Final Option

we look worse than ninety percent of the patients. Here, look at mine.” She scrabbled through the dirty laundry on her bed until she came up with her hospital I.D.
    I looked at the picture. It bore a passing resemblance to my roommate, but this woman had rosy cheeks, wore mascara, and had the light of mischief in her eyes. Her hair, dark and shiny, hung loose over her shoulders. The Claudia I lived with had an ashen face, circles under her eyes, and a look of weary defiance. I had never once seen her wear her hair down. It was always in the long braid that hung down her back, out of the way.
    “So?” I replied, handing the I.D. back to her.
    “So when I got to thinking about what my life is like, I got really depressed. So depressed, in fact, that when this dermatologist I’d met once on a consult asked me to go to dinner with him tonight, I said yes.”
    “I’m glad you’re going out,” I said. “It’ll do you some good to have some fun.”
    “You don’t understand. I don’t want to go out. That’s a loop I don’t want to be caught up in.”
    “What are you talking about? What’s wrong with going on a date?”
    “You don’t understand. I’m a surgeon. Surgery is not a ‘let’s try this for a couple of days and see if it works’ specialty. Surgery is full of absolutes. You either fix it, or you don’t. In the operating room nobody cares if you’re nice or compassionate or nurturing. You either can do the work or you can’t, and the quality of that work is open to the scrutiny and judgment of the entire surgical team. There’s no fudging. You are as good as your work. Period. I am a good surgeon, and I make a real effort to make sure that the people I work with think of me as a surgeon first and a woman second. If it gets around that I went out with a dermatologist I’ll never hear the end of it. They’ll be putting Clearasil and condoms in my locker in the surgeon’s changing room....”
    “It’s not fair to expect yourself to deny all the other parts of your personality for your work,” I protested.
    “I’m supposed to listen to advice on this from you?” Claudia challenged.
    “What’s that supposed to mean? I go out.”
    “Yeah. His secretary calls your secretary. You and Stephen see each other because you’re both too busy to find somebody else. If Stephen weren’t around, what would you do? Call Bloomingdales and have them send you a man?”
    “Ouch, that hurt,” I said. “Though I do know that I would draw the line at having them send me a dermatologist.”
    I ducked just as Claudia’s cowboy boot whizzed past my ear.
     

CHAPTER 19
     
    Another Sunday morning. The New York Times lay unread on the coffee table, still sheathed in blue plastic. That was two in a row Bart Hexter owed me. Hard to believe he’d only been dead two Sundays. The sun was out. so I lengthened my normal Sunday run down the lakefront to the Shedd Aquarium. I was still feeling wiped from my dinner at Charlie Canter’s with the Swedish chemist and his wife.
    It had been a memorable evening. The chemist was urbane and charming. His wife, no doubt a lovely woman in her own language, was unfortunately possessed of not a single word of English. The minute we were shown to our table, the two men launched into an intense and technical discussion of the next generation of beta blockers and their application in the treatment of several neurologic disorders. His wife and I smiled inanely at each other for three hours.
    Worse, I have always found Charlie Canter’s to be totally pretentious. For one thing, the food is so much more fun to read about than it is to actually eat. For dinner I ordered a pork tenderloin wrapped in soft saffron noodles and stuffed with artichokes, roasted red peppers, sauced with an herb coulis and garnished with oyster mushrooms. It sounded wonderful—an adventure for the palate. The only trouble was that I should have ordered two of them. Maybe I really am a pig—or a prig. But I think there’s something wrong with dropping close to a hundred dollars (without wine) for one meal and ending up hungry.
    As I ran, I couldn’t help but wonder how Claudia’s evening with the dermatologist had gone. I found that my roommate’s comments about my relationship with Stephen had also hit a nerve. Together Stephen and I made the kind of ‘power couple’ that made for good magazine copy. In bed we made fireworks. For many people that would be enough. But I had once had more, and I