He convinced her at last, or she simply yielded — after a week’s time it was tough to determine if she agreed because she had found some reserve of strength, or because she was hopelessly weak and he had worn her down with his voice mails. He would go with her, that was the condition. In the car on the way to her appointment, she tried putting into words her fear of doctors, hospitals, procedures — but there was no articulating it. “I spent a lot of time in hospitals when my mother was dying,” she said. “I was just a kid. Maybe that’s when it started.”
“What did she die of?”
“Give you one guess,” she said.
There was silence. Then he talked in general about the amazing advances they’d made in medicine over the years, with the same optimism that marked every conversation of its type, and she could only think how naive he was to think she would be responsive when she had always been immune to that sort of hopefulness. Technology would never advance past primal fear. It would never trump human instinct.
He parked in the hospital parking lot and for a half hour tried to coax her from the car. She wanted him inside the room during the exam, would that be okay? He said it would be. She didn’t want him to leave her side, was that understood? He said he had understood that from the first time she had asked, and the second time, and the third. “Why are you stalling?” he asked. When had Martin become so . . . committed? Had she misjudged him from the beginning? Or was this what was required for that commitment to take hold, that she be sent to hell and back? For she was in hell, in that car in the hospital parking lot, and not one cold hand had yet been laid upon her. After three or four attempts to articulate her fear on the ride over she had finally given up, but now she said to him, “I think I can finally explain it,” she said. “It comes down to this. And it’s so simple, Martin, I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before.” “Well,” he said, “so tell me.” “I cannot physically enter that building,” she said. “I cannot get out of this car and enter that building. See that building? I can’t. I won’t.” There was silence. Then he said, “Well, sounds like fear to me.” But he said he still didn’t understand. “What is it fear of, exactly?” he said. “Fear of death? No, you tell me that’s not it. You don’t fear death. Is it that they might tell you something’s wrong? You know something’s wrong. It’s not that either. So what is it? Most people, Lynn, they feel something ain’t right, they get scared. That’s natural. But the next step is getting it fixed. They’re eager to get it fixed. You,” he said, “you have all that reversed. You know something’s wrong — that doesn’t scare you. You go weeks letting it get worse! The idea of getting it fixed? That’s what scares you. Am I right? Isn’t that how it works with you?” That’s why he made partner, she thought. Good insight, good reasoning skills. “Yes,” she said. “I never thought about how fucked up it is until you put it like that, but yes, that’s it.” There was silence. “Do you think there’s a word for that?” she asked. “I could think of a few choice words,” he said. A moment of levity. After that he stared through the windshield, thinking. “Look,” he said, turning to her. “I’ll be right back. You stay here, okay?” “Where are you going?” she asked. “You said you wouldn’t leave me.” “Once we got inside,” he said. “We’re still in the parking lot.” He reached out and took her hand. “Trust me,” he said. So she let him go and he went inside the building. Ten minutes later he came out again and told her that her appointment had been rescheduled. The wave of relief that came crashing over her quickly receded again into a sea’s depth of despair when he said it was only rescheduled for later that day. “What time?” she asked. “Don’t worry about what time,” he said. “Just put this on.” “What is it?” “What’s it look like?” he asked. “It’s a handkerchief.” “But how am I supposed to ‘put it on’?” He started the car and placed it in reverse. “Like you’re a pirate’s captive,” he said, “and you’ve just been told to walk the plank.”
SHE WALKED INTO THE FIRST BUILDING holding his hand. They took an elevator that made her ears pop. She felt ridiculous because the elevator was full and what the hell was she doing in this blindfold? At one point she heard Martin say, “Stop staring.” “I’m not,” she said. “How could I be?” “I wasn’t talking to you,” he said. After what seemed like an eternity the elevator stopped and everyone got off. He led her by the hand. When he brought her to a halt he undid the blindfold and she knew instantly where she was: on the viewing deck of the John Hancock building, overlooking the city. She was surprised and delighted. “What is it you’re up to, Martin?” she asked, cocking an eye at him. He shrugged innocently and gestured at the view. “I’m showing you the city,” he said. There was the Sears Tower ahead of them and Lake Michigan to the left and to the right the grand and gaudy suburbs. They pointed out where they worked and where they lived and identified the buildings they knew by name. They put money into the viewfinder and looked out at Wrigley Field. They cast their eyes west as far as they would go and they still couldn’t exhaust that endless metropolis. When they were through, Martin put the blindfold back on her. They took the elevator down, walked back to the car, and climbed in again. They drove. Again he parked and led her by the hand. This time they walked up some stairs and she knew there were no stairs in a hospital entrance and so they had to be some other place, and when he held the door open for her and guided her in, she couldn’t see a thing but she could still smell, and she knew right away where they were. She heard a man say, “Two?” “Two,” replied Martin, who made her walk all the way to their table in the blindfold. “All right, take it off,” he said. “I knew it!” she cried out. “I knew just where we were!” They waited twenty minutes for a deep-dish pizza in a back booth under the dim light of Gino’s East, where the black planks above them made them feel as if they were eating under the main deck of a creaky old pirate ship. Those planks had been mercilessly graffitied and dollar bills had been stapled to them. When they stepped out again into the bright shock of daylight, he put the blindfold back on her. She wondered now if her luck had run out.
But they drove what she thought was too short a distance to be back at the hospital and when he took the blindfold off again, she said, “I should have known.” They were at the Jazz Record Mart on East Illinois. “Yes,” he said, full of an irony she loved, “an aficionado like you deserves to be indulged on a day like today.” “Please,” she said, “here’s my credit card, buy what you want — just take your time.” He spent almost twenty minutes looking through the dusty bins for his obscure recordings. “Not long enough,” she said, when he was through. Then it was back to the blindfold and the car, parking the car and being led by the hand. Stairs again, and not just six or seven of them — three long flights, almost enough to make her winded. She couldn’t believe what he was doing, holding her hand and guiding her along, devising this scheme so uncharacteristic of him, or at least uncharacteristic of that understanding she had arrived at long ago of the living breathing man — a Martin who was without whim or fancy, who drove home only the nail of hard truth, or chose to avoid the issue altogether. What the day had proven more than anything, she thought, was her haste to judge, and the rigidity of those judgments once made. They were inside now — the place had an airy, echoic atmosphere, rumbling low with hushed voices, and footsteps on marble stairs she could pick out one by one. He took the blindfold off and they spent an hour guiding themselves through all the highlights of the Art Institute. “I thought you weren’t an art fan, Martin,” she said. “I’m not a fan of any of the bullshit,” he replied, “but at this level, there are things I enjoy.” “Is that right?” “Sure,” he said. “Point one out to me,” she said skeptically, “when we come upon it, will you?” “This one here, for instance,” he said. “This one?” “Yes, this is a fine piece,” he said. “Care to argue?” They were standing in front of Georges Seurat’s giant Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte. “No,” she said. She didn’t care to argue.
It was three in the aftern
oon by the time they left and she knew now, getting out of the car, walking with him, that her luck had finally run out. “Don’t take it off,” he said. “Martin,” she said, and her voice trembled. They were walking across a parking lot that was unmistakably the parking lot of a hospital. “Lynn,” he said, “do not take it off.” Her hands began to shake as they had in the car earlier in the day. “Just keep walking,” he said. And she managed to because she could trick herself: maybe not, maybe not just yet. . . . But there were no stairs, and when he opened the door and the slightly warmer air from inside hit her and the light coming in above the blindfold got lighter, more fluorescent, she knew for an absolute fact where they were and she was terrified. “Just keep walking,” he said. He brought her to a stop and made her sit, and the chair beneath her was hard and plastic like a chair in a hospital waiting room, and she was terrified. “I’m not leaving your side,” he said. “I’m just going about ten feet away for a couple of seconds to talk to someone, then I’ll be back.” He returned. “I’m right here,” he said. They sat there a long time. After a while, he said, “Why don’t you take the blindfold off now.” “No way,” she said. “Trust me,” he said. “Take it off.” “I’d really rather not,” she said. “Come on,” he said, “you can do it.” She did as she was told, squinting a little as she looked around. Clerks stood behind glass. There were digitized numbers on the walls. “The DMV?” she said. “You bastard!” She swung at him with the blindfold. “You see!” he cried. “You can do the hard part!” She sighed with relief. “But now you might as well resign yourself,” he said. “You’ll never know when we’re actually there.”
THIS IS PROBABLY not the right place to be, probably the wrong place, actually. Matter of fact, if the wrong place could be identified on a map — “You Are Here” — this would probably be it. And this thing she might do, enter the building and have the night guard call up and inform him who he had waiting for him in the lobby? Not the right thing to be doing. But she’s been driving around for half a gas tank now and lo and behold she ends up here. The street where his firm’s office is located is one block east of Michigan Avenue. The Mag Mile is deserted like always this time of night. She’s parked illegally, but the only vehicle to drive past in twenty minutes is a cabbie with his light off. Going home, probably. That’s the wise choice, cabbie — big day tomorrow, take yourself home and rest your weary bones. Why can’t she have a cabbie’s good sense? Lynn Mason in her Saab outside Martin Grant’s office building doesn’t feel forty-three so much as fourteen, unhinged by strong affections. “Wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait!” she says out loud, pounding the steering wheel and grabbing onto it, shaking it. She can’t actually be where she is! How did the night, starting at the top of the mountain with Chinese and TV, run like a landslide of shit down to this low ravine here? Does she really want to go up there and just be in an office? There is no mystery, no attraction, no reward, no surprise in the empty corridors of an office at ten at night — she knows from firsthand experience. Spending her last night in an office, that’s insane. But the thing is, in that office up there? There is Martin. There is Martin. And the universal truth is, it matters not where he is, if he is drowning in the ocean or burning in a fire — that’s where his lover wants to be. So it doesn’t matter if he’s an unshowered, crabby, gaseous, overworked, eye-twitching, mind-dulled man under the purgatorial light, walking the barren halls with their unringing phones and bad art. She wants to be up there. How could she help but find herself parked here, regardless of what she told herself earlier in the evening — that there would be no calling Martin tonight, no talking to Martin? A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, and at this hour, she has thrown all consistency to the wind.
And yet, something stops her from going in. She sits in the car for twenty minutes and doesn’t move. If you’re the night guardsman, and you’re listening carefully, after a while through the glass you can even hear the car start up again. She drew your attention because she just sat out there for twenty minutes. Then you saw her bang really hard on the steering wheel, she looked like a crazy! You had to ask yourself, What’s she up to? And then to just leave! Almost a peel-out. Sit in your car twenty minutes, just to leave again? Wonder what that was all about.
It was about coming to your goddamn senses, she thinks, driving off. And here’s why: Martin has made it clear to her what the terms are, and she can’t accept the terms. It’s as simple as that. He did all those wonderful things — he took her to the top of the Hancock building, to Gino’s, to the Art Institute, and then when the time came he took her back to the hospital, and she thought she knew they had arrived but because of his canards she was able to think but maybe it’s another DMV, which was all she needed, that and the blindfold, to follow him in and sit next to him and deal with being in the hell she was in. And he didn’t leave her. And when the doctor said, in essence, things are bad, by using words like “advanced,” “aggressive,” “better for chances of recovery,” Martin was the one, because she was too stunned, to ask the questions. He was good to her, she had reason to be parked outside his building. But he had also done something terribly, terribly unexpected, something truly surprising, revealing of his true character — something terribly honest.
The doctor’s visit was on a Friday, and after the trauma of it, the night followed in a deep funk, and it was a godsend to have Martin next to her in her bed. Saturday she woke up and found the funk replaced by a burning need to know a thousand things. All the questions she would have asked the doctor, had she had the power to the day before, came to her all at once. Martin had to remind her of many of the things the doctor had said. He practically took her through the entire prognosis again, the options that were available and the consequences that followed from them. But his expertise was limited, so midmorning, he went out for breakfast and stopped at a local bookstore, where he picked up a book that took a breast cancer patient step by step from discovery and diagnosis all the way through remission. He returned with it and together they ate and they read and they debated, and they came to conclusions: the goal was to do whatever gave her the best chance of a complete recovery. It would not be without its consequences.
“You think I should have the mastectomy,” she said.
“No, I think you have to wait until the doctors get in there,” he said, “and let them decide that, but yeah, I think you should give them permission beforehand, that if they think they should do it, they do it.”
“And what do I do without my breasts,” she said, “such as they are?”
“You . . . I don’t know,” he said. “You don’t do any nursing for a while.”
He must have seen it on her face. Don’t do any nursing? Was he not aware that the prospect of having children was becoming dimmer and dimmer, and was he so insensitive that he didn’t think in advance that she might be bothered by that? Not that she was bothered — she was fine with it — but to be reminded like that? What was wrong with him?
“No, that was a bad joke,” he said quickly. “That was a terrible joke. I’m sorry I said that. I was trying for a little humor.”
“I think you should stick to reasoning,” she said.
What she had wanted him to say, of course, was, What do you do without breasts? I don’t know. I won’t mind. But they weren’t talking about the two of them at the moment. They were talking only about her, getting her to a place where she could admit these difficult circumstances to herself so she could make the right decisions. Somehow, by the end of Saturday night, they had gotten there, more or less. She looked past the bad humor. She thanked him many times. He went home. She wanted it that way. It had been an exhausting two days.
It wasn’t until Sunday — or three days before the scheduled operation — that they got around to talking about the two of them. He came over early and was standing in his spring overcoat and wouldn’t sit down. She came out from the kitchen and said, “Why are you still standing?”
“I’ve been thinking about something,” he said, “and I think you should know what it is.” She knew not to like the sound of that. For all the things she had had to worry about since her diagnosis, she had not forgotten that a busy man, a workaholic, a sworn bachelor would probably not find it in his best interest to play nursemaid to a sometime girlfriend. He had acquitted himself the past two days like a gentleman — a king, really — but it was going to happen sooner or later, something like this: I wish you the very best of luck, Lynn, but I’m not equipped for it. I do hope you call me when all of this is through. “Will you at least take your coat off?” she asked. “Of course,” he said. When that was done, she handed him his cup of coffee. “Let’s take this over by the sofa,” she said.
And there he laid it all out for her: he was hers. Entirely. Whatever she needed from him, she had it. He would take days off work. He would be by her side at every appointment. He would see her through the entire thing. “From start to finish,” he said. “If you’d rather have Sherry or Diane or whoever, that’s fine. I’m just making myself available.” “Thank you, Martin,” she said. She was stunned again, speechless — what a surprise. “I’m touched,” she said. “I won’t know what I’m doing,” he said, “but I’m willing to try — whatever it takes.” “I’m pleased,” she said. “Really, I’m very touched.” “But there’s one thing I have to make clear,” he said. “It’s a condition, I guess. And I know it’s terrible timing, but I can’t . . . you see, I watched you, the past couple of days, Lynn. You surprised me — especially yesterday. Yesterday, it was like you came alive. You wanted to know everything. And you dealt with these hard . . . these goddamn hard facts. I was so impressed. And that got me thinking last night, when I went home, got me thinking that you could handle anything. Anything.”
“Why don’t you tell me what it is you have to tell me,” she said.
Then We Came to the End Page 21
