There's Something I Want You to Do

“Elijah.” She looked at him. In the distance a car honked. The evening sky contained suggestions of rain. His smile persisted: a sturdy street-corner boy turned into a handsome pensive man but very solid-seeming, one thumb inside a belt loop, with a streetlamp behind him giving him an incandescent aura. Physically, he had the frame of a gym rat. She had the odd thought that his skin might taste of sugar, his smile was so kind. Kindness had always attracted her. It made her weak in the knees. “Elijah the prophet? Who answers all questions at the end of time? That one? Your parents must have been religious or something.”

“Yeah,” he said noncommittally, bored by the topic. “ ‘Or something’ was exactly what they were. They liked to loiter around in the Old Testament. They trusted it. They were farmers, and they believed in catastrophes. But when you have to explain your own name, you…well, this isn’t a rewarding conversation, is it?” He had a particularly deliberate way of speaking that made him sound as if he had thought up his sentences several minutes ago and was only now getting around to saying them.

She coughed. “So what do you do, Elijah?”

“Oh, that comes later,” he said. “Occupations come later. First tell me your name.”

“Susan,” she said. “So much for the introductions.” She leaned forward, showing off her great smile. “This wine. It’s so bad. I’m kind of glad I spilled it. Shall I spill more of it?” She hadn’t had more than a sip, but she felt seriously drunk.

“Well, you could spill it here.” He reversed his index finger and lifted up his necktie. “Or there.” He pointed at the sidewalk.

“But it’s white wine. White wine doesn’t really stain.” She threw the wineglass into the gutter, where it shattered.

Twenty minutes later, in a coffee shop down by the Embarcadero, she learned that he was a pediatric resident with a particular interest in mitochondrial disorders. Now she understood: out on the street, he had looked at her the way a doctor looks at a child. She herself was a psychiatric social worker, with a job waiting for her at an outpatient clinic in Millbrae. She and Elijah exchanged phone numbers. That night, rattled by their encounter, she couldn’t sleep. Three days later, still rattled, she called him and proposed a date, something her mother had advised her never to do with a man. They went to dinner and a movie, and Elijah fell asleep during the previews and didn’t wake up for another hour — poor guy, he was so worn out from his work. She didn’t bother to explain the plot: a villain had threatened the end of the world — the usual. Elijah was too tired to care.

He didn’t warm up to her convincingly — not as she really hoped he would — for a month, until he heard her sing in a local choir, a program that included the Vaughan Williams Mass in G Minor. She had a solo in the opening measures of the Benedictus, and when Elijah found her at the reception afterward, his face, as he looked at her, was softened for the first time with actual love, the real thing, that yearning, both hungry and quizzical.

“Your voice. Wow. I was undone,” he said, taking a sip of the church-basement coffee, his voice thick. Undone. He had a collection of unusual adjectives like that. Devoted was another. And committed. He used that adjective all the time. Never before had she ever met a man who was comfortable with that particular adjective.

—

A few months after they were married, they took a trip to Prague. The plan was to get pregnant there amid the European bric-a-brac. On the flight over the Atlantic, he held her hand when the Airbus hit some turbulence. In the seats next to theirs, another young couple sat together, and as the plane lurched, the woman fanned her face with a magazine while the man read passages aloud from the Psalms. “ ‘A thousand shall fall at thy side and ten thousand by thy right hand,’ ” he read. When the plane bucked, passengers laughed nervously. The flight attendants had hastily removed the drink carts and were sitting at the back doing crossword puzzles. The woman sitting next to Susan excused herself and rushed toward the bathroom, holding her hand in front of her mouth as she hurried down the fun-house-lurching aisle. When she returned, her companion was staring at his Bible. Having traded seats with Susan, Elijah then said some words to the sick woman that Susan couldn’t hear, whereupon the woman nodded and seemed to calm down.

How strange it was, his ability to give comfort. He doled it out in every direction. He wasn’t just trained as a doctor; he was a doctor all the way down to the root. Looking over at him, at his hair flecked with early gray, she thought uneasily of his generosity and its possible consequences, and then, in almost the same moment, she felt overcome with pride and love.

—