Alice & Oliver

by Charles Bock

  “Of course,” I say.

  The rules: I cannot be in crowds; I cannot take public transportation; I cannot be in places with dust; I should not be around a construction site. What about a newly renovated apartment? “No newly renovated apartments,” Blasco responds. “Nothing with dust still settling.” I know my husband enough to see him processing the answer.

  Then I realize: “We need to call my mother.” I address Oliver, rousing him from whatever he’d been mulling. “I want Doe home as soon as I am.”

  Oliver takes his time. “Are you sure we can take care of her?” He asks me to hear him out, tells me he misses the baby, too. He wonders if it would be wise to wait a week or so. “Just until you get stronger?”

  He wonders if my mother can come for a little while, whether she can take off any more days from work.

  “I’m recovering early,” I protest. “I’m already ahead of schedule.”

  “Everyone is pleased with how you are progressing.” Blasco smiles, patient as always. “What we don’t want, is for your baby to come back and give you a cold. Then, four days, you are right back here with me.”

  “This whole thing bites us right in the ass,” Oliver says.

  They are nervous Nellies, says my mother. She’ll get everything packed. She can load it into the car and drive down in an afternoon. Just give her the word. And so we continue riding on so much goodwill and radiant love. It’s humbling, how many people continue to go out of their way for me, how much effort has been lavished upon me. Oliver agrees. Blasco nods and seems a bit choked up and tells me again how impressed he is, but that we have to be very careful. When the doctor and nurses are gone, Oliver and I are alone, and I tell him that I know he’s taken good care of me. I know it hasn’t been easy on him. I have a lot of feelings about him right now, I say, but I would be wrong to not thank him for this. His eyes are wide, his face half-contorted.

  “I was thinking. Williamsburg has those big lofts. What if we buy another rattrap and fix it up? I liked doing that. We could wait until you are good to go and it’s safe to move. It’s one of those hoods your übercool friends love, right? We find a building with an elevator. Stay there long enough for you to figure out what’s next. Let Doe get a little bigger. See if the neighborhood develops.”

  He’s aged so much. Through his brow and tired, baggy eyes, here is a boy, pleading.

  “I just want to get out of here,” I answer.

  “Yeah,” he says.

  “We’ll figure the rest.”

  “Yeah?” he asks.

  “We will,” I say. “We’ll try.”

  This is as much as I can give right now, and he must understand, because his hand grips mine. Soon he will be cleaning the room, carefully removing the pictures and cards from the wall, then removing the tape, then folding the posters, and putting them away, placing them in a shoulder bag I long ago received for working some show. He stacks the cards. He starts folding my clothes. Soon he will go downstairs and pick up my many prescriptions from the pharmacy.

  One thing I am going to have to learn to do for myself is change the dressings that surround my central line. It needs to stay in for a while after I am discharged, insurance against something going wrong, so I must be responsible for it staying clean. Nurse Hwan puts the sealed plastic kit in front of me and gives me instructions: put on gloves, put down a sterile tarp, put on a mask. Always have a box of extra gloves nearby. When the kit is open, put on a new pair. Wipe with the sponge to help the tape come off. Cap your dressings in the same order every time: red, white, blue.

  I watch. I try to learn. I am going to have to learn so much again.

  The physical therapist—younger than me, tall and dark-haired, hatefully skinny—knocks and peeks her masked head inside. Justine asks if I feel like getting out of the room. “One time around the floor. Let’s get you walking.” I am stunned, a bit worried, but at the same time, the possibility is exciting, and Justine makes it easy to get swept up, her positive attitude contagious. I am stronger, but it still takes me time to rise, don the proper garb. Justine is patient and competent and grounded, and between us we figure out that this is the first time I will be out of a hospital room in twenty-five days. This time I am not doing the rounds with Oliver. I am not walking with Merv. It’s me and the therapist. I am learning to do it by myself.

  My steps are painfully slow: short, tentative shuffles. Once I’m home, well-meaning acquaintances will ask how I’m doing, and hear that I am doing well, and often will get the wrong idea, which is understandable—people think of doing well as having recovered, reverting to normal, with deadlines to meet, crosswalks to rush through as the light switches to red. But for me doing well is being able to hold down a sip of soup, take bites of a cracker. I can’t eat anything that’s been reheated, am stuck eating mostly frozen dinners. Reheated rice will get me puking like a fountain. Not losing weight during a given week is a success.

  With time my hair and eyebrows and pubes will grow back in, but curly, and in a much darker shade, a chestnut brunette. I also have a different blood type. My fingernails broke off and are starting anew. There are weird scars on my tummy. All sorts of challenges await me at home—I have no energy, no appetite; I’ve lost muscle mass and muscle tone, have all sorts of problems with cramping and muscle locks. I will spend aeons sitting in my desk chair, holding my child, while watching friends carry out the most basic household activities for me. I will be reading to her in bed and will fall asleep well before she does and Oliver will wake me when she’s crying and worried. We will become obsessives about hand washing, small bottles of Purell resting on every flat surface, always within grasping distance. Twice a week, on Tuesday and Friday, like clockwork, I will visit the hospital for blood draws, plasma transfusions, breathing treatments, for medicines to deal with bizarre side effects, for medicines to deal with the side effects of the medicines that dealt with the side effects. The constant scourge of graft-versus-host threatens, with feints and jabs, landing, or perhaps not; the bad meal that sets me back a month; the living hell of a Saturday afternoon spent waiting to see someone in the cancer center emergency room. As much as I hate the hospital right now, I will grow to despise it even more, feeling disgusted and terrified each time Oliver wheels or walks me through those sliding doors. I concentrate, clear my mind, meditate, chant; all revolving around the idea that my cancer is gone, I am healthy. Yet constant is the fear: this thing remains a part of who I am, deep inside, dormant, waiting to start all over again and take another, more serious run. I know I’m not alone in this fear. Any foul mood or stray cough jerks Oliver to attention. A single sneeze or blemish, any body fluid looking even slightly out of the ordinary, jerks the entire ward into action. Should my body temperature creep to triple digits: more blood draws, yet another biopsy.

  Yet I am in the top ten percent of respondents and recoveries. This is one of Dr. Blasco’s frequent refrains. He’s been upstanding no end, a prince in this city of heathens. Oftentimes, he wears open-collared tennis shirts, sometimes sweaters appropriate for ski resorts. Our appointments usually begin with him volunteering small details about his children. I know he uses his kids to underscore his points. Whenever I’m frustrated by restrictions, he’ll say, “As you know, I have two small boys, so I do understand a bit.”

  There’s no way to brace myself for the amount of effort it will take before I can walk to the corner of my street. Over and over, I tell myself I do not need to be better all at once, I just need to do better than yesterday. I need to trust in my improvement, whether I can see it or not. Four weeks and three days after I am released from Whitman, the sky will be filled with lazy, fat clouds, the cold bone-chilling. I will walk for twenty minutes and only take two breaks to lean on metal garbage cans, and when I make it all the way around my block and back to my front door, it is a major victory—if I had the energy, I would raise my hands over my head like Rocky. In another four months, I will have even more stamina. I will be doing tai chi in my
room, will be antsy for action, ready to eat in restaurants and push my child in her stroller. When I am tested, my T-cell count is 170, still in the range of a patient with full-blown AIDS.

  Somewhere in the midst of all this, Oliver and I will try to have sex. We will use an ocean of lubricant and the pain will be significant, not the shocked discomfort that came while losing my virginity at fifteen in the back of an old Subaru, or the intensity I felt when I pushed my child out. But a quake nonetheless. Still, my body will start to lubricate. I feel electricity where I haven’t felt it in ages. We will not go for long before I turn sore, ask to stop, and Oliver withdraws. I handle him for a bit, and soon he asks me to squeeze his balls, something he’s never done before, not in all our years. I can’t help but wonder where this came from. Still, I fulfill his request; he finishes, his voice going high for a slight grunt, his body shuddering, contracting, and then collapsing. We hold one another. The electric sensations continue for a while through me. I wish I knew what to think about this. I know that I don’t need to.

  I am luckier than I can ever express. I know this is true. It takes two hours for the orderly to arrive at my room with the wheelchair that will guide me to the special elevators, and down to the hospital exit. The sun is low by this time, the sky has a silver glow that coats everything below—buildings and cars and pedestrians. The autumn breeze on my face is thrilling: the first natural weather I’ve felt in so long, it hits me like a song that I once adored but haven’t heard for a decade. Oliver is already filling the trunk of a cab with my suitcases. The orderly makes sure to position my wheelchair at a horizontal angle, as close as possible to the open yellow door, so that I don’t have to do much more than rise a bit and fall into the backseat. It is fantastic and foreign and unfolding so plainly. “I can’t believe this is happening,” I say. Oliver’s arm is wrapped around me. He is saying sweet things, how proud of me he is, and while I hear the words, they don’t quite register. After all this time, the black box finally lifted off my chest. Only the sensation that has filled in its void is not lightness but one I scarcely recognize: something foreign, almost hollow.

  Tones of pink and light blue and a purplish orange fill in the spaces between the spikes of midtown’s towers and creep along the vanishing line of the horizon. Clouds are gathering in the south, the high sky darkening, a steel gray that promises rain. We pass the giant naval destroyer, covered in shadows, dormant, parked in the dock. The waters of the Hudson appear choppy and gray, white crests and dirty metal. Cars move slowly toward the logjam for the Lincoln Tunnel. The oncoming evening, the glittering urban panorama, its chilled beauty, its hugeness, life unfolding and all that awaits, chokes me up. I remind myself to breathe, let myself exhale. I see her large hazel eyes. Her joyous face. I see her and at the same time cannot see her, cannot imagine how much she has grown, how her face has evolved. But I don’t need to, do I? I don’t need to know the answers. I don’t need to know more than the next breath. All of this is happening. And when my child arrives home, my arms will be open, waiting.

  May, Third Wednesday, Early Afternoon

  TOUCHING HER FINGER to the rectangle of glass swept away one image, brought forward the next. In this new one she was sucking in her cheeks, blooming her lips outward, as if mocking, or offering the prospect of a kiss. Her dirty hair was slicked back into a bun so hard that it pulled the skin of her forehead. Her face was dominant: saucer eyes focused, those pursed cheeks. No morgue-red lipstick today, no morbid crypt-black eyeliner—tasteful and appropriate she’d been ordered, and it was one of those orders she could not blow off. The photo showed her holding her phone at the distance of an arm’s length, toward the large-scale bathroom mirror. The sleeves of her respectful, oversize black blazer had been rolled back into cuffs, whose white lining dwarfed her fingerless gloves and all but enveloped her gripped iPhone. The subtle pattern of her dress—red cherry blossoms and orange lilies—was all but invisible, blending into the blackish blur. In the small slit of space where her dress parted, however, there was a flash of thigh, the muted pattern in the webbing of her tights, large flowers sewn in outline. Couldn’t get more tasteful than that. The photo provided confirmation, the reflection she wanted: sophisticated, sexy, untouchable. Maybe could pass for early twenties.

  One thing about School of Performing Arts, everyone had some kind of project. Two other sophomores had started their own fashion line—out of one of their mom’s basement, naturally—and they’d paid her two hundred to model clothes on their website. For whatever reason part of the photo shoot had been on the High Line, the old elevated rail system that had been transformed into a seriously gorgeous walking park. Tourists had gawked while she’d done classic ballerina poses in hip-hop garb designed by rich white kids. The shoot had held up all the foot traffic and the park rangers had made them leave and they’d done the rest nearby, on side streets of the Meatpacking District. It was gritty, with hints of danger and street art—kinda like Bed-Stuy and Bushwick—but at the same time classy, upscale. Ever since, she and her girls had started to come down for adventures. She was against people having too much unnecessary crap, but you didn’t need to be a materialist to appreciate the couture in stores like Alexander McQueen and Comme des Garçons, plus Stella McCartney’s first U.S. store was straight up banging. Grab some lattes, a cupcake, maybe the newest thing, a mash-up between a cake and croissant and donut (off the charts on the calorie front, someone would say, eyes flashing with delight). Maybe head over to Ninth Ave to buy some single loose cigs from one of the remaining Mexican delis, bounce over to the Apple Store. The High Line was lamer now that redevelopment people had gotten all graffiti off the neighboring buildings, but the Meatpacking District was still flush with trendy glass hotels, gorgeous restaurants, wine bars, and rooftop nightclubs where bouncers had to pick you out of a line. Maybe one night she’d wear this outfit, try out her new fake ID. Sometimes, hearing about her sojourns, her dad would get all back in the day, especially if he had a few drinks in him, unrolling his grumpish, dreamy, we-used-to-have-to-walk-five-miles-in-the-snow tales about transvestite hookers on the corners. It was hard to imagine. She had no memories of being a baby, or ever living down here, let alone what her mom must have gone through.

  Gawd. Today was an all but guaranteed drag.

  Her phone was vibrating off the hook, texts doubtless asking where she was. Doe did not answer them but booked it through the reception lobby, into the brightly lit bullpen of partitioned work areas and cubicle spaces, its always rotating staff of stylized and slightly haggard men and women, most seeming just a bit older than her. Down the farthest row, steel desks guarded doors to corridors of power: Corporate Slave Janice was chained to her desk like always, this time eating some sort of curry. She got passed with perfunctory mumbling—Hey, Janice, running late, I’ve got to—and a wave that fell somewhere between perfunctory and embarrassed. No slowing, no knocking, defense shields powered up, more than ready to catch whatever hell was coming her way, she sort of burst and stumbled at the same time.

  “It needs to be better. Much better. The interface has to take on more responsibilities.”

  On the other side of the office, behind a desk of polished steel, the large woman broke away from her smartphone long enough for her mushroom of hair to shake. As she made the universally accepted motion for just a sec, her blouse caught the light. What at first glance appeared to be a black fabric instead revealed itself as deep, roasted chestnut.

  “Right,” said Tilda, speaking into her boy-band headset. “Only you’re not talking about the most technologically savvy group in the history of time.”

  Doe had been visiting this oblong building of cool, dark blue glass as long as she could remember—ever since she stayed up late trying to decide whether she liked princesses or fairies better. Through all of it: problems holding her pencil, playground dynamics, growing-pain leg cramps, her first menstrual stuff, anything she couldn’t go to anybody else about, she ended up looking at the backdrop
of floor-to-ceiling windows, their meeting-point power corner, the endless and waiting sky. Schlep had been that rarest of magazines: not only surviving but adapting to the electronic age, transforming itself into “the centralized Internet lifestyle resource for Jewish seniors on the go.” Auntie Tee had survived as well: her grumbling and malcontent earthiness serving her well, her persistent pigheadedness (as well as the lack of a significant other) giving her license to stay late after work, make sure shit got carried out and done right. Freelancer to associate to senior editor, she’d become indispensable. Senior vice president, complete with profit sharing. Even the long-standing joke about her brown outfits worked for her, now something of a personal brand: flowing chocolate shawls, suit and skirt sets in decadent russet shades.

  Doe pantomimed apology and softly stepped into the large, minimal office. Clean lines and muted colors, with small towers of books stacked along white shag, floating racks of imperfectly hung clothes. Reaching the table of thick glass, she eyed the ceramic bowl of jelly beans, then passed it, instead sitting on the edge of Tilda’s desk. She picked up and put down the doorstop masquerading as Vogue’s September issue, then opened her auntie’s purse, looking for a floating twenty or whatever.

  Tilda’s eyes went wide. “Hey you.” A flurry of motions, as if Doe were a bee that needed knocking away.

  “Just joking.”

  Sounds forced Auntie’s attention back to her conversation. “Right,” Tilda said. “Listen, I have another appointment, I gotta go….Yeah….I know….I gotta—Sorry, we’ll talk tomorrow.” She pressed a button, waved the device away from her body. “Motherfuckers.”

  Motioning for the purse, she took the heavy bag from Doe, dug around, handed Doe money. “I told you we’re putting the Schlep name on an app, calling it the Schlapp. Ridiculous, right? But cute. Thing is, it’s not just for seniors. I mean, it is, but these are Jewish seniors. The Schlapp has to do everything for them. Buy their plane tickets, confirm and check them in, dress those bubbies on the morning of their flight, deliver them to their gates, fasten their seatbelts, even gather their luggage onto the cart afterward. Our programmers don’t seem to get it.”