0n March first the doctors, who we’ve largely given up on, finally reach a diagnosis. Grahm’s disease It feels like a verdict: not guilty by reason of Grahm’s disease. Or maybe guilty In this disease, it is speculated—speculated because no one actually has any fucking idea what it is, this is just their best guess—it is speculated that the small blood vessels in the brain, which supply oxygen, food, and water to the neurotransmitters, weaken and then slowly dissolve, eroding like beachfront property. The conscious mind is hit heaviest and first, like with Alzheimer’s, and so twenty years ago is now and yesterday never happened If Evelyn is lucky, the disintegration will cause a major stroke and she’ll die a quick and painless death, at most a year from now. If she’s unlucky, it will progress slowly, and she’ll die over the course of two long years. I try not to think about that.
Not a whole lot of research has been done since Dr Grahm’s initial diagnosis in 1965—with only, at most, ten patients a year there’s not a lot of money in it—but now with the booming economy buzzing around biotech and gene research and alternative medicine, interest is perking. So Evelyn has plenty of experiments and trials to join, dozens of research studies to choose from, but there is no known cure.
No treatment, no cure.
Evelyn is calm, smooth, the only sign of what she might be thinking is that she chain-smokes now, lighting one cigarette off the last Other than the smoking she’s in great shape; she’s eating a vegan diet, taking long walks, swallowing handfuls of vitamins and herbs twice a day. Her mood is what it always is; cynical, optimistic, aloof.
“I’m doing a drug trial,” she says. “It’s very promising, so I don’t want you to worry It’s a natural product They get it from ginger. It’s like concentrated ginger What does Dr Snyder know? You see how long it took him just to figure out what’s wrong, just to get me to the right specialists? An idiot. These new people, they’re specialists, this is all that they do. They’re the people who really know. I’ll believe it when I hear it from them.”
Since the diagnosis I am angrier than I’ve ever been in my life Linda Lawrence, sales manager, asks me to put a Gris-ham novel in my column and I tell her to go to hell. She stands in my office, dumbfounded, and I tell her again. Go to hell Just go.
I’m on line for a token and an old woman tries to cut ahead of me. I growl and she shows me her half-fare card, waving it in front of my face.
“You are not,” I say, “cutting ahead of me on this line.” She waves the card again. “There is no fucking way you are cutting this line.” She looks like she might cry. I repeat myself. “No fucking way”
This morning Austin was supposed to call at eleven, to plan another round of apartment viewings this afternoon. The plan was, he would read the papers that morning, make what appointments he could, and call at eleven to tell me where to meet him At 10 50, I was dressed and ready to go I picked up a collection of short stories by a young Swedish woman and read one at random. An SS officer in a concentration camp befriends a charming Jewish child and risks his own life to bring the child to safely
11.01
I picked another short story collection, this one by a young man from Mexico City. A charming Mayan child is left indigent by Mexican economic policies and becomes a street hustler, who then dies at the hands of a vengeful pimp.
11 15.
Something in my stomach flipped over, and then flopped back into place The constant anger, which had subsided at the prospect of another day with Austin, flared, burning up through my solar plexus I called Veronica, who was waiting on a call from the Greek Producer. We don’t deserve this, we told each other. We are too fucking cool to wait. Let other women wait, women with children and homes, women who watch Oprah. We are cool, urbane single women living the life, and before we’ve quite caught up with ourselves we’ve made plans to meet in one hour at a spa in SoHo, for a little schvitz and whatever else it is cool, urbane single women do. Waiting is for assholes.
There is a large sign in the steam room that says SILENCE, PLEASE. Veronica and I are alone so we risk the consequences and speak anyway. I’ve told her the whole story of seeing Austin again. It felt like such a betrayal, to tell Veronica. I was not expecting her to take his side.
“He was only fifteen minutes late,” she says
“I don’t know that. I don’t know if he called at all.”
“I’m sure he did He’s not that much of a schmuck ”
“Veronica, this is Austin,” I remind her. “He didn’t call for three years ”
“No, he didn’t call for like two months, and after that you wouldn’t speak to him again for three years That’s not the same thing at all”
“Whatever. He should know better He should understand that I’m going to be sensitive about this Obviously it’s going to be an issue for me. Obviously.”
“Mary, it’s fifteen minutes.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Fifteen minutes,” she says. “I have never been less than fifteen minutes late for anything, ever, in my entire life, and you’ve never been mad at me ”
Her logic is denting the anger, but it’s not defeating it “Yeah, but you didn’t abandon me in the middle of a major relationship.”
“I’ve done worse,” Veronica says. She’s right. She has. “Look, the problem is not that he was late, okay? The problem is that you have a fear of abandonment ”
“I do not”
“Of course you do. You lost your father under horrific circumstances when you were what, seven? Of course you do.”
“That’s not the way it works,” I explain “First you have problems, then you make a diagnosis based on your childhood. You don’t turn a trauma into a prediction.”
She waves a hand in front of her face “Whatever. What I’m saying is, the problem is that you are totally unable to deal with a little lateness. The problem is, you don’t trust him, and if you don’t trust him now, you never will.”
“I don’t know about never.”
“Believe me,” Veronica says. “This type of thing never gets better It gets worse Everything always gets worse ”
There are three messages from Austin on my answering machine at home, the first from 11.05. I check the machine, check my watch, check my clock, and call the eight hundred number for the time. My watch, it turns out, is ten minutes fast. I left my apartment at 11.05
Still, late is late.
When I get home that afternoon I pick up the phone to call Chloe, my first instinct when something goes wrong And then I remember, things have changed with Chloe. Pregnancy is all-consuming. I don’t want to tell Chloe about Austin, or about my toothache, or the new book I read or the new sweater I bought or the shoes I saw in the window of Sassy last week, because everything seems so small compared to Chloe’s creation of a child Except for my mother’s illness, which seems unspeakably morbid Chloe spends time now with her sisters and her mother and other friends, friends I never even saw before, all of whom are pregnant or already mothers. Soon she’ll be a mommy, a regular New York City hip mom She’ll take her baby to Showroom 7 sample sales and the Sixth Avenue flea markets. I’ll be eccentric Aunt Mary, the crazy lady who’s had the same office at Intelligentsia for fifty years. I’ll be a piece of the scenery of the city. I’ll be furniture. Chloe will have new, Mommy friends and we won’t owe each other favors anymore.
I’ll miss Chloe, when she’s buried in diapers and breast milk. She won’t want my help—no one would trust me around an infant—and she won’t have time for purely social visits. Sometimes I’ve thought that Chloe was my only link to the regular world, the universe of women and men who care about their jobs and have children and credit cards and co-ops, and now, if we’re not going to be friends anymore, my only link to that world will be gone I’ll be crazy Aunt Mary, rootless, floating, motherless, alone I hang up the phone.