The Beginner's Goodbye Read online

  Somehow, that was easier to visualize than Irene’s curling up with Anne of Green Gables.

  Only Nandina seemed unconvinced. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow,” she said as she headed for the door. “I’m late for an appointment.”

  “It’s an idea, though, don’t you think?” Charles called after her. And then to the rest of us, since Nandina was already gone, “Don’t you think?”

  “I do,” Irene told him. “It’s actually a brilliant idea.”

  “Oh, just Beginner’s Marketing,” he said modestly.

  “Beginner’s Flimflam, is more like it,” I told him.

  “Hey! You said yourself that you saw my point.”

  “Well, yes,” I said.

  I was probably a bit jealous. Irene never said any of my ideas were brilliant.

  I had one more commitment that day before I could leave: a meeting in my office with a Mr. Dupont, who wanted to publish his travel memoirs. The title of his book was Contents May Have Shifted During Flight, which I found promising, but the manuscript itself—at least as near as I could tell from leafing through it while he sat there—consisted of the usual eat-your-heart-out descriptions of breathtaking mountain views he had seen and delicious native dishes he had eaten. None of my concern, of course. We discussed costs, publication schedule, et cetera, and then I told him I was looking forward to doing business with him, and we stood up and shook hands and he left.

  Peggy was the only one remaining in the outer office. She sat with her back to me, typing, and I was about to stop and make some friendly remark about how she shouldn’t work too late when she said, still clicking away, “Don’t forget your cane.”

  That irritated me, so I didn’t stop after all. I said, “Got it,” and walked past her to the coat tree, where I had hung my cane that morning.

  “Twice last week you went home without it,” she said.

  “Yes? And? You admit I somehow managed to hobble back in the next day, even so.”

  Behind me, the computer keys went silent. I turned to find her looking at me with her very wide, very blue eyes.

  “Oh,” she said. “Are we supposed to pretend you don’t use a cane?”

  “No, I … It’s just that in actual fact I actually don’t really need it,” I said. “I could do without it altogether if I had to.”

  “Oh.”

  I felt sort of bad about barking at her, but by that time she had gone back to her typing and so I just said, “Good night, then.”

  “Night,” she said, without looking up.

  It hadn’t escaped my notice that I was very snappish these days. I thought about it as I was driving home. At our office meeting that morning, when Nandina brought us to order by tapping her pen against her coffee mug, I had nearly bitten her head off. “For God’s sake, Nan,” I had said, “do you have to act as if this were the Continental Congress?” But Nandina, after all, could give as good as she got. (“Yes, I do have to,” she’d said, “and you know perfectly well that I hate to be called ‘Nan.’ ”) Peggy, on the other hand … A child might have drawn those eyes of hers, with the lashes rayed around them like sunbeams.

  I parked in front of Nandina’s and thought, I’m turning into one of those grouches that kids are scared to visit on Halloween.

  Nandina’s car was in the driveway, I was sorry to see. I had hoped she wouldn’t be back from her appointment yet. I sighed and heaved myself out from behind the wheel. Maybe I could head straight upstairs to my room—bypass her entirely.

  But when I opened the front door, I heard her talking in the kitchen. Evidently her appointment was here at the house; some workman, perhaps. And then the workman answered her and it was Gil. I recognized his voice even if I couldn’t catch the words. Still in my jacket, I went out to the kitchen. “Hello?” I said.

  Gil was sitting at the table, with his parka draped over his chair back and the sleeves of his flannel shirt rolled up. Nandina stood at the counter, slicing an orange. “Aaron!” she said, turning. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

  “Hi, Gil,” I said, and he raised one baseball-mitt hand and said, “How you doing, Aaron.”

  “Everything okay at the house?” I asked. He didn’t usually come by till later in the evening.

  But he said, “Oh, yes,” and then started patting his shirt pockets. “I did bring that lighting estimate,” he said. “Somewhere here …”

  “I’m making Gil a drink,” Nandina told me. “Would you care for one?”

  “What’s in it?”

  “Orange juice, a kiwi, ginger root, a papaya—”

  “Wow.”

  “—half a cantaloupe, two stalks of celery …”

  She had her juice extractor out on the counter—a complicated piece of equipment I hadn’t seen in use since that time a few years back when she was dating a vegan. It had turned out to be a lot of work, as I recalled. Supposedly you could clean the thing in the dishwasher, but that wasn’t very practical, since the various parts constituted an entire load in themselves.

  Wait.

  When she was dating a …

  I looked from her to Gil, who was sitting there placidly waiting for his drink. I looked again at Nandina.

  She blushed.

  I said, “Oh.”

  5

  How could I have missed so many clues?

  Nandina’s frequent intrusions on my meetings with Gil, for instance. Granted, she had always been a bit nosy, but this was extreme: if Gil and I were conferring in the living room, she just happened to need a book from the living-room bookcase, and then, while she was at it, she had to offer us some refreshments, and when she returned with a tray, she would oh-so-casually linger to contribute her two bits, eventually drifting toward a chair and dropping into it as if without realizing what she was doing.

  And her willingness to drive over to my house on the slightest excuse—to empty my fridge, check on the plastering, verify my choice of caramel or whatever-it-was flooring. Always in the daytime, you notice. Always when Gil was most likely to be there as well.

  And those questions she had asked about his background. Why, she hadn’t been asking out of suspicion! That was personal curiosity. She was like a high-school girl who ferrets out the most trivial details about a boy she has a crush on—his gym schedule and his homeroom number. And, exactly like a high-school girl, she seized on every opportunity to speak his name. “Gilead,” she had said, and her spoon had halted in the saucepan.

  Plus, she never changed into a housecoat anymore. I hadn’t seen her in a housecoat in weeks.

  But did Gil return her affections?

  I felt a twinge that was almost a pain. I couldn’t bear it if I were forced to pity her.

  Consider this, though: Gil really hadn’t needed to meet with me as often as he did. More than once I had told him that the work appeared to be going fine, and he should just let me know the next time he had any issues to discuss. It seemed he constantly had issues. And at every meeting he was more talkative; more extraneous subjects arose; it seemed more like a conversation with a friend. Here I’d been flattering myself that it was me he was warming to! I’d sniffed the air when he’d walked in recently, caught the scent of Old Spice, and said, “Somebody’s got plans for the evening,” expecting we might embark on a little chitchat about his social life. But he had merely turned red, and I had wondered if I’d overstepped—assumed too quickly that we were more than employer-employee.

  Besides which, how come he had told her, but not me, that he’d be coming unusually early that evening?

  I didn’t say anything direct to either one of them. I accepted a glass of Nandina’s juice, sat talking with them a few minutes, let Gil present his report on that day’s work. But underneath, I was extremely alert, and I saw how Nandina continued to hang around even though his report concerned some antiquated wiring they’d discovered in my living-room wall—not an interesting topic, and certainly not one that called for her opinion. I saw how their hands happened to brush when
he passed her his empty glass. How she leaned against the doorframe and tipped her head alluringly as we were seeing him out at the end of the meeting.

  Then she hurried back to the kitchen to start supper preparations, not giving me so much as a glance, allowing me no chance to question her.

  I didn’t pursue it, of course. She was a fully grown woman. She had a right to her privacy.

  Everything I knew about Gil so far had made me like him. He seemed to be a good man—honest, reliable, skilled, kindhearted. He may not have finished college, but he was clearly intelligent, and I imagined that he and Nandina could operate on a more or less equal footing. So I had no objections.

  But I couldn’t help feeling, oh, a bit wistful as I watched them together over the next couple of weeks.

  It was April, by then—early spring. Although the weather was still coolish, the daffodils were in full bloom and the trees were starting to flower. Gil and Nandina began to go out openly on what I guess you might call dates. The first date, shortly after the juicer episode, Nandina informed me about obliquely by announcing that she wouldn’t be cooking supper the following evening. Gil had suggested they try this new café in Hampden, she said. I said, “Oh, okay, maybe I’ll reheat some of that beef stew”—as if food were really the issue here. The next evening, I sat reading the newspaper on the couch, and when Gil rang the doorbell I let Nandina answer. He stepped into the living room to say, “Hey there, Aaron,” and I raised my head and said, “How you doing, Gil.” He looked sheepish but determined, his face gleaming from a recent shave and his short-sleeved shirt carefully pressed. How long had he been coming to this house in clothes too fresh to have been that day’s work clothes? Almost from the start of our dealings together, I realized. So he may have felt attracted to Nandina all along.

  I was genuinely glad for them, I swear. And yet, after they had taken their leave, when I turned in my seat to watch them through the front window, I felt stabbed to the heart by the sight of their two figures walking side by side toward Gil’s pickup. They were almost touching but not quite; there was perhaps an inch or two of empty space between them, and you could tell somehow that both of them were very conscious of this space—acutely conscious, electrically conscious. I thought of a moment early in my acquaintance with Dorothy, when she had offered to show me around her workplace. She stood up and went to her office door, and I jumped to my feet to follow, reaching past her and over her head to pull the door farther open. I guess it must have confused her. She stepped back. For an instant she was standing under the shelter of my arm, and although there was not one single point of contact between us, I felt I was surrounding her with an invisible layer of warmth and protection.

  Even that early, I loved her.

  We met in March of 1996, during The Beginner’s Cancer. Byron Worth, M.D., was our writer—an internist who had already supplied the material for The Beginner’s Childbirth and The Beginner’s Heart Attack. These books were not particularly technical, you understand. They were more on the order of household-hint collections: how to sleep comfortably in the advanced stages of pregnancy, how to order heart-healthfully in restaurants. For the cancer book Dr. Worth had already turned in the chemo section, which included some delicious-sounding recipes for calorie-rich smoothies, but in radiology he fell short, by his own admission. He said we probably needed to consult a specialist. And that’s how I came to make an appointment with Dr. Dorothy Rosales, who had treated Charles’s father-in-law after his thyroid surgery.

  She was wearing a white coat so crisp that it could have stood on its own, but her trousers were creased and rumpled, in part because they were too long for her. They buckled over the insteps of her cloddish shoes and they trailed the ground at her heels. This made her seem even shorter than she actually was, and wider. She was standing by a bookshelf when her receptionist showed me into her office. She was consulting some large, thick volume, and since her glasses were meant for distance she had pushed them up onto her forehead, which gave her a peculiar, quadruple-eyed aspect that caused me to start grinning the instant I saw her. But even in that first glance, I liked her broad, tan face and her tranquil expression. I congratulated myself for perceiving that her unbecomingly chopped hair was—as they say—as black as a raven’s wing.

  I said, “Dr. Rosales?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Aaron Woolcott. I called you about consulting on our book project.”

  “Yes, I know,” she said.

  This threw me off my stride for a moment. I hesitated, and then I held out my hand. “It’s good to meet you,” I said.

  Her own hand was warm and cushioned but rough-skinned. She shook mine efficiently and then stepped back to lower her glasses to their proper position. “What’s wrong with your arm?” she asked me.

  It’s true that when I extend my arm to shake hands, I tend to aid it slightly by supporting my elbow with my good hand. But most people don’t catch that, or at least if they do they don’t comment. I said, “Oh, just a childhood illness.”

  “Huh,” she said. “Well, have a seat.”

  I sat down in a molded plastic chair in front of her desk. There was another chair next to it. I imagined that two people generally came for the initial consultation—a married couple, or a grown son or daughter with an aged parent. This office must have seen some very distraught visitors. But Dr. Rosales, settling behind her desk now in a deliberate, unhurried way, would have made them feel instantly reassured. She placed her palms together and said, “I’m not certain what you want of me.”

  “Well, no actual writing,” I told her. “We have an internist doing that for us, Dr. Byron Worth.”

  I paused, giving her time to react if she recognized the name. Instead, she just went on watching me. Her eyes were pure black through and through, without a hint of any other colors behind them. For the first time it crossed my mind that she might be a foreigner; I mean more foreign than a mere descendant of someone Hispanic.

  “Dr. Worth is trying to give our readers a few tips for handling the day-to-day obstacles confronted by the cancer patient,” I said. “He’s discussed the emotional issues, the doctor-patient transactions, the practical aspects of various treatment options … except for radiation, which he hasn’t had any experience with. He suggested that an oncology radiologist might walk us through that—tell us what the patient can expect, in the most concrete terms.”

  “I see,” she said.

  Silence.

  “Of course we would pay you for your time, and acknowledge your assistance in the preface.”

  I considered going on to tell her that, after The Beginner’s Childbirth, a doula who’d been mentioned by name had tripled her client load. But I wasn’t sure that physicians actively sought out business in quite the same way. Especially this physician. She seemed to need nothing. She seemed entire in herself.

  She seemed fascinating.

  “Say,” I said. “It’s almost noon. May I take you out to lunch so that we can discuss this further?”

  “I’m not hungry,” she said.

  “Uh …”

  “What,” she said, “you just want to know the process? But the process is different for each type of tumor. For each individual patient, even.”

  “Oh, well, we wouldn’t have to go into great detail,” I told her. “Nothing excessively medical, ha ha.”

  I was acting like an idiot. Dr. Rosales was sitting back and watching me. I started racking my brain for some sample questions, but none came to mind. Supposedly I was there just to make the arrangements. Then Dr. Worth would take over.

  No way was I going to let him take over Dorothy Rosales.

  “All right,” I said, “here’s a plan. I will make up a written list this very afternoon of what we need to know. Then, before you decide either way, you could look through it. Maybe over dinner; I could buy you dinner. Unless … you have a husband to get home to?”

  “No.”

  “Dinner at the Old Bay,” I said. I
had to struggle to keep the happiness out of my voice. I’d already noticed that she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, but nowadays that didn’t mean much. “As soon as you get off work tonight.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “Why does this have to involve food?”

  “Well … you’d need to eat anyway, right?”

  “Right,” she said, and she looked relieved. I could tell this was the kind of logic that appealed to her. “Fine, Mr.—”

  “Woolcott. Aaron.”

  “Where is this Old Bay place?”

  “Oh, I can drive you there. I’ll swing by and pick you up.”

  “Never mind,” she said. “Our lot has a punch-clock.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Our parking lot. We pay by the hour. No point forking over any more money than I have to.”

  “Oh.”

  She stood up, and I stood, too. “I won’t be finished here till seven,” she told me.

  “That’s okay! I’ll reserve a table for half past. The restaurant is only about fifteen minutes from here.”

  “In that case, a quarter past would appear to be more appropriate,” she said.

  “Fine,” I said. “A quarter past.”

  I took a business card from my billfold and wrote down the Old Bay’s address. As a rule I would have written it on the blank side of the card, but this time I chose the front. I wanted her to become familiar with my name. I wanted her to start calling me “Aaron.”

  But all she said when we parted was, “Goodbye, then.” She didn’t use any form of my name. And she didn’t bother seeing me out.

  I could tell she must not be from Baltimore, because anyone from Baltimore would have known the Old Bay. That was where all our parents used to eat. It was old-fashioned in both good ways and bad. (The crab soup, for instance, was the real thing, but the waiters were in their eighties and the atmosphere was gloomy and dank.) I had chosen it for geographical reasons, since it wasn’t far from Dorothy’s office, but also I wanted a place that was not too businesslike, not too efficient. I wanted her to start thinking of me in a more, so to speak, social light.