Out of the Woods

by Lynn Darling

  We took a long walk up Wild Apple Road, one of my favorites, and it was beautiful, flanked by rolling meadows of snow stretching out to the hills that smudged the brilliant blue horizon.

  Afterward, he opened up a bottle of cheap red wine and I warmed up a stew, and we talked and talked, or rather he did, nattering on about his construction business, about how he had been a disappointment to his father (I am surprised, and moved, in my intermittent forays into middle-aged Internet dating, how many grown men not only bear the scars of their upbringing but also want and need to talk about them), and more tellingly, about his ex-girlfriend. She was overweight and unattractive, he said, and she had three small children, but she was his best friend and …

  He went on and on, and I began to want him gone, tired of party manners, bright and sprightly and artificial—“Are you drunk?” Zoë asked when I answered the phone, acutely aware of the man in the room. But sitting there on the sofa next to him, another conversation had begun. His physical presence asserted itself, and perhaps it was the novelty of being alone in a room with a man for the first time in a long while, but I felt an excitement stirring. Perhaps we’d make out a little and something would kindle. But no—at nine-thirty he left. I could say something that would embarrass us both, he said, before kissing me very lightly on the lips.

  The next afternoon a polite bread-and-butter e-mail arrived, and then nothing more for several days. I felt a rejection out of all proportion to the tepid interest Mitch had aroused. The weather was bleak, cheerless, and I went out for long walks in heavy wet snow with Henry, returning to the house chilled, unwashed, and grubby in my thick layers of snow clothes but lacking the initiative even to take a warm bath, as if the leaden clouds pressing on the house had settled in my soul. I tried to work, but I was foundering, slow and uninspired. I had to find a way to feel some urgency, to shake off the torpor. The small gains I thought I had made disappeared so easily; I couldn’t remember what they were. At least, I thought, I’m not in New York.

  Mitch and I made a plan to meet again, this time at his place. A week later, on a Saturday afternoon in February, I found myself driving up an icy mountain road while Henry sat at red alert in backseat-driver mode, his hackles raised, watching the road and, I was convinced, muttering to himself, “Slow down! Go faster! Pass that guy! Downshift, you moron”—through two hours of hairpin turns and iced-over bridges.

  We arrived finally at a sleek modern house perched at the edge of a bright field of snow under a bright blue bowl of a sky and decanted ourselves into the driveway. Mitch emerged with a young springer spaniel at his heels, and the two dogs bounded off across the snowy fields. There was the obligatory tour of the house, which, like the spaniel, turned out to belong to his ex-wife, for whom the object of my—well, I wasn’t sure what he was the object of—was house-sitting. Then a long walk during which he told me about his reckless youth, skating for hours on acid, the years bumming around Morocco, the 110 mph drives to Boston on one harebrained scheme after another—and dear God, he began to sound more interesting. Even the unfortunate eyebrows weren’t so bothersome. Was I just molding him, pretzel-like, into an archetype that had always attracted me? Was I talking myself into this because I was afraid I’d lost the capacity to be attracted (or attractive) to anyone?

  The answers were yes and yes. In search-and-rescue circles, this behavior is known as route delusion. It’s what lost persons do when they’ve been walking in circles for hours, ending up at the very place they were trying to leave.

  Back at the house we ate a perfectly decent lentil stew—I’m not sure what it says about my dating choices, but I’ve yet to go out with a man who doesn’t have a lentil stew in his repertoire—followed by thin slices of Asiago cheese and smoked Gouda. When it was time to go, Mitch gave me a box of kindling as a parting gift and walked me to the car, where he kissed me. A less-than-full-throttle kiss, but more than a peck this time, and then another one, and I began to feel something like the old champagne bubbling up.

  I kissed him one last time and then drove down the road, very pleased with him and with myself, wondering how soon I would see him again and how soon we would make love. I began to settle myself into a happy fantasy of the things we would do and the places we might go. Yes, I admitted to myself, I had missed a man in my life and he was just what I needed: nothing like Lee, no one I could fall in love with, and yet a possible companion. All of this, despite the less-than-captivating conversations, the not-quite kisses, the lurking ex-girlfriend.

  The champagne lasted for a day or two, until an e-mail arrived. “About those kisses. A bit confused I am by those three tantalizing kisses … Actually I’m confused not a bit about the kisses (they were just fine) but more about my head and where it is at presently. I seem to have trouble with being in the present. Will cogitate and sort and like the machine that filters and wraps spare change so tidily, I’ll try and make sense out of what’s rumbling around in my spare pockets of the cerebellum. I had a wonderful skate during lunch yesterday and intend to do the same today… .”

  I read the e-mail and wrote back, thanking him for his honesty and assuring him that I understood the sensitive nature of his feelings and would be glad, whatever the outcome of his hesitation, that we had met. Didn’t mean a word of it. There followed in his next e-mail a dithery string of ambivalence—yes, the old girlfriend was still in his heart, but gee, he wasn’t really attracted to her, but yes, he felt an obligation, but never mind, what the hell, let’s do this thing. He would come to dinner that weekend, after I got back from New York, where I was headed for a few days for a round of long-overdue medical and dental checkups.

  What’s this?”

  It was a beautiful day. The city blazed with a hard metallic sheen of bright sunshine and bitter cold. The shrink and I had had a lively conversation on one of the less tedious tropes in my psychological canon and the dental hygienist had praised my excellent flossing. What else was there? Who needed love? I was fine, just the way I was.

  Not so fast, said the Kindly Ones.

  Ron Ruden had been my doctor since I first moved to New York. We had daughters exactly the same age, and it was he, more than the Olympian and unreachable doctors at Sloan-Kettering, who had guided me through my husband’s illness. My annual visits to his office were mainly spent catching up on family news, with a mere ten minutes devoted to the requisite poking and prodding and drawing of blood.

  So my mind was far away, planning that night’s menu, when his question brought me back to the reality of the exam room. He was palpating my left breast.

  What’s what? I asked.

  This, he said. He guided my hand to something hard near the breastbone, which in fact was what I had thought it was when I had done my own manual examinations.

  It was a mass. A large one. Dr. Ruden was talking but I couldn’t seem to hear him. I got dressed while he called the hospital and scheduled an emergency mammogram for the next day.

  Back in his office, he said, It’s probably nothing.

  I looked straight into his eyes and read what was written there.

  Dr. Ruden? You don’t play poker, do you?

  No.

  Good.

  It was cancer, but it could have been anything, really. The predictable life markers, the milestones on the well-trodden path—the graduations, the promotions, the anniversaries—are more than enough to cope with, but then there are the unholy catastrophes, the curveballs you don’t see coming—the layoffs, the illnesses, the parent who can no longer find her way home. What the experts call survival situations. “It’s easy to imagine,” wrote Laurence Gonzales in Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, that such situations “would involve equipment, training, and experience. It turns out that, at the moment of truth, those might be good things to have but they aren’t decisive… . In fact that experience, training, and modern equipment can betray you. The maddening thing for someone with a Western scientific turn of mind is that it’s not what’s in your pac
k that separates the quick from the dead. It’s not even what’s in your mind. Corny as it sounds, it’s what’s in your heart.”

  That night, I called Zoë. She burst into tears but quickly recovered. I told her this was nothing, that comparing my situation to her father’s was like comparing the sniffles to tuberculosis, that I needed her strong, stoic, and black-humored self by my side. Then I told her the joke a character in a short story by Lorrie Moore tells, one that had always amused Lee. A man is told by his doctor that he has six weeks to live. “I want a second opinion,” he says. “OK,” the doctor says. “You’re ugly, too.”

  Alexander Swistel, the surgeon Dr. Ruden had recommended, couldn’t see me for a week or two, so I went back to Vermont and into a limbo of shock, anxiety, nausea, and a whirlwind of emotions so strong, so operatic in their intensity, that they rendered the mundane concerns of everyday life alluring but unreachable, like an amusement park on the opposite side of an unfordable stream.

  Which is why, I suppose, I decided not to cancel the dinner with Mitch. You would think that a potentially fatal illness is just the thing to put an abortive romance with a middle-aged slacker into perspective. But if romance has always been your drug of choice, the thing you turned to in good times and bad, then it will get you to oblivion as well as any other.

  Besides, he had been wonderful when I told him the news over the phone. I returned to Castle Dismal to find him waiting, a warm fire blazing, the refrigerator stocked. We took a long walk, and he was kind and undaunted about the future. Are you sure you want to go out with a bald-headed woman? I asked, not wanting to mention the more permanent physical changes in store. I love bald-headed women! he said, and I felt a little better. Perhaps I wasn’t going off a cliff after all. He left after that, promising to come back for dinner over the weekend.

  I worked hard in the days before the dinner, cleaning up the house, making a complicated lamb tagine, driving miles to find fresh flowers for the table. Mitch was going to let me know the night before what time to expect him. But the evening came, and the evening went, and the e-mail I sent inquiring after his whereabouts went unanswered.

  The next day he wrote back: I’m really really sorry, it began. The world is moving very fast and I’m having a little difficulty keeping up so no, I can’t come down today but will call this evening. Talk to you later and have a good day … got to run out the door!

  What had happened, he told me in the phone call that eventually followed, was simple enough. The ex-girlfriend wanted him back. They had talked, and there was still something there.

  I took it hard. I would like to think that it was the cancer talking, but I probably would have felt the same way without the diagnosis, given how hard a time I had been having with the prospect of being on my own forever. Either way, I was chagrined at how much I had wanted this to happen, how easily all my foolhardy, noble notions of forswearing men for all time had sailed out the window, how differently I had felt driving back home from Mitch’s place after one afternoon and three anemic kisses, as if I’d been somehow validated. And when it was stripped away, I felt less whole.

  I threw out the lamb tagine and indulged in a mawkish, angry evening. First I reread all of Mitch’s e-mails, and reveled in their banality. Then I listened to Leonard Cohen in the dark with a glass of sherry. Early Cohen is perfect when you want to remember just what arrogant twits men can be. (Late Cohen, after his voice changed and he had learned a thing or two, is better with a dry martini and a cup of rueful reminiscence about what twits we all can be.)

  The next morning, I felt much better—it is relatively easy to get over someone you had talked yourself into liking in the first place—but nevertheless I went through the usual cathartic ritual: the purging of the phone numbers and e-mail address from the contacts list, the deletion of the correspondence from the computer. I canceled the Match.com account. Then I wrote two e-mails to Mitch. One was noble, calm, and generous, if just a wee bit guilt trippy; the other was a wicked, mean, vindictive screed that made me laugh when I read it over. I sent the first and kept the second to cheer me up whenever the cancer threatened to overwhelm me.

  By then it had been a week since the diagnosis and I had become three people. One was a disinterested observer, watching a colossal train wreck and thinking to herself, Oh dear, those poor people: that was the writer, taking notes. The second was a kind of protean emotional swamp creature who morphed from a frightened field mouse into a gallant (and I wished this wouldn’t soon become an all-too-appropriate description) Amazonian warrior, ready to stare down any enemy, back into a trembling bit of fluff in less than a minute.

  She in turn yielded to my own personal manifestation of Kali, the Hindu goddess of death and destruction, black with rage, bearing a skull-topped staff and wearing a garland of heads, Kali of the gaping mouth and lolling tongue and fiery red eyes, filling the sky with her roars, devouring her victims, dancing on the corpses of her enemies. I would drive down the highway, the snow swirling white along the blacktop, possessed by a kind of exhilaration—I can’t figure out another word for it—at the idea of leaving my old world in ashes. Yes, cut off the breast, renounce sex and love and womanhood and contentment, revel in chaos, rejoice in a wholly impersonal universe, where the whirling snow and the injured body and the thin air of catastrophe were one and the same and equally meaningless. Off with their heads! shrieked the Red Queen. Off with their heads! And then I understood the dark power of the old crones in the legends and the fairy tales, the women who had lost everything but the rage that kept them alive.

  I began to tell people my news, each announcement sounding like some ridiculous lie—why on earth would I say such a thing? People reacted as people do, according to their nature. What both touched me and nettled me was the nearly universal need to make it better, to fix it, if only for the moment, to soften the blow. You’ll be fine! they all said. You have to be brave! My cousin had it and now she’s running marathons! It could be worse!

  The reactions brought my relationship with Lee to mind, how at first, when I came to him with bruised feelings, or disappointed hopes or fears for the future, he would set about fixing me, telling me what I should do and how I could overcome whatever obstacle had flummoxed me, with the enthusiasm of an energetic border collie determined to chivvy me back to the herd of the contented and confident. Sometimes, though, all I wanted were four short words and an accompanying tender glance: you poor sweet baby. Eventually, we got it down to a formula, as couples do after a while. I would cry or complain, he would start in on the border collie, and I would hold up four fingers.

  Oh right! he would say. You poor sweet baby! in so triumphant a tone that I always had to laugh.

  My favorite response to my situation, however, came from my friend Lynne, whose blunt Yankee pragmatism had always served to protect the easily aroused sensitivity that lay beneath it. I told her that I would probably need a mastectomy. Well, she said, casting an appraising glance at my seated form, the good news is, your breasts are small. You’ll hardly be able to tell the difference.

  Others were more overtly comforting. I blurted out the news to Harriet in the parking lot at Runamuck. She thought for a second. My best friend died of breast cancer this year, she said.

  I raised an eyebrow. And this is supposed to make me feel better how? I asked.

  It’s not, Harriet said. But my friend was eighty years old when the breast cancer came back. The first time she had cancer she was sixty. That meant she had twenty good years in between. I think that’s pretty good.

  I would have hugged her then. Luckily it was out of the question—Harriet was a New Englander born and bred. But I was grateful and, for the first time, optimistic. Harriet had provided a way marker, pointing in the direction I needed to go. It wasn’t sympathy I needed, or encouragement. It was a clear eye and a steady hand on the tiller, a realistic sense of what I was up against. A map.

  One afternoon there was a knock at the door. I looked out the window—n
o car in the driveway. That meant only one person, and yes, it was Tom, my next-door neighbor, already in the mudroom, calling my name. I braced for battle. I didn’t care what harebrained flatlander thing I’d done this time, I didn’t want to hear about it and was prepared to tell him that I had just about enough on my plate, thank you very much, without another ear beating, as my grandmother would have called it, from him. I was channeling that formidable woman when Tom appeared in the kitchen, holding a delicate blue bowl, a snow-white cloth napkin, and a mason jar full of something that smelled delicious.

  My wife made it for you, he said. I had met Catharine, or Cat as she was called, on one of her visits to Woodstock. She didn’t come often: the Vermont house was Tom’s retreat, where he could play his music and have time to himself. She was a warm woman with an incandescent smile and a down-to-earth wit. It’s her Portuguese kale soup, Tom explained. It’s really good for you, and you need to eat healthy. I’m sorry about the, about the—he could barely bring himself to say the word.

  Cancer? I said. I thanked him for the soup.

  If there was anything he could do, he said, anything at all, just call—he would walk the dog or bring in the firewood, anything.

  That was when I knew things were really, really bad. I was so touched by his kindness that my eyes began to fill, but Tom knew how to avoid a scene. “Look at it this way,” he said. “At least you won’t have to worry about dating anymore.”

  Alexander Swistel was a dapper man, inclined toward bow ties and a suavity that he wore with proper Ivy League insouciance. Well, he said after glancing at my left breast, which the biopsy had left looking like it had gone five rounds with a washing machine. You certainly didn’t give me much to work with.

  You’re the first man who ever complained, I said.