one hot summer (24 page)

It was the last week of August. I never used to think about time passing. But now my life was all about time—time hidden, time spent, deadlines and pressure. In the early morning hours sometimes I felt like Captain Hook in
Peter Pan,
hearing the ticktock of the clock in the crocodile’s stomach wherever he went.

Unless something changed, Luther would be leaving Miami within the week—exactly at the same time I was supposed to announce my decision to the firm. I had tried to ignore the hard choices in my life, losing myself in juggling priorities, schedules, and loyalties. It was frightening how easily I was able to keep each part of my life discrete from all the others, and how good I had become at not facing reality.

I should have realized there was going to be a price to be paid for my actions. There always is when someone does something wrong. It was one of the few things I could say for sure was true.

Ariel was consumed by his personal-injury case, the one involving the water-delivery driver suing his employer and everyone else he could drag in. Ariel spent a lot of hours at the office, leaving early and coming home late, sometimes after dinner. Ariel had kept these kinds of hours before when working on an important case, but never for such an extended period of time. It didn’t occur to me to question his behavior, and I believed him when he said he was at the office. Every time I phoned him there, he picked up.

Normally I would have said something to Ariel about neglecting to spend time with Marti, but I was busy with my own agenda and, of course, Ariel’s long hours made things a hell of a lot easier for me. I was busy every day either with Luther or with going to the office. I was relieved that Ariel and I weren’t spending much time together, because we were spared the usual chitchat about how we had spent our days.

When Ariel
was
home, he didn’t even seem to notice that we weren’t communicating as much as before, and that we only achieved any closeness when we were in bed making love. I thought that maybe he was unconsciously avoiding me, not wanting to discuss what I was going to do with my job. If so, I realized he was trying to be considerate and not influence my decision with anything he might do or say. Probably also he was simply working so intently on his case that he didn’t want or need any distractions for the moment. It didn’t matter much. In those days, I was happy just to be left alone.

I started feeling more and more guilt about my infidelity to Ariel in those moments when I allowed myself to stop running and examine my emotions. When Ariel lay in bed after we vigorously made love, he would softly snore next to me, with his features relaxed and his body at ease. He was a sound sleeper, the picture of a man whose world was right and who didn’t have a care. He said he seldom dreamed, never had nightmares and, once asleep, hardly ever stirred in bed.

No woman could have asked for a better husband and father than Ariel. The man loved Marti and me with every bone in his body. I knew that he would have died for us. He was a great provider, and never denied us a thing—in fact, he delighted in spoiling us rotten. He drank in moderation, and his only vice was a fondness for Cuban Montecristo Numero Uno cigars, which were smuggled into the U.S. in defiance of the embargo. He was smart, he was funny, he always knew what I was talking about and was always ready for a laugh.

I couldn’t come up with a clear answer that explained why I was betraying him. Before Luther came to Miami, the idea of getting involved with another man was the furthest thing from my mind. I wondered, if not Luther, would I eventually have had an affair with someone else? I liked to think not, that Luther had come at the right time and that I had been particularly receptive to him as a result. I didn’t think I would have ever been unfaithful to Ariel with anyone else. Luther had been the great love of my life, and I was his. We hadn’t recognized it at the time, at Duke or in the years that followed. Maybe we wouldn’t have been ready then, even if we’d tried to stay together and get married. It might even have been a huge mistake, and we might have ruined things forever between us. I could drive myself crazy with all this speculation and navel-gazing, but I craved an explanation for what had happened to me this summer. The sun kept beating down, the sidewalks baked, and I felt myself drifting.

Although I spent much of the day in air-conditioning, I felt the heat getting to me. I started to feel tired all the time, even after a long night’s sleep. I didn’t think anything of it.

But one morning I experienced a symptom I couldn’t ignore. It was the morning after a day in which I’d been with both Luther and Ariel, and I felt a painful burning sensation when I went to the bathroom for my morning pee. My bladder was so full that I had to empty it, but by the end I had tears in my eyes. Luckily, Ariel had already left for the office, so I could deal with my problem without him knowing.

I realized that my behavior had finally caught up with me. I had contracted the “honeymoon disease”—cystitis, the result of indulging in too much sex. I cursed under my breath because I realized that I would be out of commission while I took medicine to clear up the infection. The time left for Luther and me was rapidly dwindling, and the idea of abstaining from sex for at least several days seemed like an unendurable hardship.

I lay in bed, trying to think clearly despite the pain radiating from between my legs, and considered my options. I thought about going to one of my family’s pharmacies, the one on Calle Ocho. I knew the pharmacist, Rodrigo. He’d worked there for decades, and I might be able to beg him for medicine to take care of the problem without a prescription. I knew he would do it, but I also knew that I couldn’t trust him to keep quiet. Rodrigo was already privy to too much information about our family, since he filled all our prescriptions from birth control pills to Marti’s antibiotics when he became sick. Rodrigo would probably tease me about having too much sex with Ariel while filling the prescription. He was a good friend, but I couldn’t trust his discretion. He was totally loyal to my family, but that might make him more likely to blab to Mamá.

No, I would have to go see my regular ob/gyn, Dr. Kennedy, to get this deal over with. I looked over at the clock on my bedside table and saw that it wasn’t even eight yet. It was going to be agony waiting until nine for the office to open. I considered getting in my car and driving there in hopes that I could somehow be worked in between patients, but I decided against it. I could end up sitting in the waiting room for hours.

I felt terrible, but I received some pity for my sins when, at precisely nine, I called the doctor’s office. The nurse who answered told me that there had just been a cancellation, and said that an appointment was mine if I could get there by nine thirty. I didn’t even take a shower. I put on a skirt, a T-shirt, and espadrilles, then darted for the door.

Dr. Kennedy’s office was in the Grove, and traffic was light, so I made it right on time. I found an empty parking space across the street from the Mayfair House Hotel, right next to the doctor’s office, but as I bustled away I suddenly realized that I had forgotten to put money in the meter. Knowing the merciless restrictions in the Grove, I would surely find a ticket waiting for me. I was in such pain by then, though, that I would rather take the ticket than have to retrace my steps. I would have paid five tickets without complaining, if only I could get a little relief.

I arrived in the office completely out of breath, and cringing with each step I took. I didn’t want to seem overly dramatic, but keeping my composure was becoming increasingly difficult. Once inside, I signed my name on the clipboard by the frosted pane of glass that separated the nurse’s station from the waiting room. A couple of minutes later the partition opened and one of the nurses—a bored, gum-chewing twenty-something who looked barely old enough to be out of school—glanced at the paper where I’d written my name.

“Margarita,” she said. I hated to be called by my first name by strangers, especially when they were a dozen years younger than me.

“Right here,” I said weakly.

“Sorry, but Dr. Kennedy’s been called away on an emergency,” she explained. “He had to go to Baptist Hospital to deliver a baby.”

I felt my eyes tear up, and struggled to keep myself together.

“When will he be back?” I asked.

The nurse just shrugged. “Don’t know.” She chewed her gum, looked at me, and seemed finally to notice how much pain I was in. “You know, Dr. Macia is here. She can see you, if you’re not able to wait for Dr. Kennedy.”

I had no idea who Dr. Macia was, but I had gone from hating the young nurse to wanting to kiss her.

“That would be great,” I said.

The frosted glass door slammed shut. I got up and found myself in too much pain to sit down again. The waiting room was empty save for me, so no one was there to mind my pacing around and grimacing. I loved Dr. Kennedy—he had been my ob/gyn ever since my freshman year at Penn, when the family pediatrician said he could no longer see me, since I’d just turned eighteen. I thought that it was going to be a little strange, having a female doctor examine me. I was so miserable, though, that I would have seen Attila the Hun if he’d been able to help me.

I kept pacing, trying to distract myself from the burning inside me. I thought about all the prenatal visits to this office when I was expecting Marti, and how I’d never really looked around at my surroundings—I’d been too tense with expectation. It had been a blessing, really. Now that I had a good look, the place resembled nothing more than an adolescent girl’s fantasy, with light pink, striped wallpaper, rose-colored upholstery on the sofa and armchairs, a flowery red carpet, and lavender checked curtains tied off with white eyelet sashes. Even the window shades glowed with a rust color. Maternity and parenting magazines covered all the pink-stained tables in the four corners of the room.

It was bizarre to see the place as it really was, and I realized that I had never been alone in the room before. I couldn’t fathom any reason for decorating a room for grown women as though it was a nursery for little girls. Maybe some misguided decorator had thought that female patients would be more comfortable in a room that evoked their childhood. Instead, standing there alone, the room looked infantile and depressing to me. If my condition hadn’t made me sick, my surroundings would have.

Suddenly the frosted glass snapped open and Nurse Lolita called out to me. I moved as fast as I could to the door when she opened it, and went to a bathroom when she directed me to pee in a plastic cup.

“Open the little door next to the sink when you’re done,” she said with some distaste. “Just push the cup through. The lab’s on the other side. And don’t forget to write your name on the cup—there’s a pencil right here.”

The very idea of urinating filled me with horror, but I knew I was going to have to get through it. The burning pain was almost unendurable, but I somehow managed to follow the nurse’s orders. When I was finished, I washed my hands and opened the door, waiting to be escorted to the examination room. I looked at my watch. If Dr. Macia worked like Dr. Kennedy, I would be out of there, prescription in hand, in about twenty minutes.

Instead, a second nurse came to get me.

“I’ll take you to the lab,” she said.

“What for?”

“Dr. Macia has ordered a blood test,” she explained.

I just needed some antibiotics, but I went along without protest. I figured this was just the doctor’s way of dealing with patients she’d never seen before—after all, doctors were sued every day, and I was an attorney. It wouldn’t be the first time my occupation made someone paranoid.

The lab technician was doing her best to carry on the proud tradition of Count Dracula: She took about five gallons of blood from a vein in the crook of my arm. She was so enthusiastic, I was surprised she hadn’t just gone for a bite from my neck. When she was finished, she slapped a Band-Aid on my arm and gave me a big smile. The nurse returned and escorted me to an examination room. I was totally miserable, my arm throbbing and my insides burning, but I kept telling myself that it would all be over soon.

Inside the examination room the nurse ordered me to take off all my clothes; she then handed me a pink paper robe that had a red plastic strap to tie around my waist. I wasn’t going to be walking down a Paris catwalk in that outfit anytime soon. The nurse then took my blood pressure and asked me questions about my general health. I fought off the urge to just ask her for a prescription so I could be on my way.

“The doctor will be with you shortly,” the nurse said, signing her papers and nodding officiously. I sighed, resigning myself to a long wait. Apparently Dr. Macia didn’t work as quickly as Dr. Kennedy. To distract myself from the pain, I busied myself folding my clothes.

There was a magazine rack on the wall near the bench where I waited. I leafed through a couple of celebrity gossip rags, then opened the blinds and watched the traffic on the street below. So much time passed that I was almost tempted to open up one of the parenting magazines, but I was spared that brand of torture by Dr. Macia’s arrival.

At first I couldn’t believe the person who had stepped in the door could possibly be a doctor. She looked too young to buy a drink. She was tiny, with short black hair and bangs, no makeup, and she wore plain blue jeans under her white lab coat. She came in holding the clipboard containing my chart, which she looked at as though it contained incriminating information.

“I’m Dr. Macia,” she said without looking up.

“I figured that out,” I said, my voice tight with pain.

Dr. Macia seemed oblivious to sarcasm. As for me, sitting there in my pink wraparound, the throbbing between my legs, having come there without a shower, I felt ready to apply for Social Security. I had never imagined that I would long for old Dr. Kennedy.

“Please lie down.” Dr. Macia indicated the examination table. I carefully did as I was told, feeling anxious about the prospect of having a woman put her hand inside me. I gritted my teeth and tried to have an out-of-body experience as the doctor poked and prodded around. I had to admit, Dr. Macia had a gentle way about her. As soon as she was finished, I sat straight up on the table and tried to arrange my robe to cover myself as much as possible. It was a futile gesture—the young doctor knew me physically by then about as well as anyone could—but it made me feel better.