Live a Little

by Kim Green

  I make a horrible face at his departing back, as much to seal my gossip session with Sue as to make a deposit to my High-Yield Eliot Irritation Account. My elderly stepfather is fond of wearing the sort of tight, stretchy T-shirts favored by gays and Jack LaLanne. I guess he wants the world to enjoy the fruits of his daily weight-lifting sessions and Dean Ornish–approved, prostate-cancer-delaying diet.

  Then I mainline about a liter of Chardonnay and go in search of my brother-in-law. I cannot imagine what Ren wants to talk to me about. In the two-plus decades since he dumped me for Laurie, our conversations have focused mainly on the weather, his clients’ liposuction addictions, and my children’s athletic prowess.

  I find Ren in the backyard, cornered by three members of Ma’s Humanitarian Judaism/bridge/birding/whining group.

  “So, tell me something. I always wondered, what do you do with the fat you suck out?” Estelle Gilden is saying as I walk up.

  “They save it for boobs. Right, Loren?” Coco Stein slides a toothpick into her bridge.

  “Maybe we can donate some to Raquel for when she has the mastectomy.” Edith del Toro shakes her neat, birdlike head in sympathy, the crisp black waves bisected by zebra-like gray streaks. I feel a flush of heat shriek through my neck and chest at her words. It is so embarrassing, this blithe focus on your body parts. It’s as if cancer annexes what used to be private and makes it public: RAQUEL’S BREASTS: OPEN 10 A.M. –5 P.M. MONDAY–SATURDAY, CLOSED SUNDAYS FOR MAINTENANCE. PLEASE PICK UP YOUR DOG FECES.

  “Actually,” Ren begins. He looks pained. While his generosity extends to melding the palates of the less fortunate, coping with the fervor of Jewish mothers is not his strong suit.

  “Hi!” I say, glad for the opportunity to save him. Ren’s face brightens. Sad sack that I am, I take a millisecond to enjoy the sweet kiss of happiness his approval has always spawned in me.

  Estelle Gilden grasps my arm. “Raquel, dear, how are you?

  How. Are. You. Your mother told us all about it. It’s fakakta,

  is what it is.”

  “Too young!” Coco Stein.

  “Too healthy! Look at this girl. Strapping!” Edith del Toro.

  “It’s the hormones in milk. Ask Eliot about it.” Estelle.

  “So, honey, listen: My sister-in-law’s sister survived it twice. Imelda, that’s her name. Like the dictator.” Coco is already digging in her bag for her address book. “I think you two would get on like a house on fire. You know what she did after the cancer? Dropped fifty pounds and became a life coach, that’s what! You’re going to call her.”

  This is part of the Great Fraud I never anticipated: Whereas in the past, I was at pains to deflect Jewish-mother-initiated offers of dates and potential husbands, now I have to deal with an army of well-intentioned yentas who want to set me up with my breast-cancer soul mate.

  “She sounds wonderful,” I lie. Like hell. She sounds like an anorexic tyrant with a closet full of Manolos.

  “I must have left it in my other purse. It’s okay, I’ll call you,” Coco promises, nodding. I can see the onslaught now; in a matter of days, I will have to change my number or take a turn for the worse.

  I force a smile. “I’m sorry, ladies, but I’ve got to borrow this guy for a minute.” Taking Ren by the elbow, I steer him toward the gazebo, a contrivance whose only contribution to the family history is having served as a whelping box for our basset Stella’s second litter.

  Ren tilts his head toward the knot of ladies. “They scare me.”

  “They scare everyone.”

  We laugh. It feels too good, so I think of my credit-card bill. There. Balance restored.

  “Eliot told me you wanted to ask me something.” I try not to study his hazel eyes too deeply, instead scanning the crowd for disgruntled guests the way a properly indifferent sister-in-law might. On the far side of the pool, I see Taylor chatting with Ronnie Greenblatt. Her head, with its spaniel-like sheaves of highlighted chestnut hair, is tilted in a coquettish way that does not say talking-to-boring-oldbig-brother’s-friend. I make a mental note to send her to military school forthwith if the look graduates to outright flirtation.

  “How are you feeling?” Ren says.

  “Pretty good, considering.” This is basically true.

  He nods, pleased. “You look great. Better than I could have hoped. So how long does Meissner want you on chemo?”

  “Four rounds.” I’ve done my research: I’ve talked to my sculpture subjects. I’ve interrogated strange women in doctors’ waiting rooms. For the most part, I’ve tried to maintain an aura of mystery and obliqueness around my (not-)cancer treatment, deflecting probing inquiries with vague mentions of catheters and stool softeners. Obviously, this is much more challenging with an actual doctor. Among my other paranoias, I live in fear that Ren will stumble upon Meissner in the hospital cafeteria or on the golf course and find me out. I pray regularly that Wendy Yen is hot enough in the sack that Doctor Boy Meissner has no energy left for anything but surgical pursuits.

  “How are you handling the Taxol?”

  “Pretty well. They administered the first dose in the ICU, but I was okay.” So many people have allergic reactions to the highly toxic drug that they first give it under the watchful plink of cardiac monitors and trauma physicians. Just reading about it made my stomach ache in sympathy and guilty terror, so I did what I always do now when regret overrules steadfastness—think of the number $245,325.

  Ren clears his throat. “I know the timing is somewhat off, but I need to ask you a favor. I wouldn’t ask unless it was important.”

  Well, I hate to say “I told you so” . . .I’m sure Phil won’t mind a little swappy-swap now and again . . .

  “ Uh-huh.” I try to look grave instead of hopeful.

  “You know that Laurie and I have been trying for a family for many years now. It’s been really hard on her, primarily because they were never able to identify the cause, or causes, of our infertility.” Ren glances away, toying with his keys. His plastic surgeon’s hands are long and lean and ageless. I wonder if he applies chemical peels to them between patient appointments. For research purposes, naturally.

  “One of the things that’s been a sticking point for us is whether to keep trying IVF or start thinking about other options. Laurie was—is— very invested in the idea of us having our own biological child. Me, less so, though I empathize with her position.” Ren looks straight at me for the first time. His pure hazel eyes are warm and steady. I have the horrifying sense he is going to violate the twenty-three-year covenant and suggest we repeat the act of our sixth date, twelve days before the Thanksgiving visit that changed all our lives.

  He veers in an unexpected direction. “We made a decision to start the adoption process. It’s quite rigorous. One of the components is character references. Laurie and I—that is, we’d like to ask you if you’d write one for us.”

  Relief engulfs me. Among the favors he could have asked for, this one rates high on the comfort scale. My mind flits through complimentary things I could say about my sister to make them give her a baby: Thin genes. Cleans grout on a regular basis. Speaks Mandarin like a native. Never actually asked if I screwed her husband.

  “Oh, Ren, of course I’d be glad to do it. You didn’t have to worry about that. I want to do anything I can to help,” I say instead.

  “I knew you’d be okay with it. I know you and Laurie don’t always see eye to eye on things, Quel, but I didn’t think that would matter when push came to shove.” Ren takes a sip of his gin and tonic, easygoing now. He shifts his fine body closer to my less fine one, near enough that I can see the individual hairs comprising his thick brush of eyelashes.

  “If you hadn’t gotten the cancer, things might have been different, you know,” he says, his tone thoughtfully conspiratorial. “If you weren’t undergoing chemo right now, I’m pretty sure Laurie would have asked you for some eggs.”

  This warms me. Raquel Rose: fertility goddess, maker of egg
s, breeder extraordinaire.

  I am about to offer Ren my eggs any way he wants them when Phil ambles over and plants a sloppy kiss on my head. “Stop hitting on my wife,” he says to Ren with easy bonhomie. He could be talking about his love of beets.

  Phil and Ren do one of those manly handshakes where one grasps the other by the forearm and squeezes at the same time. Everything is right in the land of brothers-in-law! This is precisely the problem. What is it about me that gives my husband complete confidence that I would never flirt with an attractive man who used to be my boyfriend? Or is it complete confidence one would never flirt with me?

  “Hey, buddy. I had to schedule an otoplasty for late Wednesday. Can we move the game to Thursday?” Ren says.

  Phil says sure, and they launch into a discussion of major-league sports that would have made me whimper with ennui if not for the way the afternoon light is falling on Ren’s fair hair (like Robert Redford’s in The Way We Were, if you want to know).

  Sometimes I hate myself.

  Of all the things that bug me about the way Ren has acted with me since the fateful moment he shook Laurie’s hand in my parents’ avocado-colored kitchen, it’s the way he is with Phil that bothers me most. In the twenty years that have elapsed since my date fell in love at first sight with my sister, Loren White has never shown the slightest subtlest inkling that he begrudges my husband his catch.

  CHAPTER 10

  Good Like Back Fat

  Lies don’t spring fully formed from nowhere. Like parasites, they hunt for a welcoming environment, a warm, moist haven of subterfuge in which to burrow.

  Also: Years of hands-on research have led me to believe in a connection between lies and fighting. Shocking, I know.

  Phil and I fight about money. Not so original. However, we also lie about money. What I should say is, I lie about money. This, it turns out, is infinitely worse than the fighting part.

  I know what you’re thinking: Who doesn’t allow the occasional financial fib to sully the otherwise sparkling web of honesty between herself and her husband? Perhaps it’s that daily trip to Starbucks you leave out of the monthly food budget, or the oxygen facial you passed off as a teeth cleaning. So what if you bury your Star magazine addiction under a mound of property-value-enhancing perennials?

  That’s not what I’m talking about here.

  What I’m talking about is that for the past eight years, I have accepted a monthly check from my rich stepfather that funds, among other things, our children’s education, the occasional family vacation, and a large chunk of our mortgage. Since money doesn’t grow on trees—or pool algae; we’ve tried—I allow my husband to believe the allowance comes from a stipend from my own father’s trust. In conversation, I have even called it that: The Stuart Myron Schultz Family Trust. Six words that, together, represent an entity about as real as the Bermuda Triangle Neighborhood Association. Not real, but so unimpugnable. Who, after all, would deny a dead father the privilege of gifting his beloved daughter with a monetary bridge between ends meeting and financial ruin? A scrooge, that’s who.

  Part of me wishes I had told Phil the truth about why our perennial beyond-our-means existence—not uncommon or particularly stigmatizing in the ridiculously expensive Bay Area— stresses me out so much. Because Eliot’s checks don’t come for free: The little string-trussed albatrosses are the monetary equivalent of a leash. On me. I feel the tug every time I argue with Ma and meet Eliot’s godfatherish eyes across the table, reminding me of my promise to make nice. Every time Phil and I charge something massive and feverishly desired—competitive soccer camp, weekends in Tahoe, bathroom renovation—and Phil says, “Here’s to Stu! God bless dinette sets.” (Dad was in the furniture business.)

  I feel the tug. Yet I continue to cash those checks. So, you see, my career in deception, self and otherwise, began long before a cancer misdiagnosis.

  But back to the fight.

  “Let me put this in a way you can understand,” Phil says to me now as I tremble with anger and shame, a thick spray of ugly sympathy daisies separating us on the counter. “No French immersion class. No Spanish. No Italian or Greek or fucking Tagalog. Because. There’s. No. Money.”

  I feel the chasm open in front of me, yawning wide. I should leap it, I think. Leap it. Then run. Run fast.

  I fall in.

  “If you’d stuck with the program, you’d have tenure and a patent by now, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation!” My voice is thin, shrill, hateful. I detest the words the minute I release them into the atmosphere, but none of it matters, because I’m sliding down the cliff wall, frantic heels scudding grooves into dirt, sending plumes of shale and stones raining around us. Like all fights, this one has a surface topic and a deeper, truer subtext; a twisted little part of me knows I’ve been mad at Phil ever since he diminished me by marrying me, thus setting me on the path toward disgruntled housewifedom.

  Phil thrums his fingers on the chair back. “Oh yeah, you’d have loved that. Years of dinky apartments until the great Ph.D. ship came in. And no control over where we lived. Being the little academic wife. Kissing department-head ass while I developed something market-ready—”

  “That’s not true! You’re the one who decided for us, Philly! If I’d had a say, we’d have stayed in the city and rented a one-bedroom in the Sunset! I could have stayed at the museum. The kids could have gone to public school. We’d have been fine. You’re the one who said, ‘Stay home with the kids, Quel. I’ll take care of it.’ What’d you say? ‘Kids need their mother at home.’ Isn’t that what you said? ‘Kids need their mother!’ Not this. . . this McMansion!” This is true, isn’t it? Phil likes the house in the suburbs, relishes the deeply sunk fence posts and sturdy convention of the French doors and brick facade, even as I find the house and its environs square, spirit-killing, provincial, and deeply, humorlessly unimaginative.

  I need to believe this—that it is to satisfy Phil’s and the kids’ aspirations, not mine—that I swallow my pride each month and let the many zeros on Eliot’s checks stain my clammy fingers. It’s the dank, abiding shame inside me that blots out what I know to be true, even as I deny it: I, too, want the McMansion. Maybe not the fussy doors and the bourgeois landscaping and the many miles between us and the nearest decent cappuccino, but certainly the idea of it. The ethos. The illusion of strength it projects to the outside world, as if to say,

  Don’t fuck with those who reside herein; they are solid. They are successful. They have pillars.

  Weighing my accusations, my husband’s shoulders stiffen. “You’re crazy. You are just . . . You’re so fucking nuts, Quel. Don’t think I’m going to put up with this shit because you have fucking . . . because you’re sick.”

  “Say it!” I scream, more enraged than I’ve possibly ever been. I’m not even sure what I want him to say. What I know is, the cancer is a test, and he is in danger of failing. What if I’d really had it? Would he have risen to the occasion or smothered me in useless euphemisms that did fuck-all to show me real devotion?

  “I’m so over this!” I scream again. The “this” goes on and on, a grim echo against the sanitary confines of our stainless-steel appliance-heavy kitchen, which has recently begun to emit the self-important stench of the early nineties.

  For a long, agonizing fracture in time, Phil says nothing, just stares at me, his green eyes stewing anger, resentment, hurt, disgust. Then he turns and moves toward the door. His calves are muscular from all that supposedly noncompetitive racquetball with Ren. His gait is stiff. Phil has problems with tendons, ligaments, parts that hold things together. I wonder if he is doing his stretches or simply taking lots of ibuprofen and shark cartilage supplements.

  “I’ll get dinner out,” he says to the wall on his way out.

  She sees me first.

  Later, I’ll wish I had been paying attention. I’ll wish I had swung the Sienna into the Nordy’s lot instead of Neiman’s, stayed home and sucked down a gin and tonic instead of barreli
ng through In-N-Out blindly hunting the tried-and-true post-combat comfort of ground beef and fries.

  Still reeling from my fight with Phil, I lurch blindly from makeup counter to jewelry rack, seeing nothing but the dim glow of shrink-wrapped packaging and candy-colored jewels. Our arguments about finances, not an original thing to wrangle over by any means, nevertheless leave me feeling empty and remorseful and terribly alone. Shopping helps.

  “Raquel? I didn’t recognize you for a second. What did you do to your—”

  “Oh, hi!” I yelp. I don’t recognize the goofy teenage squeak I produce. All I know is, I’m staring into the wan face of Wendy Yen, she of the (real) cancer, shelved medical degree, and petites wardrobe.

  “You’re Raquel Rose, right? I think we met once at a charity event. But your hair. . .” Wendy begins, allowing a dainty frown to crease her otherwise flawless forehead. I ransack my brain for awareness of how far the grapevine could have stretched vis-à-vis my not-cancer, arcing from Annunciata Milk to Rochelle Schitzfelder— who may never forgive me for not telling her first—to Robin Golden to Mimi LeMaitre like a thick spine of Napa Valley fruit. Wendy and I barely know each other. But if Wendy knows, she may tell her boy toy and my would-be doctor, Babyface Meissner.

  As I sweat this revelation, a small nudge of memory tells me Mimi is out of town. I pray that my analysis is accurate— and that the gossip train creaked to a halt before it reached Wendy—and plunge into the game.

  “I know,” I say. “Isn’t it horrors? I was getting a double process over at the salon and, well, Jesus, they just fried me. Everything fell out. They said they’d never seen anything like it. I’m considering a lawsuit.”

  Wendy is looking at me, her smart, penetrating almond eyes searching for something fishy about my bald, lying, demented person. If I allow further assessment, she will guess. I know it. This is someone who is legally entrusted with applying glycolic acid to people’s faces, after all.