bought her an iPhone. For weeks, she hinted that she wanted one. Finally, when I bought her one, she spent so much time talking to her friends she had to carry her recharger with her. Money matters often sparked small arguments between us. When I told her I couldn’t afford something she’d become petulant, just like some of my college girlfriends. But that phase appeared to have passed after the first five or six months of our relationship. She’d tell me how she missed me the nights I wasn’t in her bed; she’d tell me how she looked forward to having my children. This gave me some pause, but I was thirty-two: I was not opposed to settling down; I was not opposed to having a family. After I’d been seeing her for a year, she was hinting too that she wanted to settle down.
So it was not quite an unexpected act on my part to by her a ring and become officially engaged. The ring would signify my true love of Wen Wen. Thus, it was with love that I departed the taxi in the raging dust storm in front of Oriental Plaza in Wangfujing. The jewelry store that I had in mind was located on the first floor of Oriental Plaza next to the Hyatt Regency. In Xiao Wu’s store, there were two jewelry display cases forming two squares within each other. Giving Wu’s assistant a rough idea of how much I wanted to spend, she took me to the very back counter. Showing me platinum, silver, and gold bands, encrusted with diamonds, sapphires, rubies or other semiprecious stones, I settled on a platinum band with a ruby. Setting me back about one paycheck, the dark red would appear quite elegant with her black hair. This one was precious enough to set me back several hundred dollars. “You sure you don’t want to see any others?” I shook my head. I paid her with my credit card and had her wrap the ring as a gift.
Friday couldn’t come soon enough for me. So far, I had never mentioned marriage to Wen Wen, so I knew that tonight’s solicitation would come as quite a surprise. But I did tell her that there was something I had to tell her. Again, I took her to the Metro. Inside, most of the tables were vacant. Marvin, who was the manager and a friend of mine, found us an especially private table. I ordered a steak while she ordered penne with clam sauce. The wine I ordered wasn’t the finest that the Metro carried, but it was still quite dear. From the moment we sat down, until the food arrived, Wen Wen was on her iPhone conversing with friends. While I slowly cut and ate my steak, and vigorously drank the wine, she barely recognized that I was there. She giggled at jokes I couldn’t hear; she hushed as I assumed one of her friends told her a secret. I started to say something to her, but she held her hand up as if to wave me off. I looked across the restaurant. Sitting at another table was a Chinese couple. The woman was on her smartphone too as her husband continued to put his meal away. He looked so bored with it all. I fingered the wrapped gift box sitting in my suit coat pocket. Then she dialed another friend. All the while I finished my steak and the rest of the wine. Finally, while I had taken the last sip of the wine, she hung up with her last friend and turned to me. “So what was it that you wanted to tell me?”
“I don’t know how to put it, Wen Wen, so I’ll just say it. I think we should start seeing other people.”
The Night Calls of Barry Krakauer
Coming from a long line of physicians, Barry Krakauer truly believed he had no other calling in this world than being a doctor. To him, it was his entitlement. Krakauer never quite admitted that to me when he was a third year resident in internal medicine at the University of New Mexico when I was a lowly medical intern, enduring my first month on the wards. But he implied it. One could sense it in him. Our medical team comprised of Laura Fairchild, who was the other intern, and three third year medical students doing their internal medical rotation. The first night that we – our medical team – was together on call, he exuded that very arrogance. From the cafeteria staff, we had been served the infamous white-on-white meals that the Albuquerque VA Hospital was notorious for: Tough, chewy turkey with white gravy, combined with soy beans and mash potatoes. Thinking of Gerber’s baby food, I gagged every time I tried to take a bite. I started to gag just thinking about it. I set my tray aside. Everyone in their turn did likewise. With such animal fodder, how were any of the patients supposed to get better. I listened as Krakauer rambled on. Given Krakauer’s rambling spiel, I think that Laura Fairchild, and the three medical students were also growing weary of it. Still he rattled on about how his father had gone to Hopkins and then practiced in the older section of Baltimore for his entire career. His father’s father, too, it seemed was a Hopkin’s man. Both practiced in the impoverished parts of Baltimore down by the docks where the North Baltimore Street served as an asphalt embrasure separating the whites of the city from the black denizens of the metropolis. Though the whites never crossed the boundary of this sanctuary, especially at night, his grandfather and father freely crossed into the black section of Baltimore for the blacks respected them, their profession, their care. Never were they molested or harmed. At least that was what Barry related to us while I wondered what I was going to do for dinner. If Krakauer had any reservations about going into medicine, he told us, it was simply that he didn’t feel like working as hard as they did. He didn’t want to feel like he was on call for the rest of the days of his life. Later, as I was to learn, no one who had spent anytime with Krakauer, were spared his disquisitions.
As he spoke, never once asking us where we had gone to medical school or where we were from, my stomach growled, while he kept the crowd enthralled with his own exploits. I simmered in indignation. I had been at the hospital before seven in the morning, trying to catch up on the students I was to inherit from the previous intern. I had a sandwich at the noon lunch conference, provided by one of drug company detail men, and hadn’t eaten since. It was now half past six. That first meal with the man, I kept wondering how I could keep up with the ongoing onslaught of patients, who wandered or were carried into the emergency room as if participating in some perverse, pathetic parade. All this while I fretted over some of the real sick patients belonging to the other medical interns on the other medical teams. And still Barry continued on in this vein, He ended it with the tale on how he ended up in Albuquerque in the Internal Medicine Program at the University of New Mexico. While an intern, I was in desperate straits for certain primal, needs, and I didn’t need the chutzpah of Krakauer’s rambling buzzing in the background.
None of the others seemed to have any heartier an appetite for the VA food. We all, in short fashion, got up, headed back to elevator and deposited our scarcely touched trays in the scullery of the cafeteria in the basement. Having done so, I went over to the vending machines and having put my quarters in the vending machines; they surrendered two Mars bars and one Coca-cola, while taking one of my quarters. So much for tonight’s fare. I would have to start making sandwiches to get through my ward rotations at the VA hospital. While collectively leaving the cafeteria, Barry was beeped again to the ER. He turned to me. “You’re on the bubble, Covington,” he said. I kept thinking of all of the things I needed to do on my nine patients on the floor, as well as the one in the ICU who had been admitted with a heart attack, who at the time was dropping his blood pressure. Meanwhile, I kept getting called over problems with the patients who had been signed out to me by the other medical interns. “What do I do with Jenkins?” I asked Krakauer. He was a difficult, very sick patient, septic with pneumonia, that Jerry Swerdlow signed out to me not yet an hour ago. Like Jenkins, the man with the heart attack, Marquardt was dropping his blood pressure in the ICU. To add to all that, Juan Garcia, a man never too far from a bottle, was bleeding into his gastrointestinal tract, the end result of years of drinking. He was my second admission to the intensive care unit.
“Did you read my note?” he replied. “It’s all in there.”
“I read your note, and I still don’t know what I’m supposed to do about his GI bleeding.”
“Read my note.” He began talking about how he missed the seafood of Maryland. For my first resident I had been dealt a real joker. “I’ll tell you what was in the note this time: notify the gastroenterologist on call. Have him take a look.”
“You know he’s vomited about half a liter of blood?”
“Keep
