Chris Adrian - The New World

“The French Stroke Unit,” Jane said. She wanted to spend the night with him, but they never did that, even though Ben spent the night in his office all the time. He practically lived there — Jane hadn’t ever known a pathologist who worked so hard. If he’d had a bed in his office, she might have dared. She spent the night in call rooms all the time, after a long case, or even when she had a little patient whose post-op management she didn’t totally trust to the icu . Jim wouldn’t have thought twice about that kind of absence from her. But the nearest she came were the postcoital naps, on a couch that didn’t really leave any room to cuddle, so she had to sprawl on top of Ben like a dog. That’s when she came closest to asking for what she really wanted, an intimacy more obscene than any sexual experience they pursued. She meant to burst into tears on top of him in the middle of the radically uncomfortable cuddle, so that, without even finding out what was wrong, he could tell her he was sorry, that he loved her, and that everything was always going to be okay in the end.

“I can’t believe,” he said, in line for a miserable plate of eggs in the hospital cafeteria on their last morning together, “that we’ve still got the whole morning ahead of us, and then the whole day.”

“And then I can come home with you,” she said.

“Really?”

“Not really,” she said. She put on a show of rudeness for anyone listening or reading her lips, careful to hold herself a certain way when they were together in public. But she was already being mean to him in private as well, as if to punish him for not giving her the thing she wouldn’t ask him for. They had worked a case together that morning, so they might just be discussing histology, as far as anyone watching might be concerned.

“Aww,” he said, and she flinched because she thought he was going to put his arm around her. “Just getting some ketchup,” he said.

“Sorry,” she said. She watched his omelet being prepared. The fry cook was staring hard at the eggs, like he was going to punish them with the fistful of cheddar he held, flinging the cheese like pebbles into a face. So she didn’t notice when Dick and Jim joined them in line.

“Good morning,” said Jim.

“Blessed be!” said Dick.

“Oh, hi,” said Ben, blushing like a fool. Jane smiled at her husband, her first impulse being to act nonchalant . It was the first time he’d seen her together with Ben, something she’d been avoiding so successfully for weeks. She had feared that if he saw them together he would know right away what was going on.

Her smile was desperate. Jim cocked his head at her inscrutably. She looked away.

“Blessed be!” Dick repeated brightly, and Ben made the sign of the cross at them, smiling and nodding in response.

“I don’t believe in God,” Jim said flatly. “So that bothers me a little.”

“Oh, sorry,” Ben said. “Like a vampire, huh?” he added, into the resulting silence.

“Actually, I think most people who think of themselves as vampires do believe in God. It’s part of their existential pain. Don’t they, Dick?”

“The one I counseled certainly did.”

“You counseled a vampire?” asked Ben.

“Well, he thought he was a vampire. Which is the same thing, pastorally speaking. He worked in a blood bank and nipped at those little sausagey bits that are attached to the bag.”

“They’re samples,” Ben said. “To test for the cross match.”

“They’re not enough to live on, you can imagine. But he couldn’t bring himself to sip off the bag itself, because of the infection risks — to others, not to himself. And he couldn’t bear the thought of drinking a whole bag when someone might need it. He was very conscientious. It was just an addiction, of course. Anything can be an addiction, and his was blood. There was something underneath it, of course. A spiritual problem. We worked it out. But that’s a longer story. Shall we sit together? I could tell you the whole thing.” They had all moved along down the breakfast line.

“Chaplains and doctors sitting together?” Jim said. He’d taken only a piece of toast and a boiled egg. “Dogs and cats will dance in the streets first.”

“Haha!” said Ben.

“Sometimes dogs and cats get married,” said Jane.

“Actually, I was a surgeon back then,” Jim said to Ben. “I wasn’t always a chaplain. I took up the chaplain thing after my accident. Too shaky now.” He held up a fist between them, and let it tremble freely. “But sometimes it feels like being a doctor, without all the cutting and stuff.”

“It sounds amazing,” Ben said.

“Indeed,” Jim said, “ Amazing Things Are Happening Here .” That was the hospital slogan this week, or this month. Jim wasn’t sure. Just when he had received Putting Patients First fully into his heart, they had gone and changed it. “I’m going to take mine to go. Dick, you staying?”

“Let’s have coffee,” Dick said to Ben, who looked like he thought he was being come on to. Jim could feel Jane’s gaze burning on him, but he didn’t look at her again, not even to say goodbye when he and Dick took their leave and started back across the skybridge to the old hospital and the chaplain offices.

“What was that about?” said Dick. “Couldn’t you see it? I had him right where I wanted him. I was about to get an in. That poor man!” Dick had been the chaplain on duty for staff one day when Ben had wandered into the chapel to start an abortive conversation about sex addiction. Ordinarily, Jim would never have heard about it, but Dick had brought it up in peer supervision. Back at the office, Dick picked at his eggs and said, “My heart goes out to him.”

“And something else goes out, also engorged with blood.”

“Don’t be silly,” Dick said. “This isn’t sexual, it’s pastoral . What’s wrong with you today?”

“Nothing,” Jim said. “Sorry.”

“It’s all right,” said Dick. “But let’s pray about it, before you go out on visits. You wouldn’t want to get that negative energy all over a patient, would you?”

“Of course not,” Jim said.

He had known about Jane’s Other Man from the beginning, but he hadn’t known he was Sex-Addict Ben. He only knew his emotional odor, which had been clinging to Jane for weeks. Jim only knew that it must be someone from the hospital, and he never tried very hard to find out anything more than that. That wasn’t what he was supposed to do. He was supposed to wait for her to tell him, to trust that she would. So he pretended everything was fine.

As hard as it was, that’s what he did. But he made it a little easier on himself by indulging in his own cheat. Not a sexual cheat, of course, or even an emotional one. Instead, he flirted with the idea of leaving her, and surely fantasies of abandonment were allowed while you were waiting for your wife to get brave enough to tell you she was cheating, surely he was allowed the satisfaction of punishing her, as long as he didn’t hurt her. And after all, he wasn’t even flirting with divorce, just with Alice.

It was a patient who had introduced them, a cranky old man on the vip floor. That wasn’t even Jim’s regular beat. He was only up there for Ash Wednesday, the hospital chaplain’s busiest day of the year, carrying his little pot from room to room.

“Get out!” the man yelled, when Jim strolled in to say he was the chaplain on duty, making his rounds to check on people’s spirits and offer them a daub of ash. “I’m an atheist ,” the man said, hissing up the S, like that would scare Jim away.

“Terrific!” Jim said. “So am I.”