He was staring at the tablecloth between them, and now it seemed like a vast field of snow.
She leaned forward slightly, slowly, taking care to keep her voice even. “We’re aware there is a complicating issue.”
“And you know the issue.”
“Only that it’s personal. It has to be; you loved being a surgeon, as every true master loves his art. Whatever stopped you didn’t take your ability, otherwise you couldn’t be making sculptures with emotion and beauty and character, all small enough to fit inside the eye of a needle. You can do what we need done.”
“I’m not a surgeon anymore,” Jones said quietly. “Now I teach other doctors to operate.”
“What about teaching them to do what no one else has ever done?”
Jones looked away, his eyes and his thoughts wandering across the distant mountains. Lara knew she had already pushed too hard, had already violated an internal space, perhaps a sacred one; but she could not give up. She added quickly, “I have a colleague—a friend—who works for my company. She’s a psychologist, she’s excellent. Maybe if you and she sat down together and talked about the issues that—”
Jones pushed back from the table, with icy calm.
Lara spoke hurriedly. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“No, it’s fine.”
“No, please, it’s not fine.”
“I’m sorry I’ve wasted your time, and I don’t want to waste your dinner. It’s been…” Without another word he stood and walked out.
Jones was striding quickly along the sidewalk when Lara broke from the restaurant doors and rushed to catch him. “Dr. Jones! Please—I’m sorry! Your life is your life, and I don’t mean to violate your privacy. I know I’ve done that already, it’s just… this project means a lot to me, personally, and… I just don’t know when to quit.”
Without breaking stride, he said, “And you think maybe I’m a quitter?”
“I didn’t say that!”
“No, I said that.” Jones stopped and wheeled toward her, but instead of staring into her he stared away, some argument raging within his own head. She watched him, and she did not push him now; she had pushed too much already.
And in that moment an awareness dawned in Lara that both thrilled and disturbed her; she realized that Jones found her as unique as she found him. She knew he wanted to walk away from her and her offer the way he had walked away from everyone else who sought to exploit his talents; yet she was sure, in the way women are always sure of what can’t be proven yet is clear to them alone, that the few moments they had spent together were as welcome to Jones in his aloneness as they were to Lara in hers.
For what seemed to her a long time he stared at the distant blue mountains. Then he said, “The micro sculptures. Would you like to see how they’re made?”
Her smile grew slowly, from small to huge. “Oh yeah,” she said.
What she saw through the magnifying lenses—one for each eye, resembling a pair of blunted binoculars—reminded her of one of those cigar store Indians she had seen pictured in history books, so massive and majestic did it look. It was an exquisite carving: a handsome head held nobly, the proud posture of a chieftain in ceremonial feathered headdress, exquisite detail evident in the chiseled features of the face of red clay, a sculpture not quite complete. Jones lifted an instrument and eased Lara to the side so that he could share one of the viewing lenses with her, and as she watched through the other she saw an amazing apparition: a sculpting blade moved into her view, and it looked impossibly huge in comparison. The flaws in the steel of the scalpel showed like canyons on the moon.
Jones removed the blade from her view and stepped back so that Lara could look through both lenses again. “This is a practice model,” he said. “I try to get the residents in here to experiment with the technique, and I start them on oversized pieces.”
“Oversized?” Lara wondered, looking through the magnifiers at the noble chieftain. “How large is this?”
“The chief here is about the size of an exclamation point, in standard type.” He flipped on the light of a microscope on the lab table. “This one is a bit smaller. It would fit inside a period.”
She pulled back from the magnifiers, shot a disbelieving glance at him, and leaned to look through the microscope. What she saw there was a statue of Thomas Jefferson, standing within the rotunda of the Jefferson Memorial. The carving looked so real that she spoke in a whisper, as if not to disturb him. “Jefferson…”
“Can you read the inscription?”
She pulled back from the microscope. “You’re kidding.”
He just looked at her. She peered back into the lenses and dialed the scope around to change the view. And sure enough, the inscription on the sculpted walls around the clay Jefferson came into focus. She read, “I have sworn upon the altar of God…” She pulled back, startled. “Show-off.”
“It’s all about touch. Surgeons are taught to see and think, but to work like this you’ve got to feel. Want to try it?” He picked up a tiny probe and extended it to her. Seeing her hesitate, he smiled and urged, “Come on. You can practice on Chief Red Wing.”
Lara’s heart was thumping—was it the challenge of the carving or the way he was guiding her hand?—as she pushed a blade, the tiny probe, looking huge in magnification, closer to the half-finished sculpture of the noble Indian. The probe was trembling noticeably, and Lara backed from the lenses, shaking her head. “It’s so small…”
“Just rest the edge against the base of the statue first,” he said in the same voice he had used to calm the young surgeon earlier. He leaned in to a second set of monitoring lenses, also trained on the clay model—and watched her following his instructions. He could tell instantly that she had great skill in her hands. “Good—that’s very good! I haven’t seen anybody do that on their first try. Okay, now, before you move the edge, listen to your heartbeat.”
“My what?”
“Your hearing’s good, isn’t it?”
She looked at him and said loudly, “HUH?!”
He grinned; she was good at this, good enough to joke while doing it. “We can all hear our hearts beat; we just don’t. But for this you have to listen.”
She peered through the lenses again, returned the blade to the base of the statue, and used all her willpower to focus on holding the cutting blade perfectly still, against such a tiny object, and listening to her heart. “I can’t hear it!”
“Yes, you can. You feel it more than hear it, but you can hear it too, if you focus more on the listening than on the keeping still.”
She was trying so hard that sweat was forming on her forehead. For a moment he thought she had given up, like so many of his students did when confronted with a challenge they didn’t believe they could master. Then he saw it: she took on a kind of trance, like Jones showed in the operating room; and as she did this, he glanced up from his magnifiers and studied her face.
He spoke in a soothing voice. “Now lift the blade and hold it with just a slight gap between it and the chief’s headdress.” He looked into the microscope again. “See how the blade moves with each of your heartbeats? Find the rhythm; it’ll help you focus.”
She cleared her mind of everything except her heartbeat; the blade steadied.
“Good,” he whispered. “Now, in the interval between the beats… shave off that rough edge of the headdress.”
They both watched through the magnifiers as she succeeded. “I did it!” she yelled.
“You sure did.”