by Marge Piercy
“I’m thinking about running.”
“Hell, maybe I’ll get a column out of it. Why not? My brother-in-law, the small-time pol. The ticket fixer. You can feed me the crazy stuff.”
“I don’t think so, Marty. It wouldn’t be fair.”
“To who? The motel owners? The restaurants? Are you kidding? My column has a circulation of four million. They’ll be booked all summer.”
“Don’t you think Saltash has enough problems without turning the town into Mayberry?”
“You are serious.” He studied me over the rim of his glass. “All right, so tell me the burning issues.” He put his feet up on the desk. “Win my vote.”
“Fuck you.”
“Don’t be so sensitive. We’re family, we can’t tease each other? Because we’re going to be dragged into it, you know. Holly. The children.”
“I don’t think so.”
“People say you’re doing it because you like to get laid.”
“That’s what people say? Or you?”
“Me?” Marty said. “I could care less.”
“You don’t care that Judith and I are friends?”
“Ooh, I like that. Friends.” He pitched forward and refilled his glass. “By that definition of friendship everybody’d be humping each other all over this great nation of ours. This is my friend. She sucks my cock. Next time my kid says she made a friend in school, I’m going to get her birth control.”
“You are one nasty son of a bitch.”
“Me? Then what do you call a person who screws a sick man’s wife?”
“I’ve had enough.” I stood.
“You’re not the only one, you know. Judith has a thing for younger guys.”
“What’s your problem, Marty? You wanted to be one of them?”
I watched his cheeks light up. “One of them was a buddy of mine.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“That her husband’s an old man and she likes young meat now and then?”
“That you could have a buddy.”
Marty stood, knocking his glass to the floor. Holly heard the crash and came to the office door. “You guys all right? Marty? David, where are you going?”
I told my sister I’d had a lovely evening and would see her in the morning. Marty was close behind me. “You don’t believe me, David?” he called from the door. “Ask her! Ask her about Brian. Her friend Brian!”
Judith was usually awake before sunrise, but because it was Sunday morning, I waited a few hours to call. I sensed what Marty had told me was an exaggeration. The trouble was that it explained things too well. Why a young woman would have an affair in the face of her husband’s illness. Why she might choose someone like me. I had to see Judith right away.
At nine-thirty her line was busy. I called again fifteen minutes later, and once or twice after that. I drove out to the highway to buy the Sunday paper. I tried again from a pay phone, and still unable to get through, made a decision I would regret.
The mainland was clear, but a blue band of fog clung to the treetops over the island. In the distance, soft shell clammers were bent in right angles at the waist, clawing a living from the mud as their wide-bottomed boats drifted on long anchored leads. Although there was a bitter chill on this April morning and the roads were slippery with patches of ice, you could see green shoots growing up under the dead brown stalks; you could smell spring in the funky decay of sea life, salt air and mud.
I pulled up in their drive and hit my horn. Through my own reflection in the glass door I saw Gordon tying the strings of his robe. He waved. He started slowly toward me as Judith appeared behind him. She too was wearing a robe, which she held closed with a fist over her heart. She bolted past him and whipped open the door.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded. I smelled toothpaste and soap and the same perfume she daubed between her thighs in my bedroom. “Don’t you call first? Do you just barge in on people?”
“I did call. I’ve been calling for hours.”
Gordon laughed, slowly making his way to the telephone on the kitchen wall, where he replaced the receiver on its hook. He ran water at the sink and filled a kettle. He suggested we have coffee. Judith told me to wait outside and ran upstairs to dress.
I followed her down the path to the garden, through the hollow where pine needles crackled beneath our boots, to the little cottage where we met to make love. But this time she didn’t beckon me with a silent smile. This time the garden didn’t look like magic, but a trap full of nets and sharp edges. She turned on me as soon as she slammed the door. “Do not ever come over here without calling again.”
“Sorry I interrupted whatever it was.”
“You know what it was,” she said icily.
“So you do sleep with him?”
“He is my husband.”
“Fine. But why didn’t you tell me?”
It was not often that Judith would fumble for words. “Because it’s … not a regular thing.”
“I assumed he was too sick, Judith. I assumed that you didn’t have that kind of relationship, that I wasn’t in the middle of something.”
“Most of the time he is too sick. Sometimes he feels all right. I don’t always know.” By now she seemed more confused than angry. “It’s all new, David. Gordon hadn’t been … able for a long time.”
“How new?”
“I don’t know.”
“Sure you do. Since you started sleeping with me?” The way Gordon sometimes looked at us. Nothing suggestive. He didn’t make innuendoes. He never leered. But I sensed that my presence, a younger man with his wife, excited him. “Does it happen after I visit you here?”
She wouldn’t answer. She didn’t have to.
“Hell, I’m glad he can make love to you.”
“I doubt that.”
“I am,” I said. “I’m glad he’s well enough.”
“He’s not well. Sometimes his body can remember me through the pain. Sometimes he wants to be near me. Since I met you, yes, a door has opened. Gordon senses that I’m happy. He’s my friend and my family and my teacher. We talk. And we remember what it used to be like. And we try to plan how things are going to be. And this morning … yes.” There was no fire in the woodstove. We had not turned on a lamp. A shaft of gray light poured through the skylight like a pillar between us.
“Judith, who is Brian?”
“Brian?” She looked confused. There was nothing in her expression to suggest he meant anything. She had trouble recalling his name. “He did a book with Gordon. A photographer. What’s going on here?”
“I’m trying to understand what you want with me, Judith.”
“I assume,” she moved toward me tentatively through the cold shaft of light, “the same as you want with me.”
“But Gordon—”
“Wants us all to be happy.”
“You’re serious.”
“Yes. Yes, why not?” There was pleading in her voice. “Gordon and I have a life together. You and I have a life together. No one has to be deceived or disappointed. What is the problem?”
“Where is this supposed to go? How long can it go on?”
“What’s to stop us?”
“Only the opinion of everyone around us,” I said.
“Are you under the illusion that they, whoever they are, have perfect little marriages? Above criticism? No dirty secrets?”
“Not at all.”
“And do you judge them for the way they look for love?”
“I couldn’t care less.”
“Then what is the problem? We live our own lives. We do what we want. Everybody’s honest. Nobody gets hurt. What is the problem?”
Only my own sense of right and wrong.
JUDITH
Two weeks after their ninth wedding anniversary, Judith insisted Gordon go to a doctor in Boston. She was not satisfied with the chronic bronchitis diagnosis, and nothing seemed to be helping. She felt guilty because she should have managed to get h
im to a good doctor months before. She had nagged him, she had set up an appointment. The first appointment she made, he found an excuse to cancel. He was too busy for that nonsense. He had a cough, big deal. At his age, everybody had something. He had missed his deadline on the new book, he had three speaking engagements. He didn’t need an unnecessary trek into Boston, just because she was a worrywart and a control freak and overfond of doctors. But she would not let him cancel the second appointment, when she was able to get another. She want in with him, she marched him into the office, she tried to put a good face on his grumpiness.
The doctor poked and prodded him, particularly in his neck and lymph nodes and over his chest and listened to his breathing. Then he pronounced that Gordon must go to another doctor, an oncologist. He was careful how he phrased his opinion. “To eliminate several possibilities, you need to have some tests. Then if you don’t have that problem, which is at the moment only a possibility, we need to run more diagnostic tests back here.”
Oncologist. The doctor they decided on after consulting friends and acquaintances was associated with the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. There, the word was out in the open at last. The man they saw was the surgeon of a particular team, as he put it. Dr. Edward Barrows was a year or two younger than Judith, a handsome West Indian who spoke with a lilt. He called Gordon by his first name, which made Gordon bristle. His assistant took a complete medical history, so complete that Gordon asked, “Are you sure you don’t need to know the last time I cut my toenails?” They took a sample of Gordon’s sputum and scheduled an X ray and a CAT scan of the chest.
They both understood the doctor was testing for cancer, but they did not talk about it. She did not want to believe Gordon had cancer; she knew Gordon rejected the idea. They both clung to the hope that Dr. Barrows would clear that possibility.
The X-ray diagnosis appeared to be inconclusive. Gordon celebrated with a bottle of champagne. She was not sure but drank it with him. It turned out Dr. Barrows wanted a tissue sample. “You mean you’re going to take out a piece of me,” Gordon thundered. He was reluctant, but what choice had he? The tests went on, more and more invasive. Needle aspiration. A tube inserted through an incision in the neck to test a lymph node. The tests went on for over a month, back and forth to Boston or to Hyannis, where the doctor had a satellite office.
Finally Dr. Barrows was ready to give a diagnosis. There was a tumor. Given its size and location, a combination of chemotherapy and radiation therapy was indicated to reduce it. Then they would operate, perhaps in six months if the other therapies were successful. Now they knew. The moment the doctor had told them, she realized she had suspected as much secretly, for a year. Never had she mentioned the word “cancer,” but she had always been thinking it, in a locked compartment at the back of her mind which usually contained only a certainty that some yutz she was defending was actually guilty of whatever he had been accused of. Hiding that opinion from herself let her function as she must. Hiding her fear for Gordon had let her get through the months when she could not force him to a doctor. But now they both must live with the fact of cancer. Gordon took it well. “It’s like going into a dogfight,” he said as she drove them home. “You know you may die, but you plan not to. You figure you have your will to live and your reflexes and your knowledge of the enemy and your own plane. There’s terror in facing down death, but there’s also a crazy high like nothing else I’ve known since.”
As they returned to the office where Dr. Barrows must have given similar bad news to patients every day, the next stage of the process began. “We must agree on a plan of treatment,” said the doctor, and somehow his “we” grated on her all the more because he was young, because he was handsome, because he was radiantly healthy. The oncologist who dealt with radiation therapy, Dr. O’Reilly, was much older, red in the face as if he drank or had high blood pressure or had spent too much time in the sun. Judith and Gordon both liked him at once, perhaps because he seemed vulnerable. He explained how precise the machine was that burned away at the tumor, but could not penetrate it all the way.
The doctor in charge of the chemotherapy was a woman about Judith’s age, slightly overweight, her hair straggling out of its do, the air of a worried mother. Dr. Sara Ripkin turned out to be the star, when they eventually came to her office. Besides her diplomas, she had a string of plaques for prizes. She worked with several of the oncologists.
“Chemotherapy is a little like cooking,” she said to them, resting her elbows on her desk and her chin in her cupped hands as if her head was heavy. “You try a mix and then you see how it tastes—to the tumor, to the cancer cells. There are a great number of possible chemicals and a great many possible combinations and dosages. If at first we don’t succeed, we try a different mix. We keep checking, week to week. It may seem tedious but that’s the formula for success.”
The first question was how much to tell the children.
“Ben’s what? Forty? If he can’t deal with it now, when will he be able to?” Gordon scowled.
“Forty-five,” she corrected automatically. As a good wife should, she had their birthdays memorized. She bought gifts and cards and sent them to his sons and daughters, his grandchildren. Their spouses. A reminder program on her computer told her when it was time to order a gift. Mostly she mail-ordered, except for Natasha, for whom she shopped personally.
“If we tell any of them, we must tell them all,” she said.
“Whatever.” He looked exhausted. “Can’t we just play it down? I have a touch of cancer.” He reached automatically for a cigarette.
Her hand was faster. She grabbed the pack and threw it in the fireplace. “No more. The price has been too high already!”
“Isn’t it a little late to worry? I might as well enjoy myself.”
“It’s never too late to worry. You don’t want the cancer to metastasize. What I’ve read suggests that smoking increases the risk. No more, Gordon. You’ve bullied me into putting up with it for the nine years we’ve been married, but guess what? My tolerance ran out yesterday. No more, not one.” She went to stand in front of him. “I love you, Gordon. You’re precious to me. I refuse, I refuse to give you up. We’re going to fight this. People have remissions. Some people are cured. And don’t think you can smoke out in your shack and I won’t know it. I can always smell it. Your puffing days are past.”
That night she called Natasha at school. There had been a price tag on her marriage all along: Gordon had said no more children. He had demanded that pledge from her, and she had given it. But she had a daughter. She had raised Natasha from late childhood, and Natasha was far closer to her than to her biological mother, Fern. Hannah and she had often talked about the advantages and problems of being involved with men so much older than either of them. But this cost was new and far higher.
Natasha was in her senior year at Brown, planning to go on to veterinary school. When Judith told her, Natasha was silent for a full minute. “Sometimes I hate him!” she burst out. “I’ve been trying to get him to stop smoking since I was seven. I’ve heard you trying, again and again over the years. He’s so arrogant! He thought it couldn’t happen to him!”
“But Natasha, getting angry at him won’t help him—or you.”
“But I don’t want to lose my father!”
“I don’t want to lose my husband. He’s not dying, Natasha, he hasn’t even started treatment. We have to express hope, and to do that we have to feel it. They say that attitude has a lot to do with who survives and for how long. We have to be a cheering section. And for that we have to let go of anger and despair—do you understand?”
Squamous cell carcinoma had spread from the lung to the hilar nodes. Even the name was ugly. She had never heard of a squamous cell. Being married to an invalid was a different marriage. Sometimes Judith felt pushed to the wall. Her work was unremitting, full-time law that was now, besides Gordon’s pension and occasional royalties, their sole source of income; now full-time nursing as well. She
wished she were a more patient woman. She wished she were a better person. She loved Gordon passionately, but now the major way to express that was through taking care of him. The chemotherapy and the radiation therapy sapped his energy and left him debilitated. He was often nauseous. She cleaned him up and cleaned up after him. Nursing did not come naturally to her. Gordon was cranky. He hated being ill. He was heroic in his own way, stoic, committed to the treatment. He had finally stopped sneaking cigarettes. What drove him crazy was not being able to work. He was simply too weak, too tired. His disease was his new career, he said wryly, but he meant it. He had to be taken to Boston twice every week and once to Hyannis. She could not meet those obligations and continue to practice law, so they found a young man to drive him back and forth on Mondays and a young woman who would do the Hyannis trip every Thursday.
Gordon actually liked having two drivers. He was used to enjoying an intense social life. His illness, at least during chemotherapy, curtailed that. He got involved in the lives and problems of Tim, the son of a fisherman serving time for bringing in marijuana, and Camilla, who had moved into her parents’ summer house when she lost her job. He knew all about their loves, their family squabbles, their financial burdens, their fantasies and unlikely plans. Judith listened to his reports with as much interest as she could muster, because she was touched by his involvement and she understood what this was in lieu of: his intellectual, professional, political and social life.
Some of the drugs worked and some didn’t. It seemed highly experimental. They were throwing drugs into his system to see what happened. He got very sick from some of them. The doctors monitored his white blood cells, the tumor, his blood chemistry. He was losing weight but his face was somewhat swollen, along with his neck. When he was wrapped up in a tweed jacket or sweaters, for he was often chilled, he could even look as if he had gained weight. But she saw his wasting body. She massaged him. Some days she had to dress and undress him. About two weeks after the radiation therapy stopped, his throat was so painful he could swallow nothing, not even water. His hair came out in handfuls. Soon he was bald, Gordon who had always had a full lush halo.
