Chapter 7: Tour

When the alarm went off in the morning, Diane was in Eric’s arms. He took some time to turn the alarm off. She got out of bed easily since she was almost at the edge. She grabbed the robe from the clothes tree and wrapped it around her.

She put a lipstick in the medicine cabinet after using it. She would buy another, and lipstick was all the makeup that she used for the hospital. When she went to the dresser for underwear, the panties and bra she had left in the closet four days before were on top of their respective piles. She lifted the panties and sniffed them. They smelled faintly of soap, rather than the smell she had left on them. She moved each to the bottom of its pile and took the ones from the top.

She dressed in her hospital whites and went to the kitchen. Eric was eating pancakes, and she joined him. When she had had enough, she drained her second cup of coffee.

“Eric, go warm up the car, will you?” she said.

“It’s not that cold out.”

“Go warm up the car!” She put some steel in her voice. “And open the garage door first. We don’t want carbon monoxide to accumulate.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He left the room.

“Mrs. Grant,” she said, “It was entirely unnecessary to wash my underclothes. I can do my own laundry.”

“Yes, Doctor, but I do the laundry in this house.”

“Did you wash them by themselves?”

“Should I have?” Mrs. Grant asked. “I did a load of colored clothes. Normally, we do laundry once a week. Would that be all right with you?” And if she said that it would be, then she was agreeing to Mrs. Grant’s doing her laundry for her. On the other hand, she was right. It wasn’t much of an addition to the family’s load. A good portion of the laundry she did was sheets, and Mrs. Grant did three sets of sheets and linen napkins, too. Apparently these were done for every meal; at least, she had never seen any that weren’t fresh, and she had used one for this breakfast.

“That would be fine.”

“And, doctor, there is a hamper in your dressing room. It would be easier for me if you used that. Then, too, the dress is the sort that is dry cleaned. I didn’t know whether you wanted the dress to go to the cleaners.”

“I think I can get another evening or two out of it,” she said.

“If you put anything you want dry-cleaned in the closet closest to the bathroom, I will know. The missus used to do that. The mister does it, too, though sometimes with his I use my own judgment.” It seemed to Diane that Mrs. Grant used her own judgment on lots of things. Well, it was a compliment that Diane had seemed to pass her judgment. She was tempted to ask which of her predecessors had, but Mrs. Grant obviously also kept her own counsel.

“Thanks. Thanks for everything. It was delicious.” And with that, she fled. Eric was in the car and started to drive away as soon as her seat belt was buckled.

“I once rescued a cat,” she began as soon as the car was on the street. “Something had broken her leg, she was being eaten alive by fleas, and she looked starved. I couldn’t fix her leg; I don’t know to this day how vets do it through all that fur. I kept her in my room. I got her a litter box and bought her a bag of Kitty litter. I put a flea collar on her. I fed her something like four times a day and gave her milk in a saucer. She had the longest black hair, and I brushed her and brushed her. Her leg sort of healed at an angle. This was summer, and one day I left the window open a bit -- much less than the height of the cat. She squeezed through the opening, jumped to the ground -- from the second story, on a bad leg -- and ran away. I never saw her again.”

Eric could see a metaphor without being hit over the head with a sledgehammer. Or, maybe, she had just hit him over the head with a sledgehammer. Well, she had taken control last night, and she clearly thought of it as something she had done to him. He had, on the other hand, enjoyed it immensely and not just because of the sex. Well, he had his own metaphor.

“I would never compare you to a cat. I, on the other hand, run a company that owns its own building. People say that there is no reason for a software company to be in the real-estate business, but there are advantages. Your programmers are too hot or too cold, and you don’t have a landlord telling you that conditions are reasonable.

“Anyway,” he went on, “our janitors are unionized. One day, I found that they were on strike. The union and the employers’ association were at loggerheads. I went down to the local and pointed out that we weren’t part of the employers’ association. They hadn’t made an offer to us. So they gave me a copy of their final offer to the employers’ association. I gave it to legal with directions, and the next day we were offering them a contract which was their demands except that it ran until a week after they settled with the employers’ association. They wasted another day, but we had the contract. Everybody else suffered through the strike for another week and a half, but our toilets were clean for that entire period. Besides, there are programmers who won’t cross a picket line. Now, there are programmers who don’t notice that there is one, too, but you need to accommodate all kinds.”

“Does your story have a moral?” she asked.

“The only zero-sum situations are those carefully designed to be zero-sum. There is a reason they call it game theory.”

“Gee thanks.”

Diane hadn’t found his explanation one bit helpful. She had heard the words ‘game theory’ before, however. She left her coat in her room in the hospital and easily got to the floor before six. She learned some things and eased some pain in the next twelve hours. When she was off duty, she called up her brother, Ross.

“Bothering you?” she asked. It was eight o’clock in Chicago, and he might be doing something important, though she hadn’t heard about any girl. After all, she remembered, he hadn’t heard about Eric, either.

“Darling sister, your voice is a pleasure greater even than Calc homework.” She’d been damned with faint praise, even though Ross didn’t mind Calculus as much as she had.

“You said something to me about game theory once.”

“Von Neumann’s last contribution,” he said.

“Zero sum games?”

“Standard games. We play poker, and what I win, you lose, and vice versa. Football, what yards the Packers win the Bears lose.”

“The only zero-sum situations are those carefully designed to be zero-sum,” she said. This was the best she could remember from what Eric had said.

“What it says. I’m not sure that it’s true, though. The only time when you have two sides where what you win is what I lose is when somebody creates a game for that. Commerce is based on Smith trading something to Jones that Jones wants more for something which Smith wants more. That goes along with the statement. I’m not sure that law suits do.”

“Thanks. How you doing otherwise?”

Ross was doing fine academically and horribly socially, but it took him some time to say that. After the conversation, she went down to the cafeteria. Eric was still waiting for her. She didn’t apologize, and he bought her supper and sat with her.

“I’m still in the dog house?” he asked.

“Why Eric, not at all.” She hadn’t come down late for supper to punish him, although the thought that he would be looking for her had been a minor bonus. She did give him points for not calling her. She had to answer the phone when she was on call, and she hadn’t wanted to interrupt Ross.

Eric looked like he didn’t believe her. Well, she wanted to be more in control, and that would be certain to offend him.

“You really can control the entire house from that headboard?” she asked.

“Only the room.”

“I thought you said the temperature was controlled from there.”

“The air temperature and the radiant heat,” he said. “We have thermostats in most of the upstairs rooms. The independence of the temperatures is limited, and we turn off the thermostats in some of the unused rooms. The choice of temperature is independent of the place for sensing the temperature. Madeleine controls the temperature in Sparky’s room. Sparky’s headboard controls the lights, but everything else is turned off.”

“Turned off?”

“The house was planned for raising three kids. If you’re going to control things like an overhead light from your headboard, the wires have to be in before the walls are installed. It seemed more sensible to put in all the controls they would want as teenagers to the headboards all at once. Then we turned most of them off. Sparky has a nightlight, though, controlled from her headboard. Also intercoms to Madeleine and to me. She doesn’t use them, much, but she can.”

“This house sounds more intriguing all the time,” she said.

“Well, I can give you a guided tour. Tomorrow?”

“You’re pushing. In three days.”

“If you really want to see what Sparky has done with her room,” he said, “she should be awake. Why don’t you visit for dinner?”

Well, yes. If she wanted time for her tour and also to get to sleep at a decent hour, she should do that. Besides, that was one place she could be certain of acceptance in her hospital whites. On the other hand, she felt that she was being manipulated again.

“You keep boxing me in.”

“Not really. Reality is boxing you in. It’s just that I sometimes see it before you do when it is a reality which is more familiar to me. I’d be glad to move my household around to accommodate you, but the youngest member of the household has constraints of her own.” She didn’t really believe that he’d push Valerie aside to please her. It was a perfectly safe offer, as she would feel her entire identity as a pediatrician compromised if she asked.

“You mean I shouldn’t feel like that?” she asked. He winced, as well he should.

“I mean that I’m sorry you feel like that, and I’m willing to do what I can to reduce that feeling.”

“Dinner and a tour of your house, Mr. Barnes,” she said. “I’d be pleased.”

When she got up to her room and was preparing for bed, however, she checked her Pill dispenser. She was nearly certain to begin her period on the day for which she had just made a date. She called Eric back.

Look,” she asked, “does that invitation for tomorrow night still stand?”

“Certainly.”

“Because I have things to do the next several nights off-call after that.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Eric said, “but I’ll pick you up at six at the hospital.”

“Plan on six-fifteen.” She could go up to her room, refresh her makeup, and get her coat.

“Certainly.” He had found the response to always get in the last word.

That night, there was only one call but it got her out of bed and on the floor for more than an hour. It was another appendicitis case, and this appendix seemed to have burst. She got a call into his ped’s office before going off, but they wouldn’t get it until morning. When she was back on the floor that morning, she had the surgeon paged.

“Dr. Bryson.”

“Doctor, you have Craig Romero scheduled for surgery at 11:00 for an appendectomy.”

“And I have several surgeries scheduled earlier.” Surgeons didn’t treat patients. They lined up bodies, cut them open, and cut out -- or occasionally put in -- what needed to be done. They didn’t favor medical residents who wanted to discuss a patient who wasn’t next in line.

I’m Diane Thibault, the medical resident on that case. I think Craig’s appendix burst.”

“You think so? Why do you think so?”

“I was called in at three a. m. to deal with acute pain and a spike in temperature. I had to give him codeine.”

“Tell that to the anesthesiologist.”

“I will. It’s on the chart and a big red sticker is on the chart cover, but I’ll tell the anesthesiologist by voice as well.”

“It’s better to get the information too often than not get it.”

“Yessir.”

Then she called the anesthesiologist and gave him the information, starting with the codeine. Nothing in the rest of the day was that exciting, but she was tired before she got to lunch at 2:30. Craig was back that afternoon, looking worse but probably healthier. His Ped, Dr. Trinh, came around, and he discussed his aggressive course of antibiotics with her. By 6:00, she was dragging. Still she got up to her room and put her face on and then her coat. She was going down the elevator when her cell rang.

“Thibault.” It should have been Eric, who knew her last name if he seldom used it. If it were the hospital, her last name hinted that she wasn’t a doctor for the next twelve hours.

“I’m in the usual place,” Eric said.

“I’ll come out the emergency entrance.” When she did, he spotted her and opened the door.

“Hard day?” Eric asked. She had just put on her makeup, but makeup could hide only so much.

“Not a great day. Horrible night. Another appendicitis like Valerie’s. Only, this time, we didn’t catch it in time. The appendix burst before the operation. We’re working on it, but it’s a much worse case. Somebody else’s case now, thank God.”

“You know, you take responsibility for everything. Do what you can, and then do what you can in the next case.”

“Says the man,” she pointed out, “who takes responsibility for another car hitting his because he couldn’t stop on a slippery street.”

“That’s different. That was the wife I’d sworn before God to protect. If something had happened to Sparky, God forbid, it would have been my responsibility. If it had been negligence on your part, then it would have been your responsibility. Otherwise, not. If I run into a kid in my car, I’m at fault. If somebody else does and I don’t contribute to the accident, then it’s not my fault. Unless it’s my kid. Then whatever happens to her is my fault.” Well, she’d been told. She thought how lucky she was that she was a fling. Controlling as he was now, at least he wasn’t as controlling with her as he would be with a wife.

Valerie greeted her as enthusiastically as ever when she got there. She looked at Valerie’s incision, and it was totally free of inflammation and already disappearing into her skin. Dinner was steak au poivre with roast potatoes and string beans. Dessert was hot cherry pie. Diane couldn’t figure out how Mrs. Grant had dealt with all that in one oven.

The tour of the house began right after dessert. The living room was first, though she had already seen it. Off the living room were two entrance rooms, one from the street and one from the garage. The dining room was next, and behind that was the kitchen. The kitchen held two ovens and a grill, which explained how Mrs. Grant had prepared the meal and the dessert. Off the kitchen and in back -- in a sense -- of the garage was a laundry room and through that a furnace room. In the other direction off the kitchen was a “mud room” which was the route to the back yard. As Eric had said, this was large and equipped with a swing set that deserved to be in a public park.

The street side of the house was dominated by a library. This was less than half full, and those books were more often paperbacks than hard covers. Going back from the library were a computer room and a gym. The computer room had six kiosks and a print station. Three of the kiosks held computer equipment. It became clear where Mrs. Grant had written her letter about breakfasts. The gym was smaller and held several exercise machines. Apparently, only Eric used it.

Upstairs, they started with Valerie’s room, which overlooked the back yard. There were built-in bookshelves, only the bottom shelf holding any books. She had her own bathroom with a tub and a separate shower stall. There was a toilet but no bidet. There was space for one, though. Both the closets were large, and one had only some toys on the floor.

Valerie sat on her (twin-sized) bed and enthusiastically demonstrated the devices on her headboard, including pushing the intercom buttons. “Daddy, are you there? Madeleine, are you there? They aren’t there.” Since they were both in her room at the time, their absence from the other end of the intercom was understandable. Valerie had her room plastered with the sort of large pictures that other six-year-old girls would choose.

The two rooms at the end of the hall were like Valerie’s except that they were empty. The only other room on the “back” side of the hall was a storage room, huge for that purpose and without windows, with cleaning tools and supplies, cupboards with shelves for sheets and towels, and two large bins for dirty clothes. There was a closet with shelves floor-to ceiling. The shelves stored supplies that might stock the bathrooms from toilet paper to bar soap. There were enough boxes of Band Aids that Diane figured they could care for a regiment that had marched naked through a thicket of thorns. She glanced at Valerie. Mrs. Grant saw her and smiled. There appeared to be two unopened first-aid boxes. There was an unopened box of Tampax. Whether it belonged to Mrs. Grant, had belonged to Mrs. Barnes and hadn’t been removed, or was a ridiculously-early preparation for Valerie, Diane couldn’t figure.

There were also cupboards for used clothes. Mrs. Grant explained that both “the mister’s” church and hers had rummage sales, and the household supplied them. Diane was a little confused but she figured that the storage room had Valerie’s bathroom and the bathroom of one of the empty rooms behind it. Across from it was the door to Mrs. Grant’s bedroom. That room was named but not opened.

Mrs. Grant did open the door to her “sitting room.” She didn’t invite Diane in, and even Valerie didn’t try to enter. There was a door into the bedroom on the hall side of one wall, and a door into the bathroom on the window side. Both were closed.

The street side of the other end held first the stairway which they had come up, then three “guest rooms.” These were generous in size and held queen-sized beds covered with bed spreads. They were made with sheets and a blanket. Mrs. Grant smiled at her when she checked the first room. The last of these was a corner room with many windows, clean windows, Diane noticed. She looked at Mrs. Grant, who smiled. Eric took a long time demonstrating all the gadgets connected to the headboard of that bed. Then he took out his cell and checked the time.

“Now,” he said, “I think I know a girl who has reached her bed time.”

“Oh, Daddy!” Valerie said. “A little longer.”

“No.”

“I want to show Doctor the mirrors in mommy’s room.”

“All you’re showing her,” Eric said, “is a bad little girl’s misbehavior.” Actually, Valerie wasn’t behaving all that badly for a kid at bedtime. “I’ll tell you what. Show her that you can act your age by going off with Madeleine right now without a fuss, and she can read you your story when you’re in bed. I’m not going to bring her back to your room if you’re not in bed in fifteen minutes.”

“Sorry to use you for a bribe without prior consultation,” he said to Diane while Valerie and Mrs. Grant went back down the hall.

“Quite all right,” she said. “Really, as tantrums go, that wasn’t much.”

“Well, as I told you earlier, she isn’t to enter your room. She never was permitted my room or the bedroom. Now, want to see the other side?”

The room on the backyard side at the end of the hall was a long, thin bathroom. One side held a long shelf facing alternating mirrors and windows and holding three sinks. The other side held, in order from the door, a shower stall, a tub, a toilet stall, and a urinal. As this was beside a window into the back yard, she wondered whether any man would use it. The sill was about four feet high, but still.

The next room was Eric’s dressing room. It held as many closets as his wife’s. Many of those were empty. It held many fewer mirrors. Three, on closet doors, could be turned into a three-way mirror. Eric demonstrated this.

“Same thing on your side,” he said. “And wasn’t it fun persuading the builders to hang doors opening on different sides. Everybody, from the architect, to the builder, to the foreman, wanted to correct that ‘mistake.’”