by Dick Cluster
“Tell me something,” Alex said. “We’ve warded off, and whipped, and spread our wings. We’ve embraced tiger, and according to the list you gave us, we’re going to creep down like a snake and part a wild horse’s mane. But Repulse Monkey is the first time we’ve walked backward, away from something.”
Terry nodded. He was shorter than Alex but twice as wide, an African-American with a classic Chinese build. Everything about him seemed so solid. Maybe that was why Alex felt the need to probe, to tease.
“The only time?”
Terry nodded again.
“And yet a monkey is the smallest and least powerful animal we’re dealing with. I mean, compared like to a tiger…”
Terry blinked his eyes. He always invited the students to ask questions, but he rarely answered them except with a question in return. Even when Alex had asked whether he might be related to Don Newcombe, who’d pitched for the Dodgers when Alex was a boy, that was what Terry had done. Alex’s question had been only half a joke, because after all Newcombe wasn’t all that common a name. It sounded British, especially with the Terrence. Maybe West Indian, Alex had thought. Anyway, Terry had countered with another question: “Do you want to bring your bat next time and see what my fast ball can do?” And that had led to a discussion of planting one foot, shifting weight, directing energy through the hips and ribs into the arm and hand, and other intricacies of the art of tai chi.
“Well, why?” Alex asked now, a little petulantly. “I mean, does a monkey have some especially dangerous significance in Chinese tradition?”
“I don’t know,” Terry said. “Does a monkey have some especially dangerous significance to you?”
“Well,” Alex squirmed. It did, he realized, have one that related to his disease. That was why he didn’t like the idea of retreat. “I mean, sort of like a monkey on your back?”
“If you say so,” Terry replied.
After class, Alex had a habit of taking himself out for breakfast before going to work. When he’d moved into North Cambridge, there had been at least six breakfast joints scattered along the stretch of Massachusetts Avenue above Porter Square. Now they’d become an Indian restaurant, a Mexican one, a sushi bar, a fast-food franchise, and a video rental place. Still thinking about the monkey, Alex downed his eggs and toast at the one place left. He looked up and said, “Thanks, Mary,” when the waitress refilled his cup and cleared away his plate. He was off nitrites (no bacon, no hot dogs) and food coloring (no M&Ms), but once his chemotherapy had ended, he had decided to let himself drink all the coffee he pleased. Mary, the waitress, was a cousin or aunt of his landlady, though he couldn’t remember which. “Listen,” he asked her, “do you know anybody named Lutrello that lives around here?”
“Lutrello? Not that I know about, dear. Manny Lucibello, he comes in once in a while. He brings in the baby, his granddaughter. He buys her a doughnut, she’s a sweet kid. Lutrello, you said. No, doesn’t mean anything to me. You could ask one of the other girls. Maybe they would know.”
“That’s okay,” Alex said. Mary was probably sixty, though maybe not. With that pleasantly puffy Irish face, it was hard to tell. Meredith could pass for Irish sometimes, she said, because of the hair color and the eyes. Alex thought her hair was too dark a red and too limp for this purpose, and her face was distinctively oval, not round. Still, at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, the possibility that her accent was some kind of upscale Irish rather than British did get her past initial hostility at times.
Meredith’s image stayed with Alex as he drove a crowded half-mile to his shop in Somerville, near Union Square. So did what she had said about the vanished baby-sitter, in her clipped, logical tone. “Probably Suzanne’s afraid,” Meredith had reasoned. “First she met Professor Phillips’s boyfriend, and then she let him down. She’ll skip one class for real or pretended mourning, and then she’ll come, sit way in the back, and be relieved when I ask her to stay and talk with me to clear things up. I’ll suggest that she call you, and you can give her a proper bawling out.”
You’re Maria’s parent, not Suzanne’s, Alex had interpreted this to mean. Suzanne isn’t your problem to worry about. Meredith was younger than Alex, only thirty-two in fact, but even she said she always had to remind herself that she was a teacher, not a mother, to these kids. Suzanne was a grown woman anyway, about twenty-three, hardly a kid.
It’s getting tough when people in their twenties seem so young, Alex thought as he pulled his ’75 Saab to the curb in front of the sign depicting a horned, Viking-esque half-man/ half-animal on wheels. BLOND BEASTS, it proclaimed. NORTHERN EUROPEAN AUTOS REPAIRED. Inside, the digital display on the phone machine announced that there were five messages waiting. The first three and the last one turned out to be customers who hoped (vainly) that calling in during the weekend got them on some kind of preferential waiting list. The fourth message, though, was from Suzanne.
“Look, Mr. Glaub— um, Alex,” her voice said. It was rendered thinner and higher-pitched by the poor electronics of the machine. “I lost your number, but this one was in the book. I’m sure your little girl’s okay, isn’t she? She’s a smart little kid. I’m really sorry to let you down. The thing is, the only choices I had were bad. While I’ve got you, can you tell, uh, Ms. Phillips that I’m kind of tied up in a family problem so that’s why I’m not gonna be in class Monday I don’t think.”
Alex rewound so he could listen to Suzanne Lutrello again. Then he reset the machine, changed into overalls, and was about to get to work on the Scirocco, already up on stands, that needed two new universals. But he remembered the Volvo 144 with the broken pump, parked along the narrow driveway, half in and half out of the snow. Its owner had brought it in just before quitting time, pushed down the street by a friend’s Ford van. Alex threw on his coat and trudged through the snow to pour two cans of Drygas and a gallon of fuel into the tank. Couldn’t hurt, might make it start. He’d a lot rather do the work inside than out. He left the Volvo to sit awhile and went back inside the shop.
The U-joint bolts were rusted and recalcitrant, as always. Alex, underneath, hoped the chi— the harmoniously flowing energy he’d freed up during Terry’s class— wasn’t being driven screaming from his back and shoulders by the rigors of reaching and twisting a pair of wrenches at this angle. Still, the process had a ritual about it that was comforting, that was like the Chinese discipline in a certain way. The bolts came off finally, and soon the new, well-machined joints were nestled safely in their spiders, ready to handle thirty thousand miles of torque and stop-and-go. Alex rolled his creeper out from under the Scirocco and went in the back to wash his hands. Then he called Meredith, who he thought would now be back in her office after Women Fiction Writers 1910-30. This was the class Suzanne would have missed.
“She sounded sort of scattered,” Alex told Meredith after reporting what Suzanne had left on tape, “but not especially worried or scared. I won’t hire her to baby-sit again, but I guess she’s probably all right. It’s funny, though. She said ‘family problems,’ not ‘my grandmother died’ or ‘one of my family passed away.’ ”
“Well,” Meredith said, “perhaps you’ll figure that out, and if not, then she’ll eventually explain it to me. Good luck this afternoon. I’ll call you tonight, all right?”
After Alex hung up, he wriggled into his sweatshirt from Maria’s school and covered it with an old parka from which the synthetic fiber was spilling. He trudged out into the cold to try to start the Volvo. The engine turned over but wouldn’t fire. He got out, opened the hood, and reached inside. The fuel-pump bolts were a long reach from above, but happily they came out right away. Even with a new pump, though, the engine coughed and died twice before he could drive the car in. He connected a fully charged battery, started the engine once more, listened to its complaints with a stethoscope applied to various critical points. He called the owner at a downtown office to talk her into a tuneup on top of the new pump. Then, when the Volvo was done, he showered a
nd changed back into the clothes in which he had started the day. Terry’s class already seemed like a long time ago. This was his lunch break, but today he was using it for business of another sort. On his way out he bought a newspaper. There would be a wait at the blood lab, as always. Maybe the paper would reveal who in Suzanne Lutrello’s family had picked Saturday night to die. Alex ate his tuna-salad sandwich on whole wheat as he drove.
At twelve o’clock, the Commonwealth Community Medical Plan was already a zoo. Alex’s doctor, though nowhere to be seen, had left a lab slip at the desk. Alex sat in the waiting area under a poster advertising an exhibit of French Impressionists that had taken place in Amsterdam five years before. On his left, a large teenage boy in a leg cast was reading Hollywood Husbands. On his right, a small, elderly woman who looked perfectly healthy read a thick, oversize volume called the Smithsonian Collection of American Comics. All that his neighbors had in common was never looking at their watches and never looking up. He tried to emulate their example, to concentrate on the local news and obituary pages of the Boston Globe.
The news pages yielded five Saturday deaths, none unusual. On Route 128, the belt highway surrounding Boston, three persons were killed in a late-night crash involving two vehicles; blood alcohol tests revealed that one of the drivers had been drunk. In the suburb of Boxford a woman had been shot by her estranged husband; two hours later he had turned himself in to police. In New Hampshire, a Massachusetts woman had been the victim of an accidental vehicular homicide, hit by a car driven by a Massachusetts man; local police theorized that she had not been able to move quickly enough because she was crossing the road while wearing her cross-country skis. None of the victims, killers, or survivors lived in Dorchester; some had Italian names, but not like Lutrello.
The obituary stories featured a retired linotypist, two retired businessmen, a director of nursing, a high school teacher, and a graduate student. Again, none of them seemed to match up with Suzanne. On this page of the paper, the causes of death were not so clear— only short illness, long illness, in the hospital, or unexpectedly at home. Alex, however, allowed himself to speculate further.
Since his own diagnosis, Alex read obituaries neither more nor less than he used to, probably once every two weeks, usually as a form of procrastination when he didn’t want to put the newspaper down. He did, though, now spend more time guessing at the concealed medical facts. Today he suspected the unlucky nursing director of a malignancy in breast or lung, and the graduate student of adult leukemia. He had never yet seen his own disease, a relatively slow overpopulation of malignant lymph cells, listed as a cause of death. He assumed, however, that a few of the long illnesses of relatively younger persons had been it.
Alex knew it might seem, well, unproductive, but he didn’t consider this hobby of reading obituaries macabre. Like everything else in the newspapers, he thought, obituaries were a blend of entertainment and propaganda. To learn anything, you had to read between the lines. Besides, he was almost always generous in the way he imagined the subjects. For instance, he gave both the nursing director and the graduate student fulfilled lives, good medical treatment, a will to live, and a philosophical acceptance of their deaths before the end. Still, searching for a clue to Suzanne’s family tragedy gave him an added purpose for his hobby today. He had just started to scan the fine-printed alphabetical death notices when his name was called. He skipped to the Ls, but they provided only a Larabee, a Lipkin, a Luciano, and a Lynch.
Carrying the paper with him, Alex chatted with the technician and gave up two test tubes of rich, dark-looking blood. The technician wore surgical gloves to protect herself against AIDS. Alex wanted to reassure her that his blood was not dangerous. The cells of his immune system multiplied too fast, but they were infected by no virus. As far as fighting off diseases was concerned, they did their job.
Once his blood was taken, he went upstairs to Medical Specialties, where he began again to work his way carefully through the death notices from the top: Abrahams, of Brookline, seventy-two, survived by her loving son and daughter, six grandchildren, two great grandchildren, flowers may be sent to… One of the B’s, Brady, had no children and was survived not only by loving parents and siblings but also by a beloved friend. Was that obit language, Alex wondered, for “gay”? He was midway through the alphabet when his name was called again. He folded the paper back to the front page but brought it with him to the examining room. He undressed, sat on the Naugahyde examining table looking at the headlines without reading them. He tried to make his breathing regular and slow. Finally his doctor’s cheerful voice inquired, “Alex?” as she gave the door a proprietary, I-assume-I’m-not-intruding knock.
“Yeah,” Alex said, and she swooped in to announce that he certainly looked fine, and how had he been? “Fine,” Alex said, so Dr. Wagner smiled and said, “Now let’s see what else there is to see.” She asked him bright questions about the car-repair business while feeling carefully the flesh below his ears, in the front and back of his neck, in his armpits, belly, and groin. “Relax your jaw,” she said once, and Alex tried to, though he felt that this kind of instruction was Terry’s department, not hers. She turned away to wash her hands, giving him the sense she was taking time to memorize the shape of whatever she had just perceived. The whole thing was strangely unscientific— no numbers, no instruments, just a laying-on of hands.
“I don’t feel a thing,” she announced when she was ready. “Do you?”
“Well,” Alex said. “Not really, but it’s hard for me to tell.” Now it was time to pop the question. “So— how soon would you be surprised if they came back?”
“Well, in cases of complete remission, which is what I would call yours… as you know, with your particular cell type, we don’t think there are any complete remissions in the sense of cures… in what’s called clinically complete remission, the literature says that tumors can recur as soon as one month later, or as late as three or four or even more years. Then they commonly respond well to treatment again.”
“I understand that,” said Alex. “But in my case— I mean, given, I don’t know, age and history and response to drugs and all that— if they came back in another three months, say, would you be unhappily surprised?”
“I’d be unhappy,” she said. The smile slipped away, but there was no indecision, no considering, no wrinkling of the brow. “Your last course of treatment was, what, two months ago? It would put you on the less… fortunate end of the curve to have a recurrence that soon. It might indicate that we should consider a different kind of treatment. So let’s hope they don’t, all right?” The smile reappeared. “But surprised? I don’t think I get paid to be surprised.”
Alex wondered if the implication was that she did get paid to be unhappy— that the contact with failure was one justification for the exorbitant salaries that doctors received. He didn’t think so. She was talking fast, making up her answer as she went along. Alex understood this. No matter how difficult the questions, doctors, like mechanics, were always supposed to have answers on the tips of their tongues.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s hope it doesn’t. When do you want to see me again, two more months?”
“Yes. You can call on, let’s see, Wednesday, to check your blood work. And call me, of course, if you notice anything wrong. How’s your daughter?”
“Great.”
“And… Meredith?”
Alex noticed the hesitation. It might mean that she’d had trouble coming up with Meredith’s name. Or it might mean that she considered a two-month information gap quite a long one in an unmarried relationship. Meredith had insisted on meeting this Dr. Wagner, of course. By now, they had each been in Alex’s life approximately the same amount of time.
“Twelve months and still counting,” Alex said. “I’ll tell them both you said hello.”
“And… no more adventures?”
This was the problem, Alex thought, about being in a Medical Phase of one’s life, such as he see
med forever destined to be. He liked his doctor fine, but it was a drag to have to tell her everything that might be remotely relevant to his condition— such as the emergency stitches he’d received to close a knife wound in a time that already seemed very far away.
“Not yet,” he smiled. And added, holding onto the opaque smile, “So far, I don’t have any planned.”
Like a good patient, he went back to work. Aside from replaying the conversation about recurrence several times and studying it from several angles, he didn’t think about much besides the job he had to do. Customers came by to pick up their cars. Just as the last one left, and he was punching himself out on the antique time clock he had rescued from a Vermont junk shop, the phone rang one last time. He listened to the recorder click on, listened to his distorted voice dully repeating that Blond Beasts had been reached and, without enthusiasm, advising that a message could be left. I wouldn’t wait that out, he thought. But this caller did.
“Oh shit,” she began. “Oh, fuck this machine. Are you there? This is Suzanne.’’
Alex was across the room in a leap. Obscurely, he felt he was confusing Meredith’s student with his daughter— as if he needed for Suzanne to be all right in order to make her abandonment of Maria okay, no harm done. Or was it the opposite, that he needed her to be in trouble? Anyway, he soared over a heap of parts to embrace the phone. “I’m here. This is Alex. Suzanne.”
“Tell Ms. Phillips, please, that I’m kind of in trouble and I need her to help me out. I want her to meet me for a drink, up in Saugus where I am.” Alex thought she was breathing fast, catching her breath. Now that she was talking to him, rather than railing at the machine, her speech had a rehearsed rather than extemporaneous sound. “Do you know the Typhoon, that restaurant, the Typhoon?”
