Doctors (84 page)

He lowered his voice and then said unself-consciously, “And Claire knows that I date.”

Laura did not know what to think. Liberated though she thought she was, she found the notion that Marshall “cheated” openly more than a little distasteful. And yet she had a curious admiration for his honesty.

He stood up. “Okay, Doctor, coffee break’s over. Let’s both go back and save the world from pestilence and athlete’s foot.”

“Yeah,” Laura replied, still filled with conflicting feelings.

“See you, Marshall,” she said blankly.

He paused and answered softly, “I would like that very much.”

She could not concentrate all afternoon. As usual, she blamed herself for being callous and misjudging Marshall’s brashness. And she hadn’t even acted like a true professional and asked him what
his
research was. Good going, Castellano, half a dozen conversations more like this and you’ll be a total creep.

Barney was almost ready to call up Fritz Baumann and ask for professional help.

Yet there was an irony to it all. In his valiant struggle to remain professionally aloof, he had succeeded too well. He had “suspended” his attention to the extent that Shari was aware of his emotional involvement but not of his romantic inclinations.

He thus had created the ideal analytic environment and hastened the day when this lovely bird who had come to him broken-winged would fly off.

She had rapidly regained her artistic self-confidence and had been chosen as understudy to Odette/Odile in
Swan Lake
, a definite step upward—albeit backstage.

Barney could not keep from thinking that Tchaikovsky’s ballet was yet another tale of an impossible love that ends in tragedy. Although, he concluded, the lovers are united in the end—by leaving life on earth together.

Could that not also be a way for him and Shari? Could they both leave New York—and their professions—and go to some Arcadia and live forever after as two happy swans?

“Brice,” he reported one day at the coffeemaker, “if you hear shrieks from my office, call the hospital, because I think I’m on the verge of cracking up.”

“Still the same girl?” his colleague asked.

“Yeah. She’s had to suspend therapy. The company’s been
touring on the West Coast. And now they’re all going to Europe for the rest of the summer. Brice, what should I do?”

“Thank God I’m not your shrink—you couldn’t afford me, anyway—but I’ll give you a little seed you might plant inside your head and see if anything blossoms.…”

“Yes?”

“Are you sure you’re not just cathecting on this girl?”

Barney was offended by this suggestion. “Why do you think so, Brice?”

“What matters is what
you
think, Barney.”

At this moment both their intercoms were buzzed.

“Well,” his office-mate said, smiling, “back to the salt mines.”

“Did you say ‘back to
assault minds,’
Brice?”

“No, I didn’t, but it’s valid either way.”

Even as she walked into the office, Shari Lehmann somehow seemed transformed. She had called from the coast to book a single session en route to London.

“I feel wonderful, Dr. Livingston,” she announced. “And I’ll never know how to repay you. What you’ve given me is—how can I say it—a second birth.”

So I’m her mother, Barney glumly thought.

“I guess I won’t be seeing you after this week,” she added with a smile.

“I know,” he answered quietly, “your company is touring in Europe.”

“Yes, but I’m not going.”

Wait, Livingston, he thought, all is not lost. Perhaps she’s leaving me-the-doctor so she can have a relationship with me-the-
man.

“I never thought a thing like this could happen,” she continued effervescently. “I mean, it’s so unlike me. Up till now I’ve always been attracted to men like Leland, who would use me for a mop. But now, thanks to you, I’ve learned to know myself a little better and I’m sure I haven’t made the same mistake again.”

Barney waited. The news was either going to be very good or very, very bad. Either way he held on to his chair.

“Kenneth is a very special man.”

“Who?” asked Barney.

“Oh, I guess I’m so excited I didn’t start from the beginning. I’m in love. I could almost say for the first time. I mean
that now I know that what I had with Leland sure as hell wasn’t really love. Coincidentally, he’s a doctor—professor of Neurology at Santa Barbara—Kenneth Glover. Have you heard of him?”

“Mmm,” Barney answered.

“I know you’re thinking that I’m acting hastily. But Doctor, Ken and I have spent at least part of every day with each other for the last six weeks. That may not seem a lot by psychiatric timetables—or whatever you use to gauge these things—but I honestly feel I know him. You’d like him. In a lot of ways, he reminds me of you.”

And Barney asked himself, Why is she settling for margarine when she could have real butter? I mean, here I am, melting away.

There was a momentary pause.

“Doctor,” Shari said, “would you just this once answer a specific question? Please. Please tell me if you think I’m doing the wrong thing.”

Thank God for training, Barney thought, because I can just read out from the standard textbook farewell ceremony.

“If we’ve really accomplished something here,” he said, “then you should be able to determine what’s right for you by making contact with your inner feelings. After all, the purpose of our work was not to make you depend on me, but rather to make you independent. If you feel confident—”

“I do, I do,” she quickly answered. “But I’m glad you’re not ambivalent—” she stopped herself and said apologetically, “I didn’t mean ‘ambivalent.’ I mean if you have doubts about my judgment—”

There were still a few more minutes left. But Barney rose and said, “I’ve always thought of you as someone basically mature, who only needed—shall we say—a little psychological first aid after a nasty crash.”

He held out his hand.

“Good luck, Miss Lehmann.”

“Doctor,” Shari asked, “is it against the rules for me to kiss you?”

Before he could reply, it was too late. She had pecked him on the cheek.

And danced out of his life.

Barney’s and Laura’s love lives seemed like a seesaw. When she was up he was down, and vice versa.

“Down” was not the word for what he felt that evening. “Rock bottom” came close, “six feet under” might have been even more appropriate.

“Castellano, I think I’ve lost the will to go on,” he said melodramatically. “I mean, without Shari, what is there to live for?”

“There’s your book, for one thing,” she suggested. “You could even use this heartrending experience as material.”

“Really—how?”

“Well, you could talk about the perils of countertransference.”

“No thanks, I’ll leave that to your—excuse the pun—bosom buddy, Grete. How is the old girl, anyway?”

“Thriving in Houston from what I last heard. She’s even assisted at her first transplant.”

Barney instantly regretted his question, for the mention of Houston was an instant reminder of where Bennett
wasn’t.
To think that a flake like Grete should be hopping merrily up the echelons two at a time, while his best friend was battling in the to-and-fro conflicting wind and rain in Cambridge.

For, from all he could gather, Bennett was not having a roaring social life.

(“I’m sublimating, Barn,” he had told him. “I’m using rage instead of amphetamines to keep me going through the night. In fact, I’m taking extra courses so I can get this damn thing over in two years instead of three. I hate law school because it really teaches you how to use ‘facts’ to convince people of your version of the truth—which may not really be the truth. In medicine, at least, a live man is alive and a corpse is dead. Up here they’d have a mock trial and let the jury decide.”)

“Are you still there, Barney?” Laura asked.

Her voice snapped him from his reverie.

“Sorry, Castellano, I was just thinking of a patient.”

He shifted gears and asked, “Is there anything cheerful we can talk about?”

“Well, first of all, I promise you by this time next month you’ll have totally forgotten your beloved patient and be completely wild for some new madonna.”

“That was interesting, what you just said,” he commented. “Do you really think I go for the ‘unreachable’ madonna types?”

“You want the honest version, Barney? Or shall I wrap it in Styrofoam?”

“I can take it. You think I unconsciously go for women who are unavailable.”

“Well, you’ve been pretty pissed off ever since Emily walked out, and I think you’re scared of getting burned again.”

Barney thought for a moment. Dammit, Castellano was right.

“Hey, listen, Laura, I don’t like this. Suddenly you’re reading me with psychic x-ray vision. That’s supposed to be
my
job.”

“Don’t worry, Barn, I’ll always give you plenty of material to criticize. Take Marshall Jaffe.”

“Who the hell is he?”

And then she told him. Nine dollars and eighty-five cents’ worth.

To Barney’s mind the whole thing sounded like a losing proposition.

“I don’t care how you try to rationalize it—the guy’s not available. Aren’t you smart enough to leave the married ones alone?”

“Barn, do you know that in Washington the ratio of eligible men to eligible women is five cows to every bull?”

“Do
you
know that you’re ten times better than the average ‘cow’? If you only got your act together you could generate a damn stampede.”

“But Barney, I
like
him. I can’t help it. I didn’t want to, but I really—”

“—feel sorry for him?”

She did not reply. For she had to acknowledge there was at least an element of that.

“Look, Castellano, I feel sorry for the guy, too. But I’m looking out for you and I don’t see what’s to gain if you get more involved.”

“Barn, I’m over twenty-one. You don’t have to look out for me.”

“Castellano, if I don’t, who will?”

“He’s very attractive,” she answered, almost as a non sequitur.

“I know, I know. I saw him at the party.”

“In all that mob?”

“It’s not hard to distinguish the only guy in short pants, Laura. Don’t you find that a little creepy?”

“Well,” she said, only half in jest, “he’s got nice legs.”

“So do I,” Barney replied, “but I don’t go to Fritz Baumann’s house in my basketball pants.”

“He’s also one of the brightest guys I’ve ever met—”

“As he himself constantly tells you.”

“Yeah, I’ll grant he’s somewhat enamored with himself. But that kind of balances the two of us.”

“You mean like Mr. and Mrs. Jack Sprat—he’s too
over
confident and you’re too
under
confident?”

“Something like that.”

“Have you forgotten that the Sprats were at least married? I’m sorry, Laura, but I really disapprove.”

“But I like being with him, Barn. He’s nice—in a funny kind of way. I mean, at least he’s better than nothing.”

“Okay, okay. Get your heart broken again. But you’re walking up a ‘down’ escalator. Or, to use an appropriate tennis metaphor, I see the score as love nothing. So between games try and give a little thought to where you’re going to be in, say, five years.”

There was a pause. Had Barney finally won a volley?

“You know something,” Laura said with wonderment, “I never had the slightest illusion it would last half that long.”

But she knew well what he meant. The female biological clock was ticking away her fertility. She would soon not have to “worry” about getting pregnant.

Oh, cut the self-pity, Castellano, who the hell knows what can happen in five
weeks
, let alone five years.

Laura had at last found something resembling inner equilibrium.

She and Marshall had a stable—if slightly incomplete—relationship. They would eat dinner at her place one or two evenings a week (he was teaching her to cook), perhaps preceded by a game of tennis (which he was also teaching her). He took her out to theater or a ballgame as often as their schedules allowed. And she was satisfied. At least she did not think she could aspire to more.

Marshall had a passion to be “best” at everything. And when he made up his mind that he was going to be Number One at something, no force on earth could stop him.

But he wasn’t in the science game just for the golden prizes. The thing he really cared about was seeing his ideas bear fruit. He wanted to break new ground in bio-engineering and produce results that he would be blessed for generations later.

And after having worked with Rhodes for eighteen months he felt that they were on the brink.

“This is it, Laura. This is going to be the year a lot of cancers bite the dust.”

Doctors Rhodes and Jaffe and their junior staff at NIH were on the verge of concluding a five-year collaboration with Professor Toivo Karvonen in Helsinki and
his
junior staff at Meilahti University Central Hospital. They were well into the final test run of the method they had jointly developed to induce cell differentiation and deficiency in oncogenes.

“Can you believe it, Laura? We’re on the five-yard line, goal to go.”

He almost made her living room glow with the sparks of his enthusiasm.

“We’ll get those malignant tumors by the genes. Isn’t that fantastic!”

“I haven’t got the words, Marsh. All I think of is the patients that I’ve lost that I could save in—how long till it hits the hospitals?”

“Three years, maybe two if we get lucky. Jesus, I can’t wait to scream this to the whole world!”

Marshall lived and breathed his project.

“We can produce the synthetic substance at uncytotoxic levels, Laura—isn’t that terrific?”

Laura’s joy in their relationship was immeasurably enhanced by the fact that he could speak to her as a scientific peer. Perhaps he used the jargon to boast too much, but at least she understood it.

She accepted her somewhat amorphous status as “part-time wife.” Marshall unself-consciously escorted her to all the Institute functions. Still she could not help wondering how her lover spent the evenings he and Rhodes were in Helsinki, where, as everyone knows, the nights are very, very long.