The Girl in Times Square

by Paullina Simons

  What a foe. What a formidable opponent.

  On her knees, she folded over, touching the floor tiles with her forehead, prostrate. She hadn’t expected it—feeling so afraid.

  “Arsenic?” She had managed to leave the tiles of the bathroom somehow, get back into his chair. DiAngelo was still at the edge of his desk. “Arsenic—the deadly poison?” she said incredulously.

  “Yes.”

  Lily tried to remember what little she learned about arsenic in school. “Doesn’t continued exposure to arsenic cause cancer in human beings?”

  “Yes. Remember? We treat poison with poison. The cancer cells are also susceptible to being poisoned. So we’re going to poison them.”

  “The drug cocktail didn’t work. Alkeran didn’t work, your wonder drug.”

  “Don’t worry. This will. A new study just completed over at Sloan Kettering showed that patients who have failed all standard treatment for advanced acute promyelocytic leukemia and relapsed, like you, have had a near complete remission when given arsenic trioxide. I think we should try it.”

  “Do we have much choice?”

  DiAngelo paused, before he said not much, no.

  Lily withdrew into a study of her hands. From drawing Milo, they were covered with indelible black 8B pencil that even a shower couldn’t get out. “How big was this study?”

  “Lily, come on, it’s experimental therapy!”

  “How big?”

  “Ten people.”

  “Ten people?” she repeated, looking up at him. “Ten?”

  He nodded, rolling his eyes.

  “How many of them achieved remission, doc?”

  “Six. Out of those, four continued to test negative.”

  “And the other two?”

  “Died.”

  “From the cancer or from the arsenic?”

  “Lily!”

  “I’m just asking,” she said calmly. “So what you’re telling me is, in this broadbased study of ten whole people, six people died?”

  “What’s the matter with you? This isn’t a court of law. Forty percent remission when all else has failed is very encouraging.”

  When all else has failed.

  “What’s the second thing we can try? You said two things. What’s the second thing?”

  “A bone-marrow transplant.”

  Lily perked up a little. “Oh, so what’s wrong with that? I’ve read some good stuff about that on the Internet.”

  “I told you to stop going on the Internet.”

  “I know, I know. But it sounded pretty good. Where do we get good marrow from?

  “Your two sisters. Your brother. They’re the most likely match for a donor. It’s good you have so many to choose from.”

  “So what are we waiting for?”

  Now it was DiAngelo’s turn to quietly study his hands.

  And now Lily was quietly studying her Milo hands again.

  “A bone marrow transplant is extremely invasive and debilitating,” he said at last. “BMT patients need to be in good health, free from disease and infections. Liver, heart, pancreatic functions all have to be fairly normal. Your white cell counts are through the roof again. I’ve never seen them so high, like your body has been fighting an infection for weeks. Your platelets are non-existent. The malignant cells are in record numbers. What have you been doing with yourself? What has your body been doing since I saw you last?”

  “Nothing,” Lily said. Who have I been without cancer, without Spencer, without my mother, my brother? “It’s a Catch-22, what you’re telling me.”

  “Quite a pickle, Lil.”

  “Quite. Arsenic it is then.”

  “Arsenic it is.”

  She stood up, holding on to the chair. “How are the side-effects to having a poisonous solid injected into your veins?”

  “Surprisingly mild.”

  “Well, that’s a relief. When do we start? Tomorrow?”

  “Right now.”

  She tried very hard to be brave. “Blast crisis, Doctor D.?”

  “Blast crisis, Lily.”

  Joy came back into her life. She didn’t live with Lily again, but she came when Spencer was at work to take care of her. She took her to Sloane Kettering on 68th. Paul and Rachel came on days they weren’t working to be with Lily when she received daily infusions of low doses of arsenic, administered intravenously into her newly re-installed Hickman catheter.

  Her family was overwrought. Every time they came to see her, alone or in pairs, they cried. DiAngelo finally forbade them to come until Lily felt a little better. He himself was there every day, even though it wasn’t his hospital or his arsenic to administer. Lily felt so close to him, she donated two hundred thousand dollars to DiAngelo’s Mount Sinai children’s cancer ward. On second thought and with the eleven-million-dollar apartment receding into the horizon of her lost dreams, she wrote a check for a million dollars to the cancer ward, and DiAngelo renamed it Lily’s Ward, and she even cut the red ribbon at the renaming ceremony.

  Arsenic was a slow poison then? Lily began to smell metal in her brain, in her mouth, on her arms, on her pillow. Her tongue felt like a steel gray lollipop. The side-effects of tiredness, of light-headedness she barely noticed, but the poisonous taste in her mouth she couldn’t help but notice.

  DiAngelo came every day. There were no days off for him. If Lily had to take arsenic seven days a week, then by God, he was going to walk five blocks to Sloane Kettering even on his off days.

  “You don’t have to come every day,” she said to him. “The million dollar check cleared.”

  Her body a metal spring of raw nerve endings, there was no touching her, no love for her anymore, but there was for Spencer, and so one night, after she gave him some love, they were lying in bed together, covers pulled up, cozy and warm in the dark underneath, she said, “Spencer, you have a choice, you know. You can stop drinking.”

  He smiled. “Quid pro quo, huh, Lily Quinn? All right, let’s talk about it. You think I choose to drink?”

  “Yes. Of course you do. When you’re sober, and you take the first drink. That’s your choice. We choose what we want to be, how we want to live. It’s my grandmother who didn’t have a choice. My mother’s mother.” Lily’s voice broke. “But it was war then. You understand the difference?”

  Spencer didn’t turn away from her this time, didn’t even prop up to spirit himself for a defense. He remained lying down with a small smile on his lips. Lily couldn’t resist, she leaned over and kissed him. “You’re lucky you’re so cute,” she whispered.

  He kissed her back and then pulled away. “The choices you talk about are theoretical things. This is real, like your illness. This isn’t a conversation over a poker table with five septuagenarian women.”

  “Octogenarian, but whatever.”

  “Lily, you think I choose this? Not to be able to drink at weddings, at Christmas parties? Not to be able to sit with you at dinner and have a cocktail? No more drunk bowling, fun with friends, no mimosas in the middle of Palm Court? You think I choose to drink so that I’m unconscious through a sixth of my life?”

  “Oh, Spencer.”

  “I know who I am, Lily. I have no illusions. I’m a cop. I’m an Irish drunk. That’s who I am. You want to know what my choice is? Where my free will comes in? It’s where I struggle every day, every week, to stave off the need for whisky until I can’t take it anymore, until the staving off becomes in itself the reason to reward myself with Glenfiddich, for being good so long. The longer I keep from it, the more I feel I deserve the most expensive Scotch there is. A month off? It’s Johnny Walker Blue Label for me. No AA, no God, no reason, no fear, no threat keeps me from wanting it. From craving it. That’s ancient war, that’s modern war. You willing yourself to grow healthy blood, to keep going, to keep living even though you have nothing left, that’s war. Me at home every Sunday, desperately trying to keep my idiot brain from convincing me I can have just one, me getting up every Monday and going to work, that�
��s war. What your mother goes through, tell me that’s not war—against herself, against you, against your father.”

  Lily squeezed her eyes shut. “She didn’t do so well.”

  “No. No, she didn’t.”

  “You’re doing better.”

  “A little better. Since you, I’ve been doing better, there’s no denying it.” Spencer smiled. “But I wouldn’t be doing better if I were living in Maui. I’d be just like her, sprawled out on my patio, wondering where my next drink was coming from. You think now that she’s without a foot she wants drink less? You think she’s seen the error of her ways?” Spencer exhaled skeptically. “She wants it, needs it more than ever. Her whole being is concentrated on that single need and she will not rest until she figures out a way to hobble over, peg-legged and all, to the drugstore to get it for herself. She does it the way we all do it—because we are weak and human and cannot help it.”

  Lily watched him.

  He stroked her face.

  “So what’s the subtext of what you’re telling me?” she asked. “After I’m better and our passion hour has passed, you want to be just friends again, Spencer? You want me to find someone else to be with?”

  “No. I just want you to understand that no matter how much we repair each other’s damage, and we do, I cannot be without the drink. That crying room? I can’t leave it. Rather, I leave it, but I can’t not return to it. And that’s no life for you.”

  “What do you know about what I want, what I need for my life? You don’t know. Staying with you, is that at least my choice, or has that also been removed from me?’

  “That’s your choice. Don’t be upset with me. This life is not just the only life I know, it’s the only life I know how to live. I’m being as honest as I can.”

  “I wish you were a little less honest,” said Lily.

  He fell silent in the dark. It was the worst to have him fall silent.

  “Spencer, tell me, do you think this arsenic stuff will work? Forty percent chance. Will it work on me?”

  “Of course it will, Liliput.”

  She tried to move away, crawl away from him on her bed, but he wouldn’t let her, holding her to him from behind, caressing her breasts, his lips nuzzling her head.

  The two of them, in their own pas de deux, lonely, isolated, softly knocking on each other’s souls, in their own Hungarian Dance, she with cancer, he full of a naked and desperate desire for drink.

  I’m exercising my free will, Lily thought, rolling over and wrapping the wraith of herself around him. And I choose you. However, whatever, halved, damaged, wounded, bleeding, dying, drinking, in the crying room with the wolf forever at our door, it’s you I choose.

  Spencer was not around Friday night, Saturday night. Lily didn’t discuss it with him. She didn’t bring it up. She didn’t say, Spencer, I’m having arsenic injections and you’re doing God knows what. She didn’t say that. What she did say with an ahem was, “Spencer, DiAngelo needs me to come in on Friday for an injection and some blood work.”

  “On Friday?”

  “Yes. Arsenic seven days a week. Blood work three times a week now. Is there any way you can come and take me home? Paul and Rachel are working.”

  And he would come.

  And with another ahem: “Spencer, I’m feeling so weak, I can’t carry my paintings downstairs on Saturday morning. Look how many I have now that you’re back. Is there any way you can come and help me carry them down? Maybe put them in the car for me? Help me set up my table?”

  And he would come on Saturday morning, drained like low tide and help her, and then sit wanly in his own folding chair at her table, and the women who would buy her paintings would say, “There he is! There you are—her muse.”

  There I am, Spencer would inaudibly mouth.

  Lily painted a series—seven small oil on canvas paintings that went together called “Whisky in the Hands.”

  Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, each day different hands clutched around the glass of whisky, or around the bottle, the glass empty, full, broken, the hands bleeding. An extremely well-dressed, serious man bought the whole lot without saying anything to her other than, “I’ll give you ten thousand dollars for all of them.”

  “Spencer?” Ahem. “Do you know I’ve never seen Bruce in concert? He’s doing ten shows in Madison Square Garden. I hear Saturday nights is the best time to see him. Ah, well. Tickets are completely impossible to get.”

  And because NYPD was providing police detail for Bruce, Spencer got seats, in the first row to the right of the general admission pit, and took Lily on a Saturday night on the First of July to see Bruce Springsteen play his last concert in Madison Square Garden. For three and a half hours, she jumped for joy, she sang along to twenty-eight songs, she danced through two encores, she was wiped out, she was alive.

  But all of it was nothing, nothing, compared with the best one of all, the charm of them all, even better than cancer. “Ahem, Spence, I’m so scared to be here in my apartment alone. After seeing the face of that Milo, I’m just sick in the stomach. What if he comes? Do you know the other day, I needed milk, and I was so scared, I nearly called the police to escort me to the supermarket.”

  “Liliput, I am the police. Call me.”

  Pause, pause, pause. “I’m calling, Spencer.”

  When he came, he brought his clothes.

  At the start of July, DiAngelo did not come for Lily’s Sunday arsenic injection. She felt his absence acutely; it was like spending a day without a glass of water.

  On Monday morning he came early, without Joy, without joy, his mouth barely able to form into a smile. But it formed somehow.

  “Let’s call your sisters and your brother, Lil. Let’s see if they can match marrow for you.”

  Many things have left me, Lily thinks, in the present tense, as she looks at the doctor, at her doctor, who is looking so defeated, and she doesn’t know what to say because he doesn’t know what to say.

  Lily’s white blood count is increasing in exponential mathematical equations, inversely proportional to how fast her platelet count is decreasing.

  The war still rages where you think you can’t see it, in the middle of a summertime New York, a beautiful, comfortable, peaceful life, and the drum roll please! warns of impending bloodshed ahead. Lily closed her eyes. Lily held her breath.

  “Spencer invited me to the Benevolent Patrolmen’s annual picnic in a few weeks time,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t make too many plans, Lil,” were the words DiAngelo finally spoke. “The marrow transplant is the most important thing.”

  He stopped the arsenic and moved Lily back to his own Mount Sinai and started with outpatient moderate combination drug therapy again—to have something in her. Moderate, because it was the only kind her body could take.

  Spencer shaved his own head again, and then shaved hers. Difference between then and now—when he was done and she was bald, he held her head between his hands and kissed every square of her bristly scalp.

  Lily was not allowed to go to the movies, sell her paintings, walk in crowds, go to restaurants. She painted when she could get up. Spencer put up a chair in front of her easels. When she couldn’t get up she painted on the floor. On Saturday morning it was he who went down to 8th Street, and sat at the table and sold her art, and some of the women who came, they cried. “She’s going to be okay,” he said. “She’s just on bed rest. Look—she’s still painting.” Painting Love.

  Lily’s Love—Spencer on the couch, very big, and Lily on his lap, see-through and receding, and exceedingly small.

  Lily’s love—A brown-haired beautiful woman, sitting on a bench in an overgrown village, in the summer, close to a small blonde girl.

  Back home on her bed Lily lay, surrounded by clocks ticking time away. July. Warm July, the trees full of summer.

  Oh, life. Riddle me this. Who am I? I don’t want to die and not find out.

  I don’t want to die.
r />   Amanda returned early from camping in Montana to give her marrow sample.

  Anne came in to Mount Sinai but not before she cornered DiAngelo and asked for Lily’s prognosis.

  DiAngelo couldn’t get her counts right. She was all topsy turvy—in the double digits for platelets, in the seven digits for white blood cells. Her red cells were kept steady with near constant transfusions. Why did DiAngelo not want to utter a single word of this to Anne? “She is a brave girl. She doesn’t complain,” he said.

  “What’s the prognosis, doctor, what’s the actual prognosis?”

  “Mrs. Ramen, your sister needs a sample of your marrow to see if you can be a possible match for her transplant. Let’s deal with the vital, and then deal with the trivial.” He sped her on to the hospital’s blood lab.

  “Prognoses are now trivial?” Anne said. “Since when? Isn’t prognosis essential in determining treatment?”

  “Yes, we have only one thing to do, and that is to get her what she needs to live—a transplant. So let’s get going with that.”

  “But the odds, doctor, the odds?”

  “I think the odds, despite a difference in temperaments, are very good for a donor match, very good indeed.”

  Lily is Marcus Aurelius, hands pressed together at the fingertips in a zen-like teepee. She is a philosopher.

  Flinch not, neither give up nor despair.

  Suit thyself to the estate in which thy lot is cast.

  Remember this: the longest lived and the soonest to die have an equal loss, for it is the present alone of which either will be deprived.

  Lily is calm, even tempered, takes it all in stride. She is a stoic.

  Until one afternoon, after the Fourth of July weekend, Spencer comes during the day while she’s getting her outpatient chemo and brings her flowers, white lilies, and his white Lily takes them and hurls them on the floor, and says, “Don’t ever give me flowers again.” And then turns her body to Marcie.