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  Since Jane was not from Boston, there was no point in Connie’s explaining all that, for the moment. Instead she said, in her confessional, sharing voice, “I thought Sandy was so terrifically sexy. You might say I married for sex.”

  Jane laughed. “Me too, in a way. I thought Mark was so good-looking. Funny, it’s supposed to be men who marry for sex and good looks.”

  “Oh, but they don’t really, do they?” asked Connie. Then, responding to her own question: “Or young men don’t. Certainly not ambitious young doctors.”

  “Right. Those trophy wives must be for second or third tries, probably. First they get success, then sex.”

  “Actually, Sandy married me for all the things I was trying to shake off,” said Connie. “My parents, all those big lavish lonely houses. The heavy silver.” She sighed.

  “Is this just doctors or most men, do you think?” Jane mused.

  “What I think is,” Connie pronounced, “doctors are most men, only worse. Well, that’s not fair, and it sounds awful,” she corrected. “I only mean they’re more focused than most men are. Eyes ahead. Not much peripheral vision.”

  Jane agreed, “They sure are focused. Mark, honestly, he used to make these lists, this stuff for me to do. God, I gave up nursing for that? And then he’d check things off. He didn’t like it a lot when I’d gone out for lunch instead. And got plastered. He didn’t even know about the other stuff.”

  By “other stuff” Jane meant a lot of dope, and many, many lines of coke. Not to mention some LSD. And occasionally sex with various men who were doing those things too. She had “shared” all that recent history at meetings, so that by now she was able to allude to “stuff.” At the meeting she was encouraged to go and have some tests, which she did, and she came out all right, HIV negative, and no other bad signs. Her sponsor urged her to confess everything to Mark, to confront him with it, but Jane was able to argue reasonably, “Look, I’m probably going to dump him—I’m really working on that with my therapist too. I can’t afford to give him any more ammunition. Let him just think of me as a simple alcoholic. His mother was right about what happened if he married an Irish shiksa.”

  Those were Jane’s vices, drink and drugs and fairly promiscuous sex, all of which she had now stopped doing. Mark’s vice, or one of them, was gossiping to Jane, things he should not have told her—names, illnesses, everything. This had begun fairly innocently when Jane was one of the nurses who knew those cases too. But he had gone on talking—boasting, sometimes. Thus, Jane knew all about his patient Molly Bonner, the friend of Felicia Flood, whom good old Sandy was in love with, or fucking—however one wanted to put it. So far, Jane had not told her friend Connie of this interesting gossip, and not telling was beginning to make Jane uncomfortable; it seemed a form of deceit. Although Connie pretty much knew about Felicia—good old Raleigh had seen to that.

  At the moment, Connie was continuing her doctor theories, a topic she often attacked with gusto, like a long-hungry person at breakfast. “And in a way doctors are our earliest experience of sex,” she went on. “Examining you in all those forbidden places. I remember I had a big childhood crush on Dr. Wainwright, my pediatrician. He was Jewish, but he’d been at Harvard with my father. No final clubs of course. He was what they horribly called a ‘white Jew.’ Can you imagine?”

  “Too easily,” said Jane. “Mark was probably a white Jew too.”

  “I should have married a Jewish doctor,” Connie mused. “There was one I really liked. Bob Weinberger. But I wouldn’t have dared. Someone from Cedar Falls, Iowa, was bad enough.”

  In Cedar Falls, on their last trip there, as she looked into their room in the Bed and Breakfast that had been enthusiastically chosen by Raleigh’s mother (Belle Sanderson, from Raleigh, North Carolina), what Connie thought was, Damn him, he’s told his mother that we’re in trouble, marriage-wise, and she’s trying to fix things up with this horrible room.

  For the room was indeed described as The Anniversary Waltz Suite. A pink-and-white room, with occasional touches of gold. White wicker chairs, settee, lamp stands, and magazine rack (Connie had to guess at some of these functions), and white wicker headboard for the giant-sized bed. Which was overlaid with a rose-and-gold counterpane. And above that fancy headboard, an even fancier arrangement of white net that was coyly held in place by some life-sized or larger plaster doves. (White plaster doves, thought Connie.) The windows were treated with more white net, and white lace, and rose-colored draperies.

  In a large alcove, framed by yet more swatches of white lace, again held in place by white plaster doves, an oversized, round bathtub took up all the space. A Jacuzzi, actually; there were directions for controlling its flow. A Jacuzzi for two.

  “Holy shit,” was what Raleigh-Sandy said, on viewing this stage set. “Where’s the phone?”

  “Over there.” Connie had spotted a white princess (of course a white princess) telephone in a nest of pink roses.

  “Do you think it works?”

  “I certainly hope so.” For once, on this particular weekend, Connie was as concerned with a functioning phone as Raleigh was; she was expecting news of her (well, their) new grandchild. While he only wanted to hear from some nurse, or maybe that fat blonde secretary, Felicia Flood, whom he should be tiring of about now, although he did not seem to do so.

  Raleigh strode over and pulled the instrument from its bed of roses, picked up the receiver. “Doesn’t make a fucking sound. Fucking thing’s dead.”

  “Maybe that’s why it’s buried in roses.” Connie forced a laugh.

  “Very funny. Just because you don’t need the phone—”

  “Actually I do. Katie’s very pregnant, remember?”

  “As if I could—oh, fuck. I’m going downstairs to check it out.”

  He stalked out. She could hear him heavily on the stair, and then his voice, not words by the angry sound. When Raleigh was angriest he spoke most slowly, pretending patience and control. But at any moment he might give in and shout.

  In the meantime Connie unpacked for them both.

  In addition to the Jacuzzi there was a perfectly straightforward bathroom, Connie noted with relief. A shower (single), a double basin, and toiletry shelves. She was tidily arranging things, his shaving equipment, her pale-green Clinique jars, when Raleigh with all his noise returned.

  “You’re not going to believe this, Jesus Christ! She thought we might want a private line—now there’s good thinking—but it can’t be installed until tomorrow. In the meantime, in effect, we have no phone.”

  He stared at Connie as though she had had some part in this outrage.

  Intending helpfulness, she asked him, “Couldn’t you call in to your office, on her phone?”

  “How brilliant of you. Yes, I plan to, in an hour.” He looked at his watch. “God in heaven. I told her that I’m a doctor, which she must have known—Mom wouldn’t pass up that chance—but I meant that I had to have a phone. But, she told me all about her daughter’s ulcerative colitis! Holy shit! Colitis. No wonder I left home. How does old Durham stand it here, that’s what I want to know.”

  It was a trip that began by being bad, and got worse. The men who came from the phone company to connect the phone were unable to do so. When Connie at last reached Katie, their daughter, from the manager’s phone, Katie said that her doctor had said it might be another week. Raleigh fumed, and went out to make phone calls. And it rained, a mean bleak cold rain, with angry spurts of wind—as Connie trudged along unfamiliar streets, in search of the local AA meeting.

  She was thinking bitterly of the romantic echoes set off in her silly young mind by the name Cedar Falls when Raleigh had first pronounced it. She was thinking too, No wonder he’s sometimes mean, his native weather is vicious.

  Even from some distance she could see that a large note, a message, was tacked to the church’s downstairs door. And she knew more or less what it would say: No meeting here today. Sorry.

  Connie’s soul shrank, like so
mething left out in the rain and cold overnight. She felt herself shrivel as her mind contracted into one single thought: I will have to have a drink. Just one perfect martini—well, maybe a double, in a nice clean sparkling glass. One perfectly chilled double martini, in a dim-lit, warm, and welcoming morning bar (there used to be many such bars in Boston, if you went out to the right neighborhoods; Connie acquired a special wardrobe for those bar days, cheap, friendly, inconspicuous clothes, in which she looked like a nice old middle-class drunk, who was running to fat). She could see herself now in such a place, rescued from the awful cold and rain, shrugging off her Burberry, and taking that magic first sip.

  She headed fast from the church over to the tacky, two-story main street, where she passed no bars, nor for that matter any bookstores—none at all. She walked and walked and walked, until suddenly before her was the B and B where they were staying, and then, cold and dazed, she was back in the white dove suite, feeling more defeated than triumphant; after all, she had not exactly decided not to have a drink, she just had not found one, and she was not quite able to believe that any Higher Power had prevented her from coming upon a bar.

  Raleigh’s mother was sick that weekend, too sick to see anyone but her son the doctor. “I just feel so terrible, and then there’s all this rain, and you all came all the way out here to see me,” said Belle (Bates) Sanderson, formerly of Raleigh, North Carolina.

  But then the next day the skies all cleared, and the sun shone, brilliant if not warm, and Connie walked, and walked, and walked all over the semi-familiar ugly little town. Its shabby, general charmlessness was occasionally broken by a graceful, broad-porched Victorian, with spreading roofs and low-branched leafy trees. The people that Connie passed, those also out walking, seemed fatter and unhappier than most people—than people in California, certainly. She felt a wave of compassion, then, for poor Raleigh, growing up in this stunted town. No wonder he was dazzled by Boston, even by her.

  “I think Raleigh and I were exotic to each other,” Connie told Jane Stinger, continuing her theme. “It’s funny, but we were. I was actually the most boring, conventional Boston girl you could imagine, but he’d never met one before. And all that stuff that bored me silly, the deb things, the teas and dances and breakfast parties, turned him on. I think he thought the Ritz Bar was really glamorous, and the Napoleon Club, and Lafayette—all those tired old places. And he certainly turned me on, he was really sexy, and not afraid of girls like those ultra-nice Boston boys from St. Paul’s or St. Mark’s. Maybe all Midwestern high school boys are like that, but I didn’t know any.”

  Jane sighed. “Mark certainly wasn’t afraid of girls. He was sort of contemptuous, actually. There was always this underlying attitude: it’s only a body, what’s such a big deal about touching it?” She sighed again. “Sometimes I think I just liked him because he’s bossy and mean. Like Dad. Like I was used to. I was addicted to mean.”

  “Oh, me too.”

  “Plus the class thing about doctors. I know it’s a joke—my son the doctor, all that—but it’s really strong. Our mothers really wanted doctors for sons, and sons-in-law.”

  “How about girls?” asked Connie. “They’re encouraged to go to med school?”

  Jane hesitated. “I don’t know, I’m really not sure about that. In my day we weren’t especially.”

  “God knows we weren’t in mine.” And then quite suddenly Connie laughed. “The other day I thought of something funny. Years ago when the children were in kindergarten and I was driving a car pool, there were two little boys who drove me absolutely crazy with bathroom jokes. You know, all that poopoo-doodoo stuff. Every day, on and on. Gary Solomon and Eric Winston. And those are the two boys out of that car pool who went to med school—by now they’re doctors. Interesting, don’t you think?”

  “Very. I’ve always thought doctors were sort of hung up that way. Honestly, some of the jokes they think are really funny. They might as well be four-year-olds.”

  A pause, while both women munched on vegetables, sampled the bread, agreeing that it was good, all very good. And then Connie asked the question that had been in her mind for some time, as they went back and forth on this general topic of doctors. “Are you really going to do it?” she asked. “Do you think? Leave Mark?”

  Jane hesitated. Then, “Yes,” she told her friend. “But it may take longer than I thought. I don’t think things are going too well with him right now. A doctor he really respects—Douglas Macklin, do you know him?”

  “A little.”

  “Anyway, Macklin is really ticked off. He thought Mark goofed badly over a case, someone he’d referred. They’ve been arguing over the phone at night. Macklin says Mark should have paid more attention to an MRI, and of course he could be right. Mark sounds very defensive about it. This woman whose sinusitis turned out to be an ugly tumor. Malignant.” Jane paused, then looked directly at Connie. “Actually, it was that Molly—”

  “Oh, the friend of Felicia.”

  “Right.”

  There was a pause, during which both women pondered the bad luck of Molly, whom neither of them knew; they had only heard of her as the friend of Felicia Flood, whom they did not actually know either.

  “And there’s something bad with a Dr. Tanamini,” Jane continued. “This Japanese woman Mark really likes. He really respects her, he says. He means as a doctor but someone else told me she’s beautiful. But she seems to be mad at him too.”

  “I think there’s something bad with Felicia and Raleigh too,” Connie contributed. “He’s acting so crazy. Angry. He just stares around, in this furious way. And at night he sometimes goes out and then he comes back in a very short time. I mean half an hour or so. Not like the old days when he had all these so-called emergencies at the hospital—of course some of them actually were. I guess. But these days he could hardly do more than drive around the block a couple of times.”

  FOURTEEN

  Alta Linda. Gradually all Molly’s doctors, including Dave, began to mention this name, in a hushed and reverential way. A hospital and treatment center where a rare and special, cutting-edge form of radiation was available. “Particle therapy.” Much stronger and more accurate than radiation. Alta Linda was somewhere in Southern California, not far from L.A.; this treatment was available there, and in only two other centers in the whole country, one in Boston, the other in Minnesota.

  At first all this talk seemed to Molly simply part of the background noise of doctors’ conversations; they liked to exchange news of breakthrough treatments. But then very slowly she began to understand that what was actually being discussed was the possibility of her going there. For treatment. Particle therapy. Two weeks at Alta Linda.

  “No,” she said, having finally grasped what they meant. “No. I hate Southern California.”

  “But—”

  “And how can I need any more radiation? After six weeks here.”

  “How can you take a chance on something so important?” Dave countered.

  “But there’s at least a chance I didn’t need it at all. If Donovan really got it all.”

  “You did have to have radiation.” Dave spoke with more force than logic, Molly felt: everyone had radiation after cancer surgery, and so she must have it too. Just in case some tiny grain—or rather, cell—of the great green golf ball lingered on.

  He added, “And particle therapy—these machines they have—do you know they cost fifty million dollars? Fifty million. At this point it’s mostly used for prostate cancers.”

  “Oh, of course. A fifty-million-dollar machine? Prostates, of course. Not breasts.”

  “Is that supposed to be some feminist joke?”

  “Not particularly.”

  Actually, the very contemplation of a fifty-million-dollar machine exhausted Molly, and she was sure that she did not deserve, or require, such treatment.

  But: “… fewer side effects—doesn’t penetrate the brain stem,” Dave was saying.

  “I’d rather go to Bos
ton.”

  “That’s too far, I couldn’t commute to Boston.” He added, “We’ll have to go down one day early so they can measure you for a mask.”

  “No. I can’t do that again.”

  “You don’t know how lucky you are,” Dave muttered. He could have added, “to have me,” but he did not.

  In a thick gray wet winter fog, they drove down Highway 5, California’s central artery, the direct and efficient north-south route, for the most part straight and flat, undifferentiated, without the distraction of “scenery” or views or, for that matter, of population, houses, towns. “You see?” remarked Dave. “How fast it is? And this is not exactly weather for the coast.”

  “I guess not,” Molly murmured weakly. She had put up a feeble fight for the coastal route, and now she (still) thought that even in the fog it would somehow be beautiful, there would still be something to see. Besides, why hurry to Alta Linda? She saw no cause to rush. The small amount of packing required by this trip had taken all her strength. In the car, as Dave drove fast and relentlessly, she lay back against the seat, her eyes closed. Dave was right: she could not have seen the view, even had there been one. The fog seemed to exist inside her head, as well as all over the landscape.

  Six weeks of radiation at Mt. Watson, or something, had left her with no strength. The basic problem was nausea, not the sort of nausea that makes you actively ill (such a relief if she could be, Molly thought; if it were a question of throwing up, it might be over with sometime), but rather a steady low-grade dizziness in her stomach, so that eating or just drinking soup, or milk, or even water had become nearly impossible tasks. This condition seemed to have settled in; she could not remember a former or imagine a future self who liked to eat. Just getting out of bed had become a terrific chore; packing, thinking of what to take and putting it into a suitcase had been a terrible strain. She had not been able to concentrate, and now, as they drove, she could not remember putting in her toothbrush—any toothbrushes. Of all things to have forgotten.