"Cancer," he whispered back.
"Yes. What?" said Margaret Brant. "Yes, I know Harlan Booth. What is the matter, please?"
"I am treating Harlan Booth for gonorrhea, Miss Brant," Ronkers said. There was no reaction over the phone. "Clap?" Ronkers said. "Gonorrhea? Harlan Booth has the clap."
"I know what you mean," the girl said. Her voice had gone hard; she was suspicious. Kit was turned away from him so that he couldn't see her face.
"If you have a gynecologist here in town, Miss Brant, I think you should make an appointment. I could recommend Dr. Caroline Gilmore; her office is at University Hospital. Or, of course, you could come to see me. ..."
"Look, who is this?" Margaret Brant said. "How do I know you're a doctor? Someone just left a phone number for me to call. I never had anything to do with Harlan Booth. What kind of dirty joke is this?"
Possible, thought Ronkers. Harlan Booth had been a vain, uncooperative kid who had very scornfully feigned casualness when asked who else might be infected. "Could be a lot of people," he'd said proudly. And Ronkers had been forced to press him to get even one name: Margaret Brant. Possibly a virgin whom Harlan Booth disliked?
"You can call me at my home phone after I hang up," Ronkers said. "It's listed in the book: Dr. George Ronkers ... and see if it's not the same number you have now. Or else I can simply apologize for the mistake; I can call up Harlan Booth and tell him off. And," Ronkers gambled, "you can examine yourself for any discharge, especially in the morning, and see if there's any inflammation. And if you think there's a possibility, you can certainly see another doctor and I'll never know. But if you've had relations with Harlan Booth, Miss Brant, I..."
She hung up.
"Cancer?" Kit said, her back still to him. "Cancer of what?"
"Lungs," Ronkers said. "The bronchoscopy was positive; they didn't even have to open him up."
The phone rang again. When Ronkers said hello, the party hung up. Ronkers had a deplorable habit of visualizing people he had spoken with only on the phone. He saw Margaret Brant in the girls' dormitory. First she would turn to the dictionary. Then, moving lights and mirrors, she would look at herself. What should it look like? she would be wondering. And perhaps a trip to the rack of medical encyclopedias in the library. Or, last, a talk with a friend. An embarrassing phone call to Harlan Booth? No, Ronkers couldn't see that part.
He could see Kit examining her walnut bruise in the multi-imaged mirror that was suspended beside the inverted cone -- also suspended -- that was the flue for the open-pit fireplace in their bedroom. One day, Ronkers thought, I will fall off the sleeping platform into the open-pit fireplace and run screaming and burning through the bedroom, seeing myself times five in that multi-imaged mirror. Jesus.
"One walnut sure makes a lot of bruises," Ronkers said sleepily.
"Please don't touch it," Kit said. She had wanted to bring up another subject tonight, but her enthusiasm had been stolen.
Outside, the doomed tree -- the would-be amputee -- brushed against their window the way a cat brushes against your leg. In that high room, the way the wind nudged under the eaves made sleep feel precarious -- as if the roof might be suddenly lifted off the house and they'd be left there, exposed. The final phase of achieving perfect interior space.
Sometime after midnight, Ronkers was called to the hospital for an emergency. An old woman, whose entire urinary system Ronkers had replaced with bags and hoses, was suffering perhaps her last malfunction. Five minutes after he left the house, Kit answered the phone. It was the hospital saying that the woman had died and there was no need to hurry.
George was gone two hours; Kit lay awake. She had so much she wanted to say when George got back that she was overwhelmed with where to begin; she let him fall asleep. She had wanted to discuss once more whether and when they would have children. But the night seemed so stalked by mayhem that the optimism of having babies struck her as absurd. She thought instead of the cool aesthetics, the thin economy, which characterized her leanings in the field of architecture.
She lay awake a long time after George fell asleep, listening to the restless rubbing of the tree, hearing the patternless, breakaway falls of the walnuts hurtling down on them -- dropping into their lives as randomly as old Herr Kesler's cancer, as Margaret Brant's possible case of clap.
In Ronkers's office, waiting for him even before his receptionist had arrived, was a bird-boned girl with a yogurt-and-wheat-germ complexion who couldn't have been more than 18; her clothes were expensive-looking and conservative -- a steel-toned suit her mother might have worn. A cream-colored, softly scented scarf was at her throat. Ronkers thought she was beautiful; she looked as if she'd just stepped off a yacht. But, of course, he knew who she was.
"Margaret Brant?" he asked, shaking her hand. Her eyes were a complement to her suit, an eerie dawn-gray. She had a perfect nose, wide nostrils in which, Ronkers thought, hair would not dare to grow.
"Dr. Ronkers?"
"Yes. Margaret Brant?"
"Of course," she sighed. She eyed the stirrups on Ronkers's examining table with a bitter dread.
"I'm awfully sorry, Miss Brant, to have called you, but Harlan Booth was not the most cooperative patient I've ever had, and I thought -- for your own goo
d -- since he wouldn't call you, I should." The girl nodded, biting her lower lip. She absently removed her suit jacket and her English buckle shoes; she moved toward the examining table and those gleaming stirrups as if the whole contraption were a horse she was not sure how to mount.
"You want to look at me?" she asked, her back to Ronkers.
"Please relax," Ronkers begged her. "This isn't especially unpleasant, really. Have you had any discharge? Have you noticed any burning, any inflammation?"
"I haven't noticed anything," the girl told him, and Ronkers saw she was about to burst into tears. "It's very unfair!" she cried suddenly. "I've always been so careful with ... sex," she said, "and I really didn't allow very much of anything with Harlan Booth. I hate Harlan Booth!" she screamed. "I didn't know he had anything wrong with him, of course, or I never would have let him touch me!"
"But you did let him?" Ronkers asked. He was confused.