Abraham Verghese - Cutting for Stone

“What if he comes and claims them? You heard the astrologer.” She was trembling. “Have you thought about that?”

“He won't,” Ghosh said, but she heard the uncertainty in his voice. She marched to her bedroom. “Well, if he tries, it will be over my dead body, do you hear me? Over my dead body!”

ONE VERY COLD NIGHT when the twins were nine months old, and while the mamithus slept in their quarters, and when Matron had returned to hers, everything changed. There was no longer a reason for Ghosh to sleep on the couch, but neither of them had brought up the idea of his leaving.

Ghosh came in just before midnight, and he found Hema sitting at the dining table. He came up close to her so she could inspect his eyes and see if there was liquor on his breath—it was what he always did to tease her when he returned at this hour. She pushed him away.

He went in to look at the twins. When he came out he said, “I smell incense.” Hed scolded her before for letting the twins breathe in any smoke.

“It's a hallucination. Maybe the gods are trying to reach you.” She pretended to be absorbed in the task of putting his dinner on the table.

“Macaroni that Rosina prepared,” she said, uncovering a bowl. “And Almaz left chicken curry for you. They are competing to feed you. God knows why.”

Ghosh tucked his napkin into his shirt. “You call me godless? If you read your Vedas or your Gita, you'll remember a man went to the sage, Ramakrishna, saying, ‘O Master, I don't know how to love God.’ “ Hema frowned. “And the sage asked him if there was anything he loved. He said, ‘I love my little son.’ And Ramakrishna said, ‘There is your love and service to God. In your love and service to that child.’ “

“So where were you at this hour, Mr. Godly Man?”

“Doing a Cesarean section. I was in and out in fifteen minutes,” Ghosh said. Hema did three Cesarean sections in the weeks after the birth of the twins: once to teach Ghosh, once to assist him as he did it, and the third time to stand by and watch. No woman would die at Missing or be sent elsewhere for want of a C-section. “The baby had the cord wrapped around its neck. Baby is fine. The mother is already asking for her boiled egg.”

Watching Ghosh eat had become Hema's nightly pastime. His appetites engaged him; he lived in the center of a flurry of ideas and projects that made piles around her sofa.

Her mind had been drifting, so she had to ask him to repeat what he said.

“I said I would be in the middle of my internship at Cook County Hospital now, had I gone. I was ready to leave Ethiopia, you know.”

“Why? Because Stone left?”

“No, woman. Before that. Before the babies were born or Sister died. You see, I was convinced that you would come back from India a married woman.”

To Hema this was so absurd, so unexpected, a reminder of an innocent time from so long ago, that she burst out laughing. Ghosh's consternation made it even funnier, and the safety pin that held the top of her blouse together flew into the air and landed in his plate. That was too much for her, and she clutched her breast and rose from her chair, doubled over.

Since her return from India and the tragedy of Sister's death, there had been few occasions for side-splitting humor. When she caught her breath she said, “That's what I like about you, Ghosh. I'd forgotten. You can make me laugh like no one else on earth.” She sat back in her chair.

Ghosh had stopped eating. He pushed the plate away. He was clearly upset and she didn't know why. He wiped his lips with the napkin, his movements precise and deliberate. There was a quaver in his voice.

“What joke?” he said again. “My wanting to marry you all these years was a joke?”

She found it difficult to meet his gaze. She'd never told him what had gone through her mind when she thought her plane was crashing, and how her last earthly thought was about him. The smile on her face felt false and she couldn't sustain it. She looked away, but her eye caught the menacing mask nailed up over the bedroom door.

Ghosh dropped his head into his hands. His mood had turned from ebullient to despairing; she had pushed him past a breaking point. And all because she had laughed? Once again she felt uncertain around him, as she had that day at Sister Mary Joseph Praise's grave.

“It's time I moved back to my quarters,” he said.

“No!” Hema said, so forcefully that they were both startled.

She pulled her chair closer to his. She peeled his hands from his head and held them. She studied the strange profile of her colleague, her unhandsome but beautiful friend of so many years who had allowed his fate to become so inextricably tangled with hers. He seemed intent on leaving. He wasn't looking to her for guidance.

She kissed his hand. He resisted. She moved even closer. She pulled his head to her bosom, which, without the safety pin, was more exposed than it had ever been in front of a man. She held him the way he had held her when he came running the night Shiva stopped breathing.

After a while she turned his face to hers. And before she could think about what she was doing, or why, and how this had happened, she kissed him, finding pleasure in the way his lips felt on hers. She saw now and was ashamed to see how selfishly she had dealt with him, made use of him all these years. Shed not done it consciously. Nevertheless, shed treated him as if he existed for her pleasure.

It was her turn to sigh, and she led the stunned Ghosh to the second bedroom, which was used to iron clothes and as storage, a bedroom she should have given him long ago instead of leaving him on the sofa. They undressed in the dark, cleared the bed of the mountain of diapers, towels, saris, and other garments. They resumed their embrace under the covers. “Hema, what if you get pregnant?” he asked. “Ah, you don't understand,” she said. “I'm thirty. I may have left it too late already.”

To his shame, now that those magnificent orbs he had fantasized about were unfettered and in his hands, now that she was his from the fleshy chin pad to the dimples above her buttocks, the transformation of his member from floppy flesh to stiff bamboo did not happen. When Hema realized what was amiss, she said nothing. Her silence only increased his distress. Ghosh didn't know that Hema blamed herself, that she thought she had been overeager and that she had misread the signs and misunderstood the man. A hyena's coughing in the distance seemed to mock them both.

She stayed perfectly still, as if lying on a land mine. At some point she fell asleep. She awoke to a sensation of rising from underwater to be resurrected and reclaimed. And it was because Ghosh's mouth was around her left breast, trying to swallow it. He directed her movements, pushing her this way and that, and it made her think that even when he had been at his most passive, he had really been in charge.

The sight of his great block of a head and his lips resting where no man had been before brought forth a rush of blood to her cheeks, her chest, and deep in her pelvis. One of his hands held her other breast, shock waves surging through her, while his other hand caressed her inner thighs. She found her hands responding in kind, pulling his head to her, reaching for his broad back, wanting him to swallow her whole. And now she felt something unmistakable and promising against her thighs. In that moment, witnessing his animal eagerness, she understood that shed forever lost him as a plaything, as a companion. He was no longer the Ghosh she toyed with, the Ghosh who existed only as a reaction to her own existence. She felt ashamed for not having seen him this way before, ashamed for presuming to know the nature of this pleasure and thereby denying herself and denying him all these years. She pulled him in, welcomed him—colleague, fellow physician, stranger, friend, and lover. She gasped in regret for all the evenings they'd sat across from each other, baiting each other and throwing barbs (though, now that she thought about it, she did most of the baiting and throwing) when they could have been engaged in this astonishing congress.