Creatures of Habit by Julie Baumgold

Author:Julie Baumgold [Baumgold, Julie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-80041-1
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-10-26T00:00:00+00:00

He came right to the door instead of buzzing me in. The sleeves of his blue shirt were rolled up and I saw the thick fair hair on his forearms, but I was afraid to look up at his face.

“I’ve been waiting since ten,” he said.

“ ‘Now that you have found me, how long will you stay?’ ‘Till the end of time.’ The Thief of Baghdad, one of my favorite movies.”

“I would have given you till eleven,” he said. Now I saw that when he was tired, his accent was stronger, a beautiful voice.

He came right over to me then and half nudged me into Dr. Albumen’s office, which was dark, and there, against the door, he began to kiss me. It was a strange kiss, half biting, half sucking, almost painful, and I drew back, but he continued a long time, nibbling, probing, hurting my lips.

“I know it’s different for you,” he said. “Try to trust me.”

“But I don’t like pain.”

“Are you sure?” and he began biting at my lip again until I tasted the salt in my mouth. I felt a mad and crazed desire, almost a swooning, beating in the blood, and he began to pinch at my nipples until they too were sore and he was panting and I was too. He put his hand down between my legs and moved it back and forth, the palm rigid like he was sawing, and that too hurt—and then I began to feel it, and all the months without sex, the anger of the day, the frightening tension, the risk, mounted and I could not stop. I twisted and turned against the door as over and over again it happened, maybe eight times, maybe ten, until I slumped down and he pulled me up by the hair but I scarcely felt it. Then he let me fall and went to a drawer, from which he took a set of keys.

“Come with me,” he said, and when he saw I could not move he waited. “I have to shut up the office.” He began pulling the blinds as behind him a shaft of neon light glared on in the childish pastel rooms, which added to the wicked mood.

“I should have asked if you minded staying here. Would you get some of the lights?” and we walked through the rooms with the wastebaskets overflowing and the instruments waiting to be autoclaved so that I wondered just who was going to clean up and when.

“Come in here,” he said, and it was a room I had never seen, way in the back off the pink entry and obviously his private office.

I have always, at least since my first marriage, believed that most doctors have had severe childhood illnesses or injuries, something to have brought them into long contact with hospitals and doctors. Also that the specialties they choose are no accident, and that the art in doctors’ offices always looks like their specialty. Charles had nothing on the walls but six ugly warped tin sculptures looking rather like tumors hung in very neat rows.

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