As always, I shake it and thank him. As always, he says, “My pleasure.” He said this even after what I thanked him for was cutting me open and handing me the bad news. The way he put it was “I’m afraid it’s a true cancer.” In the first instant, I wondered idly if others were untrue, and would that be better or worse? Was it true as an arrow, meaning fatal; or true as a love, forgiving?
Next day I meet with two hatchlings. First Garrett, a painter of arctic landscapes, vast and cryptically dark. He lives in a sunny SoHo loft drenched with old money. Yes, Ad Reinhardt is a hero, so is Munch; but when I mention Frederic Church, he’s insulted. I spend the rest of the hour failing to win back his trust. It will be hard not to write about his scorn. The man is clearly spoiled. Then I head east, to Rose on Avenue C. Rose is very thin, very earnest, very young, and dresses in apologetic browns. She retrieves X-rays from the trash of a nearby animal clinic: terriers and greyhounds, cats’ skulls, a boa constrictor. On the film the animals’ names stand out: Tabitha, Rocky, Bilbo Baggins. Rose covers her walls with grids of these skeletons, then over them, in a squirreled white script, writes stories of love gone wrong. Through the words you see rib cages, livers, spleens.
“I copied some stuff from an article on battered wives in Cosmo,” she says. “I can’t, like, get sued, can I?” I assure her she can’t. I don’t tell her that Helen Gurley Brown is unlikely to come across her work.
I’m late to the hospital. On the machine, I shiver from the sweat of rushing. It pools, a salty tickling burn, behind my ears. Like a bad pop song picked up from the audio feed in a drugstore, Helen Gurley Brown is stuck in my brain. I don’t read her magazine, but I’ve seen her on talk shows, purring away in her bouffant wigs. I remember being told that her book Having It All was designed to open to the page where she tells you how to give the perfect blow job. How can I think these things while my body sponges up poison? Do I wonder, spitefully, why women like Mrs. Brown seem to live forever? Do I worry that I will never have any of it, never mind all, except maybe a plot of Rhode Island soil a mile down the road from my parents’ house?
In a flash, Blue is a mortician. I hear myself whisper, Don’t you dare leave me powerless. Don’t you dare bleed me dry.
Juan shows up to do his part and, like clockwork, Burt Lancaster makes his appearance. Burt, have you met Helen?
The first person I called with the terrible news was my sister. She was in her lab, packing for a field trip. Clem is a biologist who studies bears in Wyoming. She preaches the ultimate indifference of nature and can’t understand why people ever have children except to submit to their bullying genes. “Fuck,” she said. “Oh fuck, Lou.”
“Thanks for your apparent optimism.”
“No, listen, wait. It’s amazing what they can do now, but you have to let them do it all. Don’t fall for that macrobiotic shit, the shark cartilage, the Chinese herbs. Go for the slash and burn. It’s the best they’ve got right now.” That’s my sister, blunt as a nuclear warhead. “Fuck, Louisa. I’m saying all the wrong things.”
“No. I need to hear you tell me they can do it. You’re a scientist, you know about cells and mutations.”
“Send me your path report. I have an old boyfriend at NCI.”
“You have an old boyfriend everywhere, it’s incredible.”
“Not at the IRS. Not in Hollywood—hey, you’ve got that boyfriend—or at the Vatican. Nowhere really influential.” I knew she was trying to make me laugh, so I did.
“Louisa?” She sounded earnest, even timid, which was so peculiar for Clem. “One thing that’s really important? Try to keep from flipping out.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m serious.”
“I know.” Her tone spooked me. I said, “I’d better call Mom and Dad.”
“Oh no, honey,” said my mother. “Oh honey.”
“Mom, it might turn out okay,” I said. “They won’t know the whole story till they do more surgery. But they know it was small.”
“These tests can be all wrong. Doctors make mistakes. They see cancer everywhere, it’s the rage. For heaven’s sake, people are wearing ribbons for that disease. Pink! The color of babies, for heaven’s sake!”
I wasn’t sure how to respond, so I just listened to our connection for a couple of seconds, that intercity fuzz, until she told me that my father couldn’t handle bad news right then and would call me the next day. She’d decided this on her own, of course, because whether or not Dad was there, in the room with her, she hadn’t consulted him. Where emotions are concerned, she makes decisions for him all the time. She started to cry.
“Clem says they can probably beat it,” I said.
After crying a bit longer and assuring me that my sister was brilliant and must be right, Mom collected her Darwinian self and said, “Those’ve got to be your father’s genes; there’s no cancer on my side.” She’d been picturing her family tree, no doubt, its branches groaning under the weight of all the accidents and outmoded ills that killed her forebears. I told her genetic blame wasn’t the point. Before we said good-bye, she piped up, “Remember, sweetheart: it’s a long way from your heart.” Across a lifetime of skinned knees and injuries less physical, I’d always accepted that dismissal of pain, but this time I said, “In fact, you know what? For once, that’s not a bit true.” My right hand went straight to my left breast, as if the national anthem had started to play.
On my way home I shop for a frenzy of cooking. Cooking is my favorite strategy for holding panic at bay. (And if I’m to mention children again, I should do it over a good meal.) While Ray talks to his agent on the phone, I make rosemary-crusted chicken with caramelized onions, Arborio rice baked with Swiss chard, oolong-ginger soufflé.
When we sit down, Ray tells me about a possible job in Alberta, a movie about paratroopers. The happier he sounds, the more edgy I feel. He worries about his ankles—he tapes them lately when he goes running—but Alberta; Alberta is gorgeous. It sounds like he’s singing the praises of another woman.
“What do you plan to do one day when your body just up and goes on strike?” I say before I can stop myself. “It’s not like you’re an athlete, a big name. Nobody’s going to ask you to endorse their bran flakes or bunion pads. It seems a long way off, but you will hit fifty. And then?”
For a moment, Ray just chews. “Well. How was your day?”
“I’m serious. I have to be.”
“What will I do when I’m over the hill?” He shrugs. “How about the old bag-on-the-head routine?”
It takes me a minute. “Shoot yourself? Shoot yourself? Don’t you ever think about the future?”
“Committed vagrant, that’s me.” Ray stretches his mouth into an alligator smile, a pearl onion between his front teeth.
“Please stop all this mugging around. Please. It’s time, Ray.”
“Time to what? Fish or cut bait? Make babies or hit the road?” He looks out the window. In the dark, all that’s visible is a nodding leafless branch. Several seconds tick by before he says, “Sometimes it feels like … like if I couldn’t do things your way, say yes to all your desires, right now, what kind of a guy would I be?”
I fold my napkin from a square to a triangle, press it flat on the table. “What you want matters just as much.” But that’s not what I really think. I want to shout, Say yes, say yes, just say yes!
The soufflé, when I take it from the oven, is perfect, lofty as a delusion. Minutes later, as it sinks, the odor that fills the air—the smokiness of dark tea, the comfort of eggs—seems so wrong, I wish I could break down and cry. But not now.
When Ray came into my life, he was just that: a shaft of sunlight invading a murky room. I had been married for too long to a genteel but oblivious man whose still waters hid many things but not, after all, an undertow of passion. At first, the decorum and calm in my marriage had been such a relief that I thought, So this is it. But then I met Ray, and I knew, though it made me sadder than I had ever been, This is it. He called me
Miss Fever, Miss Open Flame, Miss Hundred and Ten in the Shade—and, once, Miss Bases Loaded Tying Run on Third No Outs. One day our illicit gymnastics left his handprints in the new gray carpet of my office; that night, I locked the door so the cleaning lady couldn’t remove them. Next morning, when I walked in and saw again the image of his hands, ghostly as petroglyphs, I began to shake. I locked the door for another hour. I was certain that my life as lived (so cautiously) was over.
We’re an archetypal mismatch: a daughter of the Mayflower (my pedigree, back to the rock and beyond, sepia-inked in a leather album that my father keeps in the top drawer of an heirloom highboy) and a football star from Smelterville, Idaho (the first of seven sons, three of them cops). Ray loves to point out how pampered I’ve been. He put himself through USC by working summers on a desert road crew. My parents, almost but not quite rich, put me through Harvard by selling stocks.
We argue often and loudly: about garlic (whether to mince or crush), about anarchy and idealism (which is more deluded), about flowered upholstery (if it means you’ve sold out). I like my world baroque; Ray preaches austerity. Maybe we’re so contentious because we’re both oldests: argumentative and, when shoved, unyielding and abrasive as tree trunks.
Early on, I asked if I could watch him work. He told me I’d be bored, but one November day he woke me up before dawn and drove me through the Holland Tunnel to a bleak industrial lot, location for a make-believe Mafia sting. I spent hours in the car, drinking scorched coffee and wishing I’d worn thicker socks. When at last he tapped on the clouded window and I wiped it clean, the vision was a shock: Ray in a white shirt, dark suit, and tie. Ray the Fed. For an hour, I watched him make the same punishing move over and over: jump from a ladder on a water tank, roll across a stretch of tarmac, fire a gun. It thrilled me so much I was almost ashamed.
Even now, I’m consumed by the physical details. I love Ray’s chaotically freckled skin, his slippery stout-brown hair. I love the way he holds his toast so primly aloft while reading the Village Voice or Boatbuilding Primer, the skeptical tilt of his eyebrows when he blows on a spoonful of chili. When we go biking, I let him lead so I can watch the muscles oscillate in his wide calves. The last girl picked for every team, I crave his solidity.
Week five and it pulls me down, a deep ice-cold weariness. Every night before dinner, I furl myself in two blankets and take a nap while Ray broods on the fate of the Yankees, his loyalty to all of us pained but unswerving. My breast is seared in blotches, and the scar has turned purple, ringed by green circles and crosses where the technicians take aim. They reapply the Sharpie whenever it fades.
A curator from the Guggenheim, someone who owes me a favor, calls me. A group show is to open in three weeks, and she’s just found out that one of the sculptors was killed. Driving his work down from Vermont on a flatbed truck, he hit blizzard number fourteen—the one I’d been hoping for, to stave off a jinx. A patch of ice, a spin given surefire momentum by two tons of crafted steel, all those trees along the interstate … This isn’t the power I hoped for, I think as I pick up the phone to call Esteban. I won’t tell him why; his conscience would never let him enjoy the big break he deserves.
At the hospital, the schedule’s in a shambles because of the snow, appointments backed up more than an hour. I don’t like this waiting room. Nothing’s private, because everyone knows why everyone else is here. There’s an orgy of sharing since few of us can cope with the silence. Ordinarily, that would include me, too—me and my compulsion for expository everything—but I’ve heard enough about visualization, metastasis, recurrence, negligent grown children, bewildered small children, scars, baldness, early menopause, doctors with hollow hearts. Today, though, is different; everyone’s talking about terrorism and politics. The World Trade Center was bombed last month, and this morning there was a scare at Kennedy, a forgotten duffel bag that led to evacuation and mayhem.
Wise old Nine humors me, looking hard for my funny bone. Some days, he’s the only one who can find it. I tell him about the waiting room, glad to have escaped to his dim, frigid cave. Nearly every seat was taken out there, everyone wearing the obligatory robe. We look like a bunch of kindergartners in smocks, waiting for our paints or a game of musical chairs. Better, a variation of Duck Duck Goose: Breast Breast Breast Lung, Prostate Prostate Breast Larynx Breast. Mostly breast by far.
I give Nine my litany on dying young: not having to floss, because you’ll never lose your teeth. Not having to turn down your Walkman, because you won’t get the chance to go deaf. Not living to see your parents in diapers, mistaking you for that villainous cousin who pawned the Murano goblets to finance his golf.
As if I’m the only one who tells him these things.
Tuesdays, I’m sheltered by Science rather than Sports. Dinosaurs are on the front page; my omen detector never shuts down.
“Clem called,” says Ray. “She’s in the lab till late. She wants to hear from you.”
His arms feel like a swimming pool after a subway ride in August. I say, “Dr. Bloom recommends a little chemo. I have two weeks to decide.”
The newspaper topples. “A little chemo? What, like a little night music? A pinch of genocide? A tad of Agent Orange? He never mentioned this before the surgery, did he? It wasn’t on his smug little program, excuse me if my memory fails.”
“They ration the bad news. It’s only humane.” Anger is not what I expected. I expected him to gang up with my sister—who called, I suspect, to make sure I submit. When I tell her about the chemo, she’ll tell me to beg for an extra helping or two. She will not, however, tell me to savor small moments of joy. For that I will be grateful.
“Humane as a cattle prod,” says Ray.
I twist around to see his face.
“I leave for Alberta in less than a month.”
“That’s great. I’m glad.” I think about Ray diving, over and over, out of the sky, one more fear I don’t need.
We arrive late at Esteban’s party because of my nap. The talk around us is half about bombs and half about babies, because in the midst of the group—radiant as a prophet, wearing a purple velvet dress and a sleeve of gold bangles—is a tall, handsome woman so enormously, tautly pregnant that she looks as if she’s expecting twins, any minute.
Esteban is in raptures, sharing his good fortune with the world. As he leads us through the loft, I hear Preston—”Why we don’t nuke the bejesus out of those clowns, for the life of me I don’t know”—and then Mary, our photo editor: “Sweetie, you’ll beg for the epidural, believe me.” As I come face-to-face with the pregnant woman, Esteban says, “I have been saying, saying all the time how I cannot wait for you to meet!” and I realize as he puts an arm around each of us that this is the much-revered Muriel.
“Esteban calls you La Découvrice. His discoverer. But I say you simply lucked out,” she says. “It was bound to happen, the only mystery was how.”
“I’m sure you’re right.” I make an effort to keep my eyes on her face. When she raises her eyebrows at Ray, I realize I’ve forgotten he’s with me.
“Nice to meet you,” he says once I’ve introduced him. He stares down briefly and blushes. “And I guess—well hey, congratulations, I guess.”
Muriel laughs. She holds her belly with both hands, as if it were a trophy.
Preston sidles up and kisses me on the neck. “Miz Looweeza, poised and fetching as ever.” He toasts me with a martini. He’s as overdressed as he is drunk (he drinks and dresses, after five, to unashamed extremes), in a navy-blue suit with a pink French-collared shirt and a tie with golf-ball polka dots. “I think we have ourselves a cotillion of future gods this year, a Mount Olympus in the making,” he stage-whispers in my ear. Along with Esteban’s friends, a dozen of the hatchlings are here.
“May I thank our glamorous hostess for bringing us all together,” Preston drawls at Muriel. He spreads a hand across the expanse of velvet below her breasts. “There’s testosterone humming away in there, I can feel it.”
She seems delighted by his attention, or else she’s a very fine actress. I’d have slapped him.
Ray has wandered away. I see him, on tiptoe, whistling into the birdcage. Caught between Preston’s sloshed preening and Muriel’s radiance, I realize that a party is the last place on earth I’m ready to be. I nearly shout when I feel something damp on my hand.
“Hello, my panda king!” Muriel exclaims, reaching down. A massive black dog stands at my side, wagging his entire body. “This is Kiko. Kiko’s my hottest star, aren’t you, bushka?”
Kiko’s arrival draws several guests in our direction, including Rose of the lovelorn X-rays and Garrett of the midnight ice floes. A large woman in an elaborate turban also joins us. She kneels beside me and hugs the dog, who licks her face. “Mère, tu es sa favorite!” says Muriel, making a sequence of musical gestures with her hands.
“I love dogs, but my landlord hates them,” Rose says sadly.
“This is no dog. This is a pony,” says Preston.
“He’s a Bernese mountain dog.” Muriel scratches him behind the ears. His eyes close in pleasure.
“Oh right, totes booze to marooned mountaineers.”
“You’re thinking of Saint Bernards.” She tells us she’s an animal handler. “A wrangler. Don’t you love it? Picture me lassoing a steer.” Muriel handles dogs and cats, plus the occasional monkey. Just now, dogs are the rage in commercials; they’ll sell anything from credit cards to disposable diapers. Kiko, the only client she owns, is bringing in a nice nest egg for the baby’s college tuition.
“Like, what’s Kiko been in?” asks Rose.
“Next month, a TV movie about a family trapped on a houseboat in Hurricane Andrew. Kiko, as you can guess, saves their lives.”
Across the room, Ray talks to Mary and Esteban. He wears a studious, tender expression and swings his arms as if directing traffic. An illustration of something grand. I forgot he could look so passionate.