This wasn’t part of the plan. The plan has gone awry. I was to live the rest of my days with dignity. Mrs. John Taylor. Not to have a trail of litter behind me, false wives, bastard children, child brides. It is disgraceful. It is undignified. I even did what certain people suggested that I do when this stink became public: I resigned my posts. My chair at the head of the South Peninsula Garden Club. Member of the board of the Palo Alto Junior League. Member of the steering committee for the Peninsula Open Space Preservation Society. I shed them all.
I can’t help but blame this all on the messenger, that girl detective. She called me again after she visited LA to interview Helen, and casually dropped the bomb in passing. No doubt she enjoyed breaking the news. But I won’t go down easily. An agreement is an agreement.
I book my flight to LA.
57
Helen
A BOY. I AM CARRYING a boy. This is shocking news. This is unwelcome news. Unacceptable. What can I do with a boy? There is no boy in my future.
I found out this morning, got the call from the laboratory. The woman on the other end of the line, the technician, was inclined to be playful. “You have a healthy child,” she said, “Nothing to be alarmed about from the amnio.” “That’s a relief,” I said. My whole body relaxed. What would I have done with a Down syndrome child or child with some other severe birth defect? It would have been aborted. That would have been my only option.
“Don’t you want to know the sex?” asked the woman. I had forgotten about that, so sure was I that my child was female. “Of course,” I replied, and waited. But the technician turned coy. “Want to guess?” she asked. This irritated me. I said, “Boy” just to be ornery, and heard a congratulatory, “That’s right!” “A boy?” I asked, incredulously. “Yes, and it sounds as though that’s what you wanted!” I hung up without saying goodbye.
What do I know of footballs and lizards and wet dreams? I was prepared to deal with the PMS and first love of a girl, but not the onslaught of testosterone. This will take some adjusting. This will take some thinking about.
It has been a rough day so far. Even the overwrought parents got to me in a way they usually don’t. Often I retreat to a zone in the center of my brain that controls all the outgoing signals. The eyes, opening wide while listening and narrowing in thought at the right moments. The voice, firm yet full of compassion. The hand, reaching out to almost touch an arm, but holding back in case that’s too much of an imposition. It doesn’t mean I’m not capable of being kind. I just get so fatigued and cranky and unable to do my job well. For their sake, it’s better that I fake it, look at the children without seeing them, pat their little heads, smile at them. Good oncologists are good actors. This doesn’t make them bad people.
I would have thought so when I was younger, even post medical school. I thought sincerity was the requirement. Now I strive for authenticity. Quite a different thing altogether.
But today things aren’t going well. My control center isn’t operating properly. Earlier, I reached out and actually touched a father who jerked back angrily. To him I was the big bad cancer monster delivering the news of the impending death of his beloved son. Beloved son. I think of blue blankets, and tiny infant footsie suits printed with bats and balls or outer space or railroad motifs. I shudder. I am ashamed in the midst of my irritation. I slip off my shoes, prepare to change into the sneakers I wear home for comfort.
Sally, my favorite nurse, knocks, then opens the door to my office. “There’s someone here who won’t leave,” she says, and grimaces.
“A parent?” I ask wearily.
“More of a grandparent, if anything. But I suspect it has something to do with . . . that matter.” Sally has always been circumspect about my relationship with John—before we were married, when we were trying to keep it from the gossips throughout the medical center, and certainly after his death, when the media piranhas swarmed.
“She says her name is Deborah.” Sally’s look turns resolute when she sees my face wince. “Okay, I’ll get rid of her.”
“No,” I say. “Show her in.” I am resigned. From what I know of Deborah Taylor, she will not take no for an answer anyway, not if she knows I’m in here, which somehow I’m sure she does. I slip my shoes back on.
When Deborah enters my office, I feel the dynamics of power shift, just like that. I could be the patient on the examining table in the paper gown rather than the doctor. I stand to assert myself, but my move backfires as she graciously says, “Sit down, please.” I obey her, feeling like a visitor in my own office.
She remains standing until my assistant closes the door behind her. Then the graciousness vanishes. “How dare you,” she says, almost hisses. I don’t even try to pretend not to know what she is talking about.
“I don’t dare do anything,” I say, with more spirit than I feel in my tired bones. “But what’s done is done.”
“Is it a boy?” she asks. I wonder briefly why she thinks this is important.
“I won’t tell you,” I say. “You have no rights here.”
Deborah’s mouth twists and her eyes turn ugly. “So it is,” she says, then she takes a step forward so that she is pushing against my desk. “Be certain of one thing. You will not use the Taylor name.”
This honestly throws me for a loop. “What?” I ask.
“Nor does this child have any claim on John’s estate,” she says.
I put up my hands. “There’s no question of that,” I say. “Of either thing.”
Deborah stares at me for a full minute. Then I see the tension visibly begin to leave her body.
I gather strength as she subsides. “I don’t see what any of this has to do with you,” I say. I struggle a little getting to my feet; she is still standing, so close that I have to maneuver around her. “And I don’t know why you intrude like this when a simple phone call or even email would have been enough.”
“Because I wouldn’t have trusted the answers,” she says. “I had to see you myself.”
I am suddenly more tired than I can ever remember being. Not just tired, sleepy. I could curl up and sleep for days. It’s only Monday and I have a full week’s worth of patients.
Deborah’s eyes stay on me, and, as if against her will, she looks concerned.
“Are you all right?” she asks.
“Of course,” I say, but as I say it my knees buckle and Deborah reaches out and catches me, gently sitting me down in an armchair.
“You’re not,” she says. “You’re pale. When did you last eat?”
“Not today,” I admit. I was too nauseated to eat breakfast, and too busy to grab lunch.
“That’s ridiculous,” she says. “When I was pregnant I was eating every minute of the day, and I was still hungry. Here,” she’s rummaging in her purse, and comes up with a power bar. “I always carry these when I fly.”
I accept the bar, unwrap it, and take a bite. “Eat the whole thing,” she says. “Don’t try to do anything until you’ve had a chance to increase your blood sugar.”
I manage a smile. “Who’s the doctor here?” I ask.
She’s serious. “You should be asking, ‘Who’s the foolish pregnant lady?’”
That makes me laugh. I take another bite, “Somehow I never pegged you as having a sense of humor.”
“On occasion,” Deborah says solemnly, “I’ve been known for my wit.” Then she does smile.
Deborah turns to go. Funny how vulnerable she seems to me now, from behind, how fragile her shoulder blades stick out of her thin shoulders. I try to think if she was this thin at the funeral. I decide she’s lost a considerable amount of weight.
“Hang on,” I say. Against my better judgment and my intense tiredness I find I want to make a genuine gesture toward this woman.
She stops and looks at me questioningly.
“Are you flying back tonight?”
“No,” she says. “I’m going to find a hotel, and then leave in the morning. I can’t face the airport and tho
se security lines more than once a day.”
I hear my voice inviting her to stay with me. “I have a pullout couch in my home office,” I say. “It wouldn’t be any trouble.” This is a lie, which gives me pause. I rarely tell an untruth, and when I do, it is for a good reason. But I have no reason to invite John’s wife into my home. The words common human decency come to mind.
She appears to consider the offer. “I wouldn’t impose,” she says.
I’m about to argue with her. “We’re nearly family,” I say, and find my hand reaching out in a gesture, but somehow I miscalculate the space between us and touch her arm. This is too much. We both recoil, and I think, Well, that’s that.
Then she accepts my invitation.
58
Helen
SEEING DEBORAH SITTING IN JOHN’S favorite chair, sipping wine out of a glass he almost certainly used at some point, is unsettling. More than unsettling—crazy-making.
She’s been in my condo for about an hour. We ordered in some sushi—vegetarian for me—and while we wait for it to arrive I take a shower and put on my pajamas. She’s still fully dressed—I can’t imagine her any other way—and hasn’t even taken off her shoes.
“Do you miss him?” she asks. She is openly looking around my living room and dining room, which is minuscule compared to her Palo Alto home, but more comfortable, in my opinion. Not as funky and full of character as John’s fantasy San Francisco Victorian, of course. There’s a plush taupe sofa, love seat, and matching large armchair, the one Deborah is sitting in. An antique pine coffee table, and a similar square table with four upright chairs for the dining alcove. Walls mostly bare. My wall art is in my office, which is covered with photos of children. Patients. Many of them dead, although many have survived, too. I like to be reminded of that fact. Though all this will be quite different in a few months. The office turned into a nursery, toys and blankets and diapers strewn around.
I wonder how I’ll handle it. I like everything in its place. I hang up my clothes the minute I take them off. I wipe down the sink and bathtub immediately after using them, wash my dishes as soon as my meal is finished.
When John entered my life, I found myself trailing after him, picking shirts and socks off the floor, putting dirty glasses in the dishwasher, constantly tidying. I remember Deborah’s pristine house. Perhaps we have more in common than I’d thought.
“Did you follow John around, cleaning up after him?” I ask Deborah. She seems surprised for a moment, then smiles. It is not a particularly nice smile. I must remind myself if I start to soften towards her—she is not a nice woman.
“No, I had him trained. What, did he do that to you? He knew he could get away with it, then. I made sure he understood that everything had a place.”
“Right, that’s my rule, too,” I say, and Deborah lifts her wineglass in a mock toast. “But I could never get him to follow it.” I say.
Two women, complaining about their man.
“You’ll be interested to hear that in the . . . other . . . household, John was the neat one,” Deborah says. She smiles again, but this smile has anger in it. “He told me that MJ was impossible as a housekeeper, impossible in the kitchen, leaving pots and pans and dirty saucepans in the sink. So he took over the housekeeping. Can you believe that? I wonder how that creature is doing without her personal maid service.”
“At the reception, all she could talk about was tending to her garden,” I say.
“Yes,” says Deborah, but curtly. “Well, she’ll get to keep her damn garden. And house too.”
I don’t respond. I don’t know what arrangements have been made between the two of them, and I don’t care to know. Deborah doesn’t strike me as either a generous or merciful woman. As a judge she would have been a hanging judge and would have adjudicated to the strict letter of the law. Yet MJ, that mess of a woman, apparently got something out of her. Squeezed a drop of benevolence out of that stony heart.
Deborah breaks the silence with a strange question. “Tell me, how did you meet John?” she asks. She pauses, and then says, “He never told me. He refused. Which was unusual.”
“Through the hospital,” I say. I’m pleased that John refused to share this part of our lives with her. And I’m not sure I want to, either.
“You won’t give me any more than that?” she asks, and I am surprised by the pleading in her voice. She has put her wineglass down, still half full, and there is a plaintive look on her face. Is this some sort of trick? But what advantage could she have tricking me into telling my love story?
“No one has ever asked,” I say. This is true. To my friends, “I met a guy” had sufficed, largely because the news had so astounded them that they then pestered me with questions about John himself rather than the details of our courtship. They were overjoyed, too. My dearest friends, who had never quite accepted that I was happy on my own.
I take a deep breath. “A new patient came in, a ten-year-old boy who’d been born with a lump on his forehead. They determined it was a benign mass at birth, and the family didn’t have insurance for what was considered elective surgery, so the boy just lived with it. I saw pictures. It wasn’t that noticeable when he was very young. Or when he wore his hair in bangs later on. But by the time the boy was nine, other lumps—they were tumors, to be precise—began growing all over his face. They brought him to me, to ensure these tumors really were benign. In fact they were hemangiomas, benign tumors of the endothelial cells that line blood vessels. Since they were beginning to interfere with the boy’s functioning—his breathing and his eyesight—the insurance would now cover removing them. He had the surgery. But the poor boy was horribly disfigured due to a careless surgeon.
“I began calling around for a plastic surgeon who might do some pro bono work for this boy. I’d heard of John’s clinic, of course. It’s well known in medical circles, especially among pediatric specialists. I put in a call, got the forms, and began the tedious process of filling them out and documenting the case with photos and lab reports. Then, a colleague told me that John was actually here at UCLA on an adjunct professorship teaching a seminar on facial reconstruction after burn trauma. So I emailed him directly, and surprisingly, he got right back to me. And since he was already in the hospital, agreed to come by my office that day.”
“What was your first impression?” asks Deborah. “I’m curious.”
“He had clearly once been handsome, but I remember thinking that he was going to seed: overweight, and with a red face. I immediately thought of hypertension, or vasculitis, or perhaps alcoholism. But the redness subsided after a few minutes and I realized he had been blushing. A man of sixty, blushing to meet me!
“I had pulled the patient’s file, and we went over the photos together, and right away he said he could help this boy. No hesitation. We scheduled the surgery. The boy and his family were terribly nervous, and for some reason, so was I. There seemed to be a lot riding on the outcome of this operation. I wanted it to be successful. I needed it to be successful. I was invested.
“In the meantime, we exchanged a series of businesslike emails. Yet I understood it was a courtship of a kind. He called me several times to discuss the techniques he was planning to use—taking skin from the boy’s thigh and grafting it onto his face over the scars, rebuilding the shape of the face with borrowed cartilage. At one point I asked him if I could observe the procedure. He warned me it would take a long time—six to eight hours—but I was welcome to stay for as much of it as I liked. I was rapt during the whole thing. I positioned myself in the observation room above the operating theatre in such a way that I could see John’s hands.
“Whatever slovenly habits he had in civilian life, none of this passed the threshold to the OR. He was gentle and delicate. I stayed for seven and a half hours. I hadn’t realized how tense I’d been until John completed the last suture, and turned to his team members and gave a triumphant thumbs-up. Then he looked up at the observation room, where I was getting ready to leave
, and pointed to himself, then to me, then made a drinking motion. I nodded.
“In the waiting room I still felt tense. I was feeling . . . how can I describe it? Like I was about to see my beloved after a long absence. I remember a quotation my father recited when he saw my mother enter the room, a kind of inside joke between them. ‘Who is this that cometh out of the wilderness like pillars of smoke, perfumed with myrrh and frankincense, with all powders of the merchant?’ My beloved, he’d exclaim.
“Those are the words that came to mind when he finally approached me, his hair still slick from his shower. I saw his face was crimson again. Another blush, deeper than the first. He said, and it amazed me how close our thoughts had been. ‘I had to succeed on this one. ‘I had to win the hand of the princess in her tower.’ No other explanation. We didn’t go for a drink. We went straight to my place with very little more discussion.”
Deborah doesn’t say anything. I hadn’t looked at her while I was speaking, and turning to her now, I’m surprised to see that her eyes are closed. She is leaning against the back of the chair, her hands clutching the ends of the armrests, and that’s what tells me that she isn’t asleep—the tendons showing white from stress on the backs of her hands.
59
MJ
I’M FEELING BAD, THAT BAD feeling again. The very bad one. I just can’t shake it.
I haven’t felt like this in more than twenty-eight years. When I’d just given birth for the second time, and was breastfeeding and changing diapers in the middle of the night while caring for a hyperactive toddler during the day. My husband was off at the Odditorium, and doing extra shifts on construction sites whenever he could get the work. We needed the money. The suffocation of the soul. That shortness of breath. That heavy feeling, as though some beast was sitting on my chest. The urge to disappear, to get on the road and go was ultimately strong enough to make me move across the country.
A Circle of Wives Page 21