Turning Point(30)
They left with an armload of paperwork at the end of the day. Stephanie already had a stack of papers on her desk at the apartment at the end of the first week, and so did the others. She and Wendy went back to the Left Bank by Metro, and the boys rode home on the Vélib’ bicycles. The four of them had dinner together at the closest bistro to the apartment, and made it an early night. Tom still looked a little rough and suggested he might have a brain tumor as they all laughed at him. Bill thought it might be the tequila shots he had imbibed heavily on both weekend nights. Tom told them about the feathered G-string he’d found in his pocket and they laughed. He was running true to form, and hitting his stride in Paris.
Gabriel had wanted to have dinner with Stephanie that night, but she declined and said she wanted to have dinner with her team. He called her three times during the meal and sent her several texts. He was continuing to pursue her at the same intense pace, and Stephanie was half uncomfortable and half excited by it. No one had ever courted her so avidly, but she didn’t want to stop it either, and was feeling confused about him.
“What are you going to do?” Wendy whispered after one of his texts. Stephanie looked flushed and mildly embarrassed.
“Nothing. I’m married,” she said with determination, but she sounded like she was trying to convince herself. Other than his dogged pursuit of her, he seemed like a sane person. He was incredibly smart and fatally attractive. He was a hard man to brush off, and she didn’t want to, which was what scared her about him. He had a powerful effect on her, almost like a drug.
“Your being married doesn’t seem to slow him down,” Wendy suggested cautiously. “I’m sure you can handle it, and you’ll know what you want to do, but be careful of married men. They’re probably not much different here than in the States. That’s a hard game to win,” she said wistfully, thinking of Jeff. “Sooner or later everyone gets hurt. I don’t know many stories of married men leaving their wives for another woman. I actually don’t know any. It just doesn’t seem to happen. They’re comfortable where they are, and the two women wind up complementing each other, which just makes the guy’s marriage work better.”
“You sound like you’ve been there,” Stephanie said gently, and saw the look on Wendy’s face as she nodded but didn’t explain. There was nothing unusual about her story, except that it was happening to her.
“Just be careful. And don’t throw your life out the window for him yet.” Stephanie nodded. She barely knew Gabriel, it had only been a week since they met, although he made it feel like she’d known him for years.
She talked to her children that night before she went to bed. Andy sounded tired and sad when they talked for a few minutes afterward. He didn’t ask what she was doing and didn’t seem to care. He wasn’t interested in the medical details of what she was learning, only in the fact that she wasn’t there. It made it hard to share her activities with him, and she could hardly tell him about Gabriel. But he had become a big part of the experience in Paris for her, and she couldn’t share that with Andy either. There was nothing left for them to talk about except the kids, which happened to them at home too. Whatever interests they had shared before seemed to have disappeared. Seven years of marriage was beginning to feel like the Sahara Desert, which she had admitted to Gabriel over dinner. He said he had experienced the same thing, and only their children had kept him and his wife together. But his children were older and he had less reason to hang on now. Ryan and Aden were four and six, and needed them both, or so Stephanie thought. And she couldn’t manage them alone with her work. But it seemed like a poor reason to stay married. Even Andy had suggested they take a break, before she left, which had sounded extreme to her at the time but less so now that she had met Gabriel. Maybe it was what she needed. Time away from Andy to figure things out when she went back. Or maybe the time in Paris would do that. She had never felt so torn and confused in her life. Gabriel had already upset the apple cart in a major way, and it had only been a week.
She set her alarm for seven o’clock, and it was cold and rainy when she woke up. They all took the Metro together to their meeting. At ten o’clock, both the French and American teams were going to visit one of the major public health hospitals, where trauma victims were taken after mass casualty incidents like the recent attacks. All their intake and triage procedures had been changed in the last four years to keep up with public events. Their systems were working, but Gabriel explained that they still needed improvement, and they were working on it diligently. He hoped to pick up some new ideas in the States.
They all rode in a van to the hospital they were visiting, talking animatedly about recent studies and actual events. It was a subject they were all passionate about. Tom walked into the building with Valérie, while Bill discussed some of their procedures at SF General with Gabriel.
They started their tour of the hospital promptly, and noticed that some things were vastly different from how they were done in the States, others seemed more efficient here. Their street triage was very different, and they frequently treated victims right at the scene before moving them, getting them stable where they lay, which wasn’t done in the States. It wasn’t possible in either place if the dangers were still present and the area was under fire or at risk of a bombing. The street treatment model was more adapted to single nonviolent incidents than to terrorist attacks.