Chapter 6: Terms

“Directly to the hospital?” Eric asked Diane when they were on their way.

“Please ... Look, how many people do you plan to tell? Could we discuss it before you tell anybody else?”

“Well, if you mean Madeleine, I didn’t tell her. She cleans my room, you know. I had no idea that she was going to get up to cook us breakfast. What I told her was that I wouldn’t be home for dinner four nights ago and then again last night. Both times, I told her that it was because I was taking you out. Then she cleaned up the bedroom the morning after you first came home with me. I asked her why she’d got up. She said that I had left my alarm on the time I set it for the last time. By the way, you’re going to be early.”

“I can afford to be early,” she said. “I’ll leave this coat in my room at the hospital. Who else knows?”

“How much Murphy knows, I don’t know. She knows too much. On the other hand, realize that I trust her with information that competitors would pay big bucks for. When I told her that I was leaving for a dinner date at the hospital, she told me that I had a lousy poker face. So, she knows how I feel; she might well not know what I’ve done. Either way, she may tease me with it when we’re alone, but hot pincers couldn’t get it out of her to anybody else.”

“And you don’t tell your friends at business lunches about how you scored with this woman doctor?”

“You’re imagining relationships I don’t have,” Eric said. “I have friends in the company. Sam Weintraub, the guy who is now chief programmer, I hired straight out of college nearly ten years ago. If I mentioned you to those guys at all it’s the doctor who helped Sparky. Murphy spread the word about Sparky’s condition, and I got expressions of sympathy. The guys with whom I go to fancy restaurants for lunch and talk business? Half of them don’t even know I have a daughter. Why should I tell them my secrets when I don’t tell them anything which matters to me?”

“Bragging about your sexual conquests?”

Eric could see where she was going, but he didn’t like the picture she seemed to have of him. “Look, I was in high school once. I graduated, however. If I wanted to brag about my sexual conquests, why would I restrict myself to real women? Why not brag about the Playboy centerfold I had shagged six times on my lunch hour? Now, back in high school, everybody knew who you were dating. The imaginary exploits had to be with real girls.”

“You’re telling me.” Diane sounded bitter.

“Dated a guy with an active imagination, did you? Well, I’m not so restricted, now. I don’t discuss my sexual activities with anyone. You’re the obvious exception. Even Madeleine simply knows that you shared my bed twice. She isn’t naive; she has kids of her own. I’m sure that she knows fairly clearly what we did in bed, but all I actually told her before this morning was that I was taking you out to dinner. If I had men to whom I bragged about my sexual exploits, I wouldn’t restrict myself to my actual activities.”

“I don’t know. Back then, I suddenly thought that I was one of your possessions. I don’t want you talking about me.”

“Well,” he said, “I’ve been mentioning you, but not beyond what we do in public and not to very many people. I generally let Murphy and Madeleine know where I am -- with sort of complementary exceptions. I don’t tell Murphy about going home except when, and I don’t tell Madeleine that I’m going to the office. I’ve stopped telling Sparky about my dinners with you, but that’s because she wants you to eat at our place instead. I once told a rent-a-cop that I was waiting by the cafeteria to meet a resident, but even then I didn’t mention your name. You know, more people who know you know that you’re meeting a guy for supper some times at the end of your shift than people who know me know I’m seeing anybody.”

“Well, the people at your church know you.”

“And so they do. I was thinking of the dinners in restaurants. The reservation people and the headwaiters know that there is an Eric Barnes party of two, but they don’t know Eric Barnes apart from that. They know that you’re beautiful, but they don’t even know your name.”

“As for belonging to me,” he continued. “I certainly belong to you. I’m not quite certain what you mean by ‘possession,’ but the word obviously has negative connotations for you. Owning each other is...” He almost said ‘What marriage means.’ She hadn’t, however, agreed to marry him. She hadn’t even considered that, and right now, telling her that this meant owning each other was probably a good way to turn her off. “ ... not a bad thing,” he finished weakly.

“Well, I think of them as opposites. If I own you, then you don’t own me. And you own so much. I don’t want to be one more possession.”

“Well, not a possession like that. You’re not a convenience.” He paused while the first part of her statement triggered a memory. “You know, you’re an Aristotelian, and I’m a Newtonian. Aristotle taught that when X moves Y then Y cannot move X. Aquinas used that for his ‘unmoved mover’ proof for the existence of God. Well, Newton taught that when X moved Y, that Y moved X as well; Astronomers are using that today to discover planets around other suns. You think that since you own me, I can’t own you.” Which was the most positive way of saying that.

“Eric, you know that damnedest things. That can’t be needed for programming. I remember something vaguely about an unmoved mover, but I couldn’t tell you where or when.”

“Well, I went to MIT. The guys who learned programming as a hobby and dropped out of school to earn a living at it were a previous generation. You probably learned a hell of a lot more about frogs than I did, since my last biology course was in high school. Still, frogs aren’t part of medicine. It’s just part of what you learned on your way. Well, drop a mention of ‘unmoved mover’ in a class of MIT freshmen, and every mouth immediately says ‘but Newton.’ My Humanities professor at MIT quite clearly regarded himself as a missionary spreading a little light into the outer darkness. Then, every once in a while, the class would start to argue with each other about one of the pearls he had cast, and he didn’t have the background to follow the argument.”

“I’m not sure I know anything about frogs,” she said.

“Well, in high-school biology, that’s what I dissected.”

“Yeah. Much more fun than dead paupers.” He suddenly wanted to protect her from having to dissect people. That was idiocy. First, it had happened long before he had met her. Second, however much she had disliked the task, it was necessary for the profession she clearly liked. Unlike the biology of frogs, which she only studied because biology professors were teaching a broad foundation of their field, dissection was essential for a clear understanding of human anatomy which was essential for the treatment of sick kids. He wouldn’t have wanted her treating Sparky if she had never seen an actual appendix.

“Are you glad you went into medicine?” he asked. Maybe she regretted the choice now that it seemed too late. Maybe she thought she had gone too far to choose another profession.

“I am now. Don’t ask me tonight after the third call from the floor. As a matter of fact, don’t ask me anything after the third call from the floor; don’t even speak to me.”

“Don’t worry. Do they really call you three times a night?”

“That’s a really bad night,” she said. “But three calls for prescriptions are better than one real emergency that gets me back down to the floor for half the night.”

“Well, I’m glad you’d rather be spending the night with me.”

“Eric, I chose you over a full night’s sleep and purchase of some clothes I need.” And, content with that compliment, he drove her in silence until she told him which entrance to use for the hospital.

When he was going out the door after breakfast with Sparky, Madeleine handed him what she described as a list. He read it in the car before heading out.

| Mr. Barnes, could you ask
| Dr. T what she likes for
| breakfast?
| I avoid what you and Val
| dislike and I stock
| anything you want
| and anything she wants that
| you don’t consider
| unhealthy.
| I can’t provide Dr. T with
| her choice of breakfasts
| unless I know what they
| are. We can provide:
|
| Eggs:
| Scrambled
| Soft boiled
| Hard boiled hot
| Hard boiled cold_
| Sunny side up
| Over easy
| Poached
| (Benedict)
| Omelets:
| Cheese (Special kind of
| cheese)
| (Western)
| French toast
| (Pancakes)
| ((Waffles))
| Meat:
| Bacon
| (Canadian bacon)
| (Ham)
| (Sausages -- specify kind)
| (Lox)
| Toast:
| White
| Whole wheat
| Rye
| (Other)
| Bagels
| (Breakfast pastries)
| Cold cereal (kind)
| (Hot Cereal) With a little
| warning, though, I could
| fix rice with raisins and
| milk. We have the
| ingredients, but rice takes
| longer to cook than I’m
| allowing myself on a
| morning.
| Toppings:
| Butter
| Maple syrup
| Powdered sugar
| Honey
| Jelly (we only have a few
| kinds, though)
| (Marmalade) specify kind.
| Drinks:
| Coffee
| Tea
| Cocoa
| Milk (skim etc.)
| Orange juice (other juices)
|
| The ones in parentheses are
| ones I would have to
| purchase, but
| I could get them easily on
| the day before. We don’t
| have a waffle iron, so I
| would have to purchase
| that, too, so waffles
| might take a little longer.

Poor Madeleine must miss Laura as much in her way as he did in his. Those two would plan a week’s worth of menus together. He ate the breakfast that was set before him. He wasn’t sure he would eat eggs Benedict for breakfast, though. On vacation, the same two weeks for Madeleine and for himself, he and Sparky ate cold cereal -- Sparky’s choice of brand -- for fourteen days running. They ate lunch and dinner out. Madeleine left carrot sticks for snacks.

Anyway, Madeleine was not the current problem. Diane was. He thought about her on the way to work. Diane wanted to be independent. He could understand women wanting independence. Laura had bought the sofa in her dressing room so she would have a place to lie down without his lying down beside her.

Still, when a woman wanted more independence within the marriage, that could be negotiated. Any fool could plainly see that a single adult woman was more independent than a married woman, and Diane was far from a fool.

She was also responsive as hell. Maybe that would argue for him. Marriage might bring less independence than she desired, but it could also bring a dependable series of orgasms. The longer they went on, the more she was likely to see that as a benefit. He just had to push the sex until she came to consider it a necessity and keep the love in the background until then.

When he met Diane for dinner, he handed her the questionnaire after they were sitting down.

“That’s for you. It’s addressed to me, but only you can answer it. Read it later. Now, it strikes me that you have a car at one location and yourself at another. Why don’t I pick you up tomorrow at six?”

“Eric,” Diane said. He enjoyed hearing his name so much more the way she’d said it the previous night. “I will not go out with you tomorrow night. I have things to do.”

Diane now had hospital-style underwear in three locations. She didn’t like to go on the floor with underwear she had worn the previous day. The set of hospital whites she had up there was only for emergencies. She had needed to change in the middle of the day in the past when a patient had vomited on her, but one set of underwear up there was for use tomorrow. Anyway, the underwear in Eric’s house meant that she had to buy more. The dirty underwear was colored and meant for that dress, but she would need to get that back some time.

“You have things to do, and I’m not planning to interfere with that. On the other hand, I could pick you up here, drive you to your apartment, and leave you there while I go home. Then you can drive to do your chores.” He made it sound so reasonable. She thought of Gulliver and the Lilliputians. A ride was a mere thread tying her to him. It was just that there were so many threads.

“We’ll see,” she said. Upstairs, she read Mrs. Grant’s list. It was incredible, and that Eric had delivered it was even less believable. The way that it was addressed, he had to have read it. Well, that house wasn’t a hotel. She had been, she supposed, a guest, and guests didn’t order what would be served. They certainly didn’t order what would be bought. If guests didn’t, did mistresses? Well, she didn’t know. She was new to this mistress game.

The other problem was that he had set her up, not only in his bed, but also in his wife’s dressing room. That sounded so royal, a dressing room. Well, the wife was dead, had been dead for four years. Still it was a little creepy, especially when you see so many reflections. When she examined them, they were all hers, but they should have been the wife’s. Anything else was impractical, he slept in a bed that had been set up to facilitate two people who came together in the bed and didn’t interfere with each other when they weren’t both in bed. Sure there were other rooms, but he wasn’t going to use them.

She wondered what her predecessors had thought. Probably, they had kept their clothes in the closets and in the dressers. Certainly they had checked in the mirrors whether they were seductively enough dressed -- or seductively enough undressed. Well, if he wanted her dressed in slinky gowns, he could buy the slinky gowns. She was already buying pills and extra underwear.

He seemed to have already bought her a robe. Still, it hadn’t seemed all that indecent; surely it was less indecent than the costume she had ended up wearing, which was her skin. She should check out that robe next time. She still had a robe and a nightgown there already. If she wore the robe he provided, she could bring the robe back to her apartment. She had one here and had kept another there.

She had some shopping planned for the next evening. Should she blow the evening entirely and buy a new good dress? She had two good ones, and he had seen both twice. She was a doctor and was about to be earning a doctor’s income. When she did, she might well need a new dress appropriate for the sort of fancy restaurants that Eric patronized.

The problems were: One, that she wasn’t earning a doctor’s income, yet. Sure a resident was a doctor, but a resident’s income wasn’t a doctor’s income. Two, it was now winter. Any dress she would wear now would be a winter dress, although the one at Eric’s place had really been a fall dress. Before she was in a class to go to that sort of restaurant except as Eric’s mistress, an entire year had to pass. Anything she bought now would be a year out of date before she could afford to use it.

Well, it was past her bedtime, but it wasn’t past Eric’s. She called him up.

“I was just thinking of you,” he answered. Do you have a special wish for breakfast, and what breakfast do you want it for? How about in 36 hours?”

“No. I’m not available for a date tomorrow night. Are you going to ask me for a date two days later?”

“I certainly would like to.”

“Then,” she said. “Invite me to a place where I would feel comfortable in hospital whites.”

“Ummm. That’s asking two things of me. Taking you there, and knowing where you will feel comfortable. I’m assuming that most of those places won’t require reservations.”

“That’s fairly well a given.”

“Then let’s compromise,” he said. “I’ll invite you, I do this minute invite you, to dine with me. You, however, will pick the restaurant. I suspect that this will mean eating in San Francisco.”

“Okay.” Despite his calling it a compromise, he was giving her all that she wanted. Certainly, it was the guy’s job to pick the location for the date. Still, they had already compromised about time. She wasn’t available on the even days of the month. He was such an overbearing man that being in charge of him was always a pleasure.

“Might I point out that you’ve already dined in one location in hospital whites. I think you were quite comfortable.”

“Eric. I am not going to pick the hospital cafeteria. The food isn’t bad as hospital cafeteria food goes, but that is a damned low bar.”

“All right, two places,” he said. “You’ve eaten in two places in hospital whites. One of them is my house. We could arrange to get here after Sparky is asleep. She, on the other hand, would be delighted to see you. We could eat together; she could go to sleep; when she gets up, you will be gone. Whether you left an hour after she went to bed or an hour before she got up, she will not ask. If she did, she would be scolded for improper nosiness.”

“No. Maybe later.” That did sound intriguing. It would also put them feet from where they wanted to be. Unfortunately, it also sounded entangling. What could be more typical of marriage than tucking the little ones into bed and then going to the master bedroom to end the night with sex? Dammit, Eric had what he wanted, a mistress. She wasn’t his first mistress; he may have had dozens. So, why couldn’t he keep the rules? Why did he keep playing as though she were a wife?

She would get advice the next day. If the advice didn’t sound attractive, she would get a paper or the Yellow Pages. Perhaps sensing her distraction, Eric ended the conversation.

She was awakened twice in the night, but she could deal with those problems without leaving her bed. The day, however, was marked by storm clouds. The rain began before noon, and it was soon clear that it would last into the night. Everyone in the hospital shared her gloom, and the doctors who came on the floor did so with their shoes and pants-legs dripping. And she was stuck with her good coat. It was wool, not anything waterproof. By the time she got home, it would be soaked so badly it would take days to dry out.

It was Eric’s fault she had that coat at the hospital. She’d only worn it because of their date, and she had worn it to the hospital because she had stayed the night at his place. She was ready to tell him so when he called that night.

“Look,” he said before she could tell him, “you don’t want to go out in this.”

“Nevertheless, I have to.”

“But not quite yet. I’m in the parking spot near where I was earlier, but you shouldn’t come here. Call when you’re near the main entrance. They have a cover for the driveway. I’ll come by, and you don’t have to get wet until you leave the car.”

“Eric,” she said, “sometimes you’re really sweet.” She called when she was close to the entry, closer in time as well as space than he was. When he got there, he opened the door for her from the driver’s side without getting out of the car. As the driver’s side of the car was under a pouring-down storm just then, she thought this was wise.

Eric had Diane beside him. He would have much preferred her under him, but he would take what he could get. And he would take it as long as he could get it without annoying her.

“I don’t know where you eat when you can escape from the hospital,” he said, “but if there ever was a night for drive-through, this is the night.”

“Yeah. I’ll probably go to McDonald’s when I get my car.”

“Then you’d have to stop to eat. You can’t eat and drive at the same time. If I take you first, you can eat while I drive.”

“You’re impossible.” She looked like she was laughing, though.

“Direct me to the one that you like ... Did you select your breakfast from Madeleine, yet? If I were asked that question, I’d ask for something like kippers or grilled kidneys.”

“Do people really eat that for breakfast? I’ve heard of kippers, but I don’t know what sort of fish they are.”

“Herring,” he told her. “Kippered herring, and what kippering is I don’t know. ‘Do you like Kipling?’ he asked. ‘I’ve never kippled,’ she replied.”

This time she laughed aloud. “I couldn’t do that,” she said. “Even choosing among what she has in the house would be an imposition.”

“Y’know, that sounds silly when you know the situation. First of all, to whom is it an imposition?”

“Well, to both of you. I suppose to Mrs. Grant most of all.”

“I don’t see how. She’s hired to cook. If I asked her for a particular meal, would it be an imposition?”

“No,” she said, “but I don’t pay her.”

“So, if I told her to cook what you want, that wouldn’t be an imposition on her. And I certainly would have if I had thought of it. Instead, she asked you. She gets up at the crack of dawn to fix you a breakfast. (And, believe me, she wouldn’t get up that early unasked to feed me.) She doesn’t want that effort spoiled by your not enjoying the breakfast she cooks. So, you don’t answer her straight question, and she risks being disappointed. This is being nice to her?”

“There it is on the right. Maybe a block away.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I see it now. The ordering slot is on my side. Tell me what you want, and I’ll tell them. But that doesn’t change the question. What do you want for breakfast? Decide, tell me, and I’ll tell her before I pick you up. Otherwise, if it’s among the stuff she has on the list, we can leave her a note in the kitchen the night before. What’s a poached egg? Sounds like it was laid by your neighbor’s chicken, but that can’t be right. Madeleine is a very moral woman who goes to church Sunday morning and Wednesday evening.”

“Big Mac, small fries, and a chocolate shake. A poached egg is a soft-boiled egg except that you get it out of the shell before you cook it.”

“Sounds messy.” At that point, he had reached the mic, and he gave the order.

“It can be,” she said. “Ever eat egg-drop soup?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s poached, but they deliberately stir it up so the egg isn’t together when it’s cooked.”

“Give me your hand,” he said, holding out his right. She put her left in it. He brought it to his mouth and kissed the back until the food came and he had to pay.

“What was that?” she asked peeling the paper from her meal.

“The only part of you that I could kiss just then.”

Diane thought that was quite romantic. Then he drove her to her building and she finished her meal in the parking lot. She got into the apartment with the coat merely damp, and she went shopping in her parka. Having decided not to buy the dress, she felt that she had much more money to spend on underwear than she had thought she had previously. She was clear that this was magical thinking, but she did have more cash in her purse than she usually did.

If she spent only one night in four in her bed, she could really go four weeks between laundering sheets. With the purchase of the white underwear, she could put off white laundry longer. Although whites had always been most of her laundry, she also bought one new set of underwear which could go under either good dress.

While driving back to the apartment, she thought about Mrs. Grant’s letter. Eric was right. Not answering a direct question was impolite. Besides, breakfasts were important to her. She started her mornings early, and it was a long time before lunch. Sometimes, it was a very long time until lunch. She wanted carbs in her stomach when she faced the challenges of her day. Besides, she had got a lot of exercise in her nights with Eric, and she had woken hungry. She expected that to continue for any morning Mrs. Grant cooked for her.

She would express no desire for anything in parentheses. On second thought, the pancakes sounded good. She knew that French toast depended on stale bread, so you could only fix that so often. Purchasing a waffle iron was ridiculous.

| Dear Mrs. Grant,

she wrote when she got home and out of the damp clothes.

| The breakfast that you fixed for me was delicious. I eat fairly
| heavy breakfasts, since I eat breakfast early and lunch late.

She was not going to mention the exercise.

| Most of what you mentioned sounded delicious. I’m used to
| orange juice, and coffee is a necessity. I might mention
| that your coffee tastes much better than the coffee I am
| used to.

That was damning with faint praise.

| Both French toast and pancakes sound great. Your syrup
| tastes better than I am used to. When I have eggs, I prefer
| them over easy or soft boiled. Whole wheat toast would be
| good. I usually eat it with margarine, but that is not a
| preference.

Still, if Eric ate breakfasts and dinners like she had experienced every night, he was asking for a heart attack. He was in shape, though. The meals and the sedentary life style hadn’t ruined his waist line.

Mrs. Grant was nice to her, and she was glad. She was also puzzled. After all, Eric had said that she was a very moral woman. Cooking breakfast for her boss’s mistresses might be in the job description of ‘housekeeper,’ but she didn’t need to be so nice about it. Maybe she thought Diane was a step above Eric’s usual. What had he said about Playboy cover girls? Well, he’d been describing them as a fiction, even as a fiction he didn’t tell.

Suggesting that she eat with Valerie was weird. Sure, Valerie wouldn’t guess what they did after she was in bed. (And, for that matter, after they were in bed.) Still, a parade of women coming into his home couldn’t be good for his relationship with his daughter. She wouldn’t stay six. When she was sixteen, all those women her dad had entertained at home would look different to her. And, too, Eric had taken her to the Christmas Pageant. The parents of her classmates didn’t need to wait another decade before they began to think about others’ sexuality.

Well, maybe there wasn’t a parade. Maybe his glib comments about the stories he imagined telling his business associates weren’t so imaginary. Maybe he’d had mistresses he could discuss with them, mistresses who at least looked like they could be centerfold material. She was the mistress he could show to his daughter.

That, as she fell asleep, was vaguely comforting. She liked Valerie. Did Eric think she was the mistress with whom his daughter could associate? She liked Mrs. Grant, too. Was her approval because Diane was a better grade of concubine than Eric’s previous ones?

She didn’t think that he had another one now. Diane was available only rarely and that availability was quite predictable. But unless he had a second mistress who was also a resident, the other woman would want some of the time he spent on Diane.

Eric got home after Sparky and Madeleine had eaten. Sparky had used up her TV quota, and he played with her until it was her bedtime. Madeleine got her ready, and he read her a story. Then, over his late dinner, he brooded.

He’d managed to spend more time with Diane, but hardly enough. Okay, she had to shop. Did she have to shop without him? Two nights out of four, she was on call and needed to be in the hospital. He might not like that, but he completely accepted it. Another of the four nights was spent on details keeping her going and on sleeping alone. Why couldn’t the two of them take care of the details together and then have her sleep in his arms? The commute was longer, but it didn’t take that long at the time she would be traveling.

For that matter, he knew that women’s shopping consisted mostly of selection. Even he had to attend when his suits were fitted. Still, why did she have to do all her own shopping? Murphy did most of his, and she would be better at buying women’s things. Murphy and Madeleine were in communication these days so that ‘Daddy’s gifts to Sparky’ for Christmas wouldn’t include any duplicates.

She was probably cleaning her apartment right then. Okay, that was too far to send Madeleine, but there were commercial cleaning services. For that matter, if she had to do it herself, he could help. Instead, he was banished. When he’d got this far in his thoughts, Madeleine came in.

“I could have heated that up for you,” Madeleine said.

“You were dealing with Sparky. As I’ve said, Sparky is your first priority. Your cooking tasted great. The bitter taste in my mouth was from the crow that I was eating with it.”

“Your courtship of Dr. Thibault not going well?”

“What makes you think,” he asked, “that I’m courting her?” Then he saw his mistake. Madeleine answered direct questions, and she answered them honestly.