Attachment

by Isabel Fonseca

  “Well, what it sounds like, I guess. They just want to keep an eye on him.”

  “In intensive care? That’s a lot of eyes.”

  “I know. Thank goodness his insurance covers it. For a hundred days. Heaven forfend. The doctor told me his anatomy is unusual. Things are not where they’re supposed to be. So it took them twelve hours to finish what should’ve been more or less routine. Now what I want to tell you, honey, is that the operation has been a great success, but of course anything like this is a trauma to the body.”

  Prescription phrases—Phyllis sounded like she was reading from notes—although Jean noticed she no longer said “procedure.”

  “He was more or less frozen for all that time. Shut down. And then they actually lifted his organs over to one side.”

  Jean could hear the fascination in her mother’s voice, and she could understand that, but she wanted to get past it. “Isn’t the hospital the most dangerous place? All those sick people and supergerms.”

  “There are plenty of people worse off than your father. That I can vouch for. And some of them are in the waiting room. Oh my God, Jean, you have no idea. The asses on these people. You don’t know what America is…”

  Her mother was having trouble concentrating. Jean couldn’t tell if this was a bad sign or a good sign. Good, she decided. How serious could things be if she was talking about American asses?

  “They’re all Dominicans up there, packed into clothes two, three sizes too small. Physically impossible, in fact.”

  “Mom, you must be wrecked. Is there anyone with him now?”

  “Well, nobody. Nobody except a dozen or so nurses. You can’t believe the hours they put in, nurses from around the globe—darling Irish girls, Africans, Filipinos…or should that be Filipinas? There’s even a male nurse—fag, of course. With not one but two earrings, like a Gypsy. A girl Gypsy. They need male nurses to move the patients around, though you wouldn’t want to meet some of the female nurses in a dark alley. Good people, though, Jean. Saints, really.”

  “Mom! I’m going to get an early flight tomorrow,” she’d said—and here she finally was, once again unable to connect with her mother. Phyllis must be in intensive care, where they surely banned the use of cell phones.

  Slowing down in Washington Heights, Jean got a blast of city sounds and smells: sizzling meat and fried dough from a quilted-silver vendor’s cart on the island of the wide avenue; samba blaring, New Yorkers honking any chance they got—and today the sound struck Jean as convivial. And then, suddenly before the wide steps of Columbia-Presbyterian, it hardly looked anymore like New York City—instead a steeply pitched, leafy suburb. Along the steps, a pale wall—a great slope glittering with mica dust—was adorned by a frieze of white-and-blue-uniformed hospital workers, sitting, stretching, smoking, and chatting. Through the glass doors and into the chilled lobby, where Jean’s suitcase, a discreet wheelie, attracted the unsmiling attention of security: check that in, then to the sign-in queue, show ID, get a large color-coded pass like a flash card for the sight-impaired.

  It was in this final line that fatigue hit Jean with a powerful command to get horizontal. At least she was in a hospital, she thought, gripping the cool handrail in the elevator and silently watching the numbers climb until she was at last disgorged onto the fifth floor. Past the young doctors in the hall confiding to their cell phones, past the crowded waiting room, through the swinging double doors to the reception island, Jean was grateful all over again for her clean bill of health. But she didn’t see her father.

  The unsmiling nurse didn’t even look up—sullen posing as efficient, too busy, no, too senior—when she asked for him. This isn’t a hotel, you know. Steeling herself, Jean began her own rounds, reading the paper name card in the aluminum slot beside each curtained-off cubicle. Expecting to discover shellac-yellow patients choking on vomit, she started to peek behind the curtains.

  Major surgery was the kind of surgery they did here: the clotted hearts of old men. But it was the sight of an old woman asleep with her head flung back, displaying her narrow rodentlike teeth, that made Jean want to leave. And then she spotted his feet—those high arches and extra-long toes—at the bottom of a pair of inflated gray tubes fitted like wine-bottle coolers around his calves against deep-vein thrombosis.

  The bed was full. Dad, of course, though he didn’t look like himself in that ancient-mariner beard, but also Phyllis, slotted along the edge beside him, the metal side bar especially lowered to make room. He was asleep, and she looked like she was, too, her small hand resting on Bill’s naked oatmeal chest. A modern rendition of the Arundel Tomb, Jean thought. What will survive of us is love.

  Her mother knew she’d be arriving around now, which only increased Jean’s displeasure at finding her in bed with him. Wasn’t it insanely proprietary, even dangerous, given his delicate condition? Or was it just unseemly? The sight offended, she would later realize, not because of where they were or because he was apparently comatose, not because they were long divorced and everyone had gotten used to that; it was because they were her parents.

  But what had she expected to find? A young dark-haired Dad sitting behind his big brown desk in weekend corduroy, smiling at her over his folded New York Times as she came in, back home from Saturday-morning gymnastics? And then she noticed, across the cubicle on the window ledge, the bowl of green apples—Granny Smith, the kind they used to share on those mornings, cut into wedges with the skin left on and smeared with peanut butter.

  Jean stood hesitating at the curtain, looking in, glad now for the staff’s indifference. Everywhere she saw evidence of Phyllis’s ministrations, her sandbagging against helplessness: the stack of CDs, classical compilations and Peggy Lee; skin lotion and a comb; a brief skyline of Tupperware containers with their shadowy sealed treats. Other items, Jean grasped, had been specially selected for their settled civility, their reassuringly expensive cheer, such as the engraved silver vase, a wedding present filled with pink ranunculus. But it was his aftershave that got Jean, the ornate bottle of 4711; she’d certainly cry if she smelled it. Her throat constricted again, her toes pressed onto the floor through thin soles.

  There was nothing to do but wait. She moved to the window, careful not to knock into any of the equipment crowding the space: mechanical bed, respirator, heart monitor, the tangled rack of tubes and bags… She looked down to the shiny river Bill wouldn’t be able to see from his bed, a silver snake soundlessly wending its way to the sea.

  Jean remembered a trip around the island with Larry Mond on the Circle Line the summer she worked for Dad’s firm. It had been unbearably hot and humid—their bid for the river began in torpor. On the boat, just past the Statue of Liberty, it began to drizzle and then to pound and bounce on the slippery painted surface, a great clattering New York summer downpour; and, instead of following her inside the small cabin packed with tourists, Larry had held her back and smuggled her hand into his pocket, those joined hands soon the only dry part of their combined body, alone on the open deck. It had just been the right thing to do.

  The right thing. Jean, reflexively fingering the biopsy spot, turned to look again at the slumbering parents, their bodies alternately rising and falling like carousel horses in the final lap. Standing there, helplessly watching, it was unbearable even to think of losing either one of them. Instead, she thought about the night she got Scully’s good news.

  An elated Mark had arrived back from Germany just in time to take his girls out for a festive dinner at Chez Julien, a large, noisy French brasserie in Soho. For the first time in months she’d actively wanted his company. He excelled at celebration—a talent she lacked, which was perhaps why, she suddenly thought, she’d been quite so pleased she’d been able to gambol and frolic unfretfully that night with Dan, never mind any special daring. She had a glimmer here, midreminiscence about their family dinner, that she might possibly consider her crawl around Dan’s grotto, that swinging orange lantern in Hox-ton, as a kind of Saturnal
ia, with Dan as the Lord of Misrule. Hadn’t she played the master serving the slave, just as in the Roman feast?

  Over champagne at Chez Julien, Victoria had at first been upset not to have been told about the biopsy. But she accepted her mother’s familiar mystical reasoning, that she hadn’t wanted to make it real by saying the words: breast cancer. Jean allowed herself to be teased—the superstitious, hex-attuned health columnist—and then she changed the subject. “Do you think the paparazzi outside are waiting for someone in particular or just hanging around on the off-chance?” Jean asked.

  “Paparazz-o,” Victoria corrected, “and an obvious employee of the restaurant. Lends an air of glamour. At Chez Julien’s everyone’s a star.”

  “Actually,” Mark said, draining his glass, “the snapper was waiting for me—the man with the two loveliest women in London. Garçon!” He called after a passing waiter, holding up his empty flute. He’d positively enjoyed being ribbed about the contraceptive cream—How had he put it? “What if I’d used your friend’s depilatory cream instead.” There were toasts, and Jean’s mistaken order of foie gras. She’d stared at the organ floating in broth as if expecting it to twitch, a tumor, obviously malignant, a spongy cyst extracted entire—imagine a thing like that in your breast and then getting it for dinner; and Jean had expected a slab of paste, the nursery color of dried calamine lotion. She managed to unload the unprocessed liver on Mark with a joke: he couldn’t refuse with bonne foi.

  That night, they’d made love for the first time in months. Energy and ease drawn from champagne and from relief. She was so grateful to be alive, to be given all these extra chances. To these they’d added another relief: everything still worked. Jean badly wanted to tell Vic, and sometime she would tell her: Mark was so proud of you he didn’t stop grinning all evening. In bed the next morning, she thought with amused tenderness how he hadn’t realized the approving nods from nearby tables were a response not so much to Victoria herself, but to his ruddy pleasure in her.

  Mark had gone out for the papers and Jean contemplated getting up. She stretched, and felt, as a great luxury, relief also from complication. Somehow Giovana, as if she herself was the cancer, had been banned from attendance even among Jean’s thoughts throughout the evening and night. And this morning as well: Jean, still not dead, was too happy to care. Amazing how self-fulfilling a pleasure this was, playing happy families. Of course she knew she couldn’t shut out her troubles indefinitely, but neither was she just playing: she was cancer free and full of love—nothing had ever seemed realer. When she did at last get up, she found her hangover was mysteriously mild. Vic, in her old room at last, slept in.

  Still hovering by the window in this hospital cubicle, it was with near incredulity that Jean remembered her conviction, in the coffee-scented kitchen, with the bacon spattering and popping like an old jazz recording and Elizabeth rubbing against her ankles, that strangeness had its points, but true love, or old love, was better. It was more satisfying, it was more intimate, and it knew so much more about her.

  And then old love stirred right in front of her: our lingering parents. When her elfin mother sat up, looking just as rumpled and disoriented as Victoria had every morning of her childhood, Jean fought her tears. Poor Phyllis. Poor Bill.

  But staying with Phyllis on an inflatable mattress in her cluttered, white-carpeted TV den fed her mood of suppressed agitation. Four days quickly passed in this routine of waiting, mother and daughter sharing the unspoken thought that if Bill wasn’t getting better, he must be getting worse.

  Jean was too restless and distracted to follow the news, too emotionally unreliable for phone chat, so she communicated electronically with Victoria and Mark—both, thankfully, very busy. When Mark wrote that he was going to the Continent for a week of work away from the office, she relaxed—it seemed her fear of Dan’s confession even outweighed her misery over this latest assignation with Giovana. A sad, indeed sordid, state of affairs. In preparation for her series on sin, she’d been reading Dante. Purgatorio, where she felt very much at home.

  And shoring up her strength, sharpening her moral wits—she finally began Larry’s book, A Theory of Equality. She found his ideas both stimulating and strangely soothing. For example, the proposition that natural endowments of talent and intelligence are morally arbitrary and ought not to affect the distribution of resources in society. How Mark disagreed, Jean thought: for him, it was all a great dogfight, hard work, vim, vigor, and, yes, luck—these won the day, rightly so, every man for himself and sod the rest. But Larry was also tough, and his theory had a component beyond fairness. It was this, even if she’d known it before, that struck her in Phyllis’s feminine aerie: human beings are responsible for the choices they make.

  Bill was mostly asleep but not comatose, and he regularly awoke. All three Warners expended the great part of their energies working the nurses and doctors. The patient was gallant as he would be toward any woman, perhaps (it dawned on his newly attuned daughter) toward any woman who fussed over him in bed—never mind how much he must hate being handled, or manhandled, naked. In response to his recurrent pneumonia and a partially collapsed lung, Jean found herself eagerly offering a letter of recommendation for the pulmonologist’s would-be journalist son, whom she’d never met. And she invested in Joe, the hoop-earringed nurse with a standout candor: a real find in this world of technical talk, shift change, and buck-passing specialization. Phyllis flattered all the nurses and resisted showing them what a hospital corner looked like in Salt Lake City: something as sharp and crisply ingenious as an origami swan.

  In the evenings, mother and daughter were gentle with each other; Jean read Larry’s book and Phyllis did intricate needlepoint; they oopsed and whoopsed as they do-si-doed in the galley kitchen. And most of the day, they sat for dead hours scanning magazines in the waiting room. Jean was stunned by the profusion of health columns, so many dieting tips, while all around them, just as Phyllis had said, were the obese families of the infirm, fat men and fat women, fat children and fat adolescents: the boys in rustling fat tracksuits and the girls with oiled tresses plastered to the skull and then unleashed below the neck over fat backs and great cartoon asses. It amazed Jean to think that, through Dan’s comprehensive attentions, she’d only just discovered her own ass, and how quickly all that had again seemed alien.

  She’d start her sin series with gluttony, she thought, riveted by the families in the waiting room. She counted back on her fingers through the sins: Gluttony. Greed. Sloth. Lust, obviously, envy, and pride. That was six. What was the seventh? Anger. That didn’t seem right. Pride and anger had crossed the road—they were all virtue now. Lust had been liberated, at least for some. Sloth was laid-back, low-key, and, at least since the abolition of slavery, defiantly fashionable on St. Jacques, where people lived to a Methuselan age. But for Jean, sloth had a special resonance. Dante described it as the sin of insufficiency—not bothering to love—and he twinned it with sadness.

  Sometimes they wandered to the cafeteria on four where the soups weren’t bad and the overfilled muffin trays reminded Jean of the families in the waiting room. To escape AC and IC, they occasionally walked around the block. If ever they strayed farther, they were repelled, spooled back, as if they’d reached the limit of an extendable leash or touched an invisible electric fence. Mostly they sat or stood behind his drawn curtain, holding his hand, massaging lotion into his papery skin, reading silently and aloud. Soon Phyllis would have to recover her part-time job at the public library; she was overdue and her agitation was mounting daily like a late-book fine. Finally Jean persuaded her mother to take a break, waving her off downtown to the Upper East Side.

  Bill slept a great deal, and Jean waited. Walking out one afternoon she spotted an Internet place on Broadway and stopped to check her e-mail: There wasn’t much that was new or interesting, but as she scrolled down, tidying and deleting, there, apparently untouched, was that old message from France, À l’attention de M. Hubbard, and Jean click
ed it open.

  Dear Mark,

  I am so sorry I missed you in Londres. I will try to make new my plan so I can see you. How is Victoria? She gave me this address. You were right. I can never forget her. Thank you. Thank you for everything. You are giving me so much always. You say it is a gift and not a lend, but I will repay, je te promesse.

  Sophie

  Ps, I passed by the abbaye today it is jus the same. The top window at the last, it was opened. When I pass I think to become une soeur—a nunn?

  Jean had in fact been thinking about Sophie de Vilmorin. Ever since her chat in the kitchen with Vic, she’d wanted to write and put herself in the frame, to interpose herself. Now she saw that it was not Vic Sophie had wanted. It was money—cupidity, not cupid. Not love, not friendship, not extended family: money. Jean had been right—there was something deeply suspect about Sophie. Still, money was the least complicated of motivations, and for that alone she should be grateful. Never mind if the e-mail was for Mark, the address alone—hubbardsabroad@hotmail.com—should’ve told Sophie it was a family account. Any renewed sense of breaking and entering was unfortunate: Jean had to dispatch a reply without delay, friendly but brisk, an acknowledgment, not an expansion.

  My dear Sophie:

  Forgive my replying in Mark’s stead—he is horribly busy. We were both sorry to miss you in London.

  She deleted this. Perhaps Mark had seen her since—it seemed from her e-mail she was trying to arrange a meeting.

  Sophie,

  I was sorry to have missed you in London—Victoria was thrilled to have discovered her old babysitter. Hope for better timing next time.

  All the best

  Jean(ne!)