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  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.

  And she wished that Dave would stop putting Macklin down. You just envy his hair, she sometimes (not really) considered saying, envisioning Dave’s shining bald dome. She assumed them to be about the same age, and she thought that hair envy might well be an issue among older men.

  Since Dave’s practice was in Marin County, and since they were (she hesitated to use the word “lovers”) “friends,” there was no question of Dave’s becoming her actual primary-care doctor, but instead he carped from the sidelines, which did no good. Macklin should not have sent her to Dr. Beckle, Dave said; everyone knew Beckle was a shit—and Molly had to agree with him there. Also, further back, Macklin should not have prescribed Halcion after she and Paul broke up and then Paul died, and she couldn’t sleep. “But that was before all the fuss about Halcion,” Molly told him. “And nothing bad happened to me. I didn’t get addicted or crazy, and I could sleep.” “He was just lucky,” Dave muttered sourly.

  It was Molly’s impression that Dave was a very take-charge, authoritarian doctor, commanding his patients and judging them in terms of obedience. Whereas Dr. Macklin seemed to take a less parental approach. “She was a wonderful patient,” Dave used to say admiringly of his wife, poor woman, in her final illness. “All her doctors said so.” And Molly imagined this passive, obedient woman, docile and uncomplaining. Following all the doctors’ orders without question. A pre-feminist fifties doctor’s wife.

  Unsurprisingly, since on almost all fronts they got along so poorly, their sexual relationship had also deteriorated: whatever early (horny) enthusiasm Molly had felt diminished. “Come on, you’re not even trying,” Dave sometimes whispered loudly, angrily, scaring the cats. “I can’t,” Molly would whisper back.

  She felt—she knew—that she had to get rid of Dave. That is, stop seeing him altogether. But in order to do this somehow it seemed to Molly necessary to convince him that they did not in fact get along, which was curiously difficult, if not impossible. In her mind she argued and argued, but only convinced herself—talk about preaching to the converted. The truth is that I really don’t love you, she would end by saying in her mind, which for Molly just about summed it up.

  But she did not for the moment say that to Dave, and for two very bad but to her compelling reasons. One, she did not like the idea of being alone. Again. And, two, even less rational, she had a superstitious fear that without Dave (the doctor) she would get even sicker, as though in some mysterious medical way he was controlling whatever was wrong with her.

  “Actually you don’t have to dump him,” said Felicia. “Just use him. See him as much as you want to. Have sex with him if you enjoy it. This is not a moral issue.”

  Molly liked what she had said, especially that last—but she continued to fret as though it were indeed a moral issue. And she guessed that for her it was: she did not believe that she was supposed to “see” (meaning sleep with) a man she did not especially like.

  “You’ve got to come to dinner,” Dave said. “I’ve learned to make the greatest bourguignon in the world.”

  How could Molly tell him that her mother, too, had learned to make a great bourguignon, from Julia Child in the fifties, and that they had had it at least once a week, for months, unimproved. And that she did not like it much in the first place. Probably she could have told him if she had not felt so generally guilty toward Dave, so aware of her non-love, which came out as surliness, and besides, supposedly everyone likes a good beef stew; it is not a dish you can legitimately take against, like tripe, which, eccentrically, Molly preferred to beef.

  And so she only said a rather weak “Good for you.”

  “Okay, then, Saturday? And Sunday morning I’ll make you a really great old-fashioned breakfast.”

  • • •

  Certainly he had gone to a lot of trouble over dinner. With the early ev
ening martinis they even had little puffs of cheese, nice and hot.

  “Now if this isn’t the best bourguignon you’ve ever had—” He grinned, sitting down and serving it out. He tasted his. “Super, if I do say so myself.”

  After all that, it was hard to make the appropriate remarks, and so Molly only said, “It’s very good,” with what she hoped was strong emphasis; she did not add that the meat was a little tough and gristly, which it was.

  But his very desire to show off and to please was touching in its childish intensity. Molly was always hard on Dave, intolerant; she knew that and could not seem to control it.

  And in bed she had to say to him, “Look, I’m sorry, but I just don’t feel like it. I don’t feel sexy. Actually I don’t feel very well at all. It may sound like a joke but I do have a headache. Please. Please, Dave, come on, please don’t.”

  Molly realized that it seemed a little exaggerated to call it date rape, an almost-sixty doctor whose house you have knowingly gone to for the night. Nevertheless, she did give in to superior force. She got tired of fighting him off.

  In the morning, as he had said he would, Dave made breakfast. Bacon and eggs and frozen waffles, which he had just discovered. “As good as my mother used to make,” he assured her, with a jokey grin.

  “Your mother’s waffles were good?”

  “Of course.”

  Molly had not had any of those things for breakfast for so long that they all tasted very good, as she told him. She asked, “You don’t worry about cholesterol?”

  “It’s a fad. No one with any sense takes it seriously. I suppose your Douglas Macklin does.”

  Molly wanted to go home early. She wanted to get into bed, to take some aspirin, whatever. She wanted to be alone with her cats.

  Of course this entailed an argument, though less of one than she had feared; Dave recalled some household chores and gardening that he had wanted to do. “But remember about next Thursday,” he instructed. “The concert. And then next Tuesday week.”

  “I’d better write all this down.” Lately Molly had forgotten or confused a couple of dates. Her head was not itself, she thought. Maybe her problem was not sinuses but Alzheimer’s? She asked Dave, “Could I have some paper? I don’t have my book along.”

  “Here.” He handed her a small pad, on which she noticed two printed drawings.

  Following her glance, Dave seemed to recollect something, and he made a gesture to take back the notepad, but then he said, “That’s just an old joke. Something I had printed. I’d forgotten. Just use the other side.”

  Curious, Molly first looked. The printed drawings were of human figures, both naked, without visible gender. The first was in a crouch, ass upward, one arm reaching up toward the anus; some small object was in that reaching hand. The second picture showed the same naked person lying down, also reaching around toward the buttocks.

  “Dave, Jesus Christ, whatever?”

  He was chuckling. “You don’t know what that is? Lucky you! It’s the directions for Fleet enemas, you give them to yourself—”

  Molly said again, “Jesus Christ.” (She knew that he hated it when she swore.) “You really thought that was funny?”

  “I guess I did. You make such a fuss about nothing. Just turn the pad over, use the blank side of the paper.”

  “We have entirely different sensibilities,” she told him furiously. “Anyone who would ever think that was funny for a minute—” Declaiming, she still felt that in a way he was right: she was making a fuss, and doing it on purpose. But she did think the “joke” was quite disgusting.

  She collected her toothbrush, her moisturizer and nightgown. “Don’t come out to the car with me,” she told Dave. “I can manage perfectly well.” Meaning, as he must have known that she did, Who needs you?

  Muttering “Good God,” with a heavy scowl Dave went off into his dark and overgrown garden.

  Indeed she did not need Dave, Molly thought later as she lay in her sunny view-filled room, with the beautiful cats stretched out on her bed, near her feet. She could get through the operation on her sinuses, two weeks from then, and soon she would be all well, she would be herself again. And that would be pretty much the end of doctors in her life.

  Just for a moment then she remembered, for the first time in many years, Craig Stuart and his poopoo jokes, and his darling little cock. Viewed in the mote-filtered light between giant Virginia boxwoods, ancient magnolias.

  SEVEN

  Felicia, out in her garden, deadheading the blowsy white roses that stubbornly bloomed on, even now into the fall, still could hear her telephone if it rang inside her house. Although there was no one, really, whom she wanted to hear from at that moment, sheer habit kept her poised for the phone. And besides, there was the answering machine.

  The garden smelled richly of loamy earth, more faintly of roses, and of overripe pungently rotting apples from next door. Last week it had rained, and now small harsh weeds sprouted here and there. Seeing, registering the presence of weeds, Felicia continued with the roses, and tried to imagine an alternate, doctor-less life for herself.

  In all the years that she had been a medical secretary, she speculated, she could have gone to medical school; in this fantasy she ignored the fact that at no time did she even consider medical training. Besides, she next thought, I never wanted to be a doctor, I only wanted to have sex with doctors.

  Did it begin with the handsome pediatrician, Dr. Jack Chandler, whom all the little girls and all their mothers had crushes on? (“I called Dr. Chandler, Felicia has chicken pox, and he came right over!” boasted Susie, Felicia’s mother, to an envious friend.) Felicia’s crush, she felt sure, was stronger and deeper, more real than anyone else’s, including her mother’s. Dr. Chandler had gone to Andover and to Yale; he liked to say both those names. He was interested in child psychology; he encouraged his patients to talk. Without instruction, Felicia still knew the sort of thing he wanted to hear about: problems with parents, or guilts over some early form of sex, kissing games, masturbation, whatever. And Felicia, aware of none of those troubles, really, considered making them up—and considered too just saying: I really just want you to kiss me, and touch me, here. Dr. Chandler, perhaps advisedly, did not see adolescents, and Felicia was very upset when her mother told her, at thirteen, that she was now too old for Dr. Chandler. (Susie too was upset: the boys had outgrown Jack Chandler several years ago—but she might always run into him at a party somewhere; they were on more or less the same social circuit.)

  Felicia’s first serious boyfriend—if you call endless dope and sex serious—was a very tall (six four), very handsome pre-med student, Sloan Jeffers. One summer at Tahoe somewhat accidentally Felicia, at fifteen, had the big house on the lake all to herself, for a month. Her grandparents’ house, solid timber and stone with great stone fireplaces and a broad surrounding porch above the rich green spreading lawn—and lovely big bedrooms, all with views of the lake. And huge soft beds.

  What happened was that Susie, tired of the hereditary house, decided that Sun Valley might be more fun. And that she could leave Felicia and her brothers, who were students at Stanford, eighteen and twenty-one, with the summer live-in maid, Eileen, from Truckee. The Stanford boys decided to go camping up in the High Sierra, along with their girlfriends, an arrangement that no one’s parents knew about. And Eileen really wanted to be with her boyfriend, who was working in Reno—so Felicia told her to go ahead, she could easily cook for herself. If Eileen would just come back on Mondays and clean up the house. Felicia easily covered both for the boys and for Eileen. Her brothers were always out fishing on the Truckee River when their parents called, and they would not have asked to speak to Eileen. Everything was fine, Felicia told Susie, they were all fine. The summer of love. By the time her parents and then her brothers left, Felicia was on the verge of meeting Sloan, at a party in Squaw Valley.

  Felicia was quite a big girl, back then, and she did not much like her size, although she noticed that al
l the boys seemed to like her, anyway. But in those years of Twiggy, and the onset of eating disorders in many young girls, Felicia, untrendily interested in cooking, ate healthily, and did not get fat, but she was big. Her mother told her, “Never mind about being thin. You have that ravishing skin, and those eyes, and if you’d only brush your hair more often—” At which Felicia smiled, and widened her eyes, and tossed her hair. “You can diet when you’re middle-aged,” her sensible mother told her.

  At the Squaw Valley party, to which she had elected to come alone, and late, she stood out on a balcony, looking into and casing the party, until this very tall young man came out to stand beside her. For a minute he only stared at her, then broke into a huge (stoned) grin. Reaching for her face, which he then held between two large hands, he bent to kiss her lingeringly on each cheek.

  “I had to see what you tasted like,” he explained unapologetically.

  She laughed at him—the nerve! “Was I okay?”

  “Peach ice cream, only warm. I know I’m very stoned, but you’re still the most beautiful girl I ever saw. Are you?”

  “Stoned?” she laughed again, a little nervously. She was not used to boys quite so much taller and older than she was.

  He had very straight, very dark-brown hair, long hair that fell across his high white forehead until he pushed it back. “I’m Sloan,” he said. “Silly name. I just got up here this afternoon, I was supposed to stay with these people. Here, have a toke.”

  He held the fat joint to her mouth, fingers grazing her lips—so sexy!

  Felicia inhaled, and held it, and then on the outbreath she told him her name. “Felicia. My parents’ house—”

  He gestured at the bare-patched, steep surrounding mountains. “Out there?”

  They both laughed, and then Felicia said, “No, back on the lake.”

  “Oh, good.”

  They laughed again.

  “Actually this is not a very good party,” Sloan said, maybe twenty minutes later (or maybe two hours). “Could I take you home? But actually I don’t have either a car or a place to stay.”