Private Practices (13 page)

She too stood, reaching on tiptoe to kiss him goodbye. Her breasts arched, her nipples paraded against the violet silk of her shirt. Suddenly he thought with a start that he had been seeing her through Sidney's eyes all night. At the same moment it occurred to him with unusual clarity that Sidney would begrudge him any woman toward whom he developed an attachment. Sidney would always prefer to keep him alone, uninvolved, at his beck and call. Astonished at the realization, he returned Naomi's kiss, handed her the keys to his apartment, and whispered, “Wait for me at my place when you're finished. I'll get back as quickly as I can.”

It had begun to rain right after he left the hospital and, walking, he had gotten drenched. His shoes made dirty, wet prints on the carpet in the foyer and as he walked into his living room he felt chilled and disconsolate. But seeing Naomi with a book in her hands and a cup of coffee at her elbow, his spirits lifted. Whatever Sidney said about her, she was making him happy. It made him recall his ambition to marry and later, when they were in bed, listening to the rain beat furiously against the windowpanes, he brought the subject up, asking her whether she was still so down on the idea of marriage as she had been the day she had first come to his office.

“I try not to think about it,” Naomi said, but she cradled into his arms.

“If you have to try, then it means it must cross your mind sometimes.” He stroked her hair, his fingers knotting in the intemperate curls.

“Those ideas always cross people's minds when they're having affairs,” Naomi said. “It's the Victorian holdover. The notion that you can't have sex without its leading to marriage.”

“I don't care how you rationalize it,” he responded, pleased. “You've thought of it. You've considered it.”

“In a way,” she admitted. “But it isn't thinking, really. It's more like just daydreaming.”

“What would make you think of it,” he persisted, holding her more tightly. “Really think and not just daydream?” When she didn't answer, he prodded her by asking, “What would help? What can I do?”

“I don't know,” she said thoughtfully. And then, brightening, “Maybe it would help if you'd take more of an interest in Petey. A lot of the time I feel you keep forgetting I have a child. You never ask me about him.”

“I'm sorry.” He remembered the evening he had first met the boy, a sturdy seven-year-old with Naomi's dark, appealing eyes but a sober, even sullen mouth. He had gone downtown to Naomi's loft that night, picking her up there because they were going to an off-Broadway show, but she was still dressing when he arrived and had called out from the bathroom that he should talk with her son a while. He had tried, asking the boy what he wanted to be when he grew up. But Petey had shrugged his shoulders and looked bored with the question. It had discouraged him. He had unfolded the newspaper he had bought on his way downtown and opened it noisily, absorbing himself in the headlines. Petey had turned on the TV.

“Petey's part of me,” Naomi was saying. “When you don't ask me about him, I feel you don't really know who I am or what I'm all about.”

“Look,” he said impulsively, “I have to go down to the Caribbean for Sidney on Friday. Why don't you and Petey come with me? I'd be working a lot of the time, but still, we'd have the evenings together. The three of us. It'd be a chance to see how we all get on together.”

“Are you sure you want to get on with Petey?”

“I suggested it, didn't I?”

She nodded happily, agreeing to his suggestion, and he pulled the blankets up around her shoulders.

Everything seemed so simple to him that night. Listening to the rain beating against the windows, he was lulled into an optimism more restful than sleep itself. If all that stood in the way of his marrying Naomi was her son, surely he would find a way of coping with the boy. Then he and Naomi could give up their respective apartments and find a home for the three of them, perhaps a house up in Westchester, or a co-op in the city with a big terrace for Petey to play on. And more than two bedrooms. Three.

His breath caught with excitement. They could have a baby, he and Naomi. A cousin for Sidney and Claudia's child. It wouldn't have to be very much younger, really. They could start on it even before they got married. How surprised everyone he knew would be when he announced that he was going to be a father! And how pleased his mother would be. The last time he had seen her at the nursing home—was it already a year ago?—she had complained fretfully throughout his visit about his still being a bachelor and thereby frustrating her yearnings after immortality. Perhaps he ought to visit her this weekend. Tell her about Naomi, if not yet about the grandchild. Perhaps he could get a flight to the Caribbean that made a stopover in Miami. Closing his eyes he pictured Sara's delight at learning he was at last planning to get married.

“They're bringing your mother down right away,” a suntanned nurse assured him when he arrived at the sprawling, expensive nursing home he and Sidney had selected a year and a half ago after Sara had broken her hip. He had telephoned from the airport to say he was on his way, hoping to find her downstairs waiting for him, but the nurse explained. “She's still in her room. Putting on the finishing touches.”

“Makeup?” he asked “Does she still like makeup?”

“Oh, certainly. And that's a good sign, don't you know?”

He nodded. “It won't be very long, will it? I've got to be back at the airport at noon.”

“No. She's been a little under the weather lately. A little slowed down. But they're helping her. She'll be right along.”

Impatient, he paced the lobby of the nursing home and then made his way out into its open Spanish courtyard, sitting for a moment on the edge of a plastic lounge chair beneath a stand of tall palms. Several elderly, white-haired men and a gray-headed woman, reclining in similar chairs, looked up at him expectantly and then returned to gazing at the sun through the trees.

He saw his mother long before she spotted him. Actually, he recognized her by the ruffled blue blouse he had sent her for a birthday present last year, because except for the blouse, the woman in the wheelchair looked nothing like Sara, who had always been robust, neatly coiffed and well groomed. This woman was bone-thin, had white, matted strands of hair that jutted out from her head like the rays on a child-drawn sun, and was wearing worn blue slacks stained with food. Her lips were inverted and in her lap she was carrying a set of false teeth.

“Hello, Mama,” he said and stooped down to kiss her. But at the last moment he averted his lips. Her lipstick, vividly violet, was smeared unevenly beyond the corners of her loose lips and he felt repelled by the sight. Drawing back, he thought how much he used to love to kiss her in the days when she wore French cologne and delicately applied lipstick.

Sara looked at him uncomprehendingly at first and then began to nod her head, saying, “My little boy. I knew you'd come to me.”

“I didn't know you'd gotten so thin.”

“I wrote you, darling.”

But he had had no letter from her in three months, only doctors' reports.

“Aren't you eating? Don't you like the food?” Her loss of weight startled him.

“They've started to poison the food,” she answered, her eyes tearing. “They put prussic acid in it. I wrote you about it. You've got to speak to them, Sidney!”

“I'm Ben,” he said, puzzled at her mistake.

“How's Ben?” she asked.

“I'm Ben.” He shifted his position so that he stood between her and the powerful sun.

“You're Sidney. There's no mistaking the two of you. Ben looks like your father's side.”

“Mama, I'm Ben.” He was growing annoyed with her. He tried to muster pity for her senility and her flagging memory, but all he felt was irritability. She saw it and sighed, “What is it? What's the matter?”

“You look terrible!” he answered loudly, paying back her oversight of him by harsh appraisal of her. But when large tears appeared in the corners of her already-watery eyes, he added more gently, “It would help if you put your teeth in.”

“Uh-uh.” Despite the tears, she shook her head stubbornly. “They don't put poison in the liquids, only the solids. So if you don't have your teeth in, they can't get you. Upstairs just now, they tried to make me do it, but I wouldn't. Not even for you, darling.”

The group of old people under the palms were staring at them. “Okay, okay,” he murmured, not wanting to make a scene.

She beamed, her toothless smile broad. “You always were a good boy, Sidney. I knew you'd understand.”

Sighing, he nodded his head and repeated, “Okay. Okay,” trying to convince himself that it really made no difference to him whether or not she thought he was Sidney. But it did, and he couldn't avoid thinking bitterly that it had always been Sidney on whom her heart was fixed, always Sidney for whom she watched and waited, always Sidney for whom her once satin-skinned arms made room, while he got a pat or a peck on the cheeks. He had been superfluous to her as a child and now, in her senility, she had just about forgotten him altogether.

“How are you?” she was asking, her tears gone, her mouth relaxed. “How's your wife?”

“I don't have a wife,” he reminded her, “I came down here to tell you I'm thinking of getting married.”

Bewildered, she stared at him. “You divorced the shiksa?” Her hand went to her matted hair and she rocked her head worriedly from side to side.

He shivered slightly in the sunlight, frightened by the hold her daydream had over her. And then he said, his voice quivering, “I was only kidding, Mama. Just kidding. Of course Claudia and I are still married.”

“Oh. Thank God.” She clutched at his sleeve. “You got me so worried.” And then, turning her head and glancing at a spot directly to the left of him, she said as if to a third person, “He got me so worried. He's such a joker. All the time a joker.” Her neck was stretched forward and her head was tilted as if she was struggling to hear what the person she was now addressing had to say, and then at last he heard her use his own name, or at least one of his childhood appellations. “You don't think so Benjy? You don't think he's funny?”

He cast his eyes toward the empty spot she was concentrating on. The intensity of her vision was so compelling that she was like an actress and he the audience, all disbelief suspended, and for a moment he almost expected to see his boyhood self materialize there, where she stared. And then he shook his head, shaking off the spell she had cast, and said, “Look, Mama, I've got to go now.”

“Not yet!” Her watery eyes reddened and again she reached out to clutch at the sleeve of his jacket. “Don't go. I've been waiting so long for you and you got here so late.”

“I have to, Mama.” He pried her hand loose, and, lifting it, set it gently down on the arm of the wheelchair.

“You have work to do?” she asked, subsiding. “Patients?”

“Yes.”

“I guess it's all right then.” She closed her lips, but her throat emitted a sighing sound anyway. “I always tell everyone that a doctor's mother has to be more patient than a patient.”

Extricating himself, he moved swiftly past her and past the lounging white-haired men and the gray-headed lady, certain that he could not endure another moment of her company. She had made him feel, more acutely than usual, that he was a man without identity, a shadow, a mere tracing of humanity.

In the airport, where Naomi and Petey were awaiting him in front of the Air West Indies ticket counter, he attempted to slough off the bleak mood his visit to his mother had produced in him. He had work to do, he reminded himself, spotting Naomi from a distance, her head bent in animated conversation with her son. He had to show her he could relate to the child.

On the flight down he hadn't really tried at all. He had been preoccupied with thoughts about his mother and had noticed that anyway Petey seemed to prefer to talk to Naomi. Whenever he mentioned Ben, he referred to him in the third person. “How come he's here?” and “Is he going to be with us the whole time?” Ben had decided to let the boy grow used to him gradually. Now, seeing him standing with Naomi, he thought of buying him a chocolate bar and stopped at a newsstand. But perhaps Naomi didn't like him to have sweets. He turned from the candy display and purchased a Miami newspaper.

At lunch, a hasty affair in the airport coffee shop, the boy continued to ignore him. Throughout their hamburgers, he chattered endlessly, but still only to his mother. “Remember the time Daddy took me to Disney World? Remember the time we all went to Great Adventure and the monkeys got on the car? Remember the ride where I was scared when the little cars started flying?”

“Watch out, Petey!” Naomi was trying to prevent Petey from continuing his memories in a standing position. “Stop. Sit down,” she commanded. But Petey was evading her grasp and was standing, was whirling his arms about. A moment later he had overturned Ben's water glass, drenching his trousers.

“God, Petey!” Naomi fussed. “Petey, tell Ben you're sorry!” But the boy, sullen, simply squirreled back down into his seat.

“It's not you,” Naomi whispered to Ben. “He misses his father.” But he couldn't help taking the child's rejection of him personally and his mood grew even darker. Drying himself, he retreated into his newspaper and let Petey have Naomi all to himself. It occurred to him that he oughtn't to be so passive, that he ought to try to court the boy, try to find some common meeting ground. But he felt so colorless and inept after his visit to his mother that the effort seemed utterly beyond him. On the plane, strapped into his seat, he read
Newsweek
while Naomi and Petey played Ghost and tic-tac-toe.

Neville's clinic was in the hills, up a winding, dangerous country road. Driving to it in the unfamiliar car he had rented at the airport, Ben had to swerve several times to avoid not only stray goats but stray children and even adult men who stood forgetfully or defiantly in the middle of the road, conversing with one another. Naomi had suggested that since it was already late in the day, he postpone his first meeting with Neville until tomorrow. But he had felt duty-bound to put in an appearance at the clinic, even if it was just to announce his presence on the island, and dropping Naomi and Petey off at the hotel, he had driven directly inland.