The Dutch House(46)

“It’s strange, but my memory always conflates their wedding and the funeral.”

“No, I do that, too. I think it has to do with the flowers.”

“Do you think he loved her?”

“Andrea?” I said, as if we could have been talking about someone else. “Not at all.”

Maeve nodded again and blew a long stream of smoke out the window. “I think he was tired of being alone, that’s what I think. I think there was this big hole in his life and Andrea was always there, telling him she was the person who could fill it up, and eventually he decided to believe her.”

“Or he got tired of listening to her.”

“You think he married her just to shut her up?”

I shrugged. “He married her to end the conversation about whether or not they should get married.” As soon as I said it, I understood what we were talking about.

“So you love Celeste and you want to spend your life with her.” She wasn’t asking me a question. She was just making sure, finishing things off.

I wouldn’t get married in the summer. The idea slipped off as quickly and completely as it had arrived, and the feeling I was left with was everything I had imagined: sadness, elation, loss. “No, not like that.”

We sat with the final decision for a while. “You’re sure?”

I nodded my head, lit a second cigarette. “Why don’t we ever talk about your love life? It would be a huge relief for me.”

“It would be for me, too,” Maeve said, “but I don’t have one.”

I looked at her square on. “I don’t believe you.”

And my sister, who could outstare an owl, turned her face away. “Well, you should.”

*

After I came back from Jenkintown, Celeste decided everything was Maeve’s fault. “She tells you to break up with me three weeks before finals? Who does something like that?”

We were in my apartment. I had told her not to come down, that I would take the train up to her and we could talk there, but she said that was ridiculous. “We’re not going to talk in front of my roommate,” she said.

“Maeve didn’t tell me to break up with you. She didn’t tell me anything. All she did was listen.”

“She told you not to marry me.”

“She did not.”

“Who talks to their sister about these things anyway? Do you think when my brother was trying to decide whether or not to go to dental school he came out to the Bronx so we could hash it out together? People don’t do that. It isn’t natural.”

“Maybe he wouldn’t talk to you.” I felt a quick gust of annoyance and I let it turn to anger, anger being infinitely preferable to guilt. “And maybe that’s because he knew you wouldn’t listen to him. Or maybe he would have talked it over with your parents because you have parents. I’ve got Maeve, okay? That’s it.”

Celeste felt her advantage tipping away and she changed her tack like a little sailboat on a windy pond. “Oh, Danny.” She put her hand on my arm.

“Just leave it alone,” I said, as if I was the one who was about to be hurt. “It’s not going to work. It doesn’t have to be anyone’s fault. It’s bad timing, that’s all.”

And for that small conciliatory sentence pulled from the air she went to bed with me one more time. Afterwards she said she wanted to spend the night, that she would leave first thing in the morning, but I said no. Without any more discussion we packed up what was hers and sat together on the train back up to the Bronx, each of us with a bag in our lap.





Chapter 10




I did especially well in my surgical rotation. I was as conscientious as anyone else in my class but twice as fast, which just goes to show that basketball had served me well. Fast was how hospitals made their money, so while accuracy was very much appreciated, speed got you noticed. Just before graduation, the attending pressed me to take another three years for a subspecialty in thoracic surgery after my residency. I had spent the last two hours assisting in a right lower lobectomy and he admired the deftness of my knots. We were sitting in a tiny room with a set of bunk beds and a desk, a place we were meant to sleep for twenty minutes between cases. I kept thinking I could still smell blood and I got up for the second time to wash my face in the small sink in the corner while the attending droned on about my bankable talent. I wasn’t in much of a mood, and as I dried myself with paper towels I told him I might have talent but I had no plans to use it.

“So what are you doing here?” He was smiling, anticipating the punch line of what he was sure was the setup to my joke.

I shook my head. “It’s the rotation. This one’s not for me.” There was no point in explaining. His parents had probably come from Bangladesh so that one day their son could be a surgeon in New York. His entire family had doubtlessly been crushed beneath a load of debt and didn’t need to hear about the effort it took to liquidate an education trust.

“Listen,” he said, pulling off his scrub top and throwing it in the bin. “Surgeons are the kings. If you can be a king there’s no point being a jack, am I right?”

I could see every bone in his rib cage. “I’m a jack,” I said.

He laughed even though I’d failed to make the joke. “There are two kinds of people who come out of this place: surgeons and the ones who didn’t make it as surgeons. Nobody else. You’re going to be a surgeon.”