Read Online Medicine Men by Alice Adams - Free Book Online Page B

like him, including my wife. She couldn’t stand him. The problem was, Stinger was out of town, and he’s where I wanted you to go. And I do think whether or not you like a doctor is relevant. After all, communication is important, and if you hate a guy you can’t exactly talk to him easily.”
    “Next time I think you should listen to your wife.”
    “I’m sure you’re right.”
    Molly had the occasional fleeting thought that Dr. Macklin was, if anything, too pleasant. How would he handle some hard, unpleasant situation? She wondered, but at the same time she told herself that he was highly intelligent. That was why she liked him, wasn’t it?
    •  •  •
    Dr. Stinger, to whom she went next, was also short.
    Molly asked Dave, “Does something about ENT attract short men?”
    “Christ, only you would generalize from two examples.”
    He probably had a point, which of course Molly did not admit. (Dave always brought out her most childishly defiant qualities, which cannot have been entirely his fault.)
    Dr. Mark Stinger, then, was short but dark and handsome, and while Molly did not agree with the received opinion holding that handsome men are generally bad (she rather preferred that they be handsome), still she did not like him much, and at the time she was not at all sure why. He was polite (God knows more polite than Dr. Beckle had been), and he seemed intelligent—what more did she want?
    Dr. Stinger prescribed some antibiotics, which he assured her would work. (Was that it, his assurance, just short of arrogance?)
    And they did not work. Molly felt worse and worse, more heavy in her head, and in her veins. The smallest tasks, like making her lunch, seemed difficult, and reading was almost impossible. She could not believe that she could hardly read; always, she read enormously.
    “Call Stinger and tell him how you feel,” said Dave. “You patients don’t tell your doctors enough, and then you blame us.”
    Molly did call Stinger, and she told the nurse how terrible she felt; she would call her back, the nurse said (she, not the doctor). She did call back, with another antibiotic prescription.
    “I don’t like doctors whom you can’t even get to talk to,” Molly told Dave.
    He hesitated, then said, “Well, it’s not the way I do things, I always get back to patients eventually. But maybe he has it worked out this way.” A meaningless defense, Molly felt.
    •  •  •
    Dave asked her out to dinner. “No free concert tonight,” he told her, with a laugh. “Worse luck. We’ll probably even have to pay for dinner.”
    On the way to the restaurant he made several small jokes about their possibly going dutch, which he understood was what people did these days. But when Molly said, “Sure, fine with me” (in fact she would have liked it much better), he bridled, as though scandalized, and he told her, “I guess you don’t know when I’m kidding.”
    Which was true enough, both at the time and later on.
    At dinner they talked again about how much they missed, respectively, Paul and Martha. And they argued. That was the first occasion of the Grand Canyon argument.
    “Look,” Molly told him, “I’m almost forty. Old enough to have gone there by now if I’d wanted to.”
    “And too young to be so rigid. It’s the most glorious experience of nature in this country.”
    “I like Maine. New England. Lakes, the Atlantic coast.”
    “But you won’t even try?”
    “I’d hate it. I hate looking down from heights. Or even up.”
    They drank martinis, and had a bottle of Beaujolais with their steak, that restaurant’s specialty. Molly hadn’t had steak for several years, and she had to admit that it was good.
    They went back to her house and then, as they both must have known that they would, they went to bed.
    Sex with Dave was pretty much just that, sex. At first Molly liked it, and responded happily to something she had not done for so long, and had missed. But after the first few