Scary Old Sex

by Arlene Heyman

  “I’m coming with you,” Ann says.

  Matt shakes his head.

  “Why not?”

  “Don’t make a big production out of everything. If there’s a problem, I’ll phone you.”

  Ann feels she shouldn’t insist.

  She calls from the Metropolitan Museum, where she has just seen a Vermeer show with two women friends, art historians. “How’d the appointment go?”

  “Fine, dear.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Mears says I’m fine.”

  “What did he make of those things on your forehead?”

  “Nothing! He didn’t know what they were.”

  “He didn’t know what they were?”

  “Nope. No idea.”

  “Did you show them to him?”

  “He couldn’t exactly miss them.”

  “You asked him, though, and he said he didn’t know what they were.”

  “That’s right. Enjoy dinner with your friends—give Lisa a hug from me.”

  “You’re sure you don’t mind?”

  “Not at all.”

  “And you’re fine. You’re absolutely fine?”

  “Absolutely.”

  She arrives home a little tipsy, wearing the new pair of silvery pearl earrings she’d bought at the museum after she spoke to Matt. They are a copy of the earring worn by the sitter in Girl with a Pearl Earring. Even though that model was probably thirty-five years younger than Ann, and Ann has never modeled for anyone, and there are five centuries between them—she feels, with her husband healthy before her, more elated, and even more beautiful, than that soulful immortal girl. Standing in the living room with her coat still on, she does a slow three-hundred-sixty-degree turn in front of Matt, who watches rapt from the sofa. The earrings give off a warm human light.

  Then he stands up and helps her out of her coat and takes her in his arms. “I’ve never lied to you before in our marriage, but these—these”—he points at the black-and-blue marks on his forehead—“these damned spots are ‘chloromas,’ I think Mears called them. They’re—accumulations of—blast cells—under the skin.” He sighs.

  “No.” Ann lifts her hands to his face and slowly caresses his chin and his nose and his cheeks but not his forehead. Her hands tremble so that he has to hold them down; he stands there in the living room pressing her hands against his face.

  And then Solly comes home and they tell him.

  “Fuck this shit,” he yells as he runs back out of the house.

  At two in the morning Matt and Ann go to bed. Matt wants to make love and he asks her to put on the earrings. “You looked so happy when you walked in wearing them.”

  Ann puts them on, but very soon they seem to irritate her earlobes and she has difficulty concentrating and can’t come no matter what Matt does or she does. Finally she takes the earrings off and still can’t come.

  Well, what does she expect?

  When he seems to be asleep, she goes into the bathroom where she can see in the mirror that her right earlobe is almost as red as her eyes.

  Late that night—she never falls asleep—Ann scoops the earrings off her bedside table and goes to the window and opens it. A cold burst of air hits her. She throws the earrings out into the night as far as she can.

  Four

  In the air-conditioned hospital room Matt and Ann sit on his bed, looking up expectantly at the little bag of his brother’s bone marrow cells that hangs from the metal IV pole. Elaine, the nurse, stands beside the bed smiling; she is tall and fair-skinned, her blond hair twined into a single braid. Hugging the ceiling is a bunch of silver HAPPY BIRTHDAY balloons, their long waving stems tied together with a glossy blue ribbon. Each balloon reads IT’S A BOY! as does the blue banner on the wall over Matt’s bed. The nurses make these festivities a part of every transplant, which is, after all, a chance at a new life.

  It is a little like having the waiters at a restaurant sing “Happy Birthday,” Ann thinks. She likes it when they sing for her, but at the same time she feels foolish for feeling gratified. Her husband does not get a kick out of folderol, not for himself, anyway, but she knows he wouldn’t hurt Elaine’s feelings. After all, the nurse has been looking after him for months now—ever since he arrived at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle—so she is almost part of the family.

  Matt, pale, reaches over and pats Ann’s hands. Trying to keep her spirits up. She imagines he would like to pat that little bag of cells, wish his remaining strength, wish all of their strength, Elaine’s, Ann’s, everybody’s (maybe not their son’s) into those fresh brave red bodies and bid them Godspeed if he believed in God.

  No. He does everything he can to stay alive—he is an earnest patient—but he would not leech the world. Not even in fantasy.

  She would. (Although she wouldn’t touch their son.) Or she would curse God and die.

  Ann is a believer, even if lately mostly in the malevolence of the universe. She prays fervently now, silently reciting each Hebrew blessing she remembers from childhood, the blessing over bread and the blessing over wine, the three Hanukah prayers that are sung over the candles (she sings them in her mind), the Shema Yisrael, also “May you go from strength to strength,” and “Thank you, Lord, for keeping me alive to see this day.” She is not so sure about the last. She thinks it is meant for joyous occasions. Well, let this be a joyous occasion.

  With the ease of much practice, Elaine turns the stopcock. The dark-red cells begin to drip slowly down the clear tubular plastic wire, they aggregate and fill up the tube, it becomes a red tube that makes its way under Matt’s pajamas and disappears into his chest. Elaine smoothes any crimps out of the line, more as a ceremonial gesture than a necessity.

  Despite the bombardment of experimental treatments—during the past months, the doctors at this world-famous Seattle blood cancer center have thrown every cockamamie protocol at him, every outré treatment known on earth for his condition—Matt’s disease has not budged, or not much. It has not “remitted,” as they say.

  Every bone marrow transplant is complicated, Ann knows by now. Children under the age of six do well. The children’s wing of the hospital is full of these little bald lucky ones, their faces swollen with steroids, the violet veins showing through their fragile bluish scalps.

  For most other patients, a bone marrow transplant is what the doctors among themselves call a “heroic measure” or a “hope to Jesus” play; they are right up there, bone marrow transplants, with exenterations and hemipelvectomies. But the doctors do not tell that to the insurance companies nor do they tell the patients, not in so many words.

  Ann, of course, knows enough, even as a psychiatrist, to appreciate the oncologists’ skepticism. But she does not mention it to her husband. Nor to their son, when he comes to visit. She has grown inward about many things.

  For instance, the results of the spinal tap indicate that Matt now has leukemic cells in his spinal fluid. It does not make his chances of survival any worse, they are already worse, but she has told the doctors not to tell him unless he asks. He has not asked.

  When they found out the doctors were going to do the transplant without getting Matt into remission, Ann wept in the bathroom. Matt knocked on the door and when she came out fast thinking maybe he needed to use the toilet, he put his arms around her and touched her tearstained face and said, “It’s not over yet.”

  She now cries only in bathrooms on other floors, and she tries not to cry ever in front of him or their son—or in front of anybody, not even in the support groups for relatives. She attends those once or twice a week with other wives or husbands of patients, also parents of children and teenagers. Members disappear and new ones appear at a frightening rate. At each meeting people “share”: fellow church members at far-away parishes are holding cookouts and raffles and sending the proceeds to help cover the cost of the transplant—enormous, for those who have no insurance; some television, computer, and Internet hookups are better than others t
o keep in touch with “loved ones” back home; nausea and vomiting can be controlled occasionally by (cooked) ground root of ginger, obtainable at Susie Chin’s, a naturopathy store at 21 Pound Street. Earlier in Matt’s illness she had cried easily, “healthily.” Now she is worried she might start a panic. Everyone would stampede for the doors.

  So she does not cry at these support groups any longer but instead she often loses something, once her wallet, another time a ring, a third time her “to do” list. Each time, she returns to the small hospital room where the groups are held (it is an inside windowless off-white room with posters of paintings from the local Frye Art Museum—a painting of Amsterdam, and of an old man sitting in the sunlight) and lifts the stiff pillows off the buttercup-yellow sofa and matching chairs. She gets down on all fours to search beneath the furniture (the dust down there does not inspire confidence); shakes out the few books and magazines. Always, she finds whatever it is she lost, and each recovery occasions a few hours’ celebratory feeling. She has started wondering whether she is losing things on purpose in order to find them.

  The little cells take no more than twenty minutes to vanish altogether, whereupon the nurse removes the line and caps Matt’s catheter, and brings out two small chocolate birthday cupcakes with MATT handwritten on one in blue icing, MA on the other. Elaine hands the second cupcake to Ann, who thinks perhaps the TT fell off, or the kitchen ran out of icing. Or—and here comes a bizarre idea—perhaps the baker knows, God forbid, that soon Ann may no longer be a wife, she will be only a mother. The cupcakes have no milk in them; for some reason Matt is not allowed milk. Ann thinks about not eating her cupcake because she does not want to be only a mother, but in the end she devours it. Matt washes his hands with soapless soap that he releases from a container attached to the wall beside his bed, then opens the cellophane wrapper around his fork and knife, and cuts out a couple of bite-size pieces from the sides of his cupcake. Ann wonders if he is avoiding cutting through his name.

  “Delicious.” He beams at the nurse.

  And Ann does not say, But you hardly ate any. She simply nods and smiles in agreement.

  Matt is warned he will grow weaker (although Ann cannot imagine how he could grow any weaker), and over the next few days he does grow weaker as the new cells engraft. It is crucial that they engraft. The chemo and radiation have destroyed, the doctors hope, most of his capacity to make new cells—he was making mostly leukemic cells. His brother’s cells, which have been “transplanted,” must move in and take up residence and begin producing new, healthy cells. And they do seem to have moved in! By the end of the first week, his graft is sending out new immature red cells, and new immature white cells! But also it is sending out immune cells against Matt’s own body; the graft is recognizing Matt’s body as “foreign,” as an enemy, and is launching an attack. A little attack, a little graft-versus-host disease, is a good thing; it means the new bone marrow is in there and functioning. Already the graft has attacked his gut and his skin. And so he has sores on his tongue, which make it difficult to speak; he experiences a ripping sensation upon eliminating; he tries not to scratch at the rosy itchy rash that covers his back and chest. The gastroenterologist has visited him, and the dermatologist has visited him, and each has administered new medicines, which help some. And every day his blood is drawn and the hematologist renders his report, while Matt and Ann listen with the terrified attention Moses must have given to God thundering down the Ten Commandments.

  Because Matt is speaking little and forcing himself to eat, the doctors are worried he is depressed. Ann assures them he is only normally—“situationally”—depressed. They send a psychiatrist anyway, who asks Matt who the president is and can Matt subtract seven from a hundred and keep subtracting seven. He can but it hurts his tongue. What would Matt want if he could have three wishes?

  “To eat. To have my gut not hurt. To survive.”

  The psychiatrist offers to prescribe an antidepressant although he agrees Matt is not clinically depressed. Matt thanks him for his wish to do something, but declines.

  Matt shows Ann a full-page Alvin Ailey Company ad in the Seattle Times (“Oh, how fine they do dance!”) and so she knows, before Matt tells her, that Lucinda Wylie, a principal Ailey dancer, will be stopping by. Ann smiles fiercely. Lucinda and Matt had an affair many years ago, before he met Ann. Through Lucinda’s two marriages, the first to a wealthy Swede, the second to a black writer, Lucinda has kept in touch. Matt’s relationship with her has always worried Ann, although she believes, and Matt has reassured her, that her worries are groundless. Since Lucinda and Matt see each other not that much, maybe once a year that Ann is aware of, Ann worries not that much. Still, now, Ann takes shallow breaths through her mouth for a few moments until she can breathe normally. The next day, she notes with some small satisfaction that her last thought on falling asleep as well as her earliest thought on awakening this morning—neither thought had anything to do with Lucinda.

  Ann sees her first. She is striding down the hospital hallway in a form-fitting vermilion dress, which flares at the thighs. Crystal drop earrings swinging as she walks, Lucinda wears her straightened hair in a taut upsweep high on her head. She is at least seven feet tall, Ann thinks, the healthiest person Ann has ever seen. In her presence the patients plodding the hallway seem to be lifting their feet a little higher, a nurse pushes her pill cart with more vigor. Lucinda takes both of Ann’s hands and says deeply, “How is he? How are you?” Her hazel eyes burn in her dark face.

  Ann looks up at her, mumbles, “Okay. All right,” and in trying to get her voice to normal volume, hears herself howling. Lucinda embraces her. Ann is ashamed that the fucking tears start. After a while Lucinda reaches into her pocketbook and offers a package of tissues to Ann who shakes her head and points at the big box of tissues on the supply table behind them in the hallway. When she has control of her voice (it sounds robotic to her ears), she thanks Lucinda for coming.

  Lucinda grimaces and, with long fingers, waves away Ann’s thanks.

  Ann explains the dress code, opening the drawer of the night table to hand Lucinda a mask and gloves and an extra-large paper gown. Lucinda nods confusedly and gets into the outfit, which somehow looks stylish on her, raffish. Ann dresses also, feeling small and dowdy, and the two enter Matt’s room.

  He is dozing, snoring lightly, and when Lucinda looks at him, her forehead gullies and her bright eyes darken and she seems to lose a few inches in stature. She sways for a moment so that Ann wonders if she is praying, and then realizes she is possibly crumpling at the knees. Ann should bring her a chair. But Ann is overwhelmed by seeing in Lucinda’s face and body how ill Matt is.

  Matt wakes glumly, sees Ann and brightens, sees Lucinda and brightens—more? Yes, more. Oh, who can measure degrees, shades of brightening? And isn’t Ann delighted to see Matt brighten? Ann breathes slowly and tells herself that Matt has not seen Lucinda in a year, not since he’s been ill, while he saw Ann just before he took his nap.

  Matt says to Lucinda, “I wish I could hug you. I wish I could kiss you.”

  Ann wants to kick him, but it occurs to her with the force of revelation, that he would not say such things in front of her if she had anything, had ever had anything to fear.

  Lucinda sits down and Matt takes her hands in his and after a long moment of looking at each other, the two begin to talk.

  Mumbling something about old friends needing privacy, Ann leaves the room almost on tiptoe. Perhaps Matt says, “Bye, dear.” Or perhaps he is calling Lucinda “my dear.” Ann is not sure. She does not turn back.

  Pain. And anger at herself for feeling the pain, the same old pain, whether warranted or not. So she still has energy for jealousy, that waste of emotion, that green-eyed monster. No, Lucinda is the green-eyed monster. Still there, Lucinda is.

  One gets over nothing in this life.

  Ann sheds her paper outfit into the special metal receptacle outside Matt’s door, and walks down the hallway, down
the elevator, through another hallway and then the lobby and finally out into the world.

  The sun is shining and she closes her eyes and lifts her face to it. She is glad to be outside. In natural light and heat. Much heat. She begins to walk briskly down Marion Street, feeling her muscles move, liking the feeling. Lucinda is not the only one with muscles. Ann walks fast, faster, taking some enjoyment in feeling the skin of her forehead, of her neck, moisten. She is nearly running over the busy underpass that is Interstate 5; she turns down Pike Street and then she is really running. Past a diner, a Starbucks, a Gap, she is flying. She feels lighter despite sweat dripping down her face, her blouse sticking against her shoulders. In the distance she sees the bright blue water of Elliott Bay—she would like to run on the sand along the bay—but she is slowed by crowds of tourists just outside Pike Place Market, a covered two-story farmer’s market-cum-tourist attraction. She entered it once before with their son, remembers masses of bright flowers and vegetables; an odd fish-tossing ritual at the “flying fish market”; and, of all things, a shoe museum—SHOES OF MYSTERY and SEE A SHOE ACTUALLY WORN BY WORLD’S TALLEST MAN. Also a store that specializes in condoms; in the window there was a basket labeled THE WORLD’S BEST SELECTION—YOU BE THE JUDGE. Her son had looked impish and seemed to avoid her eyes, and she hoped that meant he had something to hide, that their family disaster had not gotten totally in the way of his teenage years.

  She enters the market, admires display crates of cherries—Queen Anne’s cherries (she wishes she could bring some back for Matt, but he can’t even have them in the room, let alone eat them), purple-black Bing cherries, Rainier cherries. Next to them are boxes of peaches—O’Henrys, Risingstars; and Washington State apples—Fujis, Pink Ladies … After the harsh white-and-chrome geometry of the hospital, she revels in the vibrant colors, the soft roundnesses, the silly names. She chooses an assortment of fruit for herself, and asks the produce seller to wash them. It is Seattle, and so he nods and lifts up a hose and sprays away. She eats a few wet cherries, spitting the pits on the floor, takes a bite of a Cresthaven peach, lets the juices run down her chin.