Then We Came to the End

by Joshua Ferris

  He spent the next month in California on a case. He left messages but she didn’t return them, and then he stopped calling. It was two weeks after his return that they next saw each other, and they should have been thick in a fight before even taking a step inside the restaurant — about the calls put in and not returned, the monthlong silence, the insult of the two additional weeks. But being across from him again was where she wanted to be. She had missed his conversation. God — had she not realized how much? It was always the same thing — pissed-off judges and incompetent prosecutors and legal issues she needed explained. But the way he talked, his mannerisms, his inimitable masculine mannerisms — she had missed them. And he had missed her company, too, it seemed. He listened to her talk about the difficulties the agency was facing and the miserable experience of laying people off. Later that night they went back to her place and it was even better having him inside her than it was having him across the table from her. She had to interrupt it briefly to tell him not to touch there, not the left breast, to spend his attention on the right breast but not to touch the other one, and he guessed appropriately that it would not be the time to ask, “How come?” and so said nothing.

  But at breakfast the next morning, at a place in the neighborhood where they sat in a courtyard on a wrought-iron table under the new spring sun, he surprised her. “I’m putting two and two together,” he said, “and it may come to equal five, but I thought I might ask. How are you feeling, healthwise?” “Why are you asking me that?” she said. “Because last time we were together you asked me to feel something. And this time you tell me not to feel something. Is it just a monthly . . . a matter of bad timing? Or is there something else going on?”

  Martin, who cared only to talk about the law. And when it wasn’t the law it was jazz — the history of jazz, how to listen to jazz, this one particular recording that changed jazz forever. “Everybody would disagree with me, but it was Louis Armstrong’s ‘St. Louis Blues.’ There had never been anything like it.” She knew it by heart by now. Oh, god — had she misread him? Had her decision not to return his phone calls when he went to California been based on a presumption that when he came to the shower door, he thought, Reach in, and I’m doomed. Two minutes of sexless inspection of the thing he lavished his attention upon at certain convenient hours and he was in it for months, maybe years. He was in for meeting the doctors and learning the terminology and driving her back and forth and holding her head as she retched. If he wasn’t likely to commit to something that included security, love, protection, how eager was he for a commitment like that? But was it possible he had in fact simply not heard her? “I have a lump in my breast,” she said. “I found a lump.” He raised his eyebrows. “A lump,” he said, looking down, suddenly toying with an empty cream container. “What’s . . . what’s a lump?” What’s a lump? He hadn’t expected that answer, had he, even if it was the obvious one — not here, not at breakfast in the sun. “Why don’t you just forget about it?” she said. “No, I mean, of course I know what a lump is,” he said. “But what have you done about it? That’s what I mean to ask. What do the doctors say?” “I’m doing fine,” she said. “Is that what they say?” “Martin,” she said, “I’m fine.” “Were you ever going to tell me?” “I told you last night,” she said. On a dime he turned into the litigator. “No, you didn’t tell me last night. You told me not to touch last night. You didn’t tell me you found a lump.” “Why don’t you not worry about it, Martin — because I think you’d rather not worry about it than worry about it.” “I brought it up, didn’t I? Wasn’t I the one who brought it up?” Well, she thought — wasn’t he? Just where did Martin stand? Who was this man she had been fucking for the past year really, and how would he react with his back up against the wall? Let’s find out. “Okay,” she said, “go to the doctor’s with me.” He returned to futzing with the creamer. He didn’t look up for some time. “So you haven’t seen a doctor?” “I just asked you to go with me,” she said. “So obviously I haven’t.” “Why not?” he asked. “Because I need someone to go with me,” she said. He returned his attention to the creamer. “Sure,” he said, not looking at her. “I’ll go with you. Of course.” She smiled at him. He looked up. “What?” he said. “I’m fine,” she said.

  BETTER THAN BEFORE, anyway, because here is a good place to be, not a half-bad place, anyway, and this thing she’s doing may be a little uninspired, but certainly better than getting blotto at a wine bar. She parks in the underground garage and goes up by elevator and steps lightly into the bright and soothing atmosphere. Home, then bar, and now, a half hour before closing time, a department store — not a very fertile imagination on me, she concludes. She wishes to god she could think of the thing she knows is right. It probably isn’t shopping, but as she told herself on the way over, shopping’s not a bad interlude. And would you look at all the shoes? She wanders around the displays. Pumps, heels, sneakers, sandals — you know (thinking back on all those shoes she pulled from her closet when eons ago it sounded like a good idea to be cleaning), I don’t really need any more shoes. She doesn’t really need any more anything. But will you just look at all the hard work these good folks have put in to make you feel like nothing could ever be wrong when there’s so many pairs of shoes to buy! She hasn’t even gone into the main body of the store yet, it’s all so lovely and pleasant already.

  And all of it soured by the lack of the one thing she wants: not likely to find Martin here in the women’s shoe department, is she? In any department of Nordstrom or anywhere else at this hour of the night. Nine-thirty — right now Martin’s walking the hallway toward some associate’s office. Is she really longing to be a part of that? She would replace these bright and open spaces full of the world’s best footwear, fashions, perfumes, and accessories — and for everything else, there’s MasterCard — just to join Martin in a hallway of bare walls and ugly carpet as he moves toward an associate’s office on some inconsequential item of business? Come on, be reasonable. So it is Martin, it is Martin’s body — he’s still standing in some boring jerk’s doorway talking about document production and privileged materials. Shop, for god’s sake! Buy something! Make this night memorable in shopping’s extremely cheap way. What she has in mind is something extravagant, something outrageously expensive. You wear it once and put it away forever. No, not that, not a wedding gown. She doesn’t want to marry Martin, believe it or not. She just wants to follow him around the corridors of his office, stepping into the supply closet with him to pick up some file tabs, or whatever. That’s a far cry from vows. It’s not not having Martin forever that makes her momentarily wacko for Martin; it’s not having him tonight.

  She passes the man at the piano. What’s he playing? Can’t name it. She drifts around the perfume and makeup counters, fending off the lab-coated jackals that want to spray her and paint her and make her look her best. Just looking, thanks. Which is what she’s been doing, for twenty years more or less, with respect to men. She doesn’t mind finding herself unmarried, it’s just how things turned out, and she’s not eager to marry just to marry. Only those with the most dull and conventional pieties, looking in at her from the outside, would suspect or pity her for being forty-three and still unmarried. Would they pity a man? They would envy the man. She heads up the escalators. That’s not to say that when she sees her friends marry, she doesn’t have moments of, not jealousy, but envy, though not envy of the friend for getting married but rather of that conviction both the bride and bridegroom seem to share that, well, this thing they’re doing is the right thing. Where does that come from? She did think for a time that she and Douglas would marry, and when instead it went in the opposite direction, because Douglas was not, in the end, what she wanted, she woke up one morning and thought, not unlike finding herself all of a sudden in that wine bar, “Whoa, I’m thirty-eight! Who’s playing tricks on me here?” And for a moment she thought along the conventional line herself, reflecting on what a loss it might be if she never married, a
nd if she did, how old would she be by then — no younger than forty, if she got lucky — and so maybe too old to have children, and what a loss that might be, too. But do let it be known — what floor is she on? — let it be known in Women’s Apparel, at nine-thirty-five PM — dinner is probably being delivered to his office about now — on the night before she’s scheduled for major surgery and at the age of forty-three, that her marital status has not been, for whatever reason — because she is “cerebral,” because she is “cold,” because she is “ambitious” — it has not been the focus of her life. If she had spent a tenth of the energy finding the right man as she has building the agency she started with the other partners, she would be living in Oak Park right now putting dinner plates into the dishwasher. Have you finished with your homework? Should I take the car in tomorrow? With some circumspection, with some healthy amount of doubt, she can say that right here is a better place to be, in Nordstrom, and this thing she’s doing a better thing than loading up the dishwasher in Oak Park. And those people who think, Oh woman, oh sister, oh girl you have no idea what you’re missing out on, we just have to part ways, me and them, because I have made a good life for myself. I know what to do with my life. I just don’t know what to do with this one night.

  SHE ENDS UP in the lingerie section. If it’s invasive, and they think it is, and if a couple of other factors are in play, she’s agreed to have a mastectomy. Basically they put it to her this way: if we go in there and we find this and we find that, we don’t see how you have much of a choice. And if she’s going to have a mastectomy, she needs to start thinking about breast reconstruction. They’re going to save as much as they can, and they’ve asked that she come in tomorrow with a favorite bra, which they will use to measure where the incision line should be. They will cut just inside the bra line so that the plastic surgeon can do his thing after she has completed her six months of chemo and radiation, should they be necessary, which they likely will be. There’s nothing but bad news for her, and then there’s more bad news. So come in, they told her, with a special bra, and with that in mind, she gravitates toward Intimate Apparel. Her choices are endless — slinky, padded, sheer, cotton, rhinestoned, patterned, leopard-printed, silky, hot pink. This is what makes the country great, isn’t it? And it’s what’s made her life in advertising possible, the opportunity afforded by this glut to market one particular offering in a way that allows it to stand alone as the leader in the marketplace. She would know exactly what to do with any one of these brands, if they were fortunate enough to win that account. But marketing one for her particular needs tonight? Picking the one bra in this haystack of bras that will define where they make the incision and that will, somehow, when all this is over, make her feel sexy again — even she admits there’s not likely to be one bra here that can fill an order like that. She takes one off the rack. Maybe this one. Another one — maybe. Soon she has ten bras in her hands, she has twelve, fifteen. She takes them to the fitting room and despite the pain caused by the chafing tries a few of them on. She looks at herself in the mirror. The idea is to look sexy again. And for whom exactly? Yourself, of course. Yes, well, that’s all wonderfully self-affirming and very strong-minded as any decent woman should be these days, but let’s just face facts here and say that when a woman — no, when a person is thinking about feeling sexy, it is always with the idea of someone else in mind. Someone in the back of the mind who says, “I can’t believe how sexy you look in that.” And just who is that person for her? Unfortunately the timing is such that it can’t be anybody other than you-know-fucking-well-who, and that is not an option. Sexiness with Martin in mind is no longer an option. And sexiness after Martin? That’s where it gets complicated, because first she’ll have the stitches. Those will scar up quickly, and for six months, while the post-op treatments are doing their tricks, she’ll wear the prosthesis. Then the plastic surgeon does the breast reconstruction in stages — who knows how long that takes. So what is she looking at here? A year, a year and a half? How is she going to feel sexy during any of that? Who’s going to look at her scars, at her prosthesis, and say, “I can’t believe how sexy you look in that.” You see, there is no man after Martin, not for a long, long time, and before she can help it, she’s screaming. She’s in the tiny dressing room with a thousand bras screaming as loud as she can. It sounds like AAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRHHHHHHHH!!! When she stops she feels the pulse of her blood pumping in that part of her breast that is sore to the touch, and a rawness in her throat. She has a terrible head rush from the wine and the scream. She sits down on the bench. Salesclerks come running. “WHAT’S WRONG IN THERE? DO YOU NEED SECURITY?” She will not cry. No. She stands up and starts handing bras over the door. “I don’t want these!” she says. “Take them!” At first she offers a few at a time, then she scoops them up and tosses them all over. “I don’t want any of them! I just want out of here!” What a stupid place to be, this dressing room, and trying on bras, trying to look sexy, what a ridiculous thing to be doing.

  AFTER HE FOUND OUT, he left long voice mails for her at work. Who knows what effect he intended by them. Typically she picked up the phone and listened to them thirty seconds after he had left them, and carried on a dialogue with his recorded voice. “What I don’t understand,” he said in an early one, “is how an intelligent, reasonable person could possibly wait, despite knowing that something was wrong, feeling sick, and still refuse to see a doctor. I don’t get that, I don’t understand that behavior coming from an intelligent person.” “That’s because,” she said into the phone, as the message unfurled, “intelligent people are not always guided by their intelligence. Sometimes, Martin, something called fear is a little more powerful.” He would know that basic fact of human psychology, she thought, if he were in marketing, but as a practitioner of the law, he believed that the decision that was most rational, or at least most shrewd, would always triumph if it determined one’s own self-survival. “Yes, I should have shown an interest earlier,” he said in a later voice mail. “I was wrapped up in my work, I wasn’t paying attention. But now,” he said, “now that I know, I can’t not know anymore, Lynn, I can’t just unlearn it, and now that I know and can’t not know, I feel . . . you know . . . a certain obligation . . .” “Obligation?” she said out loud. “. . . concern for you, Lynn, and your well-being . . .” “Oh, Martin, be still my beating heart.” “. . . that I can’t just — well, what is it you want me to do exactly, huh?” he asked. “Just forget about it? Is it one of those things, you know — we do this together, we do that, but this is one of those things we just don’t talk about, it’s off-limits, when frankly, Lynn, you could be very, very — uh, yeah, I’ll be with you in a minute, okay?” he said to someone who must have just shown up in his doorway. Returning to the message, he continued, “. . . that you should, uh . . .” He had lost his train of thought. “Look, the point is, you have to see a doctor,” he said. “Okay? Look, I have to go. I should have said all of this to you in person but you won’t pick up your goddamn phone. Please call me back.”

  In one of the last messages he said, “There’s something I’ve been thinking about and wondering about and I’m very curious: am I the only one who knows? Have you told your father, or any of your friends? Because if you haven’t, and I’m the only one, you can see how I might feel a great deal of responsibility. In fact you could see how it’s just a little unfair of you, even . . .” “Oh?” she said. “I’m curious to see how this works.” “. . . because now I know,” he continued, “and you won’t take my advice to see a doctor, and that leaves me to worry about you . . .” “Oh, poor Martin!” “. . . but without any recourse to remedy that worry. Now that’s unfair, Lynn . . .” Then you should have kept your fucking hands off me! she thought. You shouldn’t have crawled into my bed and tried to bite my nipple! “. . . I’m not complaining about it, I don’t want you to think I’m complaining. I’m just trying to plead my case here, that you should go to the doctor. If you don’t want to do it for yourself, fo
r fuck’s sake, Lynn, do it for me.”