Goodbye To All That (20 page)

“I’m not ready for the world to know about this yet,” Richard had confided to Stan last week, when he’d revealed the news about Ruth’s departure. “I’m hoping it’ll resolve itself before anyone else has to know. Like a pediatric heart murmur. God willing, Ruth will outgrow this nonsense
and come home.”

But now, if he was reading Gert’s assertive posture and accusing glower correctly, his secret had leaked. She bore down on his desk and leaned toward him, her fisted hands resting on either side of the fancy leather blotter his mother had given him when he’d started his practice thirty-odd years ago. Gert’s reddish-brown hair was smoothed severely back from her face, held in place by a semicircular piece of black plastic that arched from ear to ear across the top of her skull, and her thin, red-glossed lips were pressed into a stern line as she regarded him.

Should he tell her? Pretend he had no idea what she was talking about? Or just skip over all that and apologize? Her behavior informed him she’d already tried him and found him guilty.

Guilty of what? Channel surfing? Failing to keep everyone in his practice abreast of the current state of his marriage? Shouldn’t he have the charges read to him before Gert pronounced her sentence? And wasn’t he entitled to a lawyer? He wondered if Melissa could scoot up to Boston and handle Gert for him.

“What?” he asked noncommittally. He would have liked to tell Gert to go back to her own office and do what he was paying her to do, but he was a bit afraid of her.

“Your wife? Your marriage?”

He sighed and slumped in his ergonomic leather desk chair, his gaze resting on Myron Kupferman’s lab report, which sat on the blotter between Gert’s fists. Myron Kupferman had been eating a three-egg cheese omelet every morning of his life for the past seventy-five years, and now the bill had come due. Cholesterol readings you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy.

“Who told you?” he asked, distracting himself—and hopefully Gert—from the subject at hand. If Stan had betrayed Richard’s trust, Richard could feel indignant instead of guilty. Indignant was better than guilty.

“Nobody told me,” Gert replied. “My eyes told me. Your shirt is wrinkled. Ruth would never let you leave the house in a shirt so wrinkled.”

He slumped deeper into the chair. Gert was right. He’d run a load of laundry over the weekend—darks and whites together, because he hadn’t produced enough dirty laundry by himself for two loads even though he’d run out of underwear. The only darks he’d washed were his socks, and they didn’t bleed. But everything had emerged a little bit dingy. And ironing? What was he, a miracle worker? He could install a stent with his eyes closed, but ironing was beyond him.

Maybe he should have thanked Ruth more often for ironing his shirts. Maybe a pair of diamond earrings, to say nothing of all the other gifts he’d given her over the years—to say nothing of the fact that he kept a roof over her head and her refrigerator full of food, and he provided the money to pay the bills, including electric and water, so she could do the laundry—wasn’t enough of a thank-you.

“So my shirt’s wrinkled,” he said to Gert.

She straightened, only to strike another threatening pose by crossing her arms sternly across her chest. “What did you do to Ruth?”

“Nothing,” he insisted.

“You were cheating on her?”

“Of course not!” Indignant was definitely better.

“You just left her, for no good reason?”

“She left me,” he snapped. “For no good reason.”

Gert regarded him dubiously. “I find that hard to believe.”

“I’m still not sure I believe it myself,” he admitted.

Pursing her lips and jutting one hip out slightly, she assessed him. “Have you ever heard of dry cleaners?”

“Of course I have.” Impatience nibbled at him. Myron Kupferman’s blood work demanded his attention, and Gert already knew more than she needed to know—which probably meant everyone in the practice was bound to know more than they needed to know in the not too distant future.

“Take your shirts to the cleaners,” she ordered him. “When you pick them up, they’ll be ironed.”

“Thank you for that helpful tip,” Richard said sarcastically. “Any advice on how to prepare a pot roast so it’s cooked and waiting for me when I get home?”

Gert had an answer. She always had an answer. “Put a loin roast in a crock-pot, add some onions, a cut-up potato, a carrot, a little water and seasonings, and set the timer. When you get home, the pot roast will be cooked.”

He wondered if he had a crock pot. It sounded like a handy item.

To his surprise, Gert’s posture relaxed. She lowered herself into one of the visitor chairs facing his desk and leaned forward again, this time solicitous rather than accusatory. Her hands remained unfisted, settling in her lap. “When did this happen?” she asked.

“Two weeks ago.” He pretended to glance at the Kupferman numbers, but his eyes strayed back to Gert. He wasn’t used to her acting solicitous and concerned, at least not in her interactions with him. With the patients she was always a soft touch. Only with the folks she managed—including Richard, Stan and The Kid, who paid her salary, for God’s sake—was she a tyrant.

She was displaying her with-the-patients demeanor now, her features gentle, her usually grim mouth curved into a sympathetic smile. “Richard,” she murmured, but firmly, demanding his full attention. He obediently closed the Kupferman file and met her gaze. “You should have told me. This kind of thing can affect your work.”

“What, wrinkled shirts? I don’t think any of my patients have noticed.”

She smiled, but her amusement didn’t reach her eyes. “This is a huge adjustment. A stressful event. Traumatic, even.”

“I’m not traumatized,” he declared. And really, he wasn’t. Annoyed, impatient, all those things he’d been with Gert just minutes ago. But not traumatized. He was still working, still eating, still chatting with that round-cheeked girl at the deli. Still saving lives. Still golfing with Doug on Saturday afternoons, although the golf season was winding down. Last weekend, they’d played eighteen holes, lubricated by glasses of bourbon Doug had bought from one of the drink girls at the tenth hole. The bourbon had warmed them, just the way it had warmed them when he used to meet Doug at the Harvard stadium for home games when Doug was in medical school. Godawful seats they had in that stadium, just concrete ledges, hard enough to bruise a tush. He used to bring a cushioned stadium seat with him, but Doug would sit directly on the cold, unyielding surface. They’d shared nips of bourbon from the silver flask Richard kept tucked in an inner pocket of his jacket. The liquor had warmed them from inside. Just like last week at the golf course.

“So everything’s all right?” Gert sounded skeptical.

“Except for the lack of a good pot roast,” he said. “And the wrinkled shirts.”

“You’re not lonely?”

“Of course I’m lonely,” he said, then mentally kicked himself. How had she gotten him to reveal that truth? He hadn’t even told Doug that. Then again, Doug hadn’t asked.

“I know just the woman for you,” Gert said, and the warmth Richard had begun to feel in this conversation, the friendship bordering on kinship, evaporated.

“I don’t need a woman,” he said.

“Of course you do. Look at your shirt,” Gert said. “Shari Bernstein. A dermatologist, right here in this building. She performed a miracle with Matthew’s port-wine stain on his neck. When it comes to laser treatments, she’s an artist. She’s divorced. Very smart.”

Once again forgetting to censor himself, Richard asked, “Is she pretty?”

“Gorgeous. The most radiant skin you’ve ever seen.” She leaned across Richard’s desk and snagged his prescription pad.
Shari Bernstein
, she wrote, all in capitals, followed by a phone number. Tossing down the pen, she stood and grinned, her work done, the battle won, Western Europe safely back in the hands of the Allies.

Richard stared at the pad, panic roiling his stomach. Gert was already at his door when he said, “She’s a doctor. I bet she doesn’t iron shirts.”

“She’s a doctor,” Gert replied. “So who cares?”

He watched Gert leave the office, then tore the sheet off his prescription pad and tossed it into the trash can beneath his desk. Then he doubled over, dug through the trash can and pulled the paper back out.

Shari Bernstein. As if she were a prescription, her phone number the dosage.

He stared at the white square of paper for a minute, then tucked it under his blotter and sighed.

What was he supposed to do? Call her? Ask her out? On a date? The last time he’d asked a woman out on a date he’d been in college, and the woman had been Ruth.

So long ago. He ought to be more confident now, more self-assured. Back in college, he was a skinny egghead. That he’d had any social life at all he credited to the fraternity he’d joined at Cornell. Most of his frat brothers had heralded from the New York City area, but there had been a few, like him, from other parts of the country: Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago. If any of them hadn’t been pre-med, Richard couldn’t think of who it might have been. They were all eggheads, studying too hard, squeezing parties and mixers in around their exam schedules.

Ruth had arrived with a group of Ithaca College students for one of those mixers. With her straight, shiny hair and her curvy legs exposed beneath the hem of her minidress, she hadn’t been the most beautiful of the group, but she’d been pretty. Kind of shy, like him, but smiling. Approachable. So he’d approached. And when she’d said hello, he’d heard a familiar accent. “You’re from Boston?” he’d exclaimed, and she’d told him Brookline, and he’d told her his parents were still living in the house where he’d grown up in Dorchester, and that had been that.

They’d danced. She’d informed him she liked the Beatles better than the Rolling Stones and didn’t care much for the Beach Boys. “Surfing just doesn’t mean anything to me,” she’d admitted. “Beaches are for lying on, getting a tan and reading a good book.”

Why should he ever ask anyone else out after that night? Ruth had seemed fine. She played the piano. She could teach their children to play—because yes, there would be children. He’d be a doctor and she’d be his wife, and they’d remain together until death did them part.

And now he was supposed to ask someone out on a date? It was one thing to flirt a little with the cashier at the deli, but a dermatologist? Someone who had performed miracles on Gert’s son’s port-wine stain? A
divorcee
?

Richard wasn’t divorced. He couldn’t do this.

Doug had implied that maybe he could. Or, more accurately, maybe he should. Of course, Doug was younger. A different generation. Besides, he was married to a woman so lovely, the whole issue was moot.

What if Shari Bernstein was like Brooke, pretty and petite and blond? With a name like Bernstein, she couldn’t be a
shiksa
—unless Bernstein was her ex-husband’s name. But then, Brooke wasn’t a
shiksa
, either. She just looked and acted like one.

From the moment Richard had picked Ruth out of that gaggle of Ithaca College girls who’d arrived at Alpha Epsilon Pi for the mixer, he’d known she was safe. Solid. Not glamorous, like Brooke. Not brainy and disorganized, like Melissa. He’d sensed that Ruth would be reasonable, prudent, reliable—kind of like Jill. His middle child had that same dependability about her.

Was Jill going to walk out on Gordon someday? Announce that she was tired of some habit or idiosyncrasy of his and move into an apartment? Should Richard warn his son-in-law now? Should he tell Gordon—a good man, a loving husband—to prepare himself for the possibility that someday he’d find himself spending his nights in an empty bed and wondering whether he had enough chutzpah to telephone a divorced dermatologist who could work miracles with a port-wine stain?