“I finally called Edna Brewster. Luckily Bill was working late, so she and I ate at Charles’s and then sat around their place and caught up. Are you coming home?”

“Yes,” he said.

“I’ll tell Miguel.”

He cleaned the top of his desk and closed the door and changed out of his whites. Then he sat down and looked up Edna Brewster’s number in the book.

She was Liz’s friend, not his, and she sounded puzzled but pleased to hear from him.

“I’ve been trying to think of something special to get Liz for Christmas,” he said. “You girls all have everything.”

She groaned. “I am the worst one to come to for gift suggestions.”

“Not suggestions. Just keep your ears open when you’re with her. Try to find out if there’s something she’d really love to have.”

She promised to spy faithfully and he thanked her. “When are we going to see you people? Liz was saying just the other day she hasn’t seen you for ages.”

“Months. Isn’t it terrible?” she said. “We never seem to have time to see the people we really want to see. Let’s the four of us get together for bridge. Tell Liz I’ll call her.” She giggled. “On second thought, you’d better not tell her we talked. It’ll be our secret. Deal?”

“Deal,” he said.

11: Adam Silverstone

11

Adam Silverstone

Adam blamed his fury at Meomartino for driving him from his bed, but he returned to duty off-stride and brooding, inclined to remember at unlikely moments the way Gaby Pender had rested unsullied in the sun with her eyes closed, her perfect urgent smallness, her shy and broken laughter, as if she were uncertain she had a right to laugh.

He tried to push her from his mind by crowding in everything else.

Dr. Longwood informed him of the appointment that would be made in the surgical faculty and he understood suddenly what had happened to Meomartino. He told Spurgeon about it as they sat in his room and drank beer chilled in the snow on the window sill.

“I’m going to nail that job down,” he said. “Meomartino isn’t going to get it.” His fingers throttled an empty beer can, making dents.

“Not just because you dislike him,” Spurgeon said. “You can’t dislike anybody that much.”

“That’s only part of it. I really want the appointment.”

“It fits into the Silverstone Greater Scheme of Things?”

Adam smiled and nodded.

“The prestige job leading straight to one that pays the big money?”

“Now you’ve got it.”

“You’re just conning yourself, buddy-boy. You know what the Silverstone Greater Scheme of Things really is?”

“What?” Adam said.

“Bullshit and cow dung.”

Adam just smiled.

Spurgeon shook his head. “You think you’ve got everything figured out, don’t you, man.”

“Everything I can think of,” Adam said.