In Five Years (ARC)

by Rebecca Serle

  “You and the job.”

  Aldridge takes off his glasses. He looks me square in the eye when he says: “Me and my ambition. Far be it from me to tell you what your own deal should be. I still work eighty-hour weeks. My husband, god bless him, wants to kill me. But—”

  “You know the terms.”

  He smiles, puts his glasses back on. “I know the terms.”

  The IPO evaluation begins in mid-November. We’re already creeping further into October. I call Bella at lunch, while bent over a signature Sweetgreen salad, and she sounds rested and comfortable. The girls from the gallery are over, and she’s going over a new show. She can’t talk. Good.

  I leave work early, intent on picking up one of David’s favorite meals—the teriyaki at Haru—and surprising him at home. We’ve been strangers passing in the night. I think the last time I had a full conversation with him was at the hospital. And we’ve barely touched our wedding plans.

  I turn onto Fifth Avenue and decide to walk. It’s barely 6 p.m, David won’t be home for another two hours, at least, and the weather is perfect. One of those first truly crisp fall days, where you could conceivably wear a sweater but because the sun is out, and still strong overhead, a T-shirt will do. The wind is low and languid, and the city is buzzy with the happy, contented quality of routine.

  I’m feeling so festive, in fact, that when I pass Intimissimi, a popular lingerie company, I decide to stop inside.

  I think about sex, about David. About how it’s good, solid, satisfying, and how I’ve never been someone who wants her hair pulled or to be spanked. Who doesn’t even really like to be on top. Is that a problem? Maybe I’m not in touch with my sexuality—­which Bella, casually——too casually—has accused me of on more than one occasion.

  The shop is filled with pretty, lacy things. Tiny bras with bows and matching underwear. Frilly negligees with rosettes on the hem. Silk robes.

  I choose a black lace camisole and boy shorts, decidedly different from anything I own, but still me. I pay without trying them on, and then make my way over to Haru. I call in our order on the way. No sense in waiting.

  I can’t believe I’m doing this. I hear David’s key latch in the door and I’m tempted to run back into the bedroom and hide, but it’s too late now. The apartment is littered with candles and the low stylings of Barry Manilow. It’s like a cliché sex comedy from the nineties.

  David walks in and drops his keys on the table, sets his bag down on the counter. It’s not until he reaches to take off his shoes that he notices his surroundings. And then me.

  “Woah.”

  “Welcome home,” I say. I’m wearing the black lingerie with a black silk robe, something I got as a gift on a bachelorette weekend eons ago. I go to David. I hand him one end of the belt. “Pull,” I say, like I’m someone else.

  He does, and the thing comes apart, falling to the floor in a puddle.

  “This is for me?” he asks, his index finger stretched out to touch the strap of my camisole top.

  “It would be weird if it weren’t,” I say.

  “Right,” he says, low. “Yeah.” He fingers the strap, edging it down over my shoulder. From an open window a breeze saunters in, dancing the candles. “I like this,” he says.

  “I’m glad,” I say. I take his glasses off. I set them down on the couch. And then I start to unbutton his shirt. It’s white. Hugo Boss. I bought it for him for Hanukkah two years ago along with a pink one and a blue-striped one. He never wears the blue one. It was my favorite.

  “You look really sexy,” he says. “You never dress like this.”

  “They don’t allow this in the office, even on Friday,” I tell him.

  “You know what I mean.”

  I get the last button undone and I shake the shirt off him—one arm then the other. David is always warm. Always. And I feel the prickle of his chest hair against my skin, the soft folding my body does to his.

  “Bedroom?” he asks me.

  I nod.

  He kisses me then, hard and fast, right by the couch. It catches me by surprise. I pull back.

  “What?” he asks.

  “Nothing,” I say. “Do it again.” And he does.

  He kisses me into the bedroom. He kisses me out of the lingerie. He kisses me underneath the sheets. And when it’s just us there, on the precipice, he lifts his face up from mine and asks it:

  “When are we getting married?”

  My brain is scrambled. Undone from the day, the month, the glass-and-a-half of wine I had to prepare myself for this little stunt.

  “David,” I breathe out. “Can we talk about this later?”

  He kisses my neck, my cheek, the bridge of my nose. “Yes.”

  And then he pushes into me. He moves slowly, deliberately, and I feel myself come apart before I even have a chance to begin. He keeps moving on top of me, long after I’ve returned to my body, to my brain. We are like constellations passing each other, seeing each other’s light but in the distance. It feels impossible how much space there can be in this intimacy, how much privacy. And I think that maybe that is what love is. Not the absence of space but the acknowledgment of it, the thing that lives between the parts, the thing that makes it possible not to be one, but to be different, to be two.

  But there is something I cannot shake. Some reckoning that has burrowed into my body, through my very cells. It rises now, flooding, probing, threatening to spill out of my lips. The thing I have kept buried and locked for almost five years, exposed to this fraction of light.

  I close my eyes against it. I will them to stay shut. And when it’s over, when I finally open them, David is staring at me with a look I’ve never seen before. He’s looking at me as if he’s already gone.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  I go down to Bella’s and make her tens of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches—the only thing, really, I know how to “cook.” The gallery girls come by. We order from Buvette, and Bella’s favorite waiter brings it himself, along with a bottle of Sancerre. And then the results of the surgery come back. The doctors were right: stage three.

  It’s in the lymph system, but not the surrounding organs. Good news, bad news. Bella starts chemo and impossibly, insanely, we continue wedding planning for two months from now: December in New York. I call the wedding planner, the same one a young woman at my firm used. He wrote a book on weddings: How to Wed: Style, Food, and Tradition by Nathaniel Trent. She buys me the book, and I flip through it at work, grateful for the environment, this animal firm where I work, that does not require or ask me to ooh and ahh over peonies.

  We choose a venue. A loft downtown that is, as Nathaniel tells me, the “best raw space in Manhattan.” What he doesn’t say: Every nice hotel is booked, this is the best we’re going to get. Some couple called their wedding off and we got lucky.

  The loft will mean more decisions—everything has to be brought in—but all of the available hotels are bland or too corporate, and we agree to follow Nathaniel’s lead and end up with something that splits the difference.

  At first, the chemo goes well. Bella is a champion. “I feel great,” she tells me on her way home from the hospital after her second session. “No nausea, nothing.”

  I’ve read, of course, that the beginning is a lie. That there is an air of suspension. Before the chemicals reach your tissues, dig in, and start really doing their damage. But I am hopeful, of course I am. I’m breathing.

  I’m reading over the IPO offering for Yahtzee. Aldridge has already been to California to meet with them. If I choose to, I’ll leave in three weeks. It’s the dream case. Young female entrepreneurs, a managing partner overseeing, complete access to the deal.

  “Of course, you should do it,” David tells me over a glass of wine and Greek salad takeout.

  “I would be in LA for a month,” I say. “What about the wedding? And wh
at about Bella?” What about missing her doctors’ appointments, not being here?

  “Bella is doing well,” David says, reaching over the question. “She’d want you to go.”

  “Doesn’t mean I should.”

  David picks up his glass, drinks. The wine is a red we bought at a tasting on Long Island last fall. It was David’s favorite. I remember liking it fine, which is the way I feel about it tonight. Wine is wine.

  “You have to make choices sometimes for yourself. It doesn’t make you a bad friend, it just means you put yourself first, which you should.”

  What I don’t tell him, because I suspect, I know, that a lecture would follow, is that I don’t put myself first. I never have. Not when it comes to Bella.

  “Nate said that we should go with the tiger’s lily and that no one does roses anymore,” I say, skating to the next subject.

  “That’s insane,” David says. “It’s a wedding.”

  I shrug. “I don’t care,” I say. “Do you?”

  David takes another sip. He appears to be really considering. “No,” he says.

  We sit in silence for a few moments.

  “What do you want to do for your birthday?” he asks me.

  My birthday. Next week. October 21. Thirty-three. “Your magic year,” Bella told me. “Your year of miracles. Same year Jesus died, and was resurrected.”

  “Nothing,” I say. “It’s fine.”

  “I’ll make a reservation,” David says. He gets up with his plate and goes to the counter, refilling on tzatziki and roasted eggplant. It’s a shame neither one of us cooks. We love to eat so very much.

  “Who should we get to marry us?” David asks, and in the same breath: “I’ll ask my parents for Rabbi Shultz’s information.”

  “You don’t have it?”

  “I don’t,” he says, his back to me.

  This is what marriage is, I know. Tiffs and comfortability, miscommunications and long stretches of silence. Years and years of support and care and imperfection. I thought we’d be long married by now. But I find, as I sit there, that a hitch of relief hits me when David still doesn’t have the rabbi’s information. Maybe he’s still a step away, too.

  On Saturday, I go to Bella’s chemo appointment with her. She chats amicably to a nurse named Janine, who wears white scrubs with a hand-painted rainbow emblazoned on the back, as she hooks her up to the IV. Chemo is in a center on East One Hundred Second Street, two blocks up from where her surgery was performed. The chairs are wide, and the blankets are soft on the third floor of the Ruttenberg Treatment Center. Bella has a cashmere throw with her. “Janine is letting me store a basket here,” she tells me in a conspiratorial whisper.

  Aaron shows up, and the three of us suck on popsicles and pass the time. Two hours later, we’re in an Uber going back downtown when Bella suddenly clutches my arm.

  “Can we stop?” she asks. And then, more urgently, “Pull over.”

  We do, on the corner of Park Avenue and Thirty-Ninth Street, and she climbs over Aaron to retch in the street. She starts puking with ferocity, the remains of a technicolor popsicle spew out with the bile.

  “Hold her hair,” I tell Aaron, who gently rubs her back in small circles.

  She waves us off, breathing heavily over bent knees. “I’m fine,” she says.

  “Do you have any tissues?” I ask the Uber driver, who mercilessly hasn’t said anything.

  “Here.” He hands a box back. There are clouds on the cardboard.

  I pluck three tissues out and hand them to Bella, who takes them and wipes her mouth. “Well that was fun,” she says.

  She climbs back into the car, but there’s a change in her. She knows now that what’s to come is hers to face alone. I can’t take this part from her, I can’t even share it. I have the instinct to reach out, to try and keep the jaws open, but they have clamped shut too quickly. She leans on Aaron. I see the rise and fall of her body, matched in step to her breathing. The first evidence is in, and it isn’t good.

  Aaron helps her upstairs. Svedka is still there, washing dishes that have never been dirty. Bella hasn’t fully recovered from surgery, and small things like a few stairs or bending down are still difficult. It will take her months to fully recover, and then there is the chemo.

  “Let’s get you into bed,” I say.

  Bella is wearing a blue lace Zimmermann dress with a butter-soft chocolate leather jacket, and I help her take them off. Aaron stays in the other room. When she’s undressed, I can see her scars, some still bandaged, and how much thinner she has gotten in just a few short weeks. She must have lost fifteen pounds.

  I smile, forcing the tide back down. “Here,” I say. She holds her head out like a child, and I loop a long-sleeved cotton T-shirt over her head, then slide on some soft gray drawstring sweatpants. I pull down the freshly laundered duvet and tuck her inside, fluffing the pillows behind her.

  “You’re so good to me,” she says. She reaches up for my hand, curls her tiny palm into mine. Bella has always had the smallest hands, too little for her body.

  “You make it easy,” I say. “You’ll be better in no time.”

  We look at each other for a beat. Long enough for us to recognize the terrible fear we’re both facing.

  “I got you something!” Bella says. Her face breaks out into a smile. She tucks some hair behind her ears. Hair that will soon be gone.

  “Bella, come on,” I say. “That’s not—”

  She shakes her head. “No, for your birthday!”

  “My birthday is next week.”

  “So it’s early. I have an excuse to do things now, don’t you think?”

  I say nothing.

  “Greg, can you come help me?”

  Aaron comes into the room, wiping his hands on his jeans. “What’s up?”

  Bella sits up in bed, pointing excitedly to a gift-wrapped package that leans against her closet wall.

  Aaron picks it up. I can tell it’s not light. “On the bed?” he asks.

  “Yeah, here.” Bella removes a throw from her feet and moves her legs into a cross-legged position. She taps the space next to her, and I go to sit. “Open it.”

  The wrapping paper is gold, with a white-and-silver silk ribbon. Bella is a master gift wrapper, and it gives me some solace, some sign, that she did this herself. It feels like proof of stability, of order. I tear it away.

  Inside is a large frame. A piece of art. “Turn it over,” she says.

  I do, with Aaron’s help.

  “I saw a print of this on Instagram and immediately knew you needed it. It took forever to find the Allen Grubesic one. I think he only made twelve. Everyone at the gallery has been trying to track it down for you, and we found it two months ago. A woman in Italy was selling it. We pounced. I’m obsessed. Please tell me you love it?”

  I look at the print in my hands. It’s an eye chart, and it reads: I WAS YOUNG I NEEDED THE MONEY. My hands feel numb.

  “Do you like it?” she asks, her voice an octave lower.

  “Yes,” I say. I swallow. “I love it.”

  “I thought you would.”

  “Aaron,” I say. I can feel him standing there. It seems crazy, impossible, that he doesn’t know. “Whatever happened to that Dumbo apartment?”

  Bella laughs. “Why do you call him Aaron?” she asks.

  “It’s fine,” he says abruptly. “I don’t mind.”

  “I know you don’t mind,” Bella says. “But why?”

  “It’s his first name,” I say. “Isn’t it?” I turn my attention to the gift. I run my hand over the glass.

  “I bought it, the apartment,” she tells me. The Aaron argument dissolves as quickly as it presented. “The rest is for me to know and you to find out.”

  I push the print to the side. I take her hands in mine. “Bella, listen to me.
You cannot renovate that apartment. It will be a good investment as raw space. You bought it, fine, just sell it. Promise me you’re not going to move in there. Promise.”

  Bella squeezes my hand. “You’re crazy,” she says. “But fine. I promise you. I’m not going to move in there.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The chemo goes from good to bad to gruesome quickly, too quickly. Next week she’s sick, the following one she’s weak, and after that she is sunken, her body practically concave. The one saving grace is that her hair doesn’t fall out. Session after session, week after week, not even a strand.

  “It happens sometimes,” Dr. Shaw tells me. He comes to her chemo sessions to check up on her and run through any recent bloodwork. Today, Jill is there. Which might explain why Dr. Shaw and I are in the hallway, a whole room away from where Bella’s mother pretends to be dutiful. “A patient who doesn’t lose their hair. It’s rare, though. She’s one of the lucky ones.”

  “Lucky.” I taste the word in my mouth. Rotted.

  “Poor choice of words,” he says. “We doctors aren’t always the most sensitive. I apologize.”

  “No,” I say. “She has great hair.”

  Dr. Shaw smiles at me. Colorful Nikes peak out from the bottom of his jeans. They point to some kind of life beyond these walls. Does he go home to children? How does he shake the everyday of these patients, shrinking inside?

  “She’s lucky that she has such a good support system,” he tells me. It isn’t the first time he’s said it. “Some patients have to do this alone.”

  “She has two more weeks of this,” I say. “And then she’ll do another test?”

  “Yes.” We’ll check to see if the cancer has been localized. But you know, Dannie, because it’s in the lymph, it’s really about containment. The likelihood of remission in ovarian cancers . . .”

  “No,” I say. “She’s different. She has her hair! She’s different.”

  Dr. Shaw puts a hand on my shoulder and squeezes gently. But he doesn’t say anything.