Best Friends (66 page)

“To clammy socks!” Will said that March, lifting his glass and meeting my eye. We were at a dinner the night before the wedding, and everyone there knew about my comment of three months before and how wrong I obviously was. Alicia, beside Will, was wearing a maroon suit thick with embroidery, an outfit Janis later observed resembled a full-body chastity belt. I lifted my glass to the both of them and smiled.

“Oh, they
worked
together,” an elderly female relative of Alicia's said across the table.

“They're still going to work together,” a younger female relative said loudly and slowly. “Alicia is the nurse in Will's office.”

“Get to see each other,” the old lady said, nodding. “Nice.”

“Hap didn't think we could do it.” Alicia smoothed her skirt on her lap as she sat down. Since their engagement six weeks earlier, she hadn't called me “Dr. Markowitz” once, even in front of patients, although she still called Will “Dr. Strub” at work. “Hap thought we were just an affair.”

Brice's eyes met mine across the table, and I smiled into his glower. “I just can't figure out about Iris,” I heard him say to Caroline regarding—I assumed—some potential date he had lined up for the wedding.

Caroline said, “It was short notice for a wedding.”

“But that's Iris.” Brice sounded miserable. “She's a short notice kind of girl.”

Originally, Alicia and Will were to be married in the fall, but they moved the date up to May, on a weekend after Alicia's son competed in the national championship for high school debate. Alicia's son, Jesse, had gone from a chubby pre-teen to a tall and handsome young man. He dressed like a Young Republican—he looked more like Will's relative than Alicia's—and he sat quietly next to Will, with his eyebrows raised, listening in on conversations like an anthropologist making mental notes.

“Well, Brice, maybe you're next,” I said. “On the marriage plan, I mean.” Stupid thing to say: I glanced at Janis and widened my eyes in self-disparagement; under the table, she patted my hand.

“As if,” Brice answered.

Caroline said, “Your true love doesn't know yet what she's missing”—which both Janis and I noted, when we talked about it later, was a motherly thing to say. Caroline indeed looked motherly, with her large breasts and soft lap and knowing sort of smile, although everyone in the office, Brice included, knew about her proclivities, which involved a virtual smorgasbord of men. In fact, Janis and I, driving home, wondered if she'd ditched her date for the wedding in order to accompany Brice. Caroline always had dates for our office Christmas dinners, the latest an apparent bodybuilder who had to be ten years younger than she was.

“Alicia's family seemed excited,” Janis said as we climbed into bed. “Marrying a doctor.” Janis was wearing a flowered flannel gown that didn't really hide her bony chest. I wrapped my arms around her waist, pushed myself into her back. We always slept nested.

Alicia's family, overwhelmingly female, had been friendly in an overeager way. Will's people, especially his two daughters, were cool and remote, a family of Afghan hounds forced to tolerate an invasion of poodles.

“Ah, marrying a doctor,” I said. “There's a dream come true.” Janis and I chuckled. She lifted her head and realigned it on her pillow, and we were both almost asleep when the phone rang. It was one of Will's patients in the ER with a clot in his leg, and, yes, I had to go to the hospital to admit him. Will would probably not go in until morning, but putting things off was not my way. Risking anything was not my way. Still, when I moved, Janis's body resisted my leaving like a magnet, and, beneath my feet, the wooden floor was surprisingly cold.

Dr. Markowitz could sometimes use help with his grooming. Looking at the big picture, he was fine (he never looked sloppy), but the details escaped him. I can't think of how many times I told him about a spot on his shirt or tie or a bit of food stuck to his face. I never blamed this on his wife. She spent her visual energy on her house and garden; she didn't seem to notice her own looks, much less her husband's.

Once, Dr. Markowitz was standing beside my desk at noon, looking over his list of patients for the afternoon. “Tubman, Jenkins, Cathcart—there's trouble,” he said.

I looked up at him and grinned. “And you have Mickey Roush three patients later.” She was a notorious hypochondriac whom Alicia called “Make-Me-a-Grouch.”

Dr. Markowitz made a comical snarl. I noticed something on his right cheek. “You have something on your face, there”—and I pointed to my left cheek, because mirroring worked best with him.

He would always dab the thing off with his finger, look at it, and tell me what it was and how it got there. I found this humiliatingly predictable, so to save him I said, “It's a sesame seed.”

Alarm filled his face, his finger flew. “Oh dear,” he said sadly, peering at the speck, “breakfast bagel.”

We exploded into laughter. Exploded.

That was right after Al and Dr. Strub got married. Right after.

I think of that moment often, especially now. I never saw Dr. Markowitz laugh like that again. His mouth open, revealing his fillings, the crinkles at the side of his eyes. A thousand times I must have hoped that we would laugh like that again. We never did.

Martha Moody
is a physician living in Dayton, Ohio, with her husband and four sons.
Best Friends
is her first novel.