What Remains

by Radziwill, Carole

The footage is incredible. When the guards deny the inspectors entry to the facility, one of the inspectors in Kay’s group turns on the video camera. “Okay, then I’ll have to call New York,” Kay tells the guards, and he proceeds to set up a satellite phone in the middle of the desert—a clunky contraption with a big round satellite dish. Then he sits down cross-legged in the sand, waiting to connect. A camel walks behind him, and you can hear gunshots in the background. To which Kay remarks, deadpan, “It’s cops and robbers in the desert, ladies and gentlemen.”

  Peter Jennings records the narration track to give the background of the story, and I edit David Kay’s tapes of Fallujah into a three-minute piece that leads off the show to earn my first producing credit.

  8

  Anthony adds I love you to the end of a Sunday night phone call. The summer of 1993 starts out otherwise uneventfully. It is our second year at Sea Song and we’re sharing the house with Marc and Lori. We’re back in the city on Sunday, and he calls my apartment to say good night, the way he does every night I’m not with him.

  “Sweet dreams, I love you.” And he hangs up. Or maybe it is me hanging up quickly, startled. What? He is in the habit of ending our phone calls with big kiss—I am used to big kiss. I’m not ready for something new just like that. Shouldn’t we be drinking red wine, kissing softly in front of a fireplace? Isn’t that when this should be said?

  I once spent a hot afternoon at the University of Texas, in the cramped office of Dr. Devendra Singh, and Dr. Singh used a specific science to explain love—the waist-to-hip ratio. I was working on a piece called “The Biology of Love” for a new magazine show called Day One. Dr. Singh was considered a pioneer for his work in the study of the evolutionary significance of human physical attraction. “Love at first sight,” he said, “all boils down to one thing—the proportion of a woman’s waist to her hips.” Men, he claimed, are biologically hardwired to favor an hourglass figure, and to prove his theory he conducted a study of Playboy Playmates over fifty years. He discovered that the Playmates had gotten thinner over the years, but their waist-to-hip ratio—that is, the waist measurement divided by the size of the hips—remained constant. The most desirable proportion, he discovered, was a 0.70. And here I thought love would feel like an Etta James song, with all those thrills and flutters—passion from the depth of the soul. But my waist-to-hip ratio is a 0.71, so I was encouraged.

  I say it back one night, I love you, a month after he does, at Sea Song. We are in bed with the lights off, about to fall asleep, and I say it. He says it back. There. It’s done. And now we spend another summer building sandcastles with Anthony’s nieces and nephews and grilling fresh corn on the deck.

  When you live in New York, life decisions, like moving in with your boyfriend, are for the most part made based on who has the better real estate deal. I am subletting an apartment on the West Side, and Anthony lives in a rent-controlled apartment on the East Side. My lease is up, and I have to move. This is how we wind up together in his bachelor pad on Seventy-Eighth Street. I have traveled light these first few years on my own, and I have little more than a suitcase. Anthony clears out a drawer and closet for me, but for a month I keep my clothes in the suitcase on the floor. I love the idea of spontaneity, of clothes flung over chairs, and yet I’m just too practical. I manage for the downside; if it doesn’t work, why unpack?

  We disagree immediately on his décor. He has a couch covered in tiger velvet fabric that doesn’t quite seem to fit in the living room, and two mismatched chairs. There is an antique coffee table and a large, rectangular butcher-block table. It’s covered with piles of papers, magazines, bills, and letters, none of which I am allowed to touch. The tiny kitchen is stocked with mismatched dishes and pots and a cutting board so warped it is split down the middle. Down the hall is the bedroom—small with a dresser and bed and a clumsy-looking rocker in the corner. The economy of space in Manhattan does not permit the odd bulk of a rocker. On top of that, it’s homely—oak with a low rattan seat and wide armrests. Anthony has gym shorts and T-shirts spread flat over it to dry. The arms and back are padded and covered with vinyl. The sort of piece that works better on the porch of a big farmhouse than in a small apartment on Madison Avenue.

  He lets me replace the shower curtain—plastic with a map of the world and stiff mold on the bottom—though he thinks it is wasteful.

  “It’s still good. It keeps the water in, doesn’t it?”

  “It’s gross,” I say. “I’m getting a new one.”

  The cutting board I dismiss without asking, and it is the source of an enormous fight. We never seem to fight about interesting things—always passionately about the trivial: our different manner of cutting tomatoes, driving techniques, the high frequency with which I wash clothes and how much detergent is appropriate to use. The chair, though, is not settled with a quick fight. Our disagreement continues on and off for months. I try to adapt to it, moving it around first, from one place to another. Then I try to change the look with a chenille throw, a pillow wedged first on this side, and then that.

  “Maybe we could give it to your sister,” I say. “She could just keep it until we have a bigger place.”

  But it isn’t just any rocker. His aunt sent it when he moved in. “I thought you might like to have this,” she wrote in the note. “It belonged to Jack.”

  “I’m not getting rid of it,” he says. “It was my uncle’s.”

  “But that’s exactly why it shouldn’t be here. You should donate it to the library!”

  “No. I like it. It stays. Besides,” he adds with a wink, “where would I dry my gym clothes?”

  I have bumped up against history. It won’t be the first time. Most things here, I am learning, have a story. The tiger couch, for instance, is not just a couch, but one his mother had custom-made at De Angelis. It has been photographed for fashion books. People in certain circles know this couch, just as people in other circles know this chair. There is a well-known picture of the president sitting in it in the Oval Office, where it looks much better.

  In August, on my birthday, I feel the bump.

  “Feel my stomach right here,” Anthony says. We are on the beach. “It feels like a little bump or something.”

  “Oh, yeah. I feel it. There’s a knot. That’s weird.”

  “Yeah. It’s little. It’s nothing.”

  Cancer is like this in the beginning. It tiptoes in like a teenager past curfew.

  Anthony’s body is carved and knotted with muscle—he runs marathons, works out at the gym every day, some days twice. It is impossible that there can be something unhealthy in this body that ripples on morning runs and twenty-mile bike loops around Long Island. We are quiet for a few minutes, then I run my hand over it again.

  “It’s just a little bump,” he says abruptly. “I’ll have someone look at it when we get back.”

  It is all very casual, and Anthony dismisses it with a quick hand motion, and we both lie down on our towels with our eyes closed to the sun. I let thoughts of the wedding we are going to that night, a twinge of hunger, fill up my head like sand. They spill right over the bump, and just like that I have dismissed it, too.

  Unless you know to look for it, it is unnoticeable. It isn’t touching us. We go to the wedding that evening. We finish our vacation. We drive back to the city and carry on with our daily business. We let the bump lie there for a few months, and it grows.

  In October I return to Cambodia to produce a piece for Day One. This is my first piece as an official producer.

  This time I stay in Phnom Penh, at the Royal Cambodiana. It has changed considerably since our documentary aired. The hotel has electricity, phone service, and “western-style” breakfast in the dining room.

  I am working on a profile of Bobby Muller, founder of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, whom I first met at the live debate on the night From the Killing Fields aired. He is someone you meet once and never forget. He has a clinic in Phnom Penh that makes prosthetic limbs for
land mine victims. I interview young amputees at the hospital. I interview survivors of the murder at the torture prison in Tuel Sleng. On a day off from filming, my cameraman, Mark, and I take a plane to Siem Reap, in the western part of the country. It’s a wild town filled with guns, prostitutes, and illegal gems traders. It also lies in the shadow of Angkor Wat, the largest and most famous of the temples built in the ninth century at the height of the ancient Khmer Empire.

  I pick up a card at the airport for “guide and driver” and hire the man who answers the phone to take us there. We drive through the jungle, and then our driver pulls over, and through the trees we can see the ancient temple. It is deserted except for a few monks in saffron robes burning incense. The jungle is overgrown, and the roots of the giant banyan trees are twisted around the enormous sandstone pillars, as though they are keeping the entire structure from collapse. The colossal lichen-covered Buddhas carved on each of the temple towers, scarred from years of warfare, stand watch. By late afternoon, armed Khmer Rouge soldiers in camouflage replace the saffron-robed monks. We stay for the sunset and then our guide, nervous, insists we head back to the hotel.

  When I return to New York, I find that Anthony has seen several doctors, and each of them has a slightly different diagnosis for the bump. One performed a needle biopsy that was inconclusive. Two others told him to come back if the bump grew. Anthony seems to have whatever it is under control. We barely speak of it.

  We fly off to St. Barth’s for Christmas, untroubled, to join Lee and Herbert and Hamilton. Herbert puts together a script for a short movie and then films it for fun. The Kakadopoulis Story—a satirical Greek tragedy about a murder and a double cross. Herbert directs and the rest of us make up the cast. Anthony plays the reporter trying to crack the case. Hamilton is hilarious as a misguided hairdresser, and Lee turns in a riveting performance as his mother. Lee’s friend Count Giovanni Volpe plays the murdered tycoon. I coproduce and take one of the leading roles, a rival reporter who seduces Anthony to get the story. Anthony and I have a love scene; we flub our lines and can’t stop giggling. You can hear Herbert scolding us off camera, “Carole, Anthony, stop laughing!”

  It’s only when I watch the movie later that I see the bump as Anthony turns shirtless toward the ocean in the second scene.

  9

  Before January 1994, I have never heard of a hematoma. It’s a swelling—a clot of blood swelling in soft tissue. A hematoma is what people get from car accidents, when a head hits the windshield. It’s a nasty internal bruise that can be fatal if it swells in your brain. When we return from St. Barth’s, Anthony goes to see Dr. Klein, a family physician, and this is the diagnosis: a hematoma. He looks at the bump and decides that it is a clot of blood. We are all relieved. At least it isn’t cancer. They schedule surgery to take it out. A simple out-patient procedure at Lenox Hill Hospital.

  The night before surgery, Anthony and Lee and I decide to go to a movie to take our minds off it. It is Intersection, with Richard Gere. Gere plays a married architect who falls in love with a redheaded artist. Sharon Stone plays his devoted wife, and though he appears to be happily married, Gere is fatally drawn to the artist. In a climactic musical buildup he drives too fast in his Mercedes on his way to tell her he’s leaving his wife. There is a lot of back-and-forth, a struggle between loyalty and love, and then the moment he makes his decision, he slams into fate in the back of a semi. Hours later he dies in the hospital from a hematoma. “We’re losing him!” the movie doctors say, and he floats away with eyes closed and a smile on his face. Snapshots of his movie life flash by; the doctors’ voices get softer and softer.

  Anthony clears his throat, and his mother leaves the theater. We’ll laugh about this later, next week, I think. But we never have a chance.

  We check into Lenox Hill Hospital early the next morning, and the doctor says it will be a few hours. “We’ll call you when he’s in recovery.”

  Lee and I walk back to her apartment a few blocks away. She asks her housekeeper, Teresa, to prepare a light lunch, and I start to leaf through a book. The phone rings. “Madame, it’s the hospital.”

  Lee motions me toward the back bedroom, and I pick up the other phone. The surgeon is calling half an hour after they started. Half an hour into a three-hour surgery. When the phone rang, the thought flashed briefly, Oh God, he’s dead.

  “We just closed Anthony up. I think you should come back now. It’s not a hematoma.” He pauses, and we wait. “We did a frozen cross section of the mass in the OR.” I am picturing his mother’s face in the other room. She has the kind of face that absorbs news, tucks it away. It is both reassuring and elusive.

  “The frozen cross section shows spindle-shaped cells. We can’t be certain what it is right now.” He does not say cancer over the phone. He is careful not to say cancer. Instead he says, “It looks like a malignancy.”

  “Let’s be up,” Lee says in the cab back to the hospital. “No long faces.” And she is. She walks in light and elegant with a big smile. “Ants, darling.” I force my own smile and speak, it seems, too loudly.

  After the surgeon discovers it’s a tumor, Dr. Klein changes his report to fibrosarcoma, as if he were fixing a typo. He adds high-grade, like premium oil or a fine Scotch. We would have preferred something milder—a non-spreading tumor, for instance. One that won’t skip around impetuously but can be contained and removed. So that’s how it goes. Anthony checks into Lenox Hill in the morning healthy, it seems, and I take him home that evening, sick. While I sit in the bathroom watching him brush his teeth, I look at the bump again. It seems to have grown, ballooned up all at once. It bulges awkwardly out of his stomach. There is no missing it, and I think, Was it always that big? How did this happen? How did we not know?

  But I don’t understand yet the dynamics of this illness—denial, avoidance, the easy manipulation of truth. You can find a doctor, if you’re persistent, who will tell you whatever you want to hear.

  This isn’t Anthony’s first brush with cancer. I stumbled across it accidentally in a conversation about sex when we started dating.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said in an awkward discussion about birth control, the responsibilities of love. We’d been taking chances, or so I thought. “It’s okay, I can’t have kids.”

  We were lying in bed, and this was a slow-moving dialogue. I didn’t understand him. We were quiet, and I waited for him to add the “just kidding.”

  “I had stomach cancer a few years ago, and I can’t have kids.” It jarred me. I was disoriented. As if a stranger walked into the room and spoke in Anthony’s voice. He said it plainly, but I couldn’t digest it. And then it hung there. I was talking about sex, and he was talking about cancer. He showed me the small scar, but it wasn’t on his stomach. It was much lower. And then I knew. It said what he couldn’t say, what the seven thousand men who die from this each year can’t say. I didn’t ask questions; I let him keep the lie. But when medical histories became a piece of our lives, it was there in neat, typewritten letters—testicular cancer.

  Anthony has had cancer before, yet we still ignored the bump on the beach. Our behavior, then, defied logic, you must think. We stayed at Sea Song through Labor Day weekend and then made the three-hour drive back home.

  Anthony checks into Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center on a Monday in February, two weeks after the hematoma surgery. He doesn’t care for Sloan-Kettering. It’s where you go, he thinks, to die. Among the sick, there is a subtle hierarchy of hospitals. Lenox Hill is the “baby hospital,” with a minor reputation for sports injuries. There are no dark diseases lurking in the corners. But now we’re at Sloan-Kettering, and we feel processed. The hallways are cluttered with patients—on gurneys and in wheelchairs, dangling IVs. You check in, you wait on line, you rush out—the twenty-four-hour diner of terminal illness.

  “We got it all,” says Dr. Daniel Coit. He has excised a tumor from the right rectus muscle in Anthony’s abdomen. And now it is gone. He explains to us about t
he Mylar mesh he put in to hold everything together, to protect Anthony’s organs and make his stomach smooth where the muscle had been.

  “We won’t get the pathology results until the end of the week,” he says, “but from the looks of the frozen section we think we have negative margins.” This business of margins. It means they took the tumor out, plus the healthy tissue around it, and that the healthy tissue—the margins—was negative for cancer cells. To say this is good news is to say nothing.

  “You need to come in for a follow-up next month, and CT scans every three months after that,” he adds.

  “Okay.” I am writing it down in my notebook.

  “We need to do chest X-rays monthly to make sure it hasn’t spread.” He pauses. “You need to be diligent.”

  In the hall, where Anthony can’t hear, I ask questions. Dr. Coit tells me the longer you go between the primary occurrence and the first recurrence, the better the survivability rate. This is a very rare cancer, he confirms, sometimes fatal, but if it doesn’t metastasize, the survivability rate increases dramatically. “Metastatic” is a clean, unemotional word, but in layman’s terms it means, You’re screwed. It means the cancer is spreading from one organ to another and there is little you can do about it. It means you’re always one step, one surgery, one chemotherapy treatment behind.

  On our second day at Sloan-Kettering I find out how long Anthony will live. It is laid out very clearly in a thick, dusty medical book. His mother brings homemade consommé and a pile of magazines. We are, all of us, full of hope. His aunt talks to him about being brave, and the past and a future. I go to the basement library and look up fibrosarcoma in the American Cancer Society Atlas. Then I close the book and file the information away. It is impractical. It doesn’t tell me what to do when we go home. It doesn’t tell me how to recover from this tumor, or when he can go back to work. It doesn’t say what to do when your boyfriend has cancer. It says that in the best possible scenario he will live five years.