Suzanne Davis gets a life

by Paula Marantz Cohen

  It might have been the “perspective thing” provided by cancer, but I found this uplifting.

  A FEW DAYS AFTER I’d trashed Jane Austen at book club, I had a revisionist experience relating to this author, which I feel compelled to share before I proceed. It all started with a call from NateandClara, my fused-at-the-hip couple friends, who had moved to Edison, New Jersey, in order to have more room for their eventual family. As usual, they began the conversation by telling me how much they missed New York, which boiled down to their missing the bagel place on Second Avenue. I was expecting the usual segue into the travails of finishing their basement, when instead Nate said, “We have someone we want you to meet.”

  “Scott, my second cousin,” explained Clara. “He just moved to New York City from upstate and doesn’t know anyone.”

  This didn’t seem an overwhelming recommendation, but I didn’t say anything.

  “He’s some sort of biomedical researcher,” said Nate. “He does something with the cardiovascular system.”

  “Or the lymphatic system,” said Clara. “Something really neat like that.”

  “He’s at Columbia—or NYU,” said Nate, “working with a Nobel Prize winner in some hotshot biomedical engineering lab.”

  “At least that’s what my mother says,” said Clara, as if aware that the source might not be entirely reliable. “I haven’t seen him since I was ten. He was really smart then; he may be a chess prodigy.”

  “And he’s single.”

  “So we thought of you,” NateandClara concluded.

  I decided not to probe whether their thinking of me had anything to do with the prodigy part or only with the single part. In the past I would have interrogated them on this point at length and then spent an inordinate amount of time grappling with the pros and cons of meeting said biomedical engineer/chess prodigy. But the new me said, “Sure, why not?” with the result that a day later I had connected with NateandClara’s cousin Scott by e-mail and we had agreed to meet at the coffee shop on Amsterdam Avenue. This coffee shop alternates with the Starbucks on Broadway as my designated site for first dates. I don’t like to feel that I’m overexposing myself at any one locale. I probably opted for the former on this occasion because of my recent glimpse of Stephen in intimate tête-à-tête with the tall blond at Starbucks. There’s nothing worse than embarking on a relationship that will probably go nowhere in full view of people who are deep into a relationship that is going somewhere.

  So there I was in my wig in the coffee shop on Amsterdam when Scott (“I’ll be wearing a brown jacket”) came in. He was, as promised, wearing a brown jacket, which tells you something about his colorfulness, literally speaking, which, I soon learned, translated into his colorfulness, metaphorically speaking. He was also very short. Don’t get me wrong; I have nothing against short. The sexiest guy I ever dated was five foot two in heavy-soled shoes but carried himself as if to say, “Yeah, I’m short, but I guarantee that I’m funnier, smarter, and better in bed than anyone else you are going to meet in your entire life.” This was all in his body language, plus it happened to be true, or at least he convinced me that it was true, at which point he dumped me for a six-foot supermodel who he eventually also dumped in order to marry a Barnard French professor, who, though extremely chic, is only a few inches taller than he is.

  This is all by way of explaining that short need not be a deal breaker for me. Unfortunately, in Scott’s case, it was. This guy had succumbed to being short in the full existential sense of the word. He seemed to be apologizing for the fact as soon as he came in the door of the coffee shop in his brown jacket.

  Once he sat down, I tried to make conversation. His work was with frogs—whether it was the cardiovascular system or the lymphatic system of frogs, I’m not sure, but frogs, he explained, were his focus, more or less day in and day out.

  “That sounds interesting,” I said.

  “Actually, it’s not,” he responded. “I mean I find it sort of interesting, but I’ve been doing it for ten years and so, as you can imagine, I’m into the fine points. I mean frogs have a lot going on, but you have to study them for a while to get into them, and they’re also pretty smelly, which can turn people off. I’m used to it, but I have to scrub for a long time after I leave the lab, and even then, the smell can linger.”

  I sniffed the air and thought I caught a whiff of frog.

  This was not an auspicious beginning, but then my own job wasn’t so scintillating either, so I soldiered on.

  “I hear you’re a chess prodigy.”

  “No,” said Scott. “Where did you hear that? I haven’t played chess since I was twelve, and I wasn’t very good at it then.” He said this, then looked at me with that mixture of apology and longing that certain men have perfected and that renders them completely unattractive—perhaps a Darwinian way of making sure they will not reproduce.

  I tried to ask Scott about Albany, where he had spent the last ten years in graduate school, but his description boiled down to “it gets really cold in the winter and they have really awful bagels”—bagels being, apparently, a major issue in his family, since NateandClara also had, as noted, a bagel fetish. I tried movies, but he had seen very few because 1) he didn’t have much money; 2) he spent most of his time in the lab; and 3) whatever free time he had he used to play Second Life, which I happen to think is one of the biggest and stupidest wastes of time there is—I mean, even if I don’t have a life, I’m not about to rub my nose in it by making believe I have one by inhabiting a cartoon figure and giving said figure a house in the Hamptons.

  We went on to such topics as the reliability of Metro-North (“mostly on time”) and his relationship with Nateand-Clara. “I really don’t know them,” said Scott. “I mean I met Nate at the wedding, but mostly I knew Clara from before.” He sounded wistful, as if thinking nostalgically both of his own youth and of Clara as a singularity, before she became affixed to Nate.

  “I like your hair,” he said at one point.

  Eventually, silence set in. On first dates, I can usually get through two biscotti before I run out of things to say. In this case, however, I hadn’t even eaten half of one biscotto without macadamia nuts.

  Scott seemed to sense that things weren’t going well, and after staring at me with that particularly unattractive mix of apology and longing, he finally said, “I’m sorry that I don’t have a more exciting life.”

  This should have been a call for identification, or at least sympathy, but for some reason it had the opposite effect. I felt angry at Scott for not having a more exciting life— disappointed in him for being Scott and not, say, Mr. Darcy. I was supposed to have gotten over this sort of thinking, but here was a case of relapse—and relapse that did not end with my keeping my anger and disappointment to myself. Instead of reassuring Scott that, no, not at all, his life was exciting enough and isn’t exciting overrated anyway? what I said was, “I’m sure the frogs find your life exciting.”

  As soon as I said it, I knew it was uncalled for. I saw him blink in surprise and pain before taking refuge in self-deprecation. “I see your point,” he said. Why is it that people like this (and I include myself in this generalization, since I’ve been there) have to spell out the insult, as if to make sure to show you that they are willing to direct it against themselves if that might help matters, which of course it never does? “I mean I guess I’m not very good company, except to frogs, which isn’t saying much. I mean frogs aren’t very discriminating.”

  I knew that at this point what he really wanted was to be out of the coffee shop and back to Second Life or the frogs or maybe the bagel shop near NYU (a vast improvement over the bagel shops in Albany, New York)—anywhere, in short, except here with me.

  After he had paid—he insisted on it, especially, as he said, because he was such bad company—and hurried away on his very short legs, I felt a genuine pang. More than a pang; I felt awful. You’d think I’d shrug it off. Here I was with cancer, no prospect of a husband or
child, a dead-end job, and an apartment the size of a shoebox, feeling awful about being mean to someone who hadn’t deserved it.

  And that brings me back to Jane Austen and the realization that I hadn’t been fair to her at book club. As I was sitting there feeling awful about my treatment of Scott, I remembered that scene in Emma, the Jane Austen novel I’ve read even more times than Pride and Prejudice, when Emma insults Miss Bates, her sad-sack neighbor, who means well but is really the most headache-inducing bore, and Mr. Knightley, who in some ways is even more perfect than Mr. Darcy, scolds her for it and she sees that he’s right. Yes, I’d been a real shit to Scott. But the point was that I knew I’d been a shit. Dr. Chitturi had helped me to see this and so, in a way, had my run-in with cancer, which had put my life in perspective. Now that I thought about it, it also made me see Jane Austen differently. Elizabeth got Mr. Darcy at the end of the novel; Emma got Mr. Knightley—but that wasn’t really the point. Being a heroine meant being decent even if you didn’t get Mr. Darcy or Mr. Knightley. I didn’t want a life where I would be mean to people like Scott. I wanted a life where I would be my best self, even if I never married or had a child or lived in an apartment bigger than a shoebox. Even if my life ended sooner rather than later.

  I called Scott that night and apologized. I told him that I had cancer and the hair he liked was actually a wig, and that, given my condition, I was prone to be thoughtless. I told him that I was sure he had a lot to offer people, not just frogs, though I was not the person best suited to appreciate him, given my cancer and other sorts of baggage that I wouldn’t get into. I think he was not unmoved by my effort, and I myself felt good that I had done the decent thing, even without Mr. Knightley to point the way.

  I HAVE SAID THIS ONCE, but I will say it again: the shadow of death lurking in your vicinity can change the way you see things. In the wake of my diagnosis, my mother didn’t seem as bad as she used to, but neither did certain ideas that I had once thought would be the end of the world.

  What if, for example, I never did get married or have a child? Would my life then be worthless? Was I to consign myself to a future of joylessness and hopelessness for the simple reason that I had not found someone with whom to share it and procreate? It struck me that what I’d been looking for had not been another person at all, but—to be cliched about it—something in myself that would make me feel whole and fully alive. Ironically, the cancer had done this. I saw, in the corny fashion of one of those made-for-TV movies, that I wanted to live and was grateful for my life, even if nothing particular changed in it. I had a few good friends, a nice circle of acquaintances, a well-located if very small apartment in an exciting city, and a non-taxing job that in time might be replaced by another not unlike it. I had a lot to be thankful for.

  It was in the wake of such existential insight that I chucked the wig for a turban. I had initially been put off by the idea of a turban. We were no longer in the 1920s, when a turban might be part of an ensemble that included a cigarette holder and harem pants. Nowadays, a turban could mean only one thing: chemotherapy. But the wig had started to itch, and so I had donned the turban and, with it, a new and empowered philosophical outlook. I didn’t care that it trumpeted my condition to the world. Let them know, I thought. I’m proud to be fighting my pretty good cancer, and if anyone wants to commiserate with me, I will accept their commiseration gracefully.

  And I did have my share of well-wishers during the turban phase. Women would wander over, pat me on the shoulder, and say they’d been there—or their mother had or their sister or their best friend. I’ve never been a sentimental person, and groupthink irritates me, but here I was being patted and applauded for my cancer, which wasn’t even, as far as I could see, going to kill me. It was a disquieting but not unpleasant experience. I felt warmly toward my well-wishers, and pleased to see that those who told me they had been through what I was going through looked, for the most part, pretty good. Sometimes, of course, I was obliged to hear more than I wanted about regimens, doctors, diets, drugs, prosthetic breasts, and breast reconstructions. But it wasn’t hard to listen and smile. It was the first time that I found myself a member of a club where I didn’t have to exert myself to belong: I didn’t have to make lanyards or sing in the choir or do community service or chatter in Spanish around a lunch table. I didn’t even have to read books. It was nice to be congratulated for doing nothing.

  Inevitably—and my new club buddies might have predicted this—I abandoned the turban for the bare head. It had always annoyed me to see women strutting around bald. It seemed they were asking to be congratulated for being sick. But now that I was part of the group, I saw it differently. I knew that my chances, for all the cheeriness of my child ob-gyn and my bearded oncologist, were only statistically excellent. I could still be dead from my pretty good cancer. The point was not to advertise the fact that I might die but rather to celebrate the fact that I was alive. Whether I survived in the long term or not, it was about being here—eating, speaking, breathing—right now. That’s what the baldness meant, and I embraced it.

  I should note that baldness does upset some people. A bald woman is pugnacious-looking and can arouse a certain amount of fear and dread. No one wants to mess with a bald woman, and so, when I got a notice saying I had to pay a penalty because my checking account had fallen below the minimum for a day and a half, I went up to the bank manager and said, “Excuse me. I’ve been banking here for almost ten years, and I think that this sort of customer service is unacceptable.” And he backed down and apologized, saying how much he valued me as a customer and hoped that I would give them many more years of loyal patronage—which may have been a code for “I hope you don’t die of your cancer”—a sentiment I could appreciate as well.

  Even my mother, who was constantly telling me to put on a little makeup (even when I was on my way for treatment), inevitably adding, “You never know who you might meet in the chemo room,” seemed to be intimidated by my bald head and, after a tentative question regarding whether my turban was in the wash, said nothing more about it.

  The reactions I got to my baldness were interesting to contemplate. Why were some people so rattled? Was it because I was announcing my mortality so, well, baldly, and they didn’t like to have this rubbed in their faces? Was it my flagrant disregard for conventional female beauty—that I seemed no longer to care about the silken tresses that our society reveres, threatening, as a result, the very basis of societal norms and edicts?

  What I discovered by spending time without hair was that you can recalibrate your ideas about beauty. I came to feel that I had a very nicely shaped head (albeit with a small indentation over my left ear from where Sonia Goldstein bashed me with her field-hockey stick in tenth grade). But the dent notwithstanding, I came to like the way I looked without hair. Some people apparently agreed, including a number of young men with piercings who asked me if I wanted to hang out and hear their bands rehearse.

  To be honest, in my new, bald state, I looked better than I ever had in my life: more confident, more powerful, more authentic. And it didn’t hurt that I lost a few pounds as a side effect of chemo, so my clothes fit better.

  TO GIVE YOU an example of the new, more empowered me, consider my part in the Race for the Cure fiasco, an incident still talked about in certain circles. Here’s how it happened.

  “I’ve signed us all up for Race for the Cure,” my mother announced one day.

  This was typical of her. She was usurping my cancer and making it a team sport. I do not like team sports or, for that matter, large groups of women celebrating their breasts. Although Race for the Cure is ostensibly about raising money for cancer treatment, it has always seemed to me that the two aforesaid elements eclipse the fund-raising part. But as you may have surmised, it is very difficult to oppose my mother once she decides on a course of action. And the Race for the Cure does become more difficult to oppose when you have cancer.

  My mother, I knew, was picturing all of us—me,
her, Eleanor, and the now slavishly obedient Wordsworth—marching jubilantly among other women, celebrating themselves, which is more or less what she does all the time anyway.

  As it turns out, Eleanor had to prepare that day for a court appearance related to the tangled state of the sociopathic Ronnie’s finances, which left me without a potential ally in avoiding the event. So before I knew it, I had been fitted out in a pink Race for the Cure tee shirt and pink jogging suit, and Wordsworth had a pink breast-cancer ribbon affixed to his collar, and we were on our way, led by my mother in her pink tee shirt and jogging suit, to Central Park, where a legion of women in pink tee shirts and jogging suits had gathered.

  Seeing so many women in one place, some of them bald, though outfitted in pink, was a pretty scary thing, and if I were a man, I would have run the other way. There were nonetheless many intrepid representatives of the sex present, some of them survivors of breast cancer themselves as reported on their tee shirts and obvious anyway from their eagerness to expound on this relative rarity to any of the women who would listen.

  At one point, I was surprised to glimpse Stephen Danziger standing next to the blond woman with whom I had seen him conferring at Starbucks, thereby suggesting that they were now as good as married. A man willing to accompany a woman to Race for the Cure has to be serious—you simply don’t place yourself in the midst of so much estrogen without having made the age-old vow “in sickness and in health”; there’s no clearer way that I can see of assuring someone that the sickness part isn’t just lip service. Perhaps the blond woman had had her own scrape with breast cancer, though given the luxuriance of her hair, I doubted it. Instead, I assumed she was connected to the cause via a relative or friend, or simply out of do-goodism, which might be part of her attraction to Stephen, who, as a teacher in the South Bronx, was a do-gooder in his own right. In other words, the two were well matched, and I could only wish them the best.