The Dutch House(45)

“I can’t get married after my first year of medical school,” I said, not mentioning the fact that I didn’t want to get married. “Things are going to get harder, not easier.”

“But my parents won’t let us live together, and they won’t pay for me to get my own place and wait here while you finish school. They can’t afford something like that.”

“So you’ll get a job, right? That’s what people do after college.”

But as soon as I said it I understood that I was supposed to be Celeste’s job. The poetry courses and the senior thesis on Trollope were all well and good but I was what she’d been studying. She meant to keep the tiny apartment clean and make dinner and eventually have a baby. Women had read about their liberation in books but not many of them had seen what it looked like in action. Celeste had no idea what she was supposed to do with a life that was entirely her own.

“You’re breaking up with me,” she said.

“I’m not breaking up with you.” What I wanted was what I had: three nights a week. And to be perfectly honest, I would have been happier with two. I didn’t understand why she had to sleep over on Sundays and then get up so early Monday morning to catch the train back to school.

Celeste sat down on the bed and stared out the window into the dirty air shaft and the brick wall beyond. She was sitting with her spine rounded, her pretty blond curls tangled over her slumped shoulders, and I wanted to tell her sit up straight. Everything would have gone so much better for her had she been able to sit up straight.

“If we aren’t going forward then you’re breaking up with me.”

“I’m not breaking up with you,” I said again, but I didn’t sit down on the bed beside her and I didn’t hold her hand.

Her impossibly round blue eyes were brimming over with tears. “Why won’t you help me?” she asked, her voice so small I could barely hear her.

*

“Help her?” Maeve said. “She isn’t talking about you changing a flat. She wants you to marry her.”

I had taken the train home for the weekend. I needed to talk to my sister. I needed to think things through without Celeste in my bed, which, despite her continued insistence that I was breaking up with her, was still where she was sleeping Friday through Sunday. I had come home to sort out my life.

Maeve said she had an emergency pack of cigarettes in the glove box and we decided that this was a good time to relapse. The leaves and flowers of early spring were already crowding out our view of the Dutch House. Wrens patrolled the sidewalk, looking for twigs. “You can’t marry her a year into medical school. That’s insane. She has no business asking you for that. And even when you’re finished with school, once you’re in your residency, things are only going to get worse. You’re not going to have any time until you’ve finished.”

As it stood now, medical school made my undergraduate education look like one long game of badminton. I wasn’t so sure how I was supposed to hold it all together once things got worse. And things would always get worse. “When I’ve finished training I’m not going to have any time,” I said. “I’ll be starting a practice, I’ll be working. Or I won’t be starting a practice because I have no intention of being a doctor, so then I’ll have to go out and find a job and that won’t be the right time. I can say that for the rest of my life, can’t I? This isn’t the right time.” Though Dr. Able had told me it wasn’t like that. He said the first year was the hardest, then the second, then the third. He said it was all about learning a new system of learning, and that the farther along I went, the more fluid I would become. I hadn’t told Dr. Able about Celeste.

Maeve peeled the cellophane off the pack. Once she lit her cigarette I could tell she hadn’t really quit. She looked too natural, too relaxed. “Then the question isn’t about timing,” she said. “You deserve to get married and the timing will always be bad.”

“Diabetics shouldn’t smoke.” I was far enough along in school to know that much. In fact, that was knowledge that had nothing to do with medical school.

“Diabetics shouldn’t do anything.”

“Have you tested your sugar?”

“Jesus, you’re going to start asking me questions about my blood sugar? Stick to the topic. What are you going to do about Celeste?”

“I could marry her over the summer.” I had meant it to sound snappish because she’d snapped at me, but as soon as I said it I had a surprising glimpse of the practicality. Why not? A clean apartment, good food, loads of sex, a happy Celeste, a level of adulthood I hadn’t yet imagined. I repeated the words just to feel them leave my mouth. It sounded worldly somehow. I could marry her over the summer. All the various scenarios I’d played out in my mind up until now involved disappointing Celeste—she’d be hurt and I’d feel guilty, and then, after it was over, I would miss the naked girl in my bed. But I’d never considered the possibility of saying yes, of simply seeing this as one inconvenient time in a long string of inconvenient times ahead. Maybe marrying now wouldn’t be worse. Maybe it would be better.

Maeve nodded as if this was what she’d expected me to say. “Do you remember when Dad and Andrea got married?”

“Of course.” She wasn’t listening to me.