Evan Hunter - Far From the Sea

“Well, they are, basically. The fluid is something we can take care of, we’ve put him on medication to clear it up. His kidneys were beginning to malfunction as well...”

“Is that why there’s a tube in his penis?”

“No, that’s to facilitate emptying of the bladder.”

He looked at Bessie. Bessie looked back at him, her blue eyes unflinching. “It would have been foolish to risk an operation until the numbers were right,” Kaplan said.

“I’m not sure we should risk an operation at all ,” David said.

“Is there a choice, Mr. Weber?”

David looked at him.

“I don’t think there’s a choice, Mr. Weber.”

“When will you do it?”

“Tomorrow afternoon. I expect the problems will be resolved by tomorrow morning. We normally operate on infected patients in the afternoon. We try to operate on any non infected patients in the morning.”

“But you were supposed to operate on him this morning, weren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And he was infected, wasn’t he? He’s still infected, in fact.”

“Yes, but we ran into the problems I just told you about.”

It was all beginning to sound like gobbledygook.

“So now you won’t be operating till tomorrow afternoon. When you normally operate on infected patients.”

“Once we resolve the problems,” Kaplan said, and nodded. “And when we’re sure his heart can...”

“His heart ?” David said. “What’s wrong with his heart? ”

“He’s eighty-two years old, there’s fluid in his lungs,” Kaplan said. “We want to make sure he has the optimum chance of getting through this surgery.”

“You’re certain you’ll be able to resolve these problems?”

“I would hope so.”

“So what time will he go into surgery? Tomorrow, I mean.”

“Shortly after noon, I would expect. If the numbers are correct.”

“The numbers?”

“The readings on the heart and kidneys. I’ve been in constant touch with the cardiologist, and I plan to update the anesthesiologist before we operate. I can assure you we won’t do anything foolhardy, Mr. Weber.”

David felt mildly chastised.

“We’re trying, believe me,” Kaplan said.

“Then why is he still sick?” Bessie asked suddenly.

“I wish I could tell you that,” Kaplan said wearily. He turned to meet her challenging gaze. “My own wife died three years ago. I’m a physician, a surgeon, I still don’t know what killed her. There are things we don’t know. I wish we did know them. But we don’t.” He sighed heavily and turned to David again. “I wish I could get him to walk out of here tomorrow, believe me. I wish I could wave a magic wand over him and cure him. I can’t. I’m doing my best.”

“I’m sorry about your wife,” David said.

Kaplan nodded.

“Will I be able to see him tomorrow morning, before the operation?”

“Yes, you can come at eleven, the usual time.”

“Will you be here then?”

“Possibly.”

“I’ll look for you.”

“Please do.”

“What shall I tell my father?”

“The truth,” Kaplan said.

They decided it would be a great gag to lie to his father.

Tell him only afterward that the Molly he would automatically assume was a Regan rather than a Regen (a Webb rather than a Weber, so to speak), a blond, green-eyed, freckle-faced representative of the enemy camp (right in his own living room!), wasn’t Irish at all but was instead as Jewish as the Torah. A man who could change an “earn” to an “urn” would be thoroughly delighted by a Regan-Regen mishegoss — unless he died of a heart attack the moment he was introduced to her, a danger that was greater as concerned David’s mother, who on many an occasion had declared her intention to stick her head in the oven if he ever brought home a shiksa. His father would roar with laughter once they revealed the truth to him.

He tipped at once.

“Why’d a nice Jewish girl like you change her name?” he asked.

So much for that.

David had been seeing her for little more than a month by then; this was the fall of 1957; he was just entering his second year at N.Y.U. Law. He was not yet in love with her. That would come later. On Valentine’s Day. He often wondered whether his father’s stamp of approval had been necessary before he could make the transition from merely wanting her day and night to actually loving her. “I’ll tell you something,” a fellow law student once said to him. “Men aren’t into love, they’re into sex. If the sex is good, they kid themselves into thinking that’s love. Women are just the opposite. First they fall in love, and then they translate that into sexuality. The prosecution rests.”

But Molly—

Oh, God, Molly.

She approached sex with all the innocence and all the expertise of an idiot savant. There was nothing she was unwilling to try, nothing she denied him. He asked her once if she thought about sex often, and she replied, “Yes, all the time.” He had never known anyone like her; her appetite was so overwhelming it frightened him sometimes. He once wondered, aloud, if he had stumbled across his first real-live nymphomaniac, and Molly said, “Nymphos don’t come, David.” They made love either in his apartment on Christopher Street, six blocks from the school, or else in her smaller apartment on First Avenue, near the hospital. Often, when they were apart — even if they’d seen each other only minutes earlier — he phoned her and they masturbated the way they had that first time (“The Regen-Weber Phone Phuck,” she called it). She confessed to having begun masturbating at the age of ten, said she used to do it with a book open on her lap while her teacher prattled on about geography. That was why she didn’t know where North Carolina was. She had masturbated her way clear across the United States of America, north and south, east and west. “I also masturbated my way through civics, history, geometry, and biology — especially biology. I love masturbating, what’s wrong with it?”

David could see nothing wrong with it and often encouraged her to do it in his presence. She did so eagerly and without any sense of shame or self-consciousness, slipping her panties off, spreading her legs for him (“I love you to watch me”), touching herself gently at first and then more vigorously and at last ferociously, writhing on the bed, her skirt above her waist, her legs finally closing tight around her wildly rotating hand and her violent orgasm. He once bought her a pair of red crotchless panties and asked her to put them on (“Where’d you get these? God, I feel so open! ”), and she sat on a chair opposite him and, anticipating his request, placed her hand between her legs and brought herself to fitful climax within minutes, asking him seconds later to fuck her with the panties on, “Stick that big cock in me and grab my ass, David, with me all open in these panties.”

On another occasion, he bought a vibrator for her and told her he was interviewing applicants for saleswomen to sell the “marital aid” on a door-to-door basis, demonstrating its pleasures to any prospective customer, the sole restriction being that he could not possibly hire anyone who herself succumbed to the product’s temptations. “Oh, I get it,” she said at once, “I’m not allowed to come, right? I don’t get the job if I come.” She stood before him holding her skirt above her waist — she was wearing her nurse’s uniform that day, crisply starched and white, long white stockings, white garter belt and panties — and switched on the eight-inch-long device, and became at once a shy and inexperienced virgin with a dangerous toy, rubbing the pulsating cock-shaped machine over the nylon of the white panties, and then sliding it beneath the lace-trimmed leghole (“Wow, this is really something!”), releasing her skirt for a moment to step out of the panties, and standing spread-legged before him again, one hand clutched into the bunched skirt, the other manipulating the vibrator, pulling it away each time she felt close to orgasm (“I can’t stand it!”), and finally thrusting the entire pulsating shaft inside her, head thrown back, hips thrust forward, widespread legs quivering (“Oh, my God , it’s like a thunderstorm!”).