Timeless

by Lucinda Franks

  * * *

  When we told the children, we made light of it. As soon as they were reassured I’d be all right, they went back into their own worlds. But I knew it wasn’t all right, at least between Bob and me.

  The Monday after the Independence Day party, I was scheduled to have the lump removed under sedation at a New York Hospital outpatient center. Bob went with me, of course, but I asked two friends, Sage Sevilla and Linda Hanauer, to come also, fearing that this would unmoor Bob. After the operation, he and the doctor were standing by my gurney and told me the mixed news: the tumor was cancerous, but it seemed to be contained. I went into a cubicle to dress, feeling moderately hopeful, until a snippy researcher with a clipboard asked me my name. Then I silently wept. When I came out and Sage saw my white face, she immediately took me in her arms. Bob must have been there, but I don’t remember him at all. A gate had slammed down between us; throughout the ordeal I had the impression I saw a person who looked like him but wasn’t.

  A few days later, however, when I went into the hospital for a precautionary operation to find out if there was any residual cancer to be removed, he came with me. Jenny came to be with Bob and give me moral support before the operation. Afterward, Annie visited me, gift in hand. Penny sent me a teddy bear, Jill brought me Chinese food, and Marina slept on a chair to be with me the first night after surgery. As for Bob, when he came in and saw all the tubes and drains, he seemed to shrink. He didn’t even get too close, claiming he was afraid of dislodging the apparatus. And he stayed less than half an hour.

  After I was discharged, my stepdaughter Barbara stepped up to the plate. She had gone from being a shy fifteen-year-old to being a doctor’s assistant who worked with breast cancer patients. She knew how to interpret results and advise me.

  We were waiting for a fax from the New York Hospital pathology lab, and as it began to come in, Bob disappeared into the bedroom. I ripped out the report. It said that though the tumor was of moderate size, there was no spread into lymph nodes or cells outside it. “Hey, this is great!” I shouted, waving the fax. “I’m clear!” Bob peeked his head out. Barbara took the report from me and studied it. “It’s not entirely great, Lucille,” she said gently. “The tumor is listed as estrogen negative, not positive, and that means it’s aggressive.” Bob retreated. “You may have to have chemotherapy.”

  Barbara said I should go to an oncologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, arguably the best cancer center in the nation, the place where a surgeon had successfully operated on my mother when others thought it hopeless. The only thing was, the Lauder Breast Center was so overwhelmed, they couldn’t see me for at least a month.

  My husband suddenly jumped in to help; he was not without good friends. He found that Sloan-Kettering’s best oncologist was the eminent Larry Norton, who indeed wasn’t taking new patients. But that made no difference to the man no one could say no to. One call to the hospital’s chairman of the board, and I had an appointment with Norton in a week.

  I asked Barbara to go with me, which must have relieved Bob. When we entered Norton’s office, we shook hands with a slight, balding man who reminded me of Bob’s mild-mannered accountant. Then he opened his mouth and out shot raw, point-blank words more appropriate to a neo-Nazi biker. He ruffled my lab report and said it told him nothing conclusive and in fact he found it hard to believe; my type of tumor had to have deep roots. I told him, just as belligerently, that this is not what the New York Hospital doctors had said. Barbara, seeing Norton’s eyes narrow, swiftly played the good cop: “Lucinda, calm down, Dr. Norton is just trying to help us, we want the truth.” Norton replied that we should get the complete report from the New York Hospital lab, instead of this little summary, and his own pathology lab would analyze it.

  So Barbara and I ended up running several blocks to New York Hospital in the heat of a July day to get the complete pathology notes before the lab closed early. We got there just in time and then raced back to Sloan-Kettering, where, sweating, we gave it to a nurse who promised she’d give the new, complete report to Norton.

  We held our breath, expecting to be called in to his office at any moment.

  The moment became four hours.

  We turned over and over the possibilities of what Sloan-Kettering’s own lab would find. I imagined having my breasts removed. I began to mentally put my house in order, mentally write instructions for my funeral. I wondered if the pastor I grew up with was still alive and willing to see me. I remembered the moaning of my mother as she suffered excruciating cancer pain for months (“There is no other pain in the world like it,” her friend helpfully told me). I felt the dry, peeling skin on her feet and tried to soften them with Eucerin lotion. Would Bob and Barbara and Josh and Amy be there to hold my hand, rub my feet?

  Just when I thought I couldn’t stand the waiting anymore, Barbara suddenly cocked her ear and hushed me. She listened to a faint voice coming from behind the door to the medical offices. It sounded to me like tinny gibberish, but then she said, “It’s all right, I heard Norton’s voice talking to a pathologist, and he said, ‘She’s all clear.’ He was talking about you. Stop asking me how I knew it, I just knew.”

  And she was right. In another two hours, Norton called us in and affirmed the tumor had just sprung up unattached. I silently thanked God, and I also expressed my appreciation that he had sat us by one particular door, that a doctor’s telephone hung on the other side of it, and that Barbara had such sharp hearing.

  Because my type of malignancy was so aggressive, I had grueling courses of chemotherapy and radiation. Doctors had told Bob he was clear of cancer, but after my bouts of treatment they told me only that the prognosis was good. Some cheering literature I had read there claimed you never “got over” breast cancer, the cells were always floating around—it was just a matter of keeping them under control.

  My preventive treatments weren’t easy. The needle slipping under the skin of the hand, the quarts of toxic chemicals pumped into my body, were bearable. But when the radiation began, it was like being the victim in a horror movie. First I was warned that this six-week treatment could increase my chances of getting heart disease or lung cancer, then I was led into a room of blazing lights with the odor of what seemed like embalming fluids drifting through. Finally, I was pressed between two heavy pieces of steel and zapped. When they let me off the table, I began to sob and I couldn’t stop. It had just been too much. “I’m being a baby,” I said to a nurse.

  “You’re not alone,” she said reassuringly and put her hands on my shoulders, trying to get me to look at her, to talk about what it had been like for me. But I couldn’t. “I want my husband,” I whispered.

  She offered to call him, but I said no. Frankly, I was afraid he wouldn’t come. I got out of there as fast as I could.

  I had a powerful desire for Bob. I wanted to be held, made love to. I needed so badly to know that this part of my life had not been gouged out also. Did he see the body that he had loved now mangled, as though run over by a train? Was it hard enough to feel the same desire for a woman you had fallen in love with twenty long years ago, much less one who now had a deformity? Had I become undesirable?

  Please, Lord, I prayed, let him get used to the way I am now.

  He had been afraid to touch me while I was healing, but I healed fast, and now, only three months after my early July operation, my scars were hardly noticeable.

  That evening, I waited anxiously for Bob to come home. I never wear makeup, but that night I put on blush and a touch of lip gloss. I evened my hair with fingernail scissors; I put on the turquoise blouse that he loved because it brought out the blue of my eyes. I couldn’t just crawl into his arms these days. I needed to do everything just right.

  When he came home that night, I waited until he loosened his tie and told me about his day. Then I finally interrupted. “I had my first radiation today; it was awful … so demeaning. To see this big X-ray machine coming down and filling you with what amounts to fallout from
the atom bomb.”

  “Oh, I forgot!” he said. “I’m sorry.” He patted my hand. I waited for more: a question, a hug, a few soothing words. But he abruptly changed the subject to a potential death penalty case he was struggling over: the student who had committed the premeditated torture and murder of Jonathan Levin, son of the head of Time Warner. The tragedy made my experience seem puny.

  I went into the bedroom and put on the semi-sheer nightie I had bought for our tenth anniversary. I draped it with a new creamy silk shawl. It wasn’t exactly like the white poncho he had claimed to fall in love with, but it was the best I could find. As I walked back to him, my pulse was so fast, and I hoped he wouldn’t know how nervous I was. I thought of the risk I was taking. I couldn’t stand it if he rejected me. I had to do this right.

  He was sitting in the den watching Channel One, papers spread across his legs. Confidence: that is what men like. So with gossamer nightie swinging, I strode into the room like Bette Midler and surprised him by popping a square of Ghirardelli dark chocolate into his mouth. Then I ran my fingers through his hair, kissed his chocolaty mouth, and sat down on his lap. He didn’t seem to notice the nightie, only the papers that he held on to for dear life. “Bed?” I asked, cocking my head and giving him the apple-cheeked smile he had once fallen in love with.

  “I’m sorry, sweetheart, I have to get through this work.” Then he touched his lips to my cheek and said, “Night.”

  I went back to the bedroom and threw my nightgown across the room. Then I edged to my side of the bed, rolled myself into a ball, and cried until I fell asleep.

  At about 2:00 a.m., I woke with a start. The mattress was shaking. Was it the tremors of an earthquake? No, it was Bob, tossing around, tugging the covers, apparently in the midst of a bad dream. For weeks, he hadn’t slept well. I felt so angry with him that I might have pushed him off the bed, but I tried unsuccessfully to wake him instead. Then he began kicking and shaking the bed all over again. I spent the night half-awake, dreaming that I was in an old livery cab, bumping up and down through the potholes of Madison Avenue.

  20

  Weeks and weeks went by. We had dinner with friends, but I was afraid they would sense our alienation. I could hear the gossip: “You should have seen the Morgenthaus the other night! This perfect marriage they are supposed to have after twenty years, well, you should have seen them, taut, silent, American Gothic.”

  It was better going to the farm every weekend, where we let no one poach on our privacy. The dirty half-light of winter matched my mood. A hard, stony season, with umber grass stamped down from last fall, the muted, truncated trees throwing up bony limbs, the earth battered from its suffocating spell beneath the snow. Even the tractors looked rusty as they stood idle in the barn.

  Depression and weariness would overcome me, and I still felt a bit sick from the treatments. Since the sheer-nightgown debacle, I hung around in baggy work shirts and ate éclairs and mashed potatoes and put on weight. Who cared what I looked like? Not Bob, apparently, not the kids, to whom I was the same mom no matter what I wore.

  I was always tired. I lay like a bag of wet earth all morning on the somnolent old couch in my little study. I became superstitious: Did my fatigue mean that cancer was breeding inside my cells, coming together again like an invading army? Was Bob worried about himself? His melanoma was less serious, less likely to spread than my breast cancer. He didn’t have to have treatments like chemo or radiation, but still, though the doctors said they had gotten it all, how could they be sure?

  In the afternoon, I would graze the stores, compulsively buying things I’d never use, which would make me feel better—for a while. Then the terror would return, and the omens: Bob knew everything, and without his reassurance could I keep the disease at bay?

  One day, the bills arrived, and Bob gave me a mighty scowl: “We’re spending too much money!” It brought me a wave of relief. He hadn’t exactly said the words “You are not going to die.” But if I was going to die, he wouldn’t have barked at me so heartlessly.

  He poured his energy into the children. Cooking was love for him. He would make pancakes for the kids on Sunday, piling them on until Amy held her stomach and begged him to stop. They were our buffer, and we came together as a family, giggling and clowning around, aping each other or playing games of telephone. Josh’s thick, wavy hair, his extraordinary sky-blue eyes under dark brows; beautiful Amy, with her Alice in Wonderland smile and her deep eyes as big as they were when she was a baby. The children were our comfort, our compensation. Sometimes, when the kids had left the table, Bob would cheerfully make me an egg, poached hard, just as I liked it. But I would find myself eating it alone.

  We were coming home from a drab dinner out one night, and there was only one rather small parking space left on our street. I was an expert driver, a killer at dodging in and out of traffic with centimeters to spare, but at parallel parking I was hopeless.

  I started backing the Volvo into the space slowly.

  “Pay attention, you’re about to take the bumper off that car!”

  Squeal. My tire had hit the curbstone. “Did I back in too sharply?”

  “That’s an understatement. Straighten it out again, and then back in, slowly, slowly. Now turn your wheel, turn it now! The other way, for God’s sake!”

  By the time I had backed a quarter way in, he had made me so nervous I had bumped into the curb again.

  “You’re hopeless,” he said. “Pull out and try again.”

  “Heck, Bob, this is good enough. Let’s just leave the car where it is.”

  “Are you kidding? You’re almost perpendicular to the curb!”

  That was it. I slammed the gear into park. I got out of the car, strode to our building, and didn’t look back.

  * * *

  How close we had been before the cancer scares! Everything was done together: eating, sleeping, cheerfully sparring. We had even enjoyed brushing our teeth at the same time. We liked to look into the mirror, laughing to see who could dribble the most foam. We’d examine who had the longest neck, the biggest head, the widest torso. We looked out for each other, sensed each other’s moods, stepped in to soothe a wound.

  But now he didn’t go into the bathroom until I had left. And when he put space between us, I would return the favor. He would kiss me hello, and if I had a buoyant response, he would quickly detach. So the next time he came home, I wouldn’t even come in from my study to greet him. He would go through the motions—a dry joke, a polite smile here and there. Even a rare compliment, and this is what I hated most because not only did I have to ask for it—how does my dress look?—but I could predict his response. It was never “You look pretty” but a serviceable “Fine.”

  What was happening to us? Our lives were dangling on meat hooks. We had both just had cancer. One of us could be dead in a month. The kids stole wary glimpses at us. Josh looked worried when we were together. Amy clung to each of us more than she had before.

  Why was Bob so alienated from me? He had never before turned his back on me in times of trouble. So I waited for the reconciliation that didn’t come.

  Outside, it was cold and bracing, little white lights were looped over the branches of the trees, pink ones blinking against sunny brick. But inside our overheated apartment, it was always dusk.

  Perhaps this was the way we were destined to become. Together, but apart, our oneness riven. We all know that we are ultimately alone anyway, in life and in death, and our only solution is to embrace it. The Sufi poets of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries knew the value of solitude. Rumi told of a man who called out to Allah every day and finally, after a long time, received a response: “This longing you express is the return message.” In other words, our hunger is what makes us human. In a similar way, Hafez warned, “Don’t give up your loneliness … Let it ferment and season it.” Being alone can be bountiful. I had only to remember my paralyzing dependence when first married to know that alone we can create that which woul
d be extinguished if shared with another.

  One night, my stepchildren came over for dinner. The first thing that Paul Grand, Annie’s husband, said was “What you two have been through!” He shook his head. “You must be completely wiped out.”

  “Oh no,” I said automatically. “I’m happy! I’m just so grateful that we’re still alive and that everything turned out all right.”

  “But you’ve been through two big traumas. It’s okay to be depressed.”

  “Oh, not at all,” I heard myself say. “We’re just fine. Let me take your jackets.”

  After they had left, I realized he was right. Maybe we had closed down because we were too afraid to face the trauma. We were depressed. If we got too close to each other, then we might get too close to what had really happened to us.

  * * *

  Kriya Yoga was my favorite form of meditation. I hated living with ambiguity, and this one was supposed to give you insight, the truth, really, behind a specific problem. I closed the door to my study, lit a candle, and asked myself what had made Bob and me so angry at each other. Then I forgot the question and went deep inside myself. I pictured my hospital room, big and dark, filled with the presence of the mother of one of Amy’s playmates come to take me home. But all she seemed to do was examine the medical equipment, the bandages, asking me what the heart monitor did, why there was an IV there. What was my operation like? And then she watched me pack up. “Where is Bob?” she asked. I couldn’t exactly remember. He must have been at the farm, because when I got home from the hospital, the house was empty. Had I been disappointed at the time? Angry? Kriya meditation is supposed to bring you peace and oneness, but what I felt now was anger.