Jodi Picoult - Harvesting the Heart

“Ducky,” she said, and she waved over some of the other wives I knew. I smiled around at them and stepped back, listening to conversations about Wellesley reunions and six-figure book deals and the merits of low-E glass for houses on the ocean.

The wives of surgeons did it all. They were mothers and Nantucket real estate agents and caterers and authors all at once. Of course they had nannies and chefs and live-in maids, but they did not acknowledge these people. They spent galas dropping names of celebrities they’d worked with, places where they’d been, spectacles they’d happened to see. They chained themselves in diamonds and wore blush that threw off sparkles in the subtle light of the chandeliers. They had nothing in common with me.

Nicholas dipped his head into the circle of faces and asked if I was all right; he was going to ask Fogerty about a patient. The other women crowded around me. “Oh, Nick,” they said, “it’s been too long.” They put their cold arms around me. “We’ll take care of her, Nick,” they said, leaving me to wonder when my husband had decided it was all right to be called something other than Nicholas.

We danced to a swing orchestra, and then the doors were opened for the banquet. As always, dinner was a learning experience. There were so many things I still did not know. I didn’t realize that there was something calt="¡omething led a fish knife. I didn’t realize that you could eat snails. I blew on my leek soup before I figured out it was being served cold. I watched Nicholas move with the practiced ease of a professional, and I wondered how I had ever stumbled into this kind of life.

One of the other doctors at the table turned to me during dinner. “I’ve forgotten,” he said. “What is it you do, again?”

I stared down at my plate and waited for Nicholas to come to my rescue, but he was speaking to someone else. We had discussed it, and I wasn’t supposed to let people know where I worked. It wasn’t that he was embarrassed, he’d assured me, but in the political scheme of things, he had to present a certain image. Surgeons’ wives were supposed to present Rotary plaques, not blue-plate specials. I put on the brightest smile that I could and affected the flip voice of the other women. “Oh,” I said, “I go around town breaking hearts so my husband has something to do at work.”

It seemed like years before anyone said a word, and I could feel my hands shaking under the fine linen tablecloth, sweat breaking out in the hollow of my back. Then I heard laughter, like shattering crystal. “Wherever did you find her, Prescott?”

Nicholas turned from the conversation he’d been having. A lazy grin slipped across his face to hide the line of his eyes. “Waiting tables,” he said.

I didn’t move. Everyone at the table laughed and assumed Nich olas was making a joke. But he’d done exactly what we weren’t supposed to do. I stared at him, but he was laughing too. I pictured the other doctors’ wives, driving home with their husbands, saying, Well, this explains a lot. “Excuse me,” I said, pushing my chair from the table. My knees shook, but I walked slowly to the bathroom.

There were several people inside, but nobody I recognized. I slipped into a stall and sat on the edge of the toilet. I balled up some tissue in my palm, expecting tears, but they didn’t come. I wondered what the hell had convinced me to live at the end of someone else’s life rather than live my own, and then I realized I was going to throw up.

When I finished I was hollow inside. I could hear the echo of blood running through my veins. Women stared at me as I stepped out of the stall, but nobody asked if I was all right. I rinsed my mouth with water and then I stepped into the hallway, where Nich olas was waiting. To his credit, he looked worried. “Take me home,” I said. “Now.”

We did not speak during the ride, and when we reached the house I pushed past him at the door and ran to the bathroom and got sick again. When I looked up, Nicholas was standing in the doorway. “What did you have to eat?” he said.

I wiped my face on a towel. The back of my throat was raw and burning. “This is the second time tonight,” I told him, and those were the last words I planned to say.

Nicholas left me alone while I undressed. He’d draped his bow tie and cummerbund over the footboard, and in the play of the moonlight they seemed to shift like snakes. He sat on the edge of the bed. “You’re not mad, are you, Paige?”

I slid between the covers and turned my back to him. “You know I didn’t mean anything by it,” he said. He moved beside me and held my shoulders. “You know that, don’t you?”

I straightened my back and crossed my arms. I would not speak, I told myself. When I heard Nicholas’s even breathing I let the tears come, spilling across my face like hot mercury and burning their path to the pillow.

I got up as usual at 4:30 A.M. and made Nicholas coffee to take on the road, and I packed a light lunch, as I did every day, because I knew he’d need it between his operations. Just because my husband was being an asshole, I told myself, was no reason for patients to suffer. He came downstairs with two ties. “Which one?” he said, holding them to his throat. I pushed past him and walked back upstairs. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Paige,” he muttered, and then I heard the door slam behind him.

I ran to the bathroom and threw up. This time I was so dizzy I had to lie down, and I did, right on the fuzzy white bath mat. I fell asleep, and when I woke I called in sick to Mercy. I would not have gone to Dr. Thayer’s, either, that afternoon, but I had a hunch. I waited until she had a lull between patients, and then I left the reception desk and stood beside her at the counter where we kept the jars for urine samples, the Pap smear glass slides, and the information sheets on breast self-examination. Dr. Thayer stared up at me as if she already knew. “I need you to do me a favor,” I said.

This was not the way it was supposed to happen. Nicholas and I had discussed it a million times: I would support us until Nicholas’s salary began to pay off the loans; then it was my turn. I was going to go full time to art school, and then after I got my degree we would start a family.

It shouldn’t have happened, because we were careful, but Dr. Thayer shrugged and said nothing was completely effective. “Be happy,” she told me. “At least you’re married.”

That was what brought it all back. As I drove slowly through the traffic in Cambridge, I wondered how I could have missed the signals: the swollen breasts and spread nipples, the way I’d been so tired. After all, I had been through this before. I hadn’t been ready then, and in spite of what Dr. Thayer said, I knew that I wasn’t ready now.

The realization sent a shiver through my body: I was never going to art school. It would not be my turn for many years. It might never actually happen.

I had made my decision to attend art school after I had taken just one formal art course, connected with the Chicago Art Institute. I was only in ninth grade; I had won free tuition for a course through a city-wide student art contest. Figure Drawing was the only class offered after school hours, so I signed up. On the first night, the teacher, a wiry man with purple glasses, made us go around the room telling who we were and why we were there. I listened to the others say they were taking the class for college credit or for updating a portfolio. When it was my turn I said, “I’m Paige. I don’t know what I’m doing herem" ¡m doing h.”