Things You Should Know Page 16

  “I am made of steel and wood,” she says happily.

  As we’re falling asleep she tells me a story. “It’s true, it happened as I was walking to the hospital. I accidentally bumped into someone on the sidewalk. Excuse me, I said and continued on. He ran after me, ‘Excuse me, boy. Excuse me, boy. You knocked my comb out of my hand and I want you to go back and pick it up.’ I turned around—we bumped into each other, I said excuse me, and that will have to suffice. ‘You knocked it out of my hand on purpose, white boy.’ I said, I am not a boy. ‘Then what are you—Cancer Man? Or are you just a bitch? A bald fucking bitch.’ I wheeled around and chased him. You fucking crazy ass, I screamed. You fucking crazy ass. I screamed it about four times. He’s lucky I didn’t fucking kill him,” she says.

  I am thinking she’s lost her mind. I’m thinking she’s lucky he didn’t kill her.

  She stands up on the bed—naked. She strikes a pose like a body builder. “Cancer Man,” she says, flexing her muscles, creating a new superhero. “Cancer Man!”

  Luckily she has good insurance. The bill for the surgery comes—it’s itemized. They charge per part removed. Ovary $7,000, appendix $5,000, the total is $72,000 dollars. “It’s all in a day’s work,” she says.

  We are lying in bed. I am lying next to her, reading the paper.

  “I want to go to a desert island, alone. I don’t want to come back until this is finished,” she says.

  “You are on a desert island, but unfortunately you have taken me with you.”

  She looks at me. “It will never be finished—do you know that? I’m not going to have children and I’m going to die.”

  “Do you really think you’re going to die?”

  “Yes.”

  I reach for her.

  “Don’t,” she says. “Don’t go looking for trouble.”

  “I wasn’t. I was trying to be loving.”

  “I don’t feel loving,” she says. “I don’t feel physically bonded to anyone right now, including myself.”

  “You’re pushing me away.”

  “I’m recovering,” she says.

  “It’s been eighteen weeks.”

  Her blood counts are low. Every night for five nights, I inject her with Nupagen to increase the white blood cells. She teaches me how to prepare the injection, how to push the needle into the muscle of her leg. Every time I inject her, I apologize.

  “For what?” she asks.

  “Hurting you.”

  “Forget it,” she says, disposing of the needle.

  “Could I have a hug?” I ask.

  She glares at me. “Why do you persist? Why do you keep asking me for things I can’t do, things I can’t give?”

  “A hug?”

  “I can’t give you one.”

  “Anyone can give a hug. I can get a hug from the doorman.”

  “Then do,” she says. “I need to be married to someone who is like a potted plant, someone who needs nothing.”

  “Water?”

  “Very little, someone who is like a cactus or an orchid.”

  “It’s like you’re refusing to be human,” I tell her.

  “I have no interest in being human.”

  This is information I should be paying attention to. She is telling me something and I’m not listening. I don’t believe what she is saying.

  I go to dinner with Eric and Enid alone.

  “It’s strange,” they say. “You’d think the cancer would soften her, make her more appreciative. You’d think it would make her stop and think about what she wants to do with the rest of her life. When you ask her, what does she say?” Eric and Enid want to know.

  “Nothing. She says she wants nothing, she has no needs or desires. She says she has nothing to give.”

  Eric and Enid shake their heads. “What are you going to do?”

  I shrug. None of this is new, none of this is just because she has cancer—that’s important to keep in mind, this is exactly the way she always was, only more so.

  A few days later a woman calls; she and her husband are people we see occasionally.

  “Hi, how are you, how’s Tom?” I ask.

  “He’s a fucking asshole,” she says. “Haven’t you heard? He left me.”

  “When?”

  “About two weeks ago. I thought you would have known.”

  “I’m a little out of it.”

  “Anyway, I’m calling to see if you’d like to have lunch.”

  “Lunch, sure. Lunch would be good.”

  At lunch she is a little flirty, which is fine, it’s nice actually, it’s been a long time since someone flirted with me. In the end, when we’re having coffee, she spills the beans. “So I guess you’re wondering why I called you?”

  “I guess,” I say, although I’m perfectly pleased to be having lunch, to be listening to someone else’s troubles.

  “I heard your wife was sick, I figured you’re not getting a lot of sex, and I thought we could have an affair.”

  I don’t know which part is worse, the complete lack of seduction, the fact that she mentions my wife not being well, the idea that my wife’s illness would make me want to sleep with her, her stun gun bluntness—it’s all too much.

  “What do you think? Am I repulsive? Thoroughly disgusting? Is it the craziest thing you ever heard?”

  “I’m very busy,” I say, not knowing what to say, not wanting to be offensive, or seem to have taken offense. “I’m just very busy.”

  My wife comes home from work. “Someone came in today—he reminded me of you.”

  “What was his problem?”

  “He jumped out the window.”

  “Dead?”

  “Yes,” she says, washing her hands in the kitchen sink.

  “Was he dead when he got to you?” There’s something in her tone that makes me wonder, did she kill him?

  “Pretty much.”

  “What part reminded you of me?”

  “He was having an argument with his wife,” she says. “Imagine her standing in the living room, in the middle of a sentence, and out the window he goes. Imagine her not having a chance to finish her thought?”

  “Yes, imagine, not being able to have the last word. Did she try to stop him?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” my wife says. “I didn’t get to read the police report. I just thought you’d find it interesting.”

  “What do you want for dinner?”

  “Nothing,” she says. “I’m not hungry.”

  “You have to eat something.”

  “Why? I have cancer. I can do whatever I want.”

  Something has to happen.

  I buy tickets to Paris. “We have to go.” I invoke the magic word, “It’s an emergency.”

  “It’s not like I get a day off. It’s not like I come home at the end of the day and I don’t have cancer. It goes everywhere with me. It doesn’t matter where I am, it’s still me—it’s me with cancer. In Paris I’ll have cancer.”

  I dig out the maps, the guide books, everything we did on our last trip is marked with fluorescent highlighter. I am acting as though I believe that if we retrace our steps, if we return to a place where things were good, there will be an automatic correction, a psychic chiropractic event, which will put everything into alignment.

  I gather provisions for the plane, fresh fruit, water, magazines, the smoke hoods. It’s a little-known fact, smoke inhalation is a major cause of death on airplanes.

  “What’s the point,” she says, throwing a few things into a suitcase. “You can do everything and think you’re prepared, but you don’t know what’s going to happen. You don’t see what’s coming until it hits you in the face.”

  She points at someone outside. “See that idiot crossing the street in front of the truck—why doesn’t he have cancer?”

  She lifts her suitcase—too heavy. She takes things out. She leaves her smoke hood on the bed. “If the plane fills with smoke, I’m going to be so happy,” she says. “I’m going to breathe de
eply, I’m going to be the first to die.”

  I stuff the smoke hood into my suitcase, along with her raincoat, her extra shoes, and vitamin C drops. I lift the suitcases, I feel like a pack animal, a sherpa.

  In France, the customs people are not used to seeing bald women. They call her “sir.”

  “Sir, you’re next, sir. Sir, please step over here, sir.”

  My wife is my husband. She loves it. She smiles. She catches my eye and strikes a subdued version of the super hero/body builder pose, flexing. “Cancer Man,” she says.

  “And what is the purpose of your visit to France?” the inspector asks. “Business or pleasure?”

  “Reconciliation,” I say, watching her—Cancer Man.

  “Business or pleasure?”

  “Pleasure.”

  Paris is my fantasy, my last-ditch effort to reclaim my marriage, myself, my wife.

  As we are checking into the hotel, I remind her of our previous visit—the chef cut himself, his finger was severed, she saved it, and they were able to reattach it. “You made medical history. Remember the beautiful dinner they threw in your honor.”

  “It was supposed to be a vacation,” she says.

  The bellman takes us to our room—there’s a big basket of fruit, bottles of Champagne and Evian with a note from the concierge welcoming us.

  “It’s not as nice as it used to be,” she says, already disappointed. She opens the Evian and drinks. Her lips curl. “Even the water tastes bad.”

  “Maybe it’s you. Maybe the water is fine. Is it possible you’re wrong?”

  “We see things differently,” she says, meaning she’s right, I’m wrong.

  “Are you in an especially bad mood, or is it just the cancer?” I ask.

  “Maybe it’s you?” she says.

  We walk, across the river and down by the Louvre. There could be nothing better, nothing more perfect, and yet I am suddenly hating Paris—the beauty, the fineness of it is dwarfed by her foul humor. I realize there will be no saving it, no moment of reconciliation, redemption. Everything is irredeemably awful and getting worse.

  “If you’re so unhappy, why don’t you leave?” I ask her.

  “I keep thinking you’ll change.”

  “If I changed any more I can’t imagine who I’d be.”

  “Well, if I’m such a bitch, why do you stay?”

  “It’s my job, it’s my calling to stay with you, to soften you.”

  “I absolutely do not want to be softer, I don’t want to give another inch.”

  She trips on a cobblestone, I reach for her elbow, to steady her, and instead unbalance myself. She fails to catch me. I fall and recover quickly.

  “Imagine how I feel,” she says. “I am a doctor and I can’t fix it. I can’t fix me, I can’t fix you—what a lousy doctor.”

  “I’m losing you,” I say.

  “I’ve lost myself. Look at me—do I look like me?”

  “You act like yourself.”

  “I act like myself because I have to, because people are counting on me.”

  “I’m counting on you.”

  “Stop counting.”

  All along the Tuileries there are Ferris wheels—the world’s largest Ferris wheel is set up in the middle.

  “Let’s go,” I say, taking her hand and pulling her toward them.

  “I don’t like rides.”

  “It’s not much of a ride. It’s like a carousel, only vertical. Live a little.”

  She gets on. There are no seat belts, no safety bars. I say nothing. I am hoping she won’t notice.

  “How is it going to end?” I ask while we’re waiting for the wheel to spin.

  “I die in the end.”

  The ride takes off, climbing, pulling us up and over. We are flying, soaring; the city unfolds. It is breathtaking and higher than I thought. And faster. There is always a moment on any ride when you think it is too fast, too high, too far, too wide, and that you will not survive. And then there is the exhilaration of surviving, the thrill of having lived through it and immediately you want to go around again.

  “I have never been so unhappy in my life,” my wife says when we’re near the top. “It’s not just the cancer, I was unhappy before the cancer. We were having a very hard time. We don’t get along, we’re a bad match. Do you agree?”

  “Yes,” I say. “We’re a really bad match, but we’re such a good bad match it seems impossible to let it go.”

  “We’re stuck,” she says.

  “You bet,” I say.

  “No. I mean the ride, the ride isn’t moving.”

  “It’s not stuck, it’s just stopped. It stops along the way.”

  She begins to cry. “It’s all your fault. I hate you. And I still have to deal with you. Every day I have to look at you.”

  “No, you don’t. You don’t have to deal with me if you don’t want to.”

  She stops crying and looks at me. “What are you going to do, jump?”

  “The rest of your life, or my life, however long or short, should not be miserable. It can’t go on this way.”

  “We could both kill ourselves,” she says.

  “How about we separate?”

  I am being more grown-up than I am capable of being. I am terrified of being without her, but either way, it’s death.

  The ride lurches forward.

  I came to Paris wanting to pull things together and suddenly I am desperate to be away from her. If this doesn’t stop now, it will never stop, it will go on forever. She will be dying of her cancer and we will still be fighting. I begin to panic, to feel I can’t breathe. I am suffocating; I have to get away.

  “Where does it end?”

  “How about we say good-bye?”

  “And then what? We have opera tickets.”

  I cannot tell her I am going. I have to sneak away, to tiptoe out backwards. I have to make my own arrangements.

  We stop talking. We’re hanging in mid-air, suspended. We have run out of things to say. When the ride circles down, the silence becomes more definitive.

  I begin to make my plan. In truth, I have no idea what I am doing. All afternoon, everywhere we go, I cash traveler’s checks, I get cash advances, I have about five thousand dollars’ worth of francs stuffed in my pocket. I want to be able to leave without a trace, I want to be able to buy myself out of whatever trouble I get into. I am hysterical and giddy all at once.

  We are having an early dinner on our way to the opera.

  I time my break for just after the coffee comes. “Oops,” I say, feeling my pockets. “I forgot my opera glasses.”

  “Really?” she says. “I thought you had them when we went out.”

  “They must be at the hotel. You go on ahead, I’ll run back. You know I hate not being able to see.”

  She takes her ticket. “Hurry,” she says. “I hate it when you’re late.”

  This is the bravest thing I have ever done. I go back to the hotel and pack my bag. I am going to get out. I am going to fly away. I may never come back. I will begin again, as someone else—unrecognizable.

  I move to lift the bag off the bed, I pull it up and my knee goes out. I start to fall but catch myself. I pull at the bag and take a step—too heavy. I will have to go without it. I will have to leave everything behind. I drop the bag, but still I am falling, folding, collapsing. There is pain, searing, spreading, pouring, hot and cold, like water down my back, down my legs.

  I am lying on the floor, thinking that if I stay calm, if I can just find my breath, and follow my breath, it will pass. I lie there waiting for the paralysis to recede.

  I am afraid of it being over and yet she has given me no choice, she has systematically withdrawn life support: sex and conversation. The problem is that, despite this, she is the one I want.

  There is a knock at the door. I know it is not her, it is too soon for it to be her.

  “Entrez,” I call out.

  The maid opens the door, she holds the DO NOT DISTURB sign in her
hand. “Oooff,” she says, seeing me on the floor. “Do you need the doctor?”

  I am not sure if she means my wife or a doctor other than my wife.

  “No.”

  She takes a towel from her cart and props it under my head. She takes a spare blanket from the closet and covers me with it. She opens the Champagne and pours me a glass, tilting my head up so I can sip. She goes to her cart and gets a stack of night chocolates and sits beside me, feeding me Champagne and chocolate, stroking my forehead.

  The phone in the room rings, we ignore it. She refills my glass. She takes my socks off and rubs my feet. She unbuttons my shirt and rubs my chest. I am getting a little drunk. I am just beginning to relax and then there is another knock, a knock my body recognizes before I am fully awake. Everything tightens. My back pulls tighter still, any sensation below my knees drops off.

  “I thought something horrible happened to you, I’ve been calling and calling the room, why haven’t you answered? I thought you’d killed yourself.”

  The maid excuses herself. She goes into the bathroom and gets me a cool washcloth.

  “What are you doing?” my wife asks.

  There is nothing I can say.

  “Knock off the mummy routine. What exactly are you doing? Were you trying to run away and then you chickened out? Say something.”

  To talk would be to continue; for the moment I am silenced. I am a potted plant, and still that is not good enough for her.

  “He is paralyzed,” the maid says.

  “He is not paralyzed. I am his wife, I am a doctor. I would know if there was something really wrong.”

  THE WEATHER OUTSIDE IS SUNNY AND BRIGHT

  In the morning there are marks where the pillow touched his face, where his T-shirt wrinkled against his back, from the waistband of his underwear, elastic indentations, ghostly traces. He peels off the socks he wore to sleep, the pattern is like a picket fence. With her fingernail she writes on his chest, Milk, Butter, Eggs, Sugar. The invisible ink of her finger rises up like a welt. In the shower it becomes perfectly clear—dermatographism. For the moment he is a walking grocery list—it will fade within the hour.

  “I dreamed I was in the eighteenth century, having tea in a very elaborate cup.” He is a clockmaker lost in time, keeping track of the seconds, fascinated by the beats, hours passing, future becoming past. “And you? How did you sleep?”