The Touch Page 6

  Jones paused again and thought of his grandmother. He could hear her voice, reading from the Bible she kept tucked along with the pistol in the table beside her bed: “What is man, that Thou art mindful of him?” He looked up, surveying the stars. “My grandmother loved the stars,” he said quietly.

  “Tell me about your grandmother,” Lara asked.

  “I don’t know you well enough,” Jones said. And they strolled back toward the restaurant.

  * * *

  Lara knew they would have a nice table—she planned for good results, and expected them—but she was both surprised and delighted when the maitre d’ showed them to a nook near a window looking out toward the mountains, blue in the light of the rising moon. As they settled into their chairs—Jones held hers for her, like a gentleman, and she thanked him, like a lady—she said, “When did you start writing poetry?”

  “You know an awful lot about me.”

  “We have a lot at stake in whom we choose to work with. Not many doctors are literary, but those who are tend to be extraordinary.”

  “Chekhov said, ‘Medicine is my wife and literature is my mistress. When I—’”

  “‘—When I grow tired of one, I spend time with the other.’”

  “You know Russian writers too?”

  Lara already knew that Jones was smart enough to see through any manipulation; she desperately needed to recruit him, but something about Jones made Lara want to be completely honest with him. “I know a few. And I have a good memory,” she said. And then she confessed, “We found out that you love them, so I read up a little.” She noticed the reaction in his eyes, the defensive withdrawal there, and she added, “I’m sorry. I see you feel we’ve been prying. But talent like yours is more than rare. So let me get this out of the way. I’ve come to offer you a million dollars. And I’ll write the check tonight.”

  Jones was studying her, his gaze penetrating, his smile gone.

  Lara went on, “We’ll fund the development of any new instruments you might invent and give you half the proceeds from their sale. There are no strings attached—except that you pursue your surgical specialty.” She stopped and let that sink in.

  He was staring at the tablecloth between them, and now it seemed like a vast field of snow.

  She leaned forward slightly, slowly, taking care to keep her voice even. “We’re aware there is a complicating issue.”

  “And you know the issue.”

  “Only that it’s personal. It has to be; you loved being a surgeon, as every true master loves his art. Whatever stopped you didn’t take your ability, otherwise you couldn’t be making sculptures with emotion and beauty and character, all small enough to fit inside the eye of a needle. You can do what we need done.”

  “I’m not a surgeon anymore,” Jones said quietly. “Now I teach other doctors to operate.”

  “What about teaching them to do what no one else has ever done?”

  Jones looked away, his eyes and his thoughts wandering across the distant mountains. Lara knew she had already pushed too hard, had already violated an internal space, perhaps a sacred one; but she could not give up. She added quickly, “I have a colleague—a friend—who works for my company. She’s a psychologist, she’s excellent. Maybe if you and she sat down together and talked about the issues that—”

  Jones pushed back from the table, with icy calm.

  Lara spoke hurriedly. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “No, it’s fine.”

  “No, please, it’s not fine.”

  “I’m sorry I’ve wasted your time, and I don’t want to waste your dinner. It’s been…” Without another word he stood and walked out.

  * * *

  Jones was striding quickly along the sidewalk when Lara broke from the restaurant doors and rushed to catch him. “Dr. Jones! Please—I’m sorry! Your life is your life, and I don’t mean to violate your privacy. I know I’ve done that already, it’s just… this project means a lot to me, personally, and… I just don’t know when to quit.”

  Without breaking stride, he said, “And you think maybe I’m a quitter?”

  “I didn’t say that!”

  “No, I said that.” Jones stopped and wheeled toward her, but instead of staring into her he stared away, some argument raging within his own head. She watched him, and she did not push him now; she had pushed too much already.

  And in that moment an awareness dawned in Lara that both thrilled and disturbed her; she realized that Jones found her as unique as she found him. She knew he wanted to walk away from her and her offer the way he had walked away from everyone else who sought to exploit his talents; yet she was sure, in the way women are always sure of what can’t be proven yet is clear to them alone, that the few moments they had spent together were as welcome to Jones in his aloneness as they were to Lara in hers.

  For what seemed to her a long time he stared at the distant blue mountains. Then he said, “The micro sculptures. Would you like to see how they’re made?”

  Her smile grew slowly, from small to huge. “Oh yeah,” she said.

  * * *

  What she saw through the magnifying lenses—one for each eye, resembling a pair of blunted binoculars—reminded her of one of those cigar store Indians she had seen pictured in history books, so massive and majestic did it look. It was an exquisite carving: a handsome head held nobly, the proud posture of a chieftain in ceremonial feathered headdress, exquisite detail evident in the chiseled features of the face of red clay, a sculpture not quite complete. Jones lifted an instrument and eased Lara to the side so that he could share one of the viewing lenses with her, and as she watched through the other she saw an amazing apparition: a sculpting blade moved into her view, and it looked impossibly huge in comparison. The flaws in the steel of the scalpel showed like canyons on the moon.

  Jones removed the blade from her view and stepped back so that Lara could look through both lenses again. “This is a practice model,” he said. “I try to get the residents in here to experiment with the technique, and I start them on oversized pieces.”

  “Oversized?” Lara wondered, looking through the magnifiers at the noble chieftain. “How large is this?”

  “The chief here is about the size of an exclamation point, in standard type.” He flipped on the light of a microscope on the lab table. “This one is a bit smaller. It would fit inside a period.”

  She pulled back from the magnifiers, shot a disbelieving glance at him, and leaned to look through the microscope. What she saw there was a statue of Thomas Jefferson, standing within the rotunda of the Jefferson Memorial. The carving looked so real that she spoke in a whisper, as if not to disturb him. “Jefferson…”

  “Can you read the inscription?”

  She pulled back from the microscope. “You’re kidding.”

  He just looked at her. She peered back into the lenses and dialed the scope around to change the view. And sure enough, the inscription on the sculpted walls around the clay Jefferson came into focus. She read, “I have sworn upon the altar of God…” She pulled back, startled. “Show-off.”

  “It’s all about touch. Surgeons are taught to see and think, but to work like this you’ve got to feel. Want to try it?” He picked up a tiny probe and extended it to her. Seeing her hesitate, he smiled and urged, “Come on. You can practice on Chief Red Wing.”

  Lara’s heart was thumping—was it the challenge of the carving or the way he was guiding her hand?—as she pushed a blade, the tiny probe, looking huge in magnification, closer to the half-finished sculpture of the noble Indian. The probe was trembling noticeably, and Lara backed from the lenses, shaking her head. “It’s so small…”

  “Just rest the edge against the base of the statue first,” he said in the same voice he had used to calm the young surgeon earlier. He leaned in to a second set of monitoring lenses, also trained on the clay model—and watched her following his instructions. He could tell instantly that she had great skill in her hands.
“Good—that’s very good! I haven’t seen anybody do that on their first try. Okay, now, before you move the edge, listen to your heartbeat.”

  “My what?”

  “Your hearing’s good, isn’t it?”

  She looked at him and said loudly, “HUH?!”

  He grinned; she was good at this, good enough to joke while doing it. “We can all hear our hearts beat; we just don’t. But for this you have to listen.”

  She peered through the lenses again, returned the blade to the base of the statue, and used all her willpower to focus on holding the cutting blade perfectly still, against such a tiny object, and listening to her heart. “I can’t hear it!”

  “Yes, you can. You feel it more than hear it, but you can hear it too, if you focus more on the listening than on the keeping still.”

  She was trying so hard that sweat was forming on her forehead. For a moment he thought she had given up, like so many of his students did when confronted with a challenge they didn’t believe they could master. Then he saw it: she took on a kind of trance, like Jones showed in the operating room; and as she did this, he glanced up from his magnifiers and studied her face.

  He spoke in a soothing voice. “Now lift the blade and hold it with just a slight gap between it and the chief’s headdress.” He looked into the microscope again. “See how the blade moves with each of your heartbeats? Find the rhythm; it’ll help you focus.”

  She cleared her mind of everything except her heartbeat; the blade steadied.

  “Good,” he whispered. “Now, in the interval between the beats… shave off that rough edge of the headdress.”

  They both watched through the magnifiers as she succeeded. “I did it!” she yelled.

  “You sure did.”

  “This is so great, Andrew! I—” And in an instant, as she forgot the vastness of the microscope’s magnification, the blade decapitated the statue. She winced and pulled back from the lenses. “I jerked,” she said softly.

  “No, you didn’t. Your hand was steady. It was your heart. It beat faster and changed your rhythm. Not much. Just enough to cut off Red Wing’s head.”

  Their eyes were locked on each other.

  Then Jones’s beeper went off.

  * * *

  Lara kept pace with him now, at his shoulder as Jones strode quickly into the Emergency Room; they found it strangely quiet, with the ER nurse at her desk. Her name tag said “Carolyn” and her hair was gray, and still she looked as if she could wrestle a three-hundred-pound drunk onto an examination table. “You page me?” Jones asked her.

  “A call came in from the mountain.” She handed Jones a message slip, and as he read it she added, “I’ve called one of the orderlies to drive you.”

  “No, I can do it,” he said in that eye-of-the-storm voice already familiar to Lara. He turned to her and said, “I’m sorry to cut the evening short, Dr. Blair—”

  The ER nurse told Jones, “By my count you haven’t been to bed in forty-eight hours.”

  “I can do it, Carolyn.”

  But Nurse Carolyn was tough enough to argue—with patients, with hospital administrators, and especially with a doctor she admired enough to pray for every night, right after the AA meetings she’d been going to for the last seventeen years. “Dr. Jones—”

  “I’m fine, Nurse, thank you.”

  The nurse shoved a packed medical satchel across the desk for him. As Jones took it he patted her on the hand, then moved quickly toward the double doors leading to the parking lot. Lara was still at his side. When he looked at her she said, “Let me drive you.”

  He paused for a moment; even in his hurry, he paused; and Lara knew he was doing more than just considering her offer. “That won’t be necessary,” he said with a gentleness that struck Lara as almost… sad.

  “I’m not going home until we’ve finished our talk.”

  Jones paused another moment, taking in her determination.

  * * *

  The twenty-year-old station wagon waddled down 29-South from Charlottesville, curling toward the mountains, the headlights soaked up in the heavy darkness of tree-lined turns and rises and dips where the road disappeared. The station wagon was Jones’s, but Lara was at the wheel, the rumble of open highway feeling both unaccustomed and welcome to the palms of her hands. When they first left the parking lot Jones watched her carefully to see how she handled the weight and sway of the old suspension, but he saw quickly that Lara was comfortable, even delighted, to be driving, and slowly he began to relax.

  He directed her to an exit that sent them right, toward the Blue Ridge, and told her, “Just stay on this road south till you hit Greenstone Mountain Road.”

  The night was quiet, the heater warm and humming. The edge of anxiety about the agenda that brought her here had begun to melt away, and Lara found herself settling into this moment, strangely free from the past and unconcerned with the future. It was a peace she had not felt since… since she did not remember when, and she did not try to remember; she did not want this peace to fade.

  Beside her, Jones seemed to feel it too. His body had been taut in the hospital; now he swayed easily with the turns of the road.

  And Lara found herself wanting not so much to recruit him as to know him. From that place of ease she asked, “You teach, work double shifts… and you still travel?”

  “I’m their doctor,” he said, his eyes directed toward the range of western mountains, a rolling layer of black beneath the star-flecked sky.

  “You haven’t been to bed in two days?”

  “I don’t like to sleep much.”

  “Just listen to the tires sing. Maybe you can get a nap.” As she said this she noticed how soothing her voice had become. She had always liked Jones’s voice, resonant like a cello, with Southern softness in his accent; now Lara realized that her own voice had become gentle, even caring. She had not heard those qualities in her voice in a very long time.

  Jones rubbed his eyes and stifled a yawn. “You okay?”

  “I love to drive.” She smiled, looking up through the windshield at the barren tree branches stretching out from the roadside and mingling with the stars. “Once, coming back from college, I took a turn that I knew wasn’t the way home and just drove. Blacktop and trees and me at the wheel. Going nowhere, feeling I was going everywhere. Three days. I wanted to keep going. But my father was worried and my mother was…” She hesitated; she didn’t tell people about her mother. But Jones was different. She glanced to him—

  And she saw he had nodded off. For a minute she drove along in a deep silence. Then she found herself smiling.

  * * *

  The road wound higher into the mountains. Lara shifted the steering wheel with smooth grace, and the old station wagon floated peacefully. Jones’s head, heavy with sleep, rolled with the winding road.

  It seemed to Lara that every memory of this road was programming his subconscious—she thought of people as systems to be fixed when they were broken, machines to be refined—and she told herself that his falling asleep was a compliment because it indicated his reliance on her. She knew he did not rely on many people, because the people close to him—Janet in his office, Carolyn in the Emergency Room—were both strong and confident, the kind of people you could trust to get things done. Lara hoped he was coming to trust her, or she would never convince him to come to work for her company.

  Still, Lara was a woman, and she found Jones attractive, and his falling asleep when alone with her scraped at the edges of her ego. She liked to pretend that the human mechanical system named Lara Blair was not plagued by feminine vanities and especially not by romantic desires, but as she drove Jones’s station wagon into the deepening darkness of the mountains she found feelings rising within her that she could neither accept nor explain.

  And there was one more feeling in the stew beginning to bubble inside Lara, in the soul of this woman who did not believe she had a soul. She felt joy. She did not try to find a name for the feeling, and that was
part of its wonder: it took root and grew in her because she made no attempt to label or control it. But it was there; she, Lara Blair, principal owner and CEO of Blair Bio-Medical Engineering, had found herself somewhere she had never expected to be: in a decrepit station wagon, driving into hillbilly country, next to a surgeon who would not operate, a doctor with skinned knees and grass stains on his elbows, and she found every moment with him to be intensely exciting and he, on the other hand, had fallen asleep the moment he felt the quiet and the steady rhythm of the road into the mountains. Lara smiled again. Here in Virginia, she was smiling often.

  Maybe it was the air. Or the stars. Or the hum of the road. She could understand why Jones slept; it was peaceful here.

  * * *

  Jones opened his eyes and tried to rub the sleep from them. He glanced over at Lara just as she was nodding off.

  Before he could speak to her or grab at the wheel, he heard the blast of a truck horn and saw the glare of the headlights. Lara woke, screamed, jerked the wheel, but it was too late. A tractor-trailer truck blasting along the other side of the highway had swung too wide on a turn and was surging across the center line into their lane. Impossibly it went airborne… . For a moment, the huge truck seemed to pause in the air; then it flew down and slammed into them with a flash.

  Inside the station wagon, Jones’s scream ripped into the night—

  Lara, sitting peacefully at the wheel, jumped, startled by Jones’s shout—but she kept the station wagon perfectly steady on the otherwise empty road. He’d been dreaming.

  Jones’s mind clawed its way out of the nightmare. He gulped air, sweating, his eyes darting as he reconnected with the waking world.