“What,” he said. “What is it?”
In the emptiness she heard the ruffle and smack of the morning mail being pushed through the door slot. A dull gray light spread across the ceiling and out into the hall. At her elbow, at the base of her neck, and at the top of her skull various niggles announced themselves. Hot spots, one of the healers had called them. And she understood him to mean that these were zones where tumors could erupt at any moment.
She plunked her way downstairs and cut and ground wheatgrass and then drank it from last night’s wineglass as if she were trying to turn her stomach out. She sat at the table and began taking her vits. The doorbell rang its lame, cranky ring, and she rose to answer it.
“Martin!” For some reason she’d thought it was tomorrow he was coming.
“Elizabeth,” he said.
They hugged.
“I thought it was tomorrow,” she said.
He set his bag in the foyer and followed her into the kitchen with his briefcase.
“Do you want something to drink?”
“Wine,” he said hoarsely. “Or scotch.”
She smiled and pulled out an unopened bottle of thirty-year-old scotch.
“You shouldn’t,” he said.
“Richard’s.” She shook her head.
“Oh, well then.” He took it from her and tore it open. He grabbed what little ice there was in the pocket-sized freezer and poured a few fingers. He took a sip. “Wow,” he said.
“Can I smell it?”
He held it to her nose. It was smoky, peaty—whatever—but she bet it was smooth anyway. She pushed it back to him.
“So what’s the plan?”
She looked at him and tried to tell how scared he was for her. “I have reiki at eleven,” she said. “Other than that…” She shrugged her shoulders.
“What do you want to do?”
“Want to do?” She felt the tears start and strangled them back. There were so many choices! “I don’t have anything I want to do,” she said.
He reached for his briefcase. “I brought you some magazines.” He stopped himself. “I don’t mean to be this pathetic.”
“Neither do I.”
They stood looking at each other.
“Shit,” she said.
“I guess.” He looked at the ceiling, then made himself look back at her. “I guess it must have felt to him like I was acting like he wasn’t here.”
“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe. But there was a lot of time he was acting like I wasn’t here.”
“You don’t want to find him?”
“I don’t know.” She continued inspecting the floor. “Sometimes I think he’ll come back when he’s ready, and sometimes I know this is it. You know. The beginning of my end.”
“God,” he said.
“It’s not so bad. I mean, it’s awful. But if you take away reasons for living—or if they go away all by themselves—then this whole thing makes sense.”
“So you’re just going to lay down and die?” He took a big swallow of scotch.
She forced a laugh. “Some people do. When they’re ready. And some people fight and they still die. And some people fight and they get to live. Maybe he knows I’m not going to get to live—”
“And maybe he’s just a selfish asshole.”
“A lot of people think I’m the selfish one.”
“Everyone’s selfish,” he tried.
“When you’re in a lot of pain,” she said, “you sink more and more into yourself. Nobody can jump in to join you.”
“This is cheerful,” he said.
“You’re the only one I can say this to.” She wiped her eyes. “You won’t lose it.”
“I just drink.” He shook the ice in the otherwise empty glass. She watched as he poured himself another. “I bet he’s at one of the ashrams.”
“I don’t need to know.” She pointed at his briefcase. “Are you going to hand over those magazines or what?”
When he woke she was pulling up the window dressings to sunlight and trying to smile at him.
“It’s one o’clock,” she said. “You want to go for lunch?”
He remembered. “Your reiki?”
“It was good.”
He wasn’t hungover, just fuzzy with jet lag. “Lunch?” he mumbled.
“It’s sunny,” she said. “It’s never sunny here.”
He pulled on shoes and followed her downstairs. He looked at the calendar hanging on the side of the refrigerator.
“It’s March,” he told himself.
“You ready?”
He splashed water on his face and tried to feel clear.
She drove with the top down, in and out of roundabouts, across a bridge, through a truck barricade, from one high street to the next. He had no idea where they were, but the neighborhoods kept seeming neater and trendier. Every time they stopped at a light she kneaded her shoulder.
“Maybe it’s just a muscle or a joint thing,” she said.
“Have you told Sparks?”
She looked at him. “My scans aren’t supposed to be for another month.”
“Hmm.” He took in the wind. “You should probably tell her. Does Richard know?”
“No.”
After forty or fifty minutes, they were where she wanted them to be. She slammed out of the car and bought a parking stub and stuck it in the windshield, and he helped her close the top.
“That’s the longest I’ve driven in months,” she said. Her face was gray and yellow, and she looked brittle. “I hope it’s worth it.”
They walked down streets lined with sweater boutiques and shoe stores and French-looking cafés. He’d forgotten London could be this nice. His eyes seemed foggy and he kept rubbing them.
“You’ll wake up,” she said. “It just takes a while.”
They sat in a restaurant with blond wood floors and Scandinavian chairs. The menu seemed Californian. He Ordered a glass of wine.
“If I’m going to feel this blurry …,” he explained.
She pointed to where her morphine patch usually was, a dulled square of skin. “That’s how I always feel.”
“It’s not on,” he said. “That’s good.”
“The reiki. And you’re here. I don’t usually slip it on and off like this, but it’s time to try something new.”
He ate salmon while she nibbled a special plate of lentils, haricots verts, carrots, and romaine. “Richard was always saying I should live a little,” she said. “Maybe he was just trying to kill me off.”
He laughed. It was a joke, wasn’t it?
“I like this place.”
“Your salmon,” she said. “Can I try?”
He nodded and began sliding her his plate. She forked off a piece and ate it.
“That’s really good,” she said.
“Uh-huh.” A guy at Sloan-Kettering had told them that the most important thing was for her to keep her weight up. “You want some more?”
“Nope.”
Afterward they window-shopped. He kept missing Lauren. At an undergarment store an older woman listened to Elizabeth and looked her over. “So madam doesn’t want a string?” she said incredulously. “Madam wants a proper pair of panties?” Then Elizabeth led him into a sweater shop and began trying on pullovers in purples, reds, and oranges. She found one she liked.
“I’ll buy it for you,” he offered.
“You don’t have to.”
“I want to.”
It was almost two hundred pounds! He practically choked when he paid.
“Thank you,” she said. And kissed him on the cheek.
He should offer to drive them home, but he had never driven in London.
“It’s all right,” she insisted. “I can do it. And it will be faster on the way back.”
He sat in the passenger seat, appalled by how much he’d spent—the cab in from Heathrow, the lunch, the sweater. The plane ticket.
The traffic dripped from the city. She kept rubbing her shoulder.
“Pull over,” he said.
“You sure?”
“Absolutely.”
It took a few more minutes—all of half a block—until there was curb space, something that resembled a fire hydrant. They got out and exchanged seats.
“It’ll be easier in a little car,” he said.
“I wish the seats went back.”
She closed her eyes behind the sunglasses, and he shifted the car into gear. Almost instantly someone let him into the flow.
“This isn’t going to be so bad.”
“Keep straight for a couple of lights. Then at the next roundabout take Marble Arch.”
“You can nap in between,” he tried to cheer her.
“I hope so.” Her eyes, he could tell, were still shut. She wanted to move her shoulder around, but there was no space in the Alfa Romeo.
“Scream if you want.”
“I’m going to,” she said.
It was easy, in such slow traffic. He could practically shut his eyes. Then the roundabout came.
“Keep to the left,” she said.
“Keep to the left,” he muttered. “Keep to the left.”
The sign for Marble Arch came up, and he turned onto it easily. To the left. To the left.
“Four or five lights,” she said. “Then Dunkers Green at the roundabout.”
The road widened to two lanes his way. He stayed to the left, although the traffic moved as if it were still the fast lane. But right was passing, wasn’t it? He glanced at her. She appeared to be asleep. He stayed left. Cars kept trying to cut over, and he kept letting them in. At least he’d had only a glass to drink, and that was hours ago. He was definitely sober.
So they were together but they were apart. He had a spouse and children, she had neither. He was for the moment—and as far as he knew—well, and she was living under her sentence. He had a job, she had her retirement. They were as separate as when she was nine and he five, and she could have and do all the things that he wanted but couldn’t, because she was old enough. He used to lie sobbing in his bed at eight o’clock on a summer evening, listening to them all playing Wiffle ball in the driveway, the sky filled with daylight. Or when they went out to a restaurant with booths, Martha and Elizabeth took one to themselves while he was stuck in the other with his parents. He’d felt endlessly shut off from everything then, and it seemed to him that just when he gained a new level of independence, of freedom, his sisters had gone on to an even higher level, and as the youngest, he appeared to be more ornamental than essential, the object to be coddled and shackled and, whenever his mother’s punishments began, protected and resented.
She was lying in her bed, her eyes shut, the morphine patch reattached, talking about her scars, while he sat on a wooden chair and tried to listen, even though he had heard it all before. Dis-ease meant that there was something inside that had come from outside that had triggered the illness, and Elizabeth believed this something to have first come from their mother, from the humiliations and slappings and beltings she inflicted, and then later from the work Elizabeth had chosen, which in part was a result of the way their mother had treated her. She believed that if she had grown up in a more open and loving home, she would have turned to a life more open and loving than the straitjacket of IPOs and mergers and deals that she’d eagerly strapped herself into. Both Martha and Elizabeth always said that his life was the freest because he’d had the most freedom growing up, but he didn’t recall it that way, and he couldn’t see it that way now either. He earned much less than they did, and couldn’t afford the freedom he thought his sisters had. Perhaps none of them were free. Only really rich, really healthy people were free. Whenever he met any of those, he hated them.
Rage was a cheap fuel, but whenever he was with her after her diagnosis he shut it up inside, and so he had been even less honest and less human with her than he was with himself. There were times that he doubted he was even a person anymore, and he saw he had assumed a role that he thought the situation required, and in that way, then, they’d really switched places. He’d put on the straitjacket that her dis-ease had forced her to rip off.
“… and that time,” she was saying, “when I dropped that vase.”
He nodded his head, still unable to recall it, but perfectly capable of remembering how she recalled it, after all the times she’d told it. A party when she was six or seven, the house filled with friends of their parents. She’d picked up a vase from an end table and for one reason or another carried it toward another end table, only to have the vase slip from her hands and shatter against the floor. Their mom had swooped in, whisked down Elizabeth’s pants and underwear, right there in front of twenty or thirty people, and spanked her bare bottom.
“Yes,” he said, “I know.”
But he wanted to say: Get over it. Does it always have to be about this?
“I’m so tired,” she said.
“Could you sleep?”
“I don’t know. Can you sit there?”
“Sure.”
He watched her try to sleep, her head stiffly straight and square on the pillow, her neck exposed, her short hair fallen to the side, her sallow cheeks slightly indenting, her eyes tightly shut, as she made herself breathe slowly, deeper. The last of the gray light fell from the window, and darkness began to arrive in a tightening of the walls against bleakness, in the despair that could come at the end of the day, of the things that still had to be done, of things that would have to be left undone. Any joy at evening—at having gotten through the rush of the day’s business—was rarely something he could feel without a drink, or two or three or four. They still had dinner to decide on and gather and eat and dishes to wash and the first part of the night to get through, and then a second, later, more endless part when she would try to sleep but she couldn’t, and he’d be the only one here, and because she would have slept in this early, early part the later part would be that much worse and he’d have to be of use. But now she slept.
He shifted soundlessly on his chair, looked around for something to read or do, set his feet up on the unoccupied side of the bed. He’d been to Hamburg with her to see a jolly doctor who twiddled his thumbs and promised to make her a “cookbook” of treatment plans, but never did. He’d been to some of the worst of the appointments in Hampstead, when Richard said he couldn’t go, and afterward he’d sat with her in the oncology suite while she took in three hours of IV pamidronate and asked him to dial around to give the latest news of her situation. Once, when he persuaded her to come to Sloan-Kettering for just one more second opinion (a third opinion, a fourth opinion), they’d stood side by side in the overcrowded waiting room while a row of people resituated themselves so he and she could sit together. “Everyone is so polite,” he’d said. “Yeah,” she’d murmured, “like Auschwitz.” To which there were a hundred things he could have said, but didn’t.
“Has he called you?” Martin’s mother wanted to know.
“No,” Lauren said tiredly.
“Well, I haven’t heard a word. But I’m almost afraid to call.”
She nodded her head, even though his mother couldn’t see her. The water for the pasta was boiling, and she stuck in half a box’s worth of linguine.
“So, how’re you doing? Do you want us to come out there?”
“We’re fine,” she said gaily. She could just picture all the cleaning she’d have to do to make the house presentable.
“And you’re teaching all his classes, too? That’s unbelievable.”
“Uh-huh.” She stirred a little olive oil into the cooking pasta.
“I guess it’s too late to call anyway.”
“It’s pretty late.”
“Didn’t he say he’d call?”
“Well, you know how it is.”
“Can you talk to Carl for a minute?”
“Sure.” She stirred the pasta once more.
“How’s my daughter-in-law?” Carl said, his v
oice chalky.
“Good,” she said. “How are you?”
“Can’t complain. Can’t complain.”
She liked him and she felt empathy for him, but she just didn’t have the time. “Well,” she said.
“Did you see the paper today?” He’d somehow arranged for them to receive the Wall Street Journal for free.
“Not yet,” she said.
“There’s an article in there you might find useful.”
“Oh?”
“I’ll clip it and send it to you.”
“I can find it,” she said.
“Really, it’s no bother.” He let out a hacking cough.
“What page?”
“One of the front pages. The one about Internet teaching.”
“I’ll find it,” she insisted.
“Good. How’s the weather there?”
God, she could just scream. The sink still had breakfast dishes, and she didn’t want to think what Sarah’s book bag still had in it. It hadn’t been unpacked. “Cold,” she said.
“Same here. Although it got sunny for a little while. Did you have that?”
“I can’t remember,” she said.
“I see.”
“I’m sorry. I’ve got to go.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll call as soon as I hear—”
“Wait a minute. She wants the last word.”
“You’ll call us?” She was on the line that quickly. “Or we’ll call you.”
“Right,” Lauren said.
“You sound pretty busy. You sure you don’t want us to come out there?”
“Positive.”
“Well, let us know if you change your mind.”
“I will, I will.”
“Can you say good-bye to him?”
Aargh! “I—”
“Thanks for taking the time,” Carl said.
“Anytime,” she said. “Talk to you soon.”
“Good-bye.”
She clicked off the phone and glared at it. They were nice people. She loved them, but—
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