Page 34 of The Dutch House

I nodded my head, lit a second cigarette. “Why don’t we ever talk about your love life? It would be a huge relief for me.”

“It would be for me, too,” Maeve said, “but I don’t have one.”

I looked at her square on. “I don’t believe you.”

And my sister, who could outstare an owl, turned her face away. “Well, you should.”

After I came back from Jenkintown, Celeste decided everything was Maeve’s fault. “She tells you to break up with me three weeks before finals? Who does something like that?”

We were in my apartment. I had told her not to come down, that I would take the train up to her and we could talk there, but she said that was ridiculous. “We’re not going to talk in front of my roommate,” she said.

“Maeve didn’t tell me to break up with you. She didn’t tell me anything. All she did was listen.”

“She told you not to marry me.”

“She did not.”

“Who talks to their sister about these things anyway? Do you think when my brother was trying to decide whether or not to go to dental school he came out to the Bronx so we could hash it out together? People don’tdothat. It isn’t natural.”

“Maybe he wouldn’t talk to you.” I felt a quick gust of annoyance and I let it turn to anger, anger being infinitely preferable to guilt. “And maybe that’s because he knew you wouldn’t listen to him. Or maybe he would have talked it over with your parents because youhaveparents. I’ve got Maeve, okay? That’s it.”

Celeste felt her advantage tipping away and she changed her tack like a little sailboat on a windy pond. “Oh, Danny.” She put her hand on my arm.

“Just leave it alone,” I said, as if I was the one who was about to be hurt. “It’s not going to work. It doesn’t have to be anyone’s fault. It’s bad timing, that’s all.”

And for that small conciliatory sentence pulled from the airshe went to bed with me one more time. Afterwards she said she wanted to spend the night, that she would leave first thing in the morning, but I said no. Without any more discussion we packed up what was hers and sat together on the train back up to the Bronx, each of us with a bag in our lap.

Chapter 10

Idid especially well in my surgical rotation. I was as conscientious as anyone else in my class but twice as fast, which just goes to show that basketball had served me well. Fast was how hospitals made their money, so while accuracy was very much appreciated, speed got you noticed. Just before graduation, the attending pressed me to take another three years for a subspecialty in thoracic surgery after my residency. I had spent the last two hours assisting in a right lower lobectomy and he admired the deftness of my knots. We were sitting in a tiny room with a set of bunk beds and a desk, a place we were meant to sleep for twenty minutes between cases. I kept thinking I could still smell blood and I got up for the second time to wash my face in the small sink in the corner while the attending droned on about my bankable talent. I wasn’t in much of a mood, and as I dried myself with paper towels I told him I might have talent but I had no plans to use it.

“So what are you doing here?” He was smiling, anticipating the punch line of what he was sure was the setup to my joke.

I shook my head. “It’s the rotation. This one’s not for me.” There was no point in explaining. His parents had probably come from Bangladesh so that one day their son could be a surgeon in New York. His entire family had doubtlessly beencrushed beneath a load of debt and didn’t need to hear about the effort it took to liquidate an education trust.

“Listen,” he said, pulling off his scrub top and throwing it in the bin. “Surgeons are the kings. If you can be a king there’s no point being a jack, am I right?”

I could see every bone in his rib cage. “I’m a jack,” I said.

He laughed even though I’d failed to make the joke. “There are two kinds of people who come out of this place: surgeons and the ones who didn’t make it as surgeons. Nobody else. You’re going to be a surgeon.”

I told him I’d think about it just to shut him up. My twenty minutes were down to fourteen minutes and I needed every one of them. I was exhausted beyond anything I could remember. I wanted to tell him I wasn’t going to do a residency, or an internship for that matter. Medical school would finish and I would crack the code on real estate and sail out of this place without so much as a backwards glance.

Except I didn’t. I tried and failed and tried again and failed again. Buildings lingered on the market for years and then sold for a fraction of their worth. I saw buildings in foreclosure go for as little as $1,200, and even when they were burned-out shells covered in graffiti, even when every pane of glass had taken a brick, I thought I was the one to save them. Not the people, mind you, the ones who might have lived in those buildings. I had no grand ideas that I was the one to save the men and women who lined the hallways of the ER, waiting for a minute of my time. I wanted the buildings. But then I would have to settle up the back taxes, buy the doors, fix the windows, pay the insurance. I would have to dispatch the squatters and the rats. I didn’t know how to do any of that.

Despite every promise I had ever made to myself, I went into the internship program at Albert Einstein in the Bronx. Notonly was there no tuition for internships (“Okay,” Maeve said, “I didn’t know that”), they paid me. At this point, the trust was obligated only to cover my rent and give me a small amount for expenses, which I banked. I was no longer bilking Andrea in any meaningful way, not that I ever had. I was no longer avenging my sister. I was, in fact, finishing my training in medicine. I got along with the people I worked with, impressed the faculty, helped my patients, and every day reinforced the lessons I had learned in chemistry: you don’t have to like your work to be good at it. I stayed at Albert Einstein for my residency, and while I still made the rare trip to the law school at Columbia where I stood in the back of the hall to take in a lecture on real estate law, those trips were few and far between. I followed the real estate market the way other men followed baseball: I memorized statistics and never played the game.

Dr. Able still kept an eye on me, or maybe, as he would have said, we had become friends. He invited me for coffee every three or four months and kept at me until we locked down a date. He would talk about his students, I would complain about my workload. We talked about departmental politics, or, when we were in the company of our better selves, science. I didn’t talk to him about real estate, nor did I ask him if chemistry had been the thing he’d wanted to do with his life. It wouldn’t have occurred to me. The waitress brought our coffee.

“We’re going to London this summer,” he said. “We’ve rented a flat in Knightsbridge. Two whole weeks. Our daughter is working there, Nell. You know Nell.”

“I know Nell.”

Dr. Able rarely mentioned his family, either in deference to my own situation or because that wasn’t the nature of our relationship, but on this particular spring day he was too happy to keep his personal life to himself. “She’s doing art restoration.She went over there three years ago for a postdoc that turned into a full-time job. I don’t think she’s ever coming back.”

There was no point in mentioning that Nell Able and I had exchanged a champagne-soaked kiss one New Year’s Eve in his apartment years before. She had come into her parents’ bedroom while I was digging through a pile of black coats on the bed, looking for the black coat that belonged to Celeste. The room was dark, a million miles down the hallway from the music and raucous laughter. Nell Able. We had tipped into the pile of coats for a couple of minutes before righting ourselves.

“We haven’t been to see her a single time since she left,” her father went on. “We always make her come home to us. But Alice finally secured the major gift for the Health Sciences Building campaign. Five years she’s been chasing that money down. Alice told them she’d quit if they didn’t give her the time off.”