“I mean that we might have locked into a conversational mode that has more to do with personality — our specific personalities vis-à-vis one another, and my intensity, in particular — than with any externals. We might be speaking this way regardless of the situation, is what I’m suggesting.”
“Do you think we would have talked this way if I’d kept our five o’clock appointment?”
“No,” she said. “I’m on my second wind.”
This made him laugh spontaneously, it was so little what he expected she’d answer. When he laughed, he was aware of the huge weight he had to lift off his chest to get more air into his lungs. That awareness took him back to the moment in the car when he had sat looking at the hospital; that had been the first moment he had registered the crushing weight, and suddenly he could remember how painful it had felt — his wondering how he would get out of the car and proceed, and the thought, as if perfectly logical, that he need not button the four buttons of his coat, but instead he could grab each side and close it over his front. All the better an image: the huddled man, braced against the wind, tears shaken from his eyes a response to the frigid wind, not tears of emotion.
This time, when he looked at her, he was convinced he had been speaking when he had not. He was convinced that he had let her in — ridiculous, but he meant it literally, not metaphorically — that she had been some airborne particle, and his coat had not been tightly held against him, so that she worked her way inside, the way mice find their way into walls in winter, the way cobwebs sometimes flutter onto your fingertips. He was thinking of her as a mouse? A cobweb? She was a real person, who must be contended with. Looking at him, as if they’d come full circle, with her eyes again narrowed so that he knew she saw him in sharp focus, and that she was waiting for something. He also knew what he wanted: he wanted her to be what she was not, a prophet, someone who could tell him, definitively, that McCallum would not die, the invincible authority figure he had always secretly questioned whether any therapist could be. Confronted with a smart, complex person, he had tried to make her a small, gray annoyance. Failing that, he had tried to see her as drooping tendrils of dust.
“Just between you and me. McCallum isn’t going to die, is he?” he said.
“Whew,” she said. “That’s a slight departure from what we were talking about.”
“You’re a doctor,” he said. “If they take out a spleen — they can remove a spleen without its being a big deal, right?”
“It isn’t a good sign that when they’ve operated and things have stabilized, there’s sudden internal bleeding.”
“I wouldn’t imagine,” he said.
“I hope we find out he’s all right soon,” she said. She looked at her watch. “My son’s picking me up in another five minutes.”
“You have a son who drives?”
“Learner’s permit. You can get them at sixteen. His father’s giving him a lesson.”
“They dropped you off?”
“I don’t live with my husband. I took a bus, but my son and his father are going to pick me up and drop us at home.”
“Ah,” he said.
“He turned sixteen a week and a half ago, and already he’s volunteering to pick me up because he knows he can hit his father up for the car, and his father will feel like he’s doing a good deed to let him drive, then deposit us both safely at home.”
“That’s nice of him,” he said.
“My husband and I divorced because he was an alcoholic, but for the last three years he has been sober, married to another woman who has given birth to two of their children, and he’s very, very sorry and wants me back.”
He stared at her. Such complexity, everywhere. For what seemed an eternity, he had been sitting in an orange plastic chair, talking to a pretty young woman who sat on the corner of a sofa covered in material that looked as if a cat-clawing contest had been held atop it. Some doctor, some nurse, must have brought the sofa from home — the sofa with the clawed arms, the nearly threadbare material, a bulge of foam rubber from the far cushion, one leg propped up — he now saw — with a cinder block, in place of a gold-tipped peg leg.
“That sounds peculiar?” she said.
“Not that so much — the sofa. You’re sitting on a deteriorating sofa that looks like it’s been used after hours for a cat fight.”
“McCallum used to miss his own sofa,” she said. “His son is hyperactive, and he jumped one too many times, and he wouldn’t replace it. He put the old sofa with the broken frame by the curb for the garbage pickup, and then there were just the uncomfortable ladder-back chairs.”
“It’s a lot to have to deal with,” he said. Which, to his mind, meant all of it: the hand you were dealt, fate, unpredictable meetings in anonymous buildings, even. The alcoholic who reformed too late. The sofa frame not built to withstand repeated impact.
He was so agitated that he did not expect the doctor to be walking toward them, up to the last second, when he looked up and understood that they, alone, were the focus of the man’s attention. He asked if Jenny Oughton was McCallum’s wife. Didn’t he realize why McCallum was a patient? You always heard that doctors and nurses did nothing but gossip — could this doctor have no idea of the particular circumstances surrounding McCallum’s admission? Or could he have thought McCallum’s wife was out on bail, cooling her heels until her husband got out of surgery?
Jenny Oughton said she was not; she was a friend. Marshall said the same thing, because, again, it did not seem the right time to qualify anything.
The doctor told them the surgery had gone well. McCallum was in the recovery room, the internal bleeding stopped. He seemed to be searching their faces to see if he needed to elaborate. Then, in their muteness, he must have decided he could walk away. Marshall had risen, Jenny had not. Still, the doctor seemed more focussed on her, shaking Marshall’s hand as he looked through him. The guy’s just tired, Marshall thought. What havoc McCallum’s wife had caused. What misery and pain.
“Well,” Marshall sighed, sinking down onto the chair again as the doctor left. “Who would have thought we’d cross paths once when I walked in on a book discussion group, and the next time in the hospital? Did whatever you were discussing that night clarify anything about this?” He was mocking himself, repeating one of Gordon’s annoying assumptions: that books did not pertain to real life.
“That was probably in October, wasn’t it?” Jenny Oughton said. “As I recall, we were discussing The Scarlet Letter.”
He shook his head. Only fair that his inner-directed sarcasm had been mistaken for serious thought. This woman did not seem frivolous. She probably heard very few tossed-off comments during the course of any day.
“It was interesting that a lot of us who thought we remembered the book had forgotten the husband,” she said. “We remembered her punishment by the community, but not by Chillingworth. It must have been wonderful to be able to give characters names like that. No writer could get away with that now.”
She’d caught his interest. “What were you discussing about Chillingworth?” he said.
“That he returned to haunt her, and it turned out we’d all forgotten. I guess you grow up and you want to forget there can be real bogeymen. And the way Hawthorne presented him, he was so … well, chilling. Old and ugly. Absent. He’d wanted her youth and then deserted her, really. That’s not terribly different from what Susan McCallum was protesting, I suppose. In the book, your sympathy is all for the one who’s been abandoned: Hester Prynne. It’s not as easy to see what the transgression was with McCallum, obviously. And he isn’t old and ugly. He’s actually quite attractive. But she thought he’d withdrawn, and then when he reacted the way he did about her pregnancy, I suppose Susan thought everything was going to be worse. I’m not sanctioning stabbing him. I’m just saying that when you don’t see the thing that’s stalking someone, often you forget to factor it in. But that thing can be as real as a person.”