by Charles Bock
The room goes silent, as if no one knows how to take this remark, let alone respond. Then the doctor clears his throat. “Mrs. Culvert, what lies ahead of you is not an easy task.”
My eyes open. Blasco is waiting, patient. “You have been through very much, I know. But this is a species unto itself. You are undergoing a marathon of sprints. Have been sprinting and sprinting. Now there is a new separate marathon of sprints. This will require its own fortitudes and endurances. I want you as strong as you can be. I want us all prepared.”
My mouth is a desert road. I cannot manage enough moisture to swallow.
“Our first step”—Blasco speaks with caution—“high-dose radiation therapy. Three days is usual. Two doses a day. Sometimes we do three. It depends on how you are doing. If you are having problems, and need to go slow, we add the fourth day.”
“The rooms are much nicer on the transplant floor,” volunteers Requita. “It’s a good place to recover.”
“So we’ve heard.” Oliver doesn’t look up from his notepad.
“After radiation, the next step is a high-dose chemotherapy regimen. Thyatemper. Cytoxan. Daunorubicin. Other drugs and steroids to help with the effects. Four days of this. Then you rest a day.”
Oliver is writing as fast as he can; however, I am trying to unclench my knotted innards. I feel fear leaking through my eyes. I try to exhale, remember how to breathe.
Blasco’s concern is apparent. “You are all right?” Once I nod, he continues. “Following rest, we give you the stem cells. This part is not bad. The stem cells are delivered into your bloodstream intravenously, usually through a central catheter. Very similar to the blood transfusions you already have. The stem cells travel through the blood into the bone marrow, where they take root. We wait while you recover and the marrow takes hold, so it can start growing inside your bones. Usual stay, four to six weeks.”
A ballpoint is removed: the doctor’s large thumb clicks and unclicks and clicks again, an obvious tic. “I am not one for sugarcoating. How thin you are is a very large concern. I worry your body will not be able to withstand the rigors of the transplant. I worry your heart will not be able to take the stress. This is not a reason to not try. We will run you through tests. Either you handle it or you can’t.”
It is hard to know which direction to turn, where to focus. I notice that Blasco’s long legs are out in front of him, crossed at the ankles. His shoes have been cobbled at the toes and heels.
Requita hands the doctor a new clipboard, which he takes without a thank-you or acknowledgment, explaining to me there are perfunctory questions before we can start moving forward. While Oliver squirms, we cover the usual greatest hits: family history, how I was diagnosed, have I used recreational drugs, any huffing? Then: “Have you had unprotected sex with a prostitute in the past five years?”
“Ha. I wish.”
“Your sexual history in the past five years has been—”
I feel myself swallow, my throat clenching. “Monogamous, yes.”
—
When I’d finished visiting with my friends or completed meditating; once I’d completed my relaxation techniques, or was roused from my nap, and the coast was clear; Oliver would enter, sometimes bringing our Doe with him, or lifting the Blueberry away from the sitter and eating her nose. “Daa,” she would say, our big girl, talking now, giggling, and he would swing her as if she was a rag doll, swooping and carrying her, finally, with a happy splash, depositing her onto the pillow next to me. Other times she was already on the bed and he’d crash whatever little game we were playing, capsizing whatever book I was reading to her, inserting himself into our revelry. “Hello, my beauty,” he’d say, or “Good afternoon, my heart,” unless he did not say a word and instead made a beeline, kissing me, melted butter on my barbed-wire lips. (When he was feeling optimistic I would know, for his kiss would start out with force, then become more sensual.) Tucking himself inside the comforter; collapsing atop it; careful not to land on me; making sure not to hit my leg; snuggling into my side; taking my hand inside his as if he were clasping a peanut. He’d sag and merge into the mattress, shutting his eyes and letting out a breath, lying still for a moment, unless he could not be still, had to stroke my head, had to turn toward me, plant petal-soft baby butterfly kisses on my closed eyelids. His body was typically stale with sweat, radiating heat and exhaustion and twitchy follow-up thoughts, his eyes often red, so many hours of meticulous logic, staring into his screen. We’d lie together until it was time to address dinner, or my pill schedule, whatever was next.
If you think of a blessing as something you need, but do not know that you need, or do not know to ask for—then my afternoons with him were blessings.
But there was something else. Since my bout of blindness, or perhaps because of my meditation techniques, my senses had become sharper, more attuned. There were odd afternoons in that summer, not many of them, but a few, when Oliver would lie next to me and lean in and snuggle, he would hold my hand and stroke my hair, and from his skin, I would smell—what? Not nothing, not quite, but a chemical variant of nothing, an antiseptic freshness—radiating from his body, lingering in his scalp.
From a shampoo? A body wash? The scent appeared, what, maybe every two weeks. I can’t say it was even as regular as that. But I’d smell it.
The third, maybe fourth time, I asked Oliver if he’d worked out.
“I guess you shower at the gym?”
Motionless.
“I ask because you’ve never mentioned a shower at the rental office. I’m assuming you’d use it more if it was there.”
I could sense him groping, could tell he was unmoored.
An apologetic shake of his head. A slight smile. Hadn’t he mentioned it? The Brow had guest passes at Crunch. He’d been trying to deal with all the stress. He thought he’d told me.
—
I never smelled that antiseptic cleanliness again. Not from his hair, or off his skin. That smell vanished. Those few cameos remained unexplained, anomalies. If anything, Oliver was even better toward me. Impossibly better: waking me each morning with a kiss, arranging my pills and administering my treatments and warming my herbal teas. He sat and read to me, brought me iced water, fed me soft scrambled eggs. He went to the medical supply store in Chelsea and bought me a walker and worked with me to use the blasted thing. He made sure it was bedside in the morning and then helped me upward out of bed. Oliver scheduled the car service trips to the hospital and aided me getting my walker into the car and checked me in with the receptionists. Then he came back and sat by my side and held my hand. In the absent empty hours I would lie in our marital bed and still could not help myself, returning to those few clean whiffs, what to make of them, whether my mind was doing this to me.
—
The sitter was with Doe, he’d made sure of it, and now he’d casually closed the bedroom door, was sitting at the side of the bed. By magic, my hand had become clasped inside his. “So this thing.”
Silly as it may sound, my first thought was that his favorite jeans got shrunk in the dryer, that I had made a costly mistake on his computer. I had a flash of guilt: Whatever it is I didn’t do it.
Then, I thought: Oh.
He met my eyes, then stared past me, fighting through something.
It wasn’t as if he wanted intimacy, he said. He didn’t want any kind of emotional connection. Not a mistress. Not to cheat. He wasn’t going to bang the babysitter. I was his everything.
I understood the meaning of each word, but their arrangement, the things he was saying, they didn’t apply to my life.
Yet he kept dissembling, circling and landing on the subject for just the briefest instant. It’s not like I’m betraying you. Hell, I’ve mortgaged my company. My life is committed to getting you better, taking care of Doe. I just— All I want is relief. Get the animal urge off my back. It’s anonymous. It disappears. I go back to being kind and taking care of you. I’m here in all ways.
I felt
my eyes wide, my hand shaking. He was holding my hand and it was shaking and he let it go. I couldn’t make noise. Couldn’t breathe.
Oliver removed from his wallet a business card. It was the yellow of faded sunlight, with hard creases to it. ALEXA’S FLOWERS, it read. EXQUISITE FLOWERS FROM THE WORLD ALL OVER was beneath, a smaller, black script. There was a phone number. My eyes went blurry, the numbers and letters now going smudged.
Since the summer. Months of this.
He always made sure he was safe. He wanted me to know. This mess has been hanging over him, it had him wrecked. He couldn’t lie to me anymore, he said. He didn’t want this. He never saw the same woman twice. It didn’t mean anything.
It was as if a gloved hand were slipping through the cage of my ribs. I felt its icy grip, clutching at my heart.
—
One of our last date nights before I fell ill. We’d prepped the sitter, then made our getaway to a small, busy tapas bar on a Chelsea side street. Plied with good sangria (just enough fruit to taste, but not get in the way of the alcohol), we waited for small hot plates: braised chorizo, herbed baby potatoes, a warmed asparagus dip. On our right, a table erupted, the woman throwing down her napkin, the man jerking away, reaching for his wallet. They were impossible to ignore: getting their coats in haste, their faces stone with anger, each maneuvering down the crowded aisle. Once they were safely outside, every other couple in the restaurant, including Oliver and me, let out sighs of relief, as if to say: It wasn’t us.
Amid the low lights, over scallops ceviche, I reminded Oliver of our first major fight, and told him that, afterward, I’d called my mother and she’d relayed this message: in every good relationship, every strong marriage, there came a point where no matter how much you loved one another, you also knew too much about each other—your strengths, your weak areas. “The two of you are human, you’re frayed.”
On the night of my blind walk around the block, when Oliver pressed me about Merv, my mother’s words were stones on me. I’d answered that he could be right or we could be married. I’d told him I needed to be married to him. This new bombshell returned me to these memories, those spoken words. In the weeks that followed Oliver’s whore bombshell, my Whitman Memorial hallway thoughts—Thank God I’m not that bad—transformed into Well, now I know the other side. But my mother’s words remained. And I stewed in them, boiling in anger and indignation, my sop sweat and humiliation, my naked heartsickness.
—
Funny that you should ask, Doctor. As it happens, my husband routinely rendezvouses with whores.
The truth means insurers have an excuse to not spend ungodly amounts of money on this procedure. It gives the out that ends my life.
Oliver doesn’t hesitate in answering Blasco, lying like the hall of fame, heavyweight champion liar that he is.
“Of course she hasn’t.”
Blasco checks off something, not so much as looking up. “Very good.”
—
Presently the doctor takes his time. “After the transplant,” he says, as if explaining a tricky lock to his houseguest, “you will have a little worse immune system than a newborn. All of the questions that a mother needs to ask about her newborn will apply to you. Would you take a newborn here? Would you let a newborn do X? A huge issue becomes who will be your primary caregiver.” Blasco’s eyes dart between Oliver and me. “This is by your side each day at the hospital, in charge of your care. Is a round-the-clock job. Seven days a week.”
Again Oliver does not hesitate. “I’m her primary. Have been. Will be.”
Contrariness swirls through me. I want to shout, No. Then catch myself.
My mom has to take care of Doe. Tilda just started her new gig as an editorial assistant. Other friends may want to help, but can’t give up their lives. Oliver’s the only one who can see this through. I stare ahead at the doctor. Oliver’s jaw clenches, his tendons flexing in a manner that means he knows I’m watching. The dent of his Adam’s apple bobs.
—
And so it has come to this: I am to give myself to a culture of medicine and procedures in which I neither trust nor have faith. That I might be mother to my child, I must abandon my child. Essentially helpless, I must trust in Oliver when I can’t even look at him, can’t even think straight around him. I don’t know if we have a marriage. I don’t know if we have a life anymore.
The First Noble Truth is the Truth of Suffering: “You are born. You live. You suffer and get sick. You die.” But of course nothing is so simple.
“What can I do?” I say. “I have to do it so I’m going to.” My hands are shaking in front of me, I can’t control them. “She’s on the verge of walking. She’s saying her first words. I don’t want her to miss me. I have to do it, but how can I abandon her?”
Oliver doesn’t dare move, but he doesn’t need to. Requita is next to me, rubbing wide circles on my back. “She won’t remember a thing. It’s going to be harder on you.”
“You’re a bit traumatized,” says Dr. Blasco.
“Falling apart in these exam rooms again.” I sniff. “So humiliating. I guess some things don’t change. But this is the last time. Believe you me.”
—
Oliver helps me with my coat. He places down the flats on my wheelchair and secures my feet. Leaving the exam room, he takes his time rolling me to the elevator. When we emerge into the rain, Oliver makes sure I am dry underneath the ancient metal awning, and runs to the curb to see if the town car is where it is supposed to be. No. He tries to run down a cab, lets an elderly couple take the first available one. The rain has let up a bit since our arrival, but is still coming down at a steady pace. I see his hair going sticky, his face and ears turning slick.
Our ride home is a muted slog, with thickets of afternoon traffic, and the silence settling into the backseat more nebulous than the standard silence that has taken over between us. Oliver asks if I am hungry. He tries to engage me about who is coming over tonight. My shut eyes block him out; I start my visualizations, trying to accept, or escape. For his part, Oliver accepts. He says he’ll wake me when we get home.
At the apartment, he is especially careful in helping me into the elevator, and then to my desk, and then he ushers the sitter and Doe toward Mommy. As I embrace my girl, she begins repeating her first and most favorite word, “Mommy.” When Oliver prepares a fruit smoothie with protein powder, I make sure to thank him. When he puts his hand on my shoulder, I do not move away. Do these decencies indicate a thaw? He may choose to believe so. He does make sure to give me space, but also hovers, keeping an eye on me.
“Believe me, Oliver, I understand what it is to feel your heart pounding between your legs.” I can take no more, and lash out. “I know all about wanting to escape. But if you think you deserve a lollipop for telling me you fuck prostitutes while I’m decaying in bed with cancer? If you think you can convince me you have a right? What do you want, Oliver? Absolution? Permission?”
—
Without trust, your shit was through. Maybe it happened in a slow circling of the drain. Some trial separations, efforts at reparations, couples therapy, all that garbage. But after you attempted to bang away the dents, if your belief in that other person couldn’t be banged back into place, couldn’t be welded back together, your marriage was done.
And if you were the idiot who inflicted the damage, the way things worked, you couldn’t be the one who made it better. You didn’t get to fix it.
But someone had to get that transplant precertified. Someone had to get the ballast of tests precertified. The radiation treatments. Plus, the hospital needed copies of Alice’s last Pap smear. All of it had to get in gear tomorrow, because in two days they were scheduled to start showing up at Whitman between eight thirty and nine. Alice’s sneezing, or cold, or whatever, was enough of a concern that she’d been prescribed five hundred milligrams of Levaquin per day—doctors wanted that cough under control as quickly as possible. So Oliver was supposed to make sure she took he
r scripts. He was under orders to keep her away from echinacea, and any other natural healing remedies—the doctors didn’t know what kinds of effects would be released into her system, what might happen.
So no. Distance wasn’t an option. Not for him.
—
I am tattooed! The most insane thing!
When I was in high school tattoos were dangerous. I pined for one, but never had the guts.
Now I have a pair. It happened first thing this morning. I was told not to eat or drink anything after midnight, and am a bit piqued by this. In a large cold room I lie on a long table. “Okay, down with the smock, please,” says the attendant. I suffer a moment of confused modesty, so she helps, lowering the smock edges below my shoulders, halfway down my arms. Not happy with this, she tells me we need to lose it. I embrace the order. Take a look. Evidence of what I’ve been through: my breastbone all but breaking through my skin, the pattern of a butterfly skeleton along my chest. They measure the breadth. Then down my sides. Then I’m turned over, measurements taken down my back. The attendant washes and sterilizes my chest.
It happens so fast, it’s shocking, just a few moments, an electric charge that leaves me rushed with adrenaline and wanting more. But here I am, inked with a pair of dots, each the size of a ballpoint stain on a pillow. One is high on my chest, in the middle of my breastbone, just above where my cleavage used to start. The other at the equivalent point on my back. They mark where my lungs begin, so the hospital can customize lead guards.
The orderly who wheels me up to the sixth floor, Donnay, is massive as a linebacker. Though his orders say he has to get me to Cardiology ASAP, he saunters with an easy rhythm, and his words have a similar flow. “They got you on lockdown, huh? You gonna be all right, though, I see it.” I smile back, attempting to plug into his good nature. But when we arrive at Cardiology, the waiting room is distressingly full, and this turns me dizzy, weak as a washrag. Oliver is already at the front desk, bent over, talking low with a receptionist. Donnay rolls me up, pounds his fist against my hand. “Stay black,” he says. “Stay strong.”
