Private Practices (8 page)

It was fortunate, because when Philip walked in and saw her lying in bed, he paled, and although he tried to sound optimistic and casual after she had told him what had happened, she could see he was terribly alarmed.

She stayed in bed, getting up only to tuck a sanitary napkin into her panties. Philip rescued the chicken from the oven and ate some of it on the night table next to the bed. Then they watched a TV movie and afterward they took turns at reading the new Agatha Christie aloud. But Emily couldn't concentrate. She was watching the clock so that every hour precisely she could slip gingerly out of bed and go to the bathroom to check and change the napkin.

There wasn't much blood. Each time she looked there was just a small, scarlet pool in the center of the napkin. But she changed the napkin every hour anyway so that she could be a better judge of whether the staining was increasing or decreasing. And then, around one in the morning, there was no blood on the napkin at all.

She yelled the information out to Philip and ran to the bedroom and threw her arms around him. She wanted to jump, to leap, to fling her arms around and around. She had never felt happiness be so physical, so energizing. For Philip too, happiness became movement. Normally so sober and even pedantic, he clutched her and twirled her. They were waltzing around the bed. A moment later she grew prudent, afraid that in their jubilance they could make the bleeding start again, and she got back into bed and Philip lay down next to her, settling on top of the covers in order not to disturb her. He stroked her hair and at last she grew altogether relaxed, and now when she wanted to check the napkin she no longer got out of bed but just pulled the covers up over her head for privacy and in the half-light peered at the napkin and poked her head out of the blankets, grinning and joyous. The bleeding had not resumed. It had vanished, just as Dr. Zauber had said it might.

He seemed utterly miraculous to her then. Falling asleep at 3
A
.
M
., Philip's arms entwined around her shoulders, she felt bound to Zauber with a new compelling gratitude.

“It was because of you,” Mrs. Harper said to him in his office the next morning.

“What was?” Ben asked her, puzzled.

“That I stopped bleeding.”

He smiled modestly. “I didn't do anything.”

“Oh, you did. You calmed me down. Wouldn't the bleeding have gotten worse if I'd gotten all upset?”

“Not necessarily.”

“Well, you got me to take it easy. To stay in bed. I figure it would surely have gotten worse except for that. So it was because of you.”

The phrase stuck in his head. Daily, for over a week now, he had been planning to call Naomi but time after time, the phone receiver already off the cradle and in his hand, he had hesitated, worried about exposing his newly hatched dream of marrying to the tasks of reality. In order to marry, he would certainly have to make love successfully to Naomi, and he had been impotent for years. Of course, Masters and Johnson, whom he had heard speak at a gynecologists' convention, had claimed that virtually all impotence was curable, provided a man could find himself a willing partner. But would Naomi be willing? He remembered distinctly the hurt look on her face when he had said goodbye to her in Sidney's examining room.

Then, listening to Mrs. Harper elaborately exaggerating his role in the cessation of her bleeding, and feeling flattered despite himself, a clever plan occurred to him. He would admit his addiction to Naomi. And tell her that it was only because of her that he had at last decided to go off the pills. He would explain to her he had been eager to come to her drug free and capable of starting a serious relationship. It might move her. Certainly, whether or not she fully believed him, it would flatter her.

Mrs. Harper was staring at him with curiosity and he snapped his attention back to her, saying, “Don't exaggerate my role. I really didn't do anything. There's so much we don't know about first-trimester bleeding—what makes it start, what makes it stop …”

Mrs. Harper fidgeted with a blue cardigan folded in her lap. “Then you told me to lie down just to give me something to do?”

“More or less,” he admitted.

She blushed. “I guess it was because I sounded hysterical.”

He saw the way the color flooded her cheeks, saw how she crossed her black-booted legs and, quite unconsciously, shifted her skirt so that it rode upward on her thighs. She was flirting with him.

It made him smile bitterly to himself. It was ironic that he should be so admired by his patients and yet feel himself to be so undesirable when it came to the women he encountered outside the office. But he would have to take his chances with Naomi. A time-consuming relationship was, he was still certain of it, his only hedge against returning to the pills. And perhaps Masters and Johnson had been wrong in one respect. Perhaps it was not so much a willing partner that a man needed, as the will to find himself a willing partner. He hadn't had that will before. He had it now.

Mrs. Harper was saying, “Well, no matter what you say, I'll always be grateful that you called me back so promptly.”

He sat back, lost in his own musings. The baby had given him the will for courtship, he thought. Mrs. Kinney's baby. Or was it Sidney's baby?

“I guess I'm keeping you,” Mrs. Harper said apologetically.

“What? Oh, no. No, I'm not so very busy this morning, Mrs. Harper.”

But she was standing up and draping her overlarge cardigan around her shoulders. “Emily,” she smiled.

“Emily,” he said.

As soon as she was gone, he impulsively picked up the phone and dialed Naomi.

He reached her at the magazine and knew at once that he had been right to worry that she might not be receptive to him. She sounded aloof and told him outright, when he suggested their getting together, that she wasn't sure she wanted to see him.

“Why not?” He held the phone tightly, his knuckles paling, afraid that she was already involved with some other man. There had been no one special that day she had come to his office; he was sure of it; but that had been over a month ago.

“I find you confusing,” she answered him in the direct fashion he had noticed on the day of her first visit to him. “I'm not sure I understand you.”

He felt relieved. “You're hurt. I hurt you by not calling sooner.”

“Yes. That's part of it. You did hurt me.”

“Then that's okay.”

“Okay? Okay for who?” she quipped.

“For both of us. You see, I can explain. There were reasons for why I acted as I did. And for my not calling sooner. Please just give me a chance to explain.”

She resisted but he knew he had piqued her curiosity. “What about tonight?” he asked, pressing his advantage.

“Tonight? I'm afraid I'm promised to Petey.”

“Petey?” He felt a loss of hope until she went on, “My son. He's spending the afternoon at a schoolmate's house and I'm supposed to pick the two boys up and take them to a movie.”

“What about afterward?”

“No. I'm awfully beat today.”

He almost gave up right then and there, but he knew that if he did, it would be weeks before he would feel ready to risk another rejection. He couldn't afford those weeks. Every night that he went home alone to his small, silent apartment, he had to wrestle with the urge to go down and purchase more pills for himself. “Please, Naomi,” he said, his voice growing embarrassingly urgent. “I've got to see you. It's terribly important.”

“It can't wait?” she hesitated, and he remarked that it was his very desperation that seemed to be influencing her to consider his plea. He stored the information he had gained in a corner of his mind and said, “It shouldn't wait.”

She was silent for a moment and then she acquiesced. “Okay. Tell you what. The movie's not till seven. I get out of work at five-thirty and if you're free then, we could have a quick drink. But it'll have to be at my place. I've got to go home and change my costume from girl reporter to Supermom.”

Naomi's apartment was in the flower district above a plant store whose windows were lined three-deep with giant palms and rubber trees. Getting out of his cab and approaching the building, he imagined himself about to penetrate an exotic rain forest. But the entrance to the apartments above the store was behind a corroding metal door. He had to push on it mightily to get it to open. Then he rang Naomi's doorbell, and climbed steep flights of metal stairs to reach her.

He was perspiring heavily by the time he approached the fourth-floor landing and heard her voice above him calling, “Just one more to go.” He took the rest of the steps two at a time, trying not to seem out of breath, and then he was standing close to her and she was leading him inside to her apartment, a loft really, a single, vast room dominated by an enormous skylight.

It was sparsely decorated. There were no soft armchairs, or end tables. There was only a large, flowered couch and a handsome colonial chest and bench—the spoils of separation, he thought, and wondered how long it would take Naomi, on her journalist's income, to make her loft look homelike and complete. Still, despite its size and emptiness, the room was attractive, hung with colorful Guatemalan appliqués and, beneath the skylight, a welter of rampaging ferns and ivy.

“I imagined you in a place like this,” he said. “Something offbeat.”

“Does that mean you like it?” She was closing the door and grinning at him and he realized that despite his having fixed on her to rescue him, he had forgotten her smile, forgotten the way it journeyed so widely across her cheeks and lingered and lazed before it faded.

“Yes, I like it,” he said, meaning it. His own apartment was cramped and small. It had a luxury address but had been made by mitosis, the landlord's having split the building's large, old-fashioned apartments into half their former sizes. It was true he had two bedrooms and two bathrooms, but all the rooms were tiny and one of the bathrooms was so small he thought it had been created in the space once occupied by a deep hall closet. When he moved in, it still had an outside lock with a silvery closet key and room only for a stall shower, not a tub. He resented his minimal allotment of space and envied the vastness of Naomi's.

“I like it a lot,” he said, smiling back at her. She was wearing a wraparound denim skirt and a T-shirt. Her mother costume he supposed. But her chest was weighted down with Persian silver and filigree. “It's different. It suits you.”

“I didn't choose it just to be different, you know,” Naomi explained, draping his coat over the spindly-legged bench. “I just couldn't afford anything better when my husband and I split up.”

“Where did you want to live?”

“Oh, someplace with a view. A grand view of the river.”

“And a terrace?”

“Yes. Exactly. A terrace.”

She was still smiling and it occurred to him that he ought now to embrace her. A caress might arouse her, make her amenable to the plan he intended to propose to her. Or even better, it might promote some stirring in his own body. In the past, before he had started quieting himself with the pills, he had felt desire, however minimal, when he embraced women. That his desire fled when he was called upon to act was another matter altogether.

Reaching out, he willed himself to kiss Naomi's olive-toned cheek and, a moment later, to wander her earlobe with a pilgrim finger. But before he felt any hint of desire, she pulled away, saying, in her husky voice, “You know, it's odd. The day we talked in your office, I thought you were annoyed with me. I thought you didn't even like me.”

“Oh, I just had a lot of things on my mind,” he hedged.

“No. I felt you were suspicious of me. You were saying, ‘What does she want from me?'”

He looked away. “I wasn't very nice,” he admitted, thinking he would have to proceed more carefully, would have to avoid embracing her again until he felt he had impressed her more favorably. “I wasn't quite myself that day,” he added. “That's what I wanted to tell you about.”

“Why don't you, then?”

But he couldn't go on just yet. Not with her thoughtful plum-colored eyes searching his. “Can we have that drink?” he asked. “I think I need a drink first.”

“Sure. I'm sorry.” Seeming distressed at being considered inhospitable, Naomi began walking rapidly through the large, open room toward a corner that was outfitted with sink, stove, refrigerator and unfinished wooden counters. He followed her, tense.

“There's only Scotch,” she said regretfully over her shoulder. “Hope that's okay.”

Her back was turned. Impulsively, he decided not to wait for the drink, when her eyes would once again be upon him, but to plunge into the worst of his confession at once. “I was taking barbiturates,” he said quickly. “That time we saw each other, I was loaded up with Nembutal. I'd been taking it for years. And wishing I could stop just as long.”

She was bending to pull the bottle of Scotch from a cupboard lined with canned goods. When she extricated it, two tins of tuna fish clattered down onto the floor, but she ignored them, turning to him with a face filled with uneasy surprise.

“Lots of doctors do, you know,” he added, hoping to minimize her disapproval.

It didn't help. When she spoke, he heard disdain in her deep voice. “That's what you had to tell me? You had to see me tonight to tell me about something you've been doing for years?” She set the Scotch bottle down on the table next to where he stood and withdrew from him, busying herself with rinsing two thick-rimmed glasses at the sink.

He shook his head. “I wanted to tell you that I've stopped.”

“Hurray for you.”

“Naomi?” As she dried the glasses, he reached a hand out toward her. “I was taking them because I was looking for you.” The well-rehearsed line crept to his lips. “And I stopped because I found you.”