I’m trying not to think.” I place the liver on the scale beside me and record the result on my clipboard.
“Aw, come on. When you get right down to it, is this really all that different from what you were doing before?”
“Uh, yeah,” I answer in my best duh! tone.
“How so? You used to cut people open. You handled their insides. You saw blood and guts. It’s pretty much the same, no?”
Hardly. Though it’s been a mere two months since I traded in the starched white lab coat from Mercy Hospital that had my name, MATTIE WINSTON, RN, embroidered across the pocket, at the moment it feels like an eternity ago. This is nothing like my work in the OR. There, the patients’ bodies were always hidden behind sterile drapes and waterproof shields, the field of focus nothing more than an iodine-bronzed square of skin and whatever lay directly beneath it. Most of the time I never even saw a face. But this…not just a face but the entire body, naked, ugly, and dead. And there’s no poor-man’s tan here. These people are the color of death from head to toe. It’s a bit of a mental adjustment. After twelve years of working to save people’s lives, I now remove their innards after they’re dead and weigh them on a scale like fruit. Not exactly a move up the career ladder.
“Well, for one thing,” I tell Izzy, “my clientele used to be alive.”
“Live, schmive,” he says, handing me a spleen. “With all that anesthesia, they might as well have been dead. They didn’t talk to you, did they?”
“Well, no, but—”
“So it’s really no different, is it? Here, hold this back.” He directs my hand toward a pile of lower intestine and sets about severing the last few connections. “I don’t think it’s this job that’s bothering you. I think you miss Dr. Wonderful.”
Dr. Wonderful is Dr. David Winston, who is not only chief of surgery at Mercy Hospital but also my husband, at least until I get the divorce papers filed.
“You do miss him, don’t you?” Izzy persists.
“No, I don’t.”
“Not even the sex?”
“There’s more to life than sex.” I utter this with great nonchalance despite the fact that Izzy has hit a sore spot. During the last few months of my marriage, sex ranked just below plucking my eyebrows and cleaning out the toilet bowl on my list of things to do. Now that I no longer have the option—unless I want to don some stilettos and a tube top and cruise the streets—my libido seems to be growing by leaps and bounds.
Izzy shakes his head in wonder as he hands me a kidney. “See, that’s the difference between men and women. Men, we always miss the sex.”
“Good,” I say bitterly. “I hope David is missing it like crazy.”
“It doesn’t look like he’s missing it at all.”
My heart does a funny beat, almost as if it’s echoing the uh-oh that I’m thinking. I look over at Izzy but he’s studiously avoiding any eye contact. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
He sighs and shakes his head.
“Do you know something, Izzy? If you do, spit it out.”
“You mean you haven’t seen the woman who’s been coming over to your…to David’s house the past few nights?”
His quick correction stings, but not as much as his information does. I’ve been consoling myself ever since the split-up with an image of David pining away for me…regretful, sad, and lonely. The only communication we’ve had since I left is one long rambling, remorseful note, in which David apologized exactly nine times and swore his undying devotion to me. Izzy’s suggestion that my side of the marital bed had barely grown cold before someone else moved in to heat it up—and I have a pretty good idea who that someone else is—brings tears to my eyes.
“No, I haven’t seen any woman,” I tell him, struggling for a tone of casual indifference. “But that’s because I haven’t looked. It doesn’t matter anymore. I don’t care what…or who David does anymore.”
“Oh, okay.”
I can tell from Izzy’s tone that he isn’t buying it, but I’m determined not to ask him what I’m dying to know. We begin taking sections from the organs we’ve removed, Izzy doing the slicing and dicing, me placing the carved pieces into specimen bottles as an awkward silence stretches between us. As soon as we are finished with each organ, I place it back inside the body cavity. After several minutes of this I finally cave in.
“All right, you win. Tell me. Was it her?”
He shrugs. “I’ve never met her. What does she look like?”
His question hurls me back some two months in time and the memory, as always, triggers a flush of humiliation. Back then, David and I both worked in the OR at the local hospital. Despite working in the same place, we rarely did cases together, agreeing that it was wise to try to separate our professional lives from our private ones so the dynamics of one wouldn’t interfere with the intimacy of the other. That’s the story I bought into, anyway, though since then I’ve wondered if David’s motivation was something else entirely.
Things came to a head on a day when David had a heavy load of regular surgeries coupled with several emergency cases. He called late in the evening to say he still had one more case to do and that he planned to crash at the hospital for the night. It was something he’d done before—usually because he had an unstable patient he was worried about—so it didn’t raise any alarms with me.
Knowing how much he hated hospital food, I threw together a goody basket for him: some munchies for later that night and some fruit and muffins for in the morning. I didn’t call to tell him I was coming because I figured he’d already be in the middle of his surgery. Besides, I wanted to surprise him.
He was surprised, all right, but not half as much as I was when I found the surgical area dark, quiet, and apparently deserted except for a dim light emanating from a small operating room at the end of the hall. Inside the room I found David with Karen Owenby, one of the other surgery nurses. David was leaning back against an OR table, his scrub pants down around his ankles, a look of ecstasy stamped on his face. Karen was kneeling in front of him, wholeheartedly vying for the title of head nurse.
As the image sears its way across my brain for the millionth time, I squeeze my eyes closed in anger.
“Is she really that ugly?” Izzy asks, glancing at the expression on my face.
“Uglier,” I tell him. “She has horns growing out of her head and snakes for hair.”
Izzy chuckles. “You know what you need?”
“For Richard Gere to fall madly in love with me and be my gigolo?”
“No, you need some excitement.”
Apparently catching my husband taking his oral exam in the OR isn’t excitement enough.
“Yep,” Izzy says with a decisive nod. “You just need a little excitement. After all, isn’t that what drew you to medicine? The life-and-death pace, the high emotional stakes, the drama?”
We
