Looking for Mr. Goodbar by Judith Rossner Page A

named Mrs. Engle who was a perfect human being except that she couldn’t make a decent cup of coffee. What did that mean, anyway? She couldn’t really be perfect, and when you thoughtabout it it was the kind of thing you could say about someone without actually liking her. It made her sound formidable. And she was a doctor. That helped considerably, remembering that it wasn’t Mrs. Engle but Doctor Engle.
    “What kind of doctor is your wife?” she asked without thinking.
    He looked up and smiled. “A pediatrician.”
    The words swam around in her head for a minute with a lot of other doctors’ labels until she could identify it, fairly certainly, as a baby doctor.
    “How’s that?” he asked.
    She shrugged. “I don’t like doctors.” She blushed. It had just popped out, like her question, and it didn’t sound right. She never even thought about doctors, except once or twice a year when she had to see one, and of course that was never an experience you would look forward to, but now here she was . . . Sometimes she felt she could never just simply and easily say the right thing with him. Not that she could with other people, but with other people she didn’t care. When she wrote an essay for him she scribbled it over five or ten times before it was good enough. Then he read it and thought it was natural to her. She was a fraud. Not even really intelligent, particularly. Certainly she would never have been a doctor. You had to be very smart to even get into medical school.
    “Why?” he asked. “A lot of people would die without them.”
    “A lot of people die with them.”
    “Did you have a bad experience with a doctor?”
    “No, not particularly.”
    “Why do you limp?”
    She gasped. The sudden movement of her body made her coffee spill over the side of the cup as she held it. One hand got wet from it but she barely noticed; she was overwhelmed by a sense of unreality. He wasn’t real; she wasn’t real; they weren’t here; he hadn’t asked that question. He couldn’t have. She didn’t limp.
    “I don’t limp,” she finally said, except that her voice came out in a whisper.
    “I’m sorry,” he said after a moment. “That may have been too extreme a word to use. You have a slight sway, imbalance, whatever you want to call it, to your walk. It’s not unattractive. If I weren’t aware of such things I might never have noticed.”
    No one, not her parents, not relatives, not anyone she ever knew had ever said anything about a limp. For a long time she’d had to wear one shoe with a platform in it, and then she’d started wearing regular shoes as though she’d always worn them. No one had ever said anything about the way she walked!
    She had a wild desire to escape and stood up, about to walk away from him, from this place, when suddenly it occurred to her that as she went, he would see her limping. She sat down again. Staring at him. Frozen in the moment. Unable to make it pass.
    “Theresa.” He put his hands over hers. “I’m sorry I’ve upset you.”
    “You haven’t upset me.”
    “Yes I have.”
    Silence.
    “Come,” he said. “Let’s go someplace where we can talk. It’s not very comfortable in here.” He waited. She said nothing. “We’ll go into my study. We’ll have our coffee there, it’s much pleasanter.” He put the coffee things on a small tray and held out his free hand to her. She stood up but she didn’t take his hand. The frozen moment was passing and now she had to fight tears. He put his arm around her and they passed gingerly through the kitchen, down the hallway, into a room behind a closed door. His study. It was strange. Totally unlike the rest of the house, with nothing out of place, and maybe quite beautiful, although she couldn’t tell yet, she wasn’t familiar with this kind of room. In front of one window was a huge table with many plants and a couple of piles of papers. At an angle to it stood a typewriter on a stand. In front of anotherwindow