Loving Time

optimist, she said, liked fixing bad situations. And she had the tools to do it. She had access to the computers with the business information, to the color-coded files on the shelves that had the personal stuff, to the progress and evaluation reports. Gunn knew almost everything there was to know about everybody who worked at the Centre, including the doctors and administrators. And she cared about everybody, especially him.

Bobbie had believed in Gunn all the way until he was fired last year and lost his insurance just when his mother got so sick. Gunn paid for the old lady to come north and told Bobbie how to get the maintenance job in the Stone Pavilion, but Bobbie still felt it was Gunn’s fault his mother had died. Gunn told him he couldn’t ever apply for another nursing job. Bobbie was bitter about that, too.

And now it was worse. He’d never minded the twelve years’ age difference between them. Gunn had been twelve years older than him all along, all the years he’d worked there. She wasn’t another white bitch out to get him, was Swedish and didn’t know how to be mean. He didn’t know why she was the way she was, maybe because she’d come from somewhere else, though you could hardly hear it in her voice anymore. She was bubbly and enthusiastic, never saw the bad in anybody. He liked her in spite of the annoyance of having to listen to her foreign ideas. Real good-looking never mattered much to him, anyway. He never spent any time looking at anybody, and fucking was just—fucking.

No, older had never bothered him, but old was beginning to get to him. Bobbie still felt like a young man, like the boy who’d gone off to the Army and still had opportunity in front of him. He still had the juice, expected to inherit the earth sometime soon. But more and more these days when Gunn bugged him about keeping his head down and holding his temper—when he looked at the strange, frightened old woman she was becoming—he felt he was history like Gunn and wanted to howl like a dog.

“The police came to the Centre today,” Gunn said as soon as she calmed down and caught her breath.

“Yeah, what for?” Bobbie didn’t slow his pace for her even though she had to struggle to keep up.

“You’ll never guess what.”

“A patient death.” He guessed what. What else was there?

“How did you know, Bobbie, you sly old fox? Have you heard already?” Her hand bunched into a tiny fist to punch playfully at his massive arm. He stood way over a foot taller than she, wore a baseball cap pulled low over his forehead, and had the tight, mean look that made cautious people make a wide berth around him. She changed her mind and put her hand back in her pocket.

“It’s not a hard one. Accidents happen all the time. Who’s taking the fall this time?”

“Oh, Bobbie, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought it up.… I just thought you’d like to know, that’s all.”

“What then?” He spat out the words, didn’t give a shit.

“Clara Treadwell, that’s whose patient.” Gunn said it with great satisfaction. “Rumor is she was sleeping with him.”

“And she killed him for that? Overprescribed? The old cow should have been grateful.”

Gunn laughed. “She didn’t kill him. It was a suicide. She didn’t hand him the cup— ”

“I didn’t do that.” Bobbie interrupted her furiously. “Alice gave him the stuff. Fuck, why did you say that, Gunn? I’d never hurt a patient, never.”

“Sorry—I’m sorry, Bobbie.” Gunn’s face was instantly repentant.

“I should take your head off for that,” he fumed, stomping along the sidewalk punching the air.

“I know. It just slipped out, I don’t know why. Forgive me?” She shook her head hard, pumping her own legs faster to get out of a bad situation. “I know you had nothing to do with it.”

“The resident gave him the wrong prescription,” Bobbie raged.

“I know, Bobbie. Everybody knows that. You weren’t responsible.”

“And Alice handed it to him.”

“I know, you’re right.”

“So why did I have to take the fall? You tell me that!”

“I don’t know, Bobbie.” She didn’t remind him about his knocking out an attending physician—not even a full- time member of the staff—after the patient’s death. Or that the committee had concluded he was a danger to the community, quite apart from the question of his guilt or innocence in the matter at hand.

“Bastards.” He strode north toward the brownstone on Ninety-ninth Street, where Gunn lived on the fourth floor. He had moved into the basement flat occupied by his mother the last year of her life. It did not surprise him at all that the head of the hospital was being questioned in a patient death. That bitch Clara Treadwell ruined people’s lives every day. She’d ruined his life. It was about time someone got on her case.

“Bobbie?”

“They won’t get her for it,” he muttered angrily.

“No,” she agreed.

“There’s no justice.”

“No … Bobbie?”

They were nearing Ninety-ninth Street. “What?”

“Will you eat with me?” Gunn asked softly.

He hesitated, chugging along for almost a block before he answered. “I don’t know. Maybe. If it don’t take too long.”

“It won’t take long,” Gunn promised eagerly.

twenty-three

Jason first heard about the death of Raymond Cowles from his friend Charles, who was in private practice all the way across town on East Seventy-ninth Street. Charles hadn’t heard it from a colleague. He’d heard it from his wife, Brenda, who was the chair of some fund-raising benefit for the Centre. Brenda came back from a meeting on Tuesday with the news that the great goddess Clara Treadwell had been sleeping with one of her patients, that the patient had killed himself, and they had all better fasten their seat belts for the rough ride ahead. Jason fastened his seat belt.

“I’m sorry to get you in here so early” was the first thing Clara Treadwell said to Jason when they met at the elevators on the twentieth floor at two minutes to eight on Wednesday.

“No problem,” Jason replied, although to meet Clara’s urgent request he’d had to cancel a patient he’d been seeing at that hour for the past three years.

“Thank you, anyway.” Clara extended her gloved hand with a small smile that acknowledged her advantage.

Jason offered his hand, only to have his bones crunched in a powerful grip. He had a good six inches on her, at least seventy pounds, and was surprised by her strength. Another smile curved Clara’s lips as she turned down the long hall to lead him to the one place in the hospital he rarely saw. Jason knew all the other floors in the Centre as well as he knew his own apartment. He had done his three-year training there, qualified as a psychoanalyst, and had been invited to teach there long before anyone in his class. If he had been chief resident, he would have had an office in the executive suite on the twentieth floor and been at home there, too. But he hadn’t been chief resident. His year the post had gone to the first Latino. Now the chief resident was a Hasidic Jew with tight little curls around his ears, a belly so big he didn’t know where to wear his pants, and a leather yarmulke.

Jason scratched his beard as he watched Clara unlock two separate locks in the door of the executive suite. Inside, she hit a few light switches, then led the way to her office. She had to find another key to unlock the door there, too.

“I didn’t realize security was so tight up here,” Jason remarked.

“Oh, we’ve had to tighten up in the last year. There have been some incidents.… Just mischief.” Clara shrugged out of her cashmere coat, unlocking yet another door and disappearing into the closet. After a moment, she came out wearing a pale green suit, the color of spring moss, tightly fitted over her breasts and hips.

“Please sit down,” she said formally. She indicated a leather tub chair opposite the vast expanse of polished cherry and tooled leather that was her desk.

Jason sat and studied the view of the river. It was a sparkling November morning. The rushing water twenty stories below shimmered in the early light. “How can I help you?” he asked.

Clara’s smile reappeared. The curve of her too-red lips sought to inspire closeness and confidence but lacked