The Scenic Route (3 page)

He kept his focus on finding his table and the mystery woman potentially waiting for him there. The evening had possibilities, and that was no small thing. He approached Table Twelve with an eager bounce in his wobbly step. Until he saw who was sitting there.

Two teenage girls were texting away on their phones. Sitting to their right was a guy who was easily in his fifties, with unnaturally jet-black hair slicked back against his head and his white shirt open halfway to his navel. Next to him was an empty seat. No big surprise.

Continuing clockwise was a woman with purple cat-eye-shaped glasses. Or maybe they only seemed cat-eye shaped, because she was wearing a high-necked blouse with cats embroidered on it and had small silver cats dangling from her ears.

Next to her was a spectacled Asian fellow in a tuxedo and an awkward woman beside him in a fuchsia gown. They seemed to scream out obligatory work invitation. But that wasn't why Austin didn't sit next to them. It was because the juxtaposition of their outfits with his own suggested a support group for the sartorially challenged.

He instead took the seat between the aging Lothario, Jack, and the cat lady, Kitty. (Really.) Jack kept talking about Fergie's new debut album. Austin wasn't sure if Jack was trying to impress the
teenagers or if he believed every time he said Fergie's name it subtracted a year from his age.

The only person at the table who could have gone to school with Austin was Kitty. Austin told himself she couldn't possibly be the woman Stu was talking about, but all Stu had said was that she was single. He didn't say anything about that being particularly surprising.

Austin looked more closely at Kitty as she showed him pictures of her “family” (Mittens, Patches and Garfield). She definitely seemed eager to talk to him and was doing so with a sense of overfamiliarity. But there was nothing about her appearance or manner that rang a bell. There was still one empty chair—which he eyed optimistically.

The bandleader asked everyone to stand for the official entrance of the bride and groom. Stu and Steffi strode into the room like they had been waiting for this moment their entire lives. They made a somewhat incongruous pair. Her strapless ball gown made her look particularly short and curvy, while Stu was tall and lean. But they wore matching expressions of irrepressible joy as they danced exuberantly to Natasha Bedingfield's “Unwritten.”

Austin couldn't help swaying to the infectious beat of the music, though he didn't recall previously even liking the song. As he watched Stu embrace his new wife and new life, the bubblegum lyrics about releasing one's inhibitions took on new meaning. Austin felt like the song was speaking directly to him:

Reaching for something in the distance,

So close you can almost taste it . . .

There was much applause and clinking of glasses as Stu and Steffi repeatedly kissed. Austin's skin was tingling. He felt like the world was a canvas of new possibilities, and he was about to come face-to-face with one of them. He looked expectantly at the remaining unclaimed seat at his table.

When had an empty chair held so much promise? He knew he was
getting carried away. But he didn't care. He was hopeful. He couldn't remember the last time he had been this hopeful. And as ridiculous and irrational as it seemed, he remained blissfully hopeful.

Until Naomi Bloom sat down across from him.

There was no way for Austin to know what emotion he revealed on his face, but internally he was experiencing Edvard Munch's
The Scream
. His first impulse was to run. As for Naomi, she physically shuddered.

Steffi appeared behind her, wrapping her arms around Naomi and squealing with delight: “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you for your wonderful gift!”

“You haven't received it yet,” Naomi responded.

“But I've heard all about it!”

“Well, the proof is in the pudding, so to speak,” Naomi said. Steffi laughed uproariously, as if Naomi had said something inordinately funny. Austin was wondering if he could still make a run for it. Preferably all the way back to Michigan.

“So, Austin,” Steffi said, with the kind of chirpiness that worked best in chipmunk movies, “have you and Naomi been officially introduced? Or should I say reintroduced?”

“I think it was more unofficial,” Naomi said stiffly.

“I almost didn't recognize you without the egg yolk,” Austin said with a forced laugh that sounded like he was choking.

Steffi looked confused, but she torpedoed on. “Naomi is probably going to hate me for saying this, but she used to have a picture of you taped up in her Barbie Dreamhouse.”

“Oh, Stuffi,” Naomi said, stiff smile still in place, “I really do hate you for saying that.”

Steffi seemed to be waiting for a laugh that didn't come. Fortunately for her, she got pulled away, leaving Austin and Naomi to stew in their mutual discomfort.

It was Kitty who broke the tension by asking, “Why is the bride called ‘Stuffi'?”

For some reason, Austin felt compelled to answer a question that hadn't been directed at him. “Because she used to stuff her bra in middle school.”

“She did not!” Naomi's eyes flashed with disapproval. “Steffi had bad allergies as a kid and when she got congested her dad would call her Stuffi.”

That wasn't what Stu had told Austin, and to Austin's credit he refrained from saying so. But the damage had been done. Through the first two courses of the meal, Naomi interacted almost exclusively with the Asian couple, engrossed in their conversation or doing a good job of pretending to be. Every time Austin glanced in her direction, she seemed to reflexively look away.

However, there were only so many times Austin could nod at something Jack said about Fergie or Justin Timberlake. And Kitty was very focused on slurping her cucumber-lychee gazpacho (while the teenagers remained immersed in their texting). Austin could feel his eyelids growing heavy. It was after midnight in Detroit, and he had been up for most of the last forty hours. He tried to catch what Naomi was saying across the table, concentrating on her voice to stay alert. He couldn't make out the words so much as the timbre. He felt like he was tuning in a low-power broadcast on an analog radio, except his ears were the antennae. He pictured his ears growing in size until they looked like rabbit ears. Then he imagined Naomi also having giant rabbit ears, which looked surprisingly fetching. He thought he overheard her say something about spending a year in Rome.

“That sounds nice,” he said.

She looked at him with an odd expression. “Have you also lived there?”

Was it required for him to have lived in Italy to compliment her on doing so? “No. Haven't actually even been there.”

“You've never been to Rome?” She asked with more shock in her voice than he felt was necessary.

“I love Rome,” Jack said. “Fergie's very popular in Europe.”

“Haven't really done much traveling abroad,” Austin said, feeling defensive. “But I intend to. It's not like Rome is going anywhere.” She seemed puzzled by his statement, as if she didn't understand—or he was speaking in an alien tongue. “I mean, Rome's been around a couple millennia. It's not going to disappear anytime soon.”

“Rome disappears every day,” Naomi responded, her eyes flashing again, but this time with something more ardent. “Rome as it was just yesterday's already vanished. The bread will never rise exactly the same way. The scent of citrus blossoms will never have precisely the same density. Every day the Colosseum crumbles a tiny bit more. And the Tiber retreats a little lower along its embankment. It's a city of ruins. A city that celebrates things that have disappeared. And it reminds us that everything disappears.”

“You're making me want to get on the next plane,” Kitty said.

As for Austin, he was a little infatuated by her passion. And a little insulted. Naomi had waxed poetic at his expense while making a specious argument. “Do you really believe,” he asked, “if you were to travel to Rome this week and then again the week after that, the city would be in any way noticeably different?”

“I do believe it,” she said, “because it's true.”

For some reason, her conviction irritated him. “You can claim anything is true if you don't have to prove it. What if doctors went around spouting esoteric philosophies for prescribed treatments without any evidence of scientific benefit?”

“Personally, I'd say science is high on the list of esoteric philosophies.”

She was teasing him. Or she was testing him. “Science is based solely on facts,” he said.

“But the facts are always changing.”

“Facts don't change.” He was resolute. “We just discover new facts.”

“What we discover,” she said with equal resolve, “is how much we got the facts wrong in the past.”

Entrées were served, which provided a temporary détente as they focused on their black cod crusted with walnut-edamame hummus. Jack took advantage of the lull in conversation to ask Austin for advice about a recurring sty problem, but Austin disliked talking shop at social events. He recommended Jack make an appointment with an ophthalmologist, to no avail.

“I just want to know how serious it is if I have green ooze coming out of my eye,” Jack said.

“People are dining,” Austin said, gesturing to their tablemates, who were in fact eating their meals (other than the teenagers—one of whom looked up momentarily when Jack mentioned green ooze).

“I'm not saying I have green shit coming out of my eye
now
,” Jack protested, and, indeed, his eyes bore no visible emissions, green or otherwise.

“Without knowing the details,” Austin said in his best physician voice, “any green substance would not be associated with optimal optical health.”

“Where did you go to medical school?” asked Kitty. It was unclear if she was unimpressed by his diagnostic skills or simply wanted to change the subject.

“I actually went to a combined premedical and medical program at the University of Michigan. So I graduated in seven years with both a bachelor's and a medical degree.”

“No wonder you had no time for traveling,” Naomi said.

“I chose to focus on my studies.” He left out the fact that he couldn't afford to travel because he was putting himself through school.

“I think the problem with those kind of concentrated programs is they force high school students to decide what they want to do for the rest of their lives.”

“I wasn't forced.” He happened to love Inteflex, his seven-year program, which offered not only an accelerated curriculum, but also an innovative one. Inteflex was devoted to creating more compassionate physicians by training them to treat patients rather than illnesses. And it succeeded precisely because it started with students too young to be thinking like doctors. “I chose to do what I wanted. No one's forced to do anything.”

“I was forced to come here today,” one of the teenagers volunteered. The other one poked her.

“I didn't mean to insult you,” Naomi said. “It's just something I feel strongly about.”

“You feel strongly about my medical education?” She was judging him and Inteflex without knowing anything about either.

“I feel strongly about people having to know where they're going in life before they know what their choices are,” Naomi said.

“People like me?”

“Not you in particular.”

“But you're talking to me.” He was being overly defensive and he knew it, but she had gotten him riled up.

“We're taught that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line,” Naomi said, “but it's not. It's the fastest distance. It's only the shortest distance if it's your final destination. And no one knows their final destination.”

She was mixing science and pseudophilosophy in a disorienting and
disconcerting way. “You can't change mathematical reality,” Austin objected.

“And you can't know you're on the right path until you get to the end of it,” she responded, unchastened. “So why not try an alternative route? Why not turn at the stoplight rather than following directions to go straight?”

“Because you'd be making a wrong turn,” Austin said, pointing out what he considered to be an implicit defect in her logic, while the others at the table looked on like spectators at a tennis match.

“I don't believe in wrong turns,” Naomi stated.

“What do you mean you don't believe in them?” Austin was bewildered. “They're not like fairies. It's not a question of whether or not they exist.”

“What you might call taking a wrong turn, I call taking the scenic route. And you never know what you'll find.”

“But you know what you won't find,” Austin shot back. “Wherever it was you were driving.”

“We have a difference of opinion.”

“Do you believe in differences of opinion or are they just mental scenic routes?” He was seething. And he wasn't even sure why.

“So did you decide to be a doctor when you were, like, twelve?” Naomi asked with a noticeable edge to her voice.

“Actually I was ten,” he said, once again stopping short of expressing a crucial detail. But if Naomi had gone to his elementary school, she should have been well aware of what had happened to him when he was ten. “Do you also have something against doctors?”

“No,” she replied, “I have something against people making life-and-death decisions who never experienced life.”

“And have you experienced life?”

She shuddered again. But this time there was something vulnerable about it.

“No,” she said softly, before adding, “I'm sorry,” as she excused herself from the table.

It occurred to Austin that he was the one who owed
her
an apology, for the spilled eggs and inadvertent groping, and now his possibly excessive combativeness. He vowed to say something when she returned to the table. But she didn't return. And she didn't speak to him for the remainder of the reception.