Chapter Nine
The dream-work … does not think, calculate, or judge in any way at all; it restricts itself to giving things a new form.
—Sigmund Freud
Dr. Mark White approached the last summer of his two-year psychiatric residency on the Hill with relief. Most of his colleagues from medical school had chosen private hospitals for their residencies, grooming themselves into a lucrative network of suburban practice. Mark’s appearance did not lend itself to suburban practice—executives and their wives did not want to trust their psyches to someone who looked like an Eagle Scout too young to shave. His bright blue eyes and unmanageable brown hair furthered the naïve adolescent image. During his ER rotation he’d been mistaken for a high school volunteer and for the lab tech’s (high school) son.
Mark decided to continue with public medicine in the fall, but he kept that decision to himself. He was going to treat himself to some fishing first. This morning he bought his first fishing license in six years as a commitment to relaxation.
He had offers, all places like the Hill, but he had no plans beyond his residency. These not very attractive offers all came from overworked, understaffed state agencies. He had ignored his advisor’s warnings about a residency at the state institution, and now he reaped the consequences.
“Rich people get as crazy as the poor,” Dr. Bidet had advised him. “Psychiatric care takes time, it’s not like a gall bladder that’s wrapped up in a couple of hours.” He tapped his desktop timer that ticked away Mark’s allotment of six hundred seconds. “Time costs money—if it’s your time, then it’s either your money or somebody else’s.” He rubbed his fat neck and sighed just as the timer dinged. “I think you’re an excellent physician, Mark. I’ll recommend you wherever you choose to go.”
Mark had never admired his advisor, a corpulent teaching psychiatrist with a very limited, very lucrative private practice. In therapy, Mark had faced his distaste for the rich and fat, a “reverse snobbery,” as Mindy once put it.
The new Dr. Mark White had chosen the Hill for unprofessional reasons. The hospital grounds, parklike and peaceful, perched on a wooded ridge top overlooking the valley. On a clear evening, standing on the helipad atop the fifth-floor roof, he could watch the sunset trickle down the Olympic Mountains as it pinked up the watery spaces between the San Juan Islands. Even the rain was a pleasure up there. Rather than washing the landscape gray, as it did in the city, rain simply brightened the evergreen vista and freshened the air. If the Hill was not therapeutic for others, its location was pure therapy for Mark White.
His name tag read: “Dr. Mark,” and he seldom wore white. He worked in one of three corduroy sports coats: brown, gray, or beige. By the time he started his tenure at the Hill he had already made his only tie, a black clip-on, last four and a half years. The tie was a going-away present from his younger brother, who inherited Mark’s room over the garage.
His tie was the last straw with Mindy, who made the issue of a state institution an ultimatum.
“I can’t stand the thought of you working in an asylum,” she said. Her nose wrinkled up in that way he’d thought cute, but now he thought officious. After all, he was the only one in the room with her at the time—not his patients, not the asylum. She was not wrinkling her nose at them but at him and at his pitiful prospects, a pungent substitute for what his medical degree had implied.
Mark White had a firm confidence in the skills of his head and his hands. The year of psychotherapy required for his matriculation in psychiatry had not gone wasted. He looked forward to the Hill, not down on it, and every time he saw Mindy picking imaginary lint off the arm of her chair he felt the gulf between them widen. She was digging a hole between them by the bucketful. He knew that nothing short of continental drift could save them.
Mindy had been his only intimate relationship, and he regretted his inexperience, particularly his inexperience in ending it. Even the best therapy only reached so far.
In the end, he didn’t have to worry. She took charge of the ending as she had taken charge of their meals or their selection of movies that she preferred to call “films.”
“I respect your social conscience,” she told him, “but I believe that money saves more people than good intentions. You should be an example for them to aspire to, not grubbing around among them.”
He had simply smiled and taken her hand.
“You’re being understanding,” she said. Again, that wrinkle of the well-tanned nose. “Being understanding is not the same as understanding. You’ll see what I mean. Someday, you’ll need something or someone and nothing will quite bring it off like money. That’s why I’m going to Houston.”
She flew to Houston as the first vice-president of the BankWest International Investments division and married her Chief Executive Officer a year later. Mark circled the date on his calendar after he received the invitation, but by the time the wedding rolled around he had already met Eddie Reyes.