by Alice Adams
“I suppose this is where you come with your other boyfriends,” he sometimes teased her.
And she would laugh. “Sandy darling, how would I possibly have the energy? You know I’m basically lazy.”
It was certainly true that he kept her satisfied (that was a word he liked; it seemed both accurate and understated, in Felicia’s case and in his), but he did feel an occasional pang at the thought of all the nights that she necessarily spent at home alone. When he was with Connie and couldn’t even call her. Sometimes Felicia did go out to a movie or a restaurant or a party, and she had explained that she didn’t like going alone, so she usually called a friend—warm, gregarious Felicia had lots of friends. Mostly women, of course. And queers. She didn’t like it when Sandy used that word, so he kept on doing it, to tease her.
Once he saw her at a party, an enormous museum do, an AIDS benefit. (Connie had really twisted his arm, insisting that they go.) Felicia was with a handsome guy, even younger than she was, it seemed to Sandy. And so the next day (in bed, in the early afternoon; she had made a terrific lunch) he quizzed her—teasing, of course: “What’s all this going out with good-looking younger men behind my back?”
She gave it right back to him: “What do you care? Charlie’s only what you would call ‘some queer.’ ” She added, “And a party like that is hardly behind your back.”
She had him there, on both counts.
Rarely, he would come to a party that Felicia gave, at her house. He liked the sense of sharing in her life, being part of it; he liked meeting her friends, he liked to know who they were, and what they talked about (although he secretly disliked quite a few of them, including her good friend Molly Bonner and most of the queers). But he wanted her friends to know that he was there, a large, important presence in Felicia’s life. She was not just some woman alone. And she was most certainly not “available.”
Felicia’s fidelity, then (to be fair about it), would seem implicitly to require his own—and for quite a long time Sandy took that unspoken demand quite seriously. No problem with Connie: he hadn’t touched her for years, didn’t want to touch her; nor did she want him, although occasionally she made some gesture that could have been interpreted in that way. But he could hardly believe that they ever had. Done it together. And look what came of that unhappy coupling: four really rotten human beings, his progeny.
Too bad he and Felicia would not have children. He sometimes had fantasies of their plump blonde little baby girls, all frolicking in the bathtub, bare bottoms and dear little vaginal slits among the bubbles. He could help them wash.
But with nurses the fidelity thing was a little different. Sex with them was something he was used to. Laying nurses, whenever he felt the need. For one thing, there were certain women, nurses, who were used to him—who expected it of him, so to speak. Who would think it was really strange and maybe be hurt if he never called them into his office. And smiled, and locked the door.
And so, without giving it much thought, or guilt, Sandy got back into the sex-with-nurses habit, although perhaps less frequently than before; after all, if he was going to see Felicia later that same day, there was really no need.
One of the nurses he was most used to—and she to him, probably—was his surgical nurse, Jane White, as plain as her name but with beautiful bazooms. And, incidentally, exceptionally quick and smart in the OR. Certainly Jane would have been hurt if many months passed without those particular calls. Without her getting laid. By Dr. Raleigh Sanderson, the Chief of Surgery.
On Fridays of every week there were so-called surgical conferences held, although in fact the cardiologists talked as much as if not more than the surgeons did. (It had struck Sandy quite often that the cardiologists, including the interns and residents, were usually Jewish; the surgeons were not. Sandy dimly felt that this was as it should be, although he could not have said quite why.) Cases were presented and discussed, procedures argued. The cardiologists, naturally, wanted to medicate forever—until death itself, it sometimes seemed; the surgeons often favored a more aggressive approach. As Sandy himself liked to put it, and often did: “A life like that is simply not worth living.” By which he meant that if a given patient is in the terrible shape just described, the possible risks and discomforts of surgery are well worth it.
And so it went on the Friday following Felicia’s party. One of the cardiology residents, Dr. Bluestone, from Brookline, Massachusetts, and Harvard, and with that accent, those Harvard vowels (despite his name)—Dr. Bluestone described a sixty-year-old woman, a Mrs. Miller, a widow with a history of problems: possible childhood rheumatic fever, and the familiar litany of symptoms—dyspnea on exertion, mildly cyanotic, etc. The only original feature in all this was what sounded like a classic surgery phobia: something about a botched hysterectomy, way back. Though what that could have to do with repairing her mitral valve Sandy could not quite see, and he felt that Bluestone was making too much of this woman’s fears. She sounded to him like a very good candidate, just healthy enough to withstand the surgery, and sick enough to need it.
Sandy said, by way of summing up and to indicate that he didn’t want to prolong the discussion, “She sounds like an excellent surgical candidate to me. And as far as her symptoms go”—he smiled; his audience knew what was coming—“a life lived like that—”
“But the point is her life is very much worth living.” That pushy young Harvard kid had the nerve to interrupt. “As I said in my presentation, running the cat shelter keeps her very happy, if we could just make her even a little more comfortable. And she’s convinced that an operation would kill her.”
Seriously annoyed, both by the interruption and at the mention of cats, which he loathed, Sandy asked, as mildly as he could, “Since when have we taken the superstitions of patients into account?”
“Mrs. Miller is an intelligent woman,” this Bluestone had the presumption to argue. “I take her fears seriously.”
“I have yet to hear of a patient dying of fear.” Saying this, Sandy recognized it as a lie; people did die of fear, children did. Not often, but it happened. Nevertheless, he then shrugged as eloquently as he could, by which he meant: I have spoken, and to argue further with you would be beneath my dignity. I am Dr. Raleigh Sanderson, and you are, so far, no one.
The hour was over in a moment that could have been awkward, with Bluestone sounding off again; instead, people began to get to their feet and to start casual conversations with each other. To move back toward their respective offices.
Not speaking to anyone, and ignoring the bunch of interns and residents who tended to follow him around, Sandy stalked out into the hall and down the long passageway to his own office, his head held high, his heavily starched lab coat rustling as he strode.
Inside his sanctum, alone, he removed the coat and sat there in his pale-blue shirtsleeves, and glared at the knots in his walnut panelling. Somewhat to his surprise, he became aware of a familiar stirring in what he thought of as his loins; he recognized at least some degree of sexual arousal.
He considered calling Felicia; he could be at her house in less than ten minutes. Then he remembered that in an interval between jobs she had gone up to Seattle to visit an old college friend (she had too many friends, such a waste of time).
And so he called Jane White.
In the fifteen minutes that it took Jane to get there (so much time was unusual for her; she generally made it in five, after surgical conferences), Sandy had to recognize that whatever excitement he had felt was now in fact gone, he had lost it. Could something be wrong with his prostate? He would have to have it checked. But Jane could take care of him as she had before. He began to smile with relieved anticipation.
She came bustling in at last, still in her lab coat and carrying her clipboard, and Sandy saw trouble almost instantly on her large plain long-nosed face. What she said was “I don’t have a lot of time. I’m really busy.”
Having risen to his feet, Sandy smiled and came around his desk t
o where she stolidly stood, and he said, rather jovially, “Then we’ll just have to make do with the time we have, okay?”
She did not smile, but frowned, and backed off. “Don’t you get it?” she asked him. “I don’t feel like fooling around today.”
“Fooling around.” He did know what that meant, and it was to Sandy an especially unattractive expression, and one that Jane knew he did not like.
Perhaps for that reason he made an unfortunate joke. He said, though with a smile, “You know I could get you fired for insubordination.” And he laughed to show he was kidding.
But to his surprise—and horror; Sandy was genuinely horrified—Jane reacted as though he had meant what he said.
Narrowing her intense strange blue-gray eyes (her one good facial feature), Jane in a menacing half-whisper said to him, “And I could have you up for sexual abuse, do you know that? You’ve heard of it? You read about what happened down at Stanford, and at the big law firm in Palo Alto? Well, don’t think for a minute I couldn’t do it, and I can think of several other nurses who’d be very happy—”
“But, Jane, come on. We’ve always been—I’ve always thought—”
“You always thought I’d come in and give you a blow job on demand.”
Sandy winced. He hated, hated, hated that expression. “I thought we were friends,” he said stiffly. “Colleagues, really.”
“Colleagues!” She bore down hard on the first syllable, making it harsh and loud, accusatory. And she looked as though she had a great deal more to say along those lines, but she was interrupted by a heavy fit of coughing.
Sandy knew enough not to pat her on the back—or to touch her at all: God knows what her response would have been to any touch at this point. He felt that she was about to cry, and that when she did it would be all right to touch her, he could put his arms around her in a comforting way. Let one thing lead to another.
But Jane White did not cry. Or if she did, Sandy was never to know that she had. Still half coughing, choking a little, she just stammered out, “You stupid old shit!”—and hurried out of the room.
Alone (abandoned!), Sandy sat down again. He reached up to stroke his hair, a familiar and usually reassuring gesture, but noticed that his hand shook. (Lord, could he be getting Parkinson’s too?) Everything felt awry. His stomach clenched. He was hungry, but the very idea of food was revolting, impossible. Even his heart, that strong reliable organ, seemed to ache.
Various bad words came to his mind. Fear—but how could he possibly be afraid of a nurse? Loneliness—but he wasn’t lonely; he had Felicia, and in a way he had Connie. Old age, impotence, failure. Cold, hunger. But none of those words had any application to his life.
THREE
“She has the soul of a courtesan,” Molly once said to Paul, by way of explaining her friend Felicia. “She loves to please people, to be loved, and she’s so intelligent, so realistic that she knows what she wants. She’s learned to be infinitely pleasing. Being with her is a delight, almost always. For one thing she really lives in the moment, so when she’s with you there’s nothing, no one else on her mind.”
“I can sort of see that,” Paul told her. “Plus which she’s a dish. But Sandy. The guy’s an old shit. I don’t get it.”
Molly laughed, partly because she had heard a tiny edge of competition in Paul’s voice. “She knows he’s a shit, although she never quite admits it, how could she? She does say that she’s hung up on older men, preferably doctors. Married. She likes men she can’t marry. She’s probably right. For her, I mean.”
This conversation took place early on in their marriage, when Molly, bedazzled, thought (when she thought at all) that they would be happy forever.
Paul said, “But Sanderson, Jesus. As you know I’m crazy about Felicia, I’m an easy prey to her charm. But I’m glad we don’t have to see a lot of that guy.”
“Me too, actually. And I don’t think he likes me either, much. But I’ll still bet on Felicia. She’ll end up doing him in.”
“Do you think she plays around?”
“Well, again she’s never said so. But, lately, there’ve been some things she’s said that make me wonder. And only a moron would be faithful to someone married.”
Paul laughed. “I love the way you women have it all worked out. The new rules. I’ll remember that if I’m ever inclined to stray.”
“See that you do.”
He added, “And for all we know old Sandy still fucks nurses.”
“That’s possible. It would be just like him, wouldn’t it.”
“Are all doctors terrible guys, or do they just get that way in med school?”
“I don’t know. Felicia and I’ve talked about it, and she doesn’t know either.”
This was shortly after Felicia and Sandy had started their relationship, and not too long after Molly and Paul were married (in the tackiest chapel they could find, near Reno). Felicia thought Molly and Paul would last forever—and Molly, like Paul, gave the Felicia-Sandy affair a couple of months. And both women were wrong. Paul opted out of the marriage, and then he was killed, and for whatever curious reasons Felicia continued for several years, not months, to be the lady friend of Raleigh Sanderson.
Paul was remarkable-looking. More striking than handsome, but very, very striking. For starters he was very tall, and thin, but good shoulders. His face was long and thin, high-boned. His eyes were what one remembered, though: a very pale, very bright light blue. Like certain skies in the early dawn on a day that will be very hot—Molly had thought that, remembering summer beach days in Virginia. Paul had very gray, almost white hair, obviously premature.
Since he was a screenwriter (later a documentary filmmaker), when they first met she had asked the obvious (silly) question, “How come you’re not an actor?”
“Because I’m too smart,” he told her, somewhat dismissively. By which she understood that she was about the hundredth person to ask him that.
So she said she was sorry, and he said that was all right; the real reason was that he couldn’t act, was too shy, and really not very smart.
But he was still, always, amazing-looking.
They had met, or picked each other up, in a bookstore on Fillmore Street, in front of the travel shelves. “Talk about meeting cute,” Paul said later. “It was worse than Neil Simon.” At the time he had said to her, right off, “I like your hair. Are you going to Mexico?” They were standing in front of Guides to Mexico.
“Not particularly,” she told him. “But I do think about Mexico.” And then, “Actually I like your hair too.”
They laughed, and became good friends, and then lovers. And then they got married. As simple and as infinitely complex as that.
A long time ago, long before Paul, as a very young just-out-of-college woman, Molly had married Henry Starck; they met in college, Bates College, in Lewiston, Maine. Molly had chosen Bates for being small and excellent, coed—and far from Richmond. Henry had gone there because all the men in his family had, for generations. Henry was from Portland, a splendid old gray-shingled house on Cape Elizabeth, and a large, rich and parsimonious, discreetly alcoholic family. Henry and Molly married, and moved down to Cambridge, where he would go to Harvard Law. This was regarded as an aberrant move by the family, which they managed to blame on Molly, the Southern parvenu in their New England ranks; traditionally all the Starck men were doctors, a fact to which Molly only gave some thought, a lot of thoughts, some years after her troubles with Henry and his family were over, and those with doctors had just begun.
“It was sort of like being in love with an Easter egg,” Molly once explained to Felicia, trying to describe that marriage. “This perfect smooth surface, but brittle and hollow. Maybe dyed blue. But an attractive, very fragile egg.”
“And holy? Easter?”
“Oh, very. Groton, all that. They all wanted to be more New England than Down East. More Bostonian than really from Portland.”
“God, I’m glad I’m from California.�
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Molly had fallen in love with New England, along with Henry, or perhaps the other way around: she loved Henry because she loved Maine and all of New England that she saw—the weather (it was always such definite weather, days in Virginia could be so blurry, ill-defined), the landscape, the rocks and birches and firs, the coast and lakes and marvelous vistas of blue mountains. And local accents, like the weather and the landscapes, clear words with a definite end. In Southern talk she had often found no closure and quite often no meaning, hidden or otherwise.
They drank a lot, Molly and Henry. They used to drive out to Bailey Island with a shaker of martinis, climb down to a rocky beach and drink, and watch the waves. Drink often made Henry loquacious, and occasionally amorous, but never slurring or sloppy, like certain Southern boys. And drinking out there on the coastal rocks seemed much more romantic than smoking dope on the edges of the hockey field, at St. Catherine’s School, in Richmond, with boys from St. Christopher’s.
Henry’s kissing was restrained, was pleasant but never pushy; he did not try to shove her into bed. At first she thought him chivalrous, later just unenthusiastic. The problem was that she herself was aroused; she was very excited by Henry’s very light kisses. She wanted to go to bed with him, to make love, screw, fuck—to do anything and everything that they were not doing.
When Henry remarked one night in a casual way that maybe they should get married, Molly instantly agreed—mostly by way of getting him into bed: Now he’ll have to make love to me, she thought. We’ll sleep together—every night!
Henry did make love to her, and Molly enjoyed it very much. But sex made her greedy, she found, she wanted to do it more and more. At least every night, and preferably twice. Whereas Henry seemed satisfied with much less, and down in Cambridge Molly came to feel, as months went by, that Henry made excuses not to sleep with her. Ostensibly studying late, he would fall asleep in the big chair in his study. Or he began taking long solitary walks around Harvard Square in the evenings. “I’m in classes all day, I’ve got talk and people coming out of my ears.” She knew that he was doing exactly what he said he was, he was walking around alone, but still she was hurt. Was it too much to expect that he would look forward to going to bed as much as she did? Molly supposed that it was.