Even a patient husband could endure only so much of this treatment. By the time Karen’s face and body were entirely healed they were barely speaking to each other. While she was recovering, he’d moved into the spare room so she’d be more comfortable at night and he remained there, moving more and more of his belongings out of their old room. He worked longer hours and so they didn’t have to dine together. Soon this became normal for them, an established routine. They inhabited the same house but moved around each other like flotsam caught in opposing currents. At a certain point it seemed that at any moment one of them would say out loud what they both knew and then they would separate.
But then, sometimes, Karen would come across David unexpectedly in a room where she had not known he would be. She would remember what it had been like between them before. She wondered if that feeling could ever come back and she would imagine it returning as if it had always existed and had only been away on a long journey. Or David would arrive home at night to find Karen fallen asleep with her book still open on her chest and the bedside lamp still on and, coming in to switch it off, he’d notice the dark storm of her hair on the pillow and think how beautiful it was. And so they would each put off for another day saying that they thought that one of them should leave. And another day. And another. And another.
3.
Cynthia met Kris online during her second year of residency after medical school.
She had decided to apply for a residency in surgery, even though this meant a longer training period and even more lengthy hours and greater stress, because she didn’t want to settle for one of the specializations that she considered “mommy track” like dermatology or pediatrics; she wanted to attain the highest level of prestige and skill in her field. When she was accepted to surgery she had felt both thrilled and terrified. She moved to Madison, Wisconsin, after she finished her exams and started her internship at the university hospital there in July.
Of course, she had very little time to socialize or date or to pursue any interests outside work — she’d loved cycling during college and she’d taken several long bicycle trips, including one around the coast of Ireland; she’d played the piano well enough that she’d considered going to a conservatory to study composition and performance; she liked to garden and to cook; but all those things went by the wayside now. She had expected this. She had no time for anything that first year except work and it was thrilling and exhausting. Sometimes she envied the interns who were going into general practice and would be done in a year or two, but other times she pitied them: how could you ever want to leave the intensity of the hospital, a place where you knew the things you did and the decisions you made were of the greatest importance, where you were changing and saving lives every day?
But the body has its own cravings quite apart from the intellect, and sometimes she would feel the absence of a lover in her life as clearly as a hunger pang and then she would wonder if she’d made the right decision. It was not the same for women, she understood; even now, the expectations for a wife were different from those for a husband, and although of course many individual men and women did not conform to traditional roles and found a way to love each other anyway, still when a man she was on a date with learned she was going to be a surgeon or when after a few meetings he found he had to see her only when her work allowed, which was not often, she felt him detach, retrench, withdraw. Sometimes she could tell the exact moment when this happened. Something in the man’s posture or in his facial expression changed. The duration of time in which he’d look at her would shorten until at last he didn’t look at her at all and then she would get the call or, worse, the email or once even, to her horror, a text message, telling her that he didn’t think it was working out between them and he liked her but was sorry, etc.
All the other interns in her track were men and she tried dating a couple of them but they were too much like her: ambitious, focused and competitive.
Then her elderly parents split up, to Cynthia and her siblings’ great surprise, at the end of her first year of residency. She had thought that they were happy together or, if not happy, at least content, at least comfortable with each other. Their separation really shook her up; what other model of relationship did she have? Her brother Harry was on his second divorce. Her sister Karen occupied a marriage that seemed great at the beginning but then lost all the air inside it; Karen and her husband David seemed more like ghosts haunting each other than like spouses. Was that the point of all this effort, to end up trapped with someone in a set of small rooms, unable to either leave or truly inhabit your own life?
So Cynthia stopped trying. She focused on her work and when she was working she was happy. There was so much to learn, so much to take in; sometimes she thought she could feel the new pathways of understanding being driven through her brain like roads. She was coming to see the body in ways that she could not have imagined before, to understand how well it could recover from damage and disruption, how adroitly it could compensate when it encountered some unexpected obstacle to the fulfillment of its functions and desires. It seemed to her that this capacity to adapt was its particular gift, its magic. Sometimes she thought she could see through the people around her, through their seemingly inert flesh and into the fizzing, busy miracle of blood and bones and cells remaking and renewing themselves.
She finished her shifts exhausted and most nights or mornings she would come home and crawl into bed and drop into sleep like a stone into a pool of water. But sometimes she was still full of the feverish energy, the adrenaline that had sustained her through the many hours on her feet and then she could not sleep.
On these insomniac nights she poured herself a drink and sat down at her computer and clicked through pages of brightly colored ephemera: news stories about the latest film star to be stopped for reckless driving and ordered into rehab, pictures of children in faraway countries rescued after floods and earthquakes, quizzes that told her which Beatle she would be if she ever had been or ever could be a Beatle. And sometimes she chatted with people whom she’d never met and never thought she would.
In the different chat rooms she would visit, she introduced herself to whoever was already there and described herself a little. She told who she was and what she did, though never exactly where she lived. She talked for a while with the mostly male interlocutors who came her way, and they were variously dull or interesting, intelligent or stupid, charming or crass; she liked each of these qualities or not depending on her mood. Some evenings she was pleased to find herself communicating with someone erudite and cultured about the works of art they both loved and the books they’d read. Other times she was glad when the person typed some blunt obscenity about her breasts or cunt. She replied in kind or closed the window on her screen immediately depending on whether the explicitness turned her on or bored her. Eventually, she started to get sleepy and could go to bed and rest.
This was how she first encountered Kris. The name came up in a chat room for classical music enthusiasts that Cynthia had been to on previous occasions, but she had never seen this user before. Hello, she typed. After a moment, the mild reply came: Hello.