Beside him, hanging from his IV pole, are two transparent pouches of liquid, one clear, the other faintly blue, both dripping slowly down into plastic tubes that insert into a catheter that has been implanted in his chest and threaded into his heart. The label on one pouch reads VINCRISTINE, the label on the other GANCICLOVIR. Both are marked POISON! over a diagram of a skull and bones. “Who does the PR for the hospital?” Matt quipped the first time the bags were attached to his pole. But he has been living with these and similar bags for five months now—CYTARABINE! CYTOXAN! VP-16!—and he doesn’t pay them much mind.
What he is attending to so closely, what he is trying to get his best bead on through the window, is the George Washington Bridge. It has always been a source of comfort to him. Substantial, indeed massive, it is there, always there. When he wakes in the middle of the night and is unable to get back to sleep, it is brightly lit, and there is a kind of purity, even sanity, to its white lights, the pale-blue lights, a reliable healthiness, although that may be pushing it. Even in the middle of the night there is life on it, always somebody coming or going, so he tells himself why not one day him? He has always wanted to drive cross-country. And while he finds it hard to believe he will ever again have enough padding on his bottom to endure the jostling of a prolonged car ride, still he can picture pressing his foot down on the gas pedal, Ann sitting beside him, an atlas of the country in her hands, their son, Solly, in the backseat leaning forward to listen to rap on the radio, which will change to country and western and who knows what else as they move farther west. Yes, Matt can see himself driving across this bridge, sticking his head out the car window (after all, it is just another window) and looking down the Hudson River, down toward the Statue of Liberty. Or he’ll wave an arm out the window, maybe both arms, what the hell, wave them at the world (Ann can steer), and yell at the top of his lungs “Yippee-ay-yay—yippee-ay-yay—yippie-ay-yay!”
He closes his eyes for a moment and when he opens them the bridge is gone and he gets a tight frigid sensation up the back of his neck. What is going on? If the bridge had been hit, he would have heard something. Still, he looks down at the river to see if the bridge has fallen in, if parts of it are jutting out of the dark water. After yesterday morning, anything can happen.
Slowly, his eyes accommodate, and he sighs with relief, for yes, despite its unwonted darkness and apparent desertedness (is that a single pair of headlights coming toward him, tiny, tiny, as if the two minuscule lights were suspended in black air?) and its muteness (well, it is always hard to hear the sounds of traffic through the thick unopenable hospital windows), yes, yes, the bridge is nevertheless there. Perhaps there is a problem with the electricity; much has been understandably chaotic today. Actually, now that he reflects upon it, might it be intentional that the bridge is dark? Didn’t Londoners black out their whole city during the Blitz and didn’t they survive? The police must be letting almost no one pass. Perhaps those tiny dim lights belong to an ambulance or a fire truck. The lights are moving very slowly, scarcely moving. Perhaps the vehicle is being stopped at various checkpoints. Has the National Guard been called out? He wishes that he were standing on the walkway watching what is going on.
Looking out the southern window—his hospital room is small but it is a corner room with a window on each outside wall—he sees much of the city stretched out before him. New York is white-lit but subdued, he doesn’t see any Great White Way and he doesn’t see the Empire State Building, which is usually lit up, often red, white, and blue. (The Empire State Building was not hit; no, he would have heard, he has been watching TV all day.) But the city is not dark on the whole. What is missing, he realizes now, are the many, many white headlights of cars, bright goggle-fish eyes coming at him. There are a very few white lights, a few red taillights, perhaps an occasional car is allowed through on official business, or perhaps they are all ambulances. He suddenly realizes that there is no need for the authorities to black out the city, or to black out the bridge—the enemy has no airplanes (if we have just the one enemy), they can only hijack ours. And ours are no longer moving, the government has closed down the airports. So perhaps the darkness on the bridge is unintentional, not part of any plan. But if the Empire State Building is dark, and the bridge is dark, then maybe there is a plan. They are trying to protect us.
Squinting out this window, Matt sees a haze hanging in the downtown sky as if the damaged, disfigured part of the city were being covered with a protective veil. But he knows the World Trade Center is burning; it will burn for weeks and that protective veil is actually a noxious swirl of the products of combustion—asbestos and lead particles, paper turned to ash, human flesh turned to ash …
Matt looks away from the window, looks across his hospital bed over at his wife. Ann is still asleep on the cot on the other side of his bed, between the bed and the wall (there is barely space for the cot), and he makes an effort to stop crying. (When did he begin? He has no idea. Since his illness, this happens with some frequency. It is as if he suddenly finds himself walking in two inches of water.) At least Ann is asleep and their fifteen-year-old son is not here to see him cry. Solly has gone to spend the night at a friend’s—no one wants to be alone this dreadful night—although Matt cannot remember which friend. Is the medicine burning Matt’s mind, throwing a haze over it like the downtown haze so that he cannot remember what anyone tells him, or is Solly retreating from him, not telling him things, is he losing touch with Solly, losing track of his burgeoning boy? He cannot bear that he may not be around to see what that boy will become.
No, Solly has been talking to him, talking double time, Solly talked nonstop today and Matt has forgotten where his son is sleeping because Matt’s overloaded. He once said to Ann, forgetting their son was there, “Talk to me. It keeps me alive.” And since then Solly has whipped out a constant jumpy stream of talk as though he were a rotary lawn sprinkler and Matt burnt lawn. Which Matt is. But he is being flooded. He has to slow his whirling boy, tell that poor boy he can calm down. Matt is not dying this minute. He imagines putting his hands on Solly’s shoulders and turning the boy toward him. But Matt does not have the strength to turn Solly toward him. Solly is only a few inches shorter than Matt now and is gaining weight, and muscle. It is as though there is some private law of thermodynamics at work between them such that no pound is lost in their universe: whatever weight Matt takes off, Solly puts on, and of course Matt is losing weight at an alarming rate. Solly is at an age when he needs a father he can resist, a father he can buck up against, whose bark he can abrade a bit. He does not need a father whose roots are coming loose. Who is standing in water.
The best Matt could do today was wait until Solly left before asking the doctor, how will the blood supply hold out in this catastrophe? The hidden question being, will there be enough blood for me. Matt absorbs great quantities of blood almost daily, especially platelets, that part of the blood that causes clotting. Platelets are oddly not red but straw colored, and Matt puts away pale packet after packet. His body is producing antibodies to the platelets, it is ripping up the platelets and stepping on them, so to speak, even as they are pouring into his veins, which is more than worrisome. But it seems that the city’s catastrophe is working in his favor. There were long lines of people waiting hours yesterday to give blood, there were not enough personnel to process all the would-be donors and hook them up to IVs, not enough refrigerators to hold all the blood, the city is awash in blood.
Maybe next time Solly comes, when they go for their walk around the block, Matt will put his hands on his boy’s shoulders and simply say Shhhhh. Matt may have to say it through a mask because he is immunosuppressed. (He still feels like an asshole walking outside wearing a pink mask. That he hasn’t gotten used to.) He wonders suddenly whether the particles in the air at the World Trade Center will diffuse all the way up the nine or ten miles to where he is and further damage his leaky lungs, mask or no. Will he not be able to go out for walks anymore? They are precious to
him, those walks with his son. Fuck, he is sick of worrying about himself. Even yesterday, with the city under this wild, weird, unbelievable attack, he feared his doctor would be called away.
Matt also worried because, despite everything, he has to eat. And every time he goes to eat something, he has to think beforehand of the pain he will have (the chemo has left him with sores on the lining of his esophagus and stomach and anus) and is it worth it (yes, he knows he must eat) and can he sit, fold himself up into some position so it will hurt less. This is a three-times-a-day problem and he has come up with various solutions, each of which works a little. For instance, he sits sometimes with both knees under his chin while he eats. He doesn’t know why they can’t feed him totally through a vein, although they are wary of using up his veins, of destroying them inadvertently, he needs all his veins. Why don’t they feed him straight through the catheter into his heart? He must ask his wife. Perhaps she will know.
He turns to look at his sleeping wife, his breathing wife. Ann sleeps facing him. Always facing him. He hardly glances at the TV when she is there (these two days of course have been exceptions), he rarely even looks out the windows, he looks at her. They face each other even in their sleep. Even in separate beds.
He will get back into bed now. Turn toward Ann and, perhaps, fall asleep. Slowly, preparatory to rising, he slides his bottom forward in the chair. Feels a momentary serrated-knife thrust at his tailbone. And a little sensation of breathlessness. He takes a few breaths, pushes down on the wooden arms of the chair and lo! he is standing. Then pulling, half leaning on his pole, he shuffles the one two three steps to the bed and cautiously lets the slippers drop off his feet (do not bend over!), lifts one leg (hands under his thigh), etc. etc., takes a few additional breaths, and he is lying on his side in bed. Facing her.
Lying on her side, she sleeps. (And he didn’t wake her! With all his shenanigans!) She wears a green operating-room gown. The white hospital blanket covers her almost to her shoulder, leaving her lovely pink-toned throat visible. She is sleeping quietly, he is happy to see, her mouth relaxed. The lines between her eyebrows are eased, as is the line that starts from each nostril and passes a little wide of the joining of her lips. Despite the nurses coming and going, despite the voices over the intercom, she sleeps best, she says, when she is in the room with him. He teases her that sleeping in the hospital keeps her from raiding the refrigerator during the night; she and Solly are both night feeders—Matt knows they bump into each other in the night kitchen. And in fact she has lost ten pounds since he has become ill. She is happy with herself ten pounds lighter (Matt said, “Every cloud has its slender lining,” and they both moaned at the poor pun) and he does suppose that to the world she is more fetching this way, but to him she has always been the dearest thing.
Although sometimes he thinks why him, why not her? He would be devoted.
There is a drop of moisture in the corner of her lip, and he would like to lick it off, work his tongue into her mouth, but besides of course that it would wake her from her few untroubled hours of sleep, he is also afraid to put his tongue into her mouth, his tongue up against her dear tongue, they are both afraid, he is again immunosuppressed: she could kill him. He sees the outline of her breasts through the soft blanket, her heavy breasts, he would like to suck her nipples, it always gave her so much pleasure, but he is afraid, she is afraid. Well, he can touch her nipples with his fingers, that he still does. Often he fondles her nipples through her blouse or under her blouse under her bra and she used to leave the hospital barely able to walk, so engorged; he wanted to bring her off with his hand. (A sudden erection he gets now, well, at least that is not wholly suppressed.) But she was afraid. Suppose, she said, suppose he has a cut, a microscopic cut on a finger, and then some bacteria from her vaginal juices would enter in …
Well, he said one day, suppose he wears those latex gloves, the really thin ones, the ones surgeons wear. She shivered, fearing it, wanting it, he supposed.
“I’ll double-glove,” he said finally.
And so he triple-gloved and they both wore masks, and she wore a paper gown over her clothes, and paper hospital booties, and her luxurious hair was caught up in a paper hairnet and for humor’s sake and symmetry he caught up his no-hair in a paper hairnet. What they must look like, this pair, to the world (of the well)! But the world was barricaded out. Up against the door she set not only one of the chairs but the garbage pail and his tray table. They stood next to each other for a moment grinning into the bathroom mirror, “like two animated condoms,” he said, and she hooted.
In bed she placed a little disposable plastic chuck beneath her and slipped down her pants. Sitting up next to her, he opened her labia with sheathed fingers, touched her sweet clitoris, massaged it gently, and his hands trembled, and Ann trembled (they were both full of fear and trembling) and Ann came very fast. And he wept. Because she came and because it was over so fast and they were back to themselves with her underpants down around her ankles, the pad beneath her, and leukemia.
“What can I do for you?” she asked, seeing his erection through his loose hospital pants.
Next day he spoke (man to man) to Dr. Mears. Mears wasn’t sure—had no one ever asked him, not ever? He told Matt, “Nothing should happen.” The doctor nodded, smiled, murmured, “Give it a shot.” But their gambling impulse was gone and they ended up making love only during the weeks Matt wasn’t immunosuppressed, the weeks he was home.
But one time when they barricaded the door, she stood in the middle of the small room and slowly, shyly, unbuttoned her blouse. Please, he said, his voice tremulous, and he moved out of bed carefully (not just because he was ill but also because he had an erection) to sit in the chair and watch. And she wriggled out of the blouse and gave it a little toss onto the bold tray table and unhooked her black bra. Brown-nippled breasts fell out, still a little heavy, a little bulky (it was his Ann). She unzipped, then stepped out of her skirt, and her slip, so she was in just a pair of old black panties—you could see the elastic around the legs coming through the black cotton, they’d been washed so many times. She stepped out of them, too, so he could see her (still) glorious bushy bush, his hair was so sparse everywhere. And she was a thick bushy loamy forest to him. And her (a little wrinkled) thighs rolled beneath and to the sides of the forest as she swayed in the middle of the small room. She turned her puckered wondrous tush toward him, swung it back and forth, turned round a few times. And she sang a little Shakespeare for him, before him, sang low softly with a hey nonny ho nonny ho as he sat in the chair with the wooden arms like a king.
Three
Matt makes it into the first 40 percent, those who go into remission from the chemotherapy.
When he comes home from the hospital, Ann gives herself a two-week vacation from work. The sight, however scrawny, and the (nonmedicinal) smell of Matt thrill her, and she is always following him, touching him. If he is shaving, she gets a kick out of sitting on the toilet seat and watching; or if he is showering, she hops in with him even if she just showered—at the least, she brings him towels she’s warmed up in the dryer.
After his long, austere stay in the hospital, Matt responds to her shadowing and pampering him with bursts of physical affection so intense that Solly threatens to run away from home. And he grumbles about the childish horseplay his parents are suddenly into—his mother’s throwing a blanket over his father’s legs may lead to a tug-of-war, or her plumping his pillows, a fight that leaves the living room a feathery mess.
One day Solly comes home early from rehearsal and hears his mother laughing flirtatiously as his father belts out childish songs in their bedroom: “Oh, what does a Scotsman wear under his kilt? A shlong! A shlong!
“Do your balls hang low? Do they wobble to and fro? Can you tie them in a knot? Can you tie them in a bow?”
“For Christ sake!” Solly yells as he takes off with his homework for a pizza place.
Matt gains back six (and more coming) of the twe
nty pounds he lost and grows a stubbly field of dark, peppery hair. His skin returns to flesh tone. His blue eyes, which had grown watery, blue again.
Despite the cold weather, he cannot stay in the house but must be walking outside forever. To walk unnoticed delights him. “With that mask on, I felt like a mangy dog with a fluorescent muzzle.”
Several times he comes home from his outings with a plant or an armload of fresh flowers, mortal dangers to the immunosuppressed, which he, thankfully, no longer is. He also brings back germy things from the supermarket—raw vegetables and fruits with the skin on—which he eats with relish. He frequents lectures, movies, restaurants, parent–teacher meetings—anywhere where there are crowds of people and, especially, small children, some of whom presumably have colds.
Each day Matt stays healthy is a day fewer of the one thousand eight hundred and twenty-five days—the five years—he needs to survive so he can be considered cured. Ann marks it off on the calendar first thing in the morning and then checks the Internet to find out is there any new research on acute myelogenous leukemia, what does the National Institutes of Health have to say, what does Medline, are there any new drugs on the horizon since she went to sleep? Matt tells her to forget about it, that is Dr. Mears’s job, and while Matt appreciates her concern, he is determined not to diminish his life by focusing on its finiteness. “All of our lives are finite.”
Two weeks into the new semester—Matt has returned to teaching in January—Ann points out a black-and-blue mark on his forehead. “I probably banged myself,” he says, “although I don’t remember it.” When it is still there at the end of the week, she suggests he go to the dermatologist, who tells him, “You mustn’t be so careless.” A second black-and-blue mark appears on the day of his monthly appointment with Dr. Mears.
Scary Old Sex Page 9
