Medicine Men by Alice Adams Read Free Book Online

described as a hot new law firm, down on Union Street.
    “But I’ve never done legal typing.”
    “It’s okay. There’s one other woman, and she’s supposed to be a whiz.”
    The other woman, the whiz, was Felicia Flood. Very tall, very blonde, with corn-silk hair, Felicia was what Molly had imagined as a Californian.
    Her eyes were what you first noticed: amazing eyes, the most translucent azure, a dark, dark blue with long thick black lashes and lazy, languorous lids. Her smile was lazy too, slow and shy, somehow surprising; she was so very—so conspicuously attractive that Molly would not have expected either the shyness or the smile. A big blonde beautiful woman—who was also nice.
    “The point about this place is that really there’s nothing to do,” she told Molly, right off, in the Ladies Room. And since there were only two ladies in the office any conversation at all was possible. “You just have to look busy, make them feel important.”
    “They’re not?”
    “Oh no, not at all. Just rich.” Felicia peered nearsightedly into the mirror at her perfectly pointed nose. “Shit, I look more like Pinocchio every day.” She sounded genuinely discouraged.
    Doesn’t she think of herself as beautiful? Molly guessed that she did not.
    “They split off from a much larger firm to go out on theirown,” Felicia went on, instructively. “Out on their own with gunnysacks of money. They don’t need two secretaries, they need maybe half of one.”
    Which left a lot of time for Molly and Felicia to talk, which they did. They liked each other very much, from the start. Although they were in many ways very unlike, each might have described the other in similar terms. “She’s very smart and really funny, very up-front.” Felicia might have added, For a Southerner, she’s unusual.
    Molly was on the whole happy, then. She knew she needed a much better, more demanding job, and eventually a larger place to live, but in the meantime it was good to be living away from Henry. Without his often-depressed and censorious presence she felt younger and lighter, stronger and smarter and funnier. (Henry had not much liked her jokes.)
    Molly’s insurance company wrote that a change of residence and work required a new physical, and so she made an appointment with an internist recommended by Felicia.
    Dr. Douglas Macklin was very tall and thin, very Bostonian-sounding; his voice awakened various nostalgias in Molly, even a little for Henry—at least she had always liked his voice. Seated in his office, she was asked the usual questions. Family illnesses? Really none. Her own health problems? None. And then he asked how she liked living in San Francisco.
    “I like it, but it’s an awfully self-conscious city, don’t you think?”
    “Oh, indeed I do. And parochial. Provincial.”
    They continued in that vein for quite some time, going on about the terrible newspaper, inadequate bookstores. Kitschy postcard views. Molly was aware of exaggerating the negative aspects of her response to the city, and perhaps he was too (after all, he had lived here for quite some time, she gathered), but this more or less set the tone for later encounters. Since Molly was always in perfect health, they continued this rather self-congratulatory city-bashing—even after Molly had to a great extentchanged her mind, or her feelings—after she had met Paul in that (very good) bookstore, and fallen in love and married. They went on and on, she and Dr. Macklin, amusing each other, Molly mostly listening—until she was really sick, and attention had to be paid.
    Paul had grown up in Montana—to Molly, more distant and exotic than California had ever been. His father had been a professional guide. Both parents had recently died; there was one brother, Matthew, about whom Paul only said, “He’s sort of a problem for me. He’s really what we used to call square, and he married this awful Joanne, a lawyer. He lives in Chicago and sells insurance,