Medicine Men Read online

  Connie smiled, quite unable to say anything at all—though various things occurred to her, sentences tumbling against each other in her mind: You’re beautifully handsome, shall we go back to my house right now? Did you know I have three black grandchildren? Should we move in and live together? I think I love you—is that all right?

  As though in answer to all those questions, he kissed her again, more briefly but still sweetly, warmly. He said, “This isn’t like me at all, I don’t know—” And he laughed. He said, “What an amazing day!”

  At that exact moment of their looking at each other, surprised and smiling in the sunlight, something extraordinary happened: from the mass of brambles and scrubby pines a small pointed gray-brown face peered out, curious and frightened feral eyes, dark gold, a black nose, and, as it instantly turned to run back and away from them, a long high bushy tail.

  Connie breathlessly whispered, “Was that a feral cat—out here?”

  Henry laughed quietly. “No, it was a fox. We have them in Maine.”

  “So beautiful.”

  “Wasn’t it?”

  After the fox they were silent for a time. Connie leaned back against their log, in the gentle, sedative sunlight. She was thinking how she would tell the grandchildren about the fox. Ethan, Adam, and Laurel, six, five, and three, respectively, a little young for hiking, Connie thought—and she also thought, for the thousandth time, What a jerk Raleigh is, how can he refuse to see Kate, the mother of these children, our daughter? Ostensibly because Kate never married either of their fathers, but really because both of those men were “gentlemen of color,” as Raleigh with his high heavy irony would put it. Black. It was true that Kate was not the most responsible woman alive; she never got along especially well in jobs, but she loved her children, had fun with them, and was fiercely protective—more than you could say for Raleigh, Connie thought.

  She had an impulse to tell this nice young man, this Henry Starck, about Kate and her children, but she did not. After all, these days just being kissed did not mean all that much; Henry Starck did not necessarily want to hear about her grandchildren. Besides, at just that moment she did not feel grandmotherly.

  She hardly knew him; how could she expect him to care about her family?

  Besides, he’ll probably remarry Molly Bonner. This sudden intuition hit Connie broadside, with the binding force of truth.

  Should she tell him, though, that Raleigh this week is off at a conference in Aspen? Heart surgeons all skiing together, in some terrifically expensive resort. All free, and undoubtedly charged to their patients in some way.

  But what does it matter what she tells him, if he’s going to remarry Molly Bonner?

  Henry asked her, “Did you have any special plans for tonight? I mean, if you’re free by any chance, I thought we might—”

  “Well yes, as a matter of fact—”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Since he had removed the family photographs, those glamorous wife-and-children-at-Christmas shots that all doctors seemed to have, Dr. Macklin’s walls were somewhat bare; this must have been true for some time now but Molly had just noticed, and noticed too some minor attempts at redecoration: two Piranesi prints, and, on the mantel, in place of the red-haired actress wife, was what looked to be a small gold baseball trophy. And so she asked him, “You were a baseball star?”

  “Only mildly, as an undergraduate. Before my serious pre-med days. I really wasn’t so great. Just tall.”

  “But you got this trophy.”

  He grinned. “They had to give it to someone. Every year. Now tell me, how’ve you been feeling?”

  “Okay, I guess. On the whole. But not entirely right, you know? Eating’s still sort of a problem, and I don’t have a lot of strength.”

  He frowned a little, then got up and went over to his mantel, where he first removed, then replaced the baseball trophy. As always, Molly was surprised by his height, he must be at least six three or four, and still thin. And now that she knew, she thought he moved like an athlete: he was lithe and quick, purposeful. He was an attractive man, he really was; why hadn’t Felicia felt it?

  “… takes a while,” he was saying. “I’ll bet you’ve heard that one a couple of thousand times. But I’ve been thinking, there’s a doctor just out from Mass. General, a young guy, but he’s supposed to be really good. Just starting out in internal medicine here. I think, uh, I think I’d like you to see him.” For some reason he didn’t quite look at Molly as he said this.

  Irrationally appalled, she first thought, Oh! he’s abandoning me, I must be hopeless, I must be even sicker than I feel if I have to go to this new doctor, and she wailed, “But why? I don’t want a new doctor, I’ve been to so many already, and I really like you—”

  His acute discomfort was obvious, and he then began to backtrack. “Well of course you don’t have to,” he told her. “God knows you have seen a lot of us.” And then, visibly pulling himself together, he said, “The problem is really mine. It’s just that I, uh, I thought I’d like to ask you out to dinner, or something, and if you weren’t my patient—”

  Horribly, childishly, Molly began to cry. She said, “I need a doctor, not—” Not a new lover, she had almost said, but there it was, unsaid and heavily between them. Because of course that was what she meant.

  “Come on now,” he said, to her tears. “Just forget I said that. Of course you need a doctor, and I am your doctor.” He smiled, and touched her shoulder in a friendly way.

  No longer crying, she managed to smile; she asked him, as though joking, “You mean I get to choose?”

  “Of course.” He said, “Let’s just forget all about that other, okay?” He grinned. “I can if you can.”

  “Sure,” she told him—quite sure that neither of them would forget. Sure that their connection had, if imperceptibly, changed.

  • • •

  “This is a very hypothetical question,” Molly said to Dr. Shapiro. “But if you, uh, found yourself attracted to a patient, what if anything would you do about it?”

  He made an odd and, to Molly, unreadable gesture involving both hands, but she gathered that he intended a total dismissal of her question. And he said, “That just wouldn’t happen.”

  Oh, are we all that unattractive? She did not ask this, but she did ask him, “How can you be so sure?”

  He laughed. “You have to be sure of a few things in this life.” Then he conceded, somewhat: “I suppose you’re right, it could, I could. But my safeguards seem to me entirely trustworthy.”

  Molly let him pause, and only looked her question.

  “Okay,” he said. “Two main safeguards. One, the nature of my relation to my wife, and, two, my own analysis. I think I would see any flicker of attraction as some momentary revival of an old neurosis.”

  “The nature of my relation to my wife”: that was a long phrase to which Molly both at the time and later on gave considerable thought. Did he mean that he was so sexually drugged, bemused, besotted by his wife that he could not have the lightest, most passing impulse toward any other woman? Or did he mean that his rational control of himself was so total that, to any flicker of outside interest, a voice would instantly chide, Come on, it wouldn’t be worth it?

  At the moment he was smiling, in his shielded way. “Do you want to say why you ask?” His classic question.

  Oh Christ, thought Molly, he is somehow thinking of me, of himself and me; he is wondering if I could possibly think him drawn to me. And so, as quickly as she could, she told him what had happened with Dr. Macklin.

  “Well,” he said, seeming truly surprised. “That’s certainly one way to handle it.”

  “And you get the noncommittal prize one more time,” to her own surprise Molly broke out. “Of course it’s one way to handle it. Raping the patient would be another. One way to handle it—Jesus!”

  A pause. “What concerns me is less Dr. Macklin’s behavior than your reaction to it.”

  Calming down, she drew in a breath.
“Okay. I was hurt. Pretty crazy, no? I felt like he was abandoning me. Whereas he was really being what you might call super-kosher.”

  “Indeed you might. Or scrupulous, if you were a Catholic. Anyway, a super-honorable man. If just slightly confused.”

  “We both were, and I didn’t handle it very well.”

  “No, you were okay. And I don’t think your feeling abandoned was all that crazy. You still don’t feel terrific—you still need help from your doctors, you think.”

  Molly smiled, acknowledging kindness; he really was a kind person, she often thought.

  Why then did she suddenly hit out at him, though gently? Later she thought she might have been getting back at him for the statement about his wife (but why?). She laughed, not kindly, as she said, “Actually what you would do if you were attracted to a patient is write some salacious novel about it, wouldn’t you?”

  He smiled. “You’re probably right.”

  Molly went to her gynecologist for an annual checkup, but she did not ask him about possible attraction to patients. For one thing, the very idea was too horrible: lanky, hopelessly ugly Dr. Summers, with his carroty hair and cranberry drinker’s nose.

  For another, she did not have a chance. Dr. Summers had decided to become a novelist, and having somehow got the impression that Molly read a lot, liked books, he wanted to talk about this marvelous new project. “It’s so easy,” he announced. “I just plug in the old computer and let those fantasies go. Eight, nine pages a night, it’s really fun. And I’ve got this program for plots. It must be a lot like psychoanalysis, all this stuff comes out. My wife would be really surprised, so would anyone who knows me, I guess. Of course a lot of it isn’t mine but things patients have told me over the years. I just change their names and there it all is. I hope no one recognizes themselves—herself, I guess I should say. This may feel a little cold,” he said—unnecessarily; the speculum was already in place, and very cold.

  “I have to admit, I think about doing talk shows, all that writer stuff. On the other hand, maybe I should just do it anonymously? The fact of what I do, being an ob-gyn doctor, might prejudice people one way or another. I could just make up a name for myself, along with all the characters, and put it in another city. Although a lot of it would be a lot of fun, I think, signing books and all that. And it’s all so easy, I really don’t see why more people don’t write novels.”

  “A lot of them do, it seems to me,” Molly told him.

  “Well, I guess you’re right. But I think most people have never even tried. Does that hurt?”

  Molly, for various reasons, did not tell Felicia about Dr. Macklin and his odd suggestion. She did, however, mention the visit to Dr. Summers, the boredom, his happy computer novel, and the cold speculum.

  To all of which Felicia responded reasonably enough: “I can’t think why you still go to that tiresome old sadist. His talking forever is very hostile, I think. I’ve always had this idea that people are boring on purpose, and it’s one of the ways they have of controlling women, God knows it is. If all else fails they’ll try to bore us to death. That’s one thing I’ll say for Sandy, he never bored me that way. But of course he’s got his own arsenal of hostile weapons. My father, though! God in heaven!—the jokes, can you believe it? He tells these long, long jokes. These days he gets them off the Internet, he says. Seriously, though, Mol, you’ve got to quit Summers. No one uses a cold speculum anymore. You should go to a woman, really. They listen, and they know what you’re talking about. They’ve been there too, you know? This Sarah Lowenstein I see now, she’s really great. She’s very smart and she’s sort of shy. I like that in a doctor. It’s novel.”

  Felicia, as she talked, was making pastry dough, cutting butter into the flour in a big brown bowl, with silver knives. And she wore a large white bib-top apron over her jeans and pale-pink (faded) T-shirt. Now she began to laugh, and wiped at her face with the back of a floury hand. “You would not believe this guy I sat next to at dinner last night. Ray Rose? A very hotshot surgeon.”

  “I’ve heard of him, I think.”

  “Well, he’s very into art collecting, and that’s what he likes to talk about. Philip Guston has gone up, Diebenkorn is up—Matisse is down, can you imagine? Matisse is down. But that’s not really the prize. Then he said, he actually said this, he said, ‘The trouble with Picasso is that he had no creativity.’ Can you imagine? Picasso had no creativity.”

  Molly laughed in sheer disbelief. “But I suppose you really liked him,” she said. “You’re going out with him tomorrow.”

  “I am not. And he didn’t like me either—I’m afraid he heard me when I whispered to the man on the other side of me that he was an asshole, Ray Rose was. But Jesus, the big creativity expert—”

  “It was that scum prick Freudian Edgar Shapiro!” Dave burst out. “Shrinks! They’re the worst, I don’t know why they call themselves doctors—black magic is more like it. I always knew eventually he’d make some move, he’s always been secretly hot for you—”

  “Dave! for Christ’s sake, I am not talking about Dr. Shapiro. This has nothing to do with him. He never—”

  She might as well not have spoken. As was so often the case with Dave, he chose to hear nothing that she said.

  Unwisely, knowing even as she spoke that she was making a mistake, she had asked Dave her allegedly hypothetical question: If you were attracted to a patient—And, as she might have known he would, he instantly leapt—he vaulted, he raced—to his own conclusion: Dr. Shapiro had made some sort of pass at Molly, which he, Dave, had always known that Shapiro would do. And, in a tired way, as she listened to Dave’s rant, Molly recognized that literally nothing she could say would change his view. It was less a question of not believing her than of refusing to hear her. On and on he ranted, his anger fueled by years of righteous, obstinate fury at shrinks (they had no proof, they charged high fees, no specific results), plus all his current rage and frustration at the sheer, simple, and inexplicable fact that Molly would not love him. He sometimes suspected that she did not even like him very much.

  “Fucking shrinks, they’re always screwing their patients, one way or another. I heard about one who was charging this poor woman two hundred bucks an hour and having sex with her too—”

  “Well she can’t have been very poor, and maybe the sex was terrific.”

  “Very funny. Actually they do it all the time—statistics—think they can get away with anything—unscrupulous—ignorant—”

  Listening, as she had to do—they were face-to-face, she on her sofa, he on the adjacent leather chair—Molly felt a heating of her blood, and quickening, tightening breath; pure rage is what she felt. The shrieking anger of an overpowered child. Though actually she was neither shrieking nor overpowered.

  She stood up. “Dave, now listen to me. Now listen. I don’t want to hear this crazy stuff. You’re just totally, absolutely wrong—” and, as his rant continued—“Dave, just shut up. SHUT UP! Dave, you have to go now. I’m tired. I don’t want to see you. Dave, did you hear me? I’m through.”

  Very ostentatiously, slowly, Dave looked at his watch, and only then he too stood up. “Lord, I’m running late,” he said, as though she had not said anything at all.

  “Dave, good-bye.”

  He smiled, with all his big strong bright teeth, and he said, “I’ll call you later.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  “We’re seeing a lot of that.”

  “There’s a lot of it around.”

  “There’s not too much we can do about it.”

  “Plenty of rest and lots of liquids. Liquids are important.”

  “We’re really seeing it a lot.”

  “No, statistically it’s not an epidemic.”

  Those were the not very comforting or helpful sentences that doctors were saying to their patients during a time in late fall, early winter, when to the patients it seemed that they felt terrible. They could not get well, and nothing helped. They did not get much sympathy
from their friends, most of whom felt the same, or worse. Or from the doctors, who were perhaps understandably preoccupied with more serious ailments, notably AIDS—and who did not have a lot to say about what was generally termed “flu.” Which everyone seemed to have.

  Felicia at last recovered, and Molly came down with it. And she found her symptoms not only uncomfortable, very, but terrifying: she imagined or believed that another large malignant green-golf-ball tumor had grown there, somewhere behind her nose.

  It is difficult if not impossible to anatomize fear, but Molly gave it a try, and, if slowly, she came to several realizations, the first of which was that she was now more frightened than when she was first diagnosed and threatened by Dr. Stinger with bad survival statistics. Much more than she feared death, she understood at last, she feared more surgery. Doing all that again. The green OR with its ghastly lights and tubes and masked green faces. Going under, despite herself. Waking in the Recovery Room. Prods at her body, insensitive, harsh. Loud voices repeating her name. The protracted bright sleepless nightmare of Intensive Care.

  She thought, I cannot go through all that again, I really and truly cannot, and she tried to consider the alternatives. Though she was not sure at all what alternatives there were. There was a long slow death, and then there was a quick exit pill, and somewhere in between there were probably treatments she didn’t know about. Alternative medicine.

  But in the meantime, she had to remind herself, she had only been diagnosed with flu. She had, definitely and demonstrably, a bad case of flu, that was all—all and also enough to blacken her world temporarily. To summon the ghosts of tumors and surgeons, hospital rooms and light and noise. The nightmare of radiation, nausea, despair.

  Paul called. Or, rather, there was a voice on the phone that was Paul’s but of course turned out to belong to Matthew. In town, wanting to come by to see her. Molly explained about her flu, although her tone must have told him that she was a little lonely and would like to see him. He would just stand in her doorway and tell her bad jokes, he said. She told him the cleaning woman would let him in.