“I mean there’s no booze in it. No liquor at all. Can’t have the hospital pushing alcohol during business hours.”
The others all laugh, and he did mean it as a joke, since business hours equaled a twenty-four-hour day, but her eyes seize his and stop his own laughter. That’s when he turns away, as he feels a flush creep across his face. He drifts across the room and joins two other radiologists, but for a change he doesn’t feel like discussing shadows on x-rays; the indications of something ranging from either benign to inoperable. He has learned to control his emotions when he speaks with patients and their primary physicians. He has built up a wall of false bravado during such conversations, always faking the positive, which will give them a tortured future of discomfort and occasional pain as well as hope.
He doesn’t know her name, but steals looks across the room for the next half hour until he sees her standing alone near the door. He summons some hidden reserve of courage and approaches.
“Leaving so soon?” he asks and feels the flush return to his face. When she looks at him again with those black eyes, he begins to sense he is lost. Utterly lost or bewitched, it doesn’t matter.
They go to a neighborhood bar a few blocks away. Tiny Santa dolls share space on the shelves alongside gin and Scotch bottles. All-too-familiar Christmas songs are piped through a pair of speakers at the front of the room. A tiny tree at the end of the bar winks red-and-green lights. They laugh at the juxtaposition of Santa and the alcohol, and she wonders how he can safely drive a sled with a drinker’s red nose. They laugh some more and keep walking until they reach an empty booth in the back. He asks for a beer, and she takes a glass of red wine. They both order burgers.
“I thought Muslims don’t eat meat?” he asks referring to her cultural disclosure during their walk.
She cuts the air with a wave of her hand.
“That’s a Hindu thing, but I do many things Muslim women don’t do.” She stares intently at him, and then goes on.
“Beef should be all right for Muslims if the slaughter is ritual and clean. We are also not supposed to eat pork. The same as Jews, part of halal or Muslim dietary rules. It’s the high level of uric acid in the pig that is of concern. But I confess I do like wine. Alcohol is discouraged, but one can’t be perfect.”
She sips her wine before she adds, “Adultery is also forbidden, except that I’m not married.”
Then she laughs and her cackle overrides the dim Christmas music that floats from the front of the room. She describes how she is a blend of three cultures; her parents’ Iranian background, her years growing up in a rather strict Austrian world, and the much more laissez-faire American world, especially in New York.
“And which do you prefer?” he asks.
His earlier disorientation, for that’s what it was, has gone. He is now the consummate successful New York male his ego has constructed. And she knows nothing about him, with or without his private medicinal blanket, a condition he isn’t about to tell her. He wants to gain this woman’s serious interest. He hesitates to speak to avoid making dumb comments, yet when she reaches out and touches his hand, his voice all but disappears.
“I think I prefer it here,” she says, her accent deeper than before.
He stares at the generous hint of brown cleavage that rises above her scooped sweater neck, and calls for another round to mask the sound of blood rushing through his body. He wonders if she can hear the pumping. All his training tells him she can’t, yet she must see his fingers shake slightly as they grasp the new beer glass. She must see the white foam spill over the rim as he raises his glass.
“Prosit,” she says. “That’s how we toast each other in Vienna.”
Later he trembles when she takes his hand and leads him into her studio apartment only a block from the hospital. A bed, a small sofa, a table wedged against the wall. She says it’s enough space.
“What do you like to do?” she asks, as the sweater rises above her head and flies away.
When he doesn’t answer, and just stares at her, she says, “Then let me show you what I like.”
Later they speak long into the night about the Middle East. She abhors the mullahs that govern modern Iran, and he detects that part of her enmity was based on how her family had been treated. She dislikes the Israelis, not, she protests, because they were Jews, but because of the way they abuse the Palestinians. She had read Tolstoy and Shakespeare, and they laughed together when he remembered the bard’s quote about first killing all the lawyers, as a reason for their both becoming doctors.
“After all,” she said more than once when she rolled on top of him, “Doctors have to stick together.”
Henry waits for her at a table against the far back wall of Luca’s on First Avenue. That’s where they always meet for dinner. He watches as diners come in, most of them locals like him, there for the fish stew, or the tagliatelle with duck ragout, which is his own favorite.
Heidi has agreed to meet him at eight, but it is already past nine. He’s already finished two glasses of the house Chianti. He wonders if she’s standing him up on purpose. When they last met, two nights before, the evening had become a disaster. When she was ready for sex he just couldn’t perform. At first she was angry and threw curses at him in German. Then she softened somewhat.
“It happens sometimes,” she said, but still steered him to the door.
Yet he knew why the problem arose. A week before he had seen her emerge from a private office looking disheveled, her lipstick slightly smeared and her hair in disarray. A tall young intern followed her. He could have killed her at that moment, but all he wanted to do was lose himself within her body. He realized that he needed to calm down, but when the next opportunity came, he couldn’t do it.
There is a state of hopelessness when obsessive love becomes uncontrollable. People in love generally share some aspects of life; culture, music, books, art, even political discussion, or debate, but she would have none of that. She wanted to fuck away their time together, and he became a slave to that excess. Yes. That’s what he had become, a toy, a plaything. She was a psychiatrist, and had pushed his buttons for her own gratification, as well as her sense of control. There was even more to it. One night, about a month before, Heidi had more than her usual quota of wine.
On reflection, he wasn’t all that surprised when she said, “I like Jewish men. They’re both very intelligent and oral. All my life I’ve heard how Jews outperformed the general population in academics, business, law, and, particularly, medicine. Especially here in New York. It’s a challenge for me to outperform them.”
So Heidi is a user and a manipulator whose social goal seems to be to sexually dominate men, particularly Jewish men. But it didn’t matter. All he cared about was the few times each week he could bury his face in her flesh. He knew she saw other men; she collected them like stamps, or coins, one-time stands of sex, but always Jewish men from what he came to observe, yet she stayed with him for the most part, and in some recess of his brain he somehow hoped she would stay there forever.
They were both off on the day when she said she wanted to take the bus to East Hampton, and she’d pointedly avoided inviting him to spend time with her until the evening. He was pissed and took it out on the Avis rental agent when he picked up the Chevy at mid-morning. A sudden impulse made him anxious to drive back upstate to where he grew up even though there were no relatives or friends still there. He just needed a break.
He took the Taconic Parkway and kept the radio on the classical music station until the hills delivered more static than music. He exited at the Hillsdale turnoff and drove around aimlessly, even past his old house, now expanded and likely modernized by the weekenders who had bought it from his father’s estate, but it was shrouded behind a cluster of blue spruce much like his own past was hidden. He ate a sandwich at the Taconic Diner and headed back. He dropped the car off about five, and then went back to shower and change for dinner.
Ten o’clock passes, yet she hasn’t come. The previous day she had told him she was taking the Hampton Jitney to East Hampton on her day off.
“Ever since I’ve been in New York people always talk about the Hamptons and the beautiful beaches out there.”
So she went on an early bus despite the chill. After he got back to his apartment he checked his cell phone for messages. He had been so upset that morning he’d forgotten to take it with him. He saw that she had called. Since that day he played it over a hundred times.
And there wasn’t anything more. He tried to call her that same day, in the early evening, probably shortly after dusk, but her phone rang until her message pickup. He tried again later but could never get through, even to
