The large auditorium was packed with medical types who had shown up for the weekend kickoff. There were doctors, interns and even a few administrators. From the podium on the stage, Dr. Edwards was showing a video of his latest technique in endovascular stent grafting, while explaining how the aortic surgical program would guide his fellow professionals into the new world of advanced medical technologies.
It was career-altering, the future of cardio-technology, and Tyler would be a part of it all. The intern next to him noticed the smile on his face, and Tyler nodded toward the stage. “Takes me back to this one time when I had a descending thoracic aortic aneurysm. Eighteen hours of surgery that nearly got the better of me but the guy lived, went home in less than a week and he’s now diving off the Caymans, and sends me a card every year at Christmas.”
“Wicked awesome,” replied the twenty-four-year-old resident who was still green enough to believe that eighteen hours of surgery was a good thing.
The purpose of the fellowship was to find new, noninvasive methods that were of less risk to the patient. No more digging into chest cavities. Yes, it was healthier for the patient, but deep in the heart of every surgeon was the thrill of cutting into skin, and then mastering the miracle that was the human heart.
While Dr. Edwards explained the long-term benefits of a homograft valve, Tyler wondered about the other aspect of the human heart—the other, less fascinating, and more irrational part. The things that women expected from men.
The emotional crap.
Was that why Cynthia had cheated? Was he truly responsible? Was he cold? A brick? The more he thought about this, the more his head began to ache and he wondered if women were responsible for intracranial aneurysm. Probably. He pressed his fingers to his temples and then he moved his wayward thoughts from the crisis of understanding the female psyche, to the more pleasing idea of straddling the female body.
God, he was turning into a lech.
After the presentation was over, he called Edie to find out where the first lesson would be. Maybe she hadn’t been serious, but the more he thought about it, the more he decided that if he did have a problem, then he wanted to fix it.
“We don’t need to do that,” Edie explained, and he planted himself on a nearby couch because apparently this was not going to be a short conversation.
“I think it would help.”
“You’re trying to humor me. You don’t have to.”
Tyler remained silent, trying to determine what he should say. “No, I think we should. I have a problem.”
It was the perfect choice of words. “You don’t,” she told him, which was nice to hear, but Tyler had now decided that he needed to go through the steps and discover if there was something missing within him. And then once he knew, he could fix it. Like surgery. Only more difficult.
“I think I do. Cynthia said…” he began, then trailed off in a depressed manner.
“Oh.” Edie’s voice was quiet, reflective, believing. “You’re right. I’d forgotten.”
Tyler smiled to himself. Mission accomplished.
She told him where to meet, and he hung up.
Piece of cake.
That night he met Edie at exactly eight o’clock at a card shop on Prince Street. Why a card shop Tyler wasn’t sure, but Edie seemed enthusiastic, although when it came to helping people in need, he suspected that Edie would never be unenthusiastic.
The shop was tiny. There were four rows of cards, three shelves of useless animal statues in pastel colors and two rows of incense, samples of which were now burning and stinking up the place. In spite of all that negativity, he found himself smiling as Edie approached.
Tonight she was wearing an outrageously short yellow skirt that showed off long, tan legs, a green T-shirt that hugged her breasts and neon pink sandals topped with small plastic pink flamingos that he wouldn’t normally consider sexy, but somehow, when Edie wore them, his eager cock thought it was the hottest thing ever.
Go figure.
At the beginning, there was that one awkward moment when a man who had previously engaged in wild monkey sex with said female was now supposed to have polite, friendly conversation and forget that he knew her body intimately, or that she had sucked him until…
These sorts of moments were new to Tyler, who previously had thought wild monkey sex was beneath him. Soon his brain resumed functioning, his heart rate calmed.
Acting as if she hadn’t noticed the awkwardness, Edie casually strolled over to the display racks, removed a card and then waved it under his eyes. “This is a greeting card. The card was invented over a thousand years ago as an expression of a man’s feelings for a woman, because yes, even in the Dark Ages, men could not express their thoughts. But as a historian, you would know that.”
Tyler blinked before he realized that he was supposed to be a historian. “My specialty is ancient medicine, not textiles,” he said quickly.
“Ancient medicine, like ritualistic sacrifices to the gods?”
“More like what the Egyptians did with the brain and the heart,” he hedged, racking his brain to remember what the Egyptians did with the brain and the heart.
“Oh, yeah, where they removed the brain tissue through the nose? Frankly, I thought their surgical skills were way off, but how they used honey to treat infections? Who’d have ever thought of that?”
Tyler nodded sagely. “It was ingenious, but let’s get back to greeting cards.”
“You’re right, but you’ll have to tell me about the mummification process. I think it’s fascinating. I had a class…” She closed her eyes, then opened them again. “Back to greeting cards. So, eventually, the process was streamlined, commercialized and outsourced to create mass-produced, assembly-line type products that are supposed to express our deepest emotional connections to other human beings. It’s not pretty. It is a slap in the face to a romantic female, and yet…there is value and education there. People read into the gesture. Women love the gestures. Remember that.”
Disdainfully, she picked up a bright pink card with a pansy on the front, held it between her thumb and forefinger and began to read aloud. “‘No woman compares to the flower that is you.’”
Tyler only partially suppressed the gagging sound that he assumed was the appropriate response, but Edie was merciless. “It is trite. It is meaningless. It says ‘I don’t know what I love about you, so I shall compare you to an object that we have genetically Frankensteined until all fragrance and uniqueness has been cultivated out.’”
“And that’s bad,” guessed Tyler.
“Not all men are as perceptive as you. See you’re learning what women want in men.”
“And that’s why I’m here. To learn from the best.”
And it had nothing to do with the feel of your legs wrapped around my waist. Nothing at all.
Would she wear the sandals with pink flamingos when they had sex? If they had sex, he corrected.
If. If
they did have sex, he wanted her to leave the flamingos on.
Pervert.
Not guessing the sordid train of his thoughts, Edie smiled encouragingly. “Exactly. But the key here is to analyze the woman in question.”
“Who?” Tyler asked, because he didn’t think they were talking about Edie, but in his experience, women liked it when the discussion revolved around themselves rather than another female.
“I don’t know. We’re talking hypotheticals, and we have to pretend,” answered Edie, with a get-with-the-program look that didn’t bode well for future sex. “Create a woman. So what in the relationship makes her special and unique above all women?”
“She’s great-looking.”
Edie shrugged. “It’s not a good idea to start with the physical. Start instead with her personality, her mind, her heart.”
Tyler frowned because every human being had the same ten ounces of tissue and muscle that constructed the heart. Yes, some epicardiums were thinner than others, some chordae tendineae were stretched so far that valve function was compromised, and some arteries got so clogged they needed to be grafted with something that had a little more kick. But he didn’t think Edie would appreciate knowing all this. In fact, he suspected that if he tried to educate her on the anatomical workings of the human heart, he would be demonstrating the very shortcomings of his heart that she was trying to repair.
Edie Higgins, a heart surgeon in a metaphorical sense.
The pink flamingos began to tap on the floor.
“She’d be very witty,” he replied, which he thought would prove that he wasn’t completely hopeless.
“No, no, no,” she said, pushing at the short strands of her hair, acting with all the impatience of every great surgeon he’d ever known. Apparently “witty” wasn’t the answer she wanted. “Dig deeper, Tyler. What about this imaginary woman makes you happy? Do you get happy when she smiles at you? Does she ease your burden or calm the stormy tides of your day-to-day grind?”
Tyler considered the question and realized that no woman had never eased his burden, because he didn’t have a burden that needed easing, so it probably wasn’t germane. Unless Edie considered a hard-on a burden to be eased? Nope, he decided. Definitely not greeting-card material.
“She’s not a ‘stormy tides’ sort of female,” he said, and Edie returned the card to the display rack.
“All right. Let’s go back to the simple stuff. Why did you pick this woman and ask her out?”
Tyler tracked back to his relationship with Cynthia and remembered that he’d been set up by Paul, his roommate during his residency, who was trying to get Cynthia’s friend into bed, but only had two hours for social activities because his surgical rotation was killing him, and college women never bought that excuse, so Paul had assumed that Tyler could do some of the heavy lifting for him.
Why did women even fall for men? If Tyler were a woman, he’d be a lesbian because he wouldn’t want to date a man because frankly, all men were pigs.
Realizing that he was going to have to be inventive, Tyler finally came up with an answer that he knew would make Edie happy. “She had a nice laugh.”
Edie laughed, and he beamed proudly. “And now we’re talking! What made her laugh?”
Tyler blinked, thinking again. The most likely cause was the Long Island ice teas. That night he’d ended up walking Cynthia home from the bar, tucking her into bed and leaving two aspirin on her nightstand. Cynthia had thought it was romantic, even after Tyler had explained the bonding properties of acetylsalicylic acid, and how ASA suppresses the production of prostaglandins, which are the key pain-transmitters to the brain, thus eliminating…
Edie was clearly waiting for his answer, expecting some new breakthrough in his sensitivity training. Tyler wanted her to feel as if he had actually had a breakthrough and then inspiration struck. Cynthia had always loved it when he confessed his flaws. He could be imperfect.
“I made a joke about something. I’m not very good at jokes.”
Edie touched his arm, an encouraging gesture not designed to send further blood to his cock.
Off-topic, Tyler.
“So when she laughed, it made you happy, and made you feel good about yourself.”
Perhaps, but Cynthia’s laugh had never made him happy, especially that first night, because Cynthia had been laughing at pretty much everything. Actually, it was
in spite of
the constant laughter that Tyler had liked her, liked her nondemanding personality, and when he’d called the next day to see if she had recovered, things had progressed from there.
Not romantic.
Practical.
Edie was studying him, her impatient brown eyes urging him to make some forward progress away from the apparently evil side of practicality. Wanting to make Edie happy, he decided to steer the conversation in another direction completely. About her. “People like to feel good about themselves, don’t they? What makes you happy?” he asked, oh, so cleverly.
She glanced at the cards and worried her lower lip. “I like to help people,” she admitted, as if it was some secret that he couldn’t have guessed.
Like driving the cab for Barnaby, he thought, and then was shocked to hear the words aloud.
“And helping you,” she added. A woman brushed by them in the aisle, and Edie smiled at her, getting a smile in return. She did that to people, dazzled them with her buoyancy, confusing them, befuddling them, and then dragging them into the pink flamingo world that she had created.
And most dangerous of all, she made them
want
to be there.
With the pink flamingos.
Having sex.
His intentions were good, honorable, yet here he was, standing with her in a card shop, trying to pay attention, but knowing this was something he was never going to comprehend, all the while his randy subconscious had already stripped her naked, and had her legs on his shoulders, and her breasts in his mouth.
And didn’t she know all that?
Edie stared at him, not so whimsical anymore, her eyes had darkened and her smile fell to something more comprehending.