“Long as it’s also warm and furry.”
“What breeds do you like?”
“I don’t know-something solid and dependable. Let me think about it and when I get back we can go shopping.”
“Sounds good, bowwow.”
“We can do other stuff, too,” she said.
“Sounds even better.”
Just before midnight, I fashioned a bed for the dog out of a couple of towels, placed it on the floor of the service porch, and turned out the light.
The dog stared at it, then trotted over to the fridge.
“No way,” I said. “Time to sleep.”
He turned his back on me and sat. I left for the bedroom. He heeled along. Feeling like Simon Legree, I closed the door on his supplicating eyes.
As soon as I got under the covers I heard scratching, then heavy breathing. Then something that sounded like an old man choking.
I jumped out of bed and opened the door. The dog raced through my feet and hurled himself up on the bed.
“Forget it,” I said and put him on the carpet.
He made the choking sound again, stared, and tried to climb up.
I returned him to the floor.
A couple more tries and he gave up, turning his back on me and staying hunkered against the dust ruffle.
It seemed a reasonable compromise.
But when I awoke in the middle of the night, thinking about pain screams and robot chants, he was right next to me, soft eyes full of pity. I left him there. A moment later, he was snoring and it helped put me back to sleep.
The next morning I woke up tasting the metal and bite of bad dreams. I fed the dog and called the Rodriguez house again. Still no answer, but this time a machine fed me Evelyn’s tired voice over a background of Conway Twitty singing “Slow Hand.”
I asked her to call me. She hadn’t by the time I finished showering and shaving. Neither had anyone else.
Determined to get outdoors, I left the dog with a big biscuit and walked the couple of miles to the university campus. The computers at the biomed library yielded no references to “bad love” in any medical or psychological journals, and I returned home at noon. The dog licked my hand and jumped up and down. I petted him, gave him some cheese, and received a drool-covered hand by way of thanks.
After boxing my charts, I carried them back to the closet. A single carton had remained on the shelf. Wondering if it contained files I’d missed, I pulled it down.
No patient records: it was crammed with charts and reprints of technical articles I’d set aside as references. A thick roll of papers bound with a rubber band was wedged between the folders. The word “PROFUNDITIES” was scrawled across it, in my handwriting. I remembered myself younger, angrier, sarcastic.
Removing the band from the roll, I flattened the sheaf and inhaled a snootful of dust.
parlayed a year in Vienna as one of Freud’s students and membership in the French resistance into an international reputation. I wasn’t even sure he was still alive, the letter from his daughter didn’t make it clear, and the conference she proposed had a memorial flavor to it.
I wrote her a polite letter.
Two weeks later I was called in to see the medical director, a pediatric surgeon named Henry Bork who favored Hickey-Freeman suits, Jamaican cigars, and sawtooth abstract art, and who hadn’t operated in years.
“Alex.” He smiled and motioned to a Breuer chair. A slender woman was sitting in a matching nest of leather and chrome on the other side of the room.
She looked to be slightly older than me early thirties, I guessed-but her face was one of those long, sallow constructions that would always seem aged.
The beginnings of worry lines suggested themselves at crucial junctures, like a portrait artist’s initial tracings. Her lips were chapped-all of her looked dry-and her only makeup was a couple of grudging lines of mascara.
Her eyes were large enough without the shadowing, dark, heavy lidded, slightly bloodshot, close set. Her nose was prominent, down tilted, and sharp, with a small bulb at the tip. Full wide lips were set sternly. Her legs were pressed together at the knees, feet set squarely on the floor.