Alice & Oliver

by Charles Bock

  —

  There’s nothing enjoyable about being nuked until you are a glowing and bloated and scabrous kumquat, but at least radiation got me out of the room. Not anymore. I’m trapped inside this vulgar little triangle of space; I have to make my peace with that.

  My catheter continues its disco throb, but I’m told I must deal. Any painkillers might inhibit my ability to recognize pain, alert proper authorities to larger problems, which is important for me right now. Bless Blasco for prescribing Ativan. When it hits, the drowsy sensations are like that satisfaction you feel after a second bowl of excellent soup. Still, when I’m awake, I’m lucid, which every nurse says is a good sign. Furthermore, the familiarity is helpful, not a comfort but at least known. I keep my journal updated when nurses add a bladder protectant called Kenzlo to the Christmas tree. My mouth has gotten cotton dry. I try to drink more water, but sometimes I forget. There’s so much to track; some things slip past. I am allowing myself the luxury of more naps, especially when chemo bags are up.

  Apparently Tilda has found a niche at Schlep—its editors are more than happy to exploit her to the hilt; but here she is, still forcing herself not to crumble at the sight of my face. She spends time looking at the backs of my hands: how orange they are, their burnt hue, their texture hard and rough as mussel shells. Cleaning the clutter from my tray, Tilda calls and tells the desk to bring a new pitcher of ice water. She unwraps steaming edamame and grilled lemon chicken from Tupperware containers, a new tube of moisturizer lifted from the magazine’s makeup room. She wants to know how I am, meaning she wants a medical update. Even this kind of talk sends us back into our old dorm, college roomies—easy and familiar—again commiserating about impossible boys.

  I let her know about the return of the musician—keeping it coy, roundabout. She’s suspicious and delighted. Then an actual gasp. Tilda’s gloved hand rises in front of her masked mouth. “I would have paid to see that.”

  “To his credit, he didn’t break that keyboard over the guy’s face.”

  “Oh, he had to be pissed. Was he pissed?”

  “Tilda, I have a real dilemma. If you could see how devastated—”

  “Please. That dog doesn’t have a leg to stand on.”

  “Other than finding the insurance, you mean, and paying my premiums, and running around dry cleaning my underwear—”

  “Where was he all afternoon?” Her voice is knowing.

  “Can’t exactly blame him, can you?”

  Before she can correct me, I am correcting myself. “Right, I do. But I understand, I think. The pressure he’s under. The man’s been by my side for everything. Part of me wants to say, Go. I have to live in this every second, who else should have to? Get fucked. Some piece of ass, who cares?”

  “You care, though—don’t you?”

  “It is a betrayal. I mean, we grow up knowing men cheat. You worry so much about finding someone and getting married. And then you spend your marriage with the hovering possibility; every woman lives in fear of it. All the perfect couples that don’t make it. People get divorced. Life goes on.”

  She provides her rubber yellow hand, clasps my dry-bone knuckles.

  “Even with this rupture,” I continue, “there’s still our depth. I think that’s why it hurts more. I do need him. It just burns at me, Til. But, maybe, I mean—”

  Tilda blinks, trying to follow.

  “I’m confused, too.” I squeeze her fingers. “Yesterday was horrible. Sitting there and looking at one another and not trusting anything.”

  “Ugh.”

  “Ugh. But, but somehow, when Oliver backed down and let Merv stay, he must have put his faith in, what—the idea of what was best for me? What was larger?”

  My throat feels rough. I motion for the pitcher, pour what remains into a glass, sip at tepid water.

  “One consolation,” I continue. “I don’t need to do anything about it. I guess I’ll figure it out after. If I survive.”

  “When,” Tilda says.

  “When,” I say.

  “How’s that keyboardist’s tushie?” Tilda asks.

  We make eye contact. I wave her off.

  “You’re talking about a man who can only find an audience in the bedridden.”

  “So then, my type.”

  “When I got mad at that nurse, the terror on his face. So in over his head. But there’s a charm. An eagerness. It’s sweet. I like him coming, making me feel a little alive.”

  “I don’t think it’s the worst thing for O to remember what a catch you are.” She squeezes my hand again.

  I thank her, lie back. “Sometimes, I think about what his life will be like without me.”

  Tilda’s face goes rigid. I motion, Let me continue.

  “He might be able to finish his program, if he was able to give it the attention he has to give me. He can hire sitters. He’s young. With the violin and sob story he’ll be able to wheel out, soon enough there’d be another woman. But even when this transplant works, it’s going to take me time to get better, if I ever do.”

  “Alice—”

  “I’m not having a pity party, just admitting it. He might be better off—”

  “You’re strong enough to have these feelings,” Tilda says. “And I’m strong enough to sit with you while you have them.”

  I squeeze, thank her with my eyes, take and suck an ice chip.

  “The thing that gets me—is my daughter’s life without me. I can’t.”

  “I know, honey.”

  “I can’t imagine it,” I repeat.

  “So don’t.”

  I recognize an exhaustion in her voice. She’s been through this dance enough.

  She says, again: “So don’t.”

  —

  He hadn’t been able to sleep, work, eat, think of anything else, anyone else. That he might lose her to cancer was already unthinkable; that he might lose her heart to another man was what: Repulsive? Emasculating? It was impossible. It was his fault.

  He managed, at best, two hours of lackluster troubleshooting before saving the file, shutting things down, and heading by her magazine place, where he grabbed anything he hadn’t already seen in Alice’s room: WWD (cover: drop-dead pouty blonde with bangs), Italian Vogue (pouty blonde; long hair spraying everywhere), and Cosmo (famous amazon, pouty mole). With his every step, an instinct said he should check over his shoulder. In the middle of the sidewalk he envisioned seeing that limpy motherfucker, that bouncy mess of hair.

  He picked up her laundry from the dry cleaner across the street from Whitman. He stopped at a pharmacy and bought a few tubes of ChapStick. He might not get any decent work done with his mind like this; but he could still take care of her. He could protect what was his.

  Three hours before his usual time, Oliver arrived in front of her hospital room and stopped at the supply counter.

  The only gloves were midget-size. Their plastic barely reached over his fingers, cracking and popping and going no farther. He was putting on his mask when he became aware: someone approaching, slowly, behind him. Leather jacket. Stubble.

  The interloper arrived, put down his amp and keyboard case; he avoided eye contact, waiting for his turn.

  “Can’t you see what’s happening to her?” Oliver said.

  The musician looked down and away, seemed to suck on a thought. His hands went to his hips. His elbows jutted. Now he’d scraped together his answer. “I do.” He pursed his lips. “There’s nothing between us. Okay at first, I, but—she had an effect on me, is all.”

  “Please. Whatever bullshit—”

  “Dude, I’m just trying to do something good here.”

  The guy raised his gaze and looked Oliver in the eye, and Oliver felt himself go rigid, felt the need for some kind of response.

  “We can’t be at war,” he finally said. “Not now.”

  Merv blinked, stared.

  —

  Imagine my surprise when they file in, Oliver sheepish, leading the way, laden with to
day’s offering of grocery bags and a bunch of magazines stuffed under his armpit; then Merv, a few workmanlike steps behind, his head and shoulders hanging, arms dragging in his long black case and speaker casing. Oliver kisses me on the cheek, wants to know how I am doing. Merv cleans off a flat surface, asks about refilling the water.

  Maybe I’m reading too much into things, but after this moment, I swear, during the remaining day or so of my chemo, something inside that room changes. The mood, yes, but more. I’m convinced my rash is lighter along my forearms. And my voice grows stronger. Even the natural light from the window behind me feels different, warmer; I know it sounds ridiculous, but I swear it’s thicker, hues like the early afternoon light from some Parisian painter’s garret. This when there’s already so much—any time I awaken from sleep, or come out of a hallucination, friends surround me: Jynne with the cassette mixes that accompanied our cooking forays back when we lived together, or Mary Beth with swatches and slides, as well as a duffel of this season’s winter sweaters. I am content listening to their gossip, watching them eat fudge. Then we all take a break and do some meditations.

  And yes, Merv is here, hanging out around the edges, playing background melodies to accompany the mixtape offerings. He smiles at my friends as if to flirt, breaking in now and then with an anecdote from his days on the road. Oliver often volunteers to run down to the gift shop, or to the break room for supplies. Every so often someone exits the room just to take off their scrubs and cool down. A nurse ducks in, we get worried she’s going to scold us for the noise. Instead of telling us to turn it down, she sings along, faking it when she doesn’t know a lyric.

  However long this stretch runs, hours or days, it reaches some kind of apex when Tilda again stops by. Oliver kisses her masked cheek. Extending his arm, he introduces her to “our house musician.” (I so wish I had a picture of Tilda’s dumbfoundment.)

  This momentum sweeps me forward, into the next leg of this blessed marathon, when Blasco enters, bookended by his usual phalanx of residents and nurses. Seeing so many people in the room obviously jars him, but he smiles. He is focused in a manner that suggests something serious. “I want to ask how you are doing this morning.” He puts a hand to my throat, listens to my pulse, examines the backs of my hands, squints. “But it is apparent you are doing very well.”

  Each of the two nurses is holding a bottle, I notice, each one about the size of a child’s football—dense, smooth glass. One nurse has a mucousy-looking syrup, the dark mixed color of bourbon and blood. The other liquid is clear. Blasco tells me these two drugs are the last step before the stem cells, but they are a big one. I take a deep breath, exhale.

  “Do you need us to clear the room?” Mary Beth asks.

  Blasco studies the source of the question. “Policy doesn’t allow more than two visitors at a time. But everyone is already in here. And so today policy shouldn’t be a problem.” He refocuses on me, saying the drugs will be given simultaneously. He refers to the darker concoction by the letters ATG. It is some kind of globulin, will work as an antibody, fighting something in the T cells that can hurt me. Apparently, the clear stuff used to be some kind of horse serum.

  I admit, when he starts explaining about severe allergic reactions, low blood pressure, and problems breathing, I tune out some, and even get a bit testy, for I’ve heard every possible side effect by now, and the truth is, I have to do this anyway. I pout some, and let myself be distracted by the knocking resident, late to the room: he’s busy tying the knot behind his neck, doesn’t seem to care what the doctor is saying, instead gawks at my wall murals and slogans. One more minor victory for me.

  The nurses are adding another tier of hangers to the Christmas tree, for the new drugs, and then an assistant interrupts, peeking her head around the doorframe—she starts to ask if she can clean. I watch her take in all the doctors and nurses. She grunts, closes the door. Oliver smirks; head still down, he goes back to taking notes.

  I’ll be even more tired, I’m told, but will be getting very little sleep because I need to protect my bladder, and I’ll be peeing every two hours. “Wonderful,” I mumble; dear, alert Mary Beth asks me to repeat myself. I demur.

  “Who is to say?” Blasco continues, as always upbeat. “Your appetite might even come back.”

  I nod, but am visualizing that new tier of the Christmas tree filling up; I’m seeing even more of those thin tubes running down from the new bags and bottles, all that tubing connecting to the central line, small streams flowing into a mighty river, into my port, into my body.

  I feel my heart slamming repeatedly against my chest, trying to escape for the next room. My eyes wander, and I watch as two battery packs are added to each side of the tree, bringing the total to eight batteries that are keeping my drugs flowing and regulated, four thick plugs going into the wall sockets. My Lord. One of those tubes is always going to be getting clogged. One of those batteries will always be blinking red.

  What happens when I go to the bathroom? Will I be able to unplug all of them in time? Every two hours.

  “When I was a little girl I used to play a game.”

  I say this to the room, but my friends do not hear, they are focused on Blasco, attentive students to his lecture. Then Merv asks if I said something. This causes Jynne and Mary Beth to turn my way. Blasco pauses. I can see Oliver looking at Merv, irritated.

  “The floor was an ocean,” I say. “My bed was a boat. I had to stay in the boat and navigate the seas.”

  They are pretending to follow me. I let them pretend. I keep going. “It always was so much more fun when there were friends to be on the boat with me. I’m so lucky. All of you are around to be on my boat.”

  I hear Jynne’s voice: We’re right here. I see blurry motions of their nodding in my peripheral vision. The nurses, meanwhile, have not stopped working, are hooking up the bottles. Glendora checks and replaces a vented spike. Friends turn back toward Blasco.

  “I have a secret voice inside that thinks I am going to live.”

  There is applause. Whooping. A thumb rolls on the catheter; the drip rate adjusts. A coolness enters.

  I am lurching. My jaws unhinge. From inside comes bile and yellow and fluid. Each heave causes shock waves through my entire body; they feel like they last forever. The flow is more than makes sense—there’s not enough food in my stomach to come up like this. I feel Blasco’s hand on my back, helping me. I vaguely hear my husband’s voice saying my name. More comes up. All over my new sweater. My scrubs. Even my family quilt.

  And now Oliver is wiping clean my face, dabbing at my eyes with his sleeve. Glendora is matter-of-factly unfolding new bedsheets. Speaking over my apologies, with as much decency as I have ever heard, she says: “Don’t you worry about it, sweetheart. You can’t control these things.”

  —

  Just as the wave crested, the wave ebbed, the shock to her system abated. One of the battery alarms was always going red; one of the lines was constantly clogging. But the drugs continued their drip; the doctors threw their smocks into the trash bin; nurses came and went, their usual fixes and schedules. Alice’s heart rate normalized. She calmed, drifted off to sleep, for two hours, anyway, until the clock alarm sounded, at which point Oliver roused her, helped her to the bathroom, tucked her in, dealt cards, was caught holding embarrassing amounts of points. Waves of friends arrived, filling more shifts, twelve to three, four to six, bringing knitting and books and meals and sweets and newspapers. Alice napped and woke and napped some more. The soldiers on Oliver’s wall of defenses had been on full alert for a while now; instinct said they could relax some. He also knew the chemotherapy she’d just received was something from the nineteen fifties, a carpet bomb, supremely punishing; it made the previous induction and consolidation concoctions seem sophisticated and subtle. The horse serum was its own form of death. The other one, the one with the letters, if you took it too much, actually caused leukemia. There was no reason to tell Alice, any of it, no reason to let even Tilda
know.

  Every time he left that room he was aware of the clock, the possibility of limited time, knew he was turning his back on this time when he left; so he tried to stay in that room, he tried to stay put. And still she was asleep, and Jynne was there, and Julie was arriving soon enough. Oliver had decided that sitting there for too long while she was asleep was like waiting around for disaster. He wasn’t going to consider morbid shit like that.

  Perla had been the only availability on short notice. Oliver’s clothes were still on, his shoes still tied. She sat next to him on the upscale hotel bed. Oliver could not stop talking. Perla, all but busting out of a silky peach baby-doll, stroked his shoulder.

  “It would be one thing if she’s going to survive, if she’s going to live,” he said. “Three years. Compromised state, professional patient—whatever. It’s worthwhile. There’s a purpose.”

  “What she is going through, so she can raise child,” Perla finally answered. “Her suffering is biblical, no?”

  His bedrock belief—which had made his assignations possible, and had made his betrayals more absurd—was that these women were not worth the sweat on Alice’s brow. They couldn’t be.

  He couldn’t answer her, didn’t undress, just left the envelope on the bed, didn’t look back.

  —

  “And for her to suffer through all this, for her to jump through these goddamn hoops, I mean, fucking days away from the transplant—for her to get this close, and die?”

  Ruggles bit into the burger, appeared oblivious to the meat juice dripping onto his chin.

  “It goes into this other realm,” Oliver continued. “It’s impossible to even call something just, or unjust, right, or wrong, merciful or cruel.”

  “Brah, food’s getting cold.”

  “I can’t even put my head around it.”

  “Beyond fucking reason.” Ruggles picked at a fry, sinking his teeth into its lukewarm density.

  Oliver hadn’t been keen on getting in touch, but he needed to speak to someone, and when they finally did touch base, Ruggles must have recognized something in his voice, because he’d responded immediately, not just asking about Alice but wanting to know where Oliver was right then, and pushing. They should meet up, grab a bite.