Today Will Be Different(23)
“Mom, you’re saying the same thing over and over.”
“I’m embarrassing you, am I?”
“Stop.”
To throw gas on the fire, I stuck my butt out, assumed my shake-your-booty crouch, and— My eyes locked on something through the tearstained glass.
Perfectly framed: the yacht.
The dock was a ten-minute walk up the bike path.
“Spencer?” I said. “Can you watch Timby?”
“Shoot,” he said. “I’m meeting my curator in the pavilion.”
“Perfect,” I said. “Timby knows my number.”
“Mom!”
I handed Timby my purse. “Gum, makeup. It’s all yours.”
“Ooh.” He hooked the purse smartly around his shoulder. “Go.”
The yacht, the third largest in the world, belonged to the Russian oligarch Viktor Pasternak, who’d gotten stinking rich on natural gas. Last month, he’d gone snorkeling in Hawaii, where one hooker got jealous of a different hooker and threw a black sea urchin at Viktor’s head. He’d covered his face in time but the poisonous spikes got stuck in his hand. When it began to swell, he took off for Seattle because he’d heard about The Guy.
“A sea urchin defense wound!” Joe remarked gleefully when he received the call.
Viktor lived by a credo he’d dubbed the “eight-minute rule.” He’d calculated he was rich enough that he didn’t have to do anything he didn’t want for more than eight minutes. That included being in hospitals, which he mortally feared due to an overreaction to a recent Anderson Cooper piece on antibiotic-resistant staph infections. (Viktor kept saying Cooper Anderson, but Joe didn’t correct him.) So Viktor converted the disco on his yacht into an operating room. He’d invited Joe to the yacht, presented him with the state-of-the-art setup, and announced it was where Joe would be removing the hooker-delivered sea urchin spikes. Joe, not being insane, balked.
Viktor persisted. His equipment had been installed under the supervision of Spain’s Dr. Luis Rogoway, famous for operating on the knees of European soccer stars. Rogoway, a great friend, would fly in his nursing staff, gorgeous Spanish women, none shorter than six feet, to assist Joe.
Joe thought about it. Audacious, yes, but unethical? No law said you had to operate in a hospital. Joe had done a hundred procedures on dirt-floored dwellings in Haiti, India, Ethiopia. Insurance companies wanted you to do everything in a hospital; this guy was obscenely overpaying in cash. It was an out-of-body moment, one Joe still didn’t quite understand, when he heard himself saying yes.
Viktor had another stipulation: Joe had to clear his schedule for the week-long recovery. That’s why Joe had told his staff he was out of town.
As for why Joe didn’t tell me? He knew I’d be a gusher of opinions, all negative, and who needs that the night before you’re performing surgery in an unfamiliar disco? Joe made the decision to operate, donate the money to charity, and laugh with me later.
On the appointed day, Joe opened Viktor’s hand, removed the sea urchin spikes, and repaired the tendon damage without incident. Before closing the hand, Joe wanted to zap any lingering bacteria. He instructed the Spanish nurse to turn on the UV light. Her English being less than bueno, she hit the wrong switch. A pound of glitter dumped onto the operating table and into Viktor’s open hand. After fifteen minutes of recriminations, panicked discussion about the relative filth factor of Chinese glitter, and a torrent of cursing straight from the Tower of Babel (much of it from the patient himself), Joe was frog-marched off the yacht by Uzi-packing security.
For days he’d been trying to get in touch with Viktor but he’d been cut dead. Joe whiled away the week at Mariners games. (It was heading into October so they were in the playoffs.) He’d bought a high-powered telescope to monitor the comings and goings around the yacht, still ominously in port. A black sedan from the state’s medical board had arrived at the pier this morning. The thought of it was so revolting it had rendered Joe face down at the breakfast table.
Was I insane?
Joe hadn’t operated on a Russian oligarch in the disco of his yacht!
He wasn’t assisted by a staff of perfect-ten Spanish nurses (where did I come up with that, a Robert Palmer video?), one of whom had accidentally glitter-bombed the surgery!
The medical board doesn’t have a black sedan!
The Mariners have no chance of making the playoffs!
This witch was on tilt.
The yacht, I realized when I arrived at the dock, was no yacht at all but a banged-up squid boat. How did I know? A van from Renee Erickson’s restaurant empire was parked at the pier. A tattooed chef (is there any other kind?) haggled with a fisherman over a sea creature the size of a toilet.
A fluorescent cloud of cyclists whizzed past and practically knocked me off my feet. I was standing in the middle of the bike path, clueless and let down, unmoored from space and time. Yo-Yo sighed.
“You and me both,” I said to him.
Could Joe have been looking at something behind the boat? No, across a small channel there was only a row of corrugated metal buildings: a nautical-supply house, a marine-fuel station, and, beyond them, a Costco.
I sat on a guardrail. Yo-Yo placed his front legs on my lap and waited for a head scratch.
What I knew: Joe had told the girls in the office he was out of town for a week. Spencer’s call today had placed Joe at the end of that stretch.