Private Practices (10 page)

Disappointed, Mulenberg muttered, “Have him call me tomorrow,” and gave the nurse his home number. After a whole afternoon at the hospital today, he'd have to rest up tomorrow before trying to come in again. Then, hanging up, he made his way back to the elevator and took it down to the lounge.

Alithorn was there already, he saw as he propelled himself awkwardly through the swinging leather-paneled doors. A waiter leaped to help him, but he brushed him aside and wheeled toward the fireside table his old friend had chosen.

“Hey! Harry! Great to see you,” Alithorn called out, his suntanned face enthusiastic. Mulenberg reached out across white linen to shake his hand and for a moment forgot about Sidney Zauber. At least the chief of the department still considered him a friend, a person of value, despite his infirmities. Pulling his chair close to the side of the table, where he could be opposite Alithorn and yet still enjoy the pretty sight of the flames in the lounge's giant fireplace, he said buoyantly. “What're we drinking?”

It was Alithorn who brought his mind back to Sidney. As soon as they had ordered, he said, “Did you hear Sid? How was it? I meant to get over and hear him but I got tied up.”

“He was all right,” Mulenberg muttered and wondered whether he and Alithorn were still on good enough terms for him to criticize Sidney and be taken seriously. “Only all right?” he was saying dubiously. “He's our house genius.” Then Alithorn stuck his hand into his pocket, pulled out a small, carved ivory animal and began stroking it thoughtfully.

“Some genius,” Mulenberg said, deciding to chance an attack on Sidney, but resolving not to make it sound personal. “I know a guy in the Caribbean who says Sidney's research protocol is wretchedly designed. He says they've spent all the money doing follow-up studies of women who stay on the pill, and none at all on women who go off it.”

“You can't do everything. There's just so much money and you have to figure out how best to spend it,” Alithorn said, his eyes on the carving. “Anyway, it's not my lookout, is it? It's the Deutsch Foundation that will have to worry about that. Now, if you told me he was screwing up around here, that might be another story.”

Mulenberg swallowed the last of his bourbon and, feeling warm, dug out a cube of ice and chewed on it. “When a guy who can't bear to be questioned makes a mistake,” he said sharply, “he starts not answering to anybody.”

“What do you mean?” Alithorn raised his eyes inquisitively to Mulenberg's. But the incident in the lecture hall was too embarrassing to relate. Mulenberg retreated to generalities. “Sidney's been awfully arrogant lately.”

“Well, why shouldn't he be?” Alithorn muttered, disappointed. “Weren't you, in your heyday?” He shook his head. “I'm surprised at you, Harry. There are a lot of guys around here who are jealous of Sidney Zauber, but they're the guys who never amounted to much themselves.” Suddenly he handed his piece of ivory across the table to Mulenberg. “Maybe being in that chair is getting you down. You ought to have a hobby.”

Glancing at the carving only briefly, Mulenberg tried to resume his discussion of Sidney. Perhaps he really ought to be more specific. “This fellow in the Caribbean I mentioned,” he began, but Alithorn had lost interest in the topic. “Why don't you come with me to my netsuke dealer sometime?” he interrupted Mulenberg.

“I'm not the type for hobbies.”

“You'd be smart to develop one. It'd help, now that you have so much time on your hands. Here, look at the ears on this tiger. Now the fellow who carved this was really what you could call a genius.”

Mulenberg studied the tiny animal. “I suppose you're right,” he murmured, feeling shunted aside once again. The heat from the fireplace began to oppress him and he pushed himself slightly back from the table, his eyelids drooping.

“What's the matter?” Alithorn asked. “You dizzy?”

“No,” Mulenberg said. He straightened up in his chair and opened his eyes wide. But he had dropped the little carved tiger. It wasn't in his hand or even in his lap and Alithorn had to bend and retrieve it from under the table.

On Friday Ben hurried most of his patients. He had told Naomi he would finish up as early as he could, and would call her and pick her up at her office in sufficient time to avoid the rush hour traffic. But he was delayed by Claudia, his last patient for the day, who telephoned to say she would be a bit late for her two-thirty appointment. Waiting for her, Ben impatiently browsed for a second time through the file on her which Cora had set on his desk.

It had come from Sidney's file cabinet. Sidney had met Claudia in his professional capacity. She had first come to see him some six years ago at a time when Harry Mulenberg, her gynecologist, was out of town, and ever since then she had been in Sidney's care. Even after they married. It was unorthodox, but Sidney always said he saw no reason why so many doctors eschewed looking after their own wives and children. Who else would give them the most concerned care?

Of course, Sidney had also said that if Claudia got pregnant or ill, he would pass her on to someone else; it was medical tradition. What puzzled Ben, had puzzled him ever since the night he had learned of her pregnancy, was why he'd decided to pass Claudia on to him. He was sure that Sidney didn't think particularly highly of his professional capabilities. Yet he'd chosen him over Stearns, over Alithorn. Why?

Curious, he studied Claudia's file, hoping to find a clue. But he came across nothing—nothing that aided him. Claudia had first visited Sidney because of a mild case of vaginitis, he read. She had regular and painless menstrual cycles. She was in excellent health and had no drug allergies. She did have cystic breasts, and a retracted nipple, and as a result Sidney had recommended she use an IUD, rather than pills, for birth control. She'd had no trouble with the IUD. She had no trouble with anything, he thought. Her gynecological history was as exemplary as her social behavior.

He was still reading Sidney's scrawl when Cora opened the door and let Claudia in. “Mrs. Doctor Sidney Zauber,” Cora said. The two women were fond of each other and Cora loved to make Claudia laugh by embroidering her name with Sidney's title.

Claudia smiled at Cora until she had closed the door and left. But as soon as they were alone he saw that she was upset. Her white skin seemed paler than usual. Her smile didn't fade. It vanished. “Is something wrong?” he asked her.

“It's Mulenberg,” she said, her voice subdued. “Marilyn just called me. That's why I'm so late. He's had another stroke, he's in the hospital again.”

He leaned forward, concerned. “I'm so sorry. Is it serious?”

“It was on the left side of the brain. He can't speak. It'll take months before he's better. If he gets better.”

“I'm sure he will. He'll be getting the best of care.”

“I hope you're right.” She shifted in her chair and then stood up, squaring her shoulders, commanding herself to stop brooding. Her arms, in beige cashmere, were long, the palms turned forward, like a dancer's.

“Shall we get started?” he asked.

“Yes. Yes, sure.” But when he walked toward the examining room she didn't follow him. Instead, she dawdled, digging into her pocketbook for a handkerchief, blowing her nose, putting away the handkerchief and taking out a pocket mirror, with which she studied her eyes.

“Claudia?” he said, reminding her he was waiting.

At last she began moving, catching up to him, her silk skirt rustling. She was incredibly graceful, he thought, and reached his arm out to open the door for her. And then suddenly he remembered Naomi's awkwardness. Her habit of always augmenting her speech with gestures. Her tendency to drop things. To spill and scatter them. It was the last thought he wanted to entertain this afternoon when he was on his way to meet her. He turned his head away from Claudia, holding the door wide, keeping his eyes averted.

In the examining room, as she sat on the edge of the table waiting for Cora to take her blood pressure, there was no way to escape admiring her. No way to escape seeing the regal way she held her neck. No way to avoid looking lingeringly at her eyes, her neck, her hair. Indeed, he had to, for these were the areas he always examined first, the places where he looked for gross metabolic changes. But her eyes were vivid and unclouded, her neck was smooth and straight, her hair was thick and glistening. He could see at once that pregnancy was agreeing with her, could tell that she was doing well, and all without touching her.

Nor was he eager to touch her. Sitting there, her body statue-still, she was somehow forbidding, alarming to him.

“Slip your robe down,” Cora was instructing her. “So Ben can check your breasts.”

She did, but still he didn't want to touch her. Her breasts were white, translucent, their surface ornamented by a tracing of tiny, vivid blue veins. The areolas were large and brown, the nipples a healthy pink. But one was fierce, an erect little turret, while the other was collapsed, bent inward. Oddly, the irregularity delighted him. She was not perfect after all. He put his hands forward and began palpating her breasts, and then at last she was no longer Sidney's wife but his patient.

It made him sensitive to her in a way he had never been.

“That nipple's always been like that,” she said. “Ever since I was a girl.”

“I know. It was in your file.” He touched the flattened nipple and tried to push it upward to see if it would emulate its mate but it remained inverted.

“It's ugly, isn't it?”

“Not at all.”

“I always thought it was. When I was a girl, it embarrassed me dreadfully.”

“Poor Claudia.”

“Sometimes it still does. It makes me feel ugly.”

“You've got the pregnancy blues,” he commented, wanting to be supportive.

“You think so?”

“Sure. I'll have to tell Sidney to be nicer to you.”

“No. Please don't.” Her voice was surprisingly strained and she half sat up on the table.

“I was kidding,” he said, experiencing a sudden surge of alarm. “I was only kidding.”

He patted her on the shoulder and she lay back down again and he signaled to Cora that he was ready to do the internal examination. Cora adjusted Claudia's legs into the stirrups and pushed back the sheet that had been covering the lower part of her body. And then she stepped away and he put his fingers into Claudia's vagina, trying to measure the size and placement of the fetus. “Everything's fine,” he said as he probed. “One hundred percent fine.”

It was only then, just as he was withdrawing his hand, that he noticed that her thigh was bruised. There were several black-and-blue marks, a few quite purplish and vivid, a few others faded and ash-gray, on the outside of her thigh. “What happened?” he asked her, touching them. “Those look quite nasty.”

She winced and said, “I fell.”

He frowned.

“It was on my way to work a couple of weeks ago. Right in front of the museum.”

“A couple of weeks ago and then a couple of days ago too?”

“Yes,” she said quickly. “It's terribly icy there, right across from the park.”

Suddenly his mind was flooded with memories of Sidney's impulsiveness and violence toward him when they were young, the pinches and kicks and punches he had endured, the lies he had invented to prevent Sara from knowing her elder son's cruelty, her younger son's submission.

“Can I get up now?” Claudia was asking.

He heard her as if she were a voice in a dream. There seemed no point in answering.

“You're finished, aren't you, Dr. Zauber?” This time it was Cora questioning him.

He forced his mind back from the distance it had taken him. “Oh, yes. Oh, sure.”

Claudia slipped energetically from the table, but when she stood, the paper gown falling around her thighs and shielding her, he couldn't stop thinking about the bruises. He wasn't sure that Sidney had beaten Claudia, and yet some instinct told him it must be so. Certainly it would at last explain why Sidney had wanted her in his care, and not in that of some gossiping stranger.

Ben went into his office while Claudia dressed and, preoccupied with his new theory, wondered why the notion of Sidney's indulging in sadistic sexual play with Claudia had never before occurred to him. Then he remembered that it was shortly after Sidney had started seeing Claudia that he had started taking the barbiturates daily, quieting himself, dimming his perceptions. His mind was no longer so dulled. He sat at his desk and determined to question Claudia about her relationship with Sidney. But she came in, armored in silk and cashmere, her face a mask, and immediately began asking him about the results of the examination.

“How's Sidney taking your pregnancy?” he said, trying at least to introduce the subject of Sidney. She answered him quite smoothly, with her usual well-mannered restraint, “Quite well, thank you.”

Suddenly he felt sexually aroused. Although he found the notion of Sidney's beating Claudia repellent, it also excited him. With whom was it he identified, he wondered. With Claudia, the victim? Or with Sidney, the aggressor? “I usually ask my patients about their emotional states,” he said, trying to sound casual. “Oh, whether they're looking forward to the baby … Whether their husbands are … Whether the pregnancy affects their sexual closeness …” Claudia was looking at him coolly. “That sort of thing,” he wound down.

“Everything's fine,” Claudia said. “Just fine.”

Her answer made him feel ashamed of having wanted to probe and as suddenly as it had come, his feeling of arousal vanished. He still wasn't sure whether his notion that Sidney had injured Claudia was correct, but he knew with perfect surety that Claudia didn't want him to pursue the subject.

He could appreciate that. When he was young it had always seemed to him shameful that he tolerated Sidney's tantrums and abuse, but the thought of others knowing that he did had always seemed more painful than pain itself. So he said nothing further to her about the bruises after all, but simply answered her questions and let her leave, her self-respect intact.