We get the pathology results at the end of the week, and they confirm Dr. Coit’s judgment that the margins are negative, a cancer patient’s “A” report card. We check out of Sloan-Kettering and resume our lives.
I look back on this time with nostalgia. How smooth and clean his body was—free of the bright red scars like Pick up Sticks that marked him later. They were about to draw the first line, and I wish I had given more attention to it. Loved it, felt slowly along each centimeter, memorized the bumpy unevenness, kissed it gently. When we were still lovers and bigger than the cancer. We learned a different kind of intimacy as we went on. The intimacy of night sweats and blood counts and dialysis machines.
10
He proposes on Mother’s Day.
We are at Lee’s house, planning to head back to the city that night. I am twenty-nine, and my boyfriend has cancer, and I am always thinking about it. But for Anthony it’s over. He has had the surgery, the margins were negative—he’s beaten it. Don’t you see, Nut? Don’t be sad. We did it!
“Wake up, Peanut. Let’s go for a walk on the beach.” I am trying to take a nap in the small library, but he keeps at me. I push him away, but he’s stubborn. It’s windy and cold and getting late and we have the drive back still, work tomorrow.
“Just to the jetty, Nut. I promise.” He has to promise because this is an old trick. At the jetty it’s “Just to the flagpole, come on.” And at the flagpole, “Just to the log on the beach,” the one that only he can see. But he’s true to his word, and at the jetty we turn around. I am focused on the walk, the big rocks that mark halfway and the distance back. I am not sure I want to be here, with him. It is a lot, this, and I’m not sure it’s what I want. I love him, and yet I have asked myself, Can you leave a man who is sick? In Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Etta tells Sundance, “I’ll do anything for you, but I won’t watch you die,” and true to her word she leaves him in Bolivia to die alone. I don’t know if I am stronger than she is—whether I can watch Anthony die.
These thoughts are rumblings, faraway thunder, eclipsed by the lightning-bolt urgency of others. You can’t leave him. You love him. You’re going to save his life.
We are walking back to the house, and I am ahead of him, taking the stairs from the beach up to the house two at a time, and when I look back he is still at the bottom. I sit down and wait for him, feeling guilty now because he’s had surgery and it slows him down. And then he’s right in front of me. With the little black box.
Real life is a flurry, even the still moments. The ones like this when I remember sitting quietly and not talking. In real life there is always something. A cough, a look away, the sound of other voices. A dog barks and we both turn to look, and there are people in the house and we think of them. It is never still. But all of these things are edited out in memory, to leave a stretch of time standing still.
This is a big moment. A man I love is asking to marry me, and it seems as though everything stops for a moment while my life flashes by. I am sitting on a high rock, and everyone I have known is scattered below me like figures in a wax museum. Anthony beside me is frozen in a pose, too, while I climb down tentatively and pick through my past. Grandma Millie, Grandma Binder, Linda, Maria. They are all smiling. Where am I going from here? I want to ask them, but I can’t speak.
We sit out on the steps to the beach for some time; I know this. I am sure we are talking, holding hands; he is kissing my forehead. I am sure we hug, he makes a joke, I laugh. I say yes or something close and put the ring on, and we sit side by side on the steps. I don’t want to go back in the house. I don’t want to announce this. I’m not ready. His mother is inside. Does she know? Does Herbert? I stretch this time sitting here exactly up to the point at which it might be considered strange or odd, or Is everything okay? I push us up to this line but don’t cross it. Instead I stand up and Anthony follows, and we go inside the house. From the beach, through the windows, you would see the four of us hugging and rotating and hugging someone else.
Moments later I’m back in the library, burrowed into the armchair. My future mother-in-law is on the sofa with a yellow legal pad. She is drawing columns for the guests, one for each of us: my family, his family, friends. She is talking about churches and dates. My life feels like it is happening to me, as if I haven’t been paying attention. We are not so different, my mother and I. Before you know it, your choices are made for you.
We drive back to the city and call Marc and Lori from the car, then my mother. Anthony calls his aunt and she is thrilled. “I’ll have an engagement party for you.”
11
There were two people I knew to have cancer before Anthony, and both of them died. Grandma Millie died in Kingston in the fall of 1985. It was long after I had stopped spending summers upstate, so I wasn’t entirely aware she was dying. There were second and third-hand accounts wedged between other pieces of news in routine telephone conversations. But when you’re twenty, seventy-six seems old, and you understand that a grandmother will die, so you don’t pay such close attention to how. It was a time before I was anxious about death. I didn’t yet perk my ears up at “cancer.” I was uninitiated, and the uninitiated still believe these things can be fixed. You only hear “cancer” if you’re listening closely.
I went to visit her one weekend while she was sick. We were watching the Jerry Lewis telethon in the living room in Kingston. Suddenly she picked up the phone and dialed the number on the screen, her index finger bunched into the hole of the rotary dial. She made a ten-dollar pledge with tears falling down her face. She checked herself into the hospital the next day and died there a few weeks later. I came up again to see her in the hospital. She was bedridden and sallow, with cloudy eyes, but she held down the center of the room. She was surrounded by people, swirling around her as they had her whole life, and in that way she didn’t seem to be dying. Her funeral was in the middle of Hurricane Gloria, and we huddled under a plastic sheet at the Mount Marion cemetery, peeking up at the ornery sky.
Anthony’s aunt Jackie was the other. I had met her a year before she or Anthony or any of us were thinking about spindle-shaped cells or malignancies. We were thinking about Christmas and families, and I was wondering what to wear to dinner at her apartment. I chose a black-silk skirt, above-the-knee, with a black sweater and patent leather Mary Janes with a gold buckle. I picked it all out carefully, and she answered her door in tailored slacks and said, “Oh, you must be cold,” before he introduced us.
She had the same wide eyes as Anthony’s mother. The same breathy voice. A seemingly intense interest in anything someone was talking about. There was a fuss being made over a young cousin that night. Her mother had died young. The girl was thirteen and long and graceful. Poised, it seemed, for elegance. And I could see Jackie was ceremoniously offering her wing. It was an intimate holiday dinner: John and his cousins the Rutherfords; Ed and Caroline and their children; and Anthony, his sister Tina, and me. I felt as if I were watching through a two-way mirror.
A year later everything had changed. She called the apartment the night Anthony left Lenox Hill, the night we learned that the hematoma was a malignancy. It was a short conversation. “Something’s wrong,” he said to me after he hung up. She called back again later that night. “I have something I need to tell you,” she said to him. “So do I,” he replied. “You go first.”
After that they went for long walks in the park, the two of them, as often as they could. I tagged along once or twice, walking behind them. I tried to stay out of the way. They had so much to say to each other. Every few yards I would spot the paparazzi, long black lenses poking out from a bush or behind a tree. They were waiting for her to trip or fall—waiting, I was certain, for the picture that said she was dying.
In late May, Anthony calls as he’s leaving his office. “Can you meet me there tonight?” It’s Thursday, and he has been going to his aunt’s apartment every night after work. She checked out of the hospital three days earlier; there was no
thing left to be done.
I don’t want to see her. I’m his fiancée now and this is his family, but I don’t want to go. When I arrive, the streets are crowded with strangers, and the apartment is filled with family; most I have never met. There are awkward introductions. Stilted conversations, swinging between strained small talk and stifled tears.
Anthony is called into her bedroom, and minutes later he motions me in. There is a small circle around her bed, where she is lying, a bright-colored scarf wrapped around her head. Her eyes are closed and her hands folded peacefully, and someone leads off the prayers. Anthony speaks in an unsteady voice. I want to run from here, out of the apartment, out into the street, as far away as I can.
“I hope I can face this disease with as much dignity and courage as you,” he says, kneeling beside me, hands folded, head down. Now they know, I am thinking. He just announced he has cancer. I can hear people breathing in the room.
I am swallowed up by dread. Here it is, death. Courage is a word I will learn to say; it is part of the vocabulary of cancer—courage, hope, bravery. Before this it was something that a man in a lion’s suit chased. Now it is a word about cancer.
Anthony is a pallbearer. He has to be at the church early, so I go to the funeral with his mother. I meet her at her apartment and she asks, “Pearl earrings or no earrings?” We decide no earrings, and then she puts them on and takes them off and we go out to the car.
12
It seems like the wrong time for a wedding. I am relieved, because I assume we’ll delay it. But Lee is resolute, and we meet for lunch. She is perfectly composed and has already made inquiries about the availability of a church in East Hampton.
“We need something to celebrate this year,” she says. “Jackie would want that.”
The wedding will be a celebration of life. I find myself agreeing, Yes, a celebration of life.
We talk about dates, and I tell her I have been assigned to work on a documentary. I will be busy this summer, too busy to plan a wedding. I can see that she is determined. She doesn’t need me to plan this wedding, and we both know it. I have the feeling she would prefer, in fact, if I let her arrange it all. She tells me she’s always wanted to have a summer wedding under a tent in her backyard and not to worry, she’ll pay for everything. “If you get me your guest list, I will take care of the rest.” So it is settled. There will be a wedding in August, two and a half months away.
The documentary is on Haiti. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the deposed Haitian president, is waiting in Washington to return to his country after being ousted in a coup a few years earlier. President Clinton is considering sending the military to force the generals running the country out of power. I am flying back and forth to Washington to interview policymakers and Aristide’s lawyer.
In between there is the guest list to finish and my wedding gown to design. Lee has sent over sketches from her good friend the designer Giorgio Armani with a note attached. I think these are beautiful. There are fabric swatches pinned to each sketch: organza and chiffon, pale silk with white tulle. I can’t help but notice that the sketches bear a striking resemblance to Lee. I thank her and politely tell her I will take care of the dress.
Anthony is in Los Angeles, doing a profile of Hollywood producer Robert Evans and covering the Nicole Brown Simpson murder. Three days after the murder, he finds Beverly Deteresa, an attendant on O. J. Simpson’s flight to Chicago—a reporting coup. Everyone in news is in L.A. in a feeding frenzy, hunting down friends, waiters, and neighbors. Anthony finds Deteresa the old-fashioned way, through a persistent trail of phone calls, and then he gets her to talk.
No one can be more excited for him than I am. We understand this together, the adrenaline high of connecting these phone calls. Anthony appreciates the beauty of my David Kay, and I his Beverly Deteresa. He has what all great reporters have, ruthless empathy. He can get people to talk. They want to talk to him. From the Queen of England to a sheriff in Idaho. He is subtle and gracious, and no one knows the famous family he descended from unless he is trying to land an interview with Monaco’s royals. He knows when to play his cards.
Judd Rose is the correspondent on the Robert Evans piece, and he solicits Evans’s help to play a prank. Anthony’s colleagues are secretly shooting a video of him preparing for his wedding, highlighting his obsession with working out. We play it the night before our wedding. In it there is a scene of Evans challenging Anthony to lift a stack of film reels, and then again, and then “Can you do it ten times, and with the other hand?” There is no trace, not the slightest, of an operation in January. He is strong and eager. It is boyish and charming, this desire of his to be challenged, lifting the stack of reels ten times, then twenty. Then “way up above your head,” Evans taunts him. It is sweet and funny. It is also not so funny if you know what is going on—most in the room don’t—which is that he has cancer and difficult odds. If you know that, you feel a pang of anxiety—brief because this is a wedding and no time for such thoughts. But I recognize the searching look on Anthony’s face and the stuttered speech, the way he says to Evans, “Why would you think I couldn’t do that?” I can see that he is thinking, Can he tell? Do I look sick?
Our wedding is in a white clapboard church in East Hampton. My sister Terri is maid of honor, John the best man. Ushers in white linen escort the guests to their seats. Flower girls drop rose petals. I hear Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March,” and that is my cue. My father holds out his arm, his hair pulled back in a ponytail, and he walks me down the aisle to the groom. Father Sam talks about love and commitment, and I catch John smirking at Anthony. The three of us barely contain giggles at the pomp and circumstance of it all. I keep my eyes straight ahead and bite my lip. I know Anthony will laugh if he looks at me.
Herbert reads a Bible verse, Sirach 51:13–17. John gets through a Shakespeare sonnet. I hear, I think, a collective sigh when Father Sam says, “I now pronounce you man and wife.” And we head back up the aisle. It’s all very quick, and everyone claps when it is over. We make our way without incident past the paparazzi and into the cars. A procession of black Mercedes drives ahead to the house, to the oceanfront reception.
Then we are on a plane to Australia, flying away.
I see a bump the last week of our honeymoon, in a cool sunset on the beach. I brush my fingers across the chest of my new husband, then down across the scar that cut through his smooth, tan skin, his tight, muscled stomach. And my fingers catch it, so slightly. “I’m sure it’s nothing,” he says. “Don’t make a big deal out of it. They’ll take it out when we get back.”
So I don’t make a big deal of it. I file it away so we can lie back on our tiki chairs on an empty beach in Lanai with palm trees shading our eyes.
We stop in Los Angeles for dinner with Herbert on the way home. He’s directing a new movie, Boys on the Side.
“Don’t say anything to him about the bump,” Anthony says. “It will just worry Mummy.” So I say nothing to Herbert about the bump. I tell him about the nurse shark we saw diving on the reef. I tell him about the fresh powder snow we skied on in the New Zealand Alps. I tell him about the white-water rafting. I don’t once mention the pea-sized bump, and we leave the next morning.
Dandelion Wishes
I would indeed that love were longer-lived,
And vows were not so brittle as they are,
But so it is, and nature has contrived
To struggle on without a break thus far,
Whether or not we find what we are seeking
Is idle, biologically speaking.
—EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY,
A Few Figs from Thistles: Poems and Sonnets,
“Sonnet IV”
1
The dandelion is a gawky yellow flower that blooms and then collapses into a soft, clumsy down that little children blow wishes on. There was a sea of dandelions in our back yard on Madison Hill, and Grandma Binder, swinging her scythe, would mount a futile attack on them in her housedress and apron. T
hey grew into a clotted forest of long, milky necks in the backyard, and the best she could hope for was just to cut them down to stubs. It starts with one slouchy weed—pluck it out and it’s gone. You never quite remember, can’t pinpoint the time between when there was one weed and a sea of them. There was a time when the thing seemed manageable, and then we were looking backward over our shoulders, running away from it.
You never stop thinking you might have beaten it somehow, and there were moments when we thought we had. Your husband can be dead years, and you can’t stop thinking how you might have beaten it. Or how they could have left ten minutes earlier, or the next morning. Or that damn lighthouse could have flickered through the fog.
After our honeymoon, but before we go to the doctor, we go to a friend’s house in Connecticut for the weekend.
“I’m in trouble,” Anthony says, stepping from the shower. Now we can both see a lump when he stretches his leg out under the towel so his skin is taut. This is a different one. It is a little smaller than a golf ball, and oblong. It looks like something has been left there, like when you make the bed and there’s a sock under the covers and you try to smooth the sheets. There’s something under his skin, a bump, that shouldn’t be.
We go into Sloan-Kettering, and doctors remove the tiny bump I felt on his scar in Lanai. They also remove the second bump in his groin, but this time the margins are positive. Now we have to talk. Now there are rounds of meetings with doctors—Dr. Antman, Dr. Casper, Dr. Coit, Dr. Fair.
“Metastasized,” they say in a serious tone.
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