Stability? I suppose so. Avoiding the roller coaster of divorce that so many of my friends have been through? Okay, that’s a plus point—because no one I know has a good thing to say about the fallout of a conjugal bust-up . . . even those who were in rotten marriages. A secure home environment for our children while they were growing up? Absolutely . . . but look at them now. Knowing that Dan is there at night when I get home? I always get home before him. A life without much in the way of emotional danger? Is that a virtue?
The road turned a corner, Sebago Lake disappeared from view. My cell phone started ringing. I flipped the speaker switch and answered it.
“Hey,” Dan said. “How’s it going?”
“Not great,” I said.
“I saw your note. Something wrong?”
“I have a confession to make,” I said. “I’ve been keeping something from you, something that Lizzie asked me to keep to myself.”
Then, in as abbreviated a way as possible, I told Dan the story of Lizzie’s affair with Mark McQueen. To my husband’s infinite credit, he didn’t first demand to know why I hadn’t informed him about this before now. Instead, he asked, “Do you think she might hurt herself?”
“She reported to work this morning, which is something, I guess.”
“And when is she meeting the doctor?”
“Today sometime. Listen, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you until now.”
“A secret is a secret, I guess. Still . . .”
“You’re right. And I feel shitty about it.”
“I hope Lizzie doesn’t feel I might judge her. Because you know I would never do that.”
“Of course I know that. And I’m pretty damn sure she knows it too. But that’s not what’s going on here. I think she feels ashamed of her erratic emotional behavior and worries that you might be embarrassed by it. Between ourselves, I’m embarrassed about it . . . and I’m worried as hell.”
“Did she say she’d call you today?”
“I’ve asked her to, but can’t say whether she will or not. I suppose it all comes down to how the good doctor handles it.”
“When do you think you’ll reach Burlington?” he asked.
“In about three hours.”
“And you’re going straight to the home?”
“That’s right.”
“You’re really looking at a delightful day, aren’t you?”
“I’ll get through it. And I’ll be a lot calmer once I know how things are playing with Lizzie.”
“As soon as you speak to her . . .”
“Don’t worry. I’ll call the moment I hang up.”
“And I can always drive down to Boston tonight if she’s in a bad way.”
“Hopefully, that won’t be necessary.”
“Okay. Call me after you’ve finished your visit.”
“Roger Wilco.”
“Love you.”
“You too.”
I felt better after the call. Not because anything had changed, but because Dan was in this with me now—and I didn’t have to guard Lizzie’s secret anymore.
The road gained altitude as I approached the New Hampshire border, the peaks of the White Mountains defining the horizon toward which I moved. The snow was deep here, the driving slow. But I didn’t care, as National Public Radio was broadcasting a performance of Brahms’s German Requiem. I didn’t know the piece, but was immediately intrigued when the announcer explained that the work grappled with that most profound and difficult of personal realizations: the fact that one is completely mortal and, as such, ephemeral. The stunning power of Brahms’s music hit me full force—the profound gravity of it all; its magisterial sadness tinged with a solemn optimism. Even the settings of liturgical texts were remarkable in their refusal to talk about a paradise beyond this one. Brahms was a man after my own heart. Vis-à-vis temporal life, he understood that, like it or not, this is it.
And this got me thinking how our life as we live it always seems eternal. Though we might rationally be able to grasp the idea that we will die, there is still something incomprehensible about our own mortality; that, one day, we will be nothing; that, verily, we are all just passing through. I have often wondered if all the trouble we make for ourselves and others is nothing more than a response to the realization that everything we do, everything we achieve, largely vanishes once we are dead. I remember something Margy once told me, when she took a vacation with Husband Number Three in South Africa around four years ago . . . how they ended up for a few days in this “fabulous” (her favorite word) little town called Arniston, right at the bottom of the African continent.
“There wasn’t much there, except some holiday homes for the Cape Town bigwigs, and some shabby cottages for the workers, and miles and miles of empty beaches, and one really fabulous little hotel, where Charlie and I stayed. Anyway, opposite the hotel was a seawall, on which a plaque commemorated the sinking of some passenger ship—traveling from India back to England in the 1870s, filled with the wives and children of all those guys who ran the Empire. Around two miles off the coast of Arniston, the ship got into trouble and sank, and over two hundred passengers drowned.
“Now here I was in 1999, looking at this plaque, and then staring out at that big watery emptiness where everybody died around one hundred and thirty years earlier. At the time, all of these deaths must have been such big international news. Now it was just a long-forgotten event, commemorated on a simple plaque in some isolated South African town. Even worse was the thought of all the grief and trauma all those deaths caused back then. Two hundred women and children. Think of the devastated spouses and the parents and grandparents and siblings they left behind. Think of how all those lives were marked by this tragedy and how now, all traces have completely disappeared. That’s what got me the most—the recognition that all that suffering and pain, which probably carried over into two subsequent generations, has vanished completely. Because everyone who was ever touched by that tragedy is dead.”
Margy. Unlucky with men (one bad husband followed another—she really had a knack when it came to choosing deadbeats). Lucky in her professional life (since 1990, she’d been running her own hugely dynamic PR agency in Manhattan), even though she always regretted the fact that she’d never forced her way into journalism. Just as she also regretted that she never did the child thing (“When you marry losers—and are also in a business that demands sixteen-hour days, six days a week—bringing a kid into the midst of such a crazy life just wouldn’t be fair”). After all these years—after countless setbacks and reversals and personal griefs (and a few big professional successes)—she still managed to maintain her skewed, amused outlook on everything.
“You know that life is nothing more than one big fight,” she said after she jettisoned Husband Number Three upon discovering that he had embezzled $50,000 from her to pay for a secret investment in a shoddy dot-com company. “But what else can we do but keep on fighting? There’s no other choice.”
But now Margy was in the middle of the biggest fight of her life. Four months ago, she had been diagnosed with lung cancer.
She announced this devastating fact to me in typical Margy fashion. It was a few days before Christmas. We were in the middle of our weekly phone call. I was telling her about a conversation I’d just had with Shannon, in which she informed me that she would be bringing her own special chestnut stuffing for the turkey and that she had already spent two weeks perfecting the recipe before unveiling it to us over Christmas. As I was cracking wise on how depressing it was to have a daughter-in-law who put so much effort into closing down abortion clinics and making the perfect chestnut stuffing, I dropped a hint that Margy would be very welcome for Christmas, knowing full well that, in the wake of her divorce and with no surviving family, she’d probably be spending the holidays alone.
“Hey, I’d love to come to Maine and do the whole Currier-and-Ives Christmas thing with you,” she said. “But it seems I’m otherwise engaged over the holidays.”
&nbs
p; “Is that a euphemism for . . . ?”
“That’s right,” she said. “I have a new man in my life.”
“And would you mind revealing who the lucky guy is?”
“Sure,” she said. “He’s my oncologist.”
She was so matter-of-fact about this—so initially haha dismissive—that I first thought this was Margy’s idea of a very black joke.
“That’s not funny,” I said.
“You’re right,” she said. “It’s not fucking funny at all. Lung cancer never is. And the most diabolical thing of all is that it’s so damn sneaky. As my new significant other—Dr. Walgreen . . . yeah, just like the cheap-ass pharmacies—as Doc Walgreen said, what makes lung cancer so diabolical is that it remains largely undetectable until it starts to affect another part of the anatomy . . . like the brain.”
“Oh Christ, Margy . . .”
“Yeah, I could probably use His help right now—that is, if I could get my head around the idea that He and His Father actually run the behind-the-scenes show on this screwy planet of ours. Right now, I’m having a hard enough time getting my head around the idea that I have lung cancer . . . though the good news is that it hasn’t gone to my head, so to speak.”
She explained that the cancer was discovered on an X-ray when they were looking for something else.
“I got back from a business trip to Honolulu, pitching for the state of Hawaii tourism account. That town bills itself as the capital of our Pacific Paradise, but it also happens to be Smog City. And when I returned to Manhattan after a week there, I was suffering from this terrible cough. Since I’d had that bout of pneumonia a couple of years ago, I thought that maybe I was having a little relapse . . . even though I had no fever or any other signs of infection. After a couple of days, I called my doctor and he sent me to New York Hospital for what he called ‘a little picture.’ What the chest X-ray showed was an ominous gray cloud of something at the place where the bronchus splits into two branches, one that goes to the upper left lobe of the lung, the other to the lower lobe. There were actually two X-rays—one from the front and the other from the side, which is how they could locate the tumor so precisely. What the X-ray could not show is that the upper left lobe of my lung had collapsed, which is what was causing the coughing, because gunk collects in the collapsed lobe and keeps seeping into the bronchial tube, which the body keeps trying to clear by coughing. And hey, do you think I could get a job writing for The New England Journal of Medicine? Because only a week or so into this ‘adventure,’ I’m already beginning to sound like one of those medical geeks who gets to know everything there is to know about the disease that’s going to kill her.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Why? Because it offends your inherent need to be optimistic about everything . . . even though I—your best friend—know that, between the lines, you’re an opinionated pessimist just like me?”
“Selfishly speaking, I just don’t want you to die, that’s all.”
“Well, that makes two of us—and the good news is that I have the kinder, gentler sort of lung cancer . . . the kind that doesn’t mean an automatic death sentence.”
As she started talking about the bronchoscopy, I reached for a pad of paper and started taking notes—knowing that I would want to go over all this later on with Dan, and also because, instinctually, it was easier to focus on the facts than the underlying reality of what had befallen my friend. “Well, I just got the initial verdict yesterday evening,” Margy said. “And the first major reasonable discovery is that I have what is known as a ‘large-cell’ tumor, because in the world of lung cancer, the really lethal tumors are ‘small cell.’ The second is that the tumor has all but completely blocked off the upper bronchial tube and is now threatening to close the lower bronchial tube as well. But the other important discovery is that the tumor is actually tumorlike, rather than a lesion. Dr. Walgreen is really pleased about this—and I have to say this, though I have not had any experience of cancer doctors before this, he is one cheerful oncologist. As he explained, the harder the tumor or lesion is, the less likely that the cells from it will have made their way into the bloodstream and lodged in other organs of the body.”
By the time we got off the phone, I was already making plans to fly down to New York after finishing my classes on Friday—the day after Margy’s surgery.
“Hey, what’s the point of you schlepping all the way down here?” Margy asked. “I’m not going to be the best of company.”
But I went anyway. I had run through everything Margy told me with Dan, who in turn talked with a heart-and-lung colleague at Maine Medical, who confirmed that though her large-cell tumor was the better sort of lung cancer, it could still prove fatal.
“Once they’ve got the tumor out,” Dan explained, “they have to ‘stage’ the tumor to determine how far the cancer has progressed. Margy will be able to live with one lung. But if they discover that the cancer has progressed into both lungs, well, she might be able to buy a little time with a lung transplant. But . . .”
He opened his hands to avoid saying the unsayable. Then, after a moment, he said, “One of the many things I like about orthopedics is that you are rarely dealing with life-and-death stuff like this.”
When I reached New York Hospital on Friday evening, I expected Margy to be in a postoperative comatose state. But though she was hooked up to assorted tubes and monitors, she was sitting up in bed, watching CNN. She looked desperately pale and tired, but managed an acerbic smile before saying, “I hope you brought me some cigarettes.”
I spent most of the weekend in her room, only leaving to avail myself of the bed in her apartment. (When I said I’d find a hotel, she insisted that I stay at her place, “Because it looks like I will not be sleeping in my own bed for the next couple of weeks.”) Margy amazed me that weekend. She refused to indulge in self-pity, and she made it clear that she was planning to adopt a “scorched earth” approach to the cancer.
“After three bad husbands, I’m well used to excising shit from my life. And when I fight, I fight dirty.”
At night, back at her place, I couldn’t help but worry that this show of gutsiness was for my benefit. I could see in her eyes the fear she refused to express. Margy never really liked to show her vulnerability—even to me. Just as she didn’t ever articulate the loneliness I knew that she often felt—a loneliness that really hit home during the two nights I spent alone in her apartment. I had stayed at her place many times before, but this was the first visit when the apartment wasn’t filled with Margy’s oversized personality. So I was finally able to look at length at her small, faceless one-bedroom place—located in one of those white-brick 1960s buildings that have the appearance of a high-rise refrigerator and so dominate (from my limited experience of the place) the skyline of the East Seventies near the river. It always surprised me that she lived in such a petite apartment. After all, didn’t she run this big-deal PR firm? But it was a “boutique firm” (herself and a staff of three), and she didn’t take an enormous salary because cash flow was always an issue, and she was out and about most nights, and spent as many weekends as possible visiting friends in the Hamptons or western Connecticut. So her apartment was really just a place where she slept, changed clothes, and tolerated the occasional evening in. She had bought the apartment twenty-five years ago with the little money left over from her mother’s estate—and sublet it during each of her marriages (“On all three occasions,” she once told me, “I think I subconsciously knew that I was making a bad call, so I insisted that I move into the guy’s place . . . because it let me eventually walk out with less hassle, knowing that I had my little co-op as a getaway”). But walking in from the hospital—the calm, sanguine front I had put on for Margy now replaced by numbing aftershock—the terrible silence and sterility of the apartment hit me. It was simply decorated—a sofa and an armchair covered in plain oatmeal fabric, a small dining table, an ordinary queen-sized bed. But it was completely devoid of decorative fl
ourishes or a sense of style, let alone a hint of a personal life. There were no family photos, no quirky or interesting art on the walls—just two or three Whitney Museum posters. There was a stereo, but only twenty or so compact discs—light classics (Andrea Bocelli, The Three Tenors) and golden oldies. There was a television and a DVD player, and a bookshelf with assorted paperback best sellers of the past five years. There was a 1970s liquor cabinet—in which I now found a bottle of J&B and several packs of Merits. I poured a drink and sipped the scotch, giving quiet thanks for the medicinal pleasures (in moderation, I boringly hasten to add) of alcohol. I stared at the nowhere decor and wondered why I hadn’t noticed its facelessness before, and why I hadn’t grasped the disconnection between the chic, street-smart public woman and the lonely, impersonal world she retreated into. We rarely glimpse the true private realities of our friends. Or maybe we filter out the stuff we don’t want to see, because we prefer to buy into the life more interesting than our own. Which is what I did for years with Margy—privately envying her such a metropolitan existence, the latitude when it came to travel or falling into bed with whomever, and (most of all) the privacy and time alone that was denied me until the kids had grown up and fled. I could tell, whenever Margy visited us in Maine (especially when Jeff and Lizzie were young), that she watched the family chaos—all boisterous voices and constant child demands—with a certain quiet envy. We always want what we don’t have. We regret, in part, the lives we create for ourselves—no matter how successful they might be—because there’s a part of us that can never be satisfied with our own reality, the place where we have ended up. Looking at Margy’s bare apartment didn’t suddenly make me give thanks for my long marriage, my domestic setup. But it amplified all the questions I have about the nature of choice and the inability ever to be really content. Just as it also told me there was so much about this woman—my friend for over thirty-five years—that I simply didn’t know.
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