Loving Time

twenty-two

“Bobbie …”

Bobbie Boudreau heard the soft, muted cry and swung his body around to look for trouble behind him, his hands curling instinctively into fists. Half a block south on Broadway little Gunn Tram was hurrying after him, calling out his name in the noisy, densely populated, brightly lit rush-hour dusk. Bobbie had turned into the wind off the river and now felt the bite of approaching winter on his face. He had important business on his mind, scowled at having to be distracted.

Gunn quickened her small steps. For a second, she looked to Bobbie like an aging dachshund. Her big head and thickening body teetered precariously along Broadway on stubby legs and tiny black-sneakered feet. He didn’t call out to her but remained rooted where he’d stopped so she wouldn’t scream louder and draw more attention to herself.

Finally within hailing distance, she called out to him: “Going to the house?”

“Maybe,” he said slowly.

“Walk with me? I have news.”

“All right.” His eyes wrenched away from her, and he started moving again. He was pained to see this so-called friend in a shapeless pants suit and sneakers. It was embarrassing. It occurred to him that Gunn was letting herself go, was getting to be an old woman now, no longer bothering even with the pretense of carrying a good pair of shoes back and forth to her job in the personnel department at the Centre.

Gunn was sixty-two on her last birthday and joked about changing the dates in her own file so she couldn’t be retired. Not that anyone would think of retiring her, she said comfortably. “I’m the heart of the Centre, the human resource,” she liked to say.

Until recently, Bobbie had always thought so, too. Gunn was kind of saintly, soft on people. She was an optimist, she said, liked fixing bad situations. And she had the tools to do it. She had access to the computers with the business information, to the color-coded files on the shelves that had the personal stuff, to the progress and evaluation reports. Gunn knew almost everything there was to know about everybody who worked at the Centre, including the doctors and administrators. And she cared about everybody, especially him.

Bobbie had believed in Gunn all the way until he was fired last year and lost his insurance just when his mother got so sick. Gunn paid for the old lady to come north and told Bobbie how to get the maintenance job in the Stone Pavilion, but Bobbie still felt it was Gunn’s fault his mother had died. Gunn told him he couldn’t ever apply for another nursing job. Bobbie was bitter about that, too.

And now it was worse. He’d never minded the twelve years’ age difference between them. Gunn had been twelve years older than him all along, all the years he’d worked there. She wasn’t another white bitch out to get him, was Swedish and didn’t know how to be mean. He didn’t know why she was the way she was, maybe because she’d come from somewhere else, though you could hardly hear it in her voice anymore. She was bubbly and enthusiastic, never saw the bad in anybody. He liked her in spite of the annoyance of having to listen to her foreign ideas. Real good-looking never mattered much to him, anyway. He never spent any time looking at anybody, and fucking was just—fucking.

No, older had never bothered him, but old was beginning to get to him. Bobbie still felt like a young man, like the boy who’d gone off to the Army and still had opportunity in front of him. He still had the juice, expected to inherit the earth sometime soon. But more and more these days when Gunn bugged him about keeping his head down and holding his temper—when he looked at the strange, frightened old woman she was becoming—he felt he was history like Gunn and wanted to howl like a dog.

“The police came to the Centre today,” Gunn said as soon as she calmed down and caught her breath.

“Yeah, what for?” Bobbie didn’t slow his pace for her even though she had to struggle to keep up.

“You’ll never guess what.”

“A patient death.” He guessed what. What else was there?

“How did you know, Bobbie, you sly old fox? Have you heard already?” Her hand bunched into a tiny fist to punch playfully at his massive arm. He stood way over a foot taller than she, wore a baseball cap pulled low over his forehead, and had the tight, mean look that made cautious people make a wide berth around him. She changed her mind and put her hand back in her pocket.

“It’s not a hard one. Accidents happen all the time. Who’s taking the fall this time?”

“Oh, Bobbie, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought it up.… I just thought you’d like to know, that’s all.”

“What then?” He spat out the words, didn’t give a shit.

“Clara Treadwell, that’s whose patient.” Gunn said it with great satisfaction. “Rumor is she was sleeping with him.”

“And she killed him for that? Overprescribed? The old cow should have been grateful.”

Gunn laughed. “She didn’t kill him. It was a suicide. She didn’t hand him the cup—”

“I didn’t do that.” Bobbie interrupted her furiously. “Alice gave him the stuff. Fuck, why did you say that, Gunn? I’d never hurt a patient, never.”

“Sorry—I’m sorry, Bobbie.” Gunn’s face was instantly repentant.

“I should take your head off for that,” he fumed, stomping along the sidewalk punching the air.

“I know. It just slipped out, I don’t know why. Forgive me?” She shook her head hard, pumping her own legs faster to get out of a bad situation. “I know you had nothing to do with it.”

“The resident gave him the wrong prescription,” Bobbie raged.

“I know, Bobbie. Everybody knows that. You weren’t responsible.”

“And Alice handed it to him.”

“I know, you’re right.”

“So why did I have to take the fall? You tell me that!”

“I don’t know, Bobbie.” She didn’t remind him about his knocking out an attending physician—not even a full-time member of the staff—after the patient’s death. Or that the committee had concluded he was a danger to the community, quite apart from the question of his guilt or innocence in the matter at hand.

“Bastards.” He strode north toward the brownstone on Ninety-ninth Street, where Gunn lived on the fourth floor. He had moved into the basement flat occupied by his mother the last year of her life. It did not surprise him at all that the head of the hospital was being questioned in a patient death. That bitch Clara Treadwell ruined people’s lives every day. She’d ruined his life. It was about time someone got on her case.

“Bobbie?”

“They won’t get her for it,” he muttered angrily.

“No,” she agreed.

“There’s no justice.”

“No … Bobbie?”

They were nearing Ninety-ninth Street. “What?”

“Will you eat with me?” Gunn asked softly.

He hesitated, chugging along for almost a block before he answered. “I don’t know. Maybe. If it don’t take too long.”

“It won’t take long,” Gunn promised eagerly.