He gave her hand a last pat and picked up his cup. “You’ll come to me every week like this, Violet. You’re looking rather thin, rather pale; you must eat better. I shall stuff you with cake and sandwiches and send you on your way. Does that sound agreeable?”
She smiled. “Yes, very much.”
And so she and Dr. Grant came to take tea in his sumptuous offices every week, served without comment by his own personal secretary, talking and laughing and calling each other Dr. Grant and Violet, while the leaves changed color and fell from the trees, and the afternoon sky grew darker and darker, until it began to turn quite black by four o’clock, when she knocked punctually on his door. It was then a week before Christmas, and the air smelled of snow. Dr. Grant stood in his office with a pair of workmen, his white shirtsleeves glowing in the lamplight, wires and plaster everywhere; he was having a new telephone installed, he told her, shaking his head, and the case was hopeless.
Perhaps they should take tea at his house in Norham Gardens instead?
Doctor Paul’s living room had potential, and I told him so.
“Your living room has potential, if you’d consider unpacking the moving boxes.” I waved my chopsticks at said boxes, which were clustered in haphazard stacks about the room, like some sort of ironic modernist furniture set. “Maybe a lick of paint, too. White is so sterile.”
“Agreed. It’s like being in a hospital.”
“How can you stand it?”
“I’m not here often. I usually sleep in an empty examining room.”
I tsked. “And you’ve lived here four weeks. If I were a shrink, I’d suggest you were having second thoughts.”
“About the apartment?”
“About the apartment. About New York.”
“Maybe I was.”
In the absence of furniture, we were lying on the floor in an exact perpendicular relationship: fully clothed, I hasten to add. Our heads were propped up by a single upholstered cushion, provenance unknown, and the little white boxes of Chinese takeout sat agape between us, like a row of teeth awaiting root canals. I picked up one of them now and dug my chopsticks deep into a shiny tangle of chow mein. “What, the charms of our humble town have worn thin already?”
“I don’t mean to offend—”
“Which means you’re about to do just that.”
“—but I haven’t seen much charm to begin with. I work in a hospital, Vivian. All I see is New York’s greasy gray underbelly. Do you know what my first patient said to me? My first patient, a little kid of eight years old, in for an appendix—”
I put down my chopsticks. “You’re a kid surgeon?”
“Yes. He said to me—”
“This is just too much. Perfect Doctor Paul is so perfectly perfect, he saves the lives of nature’s little angels.”
“I am not perfect.”
I rolled my head against the cushion and looked at him, inches away. He was staring at the ceiling, chopsticks idling in one hand, chicken chop suey balanced on his ribs. His adorable hair flopped toward the cushion, a little disordered, close enough to taste. The expression on his face wrecked my chest. I said softly: “From where I’m sitting, you’re close enough to divine.”
“Don’t say that.” He sat up, catching the chicken just in time. “My dad. Pops. He’s a gambler.”
“That’s a shame, but it’s not your fault.”
“No, I mean he really gambles. Deep. Drinks, too. I was lucky, I got out when I could, went to Princeton on scholarship. I have to send him money sometimes.”
“What about your mother?”
“Died when I was ten. Cancer. But I just want you to know, my family’s not like yours. We’re nobody special.”
“For God’s sake, why would I care about that? My special family’s a mess.” I removed the white box from his hand and replaced it with my fingers. “Lie down again, will you? You’re making me anxious.”
He laughed at that and settled back against the cushion, a tiny fraction closer to me. I felt his hair against mine, his mouth disturbing the air as he spoke. “You’ve never been anxious in your life, Vivian.”
“Oh, haven’t I? I’m anxious now.”
“You shouldn’t be.”
I let that sit for a moment in perfect tranquility, because I liked the way it sounded. You shouldn’t be. Shouldn’t be anxious, Vivian, because I am the real deal, I am your Doctor Paul, and we two have an understanding, now, don’t we.
“Yes,” I whispered.
“Yes?”
“Yes, we have an understanding, don’t we?”
He squeezed my hand against the bare parquet floor of his sterile white apartment. “We do.”
Doctor Paul evidently had a clock somewhere, buried in his boxes or else on an unseen shelf, because I could hear it ticking methodically as we lay there in perpendicular quietude, absorbing the force of our understanding. If I could see that clock, I guessed it would read somewhere between seven and eight o’clock in the evening, which meant that I had now known him for just over seven hours.
I traveled through them all again: the post office, my apartment, the walk to the library, the library itself, the coffee shop. Wandering up the dull weekend stretch of Madison Avenue, bending our way to the park, not caring where we went as long as we remained linked by this pulsing thread, this shimmering ribbon of you-and-me. How we talked. Not of ourselves, of course. We stuck to the things that mattered: books read, places traveled, friends met, ideas discarded. An hour had passed in a minute, and another hour in a few electric seconds, until we’d looked up to a lowering sky in blind amazement. “Where are we?” Doctor Paul asked.
“I think that’s the Guggenheim, through the trees over there. The museum.”
“I know the Guggenheim. My apartment’s only a few blocks away.”
“Imagine that,” I said.
“Imagine that. Are you hungry?”
“Enough to eat you alive.”
“Will Chinese do?”
We ordered takeout from a tiny storefront on Eighty-ninth Street—THE PEKING DELIGHT, promised the sign above the window, in bright gold letters on a lucky red background—and Doctor Paul led me to his apartment on Lexington Avenue, on the third floor of an anodyne white-brick apartment block, the primary virtue of which was its close proximity to the express subway stop on Eighty-sixth Street. “It’s only fair,” he told me, “since I handed you such a gilded opportunity to have your psychopathic way with me this morning.”
He had opened a bottle of cheap red wine, not a good match for the Chinese, but we drank it anyway in paper Dixie cups, ounce by tannic ounce.
I listened to the clock, the irreplaceable tick of seconds and minutes.
“I should head home,” I said. “You need a few hours of sleep before you go back to the hospital.”
“I suppose I do.”
Neither of us moved.
“I don’t like it,” he said. “It’s dark out, and that neighborhood of yours—”
I laughed. “Oh, nuts. It’s the city that