Trouble Read online

  He said, “Son of a bitch.”

  It was a monster of a trophy, four feet high, acromegalic cousin to the Stanley Cup, with “gold” grapevine handles and a “marble” base. Jonah spot-appraised it at ninety thousand cereal-box UPCs plus $13.95 for engraving.

  MAJESTIC JONAH STEM

  SAVIOR OF WOMENFOLKS

  PAYER OF THE ELECTRIC BILL

  YOU RULE THE EVERLOVING COSMOS

  WITH A GOLDEN SCEPTER OF WONDER

  When he got done laughing, he brushed it free of packing material and lugged it upstairs, double-stepping over muddy puddles that had gathered on the uneven linoleum. His front door was ajar and he walked right in.

  “You’re insane,” he called. “Where’m I supposed to put this?”

  “He’s not here. He said I could wait until you came home.”

  Jonah turned around. There, on the sofa, sat Eve Jones.

  • 6 •

  THE PLACE SHE suggested was a dingy basement bar six blocks away. “It’s the first place that came to mind,” she said, biting her lip as she looked around at the rotting plaster walls. “I used to live near here, but it’s been a while.”

  He reassured her that it was fine. “My standards are low. I don’t get out much.”

  They took a booth; she got them drinks. He asked how she was.

  She displayed her bandaged palm. “Plus my shoulder. All told, sixty-two stitches.”

  “Jesus.”

  “You’re the reason it’s not worse,” she said. “And poor you. Look at that.”

  He realized she was referring to his injured elbow. “Won’t even scar. And if it does, I have a good story.”

  She smiled. “Thank you,” she said. “So much.” Up close, her features were even more delicate than in the newspaper photo: scimitar-chinned; mouth in permanent half-pucker. Beneath a close-fitting turtleneck, her breasts sat small and high. Her eyes were cups of smoke. Her ears, china saucers, were multiply pierced: her left tragus bore a diamond stud, and a garnet swung on a gold chain threaded through her right earlobe. When she moved, everything glittered, as though she was crying out of the sides of her head.

  “I hope they gave you adequate time to recuperate,” she said.

  “I was back at work on Friday.”

  “That’s shameful. You deserve…I don’t know. Bravery leave.”

  He laughed. “Tell it to my chief.”

  “And the article, you saw that, I presume.”

  He groaned.

  “What?”

  “That photo,” he said.

  “What about it.”

  “It made me look like a tool.”

  “Oh stop,” she said. “I thought it was lovely.”

  “Plus he fabricated everything,” he said. “I’m not a resident, I’m not a surgeon, I’m definitely not Superman.”

  “At least he got your name right.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Your name’s not Eve?”

  “It is. But he misspelled it.”

  “How else do you spell Eve?” he asked.

  “Not that: Jones.”

  “How else do you spell Jones?”

  “With a gee.”

  “G-O-N-E-S?”

  She nodded.

  He smiled. “Like, gones fishing?”

  “It’s pronounced Jones, jay. But it’s spelled Gones, gee. They mean the same thing, but somewhere along the line, it went kablooey. G and J are close on a keyboard, and if your penmanship isn’t too meticulous they look similar in lowercase. Your name is interesting, too. Stem, like a plant, the root of all goodness, the benevolent earth god.”

  “That’s me,” he said. “Heed my power.”

  “Where does it come from?”

  He swallowed an ice cube. “Also a mistake. It used to be Stein, someone at Ellis Island screwed up.”

  “How blunderful,” she said, “we’re partners in error.”

  He smiled and drank.

  “At least it’s a real name,” she said. “Unlike Gones.”

  “It’s uncommon,” he said. “But fair enough.”

  “It means something. I have to call credit-card companies five and six times. My driver’s license picture is dreadful, but the hassle of a new application is unthinkable. Passports, bank accounts, diplomas, standardized tests. You name it. I’ve never had a single piece of correctly addressed junk mail. Another?”

  He looked down at his glass and was surprised to find it dry. How long had it been since he’d had alcohol on a school night? Never, he never had, not since starting at HUM. He had classmates who showed up to work hungover; that was not him. He had Responsibilities.

  On the other hand. A little enforced relaxation couldn’t hurt. Not after the day he’d had. He was human. And they had been working him into the ground. And Hannah, and George…the worst that could happen was that he’d sleep solidly, and what a relief that would provide, after so many bouts of nightmares.

  He nodded, and she went back to the bar.

  While she waited, he examined her shape. She was slender and her hair draped around her shoulders. He could make out the bulge of the bandage on her back. He felt a strong urge to touch her.

  She returned with a fresh drink and a bowl of peanuts.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “You saved my life. I think that’s worth at least a couple of gin-and-tonics.”

  “Fair enough.” He took a sip. “They’re watered down, anyway.”

  “I know, I’m sorry.” She sighed. “This place used to be the place. Everyone came here. My mother kissed Lou Reed while leaning against that wall.”

  “For real?”

  “When I was growing up, the East Village was still the East Village, not the theme park it’s become today.” She bit her lip. “I didn’t mean that the way it came out. No offense.”

  “None taken. I live here cause it’s close to free.”

  “Rent-control aunt?”

  “Trust-fund roommate.”

  “Ooooh,” she said. “The rarer subspecies.”

  “Was he high? When you met him.”

  “I’m awaiting the results of my urinalysis.”

  He laughed, losing a cheekful of drink across his chin and the table. Embarrassed, he reached for a napkin that wasn’t there—because she had picked it up and folded it into his other hand. He wiped himself off. “Suave.”

  “Fret not. Everybody snarfs. Isn’t that a song?”

  He laughed again. “He—Lance, he goes out five nights a week to the movies with this girl, not his girlfriend but another filmmaker he met at a festival. They get stoned and go to BAM or Film Forum, or Angel—I don’t remember what it’s called.”

  “Angelika.”

  “That’s the one.” Regretting his impromptu caricature, he added: “He’s a good guy. He lets me stay as long as I pay the utilities. He’s smart. A little lost.”

  “I know the type.”

  Still feeling bad, he changed the subject. “This place is one of your haunts.”

  “Was. It used to be crowded.” She glanced around to confirm that they were the sole customers. “Now…It’s rather bereft, don’t you think. Although I guess it’s early.”

  Her diction made him smile. Rather bereft. Like a Brontë transplant, her sentences draped in lace; stick-on savoir faire. Or the other way round: she was trying, and failing, to hide impeccable breeding. Does the zebra have white stripes on a black body or black stripes on a white body.

  “Although,” she added, “I haven’t been here in over twenty-five years.”

  “You’re—thirty?”

  “Thirty-one.”

  “Twenty-five years ago, that would make you six.”

  “I said over twenty-five years,” she said. “I was younger. Three or four.”

  “Your parents took you to bars when you were three?”

  “They didn’t believe in babysitters.”

  “That’s…” Every normative objection he could come up with sounded hopelessly bourg
eois, so he went with a factual one: “How could you remember?”

  “How could I forget?”

  “But that’s too young to, to remember—”

  “I remember things from when I was one and a half.”

  He put his glass down. “Okay. Not possible.”

  “It most certainly is,” she said. “I remember being on a swing set at my grandparents’ house. I remember wearing pink overalls, and my father amusing me with a plastic duck. When I was eight I asked what had happened to that duck. He said, ‘What duck?’ ‘The plastic one from grand-mama’s house.’ He said, ‘That?,’ that we threw it away the day we got it. It smelled bad.

  “One day,” she said. “I played with it once. But I could draw it for you.”

  “You’re reconstructing,” he said. “From a picture, or from what he told you.”

  “There are no pictures from that day. And he never mentioned it before I brought it up. It took him a long time to remember what I was talking about.”

  “Then your mother mentioned it.”

  “By that time she had been gone for three years. Her kiss with Lou Reed ended in San Francisco.”

  “Your mother ran off with Lou Reed.”

  “Briefly. I presume it didn’t last terribly long.”

  “And then?”

  “And then she never came back.” She sat back, smiled, crossed her arms triumphantly. “Crazy but true.”

  “That’s—wow.” He took a handful of peanuts. “I feel pretty boring.”

  “Nonsense. I want to know all about you. That’s why I came to see you. Frankly, Jonah Stem, I’m having a hard time understanding if you’re real or not.”

  “I’m real.”

  “What you did was exceptional. Are you aware of that?”

  “Whatever.”

  “Don’t minimize. I’m alive because of you.”

  He looked up. “All right.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “You’re welcome.” He almost added I’d do it for anyone out of modesty’s sake, but seeing her—her perfect neck, her china ears—he wondered if that was true. If she had been hideous; if it had been Raymond Iniguez getting stabbed?

  He said, “Tell me about you first.”

  “Well, on last week’s episode, my nuclear family fell prey to the Velvet Underground. Sadly the plot weakens considerably from there on. My father was a car salesman, which he continued to be after he and my mother divorced. I went to high school. I went to college. I received my master’s. I lived in Brooklyn until it became Brooklyn. Presently, I’m ensconced in the great quasi-urban eczema known as Hoboken.”

  “You came all the way over for me,” he said. “Back to the old theme park.”

  She smiled. “The least I could do.”

  “Where’d you go to college?”

  “Yale.”

  “No shit.”

  “Lux et veritas.”

  “My sister went there,” he said. “Class of…’94? Her name is Catherine. Or Kate. Kate Hausmann. That’s her married name. Back then she was—”

  “Catherine, or Kate, Stem?” Eve said.

  “Uh.” He laughed at himself. “Yeah.”

  “I knew I recognized that name. What a small, small world we live in. Have you noticed that overeducated white New Yorkers all seem to know each other?”

  He snickered. “Two degrees of separation.”

  “I remember your sister, she was popular.”

  “That’d be her.”

  “Tell me she married someone from our class, that would be too rich.”

  “Nope. A business-school guy. He’s German.”

  “As in from das Vaterland?”

  “He was born in Berlin. He works for Deutsche Bank. They live in Greenwich and have a daughter. She’s two and a half. Her name is Gretchen. She’s pregnant again. Kate, not Gretchen.” He took a breath. “That’s pretty much the deal.”

  “I never would have pegged your sister as a full-time mom.”

  “She isn’t. She works for a hedge fund in Connecticut. She also has an MBA, from Wharton.”

  “Good Lord,” said Eve. “What else can you tell me. Give me the facts, Jonah Stem, I’m finding this all very intoxicating.”

  He talked about himself, about his family, about Scarsdale. He talked about being a child and playing with his father’s stethoscope; being a teenager and overcoming the reluctance to follow in his father’s footsteps. Not drinking for two years had turned him into a serious lightweight; Lance could down a fifth of gin and two dime bags, and drive nails without injury, whereas Jonah already felt loose-tongued. His limbs tingled pleasantly. He decided to go with the flow. She listened. She was funny, and also pretty, and also intelligent, and most of all interested: taking him in as though what he said mattered. He supposed he had to matter to her: he had saved her life. But he saw more: saw something gorgeous and honest; she cared; and he felt a swell of what did not register as attraction, not at first, as the machinery had been so long dormant. He talked and she talked and he learned about her and she about him, and, sensing heat, he observed out of the corner of his eye that their fingertips were nearly touching. He told her that his father went to Radcliffe and his mother went to Harvard, and she asked if they’d had sex-change surgery, and he laughed and said No more drinks.

  “Well anyway that’s some oligarchy,” she said. “What Ivy grows on you?”

  He shook his head. “University of Michigan. Our mascot is the black sheep.”

  She sighed. “We can’t all be so lucky.”

  “Oh please shut up.”

  “I take it your educational decision did not wow the electorate.”

  “They didn’t have a choice. I might have gotten into Brown or Columbia, but I didn’t want to go to Brown or Columbia because I was an angry young man—”

  She giggled.

  “I was, I’m not anymore. Not angry, more like…stubborn.”

  “Jonah Jonah quite contronah.”

  “Yes, and I thought that a state school was the best way to irritate them.” He finished the last of the peanuts.

  “And unfortunately for you, they were disgustingly supportive,” she said. “Dans nos temps modernes, il n’existe pas de horreurs plus dignes que celle.”

  “Yo hablo español,” he said.

  “I said, ‘Poor you.’”

  “Now you’re showing off,” he said.

  “My rap sheet includes several convictions for armed snobbery.”

  He laughed.

  “And let me guess,” she said. “Your girlfriend went to Princeton.”

  “…no.”

  “I said something wrong.”

  “No, no.” He could tell from the way she was frowning that he must look furious—which he wasn’t; he was simply unused to answering the question. Eve began to apologize and he said, “It’s all right. You didn’t do anything.”

  A horrid silence ensued, in which he could see her weighing her options: make a joke, apologize again, find a new tack, need the bathroom, call it a night. Unhappily he considered the same list, and then one option came storming forward, violent and demanding: tell her. He had saved her life, the least she could do was help roll the elephant off his chest. He never talked about Hannah. His family had learned not to ask; and Lance—who’d known her since childhood, who had been the catalyst for crissake—got jumpy, refusing to say her name, as though she had ceased to exist, a superstition that indicated to Jonah a feeling of partial responsibility. Other than them, only Vik knew the whole story, and Vik was smart enough to know that Jonah didn’t want to talk about it. Not usually. But on days like today he felt alone, and unable to keep his doctorly face up, and he wanted to talk about it, and now there was someone sitting across from him.

  More than someone. He wanted to talk about Hannah, yes, but more important, he wanted to talk about Hannah with Eve. Unknown and intimate, the ideal listener, because as much as he liked her right now—liked her a lot, in fact, had a hell of an er
ection—liked her because after two hours of casual talk she seemed to anticipate him—he doubted that he’d see her again after tonight. And although he expected to hate himself, expected telling her to sound self-indulgent, a cheap ploy for sympathy, as he talked he felt the spring uncoiling, and the alcohol gave him an assist, and she did her part by listening, nodding, listening. She listened, and when he finished, she reached across the table and touched his hand.

  He said, “I’m sorry. For all that.”

  She looked at him. “Never, ever apologize for being in love.”

  AS THEY APPROACHED his apartment he again expressed his regret, this time for cutting the evening short. “I have to be at work in five hours.”

  “Stop apologizing, Jonah Stem, it’s unbecoming for a superhero.”

  They arrived at his building. He faced her. “It was nice talking to you, Eve.”

  She nodded and said Yes. Her body inclined toward him, and he did what felt natural: he gave her a hug. Her arms around his neck felt strangely familiar. She was roughly Hannah’s height, the top of her head brushing the soft underside of his jaw, now sandy with eleven-o’clock shadow, so that when she leaned back her hair stuck to him like Velcro. He laughed and moved to brush it away, but she raised up her face and brought his down to meet it, and her mouth was quite soft.

  She stepped away, gave a short wave. He watched her disappear into the warm mist, then let himself into his building and headed upstairs, staggering a tiny bit, wondering why he hadn’t had the presence of mind to ask for her phone number.

  • 7 •

  FROM PAGE SEVENTEEN of the Guide to the Third-Year Clerkships, the official literature distributed by the Office of Student Life, the Teaching College of the Hospital of Upper Manhattan: In particular, the clerkship in surgery can be a time of significant stress. Hours can be long, and the daily tempo is highly accelerated. Students who fail to take adequate care of themselves, either physically or psychologically, will find that they are less likely to perform at an optimum level.

  Remember: A healthy student is a successful student.

  From page nine of the Book, a stapled packet of collective HUM student wisdom, first compiled in 1991 by third-years Gary S. Glaucher and Connie Teitelbaum, now blissfully wed and running a lucrative orthopedics practice in Tenafly, New Jersey: