“And she wasn’t the love of your life? Brutal honesty.”
“No, she was not. Do you want me to say who the love of my life is?”
She smiled in a way I hadn’t seen her smile in two weeks, and shook her head.
I ordered one more vodka with dessert. My head had begun to shift and shimmer-it wasn’t a bad feeling. But beyond that I felt as though something, some immensely heavy grief, was being laid across my face and ears, fine thin layers of dense wet black cloth, one upon another. The waitresses wore paisley kerchiefs around their hair and short skirts, and ours came with the last vodka and the teapot on a tray beside one thin slice of fourteen-dollar white chocolate pie with a boysenberry sauce.
“Ukraine is famous for fourteen-dollar white chocolate pie slices in boysenberry sauce, you know,” I said.
Janet had two small bites. Even in her best wool sweater with her hair brushed, she looked like a woman who belonged already to another world: eyes and cheeks sunken, skin ashen, shoulders thin. I reached across the table and put my hand over her hand.
She put her fork down. “I’m being melodramatic,” she said, setting the oxygen aside as if she would never pick it up again. “I’ve been pretending it’s our last day on earth.”
“It isn’t.”
“Don’t spoil my little fantasy.”
The noisy room tilted, righted itself. The waitresses’ legs kicked past as if they were swimming there, upright.
“I’m pretending we’re in Paris.”
“I’ve always wanted to go.”
“I went once, between college and grad school. I was sitting in the Louvre when this truly ancient man sat down beside me and struck up a conversation.” She coughed, swallowed, took one careful breath. “He was Paraguayan, probably four and a half feet tall. After a few minutes he said, ‘I would like to paint you’-dramatic pause-‘in the nude.’”
“Hope springs eternal,” I said. A fresh wave of drunkenness rolled over me.
She nodded.
“He had nothing to lose. He thought he’d give it a shot.”
She nodded again. “I said no three times. He kept asking.”
“His mother told him never ever to give up,” I said, and her eyes filled right up, and my eyes filled right up, and I couldn’t get a sound out then, though I tried and tried. Don’t, I wanted to say. Not yet. But every time I tried, another little squirt of juice came up in my eyes and we were looking into two different blank middle distances, southern and western Ukraine, twin epicenters of the universe of suffering, the remains of a slice of cake between us.
WE TOOK A CAB most of the way back, then got out and walked, holding hands, along half a block of cold Manhattan night, me with my head spinning, Janet wheezing away and refusing to use the oxygen, and a circus of Christmas lights and window decorations all around us.
Up in the hotel room it was clear there would be no love-making that night-she barely had the strength to take off her sweater and clip the plastic tube under her nose-but we left the light off anyway, as if to remind each other of the pleasure we had taken from each other’s bodies, or to pretend we might take pleasure like that again. I drank three glasses of water and swallowed two ibuprofen. We took turns pissing and brushing our teeth in the dark, then climbed into the luxurious bed. She squeezed my hand once and fell asleep.
It wasn’t completely dark in the room. A thin yellow-gray light leaked in around the sides of the window drapes. The bed spun gently. When I knew Janet was asleep, I slipped my arm out from underneath her, but I lay on my back against her bare warm skin, listening to her breathe. Without meaning to, without wanting to, I started thinking about Giselle. She had tried to call me from the plane. When I came home that Tuesday afternoon, I was already just about sure she was dead-I’d called her parents. I was a big bursting bag of feelings; everyone was, that day. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. I walked into the apartment and saw the red message light on the phone machine blinking. Eight calls. The second message was full of static and commotion, and my name spoken twice in a panicky whisper: “Jake…Jake?” I listened to it over and over and over, thirty times probably, then I went out the door and walked to the nearest bar, sat there with the television going and got stupefyingly drunk.
I put my hand on Janet’s bare leg. Sirens wailed in the street. I thought of my father, who had loved his work, loved the process of solving problems, “the business of business” he used to call it, the satisfaction of matching up investors and entrepreneurs. He smoked a pipe, he sat out on the patio, he loved to talk about it with me once I’d gotten past the stupidities of my early teenage years. “Jakie,” he said more than once, “the mistake some fellows make is they see a problem-let’s say it’s a bad problem, an almost unsolvable problem, a client over-valuing his business, let’s say-they see this problem and they either throw up their hands and surrender, and walk away from it, or they rush in like novice firemen with hoses spraying every which way. Sometimes, though, the thing to do is to sit back, hold back. You watch for a little while-sometimes it’s only sixty seconds in a heated meeting, sometimes it’s a day, a week, a year-you ponder. Occasionally it is a truly unsolvable trouble and you have to be mature enough to accept that. But usually, if you just let your mind scamper around outside the fences for a while, you see one small action you might take-a word, a shift in tactics. You tug on the knotted-up ball of string, once, here, and things begin to loosen.”
THE NEXT DAY the sky was perfectly blue between the skyscrapers, and Janet was exhausted, but glad that we’d come. I took three more ibuprofen at breakfast and pondered and waited. We drove as close as we could get to the Trade Center, down there in the tight, cluttered streets of lower Manhattan. I waited. I watched the city she loved. And then, in the truck going north, I decided to say one thing to her. I said, “I’m a big fan of doctors, you know, but I think Doctor Wilbraham is a cold, worthless, stick-up-the-ass piece of horse manure.”
She nodded, almost laughed. That’s all we said on the subject. She slept most of the way back, waking only when she coughed very hard, or to adjust the clip of the oxygen cylinder. We stopped for soup and ice cream in Providence. She coughed and coughed and slumped back in her chair and ate almost nothing.
But when we got back to the hospital and she was in the bed again, and Doctor Wilbraham came marching in and started to lecture her, she held up her hand and made him stop. “I don’t want you as my physician anymore,” she said. “I don’t care if it means being transferred to another hospital, or if it means I just go home and die, I want a different doctor now.”
He puffed and huffed but she didn’t stop looking at him. I could see the steel behind her eyes. After a while, even Doctor Wilbraham could see it.
Book Four
D e c e m b e r
1
FOR A WHILE THEN, during the last week of November and the first week or so of December, Janet’s body went into a resting mode, as if preparing for some great private exertion. I had been writing to my brother about her every few weeks, and some where near the start of December I sent Ellory a note saying she was not getting better and asking him to pray for her-not the kind of thing I had ever done. Janet’s new doctor was a very small, coffee-skinned, tight-mouthed fellow named Ronald Ouajiballah. He was from Fiji or the Solomon Islands, I could not remember which, and he was as different from Eric Wilbraham as two people in the same profession can be. Even the way he touched Janet was different. I never saw him at her bedside when he didn’t have a hand on her shoulder or arm or foot, and it was a personal, not a professional hand, the touch of a cousin with a medical degree. He switched around her medicines, beefing up the Albuterol inhaler with another steroid, adding into the IV mix an antibiotic cocktail called Zithromax, which was used for bronchitis and sinus infections, and usually prescribed for CF patients with less lung damage. He discovered she had some kind of allergy called ABPA, and prescribed prednisone. All of this seemed to help her breathe more easily.
; What helped her most was just that, without pretending everything was fine, il dottore, as we called him, didn’t stop trying, and didn’t seem to have built up a wall to protect himself from his patients’ pain and discomfort. When the flesh around the shunt in Janet’s right arm became inflamed he had the nurses move it right away; when the pain of the strenuous coughing overwhelmed her, he was there with Valium or Oxycodone-she did not have to whimper and scream to make it real to him.
For those two weeks we fell into a routine: I stopped in to see Janet before work-usually with a raspberry muffin from a place she liked, though she had very little appetite-and spent three or four hours there at night. I brought her newspapers and political magazines. Her mother, who believed in the healing powers of red meat, brought meatball and roast beef sandwiches that Janet took one look at and set aside. If she could talk we talked about everything around the edges of us-the weather, the world, the strenuous craziness of the early Christmas season. Gerard visited a few times and made her laugh with his Bob Dylan imitations (for which he was locally famous), singing “Train of Love” so loud at one point that the nurses came in to ask him to cool it. We were at the tail end of Jacqueline’s addition-hanging interior doors, grouting bathroom tile-and she was pleased, and we had our priorities straight, and so, on those early December days, we didn’t worry about cutting ourselves a little slack.
Janet was still eleventh on the transplant list, and no one was talking about her leaving the hospital anymore. But for those short, cold days we all pretended things could go on like that indefinitely. It was a kind of trick, a wishful self-hypnosis, and I suppose we all knew it-Janet’s mother, me, the orderlies and good nurses who emptied her bedpans and rubbed her back and changed her IV-but we needed a stretch of relative peace then, and for fourteen or fifteen days we had it.
And then, on the second Sunday of the month, the trick stopped working. That day I took my mother out for a nice Yankee pot roast lunch and an ice cream sundae and spent a little time watching TV with her in the community room at Apple Meadow. I hoped she would remember the Thanksgiving dinner at Amelia’s house-the first good hour at least-but it seemed to have left no mark on her memory. Janet had skidded off her radar screen. She went on and on about Lauren, a sometime friend who lived down the hall and who, my mother seemed to think, was constantly chasing the men residents who were rumored to be still capable of having sex. “Your father and I enjoy it as much as the next person,” she told me, in a voice right out of the high school hallways. “Probably more than the next person, if you want to know. But we are discreet about it, Ellory. Why, just last week we were in Aruba, and you children were asleep in your rooms and they have these beaches there, you know, not far from the hotel, and we sneaked out on the beach and he started to-”
“Mum, you don’t want to keep watching football, do you?” I said.
And so on.
When I got back to my apartment the light on the phone machine was blinking, and Janet’s mother’s voice was on the tape. “Jake, Jake, Jake. Come right away when you get this. Come right away.”
Janet was all bones and sallow skin, eyelids slowly fluttering, incommunicado. Her left lung was working like an old, worn-down bellows that had been mostly filled up with sand, and her right lung was not working at all.
I sat there with her and her mother for several hours, watching her, touching her, sinking inch by inch in a cold quicksand. Amelia was making the rosary beads go through her fingers faster and faster, and would not eat, and would not leave the room. I stayed until ten o’clock, then left the hospital and just drove aimlessly back and forth on the long east-west avenues of the Back Bay: Beacon to Marlborough to Boylston to Commonwealth, just staring out at the holiday lights, just shifting gears, just going from brake to gas to brake and slamming in the clutch. Snow was falling, large indifferent flakes twirling and skidding through the headlight beams. Eventually, I turned west onto Commonwealth and kept going as if headed home, and then, because I was near Betty’s, I stopped and bought two coffees and half a dozen doughnuts-Carmine wasn’t there-and took them over to Gerard’s.
Gerard rented the top floor of a maroon and gold Victorian in North Cambridge, not far from where Anastasia and the girls lived. Two small bedrooms, a room for his books, computer, and bicycles, a kitchen and bath-the place suited him well enough, though the ceilings slanted down in a way that made for a lot of bruised foreheads. “It has encouraged me to begin dating short women,” he liked to joke.
I told him about the change in Janet’s condition. We drank the coffee and went through all the doughnuts-unusual for him-and then we sat at his fifties-style Formica-topped table, which was the one piece of furniture Anastasia had let him take from the house, and looked out different windows. I called my apartment four times and the hospital twice. I did not want to go home. At last I said, “Let me look at the computer, will you?”
I brought up the search engine and plugged in the same thing I always plugged in: cystic fibrosis and lung transplants. The same 239 pages came up. I started to flip down through them, looking for something new, but Gerard was standing at my shoulder. “Try something else, will you?” he said impatiently. “That’s not the way to do research.”
“Something else like what?”
“I don’t know. Anything. Last ditch or something. Don’t just hit the same stupid nail in over and over again. Refine the search. What’s wrong with you?”
I typed in cystic fibrosis, transplants, last ditch, without much hope, and got forty-seven pages. I’d seen most of them before: stories of fifteen-year-olds whose lives had been saved, or prolonged, by a cadaveric transplant; professional papers so filled with medical terminology that you needed a translator to understand one-tenth of them; statistics on survival rates with various bacteria, in various hospitals, in various countries. I tapped the down arrow without much enthusiasm. When I hit the eleventh page I saw Living Lobar Transplantation in Cystic Fibrosis Patients, and I stopped there. I almost moved on, but something was making me keep looking at those words, and then a little faint bell sounded, a little blink of light.
“What?” Gerard leaned down closer.
I opened the page and we read it.
What it said was that, for cystic fibrosis patients, a lung transplant was the treatment of last resort. I knew that already. It went on to say that the number of people who wanted new lungs far exceeded the number of lungs available at any given time. I knew that, too. But in the next paragraph there was something about a surgeon in California who had been the first to try what was called a “living lobar transplant,” in 1993, removing a lobe each from two healthy donors and sewing them into a patient whose lungs had been destroyed by the same bacteria Janet had. The patient had lived three years. The operation was riskier and more complicated and more expensive than the usual cadaveric transplant, and so it was done only about a dozen times a year in America, but some recipients were still alive and doing well seven years after they’d received the new lobes.
There were six or eight more paragraphs, having to do with complications and problems, but I did not want to know about that then. “My mother mentioned this,” I told Gerard.
“Your mother mentions it,” he said over my shoulder, in the tone of voice he reserved for the courts and the IRS and the big multilingual corporations. “She’s got sixty-three brain cells left, she mentions it. Nobody else says a word.”
Before he was finished with that sentence, I was offline and on the phone to the hospital, asking for Doctor Ouajiballah. But it was one o’clock in the morning. Doctor Ouajiballah, the nurse on duty told me, would not start rounds again until eight.
When I hung up, Gerard said, “I’ll doan.”
“What?”
“I’ll doan. You need a donor, I’ll doan. I’ll give her one of my lobes.”
“You wouldn’t be able to race anymore.”
“Get your priorities straight,” he said. “It would be a way of getting inside her body wit
hout actually betraying my best friend. You gonna compare bike racing with that, Colonel?”
“No.”
“Good. You’re still in the general vicinity of sane, then. Go home and let me sleep.”
2
I DROVE HOME and went to bed for a while and then got up and put my clothes back on. I went into the painting room and walked in circles. I looked at the unfinished paintings in one of my racks, paced some more, stood at the window. Usually if I leave a canvas alone for a month or two, I come back to it with a fresh eye. I see everything that’s wrong and I think I see how to try to make it right. It’s something like looking back on your own life and being able to change part of it-things you blurted out, people you should have been kinder to, or blunter with-except that your life is cut in stone and your painting mistakes are only blots of colored oil pressed onto linen. Those patches of color show the deep patterns of your mind, though, which is why it seems so important to get them exactly right.
The painting of Janet in her sea-green pajamas was sitting in one of the racks I’d built. When I took it out and set it up on the easel I could see how little I had known her when I did it. She looked smart and pretty, when in fact she was smart and pretty and almost unbelievably brave. Every morning when I walked into her room at the hospital I could see that bravery in her because all through the night she had been a step or two this side of suffocation. Every day she coughed up and spit out as much as a quart of green and bloody mucus-not pleasant to think about, excuse me. But she did that, lived that. Not once, not just one awful time, but night after night. Not one sip of GoLYTELY, but glass after glass. Not one annual invasive procedure, but dozens of them-bronchoscopies, enemas, throat cultures, sinus irrigations, shunts, IVs, pinpricks, blood tests, intestinal surgeries-from the time she was old enough to hold her head up without help. And she woke up day after day and went about her life, trying to be pleasant, wanting to be normal, working, cleaning her apartment, facing everything she had to face without making a big fuss about it. There was no way to measure bravery like that. There were no medals given for it. Instead of calling you a hero and making a fuss over you on TV or in the magazines, people heard the wet cough and shot you nasty looks, moved away from you in subway cars, made remarks in movie theaters. Natural enough from their point of view, maybe. But a kind of second-degree torture for Janet. I had not understood all that when I tried to put her on a canvas.
A Little Love Story Page 17
