Medicine Men (20 page)

And there he was, Mark Stinger himself, standing frowning and alone, no doubt waiting for his wife.

Sandy witnessed then a somewhat curious vignette.

Mark Stinger seemed to recognize someone, some friend, whom he was both glad and a little alarmed to see, and too surprised for the moment to hide either of those emotions. Next, Dr. Tanamini, Tara Tanamini, the beautiful Japanese radiologist, approached Stinger, who smiled quickly but seemed at the same time to motion her away. Tara Tanamini’s yellowish skin in an instant went dark red, and it occurred to Sandy that he had never seen an Oriental person blush before. And Dr. Tanamini, her small nose uplifted, walked on, as though Stinger had not been there, after all.

In another minute Jane Stinger came out of the bathroom and walked toward her husband.

It all seemed oddly familiar to Sandy; too clearly he remembered the Stinger (male) role for himself: parties at which he had had to warn someone off from a too-warm greeting. Connie, though usually too drunk in those old days, would soon be along, from wherever. Including the night at a Black and White Ball soon after he had started up with Felicia, who was crazy about him then, and who, out of character for her, had drunk too much champagne and who was, as Connie later remarked, all over him when Connie came back from the can.

“That was just some secretary, a new one,” he had said. “Miss Flood. She must think that’s the way to get ahead. I guess she drinks too much.”

“Well, isn’t it, with you?”

“Jesus, Con—”

“You won’t like it when I join AA.”

“What on earth do you mean by that?”

“You just won’t, and I’m going to. I’m sick of feeling like this.” Sandy had not taken her seriously at the time, but actually as things turned out she had started going to all those meetings just about then—and what she had said was prescient: he didn’t like it, it made her an unfamiliar person, no longer predictable. Although of course, as a physician, he had to admit that no drink was better for her.

“…  there’s Jane, how great! I didn’t know they’d be coming,” Connie was saying as she headed over toward the Stingers.

“Have you seen?” was Jane’s greeting. “The loveliest juice bar. Cranberry and tomato and everything.” She frowned. “In addition to the booze.”

Knowing that what he said would not go over well, Sandy was nevertheless compelled to say it: “I’m loyal to the grape myself. And this stuff is first-rate.” He reached to a passing tray for more. “Join me, Mark?”

“Guess not. I’m going the Calistoga route these days.”

Insufferable prig of a prick. Not to mention pussy-whipped. Sandy gulped at his champagne.

An hour or so later, after several more glasses of champagne and several more trips to the bathroom (a few of them urgent but finally unproductive), Sandy believed that he was not exactly drunk, but that something was monstrously wrong.

Wrong with his whole life. In that gold and marble room, all hung with yellow silk and green brocade, and stuffed with roses, roses, everywhere you looked, cramming the air with their heavy, heavy fragrance—in that room, in that here and now, Sandy was faced with the total failure of his life. The final unmasking, the puncture of his once-successful imposture as a worthwhile person. He was old and his plumbing was failing; he soon would be rendered impotent, probably. His wife had
changed, unrecognizable, and he had lost the love of his life, the loveliest most generous Felicia, by his own stupid violent hand.

Doctors. He looked malevolently around the room, at all their faces, all swollen with self-importance and self-deception. They actually believed the old doctor myths, the brilliant science and saving of lives. Whereas, at best, they were all more or less like him, like Dr. Raleigh Sanderson, a very skillful mechanic, with very good instant (mechanical) judgment. He might have been a good carpenter too, although he was probably not creative enough to be the really terrific carpenter-contractor-architect that Alton Smith was.

In the bathroom, despite great feelings of pressure, nothing came. No drop.

“I feel better than I think I should, if you see what I mean.” Molly had not known this to be true until she said it to Dr. Shapiro.

“You think you should have been punished for running out on Alta Linda,” he supplied, with his smile.

“Exactly. And in a way running out on Dave. I think especially Dave. I’ll probably never hear from Alta Linda, but of course I’m hearing a lot from Dave. He’s so punitive! But why can’t I just tell him please to go away for good? Do you think I’m afraid of him, in a way? I guess I must be. He keeps using that horrible word,
recurrence
, and I guess I think that will be the form of my punishment. The great green golf ball will return.”

Dr. Shapiro’s smile had, again, the effect of making her darkest, most terrible fears seem implausible, farfetched.

Another good thing about talking to Shapiro, perhaps to any good shrink, was the fact that you didn’t have to make sense; in fact, you were not even supposed to; a thing that Molly had to fight was a native, perhaps inborn tendency to want to be lucid, as well as entertaining, amusing, interesting. “I am not here for the enjoyment of Edgar Shapiro,” she had frequently to remind herself early on in therapy. In the bad old days when she went in
and came out still weeping, lamenting the double loss of Paul—his defection from the marriage, and then his death.

And so now with no explanatory transition she could illogically continue: “So odd, the better I feel the more I miss Paul. Again.”

“Maybe you think that he should be around to enjoy it with you. Your improved health.”

“Oh, I do think that. He should. God knows he wouldn’t have liked me sick—he couldn’t stand any illness. But now that I’m well—” To her astonishment, embarrassment, and extreme annoyance, tears filled Molly’s eyes, and choked off her voice. “Oh shit, I’m so tired of crying. I’m tired of missing Paul, and being sick, and I don’t want to have this fucking golf ball in my head anymore.”

“The chances are very good that you don’t have it anymore.”

“Really? You think that? Dave of course doesn’t.”

Dr. Shapiro paused, considering; his opinions were never rash nor impulsive. Also, Molly had a secret suspicion that he found strictly medical issues a welcome change from his usual nebulous run of problems. He said, “Yes, I do. You had a lot of radiation at Mount Watson, and more at Alta Linda. Of course it could happen, a recurrence. But I repeat, I think the chances that it won’t are very, very good.” He smiled briefly. “And I don’t think you need more punishment. For anything.”

“I always forget you’re a doctor.” Molly said this gratefully, meaning: You’re kind and intelligent and tactful—unlike most of them. She had never explicitly stated these thoughts, but she believed that he caught the affectionate drift.

The bookcase closest to the leather chair in which Molly sat held fiction, alphabetically arranged. Nearest was F: Fitzgerald, Flaubert, Max Frisch. Not many I’s, and then J, mostly Henry James. A lot of James, and then Joyce, those huge thick books. Had Shapiro bought and read all those books, or was his wife “the literary one”? It was the sort of question that there was no good way to ask. Sometimes Molly admired the classic taste involved
in this collection of the great; at others it made her feel querulous: where are all the more personal, idiosyncratic choices? she wondered. The small private favorite books to which one returns, and returns? However, on closer inspection, as her attention meandered on to G, there were Mary Gaitskill, Mavis Gallant, Mrs. Gaspell, and Mary Gordon—all, as it happened, favorites of Molly’s. But she chose not to mention that either.

She often thought that it was fortunate that this was not an orthodox analysis, in which the rules compelled her (at least theoretically) to tell him everything that crossed her mind—all stray and sometimes rude, often sexual and occasionally hostile thoughts that she had about him, about Dr. Edgar Shapiro, with whom she was confronted—and much better this way. Molly had also thought that she did not like the idea of an invisible doctor sitting in judgment near her head.

They had agreed to call what they were doing “psychotherapy by an analyst,” and so, as Molly sat there and considered the possible size and shape and energy of his sexual member, she did not have to mention it, she thought. Nor for that matter did she have to tell him how beautiful Paul’s cock was, the lovely skin on it, and veins. How she loved the feel and taste of it.

She only said, “I do miss Paul,” as tears filled her eyes (again!) and she added, “I guess I’m not all that much better.”

“I think you’re doing very well,” he said, in his quiet way.

She had thought a great deal too about his face, in the course of these visits. The sad, slightly slant brown eyes, long bony nose, and wide, very mobile mouth—on whose every flick of expression she concentrated, passionate to read. What did he think?

Now, not wanting to talk about Shapiro’s face (nor anyone’s genitals), Molly hurried along. She said, “There’re times when I think my whole head is just permanently messed up. When I feel dizzy and nauseated.
Still.
And tired. And it’s still hard to eat. If it weren’t for Felicia I’d probably starve. You know, I think she
should come to see you. Or someone, as a patient. That crazy Sandy, Dr. Sanderson, is stalking her, I know he is. She looks up and there he is, and she thinks he comes into her garden at night. Honestly. And Felicia isn’t crazy, it’s not the kind of thing she’d make up. She’s not at all paranoid. Of course the person who really should come to you is Sanderson, but fat chance.”

Her eyes strayed then back to the bookcase, and some of her attention went there too. Because of the length of the shelves, G was just below S, and there in S Molly saw a book that she had never seen or certainly not noticed before:
The Med School Murders
, by E. Shapiro. It was so placed that the jacket was exposed, a gaudy scene of men in white, all splattered with red, presumably blood. It was an old-looking book; it must have been published a while ago.

Involuntarily she exclaimed, “You’re not that E. Shapiro?” Pointing.

He was startled. More than anything she had ever said, or asked, this had truly caught him off guard. “What’s that doing there?” he demanded (as though, Molly thought, she were his wife, or the maid). “I mean, I didn’t know it was there, it wasn’t—new secretary—” He was groping to recover. And then in his old controlled voice he told her, “Actually yes, I did write that one. Alas. When I was in med school at Columbia I was pretty broke and I owed a lot of money, and I thought this would be an easy way.” He smiled, not happily. “I was wrong all around. It wasn’t easy and I didn’t earn a lot.”

“Should I read it?”

“I don’t think you’d find it very edifying.” This was said quite stiffly and without, Molly noticed, any offer of a loan of the book; she had borrowed other books from him, once or twice.

“You stopped with that one?” Even as she asked this, Molly felt that she should not have, but she was unable not to ask (also, that prohibiting voice was the one she had tried to learn to ignore).

“Uh—no.” By their rules, most of them unspoken, if he answered
her at all he was compelled to be truthful. “There were a few more.” He grinned, very humanly. “I got into it, I couldn’t stop. My escape, and addiction.”

This conversational vein was new, and Molly was uneasy in it, dimly apprehensive. She asked, “It’s sort of fun?”

“Mostly it’s a change from what I do.” Very resolutely he told her, “I never took it seriously at all.”

That afternoon, in her branch public library, Molly moved along the shelf of S to Shapiro, E., embossed on the old library-linen covers of three books:
Dead White, Dire Emergencies
, and
Death Comes to the O.R.
Aware of guilty, spying feelings, she checked out all three.

On the other hand, Molly told herself as she walked the few blocks back to her house, he had published those books, and had chosen to do so under his own name; they were there for anyone to read—why shouldn’t she? Although she knew perfectly well that her trip to the library had been a special one (she had barely left the house before), she had gone quite purposefully to the shelf of S, in the Mystery Section. And she almost never read mysteries, and then only those writers she especially admired, like Ruth Rendell, or Carl Hiaasen.

Back at home, back in bed, she began to read.

Dead White
seemed to be about a serial killer of nurses. Many nurses turned up dead, and it gradually emerged (not too gradually, the book had a certain pace) that two of them had been having affairs with the same (married) doctor. The affairs were steamily described, with much emphasis on breasts, mostly (of course) very big ones. At first, small-breasted Molly experienced some of her old inadequacy feelings, until, more maturely, she thought, How dumb of him, how obvious.

She flipped to the front of the book to the publication date: 1948. He must have been very young then, still in his twenties, probably; she put Dr. Shapiro’s current age as somewhere in his
sixties. Was he still in med school? The other two books came out in 1946 and 1950, respectively. Like a well-planned family. Diligently procreated.

Molly skimmed them all, quickly, voyeuristically. Guiltily. There were more large breasts and even some bated breath. Perspiring foreheads, racing blood, and churning stomachs. Molly’s thought was, This stuff is awful, how could he do it? And (a worse thought), How can I tell him what I think?

How have I managed to read them all? For that is what she had done, she realized a few hours later. She had flicked through all three, skimming along like a hungry bird, avid for garbage. She had paid almost no attention to what was going on; she supposed that all those novels had plots, some story must have carried along all that freight, but she could not have said what really went on in any of the three. Sexual encounters, quite a lot of that: fucking that was breathy and perspiring (racing, churning) but at the same time rather vague, romantic. Rather forties, Molly supposed.