Doctor Love
by Gael Greene
Copyright 2012
Smashwords Edition
The smallest movement woke her every time. Damn it. Barney tried for a moment to recapture the teasing image of his interrupted dream. But Debra’s questing knee chased the images away. I can’t even groan in my sleep, thought Barney. Can’t turn over, certainly can’t get up and take a leak without knowing she will start, stretch, sigh, moan, cry out...and, from the dimmest blurred instinct that moved her hand long before her brain came fully awake, reach out for me.
“What have we here?” cooed Debra, coming alert with instant possessiveness.
“We” indeed. Barney’s pretty, freckled, myopic explorer, Debra. What have we indeed, insatiable wanton. What did she expect to find between his legs? A piano? In her sleep now she went down on him, waking with him in her mouth. Barney was thinking about the clock radio set to activate in minutes. And the hospital-board meeting this morning. He would have very little time to touch base with his staff in the Emergency Room. And there was the laundry to drop off on Columbus Avenue. No one warns you about the dumb details of divorce. Oh well, hell. It felt good. Barney gave in to it. How could a dirty aging young man resist? For a moment he was distracted by Debra’s artistry. God, she could suck cock. For a woman born hating the morning she certainly had vast inner resources for sucking cock. He watched her turning herself on, still in a semisomnolent state, rubbing her pussy on his knee as she made love to him. No disgusting slurping sounds, just pressure and touch. Exquisite interruptions, little teasing licks. Then a sudden capture. Barney could feel the back of her throat. He shuddered. Barney heard her crying, heard his moan, felt himself close to coming but decided to hold back. He lifted her off his cock. Threw her onto the bed, pushing her knees back to her shoulders, opening that cunt already wet, always wet, that wonderful slippery welcome, changing the angle slightly.
Debra gasped. “Yes. Barney. Do that Barney.” Her fist in her mouth did not really muffle the scream.
I must be hurting her, Barney thought. I know I’m hurting her. God damn she’s noisy. It can’t really be seriously painful. She loves it fast and deep. What’s wrong with me this morning? I can’t catch my breath. Barney’s arm cramped. The pain shot through his chest, breaking the rhythm.
“Barney. Fuck. Fuck me. Oh God, Barney. Do it.” Debra was crying. Her head beating the pillow.
Barney was not always sure when she came. Getting there for Debra was sometimes such a production number. She let it build, hung on the edge, fell back, let it build again. Loving that ride. So even when he knew for sure, he would let her come two or three times before he let himself go. Damn it. What was wrong with him? He felt cold and sweaty. Terrible heartburn. Got to be heartburn. Must have had too much coffee last night. He held himself still, stiff against her, letting her ride his cock. Close to coming. A cramp in his side. He ignored it, thrusting deep again and again. Debra sobbed. Shooting it into her as she came, Barney couldn’t catch his breath. Jesus. He was gasping like a beached fish. He lay there willing his blood pressure to fall back to normal.
Debra, of course, was oblivious. She lay curled on her side, far away as if he had ceased to exist, her knees up, body flushed, hugging herself, contracting...collecting herself, he imagined. Barney tried to sit up, found himself locked in a vise. He rolled away, clammy...furious. Only a hypochondriac would let a simple muscle spasm escalate into something for intensive care. Joe Namath lived with pain worse than this every day of his life, thought Barney. “Shit.”
Debra started. “Barney, what is it?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all.” Barney heard the snap in his voice. “I’m not myself this morning, sweetheart,” he said, more softly, hugging her close. Barney didn’t like the thought creeping into his head. When was the last time he had failed to order an EKG for a patient panting like this, with pain like this? He tried to cancel the thought. Barney Kincaid never gets thrown like this. He had the blood pressure of a teenager. When was that last stress test? Less than six months ago. Normal for a well-preserved man of forty-two with no vices at all. Sex not a vice, he’d always reassured himself. More than a hobby, yes, but less than a crippling obsession. And if you believed in the value of aerobic exercise, what could be healthier, Barney could argue, than spirited fucking?
“I didn’t drink that much coffee last night, did I, sweetheart?” Barney found his pulse. Not counting. Afraid to count. “Three ounces of espresso, if that.”
“And then the stingers and an Irish coffee after, darling,” Debra reminded. “That will do it.” She stroked his arm as if concerned, but Barney thought he detected a little smirk of superiority. Debra drank nothing but wine, red wine only, specifically Bordeaux, apologizing in a way that made you feel like a piker if you offered her a Beaujolais. If someone was naive enough to protest, “What...red wine with fish?” she would smile tolerantly as one might indulge a retarded child. Barney was such a snob himself, how could he condemn her?
Debra snuggled against him delicately, arranging her sticky little twat on his outstretched hand. He felt a wave of annoyance. She loved it when he played with her pussy after fucking. Loved it when he made her come a dozen times before breakfast. She never said no. Never once in all the months that he’d known her had she pleaded a headache. Never once been “too tired” or “not in the mood.” (“I spent the last three years of my marriage longing, begging...wasting away for sex,” she told him. “Now I’m thirty-eight years old and I’m not going ever to say no again.”) Well, yes, she might cry out, “No...no more.” But it was a game, a submission game. She never meant it. Just loved to be forced once in a while. One of these days, thought Barney, he ought to tie her up and do it till she screamed for mercy so he would know just once the hungry bitch had actually had enough. If that were possible. Could take days. Weeks. What appetites they have. Women weren’t always that way. In the old days you used to have to talk them into it. Trick them. A woman had to be seduced. Women. What do they want? “They eat green salad and drink human blood.” That was Marvin’s favorite line from Herzog. Marvin who jumped out a seventh-story window. Marvin who had lived those last years surrounded by mouldering memorabilia of his childhood as a wunderkind, Marvin’s mess. His death the ultimate mess. Barney’s best friend, Marvin. Marvin, a serious man. Dead now nearly...how long? Five years, six. Time moved too quickly. Barney tested his arm. The cramp had subsided. The burning was gone. The pounding let up. He gathered his strength and managed a fair imitation of his usual morning leap from bed, running a hand through damp curls, as he caught himself in the mirror.
“What a sight, Barney. Sure you’re all right?”
Barney felt her watching his progress as he sidestepped to avoid the scattered underwear. A tangle of lace and elastic. A wisp of red satin. Lewd little panties. Something a stripper would wear. He smiled. Debra was an adolescent’s dream of a sex goddess. How he had loved her last summer, crazed by her lust...her hunger, her response. “Let’s make love as if there were an ambulance waiting,” she quoted Swinburne. Reaching beyond the stars. Dying. A thousand deaths. Blissed on excess. Whipping the beast in Barney to the brink of depravity. He sighed. That kind of intensity couldn’t last. His love for Lindsay, sane and cerebral...that would survive. He would have them both, Debra and Lindsay. Together if you could eliminate their flaws, you’d have the perfect woman. Why did they always have such unforgivable flaws?
“That’s your safety valve,” Lindsay had suggested, fresh from a session with her therapist. “First you invest a woman with exaggerated virtues, then you retreat as you discover the flaws.” That could be true, Barney conceded. He tucked the comforter over Debra’s shoulders, touched by her pink-and-blonde innocence in sleep. “I’ll wake you when I’m through in the bathroom, darling.”
Ambulance lights were flashing. Barney raced into the Emergency Room behind a blur of cops and technicians. The second of two bloody loads, Nurse Mallory said. That was clear at once. There was a kid with a flap of skin sliced back, the skull exposed like a cracked egg. The paramedic had already got an IV going. Right pupil widely dilated. Blood all over the floor, all over Nurse Mallory’s shoes.
“I sent a sample for cross-matching,” Mallory said. “Look at the blood pressure.”
Crazy how strong it was.
In the next cubicle, Kala Djarta was intubating a little boy. The child was unconscious. That meant Djarta would have less trouble getting the tube in. Djarta was on tryout. For every strength she had a weakness. But she learned fast. Probably Barney would keep her on as a junior partner. They would need more trained Emergency Medicine people if they got the New Grace Hospital Emergency Room contract. Somebody was screaming. A little old lady shuffled toward Barney, grabbed his arm. “I’m waiting already so long, doctor,” she said. “It’s the pollution. I’ve got it.”
Barney gently pulled his arm away. “Later, my dear,” he said. “ We’ll get to you soon.” There was a young man with all the skin on his legs gone. He’d been thrown from a motorcycle. Barney waded in. It was a chaos he thrived on. People screaming for attention. “Later.” He patted the red-eyed young woman with a howling infant in her arms. Mallory, his brilliant triage nurse, was a monument of calm, cutting through the crap and hysteria, keeping the petty wounds and barbarian relatives at bay, shooting the bodies through in unerring order of priority.
Barney’s happiest moments came on mornings like this, when everything he knew was tested. When he raced into the ER needing to take a leak and realized ten hours later he’d not yet found a moment to pee. When all the jagged wounds were neatly sutured and all the erratic hearts shocked and reined into dutiful rhythm, all the chronic complainers soothed and reassured. He would ride the craziness in a kind of high, intoxicated by a sense of his own power. Methodical. Calm. Never raising his voice. A small half smile on his lips. A special gentle intimacy for children. Good-natured firmness with querulous old women. A special skill in communicating with teenage drug abusers. Confidence in his speed and ability. Feeding facts into his brain. Memory shooting him answers in strange and wondrous flashes. Sensing a kind of bell inside his head alerting him to danger. Fueling a fine sense of control. Dr. Barney Kincaid wrestling against time and fate. A power trip, perhaps. Something he could only confess to himself.
Bodies were two deep in the corridors even after the crush of accident victims had been wheeled away to surgery and trauma wards. Of course, Barney wanted certain cases left out in the corridors where everyone could keep an eye on them. Damn unseasonal carnage. Weekday winter mornings were mostly uneventful. This morning’s ER gore looked like a summer Saturday night on a full moon when the crazies run amok. There was even a gunshot of the foot lying stabilized, waiting his turn. By noon, the load was normal again, and he snuck off for an hour to organize his evidence against Emile Gunderson.
A rather classic hospital foul-up had delivered the case against Dr. Gunderson to Barney totally by accident. All deaths had to be reviewed by a member of the Intensive-Care Unit Mortality Committee. This case of Gunderson’s had been reviewed by Riverton, a surgeon. Riverton had questioned Gunderson’s procedure. Gunderson had blamed a nurse, insisted she misinterpreted instructions. That was the end of it. The case had been closed and then, somehow, misfiling, sloppy housekeeping, who knows, had been slipped into a batch of charts assigned to Barney for review. Exasperated to find Riverton’s signature after plowing through pages of staff chicken scratchings and Gunderson’s eccentric script, Barney was about to toss it away when something, an extrasensory click, an alert in his brain signaled, catching his hand. The case sounded familiar. Digging in the files he found four other patients - each of them dead of the same “misunderstanding.” When he had first brought his accusation to the ICU Mortality Committee, they were incredulous. “If you want to investigate, go ahead,” rheumatologist Ben Weegan said with obvious distaste, the old fart. “I promise you it’s a waste of time -- Gunderson may not be brilliant, but he’s a reasonably competent man.”
“With a lot of friends,” added the cardiologist Greenstein.
“Everyone’s gone to lunch, Dr. Kincaid,” said Mallory. “And we have a little boy with a bad laceration. Needs some fancy needlework.” The kid Barney was sewing was silent, anesthetized from the ear down. The mother was sobbing and hiccupping. Barney admired his stitches, precise and beautiful. Incredible how many kids came out of medical school equipped to stitch an elephant but not a cheek. The subcuticular stitches were what counted.
“Hey Doc.”
He was black, wearing an embroidered yamulka and surgery-scrub green. He blathered at Barney in a language vaguely related to English.
“Nurse,” Barney shouted. “Get this man whatever he wants. And get him out of here.” Barney felt his hand tremble.
“He doesn’t know what he wants,” snapped Nurse Coburn, cranky as always, a crankiness tolerated because of her awesome energy and brilliance.
“They send me down in dis place for a knee sport.”
“What kind of a knee? What kind of a support?” Gilles Coburn was exasperated. “Go back and find out.”
Barney scrawled his signature on a chart, releasing the cheek trauma, feeling hot and strangely shaky. He studied the board for a likely candidate to polish off without labwork, thinking what he needed was something to jolt the blood sugar. A milkshake, maybe. He looked around for an aide.
“Hey. Hey, you finks, don’t hang up.” Mallory slammed down the phone. “You know that old man out there, Mr. No-Name. I’ve called every nursing home in our zone, Dr. Kincaid. And nobody wants to claim El Dumpo. We’ve got to have his chart. How can I find his chart without a name.”
“Did you look for laundry marks?” asked Coburn.
“First thing. And tattoos. Boy, it’s the same old story. Two sneaky bozos carted that poor old man here from some nursing home and ran off before I could stop them. They even cut out the labels. Folks must think this is a boneyard.”
Barney grinned. Mallory would flush out the culprits. She and Coburn were the real strength of Barney Kincaid’s emergency service. If he and Turner got the contract to run New Grace Hospital’s ER, he would have to clone them both. Coburn, with her secret rage and passion for perfection. Mallory, so cool and deep. Nurse Fudgesicle, that’s how he thought of her. Barney didn’t approve of playing around on his own hospital turf. That didn’t mean he didn’t do it. He hated himself, but what could a healthy, red-blooded lover of woman do? Still, for some reason the Fudgesicle was untouchable. Taunting him with her majestic indifference...her iron dignity the real barrier.
“What about the fireman in Three-A? Smoke inhalation?” Barney asked, not really wanting to move from his chair. “Did someone send out for that milkshake?”
“Glass in the knee,” replied Mallory.
“Bleeding?”
“A little.”
Lifting himself from the chair, Barney felt like he was carrying a baby elephant on his back. Through the drawn curtain of the next cubicle, Barney could hear his partner, Henderson Turner, practicing law: ordering X-rays and lab tests some old lady probably didn’t need because nobody was going to accuse Goodman Memorial of malpractice this year.
The fireman groaned. “Jesus, Doc, what are you doing in there?”
“Hurts, huh?”
“Don’t look,” Mallory instructed. “It won’t hurt if you don’t look.” She patted the fireman’s thigh.
“Hey, Hen -- what the hell’s going on?” Barney could see blood hitting the curtain in the next cubicle. “Mallory, hold this knee.” He ran.
“I don’t know, Barney,” Henderson whispered. “All of a sudden I’m standing in a pool of blood.” The old woman coughed, sending another shower of blood down Henderson’s coat. Hen raced away. Poor bastard. He was a brilliant diagnostician. But in a crisis he couldn’t speak. The verbal apparatus stuttered and shut down. Couldn’t even ask for a piece of equipment. Had to run off and get it if one of the mind-reading nurses -- smarter than any doctor by far -- wasn’t hovering at his elbow. Fortunately, even the aides and orderlies had learned to read Henderson Turner’s mind. An aide materialized with an IV kit. Barney pulled the tourniquet on the old woman’s arm tight. Poor old alcoholic. Her veins were like linoleum. A sharp pain shot across Barney’s chest and ran down his arm. He dropped the old lady, caught her just before she hit the floor, sure now that he was having a heart attack. He tried to cry out.
“Christ Barney. What are you doing to my old lady?” Hen tugged the woman away from Barney’s rigid hug. He propped her against the wall. “Where does it hurt, Barney?” He tore at Barney’s collar, fingers on Barney’s pulse.
“You know damn well where it hurts, Hen. Exactly where it’s supposed to...”
Hen was struggling to speak. “Describe...describe...”
“Like a truck on my chest, damn it. Mallory,” Barney yelled. He was terrified, furious...the fury blotted away only by the pain. This couldn’t be happening. It was like a nightmare in excruciating slow motion. A preposterous mistake.
The Fudgesicle pushed the curtains aside. She started to laugh.
“Hit the cardiac alert,” said Barney. “Oh God damn. I’m only forty-two years old.” Even as he spoke he waited to wake up from the dream.
“Don’t worry, Barney.” said Hen. “Only the good die young.”
“Why is this woman on the floor?” Mallory scolded, leaning over the patient sprawled on the floor.
Barney caught a flash of lace on a long, slender thigh. Incredible, he thought, in the middle of an infarct a man can still appreciate thighs. Hen was hooking up the electrodes. “I’m not sure I want to get sick in this hospital, Hen. Who can I trust? Who haven’t I insulted?”
Doctors, nurses, students, aides. Good God, it felt like an army had descended. They were using up too much of his precious oxygen, damn it. Hen was tugging on Barney’s sleeve.
“Barney, eventually I’ve got to call a cardiologist.”
“Not Greenstein. He’ll laugh while I die.”
“Foley is on today.”
“Foley. I trust Foley. Do you trust Foley?”
“As long as it’s your heart, Barney, and not mine.”
“Stop clowning you two,” snapped Mallory, tearing off tape.
“Remember I died laughing,” said Barney, thinking for the first time that he could actually die. “What does it say, Hen? Bad, huh?” Henderson handed the EKG tape to Dr. Djarta. She studied it, frowned and handed it to Mallory’s outstretched hand. The three of them stood stonily studying it. Mike Steffans sauntered in, a few minutes early for the afternoon shift.
“What is this?” Steffans asked. “A civil defense exercise?”
“There’s nothing there, Barney. Foley should take a look. But I’m telling you, nothing. No ST elevation.” Hen handed Barney the coil of paper. “Any shortness of breath? Pain now?”
“What about this little jiggle?” Mallory asked.
“Since when is Mallory the cardiologist on this case? You creeps.” Barney’s hand was shaking. He felt drained and frail waiting for the next onslaught of pain. Barney held the strip three feet away from his nose.
“Nurse Mallory. You can give Dr. Kincaid back his glasses,” Henderson commanded. “Maybe it’s pericarditis. Or angina.”
“Oh God.” Barney started. The old lady was gone. Had she crept away? “Your patient, Hen. We forgot all about her. Tell me one of those orderlies didn’t just sweep her up.”
Mallory pushed him down again. “Djarta is working on her next door. She’s fine.” Mallory took Barney’s hand. It was not a pulse-focused gesture. She looked right into his eyes, seeing him... Mallory, who always looked at the air to the left of his face. “If you’re not going to die in the next twenty minutes, I’ll get back to work.” Barney felt the tears come. She squeezed his hand and left. Immediately Barney felt better. He knew Mallory would not leave unless he was definitely out of danger...or dead. Dead. A myocardial infarct at forty-two. He might as well be dead. Barney groaned. They were keeping it from him.
“Oh shit Hen. I should have known midlife crisis would get me. First the eyes go. Your arm isn’t long enough to hold the menu. Then you find it tough to get it up twice in one night. Then the knees go and the memory --”
“Twice in one night. At forty-two.” Henderson shook his head. “Tell me you’re exaggerating. This is a man with five children under twelve talking. I’m lucky to find the energy twice a week.”
“Forget I mentioned it,” Barney said. “Divorce is like a second adolescence.” Barney groaned again. Clearly the glorious Indian summer of his second adolescence was finally over. If I live, God, he negotiated silently, I’ll give up kinkiness forever. Even so, he knew it was a rash promise. Even saints have their secrets. He’d read some gossip somewhere about Marilyn Monroe and Dr. Schweitzer. Are you there, God? He visualized an old man with a white beard. “What makes you so sure God is a man?” Debra liked to taunt. He tried to imagine God as a woman. She looked like Betty Friedan.
Foley was there, his skin cool and dry. Barney had a feeling he was going to survive.
“Nobody cares. Nobody ever says, ‘Willie Mae, what for y’all bin so pendable.’” Willie Mae grinned at Barney as she drew the curtains open. “Too bad you can’t get up to see the storm, Doc,” she said. She wiggled her fat round ass. Willie Mae had turned into a collection of bulges when he wasn’t looking. Barney remembered the cute black teenager Willie Mae fresh out of reform school when she first came to work for Goodman Memorial. Hell, was it eight years ago? Everyone was getting old overnight. Brigitte Bardot. Elvis Presley, dead at forty-two.
Barney felt like a feeble old man in the soft blue nightshirt his father had brought to the hospital last night. “Don’t get scared,” Barney said as his father tried to conceal shock and fear. “I’m just hooked up to a heart monitor so the nurses out there have something to watch if there’s nothing good on the late late show. It’s definitely not a heart attack, Dad.” His father’s eyes were brimming. “I swear. My doctor, Adam Foley, swears there is no heart damage. Probably won’t be any. It’s something called pericarditis. A virus attacks the heart lining. You rest a little and take cortisone and that’s it. Honest, Dad.” Barney started to cry himself. He was relieved to find himself believing that everything Foley said was true. There had been no infarct. In his anxiety, Barney had probably exaggerated the pain.
Mama was downstairs hysterical, said Dad. She’d taken a Valium and then another and was begging to come up. Barney dispatched Foley to calm her down. “Tell her I’m sleeping,” he said. “Let her look at me, if she insists. But I’m not strong enough for my mother in full anguish.”
“It’s a bleezard out there,” observed Willie Mae. “Half the trains is out. The buses come iffen they feel like it. But Willie Mae is here.” Her skin was blue-black against the shiny white stuff of her uniform, the pants straining across her big heart-shaped ass. Once Barney had caught her rubbing against the coffee machine in the canteen. Masturbation? Conscious, unconscious...he couldn’t tell. The sweet lewdness of her laugh had gone right to his dick. But then his beeper had gone off and he was racing off to the Emergency Room, that particular lewdness resolved. Thank God.
“Twelve inches of snow, Doc,” Willie set his breakfast on the bed table. “I’m crankin’ you up a little,” she said. “Half the mornin’ shift callin’ in sick or defeated. Poor Willie Mae. I’m in the soup today.” She stuck out her lower lip, a satiny mauve curl of flesh. “Don’t eat that crap, Doc. I’ll get you a Danish from the machine, iffen you like.”
“Oatmeal is probably good for me,” said Barney, seeing all too clearly how the entire hospital experience was designed to make you feel like a child again. There was a menu for the day beside the tray. He was to check off his choice. Nauseated from the smell of the oatmeal, there was no way he could contemplate facing lunch.
“Nothing in this hospital is good for you, Doc. Everyone knows that.” Willie Mae was chattering away. “The trick is to cure yourself fastest fore they get you one way or the nother.”
Barney felt hot and clammy again, his precious privacy invaded by the tubes and sensors of the monitors. He lay there listening to his heart. It seemed revved up, unfamiliar, not really his own. Was Foley being excessively cautious or was he waiting to see if Barney’s heart had more nasty tricks on tap? Even when it was clear the pain had subsided, he refused to let Barney go home. He wanted three or four days of strict bed rest, and tests, he said. Barney was so tired by then, and frightened, he surrendered, feeling feverish and weak again the minute he gave in. Barney was furious he hadn’t asked more questions. He’d been so relieved by the diagnosis -- pericarditis, an inflammation of the heart sac, so far with no residual damage to his heart -- he had hesitated to voice all his doubts. No point in hearing assorted fears confirmed...yet. If he kept quiet, his heart might continue to do its spunky best.
Barney had chosen medicine as his life work so he would never be this vulnerable. As a doctor he would always know the odds and the alternatives, make informed medical judgments, protect his family. Uncle Ernie had died at forty-six of an infarct. Mama supposedly had a slight heart murmur. Barney had never been able to detect it himself, but she’d been warned as a teenager and been coddled because of it all her life, so he was loath to take that illusion away. Failing hearts were definitely a family tradition. Even by marriage. Reeney’s brother had his massive attack at forty-eight. Reeney would be furious if Barney died just now, the divorce in limbo. She never stopped complaining how tough it was surviving on forty thousand a year -- the outrageous allowance agreed on in their separation pact. Barney relished the thought of Reeney with her paste-on nails and eyelashes, her forty-dollar-a-week health-club habit, her indoor tennis at thirty-five dollars an hour, and the little twenty-five-dollar omelet lunches at La Goulue, on widow’s benefits. Barney was swept up for a moment with the thought of dying as the best revenge. Then he remembered -- new will or old will, Reeney would get everything unless she remarried. What there was. Not that much. The house on the dunes in Amagansett. The land they had bought in Key West in a fit of hopefulness six years ago, when it would have been clear to anyone less stubborn than Barney that the marriage was in extremis. The duplex on East Ninety-third Street. Lots of insurance. Everything else she’d already laid hysterical claim to. Barney could see Reeney in Bendel’s shopping for something in black, something suitable for a funeral but not too somber for dancing at Le Club after, you know. Would she be outrageous enough to do a black veil number? He envisioned a ravaged hysteric, hair scraggly, face streaked and swollen with tears, giant shades, too bereaved to think about appearances. That would be Debra. Reeney would go for tasteful sadness, Debra for high drama, passion unrepressed. Till Lindsay walked in, ah, yes -- that would test Reeney’s veneer of class. Lindsay, so gentle and composed. Eyes still red, of course, cheeks pale, hair squeaky-clean, brushed neat with a plain barrette. No black for Lindsay. That would be too phony, self-conscious. She would wear beige or gray, uncalculatedly uncalculated. Oh God. Debra and Lindsay in the same room. Barney got hot and clammy again. Debra would recognize Lindsay at once. But Lindsay, after the first shock of discovering Barney’s shattering infidelity, preferred to pretend Debra did not exist. Debra’s voice on the six o’clock news, even a promo for Channel 3’s City Edition, was enough to give Lindsay red blotches. He’d sworn to her months ago that he would give up Debra forever. Forever lasted exactly two months. Debra, it seems, would never give up. What do you say to a naked lady? thought Barney. For Barney, saying no was never easy.
What a shame, thought Barney, that a man couldn’t hang around for his own funeral. Of course, if Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and the death-is-but-a-passing guys were right, maybe he could hover about for the festivities. He imagined himself floating over his own body -- how tanned and healthy and young he looked in that massive mahogany box. Or would Reeney choose something contemporary -- burled walnut, maybe, or bird’s-eye maple?
He debated calling for a bedpan but he wasn’t quite ready to get intimate with the icy steel.
There was quite a crowd gathered for the memorial services. “Well, kid, didn’t I warn you all that whacking off would stunt your growth and grow hair on your hands.” It was Garland, Margaret’s boyfriend, who mowed the lawn in those flush days after the war, when Dad’s shoe store grew into a modest, thriving empire and they moved briefly to Woodmere, taking Margaret, the live-in maid. And there was Margaret, comforting his sobbing mother. Margaret in her old blue chenille bathrobe, knotted tight around her waist, her face sticky with cream -- just as he remembered her. That smell -- almonds and vanilla and that other smell, her woman smell, blurred by her perfume, Jungle Gardenia.
Had there ever been a hornier twelve-year-old? It was a miracle he didn’t fall ill from dehydration with all that masturbation. He was the lovesick slave of the sunny golden goddess in his nudist magazines. “My Diana,” he called her. Alone in his room Barney would whisper to her glossy image and imagine her crawling into his bed, teaching him to make love. “Touch me here,” she would say. “Hold me. Put your tongue in my ear.” She would kiss his fingers and tell him to be gentle. “You have such a wonderful cock, so big for a young boy,” she would say. The fantasy with his golden nudist was so vivid. More real in a way than the strange, harrowing moments with Margaret. How free and loving she was defending him from neighborhood bullies, from smothering household directives. But how distant she pretended to be letting the twelve-year-old Barney touch her breasts, her face never registering anything, no response, pretending it wasn’t really happening. He wondered if she liked it or simply suffered his touch. What a struggle it was. Each time he had to start from the beginning as if it had never happened before. Get her to let him look at them. To touch them clothed. To touch them bare. Oh God, the thrill...Thirty years later he could still invoke the shivers of ecstasy. Oh, there were so many rules. Why were there so many rules? Getting there was slow, the excitement excruciating. Barney walked around all afternoon with a hard-on, whispering to the latest photo of Goddess Diana, shooting off with Margaret’s smell of almond and vanilla haunting him. Would she let him touch her nipple? He wanted to kiss her breasts. No kidding, she said. And she wouldn’t touch Barney, nor could he touch her down there. He would beg. She was steel. Bitch, wouldn’t give an inch. “Pretty please, Margaret. Pretty please.” Barney was on his knees beside the big old chair where she did her sewing, begging, pretending to be a dog. “Please, Margaret. It’s just your little puppy. Puppies like to lick.”
She would tug at her robe, pulling it up a little so she could slip it off the shoulders without loosening the barrier at her waist. She would stretch and yawn, her face shiny from the night cream...the room full of vanilla and almonds. Barney’s swollen penis would make a tent in his pajamas. Sometimes he would try to push between her legs. “Barney,” she would scold, kicking him away. The rule was he must come sideways or from behind, bending over the chair to press his cheek against her shoulder. Once he even slipped on a goddamned bedroom slipper. She sure didn’t make anything easy for him. But from behind he could hump the chair, imagining her bottom pressed against the cushion. The chair was stained from his uncontrollable comes.
That one night she was stretched across the bed sewing glittery things on a scarf. “Is this what you’re looking for?” Margaret was pale, thin, with deep purple circles around her eyes like the people in the concentration camps in Life magazine. She seemed old to him then, but she couldn’t have been more than twenty. She made high round circles on her cheekbones with dye from a metal rouge box on the vanity Mama had made for her from an old desk painted white, with a striped skirt tacked on and a big mirror. Margaret’s room was small but it was the best room in the house for Barney because the tree in the garden out back grew in through her window. In summer he could touch the leaves, soft and green-smelling, not as soft though as Margaret’s skin. “Is this your idea of a sweetheart?” She flipped his nudist magazine till it fell open to that incredible photograph of Barney’s true love, the Goddess Diana, now Miss Nudist America. He had dozens of pictures of her squirreled away, but this was the best: Diana, sun-dappled, one perfect breast framed by her archer’s bow.
“You shouldn’t be sneaking around in my room,” said Barney, really hurt, violated by her betrayal.
“Nobody ever said you should come into my room either,” she said.
“Well, you shouldn’t be digging in drawers and things.” He wondered if she’d found his copy of As One Girl to Another, stolen from Cousin Heidi’s bedroom in the flat upstairs, and the unused Trojan.
Margaret ignored him. He snatched the magazine away and sat beside her on the bed. Her bathrobe had fallen away from her thigh. Barney stretched out beside her. “Touch me, Margaret. Just touch it.” She yawned and went on sewing. “Please, Margaret.” Barney rubbed himself against her. She pretended nothing was happening. “Margaret.” Barney was rubbing and bumping and breathing hard, going to come, so close. Impossible for her to sew now. He couldn’t believe she was letting it happen. He grabbed her from behind, his hand just lightly resting where her thing ought to be. She turned around and looked at him with a wicked little smile. “Who invited you to lie on this bed?” She pulled the robe tight. “Damn. I broke the thread.” She got up.
“Want something from downstairs?” she asked. He lay facing the wall, curled into a miserable bundle. “Oreos and milk?” He didn’t answer. She left him alone on her bed.
“It’s desolation here.” Mama affected a slightly British accent on the phone, and a shrillness veering this morning toward hysteria. “A real civil disaster, Barney. Eleven inches of snow. Your daddy won’t let me go out the front door. And God forbid he should slip and break his arm again, that’s all we need. I’m sick not seeing you. I keep thinking they might be lying to me. What does your doctor say, darling? I was speaking to Lilly Mellin, you remember Lilly, with the son in the basketball scandal? He had pericarditis...there was some kind of permanent damage. You are not going to have that kind of damage, please Barney, make the doctor promise.”
Crazy, how even at forty-two Barney still got that sick ache in his throat when she called, close to throwing up. He used to just throw up. Then for a while he took antinausea medicine. The medicine was worse than throwing up.
“Oh Mama, everything is fine. I’m normal. My EKG is perfect. Not a twinge or anything...I’m just staying here overnight because Foley is a tyrant and doesn’t trust me to rest at home.” Lying. Barney’s hand went numb just to punish him for lying. The truth was Barney hated sick people. Complaining sick people not sick enough to complain were the worst. One might ask why a man who hates sick people happened to become a doctor. A staff psychologist once asked Barney that question and he and Barney agreed the answer was not reassuring.
Anyway, that’s why Barney was not an internist or neurologist or a surgeon or a pediatrician. As a doctor of emergency medicine he would treat the emergency, not the person, he’d thought. In fact, he’d come to enjoy relating, winning the trust of almost anyone. These were pleasant fleeting involvements but nothing long range that could develop into psychological dependency. “Half my practice is really psychotherapy,” an Ob-Gyn man had confided to Barney. That would drive Barney up the wall. He had developed extraordinary skills. He wanted to use them. Triage was a skill. Recognizing the priority of need when everyone is howling for attention. Saving the dying whenever possible. Resurrecting the dead. Sometimes. If they emerged vegetables, that was unfortunate. Someone else would deal with that. Someone upstairs would struggle with the issues of heroic life-sustaining efforts versus pulling the plug. In ER the first task was to revive the patient. No one dared waste precious seconds debating whether the patient was still salvageable. From the ER, menopausal women and iffy pregnancies and wasting neuropathologies got shipped upstairs to the full-time saviors, the guys with the patience and guts to tend the chronically ill and the hypochondriacs. Barney admired that kind of mind, but boy he sure didn’t have it.
Barney’s mother was not fragile at all. She played that role to please Dad. Maybe even to control him.
“I feel so helpless, darling,” Mama was saying, “not being able to get there. The streets are a mess. If only you were at New York Hospital. Then,” she laughed, “I could hire a little boy with a sled to pull me there.”
New York Hospital. She would never forgive him for being in Riverdale at Goodman Memorial when he could have been embalmed in the status chic of New York Hospital if only he’d sold out his dream fifteen years ago. Barney decided not to revive that dreary argument. He threw her a kiss and thanked God for the blizzard and the vagaries of snowplow operations in Riverdale. He’d have to persuade Foley to let him out of here fast before major visitation rituals shattered the serenity. Given a little encouragement, his mother could turn visiting hours into a grander display of ostentation than a five-star bar mitzvah.
The snow drifted against the glass pavilion but inside it was warm, too warm. Barney loved the sound of the calliope, loved rising into the air and then dropping. He was happy till he realized he was riding the merry-go-round in pajamas, torn pajamas, shabby cut-offs. Why was it so warm? And wasn’t it strange...the horse’s mane felt like real hair, thick, silken masses of dark chestnut hair. The horse he realized suddenly was a mermaid. He felt her body between his legs, felt his penis growing hard. He woke up. The Fudgesicle was tugging at the sheet. He’d dozed off in the icy winter sunlight.
“What’s the matter with the students on this floor,” Mallory muttered. “Don’t they teach them how to make beds anymore? You’re hot,” she said. “It says they took your temperature forty-five minutes ago and it was ninety-eight point two. I find that hard to believe.” She stabbed a thermometer under his tongue.
“It was just a hot dream, nurshh--” said Barney.
“Don’t talk.” She was holding his arm by the wrist disapprovingly as if it were a rotting salami. No tender loving care from the Fudgesicle. Barney closed his eyes and became aware of her cool fingertips. He lay there willing his pulse to slow down...counting the throbs against her fingers, feeling all the weight of his big fat angry enlarged heart in its swollen pericardial sac. It was a bore sharing awareness with a sick heart. A hospital was certainly not a wholesome environment for a man with his galloping hypochondria.
“Dr. Foley says you’re in remarkable shape,” Nurse Mallory allowed, grudgingly, Barney thought. “You’re going to live, Dr. Kincaid,” she said, “if our nurses don’t find a way to kill you. Perhaps we should arrange for you to have a private special.”
“You,” said Barney, grabbing her wrist. “Just checking your pulse.”
She pulled her arm away. “Dr. Kincard. Pericarditis is not a joke.”
“But you promised I’m going to live,” said Barney. “I was hoping maybe you were ready to live too.” He realized he could be delirious, trying to melt the Fudgesicle.
“I have a good life, doctor,” she said. “A fine life. You know nothing about my life.”
That was true. Anne Mallory was reserved, awesomely private. She did not kid around. She did not fool around. She did not gossip or hang around after hours. He believed she was married to a medical student...helping to finance her husband’s less-than-brilliant passage through some less-than-first-rate med school somewhere out West. She read in the cafeteria. Maybe she took classes. He was not sure he’d actually seen her smile.
“I must say you never encouraged small talk,” said Barney. “But I’m grateful for your visit now.”
“It’s my lunch break,” she said, gesturing toward a container of yoghurt she’d set on his tray-table. “I’ve been wanting to speak to you. There’s something I’ve been thinking about -- oh for God’s sake.” She leaped into the air and did a sort of tango.
Barney felt his heart lurch.
“It was just a cockroach,” she said, grabbing his wrist again. “I killed it. Calm down please. Be calm.” She put her stethoscope to his heart.
There was a knock at the door.
“Barney.” Debra stood in the doorway. So blonde. Barney always forgot how blonde she was.
“I’m going,” said Mallory and she was gone in a screech of rubber, yoghurt and all.
Debra stood there. Her face flushed -- looking like Julie Christie in Doctor Zhivago in her wild tawny fox hat -- her matted red-fox halo. He remembered suddenly how much he had loved her last summer and his heart ached. He felt giddy with pleasure to see her. Healthier already though foolish lying there taped to his sensors. “How did you get here?” he asked. “Everyone says the city is paralyzed.”
“Not even blizzards can stop your determined consumer affairs reporter, darling,” she said, mugging, quite pleased with herself. “Neither rain nor sleet...Actually I took the subway as far as it went. And then I hitched a ride. Luckily it was a Volkswagen that picked me up because believe me, darling, nothing else is making it up that hill you have outside.” She peeled off a sodden scarf, shook the bedraggled fur, struggled out of her long black reefer, ran fingers through her hair, and turned to Barney. Measuring his welcome. They’d gone through too many bad times lately, the reality of the autumn betraying the summer’s seeming promise, his vow to Lindsay limiting the hours free for Debra. He sensed her wariness now. Wanting to know if he was angry or touched that she’d burst in. Was he sick...contagious? How serious? How long before he could have sex? Barney would just bet that’s what she would like to know, the insatiable sex fiend. He grinned to himself. He was exhilarated to think she’d got here. He loved women who know how without being told. He could imagine her kneeing a mugger or taming a lion...killing for a story. In her work she was fearless. As a woman, though, she was a pushover. Anything Barney wanted she would give him. Why did that annoy him?
Debra kissed the corner of his mouth, rosy cheeks cold against his flushed dry skin. He turned toward her, letting her make love to his mouth, touched her breast in the bright-blue sweater. She caught her breath, shook her head as if to brake the sexual tide, and got down to medical business, sitting carefully on the edge of the bed, taking his hand. What did the doctor say? What did it feel like? What was the treatment? The prognosis? Any side effects? Debra, Barney had discovered long ago, was a medical groupie. As a child she had wanted to be a doctor. Her father had wanted to be a doctor, too. Neither of them made it. The Depression put him into the furniture business in Poughkeepsie. Failing chemistry and a too-early-budding libido diverted her.
Once Debra had persuaded Barney to let her put on a doctor’s coat and hang out in the ER. She wanted to know everything as a charm against sickness. “I feel so safe having a doctor in my life,” she once told him. “I feel like you’re keeping an eye on my insides. No cells are going to go crazy and misbehave with you watching.” In bed she loved to play doctor. Loved to have Barney examine her twat -- “it’s feverish, doctor” -- to palpate her breasts and probe her ass and all the parts of her pussy as if it were an earnest and disinterested physician who ultimately, of course, could no longer contain his simmering heat.
“Well, but of course I would get here somehow, Barney. It’s terrible to be sick. But it’s wonderful, too. Everyone makes a big fuss and you get flowers and toys.”
“I’m afraid I could love it too much,” said Barney. “If I just let go I could give in to it. Sick people are such babies.”
“Silly. A man of your legendary discipline. Come on, darling, let everyone baby you. See, I brought you goodies.” There was a giant apple too perfect to eat and the current issue of Penthouse.
How could you give up a woman who indulged your childishness? thought Barney. “Come, darling, we’ll look at the pictures together.”
Debra stretched out beside him, careful not to get tangled in his hookup lines, snuggling close: “Which one do you like, Barney? Do you like her, Kitty? ‘Kitty likes older men,’ it says. Are those the kind of tits you like? What’s a good pussy?”
“That’s a good pussy. It’s like a flower. That one’s not as nice.”
“Yeeck.”
“I like Kiki,” said Barney. Kiki was blonde and small but very bosomy, freckled, a lot like Debra, the same nose. Debra was pleased. Barney could tell from the way she licked the canary feathers from her lips. Barney read aloud: “Kiki likes to play in tents with her boots on.”
Debra kissed the inside of his palm, sucked his thumb, ran her tongue in between his fingers. “Oh, look who’s here,” she said as his cock began to get hard, a precise little bump under the sheet. Debra put her hand there. “Are we allowed--”
“Well, my doctor hasn’t specifically forbidden--”
She pulled the sheet aside and slid down to his cock, circled the tip with her tongue, licked it all over. Barney heard the monitor alarm go off, the footsteps racing down the hall.
“God damn.” He struggled with the covers. “The monitor.”
Debra came up flushed and puzzled just as the stampeding horde burst through the door. She sat there with her mouth open, chin sticky, terrified as a nurse began to pound on Barney’s chest.
“Wait,” cried Barney.
Foley came into the room, spied the Penthouse and Barney calm and contained in the middle of agitated staff. “Enough,” he cried. “Perhaps you’ll all step outside,” he said. “Do I recognize Miss Teiger.”
“Debra,” said Barney. “My heart must be pounding. I think we’ve done a lot for my reputation in one afternoon. Go home, darling. Isn’t she a wonder, Foley, getting here through the blizzard?”
Debra pouted. “I’ll come tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll come every day,” she promised.
“I’m not going to be here that long,” said Barney. “And tomorrow my mother will come with Reeney and Candy.”
Debra snatched up her coat and whirled the scarf with a flourish as if it were a cape and she were Dracula and would gladly eat the competition alive. “Yes, of course, the traffic problem. How shall you schedule the women who adore you so we don’t collide in the corridor?”
“Come the day after, sweetheart. If I’m still here,” said Barney. “Come when I’m off the monitor and...you...know...what...”
She smiled a little and left, eyeing the flat of the bed between his legs as if her unfinished business were a personal challenge. What a nut. After Foley had chewed him out and left, Barney lay there remembering again how insanely he had loved her. Insane was precisely the word. He had been out of his mind. It seemed like months. Several weeks, literally out of his mind. Careering. Out of control. Even today, several months safely retreated back into sanity, Barney could at will recapture the sense memories of madness. The heat of that summer. The intense exhilaration of falling wildly in love. Why was that always the best part of the relationship? Falling wildly in love. It was wonderful. And terrifying. Barney, responsible father, devoted son, dedicated doctor, had lost all control. Nothing mattered, not the hospital nor Candy, still very bruised and confused by his breakup with Reeney, not even Lindsay, the woman he was sure that he loved and planned one day to marry.
Nothing mattered but Debra. The sun on her skin. Fog misting the air as they walked in and out of the surf’s tongue. Licking salt from her knees. Walking around with an almost constant erection. The intensity of his lust, the intensity of her hunger. Falling in love. How many times had he fallen in love? Never like this. They couldn’t keep their hands off each other. She had seemed so powerful then, regal, confident, a goddess. He could not have imagined that a woman so uninhibited and sensual existed. A beautiful sky could make her feel faint. The light coming through wild flowers moved her to tears. She was mesmerized by tastes and smells -- chocolate, fresh-cut grass, wood burning, the sea, his mouth, sweat, the sheets, her taste, his. And sexual. In his most feverish fantasies he had not invented any woman so awesomely sexual. Open. She was open to anything, everything. She was always ready for sex, hot. Hotter than he. Raw from too much, still hungry for more. She could come in any position. “Clitoral must be a mistake,” he said. “I wasn’t anywhere near your clitoris that time,” he said.
“Oh, you must have rubbed against it somehow,” she protested. “I feel it on fire.”
Barney let the notion ride. He was not about to deny the theory of clitoral orgasm and possibly undermine the superstructure of the feminist movement. He was becoming a fervent feminist himself. Besides, Debra could have an orgasm from touching, kissing, from a finger on her nipple, from squeezing a muscle as he whispered to her over the phone. Lying next to her on the beach at Flying Point: she untied her bikini bottom and opened her thighs to the sun. “The sun is kissing me, Barney,” she cried. He felt himself growing hard inside his swimsuit.
Not wanting to sleep. Watching her constantly. Coming, a great shattering explosion, getting hard again, feeling his cock bigger than a baseball bat. Feeling like a teenager. Driving Debra to ecstasy and tears, to madness and giggles. Her little-girl voice teasing, her dusky earth-mother voice commanding him to serve her. He would watch her gathering the fragments of her consciousness in the filtered light of her blue bedroom, the sheer white curtains blowing on a late July afternoon -- the field grass buzzing, the bay streaked with mauve behind. And he would have a sudden vision of Lindsay, wounded, crawling across the sand, Lindsay betrayed, Lindsay he’d promised to love. Love. Whatever the hell that was worth.
Of course, the intensity could not last. He could hardly breathe. He hired a moonlighting friend to take his shift one night so he could hurry to her. He dumped his daughter, Candy, at his folks’ without warning, without explanation. He filed charts without reading them. He made feeble excuses to Lindsay. Finally one night he made love to Lindsay and she lay there weeping, somehow knowing. He skipped out on a board meeting and took a seaplane for a last night with Debra in the cottage on the bay before fall. It was wonderful. Of course, Barney could not simply let himself fall apart like that.
“You made it stop,” Debra often accused him.
“Yes, I thought I’d just give it a little time and space, let it cool.”
“Exactly. You turned it off. You threw it away,” she said. “It was so wonderful. Why couldn’t you just go with it? Let it be whatever it could be?”
There was no easy way to explain it to Debra. Sometimes it seemed they didn’t speak the same language. He knew very well she was ready to move in, to commit herself totally, the first week. One month out of her marriage she was ready to love, risk everything. He had to weigh his commitment to Lindsay. What did she expect? He had to get his head straight after a long and terrible marriage. A man had to face responsibilities. A man cannot take off, hurtle into the stratosphere that way. Women can do it because many of them have nothing more important. Love, it seemed, was their first priority. Debra was a love junky. She was drifting through life with no responsibilities, no children, no dependent parents, only a vague sense of duty to the consumer, perhaps to her career. Barney had a complexity of responsibilities: Candy, parents, in-laws, the corporation, Keogh plans, private schools, college tuition. Perhaps it would be pleasant to disappear, drop out. Be a farmer or a carpenter. Barney actually enjoyed working with wood and tools. But he’d never understood how men -- professional men brought up in the Fifties -- could walk away from responsibility so casually. He’d need a prefrontal lobotomy to handle the guilt.
It is possible to love two women. That fall Barney had realized he loved two women. Neither of them took the news well. What did they want from him? Why did they try to force him to choose? Would it be better not to love at all? Just keep collecting bodies and moving on, like some guys he knew with five or six steady sleep-ins, always on the prowl to connect with something new. It wasn’t easy loving two women at once. When Lindsay found out about Debra she was devastated. When Debra realized there was a Lindsay he did not intend to give up, she went into hysteria. They both acted as if dividing himself was a lark for Barney, never sensing how painful it was for him knowingly to cause pain. Why should Barney give up either one? He’d just escaped from a stultifying marriage and he was only forty-two. He had married too early. His extramarital life had been constricted and tame. He deserved more time to be single and as adolescent as he needed to be.