Medicine Men (26 page)

Fink’s manner was not so great either. The way he put things. What he said was “Christ, man, you mean you never felt that lump?”

“I don’t spend a lot of time with my fingers up my ass.”

A pause as Fink continued to probe, which did not feel good. “Try to relax,” said Fink (the jerk!).

And then, straightening up, he said, “Of course we could try surgery,” in his stupid wheezy voice. As though Sandy had never heard of surgery. Jesus!

“But it’s a big one,” Fink stupidly, inexorably went on. “You probably know the risks.” He gave Sandy a pale-blue, blinking look from behind his bifocals.

Yes, I’ll be impotent, you dumb prick. Sandy did not say this, he only grunted. But of course they both knew. And then there’s sometimes some degree of incontinence: how come this Fink or whatever he calls himself didn’t mention that?

Fink cleared his throat wheezily, and looked away. Still blinking, he murmured, “And then there’s the possibility of some degree of incontinence.”

In other words, you can’t get it up and you wet your pants a lot. Or you diaper up, hiding those things and the stained underwear from the maids and your goddam nosy sympathetic wife, like you used to with the lipstick on handkerchiefs and shirt collars. And, further back, the rubbers you hid in your sock drawer, out of sight of your mom.

To Fink, Sandy said, “I’ve heard tell.”

Fink then leaned back so that his leather chair creaked. Showing off his ugly chest, his wide-striped shirt and purple tie. Purple with red hair? As Felicia would say, Please, gimme a break!

“What I usually recommend,” Fink pontificated, “is some time down at Alta Linda. They’re doing some great prostate stuff down there.”

“Alta Linda! That scumbag hellhole of a hospital from hell? Christ! Have you ever been down there? Ugliest place in the world, full of old creeps in wheelchairs—cancer—”

“But I always—” Fink was weakly explaining.

“So do I! I send CA patients down there all the time. But that’s not the same thing.”

This fact that he himself would not necessarily go to a place or undergo a treatment that he had often recommended to patients was so obvious to Sandy that he felt no need to explain. And certainly not to this horribly dressed Jewish quiz kid.

The truth was—no matter what he had said to various patients, including Felicia’s friend, that Molly Bonner—Sandy would rather die than go to Alta Linda as a patient. And, as Sandy thought this, he further thought, somewhat wryly, It may come to that.

Going down in the elevator, for some reason he found himself thinking intensively about O. J. Simpson. He got off, is what Sandy was thinking. And Nicole did not get by with sleeping around—blonde spoiled bitch. But then he had to remind himself of several obvious facts: One was that O.J. had much more money than he did, although luckily he himself was not exactly poor. Not without resources. But O.J. was black, with a wild black lawyer, lots of lawyers, and a bunch of blacks on his jury. Suppose he, Sandy, had a jury full of doctors—straight, non-Jewish doctors? They’d hang him, they’d love to. He knew that.

Besides, he had no real intention of doing anything so violent and ugly to Felicia.

Jesus, he must be going more than a little crazy, even to be thinking along these lines.

Besides, if he did go after Felicia—or after anyone, for that matter—he would know exactly where to put the knife. Very cleanly, with no mess.

In Felicia’s kitchen, she and Matthew West were listening breathlessly to certain sounds from her garden, both familiar and frightening to Felicia. To Matthew, an almost welcome diversion:
he found Felicia, her breasts and her eyes, somewhat overwhelming.

Felicia said, “I just don’t really know who’s out there. I thought I did but now I’m not so sure.”

If he had been his brother, if he had been Paul, Matthew thought, he would have rushed out into the dark to see what or who was there, and then rushed back into the house, heroic, to attack this lovely voluptuous blonde with kisses, fierce embraces. Or that is how Matthew always imagined Paul’s behavior; Paul had never especially boasted, and was certainly not given to sexual boasts. Also, Matthew depressingly thought, if he were Paul he’d be dead, instead of sitting here half-gassed with this beautiful sexy woman, ogling her breasts like a schoolboy.

The evening had begun very innocently, at Molly Bonner’s. Matthew had called to ask if he could come by to see her, and she had said sure, and that there might also be her friend Felicia Flood, whom Matthew had met a few times before. Fleetingly—Felicia seemed usually in a hurry. But they were both very faithful visitors to Molly, it seemed. Felicia, this afternoon, had brought a big pot of fish soup for Molly’s supper. But Molly had said, with a small weak apologetic laugh, “Felish, I just can’t. I think I’m having an attack of the vapors or something. You know, it comes and goes. But today I just can’t eat.”

“Should I call Dave?”

Unaccountably to Matthew, they both laughed at this suggestion.

To him the soup smelled marvelous, of fish and garlic and onions, and somehow of lemon. All his favorite smells, and he must have looked hungry for Felicia said, “Well, Matthew, it’s up to you. My freezer’s almost full and it won’t last forever. It’s up to you to come and help me out with the soup.”

And so Matthew did. He carried the big black cast-iron pot out to her car and he held it steady as Felicia drove down to her
house, and when they got there he carried it inside, into the small pretty house, the red-and-yellow kitchen. And while Felicia was heating up the soup, warming bread and bowls and tearing lettuce for a salad, Matthew sat at the butcher-block table and drank some nice chilled white wine.

Too much wine. By the time the food was ready, Matthew had drunk an oversized wineglass full, plus the wine he had already had at Molly’s. All in all, a lot more than he was used to. He did not feel drunk so much as very slightly unreal. What was he doing here in this strange, rather disheveled but attractive small house, with this strange and extremely attractive large blonde woman?

She had drunk a fair amount too, and the wine seemed to make her talkative, or maybe she too was a little nervous. She said, “Molly looks so much better, don’t you think? She had got so thin and that stupid Dr. Dave kept feeding her steak that she couldn’t eat. It’s so good that she got rid of him, at last. I thought the way she up and left Alta Linda was marvelous—such fun for us both! But sometimes she sort of regresses, and doesn’t feel too great, but that gets less and less often. And I do think finally getting Dave out of her life was a great step forward.” She paused to sip more wine, and then to laugh. “It’s funny, we both seem to have got rid of doctors at more or less the same moment. Which wasn’t easy, in either case.”

By now they had finished bowls of soup, some bread and salad, and a considerable amount of wine.

The night outside was dark and rustling, breezy. Full of the sound of leaves, and boughs. But Matthew heard then another sound, footsteps on gravel, slow but definite, purposeful. Still, he couldn’t be entirely sure of what he heard, what with all the other night noise—and all the wine.

He looked across at Felicia, and saw that she had heard it too.

Not lowering her voice, she told him, “Almost every night he comes here. At about this time. Now he’ll pee.”

And so he did. There was the tiny trickling sound of water, or whatever, against dry leaves.

Felicia said, again, that she didn’t know, really, who was out there in the dark. “I thought I did but now I’m not so sure,” she said. And, in what he felt to be an abbreviated way, she told him about her long and, he gathered, intense involvement with a local surgeon. Specializing in heart surgery, she said. Well known, “prominent.” Married, of course. “I was sure it was Sandy out there, sort of stalking. Like O.J. But lately I’ve wondered. It could be almost anyone, which is a lot scarier.”

Agreeing, Matthew added, “It’s not necessarily the same person every night either, is it?”

“No.” She seemed to consider this. “No, of course not. I’d just sort of assumed that it was. The peeing seemed a sort of signature, you know?”

They were now sitting in a shadowy half-light. Attentive to Felicia, who was staring out the window, Matthew observed that in profile her face was both stronger and less beautiful than earlier, before the dark. Her nose was long and straight, a forthright, purposeful nose, and her forehead straight and commanding, like a prow. Her mouth was strong and firm. But then she turned to him, and she smiled, and everything softened. Her eyes glistened, so blue, and her voice shook a little as she said, “I know this sounds crazy, but would you just stay and sleep with me? I mean”—she looked down, and away—“we don’t have to do anything. I just don’t feel like sleeping by myself.”

Matthew, his heart jumping wildly, spoke as diffidently as he could. “Sure,” he said. “Sure.”

“I was what they’re starting to call an Avoidance Addict,” said Henry Starck, with his small dry laugh. “Or that’s what Gloria kept telling me. Whereas she was a Love Addict, and so it was hopeless. And fatal.”

“I don’t think I’m a Love Addict,” Connie mused aloud—as
she thought that actually that was a fair description of her old self, with Raleigh. And so she added, “But maybe I was.” She also thought, To some extent I still am. In a way. I am crazy about this Henry Starck.

However, even though she had determined to be honest, she did not add that thought. Certainly not. Undoubtedly he more or less knew what she felt, and if he still was at all what they called an Avoidance Addict, her intensity would make him uneasy. She would have to watch it.

But Henry was deeply familiar to Connie, whereas Raleigh had always been somewhat alien, strange. Although much younger (she had to remind herself at times how young Henry was), he still could have been one of the boys she went to parties with a long time ago. Dancing on the Ritz roof, in summer, after an Esplanade concert, or drinking and necking (mildly) in the darkened bar of the old Lafayette. Henry still had the slightly stiff prep-school posture of boys from those days. She was moved by the set of his shoulders, and by his New England vowels.

Henry, true to type, seemed to feel that they should not actually make love. This was not explicitly stated; they just did not. They fervently kissed, and then they left it at that. They rose from the couch, or wherever they had been, and they said good night very lovingly.

Connie was slightly puzzled at first by the fact that she did not find this upsetting, or even odd—unless she gave it too much thought. She was even relieved, in a way, and she very well understood her own relief: sex with Raleigh had been so—so
terrible
for at least the last ten years or so, that she was just as glad not to have to do it.

The words “making love” in fact did not apply to what she and Raleigh did. As he himself put it, he fucked her. In recent years, he did this once a week, punctiliously. She imagined him saying to himself, with mad male pride, I fuck my wife at least once a week. It was usually very quick, on Saturday mornings,
the first chore of the day got through early. Sometimes he even whispered complaints, “You’re not helping much, how can I come?” But he always did, whether or not she even bothered to pretend.

For a long time she knew that this was all her fault; her “frigidity” was to blame for everything, including Felicia Flood. And then when she started in serious drinking, she knew that she was to blame; who would want to make love to or even to “fuck” a fat old drunken woman? Forgetting the years when she was thin and hardly drank at all, when Raleigh made love to her, although he liked to call it fucking even then, and she never had to pretend, but rather to stop herself from letting him know how eager, how aroused she was. To stop herself from coming too soon, before he did. Although when that happened he didn’t seem to mind. He only minded “frigidity.”

Connie knew that Raleigh was not responsible for her “low self-esteem,” so much mentioned and discussed in meetings. That had evolved over many earlier years. However, she did feel that he had certainly not improved how she felt about herself. For years she had thought that if she had been a really attractive, worthwhile woman he would not have been so often, so flagrantly untrue, although in a textbook way she knew that logic to be wrong; unfaithful men (or women, very probably) were unfaithful for reasons having little or nothing to do with their victims (look at O.J.’s wife, Nicole, the perfectly beautiful blonde, and he was not only unfaithful, he killed her, probably).

To Henry, Connie now said, and the words came from nowhere, really, “I’m sort of afraid of Raleigh, these days. I know it’s irrational, but he seems so—so desperate.” She did not add, If he knew you were here and that we had been kissing, he’d shoot us both—although she felt that to be true. Instead she said, “He’s not supposed to come over without calling first, but then he’s never been notably obedient. And he can’t stand lawyers.”

They were that afternoon having their own version of the
cocktail hour. Connie and Henry, drinking Clamato with lemon. In Connie’s highly polished, antique-thronged living room, a room that she no longer liked at all, but she was not quite sure what to do about it. Her lawyer had said that since the furniture came from her family it would be hers, and she had tried giving some of it to her children. “Mom, come on, can you see any of that stuff in Oakland?” Some vestigial New England thrift prevented her from just calling the Goodwill to haul it away. She would simply sell it, at times she decided, and take whatever she could get for it, and donate the money to St. Anthony’s, or Open Hand. And if Raleigh kicked up—well,
tant pis.

But she should not dwell on such problems now. She should take it a day at a time, as she had tried to learn to do, and today she is with this nice young Henry Starck, from Portland, Maine, who is so attractive to her. She would tell him something sort of funny, she decided.

Raising her small pointed chin, Connie laughed a little as she began: “You remember Jane, from meetings, don’t you?”