The Dutch House(47)

I told him I’d think about it just to shut him up. My twenty minutes were down to fourteen minutes and I needed every one of them. I was exhausted beyond anything I could remember. I wanted to tell him I wasn’t going to do a residency, or an internship for that matter. Medical school would finish and I would crack the code on real estate and sail out of this place without so much as a backwards glance.

Except I didn’t. I tried and failed and tried again and failed again. Buildings lingered on the market for years and then sold for a fraction of their worth. I saw buildings in foreclosure go for as little as $1,200, and even when they were burned-out shells covered in graffiti, even when every pane of glass had taken a brick, I thought I was the one to save them. Not the people, mind you, the ones who might have lived in those buildings. I had no grand ideas that I was the one to save the men and women who lined the hallways of the ER, waiting for a minute of my time. I wanted the buildings. But then I would have to settle up the back taxes, buy the doors, fix the windows, pay the insurance. I would have to dispatch the squatters and the rats. I didn’t know how to do any of that.

Despite every promise I had ever made to myself, I went into the internship program at Albert Einstein in the Bronx. Not only was there no tuition for internships (“Okay,” Maeve said, “I didn’t know that”), they paid me. At this point, the trust was obligated only to cover my rent and give me a small amount for expenses, which I banked. I was no longer bilking Andrea in any meaningful way, not that I ever had. I was no longer avenging my sister. I was, in fact, finishing my training in medicine. I got along with the people I worked with, impressed the faculty, helped my patients, and every day reinforced the lessons I had learned in chemistry: you don’t have to like your work to be good at it. I stayed at Albert Einstein for my residency, and while I still made the rare trip to the law school at Columbia where I stood in the back of the hall to take in a lecture on real estate law, those trips were few and far between. I followed the real estate market the way other men followed baseball: I memorized statistics and never played the game.

Dr. Able still kept an eye on me, or maybe, as he would have said, we had become friends. He invited me for coffee every three or four months and kept at me until we locked down a date. He would talk about his students, I would complain about my workload. We talked about departmental politics, or, when we were in the company of our better selves, science. I didn’t talk to him about real estate, nor did I ask him if chemistry had been the thing he’d wanted to do with his life. It wouldn’t have occurred to me. The waitress brought our coffee.

“We’re going to London this summer,” he said. “We’ve rented a flat in Knightsbridge. Two whole weeks. Our daughter is working there, Nell. You know Nell.”

“I know Nell.”

Dr. Able rarely mentioned his family, either in deference to my own situation or because that wasn’t the nature of our relationship, but on this particular spring day he was too happy to keep his personal life to himself. “She’s doing art restoration. She went over there three years ago for a postdoc that turned into a full-time job. I don’t think she’s ever coming back.”

There was no point in mentioning that Nell Able and I had exchanged a champagne-soaked kiss one New Year’s Eve in his apartment years before. She had come into her parents’ bedroom while I was digging through a pile of black coats on the bed, looking for the black coat that belonged to Celeste. The room was dark, a million miles down the hallway from the music and raucous laughter. Nell Able. We had tipped into the pile of coats for a couple of minutes before righting ourselves.

“We haven’t been to see her a single time since she left,” her father went on. “We always make her come home to us. But Alice finally secured the major gift for the Health Sciences Building campaign. Five years she’s been chasing that money down. Alice told them she’d quit if they didn’t give her the time off.”

Alice Able, who had so kindly set a place for me at her table all these years, worked in the development office at the Columbia Medical School. I wondered if I had ever known any more about her job than that. I wondered if Dr. Able had been telling me this for years: his wife’s job was to raise money for a new Health Sciences building. I wondered if Alice had told me this herself and I had just failed to register it. I used to run into her every now and then, walking across campus. She would ask me about my classes. Did I volley back a question in order to fulfill the tenets of polite conversation, or did I merely answer and wait for her to ask me something else?

“They do some kind of x-ray of the paintings now,” Dr. Able was saying, “to find out if there’s another painting underneath. Pentimento without all the guesswork.”

“Where?” I asked. I could sense what was coming before I could fully comprehend it—my future, this moment.

“The Tate,” Dr. Able said. “Nell’s at the Tate.”

I took a sip of coffee, counted to ten. “Where will they build the new Health Sciences building?”

He waved his hand as if to indicate up there, north. “I have no idea. You’d think that would be the first order of business, but until they get that major gift they don’t make any commitments. I imagine it has to be somewhere near the Armory. Do you know about the Armory? What a disaster that’s going to be.”

I nodded my head, and when the waitress brought the check, I caught it. Dr. Able fought me, and for the first time since I had known him, I won.