“Dad’s a plastic surgeon. But you don’t need him.” She flashed me a few dimples. “Yet.”

Part 2 - Wilshire

Chapter 10 - Trust

A doctor’s appointment? Why would Marjorie schedule a doctor’s appointment for me? Of course, she answered without me asking. The girl is uncanny that way.

“Because I think there are some things about yourself that you don’t know and probably should?”

She also has the ability to make me feel like a little kid sometimes. “Maybe I don’t want to know?” I said, knowing I sounded whiney.

She nodded. “Yeah. Which is exactly why you should know. You’ve mentioned things about yourself that I think anyone would be curious about. And I’ve noticed stuff that kind of confirms my suspicions.”

“Huh.” I tried to think about it as we went down Melrose toward Western. I knew where we were heading, so many doctor’s offices are in the Wilshire. Some of the tall buildings there had every sort of medical specialty spread through twenty or thirty floors. “We’re not going to Dr. Herlihy’s office, are we? My mom works there.”

“I know, and no, we’re not. It’s a block or so away.” She glanced at me, smiling. “It’s not the building where my dad has his office either. Or the one I own.”

“Huh? Your dad is a doctor? You own a building?” I know that last came out in a squeak.

She nodded. “Dad’s a plastic surgeon. It’s—never mind. You don’t need him.” She flashed me a few dimples. “Yet.”

Oh, fuh. I shook my head.

She put her right hand out, palm up. I put my left in it. She gave my hand a squeeze and I squeezed back, then she went back to two-handed driving. “Don’t be scared,” she said.

“Going to the doctor isn’t exactly my idea of a fun date.” I half-pretended to pout, half not-pretending.

She laughed.

I knew I was forgetting to ask about something else, but it didn’t occur to me until later.

We had put our big hats in the back seat because the top was still up on the convertible. I pulled down the vanity mirror and looked at myself again. My reflection didn’t look at all apprehensive. That girl looked confident and wise. Bee, the makeup artist at Venus Collection, had to be some kind of genius. I stared at the image until some of her courage infiltrated my unease.

I put the mirror back up as Marjorie pulled into another valet space after boxing the square (avoiding a left or u-turn) to get on the right side of the street, heading uptown instead of down. Must be nice not to worry about the expense of parking. Even self-park lots in the Wilshire could cost as much as $8 an hour and valet parking might be twice that, plus a tip.

Unless you owned the building. I remembered what I wanted to ask but turning the car over to the valets distracted me again.

The guys (with one girl valet at the kiosk, writing things down), hopped to it, helping us out of the car. This time I made sure not to give anyone a free show and I really appreciated the help reaching the sidewalk since curbs in the Wilshire are like a foot high. They actually had a wooden step in the gutter to make it easier.

Wayne, that’s what his nametag read, retrieved our hats and purses from the back seat and off we went, down Wilshire toward the sea, though it was miles away. In the distance, I could see the buildings of the museums on the right with more tall buildings like the ones we were walking between on the left.

I hadn’t been to the museums in years, though I lived only a few miles and a short bus ride away. A whiff of air from the west brought the smell of the Tar Pits, sharp but not completely unpleasant at this distance. I thought of saber-tooth tigers, mastodons and dire wolves and those freaky giant ground sloths. Imagine trying to park one of those on Wilshire.

“You said you’re not working now,” I mentioned on the walk, still thinking of how much money she had spent today; lunch, shopping, salons, parking, it added up. She’d said something about owning a building, did she mean on Wilshire? And she was offering me $500 to keep her company in my masquerade. “Does your dad….”

She interrupted. “I have my own money. My granddad set up a trust fund for me and I got control of it when I turned twenty-five.” She turned and looked at me directly. “Income is about $300,000 a month without me doing anything at all.”

A month! My jaw fell. That’s rockstar wages.

She gestured at the building we were standing in front of, red granite and glass sides, about twenty stories tall. Steel letters and numbers gave the address and name of the structure: R.A. Pritzger Medical and Professional Suites.

“Huh?” I said.

“My granddad, my mother’s father, is Roald Alexis Pritzger. This is one of the buildings my family owns.” She contemplated the sign. “I think my share is about four per cent of this one.”

I felt like I needed to sit down. I started toward the entrance but she pulled me away. “The doctor we’re seeing is in the next building.” She dimpled. “One I don’t own.”

I nodded and we linked arms again, hands clasped. She kept looking at my face. “I didn’t want to tell you at first. I thought it might make a difference in how you treated me.”

I blinked. “Well, I knew you were rich, the car, the shopping, -uh- even just your attitude about things.” I remembered her telling me not to look at prices more than once. “But not how rich…,” I trailed off into a mutter.

“I like being rich,” she said. “It means I can do nice things for people. Our family foundation gives away millions every year, but I can be personal.”

I’d actually heard of the Pritzger Foundation I realized. They were big in financing small businesses in India and Africa, funding rural clinics in the Americas, and research into things like orphan diseases. Also, live theaters and art museums in medium-size cities and wifi in rural libraries.

She offered a kiss and I accepted. “I’ve learned the hard way that trying to buy love turns out badly,” she whispered. “But it is a terrible temptation.”

“I’m—it—you?”

She nodded. “I’m trying to buy you, Kissy, and I know it’s wrong. Forgive me?”

We stopped in front of the building in the next half-block. It had gray stone fascia with windows so dark they looked black. Conroy Arts and Sciences Building the steel letters read.

“Granddad plays golf with Mr. Conroy,” Marjorie confided to me. “They both cheat.” We giggled about that as we struggled with twelve-feet tall glass doors that weighed half a ton each.

A man inside ran around a counter to help us. “Ladies,” he said as he held the door open, practically without effort. We thanked him, still giggling, and dashed for the elevator, Marjorie calling to him, “We’re going to the ninth floor.”

“Why did you tell him what floor?” I asked.

She shrugged. “He’ll be watching the floor indicator, anyway. But it’s good to tell security where you’re headed. Women have to think of things like that.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, I’m glad he came to help with the door. Why do they make them so heavy, anyway?”

“I don’t know, but if you’d been a guy, he probably wouldn’t have helped.”

I protested. “I would have still needed help.”

“Yeah, but he would have maybe thought you would be offended if he helped you.”

“That’s stupid,” I said.

She shrugged. “That’s how men think.”

“Ding,” the elevator said. We were on the ninth floor. I followed her down a short hall that turned a corner into a longer one.

“I still say it’s stupid,” I muttered.

“I’m not arguing.”

“Have you been to this doctor before?”

“Yes, but not for me. Guy I was in college with. I came with him.”

We stopped in front of a door that read, Dr. Guy Forbes, Endocrinologist.

“He’s a Guy doctor,” I pointed out.

“Ho, ho,” she said.

Inside a narrow reception area with only nine chairs and a sliding glass window next to a single door. Marjorie approached the glass which opened just as she reached it. “Three forty-five appointment for Kissy Davis to see Dr. Forbes.”

Kissy Davis again. I squirmed. Well, I didn’t look like any David Kissee, did I?

“You’re early,” said a voice from a woman I couldn’t see because I was too short and too far from the window. “Take a seat. There’ll be paperwork to fill out when the nurse calls you in.”

We sat down. “Endocrinologist?” I asked, hoping I got the pronunciation right.

She started to explain but I got it with the first word. “Hormones….”

I stood up, glaring at her. “You’re going to try to get me to take hormones?”

“Sit down,” she ordered. “I—we—I want to find out if you need to take hormones.”

I sat, annoyed but willing to listen. “Huh?”

“You said yourself you missed the puberty bus. You’re about average height for a woman, like you quit growing at maybe fourteen, you have almost no body hair or muscle definition, except in your legs, and while you’re pretty flat-chested, your nipples stick out and you have some shape to your ass.”

“That’s—that’s padding.”

“Not all of it. You’re also built about like a pre-teen between the legs. Something is wrong with your hormones. He’s the Guy who can tell us what it might be.”

I ignored her repeating my pun. She was right, I hadn’t grown more than half-an-inch since eighth grade. My voice hadn’t really changed either, just sort of slid down to what I thought of as a high tenor but could just as easily been described as alto or even soprano. I had worked really hard at trying to pitch my voice down all four years of high school.

Except today, I’d been speaking in more of my natural voice, which was higher than Marjorie’s.

The door opened and a woman holding a clipboard and dressed as a nurse stood there. “Miss Davis?” she inquired.

We both stood up. “It—I—that’s me,” I said. Well, for all practical purposes I was Miss Davis.

“I’m Nurse Donovan.” The nurse glanced down at the clipboard. “Kissy? That’s a cute name, I don’t think I’ve ever heard it before.”

“It’s a family name,” I explained truthfully. “Can my sister come in with me?” I asked.

The nurse looked at my girlfriend.

“I’m paying the bill and she’s underage,” said Marjorie.