I WANTED TO DO it while he was still able to walk. It seemed immoral somehow to tell a dying man the miserable and imminent truth when he was helpless, lying down in the very path of the words. Maybe I expected him to be able to run, believed that I could give him a fighting chance. Driving to the hospital I remembered old movies where the girl came to the hideout and warned the rotten but lovable crook that the law was coming. Sometimes she said, Give yourself up, sweetheart. They’ll get you in the end. Other times she said, Run for it. You still have a chance.
I was supposed to tell Jay that too. There’s always a chance. It seemed like the most terrible of lies. He could look in the mirror, couldn’t he? He could see the truth in the wasting of himself, in the way he felt. How do you feel? Fine. How do you feel? I’m dying.
My hands and feet were cold, even though the heater blasted away. Maybe Jay would make it easier for me. He knows already, I told myself. How could he not know? It was just a matter of acknowledgment now. I know that you know that I know. That sort of crap. Oh Jesus. I had read it somewhere once. They always know. They. An unfortunate exclusive club of mortals. He was like his father, would be like his father, would be dust.
“That was the first blow to my innocence,” he told me in one of our earliest night talks. “When my father died. It’s like an old movie in my head that I can roll out whenever I want to. Sometimes when I don’t even want to.”
“You were in school, weren’t you,” I said, helping him to begin.
“Yes. They called me down to the principal’s office. Boy, in those days it really meant something. The principal had never spoken to me before. He was as remote and glorified as the president.”
“Knowing you, I’ll bet you thought you had done something wrong,” I said.
“The worst. What the hell could they have on me? I did my homework. I paid my G.O. money.”
“You played with yourself.”
“Not in school, kiddo. Anyway, Dr. Summers called me down to his office. They all had a doctorate then. His secretary was an old lady in orthopedic shoes. She called me James and I didn’t correct her, but I felt relieved. They had the wrong kid!”
“Oh you sweet dummy,” I said. “Then what happened?”
“ ‘Go inside, James,’ ” she said. “I can still see that dumb kid opening the door, a frosted glass door with gilt letters on it. Dr. Summers sat behind a big desk that was loaded with papers and books. He wore eyeglasses and he had silver-gray hair. The PTA mothers thought he was a knockout.”
“Then what happened?”
“That was it. He told me. He called me by my right name. He kept that desk between us and he told me.”
“Oh Jay.”
“Yeah. I didn’t believe him for just a minute. But Jesus, he was the principal. The flag was right there over his shoulder, and my father was dead on the job.”
“He didn’t suffer,” I said, as if I were commenting on fresh news.
“No, but I did. My innocence did.”
His innocence. Pulling into the parking lot at the hospital, I thought about that and about what I had to do now, without a doctorate or a flag or any other symbol of strength or authority.
It was old home week in the hospital room. Martin and his parents were there, a man from the television studio was visiting Jay, and in the corner of the room two strangers in coveralls wrestled with the vent of the heating unit. “Be out of here in a minute, folks,” one of them said, and he knocked on metal with a hammer, as if for emphasis.
Into that chaos I smiled at Jay, who winked back. Does a dying man who knows wink at his wife, smile at his friends, endure hammering and visitors, the whole selfish business of the surviving world? It didn’t seem possible. Jay wasn’t such a good actor. It was hard for us to hide anything from each other. Without thinking about it, we always sent out signals and clues of what we were feeling. Yet there we were. The man from the studio relinquished his seat to me, still laughing about something Jay had said to him. Potted plants languished on the windowsills, Martin’s father filed away at my brain with his voice.
“How do you feel?” I said idiotically to Jay, and then I kissed him, forestalling an answer.
“Not so hot,” he admitted, as we separated.
The man from the studio found his coat on a low shelf and said that he was leaving. I envied him his freedom to go and at the same time I wished that he would stay. I couldn’t speak to Jay in front of anyone else and now that it had to be done, now that I had decided to just do it, I wanted more time, delays, distractions. But I couldn’t remember the man’s name, even as I thought of seductive words to keep him in the room. I noticed with sharp attention a shiny place on the lapel of his suit jacket and I said, “Please don’t go yet. It’s early.” But it sounded only courteous, the perfunctory remark of a hostess who really wants to do the dishes and go to bed.
“We’ll walk you to the elevator,” I said, and Jay lifted himself from the bed and put his robe and slippers on. Doing those simple things seemed to require a real and deliberate effort on his part that made me want to hurry him along, to push his arms through the sleeves, the way you do to a small child with whom you’ve lost patience. The other man watched too, with a certain fascination, but none of us said anything.
We walked down the hall at Jay’s new slow pace and when we came to the elevator I had changed my mind again. I wanted the man to go quickly, to make his escape taking with him his small, inconsequential talk, his shiny lapels that made me feel so sad.
When he was gone and Jay turned again in the direction of his room, I put my hand on his arm. “Wait,” I said. “Let’s not go back there yet.”
His look was questioning and I tried to explain. “I want to be alone with you.”
“Oh, yeah?” Jay said, out of the corner of his mouth, but it was a small weak joke that didn’t seem to help either of us.
“Let’s try the other end of the hall, the solarium,” I said. All the way there I was terribly aware of the people everywhere: patients, visitors, aides, nurses. It was a goddam circus. Maybe I should put it off, I thought, and try to get permission to come up during the day when no one else was around. How could I say something like that without privacy? How could I say it anyway?
There was a cramp in my chest as if I had been running instead of trying to walk very slowly and not get there ahead of Jay. “Well, here we are,” I said, when we were indeed there, in the large room at the end of the hall. It wasn’t very busy that night, and there were two empty couches at the farthest corner of the room. Here? I thought. Now? Us? What if he screamed, or made a terrible scene? What if he cried, fainted, bellowed? What if I did? Oh God, what if?
We sat down, sharing one cushion of the smaller couch. The other people seemed far away and out of focus, like people in the background of a photograph. He knows, I told myself, with one last desperate surge of hope, and then I looked up and saw his eyes. They seemed strange, like the eyes of someone I had never met. There was no meaning, no message in their expression. He looked merely quizzical, expectant.
Maybe it’s the drugs, I thought. Personality changes happen. Everybody knows that. Maybe the drugs had dulled his senses a little, and it wouldn’t have the same horrendous meaning. Maybe I was crazy.
“Jay,” I said. Our hands joined, automatically finding one another in my lap. I took a deep difficult breath, sending out signals wildly like a sailor on a doomed ship.
But Jay just sat there, not willing to cooperate at all.
“Jay,” I said again. “I saw Doctor Block.”
Still he waited, silent.
“He asked me to come in. Jay?”
His hand was passive in mine, but his eyes were beginning to change, the pupils contracting to black points. It was a retreat. Run for it, sweetheart. You still have a chance.
His head tilted slightly now as if he found it difficult to hear me.
“We talked about the tests,” I said. Oh help me.
But he seemed to draw slightly away from me, from this unsolicited news.
“It’s not so good, darling.” Please.
He started, like someone jolted from a dream. “What in hell are you saying, Sandy?”
“It’s not good,” I said again.
He looked quickly around the room, his eyes darting like those of a schoolboy ready to cheat on an exam.
I followed his glance. No one was looking at us. People were leaving the solarium. We were going to be alone.
Jay looked back at me again, his face full of terrible belief. “He told you that? Block told you that?”
I nodded, gripping his hand against the trembling that had begun. “Jay, listen, darling. He said there’s research going on this very minute. There are remissions, you know …”
“Oh God. Oh shit,” he said. “Where is it? Is it everywhere?” He was terrified, terrifying.
I put my other hand against the pain in my chest “Marrow,” I whispered.
His eyes widened, shut for a moment and then fastened me down again. “So this is the whole thing,” he said, and he dropped my hand, as if that was what had betrayed him.
“Please darling. Don’t,” I said, not even knowing what I meant. Don’t what? Don’t mourn for yourself? Don’t rage or grieve? How did I dare tell him what to do? Give yourself up, sweetheart. They’ll get you in the end.
I thought that the other questions would come then: how long do I have? Have you told anyone? What about pain? Will it be very bad? I braced myself, but he didn’t say anything at all. And he didn’t touch me again then, not even absently.
I felt even worse than I had before. It was as if I had killed him myself, or tried to, only inflicting a terrible wound. Bang bang, you’re almost dead. My love, my dearest.
I didn’t know what to do now in this reversal of roles. It was always Jay who had wrung whatever goodness there was out of me at the same time that he protected me from the worst of myself with the fierce concentration of his love. Now I had to protect him, save him at least from the monster of his fear, if I couldn’t save him from death itself.
“Jay,” I said. “I love you, darling.” As if that mattered. As if anything mattered.
But it did. We turned at the same moment, colliding painfully in the desperate need to hold and to be held. We made sounds against one another, small anguished sounds that I would always remember.
When it was possible to be quiet again we stood together, and now it seemed natural for me to move slowly, as if I had become a part of Jay, of his cancer, his knowledge, his very being.
“Don’t come back now,” he whispered, at the elevator. “Go home.”
“All right,” I said, feeling all the unsaid words crowding around us. I had to do it. Forgive me. Love me. Don’t give up the ship. Remember faith and fucking hope and charity. Remember.
The elevator came. Someone in a wheelchair waited inside it, looked up at us with saintly patience. So we kissed briefly, a peck really, and I took the last of his innocence and went home.