“Woolcott. Aaron.”
“Where is this Old Bay place?”
“Oh, I can drive you there. I’ll swing by and pick you up.”
“Never mind,” she said. “Our lot has a punch-clock.”
“Excuse me?”
“Our parking lot. We pay by the hour. No point forking over any more money than I have to.”
“Oh.”
She stood up, and I stood, too. “I won’t be finished here till seven,” she told me.
“That’s okay! I’ll reserve a table for half past. The restaurant is only about fifteen minutes from here.”
“In that case, a quarter past would appear to be more appropriate,” she said.
“Fine,” I said. “A quarter past.”
I took a business card from my billfold and wrote down the Old Bay’s address. As a rule I would have written it on the blank side of the card, but this time I chose the front. I wanted her to become familiar with my name. I wanted her to start calling me “Aaron.”
But all she said when we parted was, “Goodbye, then.” She didn’t use any form of my name. And she didn’t bother seeing me out.
I could tell she must not be from Baltimore, because anyone from Baltimore would have known the Old Bay. That was where all our parents used to eat. It was old-fashioned in both good ways and bad. (The crab soup, for instance, was the real thing, but the waiters were in their eighties and the atmosphere was gloomy and dank.) I had chosen it for geographical reasons, since it wasn’t far from Dorothy’s office, but also I wanted a place that was not too businesslike, not too efficient. I wanted her to start thinking of me in a more, so to speak, social light.
Well. Clearly I had my work cut out for me, because she arrived in her doctor coat. Dressed-up couples dotted the room, the women in the soft pastels of early spring, but there stood Dorothy beside the maître d’ with her leather satchel slung bandolier-style across her chest and her hands thrust deep in the pockets of her starched white coat.
I stood up and raised a hand. She headed for my table, leaving the maître d’ in her dust. “Hi,” she said when she reached me. She took hold of the chair opposite mine, but I beat her to it and slid it out for her. “Welcome!” I told her as she sat down. I returned to my own chair. “Thank — thank you for coming.”
“It’s awfully dark,” she said, looking around the room. She freed herself from her satchel and set it at her feet. “You’re expecting me to read in this?”
“Read? Oh, no, only the menu,” I said, and I gave a chuckle that came out sounding fake. “I did phone Dr. Worth for a list of questions to ask you, but he said what he would prefer is, we should arrange a time when you can walk me through your facility. See the process from start to finish, as if I were a patient.”
In fact, I had not mentioned a word of this to Dr. Worth, but I doubted if he would object to my doing some of his research for him.
Dorothy said, “So … we came to this restaurant just to set up an appointment?”
“But then also we need to discuss your terms. How much would you propose to be paid, for one thing, and — what would you like to drink?”
Our waiter had arrived, was why I asked, but Dorothy looked startled, perhaps imagining for an instant that this was another business decision. Then her expression cleared, and she told the waiter, “A Diet Pepsi, please.”
“Diet!” I said. “A doctor, drinking artificial sweeteners?”
She blinked.
“Don’t you know what aspartame does to your central nervous system?” I asked. (I’d been heavily influenced by The Beginner’s Book of Nutrition, not to mention my sister’s anti-soft-drink crusade.) “Have a glass of wine, instead. A red wine; good for your heart.”
“Well … all right.”
I accepted the wine list from the waiter and chose a Malbec, two glasses. When the waiter had left, Dorothy said, “I’m not very used to drinking alcohol.”
“But you’re familiar with the virtues of the Mediterranean diet, surely.”
“Yes,” she said. Her eyes narrowed.
“And I know you must have heard about olive oil.”
“Look,” she said. “Are you going to start telling me your symptoms?”
“What?”
“I’m here to discuss a book project, okay? I don’t want to check out some little freckle that might be cancer.”
“Check out what? What freckle?”
“Or hear about some time when you thought your pulse might have skipped a beat.”
“Are you out of your mind?” I asked.
She started looking uncertain.
“My pulse is perfect!” I said. “What are you talking about?”
“Sorry,” she said.
She lowered her gaze to her place setting. She moved her spoon half an inch to her right. She said, “A lot of times, people outside of the office ask me for free advice. Even if they’re just sitting next to me on an airplane, they ask.”
“Did I ask? Did you hear me ask you anything?”
“Well, but I thought—”
“You seem to be suffering from a serious misapprehension,” I told her. “If I need advice, I’ll make an appointment with my family physician. Who is excellent, by the way, and knows my entire medical history besides, not that I ever have the slightest reason to call on him.”
“I already said I was sorry.”
She took off her glasses and polished them on her napkin, still keeping her eyes lowered. Her eyelashes were thick but very short and stubby. Her mouth was clamped in a thin, unhappy line.
I said, “Hey. Dorothy. Want to start over?”
There was a pause. I saw the corners of her lips start to twitch, and then she looked up at me and smiled.
It makes me sad now to think back on the early days of our courtship. We didn’t know anything at all. Dorothy didn’t even know it was a courtship, at the beginning, and I was kind of like an overgrown puppy, at least as I picture myself from this distance. I was romping around her all eager and panting, dying to impress her, while for some time she remained stolidly oblivious.
By that stage of life, I’d had my fair share of romances. I had left behind the high-school girls who were so fearful of seeming freakish themselves that they couldn’t afford to be seen with me, and in college I became a kind of pet project for the aspiring social workers that all the young women of college age seemed to be. They associated my cane with, who knows, old war wounds or something. They took the premature glints of white in my hair as a sign of mysterious past sufferings. As you might surmise, I had an allergy to this viewpoint, but usually at the outset I didn’t suspect that they held it. (Or didn’t let myself suspect.) I just gave myself over to what I fancied was true love. As soon as I grasped the situation, though, I would walk out. Or sometimes they would walk out, once they lost all hope of rescuing me. Then I graduated, and in the year and a half since, I had pretty much stuck to myself, taking care to avoid the various sweet young women that my family seemed to keep strewing in my path.
You see now why I found Dorothy so appealing — Dorothy, who wouldn’t even discuss the Mediterranean diet with me.
I went to her office a few days later to tour her treatment rooms, asking what if a patient had this kind of tumor, what if a patient had that kind of tumor. I went again with a list of follow-up questions that Dr. Worth had supposedly dictated to me. And after that, of course, I had to show her my rough draft over another dinner, this time at a place with better lighting.
Then a major development: I suggested we go to a movie the following evening. An outing with no useful purpose. She had a little trouble with that one. I saw her working to make the adjustment in her mind — switching me from “business” to “pleasure.” She said, “I don’t know,” and then she said, “What movie were you thinking of?”