The Scenic Route (13 page)

“So has there been any talk about a ring?” Lila asked.

“That's not on my agenda,” Naomi said.

“Well, it should be, because men don't move unless there's a fire in the belfry.” Her mother had this habit of saying things that sounded like common knowledge but were in fact nonsensical statements she made up on the spur of the moment.

“Carlos isn't really looking to get married,” Naomi said.

“Neither was your father. It's amazing what a pregnancy can do.” Her mother had always been regrettably straightforward about the order of events surrounding Naomi's birth.

“You want me to get pregnant to get Carlos to marry me?”

“No, I want you to get pregnant so I can have grandchildren. I'm just pointing out that sometimes people need a little extra motivation.”

“Maybe I'm the one who needs extra motivation. Maybe I'm not convinced that Carlos is the right man for me.”

Lila took Naomi's hand in hers. “Can I give you some advice?”

“No.”

“Don't be a dope.” This was advice? “There isn't much I can give you in this world, but by the grace of God you have my looks. You have your father's eyesight and stubbornness. But you have my looks. And you can do so much more with them than I did.”

“They're not some kind of currency,” Naomi said with distaste.

“Oh, honey, that's exactly what they are. I know it's not politically correct to say so. But it's true. A pretty girl gets things that other people don't. So get yourself those things while you can. Because it doesn't last long.”

This was why Naomi lived an ocean away from her mother. “Have you ever considered that everything you think about the world is wrong?”

“Every day.”

“I'm serious.”

“Yesterday I had dinner with an African man who
shtups
my son,” Lila said, her voice getting brittle. “Everything I think about the world is upside-down. But what am I going to do? Give up? Cry? I'm a fighter. Like my mother was. And like I taught you to be.”

“Not everything has to be a fight,” Naomi said.

“If your grandmother thought like that, she'd have ended up in a German oven, and then you wouldn't have anything to worry about.”

Naomi felt a familiar surge of guilt and rage. “Why do you say things like that?”

“Because it's the truth. And I always tell my children the truth.”

“Well, stop!” Naomi protested, and Lila did in fact stop. Naomi put her hand to her head, wondering if she'd also inherited her mother's migraines. “You can't barge into my life and presume to know ‘the truth' about my relationship.”

“I didn't barge in,” Lila sniffed. “I was invited.”

“You can't possibly know if Carlos and I belong together. I don't even know. And I'm the one who lives with him.” Naomi realized she was sounding shrill, which was not the way to get through to her mother. “What I do know is that fighting isn't the only way to prove your strength. In fact, sometimes the strongest thing you can do is to walk away.”

“You walk away from
everything
!” Lila threw her hands in the air as if her emotions were too big to be contained inside her body. “You
were going to be a lawyer. You were going to be a psychologist. You were even going to be a ballet dancer at one point. And now what do you do? You bake cookies.”

“I'm a pastry chef!”

“Where? Where are you a chef?”

This is what her mother did. She knew exactly where Naomi's weak spots were—because she was the one who helped create them—and she'd stick her lance in as deep as she could where it would do the most damage.

“I'm not marrying Carlos!” Naomi brayed, feeling like she was sixteen years old again and battling with her mother over a prom dress.

“Well, I tried my best,” Lila said. “I knew this was a losing battle from day one.”

“What's that supposed to mean?” Her mother was baiting her, but she wasn't going to let her get the last word.

“You were never going to be able to hold on to a man like Carlos.”

Now Lila was trying reverse psychology on Naomi. But it wasn't going to work. “I don't want to ‘hold on' to Carlos. I want to move on. I'm the one thinking about leaving him. Not vice versa. He's still here.”

“Is he here? I don't see him.”

“He's at work!”

“Everything's a choice.”

Naomi groaned. Sometimes she wanted to strangle her mother. “Carlos is very happy with me,” she said. But was he? The truth was there had been a slight detachment recently. A carelessness in his caress. An occasionally distracted look in his eyes. His lovemaking had become a little less vigorous. A little less frequent. She had written it off as his age, but was it really his waning interest? And was that the real reason Naomi had been thinking about Austin?

“Naomi, I'm not trying to hurt you. Anything that hurts you hurts
me. I just don't know how to help you.” There were tears in Lila's eyes, and she was not the crying type. “How many times are you going to do the same thing? How many men are you going to run away from?”

Naomi hadn't looked at it as running away. She was looking at it as running toward something. She was just a little vague about precisely what. No, that wasn't true. She was running toward Austin. Austin Gittleman. Someone she had dreamed about since she was eight years old. Someone destiny had brought back into her life. And someone who hadn't once expressed any deep feelings for her or in any way suggested anything more than a passing attraction. Oh God, her mother was right. And she hated when her mother was right.

“Don't run away, Naomi,” her mother said. “Fight.”

Naomi thought of the young women in the Lumière film, running off the screen to unknown futures. In a hurry to get someplace else. Heedless to the laws of nature and collagen. Approaching thirty-one, could Naomi really afford to do the same? As soon as she had the thought, she silently chastised herself. It was ridiculous to be thinking of herself as old when she was still young. She knew better. She didn't know why she did this to herself.

“Fight for Carlos,” her mother was saying. “If you don't fight, you're going to lose him, because he's a successful man with options. And you're a woman over thirty.”

That was why!
She
was why.

Naomi wasn't going to fight. But she also wasn't going to run away. She was going to “hold on” to this moment in her life, and she was going to hold on to Carlos. Because he was good to her. Because he was good
for
her. And because there was no way she was going to give her mother the pleasure of being proven right.

“I don't know why things are so difficult for my children,” Lila said, forgetting herself and sitting down in a way that was doomed to put deep creases in her slacks. “Maybe it's all my fault.”

“You think?” Naomi gibed. Sometimes she wondered if she could have had a worse possible role model.

“Maybe it's because of the names I gave you and your brother.”

“What are you talking about?” It was typical for her mother to go off on some crazy-ass tangent. And Naomi was out of patience. She was out of energy.

“They say that in the Bible Noah gets
shtupped
by his son,” Lila said, seeming much older and wearier than when she arrived. “And Naomi is a bitter woman without a husband or children.”

“I
'm getting divorced,” Stu said over the phone.

“You're not getting divorced,” Austin replied, holding his BlackBerry to his ear while searching for his room key. He had the paper key sleeve with the name of the Chicago Millennium Park Hotel imprinted on it. But no key.

“How do you know I'm not getting divorced?”

“Because you've been saying it since your honeymoon.”

Austin looked behind the bureau to see if it had fallen. Nothing. He had entered the chic wheat-and-basil-colored room only an hour ago. So the key had to be there. Somewhere.

“Some honeymoon,” Stu harrumphed as Austin emptied his suitcase onto the bed.

Austin had become accustomed to the roller-coaster ride of Stu and Steffi's relationship. Their routine was several weeks of nuptial bliss, followed by a knock-down, drag-out fight, usually ending with Steffi crying and Stu storming out, which was when he would call and say he was getting divorced. This was quickly followed by apologies and shockingly good make-up sex, to hear Stu tell it. They were not a positive advertisement for marriage.

But marriage wasn't Stu's primary problem. His IPO had been canceled and investors were heading for the exits. It turned out Google was going in direct competition with them. And Yahoo was laying off employees, not investing in new products. But Stu wasn't giving up hope. He kept saying that 2008 was going to be a great year for IPOs, but, for the moment, the money train had stopped rolling.

“I can't even afford to divorce her,” Stu said. “Isn't that pathetic? Of course, she can't afford to divorce me either. She messed up. If she had divorced me a month ago, she could have bought herself a Sub-Zero freezer full of Manolo Blahniks.” Stu laughed, either picturing a freezer full of shoes or taking glee in Steffi's loss.

Usually, Austin let Stu vent. It seemed to help him, and Austin didn't really mind listening. Frequently he was tempted to remind Stu that the qualities in Steffi he found so objectionable, her bursts of emotion and extravagance, were precisely the qualities that had drawn him to her. Less frequently, Austin was tempted to ask about Naomi.

She had never responded to his New Year's call, which had been two months ago. For the first few weeks he had remained optimistic, but she was probably living with the guy in Madrid Steffi had mentioned. Austin could have asked Steffi for more details, but he didn't want to know. He desperately wanted to know. He didn't want to know.

“Here's the thing,” Stu said. “I'm not sure the problem is Stuffi. I think it might be me. I think I might not be cut out for marriage.”

This was new. “What are you talking about?” Austin asked, throwing his clothing back into his suitcase, still keyless.

“I'm not one of these people who dreamed of having a life partner. My idea of a fun night isn't cuddling up with someone and watching
Project Runway
. I'd prefer to be sitting in my boxers watching
Family Guy
. I sometimes really resent having to accommodate this other person. She says I forget about her. And the truth is I do. There are
sometimes hours that go by or even a whole day when I forget I'm married. Just entirely forget. Like it never happened.”

Austin didn't understand how that was possible. He wished he could forget about Naomi. He wished he could figure out precisely what it was about her that stuck in his mind. Was it her spontaneity? On one hand, he thought she was flaky, but on the other, he wished that he were more like her. If he could just identify and analyze the parts of her that had burrowed so deeply into his brain, they would have less power over him. And
then
he could forget about her.

But even being in Chicago was partly because of her. He was at an ophthalmology conference. Or late for an ophthalmology conference. It was precisely the kind of medical ghetto that he usually avoided, but after the Florida fiasco, it occurred to him that instead of lying about attending conferences, he could actually start going. It would be a way to meet people. And potentially a way to find a new partner for his practice. Which was critical. Len hadn't been exaggerating about there being a dearth of interested applicants. The Inteflex office hadn't even bothered calling Austin back. Which was not a good sign.

It seemed that no one wanted to move to Michigan. And the people who were already in Michigan, oddly enough didn't want to be in private practice. When Austin was in school, seventy percent of the graduating class went into private practice, and most of the rest went into academia or research. HMOs were the enemy back then. Nobody wanted to be an “employee,” working for a “corporation,” where profits took priority over patients.

But now he was being told the statistics had completely flipped; seventy percent of the medical school graduates
wanted
to work for a corporation. They didn't want the call schedule, the malpractice liability, the insurance paperwork or any of the other responsibilities that came with a private practice. They wanted to put in their hours and go
home. At first, Austin had thought it was an anomaly, but after ten months of searching for partner candidates, it was no anomaly.

“Well, if worse comes to worst, we can be roommates again,” Stu said.

“Huh?” Austin was on his hands and knees, searching for the key under the bed.

“Unless you already have a roommate,” Stu said. “Have you been holding out on me? Have you got something regular going on?”

“No, nothing regular,” Austin said. Nothing irregular either. Every time he was on a date with someone, he found himself comparing the woman to Naomi. Which was foolish, since she was probably living with some Spanish dude. New Year's had come and gone. Three hundred and twenty-five days until the next one. The situation was ridiculous. He was ridiculous. And Stu was ridiculous. “Stu, you're spending too much time thinking about what's wrong with your life rather than what's right about it. Get Steffi a box of Godiva and go home.”

“Have you not been listening to anything I just told you?”

“Just do it.”

Austin checked his pockets for what he thought was the umpteenth time, but there it was, a slip of shiny plastic caught inside his wallet. He'd had the key all along.

“Cataract Surgery and the Compromised Cornea” sounded vaguely titillating to Austin—he thought it would make a good title for a book of ophthalmologic erotica, if such a thing existed. But the seminar was actually rather dry, which he found amusing given that dryness was a major cause of a “compromised cornea.” Mandy accused him of having ophthalmologist humor. She didn't mean it as a compliment. The moderator promised she'd be broaching controversial topics, and then
went on to talk about ecstasia, which despite the promise of its name, refers to a bulging of the cornea and not any other anatomical parts.

Austin ducked out early and wandered into the conference reception area, where there were a large number of people sampling bland appetizers under poor lighting. Not the ideal atmosphere for finding a business partner. Or a date. The men at the conference outnumbered the women by a three-to-one ratio since there were so many more male ophthalmologists than female. And the number of single attendees was infinitesimally small, but Austin entered with a hopeful attitude. And it seemed to be rewarded.

“Austin Gittleman?” a woman called out. She was petite, with a birdlike face. She looked familiar, and he realized they had gone through Inteflex together. Her name was Eleanor, but he couldn't remember her last name. What he did remember about her was that she had been a total gunner in school. The type who did nothing but study every night and every weekend and then complained about how unprepared she was before acing every exam.

But he had to admit she was much more attractive than she had been in med school. Her brown hair was pulled back less severely from her face, and she was wearing a dress, which he couldn't recall her doing in the past. He also noticed there wasn't a ring on her left hand.

“Eleanor!” he exclaimed.

“I saw your name on the registration list,” she said. She seemed to sound happy about it.

“What are the odds?” he said.

“It depends whether you're doing a one-way ANOVA analysis or a chi-square,” she said, as if she had said something incredibly amusing. Austin had a new understanding of what Mandy meant by ophthalmologist humor.

“Don't forget to factor in the unlikely qualitative variable of us both being single.”

“Why are you assuming I'm single?” she asked, sounding displeased.

“I noticed you weren't wearing a ring,” he said, backpedaling.

“Because I'm not someone's property,” she snapped.

Austin tried another approach at civil intercourse. “You might be amused to know, I recently called the Inteflex office.”

“For nostalgia's sake?”

“No, to see if they could help with a job search.”

“Well, you need a lot of help if you're calling Inteflex.” He chose to believe she was making another poor attempt at humor.

“Not sure why you would say that,” he said with his most ingratiating smile.

“Because there is no Inteflex.”

Not the response he was expecting. “What do you mean there is no Inteflex?”

“Gone. Finito. It's been over a year now.”

Austin couldn't comprehend what Eleanor was talking about. “How could it be gone?”

“Very easily. They stopped funding it. All that pie-in-the-sky seventies idealism met up with twenty-first-century realpolitik, and the realpolitik won. Let's face it, people aren't really screaming for health-care reform these days. That kind of ended with the dead-on-arrival Clinton health plan. Don't you read your alumni newsletters?”

“Not often, I guess,” he said, still reeling from the news.

She looked at him with disdain. “Well, if I was trying to find a job I would try to stay more up-to-date.”

She strode away before he could inform her he was the one hiring (or ask if she knew anyone looking). He had rarely repelled someone so completely, and he couldn't wrap his head around what she'd said about Inteflex. It was like saying the English Department was gone. Or the entire university was gone. It didn't seem possible that an institution could vanish. He had graduated only eight years earlier. It
was like his diploma was written in disappearing ink. Although, the medical school was still there. Or he hoped it was.

Lost in his thoughts, Austin didn't realize how long he had been staring at a woman standing beside the punch bowl. She was in her mid-thirties, with long scarlet bangs, and she was picking up finger sandwiches one after the other, eating the inside and putting the bread back on the table wrapped in a napkin. “I haven't eaten carbs in three years,” she said when she noticed Austin looking at her. “I'm Dallas.” She wiped a hand on her slacks and extended it toward him. “But I'm not from Texas.”

Austin was thrown by the coincidence. “Neither am I,” he said, feeling a little tongue-tied as he briefly clasped her surprisingly warm hand.

“Is your name also Dallas?”

“Austin,” he replied. “But I also never lived in Texas. I was conceived there. My parents went to grad school at University of Texas.”

“My mom just liked the sound of Dallas. It was between that and Sassafras. My mother thinks she's a poet. But really she's just fond of tea.” She smiled. He couldn't tell if she was pleased to be enlightening him or proud of her cleverness. Most likely, a little of both.

Or maybe she was flirting.

“You're the third Austin I've ever met,” she said, “but the first one with dentures.”

So much for the flirting. “I don't have dentures,” he assured her.

“Are they dental implants?” she asked.

“They're my real teeth.”

“But they're so perfectly symmetrical. Like a movie star. You have Brendan Fraser's teeth. You must have heard that before.” Austin shook his head, befuddled. “Well, I don't understand why. Unless it's because you're not as tall as Brendan Fraser. And your nose is a little less proportional. However, the resemblance between your teeth is remarkable.”

She was nearly Austin's height, with narrow shoulders curving slightly inward in a vaguely defensive posture. Her hands meandered through the air as she spoke, and her flyaway red hair seemed eager to head off in multiple directions. But her gaze was locked in place on him. Or his teeth. “Do you always . . .” He searched for the right words.

“What?” she asked, jumping in before he could complete his thought.

“Say everything you're thinking?”

“Always. That way I don't have to remember anything.”

“You don't want to remember what you're thinking?”

“The opposite,” she declared, her eyes widening. “I want to remember everything, but I have a terrible memory.”