Trouble Page 10

  Jonah spent the next five days getting spit-roasted. When Benderking wasn’t in scrubs, he wore a bilious print tie that looked like it had been knotted once and left over a bedpost, nooselike, every night thereafter, as though to remind his students that their grades were swinging from the gibbet. Abusive to everyone, he appeared to take particular relish in referring to Jonah as “Scut Bag” or “Scut Slut” or simply “idiot.” Vociferously he opined that, in a contest of wits between his pet cat and Jonah, Jonah would come in second. (Jonah felt it unwise to point out the egregious lameness of a single man lauding his cat.) He would send him to the library to retrieve articles that didn’t exist, to fetch Egg McMuffins that he took one bite out of then trashed, to change his scrubs because he didn’t like the colors.

  While Jonah wanted to impute a pedagogic purpose to this tyranny—or a reason, any reason; maybe Benderking had gotten recently dumped; maybe his brother had been murdered by someone who looked like Jonah—in its frequency he perceived the truth, shining in big white letters like the exit ramp for hell: Benderking was a sadist.

  You’re going to kill people, Slut, you know that? You’re sloppy. Where’d you go to college?

  Michigan.

  I have an uncle who went there.

  Cool.

  Cool? It’s not cool. I am disgusted to be related by marriage to someone who went to the same school as you, you inept little beetle turd.

  Adding to his stress, all the surgeries were laparoscopic. The medical student’s role during laparoscopy was to drive the camera, a job specifically designed to be botched. Surgeons refused to believe Jonah’s brain wasn’t hardwired to their hands. If he performed well, nobody noticed; but if he missed one movement, once, one single—

  “Back,” said Benderking. “BACK.”

  “Sorry.”

  Plus, the image on the screen showed up inverted. Right was left, and left right; up down, and down up. Or—he forgot—down down, up up, right left, left right, or—

  “IDIOT. LEFT.”

  “Sorry.”

  When it wasn’t getting him chewed out—CENTER—Jonah admired the technique’s elegance. Leave it to the Nintendo generation to invent video-game surgery. Working through a five-cm. incision, the surgeon guided long, slender tools with the grace of a painter…

  “Move that camera any closer to his bowel, idiot, and you’re gonna burn a hole right through the tissue.”

  …and the temperament of a chef.

  “Sorry.”

  It’s about the person; think about the patient. Not any patient, but this patient, an individual human, a white man in his mid-forties with an unquenchable priapism: an erection undaunted by full anesthesia.

  “Another member of the teenie-weenie club. UP.”

  Jonah barely heard him; he’d gotten used to continuous streams of barbs about weight, pimples, exceptional genitals, arboreous back hair. Everything became fair game when the patient couldn’t hear.

  “Thank God it’s not bigger, it’d get in the way.”

  Although Benderking’s crassness repelled him, Jonah had begun to understand the urge to dehumanize. All surgeons did it to some degree, even the good guys; they had to. The less respect you had for someone, the less petrified you’d be of killing him. And the act of surgery itself made it easy to forget that the log of flesh under your knife had desires, thoughts, relatives, dreams. The only other way to conceive of the process was as an extreme intimacy, a lovemaking that—given the presence of a crowd, and the unconsciousness of one of the parties—felt more like a gang rape.

  “If I were his wife, I’d invest in a banana plant. Right. RIGHT.”

  “Sorry.” The screen appeared in triplicate; Jonah grayed out; his hand swerved. Then something hard and sharp cracked him on the shin, bringing the world back in full color. Benderking had kicked him.

  “Morning, idiot. Want to do your job?”

  “Sorry.” But he wasn’t sorry. He was angry. As he returned to looking at the screen, he fantasized about all the things he could do to hurt the bastard. Krazy Glue his locker shut. Ex-Lax in his coffee. Cut the brakes on his bike. His imagination for revenge wasn’t very powerful; he did not indulge that kind of thinking. Still, it’d be nice. He wasn’t that type of guy, it would be so nice.

  HE SAID TO EVE, “fucking motherfucker.”

  They sprawled in the living room. It was Friday night. The coffee table had been pushed aside, stacks of PlayStation games knocked humble. In the building across the street—the one Eve called the Museum of Human Frailties—select windows shone. A woman doing yoga. A toddler hurtling past, victimized by the heaviness of its own head. A shirtless man tapping ash into a window-ledge flower bed.

  She said, “What now?”

  “He made me stay late.” Jonah tried to scratch his back, could not reach the spot. Eve wordlessly did it for him. “He has this mug. It’s his special coffee mug, and the handle got smashed. He made me glue it back together. That’s why I was late. It took two hours. It was in tiny pieces. He probably broke it on purpose.” He punched the air.

  A silence.

  “I don’t understand why you put up with it,” she said.

  “He’s fifteen percent of my grade.”

  “You’re not a urinal, m’lad. Fight back.”

  “Sure.”

  “Feller needs to be learned manners sumpin good.”

  “I wish he’d just disappear.”

  “Consider it done.” She waved her hands like a conjurer.

  He snickered. “Sleep with da fishes. Makehimanoffah. Fuggeddaboutit.”

  “I think I owe you one, Jonah Stem, do I not? Simply say the word.”

  “Go for it.”

  “I will.” She got up, went to the kitchenette, took down the speed-kettle. “Tea?”

  “Nnn.” He got up and began buttoning his shirt. He checked his watch: eleven thirty. He needed to get some studying done. He had to get up early. Eve sopped and discarded a teabag, talking about weekend plans. She had an idea for another outing, not dissimiliar to last week’s but different in that—

  “I can’t.”

  “What?”

  “George called. He was pissed that I skipped out.”

  “Who cares what he thinks? The man is a leech.”

  “It’s not him.”

  “Who, then, Jonah Stem? Did the Ghost of Duty appear to you?”

  Jonah said, “He said Hannah was crying.”

  Eve took one sip of her tea, made a disgusted face, poured the rest into the sink. She faced away from him, her hands on the countertop, her shoulders bunched. He did not know what to do. He came up behind her, put his arms around her waist, but she wriggled away and went to stand by the window.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  She said nothing.

  “I can’t stop cold turkey,” he said. “It’s not right.”

  “It’s not right to treat me like a second-class citizen.”

  “This is a complicated thing.”

  “Is that so, because it seems straightforward to me.” Her voice shook.

  “If it were up to me, I’d—” He was about to say never go again but changed his mind. “I’d add five hours to the day.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I go to work,” he said. “That’s an obligation, you understand that. You don’t expect me to skip that.”

  “Your analogy stinks, Jonah Stem.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she is not an obligation.”

  “Yes she is.”

  After a long silence, she said, “I love you.”

  His heart hiccupped unpleasantly. He said, in his most measured voice, “It hasn’t been—I mean—it’s been less than a month.”

  “There isn’t a minimum requirement.”

  He rubbed his temples. “I—”

  “You love me, too.”

  “Eve—”

  “You put your life in danger to save me. You knew when you saw me that you loved me, and that
I would love you in return, and that was why you did what you did. You could have called the police. You could have stood at a safe distance.” She turned to face him. “You put out your hand to me.”

  He felt short of breath.

  She said, “Every moment I continue to live on this Earth is because of you. The consequences are self-evident: I love you. Even if I didn’t want to, I’d have to. I’m constantly building up debt to you.”

  “I forgive it,” he said.

  “You can’t. The moment you do, the debt starts to build once again. As long as I continue to breathe, I belong to you.”

  He wanted to say Come on, be serious but he could not. He could not; because as half-baked as all this sounded to him, to her it was quite obviously real. This had to be a record.

  Although—when he and Hannah—but that was different. They’d gotten carried away. And now it was happening again.

  Wrong to lie, worse to do nothing. He came toward her; hugged her; kissed the part in her hair.

  “Seeing her doesn’t say anything about how I feel about you.” He stroked her back. “We’ll have the evening.”

  She said nothing. He was about to make a joke, restore the mood. Then he felt her stomach convulsing, tears running down his arm and beneath the loose gauze on his elbow. Despite the scab, it stung. The human lachrymal glands exude at a salinity of approximately nine parts per thousand.

  AS IF TO PUNISH him for last week’s absence, Hannah refused to come out of her room. She ignored the food, rolling over and going back to sleep. Plate on his lap, Jonah sat in her pink wicker chair and watched her weather a bad dream. He had managed to please nobody.

  Eventually he went back to the living room.

  “Eight letters, ‘one member of a needy pair.’ S blank blank B I.”

  “Symbiont.” Jonah ate half a slice of American cheese and slipped the rest to Lazy Susan. His cell phone was flashing.

  Two new messages

  George said, “You know what I could really go for?”

  Jonah held up a finger.

  received today at one thirty-seven P.M.

  Hey it’s me. [Vik.] My roommates are throwing together a hold-em tournament, twenty bucks buy-in. It’s going to be up at the dorm at six. Call me if you want in.

  It was three. By the time he got home it’d be seven, and anyway he was wiped, and anyway he had to see Eve. He glanced at George—curving the newspaper to make it rigid, chewing on the butt end of a mechanical pencil—and deleted the message.

  The second message had come while he was upstairs with Hannah.

  Hello Jonah Stem.

  He sat up sharply.

  I bet you’re ensorcelled to be hearing from me in the middle of the day.

  As though ejected by the couch, he sprung up and into the kitchen.

  “Jonah?”

  —wanted to apologize for that shamefully petty display of jealousy—

  He crossed to the laundry alcove and crouched beside an industrialsize bottle of bleach and a wire basket heaped with crusty towels.

  —hope you’re in a private place. Relax. Lower the lights. Perhaps you want to light a few candles—

  “Jonah?”

  “One minute.”

  —ose your eyes, go on, Jonah Stem. Close them and listen.

  Ridiculously, he obeyed.

  I know you’ve got them closed. Now picture this:

  She began to describe obscenities.

  He admired her vocabulary.

  “Jonah?”

  He closed the phone and stood up with an enormous erection. Quickly, he bent over, pretending to thumb the dials on the washing machine.

  “What’re you doing? Are you doing laundry?”

  “One second.”

  “If you’re doing laundry already, there’s some—”

  “Just—gimme one, I’ll be with you in one second.” Blood-faced, he waited, squeezing the phone, until he heard George mutter Sure thing and pad out of the kitchen.

  He counted to two hundred, wet a paper towel, passed it over his forehead. Adjusting himself inside his boxerbriefs, so that his penis lay flat against his left leg, he forced himself to walk back into the living room. George, writing, noticed nothing as he took a seat and drew his bag over his lap.

  “Six letters, ‘eager creature,’ question mark.”

  “I—I don’t know.”

  “You okay?”

  “I got some…surprising news.” He noticed George looking at him expectantly. “My—mom. She’s publishing a poem. In a magazine.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “…yup.”

  “Tell her congratulations for me.”

  “I will.”

  “Suggestions?”

  “What’s it again.”

  “Six letters, ‘eager creature,’ second letter E. Wait, I got it. It’s beaver.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “Jonah, are you sick?”

  “…no.”

  George sucked down an ice cube. “You want a drink?”

  “No thanks.”

  A few minutes later, George said, “We’re flying to Florida. That’s where the ship departs from. Or you don’t say depart, you say ‘sets sail.’ Or ‘embarks.’”

  Jonah wondered who this We was. Unless George had adopted the royal We as justification for taking autocratic liberties with the vacations of others. Psychological eminent domain: your free time shall be confiscated for the public good.

  “Anyhow,” George said, “I arranged for Bernadette to be here during the day. We’ll discuss it further when the time comes, but how much cash you think you’ll need?”

  “Can we discuss it when the time comes?”

  “Sure, yes, yeah. I’m, y’know, leaping out of my skin.”

  “I bet.”

  “I appreciate it. Don’t think I don’t. One thing’s come up.”

  Jonah gritted his teeth. “What’s that.”

  “Bernadette. You know what she’s like.”

  “No, what.”

  “Stubbon.” George chewed his pencil. “Tough as nails, which is why I trust her. She’s giving me sort of a hard time about being here on Christmas.”

  “…uh-huh.”

  “She’s Catholic. Devout. Incense and holy water. I said I’d pay extra, but I don’t think that’s the sticking point.”

  “Offer her more.”

  “No but that’s what I’m telling you. The money doesn’t matter to her. She wants to go to church, spend time with her family.”

  “That’s understandable.”

  “Certainly,” George said. “I mean, who wouldn’t.”

  “Yup.”

  “So it comes out that I’m going to need someone for that night and the day of.”

  Jonah let the sentence float off into the stale air.

  “You might be able to help me out?” George said.

  “I’d like to spend time with my family.”

  “You don’t celebrate Christmas.”

  “Not as a religious holiday, but we celebrate having vacation.”

  “Had you gone skiing with your friends, you wouldn’t have seen them at all.”

  “Fine, but—”

  “Never mind, never mind. That’s not the point. I’m not asking you to come on Christmas. That’s not what I’m talking about.” George folded down the paper. “Is that what you thought I was asking?”

  “That’s sure what it sounded like.”

  “What do you take me for?”

  Jonah made a conciliatory gesture.

  “What I meant was I’m looking for another nurse. You might know someone from the…you honestly—come on, Jonah, a little credit, please.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I thought.”

  “Well, whatever the case may be. Hannah doesn’t take easily to new people, as you’re aware, but if we introduce whoever it is a few months in advance there won’t be any surprises come December. I’m letting you know, put it on your radar.” Ge
orge got up. “You sure you don’t want a drink? Some lox?”

  “I’m all set.”

  The fridge gasped open, and the cat mewled as George slipped it fish.

  Aggravated, Jonah got up and went to the back room. The treadmill did not respond to his touch; he found the plug and the outlet, and set the belt to two mph, clenching the bars of the machine until his hands began to turn cold.

  For some reason, the baseline chutzpah they’d gotten along with now grated on him something awful: the feigned offense; the liquor; the ratty boxer shorts, as though George couldn’t be bothered to put on pants. It’s Jonah, not the Queen of England.

  He stopped the machine and crossed to the mantel, where hung a series of mustard-toned prints of Hannah’s mother. Always serious—freckle-faced with ironed hair; grim in bell-bottoms and a suede jacket—Wendy Richter had been fair and fleshy, making it hard to see her daughter in her until the late 70s, when a strange convergence began: the more pregnant Wendy got, the stronger her resemblance to Hannah grew, mother and child meeting at a common physiognomy.

  Did George think of his wife as a mistake? If so, did that make his daughter a mistake? At what point did bad decisions cease to be an interruption of life and become life itself?

  He went back to the living room. “George.”

  “Mm.”

  “Are you going on this trip alone?”

  A brief silence, then pencil on newspaper. “Why do you ask.”

  “I’m curious.”

  “It’s—” George erased, blew. “It’s really not your business.”

  Jonah said nothing.

  “But as a matter of fact, no.”

  “Does Hannah know about her?”

  “This is private,” George said.

  “Fine.”

  “And no, she doesn’t.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I don’t know why she would.”

  “She’s not stupid. She can figure things out.”

  “I don’t think she’s stupid, I think that there’s no reason for her to know.” Proudly, defensively: “Her name is Louise.”

  “You don’t have to tell me.”

  “I’m not ashamed. Am I”—George’s voice dropped—“am I not supposed to be alive?”