The fool! The jerk!
No card. Just her knowing that he knew she liked these roses best—and proving that he could still walk into her house.
She would have the locks changed tomorrow, and how very stupid not to have done that before! But there was still the night to get through.
An hour later, though, with a glass of wine and a bowl of good vegetable soup from her freezer, Felicia was able to think, How nuts, to be terrorized by some flowers. Or even by Sandy, who could be a little irrational, certainly, but who was after all a respected, respectable doctor, who might scare her a little on purpose, but who would surely not do anything really crazy. Surely not do anything that would get him into public trouble.
While heating the soup and taking a first sip of wine, she had put in a call to Molly, who sounded okay. “No, Im not scared at all,” Molly said. “Actually I hardly think about it. It’s odd, but it seems so unreal. Surgery on my head? It makes me feel like Humpty-Dumpty. Listen, I have to go. Steak is being announced.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Jesus, I really hate steak. No wonder I’m getting so thin.”
They both laughed, and hung up, as Felicia thought, Poor Molly, with so much of Dave.
She reflected too that it was odd, out of character though for Molly not to have asked, And how was Seattle? Will? And odd that she herself had not said: This sort of creepy thing just happened here. There were these flowers in my bedroom …
“The cabin” is how Will had referred to the house he owned north of Seattle, high up on a bluff above the sound, with a magnificent view of surf and rocks and a beach, which the house seemed designed to ignore. The only windows were small and very high up, the roof steep and sharply ridged.
Heedlessly, Felicia reacted; she said, “Good
Lord
, Will, such
a fortress.” But as she was about to try to cover what instantly seemed tactless, she noticed that he looked pleased at her observation.
“The architect managed to do pretty much what I told him to do. And he agreed that you really can’t tell what’s out there in the woods these days.” Saying this, Will looked grim, very military, so that Felicia was sure he did not mean wild animals—and sure too that she would do better not to hear about whatever he did mean.
In fact, Will’s bearing was always military, though at first Felicia had simply seen him as very erect, with the perfect posture no doubt demanded by some school, some parent. Even in bed. Waking early in the morning, he sat upright as though in response to a bugle call.
Inside, this house was opulently dark. Dark leather chairs and sofas, wine-colored velvet draperies, dark walnut panelling hung with what had to be family portraits, ancient and somber, very rich people from at least a century ago.
Those ancestors and their implications were the first (and lesser, actually) surprise in terms of Will that Felicia observed in the course of that visit. Like most people who have always lived with a comfortable amount of money, Felicia assumed the same to be true of her friends, and she was always embarrassed and upset when it turned out that someone had grown up less than comfortably, in that way. In the course of things, except in her shelter work, she did not meet the genuinely poor. Curiously, the closest she had come was Raleigh Sanderson, who had angrily told her more than once, after more than enough martinis, “You’re so young! Your parents have really made it, you don’t even remember the Depression. I tell you, we were really scratching around back then.”
But Will, she recognized as they toured his “cabin,” was genuinely rich, and had been so for many generations. No doubt that was how he could afford to be a professor.
In Seattle she had not got this whiff of what her mother
would have called
real
money—or, in Felicia’s view, worse—
old
money. “But no money is really real, and none of it’s very old,” Felicia had argued. “Oh, darling, you know what I mean.” And Felicia did know. Will’s apartment on the lake was pleasant enough, but spectacular only in its setting; it did not contain wonderful “things,” just a lot of books and shabby-comfortable chairs—what Felicia assumed to be standard-issue professorial gear.
She had also noticed a rather large number of much-enlarged news photos of military actions, including some bloodily bandaged Civil War soldiers—but she assumed that this had to do with history, what he taught, rather than with specifically military tastes. But in the cabin, she was ushered into what Will had said was his study—and there was a room (four walls, no windows) entirely lined with what at first she took to be replicas of guns, big toys, but she quickly understood that they were real, real guns in a variety of shapes and sizes, in walnut and silver and plain dark heavy metal, from very small, just a couple of inches long, to enormous. And all upright, erect in their green plush cases.
Ready for action.
“These aren’t loaded, are they?” she could not help asking.
“Of course not.” But he seemed curiously pleased at the question. “There’s only one loaded gun in the house, and I keep that hidden.”
That’s one too many, Felicia thought, and just managed not to say. “These are just for fun?” she asked.
“You could put it that way. I like to have them. To me they’re very beautiful.” His tone was a little defensive.
“… arsenal …” she could not help murmuring.
He snorted, unamused. “Some people would certainly call it that.”
“I think anyone would,” she said rather quietly. Anyone outside the NRA, was her further thought.
At dinner, though, fueled by a couple of glasses of wine, she
asked him, “You don’t actually belong to the NRA, do you?”
He smiled somewhat condescendingly. “Yes,
actually
I do. You see, as a historian, I happen to take the Second Amendment seriously.”
“Oh Jesus, Will …”
That night, in bed, after love, he whispered to her insistently, “This is what’s important. Love is. We may disagree on a lot of superficial issues …”
But guns are not superficial, Felicia was too sleepy to say. And she was less sure about love.
Unhappily, on the plane going back to San Francisco, as they flew over rich dark-green beautiful mountains, Felicia read in the morning paper about another shooting: a ten-year-old boy with his father’s supposedly unloaded gun shot his sister in the head, not killing her though “damaging” (wrecking) her brain. Not exactly the fault of the NRA, or certainly not Will, although in a sense Felicia felt that it was.
And so, although restored to her own house, her bedroom, from which she had removed the ominous, beautiful roses, Felicia did not fall easily to sleep. In her mind she was writing to Will: “I’m sorry, this may sound silly, but I am so turned off by guns. I really hate them, everything about them. It really comes to this, I just can’t have a relationship with someone in the N.R.A.”
And she was writing to Sandy: “Please, no more flowers.” No point in telling him about the changed locks. “The roses are beautiful, but—”
She must have eventually slept, for at some point in the dark of early morning she awoke to the sound of someone walking around in her garden. First the creak of her gate, and then the
crunch of cautious steps on the gravel path. A faint tiny trickle of water: Christ, could someone be peeing there?
Panic froze her; she could neither move nor think. She imagined the person outside looking at her house; was that the point of his presence, to see her? Might it be someone who had watched the house and thought she was still away? Might he try to break in? Or if it was Sandy (her blood and pulses knew this to be the case), would he come in, with his key? How could he
pee
out there?
Cold in her warm, familiar bed, she lay there, until she realized that for a long time there had been no sound at all. That whoever (Sandy) had gone, and the sky was lightening.
After breakfast, in her sunny fall garden, there was no sign at all that anyone had been there—and so maybe no one had? But Felicia was sure that it had not been imaginary. She had clearly heard someone. Who
peed.
“I know there’s no connection, Will and Sandy couldn’t be more different, really,” Felicia said to Molly, over lunchtime bowls of soup, at Molly’s. “It’s just that both of them have scared me lately, and I’m not a frightened person. But Sandy was so angry when he hit me, and then doing creepy things like sneaking in flowers. And Will with all those guns.”
“Anyway, you got your locks changed?”
“Early this morning. You’d be amazed at how quickly they come and do it all. I guess they’re used to much worse emergencies than mine. It’s not a good sign.”
Molly did not seem to be drinking her soup, which must have cooled off by now. Every now and then, she brought a spoonful to her mouth, took a small listless sip, and returned it to the bowl. Her visible lack of appetite was painful to watch, especially for greedy Felicia. In fact Molly was visibly, painfully not herself; she was literally not all there, although from time to
time she spoke, sounding more or less like herself. Now she said, as though considering, “I’m not afraid of Dave, I just can’t stand him, he’s suffocating, and he’s so unpleasant. But I don’t seem to get rid of him, so maybe I am afraid.”
“I don’t think you’re afraid. Jesus, Mol, you don’t feel well.”
“That’s certainly true—and having Dave around all the time—I really can’t wait for it all to be over. You know, Dave too.”
Although Molly was obviously thinner, she moved more heavily than before, as though her thin arms and legs were weighted in cement. At first Felicia had thought that Dave might have her on some cheer-up-don’t-feel drug, but then she decided that Molly was simply drugged with her own entire discomfort, which of course included Dave.
“It’s so complicated,” Molly went on. “He naturally thinks he’s being wonderful, and I guess in a way he is, which makes me feel very guilty. Along with everything else. He’s exactly like a parent. Like both parents. And he really hates the cats.”
“Yes.” Felicia wanted to say, Look, just get rid of him, and I’ll do everything. I’ll bring you home from the hospital and move in here with you and make nice meals. Later on, she decided that she should have said exactly that, and not only said it but put it into effect—forced it, if necessary. But at the time she was too intimidated, less by Dave himself than by the fact of his being a doctor; she was unable not to think that maybe Molly should be with a doctor now, and how lucky in a way that Dave should be one. That he should be so nuts about Molly. “We both have to get away from doctors,” she told Molly, laughing a little.
“Yes, at this point I can’t even stand my dentist. I had to see him yesterday—something about radiation.”
“You’re having radiation? You know that?”
“Well, I guess so. It seems definite to everyone. All the doctors.”
But Felicia felt that to Molly nothing really seemed definite. She was blurred, her eyes not quite focused, her voice hesitant
and vague. If I were having surgery on my head for cancer, and then radiation, I would be in bed screaming or at the very least in tears, Felicia thought. Probably I would do something really infantile like move back home. And then she understood that possibly staying with Dave was Molly’s version of screaming, and that instead of crying she had willed herself into a passive semiconsciousness.
“You’ll never guess who called me,” Molly was saying. “Matthew, out of the blue. Of all times.”
“Matthew?”
“Paul’s brother. His twin, but they’re totally different. Matthew’s in insurance. The only interesting thing he does is deep-sea diving.” She added, “So odd he’d pick just now to want to see me. But then his timing’s always been strange.”
“You don’t want to see him?” Knowing what the answer would be, Felicia at the same time was thinking: Jesus, that’s what Molly really needs right now. Paul’s twin.
She herself had not really liked Paul much, for somewhat complicated reasons. She thought she had recognized in Paul some of her own worst (she thought) qualities; like her, he was a little vain, and he was a flirt. And she blamed him for allowing himself to get killed like that! He didn’t have to do that to Molly. It was as though he had left her twice.
“No,” Molly was saying in a definite way. “No, I don’t.”
“Well, you don’t have to. Right now you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”
“Except for this goddam operation.”
“Well yes, you do have to do that.”
For no reason they both began to laugh, a little hysterically.
With tubes in her nose and down her throat and in both arms, Molly lay on her hard white hospital bed, in the evil half-light of nighttime. She heard discordant TV sounds, and jarring, incomprehensible human voices speaking strange languages. She thought, If only I could make them turn off the TV, but there was no way for her to speak, to make any sound, with the tube in her throat.
She knew that she was in Intensive Care, but did not know how she knew that.
The operation was over, it had been a success, she thought; she could remember doctors smiling, self-congratulatory. Donovan. Dave. But now she could not speak, and both large clocks on the wall in front of her said 3:15. Next to the TV screen, a small nurse stood talking to a man of about her size—an orderly, maybe. Sometimes they both talked to the other two women in the room, in Intensive Care. But there was no way for Molly to get their attention, and in a distant way she thought, This is the worst night of my life. Not pain, but the purest, most total discomfort.
One of the other women in the room was Spanish, maybe Mexican, South American, and sometimes friends or relatives
spoke to her in that language, very softly, soothingly. But at times the small nurse addressed her loudly, in English. “Rosa, do you know where you are? Did you just have a baby, Rosa?” Did they think she was crazy? Was she crazy, poor Rosa, and if she had a baby where was it? Molly hoped the baby would not come into their room, but of course it might.
Her legs were all right, Molly found, no tubes or binding, and so she began to thrash them about, kicking up and down, hoping to attract someone’s attention. And after a while the small nurse came over, and, in her loud voice (did she think Molly was crazy, too, or deaf?), asked if something was wrong.