Page 159 - A Little Life: A Novel

to them, but I think they would have preferred a potential daughter-in-law
who would flirt with them a little, to whom they could tell embarrassing
stories about my childhood, who would have lunch with Adele and play

chess with my father. Someone like you, in fact. But that wasn’t Liesl and
wouldn’t ever be, and once they realized that, they too remained a bit aloof,
not to express their displeasure but as a sort of self-discipline, a reminder to
themselves that there were limits, her limits, that they should try to respect.
When I was with her, I felt oddly relaxed, as if, in the face of such sturdy
competence, even misfortune wouldn’t dare try to challenge us.
We had met in New York, where I was in law school and she was in

medical school, and after graduating, I got a clerkship in Boston, and she
(one year older than I) started her internship. She was training to be an
oncologist. I had been admiring of that, of course, because of what it
suggested: there is nothing more soothing than a woman who wants to heal,
whom you imagine bent maternally over a patient, her lab coat white as
clouds. But Liesl didn’t want to be admired: she was interested in oncology

because it was one of the harder disciplines, because it was thought to be
more cerebral. She and her fellow oncological interns had scorn for the
radiologists (too mercenary), the cardiologists (too puffed-up and pleased
with themselves), the pediatricians (too sentimental), and especially the
surgeons (unspeakably arrogant) and the dermatologists (beneath comment,
although they of course worked with them frequently). They liked the
anesthesiologists (weird and geeky and fastidious, and prone to addiction),

the pathologists (even more cerebral than they), and—well, that was about
it. Sometimes a group of them would come over to our house, and would
linger after dinner discussing cases and studies, while their partners—
lawyers and historians and writers and lesser scientists—were ignored until
we slunk off to the living room to discuss the various trivial, less-interesting
things with which we occupied our days.

We were two adults, and it was a happy enough life. There was no
whining that we didn’t spend enough time with each other, from me or from
her. We remained in Boston for her residency, and then she moved back to
New York to do her fellowship. I stayed. By that time I was working at a
firm and was an adjunct at the law school. We saw each other on the
weekends, one in Boston, one in New York. And then she completed her
program and returned to Boston; we married; we bought a house, a little

one, not the one I have now, just at the edge of Cambridge.