Michael Chabon - Telegraph Avenue

As she pictured herself, oddly satisfied, performing this bit of revenge grooming, the door between the waiting room and the examination area swung open and Dr. A. Paul Lazar, FCOG, came out. He appeared to be in a transitional state between the delivery room and the seat of his bicycle, green scrub top worn over slick black Lycra shorts and a pair of Nike bike shoes. In this hybrid getup, he looked perfectly suited to his waiting room, which conformed to the general aesthetic of Berkeley doctors’ offices by freely mixing elements of a secondhand furniture showroom, a real estate title company, and the Ministry of Truth from 1984. Lazar was better-looking and not as young as Gwen remembered him, not quite so pallid and dead-eyed. But there was still something fish-faced about the man.

“Ladies,” he said inauspiciously. He held out his hand for them to shake it, with an air of portent but also a hint of mischief, as if they had gathered to sign a treaty that would permit him to occupy their country in the guise of defending it. “Come on in.”

Aviva slid the acupuncture atlas into a canvas KPFA tote bag and stood up. Gwen leaned on Aviva’s arm for help getting to her feet. Lazar watched her rise with a bright diagnostic eye. Dread or the skull of her baby seemed to wedge itself deeper between the bones of Gwen’s rib cage as she followed Aviva into the office. It was a dull tank—black steel shelves, artwork by Pfizer, view of the parking lot—enlivened only by the disorder of Lazar’s medical texts and by a framed photograph of him sharing the sun atop some gray-green mountain with a horse-toothed young woman and two Italian bicycles. Lazar and his wife or girlfriend were smiling with an air of dutiful rapture, the way you did when some total stranger agreed to snap a photo of you. Gwen fanned the flicker of pity that lit within her at the sight of Lazar’s office, sensing that the light of its flame offered her sole hope of finding a path out of the mess she had gotten the Birth Partners into. Pity and pity alone could mask the bitter taste of shit.

“So,” Lazar said. “Here you are.”

“Here we are,” Gwen agreed, trying to stand up to his blue eyes as they further annotated her case. Edema, melasma.

“I know I have you two over a barrel,” he said. “I appreciate the gesture nevertheless.”

He smiled insincerely to show them that he was pretending to be kidding. The flame of Gwen’s pity was snuffed out. She screened a brief martial arts sequence in her imagination, perhaps a hundred frames in all, ending with a different gesture , one that would introduce her foot to the knob of Lazar’s larynx. She retained control of herself and resisted the urge to share this scenario with him. Still, his remark proved difficult for either of the partners to rally back over the net.

“I—” Gwen glanced at Aviva. “I spoke to Lydia this morning. She sounds good. I don’t know if you—”

“She’ll pull through just fine,” Lazar said. No thanks to you , said his eyes.

No, no, Gwen was only being paranoid. She had been out of line yesterday. Allowed her emotions to overcome her judgment, which was not at all like her, by nature and fiat, by habit and preference. Powerful as her emotions could be, she had known since she was seven years old that they were good for very little, and that by contrast, her judgment was uniquely reliable. It was all that, and the long, bloody unraveling of the birth yesterday, and then the hormones rolling like a thunderhead across the prairie of her third trimester, that had led Gwen to betray her principles. From a medical point of view, Dr. Lazar had performed flawlessly. Gwen had no clinical beef with him, none worth jeopardizing their standing at the hospital, which, like that of all nurse-midwives who had privileges at Chimes, was always mysteriously fragile. Now, thanks to an intervention by Aryeh Bernstein, all that Gwen needed to do was speak the two most meaningless words in the English language to Paul Lazar, and she would be forgiven. An apology, what did Nat always say, supposedly quoting his dad: It was a beautiful thing, no, a miracle of language. Cost you nothing and returned so richly. Easy for Nat to say.

“Yesterday was long and confusing,” she began, knowing this would not do, that the logical conclusion of the line, were she to follow to it, must be that fault lay not with Gwen or bad luck but with poor, long, confusing yesterday afternoon. “Normally, Doc, I am way too proud ever to put myself in the kind of position that I put myself into yesterday when I lost my cool.”

Aviva sneaked a glance at her partner and, somewhere in the profoundly dark recesses of her deep-set eyes, sent up an arcing flare of warning. Gwen had not come to discuss with Paul Lazar, MD, the flow and vagaries of her pride or her cool.

“And so,” Gwen tried.

She became aware of a flat, fetid taste building up at the back of her tongue. In coming here, she saw, she had been instructed not only to swallow her pride, apologize to this man who had insulted her with a racial slur, but also to put up with his smugness, and his bike shorts, and worst of all, the equine grin of his woman in the photograph, which no longer struck Gwen as pitiably friendless so much as self-satisfied, boastful, the smile of someone who felt that she most belonged on the tops of mountains. Or, no, maybe the bike shorts were the worst thing of all.

“And so,” she resumed, “looking back over my conduct. And taking into consideration the strong recommendation of my partner. Who has spent her whole professional life standing up to doctors, hospitals, insurance company bean counters…”

“Gwen, darling,” Aviva said, mixing forward the Brooklyn, either to ironize the term of endearment or else by way of genuine warning.

“…so that you can be sure she knows, the way I know, that just like we have to be twice as competent, twice as careful, twice as prepared, twice as sensitive, and twice as cool under fire—”

“Are we talking about midwives or Jackie Robinson?”

“—as some Lance Armstrong wannabe doctor with a diploma from—” she checked the med school sheepskin—“Loma Linda—”

“Whoa,” Lazar said. “Excuse me?”

“—just like she knows we have to be twice as good at everything as you all—”

“For God’s sake, Gwen—”

“—you can be sure that Aviva knows, because she’s the one who told me, and because God knows I’ve seen her do it enough times herself, that we also have to eat twice as much shit .”

Aviva fell back in her chair.

“So that’s what I’m here to do. In two bites. Two little words. Not the two words I might choose to say if I had any choice in the matter, but I don’t.”

Gwen stood up with what felt to her like remarkable alacrity and even, for the first time in many weeks, a kind of grace. The sight of Aviva slumped and fuming in her chair, the glitter in Lazar’s eyes—he would move to have their privileges pulled, no doubt about it—stirred no answer of remorse or regret. She went to the door, and put her hand on the knob, and turned back to Dr. Lazar, and, not quite as if she were telling him to go fuck himself, not quite as if she were suggesting that he conduct an experiment to see how far up his ass he could fit the saddle of his three-thousand-dollar Pinarello, but rather with the full force of the pity to which lately she had pinned her hopes of slipping through this ordeal without ruining everything that she and Aviva had both worked so hard to accomplish, found two little words to sum up her feelings toward this narrow-assed, C-sectioning, insurance-company-obeying excuse for a doctor, toward his entire so-called profession, toward the world that regarded everything that was human and messy, prone in equal measure to failure and joy, as a process to be streamlined and standardized and portion-controlled: