She thanked him, saying how much she had enjoyed the concert.
“Lucky that Carl gave me those tickets,” he said. “I’m glad you enjoyed it.”
“Carl?” Molly was not sure why she asked this.
“New man in the office. Johns Hopkins. He’s very good, and always buying tickets to concerts he doesn’t go to. His kids get sick or something. Lucky for me, I almost always use them.”
“Oh. Well, thanks.”
The news about the free tickets had been just slightly dispiriting, she realized. Irrationally (what difference did it make?), she had been pleased by the small trouble he had gone to, and now she liked him just a little less. She wished that he hadn’t told her.
“I can’t have people coming in late!” screeched Dr. Beckle’s nurse. Her small angry pale-blue eyes darted around the crowded waiting room as her flimsy yellow-gray hair flew out in all directions.
Uncharacteristically, Molly argued, “But I’m really not late. It’s exactly two-thirty now.”
It was only then that the nurse seemed to focus on her. “Oh, I didn’t mean you. It’s everyone, and doctors running late. You’re for Dr. Morris? Mrs. Winter?”
“No, Bonner. Dr. Beckle.” Molly had said his name, and her own, about four minutes earlier.
“Oh yes, you’re the one with the ear problem, right?” Her voice seemed to fade in and out, like a defective radio.
“No. Sinuses. I think.”
There was no place in that room to sit down, so that at first Molly thought, Indeed, a bad season for sinuses. Later she guessed that all those doctors had simply overbooked. Greedy bastards, she thought.
After about fifteen minutes more, the nurse told her, “You can go right in now,” ushering her—almost shoving, in fact—into an examining room, as Molly wondered if she was really the
right patient for this doctor, this room—which was small, bare, all sterilized. Nothing there to read. On one wall was a large poster of the interior of the nose, nasal passages, ears and their passages—all that. It was a little scary, and, never having felt anything like fear in a doctor’s office before, Molly thought that she was truly not quite herself.
Certainly, lately she had been feeling like some other, very sick person. The self with which she was familiar was never sick. But her head had been weighted, and she had frequent very sharp headaches. Quite out of character, she had fantasies about brain tumors. Galloping hypochondria, she thought. But still, she was both very uncomfortable and scared. And the longer she stayed in that room alone, the more uncomfortable, the more scared she got.
“All doctors do that to you,” Felicia told her later. “They strip you of any possible sources of comfort—often, of course, including your clothes—and they leave you alone for one hell of a long time.” At least Molly was fully dressed, but in Dr. Beckle’s case, that day it was forty-five minutes that she had to wait. “They make you wait so you’ll be ready when they are,” Felicia said. “But I don’t know why they can’t time it a little better than they do. It doesn’t seem fair to make a patient wait fifteen or twenty minutes so a doctor won’t have to wait for two. But I don’t think they see it that way. They don’t care about fair. They assume that a patient’s time has no value, whereas all of
their
time is priceless. God knows how often I’ve argued this with Sandy. Sometimes their time is really valuable, I know, but it’s not as though they spent even most of it saving lives, it really is not.”
And all that time in a room by yourself can be very scary for a patient, Molly realized, that day; you sit there contemplating your illness, whatever it is. In forty-five minutes she had almost everything. Including AIDS: just how unfaithful had Paul been, she wondered, and with whom?
She also had time to think a lot about Dave Jacobs, and the strangeness of their connection. He had wanted to come to this appointment with Molly, and in a way she wished that he had. But some inner voice continued to insist that really she did not like Dave, and that for that reason she should not use him, not for anything. Including sex, which by now she almost recognized that she looked forward to, although so far they had not even kissed. She wished that she could lighten up at least a little about both sex and her silly sinuses. For a woman of her generation, Molly thought, she was sort of a throwback, a relic of earlier, more inhibited times. Some of which she put down to being Southern, Richmond, St. Catherine’s, all that, and some to the special craziness of her parents. But everyone grew up in a place with some peculiarities, and when you get to know them everyone’s parents sound fairly nuts.
Felicia on the whole, though, handled those things better, Molly thought. She spent considerable time in bed with Raleigh Sanderson, whom in many ways she did not like, but she liked the sex quite a lot, Molly gathered, and she evened things out by occasional sexual forays elsewhere. These days Molly suspected someone new on the horizon, the man from Seattle, probably—and she looked forward to whatever Felicia would say about it. Felicia was never literal or explicit—her delicacy was a quality that Molly valued.
“Well now, let’s see what’s the matter with you.” Dr. Beckle entered talking loudly, and not, either then or later, apologizing for being late. “What seems to be the trouble?” he demanded, frowning.
Short and stocky, with no neck and no bodily tapering, he was built like a bullet, Molly thought, and he moved aggressively, speaking in a rapid-fire, unstoppable way.
Molly tried to describe what was wrong, but she felt that she did a poor job of it. She sensed that Dr. Beckle had already come to his own decision about her case, from whatever Dr. Macklin
had told him, and that she merely bored him as she spoke. He only half listened; the rest of his attention was waiting for his own speech.
When Molly stopped, feeling that her time was up, Beckle started in with what sounded like a set speech. Which she was soon able to forget, only that it was extremely frightening at the time.
He explained in detail and with some vividness the various problems that could be causing her “condition.” Tumors, aneurisms, a long and horrifying panoply of ailments. And as he spoke he pointed at the big ugly picture on the wall, locating sources of trouble.
After maybe five minutes of this he said, “Well, let’s have a look.”
Punchy with fear, Molly repressed her impulse to run out of there, to find the nearest acupuncture clinic, or maybe just a friendly drugstore, with some over-the-counter, proven remedies, and a kindly druggist.
He looked up her nose and down her throat and into her ears, with his small mirrors and long sharp steel instruments. For about three minutes.
“Don’t see a thing,” he finished. “We may have to go in there and look.”
“Go in there?”
“Surgically. No big deal. I do it every day.”
“But—”
“Well, that’s my recommendation. Of course you can get a second opinion.”
“Of course I will.”
The nurse glared as Molly left. “Good-bye, Mrs. Steffins.”
Dave Jacobs had taken to calling Molly every day, just to see how she was, he said. Thus, from the beginning, his role
as potential lover (Molly could not call anyone over fifty a boyfriend) and as doctor were confused. Since she was not feeling well she welcomed all that attention, and also she had to admit to the rise of other feelings about him. To put it most simply, he turned her on. She observed with a horny pleasure the very good shape of his body: tall and lean, broad-shouldered, slender-hipped.
One day he called and asked if she wanted to take a walk; he had a free couple of hours, it would do her good, he said. They walked from Molly’s house up to Pacific Heights, and back. At every corner, in a protective (or dominating?) way, he took her arm, which led to their holding hands for the last few blocks of the walk. Molly recognized in herself the small rush of specific heat, which she had not felt for some time. Not since Paul. Dave had to get back to his office then, and she wished that he could have stayed. That they could at least have kissed.
Once inside her house, though, alone, she castigated herself. Did she really want to involve herself with a man whom she did not much like, with whom even the most minor conversations included arguments? They had argued over everything from vitamin C to the Grand Canyon, where Molly had never been and did not much want to go.
“You’re crazy!” Dave told her.
“What a horrible person!” she told Dave on the phone, the night of her visit to Dr. Beckle. “Going out of his way to scare me. And keeping me waiting all that time with no apology, ever. I really hated him and so did his nurse. I think it’s an awful office. I think you can tell a lot about doctors from the tone of their offices, how their nurses are.”
“Good Lord, Molly, I never heard anything so silly. How their girls feel is so totally irrelevant—”
“Girls! Can’t you even call them nurses? Jesus, Dave. Anyway,
why do they try to scare you? Does it have to do with malpractice suits? I just feel so much worse after seeing that guy, I’ll never go back to him.”
“Whether or not you like the doctor has nothing to do with anything. He probably kept you waiting because he was in surgery.”
“He could have said that, I’m not really unreasonable. If he’d said he was sorry it would have been okay. Or if he was in surgery the nurse didn’t have to put me in that room for all that time.”
“Well, I always apologize to patients when I’m late. But its not all that important. You make such a point over manners. That Southern stuff. The point is his competence as a physician.”
“I can’t stand short men.”
“Oh for Christ’s sake.”
Her conversation with Dr. Macklin, in his office, was considerably less heated. More rational and coherent.
He said, “I’m sorry you had such a bad time. I probably shouldn’t have sent you there. He does overbook and I’ve heard from other patients who didn’t like him, including my wife. She couldn’t stand him. The problem was, Stinger was out of town, and he’s where I wanted you to go. And I do think whether or not you like a doctor is relevant. After all, communication is important, and if you hate a guy you can’t exactly talk to him easily.”
“Next time I think you should listen to your wife.”
“I’m sure you’re right.”
Molly had the occasional fleeting thought that Dr. Macklin was, if anything, too pleasant. How would he handle some hard, unpleasant situation? She wondered, but at the same time she told herself that he was highly intelligent. That was why she liked him, wasn’t it?
• • •
Dr. Stinger, to whom she went next, was also short.
Molly asked Dave, “Does something about ENT attract short men?”
“Christ, only you would generalize from two examples.”
He probably had a point, which of course Molly did not admit. (Dave always brought out her most childishly defiant qualities, which cannot have been entirely his fault.)
Dr. Mark Stinger, then, was short but dark and handsome, and while Molly did not agree with the received opinion holding that handsome men are generally bad (she rather preferred that they be handsome), still she did not like him much, and at the time she was not at all sure why. He was polite (God knows more polite than Dr. Beckle had been), and he seemed intelligent—what more did she want?
Dr. Stinger prescribed some antibiotics, which he assured her would work. (Was that it, his assurance, just short of arrogance?)
And they did not work. Molly felt worse and worse, more heavy in her head, and in her veins. The smallest tasks, like making her lunch, seemed difficult, and reading was almost impossible. She could not believe that she could hardly read; always, she read enormously.
“Call Stinger and tell him how you feel,” said Dave. “You patients don’t tell your doctors enough, and then you blame us.”
Molly did call Stinger, and she told the nurse how terrible she felt; she would call her back, the nurse said (she, not the doctor). She did call back, with another antibiotic prescription.
“I don’t like doctors whom you can’t even get to talk to,” Molly told Dave.
He hesitated, then said, “Well, it’s not the way I do things, I always get back to patients eventually. But maybe he has it worked out this way.” A meaningless defense, Molly felt.
• • •
Dave asked her out to dinner. “No free concert tonight,” he told her, with a laugh. “Worse luck. We’ll probably even have to pay for dinner.”
On the way to the restaurant he made several small jokes about their possibly going dutch, which he understood was what people did these days. But when Molly said, “Sure, fine with me” (in fact she would have liked it much better), he bridled, as though scandalized, and he told her, “I guess you don’t know when I’m kidding.”
Which was true enough, both at the time and later on.
At dinner they talked again about how much they missed, respectively, Paul and Martha. And they argued. That was the first occasion of the Grand Canyon argument.
“Look,” Molly told him, “I’m almost forty. Old enough to have gone there by now if I’d wanted to.”
“And too young to be so rigid. It’s the most glorious experience of nature in this country.”
“I like Maine. New England. Lakes, the Atlantic coast.”
“But you won’t even try?”
“I’d hate it. I hate looking down from heights. Or even up.”
They drank martinis, and had a bottle of Beaujolais with their steak, that restaurant’s specialty. Molly hadn’t had steak for several years, and she had to admit that it was good.
They went back to her house and then, as they both must have known that they would, they went to bed.
Sex with Dave was pretty much just that, sex. At first Molly liked it, and responded happily to something she had not done for so long, and had missed. But after the first few slakings of thirst, she began to feel drowned.
Many women complain, with reason, of too little sex in their lives, as Molly had privately done about Henry. With Henry more and more often it was she who initiated sex, as some therapists say you should, and more and more often he turned
her down, which made her feel terrible. Ugly and unloved—rejected.