Five Women (38 page)

They're giving me poison, Gara thought, looking at the list. That's what everybody says chemotherapy is. The poison will kill all the fast-growing cells like cancer and my hair follicles, but it's also going to hurt the normal cells and make me sick.
I don't want to think of it as poison.
I want to think of it as a good thing that's making me well, and I want to help.

“I want a hypnotist,” she said. “Can you recommend one?”

Jane tried to persuade her to stay longer, but after ten days Gara needed to be home. Being healthy in someone else's apartment she would have felt like a house guest, but fragile and recovering she was beginning to feel like a dependent child. She had a lot of work to do.

When she was back home a woman came to visit her from the American Cancer Society. She, too, had once had a mastectomy. She sat on Gara's couch, her face and voice so filled with empathy that she seemed to be making a condolence call. She made Gara nervous and Gara wished she would leave. The woman had brought an enormous pink cotton prosthesis that Gara couldn't relate to at all, and a handful of polyester she could put into her bra. Gara took the polyester.

“Did you have chemotherapy?” Gara asked.

“No, I didn't.”

“Well, I already had a mastectomy so I know what that's like,” Gara said, annoyed. “Why didn't they send me someone who had chemotherapy so she could tell me what it's like?”

“I don't know. They just send us wherever they send us.” She tried to be helpful. “When I had my operation they didn't give chemo, but I'm sure if they did I would have had it.”

“Oh,” Gara said, liking her better for trying.

“Do you want to see my reconstruction?”

“Sure.”

The woman lifted her blouse and bra. There were two large, perfect breasts with perfect nipples on them. “My husband kept saying to the doctor, ‘Make them bigger, make them bigger,” she said, suddenly cheerful.

“They're beautiful.”

“Thank you. Do you like your oncologist? What do you think of your treatment?”

“I love my oncologist,” Gara said. She felt angry and defensive at these questions which she knew were solicitous and well meaning but in her mental state seemed controlling and intrusive. She realized for the first time how emotionally fragile she was. “I have a very good doctor and I'm very satisfied with my treatment,” Gara went on. “She knows what she's doing.”

She knew she was gibbering and that she sounded odd. We have to like our doctors, she thought. We have to have faith in them. It would be too terrifying otherwise. “Thank you for coming,” she said, rising. “I have to do some work now,” and hurried the woman to the door.

Now it seemed that everywhere she went she met women who had recovered from breast cancer. Friends introduced her to strangers. “Stay away from all fat, oil, sugar, artificial sweetener, meat, cheese, white flour, and coffee,” one woman told her. She gave Gara a strict, healthy diet to stay on for the rest of her life, and at the end of a week Gara had lost seven pounds and looked bad. This, she knew, was no way to go into chemotherapy. She called Dr. Beddowes.

“Give me a good nutritionist,” Gara said, “one who will let me eat anything I want.”

The nutritionist, Rachel Smith, wearing a long flowered dress, sat in a small office surrounded by bottles of vitamins and plastic models of food. She had a bubbly personality, and she, too, looked forty. “Before you start on chemo eat the spiciest food you can find to toughen up your mouth,” she said. “Indian food. Curry. That will prevent mouth sores. Rub the inside of your mouth with lemon. My grandmother taught me that. Buy an electric toothbrush. Toughen up your gums. I want you to drink three quarts of liquid every day the whole time you're on chemo; two of water and one of cranberry juice. The water will flush out the chemo fast and the cranberry juice will keep you from getting cystitis, which is a side effect of Cytoxan. Buy an iron skillet, the old-fashioned kind like your mother used. Cook steaks in it. You have to eat red meat three times a week. The iron gets into the food you cook and makes it better for your blood. They didn't have anemia in the Wild West. Buy only free-range chickens, the kind that don't have estrogen and antibiotics in them. I want you to eat six to ten ounces of protein every day, minimum.”

“Coffee?”

“Of course you can have coffee. I would die without it. I would prefer you didn't drink diet sodas, but once in a while it's okay.”

“Chocolate cake?”

“A little piece, not a big piece. There are only four things you can't have. Tap water, margarine, which is full of poison and worse than a nice, natural piece of butter—they're going to find out someday how bad it is—chemically decaffeinated coffee, which is treated with cleaning fluid; and raw fish. If you get sick from raw fish when your immune system is low you'll never forget it.”

Gara wrote it all down. She had found that her concentration was hazy lately. Rachel gave her a heavy bag of bottles of vitamins, which she sold to her at cost. There were some Gara had never heard of.

“I want you to keep a journal of everything you eat and do every day and how you feel. That way we can see if any food disagrees with you, or if it's just what's happening in your life.”

“That's interesting,” Gara said.

She looked surprised. “You didn't know that?”

Gara went to see the hypnotist, another young woman, who looked almost too young. She was, however, also a psychologist dealing specifically with cancer. Gara told her how she wanted to think of the chemotherapy and the hypnotist put her into a trance, which was surprisingly easy, and made a tape for her to play at home twice a day, and told her to take it to the chemo sessions if she wanted to. It told her to relax, and said that the medicine was helping her body to get stronger and healthier, and that her body was helping the medicine to work. Nowhere did it use the word “sick.” At the end it said that she would awaken refreshed.

She lay on her bed and played the tape, and before it was finished she fell asleep. When she woke up it was over. She did feel very refreshed, and also relaxed, but she had missed the message. She called the hypnotist, concerned.

“It's okay if you sleep. The mind and body hear it anyway. And don't listen lying on the bed.”

They arranged for her to have a hypnosis session before each of her chemotherapy treatments, until she got used to them, and each time she would get the tape. She was feeling much more confident now, with her team of supportive female doctors making her a full partner in the task of saving her own life.

She was back with her own patients now, the drain was out, and Jane had taken her to buy a wig just in case she needed it. As well as knowing the best plastic surgeons, Jane also knew the best place to get great hair. Gara had decided not to tell any of her patients she had cancer. Most of them were afraid of intimacy and afraid of being deserted, and she knew they would worry that she would die and leave them. Some of them might even react by becoming angry at her, and would stop their therapy. It would be too stressful for them to be dragged into her personal life unless she actually were dying; in that event she would have to prepare them for it.

And another factor was the income. She needed it now, more than ever, even though she had savings. Her quite inadequate private insurance had paid for the hospital immediately, but she didn't know about the rest. The coverage didn't include office visits and paid very little for surgery. This would be a long drawn out and expensive experience.

Another acquaintance sent her to an acupuncturist who was supposed to tune up her system and make her balanced, therefore stronger. He was a tall dark-haired man in his forties with a small black beard. Sitting on a chair beside the raised cot Gara was lying on, he wanted to have a therapeutic conversation with her before he put the needles in.

“Do you know why you got cancer?” he asked.

“No.”

“Stress.”

“Then Carl gave me cancer,” Gara said, half in humor, half in bitterness.

“Carl?”

“My ex-husband.”

“Wrong!” he said sternly. “
You
gave yourself cancer. You were stressed, you gave in to it. Don't blame anybody but yourself.”

Blame myself? Gara thought. I am the enemy within? That's the last thing I need to think, that I'm walking around with a suicidal force inside me, that I can't even trust myself.

She got up. “Don't bother with the needles,” she said quietly. “I'm leaving.”

“I know I'm hard to take,” he said, “but you won't face the truth.”

She left. On the way home in the cab she realized she was shaking with anger, but she was also relieved that she had done something about her fury—taken action, walked away. There were so few times that she had done this. Usually she wanted to be conciliatory and polite.

My cancer is not my fault, Gara told herself calmly and firmly. It's nobody's fault. It is what it is.

It is what it is . . .

That became her mantra. It soothed her. She knew a side effect of cancer was rage: at an interrupted life, at disease and pain and fear and loss and deformity and stolen time, at death itself. Rage and grief were natural. She would not let anyone add guilt. It's not my fault. It is what it is.

She took the jitney out to Amagansett and spent the weekend in her little gray house on the beach. At sunset, when the sky was golden, she stood on her deck and looked out over the ocean. She had never been a religious person in a formal sense. She believed in God, but she didn't know if God was the spirit that made the universe work or a person. As a child, looking at pictures of the stern, robed, bearded old men in her schoolbooks, she had mistaken the prophets for God himself, and had been intimidated, and had withdrawn. Now, looking at the line of the water that blended into the sky, Gara felt a spiritual presence. She knew God was there, and that he was on her side, and that he was ready to listen. Her doctors had told her that a five-year survival was the benchmark, that after five years of being cancer-free you were considered cured. Five years suddenly seemed a long time, but a short time for all the things she wanted to appreciate, especially life itself.

“God,” she said to him silently, “I want to live. Give me five years, and then we'll renegotiate.”

Chapter Thirty-two

F
ELICITY FELT LIKE A CAGED CAT
, bristling, tail twitching, wanting to get out, wanting to hide, snarling, unable to stay still. She kept up the pretense of a precise, efficient lawyer all week but never parted from her cellular phone, returning obsessively to her computer, waiting for Jason to summon her to fill up her emptiness; and on weekends she was still a secret bulimic, filling her emptiness herself, vomiting to hide the evidence. Day after day, year after year, her unhappy life just seemed to go on without changing. Time stretched and shrank with its own logic, the hours were endless. She felt wrapped in a fog of grief and confusion and self-hatred, struggling just to survive.

Russell still refused to go to a marriage counselor, and she was afraid to divorce him and be all alone. She was getting closer to forty now, and even though she looked much younger, she was aware every day that her life was passing her by. She deserved more than to be so miserable with an angry husband who thought he was her father, to be surviving on the too-brief hours of her dangerous love affair with a man who would never marry her, but she didn't know how to change anything; she felt doomed somehow, cursed and beaten.

That was when she finally decided to see a therapist. She knew, at last, that she just couldn't fix things by herself.

Her therapist was a feisty little white woman of fifty who let Felicity call her by her first name: Florette. Once a week Felicity sat on the couch across from Florette's chair in her dimly lit office, surrounded by faded chintz that was so frumpy and unpretentious it reassured her somehow, and wept. She talked about her childhood and it seemed that the childhood pain she had pushed to the back of her mind so she could continue to exist had only been waiting for her to let it leap in, full center stage, strong and alive. When she relived it, breaking into tears, Felicity waited for the catharsis she had thought would come afterward, but she was just as upset afterward if not more so.

“When will I ever get over those terrible memories?” she asked Florette. “It makes it worse to talk about them.”

“Really?”

“No. I don't know. When can I clean up my act? I hate my life.”

“You're very insightful, but it takes time for the things you discover here to actually sink in.”

“I really want to leave Russell.”

“Then why don't you?”

“I'll never live in a house like that again,” Felicity murmured sadly, thinking how she loved it.

“The princess locked in the castle?”

“More like Cinderella.”

“You have a good job, you make enough money to take care of yourself. You can move into your own apartment. This is New York; he would have to give you a settlement because he's much richer than you are. You aren't Cinderella.”

“I could marry someone else and get a better house,” Felicity said.

“You probably could, but why do you always want to be rescued?”

“Maybe because nobody ever rescued me when I was a child.”

They sat there for a while in silence.

“I never enjoyed being in my house,” Felicity said, “because Russell was in it.”

“Then this is not about a house.”

“Then what's it about?”

“Pretend you are a house,” Florette said.

“Me?”

“Yes. Say ‘I am a house,' and describe yourself.”

Felicity pictured a room. “The floor boards are rotting,” she said. “It's not safe . . . I have to watch my step or I'll fall right through. The walls are tilted, not right . . . I feel . . .”

“You feel . . . ?”

“Scared.”

“When you can describe yourself as a safe, well-constructed house where you aren't scared, then you won't need Russell or Jason,” Florette said. “You have to learn to believe in yourself.”

It was Christmas now, and Felicity bought presents for both her husband and her lover. Her firm had done very well this year and the partners had decided to have a cocktail party in their offices. These days at office Christmas parties, spouses were encouraged to come, for the sake of propriety and to keep anyone from getting drunk and doing something that might be embarrassing. Nobody had a good time and they always left as early as they could. Still, you had to show up.

Russell refused to go with her. He said he had a meeting, but she knew that wasn't the reason. He didn't like being Mr. Felicity Johnson in her world; he wanted to be the rich, successful Russell Naylor in his. Felicity ordinarily would have been delighted that Russell wasn't going to come and stand in the corner looking sulky and judgmental the way he always did at parties given by her friends, not his, but she knew the firm's big clients had been invited, and Jason might be there with his wife, so she didn't want to go alone and unprotected. If Jason was going to bring his wife and pretend to be happy, then she wanted to be able to hang on to her own husband's arm and pretend to be happy too.

“After the meeting I'll just be home watching the game,” Russell said. “Take your time.”

Christmas decorations were up, and there was a large fir tree in the reception area, decorated with doves of peace so it wouldn't be too religious and offend anyone of another faith. There was a bartender, and a bar. The attorneys who weren't married had brought dates. Felicity sipped a glass of white wine, looking around, and realized she was the only person who was there alone. Then she saw Jason walk in with a woman she knew was his wife, and her stomach churned with anxiety.

“Hello, Felicity,” he said, cordially but very formally, to make it clear that theirs was purely a professional relationship. If he's any more formal, Felicity thought, she'll know for sure.

“Hello, Jason. Merry Christmas,” Felicity said.

“Merry Christmas. Felicity Johnson, this is my wife, Thelma.”

She's a dumpy middle-aged woman, Felicity thought, encouraged, but still she felt sad and left out. “Hello, Thelma,” she said, holding out her hand, smiling. While the two women shook hands Felicity could see Jason from the corner of her eye, and she wondered if he still wanted her. He was looking so noncommittal. She wanted to run away.

Jason took Thelma's arm and walked her to the bar. Felicity didn't know what to do so she turned away and busied herself with being charming to everyone she knew, and then she glanced back at Jason and caught him looking longingly at her. She felt happy immediately. He did still want her! His wife was apparently oblivious. Felicity wondered if she should leave right now to make him jealous, but she couldn't bring herself to leave before he did. She went over to talk to Jack Allsop, a brilliant trial lawyer trapped in a nerd's face and body, who always looked damp. Behind his back the secretaries called him “Allslop.” He was with a very attractive, intense-looking woman with a lot of long red hair.

“Hey, Jack!” Felicity said jovially, with a big grin, “Are we having fun yet?”

“No, we're not,” the woman said.

“This is Eve Bader,” Jack said, introducing his companion. “And this is Felicity Johnson.”

They shook hands. Felicity noticed that Eve Bader's hand was almost preternaturally hot, as if she was running a fever. “You're a lawyer here?” Eve said.

“Yes.”

“I'm an actress.”

“Really? How interesting.”

“I just closed in a show off-Broadway,
Trashed Cars.
Did you see it?”

“No,” Felicity said. “I'm sorry.”

“That's okay,” she said brightly. “It only played two performances.” She smiled and Felicity laughed. “But I got a lot of movie interest from it.”

“Well, that's wonderful.”

“Eve was in a soap opera for five years,” Jack said proudly. “People stop her on the street.”

“I'd like to get away from all that,” Eve said. “I'm a serious actress.”

How up and alive she seemed, such a life force, such an optimist, Felicity thought. Such a contrast to me. I wish I had so much energy.

“Why don't you get us drinks?” Eve said to Jack.

“Be back in a minute,” he said. “Felicity?”

“Sure.”

“So what kind of law do you do?” Eve asked.

“Publishing, mostly. How long do you know Jack?”

“He's just a friend. I'm not going out with any more civilians. They're even sicker than actors, and actors are sick enough.”

Felicity laughed. For the first few moments she had been so taken by Eve's presence and energy that she hadn't even noticed what she was wearing, which was unusual because she was very conscious of clothes. She looked now, and was surprised to see that Eve was wearing a formal black tail coat, the kind a man would wear, with a bit of flirty white lace showing under it, and a very short black leather skirt.

“Nice outfit,” Felicity said, although she wasn't sure whether she meant it.

“Thank you. One of my thrift shop specials. I don't believe clothes make the woman; the woman makes the clothes.”

Felicity smiled. She glanced at Jason, and saw that he was still looking at her. She was actually beginning to have a good time. Before she met this outrageous woman she had felt too vulnerable, but she didn't anymore.

“Which one here is your husband?” Eve asked, having seen Felicity's wedding ring.

“Oh, he's not here. He doesn't like parties.”

“Never?”

“Not often.”

“Are there any playwrights or screenwriters here?” Eve asked, swiveling her head.

“Some. But we handle mostly novelists and nonfiction writers.”

“Mmm,” Eve said. “Well, they're good to know too because they might have projects. Can you introduce me?”

“Sure.”

“Come on.”

When Jack came back looking for them, with glasses of white wine for them in his hands, they were already across the room. He looked over at Eve, crestfallen. Felicity felt sorry for him, but she had never seen anyone operate like Eve Bader and she was also fascinated. Eve had an abrupt way of talking and she almost crackled. She cut a swath through the party with Felicity in tow as the liaison, getting writers' business cards and giving out her own, which had her name and number and her agent's name and number on them. On the bottom of her card below the two phone numbers there was a tiny drawing of two birds, and the line:
Kill two birds with one stone.

“I designed it myself,” Eve said. “Business and personal, get it?”

“It's great,” Felicity said. Eve handed her one.

“We ought to go out and have a drink some time,” Eve said. “Does your husband let you out when there isn't a party?”

“He doesn't like to,” Felicity said. “But I would like to.”

“We'll find some new places, have some fun. You know, get a group of interesting women together, compare ideas.”

“That would be nice.”

“Give me your card and put your home number on it,” Eve said, holding out her hand.

Felicity gave her the card. When she looked around for Jason again she realized he and his wife had gone. She felt a sinking in the pit of her stomach, as if an elevator had gone down too fast. He has a right to go home with his wife, she reminded herself, trying to be sane, I have to go home to my husband—but it hurt just the same. She felt abandoned and unloved. She always dreaded going home to Russell, but she wondered if Jason really minded going home with his long-suffering mommy-wife after all. When would she ever get over this obsession?

Jack made his way to Eve's side through the thinning crowd. He had one glass of wine in his hand and he gave it to Felicity. “Where's
my
wine?” Eve demanded.

“I couldn't find you so I gave it to someone else,” he said.

“That's how you treat me?” she said. “I'll get my own.”

“Get one for me, then,” Jack said.

“You don't drink.”

Felicity laughed. Something about Eve somehow cheered her up. “You guys fighting,” she said. “You're going to fall in love.”

“No love for me,” Eve said. “Sex and my career. That's it. Love makes you interested in the wrong things.”

“Like commitment,” Jack said. “And intimacy.”

“I have a commitment to my career and I'm intimate with my life,” Eve said. “No more broken hearts. They're a waste of time.”

“I'm going to call you,” Felicity said.

So that was how she became friendly with Eve Bader, a kind of woman she had never known in all her life. After a while Felicity began to think no one had ever known anyone like Eve. This was neither a compliment nor a criticism but simply an observation. They met for drinks, and told each other their life stories. Each, of course, left some things out—whatever was too humiliating or too private—but they confided enough to feel they were friends. They met again, a few weeks later, and then more frequently, and then regularly, and eventually Felicity told Eve she was having an affair. Eve already knew she was miserable in her marriage. Felicity never told her the name of her lover; she always referred to him as “my friend.” Even though she enjoyed Eve's humor and energy, there was something in Eve, even after all this time, that she didn't quite trust enough to confide such a thing, something about Eve that was at the same time recklessly volatile and curiously cold.

It was only after a year that she stopped liking Eve, that the things she had found amusing and eccentric about her finally became annoying; but by then there was nothing she could do to separate from her without using a blowtorch, and Felicity was too sensitive to hurt anyone's feelings. She didn't know what flaw it was that made her such a bad judge of people. She had adored Russell and she had been delighted by Eve, and now she saw them both so differently. The only person she knew wouldn't change was Jason, but what she was afraid of was that he would leave her.