We Are Not Ourselves(108)

There was, on the other hand, the question of the furniture. She simply wouldn’t be able to live with the things she’d brought from the old house, not if she couldn’t fix this one up the way she wanted. Her furniture squatted shabbily and hardly filled the room. The scratched dining room table, the worn armrests on the chairs, the boxy end tables, the permanently depressed couch cushions: they were like placeholders for the real pieces to come. She saw now that she would need to replace nearly all of it. She would put it all on credit cards. Upstairs, she would create a sitting area, buy the desk she’d always lacked, and outfit each guest room with a stereo, an armchair, and a beautiful reading lamp. As soon as she got these bills paid off, she would replace Connell’s childhood furniture.

She knew she lacked the aesthetic sense necessary to give the house the ambiance it deserved. She would bring in an interior decorator. There would have to be new art everywhere, and the little touches that put one in mind of real discernment. She could pay for that with credit cards too. Ed would veto these expenses if given the chance, but he was past the point of possessing veto power. He was simply going to have to place his fate in her hands. They would pay it off. Ed would get another grant. Their salaries would rise. Once everything was in place, they would live frugally, sensibly, like Boston Brahmins. They would even find a way to build their savings back up. There was always a little more money to be had every year.





42


If nothing’s wrong with him,” Eileen told her own doctor, when she went in about a shortness of breath she’d been experiencing, “I’m going to divorce him. I can’t take it anymore.”

Dr. Aitken told her to bring her husband in. She sold it to Ed as his annual checkup, that she’d like him to try her doctor, and when he didn’t object in spite of having gone in for a checkup less than six months before, she knew she was doing the right thing. They sat in the discordant placidity of the waiting area before she led him into the examining room and went back out. She’d blustered about divorce, but now she saw that she would put up with anything in exchange for hearing that her husband had simply become an *.

After spending half an hour with Ed, Dr. Aitken came out to meet her.

“Don’t divorce him yet,” he said, handing her a referral to a neurology team he trusted.

? ? ?

She braced for the fit she expected Ed to throw once they got to Montefiore, but he sat docilely again on the papered, padded table, waiting for the doctor to arrive. His big, fleshy back looked like raw dough.

First came blood tests and a physical exam. Dr. Khalifa, the lead doctor, wanted to eliminate anything that might cause memory loss, so he checked Ed’s thyroid levels, as thyroid problems had run in his family. They gave him a CT scan.

His thyroid was fine. The CT scan showed no sign of a tumor.

She took him back for diagnostic exams. Dr. Khalifa sat Ed at a table and took a seat opposite him. She sat in the extra chair and felt nervous for Ed, as though she were about to watch his debut in a theatrical production that had limped toward opening night.

Dr. Khalifa told Ed to count backwards from one hundred. Ed got to ninety-seven before pausing. “Eighty-six,” he said, then ran off a few other numbers in accurate succession, until he jumped another decile, at which point Dr. Khalifa stopped him.

The obstreperousness she’d anticipated was starting to seem like a fantasy. Ed looked vulnerable and small. He was smiling, trying to ingratiate himself with his examiner, perhaps in unconscious pursuit of mercy in the diagnosis.

Dr. Khalifa told him to draw three concentric circles, and Ed put a good one down on the page, then drew another that was ovoid and attached to the first like a chain link. The third, a shaky line meeting finally in something more like a quadrangle than a circle, sat apart from the first two.

“Great, that’s great,” Dr. Khalifa said dully when Ed was done. The doctor was a picture of imperviousness. She watched his eyes: he betrayed no sign of surprise, gave away no clues as to whether this was a normal result or not, the product of mere aging or something more sinister. She didn’t know whether she herself would have been able to draw the concentric circles. Certainly it would be difficult under this kind of scrutiny. She had a sensation that she was watching a child take a test, and she felt a sympathy with Ed that made her question her decision to expose him to this. What right did she have to subject him in the quiddities of his middle age to a man who would be looking for any sign of deviation from a norm that was probably arbitrary in the first place? She wanted to whisk him back home and let him go at things in his own way. A category existed to describe men like him, a time-tested, venerated one at that: absentminded professor.

“I’m not an artist,” Ed said, laughing. “You should see my drawings of the digestive system.”

The doctor chuckled.

“This could be something abstract,” Ed said.

Dr. Khalifa looked at it and shook his head. She didn’t like his attitude. He was too glib, too detached. His hair was too perfect, his teeth gleamed too white. She had long wished Ed had pursued medical school, but now she felt she’d been too hard on him in her mind. She knew doctors like this at work; they thought they walked on water. The work Ed did might not have been as lucrative or flashy, but it laid the groundwork for guys like this to come to their conclusions. If Ed said nothing was wrong, then most likely nothing was wrong. She had insulted him by bringing him before this cipher who didn’t deserve to carry his briefcase, let alone pass judgment on him.