“Did you say you were sick?” she asked.
I sighed. “Yes and no.”
Entering K and K, I had always told John Richard, was an experience rivaled only by stepping into the big greenhouse at the Denver Botanic Gardens. Why obstetricians needed a jungle environment for an office was something better left to psychologists. Perhaps the sudden entry into leanness suggested fecundity. Freud, I had told John Richard to his immense irritation, would have hypothesized something more specific. I avoided the enfolding arms of a stand of Norfolk pine, threaded my way through oversized bamboo plants, and ducked a hanging basket of wandering Jew before arriving at the reception desk.
“Do you have an appointment?” asked the nurse-receptionist.
“Yes,” I said breezily. “You just don’t recognize me without my safari hat.”
“Name?”
“Bear,” I said, “as in Goldilocks and the Three—”
“I don’t have a chart on you,” she said without looking up. “You’ll have to fill out new-patient papers.” She handed me a clipboard filled with forms that would have given the IRS pause.
“But you don’t understand,” I said. “John Richard is my—”
I stopped as her withering glance shot through me. Perhaps it would be better not to advertise my presence in this office after a four-year absence. Nor did I feel welcome, given the Jerk’s assumption of my guilt in the rat- poison affair. In fact I had better try to avoid him altogether.
“Tell you what,” I said conspiratorially, “I’ll bet I could find my file back there. Just let me take a look.”
“Oh no—” she began, but was interrupted by an extremely distressed patient who had appeared at my side.
“I’m pregnant,” whispered a woman to the nurse. Her voice broke. She said, “Unplanned.” The patient signaled to her husband, who emerged from behind the foliage.
“You have two options,” the nurse started to say as I slid behind the counter’s side door.
“And we were so careful,” the woman complained.
I surveyed the file cabinets. Inside these formidable gray metal boxes the files were color-coded, I knew. Since more than thirty-six months had elapsed since I had been treated by my ex-husband, I would be classified as inactive. I opened the top drawer, A through I, pink files.
I saw some names I recognized, but no Bear. Were these current? The next drawer, J through S, was more helpful. There was Jackson, T., which would be Trixie, and Korman, M., which would be Marla. She had been married to John Richard more recently than I, and might still be classified as active, although like me she now went to a female gynecologist in Denver. There was also Korman, V.—Vonette. At this juncture I remembered that the last time I had been in the Korman office, I too had been a Korman, so these must be the current or only recently inactive patients.
I skipped the next drawer and opened drawer J through S in the adjoining cabinet, which bulged with green files. Inactive? The unhappily expectant patient at the desk was still bemoaning her fate; her husband was figuring out dates with the nurse. My ex-husband’s voice floated out his office door.
If only there were some plants behind the counter. I needed cover.
I turned back to the green files and had a sudden thought. Could Laura Smiley be in here? Would she have been active or inactive? I flipped quickly back to the
“You,” he said. “What the hell are you doing in here? I mean, besides being nosy?”
“I’m not being nosy,” I said. I gritted my teeth and tried to cut him with a glance. From behind the waiting- room bushes faces appeared, like curious pygmies. “I was looking,” I said airily, “for my file.” I waved it. “Which I found.”
Whispers from the waiting room.
John Richard said to the nurse, “Why is she back here?”
The nurse looked at me and back at the Jerk, who was a large hulking blond presence in his white doctor coat.
“She was looking for her file,” she said. “I think.”
John Richard narrowed his eyes at me again. “I suppose you weaseled your way in here with an appointment?”
I murmured assent, holding my file like a life preserver with one hand, and gesturing to the appointment book with the other. John Richard hunched over the book, and I prayed his pants would split. Then he glared back at me.
“Let me tell you something,” he said in a rough whisper. His index finger stabbed the air between us. “I don’t know what you’re up to here. But you keep out of those confidential files, you little bitch. If you try to harm my father again I’ll wring your neck. And listen up. Get yourself another doctor. Don’t come back to this office or I’ll call the cops.”
“I’ve got another doctor,” I said. “But feel free to call the cops. Ah … try the one I’ve been going out with. He shoots people for assault and battery.”
John Richard gave me a look with enough steel in it to keep Pittsburgh going for a day. Then he whisked out in a cloud of anger and white coat.
“You can see Dr. Korman now,” said the nurse, avoiding my eyes. “The other doctor. Just go on back.” She knew she had screwed up.
Patty Sue was nowhere in sight. I assumed she had already seen Fritz, come back out through the plants, and gone downstairs to the pastry shop for a bite to eat. Knowing Patty Sue, it would be more than a bite. I walked quickly past the waiting-room jungle and peered around the corner into the room where they drew blood and refrigerated samples and medications. This was also where they stored all the equipment for “office surgery,” their euphemistic term for ridding the uterus of anything unwanted. My guess was that such a procedure would be the next visit for the unexpectedly pregnant patient who had preceded me.
I knew I was also unwanted in this office. I peeked around the corner, unwilling to be removed myself.
The room with the abortion equipment was empty. I walked quietly past.
“Hi, Fritz,” I said as I entered his office. “Hope you don’t mind my coming in like this.”
“Goldy.” He looked up at me with a frown. He said, “You know you’re not supposed to come in here. Let the nurse put you in one of the examination rooms. Then I’ll come see you.”
“Oh thanks,” I said, and averted my eyes from his tall frame to the office greenery, which resembled the profusion of foliage in the waiting room. There were rows of geraniums on shelves in a built-out window, Swedish and other strains of ivy hanging behind the desk and couch, and tall rubber plants hugging the frame of a door. “Tell me, Fritz,” I said, “do you have a repressed desire to be a botanist?”
He smiled. He sat in his chair and swiveled toward me. With his head tilted, his bald pate caught the light and shone like a halo. He said, “Repressed desires? That’s shrink talk. Now why don’t you go to an examination room and we’ll get on with our appointment?”
I sat on the couch, a dark, softly stuffed expanse that exuded the sensual smell and sigh of leather.
“I’m not sick,” I said.
He chuckled. “That’s not what my son tells me.”
“Did you like the cakes?”
He nodded. “Is that why you’re here? To talk about food? Because I have other patients to attend to. Ones who are sick.”
“I need to talk to you about business. Yours and mine, if that’s okay. I won’t take long.”
He grinned again. His teeth were slightly gray, from age, but when he smiled he filled the room with his aura, a sort of older-movie-star appeal.
He said, “I don’t know anything about cooking, Goldy.”
“That’s okay,” I said and looked at a wall of framed degrees and other official-looking papers, then at a table next to the couch where African violets circled some family photographs. In these Vonette and John Richard
