And when he wasn’t hitting on younger women, he openly discussed his sex life with Madge. Alex really, really didn’t need another frank discussion about the kind of nipple clamps Madge liked.
Really.
“Josie, you ever heard of something called ‘pegging’?” Ed asked as they walked toward the exit.
Madge had the decency to wince. “Ed, we don’t talk about that,” she whispered.
Hurrying his grandpa toward the door, Alex caught Josie biting her lips, clearly enjoying watching him squirm.
“I read Dan Savage’s column, Ed, so yes,” she replied as they walked outside, Alex's eyes taking a minute to adjust in the bright sunshine.
Ed nudged Alex. “Lucky young man.”
And then Josie turned away, tears in her eyes from cry-laughing. Alex wanted to join her but he was too busy turning into a mortified puddle of flesh as his grandfather openly discussed pegging with the woman who had blown him off for the past week. The woman he’d chased down this morning, using his grandpa as desperate leverage.
Who was now talking about assfucking with a strap-on dildo.
So this was what his life had come to?
“I’ll see you next month, Ed,” she said, starting to walk off. “Bye, Alex,” she added, like he was an afterthought. Headed toward the train, her back to them as she walked quickly, shoulders shaking from laughter, Josie faded out, and Alex felt a keen sense that somehow—at some unknown point—he’d just blown everything.
“Wait!” he shouted.
She halted.
“What about the latte?”
She froze, then turned slowly. “I’m too full.”
“Too full for coffee?” The struggle to keep a begging tone out of his voice wasn’t working, damn it. “Really?” he added in an incredulous tone, trying to sound jocular and not quite so needy.
Even Josie had to acknowledge her caffeine addiction. She took a deep breath and said, “Barrington Roasters on Congress. Tomorrow morning?” Her words leaked out like helium through a pinhole in a balloon, as if she were reluctant to let them go.
“When?”
“Seven?” He could do that. He would do that, even if he had to get coverage for two hours to make it.
“It’s a date!” he shouted as she walked away.
“It’s coffee!” she retorted.
Date. Coffee. Whatever.
It was a plan.
The head of the research trial that Josie worked on was a lab rat, what they called a Mud-fud: an MD and a Ph.D. For him, practicing medicine was about studying human microbiology—not about touching human beings. Which was probably better for everyone all around given Gian Rossini’s appearance…and mannerisms…and general tone.
He was more interested in glutamate receptors and how they functioned neurologically than in watching the love fade from the eyes of an Alzheimer’s patient who could no longer recognize her husband of fifty-three years.
He was short, though like everyone, taller than Josie, about five-five. Squat, but not fat, more that barrel chested look of an Italian man who played a lot of soccer and ate his share of cannoli. Gian lived at home with his mother on Boston’s North End, the Little Italy section of the city; she knew this only because he talked about his mother nonstop, adoring her and taking her to mass four nights a week and Sunday mornings.
He was in his early fifties, a bit of a recluse, and seemed quite content with his life. He had always puzzled her because she wondered how he could be happy the way he was…and yet, he was.
The problem with Gian had absolutely nothing to do with any of the issues that she’d just been thinking about. She had watched enough patients go through the trial now to notice a distinct difference. She had no way of knowing who was in the control group and who was receiving the new medication.
That was what a double blind study was. No one was supposed to know, and therefore the outcome of the trial could not be compromised. Josie was careful and ethical—and always would be—but that didn’t mean that her very human instincts couldn’t collect their own data, honed through careful observation skills.
Patients who had come in at roughly the same functional level were different. Some, like Ed, were definitely in decline, while others seemed to stand still—and when it came to Alzheimer’s you begged whatever deity you believed in, for the patient to stand still. Some patients had deteriorated even worse than Ed had, losing a temporal sense. Lost in 1938, 1957, 1985, a few mistook grandchildren for children and one had taken to stripping na**d every day and doing her gardening in the nude.
Their children, their grandchildren, their spouses, and girlfriends, and boyfriends, pulled Josie and the other nurse on the trial aside to talk about the real issues—not the twenty- to thirty-minute test that they gave every month, but daily life functioning. All she could do was refer them to support groups in the area. But as each week passed her teeth began to clench just a little more, her jaw aching, her occipital lobe tight and straining at her scalp muscles, causing tension headaches as she watched the growing disparity between about half of her patients and the other half, fading faster.
So she approached Gian with a sense of dread, not because she thought that what she was about to say was futile but because she knew how he felt. Well, actually “felt” was inaccurate—Gian didn’t feel anything about science. He deduced, he hypothesized, he analyzed, he collected. Feeling? That wasn’t Gian’s style.
Lining up her facts, her observations, her data, and tying it all into an FDA regulation was her only chance of helping Ed.
The problem was that he was more stubborn than she was. It had to be some sort of hand of fate reaching down into her life and choking her, to make her boss as obstinate—no, rather more obstinate than she was. Once he got an idea in his head, especially one that was credible and backed up with facts and figures and data, there was little chance of changing his mind.
Gian’s office was very much like hers, an eight-by-eight cell with fluorescent lights, a small counter, a desk, a chair or two, and reams and reams of unfiled paper. Most of what they did was crunched by the computer these days. Actual paperwork was typically stupid administrative crap from inside the research facility, regulatory nonsense that no one should have had to fill out. Most of them ignored it until at least the third pleading reminder from the poor administrative assistants across the facility kept begging.
“Hey, Gian?”
“What’s up, Josie?” He pinched the bridge of his nose and smiled, a wan, weak attempt at friendliness.