A whippoorwill sang. Babe held Georgie’s hand. They drank tea as the moon rose yellow and full, a hunting moon. Owls flew through the air like thrown bricks.
“I feel like a werewolf,” Georgie said, “only my hair falls out instead of growing in.”
They slept outside, under heavy woolen blankets. In the morning, when Georgie got up to make coffee, she saw the moon still hanging above the ocean, as if someone had forgotten to put it away.
HER PUBIC HAIR fell out. Funny, because she’d had bikini waxes for years, and associated pubic hair with the triumphant face of her Russian aesthetician in San Francisco holding up the terrible strips of fabric. Her ex-boyfriend, Ralph, preferred his women “with,” as he put it. Maybe he didn’t say “my women.” But he did say “with,” as if there were only two kinds of women in the world. (Now she shattered the binary with her clumps and bald spots!) Ralph dumped her when she told him what she had, when she first found out. He hugged her; he patted her back and said he wished he could “be there” for her. But he hardly knew her at all.
Her hair fell out; fruit flies emerged. At first, they seemed concentrated around some bananas she kept in a bowl. But then one day she found a feathery cluster of them in the hair by her ear as she read Illness as Metaphor. Was she the fruit they wanted?
GEORGIE FOUND a new lover without too much trouble. The two of them carried on a torrid correspondence by e-mail during the break that followed her last chemotherapy. His profile on the Internet drew her because he wore a black watch cap; she’d also worn a black watch cap since her chemo started and the hair on her head fell out, as well as all the rest of her hair, including her eyelashes and eyebrows.
His screen name: T-Bone. He asked her to call him T.
He wrote in a sensitive way that accepted her as she was (sick), and then she wrote, raveled out a few selected details and asked about his life. He told her about his two kids and how he’d worked as a full-time stay-at-home dad until they were grown, and Georgie wrote back, telling him how much she’d wanted children, at least one child, but by the time her print shop was established, it was too late, or at least too late to start again, and the marriage came apart anyway, and—well, she and T wrote back and forth, revealing certain details and concealing others. Georgie wasn’t exactly new to Internet courtship.
T seemed different. For one thing, he lived in the Midwest—Iowa or Ohio or Nebraska. He offered to fly out to San Francisco on the first day of her radiation to meet her. He didn’t have cancer—just the hat. But he seemed drawn to the specific signal, the cancer beam of Georgie’s black watch cap. “I want to know you for a long time,” he wrote. “But I want to start knowing you now, while you’re still in the thick of this. I want to see you now, without hair. I want to hold you this way, as you are when we meet.”
In a certain kind of vulnerable moment, this seemed plausible and romantic. T’s words made Georgie feel hot and damp all over with a moisture that she felt must be the last of its kind. He wrote that he wanted to make love to her now, bald and nauseated. Even her ex-husband, a generous man, hadn’t offered that.
She wrote back to T and asked if he was kidding. He wrote back with a flight number and a time of arrival and the name of a not-bad hotel where he’d made a reservation, and the name of a restaurant near the infusion center where he would meet her for lunch. She brewed herself a pot of tea to steady her nerves, and wrote: “OK!”
IN THE GOWN ROOM, while savagely ripping tags from her expensive new lingerie, Georgie met a young woman named Linette. Linette had come from Irian Jaya, in Indonesia, and also had cancer in her breast—but a different kind. The cancer had grown on the outside of her skin, and also inside her chest cavity and bones, and it had spread, inoperable. Linette said these things in the words she had been given, the simple declarative sentences that announced her fate like a verdict from a judge. Linette asked Georgie what kind of chemo she’d had, and when Georgie told her, she said her doctors wanted her to do that protocol, too, but she was afraid it would make her even sicker than now. What did Georgie think? How sick had the chemo made Georgie? Did she still feel like herself? Georgie said, “Good question”—she no longer knew who she was. Linette said she just wanted more time to be in her body—but she wanted to be herself. “What would you do if you were me?” Linette asked. Georgie said she didn’t know, that she could only say what the chemo made her feel like—both sick and hungry, not necessarily for food. She felt poisoned by the toxic red junk that turned her toenails black, but also stronger than she had ever known herself, more interested in living. If anyone had asked her five years ago what she would think was important if she had cancer, she would have said nutrition, herbs, affirmations, et cetera. But once the disease took up residence in her, she became a tyrannical landlord, relentless in her struggle to evict. Linette stood before Georgie in her thin gown with its complicated ties—so complicated someone had actually posted a diagram in the gown room showing in detail how to weave all the loose strings together—and said, “What would you do if you were me?” Georgie could not even pretend to say. She took tiny Linette in her arms and for the first time in weeks felt her own body as a solid, as a force. She saw herself as one of the lucky ones, almost at this point a fraud. Now holding Linette, her sister, in the gown room, Georgie caught the odor of something deep: the breath of mortality. Linette’s thin arms held Georgie fiercely. Georgie could feel (through skin and bone) the quick beating of Linette’s heart, like a small bird struggling at a window.
A few minutes later, Georgie dressed and hurried from the building. What a ridiculous schedule she had laid out for herself: radiation, followed by lunch with a stranger, and then, if all went well, sex in T’s hotel room. Later, she could, if she wanted, go up Divisadero to her friend Katya’s house, where Katya would feed her some delicate broth and a glass of wine. Georgie swore off meat and sugar and liquor after the diagnosis, but when she saw the amount of poison coursing through her body, she relented, or rather protested, and ate and drank small portions of anything that gave her pleasure—roast chicken, a moderate pour of Sancerre, even an organic burrito with a dollop of sour cream.
Cabs circled around Oncology—like hawks, Georgie thought as she stepped into one. She could have walked to the restaurant to meet T, but that was an unrealistic plan if she hoped even to consider sex in the afternoon. Already she felt curled in at the edges. Yet here lay the secret gift of the disease—the heightening, the sharpening. She felt alive; she’d never been so constantly aware of it. After she gave her destination to the driver and settled into the cab, Georgie closed her eyes and concentrated on meeting T, on building appetite.
He didn’t disappoint, exactly. Although almost from the first it was clear that although he seemed a good person in every way—not the serial killer creep Katya had warned her about—T was not, under the usual circumstances, her kind of guy. But the usual circumstances had been fed eight doses of tamoxifen and then irradiated. She felt, with this man who had flown from Ohio or Iowa or Nebraska to meet her, a lightness and ease, the oppressive weights of history and the future lifted. In many ways, the disease cured the worst afflictions of this sick capitalist society: It dissipated materialist impulses, lifted the tiny burdens that tied people Gulliver-like to earth and made one more aware of the small hot fire burning inside. T seemed smart enough, attractive enough. They recognized each other immediately; under the black watch caps, they wore the same shadowy bristle.
They drank green tea and ate bowls of fresh fruit, and although Georgie tasted only a little, she felt the vitamins and moisture penetrate her tired cells. Her tissues waxed and swelled, her blood sped up and, yes, her body buzzed!
T also consumed eggs and bacon and home fries and toast—they’d starved him on the plane. Although she had to keep her eyes averted from the food, his hunger roused Georgie’s. The fruit in her bowl smelled decadent, alcoholic, and she pushed it to one side while T ate and told her how out of character it was for him to fly ac
ross the country to meet a woman—but, yes, he had done it before.
He took her hands across the table and kissed them and looked into her eyes.
“I’m glad you let me come,” he said.
Georgie reached out and touched the indentation beneath his right ear. A slight electric charge ran up her arm.
At the hotel, a sudden weakness came over her. In the excitement of meeting T, she had not stopped to wash her hands before she ate. Her hands, her clothes smelled of Linette; she tasted Linette on the end of her tongue. Georgie opened the windows in T’s room and let in the city sounds. Suddenly a tear fell out of her eye like a stone and landed on the carpet.
“I’d like to take a bath,” she told him, and he went to the closet and pulled out the hotel’s leopard-print robe for her to use. She found his razor and his toothbrush and a carefully rolled tube of toothpaste on the sink. A faux-leather ditty bag. All this effort, this human vanity. She had to struggle to be part of it.
In the bath, she pressed the soap to her nose and breathed in. She’d brought her essential oils, and with all the strength in her arm she shook droplets into the water. The familiar aromas of cloves and roses and ylang ylang came up, the smell she thought of as herself.
She reappeared wearing the leopard robe and let it fall. T lay in the bed already, slipped between the sheets like a dinner mint. His ardor was touching; he was almost too gentle. His hand on her breast smelled of Linette, his tongue in her mouth, his fingers inside her. He came inside her, too—why the hell not?
It all went well enough—it went very well. Apart from the smell of death in her nose, Georgie felt light and alive. His body next to hers felt good. He did not go to sleep immediately, but caressed her skin with his palms. Two hours later, though, she was burning up from the inside. She had to call the emergency room doctor, even though she knew the symptoms of infection. She and T dressed and walked to Walgreens at 4:00 a.m. to pick up her prescription; he wrapped a wing of his bulky midwestern coat around her. In the morning, she vomited in the bathroom while he looked at the New York Times over free coffee in the lobby. She brushed her teeth with her pink toothbrush; then they took a walk on Ocean Beach before she drove him to the airport. The wind seemed to sweep the smell from her; she blew her nose bloodily into a tissue and afterward felt better.
At the airport, he insisted that she not park, but leave him at the curb. “Call me anytime,” he told her. “Call if you need me—and call if you don’t need me.” He kissed her on the mouth and smiled into her eyes. Tears brimmed on her eyelids and she made her eyes swallow them down. They drizzled back into her body as she accelerated onto the freeway, a greedy girl who had gotten at least something of what she wanted and was now free to be no one, nothing, not even human, for anyone.
III. Babe
Cutting made Harald feel alive; the more he cut, the more he felt. He didn’t have a suicidal fantasy. There was nothing he cared about enough to die for. He knew what love was, probably, although it pained him to think of those afternoons in bed with Psycho, her flat chest rubbing against his as she seemed to be moved and swayed by some blast of erotic agony, her narrow face gouged with pain, her small teeth biting the sheets. He refused to die for love. If Psycho or his mom thought he had died for them, even posthumously it would tarnish him. He did not want to think about Psycho because she reminded him that he had betrayed her by falling in love when they’d agreed that love was bourgeois and stupid, what Psycho’s cheerful mother felt when she climbed into bed at night with Psycho’s new fat father—love as a last resort, love as gratitude, love as filler. Worse, he had fallen in “love” with someone else—a sous-chef at Café Malatesta. He’d deceived Psycho, even though she never asked him to be faithful; she sneered at the claustrophobic virtue of fidelity and agreed with him about the pointlessness of gender.
He sterilized his X-Acto knife—he wasn’t an idiot—and began very high up on his right arm. He made the first cut shallow; the first cut was a test.
He imagined Psycho in the backseat of a car with her little sister, Charity, and her inanely happy mother and her new father, all of them singing feel-good songs in harmony. He wondered whether Psycho, in spite of her Goth / bisexual pretensions, ever got into it. He thought she probably did. (On her first date with her new girlfriend, Psycho asked Harald to come along. That’s how insecure she was. Harald sat in the backseat all night and didn’t say a word. They drove to the beach and walked on the sand in the dark, Harald following a few steps behind, like a ghost. They drank green chlorophyll drinks with antioxidants to prolong the lives they’d talked at length about throwing away. They smoked weed and made out, and Harald took part as much as Harald ever took part in anything.)
He thought of his own sister, Emma, who was twenty and worked in a toy store, where she was a fucking genius. The two of them used to walk home together after school and bake muffins in a toy oven. He used to get into that, especially if he’d been smoking weed, which he had been. In the morning, after his parents left for work, he used to take a book into their bed and read. His mom had painted the bedroom red and gold—this just before she left his dad, whom everyone called “Bug,” short for Bugman, their last name. It was her last big paint job. The bedroom wasn’t really even a room, just an attached shed his father and he had caulked the brains out of one Saturday afternoon. The shed didn’t have heat—you could see wild mustard and calla lilies and gorse bushes through slivers in the walls—but it had an altar his mother had bought at a flea market in the city and a collection of turquoise Buddhas and those red-gold walls and the warmest down comforter in the house. His mother had a tiny picture of him—of Harald—in a funky gold frame on the nightstand on her side, beside her carafe of water and her amber jar of excellent antidepressants. Harald had cut himself for the first time in his parents’ bed. He felt safe there.
Now he wondered, idly, drawing a line parallel to the first line in his upper arm, whether this bed would be his last. A dramatic thought—Psycho would slap him, sit on him, tickle and humiliate him for it. He knew—they both knew—that the only power they had was not to give a shit. Harald didn’t give a shit—though he suspected that Psycho, deep down, did. (He accused her once of secretly believing in God, which she denied, then admitted, which was hot, and they had sex, sort of.)
The difference between them: She had a deep down, whereas he was all exposed and on the surface. Even now he thought he might shoot her an e-mail. He wanted to be sure she remembered him. He drew a more free-form line down his upper arm with the X-Acto knife and watched the fine line of blood inscribe itself on him, like code.
BABE TRIED, afterward, to analyze what she’d done, what had happened to her beautiful androgynous boy. He’d come out of her sixteen years ago, a new person, and Babe had given him that big-faced, oar-heaving, hard-drinking Nordic name. She didn’t blame herself for everything. She’d taken steps to maintain her sanity, her dignity and her self-respect—and left her husband, Bug. Her daughter, Emma, lived on her own, but Babe took Harald with her, and moved to a redwood cabin in a town a few miles away. The school was better, or at least different, and Babe had a job managing a B and B in the town. She did what she had to do, she told her best friend, Georgie. Somebody had to be Harald’s mother.
“You are not just his mother,” Georgie told her. “You are a human being. You have a responsibility to have a life.”
Georgie threw a dinner party for Babe and Bug, to acknowledge the change in their lives. Babe’s daughter, Emma, came, and so did Harald and his then girlfriend, Psycho. Georgie kept stirring more sugar into a pitcher of bitter Brazilian caipirinhas. She also made a special dish that had been her Syrian grandmother’s. She wrung ground lamb with water through her hands until pink water ran into the deep blue bowl, which looked good against the lamb. For the first time, Babe realized, really, what “meat” was—the tender mash of it purified by its water bath. Georgie held out a dime-size bite on a spoon—and Babe ate it.
The B
ugmans, a loose confederation of four, gathered as a family for the last time. Georgie fed them a beautiful dinner, then had them all draw Chinese sticks from a beautiful wooden tub. (Everything Georgie owned was beautiful, or turned beautiful in her possession.)
Babe’s fortune said she would get an unusual inheritance from a relative, that everything she achieved would come through her work—and she would get her wish. Greedily, Babe chose another Chinese stick, which said a strange dream would come true. Bug’s stick read that he would be granted two wishes. He wished for new rotors for his Subaru—and for world peace. Even Harald and Psycho (who didn’t reveal their wishes) seemed content with what they got. Georgie read her own stick last. It said, “You will suffer an illness before old age, and only part of your wish will come true.”
“Put it back,” said Babe. “Take another.”
HARALD SLEPT sixteen hours a day. Babe tried to wake him gently for school before she went to work, played classical music on the radio, brought him orange juice, built a fire—but nothing helped. He lied about his meds, hid pills in his socks or saved and took them all at once for a more devastating impact. Maybe she should have done more to give him continuity after the divorce. What should she have done? She’d kept his spaceman sheets.
Amor and Psycho: Stories Page 5