From where Bellows was sitting, he could see only the backs of the four students. Goldberg was busy taking notes in a furious fashion, getting every word. Dr. Druery’s lecture was mildly interesting but certainly not worth notetaking. Bellows knew the syndrome, though. He’d seen it in action a thousand times and even suffered from it to an extent himself. As soon as the lights would dim, and someone would start speaking, many medical students would respond in a Pavlovian fashion by taking notes, madly trying to get every word down onto paper without any thought as to the content. The medical student responded in this utterly unintellectual way because, more often than not, he was asked to regurgitate whatever trivia he had been fed.
Bellows was sorry he had not told Susan that he indeed would be hurt if she missed the lecture. In such a small group, her absence was painfully apparent above and beyond the fact that she was so visually distinctive. Bellows was nervous that Stark would decide to pop in and welcome the group. Of course he’d wonder where the fifth student was, and what could Bellows say? He thought about saying that she was scrubbing on a case. But so early in the game, that was unlikely.
The worry about Stark had finally caused Bellows to page Susan so that he could retract his previous silent acquiescence to her cutting the lecture. It was a bad precedent to establish. So he thought he would just inform her that she was sincerely missed and should get herself up to the tenth-floor conference room on the double. Bellows specifically decided to use the word sincerely because in the context it was used, it had several implications.
Bellows had made up his mind to ask Susan out on a date. There were several unanswerable questions and aspects involved in such a move, yet the payoff was worth the risk. Susan was bright and spirited, and Bellows was almost positive she had a dynamite figure. Whether she could be feminine and warm according to Bellows’s interpretations of those qualities remained to be seen. The trouble was that Bellows had some pretty outdated notions about femininity. For him surgery and his schedule came first; thus an important aspect of Bellows’s definition of femininity concerned availability. He expected his female friends to respect his schedule as much as he did and to rearrange their schedules to accord with it. An interesting aspect of Susan’s situation, it occurred to Bellows, was that for the next month or so, they would have similar schedules. That was encouraging. And if all else failed, Bellows reasoned that at least Susan would be a damn interesting screw.
But the phone remained silent under Bellows’s expectant hand. Impatiently he redialed the page operator and told her to repeat the page for Dr. Susan Wheeler for 482. Replacing the receiver, he again waited for the ring as the minutes slid by. Bellows began to think that maybe things would not go so smoothly with Susan. Perhaps she wouldn’t even go out with him. She could already be tight with someone else. Under his breath he cursed females in general, and he told himself that he should be sensible and leave well enough alone. At the same time he knew that Susan was triggering off his keen sense of competition. He also visualized that curve of Susan’s low back as it spread out over her ass. He decided to page once more.
Gerald Kelley was as Irish as one could be and still live in Boston and not Dublin. His hair was reddish blond and thick and curly despite the fact that he was fifty-four years old. His face had a ruddy hue, almost as if he wore theatrical makeup, especially over the crests of his cheekbones.
Kelley’s most notable feature and by far the dominant aspect of his profile was his enormous paunch. Every night three bottles of stout contributed to its awe-inspiring dimensions. For the last few years it had been pointed out that when Kelley was vertical, his belt buckle was horizontal.
Gerald Kelley had worked for the Memorial since he was fifteen years old. He had started out in the maintenance department, the boiler room to be exact, and now he was in charge. From his long experience and mechanical aptitude he knew the power plant of the hospital inside and out. In fact, he knew almost all the mechanical aspects of the building by heart. It was for this reason that he was in charge and also why he was paid $13,700 a year. The hospital administration knew he was indispensable, and they would have paid more if Gerald Kelley had made an issue of it. The fact was, each party was satisfied.