You Are My Heart and Other Stories

by Jay Neugeboren

  They were traveling west on the autoroute and were, Howard estimated, about a half hour from Aix-en-Provence. They planned to stop for lunch in Aix before going on to Saint Rémy, where Howard’s daughter Julia, a student at Tufts, was spending part of her junior year abroad. The fact that Julia was in France, Charlie had told himself, and that there was an international conference on infectious disease taking place that week not far from Saint Rémy—in Montpellier—would make his time with Deirdre—the logistics and the alibis—easier.

  “The way I see it, Charlie was just doing his job—being responsible the way you taught us,” Deirdre said. “What do they call it in bioethics—his deontologic obligation, right?—that if called upon to heal, you have to say yes because you may be the only one capable of performing that particular mission of healing. Charlie was a good guy. He was smart and cute—and shy, I remember—like you.”

  “Shy?”

  “Well, in that category, you did overcompensate prodigiously,” she said. “But I’ll bet, where he is now, he’s changed, and that, emulating his mentor, he no longer considers himself bound by marital vows.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Because I know what men are like,” she said, and slipped her hand under Howard’s shirt.

  Howard pushed at her hand. “Come on. I’m driving and—”

  “And what? You’ll crash and kill us? Hey—that way Charlie and I will get to be together even sooner—or—hmmm—perhaps the three of us…”

  “A heavenly ménage à trois?”

  “Sounds good to me.” She rested her head on Howard’s shoulder. “It’s only my hands and feet that have been turning numb lately—not my brain. And this is an historic occasion, you know—the trip you and I used to fantasize about, even though you were married back then too.”

  “I’m sorry. I—”

  “Shh,” Deirdre said, cutting him off. “No need.” She laughed. “I remember the first time we had a drink together after work—we were flirting outrageously, and I asked you about your marriage—forward then, too, I was—and you said you believed in marriage but that you weren’t a fanatic about it.” Deirdre laughed again, then coughed. “Ouch.”

  “ ‘ Ouch’ for the memory?”

  “No. For cramps.”

  What Deirdre had written in her letter to Howard was that she had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and that after a debulking—didn’t he love the word?—chemotherapy, and first-, second-, and third-line drugs, her doctors didn’t have much left to offer her. So she had contacted the Make-A-Wish Foundation, which enabled children with life-threatening medical conditions to have dream vacations, or to spend time with their favorite athletes, movie stars, or rock groups. The sad news, however, was that they did not yet have a program for adults. Therefore, because Howard was the kindest man she’d ever known, and because she was in dire need of a huge dose of his tenderness, she had decided it was time to collect on the promise he had made to her once upon a time.

  Howard saw that, arms extended, palms against the dashboard, Deirdre was now bracing herself, squeezing her eyes shut.

  “Hey—are you okay?” he asked.

  “I am, but my stomach’s not. We’d better stop.”

  Howard drove the car onto the shoulder of the highway. Deirdre got out quickly, leaned on the front fender.

  “I should have warned you before,” she said, “but I thought the cramping—it’s become violent—would pass.”

  Then she was vomiting profusely—the stuff shooting out of her mouth and onto the road, some of it splashing onto her shoes. Howard put his arm around her, rubbed the back of her neck.

  “Oh shit,” she said, looking down. “And I mean it literally—some of it may already be fecal material I’m vomiting, Howard. Fuck—!

  “Let’s get you to a hospital.”

  Deirdre wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “There’s blockage, right, doc?” she said. “An intestinal obstruction would be my diagnosis. When the stuff wants to go down and out the back way but can’t, it decides to reverse direction and go back up, right?”

  Howard took a bottle of water from the car, wet his handkerchief, started to clean Deirdre’s face. She snatched the handkerchief from him, wiped off her mouth and chin, blew her nose, then poured water onto her shoes, swiped at them.

  “Damn,” she said. “I didn’t want you to see me like this.”

  Howard helped her back into the car, tapped on her abdomen—she didn’t resist—and heard what he didn’t want to hear: a sound like that coming from a hollow drum.

  “Distended as hell,” Deirdre said. She sucked air, then sipped water. “Dehydration—another promising symptom. It’s great to be a physician at a time like this, don’t you think? Nice to really know something for a change—to be able to predict the future with a not unreasonable chance of being right.”

  Howard drove back onto the highway, pressed on the accelerator until the speedometer showed that the car was moving at a hundred and twenty kilometers an hour.

  “Headaches lately too,” Deirdre said. “Thought I’d mention them. Listen to the patient and the patient will give you the diagnosis—isn’t that what we were taught? Really nasty headaches the last few nights, and damn!—I’m messing up your plans, the time you wanted to spend with your daughter, aren’t I?”

  “There’s a hospital in Aix,” Howard said. “We can stop there. In the meantime—”

  “Forget Aix,” Deirdre said. “I was this way in the States, and with decent intervals between sieges. Well, it passed, right? So, based on past experience—hey, doc, I got off a good one—I should be okay for the next two to three hours. That means we can get to Saint Rémy, get me to a doctor there—”

  “To a hospital.”

  “Okay. Have it your way—to a hospital—but in Saint Rémy, please, because if I have to stay over in Aix, it’ll screw up your reunion with Julia, and if it does, we have to think of the toll that would take on me.”

  She opened her window, let Howard’s handkerchief fly away.

  “Hey!” he said. “If a cop’s out there—”

  “Then we’ll get an escort,” she said. She touched his hand. “I’ll be okay till Saint Rémy. I promise.”

  When Deirdre woke, they were driving along an avenue that bypassed the center of Aix-en-Provence. The street was lined on both sides with tall plane trees, their limbs, pruned back severely in early winter, looking, Howard thought, as if they had been amputated.

  “Traffic willing, we’ll be in Saint Rémy within an hour,” Howard said.

  “I like it when we do things my way,” Deirdre said. “You weren’t always this accommodating, you know. Only when we get there, I don’t want some French jerk shooting me up with a lot of drugs, or shoving things up my butt. The French do that more than we do, I hear.”

  “The French do like their suppositories,” Howard said, and let his right hand rest on her stomach. “We’re really doing okay?”

  “We? ” She put her hand on top of his. “I like it when you use that word. But hey—don’t be scared. I’m not. I’m in pain, for sure, but I’m not scared. Pain is okay. It means I’m still here. So why aren’t I scared, you may ask?” She sighed. “Because I’m with the man I love. I mean, what some women won’t do to get their guy.”

  When they arrived at their destination in Saint Rémy, the Villa Glanum, a hotel named for a nearby Roman ruin, Howard brought his suitcase into the reception area. He gave the man at the front desk his name, told him he was a physician, that he had a friend who was ill and that he had to get her to a local hospital as quickly as possible. The man replied that there was no hospital in Saint Rémy—that the nearest hospitals were in either Arles or Avignon, each of which was about a half-hour away.

  Howard recognized the name of one of the hospitals in Avignon—Hôpital Henri Duffaut—and asked the man to write down directions and, also, to telephone his daughter—he wrote down her number—and to tell her he would call as soon as
he could.

  In the center of Avignon, outside the fortress-like walls that contained the Palace of the Popes, traffic was barely moving.

  “More blockage?” Deirdre asked, and began to sing: “Sur le pont d’Avignon. La la la la—la, la la la—la…”

  Howard saw that, eyes shut, Deirdre was biting down hard on her lower lip. As soon as they made their way to an intersection, he took a left turn and drove south for several blocks, then west until he reached a street he thought would lead to the hospital, and when, a few minutes later, he saw signs for the university, he was relieved: the hospital, he recalled, had adjoined the university. Less than a minute later, he spotted the building he was hoping to see—a large red brick structure with green slate mansard roofing.

  He pulled up in front and looked for signs directing them to the emergency ward, but found instead a bronze plaque stating that the building, designated as a national monument, housed administrative offices for the University of Avignon.

  “Shit!” he exclaimed.

  “That’s my word,” Deirdre said.

  He rolled down his window, called to several young people, and asked where the hospital was. They told him there was no hospital here, but that there was one on the other side of the Palace of the Popes, by the river.

  “My problem, I decided—one of them, anyway,” Deirdre said, “is that I became attached to you at an early and vulnerable age. But consider, too, our friend Charlie, poor guy, who had a thing for Irish women like some other Jewish physicians I’ve known.”

  Behind them, cars were honking. Howard pictured Charlie, in a makeshift phone booth, lifting a receiver, smiling in anticipation of talking with his wife and children, of telling them he’d be home in less than a week. Howard looked for a phone booth, saw one about twenty yards away, opened the car door. Had he brought a phone card with him?

  He ran toward the booth, heard people shouting at him, then heard the staccato blasts of a whistle. Deirdre was calling to him, pointing to a policeman on a motorbike who was signaling to Howard with a white-gloved hand to return to the car. The policeman, dark-skinned and unsmiling—Algerian? Moroccan? —ordered him to get back into the car and to leave at once.

  Howard explained that he was an American physician, that he was looking for Hôpital Henri Duffaut, that the woman with him—also a physician—was ill and needed to be taken to a hospital immediately. The policeman, his visor raised, leaned forward, stared at Deirdre for a moment, nodded, took out his mobile phone, spoke into it and, after informing Howard that Hôpital Henri Duffaut had been relocated to another part of the city more than a dozen years before, gestured to Howard to follow him.

  Howard followed the policeman until, at the third intersection, they came to a wide cross street where two police cars were waiting, their flashers swirling. The policeman on the motorbike pointed to the cars and, as sirens began blasting on and off, he waved goodby. Howard followed the police cars.

  “I like listening to you speak French,” Deirdre said. “I meant to tell you that. Later—there will be a later, right?—will you talk to me in French? And I liked his gloves. For my first communion, I had a beautiful pair of white leather gloves my Aunt Bridget gave me.” Deirdre doubled over, tried, without success, to keep from moaning. “God but it hurts, Howard. If this is what labor’s like, I’m grateful I never…”

  She choked, coughed, shook her head back and forth violently, as if by doing so she could shake the pain from it.

  “We’re almost there,” Howard said, and, hoping to distract her, asked if she had been in love with Charlie.

  “Wasn’t everybody?”

  “He was very handsome—and exceptionally fit, I remember,” Howard said. “And when you took up with him, he was just coming out of his marriage. The two of you must have had some good times.”

  “ ‘Good times’ you say—could you clarify your terms, doctor?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Did you mean, for example—‘Was it good for me too?’ ”

  “Well, you never lacked for passion, and I just…”

  “You’re jealous,” Deirdre said. “My, my. I actually think you’re jealous and that’s a new one—a guy being jealous of a dead friend. Remarkable, really.” She closed her eyes, leaned back, let a rasping, guttural sound rumble from her throat. “Men,” she said softly.

  When they arrived at the hospital, its façade a flat surface of Mondrian-like squares in yellows, blues, and reds, and turned into the driveway that led to Emergency Services, two men in green hospital garb were waiting on a ramp, a gurney next to them. Howard went to Deirdre’s side of the car, where hospital aides were already helping her onto the gurney. Deirdre reached for Howard’s hand, asked him not to leave her. He kissed her on the forehead, inhaled the foul residue of her vomiting.

  “Come on—you can do better than that,” she said.

  He leaned down, kissed her on the mouth. Her lips were cold. At the doors that led into the hospital a security guard stopped him. Howard took out his wallet, showed the guard a card that identified him as a medical doctor. A policeman was beside Howard, telling him that he would park Howard’s car and bring the keys to the nurse’s station in the emergency room. Howard entered the hospital, saw that the staff was already checking Deirdre’s vital signs, moving her along. They disappeared behind swinging doors. Howard pushed through, watched two men lift Deirdre and place her on an examining table. They began cutting away her clothes, listening to her chest, attaching wires. They moved quickly, efficiently.

  A young man, clipboard in hand—his ID tag identified him as Clément Hémon, M.D.—asked Howard to tell him what happened. Howard began, quickly, to give the doctor Deirdre’s history, to tell him about the cramps, the headaches, the pain, the vomiting.

  A woman in a white lab coat was probing Deirdre’s stomach, asking her questions, in English: Did this hurt? When had she last moved her bowels? How often had she been throwing up?

  Doctor Hémon thanked Howard, conferred with the woman in the white lab coat. Howard went toward them but was held back by an aide who told him that Doctor Joussaume—the woman who was examining Deirdre—could speak with him later on if he wished.

  Doctor Joussaume took Deirdre’s hand in her own. “We’re going to take you into surgery as soon as we can,” she said. “We’ll sedate you. Do you have any allergies? Do you know your blood type? We will test for it, of course, but if…”

  Other personnel now entered the room, two of them transferring Deirdre to another gurney, rolling her away. Deirdre waved to Howard, who started toward her, but was held back by another man.

  “I’m Doctor Rosenthal,” the man said, in English.

  Howard spoke in French, as clearly and rapidly as he could, telling the doctor what he had told Doctor Hémon: that he was a physician, that Deirdre had cancer of the ovaries—cancer des ovaires: the words were cognates—virtually identical, Howard explained—that she had exhausted all the usual lines of treatment, and that during their drive to Saint Rémy she had begun throwing up fecal matter. Deirdre was a physician, he continued, and had been his student at The George Washington School of Medicine, in Washington, D.C.

  Doctor Rosenthal made no attempt to interrupt Howard, and Howard wondered why he couldn’t stop talking. What Howard wanted to know—he would get to the point, he added apologetically—was if he could be present when they performed the surgery. Doctor Rosenthal said that they had paged Doctor Coursaget, an excellent surgeon, who would arrive within a half hour. If Howard wished to attend the surgery, he would of course grant him this courtesy. Howard thanked the doctor and suddenly realized that all the while Doctor Rosenthal was talking to him in English, he had been talking to the doctor in French.

  The doctor shook Howard’s hand. “Your friend is very sick,” he said, “but we will do our best for her.”

  It had been at least a dozen years since Howard had attended a major surgical procedure and, feeling like a small boy allowed into t
he world of grown-ups, he watched with fascination as Doctor Coursaget and his assistants opened Deirdre’s belly, found the dilated loops of bowel through which nothing—neither liquids nor the gaseous content of her intestine—was flowing, located the tumors that were blocking the intestines, and cut them away.

  The music coming from the speakers was slow jazz, a woman—Sarah Vaughn? Dinah Washington?—singing a song Howard thought was called “Dreamy.” Doctor Coursaget, humming to the tune, was now removing his gloves and his mask, nodding to an assistant, asking the assistant to finish up.

  The assistant gestured to a nurse, who pressed a button, the music changing to something louder, and with a more savage, driving beat: what Howard assumed was called hard rock.

  “We did the best we could,” Doctor Coursaget said to Howard. “Your friend will need to stay in the hospital for four or five days, and I believe she will, for a while at least, benefit from some alleviation of pain. After that…”

  The doctor shrugged, gestured with his hands, palms upturned, in a way that indicated there really was not much that he or anyone else could do for Deirdre.

  “It is often quite difficult to close up a woman after this particular surgery,” he said. “So, as you can see, I have left the truly demanding work to my younger colleague, Doctor Maubert, in whom I have great confidence. We made a decision not to remove her uterus, by the way—a consideration of the extra time involved and possible post-operative complications. These would be negligible in most instances, but given your friend’s condition, if we…”

  Howard had stopped listening. He looked around: the operating suite was impeccably modern—as high-tech as any he had ever seen. But why was he surprised? He watched Doctor Maubert bend down over Deirdre’s stomach and imagined Charlie stitching up soldiers in a tent in Iraq, and he wondered: If he had known the day would end this way, would he have chosen to tell Deirdre about Charlie? Yet when he had, he realized, she had shown little surprise, and the obvious occurred to him for the first time: that she had already known about Charlie, and that his death was the reason for her decision to write to him.