Medicine Men (10 page)

They made, necessarily, an occasional foray out to the Tahoe City Safeway where, hunger-inspired, they would buy almost everything in sight, most of which they managed to eat. And Felicia, who had never really cooked before (or, for that matter, never really made love before), turned out to have enormous natural talent—everything they ate was incredibly good, the fresh trout and lamb chops, the glorious salads, fruits, and garlic mashed potatoes, the muffins and cookies, the pies.

•  •  •

Later in her life Felicia would try to remember what Sloan was really like. To reconstruct him. But she could only remember certain smells—all his personal ones were lovely, including sweat, and sperm. And the tiny faint snores that he made on going to sleep. The strong bony-muscular feel of his back. His beautiful, magical cock.

They did not exactly have conversations. They exchanged a few plans, Sloan’s to go to Harvard Med, where he had been accepted, in the fall, and Felicia’s to start at Stanford. But mostly they were too stoned, or aroused, or just plain busy screwing for much talk beyond exclamations of love and praise. Neither of them sentimentalized the connection, though, and they accepted its end in September with regret but no tears or foolish promises. Whenever Felicia thought of Sloan, and of that summer, what she experienced was arousal rather than nostalgia, and very likely it was the same for him, soon to be a busy doctor—an orthopedic surgeon, very successful, in New York.

Felicia sailed happily through Stanford and came back to San Francisco where with some cash from a very nice trust, and graduation presents, she bought her small house on Green Street, in Cow Hollow, down the hill from the family home, up on Broadway.

She let it be known that she was looking for a job, and one afternoon a friend of her mother’s called—Dr. Fredericks, Edwin, a very “social” psychiatrist.

“I find that I’m spending too much time doing silly things,” he told Felicia. “Writing a couple of letters, answering phone calls, sorting my magazines. If you felt like doing that for a couple of afternoons a week—well, maybe three—you’ve got yourself a job.”

Fredericks’ office was up in Pacific Heights, not far from Felicia’s parents’ house and, for that matter, not far from where she herself now lived. Ideal, from the sound of it: an undemanding
job that would pay a few clothes bills, that would not take too much of her time and energy.

It turned out, however, to involve more work than she had thought. The “couple of letters” were more like a couple of dozen a week, plus case summaries, a few articles, and an occasional book review for the local paper. All to be
perfectly typed.
“And since you’re here,” Edwin Fredericks further instructed, “Dr. Allen, in the next office, wondered if you couldn’t do a couple of letters for him sometimes. And there’re some simple books to keep, I’ll show you how. And when you’re free, if you wouldn’t mind, a little tidying-up, just the ashtrays and stacking up the magazines in the waiting room. Oh, and I like my coffee strong, the coffeemaker’s in the closet.”

Somehow the money involved turned out to be less than Felicia had thought; she must have misheard what he said in the original conversation, or miscalculated.

After a few weeks of this work, Felicia thought, This is impossible. But she was in an awkward spot; after all, he was a friend of her parents, and of many of her friends’ families. A gray-waved eminence, graceful at parties. And he was a doctor: who was she?

Also, some aspects of his practice interested her. Contrary to what she had always heard, Dr. Fredericks hated to talk about sex, and he discouraged his patients from doing so. There was one couple whom he saw in joint sessions, the transcripts of which Felicia typed—the Powerses. Mrs. Powers mentioned sex from time to time; she implied (she murmured) that they were not getting on well in that regard. Each time she did so, Dr. Fredericks quickly—and not very adroitly, in Felicia’s view—changed the subject to money. Mr. Powers had made some bad investments, it seemed—here Fredericks sounded very judgmental, accusatory. And so poor Mrs. Powers retreated, probably embarrassed to have mentioned such a dirty, forbidden topic.

Felicia scanned Dr. Fredericks’ files to see if there was anyone she knew, but alas, there was not. Nor anything of striking interest—again alas, just a lot more money-investment talk. She did not have time to go through them all with much care. She felt only the smallest guilt about her snooping: who could resist the private files of a “social” shrink?

She heard then about another job, in a hospital, a children’s psychiatric clinic. It would take more time than this one, but would also pay more—and would be more interesting, Felicia thought. At least shrinks working with children could not talk about money all the time.

Edwin Fredericks took the news of her departure with a frown, and offered her more money, a very little more.

“It’s really not the money,” Felicia told him. It’s more that you bore me to death, she could not say. “I just think I need wider experience,” she improvised.

She did, however, remark to her mother in the course of explaining her move, “Edwin Fredericks is very hung up on money, you ever notice?”

Surprisingly, Susie laughed. “I’ve heard that. We know his broker, you know, Al Green, who is not exactly discreet.”

The Child Guidance Clinic turned out to be more interesting indeed than life with Edwin Fredericks, though not in a way that Felicia would have imagined.

The director, Dr. Murphy, was in the throes of a midlife crisis, which he sometimes referred to as an anxiety depression. He had a tremendous, out-of-control crush on the pretty red-haired receptionist from Boise, Idaho, who in turn had a great, unrequited crush on a handsome black social worker, a devoted and faithful husband; his uxoriousness was a torture to the receptionist, who was further plagued by the unwelcome attentions of Dr. Murphy, as well as of still another aging psychiatrist. Another
social worker had been having a noisily and extraordinarily public affair with still another psychiatrist, doors barely closed on lunging desktop encounters.

The children were mostly all right; they suffered, most of them, from fairly mild disorders, such as bed-wetting. There were a few adolescent girls with eating problems. But there was one family, the Farwells, who were gothic in the depth and scope of their trouble. There was a mother, a stepfather, two children, boy and girl, both adolescent. The boy and girl were known to be having sex with each other, also the girl and her stepfather, and the stepfather with the boy. The collective mind of the clinic reeled with voyeuristic pleasure—this was in the eighties, somewhat before child abuse and “recovered memories” became such major public issues. It took the health workers out of themselves, so to speak. Someone for everyone, they all said, amid unwholesome giggles.

Felicia decided that she hated it there. The staff was doing more harm to its own members than to the children, she very much hoped, but in any case she was doing no good at all to anyone, and the atmosphere was bad for her, she felt, like breathing brimstone.

Edwin Fredericks was having a hard time filling his job, Felicia’s mother reported. “These girls are feminists now. They don’t want to wash out ashtrays and make his coffee.” And Susie laughed happily.

Raleigh Sanderson, Sandy, was not a friend of Felicia’s parents, although they knew each other—San Francisco being the small town that it is. They greeted each other at the opera, at certain large parties. Susie and Josh Flood rather distantly disapproved of the way Dr. Sanderson lived; they would not have used the phrase “life-style”—the phrase whispered among Susie and her friends was “flagrant infidelity.” Thus, Felicia had not
met him until the temporary agency with which she signed up sent her out to his office.

Although she did not admit as much to Molly, Felicia knew on first meeting Sandy that there would be sex, and trouble ahead. She was unable, though, to gauge the weight of either—the intensity of the sex, the severity of the trouble.

She did not really think that the early invitations to lunch were in any sense innocent, nor even casually flirtatious.

That first afternoon, his orgasm, seconds after her own, was so strong and so prolonged as to make her come yet again, and again, as he shuddered to rest, still within her. They stared at each other, both too shaken and too wise to speak. It was the greatest sexual experience of Sandy’s long sexual life, Raleigh Sanderson knew that—but could he trust this new, very beautiful girl enough to tell her that? He also knew that there would not exactly be a long line of girls succeeding Felicia; at his age any one of them could be the last.

Felicia knew too that nothing so amazing had ever happened to her, in a sexual way. But, being young, she imagined that life and sensuality, her own especially, would go on forever—and although it would be many months before she was unfaithful to Raleigh Sanderson, she was curious already.

And it was somewhat in a spirit of experiment—of wondering, Will this sex be as great as with Sandy?—that she first went to bed with her good friend Charlie, who she had untruthfully told Sandy was gay. And in a way sex with Charlie was just as good; it was unlike what happened with Sandy but in its lively way it was terrific.

Also, Felicia’s basically logical mind informed her that being faithful to a married man was silly—or, worse, it was masochistic. Furthermore, when Sandy admitted—or bragged; the sound of it was boastful, very—that after the arousal of an operation he would sometimes “bed” a nurse (he used that curiously inaccurate and old-fashioned word), Felicia, in the course of asking
him about that (it was interesting, and she was curious), had strong intuition that he had not stopped doing it, that he still sometimes “bedded” nurses, although she gathered (more intuition) that these days he had a little more trouble doing so.

She asked him straight out, “But, sexual harassment? You’re not worried about lawsuits?” She laughed to imply that of course no one would dare to sue the great Raleigh, but still she did ask.

He laughed too, of course, in his confident way, but she heard unease in the sound. “They wouldn’t dare,” and he laughed again.

By which she thought he meant that yes, he was still doing it to nurses—or secretaries, sometimes—but things were more difficult than they used to be.

There would only be trouble between herself and Sandy, as Felicia saw it, if one or the other of them began to feel a strong attachment for someone else, and most likely it would be she. She even sensed that she could be close to getting into this particular trouble with Will, the man in Seattle. But maybe not. And in the meantime, she felt that she and Raleigh Sanderson had made a very mature and sophisticated bargain, unspoken but surely there.

The trouble, in fact, began on the very day when Felicia was so peacefully and happily tending to her roses, out in the garden.

Like an omen, suddenly, then, with no warning at all in the quiet day, the blue air was rent with a horrible zooming sound, and there above, racing across the heavens, was a squadron of Army planes, small black malignant toys. The sound was dreadful, terrifying, even though Felicia vaguely remembered reading in the paper that a group called the Blue Angels were to practice that day. Practice for what, for God’s sake? She had also read of the enormous fuel costs, and now she frowned with extreme annoyance
at the whole procedure, especially the ghastly noise. It was fairly soon over, although the day seemed now less peaceful, the morning air less pristine. In the wake of war.

Felicia returned her attention at least in part to the roses.

Another area of her mind was preoccupied with Will, the nice and attractive professor from Seattle. A fantasy developed in which Will came down to stay with her. She would cook lovely meals for him, and they would make love. A lot. She smiled to herself at the thought.

Just then inside her house the phone began to ring and, still smiling, Felicia hurried into the bedroom, as though she had known who it would be.

And she had. “Will! How really nice. I was just thinking of you—no, I honestly was.… Next weekend? But that’s terrific, of course stay here—”

At just that moment, though, they were interrupted by a return of the horrible Blue Angels, the furious, lethal sound that for those long moments filled the world. “Can you hear that?” she shouted into the phone. “It’s this ghastly air show. Maneuvers, I guess they call them. Jesus, isn’t the Cold War over? Can you hear?”

After an impossible minute or two the planes were gone again, and Felicia resumed: “Ah, thank God. But Will, it’s wonderful that you’re coming down, and of course stay here with me,” she repeated, with emphasis. “I can’t wait to see you.”

“
Is that so?
” From behind Felicia came the heavily familiar, controlled-rage voice of Raleigh Sanderson. She whirled to his face, still holding the receiver in one hand.

“Well after all that you’d better say good-bye,” Sandy told her.

More amazed than frightened then, Felicia spoke into the phone. “I’m sorry, someone just came in. But let me know, okay? Great, see you soon.” And she hung up, and turned to face Sandy. “Now look,” she began. “Now really—”

“Really what? Really you get to stand around making dates
on the phone? People coming to stay with you, and you can’t wait to see them?”

His voice warned Felicia of danger, and everything in his face. But she had seen him angry before—he had a bad temper. She could always get around him, somehow mollify. Now, though, she chose rather to defy him, to ignore the danger signals. “I didn’t think I needed your permission for houseguests. Do you ask me when you want to go out with your wife, or to take some nurse—”

In a split second he had lunged and hit her across the face, hard, so that Felicia fell backward onto her bed.

“How dare you—” she ridiculously began, automatically clutching at her face, which stung, and burned. And then, more ridiculously, she began to cry.

“Oh my darling—” His voice broke, a voice that she had not heard before. Could he be crying too? Dimly, still clutching her face in pain, Felicia thought, I don’t care if he cries. The old shit.