Carolyn came to New York, to Calvin Klein, around the same time I started at ABC. She worked her way up to from sales to public relations, and one of her responsibilities at the shows is to manage the models. They are constantly, it seems, in crisis. She is mother to them all, calm and ready with answers. The group hysteria, the high-pitched drone all seem to subside, just perceptibly, the moment her hand rests on someone’s arm. It’s all taken care of.
The show is at Calvin Klein’s showroom on Seventh Avenue, and there is a crowd around the door when I get there.
“I’m looking for Carolyn Bessette,” I say to someone who looks like a security guard. And then I see her behind the runway talking to one of the models. She lifts the girl’s hair up, then puts it down, fingers it into curls around her face. Her own long hair is pulled up in a loose ponytail, and she is wearing a simple white button-down shirt and black pants. She looks up with a huge smile and leads me to a small room behind the runway where she is working. There is a table set up with individual makeup stations, and there are racks and racks of clothes, each of them pinned with a number. It’s not as glamorous as I expect, backstage at a fashion show. It’s chaotic and tense, and very messy. Before the show starts, she finds me a seat out front.
“What did you think?” she asks when it is over. I am flattered she thinks I’d have something to say. I tell her I loved it; then she kisses and hugs me good-bye, and I go back to my cubicle at work. It is all over in under an hour, my foray into the world of long-lashed fashionistas.
A couple weeks later we have dinner, just the two of us. I meet her at her office at Calvin Klein. It is dark, with scattered piles of paper, fabrics, and catalogs. She is on the phone, and she points to a note I had sent to her after I met her at Sea Song. It is a picture of her in Vogue, posed sitting on luggage in Grand Central Station. The caption read, “Perfect Friday Casual,” and I had scribbled on top of it, “Everyone should look so good on Friday at 5 p.m.!” She had it pinned on the wall.
Discovering her again, I feel the way I did when I found a Star-bucks at the airport in Dubai. I had been too far from home, for too long, and here was something I recognized. It’s a particular kind of joy. Now I can’t imagine a time without her.
In March, Anthony and I are back to Washington for a checkup. After the CT scan, Anthony gets dressed, and we wait in the cafeteria while Dr. Rosenberg and the radiologist analyze the scans, compare them with the previous scans, and determine whether the shadows have grown or multiplied. We meet him at the clinic, in a small exam room on the fourth floor. He tells us there is no doubt now that the suspicious areas are tumors.
The CT scan shows twenty-one small tumors, pulmonary nodules, in Anthony’s lungs—fifteen in his right lung and six in his left. Five of the nodules have grown since the scan in January. This is how it goes. The cancer is in one place, his abdominal wall, and then it spreads to another, his lungs. Only you don’t say spread, you say metastasize. Disease spreads. Cancer metastasizes.
But they are small, we tell ourselves, and easy to get to—at the edges of his lungs, not deep inside.
Dr. Rosenberg brings in Dr. Harvey Pass, the thoracic surgeon, to explain the operation. He tells us he’ll make a six-inch cut down the breastbone and then spread the ribs apart with a chest retractor, a saw that separates the sternum muscle and bone. He will then deflate the lungs one at a time and with his fingers feel along the length of each one. When he feels a bump, he will cut a wedge and then staple the ends together. When he is confident he got everything, he says, he will put the lungs back in Anthony’s chest and close him up. He uses words like invasive and risk. The surgical consent forms admit the possibility the operation can “result in death.”
It will be a painful surgery. It will hurt him to breathe. A breath will expand his chest and spread the incision. It will feel like a knife. They will insert thin yellow tubes into holes in his chest afterward to drain the fluid from his lungs. This may take days.
We are sitting in the exam room looking at the X-rays. The surgeon uses his pen to point out the areas of tumor, blood vessels, bronchial tubes, the trachea. We are attentive and polite.
“What’s the worst-case scenario?” I ask.
Dr. Rosenberg neither exaggerates the truth nor masks it. “The worst case is when you run your fingers across the lung and it feels like sandpaper. Because each piece of ‘sand’ is actually a tiny tumor, too small to see on a scan. At that point there is nothing we can do.”
I take out my Filofax. “Well,” Anthony says, “what’s it look like, Nut?”
“I’m screening my piece on Wednesday. What about Thursday, is that good?”
“Thursday’s good. I’ll move my meeting.”
A few days later I get the news that Day One has been canceled, and all of us scramble to other shows. It is my beginner’s course on ratings and focus groups. Day One was a good news magazine show with an unfortunate time slot—Thursday nights at ten. A one-hour news show stacked up against a second-year hospital drama called ER, competing with the steamy bedside manner of Dr. Doug Ross. Viewers defected in clumps—consistently choosing the doctor—and our show was dumped without ceremony.
I land at World News Tonight, producing for the evening news. Hard news, we call it. It doesn’t matter if you have won Emmys or worked in Peter Jennings’ documentary unit once you get to hard news. If the magazine show producers are the cheerleaders and jocks of ABC, the hard-news producers are the burnouts, hanging around the smoking section ready to beat you up if you get in their way. But I think World News might be a good place to work, because producers aren’t expected to be on the road for weeks at a time. I can stay in New York and manage our schedule in Washington.
4
National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD
April 1995 (Inpatient Record)
Admitted: 4/5/95
Discharged: 4/11/95
CLINICAL DIAGNOSIS: High-grade fibrosarcoma, metastatic, to lungs bilaterally.
REASON FOR HOSPITALIZATION: This patient is a thirty-five-year old Caucasian male, otherwise healthy, with a history of high-grade sarcoma. He returned in November with metastatic and underwent a wide excision of groin with negative margins. Follow-up scan in January showed an increasing number and size of pulmonary nodules by chest CT scan. The patient now returns for a bilateral thoracotomy.
One of the myths about cancer is that it triggers bravery and heroism and larger-than-life qualities amplified against the bleak backdrop. But bravery can be confused with denial. A patient can deny what is happening and then go on about his business—live life to the fullest—but that is not the same as being brave. A patient’s wife can sit hours at a bedside, memorize lists of medicines, and spend countless nights on a hospital cot, but that is an entirely different thing from being staunch or devoted. It is what the bewildered do, stunned in the headlights, unable to come up with anything else.
Anthony and I fly down to Washington the day before the surgery and check into the Hyatt hotel on Wisconsin Avenue. We drive to the NIH and meet Dr. Pass in the clinic on the fourth floor. He explains the surgery to us again, adding that we have much more lung tissue than we actually need. He says Anthony’s lungs are larger than average and ensures him he won’t miss the offending tissue. But you don’t want to do this any more than you have to, so you put it off as long as you can, because it’s the same surgery whether there are twenty nodules or one. He says good-bye and tells us to be back in the morning by six-thirty.
Anthony’s mother meets us at the Hyatt, and we drive to Positano’s, a neighborhood restaurant a friend has recommended. It is dressed like a Tuscan villa—ivy hangs down the walls, garlic on the door. Frank Sinatra plays in the background. Wine bottles are stacked along one wall, and a mural of the Italian coastline covers the other—Positano, Ravello, Venice, the summers of Anthony’s youth.
The three of us sit through an awkward meal, picking at salad and spaghetti pomodoro, his mother trying admirably to k
eep the conversation lively. She is practical. No sentiment or drooped heads when it can be taken care of with a thoughtful subject. She is certain this can all be resolved. It is just a matter of going to the best doctors, finding the newest treatment. Though she is not unfamiliar with Fortune. Anthony and I eat like petulant children. Still bitter at being cheated out of a hematoma.
The next morning we are up and at the hospital early, Lee in a light-blue sweater, a departure from her signature black pants and turtleneck. She never wears black to the hospital. “It’s depressing,” she tells me. “I don’t want him to wake up and see black.” When we get to his room, a nurse is checking his blood pressure; she fixes a patch to his arm for the IV, and gives him 10 mg of Valium before he gets on the gurney that will take him to the OR.
This scene, the patient going into surgery, is as heartbreaking as every television drama has ever shown it. I hold Anthony’s hand, walking alongside the gurney. He is sedated, a bit groggy, clingier than usual, sweet. He holds my hand tight. Tighter the closer we get to the big double doors. “I love you, Nut,” he mumbles.
“I love you more.”
He smiles; this is our thing. “I love you mostly.”
I am determined to be casual, smile, not say good-bye. “Okay, see you later, Sweetie.” Never good-bye. Then he disappears. The big blue double doors swing shut behind him. It’s quick, this whole scene. No lingering, no second or two longer. A brisk walk and swoosh and the doors swinging shut. Then it is completely quiet.
It’s an awkward stretch after we see him into the OR. His mother and I, neither knowing what to do, sit in the dark, drab waiting room. Lee is debating: a museum or Dumbarton Oaks? “Why don’t you join me? Get some fresh air?” But I don’t join her for some reason, choosing instead to punish myself under the glare of fluorescent lights. “I think I’ll head to the cafeteria and get a bite. I’ll meet you back here.” Instead, I find the closest empty room and go to sleep, a solid sleep that feels like sinking to the bottom of a pond.
By noon Anthony is out of surgery and in the ICU. They took the pieces of his lung out in wedges, twenty-one tumors, this first time.
Dr. Rosenberg comes in, and the first thing I see is his smile. He knows to smile; he knows we are looking for it. “We got it all,” he announces. “Right now I can say Anthony is ‘cancer-free.’” I’m encouraged. We don’t have sand.
These are the halcyon days, when we think we can beat this. Anthony is up and walking six hours after surgery, is out of the hospital within a week. He is back in the gym the morning after we return to New York, back at the office two days after that. We resume our lives, cancer-free.
5
I live another life at ABC, or more accurately, in other places. But I have been deskbound now for months, and I discover it doesn’t work. I grow frustrated with the day-to-dayness of the evening news, the three-minute stories. One day blurs into the next. A pool of producers, warm bodies plucked at random to download video from satellite feeds, fill in the black holes in pieces sent from the field. I spend hours on the phone doing interviews: lawyers, policy wonks, experts from the Brookings Institute or the Heritage Foundation. There are presidential elections this year, and we recite stump speeches by heart during the day to amuse ourselves. It’s a true day job, producing the news: low-end research and no travel. We are out the door as soon as Peter Jennings says, “Good night.”
Then World News Tonight decides to do a ten-part series called Listening to America. The senior producers, or maybe the marketing department people, think we need more human-interest stories. The kind that appeal to the average American, ideally with a sympathetic underdog and a bully. I attach myself to a story in Montana about the American buffalo—an iconic symbol of the Wild West—being shot down in cold blood by greedy cattle ranchers.
I meet a camera crew in Bozeman and read the research on the three-hour drive to Yellowstone. The bison carry a virus called brucellosis that can be fatal for cattle, though it’s almost impossible for them to become infected, and there are no documented cases of their dying from it. It’s what’s known as a stock story: an animal is deemed a nuisance, one group wants to kill it, one group is outraged—there is always a news show willing to cover it. The ranchers are organized, and they persuade the state livestock department to cull the bison herd without a dead cow in sight—preemptive slaughter.
It isn’t hard to kill a buffalo. You walk right up to it and shoot it in the head. If there are others nearby, they might look up, but then they go back to grazing, so you can clip a bunch of them in a few minutes. I get footage of park officials in brown uniforms, Smokey Bear patches on their sleeves, shooting buffalo at point-blank range. It is excellent video for the evening news.
There is a small group of locals fighting the ranchers to stop the slaughter, and they are holding a town hall meeting one evening. I take the crew to film, and it dissolves into a shouting match between the groups. I interview a few ranchers and an official from the state livestock department. The next morning we shoot b-roll footage of elk and bison grazing, tourists on snowmobiles, and Old Faithful erupting. I’ve got it, basically, and I’m scheduled to fly back to New York, but I stall. I’m in no hurry to get back. I dread it, actually.
At breakfast I overhear a story about a hermit living in Idaho, a real one—brilliant, with questionable hygiene. “He lives in a cabin in the woods, in Last Chance, just over the border,” the waitress tells me. I convince myself this guy could be a story, so I call the news desk and sell them on it. They let me check it out.
Last Chance is small, a bar and motel on the western boundary of the park, known primarily for its fly-fishing. My cameraman and I pull off at the motel advertising “reasonable rates ’n’ COLOR TV” and ask at the A-Bar next door about the hermit. “Dave,” the bartender says. The men on barstools eye us and then nod toward a stack of books by the door. Passion Below Zero: Essays from Last Chance, Idaho, by David Hays.
“He lives up the road—just keep going in that direction,” the bartender says, pointing to his right. “There’s a dirt road that turns off. He’s at the end of it.” I buy a book, grab a business card, and we head down the road in our rented blue Taurus until we see a cabin wedged among overgrown bushes. We pull up to the outhouse just as the sun is setting and get out of the car. The house looks deserted, but a man yells from the porch, “Can I help you?”
“Hi, we’re from ABC News,” I say, and show him my ID. “We’re doing a story on the bison in Yellowstone.” I hold up a copy of his book, and he smiles slightly.
“Oh, I saw the car and thought you were feds,” Dave says, then waves his arm to motion us up.
“They were here last week asking lots of questions. They were looking for the Unabomber.” Dave’s remote cabin has a computer but no plumbing or heat. Books on technology and Eastern philosophy are stacked floor to ceiling. For a moment I think, I’ve found him. It really is the Unabomber! Visions of Peabody Awards dance through my head.
“So what exactly is it that you do out here?” I ask.
“Right now, I’m teaching myself Mandarin Chinese,” he says. He shows us the books in Chinese and copies of The Island Park Bugle, the small newspaper he publishes. He writes the editorials under the name “Seldom Seen,” and his book is a compilation of them. He signs my book before we leave. Thank you, D. Hays.
We decide Dave’s not sending bombs through the mail, and we drive back out to the highway. I call the news desk from the A-Bar and tell them there isn’t much of a story. The next day, I go home. Back to the news desk, back to hurricanes, and back to taking in satellite feeds. I start studying for the GMAT and collecting admissions forms for graduate school.
6
Carolyn calls me one afternoon in July. “What are you doing?” she asks in her secret-agent voice, low and loaded with plot.
“Working, why?”
“Come down right now.” They are just back from the Fourth of July on the Vineyard. She has a story for me, t
oo good for the phone.
Carolyn moved into John’s loft in Tribeca a few months ago. It’s the ultimate bachelor pad, with bad furniture, bad lighting, ill-placed bathrooms, and small closets. When John bought it, it was industrial space, so he hired an architect to design it: a kitchen, two baths, and one bedroom. A couple hundred thousand dollars later, it looked like industrial space with a bedroom at one end, an office at the other, and mismatched furniture from his mother’s house scattered in between. We gave it nicknames: Home Depot, the Warehouse.
I take the No. 9 subway train to Franklin Street, then walk a block to North Moore, and she buzzes me in the outside door. Seven floors up in the cramped elevator and then left down the hall. The door is open for me.
“Well?” I take a banana from a bowl on the table. She’s lying on the couch, grinning, and I sit down on the floor facing her.
She sticks out her left hand. “Look!”
“Wow,” I say. It catches me off guard. She’s here for good now, I think, and I’m thrilled. But I have a flash, too, of unease. I take a bite from my banana and swallow it. “Wow.”
“Stop saying ‘Wow’! You’re scaring me. He gave it to me this weekend.”
“Were you surprised?”
“Yes!”
The ring is nice, a band of diamonds and sapphires, but not something she’d pick out for herself.
“It’s a copy of a ring his mother wore. He said she called it her ‘swimming ring.’”
She didn’t say yes or no, she tells me. They just understood it would happen. She loves him, but she isn’t in a hurry to be his wife. “Don’t tell anyone,” she says. And I don’t, not even Anthony. She would like to stay secretly engaged forever, I think.
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