Intimate Wars (5 page)

Then there was the young married man who was diagnosed with lung cancer from the chest X-rays that I had just taken. I was not in the room when Dr. Gold told him he had only a few months to live, but I stood outside the office listening to the muffled voices and the slow sobbing interrupted by long, painful pauses.

Many of Dr. Gold's patients had been seeing him through all stages of their lives. Dr. Gold was the sage, the counselor, the healer. He was the doctor, historically a position of high honor and respect within the Jewish tradition. His was a loving type of paternalism and compassionate practice of power that I came to admire and respect.

It was his hands that first attracted me to him physically. They held a great deal of power, and I never saw him abuse it. I would watch them in focused concentration as he examined the patients, put the stethoscope on their chests, palpated their stomachs, wrote on their charts, and helped them to dress. They conveyed a solid, protective tenderness. Each finger, strong and well formed, gave the impression of a world unto itself. As the weeks passed, I found myself stealing moments to study them.

WITH THE COMING OF SPRING I was delighted to find a flowering lilac tree in the small garden behind the office. Gently, I cut a sprig, found a small glass to use as a vase, and left it for Dr. Gold to find on his desk.

As my respect for him grew I continued to look for creative ways to please him. For the holiday season I built (with the help of a florist friend) a charming winter scene out of paper mache, complete with a small inn, Christmas trees, and a horse and carriage. I imagined that he was enchanted.

At the end of each day, after all the patients had been seen, I would go into Dr. Gold's office, settle in across from his desk, and we'd talk. We discussed everything from politics to philosophy to books we both loved. I found that this man I admired and respected wanted very much to hear my opinions on all sorts of things. I was even more surprised to find that he liked to share himself with me.

He spoke of his time as a Navy medical officer in the Second World War, when he had made the landing in Normandy on one of the first LSTs (amphibious ships designed to deploy troops and tanks directly onto the shore). He told me of his panic and terror when the boat in front of him was blasted out of the water. Fresh corpses lashed against the side of his LST as the men tried to steer their way carefully toward the hell of the German guns on the shore. He returned from the war a pacifist.

He talked about his impoverished childhood on the Lower East Side and how he had struggled to leave it behind. He remained ashamed of his poor, immigrant Jewish upbringing and the anti-Semitism it led him to experience until late in his life. He had gotten himself out of the ghetto physically, but it was still very much a part of who he was.

He also graphically described his experience as a resident at Bellevue Hospital. Victims of self-abortion were so
common at Bellevue that the night shift came to be called the “midnight express.” Women would start the process by inserting foreign devices into their cervixes at home; when they started to bleed, they came to the emergency room, where physicians would perform a procedure called dilation and curettage, scraping tissue from the uterus—essentially an abortion. Abortion was never openly discussed during my childhood, but I'd heard of a situation like this once before, when I was about ten. I overheard my parents' discussion of a Philadelphia physician whose patient died while he was performing an illegal procedure. To cover for himself, he cut her up in pieces and put her remains down the drain.

Dr. Gold was interested in my history, too. He recognized my intelligence, and when he learned I didn't plan to go to college, he began a gentle, supportive campaign to convince me to apply. After a few months of our talks I agreed to send in an application. I ascribed to the Socratic view that an unexamined life was not worth living, and I thought that studying psychology would give me the chance to continue examining mine. My therapist had connections at NYU and was able to help me register for three nonmatriculating classes. I got all As and was accepted as a full-time student.

I'd report on my classes to Dr. Gold during our talks, and I came to cherish these times as our personal oasis. Thrown together from different worlds and generations, we found a common safe harbor—he from his grinding responsibilities, I from my eternal state of longing and aloneness.

Our time together in the evenings was interrupted by his wife calling to find out exactly when to expect him so she could have dinner on the table. As the office assistant, it was my job to answer the phone. “It's your wife,” I would say, forcing indifference as I gradually came to resent her intrusion. But Dr. Gold slowly began to extend the hour, bit by bit, so we
would have more time to finish our discussions.

And then the Saturday ritual began. After the morning office hours I would either go out for sandwiches or he would take me to a local diner, where we would have lunch together before he went on his hospital rounds. “You need at least one good meal a week,” he would say.

My feelings began to grow beyond admiration and respect. I would imagine his hands gently touching my hair, moving over my face. My work became a way to surround myself with him even when he was absent. One Sunday afternoon I took sheets of EKG results with me to the beach, organizing them in neat piles on my towel and filing them into carefully marked folders while a friend from college lay next to me, tanning in the sun.

I was dating young men at the time, but they bored me. Dr. Gold was powerful, sophisticated, intelligent, handsome, and warm. He was twenty-eight years older than me, and I wanted him to want me.

He started to tease me with double entendres, nuanced sexual asides that I couldn't help but savor and read into. He began looking at me in a slightly different way, and I responded in kind. Being limited to an unattractive white uniform, I managed to accessorize with high black boots and black lingerie that was slightly visible through the fabric. I caught his gazes, though our eyes would never connect directly. We were professional with each other as we worked side by side, but an unspoken attraction was deepening between us.

My second summer working in the office, I planned a trip to Europe with three friends of mine. We would go to Monaco and Italy and drive through the south of France, staying at student hostels along the way.

Dr. Gold and his wife always spent August in Cannes with
two other couples. They stayed at the five-star Carlton Hotel, which was right on the beach and teemed with celebrities and jet-setters. Before we closed the office for the summer, he had told me to come by the hotel while I was in Cannes so that he and his wife could treat me to an exclusive French dinner.

To my inexperienced eyes the Carlton Hotel was a palace. I was overwhelmed with the decor, shops, fashionable people, and ambience of money. When I arrived, I was met by Mrs. Gold, who greeted me warmly. We ate a gourmet dinner at a restaurant high in the mountains overlooking the sparkling lights of the Riviera, and I was invited to join them at the hotel beach the next afternoon. I did, and we sunned ourselves while I desperately tried to concentrate on the Hermann Hesse novel I had brought along. Suddenly Dr. Gold became extremely upset. He was missing $500 in cash that had been in his pocket before lunch. He demanded to see the concierge of the hotel, who advised him to go into town and report it to the police.

Dr. Gold did not speak French, and there were no English-speaking policemen in the station. I spoke French almost fluently, so I volunteered to accompany Dr. Gold into the village and act as his translator. We drove into the picturesque town with its designer shops and cobblestoned streets and found the small police station at the corner of the square. I informed the magistrate of the theft and translated our conversation for Dr. Gold. Now our roles were reversed: I was the expert, assisting Dr. Gold in a new and strange environment. I saw him looking at me with appreciation. The police report was taken down, and after the magistrate assured us of their intention to investigate, we left the station.

Afterwards we had a coffee at one of the small outdoor cafés along the main square. As we sat quietly smoking and drinking, things changed forever between us. We were finally
alone together, not in a small office or diner in Queens, but on the French Riviera. Nothing was done, nothing was said. But there in the South of France with Dr. Gold, images of the way our lives could be began taking shape.

One year later, on the last night in his office before he left once again for his August vacation, we became lovers.

 

DR. GOLD—Marty, as I began to call him—and I had been having an affair for two months when my father began to get chest pains. He was working as a salesman for a company that required him to carry a thirty-pound case. My mother convinced him to make an appointment to see Marty. I developed his chart, took his height, weight, and blood pressure, did an EKG on him, had him undress, and left him alone for the examination. Later in the consultation I stood behind my father when Marty told him that the pains he was having were due to angina. “You're a good candidate for a heart attack,” he told my father. “Don't carry that case, it is too heavy for you. You must change your life.”

My parents decided to get a second opinion; Marty's honest prognosis and the radical changes he recommended seemed impossible. How does one follow a dictum, “You must change your life,” when the life you are living is all that you know?

The second doctor gave my parents the answer they wanted to hear. This time the EKG was normal; the physician did not find anything potentially problematic with my father's health, and he saw no reason why my father could not go on making sales calls with that thirty-pound case.

Two weeks later, I received a call from my uncle early in the morning telling me that my father was very ill and I was needed at home immediately. My heart sank. I rose from the bed that also served as a couch in my first studio apartment
in LeFrak City, dressed quickly, and made the twenty-minute drive down Queens Boulevard to my parents' apartment.

I opened the door to find my mother frantically vacuuming back and forth, back and forth over the same small piece of orange carpet in the living room. I recalled that she had also been vacuuming the day we heard on the radio that John F. Kennedy had been killed.

She looked at me with the terror and helplessness that always seemed to be brimming just beneath her surface. Her eyes were unseeing and frantic.

“Mommy,” I said.

She kept vacuuming. I walked slowly to her, gently took the machine from her hands, and turned it off.

“I don't know what happened,” she said. “They say he is in the hospital—what happened? Do you know what happened?

“Let's call the hospital and find out.”

My mother followed me into the small kitchen and I picked up the wall phone. It was early April, and as I looked out the kitchen window at the familiar row houses and trees, it occurred to me that every spring from then on would be different.

I reached the hospital, somewhere in Western Pennsylvania where my father had gone a couple of days earlier on a business trip.

“Who are you calling about please?” asked the voice on the other end of the phone.

“I am Jack Hoffman's daughter,” I said, struggling to control my anxiety.

A pause—a time period impossible to measure.

“Oh,” the voice said, “I'm terribly sorry, but Mr. Hoffman passed away sometime last night.”

I hung up the phone and turned to my mother. “He's dead.
Daddy is dead.”

Her white face contorted in pain as she howled in a kind of primal scream.

In that moment we became unequal in grief. I was the one to tell my mother the news, and I was the one to comfort her. That night I slept in my parents' bed, my mother clinging to me desperately, crying for my father.

I had moved out of their house just two weeks before. I was twenty-four years old, struggling to be on my own and to get away from that eternal triangle. My mother came to my apartment a few weeks after my father's death and angrily told me that I was responsible for it. She said I had betrayed him by moving out, that the loss had killed him. Her words cut me deeply. My mother and relatives pressured me to move back in with her, but I resisted the pull of that dark place.

The week of shivah was spent at my parents' apartment. The presentation case my father had carried was still there, and I took it and carried it purposefully toward the garbage chute in the hallway. I was just about to throw the damn thing away when one of my uncles stopped me. He was afraid that if I destroyed it, the company would have to be paid. I was furious, feeling absolutely powerless, unable even to take out my rage upon this black box, this pathetic surrogate.

I was in my parents' bedroom with my mother when Marty walked in to pay his respects. She moved easily into his arms for comfort when he bent to embrace her. I left the apartment with him that afternoon.

Driving down Queens Boulevard I didn't notice the red lights or the blur of moving objects around me. I only knew I was in a safe harbor sitting beside him. He stopped at one of our favorite diners and over a cup of chicken soup told me what a gift it was for my father to have gone so quickly, never
conscious of his life slipping away. As a doctor he had seen so many different endings; this was one of the better ones, he assured me. His words were a small comfort in an ocean of pain.

 

AFTER MY FATHER'S DEATH, there was no money for me to go to NYU. I transferred to Queens College and took on two more part-time jobs in addition to my position in Marty's office to pay for my education. Taking out student loans eased some of the financial burden, but the responsibilities of being on my own and the fact that I was always the oldest student in the class put me on a very different trajectory than my classmates. I rarely had time to involve myself in the social life of the college, so focused was I on my work, studies, and newly found love.