"Christopher Moore - The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moore Christopher)

Valerie

Dr. Valerie Riordan sat at her desk, looking at the icons of her life: a
tiny digital stock ticker that she would surreptitiously glance down at during
appointments; a gold Mont Blanc desk set the pens jutting from the jade base
like the antennae of a goldbug; a set of bookends fashioned in the likenesses
of Freud and Jung, bracing leather-bound copies of The Psychology of the
Unconscious, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
(DSM-IV), The Interpretation of Dreams, and The Physician's Desk Reference;
and a plaster-cast bust of Hippocrates that dispensed Post-it notes from the
base. Hippocrates, that wily Greek who turned medicine from magic to science.
The author of the famous oath that Val had uttered twenty years ago on that
sunny summer day in Ann Arbor when she graduated from med school: "I will use
treatment to help the sick according to my ability and judgment, but I will
never use it to injure or wrong them. I will not give poison to anyone though
asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a plan--"
The oath had seemed so silly, so antiquated then. What doctor, in their
right mind, would give poison to a patient?
"But in purity and in holiness I will guard my life and my art."
It had seemed so obvious and easy then. Now she guarded her life and her
art with a custom security system and a Glock 9mm stashed in the nightstand.
"I will not use the knife on sufferers from stone, but I will give place
to such as are craftsmen therein."
 She'd never had a problem with that part of the oath. She was loathe to
use the knife. She'd gone into psychiatry because she couldn't handle the
messy parts of medicine. Her father, a surgeon himself, had been only mildly
disappointed. At least she was a doctor, of sorts. She'd done her internship
and residency in a rehab center where movie stars and rock idols learned to be
responsible by making their own beds, while Val distributed Valium like a
flight attendant passing out peanuts. One wing of the Sunrise Center was
druggies, the other eating disorders. She preferred the eating disorders. "You
haven't lived until you've force-fed minestrone to a supermodel through a
tube," she told her father.
"Into whatsoever houses I enter, I will do so to help the sick, keeping
myself free from all intentional wrongdoing and harm, especially from
fornication with woman or man, bond or free."
Well, abstinence from fornication hadn't been a problem, had it? She
hadn't had sex since Richard left five years ago. Richard had given her the
bust of Hippocrates as a joke, he said, but she'd put it on her desk just the
same. She'd given him a statue of Blind Justice wearing a garter belt and
fishnets the year before to display at his law office. He'd brought her here
to this little village, passing up offers from corporate law firms to follow
his dream of being a country lawyer whose daily docket would include
disagreements over pig paternity or the odd pension dispute. He wanted to be
Atticus Finch, Pudd'nhead Wilson, a Jimmy Stewart or Henry Fonda character who
was paid in fresh-baked bread and baskets of avocados. Well, he'd gotten that
part; Val's practice had supported them for most of their marriage. She'd be
paying him alimony now if they'd actually divorced.