“Isn’t this the strangest pickle we find ourselves in?” she wrote. “I’ve done a lot of thinking about the word ‘hope’ in the last sixteen months, and am no closer to a definition that I can internalize and live with than I was the day Bob was diagnosed. Few diseases present the unwilling participants so little hope, right out of the gate. I have been looking for hope for so many months now, and some days I no longer even know what to hope for. Surgery was what we hoped for, and we got there. And now we’re here, not exactly where we expected to be. Have you figured out ‘hope’ yet? And if so, would you mind sharing?”
Pacific Gas and Electric was working on the power lines over our house, and to do this, they had employed helicopters that now hovered overhead eight and sometimes ten hours a day, their propellers whirling, engines roaring so loud that if Jim and I were outside in our spot on the patio at the end of the day—our oasis—we’d have to yell to make ourselves heard to each other. Because the normal power to homes in Hunsaker Canyon had been shut off, a generator was also operating nonstop. Even in the middle of the night, we could hear it.
The whole thing rattled my nerves in a way that nothing we had known over the previous twelve months had. One day I placed a call to the number PG&E had provided for the person overseeing the project. “You’d better hope there isn’t a Vietnam Veteran living on this road who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder,” I told her, “because if there is he might just put a gun to his head.”
Ten minutes later a police car pulled up, with three officers who wanted to speak to my husband, investigating my call.
“Do you consider yourself at personal risk?” one of them asked Jim. (Well, yes, there was this problem of pancreatic cancer, he might have told them. But no, he was not afraid of his wife.)
“Do you have any firearms in the home?” one of the other two inquired of Jim. (Yes again. Jim’s rifle and shotgun from target practice in the Owens Valley, along with various old guns he hadn’t taken out in years, but he was wise enough to shake his head.)
I wanted to say something, but my guard dog stopped me. This was no time for registering opinions about noise pollution and its effect on the psyche.
“Let’s go to Guatemala,” I said to Jim, after the police cars pulled away—still yelling over the roar of the hovering helicopters.
So we did.
This time there was no more hiking, and no more making pizza in the pizza oven, now that Jim no longer ate gluten. No swimming, no making love. Still, we could sit on the patio and remember when we’d done those things, and pretend to each other that we’d do them again. It would be easy to call this behavior denial, or just plain delusion. But for us, as much as we tried to live in the moment, part of the moments we experienced now required a belief in our future together. Travel—sometimes on planes, sometimes just in our imaginations—provided that.
Did I actually suppose that cancer wouldn’t find us in Guatemala? Or on the barge trip we’d hoped to make through the canals of Holland, or in New Orleans, where Jim’s old friends Al and Susan urged us to visit, or to the little cabin we used to rent on Silver Lake?
Some people, looking at the list of all the places we’d gone to since Jim’s diagnosis, and the longer list of places we tried to go—might suppose we were attempting to pack in as much living as we could while this was still possible, but it was never a burning need to experience some place or another that sent us out into the world. Sometimes being in our house just felt too sad.
There sat the Jeep that was going to take us to the Owens Valley together—the engine idle for so long now that we would later learn (but only when we went to sell it) that rats had built a nest there. There sat the outdoor ping-pong table where we’d pictured having a daily match with each other—with full knowledge that the only way I’d ever get a point off of him would have been for Jim to play left-handed. There was the music room, where Jim would have played with his band on Sundays, and the office where he would have practiced law, the long table where we had pictured our children gathered round—or friends—for big, happy meals and after, music and conversation late into the night, and if they drank more than a person should, there was the gypsy caravan out in back, where they could sleep it off. And there was the pergola where the wisteria had bloomed that first day we rode Jim’s motorcycle to check out the house—though there too was the rat, whose resistance to every effort we’d made to get rid of him had come to feel like some kind of curse.
Hunsaker Canyon represented everything we’d thought we’d make of our life together. Much of it abandoned. Hunsaker Canyon was also the place we’d returned to that day we received the diagnosis, the place where the two of us had experienced the greatest devastation of our lives. We had worked so hard to get that house but as much as we loved our home, there was a certain relief in driving away from it.
72.
A week after we got back from Guatemala, Jim returned to Boston to check in with the doctors at Beth Israel. Five months had passed since the surgery, and they wanted him to have not simply another scan but an MRI.
Jim wasn’t afraid of much, but one thing he hated was tight, closed spaces. I had seen him choose not to get into a BART train, coming home from the city, if it looked too crowded. Even an elevator sometimes made him uneasy. But an MRI would be harder than those.
The first time he tried to have one, he panicked, and they had to shut the machine down. They rescheduled for a few days later, but this time he took Valium. I was back home, so a friend who lived nearby—a former writing student who’d offered to help—agreed to bring him to the hospital for the procedure and, later, to pick him up.
When he got out of the MRI, Jim was still heavily drugged. Forbidden to eat for all the hours leading up to the MRI, he was hungry, so she brought him to the hospital cafeteria, where he’d ordered a big meal.
He took a few bites and got violently sick. In his drugged state, he had forgotten to take his Creon pills—those enzymes crucial for digestion now—and my friend had known nothing about the requirement that he do this. She drove him back to Jason and Karen’s house, where a full night passed before the worst of the pain of his mistake was behind him.
Suddenly the thought came to me, what would happen if some crisis occurred—a strike maybe, or a world financial collapse or a war—that left us unable to procure Jim’s pills. He could not take a bite of food without them.
“We need to begin setting extra pills aside,” I said to Jim—I, a woman for whom the prospect of a world financial collapse or a war now signaled one thing above all others: the prospect of a Creon shortage. I added this to the long and growing list of assignments on my yellow legal pad: Stockpile pig pancreas enzymes.
73.
An e-mail from my friend Deborah in Syracuse.
“The mourning never stops for some loss or another,” she wrote. “Even little things. Bob doesn’t make the coffee anymore. (Stab through my heart.) I am so weary of begging Bob to drink that I truly could just scream. My day is disorganized into ten-minute intervals of fielding phone calls from bat-shit crazy Medicare zombies, running to pick up meds (that someone got wrong—more phone calls and trips back to pharmacy), keeping feeding tube running, meds, meds, meds, ‘what can I get you?’ ‘how do you feel?’ ‘does anything hurt.’ On top of taking out the trash, feeding the animals, scheduling appointments, making hotel reservations, why hasn’t this scan been ordered yet (more e-mails to appropriate providers)?, maintaining the cars, paying the bills, keeping up with laundry, kids, friends.
“If we both make it through this goat rodeo, it will be a wonder if we’re not BOTH stoners! Right after Bob got sick, everyone who walked into the house brought some kind of pot, which we have stashed for the time being. But it calls to me on a regular basis. I feel like I can never let my guard down, as some shit is always just about to hit the fan. You know what I mean.”
And I did, of course. Though for me, what beckoned was wine. Two full glasses every night now, an
d once I’d finished the second, it seldom felt like a bad idea to pour a third.
74.
Jim started every day on his laptop. He loved news from the world of science, and reported to me whatever discovery had been made, especially if it concerned life in our little solar system or beyond it, in the galaxy. Then, though it generally made him mad, he’d turn to the news of the political world. Donald Trump’s name was in the news a lot now, though it was still impossible to believe that anything would come of this.
But more than any of the rest of it—politics and science or online Scrabble—what occupied Jim now were websites devoted to fast cars. More and more, that fall, I would find him studying some online write-up about a particular new model. He loved his Boxster, but it was old—no longer as responsive as it had been once, and the mechanism on the convertible roof no longer functioned. The Boxster sat under a tarp now, as it had for months, leaving Jim with a 2007 Prius as his daily driver. Hardly a car to suit a man with a James Bond persona—Don Diego, The Most Interesting Man in the World.
Jim knew all the great models of fast, expensive cars, and studied the statistics about them, read reviews from Car and Driver, not to mention the biography of Elon Musk, creator of his all-time favorite vehicle, the Tesla. That one was out of our price range, but it seemed to me he should have the pleasure of sitting behind the wheel of a vehicle he loved to drive. He’d worked hard all his life. So much was gone. Here was a pleasure still within reach.
“We can sell the Prius,” I said. “Let’s get you a new car.”
Jim pointed out the practical realities, though he didn’t have to. He was hardly earning any money as a lawyer anymore. I’d run up a major charge-card debt while Jim took cash from his savings every month for all our medical trips, and everything else. We were burning through money, throwing cash at cancer.
At another moment in our lives, our finances could have looked like our big problem, but at this one I gave little thought to dollar signs—not because we had an abundance of money, only because we had a far greater abundance of trouble. If a moment presented itself in which a few extra dollars could help get us through the day, I was seldom reluctant to spend them. If Chilean sea bass at $29.99 a pound could provide a little pleasure—after five days of hospital meals—was I going to conclude it was too expensive and opt for canned tuna instead?
That afternoon I accompanied Jim to the BMW dealership. My idea, not his.
More prudent types—which would be just about everyone we knew—might have opted to lease a car there, but I urged him to buy one outright. I wanted Jim to have a picture of a future with miles ahead, and road trips with me. It made no sense, but the magical-thinking part of me chose to believe that if we spent enough money, we might actually buy ourselves a future.
We did not purchase an absolutely new BMW. The one Jim chose, encouraged by me, was a 2015 model, with eight thousand miles on it. But it was a top of the line M3, with a sunroof and a Harman Kardon sound system and heated seats and Sirius radio and a special set of sensors in the front that showed you, on a screen by the steering wheel, exactly how much space there was in a tight parking spot, or whether some obstruction lay behind you, backing up.
I didn’t even ask the price of the car. It was Jim’s business, Jim’s money, and later, after he’d filled out the paperwork, it made me happy to sit beside him in the passenger seat (bare feet on the dashboard, my usual position) as he drove that car home.
When we reached Hunsaker Canyon, he had sat in the driveway, his head resting on the steering wheel. “I’m crazy,” he told me. “I should never have spent so much. I could be dead in a year.”
At that moment, I would have done anything to fend off despair. Pull my clothes over my head and run naked around the car, waving my hands. Crank the Sirius XM radio to top volume, blasting Guns N’ Roses. Set fire to a hundred-dollar bill.
“This is a perfect vehicle for us,” I told Jim. “You can take curves fast in this car, and sleep in the back on our road trips.” On the BMW lot, we had actually put down the seat and stretched out side by side in the back to see if we could sleep there. We could.
“I’m going to load the sound system with rock and roll,” Jim told me, patting the leather dash with the Harman Kardon speakers. “Then I’m going to bring you to the Owens Valley in this car, baby.”
75.
I had my fantasy too. Jim thought about cars. For me, it was houses.
My whole life, I’d been on a quest to find my home. I thought I’d found it in Hunsaker Canyon, but then cancer sent me back into flight, searching for something I could not even have named. A safe place to hang my hat, where trouble couldn’t reach me.
Some years before, in my early days with Jim, I’d bought a little shack that sat on the shore of a pond in New Hampshire, on a half-acre of land with an outhouse. Nothing great, but for me it had represented my toehold in the place I still considered my true home, though I hadn’t lived there for twenty years. It was typical of Jim, and the way he accepted me and my choices for my life, however odd, that he never questioned this purchase at the time, though it never made any sense. When did I think I was going to spend time in this cabin of mine? Where was the money coming from to fix it up? Two questions he never asked.
Two years after I’d bought the place, when we were scrambling to come up with the down payment for our place in Hunsaker Canyon, I’d sold my little shack—at a loss—and the money had made the purchase of the Hunsaker Canyon house possible, though Jim had contributed far more than I did.
That fall something possessed me to make a Google search for “Lakefront properties, New Hampshire.” I had less than three thousand dollars in my bank account at the time, and little prospect of more anytime soon—having barely worked for over a year by this point. Looking at New Hampshire real estate was a little escape, I told myself. When things were roughest, I dreamed of swimming at the New Hampshire lake house of my dreams.
A lot of listings showed up in my e-mail then, but I never saw a house I loved. Most of them sat on tiny pieces of land, with neighbors on both sides and a postage-stamp piece of beach. Inside, they tended to look the same. Home Depot cabinets, low ceilings, tiny dark bedrooms. Those houses all cost way too much, and I didn’t want them anyway.
Then sometime in late October, a listing showed up that was different from all the others. This house sat on two and a half acres of land on a dirt road with no nearby house on either side and a long strip of beach on a small, beautiful lake that did not allow motorboats. The house itself had been built in 1900, with a wide porch wrapping around two sides. Inside, the walls were old pine, and the kitchen looked as if nothing had been changed since around 1955, which was probably the case. The property had remained in the same family for fifty years at least.
The house itself sat on a rise overlooking the lake. Down at the water there was a boathouse with a deck. I knew right away that if this place were mine, that boathouse would be where I would set up my writing desk and where I’d sleep.
Where Jim and I would sleep, I said.
The price on this house was lower by far than any other I’d looked at. And one more thing: It was a twenty-minute drive from where my daughter Audrey lived. Twenty-five minutes to the little town of Harrisville, where Jim and I were married. My friend Danny lived nearby, and other old friends too. The farm stand where I’d always bought our corn back in the days I’d lived on our old farm was five miles down the road.
I had no money and no borrowing power. Still, I developed a little ritual. Every afternoon around five, usually before dinner when Jim was taking a nap, as he did more and more these days, I’d head up to the writing studio where I no longer wrote anything. Glass of wine in hand—wine, an essential part of my day by this point—I’d open up the website of that house on Whittemore Lake and click through the pictures.
I got to know that place so well I could have drawn a blueprint. I had studied the old gas stove in the kitchen, the ugly flowered
couch in the living room, the rocking chairs on the porch. I could have told you the china pattern of the teapot in the hutch.
I asked Danny to drive by the place for me. “It faces west,” he told me. “Good sunsets. Totally quiet except for the loons.”
I was still only dreaming, but it was a comforting dream. I asked Danny to call the Realtor. The afternoon of his visit to the house—late November by now—he called me again.
“There’s not one thing you wouldn’t love about this house, Joyce,” my friend told me.
In late December, I clicked on the website of the New Hampshire lake cottage. Flipping slowly through the familiar images on the screen, the thought came to me. “What if one day I click on this website, and the property’s been sold?”
It was five o’clock on the West Coast. Eight P.M. in New Hampshire. Still, the listing agent for the house had picked up his phone. I named a price, many thousands of dollars lower than the one being asked for the place. A crazily low figure.
“I’ll get back to you,” he told me.
Ten minutes later he did.
When I shut down my laptop and went to make our dinner, Jim was sitting in the kitchen, reading the political news. “I just put an offer in on that house,” I told him. Weeks earlier I’d shown him the pictures, but hadn’t mentioned the house since.
“They accepted it.”
He did not miss a beat, my husband. “That’s really great, baby,” he told me. Except for one time I had proposed that we get three puppies from a particularly irresistible litter at the SPCA, I cannot think of a single moment in our time together when Jim ever told me not to pursue what I had my heart set on.
I wasn’t clear where the cash would come from, but I had a little time to work that out. My long-delayed novel was set for publication that February, and though the money I’d get when it did was spoken for a half-dozen different ways, I now saw it as going to the down payment on our New Hampshire cottage.
The Best of Us Page 24
