Sandy said, by way of summing up and to indicate that he didn’t want to prolong the discussion, “She sounds like an excellent surgical candidate to me. And as far as her symptoms go”—he smiled; his audience knew what was coming—“a life lived like that—”
“But the point is her life is very much worth living.” That pushy young Harvard kid had the nerve to interrupt. “As I said in my presentation, running the cat shelter keeps her very happy, if we could just make her even a little more comfortable. And she’s convinced that an operation would kill her.”
Seriously annoyed, both by the interruption and at the mention of cats, which he loathed, Sandy asked, as mildly as he could, “Since when have we taken the superstitions of patients into account?”
“Mrs. Miller is an intelligent woman,” this Bluestone had the presumption to argue. “I take her fears seriously.”
“I have yet to hear of a patient dying of fear.” Saying this, Sandy recognized it as a lie; people did die of fear, children did. Not often, but it happened. Nevertheless, he then shrugged as eloquently as he could, by which he meant: I have spoken, and to argue further with you would be beneath my dignity. I am Dr. Raleigh Sanderson, and you are, so far, no one.
The hour was over in a moment that could have been awkward, with Bluestone sounding off again; instead, people began to get to their feet and to start casual conversations with each other. To move back toward their respective offices.
Not speaking to anyone, and ignoring the bunch of interns and residents who tended to follow him around, Sandy stalked out into the hall and down the long passageway to his own office, his head held high, his heavily starched lab coat rustling as he strode.
Inside his sanctum, alone, he removed the coat and sat there in his pale-blue shirtsleeves, and glared at the knots in his walnut
panelling. Somewhat to his surprise, he became aware of a familiar stirring in what he thought of as his loins; he recognized at least some degree of sexual arousal.
He considered calling Felicia; he could be at her house in less than ten minutes. Then he remembered that in an interval between jobs she had gone up to Seattle to visit an old college friend (she had too many friends, such a waste of time).
And so he called Jane White.
In the fifteen minutes that it took Jane to get there (so much time was unusual for her; she generally made it in five, after surgical conferences), Sandy had to recognize that whatever excitement he had felt was now in fact gone, he had lost it. Could something be wrong with his prostate? He would have to have it checked. But Jane could take care of him as she had before. He began to smile with relieved anticipation.
She came bustling in at last, still in her lab coat and carrying her clipboard, and Sandy saw trouble almost instantly on her large plain long-nosed face. What she said was “I don’t have a lot of time. I’m really busy.”
Having risen to his feet, Sandy smiled and came around his desk to where she stolidly stood, and he said, rather jovially, “Then we’ll just have to make do with the time we have, okay?”
She did not smile, but frowned, and backed off. “Don’t you get it?” she asked him. “I don’t feel like fooling around today.”
“Fooling around.” He did know what that meant, and it was to Sandy an especially unattractive expression, and one that Jane knew he did not like.
Perhaps for that reason he made an unfortunate joke. He said, though with a smile, “You know I could get you fired for insubordination.” And he laughed to show he was kidding.
But to his surprise—and horror; Sandy was genuinely horrified—Jane reacted as though he had meant what he said.
Narrowing her intense strange blue-gray eyes (her one good facial feature), Jane in a menacing half-whisper said to him, “And I could have you up for sexual abuse, do you know that?
You’ve heard of it? You read about what happened down at Stanford, and at the big law firm in Palo Alto? Well, don’t think for a minute I couldn’t do it, and I can think of several other nurses who’d be very happy—”
“But, Jane, come on. We’ve always been—I’ve always thought—”
“You always thought I’d come in and give you a blow job on demand.”
Sandy winced. He hated, hated,
hated
that expression. “I thought we were friends,” he said stiffly. “Colleagues, really.”
“Colleagues!” She bore down hard on the first syllable, making it harsh and loud, accusatory. And she looked as though she had a great deal more to say along those lines, but she was interrupted by a heavy fit of coughing.
Sandy knew enough not to pat her on the back—or to touch her at all: God knows what her response would have been to any touch at this point. He felt that she was about to cry, and that when she did it would be all right to touch her, he could put his arms around her in a comforting way. Let one thing lead to another.
But Jane White did not cry. Or if she did, Sandy was never to know that she had. Still half coughing, choking a little, she just stammered out, “You stupid old shit!”—and hurried out of the room.
Alone (abandoned!), Sandy sat down again. He reached up to stroke his hair, a familiar and usually reassuring gesture, but noticed that his hand shook. (Lord, could he be getting Parkinson’s too?) Everything felt awry. His stomach clenched. He was hungry, but the very idea of food was revolting, impossible. Even his heart, that strong reliable organ, seemed to ache.
Various bad words came to his mind. Fear—but how could he possibly be afraid of a nurse? Loneliness—but he wasn’t lonely; he had Felicia, and in a way he had Connie. Old age, impotence, failure. Cold, hunger. But none of those words had any application to his life.
“She has the soul of a courtesan,” Molly once said to Paul, by way of explaining her friend Felicia. “She loves to please people, to be loved, and she’s so intelligent, so realistic that she knows what she wants. She’s learned to be infinitely pleasing. Being with her is a delight, almost always. For one thing she really lives in the moment, so when she’s with you there’s nothing, no one else on her mind.”
“I can sort of see that,” Paul told her. “Plus which she’s a dish. But Sandy. The guy’s an old shit. I don’t get it.”
Molly laughed, partly because she had heard a tiny edge of competition in Paul’s voice. “She knows he’s a shit, although she never quite admits it, how could she? She does say that she’s hung up on older men, preferably doctors. Married. She likes men she can’t marry. She’s probably right. For her, I mean.”
This conversation took place early on in their marriage, when Molly, bedazzled, thought (when she thought at all) that they would be happy forever.
Paul said, “But Sanderson, Jesus. As you know I’m crazy about Felicia, I’m an easy prey to her charm. But I’m glad we don’t have to see a lot of that guy.”
“Me too, actually. And I don’t think he likes me either, much. But I’ll still bet on Felicia. She’ll end up doing him in.”
“Do you think she plays around?”
“Well, again she’s never said so. But, lately, there’ve been some things she’s said that make me wonder. And only a moron would be faithful to someone married.”
Paul laughed. “I love the way you women have it all worked out. The new rules. I’ll remember that if I’m ever inclined to stray.”
“See that you do.”
He added, “And for all we know old Sandy still fucks nurses.”
“That’s possible. It would be just like him, wouldn’t it.”
“Are all doctors terrible guys, or do they just get that way in med school?”
“I don’t know. Felicia and I’ve talked about it, and she doesn’t know either.”
This was shortly after Felicia and Sandy had started their relationship, and not too long after Molly and Paul were married (in the tackiest chapel they could find, near Reno). Felicia thought Molly and Paul would last forever—and Molly, like Paul, gave the Felicia-Sandy affair a couple of months. And both women were wrong. Paul opted out of the marriage, and then he was killed, and for whatever curious reasons Felicia continued for several years, not months, to be the lady friend of Raleigh Sanderson.
Paul was remarkable-looking. More striking than handsome, but very, very striking. For starters he was very tall, and thin, but good shoulders. His face was long and thin, high-boned. His eyes were what one remembered, though: a very pale, very bright light blue. Like certain skies in the early dawn on a day that will be very hot—Molly had thought that, remembering summer beach days in Virginia. Paul had very gray, almost white hair, obviously premature.
Since he was a screenwriter (later a documentary filmmaker), when they first met she had asked the obvious (silly) question, “How come you’re not an actor?”
“Because I’m too smart,” he told her, somewhat dismissively. By which she understood that she was about the hundredth person to ask him that.
So she said she was sorry, and he said that was all right; the real reason was that he couldn’t act, was too shy, and really not very smart.
But he was still, always, amazing-looking.
They had met, or picked each other up, in a bookstore on Fillmore Street, in front of the travel shelves. “Talk about meeting cute,” Paul said later. “It was worse than Neil Simon.” At the time he had said to her, right off, “I like your hair. Are you going to Mexico?” They were standing in front of Guides to Mexico.
“Not particularly,” she told him. “But I do think about Mexico.” And then, “Actually I like your hair too.”
They laughed, and became good friends, and then lovers. And then they got married. As simple and as infinitely complex as that.
A long time ago, long before Paul, as a very young just-out-of-college woman, Molly had married Henry Starck; they met in college, Bates College, in Lewiston, Maine. Molly had chosen Bates for being small and excellent, coed—and far from Richmond. Henry had gone there because all the men in his family had, for generations. Henry was from Portland, a splendid old gray-shingled house on Cape Elizabeth, and a large, rich and parsimonious, discreetly alcoholic family. Henry and Molly married, and moved down to Cambridge, where he would go to Harvard Law. This was regarded as an aberrant move by the
family, which they managed to blame on Molly, the Southern parvenu in their New England ranks; traditionally all the Starck men were doctors, a fact to which Molly only gave some thought, a lot of thoughts, some years after her troubles with Henry and his family were over, and those with doctors had just begun.
“It was sort of like being in love with an Easter egg,” Molly once explained to Felicia, trying to describe that marriage. “This perfect smooth surface, but brittle and hollow. Maybe dyed blue. But an attractive, very fragile egg.”
“And holy? Easter?”
“Oh, very. Groton, all that. They all wanted to be more New England than Down East. More Bostonian than really from Portland.”
“God, I’m glad I’m from California.”
Molly had fallen in love with New England, along with Henry, or perhaps the other way around: she loved Henry because she loved Maine and all of New England that she saw—the weather (it was always such definite weather, days in Virginia could be so blurry, ill-defined), the landscape, the rocks and birches and firs, the coast and lakes and marvelous vistas of blue mountains. And local accents, like the weather and the landscapes, clear words with a definite end. In Southern talk she had often found no closure and quite often no meaning, hidden or otherwise.
They drank a lot, Molly and Henry. They used to drive out to Bailey Island with a shaker of martinis, climb down to a rocky beach and drink, and watch the waves. Drink often made Henry loquacious, and occasionally amorous, but never slurring or sloppy, like certain Southern boys. And drinking out there on the coastal rocks seemed much more romantic than smoking dope on the edges of the hockey field, at St. Catherine’s
School, in Richmond, with boys from St. Christopher’s.
Henry’s kissing was restrained, was pleasant but never pushy; he did not try to shove her into bed. At first she thought him chivalrous, later just unenthusiastic. The problem was that she herself was aroused; she was very excited by Henry’s very light kisses. She wanted to go to bed with him, to make love, screw, fuck—to do anything and everything that they were not doing.
When Henry remarked one night in a casual way that maybe they should get married, Molly instantly agreed—mostly by way of getting him into bed: Now he’ll have to make love to me, she thought. We’ll sleep together—every night!
Henry did make love to her, and Molly enjoyed it very much. But sex made her greedy, she found, she wanted to do it more and more. At least every night, and preferably twice. Whereas Henry seemed satisfied with much less, and down in Cambridge Molly came to feel, as months went by, that Henry made excuses not to sleep with her. Ostensibly studying late, he would fall asleep in the big chair in his study. Or he began taking long solitary walks around Harvard Square in the evenings. “I’m in classes all day, I’ve got talk and people coming out of my ears.” She knew that he was doing exactly what he said he was, he was walking around alone, but still she was hurt. Was it too much to expect that he would look forward to going to bed as much as she did? Molly supposed that it was.
In a way that she could not explain to herself, she continued to be in love with Henry. She longed for him.
“I kept thinking someone wonderful would emerge from that shell,” she told Felicia—and her shrink, Dr. Edgar Shapiro. “I had to keep reminding myself that it was empty.”
“An excellent image,” he kindly murmured.
“Am I your first patient to fall in love with an Easter egg?” Molly had a tendency to make a lot of bad jokes to entertain and possibly to throw him off—she later realized.
He laughed, the smallest sound. “Probably.”
• • •
Also, Henry really drank a lot. Molly was used to heavy drinking; civilized people had a couple of martinis every night and then some wine with dinner. She had been taught this by her own parents, her Republican (still somewhat unusual in Virginia) ex-VMI football-star father, Boyd Bonner, and her ex–Sweet Briar May-queen mother. They drank a lot at home, and then more rowdily on Saturday nights at the Country Club, out in Westmorland. (And they fought a lot drunkenly; they were living disproof of the romantic adage holding that couples who yell and scream a lot are basically loving and sexy.)