Medicine Men (12 page)

“…  interesting, very common in Japan,” she heard the doctor say to Dave. “Statistically—”

And then they both looked up at Molly, who had timidly tapped on the door.

Dave frowned, but mildly, before standing up to shake hands with the other doctor. “Well, this has been very interesting.”

“Very interesting,” the other one echoed.

In the elevator: “It was interesting,” Molly complained. “Why couldn’t I have been there? They have these tumors in Japan all the time?”

“Not all the time, but statistically—oh, you don’t understand. And I have to confer with these doctors. It’s essential. Essential for you, I mean. You’ll just have to learn some patience.”

And Molly, rebuked, absorbed the familiar admonition, and returned, more depressed, to her semiconscious retreat.

At night they drank quite a lot. Dave was a two-martini man, and so that is what they had, plus a bottle of wine with dinner. Dave liked steak and potatoes, and they had a lot of both. Sometimes chicken. Not very hungry, Molly nibbled as Dave scolded: “You’ve got to keep your strength up. You’re bound to lose some weight with surgery, and probably radiation, so the more you go in with …”

But I don’t much like steak, Molly did not say.

All the wine made her sleepy, and if she woke in the night she took a pill. She had no dreams.

Respecting what he referred to as her “illness”—he did not say “cancer,” ever, nor even “CA”—Dave did not touch her much in bed. A blurry good night kiss, some vague reachings in the direction of her breasts, hands from which Molly groggily moved away.

One morning at breakfast Dave told her, “Today you get your wish. We’re going to a woman doctor. A radiologist. And not only a woman, she’s Japanese. Now, is that politically correct enough for you?”

PC or not, the Japanese woman doctor was very pretty, small and daintily featured, with short feathered black hair and large sexy eyes.

More alert than was usual for her these days, Molly understood
that the issue was whether to radiate and possibly shrink her tumor, her golf ball, her CA before or after surgery. An interesting issue, obviously.

“…  of course a great deal would depend on the wishes and opinion of Dr. Stinger” was what Dr. Tanamini at last murmured to Dave, in her very soft voice.

After a pause, “We are no longer connected with Dr. Stinger,” said Dave, in his loud stiff voice.

“But I—I most highly respect—” began Dr. Tanamini, with what sounded like real alarm.

“I understand your respect,” Dave told her firmly, as though giving an order, and then he did give an order, to Molly. “Molly, I’ll meet you in the waiting room.”

The next conversation, between Dave and Dr. Tanamini, seemed to take even longer than most of Dave’s conferences did, and Molly gathered from his face and his tone when at last he joined her in the waiting room that it had not gone very well.

“She’s terrified of Stinger,” Dave muttered, out in the corridor. “So annoying—she’s probably the best in the business.”

“She learned a lot about these tumors in Japan?”

“What?” Dave gave her an are-you-crazy? look, familiar to Molly from somewhere—and then she remembered Henry Starck, who thought most of her ideas were crazy.

She was about to remind Dave about the tumor statistics when he seemed to remember on his own.

“Oh, Japan,” he said, dismissing Japan. “No, she’s just generally good on rare tumors of the head and neck. But she’s totally intimidated by Stinger. Won’t make a move.”

“Maybe they’re lovers.”

“Oh, Molly, for God’s sake—”

“But they could be—doctors too—”

“Molly, please. This is serious. Anyway, so much for her. Tomorrow we see Bill Donovan, at Mount Watson. You remember?”

•  •  •

During this strange interim period of Molly’s life, her friend Felicia was mostly in Seattle—with her new friend, her lover, the professor. She was also between jobs, and, more important, keeping away from Dr. Raleigh Sanderson. “It may sound silly but I’m really scared of him. Doctors can go just as ballistic as anyone—after all, you don’t have to be a dope like O.J. He was saying wild things, like I’d ruined his life.

“But Seattle is really the greatest—you’d love it. Maybe you should think about moving up here? Or maybe I should?” Felicia laughed, her old rich careless sexy laugh. “I don’t know, you see more water there. Somehow in San Francisco there’s water all around, you don’t see it as much. Of course his apartment is right up above the waterfront, and near the market, so wonderful, the most voluptuous fish, and vegetables—every night I make something wonderful. But dear Molly, how are you? Is Dave a help or just a bully? Of course at this point I’m so anti-doctor—”

“So am I, and he’s both,” Molly told her. “I long to get rid of him but I can’t right now. I just want to be well, and never see a doctor again. He makes me feel guilty and ungrateful.”

“Like a parent.”

“Exactly,” Molly told her.

“There’s a wonderful sort of garden here built up above the freeways. The plants absorb all the noise and the smells, so it’s really peaceful, it seems magic, enchanted.”

“I think you’re in love with Seattle. And the professor?” asked Molly. “You like him too?”

Felicia laughed again—at herself, from the sound of it. “It’s all so hard to sort out, you know? Relief at his not being Sandy, plus my feelings about this city. Plus he’s a very nice man. And at least I know I’m not madly in love this time—that’s probably the best sign of all. Listen, do you want me to come down when
you have this surgery? Honestly, just say so and I’ll be there in a flash.”

“Oh no, it’s still so goddam uncertain. When and where, and who’s the lucky doctor who gets to do it. Who gets the green-golf-ball prize.”

“So lucky I could get this appointment.” Dave said this many more times than twice when they drove south, down the Peninsula toward Mt. Watson Hospital, and the famous, marvelous Dr. William Donovan. Molly, repeating those words back to herself, became interested in their order, which clearly put the emphasis on “I could get.” On “I.” Dave was to be the hero of this episode in her life, Molly clearly saw, and in a blurry way she wondered just what her own role was to be; she felt that if Dave was to be heroic she was not. At best she could be the rescued maiden, a markedly non-heroic part. At worst, she supposed, she would die of surgery, some strange unprecedented slip of the knife, or just a bad reaction to being anesthetized. Curiously the idea did not bother her a great deal. I won’t feel a thing, she thought, and she further thought, That might teach all these medical hotshots a thing or two.

The facts of how she felt, and had felt for these past several weeks, had seemed to be lost in the shuffle. No one asked, and Dave, the obvious target for complaints, seemed to regard her remarks on that topic as just that—complaints. Also, even if anyone had wanted to hear her symptoms, Molly would have had some trouble articulating just what was wrong. How to describe a generalized malaise, a weakness, a heaviness everywhere, but especially in her head (could the golf ball weigh a lot?), and intense fatigue. She could not, and had given up trying.

In the late afternoon, in the year of drought—the last drought before the floods of the following year—sunlight mantled the hills south of San Francisco, golden and benign. To their
left the huge flat bay shimmered, gold, and giant silver planes rose noisily, ceremoniously, from the overcrowded airport. And everywhere, on every side, new and expensive subdivisions: tomorrow’s slums.

“It’s hard not to enjoy a drought,” Molly contributed, breaking a silence.

Dave frowned. “You won’t when water’s rationed.”

And Molly thought, not for the first time: How badly, really, we get on. We can’t even discuss the weather. Which led her to the further, the truly depressing thought: I can’t get out of this just now. This goddam tumor, this fucking “CA” has anchored me.

Hallowed Mt. Watson Hospital was Spanish in design, acres of red-tiled roofs and stone arched corridors. Alien, and to Molly intimidating. In perfectly tended gardens, on this bright fall late afternoon, giant chrysanthemums of burnished gold stood steadfast among their oversized and unreal green-gray leaves. Endless gardens. Endless corridors. She could easily be lost in them, Molly thought, or confined, and never get out. She could end up caring for chrysanthemums, cautiously, carefully. Alone.

With some little trouble they came at last to the specified office, down many halls and turns.

Since she had been prepared as though for an audience with the Pope, Molly was a little surprised by the relative simplicity of the great Dr. Bill Donovan’s office, which could have been any doctor’s. There was the requisite giant glass-topped desk with its large and clearly very recent photo of what must be a second, trophy wife, a tousled, toothy young blonde with twin blonde babies. The framed diplomas and certificates.

Dr. Donovan too was blond, a large bluff man with the aggressively swaying walk of a football player—or a surgeon. Shaking hands heartily with both of them, saying to them collectively, “Call me Bill.” And then to Molly he said, as every doctor before him had said to her, in almost identical tones that mingled
intelligent concern with condescension, “Well, young lady, what seems to be the trouble?”

As if they didn’t know. Had not been forewarned about the Great Green Golf Ball.

Dave, on the long drive home, was elated. “So
lucky
,” he said many times, as he had on the drive down to Mt. Watson, but now with even more emphasis. “So lucky, he’s just about to go off on a trip to Bermuda but he agreed to do it. I’m so glad I argued and wouldn’t just take the man he recommended. He may be very competent but Donovan’s done this same operation twenty-three times.”

Molly thought, Now he’s going to say that there’s no substitute for experience, and Dave did say just that—as her attention wandered off, and she looked out the window at the glistening dark reservoir, which reminded her of lakes in Maine, or New Hampshire.

The wonderful lucky news, on which Molly was feebly trying but wholly failing to focus, was that wonderful Dr. Donovan, “Bill,” was going to perform the requisite surgery on her head the following Monday. Molly knew that she should feel strongly in some way about this event—she should probably at least feel fear—but she did not. So far she had only reacted to the news that she, that
they
, would have to get up very early to get to the hospital by eight, to be prepped and ready for surgery. No breakfast and no dinner the night before.

Looking over and misinterpreting whatever expression Molly wore at that moment, Dave told her, “You mustn’t be frightened.” He reached to pat her nearest knee. “You’re really a brave good girl.”

Molly saw no point in arguing. And indeed how could she possibly explain to him that she might as well have already been anesthetized? She was drugged, she was out of it.

Given what she had been told by Dr. Stinger, that her
chances for survival were one in four, it is odd (she much later thought) that she did not, before surgery, contemplate Death. But she did not, she
could
not; sheer inability, not avoidance, and not “denial,” made that thought—made all such thoughts—quite impossible. She could no more have contemplated death than she could have imagined the universe, or the Milky Way. Or God.

At no time did she clearly think, I might die. Or: What would it be like if I did?

Unlike Molly herself, Felicia was aware of a sudden, unreasoning dread as she approached her house, in the airport taxi. This was two days before Molly’s surgery, and Felicia thought, I’m frightened for Molly—suppose it doesn’t go well?

But then, in part because she could not bear another answer, she told herself that of course it would go well. Molly has the best possible care, and she is a healthy and relatively young woman.

But she, Felicia, in the early fall hazy twilight, was even afraid of her house. Afraid to get out of the cab and go in. To propitiate whatever was so scaring, she overtipped the driver—who did not seem to notice. A surly, dirty-blond curly-haired boy, he barely thanked her, and drove off, leaving Felicia to face her house alone. Standing there out in front, with her Seattle bags.

Still frightened, she thought that perhaps in her absence someone had broken in; it happened so often these days that it barely made the papers anymore, so you didn’t even know how often.

Telling herself that she was being ridiculous, and noting that at least she had progressed from serious preoperative concerns
about Molly to the considerably less serious housebreak worries, she opened her front door. And saw that the house was exactly as she had left it: the same minor mess, a clutter of newspapers piled on her breakfast table, the empty coffee cup that she did not have time to wash out before the plane to Seattle. The slight, faint layer of house dust that an absence, an emptiness, brings. She walked through the house, seeing nothing amiss, and opened the back door that led out to the garden.

No changes there, and she stood for several minutes savoring the November smells of loamy earth and the slight bitterness of chrysanthemums, the sweet rot of fallen apples. The neighbor’s cat, who always looked more like a fox, with her wild brilliant eyes, flicked her beautiful brush of a tail in Felicia’s direction, before scurrying under a wall of ivy.

So much for the marvelous powers of intuition on which she had always prided herself, Felicia thought. And she thought again, At least my fear was not about Molly. I know she’ll be okay.

She turned back to the house, the hall, and she opened the door to her bedroom—in which, on the bedside table, there was an enormous vase, one of hers that she kept in the kitchen closet. And a giant sheaf—three dozen? four?—of yellow roses.

At which Felicia’s heart jolted, and her breath momentarily stopped in sheer panic. She thought, Sandy, and in that petrified instant she imagined him entering the house like an owner or a most intimate friend, with his own key. Going into the kitchen, the closet, and finding the vase that he knew was there. Taking it to the sink and turning on water, so domestic, and probably remembering what she had told him, that warm was best for roses. She could perfectly visualize his carrying the vase, quite heavy now, from the kitchen to her bedroom, the confident swagger of his walk somewhat thrown off by the weight. Smiling to himself, recalling her fondness for yellow roses. Even thinking, Now everything will be all right. Will be just as it was.