The Pursuit of Alice Thrift

I thanked him for what I thought was a tribute to my discretion. I said, “Not only am I uninterested in your social life, but I wouldn’t recognize a grapevine if I were harvesting grapes from it.”

“Excellent,” said Leo.

We followed the ground rules seamlessly: rent and utilities split down the middle; food separate, with both of us having the right to throw away leftovers growing mold spores. A chore wheel was posted on the refrigerator and rotated weekly. Suggested courtesy guidelines: seven minutes for showers; baths up to twenty minutes; no music after ten P.M. No dirty dishes left in the sink. Kitchen trash should be emptied and not allowed to overflow or smell. And after six months, he’d let me know if he thought our arrangement was amenable.

WHEN WE INTERSECTED at the hospital, Leo introduced me cheerfully. It was especially nice if he was with a smart little girl patient—just the three of us on an elevator—and then he’d say, “I’d like you to meet my friend Alice. She’s a doctor. In fact, she’s a surgeon. Isn’t that a great thing to be?”

If only I could have smiled like a good role model and said something inspiring. If only I could have looked approachable enough to prompt one dad in my department to ask me to join him and his sixth-grader for lunch on Take Your Daughter to Work Day.

And did I mention that every female nurse in the hospital knew Leo? He was a friend to all—registered, practical, aide, candy striper—regardless of what floor or service or shift they worked on. If I were dispensing advice to men on how to meet women, how to be popular without having to be a matinee idol or ever leaving your workplace, I’d advise them to follow in Leo’s footsteps: Get a job in a teaching hospital. Allude often to your training in the medical corps of the U.S. Army. Wear scrubs. Smile often and easily. Attach a miniature stuffed koala bear to your stethoscope.

I myself was short of friends when I moved here for my residency. Apparently, if I believed my own reputation, I was not “fun.” Sometimes on Monday mornings in medical school I’d hear references to weekend parties, kegs, harbor cruises, but I didn’t experience them firsthand. When I decided to go into surgery, my lab partners—so-called people persons and future family practitioners—said, “How perfect.”

I graduated second in my class, which I thought was a good prognostic of how I’d perform as a resident, but apparently it was not. I had some trouble bridging the gap between the patient’s surgical site—that disembodied, exposed rectangle of skin awaiting a scalpel—and the patient’s mind, soul, and figurative heart. I thought it was helpful to disassociate the two, to forget I was cutting into a live human being; to pretend it was dead, formaldehyded Violet or Buster, my two cadavers from Gross Anatomy.

How had I gotten so appallingly ineffective with actual people? I thought I had a nice way about me—I was particularly adept at delivering good-news bulletins to relatives in the waiting room, but even that drew criticism. Once in a while, a next of kin complained that the frown on my face as I walked into the lounge scared him or her to death. But wasn’t it mere concentration? It was never enough—my excellent knowledge of anatomy, my openings and my closings, my long hours. What people want, I swear, is a doctor with the disposition of a Montessori teacher.

None of it is easy. Male patients are not thrilled to see you, especially in urology and vascular. Athletes want their bad knees, shoulders, ankles, and elbows fixed by doctors who look like them—Nordic, buff, handsome, confident, certainly not female. Everyone experienced in trauma works around and over you in the ER—faster, surer, nimbler, louder. I began to think that high marks in medical school were an indicator of nothing, and that a few parties along the way might have honed my socialization skills more than long nights at Countway Library.

I was the medical equivalent of the kid picked last for the kickball team: Honor roll doesn’t matter; sex, race, or national origin doesn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was if you could kick a ball over the head of the second baseperson and get someone else home.

AT THE SIX – MONTH juncture, during one of our rare synchronized breakfasts, it was I who asked Leo if he’d like to find a more compatible roommate.

“In what sense?”

“More fun. More charismatic.”

“Hey,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

I said, “I think you’re too polite to tell me that it’s not working out. Everything is fine on the surface, but maybe you could find someone more suitable. You know—maybe we’re like those married couples who never raise their voices, but all the same aren’t happy.”

“I’m happy,” said Leo. “I think this is working out fine.” Then he asked if it was me—was I the discontented one looking for an out?

“Just the opposite,” I said. And then I tried to define my position, that I was proud to be his roommate because of the high esteem if not popularity he enjoyed at the hospital; proud to have my name on his answering machine’s outgoing message.

Instead of looking pleased he said, “But you have to be content inside your own skin.”

I said that wasn’t possible at this juncture. Work was all-consuming, especially while I was so bad at it.

“You’ll get better. Interns, by definition, are here to learn.”

“I may have made a terrible mistake,” I told him.

His expression grew alarmed: One of his neonates? One of his preemies? “When?” he asked.

“I don’t mean a specific terrible mistake. I meant, it was a mistake to think that good grades were transferable to the actual practice of medicine. I don’t have the aptitude in any of the areas they evaluate us in.”

Leo thought for a minute, then said, “You work hard. You haven’t ever taken a sick day, as far as I know. And you haven’t had any major goof-ups, correct?”

“No one would leave me alone long enough in the OR to take out the wrong organ or amputate the wrong limb,” I said.

“Do you want me to talk to someone?” he asked.

“Like who?”

“I know people,” he said. “I could feel them out for how you’re doing and where you stand. Maybe you’re worried about nothing.”

I said I knew how I was doing, and besides, I needed the truth more than I needed the anesthetic tact they would administer out of friendship to him.

Leo said he hadn’t always been this comfortable on the ward. I should have seen him on his first medevac flight. Boy, was that a scary couple of hours. And not much hand-holding for trainees.

I said I recognized that in a million years, or even if I spent a million dollars on therapy, I’d never have his personality, his good humor, his unflappability, or that way he could walk into a patient’s room and say just the right breezy thing to make his or her pain or nausea or approaching syringe recede.

“You notice all that?” he asked.

“I hear about it. It’s common knowledge. I think some of the pediatric residents steal your lines. And your patients, let’s face it, worship you. Babies, toddlers, girls, boys. Not to mention their mothers.”

Have I mentioned that Leo is handsome? Perhaps not when you break it down, feature by feature, and factor in some patches of facial seborrhea. But altogether it’s a successful package, with its curly blond hair, well-defined mouth, and pale blue eyes that look like they’ve just finished having a good laugh. He was probably a gawky teenager, and I do see vestiges of acne scars on his red face, but overall he bears that winning combination of an elfin face on a tall, broad-shouldered man.

He said then that his late father thought he was wasting those very talents I was referring to, the gift of gab, the ability to walk into a room and—pardon the bragging—win friends and influence people. “So you know what that means, right? To a Boston-Irish father?”

I shook my head.

“State senator or state rep with an eye to an eventual run for the governor’s office.”

“Is that what you’d like?”

“Absolutely not,” said Leo. “He didn’t like telling people that his son was a nurse. He used to say ‘orderly’ because he thought it sounded manlier, but I put a stop to that. He changed it to, ‘Leo trained in the army medical corps and works at a Harvard hospital. No, not married, but he dates a different nurse every night.’”

I said, “It’s not so much your gift of gab. It’s bigger than that. It’s a quality of mercy combined with your ability to make a joke.”

Leo smiled and said that was a nice compliment. Very nice. Thanks. Quality of mercy—wow.

“Maybe some of it will rub off on me,” I added.

He said—another tribute to his diplomacy—“You have other strengths, Alice.”

“Name one.”

“Brains, for starters. I mean, let’s say there was an entire hospital staffed by smiling volunteers, happy LPNs, and class clowns like me. It would certainly lose its state certification in a hurry.”

I said that was a ridiculous argument, but thank you.

“What exactly are you worried about?” he asked. “Your private life or your professional life?”

“Professional,” I said. “I don’t know if I’ll be invited back for a second year. And then what? I’ll have to start over again. And what would that be? Who’s going to want a resident that was asked to leave?”

“Does that happen?”