Medicine Men (21 page)

But, in herself, what was this enthusiastic, even obsessive pursuit of the youthful sexual fantasies of E. Shapiro? For she had to admit, she had galloped along, propelled by God knows what unmentionable lust of her own. Her transference? Is this what was meant, an unseemly sexual interest in one’s shrink? The substitute for one’s hopelessly loved dad, in her case a diffident, indifferent, and frequently depressed alcoholic, more feared than lusted-after.

In any case she dreaded what she imagined as the necessary conversation about these books, her admission that she had not only read them, but judged them bad. Terrible—in fact, real trash.

Surprisingly, Dr. Shapiro spared her. He seemed quite unshocked at what she had done, her deliberately going to the library after his books. He even laughed. “And there you were
stuck with them, poor girl. You probably thought you had to read them, too.” He said, “I know they’re junk. It’s just a trick I learned to do. Which proves I’m not a writer. A real writer could never turn out such garbage, I’m sure. Gore Vidal wrote some early mysteries for money but his were good, actually. You see? He’s a writer. And he had the wit to make up a name. Edgar Box, I believe. I wish I had. But the money got me through med school. The only problem is, as you discovered, the damn things are still out there, with my name on them.”

“Do many patients read them?”

He became vague. “Oh, every now and then. But, once again, you seem to expect some punishment for what you’ve done. You even seem to think it’s deserved.” This last was said in his usual tone of kind and intelligent concern, and Molly responded as she often did, with feelings of gratitude and a sort of pleased surprise: “Oh, you mean I don’t have to feel like that?”

They did not (thank God) get to her (theoretical) sexual interest in him.

Nor did they during the next scheduled hour talk much about Molly’s emotional attachment to her father. “Dave at worst reminds me of my father.” Molly had said this before—God knows she had—but she had at last learned not to worry about repeating herself in this situation. “Both such bullies, I mean. But of course Dave doesn’t drink—that’s one of his pluses, for me. You know that was one of the first things I liked about Paul. His not drinking. That made me think he wasn’t dangerous, I wouldn’t get hurt. Well, I only was hurt when he got out of the marriage and then got himself killed. But we think he didn’t mean to do that, don’t we?” She gave Shapiro a small ironic smile; they had been over this point a great deal and actually had been unable to reach conclusions. “What I didn’t think about much with Paul, and maybe I should have given it some thought, was all the bad stuff he did when he was drinking.
Really bad. He and his first important girlfriend had fights, and I think he really beat her up. That’s awful. I mean a lot of people, even alcoholics, never hit anybody, even if they’re drunk.”

“That’s quite true.”

“So maybe on some level I was a little afraid. He always might revert to type, so to speak. It’s interesting. Matthew, his brother, drinks a little but not much. I thought it was supposed to run in families.”

“Not necessarily. Your father was an alcoholic, and your mother, and you’re not.”

“So far.” She laughed. “I really must be getting better, don’t you think?”

“Yes, I do.”

No thanks to your lousy novels, she did not say.

“The point is,” Matthew told Molly with the small half-smile that had been Paul’s smile, or one of Paul’s smiles, “you’ll have roughly twice the income that you do now. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.” And he laughed, Paul’s laugh. (Although, the more she saw of Matthew the less he resembled Paul, she began to notice.)

“But I’ve got plenty of money now. If I hadn’t had all this medical stuff, I’d be really rich.”

“Well, now you may be anyway. Think of it that way. Compensation, in spite of yourself,” and he laughed again.

“I don’t especially want to be rich. I don’t even like rich people.”

“I knew you’d say that.”

Molly smiled, acknowledging predictability, but isn’t everyone? she thought. More or less predictable? And anyway, how did Matthew know all that much about her opinions? She tried, and failed, to imagine a Paul-Matthew conversation concerning her character. They simply did not have such intimate, personal conversations. (It was Molly’s belief that most men did not, but how could she know for sure?) Paul and Matthew went back to Montana together, where they had both grown up, for trout fishing,
sometimes cross-country skiing in the winter. In August they liked to hike along rivers, the east fork of the Bitterroot; they made camp and cooked, and they drank, back in Paul’s drinking days. “But what do you talk about, in all that time?” Molly had once or twice asked Paul. “We talk about the trout, they’re very absorbing. And of course I tell him all about you, every single tiny most personal detail,” he teased. “I told him you were oversexed.” “Oh Paul, honestly, I’ll tell him you are too.”

Molly involuntarily smiled, remembering silly times with Paul, but then she wondered, Just what
had
he said, if anything? Molly’s the original knee-jerk bleeding-heart left-winger? She hates the rich, even the ones who don’t vote. Could Paul have said all that? It was not even true. Not quite.

Nor was it entirely true that she hated money, of course not. When she gained a little weight it would be fun to buy some great new clothes, and in the meantime she could order some from catalogues. Size 4—a terrific size on paper, but she was actually skinny, all bones, she knew that.

And she could at least double the money she sent to good places, Food-Not-Bombs, Open Hand, New Start, St. Anthony’s. She and Felicia could even start their own food and shelter operation, which they had discussed from time to time.

And when she felt well she could travel again; all those trips with Paul had whetted her appetite. All she had to do was to get well. To eat.

Partly to get away from this unwelcome drift in her thoughts—eating problems, which often seemed hopeless—she asked Matthew, “How on earth did you do this, double my money?”

“Mostly luck. There was a company I knew about, and so. Mergers—bonds—corporate earnings—” Seeming to notice then that Molly’s attention had wandered off, he stopped. “You don’t really want to know.”

“Maybe I don’t. I find that stuff so hard to understand.”

“And basically not interesting, right?”

“Well, I guess not. But it is interesting to you?”

“Unfortunately it’s become all I know anything about, really. Joanne always tried to educate me in the law, but that didn’t work out too well.”

Why was he speaking of Joanne in the past tense?

Matthew answered this obvious but unasked question. “I guess we’re splitting up this time,” he said. “I mean, for real. Never divorce a lawyer, it’s murder.”

“I already did. Henry Starck.”

“Oh, that’s right, I forgot.”

“Actually, he’s very nice. He
is
very nice,” Molly felt compelled to add.

Some ancient Hebraic law, she believed that she had heard somewhere, dictated that a widow should marry her husband’s brother, and she thought, I’m glad I don’t have to do that. In some ways Matthew is almost as ungiving, conversationally, as Henry was. Besides, she further thought, Paul and I weren’t entirely married anymore.

She had to go down to Mt. Watson for a follow-up visit.

Dave had called, seemingly in a spirit of forgiveness, to say that it must be time for her to see Bill Donovan, and that he thought he could make time to take her down. He was trying for a tone of general disapproval, Molly could tell, but his voice was still enthusiastic, eager: he wanted to go back to Mt. Watson.

Molly felt a little mean, depriving him of this pleasure, as she told him, “Thanks, but Felicia said she would.”

This was not true, but how would he find out? Though he must have caught something in her voice, for he said, “Are you sure? I don’t think you ought to drive that far alone. Not yet.” He sounded disappointed.

In fact driving down alone was exactly what Molly intended.
Felicia, quite out of character, was sick. Besides which Molly wanted to make the trip alone.

And she liked it very much, driving down in the clear bright unusually warm February weather—though almost all weather was unusual these days, Molly had noted: droughts and floods, heat waves in December, and snow and freezing days in June, in California. All as random as cancer seemed to be, and as extreme, and often as unwelcome. But the day was beautiful. Molly admired the New England look of the reservoir, with its slope of evergreens down to the shore, and even some of the houses on those expensively subdivided lots (one acre each) looked pleasant. She thought, I could live down here? But with all that money I could actually live anywhere, in Barcelona or Venice, in Paris, Prague, or Trieste.

Once back in the halls of Mt. Watson, though, and more specifically in the waiting room, Molly no longer felt romantic or adventurous, or even very rich. She was just a patient, as guilty and anxiety-burdened, as close to panic, the longer she waited, as all the rest.

After about half an hour, during which she thumbed through some old
Times
and
Newsweeks
, the nurse announced that Dr. Donovan could see her now.

“Dr. Jacobs isn’t with you?” was Donovan’s greeting, along with his big bluff smile. Molly thought that if she were a nicer person she would later tell Dave that she had been asked that question; being missed by eminent doctors would surely please him.

“No, he isn’t” was all she said; no explanation seemed necessary, or actually possible. She had no idea what they had made of that relationship, hers with Dave.

Once she was in the examining room, in that chair, interns and residents swarmed around Dr. Donovan as he again, for his audience, recounted his feats inside her head. “When we’d opened her up and some of those brains moved over—”

Had he really said that? Yes, he had. Molly could not have made it up, but she could stop listening to anything further that was said along those lines, and she did. How handy it would sometimes be, she thought, to be able to faint at will. Except that in this present instance, here and now, if she fainted they would probably clap her right back in the hospital.

“How do you feel about the shape of your nose?” Bill Donovan asked.

Knowing this to be perfunctory, that she was supposed to say, Oh, it’s better than ever, I always wanted a small nose, Molly more truthfully told him, “It’s all right. I think I liked it better before.”

“If you ever want to fix it—”

“Look, the last thing in the world I want is another operation.”

Everyone smiled at that sentiment; it was apparently understandable even to them, the doctors, although Bill looked not wholly pleased.

He next said, conversationally, “I hear you escaped like a little bird from Alta Linda. Can’t say as I blame you. Depressing place. But if you were my wife I think I’d turn you right over my knee.”

“How lucky for both of us that I’m not.”

After a startled moment Bill managed to laugh, a gruff semi-guffaw. And Molly was as startled as he that she had actually said that. It was the sort of thing she usually thought of later, and wished to have said. How brave of me, she thought. How out of character.

On the drive home, though, she fell back into a more familiar self-critical mode. She should have asked more questions. She should have complained about not feeling well, about her nausea. And she should have asked in a general way about effects of radiation: how long did they continue, usually? Even if it would have been hard to break into that web of doctors’ conversation,
she should have tried; she should have questioned and complained. It was all very well to have these conversations with Felicia about the general insensitivity of doctors, but some of it was really her own fault. You get what you ask for, has often been said, and you don’t get what you don’t. That is perhaps an unreliable rule (surely she had not asked for the green golf ball), but in this case, talking to doctors, it seemed to apply.

Felicia stayed sick. “Nothing real,” she said to Molly, on the phone, “just lousy feelings in my head. It could be the weather. Some allergy.”

“Or it could be a nice green tumor. You too can have a golf ball.”

“You won’t laugh if I actually do.”

“That’s absolutely true, I won’t.”

For her dinner alone, Molly made her favorite single-person meal: a large bowl of pasta, angel-hair, with butter and garlic and scallions. Parmesan. A small green salad, a glass of white wine. A little bread, nice and fresh and chewy.

She was chewing on the good bread, looking out to the peaceful vista of gardens behind her house, and thinking that since she would have all that money, what she most would like was a leisurely trip to Paris, so reliably beautiful, fantastic food, and the art, the river, and the trees. As she happily imagined all that, something suddenly went wrong within her mouth. She bit on something hard; at first she thought it was a little stone in the bread—how amazing. But then she spit it out and saw, small and white, a tooth. Her own, and her tongue discovered the gap: a lower front tooth.

In the mirror she saw that she could fit it back in, but of course there was no way to affix it. And without it she looked
comic, a Halloween pumpkin instead of Humpty-Dumpty. Or, when not grinning, she looked sad and terrible.

Dr. Gold, the dentist (“the sententious dentist,” Molly had sometimes called him to Felicia), rubber-gloved hand in her mouth, began by saying, “Doesn’t look too good. Lot of tissue damage that I can see right off. Radiation, bad stuff for your teeth and gums. You must have had quite a lot of it.” He replaced his hand with a clamp that was rather like a horse’s bit.

He said, “The wife and I are just back from Baja, and the prices there are not great, I tell you. Every night, a twenty-dollar cab ride from our hotel to some restaurant? Those guys have caught on quick, believe me. Of course you can’t blame them, but still we’d counted on some bargain to make up for Paris last fall. But the restaurants too, Stateside prices. Of course we were going to the recommended ones, probably pretty fancy for your average Mexican, and actually not too many Mexicans there, just the help. And tourists. Germans and French, not so many Japanese as you see most places. I’m going to have them make you something they call a flipper, nice new tooth on a little piece of plastic, fits right into your mouth. Later we can talk about a bridge. Of course the problem is that some more of those teeth could go. I just don’t like the look of those gums.”