She went to the doctor for an examination the next afternoon. She stretched out on the examination table, wearing a slip. The room was uncomfortably warm. The doctor touched her, she thought, with a gentleness that was not clinical, although this might, she knew, be the summit of her confused feelings, distorted by lewd dreams, drunkenness and a nearly sleepless night. As he handled her breasts she thought she saw in his face the undisguisable sadness of desire. She turned her face away but now her breathing was deep and tortured and her accumulated frustrations, her sorrow for Moses and her lust for Emile threatened to overwhelm her. What could she do? Discuss the weather? Criticize the Zoning Board? Evoke what seemed to her then to be the fragile and dishonest chain of circumstances that kept them from ruin? He seemed to linger, lasciviously, over the examination and she felt the bonds of her common sense give one by one until her feelings were wild. She reached up and caressed the back of his neck and he made no move to discourage her. When she heard him fumbling with his clothing she closed her eyes. The moment was explosive and instantaneous. She nearly lost consciousness. While he was dressing the telephone rang. “Yes, yes,” he said, “but as you know, Ethel, we don’t expect her to live through the day.” Melissa dressed and put on her furs. “When can I see you again?” the doctor asked. She didn’t reply. Six or seven patients were waiting in the front room. One of them, an old man, was groaning in pain. She was in great pain herself, a keener pain, she thought, because his suffering was blameless. She stepped out into the street, into the afternoon. The parking meters ticked. Chopped meat and bacon were on sale. A fountain splashed in the public park. She smiled and waved to a friend who passed in a car. The consummate skill with which she could appear respectable was crushing and she detested impostors. Here was the light of late afternoon—the store fronts seemed lit with fire—and she seemed, by her misery, shut away from the light.
Was she sick? It was the charitable judgment, she knew, that the street and its people would pass on her and she rebelled against it bitterly for if she was sick so was Moses, so was Emile, so was the doctor, so was mankind. The world, the village, would forgive her her sins if she would go to Dr. Herzog, whom she had last seen dancing with a fat woman in a red dress, and unburden herself three times a week for a year or two of her memories and confusions. But wasn’t it her detestation of bigotry and anesthesia that had gotten her into trouble, her loathing of mental, sexual and spiritual hygiene? She could not believe that her sorrows might be whitewashed as madness. This was her body, this was her soul, these were her needs.
