Parishioners and Other Stories. Joseph Dylan

over it. Standing up, she gathered the blood tubes, the vacutainer, the gauze and the bandaid wrapper onto the phlebotomy tray.

      “That wasn’t that bad,” said Rosenthal. He was still smiling. Was he smiling because he was nervous or was he smiling just because he had such a jovial manner? She wondered. Despite the age on his face, his teeth shone. They were the teeth of a much younger man. She supposed they were capped. “Heng, you seem friendlier than the rest of the nurses. You’re friendlier and you’re definitely gentler. I want you to be the one drawing my blood every two weeks from now on. Can I do that? Can I request you?”

      “You can request me. Whether you get me or not is entirely a different matter.”

      “What do you mean it might be a different matter?”

      “I might be busy with other patients.”

      “Oh, I’ll request you, anyway. You can count on it.” He laughed, this time the laugh exploding like the braying of a donkey.

      “You married?” he said, the teeth shining, the eyes crinkling.

      “I beg your pardon.” Zhang Heng, who wasn’t a girl who blushed easily, suddenly felt her face flush. Levinson continued laughing, but this time he seemed to be giggling, like some adolescent schoolgirl.

      “I said, are you married?” She stood up from the stool holding the phlebotomy tray with the two blood-filled tubes. She looked down at the tubes of blood lying on the phlebotomy tray.

      “Why do you ask that?” His eyes twinkled like those of a young boy watching the fireworks on the eve of the Chinese New Year.

      “I was just curious.” He rose from the phlebotomy chair with a spring in his step. All he needed were out-sized shoes and to go along with a clown’s costume and he would be ready for the big top. She turned and headed for the door. “You never answered my question,” he said. “It’s a harmless question. Are you married?”

      She turned and faced him. “No, I’m not.”

      “Didn’t think so,” said Rosenthal. “Didn’t think so. I sensed that in you. I sensed you were single. I’m seldom wrong about those things.”

      “Telepathy?” This was a man, she thought, who could wear you down with his questions.

      “How about having dinner with me some night.” When he wasn’t laughing, he was smiling.

      “I don’t think so,” she said. This man – a man old enough to be her father – was making a pass at her and she didn’t quite know how to respond. Not only was he old enough to be her father, he was a foreigner. This was a situation she had never encountered before. Even in the Middle East, no one had approached her quite like this. She had never dated a man this much older than she was. She had never dated a foreigner, not even in Riyadh.

      “There some rule about it? Not dating a patient?”

      “You have a good day, Mr. Rosenthal,” she said opening the door for him.

      “Think about it,” he said as he passed by her going out the door. “Think about it.” He laughed as he passed by her going through the door. “I won’t bite. I’m already house- broken.”

      “I bet you are.”

      Walking down the clinic corridor to deliver the blood tubes to the lab, she thought about Joshua Rosenthal. She thought about his invitation to dinner. She looked down at the lab sheet that she held in her hand. In the upper right hand corner was Joshua Rosenthal’s name, his clinic number, and his date-of-birth. Rosenthal was almost eight years older than her dad was when the liver cancer overcame him. Something in Rosenthal’s character made him seem much younger.

      She deposited the blood tubes in the lab and went back to the nurses’s room. JoAnne Wang and Gao Peng were still sitting where they were when she left them to deposit the blood. “Just who is this Joshua Rosenthal I drew blood on?” she asked Xiao Chen when she returned to the nurses’s room after dropping off the blood tubes in the lab.

      “He’s harmless,” she replied looking up from the schedule she was still working on. She licked the lead on her pencil and went back to work on the schedule.

      “He’s just another Lao Wei with too much time and money on their hands,” added Gao Peng.

      “He’s always smiling and hitting on the nurses,” said JoAnne Wang. “I’m surprised you hadn’t met him before. I think he’s a little bit creepy.”

      “You think all of Abrahim’s patients are creepy,” said Heng.

      “Well, they are,” replied JoAnne smiling. “Especially Joshua Rosenthal.” Gao Peng laughed. There was a certain truth to what JoAnne was saying. Abrahim had a strange following of patients.

      In time, it became a ritual: every two weeks Joshua Rosenthal saw Dr. Abrahim; every two weeks he requested that Zhang Heng draw his blood. If her time wasn’t occupied with another patient, she would oblige him. He would laugh as he rolled his sleeve up; he would laugh as she swabbed down his arm with alcohol; and, he would laugh as she stuck the needle in. If he felt any discomfort as she poked him with the Vacutainer needle, he didn’t show it. Unlike the first time she drew his blood, she was unfailingly successful on getting blood on her first try wit him in the future. Throughout the blood drawing procedure, he would talk, the talk usually centering around questions he had about Heng. Guessing he was an American, she was surprised when he told her he was from Toronto. When she told him that she didn’t know if she could take the cold weather, he said that he couldn’t either and that was one of the reasons he came to Shanghai. When she asked him what he did for a living, he told her, “I’m in promotions. Oil and gas promotions.” To Zhang Heng, all the foreigners seemed to be promoting something, so she wasn’t surprised. Each time she drew his blood, he had more and more questions for her. Where was she from? Where else had she worked? When she told him that she had been to Saudi Arabia, he asked her how she liked it? Did they make her wear a burka? Did it feel funny wearing one? How did she like Shanghai? How did she learn to speak English so well? Not only did he seem as jovial as a young boy, he seemed as curious as one, too.

      Every time she drew his blood, he asked her out to dinner. Every time, she declined. Each time, she had a new excuse. In spite of herself, she enjoyed talking to Joshua Rosenthal. Unlike the other expats, he seemed to listen to her when she talked. Unlike the other expats, he didn’t seem to take himself too seriously. Finally, a few months after she had first drawn his blood, she accepted his invitation. He had flat out worn her down. There was no regulation that a nurse could not go out with a patient. Besides it was just dinner. Dinner was just dinner. That was all that it was.

      Late on a fall night, after she’d finished in the clinic, she met Joshua Rosenthal at an expensive Sichuan restaurant that she had always wanted to try, but was beyond her means. As she had tried to explain to the man, the only real differences between an expensive Chinese restaurant and a cheap one was that the more expensive restaurants were cleaner. They were also more likely to cheat you when the bill came.

      Driving by bus, which deposited her a few blocks from the restaurant, she felt the breeze that was stirring the leaves that had not yet fallen from the branches of the willows that lined the sidewalks. The breeze, coming off the ocean, had cleared the air of any haze. Gazing up, she could see the evening stars poking through the sky. It reminded her of seeing the stars when she was a little girl in Kashgar. Then, as tonight, they appeared so clear and so near that it looked as though one could reach out and touch them. Not wanting to seem to eager to him, she was ten minutes late in getting to the restaurant. Not wanting to seem too wanton, she wore a modest blue dress. Waiting at the entrance of the restaurant, he held a single red rose for her. Taking it in her hand, she held it up to her nose and smelled it. Nodding her head, she thanked him for the gesture. He took her hand and kissed it. He had made her blush a second time. Wearing slacks, a polo shirt, and top-siders, he was dressed casually.

      Inside the restaurant, most of the tables were packed with well-healed Shanghai residents. The hostess, wearing a scarlet silk dress, ushered them to the back of the