Private Practices (25 page)

“The baby's all right,” Miss Field said, slamming the door behind herself and the resident. “The blood was Dr. Zauber's blood, from the cut on his hand.” Examining her unsightly uniform, she added, “I've put the child back in the nursery, but what are we to tell the mother?”

Before Ben could speak, the pediatric resident interrupted, “I don't see that we have to mention the incident to the mother at all, except to say that Dr. Zauber was called away for an emergency. If she really wants to leave tonight, I'll do the procedure.” He turned respectfully to Sidney who had begun to look more alert although he still seemed unsteady on his feet. “Are
you
all right, Dr. Zauber?”

“I'm all right,” Sidney muttered. “I'll be all right in a minute or two.” He too looked down at his stained white coat and abstractedly started to unbutton and then rebutton it. Then his eyes began to focus on the people around him and, shifting his glance from face to face, he at last concentrated his gaze on Miss Field. “The floor in here was slippery,” he said to her, his voice turning belligerent. “When I picked up the scalpel I slipped. It twisted in my hand.”

Miss Field responded with astonishment. “You took it up by the blade. Mrs. Olding saw you do it. And you were staggering.”

“You and Mrs. Olding interfered between me and my patient.” Sidney's voice was controlled and icy.

“You were practically bouncing off the walls. You didn't know what you were doing! You cut your own hand! God knows what you might have done to the baby if we hadn't interfered.”

Sidney gave Miss Field a scathing contemptuous look. Ben was awed. Sidney's belief in himself, his conviction that in all circumstances he himself was right and others wrong, was still utterly intact, whatever else about him was disintegrating. “That floor should have been dry,” he went on. “Jesus Christ. What are you running in here? A city pool?” He gestured at the floor and the resident smiled ingratiatingly.

Ben looked where Sidney pointed. Indeed, there were drops of water just below the baby's surgical bassinet. Would Miss Field have to accept responsibility for the accident? He wanted to say something to her, to hint to her that with the amount of drugs he was taking, Sidney might have slipped in a desert. But he didn't dare speak. Not in front of Sidney. In any event, Miss Field seemed able to take care of herself. Scowling, she withdrew into her professional persona and said coldly, “You'd better go down to Emergency and have that hand looked at.”

“She's right, Dr. Zauber,” the resident fawned.

“I'm going,” Sidney flung out. “Come on, Ben. Let's go.”

He followed Sidney.

Outside, Sidney paused for a moment at a supply cupboard, looking for gauze with which to wrap his hand. “Help me with this, will you?” he said. Unexpectedly Ben surprised himself by answering, “Wait a minute. I want to ask Miss Field something.” She'd been amazingly unflustered by Sidney's attack on her, he thought. He had to know why. Sidney looked at him angrily as he turned back toward the circumcision cubicle, but he ignored his irate glance and pushed open the door.

The resident was already gone and Miss Field was alone, staring down at the floor under the bassinet table and shaking her head. “Was Mrs. Olding with Dr. Zauber the whole time?” Ben asked her.

“Yes. That is, until she ran for me.”

“Is that customary? I've rarely had a nurse in attendance during a circumcision.”

“Dr. Alithorn left instructions this morning for a nurse to be with Dr. Zauber on all occasions,” Miss Field said. “And for us to let him know if anything unorthodox occurs.”

“I see.” Suddenly he felt cheered. At least Alithorn was doing
something.
“Thank you,” he said warmly to Miss Field.

Sidney's hand required several stitches and while Ben waited for the emergency doctor to finish with his brother, he went into the staff room and called Naomi, telling her not to expect him in time for Petey's play tonight. He had a woman in labor, he lied, and it looked as if it was going to be complicated and time-consuming. He would call Naomi later and tell her whether he could meet her at all that night.

“Poor Petey,” Naomi said. “He'll be
so
disappointed.”

Her words struck him as bizarre. Here his brother could have castrated an infant and Naomi was complaining about how upset Petey would be over Ben's missing him in
The Pied Piper.
For the first time since he had conceived his plan for marrying Naomi he found her ridiculously trivial. “Petey was really counting on your seeing him,” she was still going on.

“I'm sorry,” he answered coolly. “Some things are more important than a seven-year-old's disappointments.”

“Ouch,” Naomi said. “You're certainly fierce tonight. Maybe Petey's lucky you're not going to see him.”

It did occur to him then that, to be absolutely fair, he was himself the person responsible for Naomi's talking so trivially at so serious a moment as this one. If she failed to comprehend the darkness of his mood, it was because he had kept her uninformed about what was happening to Sidney, had continuously hidden from her scrutiny this disturbing aspect of his life. He would have to tell her about Sidney soon, if just to keep himself from feeling utterly isolated from her. But it was going to be difficult. She would be wounded at having been kept in the dark so long.

He couldn't face launching into the stressful subject now. Promising again to call her later, he hung up and tried Claudia at home once more. But still there was no answer.

In the cab going uptown, his hand neatly bandaged, Sidney was silent, subdued, not needing to pretend with Ben, as he had with Miss Field and the pediatric resident, that he was in total control of himself. After a while, he even let his head slump sideways into the corner of the cab. “I guess I'll come upstairs with you,” Ben offered, thinking of Claudia and more anxious than ever to speak with her. Perhaps he could get a minute alone with her to tell her what had happened, before Sidney launched into some inaccurate defensive version of the event.

“Thanks,” Sidney said, sounding surprisingly grateful for his offer. “I'm not quite as steady as I could be.” He half-smiled in his peculiar slack way, his mouth open but his lips straight.

Ben kept silent. The cab careened up Third Avenue, making all the lights, until at last it was forced to a screeching halt by traffic heading east on Sixty-fifth Street. Then, in the sudden absence of motion, Sidney said, “Well, what the hell. I have no future anyway.”

Ben found his brother's new self-pitying tone even less appealing than his earlier self-righteous one. He twisted forward in his seat, concentrating on the terrible driver they had chosen, surprised at how little sympathy for Sidney he was able to summon up. He was looking after him, looking out for his interests. But he felt little of the awe or even respect Sidney had always drawn from him in the past. “There's something I should tell you before you come up with me,” Sidney said, scattering his thoughts. “Claudia and I have separated.”

The cab jolted forward and Ben's head whipped around. “When? What happened?”

“When I lost my grant,” Sidney said bitterly. “She cleared out like a bat out of hell. The way everyone else is going to, once they know.” He shut his eyes, “Maybe you will too, old buddy.”

Ben clutched the leather strap of the speeding cab.

“I always figured her for a starfucker,” Sidney said, his eyes still closed. “I don't give a shit. I really don't.”

Ben clung to the strap and kept his eyes forward. He was more unsettled by Sidney's information about Claudia than by the disconcerting events of the day. “You didn't tell me,” he whispered, although he almost said, “She didn't tell me.”

“I didn't want to talk about it.”

Sidney opened his eyes, sat forward, and began fiddling with his pants pocket, trying to extricate his wallet with his good hand.

“Where is she living?” Ben asked.

“I don't know. She calls once in a while, but she won't tell me where she's staying. She quit her job so I wouldn't be able to track her down. As if I would. Who needs her?”

Ben turned and looked closely at Sidney who had not yet succeeded in drawing the wallet out of his back pocket. “I'll pay,” he said, and quickly produced his own wallet.

“Maybe I ought to stay with you for a while,” Sidney murmured, interrupting Ben's activity.

Ben concentrated on drawing change out of his jacket pocket.

“I'm worried about being alone.” Sidney reached across with his good hand and tried to stop Ben's motion. “ODing,” he whispered.

“Right,” Ben said rapidly. “Of course. I hadn't thought of that.”

“Or maybe you ought to stay with me. Though I'd rather we stayed at your place. The co-op's
hers.
I never really felt it was mine.” Still trying to reach Ben's hand, Sidney added in his self-pitying tone, “I never really felt that she was mine.”

“All right,” Ben said brusquely. “Stay with me. You can sleep in the spare room.”

He didn't like the idea of living with Sidney very much. But it had certain advantages he saw. He would be able to supervise him more adequately. And when Claudia called him, perhaps he would get a chance to speak with her too. Perhaps he could even convince her to call more frequently. If she didn't want to have daily contact with Sidney just now, she could call him. He would remind her that separated or not she was still Sidney's wife and ought at least to have the decency to stay in regular touch with the person upon whom she had shifted the burden of his care. Not that he blamed her. Looking at Sidney, fumbling and maudlin alongside him, he envied Claudia her freedom.

Upstairs, the once-meticulous apartment was a mess. There were heaps of dirty dishes on the living-room cocktail tables, stacks of mail and newspapers on virtually every chair and footstool and, in the kitchen, overflowing garbage bags on the counters, more dirty dishes in the sink, and small, disregarded mounds of broken crockery swept helter-skelter into the corners. All the rooms smelled foul and, waiting for Sidney to finish his packing, Ben opened windows. Then he cleared a space for himself on a chair at the hall phone and, calling Naomi, who had not yet left for Petey's play, told her about Sidney and the barbiturates.

It was easy for him now. His hopes for establishing regular communication with Claudia helped him overcome the reticence he had experienced just an hour ago. He was as thorough in his details as he could be and apologized many times over to Naomi for not having confided in her sooner. And then he told her that Claudia had left Sidney, and that consequently he would have to let Sidney stay with him for a while.

It wouldn't be for terribly long, he said. Still, Naomi and Petey mightn't be able to move in with him at the end of the month, as they had all anticipated. But they would do it soon, he promised.

Naomi was furious. “Goddamn it, Ben, I've already sublet the loft.”

“See if you can postpone your tenant for a while,” he said calmly. “I'm sure I'll have Sidney straightened out in a month or two.”

Naomi sulked. She was furious with Sidney. “Damn Sidney,” she railed. “That fucking Sidney.”

“I know exactly how you feel. Poor baby. Poor sweetheart.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

JULY

Claudia was firm about her decision in the daytime, but at night misgivings would invade her. What would become of her if she stayed away from Sidney permanently? What would become of the baby? Would it grow up resenting her for having deprived it of a father? Bootie had said, “All a kid needs is a mother,” but Bootie's own child, a daughter the bohemian Bootie had had with a St. Louis sculptor she had never planned to marry and no longer saw at all, was whiny and secretive and hardly a good advertisement for single parenthood. Or so it seemed to Claudia.

At night in the brightly lit suite at the Mayfair House she had taken just after her return from St. Louis, she would cry for hours or hold imaginary conversations with her unborn child, begging its forgiveness for having run away from its father.

It had been easier in the beginning, when she had first left Sidney. She had felt, the night she had run coatless out of her apartment with her husband scrambling in pursuit behind her, that she had had no choice. If she had stayed even a second longer, he might have beaten her, not in play, as he did to become aroused, but in deadly disordered madness.

She and Sidney had been talking in the living room of their apartment and he had been drinking heavily, despite the fact that earlier, at dinner, he had swallowed two glistening capsules of Nembutal right in front of her eyes. The phone had rung and she had dutifully gotten up and answered it on the kitchen extension and then returned to the living room to tell Sidney it was Borkin Layton of the Deutsch Foundation. Sidney had poured himself another bourbon before going into the kitchen, and she had waited gingerly outside, nervous because of what her brother-in-law had said about Sidney's grant being in trouble and knowing it was unusual for Layton to call on a weekend.

Eavesdropping, she had heard Sidney's voice grow louder and more explosive as his conversation with Layton progressed. He was mad at Layton, she thought as she listened, or at Keith Neville, whose name she heard him shout several times during the conversation. Then she heard the phone receiver slam down and waited for Sidney to come out of the kitchen. But he didn't come, and instead she began to hear toppling noises.

First, she heard a few glasses shattering, then a tentative fall of pottery, and last a reverberating riotous crash of china. She raced into the kitchen and saw Sidney sweeping the pantry shelves with an outstretched whirling arm, glasses and cups and plates spinning and colliding and smashing beneath his feet.