Doctors

  And there was dough in Dermatology: one guy he knew of had converted his Beverly Hills office into five separate miniconsulting rooms, each no bigger than a broom closet. He would dart from booth to booth, casting his eyes – and sometimes a magnifying glass – upon the rash, or wart, or other symptom. He’d then make an instant diagnosis and say something short and charming to the patient. Thereafter a nurse would give out all the forms and the prescriptions – and make another follow-up appointment for the next week.

  The only problem, Lance decided, was that Dermatology was boring. Seeing minor variations of the same rash a hundred times a week would be like having to look at a single painting all the time. If you were forced to stare at it hours on end, day after day, even Mona Lisa’s smile would get on your nerves.

  Next case: Urology. Recent studies in Medical Economics showed that genito-urologists now led the league in the crucial area of bucks per annum. Here again you never had to make a house call. That was good. The ratio of customers per hour was also good. And, like Dermatology, you never lost a patient. (For if you did detect something like cancer, you immediately referred the carcinoma to a surgeon or oncologist).

  But then, Lance told himself, the work was hard. And the responsibility considerable. You’d have to keep up with the literature, master new techniques, and generally take your practice seriously. Moreover, some of your patients really would be sick – might even die (albeit on someone else’s operating table). And the notion of spending the day looking into people’s private parts with a cystoscope was not exactly thrilling.

  The task of an anesthesiologist seemed to him far more attractive: to reduce his patient to a cozy state of muscle relaxation, induce a peaceful slumber, and to keep his breathing stable. Meanwhile, at the other end of the table the surgeon – under constant stress – painstakingly cuts and slices, grafts and sews, always risking danger. And if the operation fails, the surgeon nearly always gets the blame.

  All the while the friendly ‘gas-passer’ just checks his dials to balance breathing and blood pressure. Then when the operation is successful and the patient wakes, he overflows with gratitude for his new gift of life.

  What’s more, Anesthesiology pays very well. Its hours are flexible. The patients are in no condition to complain or contradict or even question you. And if you choose, you can arrange a schedule that gives you maximum free time to live a normal, wealthy life.

  And get invited to the A-list parties for your charm – and nitrous oxide.

  Barney’s days were now so busy he had half-forgotten that SI was going to publish his Jackie Robinson chapter. One Saturday morning in late February, on his return from spending two hours with a patient who had called in mortal panic the night before, he was just changing into his sweats to jog out some of the pain he had absorbed by osmosis, when the phone rang.

  ‘Hello, Doctor Livingston, sorry to bother you on a Saturday, my name’s Emily Greenwood. I’m with Sports Illustrated. I guess you know why I’m calling.’

  ‘Oh, sure, your magazine’s amputating – or should I say “editing” the chapter from my book.’

  ‘Let’s put it this way: We have to cut, but we don’t necessarily have to mutilate. Would it be convenient if I brought our proposed text to your apartment today? We’re sort of racing a deadline.’

  ‘How much time do I have?’

  ‘Well,’ she hesitated and replied apologetically, ‘since this is “soft” news it has a long lead time. In other words, we go to press on Monday.’

  ‘What? That’s ridiculous!’ (‘Soft,’ yet!)

  ‘Please, Doctor Livingston, we’re a news magazine and your piece has to go in when it’s slotted. Besides, I think you’ll be pleased with the way it’s been cut.’

  ‘Well, in that case, could you have it messengered over to me?’

  ‘No problem, it’ll be there in half an hour,’ she replied.

  Barney went to his desk, pulled out his copy of the chapter, and began to reread what he had written months ago.

  Twenty-five minutes later the bell rang. He opened the door to a petite young woman with large brown eyes and short reddish-brown hair.

  ‘Hi, I’m Emily Greenwood. Are you the good doctor?’

  ‘That’s me,’ Barney replied, trying to hide his disappointment at being regarded as a second-class writer who had to make do with an editorial assistant.

  ‘I’ve got the manuscript,’ she said cheerily, holding up a manila envelope.

  ‘Great – uh – would you like to come in for a cup of coffee?’

  ‘Well,’ she replied, smiling, ‘I guess I’ll have to – that is, unless you want to go over my edits in your hallway.’

  ‘You’re my editor?’ he exclaimed.

  ‘You bet. I wouldn’t have let any of my assistants go near this. I think it’s a great piece.’

  Flattery – if it was that – smoothed Barney’s ruffled feathers.

  ‘Come in … come in,’ he said, motioning with an exaggerated bow. ‘Why don’t you get set at what I grandiosely call my dining table while I boil some water?’

  ‘Fine,’ Emily replied, entering Barney’s living room. Piles of clothing were scattered everywhere, each suggesting the end of a specific activity – running pants and jogging shoes, assorted socks and a squash racket, etc.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind instant,’ he called out from the kitchen alcove.

  ‘You’re the doctor,’ she replied agreeably.

  In no time he was back with two mugs of coffee, and as he set them down on the table, remarked, ‘I guess I owe you an apology.’

  ‘Don’t worry, it happens all the time. Everybody takes me for my own secretary – it must be my childish enthusiasm for sports. But why shouldn’t a woman be the next Grantland Rice? I believe in what Virginia Woolf said about the “androgynous mind.”’

  Apt allusion, Barney thought – and responded by indicating that he knew the source.

  ‘“A Room of One’s Own” was really a landmark essay for women writers. And there’s plenty of clinical data that each of us needs some of the qualities of the opposite sex to be able to function creatively.’

  ‘Well,’ said Emily, ‘I’m not exactly Virginia Woolf.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ he replied, ‘I’m not exactly Sigmund Freud.’

  ‘Fine.’ She smiled. ‘Now that we’ve exchanged mutual expressions of humility, let’s put on the gloves and start fighting over the cuts.’

  And fight they did. To Barney every excision felt like an incision.

  ‘Emily, no, no, that’s “the most unkindest cut of all.”’

  ‘C’mon, Barney,’ she countered, ‘we’ve got to make the focal point Robinson’s gut feelings on that very first day in the major leagues. Don’t you agree?’ She gazed at him with those wide brown eyes.

  ‘Frankly, Emily,’ Barney confessed, ‘you keep looking at me like that and I’ll end up letting you cut the whole damn thing in exchange for your phone number.’

  ‘C’mon,’ she chided like a miniature football coach, ‘let’s get this over with.’

  ‘Listen, Em – you don’t mind if I call you Em?’

  ‘Not at all – it’s the first letter in mother, so I’m sure it must have some psychological significance for you. But don’t tell me until we finish the job. Now I suggest we start when Robinson first walks into Branch Rickey’s office. I think that’s the most astonishing part.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘I mean, I don’t know about you, but everybody’s recollection of Jackie in that first incredible year – when they were throwing insults at him from the bleachers and baseballs at his head from the mound – was that he was above it all. He seemed so noble that he never felt rage or the urge to retaliate.’

  ‘That’s what I thought, too. And it really knocked me out when he told me that Rickey actually made him swear an oath to lock up his emotions for three whole seasons. Only a saint could have kept his cool for all that time.’

  It too
k them less than an hour to extract what Barney had to admit was better than his own original chapter. Jesus, she was bright.

  And not bad-looking, either.

  No, no, stop lying to yourself, she’s pretty, Barney admitted to himself. In fact, she’s very pretty. Goddamn, a girl like that must have a boyfriend for sure. Better not risk asking her to dinner or we could ruin our editorial relationship.

  ‘Now,’ said Emily, as she closed her notebooks with a dramatic slap, ‘I hope you’ll give me the pleasure of your company for a late lunch at the restaurant of your choice.’

  ‘You’re inviting me?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, let’s say I’m inviting – and the magazine is paying. So give your appetite free rein.’

  ‘Okay then, how about The 21 Club?’

  ‘Then “21” it is. I know the Kriendler boys, so if it’s okay, I’ll just use your phone to tell them we’re on our way.’

  It was indeed late, even for a Saturday afternoon, and the upstairs room was filled mostly with waiters clearing tables.

  Seated in a corner table, oblivious to all else, was a pair of sports freaks trying to top one another with recondite reminiscences of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Emily accepted Barney’s challenge, and he began testing her knowledge by demanding she identify the players by their uniform numbers.

  ‘One—’

  ‘Pee Wee Reese, shortstop – good glove, so-so bat, lifetime average .261.’

  ‘Four.’

  ‘Edwin “Duke” Snider – center fielder, long ball hitter, best season 136 RBIs.’

  ‘Six.’

  ‘Carl “The Reading Rifle” Furillo – right field, greatest throwing arm in baseball – lifetime batting average .299, led the league in ’53 with a .344.’

  Their game ended in a tie, each having scored all hits and no errors. Then, just as they were moving from numerals to topics requiring verbs, a thought occurred to Barney.

  ‘Do you realize, Emily, that all the early Dodger heroes had a single-digit uniform? Then Jackie Robinson shows up and they give him forty-two? Do you think that’s just coincidence?’

  ‘No, you’ve got a point,’ she answered, ‘because they gave Campy – the second Dodger black man – number thirty-nine. As a doctor, what do you make of that?’

  ‘Well,’ Barney began, ‘in my professional opinion, I’d say – absolutely nothing. I personally always used to ask for number ten – not in the major leagues, I hasten to say.’

  ‘I know,’ said Emily Greenwood cheerfully.

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘I know you used to be a basketball jock – before you got so intellectual. Actually, I’ve got a confession to make – I hope you won’t psychoanalyze it too much.’ And then she confided, ‘I used to have a thing about your legs.’

  Barney did not know quite how to react. Was this some trendy new locution among the East Side swingers? (‘Would you like to come up and see my kneecaps?’) He responded with a similiar tone of levity.

  ‘That’s very flattering, Em. I mean, I don’t think anyone’s ever said anything that nice – or off-the-wall – to me.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m not some kind of fetishist. I was two years behind you at Midwood.’

  ‘You were at Midwood – how come I never noticed you?’

  ‘Well, I guess you were too busy romancing the cheerleaders. Anyway I used to photograph the games for the Argus. Actually, I’ve always wondered why you didn’t play senior year – you would have made All-City First Team for sure. I mean, you weren’t just good on offense, you were a tiger on defense. Whatever happened?’

  Elated by her admiration for his erstwhile sporting exploits, Barney replied in laconic, Gary Cooper fashion, ‘It’s a long, sad story, Emily. I don’t think you’d want to hear it.’

  ‘I’ve got plenty of time,’ she said, smiling.

  Her innocent remark made him glance at his watch. It was four-fifteen.

  ‘Hey, Em, the captain’s looking razor blades at us. I think he’ll kill us if we don’t get out of here.’

  ‘Don’t be so paranoid, Barney, Dimitri lets me stay forever. I’m his connection for tickets to the Super Bowl.’

  ‘Don’t you have a date – or work to do?’

  ‘No, to the first; yes, to the second. And you?’

  ‘The same. But let’s forget the pages yet unwritten. And as the Latin poet says, “Seize the Day.”’

  ‘You’re right,’ she answered. ‘Carpe diem.’

  And as they walked out Barney thought to himself, I’d really like to ‘seize’ you, too, Emily.

  After another few blocks of high-spirited conversation, Barney realized, Now I really know what euphoric means.

  35

  It was a November Saturday morning, crisp as an autumn apple, and the normally brown and stone-gray Yale campus was enlivened by blue-and-white football scarves, blond-haired Vassar girls, and undergraduates’ cheeks red from excitement, football fever, and the cold.

  Bennett had gotten off duty at 10 A.M. After assisting Rick Zeltman on an eight-hour ‘plumbing job’ (which is how the senior surgeon had referred to the complex genito-urinary procedure), he was bushed from the mental strain as well as the physical effort. But much too excited to go straight to bed.

  He strolled over toward the college campus with the thought of dropping by the Co-op and picking up a book to take his mind off blood and guts.

  Street vendors were out in force, hawking balloons, pins and other paraphernalia. The undergraduates looked like children to him. Christ, he thought, have I grown old so quickly? What’s been going on since I was locked inside that concrete and linoleum dungeon where there’s no day, no night, no change of season? Ten years ago I walked in like a young lion, and now I suddenly feel like an old goat.

  As Bennett crossed Chapel Street toward Broadway, a young black selling newspapers approached him.

  ‘Hey brother,’ he called out, ‘have you got the news? Are you tuned in? If not, better buy this document. Just two bits, brother, and you’ll find out where it’s at.’

  Bennett reached into his pocket, gave the boy a quarter, put the paper underneath his arm, and walked away.

  Half an hour later he was home with fifteen dollars worth of books that, if he was lucky, he’d read between that afternoon and next July. He turned on his stereo, kicked off his loafers, and sat down to read.

  But he was so zonked from cutting, tying off blood vessels, suturing – and most of all worrying if he was doing everything correctly – that even the stylistic pratfalls of Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test could not hold his attention. As a kind of last resort, he started to glance over the latest Panther news.

  The paper’s rhetoric was strident and virulently antiwhite. Hell, Bennett thought, I’ll skip the heavy stuff. Maybe they’ve got a sports section.

  He flipped through the final pages and was happy to come upon some cartoons. Ah, he thought to himself, just the level of literature I need right now.

  And then he began to read one. But after the initial obscene caricatures of ‘Filthy Jewpigs ripping off Blacks,’ he hurled the paper to the floor and stormed out of his apartment into the chill New Haven wind.

  He found Jack in the orderly room.

  ‘Hi there, Ben baby,’ Jack greeted him – forsaking the usual hospital formalities, since the other orderlies regarded Bennett more or less as ‘one of them.’

  ‘I’d like a word with you,’ Bennett said sternly.

  ‘Certainly, Doctor.’

  The two men stepped into the empty corridor. Bennett was about to explode with the tirade he had prepared en route to the hospital. (‘Is this all you can write in that filthy rag of yours?’)

  But he realized that to vent his anger on poor Jack would serve no purpose. He was not the editor, he was not a leader, he was just a simple foot soldier fighting for a cause in a foreign land known as America.

  So he reined in his fury and said simply, ‘I’d like to come to the next meeting, Ja
ck.’

  ‘Change of heart, Doc?’

  ‘You might say that.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll let you know.’

  The chief resident had been in the Emergency Room of Boston Children’s Hospital admitting a nine-year-old girl with a dangerously high FUO (fever of unknown origin), which she suspected signaled endocarditis.

  By the time Laura had finished writing up everything, it was after midnight. She was heading for the on-call sleeping room when she noticed that the normally sedate voices at the nurses’ station were unusually loud and excited.

  One of the women called from afar, ‘Laura, did you see the eleven o’clock news tonight?’

  ‘No,’ she said, too exhausted to be aroused by anything other than World War IV (she was sure she was tired enough to sleep through World War III). ‘What did I miss?’

  ‘It’s wild, Laura. Absolutely wild,’ said the youngest – and normally the most reticent among them. ‘It’s a really raunchy Washington scandal about two doctors – the woman surgeon was from Harvard and about your age.’

  Laura instantly knew who this had to be. Her heart began to race and she blurted out, ‘Did one of them commit suicide?’

  ‘Tried to. Nearly three hundred mg’s of Valium. But they reached the stomach pump in time. The woman doctor was positively gorgeous.’

  Laura, half in shock, muttered, ‘Grete Andersen?’

  ‘Yes,’ a nurse replied. ‘That was her name. Did you know her?’

  Laura asked anxiously, ‘Was there any brain damage? Just what did that damn psychiatrist do?’

  The nurses looked surprised.

  ‘Why, he was the one that took the pills,’ one of them replied.

  Laura held her head, for she was growing dizzy.

  A nurse named Nida came up and asked solicitously, ‘Laura, are you all right? Is Doctor Himmerman a friend of yours as well?’

  ‘No, no,’ she said still in confusion, allowing herself to be led to a plastic armchair in one of the waiting alcoves. ‘I’d be grateful if someone would tell me just what the newscast said.’

  ‘Well,’ Nida began, ‘this doctor is supposed to be a really world-class honcho in psychiatry.’