Post by Tatum MacNamara on Sept 18, 2006 18:54:35 GMT -5
{So yeeeeah . . . this is off-topic, but I'm currently working on a novel and looking for some feedback and i thought this was a safe place to put it. this is the first chapter. Please let me know what you all think, particularly if any part of it really makes you laugh}
Now, don’t get me wrong – I’ve never been one of those hipsters who sneer venomously at the mere mention of ‘pop culture.’ I’m not critical of thirtysomethings with a penchant for The Gap, and I don’t roll my eyes when someone wants to dish at the water cooler about the latest ‘Who Wants to Be A Russian Cosmonaut’ kind of reality TV show. I happen to think that pop music is sort of catchy in that mainstream, infectious want-to-scratch-your-eyes out kind of way. I owned a Pet Rock, a Slinky and yes, sigh, I did sport myself a lovely pair of black lycra running shorts toward the latter portion of the 80s at times that involved neither a bicycle or a rational venue for short-wearing. I fully embrace American kitsch culture and am often times a victim of what the incomparably ‘cool’ would label ‘heinous crimes.’
That said – I hate medical dramas. Some young MD wearing scrubs and darting hurriedly through an endless labyrinth of sterile corridors with a big busted colleague next to him, both looking like at any minute their pristine white coats could be shed, a deafening techno music could ensue, and the two could break out showing Donatella Versace’s spring line “La Medique” a cure for the fashion victim, prognosis virulent. Cut away to the bedside scene. Devastatingly gorgeous MD holds hand of female patient who at the top of the hour was vibrant, perky, a bit vacant around the eyes perhaps but still oh-so-breathtaking, now after the first half hour wan, desiccated, and grizzled. She fights to breathe. She fights to speak. And then – one drone from the heart monitor. The doctor’s hand, the one that should have healed but due to the cruelness of this fallen world failed to, reaches forth and closes the now deceased’s eyes. The camera zooms in on his face. He is broken. Part of him seized as his patient’s life seeped from her. Cut to the nurse’s station where he informs them of young Heather or Jenny or Tiffany’s departure. The nurses, a cavalcade of silicone and lip implants with the one token middle-aged obese head-woman-in-charge, console the good doctor. He rallies himself, of course, as there are others who need him, but this is undoubtedly after waxing melancholic with a line like “it never gets any easier.”
Which, of course, is absolute bullshit. It does get easier. It gets too easy, in fact. By my fourth year practicing as a pediatric oncologist, I could look a young couple in the eye and tell them the infant they had tried for three years to conceive, the child they had spoon fed strained carrots to and suffered through television shows with aggravating puppets and creepy animatronics for was going to die, that the final hour had come, and that there was nothing that they could do but sit by and watch like the powerless whelps that disease reduces humanity too with the bedside manner of a tax lawyer. I could hear father’s breaths catch in their throats and mother’s sob pierce the atmosphere with the same response as a twangy country tune – not something I wanted to tap my foot to, but bearable. And it had to be bearable or else there was no way to do the job. I learned to see my patients’, even the smallest ones, as ‘boy aged two with acute myelogenous leukemia’ or ‘girl aged four with stage 3 pancreatic cancer.’ If the occasion did arise that I had to use first names, I found myself glancing down at the chart in my hand to remind myself, and by my sixth year I didn’t even bother getting embarrassed when I needed to jog my memory.
And apart from the necessary detachment, there was what I call the somnambulatory factor. To a loyal viewer of the medical drama that I, Jack Lachance, would be the main character of it would play something like this. Dr. Lachance awakes on Monday morning readies himself and travels to the practice he is a junior associate partner in because insurance costs are too high for him to eke out on his own the salary a city bus driver might make if he were fortunate enough to carry a union card. Cut to Dr. Lachance seeing 20 patients an hour, allowing one minutes to examine, one minute to diagnose, thirty seconds to field questions with rehearsed and convoluted replies, fifteen seconds to make a hasty exit, five to nab a sip of coffee, five to run hands under scalding water, and five more to find the next examining room and do it all over again. If the audience manages to make it through the first four hours, they see Dr. Lachance who weights twenty pounds more than he did when he entered medical school choose various lunch options from one of four fast-food establishments all of which know him by name and extra value meal number, though the good doctor never supersizes because he tries to watch what he eats. After lunch there’s more patients, followed by two hours of dictating records and returning phone calls and then a stop over at the pediatric hospital where Dr. Lachance makes his rounds, again only able to devote enough time to ensure that yes the patient is still alive and still no doubt dying. If the audience is lucky, the show ends around midnight, though usually one catastrophe or another pre-empts the late show and our drama continues well into the wee hours of the morning when the doctor is finally afforded, at best, a solid five hour stretch of sleep. By the end of the first season we realize Dr. Lachance is just going through the motions, sleepwalking with open eyes, and there is no sense that the slumbering physician will ever awaken again.
Such was my life at the beginning of 2002, an endless stretch of days lived in the haze of complacency. It was my sixth year practicing medicine and I was nearly 40. The shockwaves of 9/11 had diminished as well as that strong sense of unity that followed immediately after the disaster. People were being all out pricks to each other again, and there was a sort of peace in having someone give you the finger when you cut them off in traffic. I was living in Pittsburgh where I had completed my residency what felt like a lifetime before. My parents had been the ones to suggest moving there. We had been sitting on the front porch of my childhood home in Thomasville, Georgia. The town had come into some fame when Jackie O went there to pick up the pieces after JFK’s death. It was a place to escape to. A place that moved at such a slow pace your problems got ahead of you and kept right on sprinting. My mother had a god awful lime green dress on, my father was still wearing his collar as it was Sunday and for some reason he though a Baptist Minister should look the part the whole livelong Sabbath day. The ice was melting in the lemonade my mother always put too much sugar into, and they were both telling me to go north, to choose a city that was big, but not unfriendly like New York or Boston. They told me I’d get to the seasons change. And it had all sounded quite appealing, like sage advice from the two people I respected more than anyone in this world.
But the truth of the matter was people are unfriendly everywhere and Pittsburgh really just has two seasons: so hot and humid that you have a river of sweat running through the crack of your ass and cold enough to make your dick the size of a Lil’ Smokies cocktail frank. Spring and autumn were about a week long. Take a long nap and you were liable to miss them. Not that I had any time to nap. Or to follow football. Or to date. Or change my underwear. That last part might have had something to do with the lack of dates, of course. That or those aforementioned extra twenty pounds which, alright, might have been more like thirty or forty. Definitely no more than 50. Or 55.
I was unhappy. I was overweight. And I was turning into an insomniac. By the week after New Years’, I found I was only able to fall asleep once every three or four days. I spent nights wide-eyed in front of the illuminated images of celebrities like Dionne Warwick and Eric Estrada pawning telepsychics and miracle abdominal-shaping contraptions. I drank warm milk and then whiskey and then both at the same time, which incidentally, is pretty much the most disgusting combination of tastes known to man apart from tuna fish and Frosted Flakes, though both flavor sensations are handy to keep in mind if your son or daughter drinks bleach and there’s no Ipecac handy. I read Tolstoy and Steinbeck, both authors having lulled me into many a peaceful slumber during Survey of World Literature my freshman year at Rollins College. I even saw a shrink who told me I needed to reduce my stress, then said in the next breath that for a doctor that’s nearly impossible. I didn’t take pills because I couldn’t afford to be groggy the next day at work though in retrospect, it seems I was barely coherent most days anyway.
There’s a certain point where the sleep-deprived mind begins to slip. At a certain point of sensory overload caused from too many nights without rest, a patient can hallucinate, even become psychotic, and this knowledge became a sick obsession. In the quiet of my suburban townhouse, I would strain to listen as if at any moment a faint whisper from a voice in my head might sound. And one night in particular I thought maybe, just maybe, I heard one. I thought it shouted ‘Jack easy does it. Easy does it. Easy does it’ and that was enough to make me spring from my couch, don my jacket and the first pair of shoes that I could summon and head out into the night. As if one can outrun the voices in their head. By the time I had my car headed toward the city, I had realized that my mysterious voice in the head was more likely the breathy moans of my next door neighbors Thomas and Jackie-that’s-it Davenport in flagrante delicto. Despite this discovery, however, I resolved to continue my suburban exodus, deciding that if I was to be awake for the next four hours I may as well catch up on some patients’ charts I had been neglecting.
Upon unlocking the office door, I felt my eyebrow raise not just from the light that was streaming into the waiting room from the long corridor that housed the offices of my partners and myself. The flick of a light switch can easily be forgotten in a hasty rush home after a long day suffered in any workplace, after all, but one does not expect to hear ‘Stayin’ Alive’ played so loudly that it seems Barry Gibbs himself is present in a doctor’s office at 1AM. I felt a pang of indignation in my guts. The audacity of the custodian treating the office like a disco after hours! The nerve! How dare anyone enjoy themselves in this office! How dare anyone enjoy themselves at all when I was so fucking miserable! I stormed down the hallway, my footfall even sounding angry against the flooring, my eyes a narrow glare fixed upon the last office, the empty one at that, where I was certain some sort of after-hours Studio 54 for cleaning personnel and night guards was transpiring, and I was hell bent on stopping it. I hurled myself through the doorway, arms folded over my slight manboobs, scowling as poisonously as possible and conjuring every ounce of sternness I could muster into my rhetorical “What the Hell do you think you’re doing?”
There was no reply for a moment, the only sound audible apart from Barry’s assertion that he was ‘going nowhere’ and his plea for ‘someone’ to help him was the pounding of my heart in my ears, pumping full tilt from the adrenaline anger had released into my bloodstream. It was in this moment that I actually took in the scene before me, a scene devoid of hulking nightwatchmen snorting coke off cleaning ladies asses and drunken maintenance men doing the hustle on top of the desk. There was only a sea of boxes and the lone form of a raven-haired woman amidst them. Her back was to me, but there was something about the line of her shoulders, the way her wavy locks cascaded over the small of her back in the neat confines of a ponytail that signaled the face that was about to turn to me would steal my breath from me like a cat poised at the rail of a slumbering babe’s crib in an old wives’ tale. I felt my cheeks flush. My feet took an involuntary step back into the corridor.
And then she turned and the music didn’t seem as loud though it must have been because she shouted to be heard over it, “Unpacking.” Two chestnut eyes with the depth of the Marianas focused on mine. A smile formed on olive skin, and the woman rose to what I could see past the boxes as bare feet. Slender fingers dusted off well-worn blue jeans, and the woman, every bit as captivating as I had feared, focused on me, her hand skimming a wayward curl away from her delicate features, stowing it behind her ear.
The music stopped though the song hadn’t ended, and I didn’t notice her bending to silence a stereo. I was too focused on my curiosity, and the way the ‘S’ and the ‘D’ on her ‘Stanford’-emblazoned T-shirt swelled outwards from a confluence of chest and cloth made my pants feel tighter than an afternoon of over-indulgence at the Golden Arches could ever hope to. Her head tilted, and she laughed good-naturedly, the sound coming like the sweet melody of chimes. “And what the Hell do you think you’re doing?” she rebuffed, a hand coming to a narrow hip.
I moved to speak. My mouth opened and closed, but no sound came forth, only a prepubescent squeak a la Peter Brady. See Jack make asshole of himself in front of mysterious Mediterranean beauty. I cleared my throat, forced what I’m sure was a goofy smile and shrugged. “Harassing my newest colleague” I managed, scratching the back of my neck as the words found their way from my lips, a nervous habit I had suffered from in my youth but had overcome in college. Or, I suppose, beat it into a twenty year hiatus. “Sorry. I er-just wasn’t expecting to see anyone.” I realized I was nodding my head which made no sense as I was neither answering a question nor agreeing with anyone and then tried to hold completely still as the room slipped into what seemed the onset of an uncomfortable silence.
Just as I was beginning my prayer to St. Foot-in-the-mouth, the patron saint of those who wish the floor would open and swallow them up, she waved her hand as if banishing my apology, starting for me with a long easy stride that made her hips sway in a way only a dead man could ignore. “Obviously,” she teased, arriving in front of me with her hand outstretched.
“I’m Chase LeBrun.” I didn’t manage to shake her hand of my own volition, and she promptly reached out and took my left hand in her right, her chin inclining to maintain eye contact at the closer proximity. “And I swear to you I’m a doctor. Honest to Gaea.” Her laugh rang out again, and then she turned to nod to the array of boxes. “If you want to hang around a bit, I can try to find my diplomas. They’re around here someplace.” Dropping my hand, she turned to survey her belongings, starting off toward them again, but pausing to look over her shoulder and add with a smirk. “They have lovely frames.”
I found myself laughing in spite of myself, and I tried to create a fitting witty remark to reply with, but only came up with a feeble, “I’m sure they do. But I can take your word for it.” Realizing I was staring at her like a hypnosis subject’s eyes following a pocket watch, I looked to the floor, noticing that even her feet were lovely, the small toe of her left one adorned with a thin silver band, the base of a tattoo whose shape was hidden under the hem of her jeans visible on the top of her right foot. Inwardly, I cursed her for being so damn beautiful and myself for being so paralyzed by it.
Stooping to retrieve a book, her neck curved, giving her the line of an Ingres Odalisque. “Maybe some other time then,” she sighed at the brown and orange U-Haul box, standing to her full height once more and crossing to shelves at the opposite end of the room from where I stood. “No one mentioned to me that in addition to seeing patients I would be expected to take a turn patrolling the office for intruders.” Turning back to me, she leaned back against the shelf casually, “Do they let you carry a nightstick or something, Doctor?”
“Lachance,” I added quickly, filling in the blanks for her. “Call me Jack. Please.” I shifted my weight and smiled sheepishly. “Just having some trouble sleeping. Thought I’d come in and see if an evening spent in dictation would be a good remedy.”
She nodded sympathetically, “I see. Jack.” Returning to the box, each step a feat of feline grace, she sank to her knees and rummaged a bit, looking up a moment later with a gleam in her brown orbs that could have been fiery mischief evoked by the devil himself. “If that doesn’t do the trick,” she stood, two mugs in one hand and a decanter of amber-colored liquid in the other, “this shall.”
A conspiratorial wink and then she was at the desk pouring us each a serving. “Booze never works,” I shrugged, stuffing the hands in the pockets of my coat and then suddenly realizing that in my haste to escape the voice from within I had worn my bedroom slippers. “But I won’t pass up a drink. Not from a new partner.”
“Good,” she laughed, coming to me with the glass, which I took. She extended her hand and clinked my glass with hers, saying what sounded like “Sonno” in the semblance of a toast and then downing the contents of her glass.
I followed suit, wondering what the toast had signified, but the fire in my throat soon banished the thought from my head. The stuff was stronger than anything I had ever drank, even in the shadiest of southern barrooms, and a cacophony of coughs erupted from me. When the embarrassing response was ended, I muttered a thank you and realized through watery eyes that she had taken back my glass and had retreated once more to the boxes, the bottle now gone from sight.
“You’ll sleep now. And I’ll keep the noise down.” That said, she returned to her unpacking, and I bade her a gentlemanly goodnight, feeling as if I had been dismissed.
Slightly defeated as it was clear I had not made the slightest impression on this woman that I was already taken with, I entered my office, thoughts of her running through my mind at breakneck pace. So distracted was I that I didn’t notice the yawn as I settled into my chair and turned to the stack of files before me, opening the top one and just staring at it without reading, my thoughts firmly on the room at the end of the hallway, unaware of the winding away of the minutes, time spinning out slowly to the imaginings of the woman contained in its four walls. At some point, those thoughts gave way to dreams, leaving me to wake the next morning with an imprint of the crinkled file present on my cheek.
And I never suffered another sleepless night.
Now, don’t get me wrong – I’ve never been one of those hipsters who sneer venomously at the mere mention of ‘pop culture.’ I’m not critical of thirtysomethings with a penchant for The Gap, and I don’t roll my eyes when someone wants to dish at the water cooler about the latest ‘Who Wants to Be A Russian Cosmonaut’ kind of reality TV show. I happen to think that pop music is sort of catchy in that mainstream, infectious want-to-scratch-your-eyes out kind of way. I owned a Pet Rock, a Slinky and yes, sigh, I did sport myself a lovely pair of black lycra running shorts toward the latter portion of the 80s at times that involved neither a bicycle or a rational venue for short-wearing. I fully embrace American kitsch culture and am often times a victim of what the incomparably ‘cool’ would label ‘heinous crimes.’
That said – I hate medical dramas. Some young MD wearing scrubs and darting hurriedly through an endless labyrinth of sterile corridors with a big busted colleague next to him, both looking like at any minute their pristine white coats could be shed, a deafening techno music could ensue, and the two could break out showing Donatella Versace’s spring line “La Medique” a cure for the fashion victim, prognosis virulent. Cut away to the bedside scene. Devastatingly gorgeous MD holds hand of female patient who at the top of the hour was vibrant, perky, a bit vacant around the eyes perhaps but still oh-so-breathtaking, now after the first half hour wan, desiccated, and grizzled. She fights to breathe. She fights to speak. And then – one drone from the heart monitor. The doctor’s hand, the one that should have healed but due to the cruelness of this fallen world failed to, reaches forth and closes the now deceased’s eyes. The camera zooms in on his face. He is broken. Part of him seized as his patient’s life seeped from her. Cut to the nurse’s station where he informs them of young Heather or Jenny or Tiffany’s departure. The nurses, a cavalcade of silicone and lip implants with the one token middle-aged obese head-woman-in-charge, console the good doctor. He rallies himself, of course, as there are others who need him, but this is undoubtedly after waxing melancholic with a line like “it never gets any easier.”
Which, of course, is absolute bullshit. It does get easier. It gets too easy, in fact. By my fourth year practicing as a pediatric oncologist, I could look a young couple in the eye and tell them the infant they had tried for three years to conceive, the child they had spoon fed strained carrots to and suffered through television shows with aggravating puppets and creepy animatronics for was going to die, that the final hour had come, and that there was nothing that they could do but sit by and watch like the powerless whelps that disease reduces humanity too with the bedside manner of a tax lawyer. I could hear father’s breaths catch in their throats and mother’s sob pierce the atmosphere with the same response as a twangy country tune – not something I wanted to tap my foot to, but bearable. And it had to be bearable or else there was no way to do the job. I learned to see my patients’, even the smallest ones, as ‘boy aged two with acute myelogenous leukemia’ or ‘girl aged four with stage 3 pancreatic cancer.’ If the occasion did arise that I had to use first names, I found myself glancing down at the chart in my hand to remind myself, and by my sixth year I didn’t even bother getting embarrassed when I needed to jog my memory.
And apart from the necessary detachment, there was what I call the somnambulatory factor. To a loyal viewer of the medical drama that I, Jack Lachance, would be the main character of it would play something like this. Dr. Lachance awakes on Monday morning readies himself and travels to the practice he is a junior associate partner in because insurance costs are too high for him to eke out on his own the salary a city bus driver might make if he were fortunate enough to carry a union card. Cut to Dr. Lachance seeing 20 patients an hour, allowing one minutes to examine, one minute to diagnose, thirty seconds to field questions with rehearsed and convoluted replies, fifteen seconds to make a hasty exit, five to nab a sip of coffee, five to run hands under scalding water, and five more to find the next examining room and do it all over again. If the audience manages to make it through the first four hours, they see Dr. Lachance who weights twenty pounds more than he did when he entered medical school choose various lunch options from one of four fast-food establishments all of which know him by name and extra value meal number, though the good doctor never supersizes because he tries to watch what he eats. After lunch there’s more patients, followed by two hours of dictating records and returning phone calls and then a stop over at the pediatric hospital where Dr. Lachance makes his rounds, again only able to devote enough time to ensure that yes the patient is still alive and still no doubt dying. If the audience is lucky, the show ends around midnight, though usually one catastrophe or another pre-empts the late show and our drama continues well into the wee hours of the morning when the doctor is finally afforded, at best, a solid five hour stretch of sleep. By the end of the first season we realize Dr. Lachance is just going through the motions, sleepwalking with open eyes, and there is no sense that the slumbering physician will ever awaken again.
Such was my life at the beginning of 2002, an endless stretch of days lived in the haze of complacency. It was my sixth year practicing medicine and I was nearly 40. The shockwaves of 9/11 had diminished as well as that strong sense of unity that followed immediately after the disaster. People were being all out pricks to each other again, and there was a sort of peace in having someone give you the finger when you cut them off in traffic. I was living in Pittsburgh where I had completed my residency what felt like a lifetime before. My parents had been the ones to suggest moving there. We had been sitting on the front porch of my childhood home in Thomasville, Georgia. The town had come into some fame when Jackie O went there to pick up the pieces after JFK’s death. It was a place to escape to. A place that moved at such a slow pace your problems got ahead of you and kept right on sprinting. My mother had a god awful lime green dress on, my father was still wearing his collar as it was Sunday and for some reason he though a Baptist Minister should look the part the whole livelong Sabbath day. The ice was melting in the lemonade my mother always put too much sugar into, and they were both telling me to go north, to choose a city that was big, but not unfriendly like New York or Boston. They told me I’d get to the seasons change. And it had all sounded quite appealing, like sage advice from the two people I respected more than anyone in this world.
But the truth of the matter was people are unfriendly everywhere and Pittsburgh really just has two seasons: so hot and humid that you have a river of sweat running through the crack of your ass and cold enough to make your dick the size of a Lil’ Smokies cocktail frank. Spring and autumn were about a week long. Take a long nap and you were liable to miss them. Not that I had any time to nap. Or to follow football. Or to date. Or change my underwear. That last part might have had something to do with the lack of dates, of course. That or those aforementioned extra twenty pounds which, alright, might have been more like thirty or forty. Definitely no more than 50. Or 55.
I was unhappy. I was overweight. And I was turning into an insomniac. By the week after New Years’, I found I was only able to fall asleep once every three or four days. I spent nights wide-eyed in front of the illuminated images of celebrities like Dionne Warwick and Eric Estrada pawning telepsychics and miracle abdominal-shaping contraptions. I drank warm milk and then whiskey and then both at the same time, which incidentally, is pretty much the most disgusting combination of tastes known to man apart from tuna fish and Frosted Flakes, though both flavor sensations are handy to keep in mind if your son or daughter drinks bleach and there’s no Ipecac handy. I read Tolstoy and Steinbeck, both authors having lulled me into many a peaceful slumber during Survey of World Literature my freshman year at Rollins College. I even saw a shrink who told me I needed to reduce my stress, then said in the next breath that for a doctor that’s nearly impossible. I didn’t take pills because I couldn’t afford to be groggy the next day at work though in retrospect, it seems I was barely coherent most days anyway.
There’s a certain point where the sleep-deprived mind begins to slip. At a certain point of sensory overload caused from too many nights without rest, a patient can hallucinate, even become psychotic, and this knowledge became a sick obsession. In the quiet of my suburban townhouse, I would strain to listen as if at any moment a faint whisper from a voice in my head might sound. And one night in particular I thought maybe, just maybe, I heard one. I thought it shouted ‘Jack easy does it. Easy does it. Easy does it’ and that was enough to make me spring from my couch, don my jacket and the first pair of shoes that I could summon and head out into the night. As if one can outrun the voices in their head. By the time I had my car headed toward the city, I had realized that my mysterious voice in the head was more likely the breathy moans of my next door neighbors Thomas and Jackie-that’s-it Davenport in flagrante delicto. Despite this discovery, however, I resolved to continue my suburban exodus, deciding that if I was to be awake for the next four hours I may as well catch up on some patients’ charts I had been neglecting.
Upon unlocking the office door, I felt my eyebrow raise not just from the light that was streaming into the waiting room from the long corridor that housed the offices of my partners and myself. The flick of a light switch can easily be forgotten in a hasty rush home after a long day suffered in any workplace, after all, but one does not expect to hear ‘Stayin’ Alive’ played so loudly that it seems Barry Gibbs himself is present in a doctor’s office at 1AM. I felt a pang of indignation in my guts. The audacity of the custodian treating the office like a disco after hours! The nerve! How dare anyone enjoy themselves in this office! How dare anyone enjoy themselves at all when I was so fucking miserable! I stormed down the hallway, my footfall even sounding angry against the flooring, my eyes a narrow glare fixed upon the last office, the empty one at that, where I was certain some sort of after-hours Studio 54 for cleaning personnel and night guards was transpiring, and I was hell bent on stopping it. I hurled myself through the doorway, arms folded over my slight manboobs, scowling as poisonously as possible and conjuring every ounce of sternness I could muster into my rhetorical “What the Hell do you think you’re doing?”
There was no reply for a moment, the only sound audible apart from Barry’s assertion that he was ‘going nowhere’ and his plea for ‘someone’ to help him was the pounding of my heart in my ears, pumping full tilt from the adrenaline anger had released into my bloodstream. It was in this moment that I actually took in the scene before me, a scene devoid of hulking nightwatchmen snorting coke off cleaning ladies asses and drunken maintenance men doing the hustle on top of the desk. There was only a sea of boxes and the lone form of a raven-haired woman amidst them. Her back was to me, but there was something about the line of her shoulders, the way her wavy locks cascaded over the small of her back in the neat confines of a ponytail that signaled the face that was about to turn to me would steal my breath from me like a cat poised at the rail of a slumbering babe’s crib in an old wives’ tale. I felt my cheeks flush. My feet took an involuntary step back into the corridor.
And then she turned and the music didn’t seem as loud though it must have been because she shouted to be heard over it, “Unpacking.” Two chestnut eyes with the depth of the Marianas focused on mine. A smile formed on olive skin, and the woman rose to what I could see past the boxes as bare feet. Slender fingers dusted off well-worn blue jeans, and the woman, every bit as captivating as I had feared, focused on me, her hand skimming a wayward curl away from her delicate features, stowing it behind her ear.
The music stopped though the song hadn’t ended, and I didn’t notice her bending to silence a stereo. I was too focused on my curiosity, and the way the ‘S’ and the ‘D’ on her ‘Stanford’-emblazoned T-shirt swelled outwards from a confluence of chest and cloth made my pants feel tighter than an afternoon of over-indulgence at the Golden Arches could ever hope to. Her head tilted, and she laughed good-naturedly, the sound coming like the sweet melody of chimes. “And what the Hell do you think you’re doing?” she rebuffed, a hand coming to a narrow hip.
I moved to speak. My mouth opened and closed, but no sound came forth, only a prepubescent squeak a la Peter Brady. See Jack make asshole of himself in front of mysterious Mediterranean beauty. I cleared my throat, forced what I’m sure was a goofy smile and shrugged. “Harassing my newest colleague” I managed, scratching the back of my neck as the words found their way from my lips, a nervous habit I had suffered from in my youth but had overcome in college. Or, I suppose, beat it into a twenty year hiatus. “Sorry. I er-just wasn’t expecting to see anyone.” I realized I was nodding my head which made no sense as I was neither answering a question nor agreeing with anyone and then tried to hold completely still as the room slipped into what seemed the onset of an uncomfortable silence.
Just as I was beginning my prayer to St. Foot-in-the-mouth, the patron saint of those who wish the floor would open and swallow them up, she waved her hand as if banishing my apology, starting for me with a long easy stride that made her hips sway in a way only a dead man could ignore. “Obviously,” she teased, arriving in front of me with her hand outstretched.
“I’m Chase LeBrun.” I didn’t manage to shake her hand of my own volition, and she promptly reached out and took my left hand in her right, her chin inclining to maintain eye contact at the closer proximity. “And I swear to you I’m a doctor. Honest to Gaea.” Her laugh rang out again, and then she turned to nod to the array of boxes. “If you want to hang around a bit, I can try to find my diplomas. They’re around here someplace.” Dropping my hand, she turned to survey her belongings, starting off toward them again, but pausing to look over her shoulder and add with a smirk. “They have lovely frames.”
I found myself laughing in spite of myself, and I tried to create a fitting witty remark to reply with, but only came up with a feeble, “I’m sure they do. But I can take your word for it.” Realizing I was staring at her like a hypnosis subject’s eyes following a pocket watch, I looked to the floor, noticing that even her feet were lovely, the small toe of her left one adorned with a thin silver band, the base of a tattoo whose shape was hidden under the hem of her jeans visible on the top of her right foot. Inwardly, I cursed her for being so damn beautiful and myself for being so paralyzed by it.
Stooping to retrieve a book, her neck curved, giving her the line of an Ingres Odalisque. “Maybe some other time then,” she sighed at the brown and orange U-Haul box, standing to her full height once more and crossing to shelves at the opposite end of the room from where I stood. “No one mentioned to me that in addition to seeing patients I would be expected to take a turn patrolling the office for intruders.” Turning back to me, she leaned back against the shelf casually, “Do they let you carry a nightstick or something, Doctor?”
“Lachance,” I added quickly, filling in the blanks for her. “Call me Jack. Please.” I shifted my weight and smiled sheepishly. “Just having some trouble sleeping. Thought I’d come in and see if an evening spent in dictation would be a good remedy.”
She nodded sympathetically, “I see. Jack.” Returning to the box, each step a feat of feline grace, she sank to her knees and rummaged a bit, looking up a moment later with a gleam in her brown orbs that could have been fiery mischief evoked by the devil himself. “If that doesn’t do the trick,” she stood, two mugs in one hand and a decanter of amber-colored liquid in the other, “this shall.”
A conspiratorial wink and then she was at the desk pouring us each a serving. “Booze never works,” I shrugged, stuffing the hands in the pockets of my coat and then suddenly realizing that in my haste to escape the voice from within I had worn my bedroom slippers. “But I won’t pass up a drink. Not from a new partner.”
“Good,” she laughed, coming to me with the glass, which I took. She extended her hand and clinked my glass with hers, saying what sounded like “Sonno” in the semblance of a toast and then downing the contents of her glass.
I followed suit, wondering what the toast had signified, but the fire in my throat soon banished the thought from my head. The stuff was stronger than anything I had ever drank, even in the shadiest of southern barrooms, and a cacophony of coughs erupted from me. When the embarrassing response was ended, I muttered a thank you and realized through watery eyes that she had taken back my glass and had retreated once more to the boxes, the bottle now gone from sight.
“You’ll sleep now. And I’ll keep the noise down.” That said, she returned to her unpacking, and I bade her a gentlemanly goodnight, feeling as if I had been dismissed.
Slightly defeated as it was clear I had not made the slightest impression on this woman that I was already taken with, I entered my office, thoughts of her running through my mind at breakneck pace. So distracted was I that I didn’t notice the yawn as I settled into my chair and turned to the stack of files before me, opening the top one and just staring at it without reading, my thoughts firmly on the room at the end of the hallway, unaware of the winding away of the minutes, time spinning out slowly to the imaginings of the woman contained in its four walls. At some point, those thoughts gave way to dreams, leaving me to wake the next morning with an imprint of the crinkled file present on my cheek.
And I never suffered another sleepless night.
