So I mixed white and red and brown in different amounts on different places on my glass-topped table until I had a shade of skin that seemed right, then I wiped almost all the paint from the brush and ran the tip of the bristles diagonally in under her cheekbones, one stroke each side. I cut a sixteenth of an inch from her smile, one stroke each side. Each of her irises got one more spark of light. I tried to make it so you could see the tiny hairs on the veins on the backs of her elegant hands, and I made her hair shinier than it had been in months. In all, I put maybe ten touches of paint on the canvas.
And then, just before going to bed, I ran some lighter gray here and there into the background, because the first time around I had made it one shade too dark.
3
IN THE MORNING I brought Janet flowers with the raspberry muffin, but I did not say anything about what I’d seen on the computer the night before. It was not easy to do that, and I was not sure it was the right thing to do. But hope is an almost-tame lion-gorgeous to look at and capable of turning on you in a nanosecond. According to the nurses on duty, she’d had a miserable night and couldn’t eat or talk, and I didn’t want anything else that could hurt her to be in the room then. I stood or sat by the bed and held her long fingers. I pulled the blanket up an inch higher on her chest. I wiped away the saliva that dribbled down her chin. A little bit after eight o’clock she moaned and slowly woke up. We made eye contact, she squeezed my hand, and I almost told her. There was just about nothing left of her-the beating heart, a few weak puffs of air, the movement of her eyes, enough strength to say, “Hi, Joe Date,” in a voice that was like three scratches from a broken violin. I opened the get-well cards from her cousins and coworkers, one from the governor himself. I read them to her and turned them so she could see what people had written: how much they missed her and were praying for her; how they knew everything would be fine. When I couldn’t stand to be there anymore, I kissed her eyelids, said I would be back that night, and went out of the room as if I were only headed off to work.
Doctor Ouajiballah weighed maybe a hundred and forty pounds. I nearly knocked him flat going fast around a corner of the hospital corridor, looking for him. I didn’t even say I was sorry, or good morning. I said, “Living lobar transplant.”
He lifted his coffee-brown eyes to me and said, in his soft, lilting, Pacific Island voice, “Yes?”
“Why didn’t anyone tell us about a living lobar transplant?”
“I assumed Doctor Wilbraham had done so.”
“He didn’t.”
“I assumed you knew it was one option.”
“We didn’t. Is it an option?”
He pinched his lips together and tilted his head sideways. “It’s not commonly done, sir. You would need two donors.”
“We have them.”
“They would have to match blood type or be O-positive.”
“I’m O-positive.”
“The other donor would have to be. And be of a certain size. Each lobe would have to be large enough to take up much of the space left by the removal of a whole adult lung. The body abhors a vacuum, sir.”
“He’s an inch shorter than me. He’s a champion bicycle racer.”
“You cannot be a smoker, or an asthmatic. You will have to be in excellent cardiovascular condition. The psychological motivation must be appropriate.”
I looked at him.
“There are many factors,” he added weakly.
I said, “The insurance company won’t pay for it, am I right?”
He pinched the skin over his Adam’s apple and shifted his eyes to the back of a passing nurse.
“Will they pay for something like that or not, at this point?”
“It’s a quarter of a million dollars, at a minimum.”
“Will they, or not?”
“They do not like to, not in general. In the case of the types of bacteria Janet harbors-one bacterium in particular-the data on survival after such a procedure is not encouraging. Many hospitals will not do it.”
“Has this hospital ever done it?”
“Yes.”
“On somebody with that bacterium?”
“Yes. In fact, twice that I am aware of.”
“And the people lived?”
“Yes, at first. One is still alive.”
“Will you recommend it for Janet, officially, in writing?”
“Many surgeons will not do it.”
“Is there a surgeon here who does it?”
“There was. The very finest surgeon. He retired three weeks ago, unfortunately. If he were here I would recommend it. But, if we were to do it now, without him, we would have to go to New York. If the donors are qualified. If the insurance company will pay. If patient is strong enough to endure traveling, and to survive the procedure itself.”
There was a bustle of traffic in the hallway. Someone rolled an empty gurney past us and we moved aside. A doctor came hurrying in the opposite direction and nodded at Ouajiballah. He nodded back at her.
“I want one thing from you,” I said, when no one could hear. “I want the home address of the surgeon.”
“His name is Leicus Vaskis. His address, home address, is in Dover, Massachusetts, I believe. I could perhaps find it for you, though it would be highly irregular for me to give that information out.”
“This seems like a good time for highly irregular, don’t you think?”
He looked at me. He raised and lowered his eyebrows.
“I want your word that if he agrees to do it, you’ll recommend that the insurance company pay for it.”
He raised his eyebrows a second time. It was some kind of island code for yes. He said, “If all other factors are in order, I would surely consider doing that.”
“Why didn’t you consider doing it before?”
“Because the chances of success at this point are exceedingly slim, sir. Because I wasn’t her doctor. Because it should rightly have been tried two weeks ago if we were going to try it.”
“How much time do we have before…before it would be too late to try?”
“At the minimum, two days. At the maximum, I would guess, ten days.”
I asked il dottore another handful of questions, yanking the information out of him, short melodies of polite and beautifully cadenced speech, and then I thanked him three times and nearly crushed his hand in mine, and, instead of waiting for the elevator, I ran down the four flights of stairs.
From a pay phone in the lobby I called Gerard’s cell. I knew he would be at the job site, and I guessed he’d be putting hardware on the louvered bifold doors in the professor’s new bedroom. Every couple of weeks he changed the way he answered his phone: sometimes it would be a quote from Anna Akhmatova, or a scrap of T. S. Eliot; because he had a fondness for Chinese women, he’d ask a waiter at a Chinese restaurant how to say, “I know you love me,” in Mandarin, and then practice it until he believed he’d gotten it right. Anything but a simple “hello.” It was funny sometimes; other times it made you crazy.
“Nixon residence. Gerard the plumber,” he said when he picked up.
“Gerard.”
“Speaking.”
“I talked to Ouajiballah, and it’s a possibility.”
“That’s what we like to hear!” he said. “What’s Janet’s blood type?”
“O-positive, like me.”
“I can’t doan, then. I’m AB-negative. I stayed up until three last night doing research.”
“Alright.” I kicked the base of the telephone, hard. “Alright, we’ll find somebody. Do you know how to get to Dover?”
“Of course. I go there regularly. My bookie lives there.”
“Forget the closet hardware for now. And forget the damn jokes, will you please? Meet me at my place at nine-fifteen.”
“Yes, Mister Liddy,” he said, and hung up.
I swung by Doctor Ouajiballah’s office, which was in a building next to the hospital. When I told his secretary my name, she handed me a manila envelope, whic
h I opened in the hallway. Inside was a piece of paper with the logo of a pharmaceuticals company on it and beneath the logo: “1339 Madison Road.”
4
AT THAT POINT in my painting career, I’d had three solo shows, all at the same small gallery between Newbury and Boylston Streets. In order to get my paintings there-physically move them there, I mean-I’d built a wooden box that just fit between the wheel bays in the bed of the pickup, and a balsa-wood rack (the same light, strong wood that racing shells used to be made from) that could be slid neatly into the box. I’d wrap the canvases loosely in plastic and bubble wrap and slide them into the rack so they were standing up on one edge. A piece of quarter-inch-thick red rubber glued to the top of the box kept the rain and snow out.
I screeched up in front of the apartment and double-parked there, flashers on. Gerard was waiting. He and I cleaned some wood scraps and a sawhorse out of the bed and threw them on the frozen mini-lawn. We carried the rubber-topped box down from my apartment and bolted it in place with freezing fingertips. I ran back up, checked the portrait of Janet to make sure the new paint had dried, then wrapped it as if I were taking it to the gallery to be shown. I carried the painting, Gerard carried the rack. We slid everything into place in the box in the truck bed, closed and bolted the box, slammed the tailgate, and headed off.
“Sorry about the blood type,” Gerard said, when we were on our way.
“We’ll find somebody.”
“What about your brother?”
“My brother smokes.”
“We’ll broadcast an appeal. I dated a woman at WCVB, she’ll-”
“The hospital won’t allow any publicity.”
“Screw the hospital. What can they do?”
“They’ll refuse to do the operation. Ouajiballah told me. They don’t want some shithead coming in and saying he’ll be more than happy to give a lobe of his lung…for fifty thousand bucks or something.”
“Or her firstborn.”
“Right. Nice.”
“Sorry.”
“The first step is getting this guy to agree to do it. Ouajiballah says he’s an odd duck. He’d never even ever speak a single word to the person he put the lungs into, never even see them when they were conscious. He refused to talk to the press. He’d just come into the hospital in a kind of zone, go into the operating room, stand there for six hours, do something that about ten other people on earth can do, and go home.”
“A psycho.”
“Right. Psycho-genius.”
“I can relate. Why the painting?”
“He retired three weeks ago. The painting is the best bribe I could think of on short notice.”
“Ah,” Gerard said. “Something for the man who has everything.”
5
I AM A VERY CALM PERSON. I inherited that from both sides of the family. It wasn’t unusual for my mother or father to receive an urgent phone call at home, a nurse saying a patient had taken a sudden turn for the worse, or a client panicking about oil futures. Under my parents I’d served a kind of apprenticeship of calm.
But as we drove out of Boston into the picket-fence suburbs, I could feel a sort of salty panic rising like a tide in the cab of the truck. The sky was a woolly gray and the air outside cold and hard as metal. I had a feeling that Janet was going to die on that day. I had given Amelia the number of Gerard’s cell phone, and I kept expecting it to ring, and to have Gerard hand it to me across the seat, and to hear Amelia’s voice on the line, shaking with terror.
But the phone didn’t ring. The premonition about Janet built up in me. The nice houses we drove past turned into nicer houses, until, by the time we crossed the Dover line, “house” wasn’t even the right word anymore.
We could not find a single restaurant or public building in Dover. Finally we saw a library, and stopped there to ask how to get to Madison Road. Even after we found Madison Road, we had to drive the entire length of it-about two miles-three times before we could be sure which long, unmarked driveway corresponded to the address Ouajiballah had given me.
“And I thought you grew up in a fancy neighborhood,” Gerard said.
We turned in between two shoulder-high fieldstone pillars with stone lions sitting regally on top. The driveway was hard-packed gray gravel, and at first, to either side, we saw only hardwood trees with red brambles on the lower tier, the bare cold branches and trunks running the whole spectrum of grays and blacks and browns. A quarter-mile in, the terrain to the left of us opened into pastureland with white rail fencing enclosing it, and what might have been mistaken for a hotel-gray-shingled, many-windowed, three-floored-in the distance. A Thoroughbred horse cantered riderless toward the house, as if hurrying to announce our arrival.
“Wise of you to drop out of med school,” Gerard said.
But I had grown up around doctors. Doctors didn’t live like this.
Gravel crackled under the truck tires. When we reached a high spot in the driveway, about halfway between the street and the house, I could see two people jogging in front of us, climbing a long, gentle slope that crested just ahead of them and then flattened as it approached the front door. A few more seconds and I could tell that the runners were a man and a woman. They were dressed in blue sweat suits, the woman’s long straight black hair floating up and then bouncing down against her back, the man wearing a dark wool winter cap.
They were running fairly hard. They must have heard the truck wheels on the gravel because they moved to their left when we approached. As we passed I gave them as much room as I could, and slowed down and lifted my left forearm in a casual greeting, without looking at them. The way any deliveryman would.
We pulled up just beyond the path to the front steps, and got out. The man and the woman were probably seventy-five feet behind us, sprinting now, we could hear their running shoes scuffing and slapping the dirt, and then the sound of labored breathing.
I lowered the tailgate. Gerard and I started to loosen the wing nuts at the four corners of the box, but it was slow going in the cold, and by the time we had the wooden cover off and had set it in the pickup bed, the runners had reached their finish line-which seemed to be about even with the back end of the truck-and were trotting in loose circles and breathing hard, then walking with hands on hips. Ducking beneath the ladder rack, we tugged the bubble-wrapped painting out of its box, and balanced it on the tailgate. Gerard hopped down, then held it steady while I hopped down. When we started to loosen the outer covering of bubble wrap, I could not keep myself from glancing at the man and the woman again. The doctor was lanky and wide-shouldered, sharp-featured, sixtyish, breath spewing out of him in big clouds. I had told myself that I’d be able to guess our odds as soon as I had a good look at his face, but I’d been wrong about that. My hands were working the masking tape, and I didn’t want eye contact yet, and just as I started to glance away the woman turned toward me, breathing hard, and I saw in that second that she was young and healthy-looking and very beautiful. A little squirt of bitterness went through my mind-irrational, idiotic. I looked away.
We let the bubble wrap and the plastic sheeting fall to the ground and rested the bottom edge of the frame on it, facing us. It wasn’t exactly the way real delivery people would have done it. By that point the man and the woman were moving toward us, not breathing as hard as they had been. I realized I had not shaved that morning. Try as he did, Gerard could never completely erase a certain tough-guy pentimento from his face-the heavy eyebrows, the rough mouth and chin-and it occurred to me that it would not take any great leap of imagination for the doctor and his girlfriend to see us as thieves. Or worse.
The doctor was two inches taller than me, his eyes steady, an unnaturally pale blue, not particularly friendly.
I made my face pleasant and unthreatening. “Doctor Vaskis?”
He nodded curtly. He was not happy to see us. The gorgeous woman-thirty years his junior-had come up close to him and now pulled a foot up behind her, stretching her quadriceps and holding his
elbow with her other hand for balance.
“We have a gift delivery for you,” I said, and though, by then, my voice was starting to wobble like the voice of an unpracticed liar, the word “gift” caught them. Everyone likes to be given a gift. The woman tilted her head slightly, as if she might change her angle of vision and see through the back of the canvas, and, in spite of himself it seemed, Doctor Vaskis let his features soften in expectation, too, the way you do on the morning of your birthday when someone is about to give you something and you want to assure them you like it. I had more or less prepared things to that point, and then decided I would just ad-lib. But no ad-lib was coming to me. The Thoroughbred had trotted up to the end of the pasture nearest us, and was snorting and fuffing his lips over the top rail, and when he was finished, a bad, cold silence started to creep up around us.
“We’re the delivery guys from Entwhistle Fine Arts,” Gerard ad-libbed.
The doctor and the woman looked at each other, and then at me. I took a breath, as if I had something else to say, but I didn’t, and the doctor seemed to sense then that things were not what they seemed. His face turned hard in the way of people with money or power when they are afraid. Another second and he would have thrown us off the property, or taken out his cell phone and called the Dover police, who would not have been kind to us. I saw it. Gerard saw it, too, and turned the painting around to face them. The woman studied the canvas, then bent her lips in between her teeth. She looked up at me, and then at the doctor.
A Little Love Story Page 18