” he said, in line for a miserable plate of eggs in the hospital cafeteria on their last morning together, “that we’ve still got the whole morning ahead of us, and then the whole day.”

“And then I can come home with you,” she said.

“Really?”

“Not really,” she said. She put on a show of rudeness for anyone listening or reading her lips, careful to hold herself a certain way when they were together in public. But she was already being mean to him in private as well, as if to punish him for not giving her the thing she wouldn’t ask him for. They had worked a case together that morning, so they might just be discussing histology, as far as anyone watching might be concerned.

“Aww,” he said, and she flinched because she thought he was going to put his arm around her. “Just getting some ketchup,” he said.

“Sorry,” she said. She watched his omelet being prepared. The fry cook was staring hard at the eggs, like he was going to punish them with the fistful of cheddar he held, flinging the cheese like pebbles into a face. So she didn’t notice when Dick and Jim joined them in line.

“Good morning,” said Jim.

“Blessed be!” said Dick.

“Oh, hi,” said Ben, blushing like a fool. Jane smiled at her husband, her first impulse being to
act nonchalant
. It was the first time he’d seen her together with Ben, something she’d been avoiding so successfully for weeks. She had feared that if he saw them together he would know right away what was going on.

Her smile was desperate. Jim cocked his head at her inscrutably. She looked away.

“Blessed be!” Dick repeated brightly, and Ben made the sign of the cross at them, smiling and nodding in response.

“I don’t believe in God,” Jim said flatly. “So that bothers me a little.”

“Oh, sorry,” Ben said. “Like a vampire, huh?” he added, into the resulting silence.

“Actually, I think most people who think of themselves as vampires do believe in God. It’s part of their existential pain. Don’t they, Dick?”

“The one I counseled certainly did.”

“You counseled a vampire?” asked Ben.

“Well, he
thought
he was a vampire. Which is the same thing, pastorally speaking. He worked in a blood bank and nipped at those little sausagey bits that are attached to the bag.”

“They’re samples,” Ben said. “To test for the cross match.”

“They’re not enough to live on, you can imagine. But he couldn’t bring himself to sip off the bag itself, because of the infection risks—to others, not to himself. And he couldn’t bear the thought of drinking a whole bag when someone might
need
it. He was very conscientious. It was just an addiction, of course. Anything can be an addiction, and his was blood. There was something underneath it, of course. A spiritual problem. We worked it out. But that’s a longer story. Shall we sit together? I could tell you the whole thing.” They had all moved along down the breakfast line.

“Chaplains and doctors sitting together?” Jim said. He’d taken only a piece of toast and a boiled egg. “Dogs and cats will dance in the streets first.”

“Haha!” said Ben.

“Sometimes dogs and cats get married,” said Jane.

“Actually, I was a surgeon back then,” Jim said to Ben. “I wasn’t always a chaplain. I took up the chaplain thing after my accident. Too shaky now.” He held up a fist between them, and let it tremble freely. “But sometimes it feels like being a doctor, without all the cutting and stuff.”

“It sounds amazing,” Ben said.

“Indeed,” Jim said, “
Amazing Things Are Happening
Here
.” That was the hospital slogan this week, or this month. Jim wasn’t sure. Just when he had received
Putting Patients First
fully into his heart, they had gone and changed it. “I’m going to take mine to go. Dick, you staying?”

“Let’s have coffee,” Dick said to Ben, who looked like he thought he was being come on to. Jim could feel Jane’s gaze burning on him, but he didn’t look at her again, not even to say goodbye when he and Dick took their leave and started back across the skybridge to the old hospital and the chaplain offices.

“What was that about?” said Dick. “Couldn’t you see it? I had him right where I wanted him. I was about to get an in. That poor man!” Dick had been the chaplain on duty for staff one day when Ben had wandered into the chapel to start an abortive conversation about sex addiction. Ordinarily, Jim would never have heard about it, but Dick had brought it up in peer supervision. Back at the office, Dick picked at his eggs and said, “My heart goes out to him.”

“And something else goes out, also engorged with blood.”

“Don’t be silly,” Dick said. “This isn’t sexual, it’s
pastoral
. What’s wrong with you today?”

“Nothing,” Jim said. “Sorry.”

“It’s all right,” said Dick. “But let’s pray about it, before you go out on visits. You wouldn’t want to get that negative energy all over a patient, would you?”

“Of course not,” Jim said.

He had known about Jane’s Other Man from the beginning, but he hadn’t known he was Sex-Addict Ben. He only knew his emotional odor, which had been clinging to Jane for weeks. Jim only knew that it must be someone from the hospital, and he never tried very hard to find out anything more than that. That wasn’t what he was supposed to do. He was supposed to wait for her to tell him, to trust that she would. So he pretended everything was fine.

As hard as it was, that’s what he did. But he made it a little easier on himself by indulging in his own cheat. Not a sexual cheat, of course, or even an emotional one. Instead, he flirted with the idea of leaving her, and surely fantasies of abandonment were allowed while you were waiting for your wife to get brave enough to tell you she was cheating, surely he was allowed the satisfaction of punishing her, as long as he didn’t hurt her. And after all, he wasn’t even flirting with divorce, just with Alice.

It was a patient who had introduced them, a cranky old man on the
vip
floor. That wasn’t even Jim’s regular beat. He was only up there for Ash Wednesday, the hospital chaplain’s busiest day of the year, carrying his little pot from room to room.

“Get out!” the man yelled, when Jim strolled in to say he was the chaplain on duty, making his rounds to check on people’s spirits and offer them a daub of ash. “I’m an
atheist
,” the man said, hissing up the S, like that would scare Jim away.

“Terrific!” Jim said. “So am I.”

“Really?”

“Really!” Jim said. The man, whose name was Charlie, softened his glare. He beckoned Jim to his bedside, and even let him place the ashes, once he discovered that Jim was offering circles instead of crosses. Jim’s boss, a stern and remote Lutheran pastor, had finally acceded to his lobbying on behalf of all the people in the hospital who might wish to wear proof of their awareness of mortality, and a sign of their faith in
something
, but to whom crosses were anathema. So Jim went around with his little pot of ashes, in solemn joy, making crosses for the cross folk and circles for the circle folk, reminding everyone that they were going to die one day.