Free Medicine Men by Alice Adams

slakings of thirst, she began to feel drowned.
    Many women complain, with reason, of too little sex in their lives, as Molly had privately done about Henry. With Henry more and more often it was she who initiated sex, as some therapists say you should, and more and more often he turnedher down, which made her feel terrible. Ugly and unloved—rejected.
    But Dave overdid it, so that Molly began to feel that he was engaged in some contest with himself. She was sure that he was counting: four times, not bad for a guy almost sixty. Try for five? But that was several too many times for Molly; she could not, was not thirsty anymore.
    Love with Paul was not exactly perfect, whatever perfect love would be, but for quite a while it was perfect enough for Molly. Until (another sign that she should have read) it slacked off to almost never. But in the good days, early on, she surely never thought of numbers, nor of being drowned.
    Invaded is actually what she felt with Dave. Assaulted. He almost never let her peacefully sleep; he kept waking her, prodding her, turning her over. And while he talked a lot about love, how much he loved her, how wonderful to find love twice in his lifetime, to Molly it did not feel like love but rather a form of aggression. She could have been anyone at all, Molly thought, and she often wondered, Why me?
    She complained, “You’ve got to let me sleep. This is crazy. You don’t listen. I need more sleep, and I need to be sort of alone to sleep.”
    “But you’re so terribly attractive to me. Aren’t you glad?”
    Actually she was not glad, but she did not feel that she could tell him that, and so she only repeated, “I’ve got to get more sleep. I’ll never get well with no sleep.”
    “Love is the greatest cure,” he told her, sententiously. “Haven’t you heard that? It’s what your friend Dr. Freud always said.” Like many so-called “real” doctors, Dave disliked and distrusted any form of psychotherapy; he was full of anecdotes (patients of his who had had terrible experiences with shrinks, and
no help
) and of very old bad jokes.
    However, playing up her illness was effective, Molly found. And besides, what she said was true: sleep deprivation made her feel a great deal worse.
    •  •  •
    Dave and Martha, his wife, had made love every night of their marriage, Dave told Molly. Taken literally, that statement struck her as impossible, or most unlikely. The certain truth, though, was that Martha was a woman who could not say no, and Molly tried to imagine that poor masochistic lady, who Dave had assured her was not a feminist. (“I’ll bet not,” Molly had said.)
    “I don’t remember her too well,” Felicia said. “I just met her once, at that terribly dark-brown house in the woods where they lived. It was a big party, and Dave was all over the place being host. She was more like the maid, serving things. She had the most boring perfect hair and perfect flowered silk dress, I do remember that. A real doctor’s wife, I thought. A fifties throwback. Of course that was early on with Sandy, and I was feeling a little hostile to wives, but still. That poor woman.”
    “Wasn’t Donna Reed’s husband a doctor? Remember ‘The Donna Reed Show’?”
    “I think so. The paradigmatic doctor’s wife, anyway.”
    “Poor Martha. Is Sandy’s wife like that, do you think—poor Connie?”
    After the tiniest pause, two beats, Felicia said, “Actually I don’t think so. I’ve heard lately that she’s doing really well. She went to AA, stopped drinking. And she’s fighting City Hall about the homeless.” Another pause. “I really don’t know what to do.”
    “Neither do I.”
    They laughed. Then Molly said, “I have a new theory about men like Dave who hate cats. They’re bullies, you know? And you can’t possibly bully a cat, that’s why they hate them.”
    Molly called Dr. Stinger to say that these new antibiotics did not work either. She felt worse. Dr. Stinger was out