Private Practices by Linda Wolfe Page B

studied her eyes.
    â€œClaudia?” he said, reminding her he was waiting.
    At last she began moving, catching up to him, her silk skirt rustling. She was incredibly graceful, he thought, and reached his arm out to open the door for her. And then suddenly he remembered Naomi’s awkwardness. Her habit of always augmenting her speech with gestures. Her tendency to drop things. To spill and scatter them. It was the last thought he wanted to entertain this afternoon when he was on his way to meet her. He turned his head away from Claudia, holding the door wide, keeping his eyes averted.
    In the examining room, as she sat on the edge of the table waiting for Cora to take her blood pressure, there was no way to escape admiring her. No way to escape seeing the regal way she held her neck. No way to avoid looking lingeringly at her eyes, her neck, her hair. Indeed, he had to, for these were the areas he always examined first, the places where he looked for gross metabolic changes. But her eyes were vivid and unclouded, her neck was smooth and straight, her hair was thick and glistening. He could see at once that pregnancy was agreeing with her, could tell that she was doing well, and all without touching her.
    Nor was he eager to touch her. Sitting there, her body statue-still, she was somehow forbidding, alarming to him.
    â€œSlip your robe down,” Cora was instructing her. “So Ben can check your breasts.”
    She did, but still he didn’t want to touch her. Her breasts were white, translucent, their surface ornamented by a tracing of tiny, vivid blue veins. The areolas were large and brown, the nipples a healthy pink. But one was fierce, an erect little turret, while the other was collapsed, bent inward. Oddly, the irregularity delighted him. She was not perfect after all. He put his hands forward and began palpating her breasts, and then at last she was no longer Sidney’s wife but his patient.
    It made him sensitive to her in a way he had never been.
    â€œThat nipple’s always been like that,” she said. “Ever since I was a girl.”
    â€œI know. It was in your file.” He touched the flattened nipple and tried to push it upward to see if it would emulate its mate but it remained inverted.
    â€œIt’s ugly, isn’t it?”
    â€œNot at all.”
    â€œI always thought it was. When I was a girl, it embarrassed me dreadfully.”
    â€œPoor Claudia.”
    â€œSometimes it still does. It makes me feel ugly.”
    â€œYou’ve got the pregnancy blues,” he commented, wanting to be supportive.
    â€œYou think so?”
    â€œSure. I’ll have to tell Sidney to be nicer to you.”
    â€œNo. Please don’t.” Her voice was surprisingly strained and she half sat up on the table.
    â€œI was kidding,” he said, experiencing a sudden surge of alarm. “I was only kidding.”
    He patted her on the shoulder and she lay back down again and he signaled to Cora that he was ready to do the internal examination. Cora adjusted Claudia’s legs into the stirrups and pushed back the sheet that had been covering the lower part of her body. And then she stepped away and he put his fingers into Claudia’s vagina, trying to measure the size and placement of the fetus. “Everything’s fine,” he said as he probed. “One hundred percent fine.”
    It was only then, just as he was withdrawing his hand, that he noticed that her thigh was bruised. There were several black-and-blue marks, a few quite purplish and vivid, a few others faded and ash-gray, on the outside of her thigh. “What happened?” he asked her, touching them. “Those look quite nasty.”
    She winced and said, “I fell.”
    He frowned.
    â€œIt was on my way to work a couple of weeks ago. Right in front of the museum.”
    â€œA couple of weeks ago and then a couple of days ago too?”
    â€œYes,” she said quickly.