Only the Strong (22 page)

She hadn't thought about saving herself for years, despite Billie's warnings that she was just wearing herself out. Billie left every day at precisely six p.m., an unlit cigarette between her lips and her handbag dangling from her wrist just so. “Work ain't everything” was
her
mantra.

The sun's fading glow receded from the windows. Artinces stood, flicked the light switch off, and sat down again. Shadows moved across the walls, covering the sink, the cabinets, the helpful posters about vaccinations and the virtues of breastfeeding. She welcomed the encroaching darkness, thinking it would ease her troubled mind. Instead she felt cornered, pushed and prodded by a profound and unexpected loneliness. She had last cried at age 24, and at age 15 before that. Throughout her career, she had never shed tears, even when patients died in her arms. She was saddened, terribly so, but her eyes stayed dry. She no longer beat herself up when patients took a turn for the worse, failed to respond to
treatment, didn't wake up. In time, she recognized that knowing the answer wouldn't return the light to a dead child's eyes. Instead of crying, Artinces just resolved to do all she could, all the time. In the dark, thinking on her loneliness, she remained dry-eyed. She determined to examine her situation as she did all others, with the cool, analytical gaze of an experienced clinician.

It didn't take her long to identify her symptoms as indications of a hunger, a need, that she had convinced herself she'd outgrown. She was 40, not a girl. And this handsome stranger, this Ananias Goode, he had to be even older. They should have been ashamed to huff and puff and flirt the way they had. Well,
he
had flirted. She had managed to conduct herself honorably despite the stirrings she felt. Yes, she'd found him attractive, the most magnetic man she'd met in many long years. But she had successfully hidden it from him. He had no idea. She was sure of it.

When he reappeared in the alley 10 days later, she brought him in to remove his stitches. He was polite and smelled delicious, but this time offered no sly double-talk, inserted no witty flirtations into the gaps of their stilted conversation. He kept his hat on, still angled rakishly. Artinces fought off an urge to remove the hat and place it on her own head. She could tell he was distracted, barely listening as she extracted the sutures and pronounced him healed. When she was done, he all but leaped off her exam table.

Hurriedly buttoning up, he finally looked into her eyes. “I have to go,” he said. “I'm sorry. I have to.”

“Try not to disturb that wound, even now that the stitches are out,” Artinces said, trying to be matter-of-fact. She picked up her instrument tray and carried it to the counter.

“I'm going to make it up to you. You'll see,” he promised.

Artinces pretended to study the tray. She didn't want him to see how disappointed she was.

He opened the door and crossed the threshold. Suddenly he stopped and whirled around, almost catching Artinces in the act of staring longingly after him. “I've been thinking of you a lot,” he said. “Have you been thinking of me?”

Looking up at him, she swayed on her feet, a schoolgirl waiting to be asked to the dance. “No,” she said.

He grinned. “Now who's the liar?” he asked. He tipped his hat and left, closing the door behind him.

Artinces's long leap had yet to bring her to the ground. Since taking that fateful step off her imagined cliff, she had gone from surprise to shame to, finally, determination to act on her growing feelings. All the while, she was still falling. And she intended to land in his arms.

Another week passed before he showed up again, and Artinces had done her homework by then. She found out he was a self-described “independent businessman” who had his hands in a number of concerns—most of them illegal. She was prepared to grill him about all of them.

“Doctor,” he said. “We've got to stop meeting like this.” He was leaning against a dark blue New Yorker, idly turning his hat in his hands. Again the sun hovered just over his shoulder, casting his face in shadow.

Artinces had been getting ready to lock up. Instead, she smiled and turned, leaving the door ajar. “The pleasure's all yours, I'm sure.”

He stepped toward her, flashing a smile. To Artinces, the sun seemed dull in comparison.

She shielded her brow with her hand. “Remember I told you I had a scalpel and I know how to use it?” She slowly removed her hand from the pocket of her lab coat and held up the blade. “I wasn't kidding. See, I can get nasty in a minute.”

Goode raised his hands in mock surrender. “Mercy,” he said.

Artinces ducked her chin and showed him her naughtiest look. “I feel like you're teasing me,” she said. “You think I don't know the first thing about nasty.”

Goode stepped past her and pushed the door until it was completely open. He turned to her and bowed. “Why don't you show me what you know?”

She went in. He followed, bending to shut and lock the door. He turned and she leaped at him, wrapping her legs around his waist and slamming him back against the door. She kissed and sucked at his face as if she wanted to devour him. He held her there, nuzzling, licking, and finally sliding with her to the ground. Neither of them spoke again until the deed was done. Side by side
on the floor, they clung to each other in the rising dark, a puddle of clothes beneath them. Artinces rose first, wrapping herself in her lab coat and topping off the makeshift ensemble with Goode's hat.

“I have to go,” Goode announced. “But I want to see you again.”

“I know,” Artinces said. She helped him dress in silence, both of them understanding that talk would spoil the mood. Still naked under her lab coat, she stood on tiptoes to lay his hat on his smooth scalp.

Outside, the sun was gone. The moon was rising to take its place. The lunar glow combined with the glare of a streetlight, adorning everything below with a silvery tint. Everything except Goode, as far as Artinces was concerned. She watched him get in his car and start the engine, as golden as the first moment she laid eyes on him.

Heading home to Lewis Place, Goode puzzled over his new lover's aggressive, even combative manner. The ferocity of their coupling had staggered him. Like the men who endured his moods and executed his demands in the streets, the women he slept with instinctively knew to serve and obey. As a man accustomed to deference, he understood that his pleasure was the first priority, and he instructed his partners accordingly.

Goode had never grown recklessly arrogant, like some of his rivals. He had never deluded himself into thinking his North Side swagger compared in any way to the real power wielded by Virgil Washburn and the banking and department-store titans who swapped gossip and brokered deals in the steam rooms of the Downtown Athletic Club. In the time it took to smoke a single expensive cigar, those fat cats moved more product and secured more real estate than the local black chamber of commerce could accomplish in several generations. Goode didn't bow and scrape when his interests overlapped with the white elite, but his instincts told him when to grin amiably and when to say nothing. He greased the right palms, offered the right concessions, formed the right alliances, and showed appropriate gratitude for his share of the crumbs that fell from the fat cats' table.

Long ago, when he'd hopped that freight with Miles Washington, they'd left bloodstained Mississippi at their backs with New York,
Chicago, or maybe Detroit on their minds. But they stopped and staked a claim in this midsized burg on the banks of the river with that same bloody name, in the heart of a border state best known for stubborn mules, lager beer, and the infamous 1820 compromise that kept their kinsmen below the Mason-Dixon clapped in chains until Emancipation. That rail-yard dust was now far behind him. Like Miles, Goode was also no stranger to the complex art of compromise. While Miles taught his parishioners about the kingdom of Heaven, Goode, ever the dealmaker, set out to make the North Side his personal realm. He wore the crown and he wore it with ease. No one could gain access to numbers, gambling, lending, or liquor without kissing his ring, or his ass, depending on his mood. He'd done some horrible things, true, but they were necessary things, and the horror of those acts had spawned a pervasive and equally necessary fear, a zone of which surrounded him like a force field and functioned as reliably as Guts Tolliver. Only a few people on the entire North Side were unaware of him, and thus didn't adopt the nervous posture with which they were supposed to greet him. For reasons Goode couldn't fathom, Artinces Noel was among those few.

She had absolutely no fear of him, he was sure. He decided he liked that.

For Artinces, the route home was short. She typically zoomed down Kingshighway before crossing Delmar, the southernmost border of North Gateway, and entering the West End, her neighborhood. An upscale and ostensibly liberal community, it occupied a narrow strip that quickly gave way to the South Side, an alien, forbidden territory for most of Artinces's patients. Once past Delmar, Artinces could look out her driver's-side window and see the expensive restaurants, specialty-food emporiums, and clothing stores (including Aldo's, her favorite) lining the street. Or she could look out the passenger window and admire the imposing ornate gates that protected the city's doctors, professors, and power brokers from the unwashed hordes struggling just blocks away. Most evenings, Artinces would take little note of the shifts in the landscape. Her mind would still be at the office, thinking about charts and x-rays and the case files stuffed into the tote bag beside
her on the seat. But ever since Goode had driven away and left her wearing just a lab coat and a smile, Artinces rolled through the Gateway streets like a stranger in a magical wonderland. Where others may have seen creeping blight or obnoxious opulence, she saw only vague outlines of dazzling gold. Artinces wore sunglasses to counter the tenacious brightness that still enveloped her as she pulled up to her house on the outer rim of the Protected Zone, across the street from the city's largest park.

Although it was Artinces Noel who locked up the building every night, Billie Pope turned on the lights in the morning. She liked being the first to arrive and the first to leave. That's why she was surprised to find Artinces already on the scene, on her hands and knees in fact, scrubbing the floor of Exam Room No. 3 as if her life depended on it. The doctor didn't even look up when Billie entered the room.

“Ahem,” Billie said.

Artinces had on rubber gloves and a scarf around her head. She was wearing jeans. Billie tried to recall if she'd ever seen Artinces in jeans. Or even in pants.

“Oh, hi, Billie,” she finally said. “Just sprucing up.”

“I can see that. Any particular reason?”

“No, the floor just looked a little—it just seemed to me that it could use a little elbow grease.”

Billie studied Artinces, waiting for an explanation. When none was offered, she filled the silence with another question. “Elbow grease?”

“Yep.”

“Don't we pay a janitorial service to do that?”

“Indeed we do. I just didn't want to wait.”

“They're coming tonight. You couldn't wait until then?”

Billie was technically Artinces's employee, but more than that, she had been her friend for 15 years running, one of the few people able to claim any semblance of closeness to the doctor. The two women could speak freely without fear of hurt feelings or misunderstanding. Yet they respected each other's boundaries.
Billie said nothing when Artinces went a decade and a half without a lover, and Artinces kept her lips sealed when Billie went through her typical half-dozen or more partners per year, none of them men.

But on the day after Artinces and Goode made love on the floor, Billie could not hold her tongue. She watched the doctor zip through her roster of patients with more than her usual zest. “What's gotten into you?” Billie finally asked when Artinces slowed down just long enough to gobble a sandwich at her desk. “Or should I say, who?”

Artinces put down her sandwich and dabbed at the corners of her mouth with a napkin. “Mind your own business, Billie,” she replied. “Your imagination's getting the best of you.”

When decked out in her uniform and standard white shoes, Billie was a routine beauty. In her civilian garb, though, she looked like a runway model. Tall and slim with high cheekbones and dramatic, almond eyes that suggested a hint of Asian ancestry, she had a casual disdain for male suitors that only magnified her haughty allure. She'd done her damnedest to slide some of that unwanted attention to her intense friend and colleague whose obsession with work was, in Billie's view, plainly unhealthy. For Billie, nursing was a means to an end. She was good at it, to be sure. It was her poise and competence that made her Artinces's most trusted ally during the diarrhea epidemic of 1948. Plus, with people always getting sick and dying, there could never be enough nurses. It beat being chased around a desk by a potbellied middle manager or slaving for tips as a hatcheck girl. Best of all, Billie could live freely without ever considering the monetary reasons for keeping a man around. As for any other reason for putting up with men, well, Billie had no need for that either.

She could easily recognize the symptoms of love sickness. The diagnosis was clear: a mystery man had the doctor's nose open. She'd seen people of all persuasions stumble under the spell of a powerful longing, and she'd certainly fallen victim to it more than once. She'd seen women wander streets in a daze, women who couldn't stop grinning, women who willingly used themselves up in service to the great god of love by all manner of acts, some
ordinary, some completely baffling. She'd once known a woman who jumped off a roof to prove her devotion to a man who didn't want her. But she'd never seen a woman respond to desire by scrubbing floors.