The answer was no. I had my career, or at least the start of one. It was as close to insurrection as I ever came.
“Well,” she said, “There’s no point in quitting now. Finish what you started.”
Maeve agreed to keep my books and handle the tax exchange codes while I went back to Albert Einstein with less than six months on the clock. I didn’t regret it. Those final months were the only part of my medical training I ever enjoyed, knowing that I was just about to walk out the door. I bought two brownstones in foreclosure, one for $1,900 and another for $2,300. They were disasters. They were mine.
Three weeks later I went to Immaculate Conception back in Jenkintown to attend the funeral of Mr. Martin, my high school basketball coach. Non–small cell lung cancer at the age of fifty, having never smoked a day in his life. Mr. Martin had been good to me in those storm-tossed days after my father’s death, and I remembered his wife, who’d sat in the bleachers for all of the games and cheered the team on, a mother to us all. There was a reception afterwards in the church basement and when I saw a girl in a black dress with her blond hair neatly pinned, I walked over and touched her shoulder. As soon as Celeste turned around I remembered every single thing I’d ever liked about her. There were no recriminations, no distance. I leaned down to kiss her cheek and she squeezed my hand, the way she might have done had it always been our intention to meet there in the basement after the funeral. Celeste had been a friend of the Martins’ daughter, a detail I’d either forgotten or had never known.
I’d learned a lot about Celeste in the years she’d been gone: I came to see her willingness to not be a distraction as something that took effort. I didn’t even know to be grateful for it until I was with other women who wanted to read me articles from the paper in the morning while I was studying, or read me their horoscope, or my horoscope, or explain their feelings to me while crying over the fact that I had never explained my feelings to them. Celeste, on the other hand, would sink into her giant British novel and stay there. She didn’t slam the plates trying to get my attention, or walk on her toes to show how thoughtful she was about not making any noise. She would peel a peach and cut it up in a dish, or make me a sandwich and leave it on the table without comment the way Sandy and Jocelyn used to do. Celeste had been so adept at making me her job that I hadn’t seen her doing it. It wasn’t until after she left that I realized she’d stayed those Sunday nights because Sunday was when she washed the sheets and did the rest of the laundry, made the bed, then got back in it.
She and I picked up where we’d left off, or picked up in that better place where we’d been a couple of months before the ending. She was living back at her parents’ house in Rydal. She taught reading at the public grade school. She said she missed the city. Pretty soon she was taking the train on Friday nights and going home on Sunday, the way I had always wanted her to. She worked on her lesson plans while I made rounds at the hospital. If her parents questioned the morality of the arrangement, they never said a word. Celeste was closing the deal, and they were going to let her do it her own way.
In all the years I’d known her, going back to that first train ride and the chemistry book, I’d never told Celeste anything about my plans. She knew I didn’t have parents without having been told the details of what that meant. She didn’t know about Andrea or the trust, or that we had ever lived in the Dutch House. She didn’t know that I had bought two parking lots and sold them to buy a building, or that I would never practice medicine. I hadn’t even made a conscious decision to exclude her from this information, only that I didn’t make a habit of talking about my life. The residency program was almost over and the rest of my classmates had finished their interviews, accepted their offers, and put deposits on moving vans. Celeste, who prided herself on not asking too many questions, was left to wonder where I was going and whether or not she would be coming with me. I could see her pressing herself down, remembering what had happened the last time she’d presented an ultimatum. I knew that the uncertainty was terrifying for her and still, I made love to her and ate the dinners she’d prepared and put off talking to her for as long as I could, because it was easier.
In the end, of course, I told her everything. There was no such thing as jumping into a lake partway. One explanation led to another and soon we were falling back through time: my mother, my father, my sister, the house and Andrea and the girls and the trust. She took it all in, and as the stories of the past unfolded she had nothing but sympathy for me. Celeste wasn’t wondering why I had taken so long to tell her about my life, she took the fact that I was telling her now as proof of my love. I put my hand on her thigh and she crossed her other leg over it, securing me to her. The only part that was incomprehensible to her was the least interesting detail in the entire saga: I wasn’t going to be a doctor.
“But how could you go through all that training if you aren’t going to use it?” We were sitting on a bench looking out across the Hudson River. We were both wearing T-shirts in late April. “All that education. All the money.”
“That was the point,” I said.
“You didn’t want to go to medical school. Fine. You got there in your own way. But you’re a doctor now. You have to at least give it a try.”
I shook my head. There was a tugboat not too far from us pushing an enormous barge and I took a moment to revel in the physics. “I’m not going to be a doctor.”
“You haven’t even done it yet. You can’t quit doing something you haven’t started.”
I was still watching the river. “That’s what residency is. You’re practicing medicine.”
“Then what are you going to do with your life?”
Everything in me wanted to turn the question back on her, but I didn’t. “Real estate and development. I own three buildings.”
“You’re a doctor and you’re going to sell real estate?”
There was no place for Celeste to cast her vote in the matter of my future. “It’s a little bit more than that.” I could hear the peaceful condescension in my voice. She refused to grasp the simplest part of what I was saying.
“It’s such a waste,” she said, her eyes bright with anger. “I don’t know how you can live with it, really. You took someone’s spot in the program, do you ever think about that? Someone who wanted to be a doctor.”
“Trust me, whoever that person was, he didn’t want to be a doctor either. I did that guy a favor.”
The problem wasn’t mine, after all, it was hers. Celeste had her heart set on marrying a doctor.
Maeve and I had been playing tennis over at the high school when she broke up the game after a single crack of lightning. I had an aluminum racquet and she said she wasn’t about to watch me get electrocuted during a serve, so we got in the car and drove to the Dutch House, just to check on things before dark. The summer was essentially over and soon it would be time for me to go back for my second year at Choate. We were both miserable about it, each in our own way.
“I remember the very first time I saw this house,” Maeve said, straight out of nowhere. The felted sky hung over us, waiting to split apart.
“You do not. You were just a baby then.”
She cranked down the window of the Volkswagen. “I was almost six. You remember things from when you were six. I’ll tell you what, you would’ve remembered coming here.”
She was right, of course. I had remembered my life very clearly ever since Fluffy cracked me open with the spoon. “So what happened?”
“Dad borrowed some guy’s car and he drove us up from Philadelphia. It must have been a Saturday, either that or he’d taken off from work.” Maeve stopped and looked through the linden trees, trying to put herself back there. In the summer you really couldn’t see anything, the leaves were so thick. “Coming up the driveway, the house was shocking. That’s the only word for it. I mean, it’s second nature to you, you were born here. You probably grew up thinking everyone lived in a house like this.”