The Dutch House(48)

I stopped by the Columbia bookstore to get some maps of the Medical Center campus and Washington Heights before heading back to the Bronx. The undergraduates I passed could have been boys of fourteen, shaggy-haired and barefoot on their way to the beach. I sat on the steps of the Butler Library in front of South Field and unfolded my purchases. Like Dr. Able, it seemed to me the area near the Track and Field Armory was inevitable, even if the medical school had yet to come to this conclusion. The Armory was about to be converted into an 1,800-bed homeless shelter, which would doubtlessly lower the price on surrounding parking lots. They weren’t hard to find. By the end of the week I had two under contract with a six-month due diligence period. After all those years of banging on a locked door, I found the door wide open. The seller was a man long convinced he had no options. He had fired his broker and wore a collared shirt and tie to our meeting, hoping to take care of things himself. He was tired enough to take the deal I offered. I told him I was a doctor and doctors had no safe place to park. I made him laugh when I said that was why none of us had cars. He liked me enough to feel sorry to be sticking me with two parking lots that had been for sale for three years. He thought I was cutting my own throat when I asked for a specific performance clause in the contract: he would surrender the right to change his mind and I would surrender the right to change mine. We were locked in this together. The seller was promised he would walk out of the deal with money in hand in six months. The buyer promised to find that money and claim the parking lots. In retrospect, it looked perfectly obvious, but at the time I might as well have been standing with my back to a craps table, throwing dice over my shoulder. I was buying two parking lots next to a massive homeless shelter. I was betting money I didn’t have on the assumption that I would own the land underneath a building that had yet to be placed. I was banking that the decision about the placement of the building would be made before I had to get a loan I’d never qualify for.

Five months later I sold the parking lots to the College of Physicians and Surgeons, and with the considerable proceeds I paid off the seller, got a loan from the Housing Fund, and put a deposit on my first building on West 116th. Most of the eighteen units were occupied, the storefront on the ground floor was split between a laundry and a Chinese takeout—both businesses in good health. According to the comps, the building was undervalued by twelve percent. I was finally pursuing opportunity beyond my resources. I was not a doctor. I was, at last, myself. I would have dropped out of the residency program on the day I signed the escrow papers, but Maeve said no.

“You could still get a doctorate in chemistry,” she said on the phone. “You liked chemistry.”

I didn’t like chemistry, I just wound up being good at it. We’d had this conversation before.

“Then think about business school. That would come in handy now, or law school. You’d be unstoppable with a law degree.”

The answer was no. I had my career, or at least the start of one. It was as close to insurrection as I ever came.

“Well,” she said, “There’s no point in quitting now. Finish what you started.”

Maeve agreed to keep my books and handle the tax exchange codes while I went back to Albert Einstein with less than six months on the clock. I didn’t regret it. Those final months were the only part of my medical training I ever enjoyed, knowing that I was just about to walk out the door. I bought two brownstones in foreclosure, one for $1,900 and another for $2,300. They were disasters. They were mine.

Three weeks later I went to Immaculate Conception back in Jenkintown to attend the funeral of Mr. Martin, my high school basketball coach. Non–small cell lung cancer at the age of fifty, having never smoked a day in his life. Mr. Martin had been good to me in those storm-tossed days after my father’s death, and I remembered his wife, who’d sat in the bleachers for all of the games and cheered the team on, a mother to us all. There was a reception afterwards in the church basement and when I saw a girl in a black dress with her blond hair neatly pinned, I walked over and touched her shoulder. As soon as Celeste turned around I remembered every single thing I’d ever liked about her. There were no recriminations, no distance. I leaned down to kiss her cheek and she squeezed my hand, the way she might have done had it always been our intention to meet there in the basement after the funeral. Celeste had been a friend of the Martins’ daughter, a detail I’d either forgotten or had never known.

I’d learned a lot about Celeste in the years she’d been gone: I came to see her willingness to not be a distraction as something that took effort. I didn’t even know to be grateful for it until I was with other women who wanted to read me articles from the paper in the morning while I was studying, or read me their horoscope, or my horoscope, or explain their feelings to me while crying over the fact that I had never explained my feelings to them. Celeste, on the other hand, would sink into her giant British novel and stay there. She didn’t slam the plates trying to get my attention, or walk on her toes to show how thoughtful she was about not making any noise. She would peel a peach and cut it up in a dish, or make me a sandwich and leave it on the table without comment the way Sandy and Jocelyn used to do. Celeste had been so adept at making me her job that I hadn’t seen her doing it. It wasn’t until after she left that I realized she’d stayed those Sunday nights because Sunday was when she washed the sheets and did the rest of the laundry, made the bed, then got back in it.