I See You Everywhere by Julia Glass

Author:Julia Glass [Glass, Julia]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 0100-12-31T22:00:00+00:00

The drama king is the first to reach my bed. “Honeybee, they confiscated your flowers!” He saves me the difficulty of a reply when he kisses me, long and tender, on my mouth. I gasp, not just at the shock of being kissed like that by a stranger but because I’ve grown so used to Jerry’s beard, its prickle and rasp against my mouth. I feel like I’ve just been kissed by a Victoria’s Secret model.

Behind the guy who kissed me, Louisa gloats like a yenta, and behind her, Dr. Athanassiou makes his typically fragrant entrance. Dr. A. (which is what the other doctors and nurses call him) smells like what I imagine backyards must smell like in Greece, like plants that are green but frugal and thorny, thirst-proof succulents. Ordinarily, I find perfumed men repulsive, just as, ordinarily, I find doctors tedious. To both rules, this man is an exception. Yesterday he came to see me three times. Whenever he arrives, he stands very still for a moment at the edge of my curtain, an unspoken request for permission to enter. He never barges in or bustles around. He’s no Dr. Slocum. He asks me strange and amusing questions, like “Can you name for me the capital of France?” “The vice president of your country?” “Your favorite fruit?” “Do you habitually wear pyjamas?” “How many first cousins have you, maternal and paternal respective?” My favorite so far: “What is chivalry?” He has a regal posture, a thicket of a black mustache, slightly salted, and an accent that I like to imagine comes from Athens by way of upper-crust Nairobi or somewhere equally dashing. He makes me feel like the winning guest on a game show. I don’t think I’ve flubbed an answer yet—but he’s still being cautious. Otherwise, he’d have released me to the upstairs world of flowers and phones. And there’s the gash under the bandage on the back of my head. When I asked him how much they shaved, he frowned at me and said, “Would not a touch of baldness be but a trivial price for your life?”

The first thing he does today is wheel my bed around, so once again I’m looking out the window at the parking lot. “I prefer that patients face the light,” he says.

After I introduce him to Louisa, the drama king grabs his hand. “Larney Poole. I’m the one who got her into this pickle, I fear.” Pickle? Is this guy related to the Dr. Slocum of copacetic and noggin?

Dr. A. pats him on the shoulder and says, “I am quite sure your young woman does not believe sailing is checkers.”

We chuckle politely.

He turns to me and says, “It is what day today?”

Thursday, I tell him.

“Who are your visitors today? Tell me of your companions here.”

I try to draw out a speech on Louisa—how she lives in New York, she’s four years older, she’s an art critic at a magazine, her husband is a guy named Hugh who teaches American history at a prep school…

Dr.

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