What Remains

by Radziwill, Carole

  Graduate school was my idea, though Anthony is thrilled. I know it’s crazy, but we don’t say that. I want something away from everyone I know, a place where I am just a student, a place away from cancer. To Anthony, I think it is a relief.

  We are not ones to speak about death—as it relates to him, anyway. He never hints at his own death; he never admits he might die. Nothing is to be put on hold, which of course implies on hold until after. Instead we speak of futures that won’t exist. With all of the earnestness of a gambler putting down a bet. We pretend to be two people who have every right to talk casually of places, for instance, where we might move someday, of projects we might start, of career moves we might make.

  When I think about graduate school, I have in mind dreamy afternoon literature classes at Princeton, but Anthony is more practical. He pushes me toward NYU, the Stern School of Business. He doesn’t say it, but I suspect he thinks an MBA will be useful for a future I might have without him. He is careful, in any event, to make sure I will be okay.

  So I apply to Stern’s Executive MBA program. My admissions interview goes well and my GMAT scores are respectable. I’m accepted for the fall.

  I love school. The routine, the weekend classes, the study groups after work. School is my own thing—my escape. There are four men and a woman in my study group, all with their eyes on promotions and boardrooms. We meet once a week, sometimes twice. They know nothing about me except that I am a journalist, I have a last name they recognize, and I don’t quite fit the profile of business school student.

  They have families—children, wives, and husbands who need them. Sometimes if someone is sick, we cancel study group. Two people travel occasionally on business. And sometimes I am away, spending nights in a hospital.

  7

  National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD

  October 1995 (Inpatient Record)

  Admitted: 10/16/95

  Discharged: 10/22/95

  CLINICAL DIAGNOSIS: High-grade fibrosarcoma, metastatic, to lungs bilaterally.

  REASON FOR HOSPITALIZATION: The patient has previously undergone a bilateral thoracotomy to remove 21 nodules in April 1995. He is admitted now to undergo left thoracotomy for recurrent solitary lung nodule.

  “Right here,” Dr. Rosenberg says, pointing to the X-ray. I point to an area that looks shadowy. Here? And he nods at me seriously. He points out the scar tissue and the blood vessels. To me it all looks the same. Tumors are small and make shadows on the film, and the doctors somehow know whether the shadow is scar tissue or blood vessel or nothing at all. Anthony and I check our schedules, and we plan the surgery for the following week.

  We are hopeful. We are still saying things like cancer-free. It will be the second operation in six months, but Anthony recovers easily. It is nothing, we say. Hardly anyone even knows we go to Washington.

  After this surgery, the doctors put two hoses in his chest, attach the hoses to clear plastic buckets, the buckets to the wall. It means days of lying in bed hooked up to the wall. Anthony can’t stand it. “Hey, Nut, get me my gym bag. It’s in the locker.”

  Before Nut, I was Peanut, and before Peanut, I was Bear. I remember when I became Peanut. Anthony was standing in the living room waiting for me at Sea Song. “The Peanut’s here!” he yelled out when I walked in, and it stuck. We get strange looks from the doctors whenever he asks me about something. Nut, what do you think?

  “Nut, get my gym bag,” he’s telling me now with a look on his face I know well. He swings out of bed in his T-shirt and shorts. “Grab the buckets and see if they fit.”

  “Sure,” I say, as if he’s asking me for a tissue or to turn up the volume on the television. I put the buckets in the bag.

  “Can you zip it?”

  “Um, yeah.”

  He pulls his jeans on, grinning. “Hurry up!” He throws the bag over his shoulder and tucks the yellow-plastic tubes under his shirt, and we are off. The two of us walk nonchalantly down the hall past the nurses. “We’re just going down to the second floor,” he tells them. “Stretching my legs.” He doesn’t look like he’s just walking down the hall, but they don’t question us. He is the darling of the NIH. They are all rooting for him. The doctors all want a patient like Anthony. He isn’t content to be the Very Satisfactory patient; he wants to be Excellent. So if they are looking for him to be up and walking on the second day, he makes it the first. If they expect recovery in five days, he does it in four. He is thrilling to watch. He is unstoppable, the unseeded player taking the tournament by storm. It is a shame there are only the few of us to see, because his accomplishments are stunning.

  We drive to Hamburger Hamlet with the gym bag of hoses and sit at the bar eating hamburgers and fries, watching the football game on a big screen.

  After the second time we sneak out, Dr. Michael Cooper pops his head in the room. “Carole, can I talk to you for a sec?”

  “Sure,” I say. He is a young doctor and one of our favorites.

  “Listen, I saw you leaving. I’m not going to say I think it’s a good idea. It’s not. But if you’re going to go out, you need to take these with you.” He gives me a pair of clamps that look like long, thin scissors with flat ends. The ones they use in surgery to close off the arteries so patients don’t bleed to death.

  “I shouldn’t be abetting, but this is important.” He is all business. “If the tubes get weak they let air in, and if air is going in instead of coming out, that’s not good. If a tube rips or falls out or gets loose and disconnects from the bucket, that’s not good either.” He has a firm grip on the clamps and squeezes them together to demonstrate. “You’ve got to clamp it immediately.”

  “You mean within a minute?” I ask him.

  “I mean immediately.”

  I practice clamping so I will be ready if a tube pops out, and Anthony times me. “Okay, Nut. Go!” I grab the clamps from my bag and squeeze down on the yellow tube the way Dr. Cooper showed me. Anthony keeps timing me, like a fire drill. He grabs his chest suddenly at the bar of Hamburger Hamlet. “I’m taking in air!” he shouts, and then laughs while I fumble for the clamps. The bartender eyes us cautiously. By the second day of this I can get both tubes clamped in four seconds flat.

  8

  After the second thoracotomy, Anthony’s mother arranges a trip for us to Cap Juluca, a fancy resort on the island of Anguilla. I’m feeling uneasy this trip. We are falling into a habit I am uncomfortable with—masking illness with storybook getaways. I lie on the beach unable to focus on a book, a magazine, a conversation.

  My mother-in-law is a staunch believer in the curative powers of sun and sea, so we swim in the ocean, take long walks on the beach, and sprawl out lazily in the sun. On one of my walks around the resort, I hear Anthony’s voice and stop to eavesdrop. I like these spontaneous moments to spy on him. He has withdrawn a bit. He has adopted a role, as have I. Our lives seem more scripted.

  He’s a few yards away, holding his tennis racket, talking to security guards. One is telling him a story, and then Anthony says something and they all laugh. I can see they’re enjoying him. Then the Queen of England appears out of nowhere, in a cornflower-blue floral dress. She is carrying a white handbag and has a plaster cast on her arm. She is small but commanding, unmistakable. It is clear the way the slack is pulled in. The guards snap to immediately. Anthony changes his posture, too, and then asks her in a brisk British accent, splitting, not swallowing, his Ts and lilting in the right place, “Madame, what happened to your wrist?” She answers him quickly. “I fell off my horse. Thank you for asking.” She pauses to smile at him, then steps away in a cloud of security.

  The moment catches me off guard; there he is, cute and funny. I run over giggling and kiss him on the neck. He puts his arm around me, mock-serious, still in accent, What’s gotten into you, Nut? You’re off your rocker!

  When we get back from Anguilla, we start looking for a bigger apartment. I look at sixty and keep a log of every one of them sorted by type (classi
c six or classic eight), price, and description. I know what Anthony wants, and I don’t bring him in until I find it—at 969 Park Avenue at Eighty-Second Street. Number 7F. “It’s in the back and doesn’t get much sun,” Gary, our realtor, says cautiously in the elevator, and Anthony brightens. “That’s fine. It’ll be quiet.”

  We fall in love with its sixteen-foot ceilings and tumbled-marble bathrooms. Then the owners take it off the market. A month later, Gary calls to tell us that another apartment has become available at 969 Park. Number 5F. And we go straight from work to see it.

  The apartment opens into a dark and narrow foyer painted a hospital-tone pea green and ends at what looks like a closet but turns out to be a converted kitchen. It is dark and shabby, a fixer-upper, and appears not to have been cleaned in years. Both of the bathrooms are filthy—worse than the annually scrubbed ones of my childhood. Gone is my naïve assumption that slovenliness is averted with money: 5F is just short of horrible. Still, we call the following day and put in a bid. Having seen the same apartment on the seventh floor, we know what it can be. We are fantasizing about our future—rolling our sleeves up, making a home together.

  We close in January and then there are walls to rip out, floors to tear up. We are anxious about paying for the renovation until the Sotheby’s auction of his aunt’s estate in April. Anthony is listening in on the phone, and I am sitting across from him when our chair comes up—not ours, but one of them, the president’s rocker. They seem to be everywhere. I have a naughty image of storage lockers stacked high with presidential rocking chairs—Jackie unloading them as discreetly as possible: a birthday here, a housewarming there.

  The bidding starts at four thousand dollars and shoots up—it stops just over four hundred thousand dollars.

  “Oh, my God.” Anthony stares at me, astonished. “They have to be kidding.” And then we start laughing, as the thought hits us both at the same time. “Good thing, Nut, I didn’t listen to you and give it away!”

  It takes a few phone calls to get our rocker on the block, but we do and it is sold to the runner-up bidder, Prince Albert of Monaco. The Sotheby’s men come the next day with padding and rope to take it away, and then the knobby wooden chair is shipped to the royal palace in Monaco. We use what is left after taxes and commissions to start the work that turns the dark apartment at the back of the building on Park into paradise.

  A few weeks later I fly to France with my MBA class. We are studying the airline industry, and we spend two days in Toulouse meeting Airbus officials and touring the factory. The night before I fly home I call Anthony. He is just back from dinner at Caroline’s.

  “I have bad news and good news,” he says on the phone, and without waiting, “the checkup wasn’t good.”

  We both know what this means, so there is nothing to discuss. We can handle surgery logistics when I get back.

  “And the good news?” I ask.

  “John and Carolyn are getting married!”

  I call Carolyn right after we hang up. “Congratulations! How’d that come up?”

  “I don’t know—John just blurted it out. I was as surprised as everyone else.”

  It’s been nine months since John proposed, and I know she’s been in no hurry to set a date or even announce it to his family. But I’m not surprised. Anthony’s news is more frequent now, and most often bad. John can’t do anything about the next operation, but he can take our minds off of it by making a different announcement.

  “Did you act surprised when he told you?” she asked.

  “Of course,” I said, laughing.

  This is wonderful news, but I am apprehensive the flight home. The bad checkup means surgery on his lungs, and this will be the third. I am starting to fade, to feel heavy, and Carolyn reaches in right here to pick me up. “Why don’t I come with you this time,” she says when I get back. She is not asking but telling me she will come.

  9

  National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD

  May 1996 (Inpatient Record)

  Admitted: 5/22/96

  Discharged: 5/28/96

  CLINICAL DIAGNOSIS: High-grade fibrosarcoma, metastatic, to lungs

  REASON FOR HOSPITALIZATION: The patient, a thirty-seven-year-old male, has undergone two previous thoracotomy operations. 21 pulmonary nodules were excised in April 1995 and one in his left lung, October 1995. He is admitted now to undergo a median sternotomy and metastasectomy of five bilateral pulmonary metastases.

  Everything changes when Carolyn comes to the NIH. I am in danger of losing my optimism, and she distracts Anthony and me both.

  Anthony takes an earlier flight, and Carolyn and I fly down together in the afternoon. I am excited to show her around: the Hertz rental lot, the Pontiac Sunbird I’ve reserved. It’s all old hat to me now. I am proud, even, of the sure-handed way I zip up the Beltway from the airport.

  “Here is the suite,” I say, when we check in at the Hyatt. “This is my room and this is Lee’s.” She watches as I unpack—shirts all in one drawer, pants in another, pajamas and underwear separate. I have a strict procedure and a bag full of products that I carefully unpack and set on the bathroom counter. I group them by category—hair gel, face moisturizer, body lotions—then line them up by size. Then I pull out my flannel-lined jeans to change before going to the hospital. Carolyn studies me intently, then bursts out laughing.

  “You’re insane,” she says. “And where did you get those jeans?”

  “L.L. Bean.”

  “Oh, my God, you can’t wear those. I can’t even believe we’re friends.”

  “Laugh, but you’ll see,” I say wisely. “It’s cold in the hospital; you’ll wish you had flannel.”

  She jumps up and fishes something out of her small travel case. “Here,” she says, and hands me a lipstick. “Ruby Stain. It will look perfect on you. Keep it.” She buys Ruby Stain because Ruby is the name of her black cat. A haughty ball of attitude that only she could love.

  When we get to the hospital, we find Anthony in his room unpacking. Carolyn gives him a big kiss.

  “Look what I brought for you!” She has a framed 8 x 10 glossy photo of her dog, Friday, backlit and paws crossed like a Vargas pinup.

  “Just what I’ve always wanted,” he says, grinning.

  “Everyone needs a dog,” she says, and hangs Friday on the wall. Anthony kisses us good-bye and heads to the clinic for pre-op lab tests.

  “Oh no, how dreary,” she says, after scanning the drab room. “We need to get flowers before he comes back.” We get in the car and turn up the radio, roll the windows down so the air can rush in, and then we cruise down Rockville Pike. We stop at Bethesda Florist to buy bunches of yellow tulips for Anthony, and at the 7-Eleven for Spaghettios for us. We eat them cold right out of the can. Then we drive back to the Hyatt to wait for Lee. When she arrives, Carolyn gives her a double kiss and before we leave to pick up Anthony for dinner, they have plans for lunch in New York.

  At Positano’s we gossip about fashion designers. We pass around bruschetta and drink glasses of wine. It’s easier when Carolyn is here. She fills in the gap of formality between Lee and me—mother-in-law and daughter-in-law.

  But Carolyn is new here, engaged to John, not yet technically family. She does not have an official role, and she knows it. For her to fly down and stay with me, to comfort Anthony, is slightly out of order and regarded, we think, with suspicion. So she downplays it. “I’m the only one without a life,” she jokes. She has recently left her job at Calvin Klein. “It’s easy for me to go.”

  When Carolyn and I arrive at the hospital the second morning, Anthony’s cousin Caroline and her husband, Ed, are seated in two of the blue chairs in the waiting room outside the ICU. I am startled by the unannounced visit. I am not used to seeing them here.

  The four of us seem unnaturally large and quiet in the small room, and then there aren’t enough chairs, so Carolyn waits in the larger room outside. I ask polite questions, and they answer them. Are you staying o
ver? No, we’re leaving this afternoon. We are stiff and awkward; small talk is scarce. Anthony is thrilled to see them. I am relieved when they leave.

  Lee leaves, too, that afternoon, and Carolyn and I move into her bigger room. We stay up late watching I Love Lucy. The next day Carolyn catches an early shuttle back to New York.

  When I check out of the Hyatt, there is a note at the front desk.

  Lamb,

  Please know that I am always thinking about you and worrying about you. It is so lonely and scary to go through that and I can’t bear the thought that you ever had to do it alone. I can’t ever let you go again without me. It broke my heart.

  XOXO, Carolyn

  I drive to the NIH to pick up Anthony. The operation was uneventful. Anthony is in perfect health, except for the cancer.

  After the first operation that Carolyn comes down for, we have almost a year of no cancer. A respite. She jokes that she is our lucky charm. There are three-month checkups, and shadows, but they are either too small or too few to act on. I look back and think wow, a year. A long time, but only in retrospect. It’s short while you’re living it, when you don’t know if it ends today or tomorrow or next month. I am conditioned. I am afraid to turn my back, breathe a sigh of relief. We are on the lam. We have a year—a nervous year, yet there is promise in the air.

  We take a deep breath in June. We will not even talk about cancer until the next checkup, in September.

  Anthony interviews with Sheila Nevins for vice president of documentaries at HBO.

  “I have cancer,” he tells her.

  “Well, I could get hit by a bus tomorrow,” she replies, and hires him.

  Chester, our contractor, starts the work on our apartment. He is Polish; I know, because when Anthony introduces himself, Chester repeats the last name and pronounces it the proper way, with the “w” like a “v”—then he says it again. The recognition worries me. There are greatly exaggerated tales of a Radziwill fortune, and I suspect that on occasion we are charged according to it. So I call vendors for estimates—once as Carole Radziwill and once as Carole DiFalco. Mrs. Radziwill is consistently quoted more, so I am Carole DiFalco for the renovation.