Travels by Michael Crichton Read Free Book Online Page A

rotation, I was more relaxed about drawing bloods. But right now my hands were shaking. She was sure to notice.
    She lay back on the examining table and stretched like a cat. “You want me on my stomach or my back?”
    “On your back is fine.”
    “This couch is too short; I have to put my legs up.” Her miniskirt slid around her hips.
    “Whatever’s comfortable,” I said.
    “Is it going to hurt?” she asked, wide-eyed.
    “No, not at all.”
    “Why are you shaking, Dr. Crichton?”
    “I’m not.”
    “Yes, you are. Do I make you nervous?”
    “No.”
    “Not even a little?” She was smiling, laughing at me.
    “You’re a beautiful girl, Karen; you’d make anybody nervous.”
    She smiled with pleasure. “You think so?”
    “Of course.”
    She seemed reassured by this, and I felt calmer as well. It didn’t hurt anything, I thought, to tell her she was attractive.
    I started drawing the bloods. She watched the needle, watched the tubes fill. She had a calm gaze, a steady way of looking at things.
    “Are you single?”
    “No, I’m married.”
    “You tell your wife everything you do?”
    “No.”
    “Men never do,” she said, laughing. It was a sarcastic, knowing laugh.
    “My wife is in graduate school,” I said. “I sometimes don’t see her for days at a time.”
    “Are you going to tell her about me?”
    “What goes on between you and me is confidential,” I said.
    “So you won’t tell her?”
    “No.”
    “
Good
.” She licked her lips.
    I lived in an apartment on Maple Avenue in Cambridge. I had known my wife since high school. She was studying child psychology at Brandeis. One block away, my wife’s college roommate lived with her husband; they were both graduate students at Harvard. A block beyond that lived another friend and her husband, with whom I used to play basketball in high school. The six of us, all stable, all married, all in school, all connected in the past, spent a lot of time together. The relationships went way back. It was a small, complete world.
    My wife liked to cook. She was cooking while we talked. “Is this girl in school?”
    “Yes. Junior at BU. Says she wants to be a lawyer.”
    “Smart?”
    “Seems to be.”
    “And she’s your patient?”
    “Yes.”
    “What’s her problem?”
    “She has trouble relating to men.”
    “And what are you supposed to do?”
    “Interview her. Find out what’s wrong. Write a paper at the end.”
    “Long paper?”
    “Five pages.”
    “That’s not too bad,” my wife said.
    The resident told me I could meet with my patient twice a week, or three times a week, if I felt that was necessary. I felt three times a week would be required. There was an interview room that you booked.
    I asked Karen how she had come to be admitted to the hospital. She told me she had had a bad trip on LSD in her school dorm; the campus police had brought her in. “But I don’t know why they made me stay here. I mean, it was no big deal, just a bad trip.”
    I made a mental note to check with the BU campus authorities, and then asked her about her background, before college.
    Karen spoke freely. She had grown up in a small coastal town in Maine. Her father was a salesman; he fooled around with a lot of women; he had always ignored her. Her father didn’t like it when she took up with Ed, just because he was a Hell’s Angel. Her father was very angry when she became pregnant by Ed at fourteen. He made her have the baby. She gave the baby up for adoption. Her father never liked her other boyfriends, either. For example, he didn’t like Tod, the rich kid who made her pregnant when she was sixteen. He wanted her to have that baby, too, but instead she had a miscarriage. She laughed. “In Puerto Rico,” she said.
    “You had an abortion?”
    “Tod’s rich. And he didn’t want
his
father to find out.” She laughed. “You probably think I’m crazy.”
    “Not at all.”
    “You smoke so much when we’re together.”
    “Do I?”
    “Yes.