“You see, he gave another patient a bad result on the phone in the middle of my breast exam. I mean, right in the middle.”
She had decided to start with this fact, the most outrageous and believable, before getting to the prick part. Eva had concluded that almost anyone in their right mind would agree that this part of the story was wrong. Morally wrong. Then she could tread into the murkier waters of innuendo, where it would come down to Lesbian Accuses Religious Father/Doctor. That would take more than luck to pull off. There would have to be no God.
Dr. Kumar turned her head but not her body, and posed like a supermodel on the cover of a Karachi fashion magazine. She smiled a dazzling smile. She was wearing nail polish. Deep red.
“I’m sure it was nothing.”
“I think it was something.”
Kumar stopped still and stared at her. She was slightly cockeyed. She wasn’t glamorous. Actually, she looked exhausted. Sloppily, Eva told the story of the phone call, the never-ending breast exam.
“That’s crass,” she said, plucking film off the light wall and coming closer to Eva’s barefoot, infantilized, fearful body. “But he’s a nice guy. Stop looking for justice and take care of your health. We can do a surgical biopsy, or we can just watch it. Your chart says your mother had breast cancer at forty-nine. You’re forty. It could be at the microscopic mass-in-a-milk-duct stage.”
“Wait and watch? That feels right. I’m not a good fighter.”
“Well, better learn. You don’t want your first real fight to be for your life. Think it over.”
Kumar was done. She’d recited her Miranda rights.
“Do you think I should have the biopsy?”
“It’s very early.” She was patient. “If we do a biopsy and find cancer, it would be easily treatable. It most likely is nothing. You can save yourself the surgery and just wait and see if it grows. I can’t make that decision for you.”
Grows?
“I can’t wait and watch anything,” Eva said, sweating. “Surgery is my only option, emotionally.”
Back in the waiting room, Mary was sleeping. Eva was so happy to see her. She could accept Mary’s limitations—of course she was exhausted by all of this. What was the good side? Despite hating doctors, feeling inadequate, and having a generally difficult time giving herself and others a break, Mary had still come to this waiting room and done her best. Mary was there when Eva needed her, and that made this whole nightmare so much easier, even though it was still hard. Eva felt reassured as she reached for her checkbook. The receptionist was madly answering the phones. Everyone in New York seemed to have cancer.
“How much do I owe you?”
The phones are wildly waving.
“Three hundred and fifty dollars.”
“Do you take HIP Choice Plus?”
“No HMOs.”
“How much is this surgical biopsy going to cost? I know this is an expensive business.”
“Dr. Kumar’s fee will be three thousand dollars. Hold on … Dr. Kumar’s office. Hold on, please … Dr. Kumar’s office. Hold on, please…. The facility charges four thousand dollars, plus you have to have a wire placed in the breast on the day of surgery at another facility. That will cost about fifteen hundred plus lab fees.”
“How much is the lab?”
“I don’t know. Hold on. Dr. Kumar’s office.”
“What insurance do I need?”
“We don’t recommend insurance. Hold on. Hello?”
Eva looked at Mary. She was stretching.
“Wait, do you take Oxford?”
“What? We bill to Oxford. Dr. Kumar’s office, please hold.”
“Okay, I’ll go get Oxford.” She kissed Mary on the hair. “Honey, wake up. Everything is going to be fine.”
“I knew it,” Mary said and smiled.
“Everything is taken care of now.” Eva kissed her. “I just need to get one more small thing, and then it will all be over.”
21
Stew ran–he did not make a decision. He was not in charge of his actions anymore. As he felt his body turning, he knew this was the wrong thing to do. That it was irreversible, the flight. That, irreversibly, it would lead him to more disaster of such supreme dimension that he was compelled to run toward it. He fled out the door and into his dark, unavoidable fate. His parents’ actions had sealed his future. He gave in and he ran.
Stew ran until he was out of breath. Then he walked down to the park, panting and sweating. There, some boys he did not know were playing basketball. He sat down and stared at them. Their light, dancing ease and their tense insecurities. Both attributes naïve. He was not naïve; he saw everything now. Their stupid competition and dull put-downs. They sped up before him and lost some of their dimension. Slowly their faces and personalities merged, and instead he was taken over by the swirling sneakers and their competing brand names, the white skin like beige clouds. There was no time anymore, just a sea of short swooshes moving through the air. Punctuating sweatbands.
Then it was dark, and suddenly he was alone on the bleachers. He had hypnotized himself, but the trance wore off, so he started walking back toward his house. It was a blind plunge into the darkness. It wasn’t too cold out, and he could hear the crickets chirping, the buzz of electrical devices, TV sets, and a couple of cars gliding around corners, the sound of garage doors opening automatically. No sighs or moans of pleasure.
He climbed into his father’s garage and breathed in the smell of oil and gasoline. He felt like puking. Then he lay down in a corner with his head against the cold concrete floor. Did he sleep? What does that mean?
In the morning Stew got up and went to school like an automaton. It was weird. He was dirty and had no books, but no one seemed to notice. He hadn’t handed in any homework in a few weeks anyway, and had become one those kids the teachers expected very little from. But he did get some lunch. It was delicious grilled cheese and French fries and milk. He washed his face in the boys’ room and slept through sophomore English. After school he just went back to the park and watched basketball again.
This was the kind of life his parents wanted him to have. Repeated nothing day in and day out. This is what they had done, slept through school and watched the game. He had the ability to do that forever. It was how he was raised, but he didn’t want to. Now it was evening again, and Stew was freezing this time and starving. He slowly climbed of the bleachers and headed home.
Stew was afraid to make a decision—he didn’t know how. Everything was topsy-turvy, and any move would have been a bad one, but he couldn’t just stand still. He tried it, standing very still on the corner of his subdivision, under a streetlight. The electronic buzz became deafening, he thought he was going insane. He couldn’t go home. He had no money. He was hungry, having long before consumed the squashed, pocketed egg.
Did Stew have a friend? He wasn’t sure. David was his friend. There was a girl in his chemistry class whom he admired. She was smart and loud. She deflected the attention, which made him feel safer. But she was black, and he didn’t know where she lived. She was the only black girl in his class. Who was her father? Some black guy somewhere. He just wanted to go online. It was the only way he knew how to relax.
Stew finally accepted for real that he couldn’t go back to the house. Trouble was waiting for him there. It all started to come together–what was going wrong. Everyone around him was mediocre. They couldn’t do anything they wanted to. And they were mad at him because he could.
It was shocking, this revelation. His family was a bunch of bores. They weren’t happy, and nothing interesting ever happened. That buzz of the garage door was the soundtrack to their life. Then he got it, and fear stalked his soul. Stew realized that the more his family understood how truly different he was, the more they were going to want to remove him. He had to get out. But how? Where would he go? He could go to Joe’s house, but how would he get there?
It hit him then–he couldn’t go to Joe’s. Joe and David were in troubl
e because of him. Stew couldn’t go near them. He was surrounded by walls, his family, the police. No one was flexible. No one had a reasonable explanation for their behavior, and no one had to. It was crazy.
In this way Stew started to take in that he was completely and totally alone. He had no mother. He had no father. He had no sister. He had no boyfriend. Everything had been taken away from him for some reason he couldn’t understand. Everything that everyone else in the world had every day had been taken away. It made no sense. He looked at the lights protruding from houses on both sides of his street. Each of those people had families and lovers. He was the only person on this block who did not.
He thought ahead to his future and saw nothing. There was no achievement, no maturation, no old parents proud and happy. No Carole to barbecue with, no Joe or David to snuggle up with and suck their cocks. There was no birthday. No Christmas. No money. No food. No dinner. No phone calls. Maybe his mother and father would die soon and Carole would let him back in the house. But when would that happen? It could take a long time. Then what would he do if his parents died? He needed them. If they died, they would never change their minds.
There was only one person who could help him. Who would outlive him, who everyone seemed to listen to. That was Victor. He needed to talk to Victor. He needed to get Victor on his side.
Stew turned left instead of right and went down the block to Carole’s house. Where was Victor? The car wasn’t in the garage. That meant Sam was out drinking as usual and Carole had taken Victor somewhere. But where? Stew then decided to go back to his house, get some food, clean up, and pack his stuff. He turned again and walked down his block, up his walk. He had walked this block and that walk for fifteen years. His whole life. He had always thought of it as his, but it wasn’t his. It belonged to his father. He had to take his stuff and get out.
When Stew got to the front step, he could see that the TV was on. It glowed through the drapes. That was the sunlight in his life, the TV. It illuminated every path. He put his hand on the knob and opened the door.
22
Mary waited for Ilene Leopold to return her phone call. She had been waiting for weeks. Each morning she left for work with seven dollars worth of quarters, calling her own answering machine from every third working pay phone to see if Ilene had left a message. If she got sent out on a temp job that had e-mail access, she checked her e-mail every ten–no, nine–minutes to see if Ilene had sent any.
As each day passed, Mary became more possessed by strategizing about Ilene Leopold. After all, Ilene was the key to the life Mary wanted to have. Her real life. Everything before this next moment was a waste–it was just treading water. Because after Ilene Leopold kept her word, Mary would cease to be a discarded person whose plays would never be seen, and whose calls would never be answered. She would become her true self. Mary knew that later, when her play had had a moderately successful run and she and Ilene were on their next, really big project, Mary would buy a cell phone and one of those handheld e-mail things, but that was then and this was now.
“Hockey is having problems again. He has growths all over his face that have to be frozen and burned off. He’s depressed.”
Mary calmly watched Eva talking, but inside she was screaming, Ilene, Ilene.
“He’s always depressed, but who can blame him?” This was Mary speaking in code about herself.
“The fact is,” Eva said over her morning coffee, “we’ve lost our preliminary pretrial motions because the judge is Catholic. It’s a fix. If the judge were Jewish or black, we’d have a chance. We’re going to have to settle. David isn’t going to like it, and neither is Thor.”
Eva loved talking like this over breakfast, sharing the amazing journey toward solution with the most interesting person she’d ever known. No one Eva had ever loved had had to come as far as Mary had had to come. She admired this so much. Eva loved this strength, all that vision in one little person.
Mary had to keep her message-checking to herself. If Eva knew about it, she would go bonkers. Since Eva did not have big dreams, she had no patience for another scheme gone awry. Well, it wasn’t that she had zero dreams; they were just about things like rent control. She was able to do what she was put on this earth to do, so she didn’t understand how crucial it is to someone’s soul when they are kept from that pursuit, as Mary had been. Mary had always known that false hope was better than no hope. “Dwell in Possibility,” Emily Dickinson has said, and look at what a great writer she was. A big break can only happen if you try.
“The thing is,” Eva said from her cup of joe, “if this were a heterosexual adult male and a girl child, I know I would feel differently. But when it’s two gay men, I don’t know, the romance serves another function.”
“What’s that?” Mary asked, thinking about Ilene Leopold.
“Well, a lot of gay people felt like aliens in their families. The structures did not always serve them. But gay children need parents, too, and sometimes gay adults are the only ones who can give that kind of knowing love.”
“But sex….” Mary said.
“I know. But isn’t there something sexy about having parents for kids who are straight? They watch them sleep together, live together, kiss and hug. They hear them have sex and probably watch them doing it, too, catch sight of their genitals. Straight kids get all that porn at home, and gay kids have nothing to look at. Why wouldn’t gay teenagers want to have sex with gay adults? They need parents and friends and their own private peep show.”
“What are you going to do about tomorrow?”
“You’re coming with me to the clinic, aren’t you?” Eva panicked. “You’re going to meet me there at one, right?”
There were a lot of cars honking outside. Something must have happened. It reminded Mary that there was an outside.
“Of course, but I mean, aren’t you nervous?”
That morning Mary had gone for a run along the river. The air was so sweet, just a light breeze peeking around the boats. Over her shoulder, the skyscrapers looked scrubbed. They were gorgeous. But even this image laid out before her wasn’t enough. She knew that without opportunity she would always be a spectator. And that would never be the right life. Never.
“I’m terribly nervous,” Eva said. “I’m terrified that I have cancer. I’m afraid that tomorrow I’m going to come out of that clinic with breast cancer, and then it’ll just be me and you dealing with it. We’ll be alone. Are you afraid of that?”
“Yes,” Mary said. “I am afraid.”
She seemed little, vulnerable. A soft, trying love. Eva’s heart was so open.
“But you are not alone,” Mary said, reaching for her sweet. “You have me.”
Eva listened closely. This was what she had dreamed of her entire life. She watched those lips say You have me. And yet she was thinking, guiltily, adulterously, that she also wanted her niece/nephew. Was that wrong of her? Was she letting Mary down by still, after all this cruelty, wanting to have relatives? Would this subconsciously make Mary feel unloved?
When she left the house for Hockey’s office, Eva stopped at a pay phone and called Nathalie’s number. It was strange to dial it after so much time. It made her sick, the familiarity.
“Hello?”
That voice. Eva wanted to be a good daughter and slit her own throat.
“Hi, it’s Eva.”
“Hello.”
“Did Ethel get our present for the baby?”
Yes, Eva hoped she would say. That was very thoughtful. We know it’s been hard for you, being kept away from the family for so long. But I can see that you really love the baby, and I’ve told Ethel that this exclusion has to stop.
“I don’t think a black T-shirt with the words Iggy Pop on it is appropriate for a baby, do you? Ethel says it’s some kind of Satanic cult.”
A particularly noisy truck came by at that moment, so Eva had to hunch over the phone, pressing one finger against the other ear, keeping out every influence but Nathalie’
s.
“We thought it was fun.”
“What do you know, Eva?”
“You know, Mom. You’re right. I know nothing.”
“Well, you’re right about something.”
Eva kept her voice even. “What’s the kid’s name?”
“Maison Toibyn Levi.”
“Any chance of me and Mary getting to come visit … Maison?” She clutched the pay phone’s slimy receiver.
“Eva, Ethel doesn’t want you influencing her children, and I agree.”
“Influencing them to do what?”
“You know … going against their parents.”
That was it, after all this time. Eva’s conjecture was actually right. It was fear of the other world. The world of people who know that the rules don’t matter, or are wrong or boring or unfair. Homosexuality was at the centerpiece of this other way of seeing, and Nathalie took it as a personal affront.
Would it be worth it to have cancer if that got her a mother? Too late. The days of deal making were over. She had no mother and she never would. She did not want cancer. Someday she and Mary would see their niece/nephew and the three of them would talk.
When she hung up, Eva called Mary.
“Guess what?” Mary said on the phone, ecstatic. Happier than Eva had ever heard her. “Ilene Leopold is on her way over.”
“I’m so glad,” Eva said, deciding to keep her own problems to herself. “I knew you could do it. I believe in you.”
Back home Mary was preparing for Ilene’s arrival. She cleaned the whole place and bought great food: fresh mozzarella, Israeli tomatoes, gorgeous bread. She changed the sheets, just in case. She went to the expensive deli and got olives and hot peppers, and when she came home fifteen minutes before the meeting, there was a message on her machine.
“Hello … Mary? It’s Ilene. I’m feeling dizzy and won’t be able to come over. But, Mary, if you call me exactly on the hour, we can have a phone conference. I’m really, really sorry, but I’m really, really sick.”
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