She stopped as if she had run into a glass wall. “You have a Code 99?”

“No,” he said.

“Are you expecting an emergency, Doctor?”

“No.”

“Well, I’ve got a woman vomiting her guts out,” she said indignantly and hurried away.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, but she was gone. Sighing, he set out to search, an explorer in a strange and foreign land.

At eight p.m., thirty-six hours after he had begun his career as an intern, Spurgeon opened the door of his room on the sixth floor and winced as the heat flooded out to meet him.

“Hoo-whee,” he said softly.

He had slept here only a few hours on the preceding night, interns being on first call, with the resident being bothered only for matters of some seriousness. Eight or nine times he had been awakened to prescribe drugs that would bring to patients the sleep denied to their intern.

He put down the paper sack he was carrying and threw the window open wide. He pushed out of his shoes without untying the laces, stripped out of his whites and peeled off a sodden undershirt. From the bag he took a six-pack of beer and, tearing the aluminum tab from a can, drank one-third of its contents in one long, cold swallow. Then, sighing, he went to the closet and got the guitar.

Sitting on the bed he finished the can of beer and began to pluck the strings and sing softly, the tenor part of a madrigal.

There’s a rose in my gar-den

And it has one sharp thorn,

And I prick myself on it

At least twice a morn.

And I hasten to plead

As I hasten to bleed:

Wipe the blood

Off the rose

In my gar-den . . .

Hell, no, he thought sorrowfully, the mood was all wrong in this place.

What his own material had always needed was an admiring audience, a willowy chick telling him, “clever Spurgeon” with her eyes, the slight promising pressure of a knee as she sat next to him on the piano bench, and guys hustling drinks for him as if he were Ellington and urging him to play this song or that.

He missed that gig, he realized.

“Your fault, Uncle Calvin,” he said aloud.

Uncle Calvin had thought for sure he’d end up playing piano in some Harlem joint, knocking himself out for cakes or worse. He grinned and opened another can and drank to the stepfather whose money had made him a doctor despite the fact that Spurgeon refused to train himself to take over the business the old man had sweated most of his life to develop. And then drank to himself, swimming in his own sweat in the tiny hotbox of a room.

“Uncle Calvin,” he admitted aloud, “this ain’t exactly my idea of success.”

He walked to the window and looked out at the lights that were beginning to pop into life as the city darkened. Got to get away from this clothes-closet, he told himself. Somewhere down there was a comfortable pad where maybe he could have a second-hand piano.