by Alice Adams
She was followed by Felicia, who called to her, “I’ll bring you some ice.”
In Felicia’s warm, aromatic kitchen, which smelled of every possible spice, and fruit and coffee and sweets—having removed the stained shirt in the bathroom and put on the soft pink, too-large sweater that Felicia offered—Molly began to run cold water through the shirt.
She wiped at her nose: no more blood.
“Just leave it here to soak,” Felicia told her. “I’ll hang it up tomorrow.”
“Thanks. You know, I think I’ll just go on home now. I’ll be okay but I don’t really feel all that great.”
Molly’s small but rather grand apartment, with its views of the bay, and the bridge, and Marin, was just a couple of blocks up the hill from Felicia’s pretty little house—both being in the neighborhood called Cow Hollow, which is above the Marina and below Pacific Heights, and is where in earlier, simpler (pre-Earthquake) pastoral times, cows used to roam at large. Molly had moved into her place shortly after Paul’s death: she wanted not to stay where they had lived together, on Russian Hill—and she suddenly had all that funny money, the insurance. New freedom of choice. And the idea of being in walking distance of Felicia was nice.
“Oh sure,” Felicia was saying. “I’ll do good nights for you, and we’ll talk tomorrow. You sure you’ll be okay?”
But just then a loud voice announced, “I’ll take you home.”
Turning, Molly saw the strong white teeth, smooth bald head, and the handsome, authoritative face of Dr. David Jacobs.
“No,” she told him. “Really. I just live up the hill a couple of blocks. I’ll walk. I’d rather, actually.”
She began to put out her hand, to say good night, but instead he took her arm and began to guide her toward the door. “You need a doctor,” he said.
He had spoken jokingly, but did he mean it? Were nose-bleeds a bad symptom, of something serious?
“Honestly,” she told him, “I’ll be perfectly okay.”
He gripped her arm more firmly. “You don’t know, you may need me.” He grinned.
There seemed no way to escape him without a minor scene, and Molly never made even those minor scenes. And so she did not now, only murmuring, “You could just drop me off and then come on back here.” And, to Felicia, “I certainly didn’t mean to break up your party.”
The two women lightly kissed, and Molly thanked Felicia for the party; they exchanged smiles that promised further talk.
Dave Jacobs had parked about two blocks from Felicia’s house (“No space,” he explained unnecessarily; parking in that neighborhood was terrible), making him farther still from Molly’s. She reflected that she could as easily and more quickly have walked in the time the short drive required for the fairly battered old Camaro he drove. Molly found it sympathetic; it seemed such an undoctorly car. But he apologized. “My wife’s car,” he said. “For some reason she really liked it, and I haven’t been able to get rid of it. A combination of sentiment and thrift, I guess.”
Moved by both the sentiment and the honesty, Molly at that moment liked him a little better.
In the car he asked her, “Do you have many nosebleeds?”
“Oh no, not really.” Actually she had had several in the past few months.
“Come on, how many?”
“Oh, maybe two or three.”
“And how long have you had that cold?”
“Oh, it seems like all spring. I think it must be an allergy or something.”
“Could be. You should see a good ENT man, no point putting up with that kind of discomfort.”
“This is where I live,” Molly told him. “You can just let me off here. Really.”
Propitiously (or perhaps not) there was a parking space just in front of Molly’s building, into which he slid the car, then came around for her before she could let herself out.
“And now,” he said, with a flash of all those teeth, “you can ask me in and give me a brandy. Return for all that good medical advice.”
“I’m not even sure I have any brandy,” she murmured, though she did know: Paul had liked a good brandy after dinner, and the bottle of cognac had come along with everything else when she moved—although she remembered a fleeting temptation just to throw it out.
She was tempted now to throw David Jacobs out, so to speak—to tell him that she was tired, he would have to go. Southern training as usual prevailed, however, and moments later they were seated across from each other in her living room, he with a brandy and Molly with a glass of orange juice.
“I suppose you’re strong on vitamin C,” he remarked aggressively.
“Actually I am. And of course you’re not,” she said as she thought, Is this a quarrel? already?
“Well, I don’t think it can hurt you much.” The grin. “And God knows Pauling was a brilliant fellow.” He looked around, dismissing Linus Pauling, and vitamins. “Great place you have here. I’m really impressed.”
Molly started to explain, as she sometimes did: I had all this insurance money, Paul bought it almost as a joke to help his younger brother, I’ve never lived in such a fancy place. But she stopped herself, and only said, “Thanks, I like it here.” She added, “I just bought it a couple of years ago when my husband died.”
“That was really smart.” He stared at her with faintly too much interest. “I should have done that,” he said. “I thought of it. Moved out when Martha died, I mean. But I didn’t, and there I am with all that stuff. Reminding me.”
Molly heard such genuine feeling in his voice that she was moved: he had truly loved his wife, and he missed her. And she probably was fairly young to die, these days, Molly thought. She put Dave’s age as late fifties, early sixties. But then, Paul had been barely forty. She asked Dave, “Where do you live?”
“Mill Valley. Down in the woods. I’m used to the darkness, but when I see views like these, I wonder.”
Molly suddenly, uncontrollably began to sneeze. She sneezed once, twice, three times, four. She couldn’t stop. At the same time, she tried to smile and to signal with her free hand that she was all right. And then she stopped.
He asked, “You do that often?”
She lied, “No. I must be sort of tired.” The truth was, she was very tired indeed. Standing up, she said to him, “I’m sorry, but I think I have to go to bed now. But thanks for driving me home.”
He quickly got up too. “Maybe we could have dinner sometime.” An awkward smile; he was probably unused to asking women to dinner.
“That would be nice.” She spoke without enthusiasm, she knew, but she smiled as though she had meant it.
“And watch that cold,” he cautioned on the way out, once more in control. “Call me if you need the name of a good ENT man.”
“Oh. Thanks.”
TWO
Since he had always laid nurses, Dr. Raleigh Sanderson felt that laying nurses did not count; it did not constitute infidelity to Felicia, his official (and unofficial) lady. And “lay” is the word that he would have used for his encounters with nurses. “Fuck” in his mind was a dirty word; making love was what he and Felicia did—although sometimes they fucked, dirtily, on a sweaty afternoon. What Raleigh used to do with Connie, his wife, he thought of as simply that, as “doing it.” But he laid nurses; Sandy did not think of himself as “getting laid,” even though more often than not these days it was he who lay down, allowing the bouncy nurse to bring him to climax with her hands or her mouth, or both. He much disliked the vulgar, graphic expressions for these activities. Even “oral sex” was too explicit for Sandy.
Like so many people, Sandy was convinced that his sexual drives were exceptionally strong. As proof of such strength, he cited (to himself; he was not given to even semi-public boasting) the extreme and compelling arousal that he often experienced at the end of a successful operation, and almost all his operations were successful; his record was world-renowned. His skill was indeed quite fantastic; sometimes Sandy himself was amazed at what
went on beneath his hands, the incredible speed and precision with which his fingers moved, all racing toward the instant at which he knew: This heart is all right now, I’ve repaired (or replaced) the valve, I’ve saved it. Of course he could not know absolutely for days or weeks, even months, that the heart was really functioning on its own. Still, there was always the moment when, within his own heart, he knew, and he lived for that moment, that peak. Further recovery on the part of the patient was anticlimactic, and basically uninteresting to Sandy. It was boring to have to keep seeing those patients again and again, listening to their parade of minor symptoms, their major gratitude. But the operations themselves—they thrilled him still. No other word for it, he was thrilled. It was thrilling work that he did.
Small wonder, then, that after such an exciting, deeply felt triumph he should feel himself excited in a sexual way, as well as in his own heart.
Not surprisingly, Sandy thought considerably about that organ, that marvelous muscle: his personal heart. He admired its strength, and its clear superiority to those lesser hearts that he operated on, and fixed: hearts enlarged or those with leaking valves, those damaged by early rheumatic fever, or simply born bad, defective. As his heart was born strong and good. A superior heart.
And he had kept in shape. Played racquetball and tennis at his club, swam at Tahoe in the summer and worked out on an exercise bike almost every day. Made love to lively Felicia a lot, in recent years, and sometimes laid nurses.
No wonder that even his hair was still so enviably thick and lively. He wondered about those guys, like Dave Jacobs, who went bald.
A long time ago, when Sandy was an intern at Mass. General Hospital, he and some of his doctor friends had a shared bachelor apartment down on Chambers Street. Connie Knowles was a tall, blonde Boston deb, and she had seemed the perfect girl for him, with her family house on Chestnut Street, Louisburg Square, and the summer place in Magnolia. She was even fairly smart. Unlike most of the debs who only dabbled in some kind of social work, Connie went to Radcliffe, where she studied sociology (well, that did seem a little eccentric; he might have known there was some sort of trouble ahead. Why not fine arts, or French?—something that would come in handy in later life). But she was very wellborn, and beautiful and rich, and to cap her perfections she fell madly in love with Raleigh Sanderson, out from Iowa. “Raleigh.” Connie always called him that, turning his name into a beautiful Boston word, the first syllable long and drawn out, the second light, barely there. (Raleigh never told anyone that he got that name because his mother came from that town, Raleigh, North Carolina, and made it worse by naming his brother Durham. Jesus! But she missed it there.) Connie was crazy about her tall dark Dr. Raleigh; she wanted to get married and have a lot of children as soon as possible. Maybe even then she drank a little too much—“tee many martoonies,” as they said on Chambers Street. But she let him do it to her, she was very passionate. First in the back seat of his car, parked behind some dunes, at Crane’s Beach, in Ipswich. And then quite often, every chance they got, in the upstairs room on Chambers Street, even if the other guys with their dates were all downstairs.
That is how Sandy thought of what happened between them, her “letting him do it to her.” He more or less discouraged active participation from Connie; it didn’t seem right, especially once they were married.
In any case, Connie got her wish. She got her Dr. Raleigh Sanderson, in a huge June wedding with a big outdoor garden reception up in Magnolia. And, within the first six years, four children. All born out in San Francisco, where they moved for Raleigh’s residency at Presbyterian Hospital—and bought a big house, in Pacific Heights, and stayed.
In the years since then Sandy successfully attached the phrase “Fetal Alcohol Syndrome” to explain his children, none of whom had turned out well, or even reasonably all right, by his standards. None of them are speaking to him just now, and he has disinherited them all. He has even been known to murmur that acronym, FAS, in response to inquiries about his family. This not only lets him off the hook, or covers his ass (to use a phrase that Sandy himself would never employ), it glosses over the fact that Connie as a pregnant woman and then as a very young mother drank almost not at all. She started up drinking in a serious way about the time of the first drug arrest of their youngest child, who was twelve and dealing LSD at the Town School for Boys. For Connie, that was the last straw. She began to go a little crazy after that, drinking and gaining weight, of course, and developing these crazy, irrational jealousies. Making scenes. Seeing shrinks, thousands of dollars on shrinks.
These days Connie still describes herself as an alcoholic, although she does not drink, not at all. Just Perrier, and other ridiculous expensive waters. She is still quite fat, although a recent accusation was that he had not noticed her loss of twenty pounds, some crazy so-called spiritual spa she went to. God knows what she does with her time all day: probably women’s meetings, nature and animals and refugees, the things she mentions briefly at dinner; they do have dinner together, usually; they go to the requisite parties, they give the occasional obligatory reception.
But do not talk to Raleigh Sanderson about the sixties. These were the years that wrecked his family, finishing off the work of FAS. Since then it’s been a series of drug arrests and crazy marriages, divorces and bastard children. (He has three half-black grandchildren, probably in Oakland; he no longer even asks Connie where they are.) Most recently, there have been lawsuits; they want his money.
What Sandy feels worst about is the grandchildren aspect of all this trouble. He adores little tiny girls, even half-black ones. He is completely nuts about them, he admits it. When he sees one in a store or on the street, with her fat little cheeks and her big wide innocent eyes and her little ruffled panties, Sandy feels the most terrible pangs of longing, and of loss. Even, his eyes tear up.
And then he reads in the paper that some man has molested one of those babies—has actually done it to her. Sandy feels his blood pressure dangerously rise, and rage grips his throat. Those guys should be castrated, Sandy thinks. The chair or, God knows, lethal injection is too good for them. Just cut it off, without anesthetic, let them bleed to death. He can’t even think about child molestation, it makes him crazy.
Felicia. What a woman! That was Sandy’s first thought on seeing Miss Felicia Flood walk into his office. A classical big blonde woman, built like the Varga girls in the Esquire of his young manhood. But with a classier face, and a kind of style about her, and as soon as she spoke he could tell: real class. (Sandy is dead accurate on accents, an expertise fueled by ferocious snobbery. When a couple of other doctors suggested that Dr. Dave Jacobs might not be Jewish, despite the name, Sandy countered, “Of course he’s Jewish, just listen to him talk.” And of course he was right.) Sandy is also snobbish, and accurate about Midwestern accents, forgetting his own origins. No more Cedar Falls.
But Miss Flood, Felicia, his new temporary secretary, was something else. He read sexual compliance in her lively smile, but not right away, he knew that. She was too good-looking for anything immediate; old Sandy knew the rules. She liked him a lot, though; he could tell. She kept those big dark-blue eyes on his face (true sapphire eyes, like expensive jewels), and she smiled at his smallest jokes. So interested. She seemed intrigued by anything he had to say, fascinated by surgery, hospital politics. By professional tennis and water problems at Lake Tahoe and the general decline of life in San Francisco.
Strangely, their first time together was on the day of one of Sandy’s worst surgeries: the old bastard (the patient) expired on him. A bad aortic, but Sandy had done a lot of bad aortics before, no need for this one to die. He was sitting in his office an hour or so later, feeling terrible, too terrible even to call in a nurse, as he had meant to do (had even thought of doing when he was right there in the OR; he had one all picked out, a plain girl with enormous cans), and suddenly there was Miss Flood, Felicia, who took one look at him and said, “You poor guy, can I feed you some lunch, for a
change? My house isn’t far from here.”
And although he had carefully never touched her before, there was no playing around once they got inside her house. They fell upon each other. Knowing these words to be trite, that was still how Sandy described (to himself) what almost immediately happened with him and Felicia, that day, as she reached to close her front door. He grabbed her toward him, she turned and grasped his neck; his mouth plunged down to hers, which instantly opened for him. Wild! For a moment he thought they would have to do it right there, on the bright hall rug, but then Felicia jerked away, pulling him into a room where there was a bed, both of them ripping off clothes. As they fell upon each other.
Jesus Christ. The greatest experience of his life, bar none. Making love with Felicia was like—was like nothing else he could possibly imagine. Maybe like reaching the top of Mont Blanc—and then some.
For a while after that—in fact for quite a while—Sandy felt that his life was perfect. His work was going well—actually it always had: he was about the best in the business, well paid and well known too. And he had a lady in his life, the sexiest woman alive, probably, and also very intelligent and nice, and the most fantastic cook; often Felicia would bring him a pretty little bowl of soup in bed, always something amazing, sorrel or hazelnuts, mussels and spinach. And sometimes when Connie was out of town, back to Boston to see her family or some women’s meeting somewhere, Sandy would boldly take Felicia out to a well-known restaurant—he favored the old ones, Jack’s or Trader Vic’s, or even Ernie’s. Whereas she always had heard of a new place, with handsome boyish waiters, a lot of fruit and vegetables mixed in with the meat, or fish.