Woman on Top (15 page)

“All right come, I don’t know how I’ll make it through this one.”

In the morning Jake lay on the hospital bed in a daze, terrified. I held Jake’s hand and knew he had to hear the truth before Martin arrived, before the boom was lowered.

“Jake, I think Martin is going to tell us it’s a recurrence.”

Jake stared at me like a hurt, bewildered child.

“We’ll get through this. You’ll take that experimental drug that Martin’s working on, and you’ll be okay. We’ll do everything there is in this world - you know we will. You’re going to be okay.”

Martin opened the door. “Jake, I just came from the pathology department, I looked at the slides myself. It’s lymphoma. I cried on the way over here.”

Jake took in a deep breath and held it. He was a doctor; he knew what this meant, far more than I did.

“Can he get that experimental drug?” I asked.

“We’ll discuss it after we get him over this crisis. I’m sorry Jake. I love both of you and I didn’t want to have to tell you this.”

Jake could have said no at this point to further treatment and acknowledged his fate and declined to fight.

Instead, he chose to continue on the path we had been taking. Life, if possible.

I left the room and found that I couldn’t stop crying. All of last night’s anxiety - all those phone calls, those pleas for reassurance - seemed ludicrous.

Over and over again, I walked up and down the halls.

Martin found me. “It’s only a matter of months now,” he said.

“NO!”

Jake would die of cancer, I knew that now. But not in months.

“You did something terrible Martin. When you yelled at Jake on the phone that this wasn’t a recurrence, you hurt him. It wasn’t necessary. The lumps in his neck and testicle were cancer, he had every right to be scared.”

Martin was silent for the first time since I had met him.

“After all those promises of cure, Martin, how could you?”

“Kate, you have to be prepared for the worst now. A typical breast cancer doubles every six weeks. Jake’s tumor is doubling every other day.”

Now I had to tell my children that their daddy might not make it after all. We had always said that he was very sick but that the treatments and all the suffering had a purpose - that he would live. Now, the only hope I could give them - or myself - lay with an experimental drug.

We met at the same hotel we had used for so many weekends. The kids were their usual selves, running around the room, watching television, and playing Monopoly. They enjoyed the novelty of being in the hotel, the video arcade, the pool, and restaurants and gift shop. I loathed the place.

“I have to talk to you both tonight,” I said. “I have something really important to tell you.”

Chloe sat down on the bed and looked at me. Ben, always in constant motion, listened while he continued to play with his Lego bricks.

“Daddy’s cancer is back. The medicines they gave him didn’t work. Now the doctors are running out of medicines to give him. There’s one more to try - we hope it will work, but it may not.”

“What does that mean?” Chloe asked.

“It means Daddy could die.”

Chloe’s body jerked as she heard the words. She threw herself on the bed and cried while I held her. Ben didn’t seem to take it in. Every few minutes he would cry briefly -as if imitating his sister - and then it would pass. Chloe was inconsolable.

Finally she got up, took a piece of hotel stationary and a pen and wrote in the lovely tentative handwriting of a seven-year-old.

Dear God,

Help daddy please?

I love him very much.

I don’t want him to die.

Sincerely,

Chloe Newman

She went to the window of our room and pressed the paper to the pane with the writing face-out.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I want God to see this. He’ll see it much better this way.”

That night the three of us cuddled together in one of the double beds, and fell asleep glad to have each other but knowing that one very important piece of us was missing. I dreaded the future.

SPRING 1996

CHAPTER 18

April

F
rom the moment Jake died, I became the widow with her nose pressed against the window of life. Watching my friends through that window, always hoping to get back inside, I ached with envy. And now, after what seemed like years wandering alone, I had arrived in the promised land. Being with Len was the answer to my isolation and deprivation.

More importantly, knowing that Len could and would take charge meant that I could and would relinquish some of the sole control I had maintained for my children and myself for all of those years. If anyone were listening for it, an enormous sigh of relief could be heard leaving my lips. No longer responsible for all that transpired in our lives, I cherished the feeling of having someone to watch over us at last.

Len arranged our travels, our weekends, and our social life. All I had to do was to mention that Billy Joel, Tina Turner or Bruce Springsteen would be in town, and tickets would appear. He was always arranging something, while I had lost that ability to feel so sure that the future was guaranteed. Jake’s death had taught me to be more cautious, that planned events might not take place. Len was somehow unfettered with such inhibitions despite Judy’s death.

But what mattered most to me was that Len was now arranging Ben’s athletics. All of his life, Ben had been a terrific natural athlete and the fathers in our town had marveled at his abilities and determination. Ben’s natural talents had carried him all these years as the other kids’ fathers zealously worked on their sons’ skills. Many a father had said to me that they would love to take Ben on a weekend and work with him.

“He’s so good, maybe we could play a little ball,” they’d say.

But they never called. So there had been no end to my attempt to be one of the guys, even serving as the first and sole female member of the Montwood Little League Board. When Ben was in elementary school, I managed his basketball team and coached his Little League team for a year. One father told me he objected to his son having a woman as the coach and I almost caved. But our team won because of Ben, and he even made me look good.

Even so, I was plagued with a vague notion that men knew something I didn’t - that all of those years parked in front of their television sets watching sports gave them an advantage. I wondered what I could offer Ben as he grew older and the competition increased.

At one tennis match we attended, Ben had won the first set and the other boy had won the second set. There was a ten-minute break before the third set. The kid’s father put his arm around the boy and began to coach him about mixing up his backhand with more slices and topspin. I had absolutely nothing to offer to Ben about tennis.

“Do you have to go to the bathroom? I said.

“No.”

“Would you like some M&M’s?” I showed him the ones left in my hand.

“No.”

Ben went back out and lost the third set.

At tryouts for summer baseball leagues, there were always dozens of men and me watching the kids. And the fathers engaged in a lot of son promoting man talk with each other. Watching as they took their turns schmoozing with the coaches, pointing out their talented sons, I remained silent. Ben’s abilities would have to speak for themselves.

One day Ben was pitching and I overheard the coaches discussing him.

“That lefty is really good. He’s focused. What he has can’t be taught.”

I sat there wondering what Ben had and where he got it from.

As we were leaving I whispered to Ben what I had heard. He was beaming.

“You know you got your pitching genes from me?” I said.

“Yeah right!”

Well, Len took one look at Ben’s abilities and was in charge immediately, the same way he had guided his own sons through their high school years in sports. And Ben loved that Len had played catcher in college baseball.

Len began to schedule Ben’s pitching lessons and attend his games. At last a man who knew what he was doing could guide Ben in a man’s world of sports. Len didn’t know much about tennis but was able to advise Ben on the game certainly more than I could. I sat back and blessed my lucky stars. If Len offered nothing else to us, his stepping into this role with Ben was exactly what Ben and I had been praying for.

The natural result of this was a bond that grew between Len and Ben. Ben, surrounded in suburbia by involved fathers, seemed desperate for one of his own. And along came Len, ready to take him on.

Len was warming to the sweet, gentle nature Ben had developed over the years. Ben would snuggle up to him as they sat together on a couch watching whatever sport was on television and Len seemed to like the loving. They couldn’t have been more different.

On the other hand, Len couldn’t seem to muster much with Chloe because she kept her distance. Chloe, very adept at reading people within minutes of meeting them and a magnet for friends, was constantly surrounded by her coterie of teenagers. But she limited her interactions with Len and only occasionally allowed him to offer her advice about colleges. I chose to ignore what signals her radar might be picking up. And I dismissed her instincts, once again ascribing them to her age. No single woman would want to admit that her teenage daughter was better at judging men than she was.

•  •  •

Len and I sat at a table of eight in a gaggle of multimillionaires and billionaires. The frenetic energy of the celebration for the fiftieth birthday party of a twice divorced banker filled his penthouse apartment. The 360 degree view of the City from the floor to ceiling glass windows was simply spellbinding. A signed Picasso hung on the wall behind our table.

“Why is that guy at the next table staring at you?” Len asked while we poked at the pieces of rich chocolate ganache birthday cake in front of us.

“Lindsay? I went out to dinner with him on date a year or two before I met you.”

Len leaned over towards me.

“Did you sleep with him? Why does he keep staring at you?”

“No, I didn’t sleep with him. I didn’t sleep around. You know that. I once had a guy spend $5000 on Yankee playoff tickets he got from a scalper thinking he’d get me into bed. He said he likes to spend that kind of money to take women to the South of France to seduce them. And here we were in the South Bronx.”

“I gather he wasn’t too happy if he didn’t get you into bed.”

“He was fuming when I got out of the cab at his building and walked away.”

“What does Lindsay do?”

“I don’t know. But he did inform me in the first fifteen minutes of our dinner that he’s worth a few billion.”

“I don’t recognize him at all,” Len said as he glanced once again at Lindsay.

“He’s from Georgia. He actually told a story about when he was fifteen his father arranged a visit for him with a prostitute. Of course, he had to tell me that after they did it, she said how good he was.”

“Damn, wish I had grown up in Georgia.”

Two attractive New York socialites sat on either side of Lindsay. He looked quickly over at Len and me.

“Lindsay’s tried to carry some of the charm of his family’s old Southern ways to his current life. He has a housekeeper and said he rings for her with a bell.”

“In New York City?”

“Can you imagine? I asked him where he found someone who would respond to his bell. He also told me that he has a masseuse come to his apartment once a week. I thought that sounded really cool until he said I’d have to earn a massage. As he tried to kiss me good night, I pushed him away and told him he’d have to earn it.”

“I assume he’s divorced.”

“Of course. They all are, at least once. But when I explained I’m a widow, he blurted out that he wished his exwife were dead.”

“That’s classy. Did you actually kiss him?”

“Lindsay grabbed me when we left the restaurant and started kissing me very passionately. He pressed against me and I could feel his erection. So I pulled away and left him standing there on the sidewalk.”

Len looked around the room for a minute or two.

“You have any more stories you haven’t told me?”

“Just keep your eyes open for any other men staring at me.”

The withering look on Len’s face was probably the stuff of children’s nightmares.

“That woman is wearing the wrong bra for her dress,” he said a moment later.

A twentysomething woman in an off the shoulder Herve Leger bandage dress walked slowly by.

“You work quickly to even the score, don’t you?” I said.

I turned to the man sitting on my left whose wife was busy chatting across the table.