Read Online Private Practices by Linda Wolfe - Free Book Online

explained limply, “I liked it.” Sidney had shrugged and said, “Tell you what. I’ll write a paper for you while I’m home.” Ben demurred, but Sidney was insistent. “You picked the wrong topic, old buddy,” he said. “You’ll never get as good a grade with this as you’d get if you did the cell.” Ben had finally acquiesced, and he got an A in biology, although he was never quite certain what grade he would have gotten if he had used his own paper.
    In college—unlike Sidney he went to City and lived at home to save Sara money—he and Sidney had similar altercations. To Sidney, anything short of glowing success was failure, and he was always predicting failure for Ben and trying to get him to forestall it through deceit, urging him to cheat on exams, hire a fellow student to go over his papers for him, even to subscribe to a thesis-writing service he had read about somewhere.
    Sidney never practiced deceit to advance his own career. He didn’t have to. But when it came to Ben’s career, he believed it was essential.
    It wasn’t that Ben was doing badly in college. He was as smart as the next fellow, if not as brilliant as Sidney. But, knowing Ben’s early slowness, Sidney never quite trusted his advances during adolescence and young manhood. It was as if the past had greater reality than the present. When Ben found the work in medical school extremely difficult, Sidney said, “There’s only one way a guy like you can make it through. You’re going to have to start studying all night.”
    Ben promised to try. But he couldn’t do it. To help him, Sidney, already an intern, produced amphetamines to keep him awake for hours on end, and barbiturates to permit him brief restorative naps. “No harm in these,” Sidney said. “No harm in anything but failure.”
    Following Sidney’s advice, Ben had made it through medical school, and later through a grueling internship and residency, and at last he had become, like Sidney himself, a specialist in obstetrics and gynecology. Yet he always felt himself to be an inferior doctor. Years later, thoroughly disillusioned with himself, he returned to the barbiturates he had first come to enjoy during medical school. He monitored his habit, tried to keep it from overwhelming his life. But he never tried to give it up. It made failure tolerable.
    Wandering through the park, his legs finally grew so weary that he felt grateful. He would be able to sleep now. Able to sleep even without the pills. He didn’t want to have to take them. Not tonight, when at any minute the Kinney baby might die and he would have to break the news to Annette. Stamping through the snow onto an unfamiliar windy corner, he hailed a cab and rode to his apartment.
    But he couldn’t sleep. Lying exhausted on the living room couch, he kept thinking that if the Kinney baby died, he would blame himself fiercely for its brief labored life. And even if it lived, if it was in any way damaged, he would still blame himself, no matter whom Sidney blamed officially. And he would blame himself for whatever happened to Diehl, would have Diehl on his conscience too.
    But he had no choice. As Sidney had said, he had too much to hide to risk a malpractice suit. Such a suit might dredge up his addiction and possibly result in suspension from the hospital. As long as he was taking his pills, he’d have to do what Sidney advised. And he couldn’t give them up. They were the jewels with which he courted his beloved sleep.
    Lying on his back, he withdrew the container from his pocket and spread a few yellow capsules on his palm. Golden and shiny in their clear jell covers, they seemed to him jewels indeed, and he held them gently and then at last got up and went into the kitchen to fill a glass of water. There was no point in fooling himself; he needed the pills.
    Far below, outside the kitchen window, was a wide