The Half-Life of Everything

by Deborah Carol Gang

  “What about publicity? We’re still living in fear of a national news blitz.” David asked this but he knew he spoke for Kate too.

  “We did issue a very guarded press release when we filed the last interim report, but it hasn’t attracted much attention. Perhaps there have been so many ‘breakthroughs’ that proved to be false hopes that the media isn’t as interested in us now. It will still happen, but maybe we have more time than we’d thought. Still,” he said, “don’t let down your guard.”

  “I’m glad that crying wolf has worked to our benefit so far,” Kate observed. “And on the subject of the meds, I should tell you that lowering the tricyclic has been useful. I forgot to say that last time.”

  David sat straighter. She hadn’t mentioned a change in medication to him. He knew they weren’t talking about the experimental drugs, but still, he hadn’t expected to be cut out of a treatment decision. Now he did a double-take on her choice of useful and realized she meant sexually. He had noticed that the last few times, sex seemed less effort for her. Apparently, her chemistry was being restored to something closer to its original state. Did their “arrangement,” he wondered, hinge on Kate’s reduced interest in sex? He didn’t think that a woman’s desire for sex—at least with her husband—ever increased past middle age, but what was predictable about any of this?

  “Well, that’s good news,” the doctor said, and then a small chirp came from his pocket. “My phone is telling me to leave for the airport,” he said reluctantly. “You will call me anytime if you need to?” He offered his card to each of them. “I think you know that I mean this.” He and David shook hands, and he hugged Kate one last time. “It’s been a pleasure, Mrs. Sanders—Kate. It’s been a pleasure working with you. I will hear of your progress through the team, and I will always be thinking of your health.”

  To David, he said, “You are a very lucky man.”

  If there was a way to decipher an additional meaning to the statement, David didn’t know what it was.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Sometimes, David worried that Kate felt guilty for having gotten sick, almost as if she had cheated on him and, as if by returning, she was the interloper, not Jane, and that it was Jane who had some degree of prior claim.

  “You aren’t the only winner here,” Kate said to him one day, apropos of nothing they were chatting about. “I needed a new friend—a post-illness friend—and you sort of handed me Jane. I like her. I like who I am around her. She has this sort of completing, non-needy presence. And smart. I’ve added her to my short list of people—my parents, you, Ian and Martha, the kids—I always want to hear their opinion on something before I make up my mind.”

  “For you to say that out loud, is so…not just kind, it’s generous. And it makes me think that maybe I’m not a burden—that our messy life isn’t a burden.”

  “You have to understand,” Kate said, “I’m not afraid of this. I’m afraid of getting old—and of not getting old. I’m afraid of Jane leaving. I’m afraid you’ll die too young. But the three of us, I can handle. Someone has always loved me, and it’s almost always been you. What we’re doing doesn’t burden me or scare me. Everything else does, but not this.”

  Still, not long after, when he didn’t offer to cancel an overnight trip to Chicago with Jane for a big-deal fundraiser Kate had told him about too late, they argued.

  “You said you’d make sure this didn’t cause trouble for me,’ Kate said, misquoting him, perhaps innocently, perhaps not.

  “I said I’d leave her if you were in pain, but you’re just inconvenienced. Do you want this to be a union shop? And you have seniority? That’s not how we set things up, but is that something we need to talk about?” They were standing at opposite ends of the kitchen, and he could see the tension in her hands. She had never thrown anything at him, but he took a step back reflexively.

  ‘No, I don’t see it that way,” Kate said, “though I wonder what Jane would think.”

  He gave her a look, harder than he meant to, and she added quickly, “I would never say anything.”

  “She’s not a prop or a character in some script you wrote. You must have known these kinds of conflicts would come up. But I meant my promise: If this ever becomes something that makes you sad, I won’t let it go on.”

  “No, I don’t think that’s what I mean. I have to pull my thoughts together.” She poured herself some water, but then held the glass without drinking. “I think you may be right about annoyance. And some boredom. I feel terrible admitting to boredom. Am I used to life already? Jaded? Why can’t I treasure every moment, like a dying person?”

  “Because you’re not a dying person. No more than the rest of us. You’re one of us now, more or less. You can’t survive on gratitude and amazement alone.”

  Seeming to replay his last sentence, she now nodded. “I need to fill my life more. I need to use it. Yours is already full. But if I do the same, are we going to have room for each other?”

  “You need a full life anyway, with or without Jane,” David said. “We used to scramble to see each other. Remember when you were working one of those stretches of days, and I left work to bring you lunch?” They’d had quick and furtive sex in her windowless consultation room, surprising both of them.

  “I thought about that a lot later on,” Kate said. “It was nice to have a true fantasy.”

  “So, Kate, do you want to stop this?” He tried to convey that there was no right answer.

  “I didn’t want to wake up and find you in love with someone else.”

  Was their grand experiment over?

  “I don’t wish her gone. It could happen, but I don’t wish for it now. There’s something to be said for doing something wild—something you never imagined. I don’t have to like every minute of it.” He crossed the kitchen to join her, and they both leaned against the sink, facing each other.

  “This can go either way. I’m stronger than you think.”

  “I know that. That’s not something I ever doubted.” She gestured with her hands, and he reached to steady the glass she was holding just before it overflowed. “Sometimes I worry that we’ve ruined Jane’s life in some yet-to-be-determined way. But then I decide we’ve just changed it. Or rather Jane chose to change it. Then I worry: Did she really have a choice, given the force of love…and your irresistibility? And tell me this: Has anyone ever successfully defined free will?”

  David came in through the garage to the kitchen, where he found a pot of water boiled down to an inch and the radio playing to no one. He turned off the stove and went looking. There wasn’t another sound to guide him, but he found Kate in the upstairs bathroom, still kneeling near the toilet.

  “You threw up?”

  She nodded.

  “Are you sick?”

  “It’s a panic attack. The worst should be over.”

  “You’ve had these before?” Her skin was a terrible shade, and when he touched her arm, he felt the clamminess left by a cold sweat.

  “This is the third. They’re a new thing.” She raised her head. “I thought it was a heart attack the first time, just like you hear. But then I did the nurse thing and realized what it was.”

  “I’m really sorry. I haven’t had one in decades, but I know they’re horrible.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think it’s from the medicine? Or is it about something?”

  “Dr. Ratha is pretty sure it’s not the medication.”

  “Good. I’m glad you talked to him. I feel bad you didn’t want to tell me.”

  “I never think there’s going to be another one. I thought I could will them away.” They sat for a moment, and he stopped himself from offering empty reassurance. He offered silence instead, and it seemed to be what Kate needed.

  “Maybe they are about something.” She wiped her face with a dry washcloth. “I had just begun to let go of the certainty of relapse. Or at least I thought I had. I was feeling so…myself. Not unworried but less worried. I gue
ss I don’t know if that’s why it started, but that’s when. I didn’t want to tell you. I cannot bear to be the sick one again.”

  “Did it ever happen when I was with Jane, and would you tell me if it did?”

  “I was at home all three times, but you weren’t with her. And the only thing that happens away from home is that it’s become hard to drive. I have the sensation that I’ll be hit at any time. I almost hallucinate about cars coming at me.”

  “Okay, that’s good to know.” He recalled something. “You know, I read somewhere that those sensations can increase with age. Which would account for older drivers crawling along.” She smiled. “If this happens again—the panic attacks, I mean—would it help if I were with you?

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “Next time, you need to find me. I’ll cancel class. Whatever.” That definitely got her attention. “I worry a lot about relapse. Maybe we need to be more open about it—worry together.”

  “You’ve never cancelled a class.”

  “Exactly. I’ve earned it. And I’ll come home if I’m with Jane. She won’t give it a thought.”

  “She will. What if she thinks I’m being manipulative?”

  “Oh, Katie.” He brushed her hair away from her face. “She trusts you. She’s not like that, and she trusts you.”

  Kate proposed to David that they take dance lessons. “Social dance, not ballet or anything.”

  “No, I don’t think so,” he said warily.

  “That’s fine. Jane said she would go with me if you didn’t want to.”

  David gave a startled yelp. “Okay, so now I’m competing with Jane for time with you?”

  “Yes,” she said nicely. “That wasn’t my plan, but I guess so.”

  “What’s next? Are you getting a horse?” He made himself go through the motions of resisting her, when really he was too happy to care about the details as long as he could be with each of them. If Kate wanted a horse, he would get her a horse. Empress Kate, may your reign be long and powerful.

  As time passed in this new odd normal, Tom and Lucy, quasi-family to Jane, moved through the stages of horrified, then stoic, and now resigned, as they witnessed their friend happy again. Jane invited them to brunch at her house, along with Kate and David, which David thought might be too much, even for his open-minded wife, and she did pause long enough to say, “What’s the worst that could happen?”

  David, normally so good at imagining just that thing, said only, “nothing.” He couldn’t see anything bad happening. The morning was awkward for the first hour but sociable and noisy in the second, and he felt that he was forgiven by Tom and Lucy, though he wasn’t sure if it was for staying with Jane or for not leaving Kate—he guessed they wouldn’t have been able to decide exactly.

  He had no clue which of the women first suggested the idea of the five of them meeting for dinner downtown—in public. In the past, he heard one side of the arranging phone calls, but now fullblown plans were presented to him for his perfunctory approval. For this milestone, they arrived in five different cars, something they realized as they showed up one by one at the table—David from interviewing a possible new hire, and Tom from a job site where he was placating a demanding couple—the only type, it seemed, who ever want a house built. “They’re freakin’ perfectionists,” Tom said. “That’s why they do it in the first place. They think that perfect exists.”

  “Well, my interview with the young hotshot went great,” David volunteered. “At one point, he said his only concern was that the community might be too conservative for him, at which point everyone looked right at me. Every single person looked like I was supposed to get up and tell my story.”

  “What did you say?” Kate asked.

  “I asked the hotshot, ‘What is it that you’re planning on doing?’ ” The other four laughed loudly. “Same thing happened at my meeting, and then we moved on. He can ask some of the others tonight when they take him out for dinner.”

  They were quiet for a moment and, in the lull, Kate said, “Do you find that you don’t remember much about your early experiences with sex? Like who you did what with first? Oral sex especially—it should be a milestone. I don’t remember much of the details, and it makes me kind of sad.”

  Tom said, with phony solicitousness, “You mean you used to remember and now you don’t?”

  Kate made a face at him. “No. I’ve never been able to remember.”

  “Me neither,” David said. “I must have had to get her drunk first, whoever she was.”

  Lucy and Tom looked at each other. “It wasn’t him,” Lucy said. “But I don’t know who it was.” Tom shrugged.

  The four of them looked at Jane now.

  “I do remember,” she said. “We were very young, and I thought he had invented it. And, I think you’re all tramps.”

  Amid the laughter, Lucy said, “Why do you ask, Kate?”

  “It just makes me a little sorry that something like that is gone.”

  Tom said, “I should probably tell you, Kate, that we have sort of an unspoken rule that we—Lucy, Jane, and I—don’t talk about sex. It’s one way we keep the incest taboo going between me and Jane.”

  “Though the first firewall is that you’re repugnant to me,” Jane said sweetly. Tom sputtered into his wine as she batted her eyes at him.

  “We’ve obviously given up on taboos,” said David, “We just say whatever we want.”

  Lucy raised her hand. “Let’s list all the things that we know have happened to us that we don’t remember.”

  “No,” Tom said decisively. “It’s only interesting if it’s about sex. Otherwise, forgetting isn’t remarkable at our age. Not any more, anyway.” He lifted his glass to toast Kate. “Plus, my theory is that we don’t remember details about sex because we were the first generation where it wasn’t such a huge deal. It was something you did sometime between the first time you hung out with someone and the third.”

  “You slut,” Lucy said genially.

  “I’m not going to take that too seriously, though I am eternally grateful,” he said, as he leaned over to kiss her. “But what I was leading up to is that for us, technology is our virginity, so to speak. That’s what we remember: our first email, first time we heard www or Wikipedia or Google—all of it.”

  David joined in. “I clearly remember the moment I heard two guys from the Geology Department talking with awe about the World Wide Web. I had never heard of it. As you can imagine, the History Department’s always the last to hear things.”

  “I remember my first awareness of email,” Kate said. “My famously smart cousin sent an invitation for something, and it said on the reply card that you could also use electronic mail to respond, and I thought: ‘Well of course, she’s invented a new kind of mail.’ ”

  David was enjoying himself. He scanned the room and didn’t see anyone he knew. Nor did he see anyone watching them with interest. When Kate got up to use the bathroom and Jane soon followed, he wondered why, but was distracted by Tom and Lucy describing their oldest child’s detention at school. “I would like to hook her up to a lie detector,” Lucy said, “because everything she says sounds plausible, but not much of it is actually true.”

  “Lie detectors aren’t accurate,” Tom said. “Especially with sociopaths. Did your boys lie?”

  “Of course,” David answered promptly. “But not nearly as much as I did at their age. My parents were so self-absorbed that I used to lie just to dare them to concentrate on me long enough to catch me. I told them once that I’d been chosen to skip a grade of high school, and they believed it, even though no one had ever skipped a grade in our school system.” He drained his wine glass. “Since leaving home, though, I’ve hardly ever lied.”

  He remembered then that Lucy knew the real story of Kate’s recovery—and presumably Tom did also—so they knew he was currently involved in a large network of lies. David was surprised to be going on about himself, especially on this topic, which was making h
im a little dizzy. Was he telling the truth about lying? Or lying about being honest?

  Jane found Kate at the mirror, brushing her hair and mouthing the words to the endlessly repeating Spanish language tape. After checking the stalls to be sure they were alone, she said quietly, “Listen, why don’t you and David go home together? I know it’s not what we planned, but…”

  Kate froze. “No, I’m fine. Why?”

  “The way you were reminiscing, I thought maybe you needed him around tonight.” It pained Jane to make the offer. She had been waiting almost a week to be alone with him, though she had been the one who’d been unavailable. David finally asked if she kept her life so frenetic to avoid depending on him. He understood why she would think this was the safe way to do things. But he didn’t like it. He understood it and he didn’t want to argue about it, but he didn’t like it. “Do you think I don’t miss you? Do you think that because there’s Kate, that you, Jane, are just an enhancement?”

  Sometimes she wished she were more adventurous or more attracted to Kate. She admired her enormously, but as everyone learned at some point, admiration wasn’t enough. She couldn’t picture the two of them together, and never had the slightest hint of it from Kate, and certainly not from David.

  “Well, that’s a kind thing to say,” Kate answered. “But I’m fine. And I wouldn’t expect you to change your plans. I mean, I don’t outrank you.”

  “I wasn’t referring to rank, just to need.” Jane smiled. “Yes, I am that magnanimous.”

  Kate squeezed Jane’s hand. “What I was really trying to talk about is that, as I come to grips with losing those years, I also run up against all the other normal forgotten events. Memory is so loosely knit. It helps a little to know that others can’t remember things either. Except you, Jane, with your inventive boyfriend.”

  They made eye contact in the mirror and Jane said, “We should ask David to warn the boys to make note of their first blow-jobs before it’s too late.” Kate’s eyes went wide and she laughed explosively at the usually reserved Jane, who, equally surprised, began to laugh too, their laughter fueling more laughter until Kate, weak and breathless, went to sit on a gaudily painted chair. They calmed themselves and began to leave when Jane remembered the other reason she had come to the restroom. “Who cares about sex? I actually forgot to pee,” she said, and their laughter started again as Kate waved goodbye.