But Dave overdid it, so that Molly began to feel that he was engaged in some contest with himself. She was sure that he was counting: four times, not bad for a guy almost sixty. Try for five? But that was several too many times for Molly; she could not, was not thirsty anymore.
Love with Paul was not exactly perfect, whatever perfect love would be, but for quite a while it was perfect enough for Molly. Until (another sign that she should have read) it slacked off to almost never. But in the good days, early on, she surely never thought of numbers, nor of being drowned.
Invaded is actually what she felt with Dave. Assaulted. He almost never let her peacefully sleep; he kept waking her, prodding her, turning her over. And while he talked a lot about love, how much he loved her, how wonderful to find love twice in his lifetime, to Molly it did not feel like love but rather a form of aggression. She could have been anyone at all, Molly thought, and she often wondered, Why me?
She complained, “You’ve got to let me sleep. This is crazy. You don’t listen. I need more sleep, and I need to be sort of alone to sleep.”
“But you’re so terribly attractive to me. Aren’t you glad?”
Actually she was not glad, but she did not feel that she could tell him that, and so she only repeated, “I’ve got to get more sleep. I’ll never get well with no sleep.”
“Love is the greatest cure,” he told her, sententiously. “Haven’t you heard that? It’s what your friend Dr. Freud always said.” Like many so-called “real” doctors, Dave disliked and distrusted any form of psychotherapy; he was full of anecdotes (patients of his who had had terrible experiences with shrinks, and
no help
) and of very old bad jokes.
However, playing up her illness was effective, Molly found. And besides, what she said was true: sleep deprivation made her feel a great deal worse.
• • •
Dave and Martha, his wife, had made love every night of their marriage, Dave told Molly. Taken literally, that statement struck her as impossible, or most unlikely. The certain truth, though, was that Martha was a woman who could not say no, and Molly tried to imagine that poor masochistic lady, who Dave had assured her was not a feminist. (“I’ll bet not,” Molly had said.)
“I don’t remember her too well,” Felicia said. “I just met her once, at that terribly dark-brown house in the woods where they lived. It was a big party, and Dave was all over the place being host. She was more like the maid, serving things. She had the most boring perfect hair and perfect flowered silk dress, I do remember that. A real doctor’s wife, I thought. A fifties throwback. Of course that was early on with Sandy, and I was feeling a little hostile to wives, but still. That poor woman.”
“Wasn’t Donna Reed’s husband a doctor? Remember ‘The Donna Reed Show’?”
“I think so. The paradigmatic doctor’s wife, anyway.”
“Poor Martha. Is Sandy’s wife like that, do you think—poor Connie?”
After the tiniest pause, two beats, Felicia said, “Actually I don’t think so. I’ve heard lately that she’s doing really well. She went to AA, stopped drinking. And she’s fighting City Hall about the homeless.” Another pause. “I really don’t know what to do.”
“Neither do I.”
They laughed. Then Molly said, “I have a new theory about men like Dave who hate cats. They’re bullies, you know? And you can’t possibly bully a cat, that’s why they hate them.”
Molly called Dr. Stinger to say that these new antibiotics did not work either. She felt worse. Dr. Stinger was out of town, his
nurse informed her. Perhaps Molly would like to see some of his residents? Molly thought that she would. Any doctor would—or might—help, she thought. Any doctor but Dave. She realized that in a very irrational way she was confusing her illness with Dave: I’m allergic to Dave, is what she more or less thought, as she made more and more excuses not to see him.
The two residents were both Chinese, both small. One plump, one thin, and both very courteous, shy, and thorough. They examined Molly gravely, with a small air of apology for invading her head in that way. They smiled a lot in her direction—a form of reassurance, she thought.
But then, at the end, with a tiny frown the thin one told her, “We found some small polyps. High up.”
“Well, that would explain quite a lot, wouldn’t it?”
Evasively, their looks consulted each other. “We have to talk to Dr. Stinger.”
Dr. Stinger’s nurse told her that Dr. Stinger would like her to have an MRI, whatever that was.
Molly told Dave, “I really don’t like all this communicating through his nurse. He could call me. Dr. Macklin does. I’m not going to keep him on the phone.”
“His girl is good at communicating with patients, I’m sure. She’s trained for that.”
“Why do you insist on calling her a girl if she’s so highly trained? She’s a nurse. I met her, and she’s a very smart woman.”
Carping at Dave had become a way of complaining about her whole situation, for Molly. Otherwise she was really too enfeebled to protest. Her sense was that Dr. Stinger thought her a neurotic, hypochondriac woman—and she was not entirely sure that he was wrong.
“Everyone calls them girls,” Dave snarled.
“Not anymore. Besides, why didn’t Stinger find the polyps?” Molly had suddenly thought of that, another indictment. But it was a reasonable question, to which Dave had no answer.
The MRI.
Molly had to lie in a long white tube, with a lid fitted over her head and her legs strapped down. The nurse, Dr. Stinger’s “girl,” had asked as she made the schedule if Molly was claustrophobic, and Molly had said no, not especially, but lying there, locked in place, she thought that she really was claustrophobic, very. And what would she do if she was: would she kick and scream her way out of there?
Later, when various kind friends remarked that she had been such a good sport about everything, even that she had been “brave,” Molly thought that really she had not had much choice—as she had no choice in the MRI white tube. She just had to lie there. Enduring.
Almost the worst of it was the noise. The young doctor who put her in the tube had warned: “There’ll be a sort of pounding in your ears. If you’re really uncomfortable with it let me know.” He did not say how she would let him know. But before each bout of noise his disembodied voice would announce, “This first will take about five minutes … this will take seven … fifteen minutes.”
All those long sequences involved a pounding near Molly’s ears, as though someone were tearing through the next room with a jackhammer, Molly’s most hated noise; to her it sounded like a giant’s dentist drill. Sometimes in the intervals there was music, once a Haydn “Sinfonia Concertante” that she especially liked, so graceful, so literally full of grace. Superstitiously then, she thought, Oh good, a good sign, this will be okay.
So much for superstition.
Until that MRI, Molly had no idea how long seven or eight or fifteen minutes could be. Just lying there, with that terrible
noise in her ears. Later, she had no idea what she had thought about during those endless minutes, nor for that matter how she had managed to get through it without some childish display.
At last the doctor, a dour and sallow young man, released her, and Molly sat up. “I can go now?” she asked, not believing it possible that she could.
And—right: she could not. He said, “I just have to look at these pictures a little.”
Scowling hard, he held a series of what looked like X-rays up against a light—all images of shadows, all dark and terrible.
But the sheer relief of being out of that tube had made Molly manic. She was mildly hysterical. “I suppose you’re finding lots of brain tumors.” That was her notion of a joke, at that moment.
“We’re not allowed to give diagnoses.” He frowned more deeply. “Well, I guess you can go now.”
As a small child, near the banks of the James River, in Richmond, what Molly liked best was the game of doctor—and “like” is not the correct word; this was an obsession, a major passion. She played that quite unregulated game with various other children, often new ones, but later she was unable to remember how the activity was ever proposed. Was it always she who made the suggestion? Molly was a shy, on the whole very inhibited child, and so she found it unlikely that she should have been so bold. She remembered her intense eagerness for the game, but maybe all the children involved felt the same. They were like a bunch of addicts among whom a lot of verbal communication was unnecessary.
And calling what they did a game is misleading: the doctors that those children played at did nothing but examine, and that not very thoroughly. They only looked at each other, they showed themselves off. No mutual touching, and God knows nothing more advanced like “foreign objects.”
Molly played doctor with many children, then, but for several years her best and most interested companion in that pursuit was a handsome, blond, and green-eyed little boy named Craig Stuart. His parents were friends and drinking companions
of Molly’s parents, and the Stuarts lived in a large, white, and somewhat forbidding house on a bluff above the river, with an ancient mysteriously laid out garden, full of inexplicable and wonderfully secret nooks and glades. And so that is where Molly and Craig exhibited their small pale-pink genitals to each other, among the sheltering, giant pre-Civil War boxwood, the magnolias and crepe myrtle. Their parents were pleased that they were friends, and that they liked to play together so often, and so contentedly.
Craig’s was the first penis that Molly ever saw, and she thought it was marvelous. Tiny and a pretty peachy-pink, it sometimes stood straight up. Craig could make it do this just by thinking about it, he said. So interesting, Molly thought. A sort of magic.
When she told Felicia about playing doctor, after they had become friends and were talking about what they were like as children, Felicia said that Molly was the only person she knew with a genuine case of penis envy, but Molly said that was not true. She didn’t envy Craig’s penis, she only admired and wondered at it. It was much more interesting to look at than a girl’s tiny fold, she thought.
Craig was also very interested in something that he persisted in calling “poopoo,” a minor obsession that Molly considered babyish, unworthy. He liked poopoo jokes, and he told Molly that once he had “made poopoo” in his sandbox; proudly confiding, he giggled with pleasure.
“Didn’t they find it and punish you?” Molly was frightened at the very thought of such a discovery by parents. Horrifying!
“They thought it was a dog!” Triumphant laughter from Craig.
Molly did not find it all that funny but she laughed enthusiastically anyway. (Southern female training kicks in early.)
On the other hand, Molly was interested in kissing, and Craig was not. Molly did not think that doctors kissed their patients, and certainly they did not kiss each other; still, making
some obscure but definite connection, she felt that playing doctor should include an occasional kiss. Sometimes she would kiss Craig, her small mouth pressed for the one instant he allowed it to his cool smooth cheek. Molly especially like the smell of his shirts when she did that, a clean ironed boyish smell.
Actually, as Molly later came to think of it, Craig was more tolerant of her wishes to kiss than she was of his poopoo talk—which proved she was not sure what. Several things, probably.
Craig grew up to be a doctor, just as he always said that he would do; he is now a well-known plastic surgeon, living in Richmond. Molly did not think of him much in her grown-up life, except when she arrived at that time of overinvolvement with doctors, and then she wondered if lots of doctors started out like that, smart little boys who liked to play doctor with little girls, who retained a lingering interest in poopoo, in the form of fecal jokes.
Certainly jokes of that nature seem more popular with doctors than with most other groups (this is the sort of wild generalization from Molly that drove Dave wild), and such a joke, and a vast divergence in their notions of what is funny, led to the first of Molly’s final schisms with Dave.
Molly disliked going to Dave’s house, in Mill Valley, and usually made excuses not to. This presented a problem in that Dave liked to cook; he was enrolled in a cooking class in Sausalito, and he often mentioned new dishes that he wanted Molly to try. But it never worked out very well. Two true gourmet San Franciscans, two foodies, they both recognized that his stuff was really not first-rate. Poor man, he always overdid the salt, or the cooking time, or something; and he tended to leave out the crucial garlic, or the lemon rind.
It was not really the dubious cooking, though, that made Molly not want to go there; it was rather the house itself, which
she found depressing. Set in its deep dark glade of huge shadowing redwoods, the house was always dark and, as though to underline this effect, everything inside was dark brown. All “practical” fabrics. Draperies, upholstery, rugs, and heavy family portrait frames—all brown, no bright cushion or pot of flowers anywhere to relieve the gloom.
“I’ll even come to get you,” Dave offered, “though it’s not much of a drive.”
“Honestly, I don’t mind the driving,” Molly told him. “I just—I don’t know.” I just hate your house, she could not exactly say.
Dr. Macklin told her that her MRI was okay. Showed nothing much.
“That’s very good news,” Dave said when she told him. “I was a little worried.” A remark that at the time Molly (wrongly) considered merely hostile.
But since she continued to feel so terrible, and since no antibiotics helped, Dr. Stinger wanted to “go in there and have a look.” Which Molly understood to be very minor surgery, easily postponed for a couple of weeks: Dr. Stinger was off somewhere (“out of town” seemed to cover everything from scuba diving in Cozumel to a hot ENT conference in Brussels).
As she listened to the pleasantly familiar New England vowels of Douglas Macklin telling her all this, it struck Molly that in him she had found a new and improved edition of Henry, her cold and detached first husband, over whose unwilling head and broad shoulders she had poured so much warm, unwelcome, inconvenient affection. Which is not to say that she had a crush or anything like that on Dr. Macklin. She simply liked him a lot, and she wished (she still wished) that Henry could have been warmer.