The Carlton Club (11 page)

Of course, she also wanted to see Mark. Even at a distance. And she wanted to see who occupied the seat next to his.

“This is all a little nuts, Katie,” Ross said to her when she explained why she intended to watch the production hidden off stage.

“Maybe. But I am sticking to my plan. I just couldn’t miss opening night.”

Kathleen knew where Mark would be sitting. She had carefully selected the seats. Kathleen recognized Leslie and watched them both with increasing relief. Kathleen watched the way Mark and Leslie interacted—and didn’t interact—and knew that the relationship was platonic. Leslie was, simply, a friend of the family. The family that Mark and Janet used to be.

Kathleen relaxed and enjoyed the spectacular performance. Afterward she waited in the private theater lounge while Ross, who produced and directed
Joanna
, went backstage to congratulate his triumphant company. As he left, Kathleen asked him to notice if Mark was backstage and to observe his interactions with Janet if he was.

“You’re not in third grade anymore, Katie,” he said good-naturedly, smiling as he left.

Kathleen paced while she waited anxiously for Ross to return.

“So?” Kathleen asked the instant he reappeared forty-five minutes later.

“So everyone was absolutely ecstatic including the critics. It’s a smash, Katie. We did it.”

“What about Mark? Was he there?”

“Did I mention third grade?”

“Ross,” she pleaded.

“He was there for under two minutes. Janet was swarmed, of course. They exchanged curt nods from across the room. They looked uncomfortable. Not in love.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome. I’d be a little worried about the woman with Mark. She’s gorgeous.”

“I’m not worried.”

“Good. C’mon, let’s go to my place and celebrate.”

“I can’t” Kathleen said, knowing then that the reason she hadn’t slept with anyone in the past two months was because she couldn’t. Wouldn’t. Didn’t want to.

Kathleen’s other lovers had never interfered with her sexual relationship with Ross.

“I wish you had given me a little advance warning about this,” Ross said amiably. They were good friends.

“I didn’t know until right now.”

“You are nuts, Katie, really nuts.”

Jean Watson’s condition deteriorated rapidly during the first week of May. Mark and Leslie and Jack Samuels discussed the options—new experimental protocols, different chemotherapy, transplantation—and came up empty. There was nothing more to do.

Jean’s marrow showed no signs of recovery. It was almost impossible to transfuse her. She had started to have serious allergic reactions to blood and blood products. Because she had no platelets, she bled. Because she had few red blood cells, she was weak and anemic. Because she had no white blood cells in her bloodstream, no defense against invasion by bacteria, she had infections.

Still her mind and her spirit lived.

When Leslie made her seven
A.M.
rounds on May first, the morning following the opening night of
Joanna
, she found Jean propped up on her bed pouring over
The San Francisco Chronicle
.

“I’ve never seen reviews like these. Not from these critics. Your friend Janet! Well, they simply ran out of superlatives and space. I’m surprised they didn’t spill over from the theater page to the front page. She’s headline news!”

Leslie laughed.

“It was really marvelous. Janet truly was sensational. I wish—” Leslie frowned.

“You wish I could see it. So do I, my dear,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone. Jean refused to feel sorry for herself. “But you can tell me all about it.”

“I will. Don’t worry. How are you feeling?”

“Bacteremic,” Jean said simply. She knew the medical terms. Bacteremia meant bacteria in the bloodstream. Bacteria in a place they shouldn’t be, but were, because she had no white blood cells, no defenses. Jean could tell when her bloodstream was contaminated. She felt a certain, indescribable but recognizable way. She asked as lightly as she could, “Who’s in my blood today?”

“Klebsiella.”

“The
E. coli
are gone?”

“So far.”

Five days later two different bacteria,
Serratia marcesans
and
Pseudomonas aeruginosa
and a fungus,
Candida albicans
, all grew from multiple cultures of Jean’s blood. Despite antibiotics her blood pressure dropped. She was in shock because of the organisms in her bloodstream.

There was nothing they could do, except make her comfortable.

Mark and Leslie were both on call the night Jean went into shock. It was a new on call system. The R-
1
and R-
2
from the same team were on call together instead of on alternate nights. It provided better continuity of care, the schedule makers claimed.

Leslie preferred the new system because, apart from simply being with Mark, seeing even more of him, she trusted him the most medically.

At six in the evening, Leslie went into Jean’s room. Carl was at her bedside. The boys had come and gone. They all knew she would die that night. The boys had already said goodbye.

Carl Watson held his wife’s frail purple hand.

Jean’s eyes flickered open when Leslie entered the room.

“Leslie,” she whispered, a slight smile.

“Hi,” Leslie said and sat down.

Jean’s eyes closed. After a few moments her breathing quickened. It was a physiologic response to the acidosis caused by shock.

Leslie and Carl watched Jean. Then Leslie turned to him.

“Are you OK?” she asked barely able to speak herself.

Carl’s eyes glistened.

“I want to be with her, touching her, when she goes,” he said, his voice shaky with emotion. “But I’m a little afraid.”

“Do you want me to stay?” she asked.

“If you have time.”

Time? Leslie thought. Do I have time to watch this lovely, beloved woman die?

Leslie switched her pager to the silent vibratory mode. She would know if she was needed, but the beeper wouldn’t sound.

Leslie took Jean’s other hand. Was it her imagination or did she feel a squeeze as she took it?

Then they sat, silently, watching, waiting.

Leslie had never watched anyone die. She had seen patients die, but she had always been involved in trying to prevent the death. Even at the final moment.

She had never just watched.

After twenty minutes, Jean’s breathing pattern changed again. Slow deep breaths. Final breaths.

It wouldn’t be long

Leslie took Carl’s hand, the hand that didn’t hold Jean’s, and held it.

When she did, they formed a circle. Jean’s hands were held by her beloved husband and her dear Leslie, her surrogate daughter. The circle was complete when Leslie reached for Carl’s hand.

Jean looked peaceful when she died. She simply exhaled one breath and didn’t take another. It took Leslie a moment to realize that it was over.

Leslie and Carl didn’t move after Jean died. They continued to hold Jean’s hands and each others.

Leslie detected the warmth leaving Jean’s hand. It made her feel terribly empty and sad.

She didn’t want Carl to feel it. He needed to remember the warmth. It would be too much for him to feel the warmth, the final vestige of life, leaving his wife’s hand.

“Mr. Watson,” Leslie began, a little firm, a little urgent. It was too much for her, too.

Carl looked at her, his cheeks damp with tears.

“She’s gone,” Leslie whispered, controlling her own emotion with difficulty. “Shall we go?”

Leslie pulled gently at his hand, the one she still held. Carl moved with her without resistance.

The hallway lights were bright, too bright. Carl and Leslie squinted as they emerged from the dimly lit room. Leslie signaled silently to the head nurse to let her know that Jean Watson had died.

All the arrangements had been made. After, only after Carl Watson left, the efficient, impersonal mechanics of the paperwork and red tape that accompanied death would be put into action.

Leslie walked down the hall with Carl to the visitors’ waiting room. The boys were there. Leslie had assumed they had gone.

But, of course, they wouldn’t leave. They waited for their father. To be with him. To take him home.

Leslie withdrew quickly. Carl Watson was where he needed to be. Five minutes before, her pager had vibrated. The telephone number indicated on the lighted dial was that of the emergency room.

Leslie dialed the number. Mark answered.

“Anything wrong?” he asked. Leslie usually answered pages immediately. Even this slight delay surprised Mark.

“Mrs. Watson just died. I was with Mr. Watson.”

“Oh. Is everything OK?” Mark should have just asked the question that was really in his mind: Are you OK?

“Yes. Fine. What do we have?” Meaning, what does the admission you must be paging me about have wrong with him or her?

“A fifty year old man with liver cancer and hepatic encephalopathy,” Mark said.

It was the hematology/oncology service after all.

“I’ll be right down.”

Six hours and two admissions later, at midnight, Mark found Leslie sitting huddled in the doctors’ write-up area staring out the window into the blackness. Mark closed the door behind him as he entered the small room.

He had been worrying about her.

“Leslie?”

Leslie spun around, surprised. Her eyes glistened, brilliant blue, wet with tears.

“Why did she have to die, Mark?” Hot tears spilled onto her cheeks.

Mark was beside her in an instant. Without hesitation he put his arms around her and held her, rocking her gently, stroking her dark curls.

“It was so sad,” Leslie said finally, talking into his chest. “It was so awful, just watching her die. Not being able to stop it.”

Leslie shook her head and began to cry again. Mark blinked back his own tears and whispered, “I know, honey. I know.”

As Mark spoke his lips brushed against her soft chestnut hair.

Toward the end of May, on their second to last night on call together, Mark found Leslie sitting by the picture window on the eleventh floor.

It was five
A.M.

“So this is where the Night Stalker lurks,” he said, startling her.

Leslie spun around and suppressed a gasp.

He is so handsome! she thought.

Mark stood in front of her, his dark hair tousled, his baggy white pants pulled tight at his slender waist with an old belt. Instead of his usual oxford shirt and necktie Mark wore a blue, surgical scrub shirt. The deep V neck revealed a few dark, straight hairs on his bare, white chest. The short, loose sleeves showed his strong, sinewy, pale forearms. His white coat, his shirt and tie, his medical armamentarium, except for the pager which was clipped to his belt, were elsewhere—probably folded neatly in his on call room.

Mark stood in front of her, looking almost naked. Just Mark, a critical minimum of loose clothing and a pager. The bare essentials.

“Where she lurks when it’s safe to stop stalking. When the sun comes up,” Leslie said. Then she added a question, “Or do we have some business?”

“No. I just had six hours of uninterrupted sleep thanks to you. I’m wide awake. Rested. I decided to see if the rumors were true. If you really, in the eleventh month of your internship, still pace.”

“This is why I do it, you know,” Leslie answered a little coolly, her voice a little sharp. She gestured toward the view of sunrise over Golden Gate Park, the bay and the bridge. “It’s so beautiful.”

“I wasn’t being critical, Leslie,” Mark said quickly as he sat down across from her. His view was northeast toward Pacific Heights with its elegant condominium buildings shining in the new day sun.

“I’m a bit sensitive today, I guess,” Leslie said.

“Why?”

“Because yesterday Greg signed out to me, at noon, to go jogging. His so-called stable service included two oozing GI bleeders and a leukemic with a temperature of one hundred four.”

“Sounds like Greg,” Mark murmured critically.

“Anyway, I nonverbally registered my annoyance,” Leslie said, then hesitated. Maybe she didn’t want to tell Mark about this after all.

Mark looked into her eyes. They were eyes, he had learned over the past eleven months, that could deliver clear, specific messages. Eyes that could make direct blows. Remarkable dark blue eyes that weren’t always so merry or cheerful. As the months passed, Leslie’s always positive facade yielded occasionally to the pressures of fatigue and the realities, the frustrations and the lack of perfection she encountered. Leslie never said anything, never lost her temper, but her eyes effectively communicated annoyance, impatience, irritation and even censure.

Mark had never been on the receiving end of one of Leslie’s glacial glances, but he had seen them delivered—ice cold, unyielding, uncompromising. Leslie could set her jaw and dig in with the best of them.

Mark hoped she would never look at him that way. He hoped that she would never have cause.

“I’m sure you did,” he said. “So, what did Greg say?”

“He said,” Leslie said slowly, looking out the window, embarrassed, “that I was strung so tight if he touched me I’d twang.”

Mark started a laugh but suppressed it as he caught the shy, almost hurt expression in her eyes.

“It’s sort of a cute remark, especially coming from an idiot like Greg.”

“He’s more than an idiot.”

“How did his patients do?”

“Fine of course. By the time he jogged back two hours later, I had taken care of everything.”

“So he’s not such an idiot, is he?”

“I thought it was sort of an unfair remark,” Leslie said.

“And untrue,” Mark said, hesitating a moment. Then he added gently, carefully, “When I touched you, you didn’t twang.”

She had been so soft! A wounded little creature cuddling into him for protection. As Mark held the boniness of her ribs, he felt the womanly fullness of her breasts, the soft warmth of her skin and the strong rapid pounding of her heart.

When you touched me, she thought as she stared at the shimmering sunlight on the azure bay, when you put your arms around me, I wanted to stay there forever.

Mark and Leslie sat in silence for many minutes, watching the new day begin.

At last Leslie decided to ask him. It was a risk. It could make him mad, but she remembered the closeness of that night, the night Jean Watson died, the night he held her. She knew how much she cared about him—about what happened to him—even if it had nothing to do with her.

“Have you decided?” she asked.

“Decided?”

“To quit medicine,” she said quietly. There. She had said it.

“Quit medicine?” Mark repeated, surprised but not angry.

Quit was as charged a word as best. Quit, something you never did. Best, something you always were.

“Yes. Quit.”

“What made you ask that?”

“You told me the night we saw
Joanna
that you didn’t want to be a doctor,” Leslie said flatly, as if it were fact. They both knew he hadn’t said that.