I see you everywhere (26 page)

Ray works in sprints. All together, he spends three or four months a year out west but insists on New York as home. Not long ago, there was plenty of work in all those cop-buddy features they’d film in this city. (Ray’s the one who vaults off a roof into a Dumpster, rolls across the hood of a speeding patrol car, tangles with three nasty punks in a dark fogbound alley.) But now they make movies like that in Toronto, Vancouver, Seattle, cold places desperate for stardom. Ray fell into stunts by chance. In college, he studied illustration. He wanted to be a cartoonist, but there were loans to pay off. He had a friend with a friend; somebody ruptured a disk; this was L.A. So here he is, thirty-eight and still at it, nicked around the edges but hooked on how alive it makes him feel, on the open air, on the long indulgent spaces between lucrative sessions of beating himself black and blue. At parties, I’ve heard him say he still draws, but all I’ve seen are angular ramblings in the margins of our phone pad. His old cartoons, acerbically leftist, lie in a portfolio under our bed, with tumbleweeds of city dust and out-ofseason shoes.

“What a fine healer you are! So little hardening, I am impressed!” Dr. Bloom fingers the scar gently but fervently, a blind man reading Walt Whitman in braille.

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over what he’s praising. So I gush, “It’s you who did such a good job. It’s so . . . minimalist. It’s nothing, really.” And I mean it, since the scar is just a two-inch lavender stroke, the slip of a pen, a tiny jet trail above my left nipple. The least of my worries.

My nose is nearly touching Dr. Bloom’s bald head, which looks as if it’s been buffed to match the sheen of his tasseled cordovan loafers. He’s young for what he does, maybe forty—Esteban’s age. Not tall, but handsome if only because he’s so immaculate and gleaming with health. Ray has a grab bag of names for my surgeon: Titmaim, Razorfest, Scalpelthrust. David Coppafeel. They come to me when Dr. Bloom stands over me like this, looking so inhumanly perfect, and keep me gratefully amused. But Ray’s contempt makes me nervous. Dr. Bloom turns his attention from the breast to me. “So now. Our next step. Your radiation is, let’s see . . .” He looks at his clipboard.

“Tomorrow is three weeks.”

“Halftime! Good for you!”

I return his smile, but all this flattery makes me suspicious. He folds his arms. The starch in his white coat creaks faintly.

“Chances are we’ve cured you already. Negative nodes—the best news of all! Statistics are on your side! But”—he hugs the clipboard—“we want to give you every percentage point possible. Your tumor . . .” He sits in a chair and goes on, with incisive gestures, to portray my personal tumor as if it were one of Ma Barker’s sons. He skips the jargon I’ve already heard—
infiltrating, aneuploid, invasive
—and springs instead for words like
angry, unpredictable, insidious, wild.
My mind bustles about like a workaholic thesaurus and offers a few more:
lawless, capricious, malicious,
mean.

“Chemotherapy, right?”

Dr. Bloom smiles without blinking. Meeting his gaze, I remember how surprisingly beautiful his brown eyes looked above his surgical mask, right before I went under. “Maybe just a little,” he says. I’ve read how the drugs swim straight for the fastest-growing cells. Like sharks, they aren’t picky, nor do they sleep. Eggs, the delectable ova Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 175
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that begin to stagnate in a body this old, are among their first prey. The caviar of chemo.

He rises briskly. “You’re a smart young woman, Louisa, and you’re in a good place. I have faith in you.” He holds out his hand. As always, I shake it and thank him. As always, he says, “My pleasure.”

He said this even after what I thanked him for was cutting me open and handing me the bad news. The way he put it was “I’m afraid it’s a true cancer.” In the first instant, I wondered idly if others were untrue, and would that be better or worse? Was it true as an arrow, meaning fatal; or true as a love, forgiving?

Next day I meet with two hatchlings. First Garrett, a painter of arctic landscapes, vast and cryptically dark. He lives in a sunny SoHo loft drenched with old money. Yes, Ad Reinhardt is a hero, so is Munch; but when I mention Frederic Church, he’s insulted. I spend the rest of the hour failing to win back his trust. It will be hard not to write about his scorn. The man is clearly spoiled. Then I head east, to Rose on Avenue C. Rose is very thin, very earnest, very young, and dresses in apologetic browns. She retrieves X-rays from the trash of a nearby animal clinic: terriers and greyhounds, cats’ skulls, a boa constrictor. On the film the animals’ names stand out: Tabitha, Rocky, Bilbo Baggins. Rose covers her walls with grids of these skeletons, then over them, in a squirreled white script, writes stories of love gone wrong. Through the words you see rib cages, livers, spleens.

“I copied some stuff from an article on battered wives in
Cosmo,
” she says. “I can’t, like, get sued, can I?” I assure her she can’t. I don’t tell her that Helen Gurley Brown is unlikely to come across her work. I’m late to the hospital. On the machine, I shiver from the sweat of rushing. It pools, a salty tickling burn, behind my ears. Like a bad pop song picked up from the audio feed in a drugstore, Helen Gurley Brown is stuck in my brain. I don’t read her magazine, but I’ve seen her on talk shows, purring away in her bouffant wigs. I remember being told that her Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 176 176

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book
Having It All
was designed to open to the page where she tells you how to give the perfect blow job. How can I think these things while my body sponges up poison? Do I wonder, spitefully, why women like Mrs. Brown seem to live forever? Do I worry that I will never have
any
of it, never mind all, except maybe a plot of Rhode Island soil a mile down the road from my parents’ house?

In a flash, Blue is a mortician. I hear myself whisper,
Don’t you dare
leave me powerless. Don’t you dare bleed me dry.
Juan shows up to do his part and, like clockwork, Burt Lancaster makes his appearance.
Burt, have you met Helen?
The first person I called with the terrible news was my sister. She was in her lab, packing for a field trip. Clem is a biologist who studies bears in Wyoming. She preaches the ultimate indifference of nature and can’t understand why people ever have children except to submit to their bullying genes. “Fuck,” she said. “Oh fuck, Lou.”

“Thanks for your apparent optimism.”

“No, listen, wait. It’s amazing what they can do now, but you have to let them do it all. Don’t fall for that macrobiotic shit, the shark cartilage, the Chinese herbs. Go for the slash and burn. It’s the best they’ve got right now.” That’s my sister, blunt as a nuclear warhead. “Fuck, Louisa. I’m saying all the wrong things.”

“No. I need to hear you tell me they can do it. You’re a scientist, you know about cells and mutations.”

“Send me your path report. I have an old boyfriend at NCI.”

“You have an old boyfriend everywhere, it’s incredible.”

“Not at the IRS. Not in Hollywood—hey, you’ve got
that
boyfriend—

or at the Vatican. Nowhere really influential.” I knew she was trying to make me laugh, so I did.

“Louisa?” She sounded earnest, even timid, which was so peculiar for Clem. “One thing that’s really important? Try to keep from flipping out.”

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“Thank you.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know.” Her tone spooked me. I said, “I’d better call Mom and Dad.”

“Oh no, honey,” said my mother. “Oh honey.”

“Mom, it might turn out okay,” I said. “They won’t know the whole story till they do more surgery. But they know it was small.”

“These tests can be all wrong. Doctors make mistakes. They see cancer everywhere, it’s the rage. For heaven’s sake, people are wearing
rib-
bons
for that disease. Pink! The color of babies, for heaven’s sake!”

I wasn’t sure how to respond, so I just listened to our connection for a couple of seconds, that intercity fuzz, until she told me that my father couldn’t handle bad news right then and would call me the next day. She’d decided this on her own, of course, because whether or not Dad was there, in the room with her, she hadn’t consulted him. Where emotions are concerned, she makes decisions for him all the time. She started to cry.

“Clem says they can probably beat it,” I said.

After crying a bit longer and assuring me that my sister was brilliant and must be right, Mom collected her Darwinian self and said,

“Those’ve got to be your father’s genes; there’s no cancer on my side.”

She’d been picturing her family tree, no doubt, its branches groaning under the weight of all the accidents and outmoded ills that killed her forebears. I told her genetic blame wasn’t the point. Before we said goodbye, she piped up, “Remember, sweetheart: it’s a long way from your heart.” Across a lifetime of skinned knees and injuries less physical, I’d always accepted that dismissal of pain, but this time I said, “In fact, you know what? For once, that’s not a bit true.” My right hand went straight to my left breast, as if the national anthem had started to play. On my way home I shop for a frenzy of cooking. Cooking is my favorite strategy for holding panic at bay. (And if I’m to mention children again, I Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 178 178

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should do it over a good meal.) While Ray talks to his agent on the phone, I make rosemary-crusted chicken with caramelized onions, Arborio rice baked with Swiss chard, oolong-ginger soufflé.

When we sit down, Ray tells me about a possible job in Alberta, a movie about paratroopers. The happier he sounds, the more edgy I feel. He worries about his ankles—he tapes them lately when he goes running—but Alberta; Alberta is gorgeous. It sounds like he’s singing the praises of another woman.

“What do you plan to do one day when your body just up and goes on strike?” I say before I can stop myself. “It’s not like you’re an athlete, a big name. Nobody’s going to ask you to endorse their bran flakes or bunion pads. It seems a long way off, but you will hit fifty. And then?”

For a moment, Ray just chews. “Well. How was
your
day?”

“I’m serious. I have to be.”

“What will I do when I’m over the hill?” He shrugs. “How about the old bag-on-the-head routine?”

It takes me a minute. “Shoot yourself ?
Shoot
yourself ? Don’t you ever think about the future?”

“Committed vagrant, that’s me.” Ray stretches his mouth into an alligator smile, a pearl onion between his front teeth.

“Please stop all this mugging around. Please. It’s
time,
Ray.”

“Time to what? Fish or cut bait? Make babies or hit the road?” He looks out the window. In the dark, all that’s visible is a nodding leafless branch. Several seconds tick by before he says, “Sometimes it feels like . . . like if I couldn’t do things your way, say yes to all your desires, right now, what kind of a guy would I be?”

I fold my napkin from a square to a triangle, press it flat on the table.

“What you want matters just as much.” But that’s not what I really think. I want to shout,
Say yes, say yes, just say
yes
!
The soufflé, when I take it from the oven, is perfect, lofty as a delusion. Minutes later, as it sinks, the odor that fills the air—the smokiness of dark tea, the comfort of eggs—seems so wrong, I wish I could break down and cry. But not now.

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∞

When Ray came into my life, he was just that: a shaft of sunlight invading a murky room. I had been married for too long to a genteel but oblivious man whose still waters hid many things but not, after all, an undertow of passion. At first, the decorum and calm in my marriage had been such a relief that I thought, So
this
is it. But then I met Ray, and I knew, though it made me sadder than I had ever been, This is
it.
He called me Miss Fever, Miss Open Flame, Miss Hundred and Ten in the Shade—and, once, Miss Bases Loaded Tying Run on Third No Outs. One day our illicit gymnastics left his handprints in the new gray carpet of my office; that night, I locked the door so the cleaning lady couldn’t remove them. Next morning, when I walked in and saw again the image of his hands, ghostly as petroglyphs, I began to shake. I locked the door for another hour. I was certain that my life as lived (so cautiously) was over. We’re an archetypal mismatch: a daughter of the
Mayflower
(my pedigree, back to the rock and beyond, sepia-inked in a leather album that my father keeps in the top drawer of an heirloom highboy) and a football star from Smelterville, Idaho (the first of seven sons, three of them cops). Ray loves to point out how pampered I’ve been. He put himself through USC by working summers on a desert road crew. My parents, almost but not quite rich, put me through Harvard by selling stocks. We argue often and loudly: about garlic (whether to mince or crush), about anarchy and idealism (which is more deluded), about flowered upholstery (if it means you’ve sold out). I like my world baroque; Ray preaches austerity. Maybe we’re so contentious because we’re both oldests: argumentative and, when shoved, unyielding and abrasive as tree trunks.

Early on, I asked if I could watch him work. He told me I’d be bored, but one November day he woke me up before dawn and drove me through the Holland Tunnel to a bleak industrial lot, location for a makebelieve Mafia sting. I spent hours in the car, drinking scorched coffee and wishing I’d worn thicker socks. When at last he tapped on the clouded Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 180 180

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window and I wiped it clean, the vision was a shock: Ray in a white shirt, dark suit, and tie. Ray the Fed. For an hour, I watched him make the same punishing move over and over: jump from a ladder on a water tank, roll across a stretch of tarmac, fire a gun. It thrilled me so much I was almost ashamed.