Ann Beattie - Another You

Ahead of him, the parking lot attendant’s lighted booth shocked him back to reality, though as he coasted to a stop the attendant waved him past, indicating that he should take a card from the automatic machine to activate the gate. He rolled down the window and punched the button and saw that it was 5:45 p.m., put the card on the dashboard, turned into the first empty space, and turned off the headlights and the ignition. He stared straight ahead, testing: he knew his image had been exact, though it tortured him that he could not conjure up more details, that he had only seen it as in a few moments of pulsing strobe light, first his father outside the window, then the flash illuminating the blue fabric of the chairs, shining in a nimbus around the two brothers huddled together, their mother in a nightgown he had just a few moments before seen distinctly and now could only remember as being long and white. Hadn’t there been details? Endless details he was forgetting? “Lift up your eyes,” he remembered her saying. He recalled the tone of her voice, the slightly skeptical way she said it, as if she, herself, was not sure this was the thing to ask for.

Ahead of him, through the snow-covered windshield, was the hospital, and as he got out of the car, locking it, grabbing his coat closed instead of taking time to button it, he reflected that because of the wind, no one would think that he was crying, but assume the wind had dashed tears from his eyes.

Martine, Most Dear ,

I must hope your last letter was written in haste, and that you are not seriously suffering the distress you imply. I am certain — I say this most emphatically, and I do hope you will believe me in this if in nothing else — Martine, I am absolutely certain that there is no such thing as retribution sent by God Almighty, if God Almighty indeed exists, to rain down on the heads of those of us on earth who may have committed misdeeds. In our time, we have seen science come to the fore to increasingly provide answers to many mysteries, including the previously unknown medical causes of particular physical afflictions. Whether or not there is a just or an unjust god is a question men have been grappling with through the ages. I myself believe that it is a way to avoid personal responsibility, an obscuring of one’s role in one’s destiny … though I do not see this in any way as contradicting my position, which is to say that though painful things may be thrust upon us, in time science may reveal more cause and effect at work than we suspect. I am constantly upset by backsliding, such as the very unexpected stance taken by my brilliant acquaintance J. R. Oppenheimer, who has shown us the key to materializing one amazing creation but who has hesitated on alleged moral grounds about continuing to use his brilliant mind to provide others. I do not mean to compare you two, because I know you have exhibited great courage and will continue to do so, yet in your situation and in his I see some similarity. One must proceed by logic. It is our ally. I have been unfair in announcing my arrival so many times, but you must not feel that because you are alone there without Alice and me (you know she would prefer to be there; you know I prefer it) huge forces have conspired against you. Please think of each situation in its own context and do not do yourself the disservice of jumbling everything together so that one bit of bad luck and then another become a cumulus cloud hanging over your dear head. I am sure there are any number of explanations for why Alice’s letters to you have suddenly ceased, by the way. I, too, have been carrying a heavy burden, though I am certain that nothing that happens to you, or to me, or to Alice, has befallen us because it is justice dealt us by cosmic forces .

Ever ,

Your devoted M .

“WE’VE ONLY MET briefly,” she said. “There’s no reason you’d remember me.”

The attractive young woman standing in front of him, clasping his hand, was Jenny Oughton, Sonja’s busy friend he’d intended to meet with the day he found himself, in another hospital waiting room, holding Sonja’s hand as they awaited word from Evie’s doctor.

Jenny Oughton had called to him as he came off the elevator in something of a fog. He had been heading toward the nurses’ station, as the woman at the patient information counter had told him to. Jenny had given him the shocking news that McCallum was back in surgery: internal bleeding — apparently a complication, and they suspected, also, a problem with his spleen. They might be removing McCallum’s spleen. She had said all that without realizing that he didn’t know who she was. “Oh, of course,” he had said, but he was sure she saw through him. Then he wondered what she was doing there, this attractive woman with auburn hair and heavily outlined blue eyes, younger than he’d imagined, and nowhere near as cool as she’d been on the telephone. He found himself apologizing a second time: once, disingenuously, for not immediately recognizing her; again, for not keeping the five o’clock appointment he had set up with her days before. He suddenly remembered McCallum, late at night, in the living room, after he had thought of rescheduling the appointment he’d missed with Jenny Oughton — the moment when he had said to McCallum that they needed to go on the record with someone about Livan Baker’s lies, McCallum looking at him, slightly bemused, saying, “ ‘The record’? What is ‘the record’? Is it like ‘the Force’?” Jesus: McCallum was back in surgery. Still, his eyes darted around the waiting room as if McCallum might suddenly appear, as if all this weren’t really happening.

Jenny Oughton gestured to the sofa. He sat beside her in a chair. He realized Jenny Oughton was focusing on him and forced himself to assume a less alarmed expression. She seemed quite young to be a doctor, though increasingly everyone seemed younger: gas station attendants; airplane pilots. So: he had apparently met her once before, a face smiling as he came into the house after his night class, while Sonja’s book discussion group was still meeting. “I know he’s a very good friend of yours,” she said now, her hand on his wrist. “I’m very sorry.”

He had arrived at the point where he’d decided not to question this repeatedly. Also, although the assertion continued to perplex him, it didn’t seem the time to disclaim any feelings for McCallum.

“But I assume since you’re here, he must be your friend, too.”

She smiled. “When I was still practicing, he was my client.”

“Client?”

“In the old days ‘patient’ was the term, I believe.”

There was something he could identify with; her sense of irony, though in her case she was obviously using it to put him at ease.

“Well, that’s amazing, because when I suggested he and I”—he faltered—“I mentioned, or maybe I didn’t mention, your name, and he agreed to consult with you, but he never said he knew you. I mean, that would have been bizarre. If we’d walked in and he’d been your former patient.”

What did that quixotic smile mean? That he was somehow the odd man out in this situation, that there might be no end to the number of things she might fill him in on?

“You had been coming alone that day, I thought.”

“I guess I had been coming alone,” he said. “It seemed …” What had it seemed? What had that whole tedious episode with Livan Baker been about when obviously the real threat to McCallum had been his own crazy wife? “He didn’t tell me he knew you,” he said simply.

“Well,” she said, just as simply, “if you didn’t use my name, I suppose he didn’t know it was me you’d be seeing.”

“Yes, but I don’t see why he didn’t just call you about this problem to begin with.”