Dangerously close. Dangerously close to the ledge.
Take a step further, and we’re off the edge.
Take a step back, and we don’t know where we’ll be.
But maybe we’ll find we’ll set each other free.
I looped my scarf around my neck and kept moving. And as I always do when I hear one of his songs, I wondered if he wrote it about us.
THE DAY OF beauty worked well enough as a distraction. At least for twenty-four hours. Still though, six days before election day, I was pacing even more frantically around my couch, and neither my newfound discovery of the Game Show Network, nor my scary knowledge of the intricacies of the Passions plotline could distract me. Taylor’s steam train was moving full speed ahead, and thus my pulse was increasing at approximately the same rate. So you’ll understand why I woke up the Wednesday before election day, and before I even brushed my teeth, clicked away on my BlackBerry until I found what I needed.
I wasn’t surprised to catch her at her desk, even if it was 7:30 in the morning.
“Jodi. Natalie Miller, how are you?”
“Natalie! I was wondering when I’d hear from you. This call’s about two weeks later than I thought it would be.”
Jodi Baylor was one year ahead of me at Dartmouth and currently one of the top scoop-getters at the New York Post. The beauty about having a friend in the media was that while the media was almost never to be trusted, I trusted her about 7 percent more than other reporters. Not to mention that she prided herself on never revealing her sources, which was critical when you were said source. And when your boss had explicitly asked you not to be.
“I know. Things are in the crapper, right?” I sat down in my desk chair and looked out the window to the dim late-October skies.
“Well, you’re still up 6 percent. But you guys really screwed the pooch with the hooker debacle.”
Pretending I didn’t hear her, I picked up the card of the wigmaker, Mrs. Seidel, which was tucked next to my pen holder, and flicked it with my fingers. “So here’s the deal. And you didn’t hear this from me. But honestly, the senator is getting an incredibly unfair rap here. She’s donated over twenty-five thousand dollars to cancer research this year. Why isn’t anyone printing that? I mean, I know that Susanna Taylor is suffering through it herself, but it’s not as if Dupris has turned a cold shoulder to the cause.” I got up to make some chamomile tea in the kitchen, but found no clean mugs, so started scrubbing a dirty one from the sink.
“I hear you, Nat. But Susanna comes off like a martyr. She gives the campaign a sympathetic face. Dupris needs to muster up some sympathy of her own.”
Distracted, I turned the water up too hot and dropped the mug into the sink.
“Ow, fuck! Sorry. Okay, well, I can inject a bit of sympathy to the story. But this didn’t come from me, you got it?”
“Got it.”
“You want sympathy to match Susanna Taylor? One of Dupris’s top aides may or may not be dying of cancer herself. And Dupris is so sympathetic that she’s doing everything she can to help out.” Not quite true, but the senator had vaguely mentioned a connection at the NIH if I needed it, and she certainly was paying me for my time off. Oh, and let’s not forget those orchids that she sent over, which now, unfortunately, were doing about as well as the limp hair strands on my head. I filled my semiclean cup with fresh water and plopped in a tea bag.
“So, what you’re saying is that you want to play up this aide’s cancer so that you guys can garner some votes?” Jodi asked, as she typed in the background.
“Whatever works. And reminder: This is off the record,” I replied and popped my mug into the microwave. “And don’t forget her donations.”
“Will do.” She paused. “Do you mind me asking who it is? Who’s the one with the cancer?”
“Sure,” I said. “It’s me. I’m the one with the fucking disease.”
From: Richardson, Kyle
To: Miller, Natalie
Re: I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt
Nat,
I’m sure that you saw today’s paper. You’re mentioned in the leading story. I know that we discussed that the senator didn’t want any PR, so I’m going to assume that you didn’t plant this. I CAN assume that, correct? Because I’m hoping that you didn’t go public with your disease just to turn public sympathy.
KR
From: Miller, Natalie
To: Richardson, Kyle
Re: Never
K—
Not only did I not go public, I’m terribly upset that someone did. I feel like a pawn. Truly. But I bet it helps us at the polls.
—Nat
ROUND THREE
November
SEVEN
The first Tuesday in November, just as I had on every other election year, I made my way to the voting booth. The only difference was that today, I couldn’t make it there myself. I’d had my third chemo infusion the Friday before, and this time, it knocked me on my ass.
By Monday, I was still in bed, burning through nearly eighteen hours of the day asleep. Sally was back in Puerto Rico doing some wedding planning. (“I swear,” she said, “I sent in my absentee ballot,” just before I was about to launch into my “it’s your citizen’s duty” speech.)
Back in August, Sally’s boyfriend, Drew, got on bended knee and asked her to take him for life. That he surprised her proved to me just how right they were for each other: The girl was a journalist, which essentially made her a hired snoop. She could sniff out clues to a story like a bloodhound to a juicy steak ten miles away. Hell, I always said they should have hired her, not Ken Starr, to get to the bottom of Monica-gate. So that Drew, an advertising exec, was able to dupe her—(and trust me, she tried valiantly not to be duped: hacking into his e-mail, checking his Palm Pilot, filtering through receipts)—and propose one lazy morning when they’d just gotten back from a jog in Central Park, well, it was enough for me to turn in my key as her best friend and keeper and hand it trustingly over to him.
Still though, I missed her, not least because on days like today, days when I begrudgingly admitted that I needed someone, days when every other person I knew was gainfully employed, I would have liked to have her to lean on. So when Dr. Zach called to check in on me, I took him up on his offer to accompany me to the polls.
I didn’t have the stamina for a shower that morning, but clearly was in need of a hygiene fix (night sweats will do that to you), so instead, I sat at the base of my porcelain tub, and let the scalding water pour down over me, head bent over, breasts in hand. Just before buzzing Zach up, I’d also managed to brush my fabulous newly hued hair and noticed an alarming number of strands making suicide leaps from my scalp. I stared into the mirror, trying to ignore the purple circles underneath my eyes—they sat like bruises on my pallid skin—and willed myself not to cry at the prospect of going bald. As soon as Sally got back, I resolved, we were shaving it off, even though it now gleamed like a movie star’s. I sniffed in any leaking emotion.
After complimenting me on my new color, Zach placed one arm firmly around my waist and with the other, he grasped my elbow as we shuffled along the five blocks to the Gothic-style church on Seventy-third Street where we were to cast our votes. Most nights, you’d find homeless men hovering under the scaffolding that had stood there for nearly a year, but today, it was solely plugged full with dutiful voters.
“Are you all right?” Zach asked, just before letting go of me at the entry to the voting booth. I caught my breath for a second when I was certain that I was going to collapse right on top of the table that held pamphlets for various causes, the kind of causes that the Upper West Side demographic held dear. A light blue flyer called for a nurse-in, so breast-feeding moms could gain the right to openly feed their babies in local restaurants. A pink Xerox sheet asked neighbors to join them in a rally for gay marriage rights.
But I managed to steady myself before I gave in to the gravitational pull, even though I felt like melting
into a rumpled heap on the tiled floor.
“I can hardly allow these horrid little cells to rob me of my God-granted right,” I replied and managed a wan smile, as I pulled the booth’s curtain closed triumphantly. After I performed my citizen’s duty by tugging the lever, I pushed back the curtain and reached for Zach’s arm before my legs defied my will and gave way.
“You need to eat something,” he said, as we made our way back to my apartment.
“I can’t. I throw it all back up. Even with the antinausea pills that Dr. Chin prescribed.”
“Have you tried ice cream? A lot of my patients can hold that down. Besides, it gives them an excuse to eat ice cream. I think most of them swore off it after the age of twelve.”
“Me included.” I smirked wistfully.
“Come on, let’s go for a cone.” Zach tugged my elbow to cross the street.
“It’s freezing out,” I said, as I saw puffs of air from my breath explode around me. “We can’t eat ice cream now.”
“No one ever told you that eating cold foods in the winter will warm you up?” he said, as I looked at him warily. “Nope, seriously. My grandmother swore by it. And eating hot foods in the summer will cool you down. She used to make us sip hot cocoa whenever we visited her in Florida.”
“I suspect that your grandmother might have been prematurely senile.”
“Oh.” He nodded and laughed. “She definitely was. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t eat some ice cream.”
And this is how I found myself in a diner on Seventy-seventh Street sitting across from my gynecologist and my close friend’s ex-boyfriend, devouring a cup of mint chocolate chip on a blustery day in November while everyone else scurried around outside wrapped in wool scarves and Nordic-styled hats.
“God, I’d forgotten what real ice cream tasted like,” I said, as I spooned down toward the second scoop, gorging like a rescued castaway. “Actually, I’d forgotten what food tasted like.” I paused and looked over at him. “So, are you going to ask me about her?” Even from my first appointment two months back, Zach had never broached the subject of Lila.
“Nah, it was a while ago. I’m moving forward.” He bit his lower lip and thought it over. “It took me a few months, but I think I get it now. I don’t bear any ill will.”
“I’m impressed,” I said, as I scarfed down another bite. “I thought that I’d made my peace with Ned, but the truth is that I’m living in a constant state of alternatively wanting to bash his head into a wall and wishing that he would beg to come back to me.”
“It gets easier. Eventually you figure out what went wrong and you sort of breathe a sigh of relief that you didn’t make a more permanent mistake. And then you just hope that you find someone who won’t end up being another misstep.”
I shook my head and pointed my spoon at him. “See, it’s your perspective that amazes me. I mean, how did you reach that point—the one where you felt like you really knew what went wrong?” I stopped and took a bite. “Take Ned and me. Yeah, I worked a lot, and, true, I was a little self-absorbed, but how did we go from conceivably having small problems that could have been talked out to him banging some work associate in Chicago and dumping me when things got rough?” I licked the back of my spoon and thought of the charm necklace he’d bought me. A sign of hope that never blossomed. My tone softened. “Anyway, that’s sort of what I’m trying to figure out right now. How I can be thirty, and be just as pathetically single as I was a decade ago.”
“You were pathetic a decade ago?” Zach smiled and looked over his cocoa at me. “I can’t really see that.”
I started to tell him about how back in college, I’d sit on the bench of our main walkway underneath the imposing trees, feet folded up below me on the wooden slats, and just take people in. Envision where they were rushing off to. Mull over how they’d spent their previous evening. Wonder if their hearts had been broken or if they were in the thralls of heady love or if, as was often the case both at that time and beyond, they were lonely like me. Not that I had reason to be lonely: I had Brandon (the next ex on my list to call); I had friends; I had, from the outside, a very vibrant life, but I was lonely all the same. I thought about telling him my alpha dog theory, and that now, with no one to cling to, with no one to prop me up, I felt like an anchor that was sinking even further into loneliness, and that I couldn’t help but wonder if I would literally die alone. True, I had Sally, but now Sally had Drew; I couldn’t expect her to rescue me the way she had when I brushed up against anorexia or to remain connected in the way that friends pledge themselves to always do but then occasionally falter in doing because life gets in the way.
Instead, I waved my hand and said to Zach, “Well, you know, in the figurative sense of the word ‘pathetic.’ I mean, really, over the course of ten years, not much has changed, even when it seems like it should have.”
“You know, Nat,” he said, leaning back in the booth and looking at the ceiling, “I’m not sure where the perspective comes from. But they teach you in medical school and in your residency to be analytical. When a patient dies, you can’t just pull off your scrubs and say, ‘I fucked up,’ and go have a beer. Your attending forces you to address what went wrong because if you didn’t, all of your patients might wind up dead.” He paused and took a sip. “So I guess I sort of treat everything in my life that way: Even when I’d rather have a beer, I better first make sure that someone isn’t dying.”
I dissolved another bite of the ice cream in my mouth and bit into a rich dark chocolate chip. Suddenly, I wasn’t sure who I was: the one who would rather have a beer or the one who was actually dying.
Dear Diary:
Don’t have much time to talk because I’m trying to reach Kyle, but I promised Janice that I’d try to write something every week, so here I am. The good news: Dupris won the campaign! The more good news: No one at the office seems to have picked up on my tip off to the Post. The even better news: The senator called the day after the election and told me that although she’s sorry that we won’t be following up on the birth control agenda that I wanted to pursue, she is prepared to go guns a-blazing on stem cell research. So she asked me to start tackling the project…which at least gives me something to do on top of hunting down my exes.
But I’m leaving the greatest news of all for last: I got a dog! Yes, that’s right. A pooch. A hound. A canine. A four-legged friend. I know, everyone thinks I’m nuts, so don’t get all judge-y on me, too. My mom was especially annoyed—she didn’t think I should be around the germs, but I asked Dr. Chin, and he said no problem, and besides, I’ve never felt so in love with anything in my life. Manny. That’s his name.
Anyway, after Zach and I got some ice cream, I got to thinking about my loneliness, how I probably chased it as much as it chased me. Sitting on benches staring at strangers, pulling down my blinds at work so I didn’t have to see the world around me. You know, all of those “isolating techniques” (as Janice likes to call them) that I tend to fall into out of habit. It probably stems from being an only child, but both Janice and I agreed that passing the buck and pointing the finger at my childhood, much of which I spent reading in my room with my door closed, was probably counterproductive.
Anyhoo, this deep philosophizing explains how I found myself at the ASPCA after my last appointment with Janice. I didn’t even mean to end up there, but I’d gotten a flyer from them the day before in the mail, and so I guess I took this as a sign. Huh. Go figure. Maybe I do believe in God, after all?
Okay. Gotta run. I think Kyle could use my help at the office. More later.
PS—Yippee! I love Manny.
EIGHT
I cannot believe that you got a dog,” Sally said, as she stared down at the big-eyed mutt that ran to the door to greet her. “I mean, he’s adorable, but Nat, it’s a huge responsibility. Did you even consider that?”
“I saw him, and I wanted him.” I shrugged and waved her in. “Besides, Janice said that pets can be healing. Can’t y
ou quote some study on that? Anyway, he’s already house-trained.”
I dropped to the floor to nuzzle him. Part black lab, part they-weren’t-sure-what, Manny had been found rooting around a trash bin in the Bronx before a Good Samaritan dropped him off at the shelter. They figured he was about eight months old, so right now, he was all paws. Well, paws and eyes, which belied his mutt roots: He looked exactly like a lab except that his eyes drooped like a bloodhound.
I’d cased the rows of cages at the ASPCA, holding my breath to avoid the pervasive urine scent that clung to the air and peered in to see who might be mine, and the force was magnetic. I was looking up and down and up again, and suddenly, I just stopped. He stared out from behind the stainless-steel bars and pressed his nose up as if to say hello. When the volunteer opened the door for me, he practically leapt into my arms, smothering my face with slobbery puppy breath and a moist, wet tongue. Today, he lapped my face up all over again, and I pulled Sally down on her knees for a similar tongue bath until she agreed that having Manny around wasn’t the worst idea ever conceived.
After wiping ourselves down, Sally asked if I wanted to get started. She’d had come over to do it—to shave my head until I looked like a cue ball. Every morning after I showered, I’d have to unclog the drain; my hair would create such a backup that I’d practically be taking a bath by the time I was done. So this morning, I called Sally and told her that I was ready, ready to face what I might have dreaded most about this ordeal. Losing a breast seemed scary, but losing my hair was horrifying. Sally dutifully showed up with Drew’s electric razor and a pair of scissors that she used to cut the tips off artichokes when she felt like cooking.
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