Henry smiled, and nodded.
“You remember, in some of her ‘shares’ she was talking about leaving her husband, who was this really mean little doctor? Well, it’s too funny. She had flu, and went to this doctor in Mill Valley—I think her new landlord recommended him—and the doctor gave her some new antibiotic that cured her flu right away. And then he kept calling to see how she was. And then he told her she didn’t need a doctor anymore, and would she go out to dinner. Actually, I’ve met him. An internist, Dave Jacobs. I didn’t like him very much, I thought he seemed mean and bossy, but Jane seems really pleased. Maybe she can handle him. I told her she was addicted to doctors, but I’m not sure how funny she thought that was.”
“I think it’s very funny.” Henry laughed, and he added, “I’m very glad you’re not, though.”
She smiled up at him. “So am I. Very glad.”
“You’re really lucky to be alive,” said Dr. Douglas Macklin to Molly Bonner. “After all that.”
“Tell me something I don’t know!” But even as she spoke Molly knew that this was rude, and not at all in the right tone for this visit. And so she apologized (she had a definite agenda). “I’m sorry, it’s just that I have heard that so much, and in a way you could say it to anyone. Bill Clinton or Magic Johnson. O. J. Simpson. Anyone. And I’ve especially heard that a lot from doctors.”
But despite all her efforts Macklin seemed not to be listening. “Lucky!” he repeated somewhat dreamily. And then, with a big grin, he told her, “I’ve had some good luck too, you might say.”
A quickie divorce, with no trouble? Molly’s agile mind had raced ahead to that possible news, which would perfectly coincide with her own plan: she meant to retract her earlier scruple about their going out. The more she had thought about it the more foolish her position had seemed to her. They obviously liked each other; why not? Besides, how many attractive and intelligent, straight, single men did she or anyone know? Plus kind, and funny. Douglas Macklin was all these things, and possibly
more; she would be a fool to turn him down completely. She could always find another doctor somewhere. (She would only go to women doctors from now on, she had sometimes thought.) And so she smiled across at Dr. Macklin, Douglas, warmly. Maybe sexily.
He smiled back, warm and friendly. “I knew you’d be pleased to hear this,” he said. “As you know, you’re really more than just a, uh, patient.” Was he blushing a little? And then he said, “I thought you’d want to know”—God, why didn’t he get on with it?—“that Claire and I, well, we’re not divorcing after all. We got back together.”
A simple enough statement, but his delivery had been so laborious that it took Molly several seconds to take it in. Also, that was not exactly the message that she had wanted to hear.
However, she managed to beam in response, and to tell him, “Well, that’s really great. Terrific.”
“Yes.” He continued, smiling, “I think things will be better than ever now. I guess we just needed a little shaking up, you know. But I think once we both faced the prospect of living apart, we were truly appalled. We couldn’t do it. Gee, I met Claire back in high school, when I was playing baseball.” A triumphant smile. “So now we’re going to celebrate with a snow-climbing trip in the Andes. You know it’s spring down there, and we’ve always wanted to do this.”
One of the things that Molly thought, on leaving Macklin’s office, was, Thank God I don’t have to go climbing around in the snow, in the goddam Andes. But then she thought, It’s not as though I’d had a choice, actually. He did not exactly ask me, not at all. One chance at dinner was all I got, and even that I’m sure he would have retracted. He wants to be married. To Claire.
The San Francisco day into which she walked out, though, was ravishingly lovely: a clear blue sky, and golden warmth. Later there would be drought alarms, undoubtedly, and threats of water rationing. Dead lawns and slowly dying flowers. But for
the moment it was hard not just to accept this beneficent, gorgeous weather as a gift—unless you gave serious thought in a general way to the weather of the world. As Molly tended to do. It seemed to her that every season was unseasonable now, floods in Norway, heat waves in England and Italy. Tornadoes in Georgia, and earthquakes everywhere. Did the fact of global warming explain any or all of this?
And just underneath, or perhaps behind, this local, unnatural warmth was the faintest, slightest chill, like a very pale shadow, a whispered rumor of fall.
In part because of the weather, Molly had chosen to walk to Dr. Macklin’s office from her apartment—though in quite a different mood. Then, an hour or so earlier, she had felt a mild excitement, and some small nervousness about her plan: to say, in effect, to Douglas Macklin, Let’s do go out, and see what happens. Now, not quite defeated but almost, she was aware of some little embarrassment, as though Macklin had read her mind, had seen or felt her intention. More reasonably she decided that this was impossible. Also, with yet more reason, and sense, she could see that things were better all around for everyone. For Douglas Macklin and his Claire, and for herself; she needed at least one good, reliable, and fairly sensitive doctor. She even further thought, and this was somewhat less rational: I really feel too well these days to hang out with doctors.
But it was true; she did feel extremely well, healthy and strong, walking fast in that euphoric, brilliant air. She did not need to be “involved” with anyone at all. She needed sunshine, and long fast walks in this clean fresh lively wind.
Across the Golden Gate Bridge, in Sausalito, on the other side of all that bright choppy blue bay water, but in much the same weather, Jane Stinger and Connie Sanderson, as they often did after their Mill Valley AA meeting, were discussing their
own lives in greater detail than either had offered in the more public “sharing.” And they had come to rather different conclusions about life and love from those reached by Molly Bonner.
“Do you really think I’m a doctor junkie?” Jane asked Connie, half laughing. “Don’t think it hasn’t occurred to me, and sometimes seriously. But I don’t think so. God, they’re so unlike each other. Mark and Dave. Dave can be irritating too, God knows, but he’s just so—so incredibly sexy. I mean, all the time. He says that Molly Bonner used to complain about too much sex. God, some complaint.”
Connie smiled, hoping that her expression successfully concealed certain reactions that she felt to be impermissible.
One, she was embarrassed. She was simply not used to that sort of conversation, even after all the AA shares and all the making friends over coffee with Jane, she still was bothered by such personal revelation. No one she had ever known before had talked about her intimate (sexual) life. Nor for that matter had she and Raleigh talked about it, ever. And as a matter of fact Connie had had something of the same problem with Raleigh that Jane had described with Dave Jacobs and Molly Bonner. Hyperactivity. At first—that is, a long time ago.
And, two, she was just a little envious. Hyperactivity in that area was not an accusation that she would make of Henry Starck. He did not exactly conform to the stereotype of the young lover, in that regard—although he had managed to overcome his early scruples about actually making love; now they spent long nights together. But, if anything, Connie was the more eager, the more passionate. Embarrassing to think of it that way, but there it was; she had to be honest and face things, at least with herself. She did not, though, see any necessity for sharing details of her sexual life with Henry—with Jane. She didn’t need to, and what good would it really do anyone? She loved Henry in her way, and he loved her in his, and his presence
in her life made her much happier than she had been before. As did hers in his, she was sure; he had even said so, in his way.
“Dave doesn’t have the greatest manners in the world, though,” Jane continued. “I have to admit, he’s pretty pushy and he makes a sort of point of saying the wrong thing to people. I’ve tried to tell him, and I think he really wants to change, and I can help him. I know I can.”
Connie reacted to all this in several separate ways, most of which she kept to herself. First off, she thought just a little smugly that Henry was really the least rude, least pushy, and most courteous person she had ever met. She thought too that Jane had certain tendencies toward pushiness herself, and she wondered how this would come out, Jane Stinger and Dave Jacobs, each pushing in opposite directions. She did not think that Jane would succeed in changing Dave, certainly not much. Conventional wisdom, and received opinion would apply, she thought: people don’t change. And especially not a rather stubborn older man. A doctor.
But she said, “I used to think Raleigh was a little rude, and he was, by Boston standards.”
“Did he change much?” Jane eagerly asked.
“No, really not.” Connie could not resist saying this, the truth. Raleigh’s manners had not changed much, he had only become so successful that no one minded. She said, “Maybe doctors are like that, do you think? Basically very self-absorbed?”
Jane frowned. “No, I don’t think that. Not really. I think Dave’s just reacting to such terrible treatment from that Molly Bonner. Talk about ungrateful! You know, she was really sick, and he took care of her, he even took her down to Alta Linda, radiation for her cancer, and she was just—just terrible to him. I think he’s hitting out at the world, because of her.”
Connie remembered Dave as a rather rude and aggressive young man, many years ago, when he was supposedly happily
married. And at that time, since Raleigh was somewhat like that too, she had indeed wondered, Is it being a doctor that makes some men rude? Not wanting to say any of that to Jane Stinger (if Jane and Dave Jacobs made each other happy,
tant mieux
), Connie said another thing that she had not intended; she said, “I’m really worried about Raleigh. I never hear from him, and God knows the children don’t. I just hope he’s okay.”
With a short laugh, Jane suggested, “I could call that Felicia Flood. Dave knows her. She might know.”
“Oh, I don’t think we have to do that,” said Connie. And as she too laughed, she added, “I’m not all that concerned.”
Connie was also thinking about the (to her) unknown Molly Bonner. Henry’s first wife. Henry had spoken of her almost not at all, and when he had he had done so with characteristic gallantry and restraint. “She’s a marvelous woman,” he had said, not specifying in what ways—so that Connie had wondered: Did he mean great moral stature of some sort, a marvelous hostess, or cook? Marvelous in bed? “She just doesn’t seem to marry very well,” Henry had added, with a smallish laugh. Connie asked him, “Paul wasn’t wonderful?” “I know almost nothing about him. I meant me.”
As Connie and Jane sat there in the briny Sausalito sunshine, though, sipping at innocently unfermented fruity drinks, Connie reflected that what she had said about Raleigh was not entirely true. She did worry about Raleigh; she felt that in some permanent way they were married still.
And so in some spirit of obligation to the truth, perhaps AA-inspired, she said to Jane, “Actually I can’t seem to just dismiss Raleigh, just to decide that he’s not my worry anymore. I wish I could but I can’t.”
Jane was more sympathetic to this view than Connie would have expected. “Oh, I know,” she said, with feeling. “I worry about Mark too, never mind that he has this beautiful Japanese girlfriend.” But she added, in a mutter, “Shit that he is.”
“Some curious instinct is telling me that Raleigh’s really in trouble,” said Connie very seriously. “And I can’t do a damn thing to help.”
“You didn’t cause it, you can’t cure it,” Jane quoted, and then, with an obvious shift of attention, away from Connie and Raleigh, she began to smile. She said, “I really gave it to Dave last night, though. I guess he thought he was being flattering, but he told me he’d always liked shiksas, his wife and now me. Can you imagine? Of all the ridiculous, racist, sexist remarks. Well, I really let him have it—” And she laughed with pleasure, remembering.
Felicia said, “This is terrific! You
never
drop in. And I’ve got so much to tell you! You won’t believe what’s happened. You really must have felt me wanting to see you. I called but of course you weren’t there.”
“Well, I did have this strong feeling that I wanted to come and see you, and it seemed silly to look around for a phone before I did.”
They both laughed.
It was true: partly because of the warm and beautiful day, Molly had not wanted to go directly home—where, alone with her cats, she might well be subject to lonely thoughts, even regretful ones, concerning Douglas Macklin. But more strongly than the weather and fears of solitude she had heard an inner voice that urged her toward Felicia. She would find Felicia out in her garden, she knew that she would, and they could just sit out there for a while and talk.
And Molly did just that. Instead of turning off Divisadero toward her own flat, on Pacific, she continued down to Vallejo Street, to Felicia. And she went into Felicia’s garden, where the gate had been left open, as though for her coming (but she would have to remind Felicia again, that was really not safe).
However, Felicia was much too eager to tell her news; literally breathless, she had no time for remonstrance, or even for much greeting small talk. “I’ve got so much to tell you,” she repeated.
In brief, what happened was that Sandy, Dr. Raleigh Sanderson, had tripped and sprained his ankle. Right there in the garden. Couldn’t move, had to be carted off in an ambulance, which Matthew called. In fact, Matthew had begun the whole process that led to the fall, the sprain, the ambulance.
Matthew and Felicia had had a long, pleasant dinner together in Felicia’s kitchen, one of Felicia’s richest, most garlicky stews, and a bright crisp salad, a nice wine—very possibly too much wine. And too much food. So that Matthew said, “I’ve really overeaten. Shall we run around the block?”
“Are you serious? Sounds crazy but it’s probably a good idea.”
They looked at each other in a smiling but still-testing way, and Matthew said, “You’re really the greatest, you know?”