James Ellroy - The Best American Crime Writing 2005

On April 7, 1982, Arndt married a woman from India named Shobha Hundraj Nagrani. They would file for divorce four years later, and it became official in December 1987. Many of his friends say they knew little about the circumstances surrounding the marriage. What they did know about Arndt during this period was that he was into writing, literature, the arts scene. He was passionate, smart, insightful, alive.

And arrogant.

"One of a kind," says Harvey Peskin, who was a professor in San Francisco State University's clinical psychology graduate program when Arndt enrolled in 1983. What set him apart was the way he put everyone around him, especially the professor, on notice. "Professors tend to believe that students have to work to earn their respect," Peskin says. "David felt that the professor was the one who had to earn the right to have his respect."

As the yearlong class wore on, Peskin, who had initially been irritated by Arndt's chutzpah, found himself wanting to pass his brilliant student's test. David Arndt has that effect on people. "I don't think his behavior changed much," Peskin says, "but I think I changed."

But Arndt would begin changing in other ways. One day in 1983, he walked into a San Francisco clinic where Stephen M. Goldfinger, a psychiatrist who oversaw mental health services for the homeless, was presiding over a case conference. Afterward, they talked, and soon they were dating and then living together. Goldfinger was thirty-two, Arndt twenty-three.

Arndt earned his master's degree and turned in his tie-dye for extensive travel throughout Asia, gourmet cooking, and an intensified focus on his career. He began contemplating medical school and took some supplemental pre-med classes.

It was around this time that Jack Barchas got a call from Ken Arndt. Barchas was then the director of a prestigious research laboratory at Stanford. His old Yale med school pal told him that David was living in California and for the first time was thinking about pursuing medicine. "Ken, it's probably easier for me to talk to him about it than you," Barchas said. "Have him come see me."

As it turned out, Barchas's lab had just been given a very early and crude MRI machine, which the researchers were about to experiment with using rats. Arndt volunteered to help. In no time, he had all but taken over the project. "He was like a navy SEAL," Barchas recalls. "Just willing to do it and not waiting to be told." Arndt suggested to Barchas that they write an academic paper about their findings. When it was published, the name of David Arndt was listed first, followed by a bunch of respected researchers with actual titles after their names.

Years later, when Barchas was serving with Ken Arndt on the editorial board of the Journal of the American Medical Association,and he would ask about David, Ken would say, "It's all coming together for him."

In 1988, David Arndt came home. He made his way to the hallowed ground of Harvard Medical School, where his father, one of the nation's top dermatologists, was a heavyweight. If relations between him and his parents had been strained during some of his time in San Francisco, they appeared to be back on track. But David didn't advertise his connections. Occasionally, a classmate would notice the author's name on their dermatology textbook. "Kenneth A. Arndt-any relation to you?"

"Yeah, that's my father," David would reply casually.

And no one who saw David in class-with his burning intelligence and remarkable self-possession-would question whether he had the goods to get into Harvard on his own. Soon after Arndt joined the medical school's class of 1992, Steve Goldfinger joined the Harvard faculty. They shared a gracious Victorian in Jamaica Plain that was well appointed with the artwork they had collected together on their travels-Balinese puppets, Burmese wall hangings, Borneo masks. They frequently had Arndt's med school friends over for dinner or cocktail parties. What those friends saw was a couple that seemed to enjoy life and each other's company. They had a couple of dogs and a garden that Goldfinger faithfully tended to.

This is not the average med student experience. "Most of us came as unformed characters, having spent all of our time studying to get to Harvard," says Timothy Ferris, a classmate of Arndt's who is now a primary care doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital. "We came as receptors of knowledge, not producers. David immediately stood out as someone who appeared to have a fully formed character. He could do the work. He was confident. Most medical students were still so afraid that they spent all their time studying. David was organizing parties. He had a life. He had a car. He had a nice house. While the rest of us were putting our personal lives on hold for four to eight years, David had balance. He was where we all hoped to be. The fact that he was gay only added to that. The most mysterious part of us- our sexuality-and here is a guy who has it all figured out."

Not that there weren't moments that gave his friends pause.

Grant Colfax appreciated Arndt's tremendous warmth and easy ability to talk intelligently about literature, politics, life. Like most of Arndt's friends, he found something magnetic about him. "But he had some clear character flaws," Colfax says. "To my dearest friend, he was outwardly rude and uninterested. He couldn't even exude the bare social graces. She asked me, 'How can you be friends with such a jerk?' I saw what she was saying, but he had always been really kind to me and fun to be around."

A few years into med school, Arndt accompanied Colfax to a gym near campus. "David was totally dismissive of the whole thing," Colfax recalls. "Then, overnight, he had to be the best." And so David Arndt, who up until this point had stood out only by what he said, also began to stand out by how he looked.

His nondescript physique was soon gone. He became even more toned as his weight training intensified during his general surgery internship at Beth Israel Hospital. On a warm spring day in 1993, Alexandra Page, a med school friend and fellow intern, had brunch with Arndt and Goldfinger. Afterward, Arndt showed her the new gym he had just switched to. "We went inside," she remembers, "and it was just flush with attractive young men."

It's only looking back now that Page can recognize that visit as a sign of trouble ahead. Goldfinger, she says, "was a wonderful guy, incredibly bright and interesting, but he wasn't an Adonis."

The relationship with Goldfinger would last through Arndt's first year of residency. But friends detected a change in Arndt's priorities, starting with his surprising choice of residency. He had always talked about neurosurgery. But when he didn't get into the Harvard neurosurgery residency program, he decided against pursuing the field elsewhere and switched gears. He secured a spot in orthopedic surgery at Harvard. In medical circles, neurosurgery has the reputation-fair or not-of attracting the intellectuals and orthopedics, the jocks. Arndt's interest in fixing other people's bones and muscles dovetailed with his growing concern with developing his own.

The breakup with Goldfinger came in the summer of 1994. They had been together for almost eleven years. Their lives were interwoven. Arndt had found someone new and wanted out. He moved into an apartment in the South End. Goldfinger had an exhaustively detailed legal agreement drawn up providing for the division of their art collection, arrangements for the care of their dogs, and a financial settlement. For more than a decade, Goldfinger would argue, he had paid for nearly all of Arndt's living, travel, and entertainment expenses (but not his tuition). The expectation had been that Arndt would absorb more of their shared costs after he entered private practice. So the most controversial provision in the agreement was this: Beginning in 1998,Arndt would be required to pay Goldfinger 9 percent of his income over the next fifteen years, not to exceed $500,000. Arndt signed the agreement.