“Am I going to be all right?”
“Of course you are.”
“How do you know?”
“I’m sure of it.”
“I just wanted us to have a normal dinner, and now I’ve gone and ruined that, too.”
“We can still have dinner.” But Julian simply stood in the living room and she did as well, and now she was telling him she wasn’t hungry.
“You have to eat.”
“I don’t want to.”
“I’ll go out and get you whatever you want. Chinese, Thai, Italian, you name it…”
“I just want you to stay with me.”
“Of course.”
She went into the kitchen. “What about you? Are you hungry?”
“I’m fine.”
“You shouldn’t starve because of me.”
“Mia…”
She placed the salad bowl on the floor, and having forgotten utensils and failed to make a dressing, she doused the greens with oil and vinegar, pouring them on like kerosene. Slowly, with their hands, they picked at the lettuce leaf by leaf, olive oil coating their fingers. Then she removed a quart of vanilla ice cream, and they hacked away at it as if with pickaxes, managing to get little clumps onto their spoons. But they weren’t hungry, and so they left the rest on the floor for Cooper to eat.
They lay in bed that night, unable to sleep, and the following morning when they got up they took a cab to the hospital.
Back at home, Julian did his best to keep himself diverted. One minute he was transported on the billows of his own hope; the next he was downcast. Three days passed, and Mia hadn’t heard from Dr. Kaplan. Maybe the results had come back already and Dr. Kaplan had been too busy to call. Julian told Mia that a delay might be good. No need to rush if the lump was benign; it was a malignant lump that required swift attention. Half the time they wanted to get it over with, to learn the news no matter what it was, and more than once, Mia picked up the phone to call the hospital, only to think better of it.
Professor Chesterfield’s manuscript had arrived, and for the first day Julian simply left it in its packing.
When he finally opened it, he handed the manuscript to Mia. “Four hundred and seventeen pages,” he said despairingly.
“Is that too long?”
“If anything, it’s too short.” It was 2004, eighteen years since Julian had first studied with Professor Chesterfield, at which point Professor Chesterfield had already been working on his novel for more than twenty years. It was a forty-year project, Julian realized, which came out to ten pages a year. At that rate, it had better read like Joyce, but when he sat down with it, he found the novel uninspiring; fearing he wouldn’t love it, he decided he was going about things wrong, dipping into the book for a few pages, then laying it down. He half suspected, fretful as he was, jumping up with Mia every time the phone rang, that if he’d been reading Joyce himself he wouldn’t have been drawn in, and so he put the manuscript away, believing he had to read it under different circumstances, so as to be fair to Professor Chesterfield.
One night, Julian and Mia caught a movie at the Angelika, and afterward they ate dinner at an Italian restaurant, sharing a chicken dish and pasta, shouting to each other over the noise. The next day they met after work to play racquetball, and when Mia thought Julian wasn’t trying, she said, “Hey, don’t take pity on me!” and she whacked the ball as hard and as low as she could, hitting several consecutive winners and reaching game point before Julian came back to beat her.
Later that night they had sex, and when Mia came she was elated, feeling this was her body and she was fine, though she understood it meant nothing, that, vigorous as she felt, when it came to cancer by the time you didn’t feel healthy it was generally too late and it was only when you still felt good that you had a chance.
Exactly a week after her biopsy, the phone rang, and it was Dr. Kaplan. “How would you like some good news?”
Her heart, her whole body launched. “The lump is benign?”
“The lab results came back an hour ago. You’re fine. Your pap smear was normal, too.”
She was crying. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
“I had nothing to do with it,” Dr. Kaplan said.
But Mia felt that Dr. Kaplan did have something to do with it, that in a way she’d saved her.
“While I have you on the phone,” Dr. Kaplan said, “I think you should start getting regular mammograms. We recommend forty for most women, but because of your mother I would start you now. And women with benign lumps have a slightly elevated risk of malignancy. It’s nothing to be too concerned about, but it should give you extra incentive to pay attention.”
“Oh, I will.”
“One more thing. Am I right in thinking you’re Jewish?”
“Yes,” Mia said. “Why?”
“I assume you know about the Ashkenazi Jewish breast cancer genes. We call them BRCA1 and BRCA2.”
“I’ve heard of them.”
“Well, before you get worried, I’d say you’re not a very likely candidate.” The two genes, Dr. Kaplan explained, accounted for only about five percent of breast cancers, and most women who carried the gene had more than one close relative with the disease. “Your mother was the only immediate family member to have breast cancer, right?”
“That’s right,” Mia said.
“What about on your father’s side?”
“My great-aunt had breast cancer. But that was years ago. I never even met her.”
Dr. Kaplan paused.
“Why? Does it make a difference?”
“Most people don’t realize it, but the gene can be passed down from the father’s side, too. Still, I’d say it’s unlikely. Your father’s family doesn’t have an extensive history, either. On the other hand, your mother was diagnosed relatively young, so we couldn’t rule it out.”
“And if I had the gene?”
“You’d have a greater than eighty percent likelihood of developing breast cancer and a fifty percent likelihood of developing ovarian cancer.” In a way, Dr. Kaplan said, the ovarian cancer would be more worrisome. There was a pretty good chance of catching breast cancer early, but by the time ovarian cancer was diagnosed, it was usually too late.
“So what would my options be?”
“If I had the gene,” Dr. Kaplan said, “I would certainly get more regular checkups. Mammograms two or three times a year, along with an annual MRI.” Some women took Tamoxifen, Dr. Kaplan explained, but it remained to be seen whether the drug was effective at preventing gene-linked breast cancer. Researchers were learning that “breast cancer” was an imprecise term. There were a number of different kinds of breast cancer, each with distinct cell makeups and disease mechanisms. It almost made no sense to call them the same disease.
“Don’t some people get mastectomies?” Mia asked.
“That’s right,” Dr. Kaplan said. “They do it prophylactically. It’s the best way to ensure you won’t get breast cancer. Though I don’t have to tell you that’s a drastic step. Still, if you’ve seen one, two, three people you love die…And a prophylactic double mastectomy reduces your chances to almost zero.”
“Almost zero?”
“I know,” Dr. Kaplan said. “You’d think with a double mastectomy you should get a money-back guarantee. But it’s next to impossible to remove all the breast cells.” Still, Dr. Kaplan said, with a double mastectomy a person could feel pretty safe. As for ovarian cancer, what she recommended was that anyone who tested positive and was past her childbearing years seriously consider having her ovaries removed.
“Well,” Mia said, “this is all very cheery.”
“In the end, it’s a personal decision. How much risk can you tolerate and what kinds of risks? How much do you want to know about things over which you have only limited control?”
“Let me think about it,” Mia said. Julian had come home, and greeting him at the door, Cooper was wagging his tail so hard he was wagging his whole butt. Julia
n seemed to know who had called, for when Mia smiled at him he jumped in the air. And when she got off the phone he popped open a bottle of champagne and they decided to go out and celebrate.
Temperate weather, a delicious meal, feeling robust when she awoke in the morning, the throb of her heartbeat as she ran beside the Hudson, the traffic speeding by her. She noted these things now and was grateful for them. Her subway stalled, she got a ticket for double parking, and she didn’t care. She was, she realized, a survivor cliché, and she hadn’t even survived anything.
“My unflappable wife,” Julian said. “From now on, I dub you Mellow Mia.” He walked about the house imitating her, though he looked less like someone mellow than someone asleep, for his neck lolled and his knees buckled and he seemed to have lost all muscle tone.
But after a few weeks had passed, it became difficult to recapture the dread, or the relief. Things went back to how they’d been before. She submerged herself in work. She went out to dinner with Julian. They played racquetball. They saw friends. But there remained a pall: that she might have the breast cancer gene. Late at night, after Julian had gone to sleep, she would surf the Web, trying to find out whether she had anything to worry about.
She learned that nearly a million Americans carried one of the mutations, which meant that in the population at large the odds were about one in four hundred. But among Ashkenazi Jews the odds were one in forty. What was more, in one study, out of 104 women who had been found to have the mutation, half had no known family history of breast cancer. In almost all those cases, the gene had been passed down silently by the woman’s father.
On the phone with her father, Mia said, “Did anyone besides your aunt have breast cancer, Dad?”
“A cousin of mine had it in her thirties,” he said. “But they caught it early and she was cured.”
“But no one else?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You aren’t sure?”
“How can I be? I’ve never stayed in touch with extended family.”
He was right, Mia thought. She had friends who were close with a large family tree, second cousins, first cousins once removed, everyone descending for an annual family reunion. But her family had never been that way, and her father, at least, looked at extended family with near distaste, as if the very category of “cousin” had been foisted on him. He found blood ties, except for those of immediate family, abstract, a curiosity, and he saw no reason to fraternize with people he had little in common with simply because they shared a great-grandfather. His extended family was the family of physicists; those were the people he wished to spend time with.
“What about Mom? Was her cancer pre- or post-menopausal?”
Her father didn’t respond.
“Dad, did Mom reach menopause before she got sick?”
“I don’t know.”
“Wouldn’t you remember if she had?”
“It’s been ages now, Mia, and we had much more pressing things on our minds than whether Mom had reached menopause.”
“I understand.”
“Is everything all right?”
“Yes.” For years now, her father had resisted going to doctors. He had a superstitious regard for the medical profession; he believed if you paid attention to doctors they’d pay attention to you. He’d been proven right, he believed. Mia’s mother had held doctors in high esteem and it hadn’t done her any good; he, on the other hand, had remained healthy. Since her mother had died, it had fallen on Mia to watch over her father’s health, and it was all she could do, miles away, to get him to go for his annual physical. She hadn’t told him about the breast lump. In fact, the only people she had told were Julian and Dr. Kaplan. She was a private person, and she didn’t want anyone to worry about her, especially not her father, alone in Montreal.
She had a couple of hours off from work, so she stopped by Olivia’s apartment in Alphabet City. Olivia’s place was small, but it was so uncluttered and sleek that it always looked as if she’d just moved in. “You’re amazing,” Mia said. “How do you keep the walls so white?”
Olivia shrugged. “I guess I make things sparkle.”
She did, Mia thought. Olivia and her feng shui. At the center of the living room, across from the couch, sat a brass Chinese trunk, and on the wall beside the window was an ebony side table on which stood a slender glass vase holding a rose. Aside from that, there was little furniture in the room and the walls were bare. Everything was understated, which made sense, Mia thought, for when Olivia had been mentioned in The New York Times, in a review of her dance troupe’s performance, the reviewer had written, “Olivia Mendelsohn glides across the stage with such economy of motion she appears not to be moving at all.”
“Anyway,” Olivia said, “Kincaid likes how I keep things here.”
“Immaculate?”
“No dirty dishes in the sink, no kids’ underwear to pick up, no Parcheesi pieces lodged between the sofa cushions.” She subsided onto the sofa, frowning. “You must think I’m crazy.”
“For keeping house for someone you don’t even live with?”
Olivia shook her head. “I keep house for myself. Still, I can’t help thinking I’m a feminist’s nightmare.”
“Oh, Ol, that’s not true. You’re living alone and supporting yourself. You’re doing what you love.”
“Mia, I’m going out with a married man.”
“But you love him, don’t you?”
“Absolutely.”
Olivia had been with Kincaid for four years now, and long ago Mia had resolved to stop judging her for it. Who was Mia to judge, in any case, when she had slept with her husband’s best friend and nearly lost him over it, when for a time she had lost him? Kincaid had promised to leave his wife, and the fact that he hadn’t made Mia doubt he ever would, but then she didn’t know Kincaid—not well, at least: his relationship with Olivia was, of necessity, secretive—and if Olivia believed Kincaid would leave his wife, Mia was determined to believe it, too.
It was noon, and Mia had called to see whether Olivia wanted to get lunch, but Olivia was still in her sweatpants—she’d been waitressing late last night—so they agreed to have lunch at her apartment.
In the kitchen, Olivia slathered cream cheese on a couple of bagels and placed blueberries in a bowl. A long mirror hung in the hallway, and she stopped in front of it to examine herself. “I hate this,” she said. “I’m losing my looks.”
“You were saying that when you were twelve, Ol.”
“But this time it’s true.”
Olivia claimed she had a bump on her nose and that her chin was misaligned, but Mia could see none of this. Neither, apparently, could men, who had been drawn to Olivia when she was younger and who were still drawn to her; Kincaid wasn’t the only one who had pursued her.
“Remember that Newsweek article that said that a single woman over thirty-five is less likely to get married than be killed by a terrorist? And that was in the days before there were terrorists.”
“You aren’t thirty-five yet,” Mia said. “And they disproved that study,” Mia said.
“Okay,” Olivia said, “so I’m being retrograde.” She sat down at the table. “Sometimes I think Kincaid is with me because I’m the path not taken.”
“Because you’re a dancer?”
Olivia nodded. “Frustrated artists are attracted to me.” Apparently, Kincaid had been a painter once, but there had been pressure on him not to pursue his art, first from his parents and then from his wife, who believed that painting was ultimately an indulgence. He’d considered architecture and graphic design, but he had ended up in investment banking. Then there were kids and bills, the usual things, and he was locked into something he found soulless. “He says I followed my dream,” Olivia said.
“Well, you did.”
“I just wish he wouldn’t romanticize me.”
“Think of it as a compliment.”
“Kincaid wishes he’d done what I’ve done, and what do I want? D
omesticity. Jesus, Mia, I want to cook for him.”
“There are worse things than that.”
“I love to cook, but it’s lame to cook for yourself, and when Kincaid and I are together, he wants to go out.”
“And you don’t want to?”
“Sometimes I do. But more often, I just want to stay home and watch TV with him.”
Olivia retreated to her bedroom, and when she came back she was holding a picture of her and Kincaid. It was a strip of three photos, the kind taken in a drugstore booth, and it made Mia think of her sister from years ago, Olivia with her arm draped over some boy’s shoulder, lipstick smeared across her mouth. “And when we do go out,” Olivia said, “we have to go someplace where Kincaid won’t run into anyone. A few weeks ago, we had reservations at this Italian restaurant I love, but he needed to cancel a couple of hours before because he forgot it was his wife’s birthday. I was torn between being furious at him for blowing me off and thinking, What kind of jerk forgets his wife’s birthday?”
Olivia was standing by the window, looking out at the traffic. Her hair, which had always been lighter than Mia’s, was even lighter now, for she’d begun to highlight it, but aside from that, she looked as she always had. When they were girls, Olivia used to ask Mia to pinch her stomach, but there had been nothing to pinch—that was the point—and there still wasn’t. Even through her sister’s sweatpants, Mia could make out the muscles in her calves. Olivia had been born a month early, had pounded her way out, their mother used to say, and Mia recalled leg-wrestling with her, lying on her back on the floor opposite Olivia and grabbing on. She could hardly remember a time when she’d been stronger than Olivia. Already when she was seventeen and Olivia was twelve she’d landed feet-over-head when she leg-wrestled her. “Have you thought of breaking up with him?”
“Of course I have.”
“But?”
“I love him, Mia. I really do. And…” She looked up. “Oh, God, I can’t believe I’m about to say this.”
Matrimony (Vintage Contemporaries) Page 25
