Medicine Men (23 page)

“In Dr. Macklin? Molly, I’m not. I’ve had it with doctors, remember?”

“Honestly, Felicia, you make these rules.”

“Besides, I got an idea he was more interested in you.”

“Douglas Macklin? Oh, really not. Or only as a patient.”

•  •  •

That night, as she lay in bed, still feeling some ache of flu, though diminished—she really was better, Felicia thought—she began to hear the by now familiar pad of footsteps on her garden path, and she smiled to herself as she thought, Dumb Sandy, he must know that I know who it is out there, what a silly game. Can he possibly imagine I’ll come to the door and ask him in?

Felicia had a sudden bad thought then: What if it isn’t Sandy after all, but someone who seriously wishes me harm?—someone more truly, more seriously deranged than Sandy?

At that thought she experienced fear like a large cold cave within her chest, a dark hollow space, and she shivered as, at that moment, a heavy blow sounded on her front door.

Not Sandy. He wouldn’t do that, would he? Rigid, cold with panic, Felicia listened to the totally silent night—even no cars passed at just that moment.

Should she call 911? Suppose they took an hour or so getting there, as she had heard that they sometimes did. Something that women in the shelter talked about: whether or not calling 911 was worth it, the waiting and the hassle.

At that moment it was not much help for Felicia to tell herself that in such a “good” neighborhood the police would probably come right away, and that probably the person she feared was a famous doctor who would not really hurt her. Probably.

In the morning she found that someone had thrown a large hunk of broken concrete, as from some street repair, against her door. She called the alarm system to see why this had not set off her alarm, and then waited for the promised inspector to arrive.

On a narrow ridge high above the bright Pacific, on a brilliantly blue January day, two tall thin people, a man and a woman, both obviously strong though not young, together battled a ferocious, chilling wind. They looked somewhat alike, those two, both with silky gray-blond hair, blue eyes, fine fair skin, now flushed with the blood of cold and exertion. They were not brother and sister—that was somehow obvious—but possibly distant cousins. They wore sturdy, good old hiker clothes, neither new nor Californian but rather New England in their look, as were their wearers. Who were, in fact, Connie Sanderson, wife of Raleigh, and Henry Starck, former husband of Molly Bonner; they had met at several AA meetings and felt some affinity, even beyond that of a joint recovery from addiction. They bonded as friends. An enthusiasm for hiking was the acted-out part of the bond—they had not yet discovered their indirect but highly personal connection, the Sandy-Felicia-Molly relationship.

Below them the ocean roiled and crashed, a bright green streaked with blue, with wide white lines of foam. More immediately, leading down from their path, was the steep crevassed slope of wind-battered green-gray furze, and off to their right,
dark towering majestic trees, redwoods and smaller cypresses and firs, and leafless winter brambles, thick with thorns. Impossible to speak below a shout in the heavy wind, but from time to time the two exchanged a small and mutually shy smile, acknowledging the beauty of the day, which was extreme—an extraordinary day—and also the commendable exertion that this hike required of them. Recovery was great, as they did not have to say.

But despite the exceptional beauty all around, the gift of amazing weather—January, even in California?—Connie was finding herself a prey to far-too-familiar bad thoughts. Feminist but unhelpful. The sequence began with Felicia, of whom she was all too aware. Of course she had seen Felicia, it seemed a great many times; she felt that she knew every tiniest patch of Felicia’s perfect, poreless skin. The sequence of thoughts went like this, with just a few variations: That girl is a good thirty years younger than Raleigh is, and they both think—and very likely everyone else thinks—that is perfectly all right. Whereas if I, a good ten years younger than Raleigh and in what one would call good shape—if I took an interest in a younger man, everyone, including the man himself, would view it as obscene, pathetic, quite out of the question. Even if the difference was only, say, ten years, as with this Henry Starck. But to whom, thank God, I am not at all attracted in that way. Nice as he is.

Just last week at a meeting, a woman’s “share” had been about exactly such an experience: “It was so terrible,” this woman said. “Really it was why I stopped drinking. And these days I never think about it, I never see
him
, thank God, but sometimes it just surfaces in my mind, and I have to deal with it all over again.” A pretty woman, in her early forties, probably. But not feeling pretty: she hunched over heavy breasts, and her beautiful large black Latin eyes were both mournful and accusatory. She said, “I was having some drinks after work in this bar down on Union Street—Perry’s? Everyone knows it’s for pickups but I was really okay by myself, and then this young guy
came over asking if he could join me. Not all that young, maybe ten years younger than me, and he said he was a doctor. At Children’s. Very cute and blond, and did he know it. I think at a distance I look younger than I am, or something, because right off, when he sat down, I felt like he was kind of disappointed. But I didn’t let that idea register, really. And disappointed or not he kept right on ordering these drinks. You might say he had a little problem too? God, do doctors drink?” (
Do
they, Connie had thought. Some of them can put an ordinary lay-alkie right under the table.) “Anyway, we had lots, and he kept getting cuter and cuter, though I can’t say we had a lot to talk about—I mean, why would a doctor be interested in my dumb life? I’m a social worker. Well, the truth is, as he got cuter and I got drunker I also got hornier and hornier, you know? Anyone else get like that? So at last I just thought, What the hell? Why are we both here anyway—to get laid, right? So I just flat out said to him that luckily my place was around the corner, on Greenwich? And he looked really shocked—God, I’ll never forget that look—and he said, he really said this, he said, ‘Sorry, I think you’re a year or so out of my age range, and besides I like legs, not tits.’ Can you imagine? Was he really a doctor? Could a real doctor be that mean?”

Damn right he could, and meaner, Connie had thought; of course he was a doctor. But she thought too, How utterly terrible, how could anyone, even a doctor, be so cruel? She felt it as though it had happened, really, to her, and she had to lecture herself severely: Come on, being empathetic is one thing but this is sick—you’ve never made a pass at anyone in your life, even drunk, and you probably won’t, certainly not now that you’re not drinking. You’re in recovery, remember?

She said to this nice Henry Starck, shouting above the wind, “Remember when picnics used to mean a gallon of wine and some cheese?”

He grinned and shouted back, “I think I’ve done a little better than that. Food-wise.”

“I’m sure.”

For he had insisted on bringing the lunch. “In my new life I’m a cook,” he had said. “You won’t mind?”

“Of course not.” And maybe in my new life young men bring home-cooked picnics to me, Connie had thought.

Perhaps a half-mile ahead of them was the tip of the headlands, and much farther away, in distant waves, a small boat battled forward, up and down, like a child’s rocking horse. Closer to hand were rocks and beaten-down grasses, and a wind that was almost visible, so fierce and strong and capricious in its direction.

They had stopped their forward stride and simply stood there, craning ahead, until Connie said, more loudly than she would have chosen to speak, “We don’t have to go out to the end now, do we?”

“No, actually no one will know if we don’t.” Neither could hear the other’s laugh, but they smiled relief to each other and turned in silent agreement toward the sheltering trees and a cleared patch of ground. A little sunlit space, with a log for a possible backrest, or maybe a table. Or both.

They sat, and Henry began to bring out food from his knapsack as Connie thought, Well, such a nice young man, I can’t imagine Raleigh bringing a picnic, but of course with Felicia he doesn’t have to. She had heard of Felicia’s exceptional cooking skills, along with the fabled blue eyes and the famous skin. Catching herself in such thoughts—
so passé
, so
vieux jeux
, she should be far past all that—she asked Henry Starck, because he was handy, was there, “Tell me, do you ever have any bad thoughts, still, about your former wife?”

“Odd you ask that.” Henry’s mouth moved rather little as he smiled. “My first, former wife lives out here now, and we’re just in a way at last getting to be friends. She lost her husband, and then she had some unusual, awful cancer, but now she seems to be all right.” He smiled again. “I’m trying to get sort of used to
her again. She’s called Molly Bonner. I always liked her name, never even wanted her to change it—”

“Really? She’s Molly Bonner?”

“Yes, why? Do you know her?”

“Well, not exactly.” And as best she could, Connie explained the connection. She finished by saying, “It’s almost scary, isn’t it, the people you know a lot about when you don’t actually know them. As though in some way everyone were famous.”

He did not quite see what she meant, Connie could tell. Also, like most men, he was made nervous by personal conversations.

He said, “Molly did mention such a friend. A Felicia. Who’d taken care of her, she said.”

“Probably. I’ve heard she’s a famous cook, and probably terribly nice. But you can see that my view would be a little biased.”

“Of course.”

Henry’s sandwiches had a rather sweetly old-fashioned quality to them, Connie felt—at least in terms of intention. There were cucumber and cream cheese, egg salad and watercress and pâté, but he seemed not to have grasped the principle of thin bread, nor, with the cucumbers, cutting off crusts. Even as she praised them Connie struggled with heavy bites of sandwich.

She said, when she could, “It’s sort of like a picnic in Maine, don’t you think?”

“Oh, absolutely. In fact I was just thinking that. Also thinking how provincial I am, in this beautiful spot to refer things back to Maine.”

“I always do. But where did you go in Maine?”

“A place called Bailey Island, it’s up off the coast—”

“Oh, but I know Bailey Island. My cousins had a house …”

This all led to a complicated but enthusiastic conversation: Henry (of course) knew Connie’s cousins, the Forbeses; he was a very distant relation, and so it could be said that Connie and
Henry
were
related very distantly. Which would not have come as a surprise to anyone observing the two of them.

Sitting there out of the wind, among sheltering trees, they were very warm in the full sunlight of early afternoon. Having eaten all she could, and possibly exhausted their conversation, Connie felt that they should leave now; on the other hand, why? She was happier than she could remember being for quite some time—and she was thinking, I’ll have to bring Katie and the grandchildren here, they’d love it—when out of the blue, so to speak, Henry Starck did something quite remarkable, and crazy: he leaned over and kissed her, very warmly, firmly, and lingeringly, on her mouth, and then he said, “I hope you don’t mind, I’ve been wanting to do that all day.”

Connie smiled, quite unable to say anything at all—though various things occurred to her, sentences tumbling against each other in her mind: You’re beautifully handsome, shall we go back to my house right now? Did you know I have three black grandchildren? Should we move in and live together? I think I love you—is that all right?

As though in answer to all those questions, he kissed her again, more briefly but still sweetly, warmly. He said, “This isn’t like me at all, I don’t know—” And he laughed. He said, “What an amazing day!”

At that exact moment of their looking at each other, surprised and smiling in the sunlight, something extraordinary happened: from the mass of brambles and scrubby pines a small pointed gray-brown face peered out, curious and frightened feral eyes, dark gold, a black nose, and, as it instantly turned to run back and away from them, a long high bushy tail.

Connie breathlessly whispered, “Was that a feral cat—out here?”

Henry laughed quietly. “No, it was a fox. We have them in Maine.”

“So beautiful.”

“Wasn’t it?”

After the fox they were silent for a time. Connie leaned back against their log, in the gentle, sedative sunlight. She was thinking how she would tell the grandchildren about the fox. Ethan, Adam, and Laurel, six, five, and three, respectively, a little young for hiking, Connie thought—and she also thought, for the thousandth time, What a jerk Raleigh is, how can he refuse to see Kate, the mother of these children, our
daughter?
Ostensibly because Kate never married either of their fathers, but really because both of those men were “gentlemen of color,” as Raleigh with his high heavy irony would put it. Black. It was true that Kate was not the most responsible woman alive; she never got along especially well in jobs, but she loved her children, had fun with them, and was fiercely protective—more than you could say for Raleigh, Connie thought.

She had an impulse to tell this nice young man, this Henry Starck, about Kate and her children, but she did not. After all, these days just being kissed did not mean all that much; Henry Starck did not necessarily want to hear about her grandchildren. Besides, at just that moment she did not feel grandmotherly.

She hardly knew him; how could she expect him to care about her family?

Besides, he’ll probably remarry Molly Bonner. This sudden intuition hit Connie broadside, with the binding force of truth.

Should she tell him, though, that Raleigh this week is off at a conference in Aspen? Heart surgeons all skiing together, in some terrifically expensive resort. All free, and undoubtedly charged to their patients in some way.

But what does it matter what she tells him, if he’s going to remarry Molly Bonner?