Bitter Business

left lay Lake Michigan, brooding and unseen in the darkness. To my right, the city was lit up and gloriously peaceful, like a fairy-tale town in one of those glass globes that you shake up. The Wrigley Building, like an enchanted wedding cake, glittered in the distance; the Art Institute with its juxtaposition of old and new buildings, and the Field Museum, solid and magnificent, stood sentinel to my passing.
    It had, I reflected, been a long day filled with Cavanaughs, but it had ended well. I’d enjoyed getting to know Dagny and I was beginning to understand what Daniel Babbage found so satisfying about representing family businesses. He built his relationships with his clients over decades, not deals. Unlike the constantly changing roster of lawyers and executives I usually worked with, Babbage and Jack Cavanaugh went back more than thirty years.
    I looked forward to developing that kind of relationship with Dagny. It was more than the fact that I felt an easy kinship with her. I also got a sense, looking at her, that I was seeing what I might become in ten years’ time. She had taken what life had dealt her—good and bad— and built something with it. She had chosen hard work and happiness as surely as her sister, Lydia, had chosen self-pity and neurosis. At a time when I was beginning to feel the need for my own forced march from the past, Dagny’s accomplishments stood out for me like a beacon.
     
    Parking my car in the alley behind my apartment, I was glad to see the light on in the kitchen, which meant that my roommate was home. Claudia was a surgical resident at the University of Chicago Hospitals. She worked long hours and spent every third night in the on-call room. In addition, she’d lately begun seeing someone, a dermatologist at the same hospital. While I didn’t keep track of her comings and goings, my sense was that recently she’d been out of the apartment more than one night in three.
    Claudia and I had met when we roomed together our freshman year at Bryn Mawr, thrust together by fate in the form of the housing office computer. We knew each other for all of fifteen minutes before we realized that we had absolutely nothing in common.
    Claudia was from New York City. Her parents, both professors at Columbia, had embraced radicalism in the sixties and never let go. Claudia had grown up boycotting grapes, picketing in sympathy with striking union workers, and marching against nuclear power. She didn’t care about being pretty, or popular, or what other people thought. Her entire approach to life seemed to be “who says I can’t?”
    Naturally, we became best friends.
    I let myself in the door and dust balls scattered in every direction. Petra, our Czech cleaning lady, had walked out right after Christmas. Indeed, the first indication I had that she spoke any English was when she told me that she was quitting.
    Claudia was sitting cross-legged on the floor dressed in hospital scrubs. Her long hair, which she invariably wore in one braid long enough to sit on, was casually thrown over her shoulder. She was drinking a beer.
    “Do you ever get the feeling that you just have to change your life?” she demanded without looking up.
    “I don’t know,” I replied, disconcerted by the question. Like most surgeons’, Claudia’s approach to life had always been straightforward and not particularly introspective. “Why do you ask?”
    “I just think all of it is starting to get to me.”
    “All of what?”
    “The work, the hours, being up to my elbows in blood all the time. I get to hospital in the morning before the sun comes up and I leave long after it’s gotten dark. I can’t remember the last time I saw the sun.”
    “It’s hard this time of year. It gets dark so early,” I offered lamely. I’d never known Claudia to be discouraged about her choice of professions, and frankly, I was alarmed.
    “It’s gotten so that the hospital is my whole world. I’m either in the OR, or in the clinic, or crashed in the on-call room.”
    “What about Geoff? Don’t you guys go out when you’re both off?”
    “Yeah, but when’s that? The last three months we’ve been on conflicting schedules—when I’m off he’s on and vice versa. And the few nights we’ve been able to spend together I’m so tired I don’t want him to touch me. Isn’t that terrible? I’ve reached the point where sleep is much more attractive than sex. It doesn’t help any that Geoff’s a dermatologist. Believe