The Finest Medical Attention

Anna has two close friends, celestine and jill, women she has known since childhood, the three of them from families with live-in housekeepers and feuding parents and assorted neglected pets. They have gone through periods of intense closeness as well as bouts of jealous competition, which, in one case, resulted in Jill’s not speaking to Celestine for almost a year because Celestine began dating Jill’s ex-boyfriend two days after he had broken up with her.

The lives of Celestine and Jill often have the air of a siege, at least as Anna perceives their confessions and self-mocking admissions, both of her friends prone to spending too much money on clothes they might wear only once, to dating more than one man at a time, to having sex with their bosses, and even, in one case, a boss’s wife. Anna has only ever expressed mild dismay over their behavior, though, even when she finds it scandalous. They are her oldest friends, and she wants them to continue to confide in her. Any serious criticism might upset the established balance between them—she the lucid, understanding friend, they the unabashed, impulsive pleasure-seekers. They talk often, despite how busy Anna has been with medical school over the past four years, and how tired but often exhilarated she feels when she’s at the hospital, following around the attending physicians she and the other fourth-year students have been assigned to. Dr. Glass, one of the attendings for her internal medicine rotations, is her favorite. She guesses that he is in his mid-forties, though he looks younger, his face turning especially boyish when he smiles. His credentials make it clear, however, that he has been out of medical school for close to twenty years.

She began working with him in the spring of her third year, when clinical rotations began, and now, a year later, with her coursework finally finished and a full-time summer residency underway, she is with him for nine or ten hours at a time, five days a week, unless he alternates with the other attendings she has been assigned to in internal medicine, Dr. Fitch and Dr. Kaczmerski, who are older and often humorless. Dr. Fitch also has a wandering eye and, on some days, bad breath; Dr. Kaczmerski snaps when he is impatient and favors the male interns.

“The hospital is full of the busiest, most important people in the world,” Anna has joked to Jill and Celestine. “Nowhere else on the planet is anyone’s work as important.”

“If you start acting like your bosses,” Jill said, “we’ll have to kill you.”

Anna laughed. “You can’t kill me. I’m too important. You’d have to call it an assassination.”

As for Dr. Glass, however, he is not, as Anna has informed her friends, a stuffed shirt. He is thoughtful and handsome and his temper doesn’t fray easily. “I have a long temper,” he said soon after they started working together. “But that doesn’t mean I never get mad. I just prefer to handle problems without a flare-up. My expectations are that you will also be on your best behavior and do the most rigorous work you have done so far in medical science.”

Two weeks into her summer rotation, Anna realizes that she thinks about him more often than about anyone else in or outside the hospital, and twice she has had dreams about him, both leaving her with a physical ache that lasted for an entire day. When she is choosing a carton of strawberries at Von’s or deciding which blouse to wear or else lying restless in bed despite how exhausted her body is, she finds that her mind is running a series of impressions and images that all feature Dr. Glass. She sees his curly black hair, which he had cut very short the week her summer rotation began, his newly shorn head alarming her for days. The curls had suited him and their removal had struck her as too aggressive, as if instead he had cut off...