by Ben Marcus
“Is there anything left in there?” she asks.
The resident shakes his head. “Your vagina now just comes to a stop, it’s a stump, an unconnected sleeve. Don’t be surprised if you bleed, if you pop a stitch or two.” He checks her chart and signs her out. “Kibbowitz has you on pelvic rest for six weeks.”
“Pelvic rest?” I ask.
“No fucking,” she says.
Not a problem.
Home. She watches forty-eight hours of Holocaust films on cable TV. Although she claims to compartmentalize everything, suddenly she identifies with the bald, starving prisoners of war. She sees herself as a victim. She points to the naked corpse of a woman. “That’s me,” she says. “That’s exactly how I feel.”
“She’s dead,” I say.
“Exactly.”
Her notorious vigilance is gone. As I’m fluffing her pillows, her billy club rolls out from under the bed. “Put it in the closet,” she says.
“Why?” I ask, rolling it back under the bed.
“Why sleep with a billy club under the bed? Why do anything when you have cancer?”
During a break between Shoah and The Sorrow and the Pity, she taps me. “I’m missing my parts,” she says. “Maybe one of those lost eggs was someone special, someone who would have cured something, someone who would have invented something wonderful. You never know who was in there. They are my lost children.”
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?” She looks at me accusingly.
“Everything.”
“Thirty-eight-year-olds don’t get cancer, they get Lyme disease, maybe they have appendicitis, on rare occasions in some other parts of the world they have Siamese twins, but that’s it.”
In the middle of the night she wakes up, she throws the covers off. “I can’t breathe, I’m burning up. Open the window, I’m hot, I’m so hot.”
“Do you know what’s happening to you?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re having hot flashes.”
“I am not,” she says, as though I’ve insulted her. “They don’t start so soon.”
They do.
“Get away from me, get away,” she yells. “Just being near you makes me uncomfortable, it makes my temperature unstable.”
On Monday she starts chemotherapy.
“Will I go bald?” she asks the nurse.
I cannot imagine my wife bald.
“Most women buy a wig before it happens,” the nurse says, plugging her into the magic potion.
One of the other women, her head wrapped in a red turban, leans over and whispers, “My husband says I look like a porno star.” She winks. She has no eyebrows, no eyelashes, nothing.
We shop for a wig. She tries on every style, every shape and color. She looks like a man in drag, like she’s wearing a bad Halloween costume, like it’s all a horrible joke.
“Maybe my hair won’t fall out?” she says.
“It’s okay,” the woman in the wig shop says. “Insurance covers it. Ask your doctor to write a prescription for a cranial prosthesis.”
“I’m a doctor,” my wife says.
The wig woman looks confused. “It’s okay,” she says, putting another wig on my wife’s head.
She buys a wig. I never see it. She brings it home and immediately puts it in the closet. “It looks like Linda Evans, like someone on Dynasty. I just can’t do it,” she says.
Her scalp begins to tingle. Her hair hurts. “It’s as though someone grabbed my hair and is pulling as hard as they can.”
“It’s getting ready to go,” I say. “It’s like a time bomb. It ticks and then it blows.”
“What are you, a doctor? Suddenly you know everything about cancer, about menopause, about everything?”
In the morning her hair is falling out. It is all over the pillow, all over the shower floor.
“Your hair’s not really falling out,” Enid says when we meet them for dinner. Enid reaches and touches her hair, sweeps her hand through it, as if to be comforting. She ends up with a handful of hair; she has pulled my wife’s hair out. She tries to put it back, she furiously pats it back in place.
“Forget that I was worried about them shaving my pubic hair, how ’bout it all just went down the drain.”
She looks like a rat, like something that’s been chewed on and spit out, like something that someone tried to electrocute and failed. In four days she is 80 percent bald.
She stands before me naked. “Document me.”
I take pictures. I take the film to one of those special stores that has a sign in the window—we don’t censor.
I give her a baseball cap to wear to work. Every day she goes to work, she will not miss a day, no matter what.
I, on the other hand, can’t work. Since this happened, my work has been nonexistent. I spend my day as the holder of the feelings, the keeper of sensation.
“It’s not my fault,” she says. “What the hell do you do all day while I’m at the hospital?”
Recuperate.
She wears the baseball cap for a week and then takes a razor, shaves the few scraggly hairs that remain, and goes to work bald, without a hat, without a wig—starkers.
There’s something admirable and aggressive about her baldness, as if she’s saying to everyone—I have cancer and you have to deal with it.
“How do you feel?” I ask at night when she comes home from the hospital.
“I feel nothing.”
“How can you feel nothing?”
“I am made of steel and wood,” she says happily.
As we’re falling asleep she tells me a story. “It’s true, it happened as I was walking to the hospital. I accidentally bumped into someone on the sidewalk. Excuse me, I said and continued on. He ran after me, ‘Excuse me, boy. Excuse me, boy. You knocked my comb out of my hand and I want you to go back and pick it up.’ I turned around—we bumped into each other, I said excuse me, and that will have to suffice. ‘You knocked it out of my hand on purpose, white boy.’ I said, I am not a boy. ‘Then what are you—Cancer Man? Or are you just a bitch? A bald fucking bitch.’ I wheeled around and chased him. You fucking crazy ass, I screamed. You fucking crazy ass. I screamed it about four times. He’s lucky I didn’t fucking kill him,” she says.
I am thinking she’s lost her mind. I’m thinking she’s lucky he didn’t kill her.
She stands up on the bed—naked. She strikes a pose like a bodybuilder. “Cancer Man,” she says, flexing her muscles, creating a new superhero. “Cancer Man!”
Luckily she has good insurance. The bill for the surgery comes—it’s itemized. They charge per part removed. Ovary $7,000, appendix $5,000, the total is $72,000. “It’s all in a day’s work,” she says.
We are lying in bed. I am lying next to her, reading the paper.
“I want to go to a desert island, alone. I don’t want to come back until this is finished,” she says.
“You are on a desert island, but unfortunately you have taken me with you.”
She looks at me. “It will never be finished—do you know that? I’m not going to have children and I’m going to die.”
“Do you really think you’re going to die?”
“Yes.”
I reach for her.
“Don’t,” she says. “Don’t go looking for trouble.”
“I wasn’t. I was trying to be loving.”
“I don’t feel loving,” she says. “I don’t feel physically bonded to anyone right now, including myself.”
“You’re pushing me away.”
“I’m recovering,” she says.
“It’s been eighteen weeks.”
Her blood counts are low. Every night for five nights, I inject her with Nupagen to increase the white blood cells. She teaches me how to prepare the injection, how to push the needle into the muscle of her leg. Every time I inject her, I apologize.
“For what?” she asks.
“Hurting you.”
“Forget it,�
�� she says, disposing of the needle.
“Could I have a hug?” I ask.
She glares at me. “Why do you persist? Why do you keep asking me for things I can’t do, things I can’t give?”
“A hug?”
“I can’t give you one.”
“Anyone can give a hug. I can get a hug from the doorman.”
“Then do,” she says. “I need to be married to someone who is like a potted plant, someone who needs nothing.”
“Water?”
“Very little, someone who is like a cactus or an orchid.”
“It’s like you’re refusing to be human,” I tell her.
“I have no interest in being human.”
This is information I should be paying attention to. She is telling me something and I’m not listening. I don’t believe what she is saying.
I go to dinner with Eric and Enid alone.
“It’s strange,” they say. “You’d think the cancer would soften her, make her more appreciative. You’d think it would make her stop and think about what she wants to do with the rest of her life. When you ask her, what does she say?” Eric and Enid want to know.
“Nothing. She says she wants nothing. She has no needs or desires. She says she has nothing to give.”
Eric and Enid shake their heads. “What are you going to do?”
I shrug. None of this is new, none of this is just because she has cancer—that’s important to keep in mind, this is exactly the way she always was, only more so.
A few days later a woman calls; she and her husband are people we see occasionally.
“Hi, how are you, how’s Tom?” I ask.
“He’s a fucking asshole,” she says. “Haven’t you heard? He left me.”
“When?”
“About two weeks ago. I thought you would have known.”
“I’m a little out of it.”
“Anyway, I’m calling to see if you’d like to have lunch.”
“Lunch, sure. Lunch would be good.”
At lunch she is a little flirty, which is fine, it’s nice actually, it’s been a long time since someone flirted with me. In the end, when we’re having coffee, she spills the beans. “So I guess you’re wondering why I called you?”
“I guess,” I say, although I’m perfectly pleased to be having lunch, to be listening to someone else’s troubles.
“I heard your wife was sick, I figured you’re not getting a lot of sex, and I thought we could have an affair.”
I don’t know which part is worse, the complete lack of seduction, the fact that she mentions my wife not being well, the idea that my wife’s illness would make me want to sleep with her, her stun-gun bluntness—it’s all too much.
“What do you think? Am I repulsive? Thoroughly disgusting? Is it the craziest thing you ever heard?”
“I’m very busy,” I say, not knowing what to say, not wanting to be offensive, or seem to have taken offense. “I’m just very busy.”
My wife comes home from work. “Someone came in today—he reminded me of you.”
“What was his problem?”
“He jumped out of the window.”
“Dead?”
“Yes,” she says, washing her hands in the kitchen sink.
“Was he dead when he got to you?” There’s something in her tone that makes me wonder, did she kill him?
“Pretty much.”
“What part reminded you of me?”
“He was having an argument with his wife,” she says. “Imagine her standing in the living room, in the middle of a sentence, and out the window he goes. Imagine her not having a chance to finish her thought?”
“Yes, imagine, not being able to have the last word. Did she try to stop him?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” my wife says. “I didn’t get to read the police report. I just thought you’d find it interesting.”
“What do you want for dinner?”
“Nothing,” she says. “I’m not hungry.”
“You have to eat something.”
“Why? I have cancer. I can do whatever I want.”
Something has to happen.
I buy tickets to Paris. “We have to go.” I invoke the magic word, “It’s an emergency.”
“It’s not like I get a day off. It’s not like I come home at the end of the day and I don’t have cancer. It goes everywhere with me. It doesn’t matter where I am, it’s still me—it’s me with cancer. In Paris I’ll have cancer.”
I dig out the maps, the guidebooks, everything we did on our last trip is marked with fluorescent highlighter. I am acting as though I believe that if we retrace our steps, if we return to a place where things were good, there will be an automatic correction, a psychic chiropractic event, which will put everything into alignment.
I gather provisions for the plane, fresh fruit, water, magazines, the smoke hoods. It’s a little-known fact, smoke inhalation is a major cause of death on airplanes.
“What’s the point,” she says, throwing a few things into a suitcase. “You can do everything and think you’re prepared, but you don’t know what’s going to happen. You don’t see what’s coming until it hits you in the face.”
She points at someone outside. “See that idiot crossing the street in front of the truck—why doesn’t he have cancer?”
She lifts her suitcase—too heavy. She takes things out. She leaves her smoke hood on the bed. “If the plane fills with smoke, I’m going to be so happy,” she says. “I’m going to breathe deeply, I’m going to be the first to die.”
I stuff the smoke hood into my suitcase, along with her raincoat, her extra shoes, and vitamin C drops. I lift the suitcases, I feel like a pack animal, a Sherpa.
In France, the customs people are not used to seeing bald women. They call her “sir.”
“Sir, you’re next, sir. Sir, please step over here, sir.”
My wife is my husband. She loves it. She smiles. She catches my eye and strikes a subdued version of the superhero/bodybuilder pose, flexing. “Cancer Man,” she says.
“And what is the purpose of your visit to France?” the inspector asks. “Business or pleasure?”
“Reconciliation,” I say, watching her—Cancer Man.
“Business or pleasure?”
“Pleasure.”
Paris is my fantasy, my last-ditch effort to reclaim my marriage, myself, my wife.
As we are checking into the hotel, I remind her of our previous visit—the chef cut himself, his finger was severed, she saved it, and they were able to reattach it. “You made medical history. Remember the beautiful dinner they threw in your honor.”
“It was supposed to be a vacation,” she says.
The bellman takes us to our room—there’s a big basket of fruit, bottles of Champagne and Evian with a note from the concierge welcoming us.
“It’s not as nice as it used to be,” she says, already disappointed. She opens the Evian and drinks. Her lips curl. “Even the water tastes bad.”
“Maybe it’s you. Maybe the water is fine. Is it possible you’re wrong?”
“We see things differently,” she says, meaning she’s right, I’m wrong.
“Are you in an especially bad mood, or is it just the cancer?” I ask.
“Maybe it’s you?” she says.
We walk, across the river and down by the Louvre. There could be nothing better, nothing more perfect, and yet I am suddenly hating Paris—the beauty, the fineness of it is dwarfed by her foul humor. I realize there will be no saving it, no moment of reconciliation, redemption. Everything is irredeemably awful and getting worse.
“If you’re so unhappy, why don’t you leave?” I ask her.
“I keep thinking you’ll change.”
“If I changed any more I can’t imagine who I’d be.”
“Well, if I’m such a bitch, why do you stay?”
“It’s my job, it’s my calling to stay with you, to soften you.”
“I absolutely do not want to be softe
r, I don’t want to give another inch.”
She trips on a cobblestone, I reach for her elbow, to steady her, and instead unbalance myself. She fails to catch me. I fall and recover quickly.
“Imagine how I feel,” she says. “I am a doctor and I can’t fix it. I can’t fix me, I can’t fix you—what a lousy doctor.”
“I’m losing you,” I say.
“I’ve lost myself. Look at me—do I look like me?”
“You act like yourself.”
“I act like myself because I have to, because people are counting on me.”
“I’m counting on you.”
“Stop counting.”
All along the Tuileries there are Ferris wheels—the world’s largest Ferris wheel is set up in the middle.
“Let’s go,” I say, taking her hand and pulling her toward them.
“I don’t like rides.”
“It’s not much of a ride. It’s like a carousel, only vertical. Live a little.”
She gets on. There are no seat belts, no safety bars. I say nothing. I am hoping she won’t notice.
“How is it going to end?” I ask while we’re waiting for the wheel to spin.
“I die in the end.”
The ride takes off, climbing, pulling us up and over. We are flying, soaring; the city unfolds. It is breathtaking and higher than I thought. And faster. There is always a moment on any ride when you think it is too fast, too high, too far, too wide, and that you will not survive. And then there is the exhilaration of surviving, the thrill of having lived through it, and immediately you want to go around again.
“I have never been so unhappy in my life,” my wife says when we’re near the top. “It’s not just the cancer, I was unhappy before the cancer. We were having a very hard time. We don’t get along, we’re a bad match. Do you agree?”
“Yes,” I say. “We’re a really bad match, but we’re such a good bad match it seems impossible to let it go.”
“We’re stuck,” she says.
“You bet,” I say.
“No. I mean the ride, the ride isn’t moving.”
“It’s not stuck, it’s just stopped. It stops along the way.”
