22 She had not been with Doc in more than two years. The last time was after the wrap party for – which movie was that? – oh, yes: See-Through, in which she wore nothing but gauzy silk gowns, except when she wore nothing at all, and in which Barry had given Doc the part of a gynecologist. At the time he had still been getting some from his wife, and with Gina he was a gentle, patient lover; not unexpectedly, he was a master at feeling a woman’s breasts. His conversation, though, had been unbearably one-sided, with his work as the only subject. Shortly after that time she had become closer with Barry than she had ever been before, a closeness that lasted over a year, during which she had, apart from work, no sex with anyone else. This time, over dinner, Doc was surprisingly attentive to what she had to tell him, and also quite forthcoming about his problems, both legal – aside from the assault charge there was a possible malpractice suit threatening him – and personal. In bed, however, he was needy and impatient. He seemed to have forgotten the avowed purpose of their date, and though they both knew that the checkup idea was a ruse, she missed his touch. He used his hand only to help her come after he had done so. Now it was dawn, and she was awake. She needed to get some more sleep, but at home, in her bed. She felt cramped in the double bed with him and surprised that a womanizer like Doc would not have insisted on a king or at least a queen. She was facing away from him and she began to sidle toward the edge of the bed. She would get out of bed, quietly get dressed but not put her shoes until she was in the hallway, and sneak out. She would call him later. A tug on the sheet stirred him and, by a reflex that like most doctors he must have acquired while a resident, he was instantly wide awake. He reached out his hand and put it on her waist. “Hi, Gina,” he said. His touch felt good, and she stopped her movement away from him. He pulled her back toward him with his forearm and moved his hand to her abdomen. He must have had a sexy dream, she thought when she felt his body. His hand began a slow journey up her torso and when it reached her breasts it slid into the cleft, beginning a back-and-forth motion that put a slight pressure alternately on each breast. He then partly cupped his hand around her right breast and his fingers gently explored various points. Suddenly he stopped. After a little while, as she felt his penis go limp against her buttocks, his exploration began again, but only in one place. “What’s the matter?” she asked. “I’m feeling something,” he said. So he’s got feelings. That’s nice, she thought. But why should that make him stop? “It doesn’t feel right,” he said. He’s got guilt feelings? What about? “It’s a little lump,” he said. A lump where? In his throat? “It doesn’t belong there,” he said. What was he talking about? “It’s away from the implant,” he said. Was he talking about her? About her breast? “What are you talking about, Doc?” she asked as she turned to face him. His finger did not stop exploring. “It could be just a cyst, and it’s probably benign...” “Are you talking about me? About my breast?” “Yes. What did you think?” “Never mind. And what do you mean, ‘probably benign’? You mean it might not be?” “I don’t know. We need a mammogram and biopsy right away. I’m going to call Jerry Hanley, the oncologist, as soon as is reasonable, and I’m going to take you to his office as soon as he opens. He’s got a lab right there.” As soon as is reasonable. Sure. So much for getting more sleep, she thought. “Thanks, Doc,” she said. “Either way we’ll take it out, and I guarantee that you’ll look as perfect as you do now.” “Thanks again, Doc,” she said. “Now, can you get back to what you were doing before you found the... before you felt it?” “Only if you call me Paul,” he said. “Okay, Paul.” “By the way, the implants are holding up just fine. They were state-of-the-art when I put them in, and they still are.” He was Doc then, and he still is, she said to herself. Suddenly she remembered something. “I’ll need to call Europe some time this morning,” she said. “I’ll use my calling card.” It was only after Albert Bosch’s mother succumbed to the cancer that had been gnawing at her for a dozen years that his father’s condition became clear. Up to then, his persistence in speaking Swiss-German after some forty years of speaking mainly French had seemed like a late-middle-age quirk. But when Albert’s sister Christine, who had been a baby when the family moved – for the sake of Albert’s schooling – to an apartment in a French-speaking section of the state capital, came in from her home in Montreal for the funeral and tried to talk with her father, it became evident that the polyglot lawyer Max Bosch had forgotten every language he had learned after his infancy. When his law partner and executor came by for a revision of his will, Max Bosch could not even follow the standard German that it was written in. And now Albert Bosch, having found a fitness center and gotten a good workout for his hamstrings after Sylvie had gone to work, was once again on the Lucerne-bound InterCity (which he preferred to the slightly faster but usually more crowded Zurich-bound trains) on his way to Fribourg. He had only three things to do there: pick up his car from the apartment-house garage; visit his father at the rest home; and go back to the apartment in order to pick up his ski equipment and drive back to Lausanne. He had taken this trip many times, by train and by car, and each time it seemed to him that such a journey – that of an adult visiting a parent losing his faculties – might be a good basis for a screenplay. But every time he tried to write something his creative powers failed him. He tried every gender combination – son and mother, daughter and father, daughter and mother – but none of them worked. There seemed to be something about the subject matter that was resistant to the Albert Bosch touch. In fact he had rarely, and never successfully, been able to work parent-child relationships into his films. Failed love stories, people torn between two loves, with a glimmer of hope left at the end, were his specialty. In cinema, anyway. And in life? The year that was coming to an end was the year of Margaret, Gina, and now – again – Sylvie. The glimmer of hope that he might have harbored about Margaret was extinguished the previous afternoon at the Geneva airport. Gina – well, Gina, whom he would be seeing again in Utah a month hence, was unlike any other woman he had ever known, and he did not really know how to qualify his experience with her, but a love story – what in English was called a romance – was the one thing he would not call it. And Sylvie? In the course of the past evening, night and morning he had realized that it had not been only her smoking that had driven him away from her, but that there also were other things that inexorably drew him back. And she did not seem to mind the irregularly cyclical nature of their relationship; on the contrary, she seemed to relish it, as if each of his swings back to her were an affirmation of her magnetism, especially now, after three and a half years, when she must have felt herself to have aged somewhat, and when, as he had told her, he had spent the past half-year with a young and glamorous porno star. Sylvie, like him, traveled as part of her work. She was a photographer and photo editor who worked at an advertising agency (in which she was a partner) specializing in print advertisements with exotic settings, and she was in fact due to fly to Thailand for a shoot in the latter part of January, about the time that the United States Film Festival, as it was so grandly called, would begin. He therefore began to wonder about his plan to go to Utah for a week of skiing before the festival. He had heard about the wonders of skiing in the Rocky Mountains, but he would be alone, while here in the Alps he now had company, and the run between Rougemont and Gstaad, which he had done when he was much younger, might be quite a challenge. But, he decided as the train was pulling into Fribourg, he needed a few days more with Sylvie to see how things would work out. When he paid the taxi driver he remembered that he had left the car key in the apartment, and when he opened the apartment door he was momentarily taken aback to hear the telephone ringing. He then remembered: Gina. He hesitated over whether to pick it up. When the ringing stopped he felt justified in not answering. He was feeling too unsettled in his plans and his emotions, and Gina was not one to whom he could communicate such a state. Margaret would have been another matter. In a few days, when he knew better, he would call Gina. And meanwhile he would leave his answering machine turned off. It felt strange for Barry Bergman to wake up in what had been Doc and Nancy’s, and was now, practically speaking, Nancy’s house. He was not used to waking up to the aroma of the coffee that Nancy, or for that matter any woman except occasionally Jenny, was making. Jenny had quickly learned to make coffee exactly the way he liked it, and he now wondered about Nancy, who had drunk Barry’s coffee on many occasions. It smelled good. And Nancy had smelled good. After their date she had insisted on taking him home to what was now her place, and since she was driving, he had no choice, and indeed no reason to say no. Helena was staying at her paternal grandparents’, to whom she felt closer than to Nancy’s parents. Nancy was evidently enjoying her freedom as a newly single woman, and she wanted to share it with her boyfriend. She had not used the word, of course, but there was no getting around the fact of their being in a relationship that was more than fucking. Their three years of nonsexual friendship, the time of his strange series of couplings – which now seemed embarrassingly stupid – with Helena, had laid the foundation for something that now felt comfortable and yet exciting. ‘My girlfriend Nancy,’ he said to himself to test the sound of it, and it didn’t sound half bad. It helped to know that Nancy did not regard monogamy as a necessary condition of a relationship. At least she had not done so with Doc, either on his part or hers, and there was no reason why she would do so with him, knowing what he did for a living. There was the matter of casting the part of the girl in his upcoming film, Cécile in the book: of course he would have to test the candidates in bed. He got up to go to the bathroom. The sound of his flushing, he decided, would be his first signal to Nancy. His thigh still hurt. But the thought of his film would not leave his mind. He had been stymied in his mental search for a modern-day setting that would make the story’s motivations plausible. And then, as he expelled a sizable turd, he had a brainstorm: he would set it in Mexico! In some town where conservative Mexicans, with their traditional family values, and freewheeling American expatriates lived side by side. So many Hollywood movies were being shot in Mexico anyway, and Americans had always liked movies that were set there! Jenny could be an American married to a rich Mexican, maybe one she had met in college. And maybe that girl Carla that Mario had been so ambivalent about – sex with her had been great, he had said quite openly in Jenny’s presence – could try out for the Cécile part. Of course she had already been tested, in a sense, but not by the producer, and his business still honored its version of droit du seigneur, colloquially known as the casting couch. He put on his pants and shirt with no underwear and limped into the kitchen. Nancy, wearing a robe, looked up at him with a joyous smile but without a word. None was needed. He approached her and they put their arms around each other. On kissing her he knew that she had already had some coffee. It tasted delicious. Paul Kruger and Gina George stopped for breakfast at a coffee shop on their way to the oncologist’s office, where an opening was found for her at 9:15. They did not talk much. He could tell that she was preoccupied, but he did not know that what was foremost in her mind was her frustration at her inability to reach Albert Bosch. What could be the matter with him? she kept asking herself. He had told her that he would be at his place, and that in any case he would turn on his answering machine. And yet his phone had kept ringing and ringing. Only occasionally, when she would glance at Doc looking at her, did a thought about her upcoming biopsy intrude. It’s nothing, she said to herself. And he’s going to take it out. Either way. As if guessing her thoughts, he said, “There’s nothing to worry about.” “I know, Paul,” she said. “I’m in good hands.” And, pushing her coffee cup away with her forearm, she reached out her hands to meet his.