Amor and Psycho: Stories (6 page)

Georgie looked in the mirror and realized that without hair she had no face. She had only a head, a globe turning on the axis of her neck. Eyes, mouth, nose—but no face. Her face was history.

She looked gorgeous and irresistible without hair, her new boyfriend, Ralph, said wildly. She looked so intense and theatrical, he could no longer bear to sleep with her. He said he felt weak, cowardly and defective. Georgie agreed.

Ralph’s mother sent her a reusable barf bag. Georgie had never even met Ralph’s mother—but they were sisters in cancer! The barf bag, like all the other accoutrements of this disease, came in pink. A joke that was not a joke, like all jokes. A barf bag! Mouth spray! A toothbrush! What more thoughtful gifts could you give somebody getting chemotherapy?

What Georgie wanted, really, was sex—vigorous human sex with a reasonable person, preferably of the other gender. When she divorced, several women she knew called with offers. She said she would think about it—and she did think about it. Who wouldn’t?

*   *   *

THE BAD NEWS STARTED
on election night. Georgie had some friends over, and they ate lamb and drank cold rosé from Spain and watched on television as the evening went as badly as possible for their side. Their candidate lacked charisma, but they had tried to believe in him. After the results came in, they read their fortunes on Georgie’s Chinese sticks, and Georgie’s said something like “You will know illness before old age.”

“No fair,” her friend Babe said. “I took two. I took yours.”

This was true—greedy Babe.

“It doesn’t matter,” Georgie said.

“Take another.”

Georgie’s second fortune read: “What you ask for is unreasonable and you will not get your wish.”

BEFORE HER FIRST CHEMO
, everyone said Georgie was lucky to have had experience with psychotropic drugs, because nuclear medicine tripped you out. It
was
trippy, and afterward she felt poisoned, as advertised; the Popsicle red medicine turned her pee red. She spent the night in a little hotel just a few blocks from the Cancer Center. In the morning, she tried to give the doorman three dollars for carrying her bag. He pulled his hand back from hers as if she were on fire or poisonous and said, “No, no, no!”

Georgie’s first night home, Babe came over to shear her hair. It would fall out anyway, so why not? They dragged two lounge chairs out onto the lawn and watched the sunset
over the ocean as Babe cut the hair down to the stubble of all the colors Georgie had dyed it over the years, a kaleidoscope of color embedded in her follicles. (Her features were still strong, though, Babe said, and her eyes glowed like bonfires.) Georgie realized that what she thought of as “my face” and “my self” enclosed just a small part of something larger. The face was a few planes of flesh stretched over a structure of bones—frontal, temporal, parietal, occipital. Georgie knew this from looking at skeletons; she was a kind of skeleton herself, her body a loose confederation of bones held together by joints and a temporary binding of muscles, enclosed by a skin that marked the boundary between herself and everything not herself. The profound moment of confronting her hairless head made Georgie want to have sex immediately. Dr. Daly had promised the drugs would send her into a fierce and irrevocable menopause; this could be her last egg drop. Lying on her back in the lounge chair and looking up at the sky, she felt like someone waiting to be hit by a train. She watched the sun burn on the horizon before it fell through a hole in the ocean.

A whippoorwill sang. Babe held Georgie’s hand. They drank tea as the moon rose yellow and full, a hunting moon. Owls flew through the air like thrown bricks.

“I feel like a werewolf,” Georgie said, “only my hair falls out instead of growing in.”

They slept outside, under heavy woolen blankets. In the morning, when Georgie got up to make coffee, she saw the
moon still hanging above the ocean, as if someone had forgotten to put it away.

HER PUBIC HAIR
fell out. Funny, because she’d had bikini waxes for years, and associated pubic hair with the triumphant face of her Russian aesthetician in San Francisco holding up the terrible strips of fabric. Her ex-boyfriend, Ralph, preferred his women “with,” as he put it. Maybe he didn’t say “my women.” But he did say “with,” as if there were only two kinds of women in the world. (Now she shattered the binary with her clumps and bald spots!) Ralph dumped her when she told him what she had, when she first found out. He hugged her; he patted her back and said he wished he could “be there” for her. But he hardly knew her at all.

Her hair fell out; fruit flies emerged. At first, they seemed concentrated around some bananas she kept in a bowl. But then one day she found a feathery cluster of them in the hair by her ear as she read
Illness as Metaphor
. Was she the fruit they wanted?

GEORGIE FOUND
a new lover without too much trouble. The two of them carried on a torrid correspondence by e-mail during the break that followed her last chemotherapy. His profile on the Internet drew her because he wore a black watch cap; she’d also worn a black watch cap since her
chemo started and the hair on her head fell out, as well as all the rest of her hair, including her eyelashes and eyebrows.

His screen name: T-Bone. He asked her to call him T.

He wrote in a sensitive way that accepted her as she was (sick), and then she wrote, raveled out a few selected details and asked about his life. He told her about his two kids and how he’d worked as a full-time stay-at-home dad until they were grown, and Georgie wrote back, telling him how much she’d wanted children, at least one child, but by the time her print shop was established, it was too late, or at least too late to start again, and the marriage came apart anyway, and—well, she and T wrote back and forth, revealing certain details and concealing others. Georgie wasn’t exactly new to Internet courtship.

T seemed different. For one thing, he lived in the Midwest—Iowa or Ohio or Nebraska. He offered to fly out to San Francisco on the first day of her radiation to meet her. He didn’t have cancer—just the hat. But he seemed drawn to the specific signal, the cancer beam of Georgie’s black watch cap. “I want to know you for a long time,” he wrote. “But I want to start knowing you now, while you’re still in the thick of this. I want to see you now, without hair. I want to hold you this way, as you are when we meet.”

In a certain kind of vulnerable moment, this seemed plausible and romantic. T’s words made Georgie feel hot and damp all over with a moisture that she felt must be the last of its kind. He wrote that he wanted to make love to her now,
bald and nauseated. Even her ex-husband, a generous man, hadn’t offered that.

She wrote back to T and asked if he was kidding. He wrote back with a flight number and a time of arrival and the name of a not-bad hotel where he’d made a reservation, and the name of a restaurant near the infusion center where he would meet her for lunch. She brewed herself a pot of tea to steady her nerves, and wrote: “OK!”

IN THE GOWN ROOM
, while savagely ripping tags from her expensive new lingerie, Georgie met a young woman named Linette. Linette had come from Irian Jaya, in Indonesia, and also had cancer in her breast—but a different kind. The cancer had grown on the outside of her skin, and also inside her chest cavity and bones, and it had spread, inoperable. Linette said these things in the words she had been given, the simple declarative sentences that announced her fate like a verdict from a judge. Linette asked Georgie what kind of chemo she’d had, and when Georgie told her, she said her doctors wanted her to do that protocol, too, but she was afraid it would make her even sicker than now. What did Georgie think? How sick had the chemo made Georgie? Did she still feel like herself? Georgie said, “Good question”—she no longer knew who she was. Linette said she just wanted more time to be in her body—but she wanted to be herself. “What would you do if you were me?” Linette asked.
Georgie said she didn’t know, that she could only say what the chemo made her feel like—both sick and hungry, not necessarily for food. She felt poisoned by the toxic red junk that turned her toenails black, but also stronger than she had ever known herself, more interested in living. If anyone had asked her five years ago what she would think was important if she had cancer, she would have said nutrition, herbs, affirmations, et cetera. But once the disease took up residence in her, she became a tyrannical landlord, relentless in her struggle to evict. Linette stood before Georgie in her thin gown with its complicated ties—so complicated someone had actually posted a diagram in the gown room showing in detail how to weave all the loose strings together—and said, “What would you do if you were me?” Georgie could not even pretend to say. She took tiny Linette in her arms and for the first time in weeks felt her own body as a solid, as a force. She saw herself as one of the lucky ones, almost at this point a fraud. Now holding Linette, her sister, in the gown room, Georgie caught the odor of something deep: the breath of mortality. Linette’s thin arms held Georgie fiercely. Georgie could feel (through skin and bone) the quick beating of Linette’s heart, like a small bird struggling at a window.

A few minutes later, Georgie dressed and hurried from the building. What a ridiculous schedule she had laid out for herself: radiation, followed by lunch with a stranger, and then, if all went well, sex in T’s hotel room. Later, she could, if she wanted, go up Divisadero to her friend Katya’s house, where Katya would feed her some delicate broth and
a glass of wine. Georgie swore off meat and sugar and liquor after the diagnosis, but when she saw the amount of poison coursing through her body, she relented, or rather protested, and ate and drank small portions of anything that gave her pleasure—roast chicken, a moderate pour of Sancerre, even an organic burrito with a dollop of sour cream.

Cabs circled around Oncology—like hawks, Georgie thought as she stepped into one. She could have walked to the restaurant to meet T, but that was an unrealistic plan if she hoped even to consider sex in the afternoon. Already she felt curled in at the edges. Yet here lay the secret gift of the disease—the heightening, the sharpening. She felt alive; she’d never been so constantly aware of it. After she gave her destination to the driver and settled into the cab, Georgie closed her eyes and concentrated on meeting T, on building appetite.

He didn’t disappoint, exactly. Although almost from the first it was clear that although he seemed a good person in every way—not the serial killer creep Katya had warned her about—T was not, under the usual circumstances, her kind of guy. But the usual circumstances had been fed eight doses of tamoxifen and then irradiated. She felt, with this man who had flown from Ohio or Iowa or Nebraska to meet her, a lightness and ease, the oppressive weights of history and the future lifted. In many ways, the disease cured the worst afflictions of this sick capitalist society: It dissipated materialist impulses, lifted the tiny burdens that tied people Gulliver-like to earth and made one more aware of the small
hot fire burning inside. T seemed smart enough, attractive enough. They recognized each other immediately; under the black watch caps, they wore the same shadowy bristle.

They drank green tea and ate bowls of fresh fruit, and although Georgie tasted only a little, she felt the vitamins and moisture penetrate her tired cells. Her tissues waxed and swelled, her blood sped up and, yes, her body buzzed!

T also consumed eggs and bacon and home fries and toast—they’d starved him on the plane. Although she had to keep her eyes averted from the food, his hunger roused Georgie’s. The fruit in her bowl smelled decadent, alcoholic, and she pushed it to one side while T ate and told her how out of character it was for him to fly across the country to meet a woman—but, yes, he had done it before.

He took her hands across the table and kissed them and looked into her eyes.

“I’m glad you let me come,” he said.

Georgie reached out and touched the indentation beneath his right ear. A slight electric charge ran up her arm.

At the hotel, a sudden weakness came over her. In the excitement of meeting T, she had not stopped to wash her hands before she ate. Her hands, her clothes smelled of Linette; she tasted Linette on the end of her tongue. Georgie opened the windows in T’s room and let in the city sounds. Suddenly a tear fell out of her eye like a stone and landed on the carpet.

“I’d like to take a bath,” she told him, and he went to the closet and pulled out the hotel’s leopard-print robe for her to
use. She found his razor and his toothbrush and a carefully rolled tube of toothpaste on the sink. A faux-leather ditty bag. All this effort, this human vanity. She had to struggle to be part of it.

In the bath, she pressed the soap to her nose and breathed in. She’d brought her essential oils, and with all the strength in her arm she shook droplets into the water. The familiar aromas of cloves and roses and ylang ylang came up, the smell she thought of as herself.

She reappeared wearing the leopard robe and let it fall. T lay in the bed already, slipped between the sheets like a dinner mint. His ardor was touching; he was almost too gentle. His hand on her breast smelled of Linette, his tongue in her mouth, his fingers inside her. He came inside her, too—why the hell not?

It all went well enough—it went very well. Apart from the smell of death in her nose, Georgie felt light and alive. His body next to hers felt good. He did not go to sleep immediately, but caressed her skin with his palms. Two hours later, though, she was burning up from the inside. She had to call the emergency room doctor, even though she knew the symptoms of infection. She and T dressed and walked to Walgreens at 4:00 a.m. to pick up her prescription; he wrapped a wing of his bulky midwestern coat around her. In the morning, she vomited in the bathroom while he looked at the
New York Times
over free coffee in the lobby. She brushed her teeth with her pink toothbrush; then they took a walk on Ocean Beach before she drove him to the airport.
The wind seemed to sweep the smell from her; she blew her nose bloodily into a tissue and afterward felt better.