Private Practices (27 page)

“You're not getting anywhere with him? With talking him into stopping?”

“Not really.”

“Oh, Ben. Please keep trying.”

After a few minutes of answering Claudia's questions about Sidney, he would try to get her talking about herself and the baby. Was she resting sufficiently? Exercising? Drinking plenty of milk? Or had her new obstetrician instructed her to be careful about milk in order to keep her weight down?

No matter what she told him, invariably he found fault with the way she was looking after herself and blamed the influence of the new doctor. She had switched to him right after leaving Sidney, and although she had explained to Ben that it had nothing to do with being dissatisfied with him, that it had to do only with her fears of running into Sidney if she came down to the office, he had been deeply hurt by her decision. Hadn't Claudia realized that just as pregnant women become profoundly involved with their obstetricians, so, too, did the obstetricians become involved with them? He still felt responsible for her well-being and inordinately wrapped up in the health of the baby.

“This Dr. Hecksher of yours sounds too casual to me,” he would often tell her. Or he would say disparagingly, “Sounds like a faddist to me. Be careful.”

Claudia didn't mind. She liked to be scolded, he noticed, or told what to look out for in new situations. She liked to receive advice. One night she said that she had begun to think that perhaps after the baby was born she shouldn't, after all, go back to her museum job. Perhaps she should do something different. Go to law school, maybe.

At first he didn't want to comment; he had never been able to form a firm opinion of Claudia's intellectual abilities. But she prodded him into discussing the subject of law school with her and listened very seriously when he outlined the steps she should take before making a decision, the people she ought to see, the law school admission tests she ought to examine. She even made notes.

Another night she asked him what she should wear to the party Bootie was planning in August when her paintings went on exhibit in a prestigious St. Louis gallery. “Should I wear something bohemian? Bootie surely will. Or should I wear something elegant? The Halston, if it still fits?”

Always when they spoke he felt sexually aroused.

He was alone with Sidney so much of the time that he was perpetually tense. But whenever Claudia called, the frustrations that Sidney provoked in him resolved themselves into sexual tension and this, at least, he could relieve. Lying stretched out on the bed, a pillow behind his head and Claudia's voice in his ear, he would know that he could soon attain peace, however momentarily.

Always, when she hung up, he masturbated.

Once, he managed to get Claudia talking about her relationship with Sidney. “Did he ever beat you?” he asked her shyly. “You know, that first time I examined you, I thought he might have.”

She didn't answer at first. He imagined her drifting into diffidence, her face a mask, imagined her changing the subject as she had in his office the day he had noticed the bruises on her thighs. But at last she confessed, “Yes. Sometimes. A little.”

“You liked it?”

“Oh no. No, I didn't.”

“But you let him.”

“He was so insistent. And I wanted to please him.”

“But you must have liked it,” he persisted.

“No. Well, maybe I did. I suppose it must look that way to outside eyes. I thought I was just doing it to hold on to him.”

“What was it about him that you wanted so to hold on to?”

“He made me feel important. The rest of the time.”

“Because of his fame?”

“Yes.”

“Just that? Or other things?”

“Well, his personality, too. His intelligence. His authority. His imagination.”

His hand had gone to his penis. He couldn't help it. Always her cool, unemotional voice excited him.

When they had finished talking, he hung up and made himself come right afterward.

Sidney didn't know that Claudia called and Ben didn't tell him. He seemed to assume Claudia had just decided to forget their relationship. He was angry, he told Ben, but not surprised. Claudia had always been heartless. Ben thought Sidney was hurt, but Sidney wouldn't admit it. “I never loved her anyway,” he would insist. But Ben was sure that Sidney still longed for her, wondered about her.

“I'm puzzled about Claudia's not having moved back into the co-op,” Sidney said one day.

“How do you know she hasn't?” Ben asked.

“I walked over there last week. Spoke to George. He said a new cleaning woman was coming in once a week, and picking up Claudia's mail. I gave him ten bucks to tell me where Claudia was staying, but he told me to keep it. Said he really didn't know.”

“I imagine you'll find out eventually,” Ben reassured Sidney.

“Yeah. I suppose,” Sidney said morosely. “Not that it matters. I suppose I'll be hearing from a lawyer.”

“I hardly see you anymore,” Naomi said to Ben. They were sitting in the kitchen of her loft and Naomi had put up water for tea. But instead of setting out cups and getting down a tin of tea, she paced around the small area, occasionally kicking a sandalled foot against the packing crates stacked in the corner.

“I've told you before,” Ben said patiently, “I can't leave Sidney alone very often. And I can't have you up there when he's there.”

“Why the hell not?”

“It would disturb him. He's terribly upset about Claudia's leaving him, and seeing me with you would just rub things in.”

“Maybe he needs to have things rubbed in,” Naomi commented. “Why must everyone pussyfoot around him all the time?”

“Please calm yourself,” he begged her.

“And be a patsy like you?”

It was not the first time they had fought over Sidney, and usually he attempted to soothe her with promises that Sidney would soon be gone, or with encouraging, anger-dissolving embraces. But tonight, he felt he wanted to win her silence without compromise, wanted to make her cease her annoying complaints without having to work at obtaining the goal. He said nothing, and made no move toward her, remaining with his elbows set firmly down on the table while she stormed about among the boxes.

“Here Petey and I were supposed to move in with you at the end of last month,” she said, kicking hard at one of the crates, “and Sidney just snaps his fingers and you go running to him, not caring who you hurt in the process.”

“That's not quite fair,” he replied quitely. “Or even accurate.”

“Sure it is. ‘Sidney needs me. Sidney can't be left alone.'” She mimicked him, her eyes blazing. “But what are you doing for him? What's anyone doing? What's the hospital doing? If it weren't for the fact that I love you, I'd get my editor to assign a story on that fucking hospital. That fucking Sidney.”

“But you do love me, don't you?” He felt utterly confident of her answer.

“Yes.” She sat down heavily. “I do right now. But love isn't something that just stands still. That never changes. What you do affects my love.”

“And what you do affects mine,” he answered coldly. “It's hard to love someone who complains all the time. So no more complaining, all right? Let's just go to bed.”

She looked away from him, frustration making her shoulders quiver.

“I hate making love here,” she said. “There's no privacy here.”

“It's your own fault. Taking a loft.” He glanced around at the large, open space, only a set of carved Indian screens demarking the area where Petey was sleeping. “Let me ask you something,” he went on, exceedingly calm and rational, “Doesn't it say something about a woman's attitude toward sex when she leaves her husband and moves into a
loft
? With no doors?”

“It was all I could afford,” Naomi countered. “And how dare you talk about my attitudes toward sex? What about yours when I first met you? I'm surprised I even bothered with you.”

He stood up and reached for his raincoat. “I'm going,” he announced. “You've been carping at me all night. I don't have to listen to this.”

She stared at him, her mouth and eyes wide. “No. No, don't go. I'm sorry.”

“I don't feel like making love tonight anyway. I'm not in the mood.”

“Please don't go,” she pleaded. “I'm sorry. I won't say another word about it.”

He hesitated. “You promise?”

“Yes. Yes, I promise.”

He stayed, knowing he had won. But he still didn't feel much like making love to Naomi. He wasn't sure whether it was because of her argumentativeness or because he had been satisfying himself so intensely in response to Claudia's disembodied voice. Still, he went to bed with Naomi, remembering, as he always did when they made love in her loft, to inhibit his usual grunts of passion in order not to awaken Petey.

“This place looks like a pigsty,” Sidney said to him the next morning. Ben had made coffee, shaking the old grounds down the sink drain but scattering some of them onto the counter and the floor beneath the table as he did so. “Clean it up, will you?” Sidney asked irritably, sitting down at the table.

“Tonight,” Ben said. “I've got to get out of here fast this morning. I have a consult.”

He unplugged the coffee pot, poured two mugs of coffee, and set one down in front of Sidney. He drank his own standing, while rummaging in the refrigerator.

“It can wait,” Sidney said. “This place looks foul.”

“No, it can't.” Turning toward Sidney, he gulped coffee.

Sidney's hand was clenched around his coffee mug and he too began to drink, raising the mug carefully to his lips. But his fingers were shaking. They kept tightening and loosening around the smooth ceramic sides. A second later, his fingers uncurled and he let go of the mug. It fell, shattering on the linoleum, and the steaming coffee splattered around his feet. Sidney didn't move them out of the way but sat, looking puzzled, at his empty hand.

Turning back to the sink, Ben got a sponge and began wiping the floor around Sidney's feet. They were dirty, he saw, and the toenails were starting to curve under, like talons. He stood, wrung out the sponge and, bending down again, wiped Sidney's feet.

Ben cleaned up in the office, too, although there the messes were of a different order. Sidney not only continued to arrive late for his appointments, or to cancel an entire waiting room full of patients without explanation, but sometimes he would start to examine a patient and then stalk out of his examining room. Disappearing for fifteen or twenty minutes or sometimes not returning at all, he would leave the office to make one of his excursions to a drugstore. The abandoned patients called the nurses and the nurses called Ben.

“Dr. Zauber's had to leave. He's terribly sorry,” Ben would mutter, embarrassed.

“He didn't say anything. He just walked out,” the patients would complain indignantly.

“Young girl with cancer,” he would say. “Terrible business.” Or even, on occasion, “His wife. She's pregnant, you know. But she's been hospitalized for toxemia and it's preying on his mind.” Usually the patients would soon begin to nod forgivingly. Once he got over feeling extremely shocked at his ability to lie so convincingly, he was amused to realize that he had, after all his years of feeling unimaginative, at last learned the joys of invention.

But many patients were starting to realize that something was seriously wrong with Sidney. Although they didn't suspect what it was, a few began switching to other doctors. By the middle of July, Sidney had confused or alienated so many women that his appointments chart showed numerous gaps and empty hours.

It was just as well, Ben thought. When Sidney did see patients, when he didn't cancel them or disappear, he was so aggressive that Ben's own patients would overhear his voice and act edgy and ill-at-ease. Some even canceled their visits with Ben.

Sidney was under better control of himself at the hospital, as if there some inner monitor still protected him from self-destruction. The consequences of a tantrum or a disappearance at the office were minimal; at the hospital they would have been disastrous. He was like a heavy drinker, Ben thought, a man who stumbles when he leaves a party but manages, once caution is utterly essential, to snap himself into alertness when he gets behind the wheel of his car. Sidney had managed to keep himself relatively free of harm at the hospital. He'd had no accidents after the incident in the circumcision room.

Of course, Alithorn had alerted everyone on the gynecological and maternity floor to keep an eye out for him. They stayed close when he delivered babies, closer still when he operated. When his mind seemed to waver, a nurse would immediately call his attention back into focus; when his hands trembled, a senior resident would offer to complete his cutting or sewing.

Still, Sidney might one day escape the protective net the hospital had cast about him, Ben worried. He might tremble so violently or move his scalpel so erratically that an injury would occur to a patient or a baby before there was time for intercession. He was right to worry. Only
he
saw Sidney at his worst. Saw him at home where he felt no need to maintain controls. Saw him swallowing his pills, staggering, muttering incoherently to himself.

He tried desperately to keep Sidney from going to the hospital when he was in these states, generously offering to take over for him. But invariably Sidney refused. He would turn livid, curse, scream paranoiacally that Ben was trying to interfere in his affairs, and even act physically threatening. He was forever clenching a fist or shaking an upraised arm.

He would back down and let Sidney go off to the hospital, but the whole time he was gone he would pace in panic up and down in his office, or in the living room of the apartment, or, on the days he was most worried, just outside the operating suite. For all his resentment of Sidney, he didn't want to see him injure anyone or bring disaster shattering down around his head. Yet he felt totally ineffectual when it came to keeping those possibilities at bay.