NO SOUND. No birds, no cars, no garbage trucks, no voices. I lay on my bed Friday morning and couldn’t move, daylight seeping through my blinds.
The phone rang. It took me a moment to understand the sound, and then I had to locate the receiver.
“God, I’m glad you answered.” It was Helen in the cath lab. “We’ve had your first patient here since six-thirty and now your next one’s here too.”
“You woke me up,” I said. “I was up all night vomiting and I must have finally fallen asleep. I can’t come in today.” I wasn’t on call until next weekend. My two caths for today were old people with minor changes on their nuclear stress tests, nothing that couldn’t be put off. And the office could limp on without me.
“Jeez, Dr. Toledo, you take care. It must be a bad bug if you’re sick.”
“Can you call LeeAnn in my office?” I asked. “I’m going back to sleep.”
After a while I made myself pull on my robe and walk downstairs. One of those shiny, frigid days, a day that leaps up to betray you when you take a step outside. The sun was bright upon the sofa; the floorboards gleamed; the jars and cans and boxes in the kitchen cupboard were lined up in military rows. The elliptical trainer in the family (family!) room, the throw pillows on the sofa, the juicer on the kitchen counter: everything around me bespoke an orderly, health-conscious life, a life of exercise and healthy snacks and tasteful, low-key furnishings. This is hell, I thought, emptying a box of low-fat crackers into the sink. Why should I stay alive for this? “I hate my life!” I screamed out loud, and the echo of this was startling and almost comical. But it wasn’t comical, and the next thing I knew I was standing behind the sofa, tears streaming down my face.
Mick’s PSA was up. “You’re aware that he has cancer of the prostate,” Karn said from her chair on the other side of the table, meeting my eyes with startling hate. “I guess that’s something he’d have to tell you, to explain his recent”—she glanced at the bed in front of us—“performance.”
“How high is the PSA?”
“Ninety-six.”
Two months before, Mick’s PSA had been five point two. “Nine point six?” I said, incredulous, hopeful, and Karn’s scathing look back was the only answer I needed.
His urologist was calling for surgery, and right this minute. Karn wished his oncologist had been blunter, but she was gaga over Mick, you know how women are. Mick said he had to finish out his season. Karn couldn’t talk sense into him, and their boys couldn’t, either. He wouldn’t even listen to Jessica, and Karn had thought Jessica was a secret weapon.
Karn looked like an old house in a storm, flashes of lightning exposing broken windows and slipped shingles.
“Maybe he shouldn’t be operated on at this point,” I said, wondering what Dr. Leslie really thought. “Maybe, at this point, he should go for alternative therapy.”
“Alternative therapy? Are you an expert on the prostate now too?”
I bit the inside of my cheek. “Advanced prostate cancer is treated with hormones and radiation and chemo, and maybe at this point it’s late for curative surgery.”
“He’s on the hormones already,” Karn snapped, and this was an important point, this was something I had forgotten. How? The hormones had ruined our sex life. Karn shifted her head like a dog picking up a scent. “What do you mean, ‘advanced’? What do you mean ‘curative’?”
A radiation doctor might have an opinion, I suggested.
“We have doctors!” Karn said. “He doesn’t want to see more doctors!” She sank into her chair, put her elbow on the table between us, and talked into the air. She didn’t know what his doctors told him, exactly. He wouldn’t let her come in for his office visits. The urologist only told Karn about Mick’s PSA so Karn couldn’t sue him if Mick got worse. The urologist had told Karn about twenty times that it was Mick’s own decision not to pursue treatment.
“It was Frederick at first, then Eluard. But now it’s everybody, even Chiswick, now he thinks he has a real team. I told him they could go on fine without him. I told him fighting cancer would fire his team up too. But no-o-o-o. He’s got that egotist thing, can’t see anyone doing things without him. You let yourself get sick and we’ll be doing everything without you, I said. You keep letting that thing grow and I’m a widow and my grandson doesn’t have a grandpa and I’m alone. That’s how I found out about this setup. I’ve always done the bills. You ask him, Mick hardly writes a check. But I never went through his Turkman U. receipts. Never had to. Then I thought, Well, maybe I should. I wasn’t being nosy. I was trying to take a load off him, not make him be responsible. And there it was, week after week: a hundred twenty-nine dollars to the Marietta Marriott. It took me a while to figure out it was Thursdays. I thought he played poker on Thursdays. I thought he spent four hours in Marcus’s basement. So I followed him a couple weeks ago. I sat in the parking lot, and twenty minutes later you get out of your car and walk in. I couldn’t believe it. I kept telling myself it was a co-inky-dink, and then I saw the two of you come out.”
Co-inky-dink. When I was a child, women of Karn’s size and age wore girdles. They had a smooth, hard surface to their formidable heft. They were matrons, women of substance, holier-than-thou-ers. She came into the store like a Sherman tank, my father used to say. But Karn was pitiably unsheathed. Her loose knit shirt hung over loose knit pants, and, whatever its origin and expense, the outfit made her bulk a weakness, not a threat. At that moment keeping any secret from her seemed impossibly cruel. “Mick just bought me a car,” I blurted, feeling that, in some way, it would be a kindness to tell all. And maybe he had put it on a credit card, and Karn already knew.
“A car? I drive a Lexus SUV. What do you drive?”
“Blue Jaguar.”
“What model?” she said, and when I told her her face went white. “Why’d he do that?” she said, her voice curling like a child’s. “Didn’t you already have a nice car?”
And later: “What do you talk about? Are you a fan?”
And: “It’s really been twelve years?”
She guessed she could understand it, she said, up until the time I met Jessica. Mick was an attractive man, and he was powerful, which was an aphrodisiac, and maybe she hadn’t always been the best wife. “There hasn’t always been a lot of ”—she hesitated—“stuff we did. I mean little things, talking in the dark, taking a ride. I saw this friend of mine, she was putting on her coat and she had trouble with the sleeve and then her husband ran up and he helped her. That got me. And I thought, Well, Mick was never home anyway. And then, you know, you’re alone with your kids, and you and them make your own life. I guess I never thought Mick would . . . I thought basketball was his mistress.”
There was nowhere to look. There was Karn and there was the bed, and both of them seemed to be growing, as if they were trying to push me from the room. “Sex just isn’t a big thing for me. I tried the hormones but they gave me headaches,” Karn went on. “And then they have this cream but it’s messy, and I don’t like to, to . . .
“What about the Oath of Hippocrates?” she said suddenly, interrupting herself. The physicians’ oath, traditionally recited at medical school graduations. Karn had looked it up on the Internet. The day that Jessica walked into my office, Karn said, the day I took Jessica on, that day I should have said to Mick, No way, we are done. “I can understand if you’re not moral in your personal life, but shouldn’t you follow the codes of your profession? He’ll never leave us, we’re family.” Karn’s voice rose. “Don’t worry, I don’t want publicity. You know what they do to coaches these days. I can’t give them an excuse to fire him.”
There was a moment of silence, as if the room itself were taking a deep breath. I was sure the oath of Hippocrates made no mention of marriage or affairs. “Didn’t you like us?” Karn asked. “Didn’t you see we were decent people? We liked you.”
I had no idea what to say. Karn went on.
“I’ve thought and thought about it. Did we say something to you when Jessica was in the hospital, were we ever not nice? I think we were very nice. Weren’t we nice? We sent you those flowers. We had trouble on a cruise once, I think this waiter hated us, but he was from poverty and he had children, and there we were at his table, these big wealthy Americans asking for more rolls. I mean, I could see it. But you . . .” Karn shook her head. “You I can’t see.”
Too odd. I leapt from the chair, ran to the bathroom, and hurled open the door, expecting to see someone—Marcus, Mick, a hired technician—behind the door twitching with suppressed laughter. But there was nobody. The bathtub was empty, the sink wiped clean, two upside-down glasses in fluted caps beside it.
“I’m not going to divorce him,” Karn said. “If you care about him at all, you’ll leave him alone. You’re wearing him out. Even he says he needs rest now.”
“You can’t speak for Mick,” I said finally. “I can’t agree to anything if I don’t talk to Mick.”
Then Karn said the words that sent the colors streaking by—the peach of the hall, the bronze of the elevator, the cream keycard sliding across the brown counter, the distant flash of my blue car. I stood breathless in the parking lot, my coat open, and it was only the people walking past with scarves across their lower faces that made me realize it was cold. “Why do you think Mick let me come here,” Karn asked, “if he didn’t agree with me?”
FRIDAY NIGHT I CALLED RICK, my psychiatrist brother. I told him everything, I didn’t make excuses.
“Wow,” he said. “She was lying in wait in your hotel room? That took balls.”
“Rick,” I said, “his PSA is up. He’s worse. I don’t know how long he’ll be around.” I don’t remember much more of the conversation. I do remember several of Rick’s phrases: “natural consequences”; “respecting your loved one’s choices”; “crisis as a window for change.”
Believe it or not, Rick had a female social worker who was a huge Turkman fan. Her brother had gone there. Would it be okay if Rick told her I knew Mick?
I spent the weekend watching the Godfather movies and doing exercise tapes; I went so far, at two A.M. Sunday, as to get out some old Jane Fonda. My goal was to drive myself to physical exhaustion, then wake up hours later and without thinking start moving again.
“I won’t need you this Thursday,” I told Howard on Monday. “I can take my own calls.”
“But what about Tuesday? Can you still cover . . . ?”
“Sure,” I said. “No sweat”—vowing never to be as obvious as he was, never to let my neediness show.
Later, waiting as Lindy bent over from her chair and rummaged in the cupboards, I spotted Jessica Crabbe’s chart. She’d never be back to see me. No more big bouquets. I wondered if Karn had told her. I wondered if Jessica liked me enough to see her father’s side. How could Karn, all these years, not suspect Mick had a lover? It hit me then that Karn’s innocence—like any innocence carried deep into adulthood—had a willful, almost petulant quality. “Here you go,” Lindy said, swiveling up, a fresh prescription pad in her hand, and I’ll always associate that gesture with my next, unbidden thought: that my trust in Mick’s and my shared future had been an act of petulance itself.
ONE-MAIL, which I finally checked at home Monday evening, I had twenty-four messages from mcrabbe@turkmanst.edu. Their titles ranged from contrition to nonchalance to desperation. Genie! Answer me! That last title made me smile. The hell with you, I thought. Go ahead and die. I didn’t open one e-mail. I highlighted each one and deleted the lot in one stroke. My crawling days were over. Now Mick would have to crawl to me.
TUESDAY, I took Claudia and Toby to an Indian place where we all could eat vegetarian. After we’d ordered our main dishes Toby cleared his throat. “We wanted to talk with you about our vision of married life.”
Now? Their vision? I hadn’t told Claudia about Karn’s hotel room visit, and I doubted I ever would. The man I loved was dying and I’d thrown away his e-mails. Hard to imagine telling my sweet daughter that. “Okay,” I said, glancing toward Claudia.
Their vision was traditional, of husband and wife in the roles they had taken for thousands of years. The wife had her duties—children, order, the nurturing that led to survival—and the husband had his duties of leadership and protection. The husband was the head of the household the way a bull elk was the head of a herd, because without a head a herd would not survive.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Doesn’t a bull elk have a lot of wives?”
“Well . . .” Toby said, and his grin made me almost forgive him for this whole concept. A bull elk, he admitted, actually wasn’t a good example. Maybe a male brown bear. But the animal itself wasn’t really the point. The point was to lay out a philosophy of marriage ahead of time, so neither of them would ever be surprised.
“If you look at the natural world,” Toby said, “the females are geared to caring for their young and living longer. The males put themselves at risk, being out there protecting and providing.”
I said, “You agree with all this, Claudia?”
Toby’s new job was a burden to him, Claudia had told me. Every day, he ordered something new that disturbed him: throwaway sil verware or adult paper diapers or cleaning supplies bubbling with questionable chemicals. When he asked if this or that was really needed, his boss simply laughed. The term “Toby the tree-hugger” had already taken root in the office. But the people he worked with were good-hearted, changing minds was not an overnight business, and his salary and health insurance coverage were stellar.
Our food arrived. The rice and curries were steaming, but none of us made a move to eat.
“I don’t really have a vision of marriage from you and Daddy,” Claudia said. “I don’t remember it. But from what you’ve told me about Grandma and your father, I’m not sure their marriage was a great one. Did he respect her? Did he do everything he could to make life good for her?”
“He did not,” I said, startled. He had made her life worse daily, criticizing her cooking, her taste in pictures, the thinness of her hair.
Claudia said, “Toby sees me as . . . his mate.” She smiled. “It’s instinctual. It’s like he’s a cardinal and he knows. And I know back.”
“So cardinals mate for life?” I said, reaching for a spoon. “They’re the state bird of Ohio, did you know that?” I felt too bruised to argue. At that moment, I would have liked to have a natural mate to protect and nurture me.
“Do your parents have one of these cardinal marriages?” I asked Toby later in the meal.
“Not really,” he said, hiding a smile and glancing at Claudia. “My father spends a lot of time in the basement.”
Maybe that’s life, I thought driving home: each generation reacting against the mistakes of the one before it, and no one ever, except by serendipity, getting it right.
It crossed my mind that Toby’s new job was a sort of sacrifice, that he was serious about his duties as a provider. He has gnawing teeth, I thought suddenly, the vision of his smile flashing in my mind. He could work on his boss over months and years and who knew how the ordering would change? In the nature shows, it was always staggering how big a tree could be felled by one or two beavers.
That evening, I made plans over the phone with Tessa. “You want to meet Thursday?” Tessa said, startled. “Does Mick have a game that night?”
“I’ll explain when I see you,” I said.
“His wife was impossible,” I told Tessa when we met. “She was all over the map. She said ‘co-inky-dink.’
“Whatever happened to girdles?” I said to Tessa. “I could have stood up to her if she was wearing a girdle.”
“Has Mick called you?” Tessa asked. “Has he said, Ignore this woman behind the curtain?”
“He’s e-mailing me all the time. He’s frantic.”
Tessa nodded.
“He wants to lay low for a week or two, let things settle down. With his season, he’s awfully busy, and . . .” In truth, Mick’s e-mails had stopped arriving, and I regretted in every cell having deleted his earlier ones unopened.
“I feel bad for you, Genie. I know you had such hopes.” My eyes teared up. I thought I should tell Tessa the truth about Mick’s letting Karn come to our hotel, but before I had a chance Tessa went on: “Herbie can’t believe this year’s team. He says they wear down their opponents for three quarters and beat them in the fourth. He heard they had a new conditioning coach.”
“Conditioning may be part of it,” I said. “A tiny part.” Mick had worked for years to recruit and train this bunch. He knew their hamstrings, their sisters, the dominant sides of their brains. “Mick hired the conditioning guy,” I added.
“Oh, we know Mick’s good. But he hasn’t had a team like . . .”
“Tessa, his PSA is up. I’m sure his cancer’s spread.”
I told her all I knew. I gave her PSA values and medical opinions and a brief lecture on the natural history of prostate cancer. Before I was done she interrupted. “Girlfriend, this is no-choice time. You have got to leave that man alone.”
Why was Tessa talking like a black woman half her age? The threat of it, I realized. The swaggering bravado of it. I was gripping the edge of the table, holding on. “But what if I could talk him into treatment?” I said. “What if he’d agree to treatment for me?”
I GOT HOLD OF HIM by phone the next afternoon. “I have to see you,” I said. All these years, I’d never had to say that.
“Genie.” The gratitude in his voice was heartbreaking. He was in the gym, shouts and dribbling balls in the background. There was a moment’s hesitation, then he went on in a softer voice. “I can’t do it this weekend.”
“Monday?”
“What took you so long? What’s wrong with you?”
“Monday?”
“I can’t get away then. Hold on.” A rush of air, and Mick’s muffled shout. Morgan, move out there! Do I have to get you a golf cart? Then: “I’m back.”
“Tuesday?”
“January thirtieth? I can get an hour free, seven to eight. But that’s not enough time to . . .”
“I’ll drive to you,” I said. “I’ll get off early and I’ll come all the way there.” Mick and I made plans to meet at an Applebee’s in Turkman just off the highway. I could ask Jeremy to take calls for me until eleven, and cover for him on a symphony night in return. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I didn’t read your e-mails.”
Mick’s voice dropped. “Drive something anonymous.” I could picture him with his hand cupped over the receiver. “Not the Jag. And Genie . . .”
I couldn’t swear, later, that it had been a conscious move, but I clicked my cellphone off before he had a chance to finish. A little trick to guarantee our meeting.
YOU CUT ME OFF,” he’d say. “Why’d you cut me off?” Or worse, he’d look at me sadly, drop the corners of his mouth, and look away. I’d get to Applebee’s on Tuesday and he wouldn’t be there. Karn would be there. Maybe Marcus would be there, his large frame blocking the restaurant door. “Coach Crabbe wants you to know you won’t be needed. Coach Crabbe’s releasing you, Dr. Toledo.”
I was on call that weekend, which helped, but all the chest pain and atrial fibrillation and inverted T waves in the world couldn’t fill my mind. The facts were suddenly around me, beach balls bobbing to the surface, crowding the pool so there was barely room for me. Mick had cancer. His PSA had skyrocketed. He wouldn’t have surgery. Did he need surgery? His wife said I’d betrayed their entire family. I cut him off.
I pictured Mick as a juggler on a stage. He had said he’d juggle anything, but tonight he didn’t have his timing, and the audience, hungry for blood, was taunting him with bowling balls and chain saws. I showed up in the wings. What took you so long? his look asked. What’s wrong with you? I’m dying here, sweetheart.
