But before I got too wistful, I realized that these two attributes also meant that I could tick off another trait in the right-hand column.
-Aforementioned domesticity would lead me to the conclusion that you should, perhaps, examine your sexual preference.
And then I thought of one more.
-Leaves cancer-laden girlfriend for ridiculously named hussy
It was true. If Ned and Agnes were to ever procreate, their kids had no chance at being cool. This was a fact.
I went to press Send, but then remembered the very purpose of the original e-mail. “I’ll leave your clothes with my doorman by 5:00 tonight. I don’t want any future reminders of you around to stink up my karma.”
Send.
THIS WASN’T THE first time I’d been faced with packing up my romantic history. And certainly, if it hadn’t been for the nuclear drugs coursing through my body and the diabolic cells they were trying to stomp out, this wouldn’t have been the hardest. No, that title fell to Jake. So as I pulled out Ned’s seemingly endless amount of staid blue pin-striped suits and threw them—literally threw them, he could have Agnes iron them for him—into a duffel bag, it was hard not to think of Jake.
I met Jacob Spencer Martin when I was twenty-five. I’d moved to the city only three months before, fresh out of Yale Law, to join Dupris’s first election campaign, and given the clip at which I worked, I wasn’t looking for anything romantically. To be more precise, I wasn’t looking for anything. But on a damp October evening, Sally begged me to join her for a girls’ night out. “We haven’t seen you in a month,” she said, and she wasn’t incorrect: I’d been holed up in my crappy cubicle in midtown making last-minute calls encouraging people to get out and vote. When she put her figurative foot down and told me that if I didn’t come out, she’d never speak to me again (she has a knack for exaggeration), I caved. I placed the cap on my highlighter and tucked away my list of phone numbers and met Sally, Lila, and a pack of other sorority sisters at a bar in the East Village. I didn’t even bother changing out of my entirely too-geekish suit. I can assure you that I was the only one there in pumps. And hose. And we’ll leave it at that.
Around 10:00, a band, the Misbees, one that my friends made a point to see every time they played in the city, hit the stage. Maybe it was the wine, or maybe he really was a fucking great singer, but either way, I couldn’t take my eyes off the blond, tousled-hair guy behind the microphone. His voice hummed out low and deep, and when he sang of pain and betrayal and love and lust, I believed him. And I wanted to know more. Our eyes locked toward the end of the set, and I felt my pulse speed up and my stomach tighten.
When the Misbees finished their set, the singer wandered over to the bar directly next to my perch on a stool and ordered a beer, and when he took a step backward, he somehow missed the fact that said leg of the stool was in his way. Which is how he wound up tripping and dumping at least half of his Heineken on the Donna Karan suit my mother had bought me when I accepted the senator’s offer. Maybe that should have been a warning sign—an inauspicious start—but when he patted me down with a napkin and apologized with his hound-dog eyes, I was hooked. Line and sinker. Sinking fast, actually….
I heard the microwave timer ding, and shaking off my memory, I placed my feet firmly into the existence that now comprised my reality. I stared at a pin-striped shirt and snorted. Ned. As if he’d ever compare to the great love of my life. As if he were anything more than filler. Maybe I’ll e-mail him again, I thought. Just to let him know. I plodded out of my walk-in closet, dropping Ned’s dry-cleaned Armani on the floor and stepping smack on it. I might have even let my foot swivel a few times before I actually took a step forward.
I’d programmed the timer to remind me to take my medicines: the antinausea, the anticancer, the pretty much antieverything. It dinged four times a day, subtle reminders of my altered existence just in case I should ever be lulled into a false sense of reality. The antinausea drugs were the worst: so large I didn’t see how it was possible for a gorilla, much less a human, to swallow them. I’d swing back a gulp of water and the prickly pill would hang in the curve of my throat, daring me to dry heave or cough and start all over again. You’d think after three weeks, I’d have mastered this, but there are some things you just never get used to.
I went back to the closet and picked up Ned’s Armani. My hands dove into the side pockets: I figured that if he had any spare cash, I might as well line my own wallet. I’d already found $31.57, and I was only half done. I pulled out a receipt from an Italian restaurant in the West Village, dated the night of the day that Ned discovered the lump. Bastard. He told me he was in Chicago. I threw the Armani onto the duffel bag on my bed and kept the receipt. Ammunition in case things ever got dirty, I figured. As if they’re not dirty enough, I thought. But I’d learned that on the job: Keep whatever evidence necessary to burn the opponent and shred whatever evidence might be able to be used to bury you.
I reached up to the top shelf for his T-shirts. His lacrosse shirt from Harvard. I tossed it over my shoulder into a garbage bag. After all, it was his favorite. Not that he actually played on the team, you understand. But he managed them, so I guess he felt entitled to don it regardless. And not that he actually got into Harvard on his own merits. As I’ve already mentioned, he’s one step above a complete twit. But his family practically dates back to the Mayflower, and the admissions committee seems to look fondly on ancestry that has enough cash and leverage to donate a new library or two.
From that same shelf, I pulled out a Martha’s Vineyard T-shirt. the black dog, it read. Ned and I had spent a week there earlier in the summer. He started in on me in April to set aside a week in July for “just the two of us,” and given the desperation in his voice, maybe I should have sensed that the lives we were carving out around, not with, each other, weren’t enough. He brought it up again when I was dashing out the door to begin a weeklong trip through Europe with the senator, and in my haste, I agreed, which is how I found myself begrudgingly enjoying a lazy week in a quintessential beach house on the Vineyard. That week, I boiled lobsters for dinner because they were his favorite, I indulged him in renting a kayak, and I stayed up far later than I liked just to sit on our rented porch and listen to the lapping of the waves and hold his hand and stare at the stars.
I held the Black Dog T-shirt out in front of me and almost tasted the homemade donuts that we’d eaten each morning that week. Tangy, sweet, cinnamon, soft, and crusty. Ned would dunk his into his black coffee, and I’d eat mine slowly until it literally melted in my mouth. Maybe I should have savored more than just the donuts, it occurred to me just then. I pulled the shirt into my face and inhaled, as if I might still be able to smell the salty air or breathe in the hazy sunsets or capture those moments—the moments of my former life—in the deep gasp of my breath.
But there was nothing. So instead, I wiped away the solitary tear that had weaseled itself out of my right eye and careened down my cheek, and with sheer brute force, grabbed the neck of the T-shirt and tore it right down the middle. It would make a good dust rag, I figured, when I needed to do some cleaning up.
From: Miller, Natalie
To: Richardson, Kyle
Re: Please Call Me
K—
No word from you. The Post has this splattered all over the front page, of which I’m sure you’re well aware.
Call ASAP.
—N
It was hardly an ideal thing to wake up to: your boss’s dirty laundry airing out for all to see, complete with the headline, “Dupris Is Duplicitous.” Lovely. The truth was that I didn’t know the particulars of this sticky tax problem. And as her senior adviser, I probably should have, but even I, future Madame President, wasn’t immune to the occasional dropped ball at work. And besides, dirty laundry is simply part of my job. In politics, it’s not the dirt that bothers us, it’s the chance that someone might pick up our reeking scent. If you can manage to wring everything through the laundry
without the evidence being spotted, well, hurrah to you.
In the early spring, Kyle, who was my age but still a notch below me in seniority, which didn’t always foster the warmest of relationships, brought the senator’s endless list of gifts—including a Fabergé egg from a Russian diplomat and carved ivory elephants from ambassadors—to my attention.
“I don’t think this is legal,” he said, taking a deep sip of the grande coffee that I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen him without. “Have you ever looked into this? I mean, she gets thousands of thousands of dollars of gifts. And I think it could be an issue.”
“Go away,” I said, waving my hand and squinting at my computer, dismissing him in the way that a queen might shoo a fly. I stopped to readjust the elastic band in my hair and pulled my highlighted brown locks into a bun at the nape of my neck.
“Natalie, I’m serious. I think that this campaign might get ugly, and I really think that this could be an issue. I took a look at some of the stuff that she’s declared in the past, and…” He paused. “Not everything is there.”
I rubbed my eyes. “Everyone fudges, Kyle. No one reports everything. Not our senator, not anyone else’s. No one cares and no one gets caught. It’s just SOP.” I sighed and softened my voice. “Look, I’m fucking dying here trying to write this proposal for the birth control bill—those assholes from Mississippi are threatening to block it—as if offering women the right to insured birth control is somehow a threat to their own testicular power. So I trust that you can handle this. I handled it for years before you, and I’m sure you can handle it now. If you have further concerns, call Diane in Senator Kroiz’s office; though she’ll be relatively hush-hush about it, she’ll tell you this is SOP, too.”
I turned back to my computer just as I saw his face turn perfect cherry tomato red. Despite his tailor-made suits, crisp pocket handkerchiefs, and polished Prada shoes, Kyle was not nearly as composed on the inside as he was on the out, and his emotional constitution was perhaps his one weakness. After all, in politics, you never let them see you ruffled. (Unless, of course, it helped your poll numbers, in which case, they saw you ruffled, rattled, and rolled.)
“Fine.” He huffed dramatically, his voice registering about two decibels louder and dripping with disdain. “But you heard it here first. I think this is a red flag, and I thought that, you know, as her senior adviser, you’d want to know.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t. It’s never been a problem in the past, and I’m sure it won’t be now. So clean it up however you need to. Alter the returns, fudge this year’s gifts, whatever.” I kept typing.
“So that’s your final word? Do whatever I need to do?”
Rather than answer, I flicked my hand in his direction as his cue to leave.
I heard him snort as he spun around to leave, and under his breath he muttered, “Senior adviser. As if.”
“Kyle?” I called after him, ceasing my work and looking up at him. He swiveled his neck over his shoulder rather than give me the courtesy of turning. “I’m sorry. I’m just overworked and on a deadline, and I truly can’t deal with this right now. I’m putting it in your court, so handle it.”
He raised his eyebrows. “You? Natalie Miller. Sorry? I don’t buy it for a second.”
“Fair enough,” I said, half-smiling. “I’m not really sorry. But I figured that you’d stop bothering me and go about getting your job done if you thought that I was.” I turned back to my computer. “So go get it done. And keep me out of it.”
So really, as I stared at the Post and popped the first of my morning pills, I could hardly blame him for ignoring me now that his theory had hit the fan. Turns out, I’d preemptively ignored a very large and seemingly looming time bomb. I flipped on the TV. The Price Is Right was coming on in fifteen minutes and even though I never envisioned a time in my life when this would be part of my daily scheduling, there it was.
I dropped the remote on the couch and went to the kitchen to prepare a bowl of oatmeal. If there were any good news of the day, it was that I was actually feeling semidecent. When I first met with Dr. Chin, when I sat in his dignified mahogany-walled office decorated with Persian rugs and leather chairs, he had told me that there were three stages of chemo recovery. The first week, you feel like your insides are on fire, like the chemicals rushing through you might kill you if the cancer doesn’t. The second week, you sense that you might survive; it’s not that you feel normal, but you feel the absence of the afflictions that plagued you the last week, so in that way, it’s like you won the lottery. And the third week is the one where you can’t believe that you ever felt like such a steaming mound of shit. Chemo? You’re thinking. That’s the best you can dish out? Because that, my darling cancer gods, I can take without blinking an eye. The sick part of this pattern, which I’m sure you’ve already figured out, is that just as you’re on the cusp of returning to your everyday life, right as you press your nose up to healthfulness and start going about your business as you did before the disease mowed you down, you have to start it all over again.
At the time, Dr. Chin flipped through my chart, ignoring his assistant, who kept paging him over the intercom, and explained that we’d be doing six or seven months of chemo, a round every three weeks, and based on my reaction to this treatment, we’d proceed from there. At some point along the way, either in the middle or at the end, they’d perform a mastectomy. They would take my breasts from me.
He also spoke about what I could expect: fatigue, nausea, and the thing that I dreaded most—hair loss. “The aim of chemotherapy is to kill the fast-growing cancer cells,” he explained. “But what also happens as a result is that healthy cells are killed as well. So, for example, your hair follicles are, in effect, shut down. Fortunately, the human body is resilient and smart enough to know how to grow them back when we’re done.” He said all of this in the kind of tone that he’d clearly perfected after years of treating depressing cases such as mine. He was firm yet still reassuring, regretful yet still commanding. I sat in his office and stared at his numerous diplomas and awards and medical society memberships, and I simply nodded my head, a small acknowledgment of the inevitable, of resigned acceptance. It’s not as if I had a choice.
What I didn’t tell Dr. Chin, when he asked how I felt, because surely he was referring to my physical maladies, not the emotional ones, was that I was gutted. That the fear that ran through me was nearly paralyzing. That the sheer terror of his words, “you have cancer,” caused my breath to leave my body, and that nodding my head in resignation was all that I could do. Anything more simply would have been impossible, because, you see, I was frozen.
I was thirty. I was the future ruler of the free world. And yet…this. I was thirty, and I had cancer. I was thirty, and I had cancer. I replayed it over and over again in my mind because it didn’t add up; it couldn’t add up. This. Could. Not. Be. My. Life. And yet…it was. So I sat in his office, and I tasted the horror that comes from discovering you’re not invincible, and maybe it was the cancer, but more likely, it was the spine-chilling terror of my diagnosis, but I literally wanted to curl up and die. Because the sum of Dr. Chin’s words led me to believe that I might just do that anyway.
Before I got up to leave, he pressed a card into my hand. “At some point, you might want to go see her.” I looked down and read Mrs. Adina Seidel. Master Wigmaker. Dr. Chin offered me a thin smile. “She’s the best that there is. And many of my patients find the process cathartic.” I met his eyes and wondered how a pile of fake hair could ever make someone feel more complete. But rather than reply, I took the card into my shaking fingers, thanked him for his time, and told him that I’d see him in a few days. As I left his office, I remember thinking that I couldn’t feel my legs. That I was walking, yes, surely, I was shuffling down the linoleum-covered floor and through the dimly lit corridor, but how I was doing it, I don’t know. I remembered back to high school biology, when my teacher, Mr. Katz, lectured us on the “fight-or-flight” syndrome: that when an
animal is put in peril, any unnecessary part of his brain function shuts down, that his body responds in a purely visceral way, doing what it must to survive the threat. But my own body, when faced with such a threat, was seemingly retreating. Rather than gathering its army to face the hell to come, it was already abandoning me. Already shutting me down. My legs were just the beginning.
But now, as I wrapped up the last few days of my first chemo round, things were indeed looking up. At least as far as my vomit/ nausea/exhaustion/dizzy problems went. That, I supposed, was something.
I stared at the Post while stirring my oatmeal, waiting for it to cool. I reached for the cordless phone on my white Formica counter and considered calling Kyle but figured that I could at least wait until the end of The Price Is Right to harass him. (I was getting quite adept at homing in on the prices of nearly all of the electronics the contestants had to bid on, though admittedly, the groceries still threw me off my game.) Besides, I rationalized, Kyle was probably in his morning meeting. He’d definitely e-mail me as soon as he was done. So instead, I dialed Sally, who promptly agreed to meet me for an afternoon walk. Dr. Chin had recommended that I stay as active as possible without crossing the line to where I actually did more damage to my weary body.
By the time Bob Barker had awarded the showcase showdown (a vacation to Tahiti! Was this really just an excuse for The Price Is Right girls to wear bikinis onstage? I wondered), there was still no word from Kyle. There was, however, word from the senator. Or her assistant, Blair, to be more precise.
From: Foley, Blair
To: Miller, Natalie
Re: The BC bill
Hi Natalie!!!!!
I hope you’re doing well!!!! We’re all keeping our best thoughts with you and know that if anyone can beat this, it’s you!!!!
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