The Queen of Hearts(14)
We could faintly hear Mary Sarah’s voice carry across the pool: “Well, heyyy there, sugar! What’s wrong?”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “How do you tolerate those people?”
“Em, please,” Zadie said. “Why is he leaving Denver? When does this become official?”
Unease percolated in my chest. Two million people live in the Charlotte metro area, but I would never be able to avoid Nick, even if he weren’t joining my particular group. And actually, Zadie wouldn’t either. There were lots of hospital functions and medical society events where doctors of various specialties ran into one another. Not to mention the social scene: if you had a house in one of the neighborhoods near the hospital, and your kids went to one of the schools nearby, and you or your spouse volunteered in the same philanthropic circles as everyone else (did Nick have a wife?), and you joined one of the main country clubs in town, then you were a de facto member of a group that knew everything about you. Could I dare hope that he’d be a confirmed bachelor who didn’t mind commuting in from Lake Norman?
“Hey.” Zadie snapped her fingers in front of my eyes. “Why is he coming here?”
“Nobody really said why he was leaving his current practice,” I answered quickly. “Jack Inman”—this was one of my partners, the medical chair of the executive committee that managed my practice—“spoke with some of his current partners and didn’t pick up on any glaring red flags. ‘Technically gifted, innovative, strong presence in the American College of Surgeons’—that kind of thing. I asked him if anybody mentioned what he was like and Jack asked if I was looking to step out on Wyatt. You know what a pervert Jack is. Anyway, it’s a done deal. They got him credentialed already. I found out today he’s already here.”
A rare moment of silence gripped Zadie.
“Well,” she said, finally recovering, “I guess we will deal with this. But nothing gets said to Drew, okay?”
“He doesn’t know?” I said with some surprise.
Despite her discomfort, her irrepressible good humor returned. She flashed me a mock-guilty grin. “I know this sounds weird,” she said, “but we never really dissected our pasts with each other. Childhood, and families, and college angst—all that, yes. But the one time I tried to pry information out of him about old girlfriends, he got so embarrassed I had to terminate the conversation out of mercy.” She stopped, apparently transfixed by a mental image of her blushing, grimacing husband. I pictured him too. Drew Anson was one of those guys who will always appear boyish; even when he’s gray-haired and creaky, he’ll probably look like he’s fourteen.
“Zadie?” My turn to wave a hand in front of her face after a minute went by without the conversation resuming. She was staring at the horizon with the intent but sightless expression of a wax figure, her mouth hanging slightly ajar.
She blinked and said, “Oh, yeah.”
Before I could steer us in a different direction, she relaunched the conversation right where we were. “And Drew doesn’t want to hear a word about my, uh, romantic past with other guys, either. We never really had the ‘how many people have you slept with’ conversation. I tried one time, but he actually put his hands over his ears. Drew isn’t the kind of guy who wants to delve into my every inner thought. He’s, uh, fine with a little mystery here and there.”
“Oh, that’s like Wyatt too. Silent and mysterious,” I said.
“It is?”
“I’m joking!” I always had to explain to people when I was joking, unfortunately. Even Zadie sometimes. “Of course not. He put me through a two-hour interrogation about my sexual past on our first date.”
“What? He did? And it took you two hours to talk about it?” Zadie shrieked. I knew what she meant. One mysterious and wonderful thing about Wyatt: he never failed to behave exactly the opposite of what one might find appropriate, yet somehow he always got away with it. “How did you never tell me this before?”
“Well, you know Wy. At first I was shocked, but he was so straightforward, like this was normal, and also he conveyed such interest in me that after a few minutes of it, I actually felt charmed. He wasn’t a bit judgmental, not that I was confessing any bizarre fetishes or anything—I was always shy with guys—but he asked me everything.”
Zadie mulled this over. “Did you tell him about . . . our third year of med school?”
“Yes. I did.”
“All of it?”
“Yes, everything.” Almost true. Wyatt knew more than Zadie did about what had happened that year. “On our first date.”
It still astonished me, three years after marrying Wyatt, that he’d conjured up such a sense of ease in our relationship that I was capable of confiding in him. I was a fiercely private person. Before I met Wyatt, Zadie was my only close friend, and I loved her with a devotion born of shared history. Ours was a friendship forged when we were young, the kind that endures no matter what because losing it would be like losing an aspect of your own personality: your sense of humor or your ability to empathize. You wouldn’t be the same person without your friend as your external hard drive. I know, because for quite a while I thought I would lose her.
But even so, there were things I’d never been able to articulate to Zadie. We didn’t talk about certain topics, much the same way we didn’t mention Nick: even now, more than a decade later, it was too threatening. I fixed my gaze on the far side of the pool and began silently counting chairs, trying to erase the memories crowding into my consciousness.