“Some of it is,” I agree.
“I can go with you if you need some help. What kind of case? A drowning?” His vivid blue eyes are fastened to me. “I remind you I’m a certified scuba diver, too. We can buddy dive. The visibility in the harbor is bound to be quite bad, the water cold as hell. You shouldn’t be alone. Marino doesn’t dive. I’m happy to go.”
“I’m not sure at the moment what we’ve got, but I think we can handle it,” I reply. “I’ll trust you to manage morning rounds and oversee the assigning of cases to the other docs. That would be much appreciated.”
“Of course. When you’ve got a moment, can we talk about the on-call schedule or lack of one?”
He stares at me as I open the door that leads into the bay, his keen face so much like his aunt’s that I find it unsettling. Or maybe it’s the way he looks at me, the way he helps himself to me and how it makes me feel and the difficulties it has caused.
“It’s a bit of a problem.” He’s saying Marino is, and maybe saying something else.
It is the something else I fear, and I’m reminded of Vienna after the service, when Luke guided Benton and me along the graceful tree-lined paths of the Zentralfriedhof to show us the graves of Brahms and Beethoven and Strauss. Benton got palpably unhappy. I could feel his upset like sleet stinging my face.
“I understand, and plan to take it up with him.” I promise Luke I will deal with the electronic calendar problem, that if need be I’ll have Bryce take it over, and while I’m saying all this I’m remembering what happened.
It was awful. Benton’s visible displeasure was triggered by nothing more than Luke’s ability to speak perfect English and German and serve as a thoughtful, affectionate guide on a very sad occasion, the burial of his aunt, whom I dearly loved. But Luke, her only nephew, was gracious and brave and unflappably charming, and as we stopped to look at the monument to Mozart, where people had placed candles and flowers on its marble steps, Luke hooked his arm around me to thank me for coming to Vienna for the funeral of Anna, his only aunt and someone I could never forget.
That was all, a hug that pulled me close for a tender moment. But it was enough. When Benton and I returned to our hotel near the Ringstrasse, we drank and didn’t eat, and we argued.
“Where is your respect?” my FBI husband began to interrogate me, and I knew what he meant, but I wouldn’t own up to it. “You really don’t see it, do you, Kay?” He paced the room furiously as he opened another bottle of champagne. “Things start this way, you know.” He wouldn’t look at me. “The nephew of a friend, and you treat him like family and give him a job and next thing . . . ?” He drank half a glass of champagne in one swallow. “He’s not Lucy. You’re projecting as if you’re his only aunt the way Anna was his only aunt, and somehow that makes you his de facto mother the same way you’re Lucy’s de facto mother, and next thing . . . ?”
“Next thing what, Benton? I go to bed with him? That’s the logical conclusion if I mentor people and am their de facto mother?” I didn’t add that I don’t sleep with my niece, either.
“You want him. You want someone younger. It happens as we get older, it always does, because we hold on to vitality, fight for it and want it back. That’s the problem; it will always be a problem and gets only worse. And young men want you because you’re a trophy.”
“I’ve never thought of myself as a trophy.”
“And maybe you’re bored.”
“I’ve never been bored with you, Benton.”
“I didn’t say with me,” he said.
I walk through the beige epoxy-painted bay, the size of a small hangar, and it crosses my mind as it has a number of times this past week that I don’t feel I’m bored with my job or my life, and not with Benton, never with him. It’s not possible to be bored with such a complex elegant man, whom I’ve always found strikingly compelling and impossible to own, a part of him inaccessible no matter how intimate we could ever be.
But it is true that I notice other attractive human beings, and certainly I notice them noticing me, and since I’m not as young as I was, maybe noticing has become more important. But it’s simply not true that I don’t have insight about it, I certainly do, am insightful enough to know that it’s damn harder for women. It’s hard in ways men will never understand, and I hate being reminded of our fight and how it ended, which was with Benton’s assertion that I’m not honest with myself.
It occurs to me that the person I could be completely honest with is the one who inadvertently caused the problem, Anna Zenner, my confidante of old, who used to tell me stories of her nephew, Luka, or Luke, as the rest of us know him. He left Austria for public school in England, then Oxford, and after that King’s College London School of Medicine, and eventually made his way to America, where he completed his forensic pathology residency at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore, one of the finest facilities anywhere. He came highly recommended and had many prestigious job offers, and I’ve had no trouble with him and can’t see why anyone would question his credentials or feel I hired him as a favor.
The roll-up bay door is retracted, and through the concrete space and out the big square opening is the tarmac and the clean blue sky. Cars and CFC vehicles, all of them white, shine in the fall morning light, and enclosing the lot is the black PVC-coated anti-climb fence, and over the top of it, rising above my titanium-skinned building on two sides, are brick-and-glass MIT labs with radar dishes and antennas on the roofs. To the west is Harvard and its divinity school near my house, which of course I can’t make out above the barricade of dense dark fencing that keeps the world away from those I take care of, my patients, all of them dead.
I emerge onto the tarmac as a white Tahoe rumbles toward me. The air is cool and clear like glass, and I pull on my jacket, grateful that Bryce chose my attire for the day. I’m reminded of how unexpected it is that I’ve grown accustomed to a chief of staff who cares about my wardrobe. I’ve come to like what at first I resisted, although his attending to me encourages forgetfulness on my part, a complete disinterest in relatively unimportant details he can easily manage or fix. But he was right, I will need the jacket because it will be cold on the boat and there’s a very good chance I will get wet. If anyone has to go into the water, it will be me. I’m already convinced of that.
I will insist on seeing for myself exactly what we’re dealing with and making sure the death is managed the way it should be, precisely and respectfully, beyond reproach and in anticipation of any legal accusations, because there are always those. Marino can help me or not, but he’s no diver and doesn’t do well in a wetsuit or a drysuit, says they make him feel as if he’s suffocating, and he isn’t much of a swimmer. He can stay on the boat, and I will take care of things on my own. I’m not going to squabble with him or anyone. I’ve had my fill of squabbling and worrying about the slightest thing that can be misinterpreted. As if I would have an affair with Anna Zenner’s nephew, who, even if I were single, would be far more compatible with Lucy, were she inclined that way.
I’m not Luke’s de facto mother, and what continues to cut me to the bone about Benton’s remark is the suggestion that I’m old.
Old like a Eurostile font evocative of a past era, the fifties and sixties, which I scarcely can recall and don’t want to believe I’m from.
I feel Benton’s implication like an internal injury that chronically smarts, a depressing symptom of being damaged and not knowing it until he spoke those angry words to me in Vienna. I’ve perceived myself differently since he said it, and I’m not sure I can get over the deeper wounding it has done.