Free Hooked by Michael Harris, Ruth Harris Page A

overflowing with people waiting for their turn with the doctor.
    As much as she disliked the intrusion by Gavin’s patients, she resented the mobile radio receiver he kept in his inside jacket pocket even more. Even when she was able to drag him to the ballet or theater, she knew, just knew, that the goddamn thing would purr with a message. He would get up and leave and she would be left to go home alone.
    “Why is every call so urgent?” she had demanded late one night when he had left during the middle of a performance of The Magic Flute. “Can’t your patients wait until the morning?”
    “I am a physician,” he had replied. “My first responsibility is to my patients.”
    “All day and all night?”
    “Yes,” he replied. “As long as they need me—”
    The note of finality in his voice ended the conversation.
    On top of his jam-packed days, he consulted at the Department of Neurology at Lowell Hospital. He was researching a new treatment for hyperkinetic children that involved amphetamine. The drug had an unexpected effect on these youngsters and quieted them down. He was, he told Cleo, surprised at the high levels at which the drug could be administered to even such young patients.
    A year and a half after they settled in New York, it was Cleo who needed quieting down. Gavin had almost stopped making love to her. She would lie next to him at night and run her hand along his thigh but he rarely responded.
    Cleo bought filmy new nightgowns and sexy new underwear. She wore perfume to bed, sometimes dabbing it on her public hair. Remembering that he had prodded her into saying
fuck
, she talked dirty, hoping to excite him. Still, no matter what she tried, her efforts made little difference.
    Cleo kept hoping things would change until one evening when they had been invited for dinner at Bobbi’s. They were expected at seven-thirty, but it was almost quarter to nine when Gavin got home from the hospital.
    “Where the hell have you been?” Cleo demanded when he let himself in.
    “At Lowell, as you perfectly well know,” he said, his face stony.
    “I hate Lowell,” said Cleo, raising her voice. “I hate your patients and I hate your career—”
    “And I hate your goddamn dinners,” Gavin snapped back. “They’re a waste of time—”
    “You know how much trouble Bobbi goes to—”
    “The hell with Bobbi,” said Gavin in his cold, tight voice. He brushed past her and headed for the bathroom.
    Cleo’s anger boiled over and she followed Gavin into the bathroom. The mirrored room was steamy from his shower and his clothes lay in a heap on the floor. She noticed that the monogrammed gold key she had given him when they returned from their honeymoon was no longer on his key ring.
    “Where’s the key I gave you?” she asked as he stepped out of the shower.
    “In the top drawer of my bureau,” he said, drying himself. “If you want to know why I’m not using it, the answer is that it’s pretentious. If you want, you can have it melted down. You can have it made into your three thousandth piece of jewelry.”
    She followed him as he walked naked into his dressing room. Angry as she was, she still responded to his lean, strong body. She touched his shoulder.
    “Gavin, do we have to fight all the time?”
    “You’re the one who’s angry, not me.”
    “But you don’t care that I’m angry and hurt? We don’t spend time together,” she said. “We don’t even make love anymore except when you give me a shot—”
    “You’re angry, Cleo, because you don’t have anything constructive to do with your life,” he said. “Your life is boring and mine isn’t and that’s why you’re angry—”
    Cleo didn’t answer. She saw the reflection of the two of them in the mirrored door of the dressing room — she in the evening gown she had put on in anticipation of going to Bobbi’s, he in the casual clothes he wore for evening office hours.
    “You’re going back to your office,” she said.
    It