Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [250]
“Wait, my Marion. You've saved yourself all these years. That is not a small thing. I want you to go home. After you have thought about it, if you want me, I will be here. You can come back here or we can go away, go on a trip together. Or I will come to New York and we will take a beautiful hotel room.” She read the disappointment on my face, the rejection. “Don't be sad. I am doing this out of love for you. When you have something this precious, you must think carefully how you give it away. I'll understand if you don't give it to me. If you choose me, I will be honored, and I will honor you. Now, I'll get a taxi to take you. Go, my sweet man. Go with God. There is no one else like you.”
This is my life, I thought, as my taxi slogged through heavy traffic and inched through the tunnel to Logan Airport. I have excised the cancer from my past, cut it out; I have crossed the high plains, descended into the desert, traversed oceans, and planted my feet in new soil; I have been the apprentice, paid my dues, and have just become master of my ship. But when I look down, why do I see the ancient, tarred, mud-stained slippers that I buried at the start of the journey still stuck to my feet?
CHAPTER 50
Slit the Thew
NOW THAT I HAD the income of an attending surgeon, I bought a duplex at one end of a row of such units in Queens. The roofline above the dormer window on one side was peaked like an eyebrow, and it cast a proprietary gaze over an overgrown wedge of land, thick with maples. In summer, I put my jasmine pots on the little patio and I grew salad staples in a tiny garden. In winter, I brought the jasmine indoors while the empty wire cages outside stood as memorials to the succulent, blood-red tomatoes the earth had given up. I painted walls; I repaired roof shingles; I installed bookshelves. Uprooted from Africa, I was satisfying a nesting impulse. I'd found my version of happiness in America. Six years had gone by, and though I should have visited Ethiopia, somehow I could never quite break free.
One day, when coming out of an ice-cream shop, a tall elegantly dressed black woman, her leather coat dancing above her ankles, brushed past me. I held the door for her, and as she slid past, an intense disquiet came over me. She turned back to look at me, smiling. Another evening, while driving back through Manhattan from a trauma conference in New Jersey, a streetwalker caught my eye as she stepped out from under an awning near the Holland Tunnel. She was ghost lit by car headlamps and reflections off the puddles. She tit-flashed me in the rain. Or I imagined she did. I felt the disquiet again, like the hint of something afire, but one doesn't know where. I circled the block, but she was gone.
At home, I prepared for the next day's work. I could have gone into private practice when I finished my five-year residency, or else I could have gone to some other teaching institution. But I felt a great loyalty to Our Lady. And now, Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio and Walter Reed in Washington were sending us a few of their senior surgical residents. In peacetime, we provided the closest thing to a war zone, a place where they could hone their skills. I was Our Lady's Head of Trauma; we were blessed with new resources and more personnel. There was no reason for me to be unhappy. But that night, with a fire going in the grate, I felt restless, as if a paralysis would soon set in if I didn't take certain measures.
That weekend, I decided my life needed a dimension that did not involve work. I looked over the Times for events, readings, openings, plays, lectures, and other matters of interest. I forced myself to leave the house on Saturday and again on Sunday.
THE FOLLOWING FRIDAY, I came home after work and deposited my briefcase and the mail in my library. In the kitchen, I lit the candle, set the table, and warmed up the last portion of a chicken casserole that I had cooked the previous Sunday