I See You Made an Effort: Compliments, Indignities, and Survival Stories from the Edge of 50 (5 page)

“Would you like an explanation of all the services we offer?”

I am curious, but always feel guilty in situations like this.
*
I don’t want him to waste his time and attention on someone who can’t afford to leave a gigantic tip or become a regular customer.

“You don’t have to do that,” I assure him. I want to whisper, “I’m one of you. I’m just working here tonight.”

But instead of refusing, I let him walk me to view the five-foot purple amethyst crystal positioned in front of a purple glass wall that has purple water gently cascading into a small pond.

“The spa was built around this geode.”

“Really? I thought it was built around a pile of money.”

I later learn that amethyst is supposed to promote clarity of thinking. Maybe it works, because he lets my comment pass without even registering it. It’s time to host the charity event, so I rub on every lotion I can find, then pocket a few disposable razors and travel toothbrushes, hoping they don’t have hidden cameras inside the vault.

I head upstairs, change into my clothes and proceed down to the ballroom. It would be too tedious to explain my duties, but they involve two and a half hours of facilitating a panel about the preservation of wetlands that includes an elderly philanthropist, a noted film producer and an American alligator. One of them urinates on my lap during a spirited moment.

After the show, I see that mistress of efficiency, blandiful Monica, and ask her to point me in the direction of a bathroom. She says there is one I can use just down the hall. I follow a hallway that narrows until I’m practically brushing past the walls. The lighting starts to look different, dimmer, and even the paint looks less lustrous. The hallway ends in a stairway lit by a single naked lightbulb. Where am I going, Anne Frank’s bathroom? I open the door at the top of the stairs. It’s a restroom. It is not unlike other bathrooms I have used tens of thousands of times. There’s a row of individual stalls separated by dented metal dividers and an industrial soap dispenser with a greasy pinkish film coating the pumping mechanism. Water drips into a rust-stained cracked sink, and rough, brown paper towels are stacked haphazardly in a pile on the grimy windowsill. It’s simply outrageous. Where’s my bathroom with the heavy door? Where are my
products? It doesn’t smell like any kind of money here, old or new. She’s sent me to the bathroom for The Help. I am not The Help. I am a guest. I turn, march down the stairs, run out of that hallway and search until I find a hotel guest bathroom.

I didn’t sleep at all that night. I would like to say I was kept awake horrified by my own self-involved, entitled, elitist behavior, but that would not be accurate. After dousing myself with more Asprey Purple Water, I lay awake because the pillow had my initials monogrammed into them. That’s something I am still a little confused about. Do they keep stacks of initialed linens? Is there an algorithm that predicts the frequency of combinations, otherwise the linen closet would be immeasurably vast? Was my head resting on the same pillow used by Alan Greenspan? Do they remove the embroidery after you check out or was I expected to take the pillowcases home? It was truly vexing. Plus, I didn’t want to waste one minute of how pleasurable the bedding felt by sleeping. The thread count of the sheets was so high they felt cold and creamy. The texture was not unlike what became one of my mother’s signature dishes at our island home. Key lime pie, made with the limes from our backyard tree. The lime custard filling was terribly deceiving. It was so light, you’d be fooled into thinking you’d sampled a single bite only to find you’d devoured the entire thing.

It takes two, maybe three calls from the front desk to remind me of the checkout time. I take a shower and a bath. I suppose I subconsciously don’t want to leave, because as I get into my car, I realize I’ve left my evening clothes upstairs in the room. The valet brings them down for me. I tip him ten dollars, even though that
was six dollars more than I was planning on spending on a carne asada burrito sin frijoles for lunch.

The attendant asks me if there is anything else he can do for me.
Where do I begin?
I think. “Oh, nothing,” I say. I head back across town, where the air is hotter, the streets are dirtier, where a sticky cough drop and half an Ativan can be found in my bathrobe pockets.

Arriving home to my block, I pull up in front of my neighbor’s house. Our home was designed when families typically had only one car, and my husband has parked in our driveway, so today it’s my turn to park on the street. These neighbors purchased right at the top of the market and have transformed their home into a spacious manse with a meticulously well-maintained native-plant zero-scaping, stone fountains, and imported olive trees that had to be lowered by cranes into the front yard terracing. I catch a glimpse of their sleek, powerful new Sub-Zero stainless steel refrigerator in their newly renovated kitchen.
Mon dieu
, it’s got French doors.

On the other side of our home is Tobacco Road. The Joad family’s home is sliding into disrepair; windows have been strangely and randomly blocked by metal stacking shelves, and bedsheets hang in the window frames, never a good sign. Our kittens jump over their fence and come home with oil stains on their foreheads. What’s going on in that backyard, piled high with old furniture and car parts? They own a ten-year-old refrigerated truck, from the back of which they sell off-brand ice cream that I have strictly forbidden my son to eat. The truck is parked outside their house, where the patriarch of the family often works on it sans
shirt and, neighborhood rumor has it, on occasion without pants as well. With the tangle of plants I like to call our English garden and our faded wooden shingles, I sense our house listing slowly toward Tobacco Road. When will our bedsheets go up?

I open our front door and it smells like teen spirit. I’m not sure what Kurt Cobain had in mind, but it’s come to mean sweaty socks and FroYo, with just a hint of sunscreen, at my house. No one is going to take the aroma of our home and bottle it. I have bills to pay. I’ve got both horizontal
and
vertical cracks in the foundation of my house, but my bedroom is still bigger than any apartment I had in my twenties, potable water is only a few feet away, and I can still afford my own strawberries.

I will need to keep up that gratitude list practice. I vow to keep one of my dozen or so pilfered bottles of Asprey Purple Water body lotion on my nightstand as a reminder of how quickly I can be seduced. Also, because it smells soooo damn good.

828-3886. I recognize the number when I see it flash up on the screen. It’s one of the few phone numbers that I know by heart. We’ve been friends for twenty-two years. Hers were the last digits I learned before we all outsourced our memories to our cell phones. All the other numbers from my past have lost relevancy or don’t connect to the living: street addresses for homes we no longer own, birthdays of grandparents, channels of TV stations, prepregnancy shoe size, and of all those landlines long abandoned—hers was the last working phone number.

828-3886.

I answer the phone.

“Hey, Robin, what’s up?”

When you’ve been close friends for over two decades, you can hear the bad news in the sound of their breath.

“Oh no,” I say, bracing for the news.

“I have cancer.”

“What kind?”

“Pancreatic.”

“Pancreatic,” I repeat in a voice I don’t recognize. Or maybe it’s a finality I haven’t heard in my voice until now.

It had started as a slight pain in her abdomen earlier in the year. The initial diagnosis was gastritis. In recent years, Robin’s greatest pleasures had been her wine-tasting group, gourmand weekends in Napa Valley and an annual trip to France. She’d even considered cashing out and hightailing it to a wine cave in the Loire Valley. After she triumphed over a lifetime of struggle with body issues, wine and anything worth eating would now be denied to her. It seemed impossible that “Cut out spicy foods and wine” had progressed to “Get your affairs in order” by springtime, but it had.

In my twenties, all cancers sounded the same to me, but I’m old enough to know that pancreatic is one of those no-one-gets-out-of-here-alive cancers. I voraciously consume the obits, tallying what takes out whom, at what speed and what the symptoms are, and I know that if Steve Jobs couldn’t beat this one, nobody can.

Every time I pick up the phone, someone’s having a health crisis. In the past, when friends have died it’s seemed like the exception, not the rule, but now all bets are off. There was the cruel swiftness with which AIDS dispatched my gay friends in the eighties and then there was Fernando’s overdose at thirty-nine; the actress who was murdered, leaving her young daughter motherless; the neighbor who’d dropped dead from a brain
aneurysm on his daily run. Come to think of it, he’d just turned fifty. Now every passing year brings news of a friend’s decline or demise. Last month brought a wave of suicides.

“Have you heard about Daniella’s husband? He went off his meds and drove off a cliff. He left a note saying, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’”

“Two young children. Tragic.”

“Did you know the comedy writer, Steven Something-Jewish?”

“Steven Something-Jewish, oh yeah, it was drugs and alcohol, right?”

“It wasn’t career related, right, wasn’t he always working?”

“Yes!”

“Tragic.”

“Have you heard about . . .”

“Yes. Tragic!”

Deena’s brain tumor, Yulissa’s back surgery and Curtis’s irregular heartbeat.

“Heart? Heart is good. Just look at Dick Cheney.”

If I’m not filling out bring-them-a-meal requests, I’m dropping off medication, driving a friend to get an MRI, making an emergency sour cream run or walking someone’s dog. People are starting to brag about their low cholesterol levels with the enthusiasm once reserved for sexual conquests. I hate that I get a joke with Boniva in the punchline.

But the news about Robin hit especially hard. She was the person I’ve known the longest since moving to Los Angeles. It can be challenging to make long-lasting friendships after college, but Robin and I had stuck it out. I leaned on Robin like an older sister
in the early years of our acquaintance, when our five-year age difference seemed enormous, but over time, the gap had compressed and we’d become peers.

When my sulky movie-star boyfriend disappeared overnight and changed his phone number, it was her idea to drive out to a crummy strip mall and chuck the keys to his apartment into the sewer.
*
She knew me well enough to know that having those keys in my possession would be dangerously tempting for me, though in retrospect, I’m sure he had changed his locks as well.

Over the years there’d been times when I’d see that phone number and brace myself for the way her New Jersey nasal whine could inspire guilt in me. “Annnabeeeelle, it’s Roooobin. Where are you??” But we’d put in the time. My divorce, her career setbacks, my career setbacks, my new marriage, her new career, the birth of my son, her big breakups, her parents’ declining health. We’d been like sisters for two and a half decades and were heading into our third.

Our friendship was tested when she turned fifty. She’d woken up convinced that she’d been cheated out of the attention she deserved having never been married, with no children to birthday party or bar mitzvah. She insisted her closest girlfriends accompany her to sample Syrahs in the Rhône Valley. When none of us could take the trip, she felt betrayed and abandoned. Now, facing this diagnosis, she’d taken me and the rest of her inner circle back.

“No one will ever have sex with me again.”

“No one’s having sex with you now. At least now you can attend your own group,” I said in an attempt at humor.

After an award-winning career of producing stand-up comedy, Robin had gone back to school to become a therapist and had been working as a bereavement facilitator for oncology groups. She knew the landscape ahead of her: punishing rounds of chemo and if she was really, really lucky, she might get a year or two. Later it would make me apoplectic to hear people say, “It’s ironic that a grief facilitator gets cancer.”

“Not really,” I’d counter. “That’s like saying it’s extraordinary when your doctor dies. What would be amazing is if they lived forever.”

There was a certain excitement when she started the treatment, like the third season of a sitcom, when the characters face serious challenges but still fire off hilariously biting one-liners. It was just like Samantha’s breast cancer story line in
Sex and the City
, except Robin didn’t have a lavish wardrobe, designer shoe collection, sex, the city, or any chance of recovery. She did still have her sense of humor when she registered the domain name Tumor Humor. She was going to blog about coping with cancer through humor. Chemo was also a great excuse to purchase one or two new sweaters to attractively provide coverage for the port she’d need in her chest and cute fuzzy booties for good measure. Minus her gourmet cuisine and wine, her weight dipped precipitously, but we joked about how she was finally able to lose those pesky last
twenty
-five pounds.

After only a few months we went from sitcom to Lifetime Movie of the Week. Robin sprung for a human-hair wig styled after Elaine’s
Seinfeld
season-six layered locks, so when her hair fell out, every day was a good hair day. Glowing from the chemo, she really had never looked better. But those good days didn’t last. Her feet swelled up and the comfy booties had to be cast aside. The new sweaters hung loosely from her shrinking frame, her skin began to turn dull and gray and she still hadn’t written more than a few paragraphs of Tumor Humor. Cancer? Not so funny after all. It was terrifying. For her. For all of her friends.

Is there something growing inside me right now that will eventually kill me as well? I’ve always harbored an irrational resistance to washing off fruit. I’ve purposefully, stubbornly refused to rinse it off. Why on earth do I do this? What’s wrong with me?
*
Pesticides are undoubtedly eating away at my insides at this very minute, though statistically speaking, I will probably be bumped off by a teenage driver texting “What’s up?” or the last thing I will glimpse will be tile. My friend the futurist and author Dave Freeman had worked his way through fifty of his Hundred Things to Do Before You Die that he’d recommended in his book; he’d survived running with the bulls in Spain and land diving in the South Pacific, but was taken out by a fall in the tub.

“The fifties are the weeding-out time,” my friend Arye explains. He serves on the pension advisory board of the actors’
union. “We could never afford to pay pension and health-care benefits if so many people didn’t start dropping dead.”

“Well, it’s comforting to know they’re serving a purpose for the greater good.”

I’m a child of the 1970s: I saw
Logan’s Run
, I know that Soylent Green is people and that if we lived forever we’d be unfairly stealing resources that belong to future generations. But when it comes to giving up your seat at the dinner table, most of us prefer to linger for one more coffee and dessert.

Robin wanted to hang on as long as possible, and she needed our help to make that possible. With no spouse, no children, she had only her friends, her chosen family. She didn’t want to return to New Jersey to her mother with Alzheimer’s, father with dementia and a strained relationship with her brother and sister-in-law. Isolation from her home and friends would kill her faster than the cancer and make any time she had left miserable, she reasoned, and the troops assembled. Neighbors began dog walking and handled the food shopping. Roommates from college, comedians and members of her wine group showed up to bolster her spirits. Her closest friends began coordinating and accompanying her to doctor’s appointments and chemo, and even sleeping over on a regular basis.

I tried to carve out my usefulness. Her last relationship, with a foodie who had run a bacon-of-the-month mail-order business, had ended two years before. He left her with a Viking oven and a large collection of wines, but without hope of entering into another relationship. I decided I would start touching her as much as possible. We’d smoke her medical marijuana and then I’d wash
her hair. She’d put her head in my lap, and I’d stroke her head and massage her feet.

Within eight months, we were in Bergman territory. Every time I’d leave her, we’d say good-bye not knowing if this would be
that
good-bye. There were so many farewells that she was starting to tire of them. It was gut-wrenching.

“You’re losing me, but I’m losing everyone I love all at once.”

Robin couldn’t tolerate even the most soothing of music, watch television or read, and barely rose from her bed. Hospice workers began twenty-four-hour shifts.

Every day I began bracing for the call that would tell me she had passed, but it didn’t come. I was performing around the country and each time I’d see 828-3886 flash on my phone, I’d answer with the same question. Is this the call? “It’s not
that
call, but I think you should come over when you get back in town and say good-bye,” one of her caregivers would say. As soon as my plane would land, I’d drop my suitcases at home, drive to her place, hop into her bed, massage her bony shoulders and lead her through a relaxation exercise I learned from a rabbi. We’re both atheists, but what harm could it do?

“Picture yourself lying on a beach. The sun warms your body. You know, Robin, we should really take you to the beach now that you don’t need to worry about skin cancer! Imagine your soul rising up into the atmosphere, even though there is no soul separate from the body. Did you know that it was only after people realized that the body deteriorated after death, they needed to conceive of something that was separate from the corporeal body in order to support the idea of resurrection, and that’s how the concept of the
soul being untethered to the body became an accepted belief?
*
Anyway, ‘you,’ whatever that means, rise up to the clouds to Gan Eden, the Garden of Eden, your soul’s true home. I prefer concrete under my feet, but whatever works—maybe it’s Bergerac or Cahors. Everyone you love and who loves you is waiting for you. I suppose that could be two separate and distinct groups of people. I’m not sure what happens if your grandmother would prefer not to spend the afterlife in the company of your grandfather, which I’m sure is true in my family, but maybe the way it works is that these ‘souls’ get together to greet you and then they go off to their own corner of heaven with the people they’d prefer to spend eternity with—anyway, you greet your loved ones and you’re surrounded by love. You’re surrounded by love, Robin. Let go of any stress you’re feeling. Let go. Just let go. Now, slowly return back to your body in a more relaxed state,” I’d repeat.

I’d been doing this meditation in times of stress for years, but it wasn’t until I lay in Robin’s bed that I realized it might actually be a preparation for the Big Relaxation and that it might not be a bad idea to skip the part about returning to your body, but I couldn’t bring myself to do that. She didn’t need me to decide for her when to go.

The words of the dying hold a special power. Famous last words are oft quoted, even if they aren’t true.
Jefferson lives
,
John Adams supposedly proclaimed, the rivalry between these two Founding Fathers following him to the death. I imagine his real last words were probably
I’m so uncomfortable . . . water, hot, where?
Some non sequitur. But we like this idea, the it-all-makes-sense-now moment that connects you to the dying, which gives their life meaning and in turn gives your life meaning and thus It All Makes Sense. I’m not going to lie and say these were her last words, but during one of these last visits, she clutched my hands and these were four of the last words I can remember her saying to me.

“Learn from my life.”

I nodded my head, cried, and promised I would in the way that you do to the dying.

But what did she mean?
Learn from my life?
She should have married Bacon Man? Would things have been different? Would years of consuming even more pork products have sped up or slowed down what might have been the inevitable? Should she have moved to France? Would she have gotten pancreatic cancer if she’d taken up residence in a wine cave? Wouldn’t we be having the same conversation in a room with fewer windows?

Learn from my life.

The only thing I was learning was just how much suffering a relatively small collection of fast-growing cells can cause.