Matrimony (30 page)

“Even if you had the gene?”

“Tell me something,” Olivia said. “If you had the gene and you got a mastectomy, would Julian stick by you?”

“Of course he would.”

“Because I’m not so sure about Kincaid.”

“You’re saying he’d leave you?”

“I just don’t know.” Olivia started to cry, tears rolling down her face, falling onto her plate next to a mound of leftover cream cheese.

“Olivia, honey.” Mia laid her hand on her sister’s arm, but Olivia swatted it away.

“And if I tested positive and didn’t have the mastectomy, I’d spend the rest of my life worrying. I worry so much already. When’s the next audition? Will I land the part? What if I get injured again? Will Kincaid leave his wife? Will I get married to him? Will I be able to have children?”

“You want children?”

“I might.”

“You never told me that.”

“But how can I even think about children when I’m barely getting by on my own?”

“Well, if you did have children…”

“You’re saying wouldn’t I want to spare them what we went through with Mom?”

Mia nodded. Sitting next to Olivia on the couch, feeling the leg of her sister’s sweatpants brush against her, she said, “If this test had been around twenty years ago, Mom might be alive today. Do you know how old she’d be?”

“Sixty-four.” They always called each other on their mother’s birthday, and now that Mia was living in New York they went out for drinks to commemorate it. Sometimes they didn’t even talk about their mother, but they knew without having to say so why they were there.

“Don’t you think about her, Ol?”

“Only all the time.” Olivia opened her jewelry box and removed a locket. It was a photo of their mother, so small it was hard to make out, but Mia recognized her, unmistakably.

Staring at that photo, Mia thought of her and Julian’s wedding, her mother in a wheelchair at that point, her father pushing her down the aisle. It was the last time the family was together; three weeks later, they would gather for her funeral. “Olivia,” she said, “I found a lump in my breast.”

“You what?”

“But I’m okay,” she said. “It was benign.”

“Jesus, Mia, you scared the shit out of me.”

“Imagine how much I scared myself.”

Olivia was sucking on her arm, and Mia recalled Olivia as an infant crying herself to sleep, how she used to suck on her forearm to comfort herself. And in the morning, when their mother went in, there would be little mouth marks on Olivia’s arms from where she’d been sucking.

“Mia,” she said, “what happened between us?”

“What do you mean?”

“Remember when I was small and you would guard my room against intruders? You didn’t even want to let Mom and Dad in. You told me you were my real mother and Mom and Dad were just the hired help.”

Mia laughed.

“I was crazy about you,” Olivia said. “What little girl doesn’t worship her big sister? But then you went off to college and left me with Mom and Dad. I don’t think I ever forgave you for not going to McGill.”

“Oh, Olivia.”

“I thought of calling you at school, but what was I going to say? ‘How are your classes going?’ I wasn’t interested in my own classes, let alone in yours. ‘Have you met any boys?’ Well, you’d met Julian and that was that, and I wasn’t going to ask about your sex life.”

“You could have.”

“I was fourteen, fifteen, going through my sullen period…”

Mia remembered. She had come home with Julian one vacation and found Olivia holed up in her bedroom with a “Witness Protection Program” sign on the door. For a week, Olivia refused to talk to anyone in the family. One night, she showed up at dinner with a towel covering her head and the words “Ignore Me” taped over the towel.

“Then Mom got sick, and she and Dad were so preoccupied I could have disappeared for a month and they wouldn’t have noticed. I thought it would be easier once Mom died, but it was worse afterward. It was just me and Dad, and we never got along.”

“He was hard on you growing up.”

Olivia shrugged. “He was all right.”

“Herr Doktor Professor,” Mia said. It was what they used to call their father, a man who wore no necktie to work, who hoped that if he dressed informally his students would find him approachable. But it hadn’t worked. His students were intimidated by him, and in a way his daughters had been intimidated, too, even Mia, on whom the burden of his expectations fell. Even now, she thought, he still hadn’t gotten over the fact that she hadn’t gone into physics. Psychology, with its fuzzy intricacies, its emotions blooming like mold, was too soft for him. Everything she was doing that wasn’t what he was doing, he’d assumed was simply a phase. She recalled those nights at the Montreal Forum, how he liked to list the Canadiens hockey players they were watching, Guy Lafleur and Jacques Lemaire and Guy Lapointe and Ken Dryden. Then he would move back in time to the Canadiens of the sixties and fifties and earlier, from Serge Savard and Jean Béliveau to Maurice “The Rocket” Richard, and when he said Richard’s name he would whistle like a rocket.

“You should have seen what he was like after Mom died,” Olivia said. “It was my last year of high school, and I thought if I didn’t come home and make dinner for him, he’d starve himself.”

“And I was in Northington,” Mia said. Not that she hadn’t been mourning, too. But she was miles away, having started her marriage, and Olivia was home, taking care of him. “I should have come back more often.”

Olivia shook her head. “You came back plenty. Certainly more than I would have.” She looked up.

“What?”

“Remember how when you were moving to New York the plan was for you to stay with me?”

“I was looking forward to that.”

“I was, too. And even once things worked out between you and Julian, I thought we’d spend more time together.”

“Why didn’t we?”

“I wish I knew. Your door has always been open to me.”

“Your door’s been open to me, too, Ol. Look at me. I’m here.”

“But you’re the one who’s made the effort. It’s like it’s enough for me to know that I can see you anytime. And now you tell me you had a lump in your breast, and it makes me realize we’re going to die someday and I don’t want to die not having been close to you.”

“We can still try.”

“I don’t know…”

“What do you mean?”

“I want to be close to you, Mia, but I’ve wanted to be close to you for so long and I haven’t been able to do it.” Olivia removed a Popsicle from the freezer and took a bite of it. It was cherry flavored, and a red smudge bloomed beneath her nose, as if she’d misapplied her lipstick.

Picking at the blueberries on her plate, Mia thought of their mother, the fruit czar, who years ago, when they were small, used to count the berries she gave them. She was a stickler for impartiality, and she wanted to make sure the girls got the same amount. Though Mia, five years older than Olivia, would sneak extra berries when her sister wasn’t looking. And years after that, she would sneak them back in the other direction, like someone paying off an unacknowledged debt. She put on her jacket.

“You have to go?”

She nodded.

“Here,” Olivia said, removing another Popsicle from the freezer. “Take one for the road.”

She unwrapped it.

“Red Dye Number Two,” Olivia said. “Remember how Mom wouldn’t let us eat that? No maraschino cherries? They caused cancer.”

Mia smiled dolorously.

She walked up Fifth Street, and when she turned around she could see Olivia’s fire escape. When she first went to school, her mother would stand at the window holding Olivia and they would wave at her as she departed. And years later, when she left for Graymont, they’d been waving, too. When she pictured her family, what she thought of was leave-takings, and here was another one; she’d never been good at saying goodbye.

When she got home, she made an appointment with the genetics counselor. And the following week, accompanied by Julian, she went to the hospital to have her blood drawn.

When the results came back, she was required to retrieve them in person. She sat beside Julian in the same waiting room they’d sat in three weeks before, and the geneticist emerged to greet them.

“Have a seat,” the woman said.

Mia sat in the chair facing the geneticist’s desk, and Julian stood behind her.

The geneticist looked down at Mia’s file. “I wish the news were better. You tested positive for BRCA1.”

“I have the breast cancer gene?”

The geneticist nodded.

“There must be a mistake.” She had tested to rule out the gene, not to have it.

The geneticist, shaking her head, regarded her kindly. “These tests are extremely accurate.”

“How accurate?”

“They’re practically foolproof.”

Julian took her hand.

“What you need to remember,” the geneticist said, “is that this doesn’t mean you’re going to get breast or ovarian cancer. Every person is different, and there’s still a lot we don’t know.”

So this was why they told you in person. Because in Mia’s case there was so much more to talk about, more geneticists, more doctors, more experts to consult. But she didn’t want to talk to any of them right now; the only person she wanted to be with was Julian.

She must have stayed at the hospital for another hour, taking down phone numbers, getting referrals. But later she would recall none of it. The only thing she would remember was embracing Julian, and afterward the walk home, from the Upper East Side down to Perry Street, five miles, she ventured, but she refused to take a cab. They walked, slowly, cheerlessly, passing thousands of people along the way, but it was as if the streets were desolate, for they didn’t notice anyone as they moved from block to block, making their silent way home.

Northington, Massachusetts

“Julian Wainwright!”
a woman shrieked. She took Julian in a hug, but before he could determine who she was, she had extricated herself and was doing her best to catch up with her friend, who was running down Rigby Hill in stiletto heels, her pocketbook slamming against her.

“Who was that?” Mia asked.

“I don’t know.”

“She certainly seemed to know you.”

Men in seersucker jackets and women in sundresses dotted the lawn, some with children in tow. A volleyball net had been erected in Allenby Field, and two barefoot couples were swatting a beach ball over it. One of the women was wearing a bikini top with the words “Class of 2000” masking-taped across her spine.

It was June 2005, Julian and Mia’s fifteen-year college reunion.

They hadn’t attended a Graymont reunion before; at their five-year reunion they’d been living in Ann Arbor, and at their ten-year reunion they’d been separated. Now they were back together and only a few hours’ drive from Northington—though, in truth, Julian had been surprised when Mia suggested they go, and surprised, too, that he acquiesced so readily. They were getting older, he thought, and more sentimental.

Towels had been folded on the dormitory beds and little mints placed on the pillows, as at a hotel. There was a fan in the room, and Mia turned theirs on high and placed herself in front of it.

Now, having unpacked, they wandered through campus and into town. Megan’s Muffins was gone, as was McNulty’s Cleaners. Northington Paper and Copy was still there, and so was Store 24, but most of the businesses had changed hands, perhaps, Julian thought, several times over.

“Where’s the Bison Bar and Grill?” he asked. It was where he and Carter used to go for cheeseburgers, where Carter and Pilar had gone on their first date.

“It’s a cell phone store.”

“And Burgher’s Burger?”

“Gone, too.”

And where, he wanted to know, was Mr. Kang’s produce store? And Mr. Kang himself? In place of the produce store stood a real estate agency. Mia asked a few passersby what had happened to the Kangs, but no one seemed to know.

“I used to be friends with the Kangs,” she told someone, though really it was Julian who had been friends with them. But she felt as if she had, too, if only vicariously.

At the co-op where they’d lived senior year, they found a group of construction workers patrolling an empty lot.

“Don’t tell me,” Mia said. “You’re putting up condominiums.”

“A bank,” said one of the construction workers. “The students need somewhere to put all their cash.”

They sat down on a park bench; Mia was exhausted. It was fourteen months since she’d found her breast lump, a year since she’d tested positive for the gene. It wasn’t simply that she measured time this way; it was that she couldn’t recall how she used to feel, before everything was fraught with peril. When she’d tested positive, she’d wanted to schedule the surgeries immediately, but Dr. Kaplan told her not to rush. “At least take a few weeks to decide,” she said. “You’re unlikely to come down with cancer in that time.”

So Mia stayed up late talking with Julian, flipping through the articles she’d copied. There was some evidence that pregnancy was protective against breast cancer. Nursing was supposed to be protective, too. “I thought you wanted to have a baby.”

“I do,” Julian said.

She looked up at him. “On the other hand, we could adopt.”

Finally, after weeks of vacillating (she even proposed, half seriously, that they flip a coin), she announced that she wanted to have a baby.

“You mean through sex?”

She laughed. “Yes, through sex.”

How incongruous it was, not just the act of unprotected sex but the very fact of wishing to get pregnant when for so long she’d hoped she wouldn’t, when back in college her period had been late a couple of times and she’d been frantic. Perhaps that was why she hadn’t given thought to infertility. She’d spent so many years afraid she was fertile, it was hard to change course now.

But three months elapsed, and she realized she had no right to be complacent about getting pregnant, that having the gene didn’t earn her a pass.

She called Dr. Kaplan, who told her it was too early to panic. “It takes six months for the typical thirty-year-old to get pregnant,” Dr. Kaplan said. “And you’re thirty-six, so there’s probably nothing wrong with you.”

But there
was
something wrong with her. She had the breast cancer gene, and every month she didn’t get pregnant was another month she could get sick. She watched her diet and tried to get more sleep, but when two more months passed and, despite having used home ovulation tests, she still hadn’t gotten pregnant, she became abject.

Finally, after six months of trying, she returned to Dr. Kaplan, who agreed to send her to a fertility specialist. “But I’m warning you,” Dr. Kaplan said. “The doctor is going to put you on Clomid.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing, necessarily. But there’s a suspected link to ovarian cancer. It hasn’t been proved, but in general, you don’t want to take these drugs unless there’s a good reason.”

The last article Mia had read suggested she had a fifty-four percent chance of developing ovarian cancer. How much worse could her odds be?

Finally, like an alcoholic, she drank half a bottle of Robitussin. The theory was that cough syrup thinned the mucus in your body, and a woman’s cervical mucus needed to be thin so that sperm could get through it. But as Mia stood in the bathroom with the bottle of Robitussin pressed to her lips, aware that no studies had proven a connection between cough syrup and fertility, she felt like a crackpot.

Yet almost as soon as she and Julian started to try again, she felt a low-grade queasiness she couldn’t account for; even if she was pregnant, it was far too early for morning sickness.

“Maybe you’re just anxious,” Julian said.

“About what?”

“Your special lunch?” Julian had just emerged from the shower, and he stood before Mia in his towel, dripping water on the floor.

“Oh, come on.” Julian was talking about Derek, she realized. Derek from Japan. He was visiting New York with his son, and she’d arranged to have lunch with them. Her Japanese boyfriend, Julian called Derek, and the more she resisted, the more he poked fun.

The last time Mia saw Derek, they were nineteen, and it was as if she’d overcompensated, for she imagined him now in his fifties instead of his thirties. So when she saw him again, standing in front of a bodega on Eighth Avenue, she was doubly surprised to see he’d hardly aged. His hair was graying at the temples, but other than that he appeared just as he had, his cheeks pale and unmottled, his bangs falling across his face. “Derek, you look exactly the same.”

“You do, too,” he said, and he shook her hand.

When Derek had said he was bringing his son, Mia had imagined a boy of seven or eight, but the young man next to Derek appeared sixteen.

“We’re visiting universities,” Derek explained. “Rodney wants to go to school in the United States.” He rested his hand on his son’s shoulder. He’s just like me when I was his age. He’s already given himself an American name.”

Mia looked at Rodney, then at Derek. “You have a son who’s going to
college
?”

“I got married young.”

“So did I.”

“But you don’t have a child who’s ready for college?”

Mia smiled sadly. “I don’t have children at all.” She reached into her bag. “Here,” she said, “let me buy you a drink,” and she returned from the bodega holding three cans of Coke, and they stood on the street corner drinking them.

“Tell me about yourself,” Mia said to Derek. “What does your wife do? Do you have other children besides Rodney?”

“It’s just me and Rodney,” Derek said. “I don’t have a wife.”

“You’re divorced?”

“Actually, my wife died.”

“Oh,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

She got discomposed after that, and it seemed for the next couple of hours she didn’t know what to say. So she contented herself with wandering around Manhattan with Derek and Rodney, taking them to South Street Seaport and the Empire State Building, talking about the differences between Columbia and NYU.

Eventually, though, Rodney tired of adult company and left Mia and Derek alone in Central Park. Runners loped around the reservoir; a girl on a skateboard whizzed past them. A unicyclist juggling bowling pins emerged from behind the bend, and a crowd gathered to watch him.

“It’s New York,” Mia explained. She sat down on a park bench next to Derek, and soon a flock of pigeons approached them. One was picking at something by Derek’s feet.

“It’s funny,” Derek said. “Rodney’s always telling me I should feed the pigeons. He says I need to relax.”

“Do you?”

“Probably. I work too hard. It’s true of men of my generation. Maybe of men of all generations. But Rodney swears he’s going to be different. That’s why he wants to come to college in the U.S. He thinks university students in America have more fun. They sleep late and drink more beer.”

“There’s some of that,” Mia said, remembering her students at the University of Michigan.

“I guess if you don’t drink beer at college, when are you going to drink?”

“So you’re not worried?”

Derek shook his head. “Rodney will probably find he’s more serious than he realized. Away from my influence, he’ll turn out just like me. It’s what happened with me and my father.”

“Is he an economics professor, too?”

“No,” Derek said, “but temperamentally we’re the same.” A group of preschool children walked past them, everyone in pairs, holding hands. “Why? What kind of work do you do?”

“I’m a psychotherapist,” Mia said.

“Is that what you studied in college? Psychology?”

She shook her head. She’d taken a psychology course her sophomore year, but half of what she learned seemed so obviously true she wasn’t sure why anyone bothered to teach it, and the other half seemed just as obviously false. Everything felt as if it were straight from a psychology textbook, which shouldn’t have surprised her, because it was. “My mother died, and I started to see a therapist myself. Before that, I hadn’t considered it as a career.”

“Are you a good therapist?”

Mia laughed.

“Why? Has no one asked you that before?”

“Not so directly.” And she remembered now how forthright Derek had been, and how it had disarmed her.

She said, “People make fun of therapists for projecting themselves as a blank screen. The patient asks them a question, and all they can say is, ‘What do
you
think?’ But I’ve got the opposite problem. I’m too quick to say what’s on my mind. It’s the product of being a big sister. I’m a know-it-all. She looked up at him. What about you, Derek? Are you a good economist?”

He shrugged. “Sometimes I think I’m too good. Remember in France, when we went out to eat, how quickly I could calculate the tax? You taught me that phrase, ‘the three R’s.’ Reading, writing, and ’rithmetic. I was good at them.”

“But especially arithmetic?”

Derek nodded. “Economics was the easy path for me. I have a friend who was a stutterer when he was a child and he ended up becoming a politician. Compared to him, I’m a coward.”

“Why?” she said. “What would you have been if not an economist?”

“A musician, maybe?”

“I didn’t know you played music.”

“That’s the point. I don’t. But I could have tried. It would have been a challenge.”

Mia laughed.

“But no,” he said. “I’ve been happy professionally.”

“But not in other ways?”

“My wife died,” he said. “It’s hard to get over something like that.”

Mia thought of her father, who seemed to have recovered from her mother’s death. He went to work every morning. He had friends. Most of the time he appeared happy. But it had been fifteen years since her mother had died, and he still thought of her every day. He’d told her this once and it startled her. Though she didn’t know why. She thought of her mother every day, too.

“I have a colleague whose wife was killed in a plane crash, and less than a year later he got married again. I guess some people fall in love easily.” He looked up at her. “What about you?”

“Do
I
fall in love easily?”

“Tell me about Julian,” he said. “He’s a fiction writer?”

She nodded.

“And you love him?”

She laughed. “Yes, I love Julian. We had some difficulties—we were separated for a while—but things are better now.” She looked up at Derek. “How long ago did your wife die?”

“When Rodney was three.”

“So you raised him on your own?”

Derek nodded. “And now he’s getting ready to go to university. It’s not easy when they leave. That year in Provence, my mother cried at the airport when I left, and I thought,
What are you crying about?
”

“And now you understand?”

“Absolutely.” Derek glanced at his watch. He’d agreed to meet Rodney, he told Mia, at the Metropolitan Museum. Mia had to leave, too, but she decided to walk him partway there.

Above them, the sun emerged from behind the clouds, and as they made their way across the open meadow, Mia could see Fifth Avenue, its majestic apartment buildings lined up like gift boxes. “So you never remarried?”

“I almost did,” Derek said. “But Rodney was twelve at the time, and he and my fiancée didn’t get along. In the end, she wasn’t right for me.”

“And now?”

“Now I sort of have a girlfriend.”

“Sort of? Does your girlfriend know you feel this way?”

“Look who’s talking,” Derek said. “You were Miss Sort Of yourself.”

“What do you mean?”

“You sort of had a boyfriend, too. What was his name? Glen?”

“How do you remember that?”

“You made an impression on me.”

And an image came to Mia of Derek tossing a mango from hand to hand, the two of them weaving through the streets of Aix, Derek on his way back from class, carrying his knapsack of groceries. She wondered what would have happened if she’d let herself love Derek. She imagined herself in Kyoto, mother to his children, and for a moment it seemed as possible as the life she’d lived, as any path she might have taken. “Do you still like Derek and the Dominos?”