Lauren poked the necessary folders into her briefcase, locked shut the door, and stepped down the worn stairs to the lobby. In the empty quad the grass was deep green and newly mown, the trees stout and densely grooved. Along a distant asphalt path, the provost marched to his blue BMW. Atop the white administration building slumped an American flag.
She didn’t have to feel deflated. A year was a long time, and they had gotten through it, and now it was a new year. New students—at least some. Now Sarah was in second grade, and Max was in day care two days a week. Now they continued in a steady, if vulnerable way. Martin was always flying off to be with Elizabeth, and at Lincoln College there were always students falling off the edge. There was always something. That was what approaching forty was all about. The first mammogram, the first colonoscopy, the first biopsy.
She sped into the walk home. It was really just about getting blood to the brain and keeping it there, and then you never felt sucked under. You only felt speed. You could only keep moving. Otherwise, you’d drop. She blew by the houses on West Main, New England clapboard or redbrick, porticoes or screened porches, many windowed, two-toned painted shutters, dimensionally shingled roofs, gutters with custom guards, maple-fenced backyards. From the corner she could see to East Main where it met Fourth, could see that Martin had switched on the lamp over the front door in the fading daylight. Inside he’d be setting pots on the stove, rinsing vegetables, slicing skin from chicken or fish.
The wrong end of Main Street, everyone called it. The houses less stylish and kept up, the elementary school squatting opposite and beyond it the dulled shopping center, half ruined by a flood two summers past. Don’t worry, the realtor had told them, it was a once in a lifetime type of event.
FALL
So, did you empty yourself out good for me?” Dr. Dowler smiled as he glanced briefly from the monitor.
Martin nodded, still dazed from all the laxatives. “Real good,” he said.
“I’ll have the nurse start the IV, and when the anesthesia kicks in, we’ll proceed. Okay?”
“Okay.”
The doctor stepped from the tight blue room.
“Just have to check on a few things,” the nurse said. She examined the equipment, then turned to the gurney, where he lay on his side. She was about his age, maybe younger, with a wide, sunny face and a roll of fat around her waist. “We don’t get many young guys in for this kind of thing,” she said. “Something specifically you worried about, or family history?”
“Family history,” he said.
“Let’s hope you check out clear.” She came around to face him and gently tugged at the neck of his gown and looked down the front of his chest to the rest of him and then let his gown fall back against him. She smiled. “Everything looks okay,” she said.
Was she checking him out? A grin slopped over his numb face. She hummed to herself as she watched him and watched the IV and watched the monitor.
Soon—or was it later—Dowler came in. “How you feeling, Martin?”
“Good,” Martin said.
“The monitor’s right there, if you want to watch.”
“In full color,” Martin said.
“Yup.”
Martin tried to stay awake for it, but his head was light, and his eyes heavy, and inside he was empty from the forced evacuation and the starvation diet, and he was drifting, falling. People had told him that it hurt so much you couldn’t possibly sleep through it, but here he was, relaxed, all checked out, checking out. It wasn’t so bad. It was nothing. A snap.
He woke against a tearing, cutting, churning pressure that felt like someone was trying to expand his anus with an outboard motor.
“Almost done,” Dowler said.
That wasn’t too bad. But still Dowler drilled. Martin squirmed and was held against the gurney.
“Almost done,” Dowler said again.
Yeah, right, he told himself.
Gradually, slowly, as if, with a tenuous string, he were removing the Hope diamond from his rectum, Dowler pulled the scope from him.
“Jesus,” Martin said.
“All done.” He patted Martin gently on the shoulder. “I’ll come see you when you’re all set up.”
Again he was left with the nurse. He dropped his chin tightly against the neck of his gown and tried to sleep.
Afterward, as he sat sipping ginger ale in the outpatient ward, Dowler told him that he was clear and that even his prostate looked good. He shook his hand. “Same time next year?” he said.
“Same time next year,” Martin said.
In Hampstead Hospital’s lower lobby, lined by stuffed racks of yellowed pamphlets and application forms, Elizabeth registered under the territorial gaze of an elderly receptionist with thinning bluish hair and too-pink lipstick.
“Can’t say I’ve missed it,” Richard said under his breath.
“It’s so nice of you to come with me.” He didn’t usually—hospitals upset him—but now she could run six kilometers a day or bicycle eighteen, host dinner parties, meditate for ninety minutes at a time. She had entered the cliché and experienced it from the inside out: she had never felt better in her life.
The receptionist rang up to the eighth floor, murmured Elizabeth’s full name, then glanced at her. “You’re expected.” She waved her on with a steely pen.
Along the hall and in the elevator, she found herself trying not to breathe, as if it were hospitals that made you sick in the first place. Richard held her hand and studied the number of each floor lighting one at a time. She made herself breathe normally.
In the blank office sat Sparks, rising as they entered, a smile sliding onto her face, her hair styled back around each pale ear, a faint luster in each cheek. She’d been cycling in Italy on holiday. Spread before her were the fresh bone scan and stapled pages of lab printouts.
“Was it good?” asked Elizabeth, fumbling with her own Britishy inflection.
Sparks looked at her oddly.
“The holiday.”
“Delightful.” She grinned reluctantly. “Rather nice. It was good to get the air, and the scenery was fine.”
“Was it Tuscany?” Richard asked politely.
She nodded, smiled.
“We’ve been once,” he said.
“I know.”
It was rude to ask directly after the results; Elizabeth couldn’t help peering at the shiny opaque sheet. Against the white table it was quite black.
“So how are you feeling?”
She blushed, caught in her curiosity. “Great,” she said. “I haven’t felt this good in years. Running, bicycling. Trips to the health club. Meditation. And my tinctures and vits. I feel quite good.”
“That’s wonderful.” Sparks let the corners of her mouth upturn ever so slightly, and nodded. “I really think you’re doing wonderfully, too.” She held up the bone scan. “No change, for better or for worse; that’s another month of stability. Quite good. And all the blood work is up. You’re doing fine.”
Beside her, Richard admitted a breath, and reached over and squeezed her hand.
“So I guess we should talk about options,” Elizabeth said.
“Alternatives?”
She’d preempted Sparks again. “Yes.”
“Well, I was thinking we could try some chemotherapy or increase the hormones.”
Elizabeth felt her face falling and pushed it back into place. “I thought you said I was doing fine.”
“You’re stable,” Sparks confirmed. For the first time Elizabeth noticed she was wearing a tiny diamond stud in each ear. Must have a new beau. “The spots on the liver are stable. The spots on the spine are stable. The blood is improved. It’s still in your system, Elizabeth.”
“Of course, of course. I’m not denying that. I was just thinking I was doing so well that why should I put any more toxins in my system.”
“The hormone therapy is what is working for you,” Sparks said clinically. “That’s quality of life. But to try to destroy the d
isease with some bold chemotherapy is really your only strategy. Of course,” she paused, “the chances are still quite small.”
Elizabeth just looked at her, just took in the minute, glittering world of each pinhead of diamond. Understated. Subtle. Expensive.
“Now that you’re strong, I think it’s your best opportunity.”
Elizabeth shook her head.
“Well, you have time. It’s not like you have to do it tomorrow.”
“I was wondering,” Elizabeth said. “I was thinking about going back to work. Not the same job, of course. But, you know, pursuing something.”
“What a good idea,” Sparks said.
“We were also thinking …” Elizabeth threw a sideways glance at Richard; his eyes were open, and he nodded. “We were thinking we might also try for an adoption.”
Sparks looked from her to Richard and back again.
“Since I’ll never be able to have children—I understand that now—and since I’m stable, we thought we might adopt a child.”
“Richard?” Sparks said.
He nodded. “That’s what we are thinking,” he said.
“I just don’t think”—Sparks’s ears were turning red from the tips down—“I just don’t consider that to be terribly pragmatic.”
“But you said—”
“In fact”—she quickly leafed through the test results—“I am certain you’d find the process a quite difficult one in which to achieve an affirmative result.”
“Why?”
“Because the health status and projected longevity of the applicant parents are crucial elements in the overall evaluation.”
“But I’m stable. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Even in cases of remission, and yours is not that, it’s impossible to proceed without a five-year disease-free case history.”
“Five years. I could be dead by then.”
She covered her mouth from the horror and truth of what she’d said.
“You’re doing fine,” Sparks consoled her. “Just keep doing fine. You’re surprising all of us.”
They already had her damn certificate written out and ready to go. But she couldn’t muster the rage. She felt as if Sparks had stuck a hose in her and flooded her veins with everything she was not. Her body. It was so tiring to be conscious of her body all the time. Richard touched her sleeve. His eyes were full. Not that, please not that.
“I guess we’ll talk in a month,” she said, standing, waiting for the sturdiness. It was somewhere in there, clinging to whatever hadn’t been washed away.
“Yes.” Sparks smiled patronizingly. “But do call sooner, if you like.”
“Thanks ever so much,” Richard mumbled.
In the Alfa Romeo convertible—the one she’d treated herself to after a larger than expected bonus—with the top down, she let the wind wash her, the weather golden and dry, stunning. The kind of weather that made you wish you could live forever. Down into the car-exhaust jumble of London they rode, the canyon of buildings rising around them.
“You don’t mind the long ride back?”
“Of course not.”
“I’m sorry she said what she said.”
Elizabeth sighed. At least she had her sunglasses on. At least he wouldn’t have to see her like this. “I’ll make some calls,” she said, smoothing the knees of her pants. “We’ll see.”
“The States?”
She glanced at him. It wasn’t an issue between them. She had decided it was best to continue living in London. She had decided they should stay in their nice new house they’d spent two years and a small fortune to remodel. Refurbish. Restore. Resurrect. They had a scrapbook of how it looked before, how it looked when it was completely gutted out, and how it looked now, as if even now were just another completed phase between then and the future. A scrapbook of their house! She wanted a scrapbook of their children.
“Probably,” she said, relieved that their long halt at the light was over, her back sucked into the seat as he roared the last blocks to his office.
He nodded, his face into the wind as neutral as a clock.
She couldn’t quite find the door in her brain, but she knew where it was: when they told her that she couldn’t, not ever. For five years she and Richard had done calendars and tests and counts and counseling. They hadn’t even yet considered in vitro, the cost of it exaggerated by her ambivalence. What about adoption? everyone had wondered. She’d dismissed it. Their babies had to come from them. Their babies had to be of them. The self was the center, the sun, the emanator. A child didn’t come from the outside. A child came from you. And now, when she’d finally accepted the uselessness of her own system, they were going to deny her. She hadn’t even miscarried. She hadn’t even once been late. She hadn’t even ever been certain that she wanted to be a mother. It was Richard who insisted, Richard who was passionate, and she’d decided, Okay, if it happened. But remove the opportunity, remove her from that side of the world (the healthy side, the do-anything, be-anything, eat-anything side), and she was no longer someone who could think about becoming a mother. She was childless. She was less.
“So here we are,” Richard said, the car pulling over at the curb, idling. Oh, she was way below idling. He stroked the back of her bent neck. “I could call in sick.”
“No way.”
“All right. Then I’ve got Epiphany until eleven.”
“That’s fine,” she said.
They got out and kissed timidly—or was it tenuously or tentatively? something with a t, but something not true—and he shouldered his way through the revolving door into his building, and she got in the car and buckled herself in—as if that mattered—and shifted into gear and pulled from the curb alone.
There is love, she thought. Love is everywhere.
Or was that God?
This endless mixing up of what to think and who she was, of advancing along exactly the right chord to grace, to mercy. Of not being so aware all the time of how fucking alone she was. Of stopping at the stoplight and starting again and taking the circle and pulling over at the storefront and jumping out and making sure she could park there, and running in and plucking out the kind of milk and juice she was supposed to drink and the kind of cheese she was supposed to eat and paying and climbing back in, and taking the right roundabout to the next offshoot to the next storefront, and picking up the kind of grains and tofu she was supposed to eat and the kind of soup base she was allowed to sip, and in the car making sure not to get hit or hit anyone. And chugging to the next correct shop, and hunting the organic lettuce and radishes and carrots and peppers that she was to eat and dumping them in the boot with the rest of the plastic sacks, and lurching the seventeen stoplights home. And clubbing the steering wheel and lugging the bags in two at a time, remembering to disarm the alarm, and making sure the car was locked and then that she was locked in the house, and stowing the groceries in the proper cabinets, and making room in the fridge, and washing your hands and grinding your wheatgrass and drinking your juice, and passing the living room on your way upstairs, where you couldn’t help but notice the couch but avoiding the couch and avoiding the bed, and slipping out of your shoes and opening the thick door of the crib-sized room and landing on your knees, and staring at the picture and bowing and shutting your eyes and then opening them and then shutting them again, then not remembering whether they were supposed to be open or shut—it didn’t matter, it was just you in your home, in your farflung, nowhere neighborhood—and beginning or trying to begin, trying to start. Because, anyway, as it had always been since that first day when you’d gotten off the plane from the meeting in Geneva and rushed to that appointment at Hampstead, and there sat the bone specialist with his arms folded across his chest, and you were breathless and in pain from the trip and the cab and just from living, and he said to you as you sat there in the single chair in his ticking office that he was sorry, but he was afraid it was cancer and that it was rather developed, and that was the first time that it ope
ned and you walked through, and you understood for that first time and from here on that you were alone.
At the Halloween parade all the men on the first flatbed truck were dressed as women, but it was the Hot Rod Association, and everyone around Martin laughed and poked one another with their elbows and said, Jeez, would you look at that, there isn’t anything those guys won’t do. He and Lauren passed Max back and forth so the boy could see as much as he liked, while a block away Sarah sat on the curb with her friends and pretended that at seven years old she didn’t have to have a family. Only rarely now did she climb into his arms when he sat watching television or reading on the sofa, and only then when she needed a favor or a treat. Again he walked the one block up to see how she was doing. When she felt him behind her, she turned and mouthed, Go away. Go. Away. He walked back down the street alongside a tap-dance troupe from nearby Potterstown busily clacking their castanets amid warm plumes of exhalation, the coaches potbellied, the girls narrow and stiff as posts, the one boy remote and disdainful. They were charming and pathetic, and the people who watched them were charming and pathetic and so, Martin thought of himself, was he, and he tried to feel he had something in common with the migrant workers who hung out in the video arcade at the Wal-Mart and the Civil War reenactors who drove Confederate-decaled four-by-fours and the Girl Scout moms with their GOT JESUS? license plates and the geriatrics who nervously tended their patches of lawn and boxy ranch homes and the clumps of clubby, grubby parents who sucked on cigarettes while waiting for their children to march by so they could scream and hoot and otherwise demonstrate their kinship and affection. It was an odd town, really. Whenever he picked up Sarah from a friend’s house he waited patiently at the front door, and whenever someone picked up his or her daughter at Sarah’s house, he invited the parent in but the parent always remained just outside. He figured it would take another five to seven years before he and Lauren would be accepted, and yet he wasn’t at all sure that this wasn’t a town where the people had all decided it was so small that you simply didn’t want to get to know anybody any better.
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