My wife, the doctor, is not well. In the end she could be dead. It started suddenly, on a country weekend, a movie with friends, a pizza, and then pain. “I liked the part where he lunged at the woman with a knife,” Eric says.
“She deserved it,” Enid says.
“Excuse me,” my wife says, getting up from the table.
A few minutes later I find her doubled over on the sidewalk. “Something is ripping me from the inside out.”
“Should I get the check?” She looks at me like I am an idiot.
“My wife is not well,” I announce, returning to the table. “We have to go.”
“What do you mean—is she all right?”
Eric and Enid hurry out while I wait for the check. They drive us home. As I open the front door, my wife pushes past me and goes running for the bathroom. Eric, Enid, and I stand in the living room, waiting.
“Are you all right in there?” I call out.
“No,” she says.
“Maybe she should go to the hospital,” Enid says.
“Doctors don’t go to the hospital,” I say.
She lies on the bathroom floor, her cheek against the white tile. “I keep thinking it will pass.”
“Call us if you need us,” Eric and Enid say, leaving.
I tuck the bath mat under her head and sneak away. From the kitchen I call a doctor friend. I stand in the dark, whispering, “She’s just lying there on the floor, what do I do?”
“Don’t do anything,” the doctor says, half-insulted by the thought that there is something to do. “Observe her. Either it will go away, or something more will happen. You watch and you wait.”
Watch and wait. I am thinking about our relationship. We haven’t been getting along. The situation has become oxygenless and addictive, a suffocating annihilation, each staying to see how far it will go.
I sit on the edge of the tub, looking at her. “I’m worried.”
“Don’t worry,” she says. “And don’t just sit there staring.”
Earlier in the afternoon we were fighting, I don’t remember about what. I only know—I called her a bitch.
“I was a bitch before I met you and I’ll be a bitch long after you’re gone. Surprise me,” she said. “Tell me something new.”
I wanted to say, I’m leaving. I wanted to say, I know you think I never will and that’s why you treat me like you do. But I’m going. I wanted to get in the car, drive off, and call it a day.
The fight ended with the clock. She glanced at it. “It’s six-thirty, we’re meeting Eric and Enid at seven; put on a clean shirt.”
She is lying on the bathroom floor, the print of the bath mat making an impression on her cheek. “Are you comfortable?” I ask.
She looks surprised, as though she’s just realized she’s on the floor.
“Help me,” she says, struggling to get up.
Her lips are white and thin.
“Bring me a trash can, a plastic bag, a thermometer, some Tylenol, and a glass of water.”
“Are you going to throw up?”
“I want to be prepared,” she says.
We are always prepared. We have flare guns and fire extinguishers, walkie talkies, a rubber raft, a hundred batteries in assorted shapes and sizes, a thousand bucks in dollar bills, enough toilet paper and bottled water to get us through six months. When we travel we have smoke hoods in our carry-on bags, protein bars, water purification tablets, and a king-sized bag of M&Ms. We are ready and waiting.
She slips the digital thermometer under her tongue; the numbers move up the scale—each beep is a tenth of a degree.
“A hundred and one point four,” I announce.
“I have a fever?” she says in disbelief.
“I wish things between us weren’t so bad.”
“It’s not as bad as you think,” she says. “Expect less and you won’t be disappointed.”
We try to sleep; she is hot, she is cold, she is mumbling something about having “a surgical belly,” something about “guarding and rebound.” I don’t know if she’s talking about herself or the NBA.
“This is incredible.” She sits bolt upright and folds over again, writhing. “Something is struggling inside me. It’s like one of those alien movies, like I’m going to burst open and something’s going to spew out, like I’m erupting.” She pauses, takes a breath. “And then it stops. Who would ever have thought this would happen to me—and on a Saturday night?”
“Is it your appendix?”
“That’s the one thought I have, but I’m not sure. I don’t have the classic symptoms. I don’t have anorexia or diarrhea. When I was eating that pizza, I was hungry.”
“Is it an ovary? Women have lots of ovaries.”
“Women have two ovaries,” she says. “It did occur to me that it could be Mittelschmertz.”
“Mittelschmertz?”
“The launching of the egg, the middle of the cycle.”
At five in the morning her temperature is one hundred and three. She is alternately sweating and shivering.
“Should I drive you back to the city or to the hospital out here?”
“I don’t want to be the doctor who goes to the ER with gas.”
“Fine.”
I am dressing myself, packing, thinking of what I will need in the waiting room: cell phone, notebook, pen, something to read, something to eat, my wallet, her insurance card.
We are in the car, hurrying. There is an urgency to the situation, the unmistakable sense that something bad is happening. I am driving seventy miles an hour.
She is not a doctor now. She is lost, inside herself.
“I think I’m dying,” she says.
I pull up to the emergency entrance and half-carry her in, leaving the car doors open, the engine running; I have the impulse to drop her off and walk away.
The emergency room is empty. There is a bell on the check-in desk. I ring it twice.
A woman appears. “Can I help you?”
“My wife is not well,” I say. “She is a doctor.”
The woman sits at her computer. She takes my wife’s name. She takes her insurance card and then she takes her temperature and blood pressure. “Are you in a lot of pain?”
“Yes,” my wife says.
Within minutes a doctor is there, pressing on my wife. “It’s got to come out,” he says.
“What?” I ask.
“Appendix. Do you want some Demerol?”
She shakes her head. “I’m working tomorrow and I’m on call.”
In the cubicle next to her, someone vomits.
The nurse comes to take blood. “They called Barry Manilow—he’s a very good surgeon.” She ties off my wife’s arm. “We call him Barry Manilow because he looks like Barry Manilow.”
“I want to do right by you,” Barry Manilow says, as he’s feeling my wife’s belly. “I’m not sure it’s your appendix, not sure it’s your gall bladder either. I’m going to call the radiologist and let him scan it. How’s that sound?” She nods.
I take the surgeon aside. “Should she be staying here? Is this the place to do this?”
“It’s not a kidney transplant,” he says.
The nurse brings me a cold drink. She offers me a chair. I sit close to the gurney where my wife lies. “Do you want me to get you out of here? I could hire a car and have us driven to the city. I could have you medevaced home.”
“I don’t want to go anywhere,” she says. She is on the wrong side of it now.
Back in the cubicle, Barry Manilow is talking to her. “It’s not your appendix. It’s your ovary. It’s a hemmorhagic cyst; you’re bleeding and your hematocrit is falling. We have to operate. I’ve called a gynecologist and the anesthesiologist—I’m just waiting for them to arrive. We’re going to take you upstairs very soon.”
“Just do it,” she says.
I stop Barry Manilow in the hall. “Can you try and save the ovary, she very much wants to have children. It’s just something she hasn’t gotten around to yet—first she had her career, then me, and now this.”
“We’ll do everything we can,” he says, disappearing through the door marked “Authorized Personnel Only.”
I am the only one in the surgical waiting room, flipping through copies of Field and Stream, Highlights for Children, a pamphlet on colon cancer. Less than an hour later, Barry Manilow comes to find me. “We saved the ovary. We took out something the size of a lemon.”
“The size of a lemon?”
He makes a fist and holds it up—“A lemon,” he says. “It looked a little funny. We sent it to Pathology.” He shrugs.
A lemon, a bleeding lemon, like a blood orange, a lemon souring in her. Why is fruit used as the universal medical measurement?
“She should be upstairs in about an hour.”
When I get to her room she is asleep. A tube poking out from under the covers drains urine into a bag. She is hooked up to oxygen and an IV.
I put my hand on her forehead. Her eyes open.
“A little fresh air,” she says, pulling at the oxygen tube. “I always wondered what all this felt like.”
She has a morphine drip, the kind she can control herself. She keeps the clicker in hand. She never pushes the button.
I feed her ice chips and climb into the bed next to her. In the middle of the night I go home. In the morning she calls, waking me up.
“Flowers have been arriving like crazy,” she says, “from the hospital, from the ER, from the clinic.”
Doctors are like firemen. When one of their own is down they go crazy.
“They took the catheter out, I’m sitting up in a chair. I already had some juice and took myself to the bathroom,” she says proudly. “They couldn’t be nicer. But, of course, I’m a very good patient.”
I interrupt her. “Do you want anything from the house?”
“Clean socks, a pair of sweat pants, my hairbrush, some toothpaste, my face soap, a radio, maybe a can of Diet Coke.”
“You’re only going to be there a couple of days.”
“You asked if I needed anything. Don’t forget to feed the dog.”
Five minutes later she calls back, crying. “I have ovarian cancer.”
I run out the door. When I get there the room is empty. I’m expecting a big romantic scene, expecting her to cling to me, to tell me how much she loves me, how she’s sorry we’ve been having such a hard time, how much she needs me, wants me, now more than ever. The bed is empty. For a moment I think she’s died, jumped out the window, escaped. Her absence is terrifying.
In the bathroom, the toilet flushes. “I want to go home,” she says, stepping out, fully dressed.
“Do you want to take the flowers?”
“They’re mine, aren’t they? Do you think all the nurses know I have cancer? I don’t want anyone to know.”
The nurse comes with a wheelchair; she takes us down to the lobby. “Good luck,” she says, loading the flowers into the car.
“She knows,” my wife says.
We are on the Long Island Expressway. I am dialing and driving. I call my wife’s doctor in New York.
“She has to see Kibbowitz immediately,” the doctor says.
“Do you think I’ll lose my ovary?”
She will lose everything—instinctively I know that.
We are home. She is on the bed with the dog on her lap. She peeks beneath the gauze; her incision is crooked, the lack of precision an incredible insult. “Do you think they can fix it?”
In the morning we go to Kibbowitz. She is again on a table, her feet in the stirrups, in launch position, waiting. Before the doctor arrives she is interviewed and examined by seven medical students. I hate them. I hate them for talking to her, for touching her, for wasting her time. I hate Kibbowitz for keeping her on the table for more than an hour, waiting.
And she is angry with me for being annoyed. “They’re just doing their job.”
Kibbowitz arrives. He is enormous, like a hockey player, a brute and a bully. It is hard to understand how a man gets gynecologic oncology as his calling. I can tell immediately that she likes him. She will do anything he says.
“Scootch down a little closer to me,” he says, settling himself on a stool between her legs. She lifts her ass and slides down. He examines her. He looks under the gauze—“Crooked,” he says. “Get dressed and meet me in my office.”
“I want a number,” she says. “A survival rate.”
“I don’t deal in numbers,” he says.
“I need a number.”
He shrugs. “How’s seventy percent?”
“Seventy percent what?”
“Seventy percent live five years.”
“And then what?” I ask.
“And then some don’t,” he says.
“What has to come out?” she asks.
“What do you want to keep?”
“I wanted to have a child.”
This is a delicate negotiation; they talk parts. “I could take just the one ovary,” he says. “And then after the chemo you could try and get pregnant and then after you had a child we could go in and get the rest.”
“Can you really get pregnant after chemo?” I ask.
The doctor shrugs. “Miracles happen all the time,” he says. “The problem is you can’t raise a child if you’re dead. You don’t have to decide now, let me know in a day or two. Meanwhile I’ll book the operating room for Friday morning. Nice meeting you,” he says, shaking my hand.
“I want to have a baby,” she says.
“I want to have you,” I say.
Beyond that I say nothing. Whatever I say she will do the opposite. We are at that point—spite, blame, and fault. I don’t want to be held responsible. She opens the door of the consulting room. “Doctor,” she shouts, hurrying down the hall after him, clutching her belly, her incision, her wound. “Take it,” she screams. “Take it all the hell out.”
He is standing outside another examination room, chart in hand.
He nods. “We’ll take it through your vagina. We’ll take the ovaries, the uterus, cervix, omentum, and your appendix, if they didn’t already get it in Southampton. And then we’ll put a port in your chest and sign you up for chemotherapy—eight rounds should do it.”
She nods.
“See you Friday.”
We leave. I am holding her hand, holding her pocketbook on my shoulder, trying to be as good as anyone can be.
“Why don’t they just say ‘eviscerate’? Why don’t they just come out and say, on Friday at nine we’re going to eviscerate you—be ready.”
“Do you want a little lunch? Some soup? There’s a lovely restaurant near here.”
She looks flushed. I put my hand to her forehead. She’s burning up. “You have a fever. Did you mention that to the doctor?”
“It’s not relevant.”
Later, when we are home, I ask, “Do you remember our third date? Do you remember asking—how would you kill yourself if you had to do it with bare hands? I said I would break my nose and shove it up into my brain, and you said you would reach up with your bare hands and rip your uterus out through your vagina and throw it across the room.”
“What’s your point?”
“No point—I just suddenly remembered it. Isn’t Kibbowitz taking your uterus out through your vagina?”
“I doubt he’s going to throw it across the room,” she says. There is a pause. “You don’t have to stay with me now that I have cancer. I don’t need you. I don’t need anyone. I don’t need anything.”
“If I left, I wouldn’t be leaving because you have cancer. But I would look like an ass, everyone would think I couldn’t take it.”
“I would make sure they knew it was me, that I was a monster, a cold steely monster, that I drove you away.”
“They wouldn’t believe you.”
She suddenly farts and runs, embarrassed, into the bathroom—as though this is the first time she’s farted in her life. “My life is ruined,” she yells, slamming the door.
“Farting is the least of it.”
When she comes out she is calmer, she crawls into bed next to me, wrung out, shivering.
I hold her. “Do you want to make love?”
“You mean one last time before I’m not a woman, before I’m a dried old husk?”
Instead of fucking we fight. It’s the same sort of thing, dramatic, draining. When we’re done, I roll over and sleep in a tight knot on my side of the bed.
“Surgical menopause,” she says. “That sounds so final.” I turn toward her. She runs her hand over her pubic hair. “Do you think they’ll shave me?”
I am not going to be able to leave the woman with cancer. I am not the kind of person who leaves the woman with cancer, but I don’t know what you do when the woman with cancer is a bitch. Do you hope that the cancer prompts the woman to reevaluate herself, to take it as an opportunity, a signal for change? As far as she’s concerned there is no such thing as the mind-body connection; there is science and there is law. There is fact and everything else is bullshit.
Friday morning, while she is in the hospital registration area waiting for her number to be called, she makes another list out loud: “My will is in the top left drawer of the dresser. If anything goes wrong, pull the plug. No heroic measures. I want to be cremated. Donate my organs. Give it away, all of it, every last drop.” She stops. “I guess no one will want me now that I’m contaminated.” She says the word “contaminated” filled with disgust, disappointment, as though she has failed, soiled herself.
It is nearly eight P.M. when Kibbowitz comes out to tell me he’s done. “Everything was stuck together like macaroni and cheese. It took longer than I expected. I found some in the fallopian tube and some on the wall of her abdomen. We cleaned everything out.”
She is wheeled back to her room, sad, agitated, angry.
“Why didn’t you come and see me?” she asks accusatorily.
“I was right there the whole time, on the other side of the door, waiting for word.”
She acts as though she doesn’t believe me, as though I screwed with a secretary from the patient services office while she was on the table.
“How’re you feeling?”
“Like I’ve taken a trip to another country and my suitcases are lost.”
She is writhing. I adjust her pillow, the position of the bed.
“What hurts?”
“What doesn’t hurt? Everything hurts. Breathing hurts.”
Because she is a doctor, because she did her residency at this hospital, they give me a small folding cot to set up in the corner of the room. Bending to unfold it, something happens in my back, a hot searing pain spreads across and down. I lower myself to the floor, grabbing the blanket as I go.
Luckily she is sleeping.
The nurse who comes to check her vital signs sees me. “Are you in trouble?”
“It’s happened before,” I say. “I’ll just lie here and see where it goes.”
She brings me a pillow and covers me with the blanket.
Eric and Enid arrive. My wife is asleep and I am still on the floor. Eric stands over me.
“We’re sorry,” Eric whispers. “We didn’t get your message until today. We were at Enid’s parents’—upstate.”
“It’s shocking, it’s sudden, it’s so out of the blue.” Enid moves to look at my wife. “She looks like she’s in a really bad mood, her brow is furrowed. Is she in pain?”
“I assume so.”
“If there’s anything we can do, let us know,” Eric says.
“Actually, could you walk the dog?” I pull the keys out of my pocket and hold them in the air. “He’s been home alone all day.”
“Walk the dog—I think we can do that,” Eric says, looking at Enid for confirmation.
“We’ll check on you in the morning,” Enid says.
“Before you go; there’s a bottle of Percoset in her purse—give me two.”
During the night she wakes up. “Where are you?” she asks.
“I’m right here.”
She is sufficiently drugged that she doesn’t ask for details. At around six she opens her eyes and sees me on the floor.
“Your back?”
“Yep.”
“Cancer beats back,” she says and falls back to sleep.
When the cleaning man comes with the damp mop, I pry myself off the floor. I’m fine as long as I’m standing.
“You’re walking like you have a rod up your ass,” my wife says.
“Is there anything I can do for you?” I ask, trying to be solicitous.
“Can you have cancer for me?”
The pain management team arrives to check on my wife’s level of comfort.
“On a scale of one to ten, how do you feel?” the pain fellow asks.
“Five,” my wife says.
“She lies,” I say.
“Are you lying?”
“How can you tell?”
The specialist arrives. “I know you,” he says, seeing my wife in the bed. “We went to school together.”
My wife tries to smile.
“You were the smartest one in the class and now look,” he reads my wife’s chart. “Ovarian cancer and you, that’s horrible.”
My wife is sitting up high in her hospital bed, puking her guts into a metal bucket, like a poisoned pet monkey. She is throwing up bright green like an alien. Ted, her boss, stares at her, mesmerized.
The room is filled with people—people I don’t know, medical people, people she went to school with, people she did her residency with, a man whose fingers she sewed back on, relatives I’ve not met. I don’t understand why they don’t excuse themselves, why they don’t step out of the room. I don’t understand why there is no privacy. They’re all watching her like they’ve never seen anyone throw up before—riveted.
She is not sleeping. She is not eating. She is not getting up and walking around. She is afraid to leave her bed, afraid to leave her bucket.
I make a sign for the door. I borrow a black Magic Marker from the charge nurse and print in large black letters, DO NOT DISTURB.
They push the door open. They come bearing gifts, flowers, food, books. “I saw the sign, I assumed it was for someone else.”
I am wiping green spittle from her lips.
“Do you want me to get rid of everyone?” I ask.
I want to get rid of everyone. The idea that these people have some claim to her, some right to entertain, distract, bother her more than I, drives me up the wall. “Should I tell them to go?”
She shakes her head. “Just the flowers, the flowers nauseate me.”
An hour later, I empty the bucket again. The room remains overcrowded. I am on my knees by the side of her hospital bed, whispering, “I’m leaving.”
“Are you coming back?” she whispers.
“No.”
She looks at me strangely. “Where are you going?”
“Away.”
“Bring me a Diet Coke.”
She has missed the point.
It is heartbreaking seeing her in a stained gown, in the middle of a bed, unable to tell everyone to go home, unable to turn it off. Her pager is clipped to her hospital gown, several times it goes off. She returns the calls. She always returns the calls. I imagine her saying, “What the hell are you bothering me for—I’m busy, I’m having cancer.”
Later, I am on the edge of the bed, looking at her. She is increasingly beautiful, more vulnerable, female.
“Honey?”
“What?” Her intonation is like a pissy caged bird—cawww. “What? What are you looking at? What do you want?” Cawww.
“Nothing.”
I am washing her with a cool washcloth.
“You’re tickling me,” she complains.
“Make sure you tell her you still find her attractive,” a man in the hall tells me. “Husbands of women who have mastectomies need to keep reminding their wives that they are beautiful.”
“She had a hysterectomy,” I say.
“Same thing.”
Two days later, they remove the packing. I am in the room when the resident comes with a long tweezers like tongs and pulls yards of material from her vagina, wads of cotton, and gauze, stained battlefield red. It’s like a magic trick gone awry, one of those jokes about how many people you can fit in a telephone booth, more and more keeps coming out.
“Is there anything left in there?” she asks.
The resident shakes his head. “Your vagina now just comes to a stop, it’s a stump, an unconnected sleeve. Don’t be surprised if you bleed, if you pop a stitch or two.” He checks her chart and signs her out. “Kibbowitz has you on pelvic rest for six weeks.”
“Pelvic rest?” I ask.
“No fucking,” she says.
Not a problem.
Home. She watches forty-eight hours of Holocaust films on cable TV. Although she claims to compartmentalize everything, suddenly she identifies with the bald, starving prisoners of war. She sees herself as a victim. She points to the naked corpse of a woman. “That’s me,” she says. “That’s exactly how I feel.”
“She’s dead,” I say.
“Exactly.”
Her notorious vigilance is gone. As I’m fluffing her pillows, her billy club rolls out from under the bed. “Put it in the closet,” she says.
“Why?” I ask, rolling it back under the bed.
“Why sleep with a billy club under the bed? Why do anything when you have cancer?”
During a break between Shoah and The Sorrow and the Pity, she taps me. “I’m missing my parts,” she says. “Maybe one of those lost eggs was someone special, someone who would have cured something, someone who would have invented something wonderful. You never know who was in there. They are my lost children.”
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?” she looks at me accusingly.
“Everything.”
“Thirty-eight-year-olds don’t get cancer, they get Lyme disease, maybe they have appendicitis, on rare occasions in some other parts of the world they have Siamese twins, but that’s it.”
In the middle of the night she wakes up, she throws the covers off. “I can’t breathe, I’m burning up. Open the window, I’m hot, I’m so hot.”
“Do you know what’s happening to you?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re having hot flashes.”
“I am not,” she says, as though I’ve insulted her. “They don’t start so soon.”
They do.
“Get away from me, get away,” she yells. “Just being near you makes me uncomfortable, it makes my temperature unstable.”
On Monday she starts chemotherapy.
“Will I go bald?” she asks the nurse.
I cannot imagine my wife bald.
“Most women buy a wig before it happens,” the nurse says, plugging her into the magic potion.
One of the other women, her head wrapped in a red turban, leans over and whispers, “My husband says I look like a porno star.” She winks. She has no eyebrows, no eyelashes, nothing.
We shop for a wig. She tries on every style, every shape and color. She looks like a man in drag, like she’s wearing a bad Halloween costume, like it’s all a horrible joke.
“Maybe my hair won’t fall out?” she says.
“It’s okay,” the woman in the wig shop says. “Insurance covers it. Ask your doctor to write a prescription for a cranial prosthesis.”
“I’m a doctor,” my wife says.
The wig woman looks confused. “It’s okay,” she says, putting another wig on my wife’s head.
She buys a wig. I never see it. She brings it home and immediately puts it in the closet. “It looks like Linda Evans, like someone on Dynasty. I just can’t do it,” she says.
Her scalp begins to tingle. Her hair hurts. “It’s as though someone grabbed my hair and is pulling as hard as they can.”
“It’s getting ready to go,” I say. “It’s like a time bomb. It ticks and then it blows.”
“What are you, a doctor? Suddenly you know everything about cancer, about menopause, about everything?”
In the morning her hair is falling out. It is all over the pillow, all over the shower floor.
“Your hair’s not really falling out,” Enid says when we meet them for dinner. Enid reaches and touches her hair, sweeps her hand through it, as if to be comforting. She ends up with a handful of hair; she has pulled my wife’s hair out. She tries to put it back, she furiously pats it back in place.
“Forget that I was worried about them shaving my pubic hair, how ’bout it all just went down the drain.”
She looks like a rat, like something that’s been chewed on and spit out, like something that someone tried to electrocute and failed. In four days she is eighty percent bald.
She stands before me naked. “Document me.”
I take pictures. I take the film to one of those special stores that has a sign in the window—we don’t censor.
I give her a baseball cap to wear to work. Every day she goes to work, she will not miss a day, no matter what.
I, on the other hand, can’t work. Since this happened, my work has been nonexistent. I spend my day as the holder of the feelings, the keeper of sensation.
“It’s not my fault,” she says. “What the hell do you do all day while I’m at the hospital?”
Recuperate.
She wears the baseball cap for a week and then takes a razor, shaves the few scraggly hairs that remain, and goes to work bald, without a hat, without a wig—starkers.
There’s something both admirable and aggressive about her baldness, as if she’s saying to everyone—I have cancer and you have to deal with it.
“How do you feel?” I ask at night when she comes home from the hospital.
“I feel nothing.”
“How can you feel nothing?”
“I am made of steel and wood,” she says happily.
As we’re falling asleep she tells me a story. “It’s true, it happened as I was walking to the hospital. I accidentally bumped into someone on the sidewalk. Excuse me, I said and continued on. He ran after me, ‘Excuse me, boy. Excuse me, boy. You knocked my comb out of my hand and I want you to go back and pick it up.’ I turned around—we bumped into each other, I said excuse me, and that will have to suffice. ‘You knocked it out of my hand on purpose, white boy.’ I said, I am not a boy. ‘Then what are you—Cancer Man? Or are you just a bitch? A bald fucking bitch.’ I wheeled around and chased him. You fucking crazy ass, I screamed. You fucking crazy ass. I screamed it about four times. He’s lucky I didn’t fucking kill him,” she says.
I am thinking she’s lost her mind. I’m thinking she’s lucky he didn’t kill her.
She stands up on the bed—naked. She strikes a pose like a body builder. “Cancer Man,” she says, flexing her muscles, creating a new superhero. “Cancer Man!”
Luckily she has good insurance. The bill for the surgery comes—it’s itemized. They charge per part removed. Ovary $7,000, appendix $5,000, the total is $72,000 dollars. “It’s all in a day’s work,” she says.
We are lying in bed. I am lying next to her, reading the paper.
“I want to go to a desert island, alone. I don’t want to come back until this is finished,” she says.
“You are on a desert island, but unfortunately you have taken me with you.”
She looks at me. “It will never be finished—do you know that? I’m not going to have children and I’m going to die.”
“Do you really think you’re going to die?”
“Yes.”
I reach for her.
“Don’t,” she says. “Don’t go looking for trouble.”
“I wasn’t. I was trying to be loving.”
“I don’t feel loving,” she says. “I don’t feel physically bonded to anyone right now, including myself.”
“You’re pushing me away.”
“I’m recovering,” she says.
“It’s been eighteen weeks.”
Her blood counts are low. Every night for five nights, I inject her with Nupagen to increase the white blood cells. She teaches me how to prepare the injection, how to push the needle into the muscle of her leg. Every time I inject her, I apologize.
“For what?” she asks.
“Hurting you.”
“Forget it,” she says, disposing of the needle.
“Could I have a hug?” I ask.
She glares at me. “Why do you persist? Why do you keep asking me for things I can’t do, things I can’t give?”
“A hug?”
“I can’t give you one.”
“Anyone can give a hug. I can get a hug from the doorman.”
“Then do,” she says. “I need to be married to someone who is like a potted plant, someone who needs nothing.”
“Water?”
“Very little, someone who is like a cactus or an orchid.”
“It’s like you’re refusing to be human,” I tell her.
“I have no interest in being human.”
This is information I should be paying attention to. She is telling me something and I’m not listening. I don’t believe what she is saying.
I go to dinner with Eric and Enid alone.
“It’s strange,” they say. “You’d think the cancer would soften her, make her more appreciative. You’d think it would make her stop and think about what she wants to do with the rest of her life. When you ask her, what does she say?” Eric and Enid want to know.
“Nothing. She says she wants nothing, she has no needs or desires. She says she has nothing to give.”
Eric and Enid shake their heads. “What are you going to do?”
I shrug. None of this is new, none of this is just because she has cancer—that’s important to keep in mind, this is exactly the way she always was, only more so.
A few days later a woman calls; she and her husband are people we see occasionally.
“Hi, how are you, how’s Tom?” I ask.
“He’s a fucking asshole,” she says. “Haven’t you heard? He left me.”
“When?”
“About two weeks ago. I thought you would have known.”
“I’m a little out of it.”
“Anyway, I’m calling to see if you’d like to have lunch.”
“Lunch, sure. Lunch would be good.”
At lunch she is a little flirty, which is fine, it’s nice actually, it’s been a long time since someone flirted with me. In the end, when we’re having coffee, she spills the beans. “So I guess you’re wondering why I called you?”
“I guess,” I say, although I’m perfectly pleased to be having lunch, to be listening to someone else’s troubles.
“I heard your wife was sick, I figured you’re not getting a lot of sex, and I thought we could have an affair.”
I don’t know which part is worse, the complete lack of seduction, the fact that she mentions my wife not being well, the idea that my wife’s illness would make me want to sleep with her, her stun gun bluntness—it’s all too much.
“What do you think? Am I repulsive? Thoroughly disgusting? Is it the craziest thing you ever heard?”
“I’m very busy,” I say, not knowing what to say, not wanting to be offensive, or seem to have taken offense. “I’m just very busy.”
My wife comes home from work. “Someone came in today—he reminded me of you.”
“What was his problem?”
“He jumped out the window.”
“Dead?”
“Yes,” she says, washing her hands in the kitchen sink.
“Was he dead when he got to you?” There’s something in her tone that makes me wonder, did she kill him?
“Pretty much.”
“What part reminded you of me?”
“He was having an argument with his wife,” she says. “Imagine her standing in the living room, in the middle of a sentence, and out the window he goes. Imagine her not having a chance to finish her thought?”
“Yes, imagine, not being able to have the last word. Did she try to stop him?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” my wife says. “I didn’t get to read the police report. I just thought you’d find it interesting.”
“What do you want for dinner?”
“Nothing,” she says. “I’m not hungry.”
“You have to eat something.”
“Why? I have cancer. I can do whatever I want.”
Something has to happen.
I buy tickets to Paris. “We have to go.” I invoke the magic word, “It’s an emergency.”
“It’s not like I get a day off. It’s not like I come home at the end of the day and I don’t have cancer. It goes everywhere with me. It doesn’t matter where I am, it’s still me—it’s me with cancer. In Paris I’ll have cancer.”
I dig out the maps, the guide books, everything we did on our last trip is marked with fluorescent highlighter. I am acting as though I believe that if we retrace our steps, if we return to a place where things were good, there will be an automatic correction, a psychic chiropractic event, which will put everything into alignment.
I gather provisions for the plane, fresh fruit, water, magazines, the smoke hoods. It’s a little-known fact, smoke inhalation is a major cause of death on airplanes.
“What’s the point,” she says, throwing a few things into a suitcase. “You can do everything and think you’re prepared, but you don’t know what’s going to happen. You don’t see what’s coming until it hits you in the face.”
She points at someone outside. “See that idiot crossing the street in front of the truck—why doesn’t he have cancer?”
She lifts her suitcase—too heavy. She takes things out. She leaves her smoke hood on the bed. “If the plane fills with smoke, I’m going to be so happy,” she says. “I’m going to breathe deeply, I’m going to be the first to die.”
I stuff the smoke hood into my suitcase, along with her raincoat, her extra shoes, and vitamin C drops. I lift the suitcases, I feel like a pack animal, a sherpa.
In France, the customs people are not used to seeing bald women. They call her “sir.”
“Sir, you’re next, sir. Sir, please step over here, sir.”
My wife is my husband. She loves it. She smiles. She catches my eye and strikes a subdued version of the super hero/body builder pose, flexing. “Cancer Man,” she says.
“And what is the purpose of your visit to France?” the inspector asks. “Business or pleasure?”
“Reconciliation,” I say, watching her—Cancer Man.
“Business or pleasure?”
“Pleasure.”
Paris is my fantasy, my last-ditch effort to reclaim my marriage, myself, my wife.
As we are checking into the hotel, I remind her of our previous visit—the chef cut himself, his finger was severed, she saved it, and they were able to reattach it. “You made medical history. Remember the beautiful dinner they threw in your honor.”
“It was supposed to be a vacation,” she says.
The bellman takes us to our room—there’s a big basket of fruit, bottles of Champagne and Evian with a note from the concierge welcoming us.
“It’s not as nice as it used to be,” she says, already disappointed. She opens the Evian and drinks. Her lips curl. “Even the water tastes bad.”
“Maybe it’s you. Maybe the water is fine. Is it possible you’re wrong?”
“We see things differently,” she says, meaning she’s right, I’m wrong.
“Are you in an especially bad mood, or is it just the cancer?” I ask.
“Maybe it’s you?” she says.
We walk, across the river and down by the Louvre. There could be nothing better, nothing more perfect, and yet I am suddenly hating Paris—the beauty, the fineness of it is dwarfed by her foul humor. I realize there will be no saving it, no moment of reconciliation, redemption. Everything is irredeemably awful and getting worse.
“If you’re so unhappy, why don’t you leave?” I ask her.
“I keep thinking you’ll change.”
“If I changed any more I can’t imagine who I’d be.”
“Well, if I’m such a bitch, why do you stay?”
“It’s my job, it’s my calling to stay with you, to soften you.”
“I absolutely do not want to be softer, I don’t want to give another inch.”
She trips on a cobblestone, I reach for her elbow, to steady her, and instead unbalance myself. She fails to catch me. I fall and recover quickly.
“Imagine how I feel,” she says. “I am a doctor and I can’t fix it. I can’t fix me, I can’t fix you—what a lousy doctor.”
“I’m losing you,” I say.
“I’ve lost myself. Look at me—do I look like me?”
“You act like yourself.”
“I act like myself because I have to, because people are counting on me.”
“I’m counting on you.”
“Stop counting.”
All along the Tuileries there are Ferris wheels—the world’s largest Ferris wheel is set up in the middle.
“Let’s go,” I say, taking her hand and pulling her toward them.
“I don’t like rides.”
“It’s not much of a ride. It’s like a carousel, only vertical. Live a little.”
She gets on. There are no seat belts, no safety bars. I say nothing. I am hoping she won’t notice.
“How is it going to end?” I ask while we’re waiting for the wheel to spin.
“I die in the end.”
The ride takes off, climbing, pulling us up and over. We are flying, soaring; the city unfolds. It is breathtaking and higher than I thought. And faster. There is always a moment on any ride when you think it is too fast, too high, too far, too wide, and that you will not survive. And then there is the exhilaration of surviving, the thrill of having lived through it and immediately you want to go around again.
“I have never been so unhappy in my life,” my wife says when we’re near the top. “It’s not just the cancer, I was unhappy before the cancer. We were having a very hard time. We don’t get along, we’re a bad match. Do you agree?”
“Yes,” I say. “We’re a really bad match, but we’re such a good bad match it seems impossible to let it go.”
“We’re stuck,” she says.
“You bet,” I say.
“No. I mean the ride, the ride isn’t moving.”
“It’s not stuck, it’s just stopped. It stops along the way.”
She begins to cry. “It’s all your fault. I hate you. And I still have to deal with you. Every day I have to look at you.”
“No, you don’t. You don’t have to deal with me if you don’t want to.”
She stops crying and looks at me. “What are you going to do, jump?”
“The rest of your life, or my life, however long or short, should not be miserable. It can’t go on this way.”
“We could both kill ourselves,” she says.
“How about we separate?”
I am being more grown-up than I am capable of being. I am terrified of being without her, but either way, it’s death.
The ride lurches forward.
I came to Paris wanting to pull things together and suddenly I am desperate to be away from her. If this doesn’t stop now, it will never stop, it will go on forever. She will be dying of her cancer and we will still be fighting. I begin to panic, to feel I can’t breathe. I am suffocating; I have to get away.
“Where does it end?”
“How about we say good-bye?”
“And then what? We have opera tickets.”
I cannot tell her I am going. I have to sneak away, to tiptoe out backwards. I have to make my own arrangements.
We stop talking. We’re hanging in mid-air, suspended. We have run out of things to say. When the ride circles down, the silence becomes more definitive.
I begin to make my plan. In truth, I have no idea what I am doing. All afternoon, everywhere we go, I cash traveler’s checks, I get cash advances, I have about five thousand dollars’ worth of francs stuffed in my pocket. I want to be able to leave without a trace, I want to be able to buy myself out of whatever trouble I get into. I am hysterical and giddy all at once.
We are having an early dinner on our way to the opera.
I time my break for just after the coffee comes. “Oops,” I say, feeling my pockets. “I forgot my opera glasses.”
“Really?” she says. “I thought you had them when we went out.”
“They must be at the hotel. You go on ahead, I’ll run back. You know I hate not being able to see.”
She takes her ticket. “Hurry,” she says. “I hate it when you’re late.”
This is the bravest thing I have ever done. I go back to the hotel and pack my bag. I am going to get out. I am going to fly away. I may never come back. I will begin again, as someone else—unrecognizable.
I move to lift the bag off the bed, I pull it up and my knee goes out. I start to fall but catch myself. I pull at the bag and take a step—too heavy. I will have to go without it. I will have to leave everything behind. I drop the bag, but still I am falling, folding, collapsing. There is pain, searing, spreading, pouring, hot and cold, like water down my back, down my legs.
I am lying on the floor, thinking that if I stay calm, if I can just find my breath, and follow my breath, it will pass. I lie there waiting for the paralysis to recede.
I am afraid of it being over and yet she has given me no choice, she has systematically withdrawn life support: sex and conversation. The problem is that, despite this, she is the one I want.
There is a knock at the door. I know it is not her, it is too soon for it to be her.
“Entrez,” I call out.
The maid opens the door, she holds the DO NOT DISTURB sign in her hand. “Oooff,” she says, seeing me on the floor. “Do you need the doctor?”
I am not sure if she means my wife or a doctor other than my wife.
“No.”
She takes a towel from her cart and props it under my head. She takes a spare blanket from the closet and covers me with it. She opens the Champagne and pours me a glass, tilting my head up so I can sip. She goes to her cart and gets a stack of night chocolates and sits beside me, feeding me Champagne and chocolate, stroking my forehead.
The phone in the room rings, we ignore it. She refills my glass. She takes my socks off and rubs my feet. She unbuttons my shirt and rubs my chest. I am getting a little drunk. I am just beginning to relax and then there is another knock, a knock my body recognizes before I am fully awake. Everything tightens. My back pulls tighter still, any sensation below my knees drops off.
“I thought something horrible happened to you, I’ve been calling and calling the room, why haven’t you answered? I thought you’d killed yourself.”
The maid excuses herself. She goes into the bathroom and gets me a cool washcloth.
“What are you doing?” my wife asks.
There is nothing I can say.
“Knock off the mummy routine. What exactly are you doing? Were you trying to run away and then you chickened out? Say something.”
To talk would be to continue; for the moment I am silenced. I am a potted plant, and still that is not good enough for her.
“He is paralyzed,” the maid says.
“He is not paralyzed. I am his wife, I am a doctor. I would know if there was something really wrong.”