She tasted of silver and salt.
He probed her with his tongue, her back arched to him, her hands resting lightly on either side of his face, her fingers tightening as he explored her more relentlessly and discovered at last (“Yes, that’s it”) the miniature pink replica of his own spiring tower beating against the tortured sheet, the damp salt air, the silvery splintered sunshine. Dizzily he lapped at her, devouring her, consuming her, licking her quivering, quaking quim, tonguing her to dissolving oblivion, her litany echoing in his ears, bigcock, suckcock, wetcunt, eat me! Fuck Freud and his vagina dentata, David thought; Freud never went down on Molly Regen.
David’s father tipped to her sensuality as quickly as he had to her ethnicity. He became flirtatious, almost seductive. He had always played the fool for David’s mother, and he played the fool for Molly as well at their first meeting in that fall of 1957. One of his father’s specialties was the sophisticated pratfall. He would seemingly trip going up a flight of stairs, plunge headlong toward the steps, come up holding his hand to the famous Weber proboscis, and then smilingly pull the hand away to reveal his uninjured beak. Similarly, he would walk into walls or open doors, the hand coming up immediately to cover the supposedly violated nose, and then unmasking it (again the roguish smile) unbloodied and unbent. By David’s count, he walked into six doors before dinner that night. Molly giggled in delight each time. David was beginning to feel a little jealous.
His father punned unmercifully for her; she found this delightful, too, although David’s own puns over the past month had left her seemingly unmoved. “Would you please pass the bread, kiddo?” he said to David’s mother, and then winked at Molly and said, “I’ll bet bakers make a lot of dough.” Molly giggled. As he ladled out the soup, he asked, “Who was that ladle I saw you with last night?” and then immediately supplied, “That was no ladle, that was my knife.” Molly giggled. David looked at her. In recounting the history of all his failed businesses (he made them all sound like enormous successes he had abandoned on whims), he said, “I used to be in ladies’ underpants, too; pulled down a hundred a week,” and Molly giggled, and David thought of her own underpants and wondered if she was wearing any. (Besides, his father had never been in ladies’ underpants.)
His success with this mild sexual innuendo led to a bolder pun. Glancing covertly at Molly’s low-cut blouse, ostensibly commenting on the giggle that erupted girlishly each time he delivered another of his little bon mots (which David had only heard a thousand times already), he said, “I love your titters, Molly,” and then rolled his eyes heavenward as though he’d shocked even himself. Molly tittered. “A little more breast?” his father asked, extending the platter of chicken to her, compounding the felony. “You eat like a bird,” he said, and then immediately, “You chicks are all the same,” priding himself on what he thought was youthful jargon, even though the expression had gone out of style fifteen years ago. “You’ll waist away to a shadow,” he said, and spelled “waist” for her, lest she miss his cleverness, and then mysteriously added, “The Shadow knows,” to which Molly inexplicably giggled even before he touched the Weber legacy with the tip of his finger and amended his earlier remark to “The Shadow’s nose,” eliciting yet another giggle — was she losing her mind? “I once auditioned for a job as a r-r-r-radio an-an-announcer, his father said, imitating a stutterer, “b-but they t-t-turned me down. Anti-S-S-Semitism!” he said, and laughed triumphantly when Molly almost choked on her chicken.
He dubbed her “The Shiksa” that night.
It would become a private and personal endearment over the years.
He wanted The Shiksa to have his ring when he died.
That first meeting between them took place in September of 1957; it was not until February of 1958 — on St. Valentine’s Day, to be exact — that David knew he truly loved Molly. He wondered now if his father hadn’t fallen in love with her first.
The people in the waiting room were becoming family.
Lacking the proximity of his own family, deprived of anyone who might empathize and sympathize, he began thinking of these people as kindly relatives who understood and shared the pain and the suspense. He could have been a young boy again, surrounded by his Uncle Max, his Aunt Anna, his cousin Shirley, his cousin Rebecca.
“He’ll probably be wearing different clothes tomorrow,” Di Salvo said, and unconsciously stroked the mustache he was growing. “He’s finally going to bed. Tomorrow we’ll see him waking up in the morning, the tuxedo’ll be draped over the chair there.”
“Things take forever on the soaps,” Mrs. Daniels said. She was not wearing her wedgies today. She had on sandals instead. Her toenails were painted a bright red. She looked paler and thinner than she had yesterday. Her husband still refused to eat, she had told David, even when she and her daughter had tried feeding him.
“Usually on these soaps, the girl goes to bed with them,” Mrs. Horowitz said. Her face still looked flushed and excited. She was smoking a cigarette. “They get right into bed together. You can see their shoulders, they’re supposed to be naked.”
“Anything goes on television these days,” Mrs. Daniels’ fat daughter Louise said. Her own daughter was with her today, a thin, dark little girl, eight or nine years old, David guessed. Her ballet recital yesterday had been a great success, but when Mrs. Horowitz asked her more about it, she turned away shyly and buried her face in her mother’s bosom. “I’ll bet she has the biggest minnies in the entire world,” his cousin Shirley had said about their grandmother an eternity ago. He wondered where Shirley was now. The last he’d heard, she had divorced her second husband to run off with an insurance salesman.
“Hey, look, there he goes!” Di Salvo said. “He’s taking off his jacket!”
“He’ll be taking off his pants next,” Mrs. Daniels’ daughter said. “They can do anything they want on television nowadays.” She was wearing dangling red earrings today; they spilled from her short platinum hair like bloody teardrops, matching the lipstick slash across her mouth.
“Now he’s lowering his suspenders,” Di Salvo said.
“He’s keeping us in suspenders,” David said.
“That’s very good,” Mrs. Daniels said. “A smile every now and then, Mr. Weber. It can’t hurt.”
“Neither could a little chicken soup,” Mrs. Horowitz said, and suddenly winked at David, as if certain he would understand her reference to the old joke. He nodded to her, acknowledging her surmise.
“I’ll be happy to see the end of that tuxedo,” Di Salvo said.
“I’ll be happy to see the end of this room,” Mrs. Horowitz said.
“What room is this, Mommy?” the little girl asked Louise.
“It’s Intensive Care,” Louise said. “The waiting room.”
“Is it the hospital?”
“It’s the hospital.”
“Be quiet now, Charlene,” her grandmother said.
“She’s not supposed to visit unless she’s twelve, you know,” the pink lady said.