Little Known Facts A Novel - By Christine Sneed Page 0,31
a very young age with the directive that nice girls don’t. Jill’s response to this had long been: Nice girls do but don’t admit it.
By the time Anna walks through her front door, she has already imagined him leaving his wife for her, introducing her to his surly sons, whom she will quickly win over because her father is a movie star. She can see herself giving up her earlier intention to do a residency in some dangerous and impoverished area of the L.A. sprawl because she does not want to risk being killed or assaulted if she has him to come home to at night. She remembers something her mother once said about Anna’s father during the divorce proceedings, that the brain shrinks to the size of a walnut when sex is in the equation, which, incidentally, is about the size of quite a few animal brains. “Your father can’t think properly because he’s forfeited most of his brain cells. He wants to keep them from getting in the way of his dick.” At the time, Anna was angry with her mother but also unsure if she really understood the insult. She had just turned eleven, and when she later repeated their mother’s words to her brother, he had looked at her and said, “She’s right, but so what? Men are supposed to think with their dicks.” He was twelve, and it wasn’t until several years later that she realized how cynical his response was. She didn’t believe that she shared his cynicism, but having been raised by the same parents who had conferred to them many of the same genes, she wasn’t sure how this could be possible. It wasn’t until medical school that she finally understood how his moodiness, his air of aggrievement and difficulty in yielding to any potentially joyful impulse, were not qualities that she also possessed, ones simply waiting for the proper conditions to express themselves.
The week following their encounter is her last under Dr. Glass’s tutelage until September, and during the five days that he mentors her and her classmates from seven thirty to five, he says nothing about their encounter in Marina del Rey. He treats her no differently than usual, and she feels alternately disappointed and relieved. He is married, she reminds herself. But in the next moment she can’t believe that his invitation was innocent. All week she goes back and forth with her silent, fruitless attempts to determine the definitive reason for his behavior on Sunday. But like baffling symptoms that refuse to yield to a diagnosis, his motives are indiscernible. It is also possible that he didn’t know what he was up to that day either.
Some of the patients she sees during the last week with Dr. Glass before she moves to an ICU rotation—just before, she will come to think of this time of self-recrimination and agonizing anticipation—have embarrassing, messy afflictions. One of them, a Slovenian man in his late fifties, is suffering from what tests will soon reveal to be advanced colon cancer, and Anna and her classmates must examine him, despite the fact his ailing body exudes an odor worse than anything she has come across in her life. She has to try very hard not to gag when she stands close to him, and one of her classmates actually does gag—not Jim Lewin, but Anna thinks she sees tears of pained restraint in his eyes when he gently palpates the man’s abdomen, trying not to cause him more anxiety or suffering.
The man of Sunday’s flirtation seems very remote when they are examining the sickest patients, and Anna views him in the same light that she often perceives her father when watching one of his films—at a distance, almost as a doppelganger, someone who looks intensely familiar but is unapproachable. She thinks that he couldn’t possibly have been serious about the invitation to see him again in Marina del Rey, and in her disappointment over this realization, she understands that she has already made up her mind to meet him.
“Grace Whiting’s cancer is still in remission,” Dr. Glass tells her after she sits down across from him at the same table as the previous week, self-conscious in her pale pink sundress and a strand of small, flawless pearls, a gift from her mother on her twenty-first birthday. She feels overdressed, which she knew would probably happen, but the dress is her favorite and she has only worn it once before today. Everyone else is in