This was true for us of our odd, unlikely mix of possessions—my Guatemalan masks, his abstract dot painting—as it was true of all the other differences between how I’d spent the first fifty-some years of my life and the way he had, and all the things (not just possessions but ideas) we’d picked up along the way. Even then, before the discovery of how little any of this was going to matter in the end, I had actually managed to ask myself, “Which is more important, that I love this man’s chairs, or that I love this man?”
31.
In September I traveled to France again to promote another translation of a book of mine. This time, though I knew he hated missing the trip, Jim stayed home to work. He joined me just for the last two days in Paris, where we stayed as we always did on these trips in our wonderful little hotel with the sunroom and the croissants. We returned to the Musée D’Orsay, and the Rodin museum, and the little bar on Rue Cassette where we shared a glass of wine and walked the streets as we always did, holding hands.
After, we flew to Budapest as the guests of my Hungarian publisher, who was just now bringing out a translation of Labor Day. My Hungarian editor picked us up at the airport, and for three days we managed to combine my book events with explorations of that city—the museums, the baths, the bridges, life in the street.
Though Hungary was no longer under Communist control, you could still feel, walking down the streets of Budapest, how recently and how painfully the people here had struggled. When I appeared at a book signing, readers came up to tell me they were saving up to buy my book. Earlier that day, at a cooking school there, I had put on for the Hungarian press a demonstration of how to make an American pie—a skill demonstrated by one of the main characters in the novel, the escaped convict played in the movie by Josh Brolin. Well over a dozen journalists and photographers had shown up for this event—along with Jim, of course, who set up his own camera as he always did, snapping pictures of me; the ever-present documentarian of our adventures.
After, my editor and publisher took us out to dinner at a tiny and beautiful restaurant no tourist who did not have a Hungarian friend would ever manage to locate, for one of the most extraordinary meals in my life or Jim’s. The courses went on forever, each accompanied by a different great Hungarian wine. The food was so rich we staggered away from the table, vowing to eat not one more bite for the next two days to make up for it.
Our strange Eastern European hotel room had a mirror over the bed. As we lay there naked in the aftermath of our gluttonous debauchery, I took out my iPhone.
“When will we have a better opportunity for this?” I said to Jim.
I am studying these pictures now. There we are, our naked bodies wrapped around each other and in the tangle of sheets, with the phone in my hand pointed up to the ceiling, my hair fanned out over the pillow, Jim’s shoes flung on the floor, along with a single sock, my dress, a copy of Labor Day in Hungarian. Two aging lovers in Budapest, sleeping it off. Two people drunk on love.
32.
Later, when I considered the arrival of the rat into our little paradise, it seemed like a harbinger of trouble to come. At the time, he was only an annoyance.
We first became aware of the rat a few weeks after we moved into the house in Hunsaker Canyon. We hadn’t seen him yet, but every night in bed now we could hear him outside, running back and forth on the beams of the pergola, and sometimes even closer too—out on the balcony just beyond our bedroom, or skittering across the roof, his sharp little claws scraping against the metal, making his way across the balcony beams and sometimes gnawing at the wood supporting the wisteria, the telltale droppings providing evidence, next morning, of his route. From the sound of him, we could tell this was a very large rat.
We tried the usual methods for rat extermination: a conventional trap, and then an electronic trap, and a glue trap, but the rat only seemed to become more brazen. Jim went online to study methods of rat extermination and rigged up a device he read about that called for taking an old drywall bucket, filling it with water, and placing across the top an empty coke bottle with a dowel through the middle, slathered with peanut butter.
The idea was that the rat, lured by the peanut butter, would venture onto the Coke bottle, lose his footing, and fall into the water, where he would drown. But the morning after Jim set out his contraption, the coke bottle had been licked clean and there was no rat to be found.
This was when we knew we had a super-rat on our hands—large enough that his body could span a drywall bucket without falling in and smart enough that he was onto whatever tricks we might employ to catch him.
By this point we had read up on rats, and the particular variety we believed to have taken up residence at our little paradise home among the wisteria vines. This would be a Norway rat, we believed. A single male, we learned, was capable of fathering—with a harem of female rats—as many as eighty offspring within a season.
That fall, rats—rats and the upcoming midterm election—became Jim’s obsession. Every day he set out for the hardware store in search of some new device to get rid of rats, or materials to create his own rat-exterminating setup. Because my son Willy sometimes visited with his dog, we couldn’t put out poison, which cut down on our options. There was a device that emitted a high-frequency sound that rats supposedly hated, but ours seemed indifferent to it. One night, Jim set up his bass amp at the loudest volume and attached his guitar. The sound that came out—like a heavy metal band gone mad—was awful, but we let it go on all night. The rat remained.
One day Jim came home from the hardware store with twenty glue traps—enough to stretch the full length of the beams of the pergola where our rat made his nightly forays. The glue trap investment came to a couple hundred dollars, but we were desperate. This was no longer simply about rats either. It felt as if Jim and I had fallen victim to a curse, and our beautiful, perfect oasis was under siege.
Jim set out the glue traps end to end, so even the cleverest rat would have no choice but to step into the glue. “I think I’ve got him now,” Jim told me as he finished his nightly pushups and we climbed into bed.
We were awakened by the sound of flailing. Jim went out on the balcony to investigate.
It appeared that our rat had gotten affixed to the glue, all right. He had fought so hard to get unstuck that he’d flung himself—himself, and the trap—down onto the ground below the second-floor beam.
Jim grabbed a flashlight and went out into the night. On the ground he found the rat, face up on the trap, staring up at him with his beady eyes and sharp little teeth.
Here, Jim faltered. He knew he should kill the rat then and there, but it was three in the morning and he was tired. The idea of clubbing the rat to death or going for his knife and slitting its throat there in the darkness felt like too much. He figured he’d take care of this in a few hours, with the hope that maybe the rat would have expired on his own by morning.
In the meantime, he placed the drywall bucket over the glue trap with the rat on it. On top of this he placed a large cement garden sculpture of a rabbit. Then he went back to bed.
We were up at five thirty, as always. Jim headed out to dispatch the rat. When he came back in the house he was shaking his head. The rat was gone, having burrowed out from under the bucket. Nothing left on the glue trap but an astonishingly long whisker.
33.
October had been a difficult month for us. There was an election coming up, and though this was the first time Jim and I had gone through one of those together, I’d learned by now that nothing got Jim more upset than hearing certain right-wing candidates holding forth. Reading what was going on in the news—the latest comment from John Boehner or Paul Ryan—was almost physically painful for him.
For me, that fall had signaled breakthroughs in my work. I’d just signed a book contract for two more novels, and after a couple of years of feeling unrooted—living in Mill Valley for a while, then Jim’s house in Oakland; setting up a temporary work space in Karen’s little r
ed farmhouse—I finally had my own desk again in my own writing studio. My new novel was almost ready to deliver now. I was making good money, for once.
But Jim seemed distracted, absent, and though in the past the one thing I had never doubted for a minute was his delight in me, and his joy in our life together, even that seemed to have faded. I still put on my fancy thrift-shop getups most nights for our dinners together, but he seemed distracted, absent. I still researched recipes and cooked good meals for us every night—lighting the candles, holding his hand to say grace before we’d pick up our forks—but he had little to say. If he spoke, it would often be a rant about some candidate.
“You don’t need to convince me about the Republicans,” I told him—sharper than intended. “I’m with you there.”
One of the things I had loved about Jim—loved about the two of us together—was how, with him, I had become a kinder, better version of myself. I had been a critical person in the past, particularly with men. With Jim, it had felt easy to be loving, and to be generous.
“I want to shower you with every good thing,” I used to say to him, and for a long time I had done that. But now I heard the old familiar habit of criticism creeping into my voice. I felt impatient. Disappointed. Where had my hero gone? My guard dog.
My birthday was coming up the first week in November, and I had learned that as much as he loved me, Jim was not adept at thinking up ways to mark November 5. The year before, he had bought me a gift certificate for an expensive massage and spa day—a good present for somebody, but probably not me. The year before he presented me with a necklace I never wore.
Why did it matter? Was there any doubt of Jim’s love? But for me at the time, Jim’s inability to choose a good birthday present served as indication of some larger failure to know and see me.
He did see me, in fact. He did know me, as well as anybody ever did, and he revealed his love to me daily. He just didn’t always know how to express that knowledge with material gifts, or to mark the day with the kind of big, romantic gesture that once seemed important.
That year, as my birthday approached—with Jim in his disconcertingly tuned-out state—I wondered if my husband had even remembered that the day was coming up. Nothing he said or did suggested he had.
I mentioned this to Becky, who had been my friend first, but now loved Jim too. Don Diego, she called him.
“I think he forgot all about it,” I said. No doubt there was bitterness in my voice that day. “If so, I won’t remind him.”
My friend pointed out that this was an unkind test. I had a good and unfailingly devoted man for my husband. Did I really want to set him up for failure?
“Jim is just so oblivious lately,” I said. “He doesn’t seem to be all there anymore.”
“Maybe there’s something wrong with him,” Becky offered. “Suppose you found out Don Diego had a brain tumor. Think how terrible you’d feel.”
It turned out that Jim remembered my birthday. The day before I turned sixty-one, an enormous box was delivered to our house from the Gibson guitar company. The shape made its contents unmistakable.
The birthday box had contained a two-thousand-dollar acoustic guitar—an extravagant and loving present. Just not one that made any sense at this moment in my life, I pointed out, when I told Jim to return it. I didn’t know how to play the guitar, and though I had often mentioned my regret about this, it seemed a little late to learn.
In the end, he went to the music store and came home with a very beautiful ukulele. “I’ll get you lessons,” he told me.
The idea of learning to play the ukulele was more realistic. But I continued to feel irritation over Jim’s increasingly distracted manner. Maybe because I’d lived through so much more trouble in relationships than good over the years, I was ready to believe that we were hitting the wall.
Jim hardly ever wanted to go on our walks anymore. He spent more and more time in his office, though what he was doing there was unclear. He talked about broadening his practice to include estate planning—something he’d done when he was a young lawyer—or maybe offering his services to firms in the city when they needed outside help. But it seemed to me he couldn’t focus. He was always making lists of things to do without checking anything off. Packages would arrive with some new four-hundred-page volume by some political scientist or science fiction novel from Amazon that he’d pick up briefly, then set aside. Sometimes, hearing him rail against the Republican Congress and the upcoming election, his level of ire ran so deep and bitter that even though I agreed with him, I had to leave the room.
The weekend after the election, I’d been invited to participate in a performance in the town of Grass Valley, a few hours north. A folk singer from Berkeley had put together a show combining songs she’d written with excerpts from letters home written by soldiers over the past couple hundred years. She’d asked me to be one of the readers—the other, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot—and I’d been happy to say yes.
I had hoped the weekend might signal a return to our romantic days. We took the Boxster with the plan to make a weekend of it, stopping along the way at interesting spots in the Gold Country, and went out to dinner together before the show.
But once again it felt as if Jim wasn’t fully there. Sometime after the show, as we were settling in to our hotel room, he told me he was having back pain—something he’d complained about intermittently, and noteworthy because he was never a complainer. The next morning his back was worse, and there was something else: His urine had turned amber colored. His skin had a yellowish tint. His mouth was set in an unfamiliar grimace that told me he was experiencing more pain than he was telling me about.
He had still insisted on taking the wheel of the Boxster as we headed home from Nevada City. But I could see tension in the muscles in his neck. We did not talk, on the drive, about our upcoming plan to go to Guatemala with my children, or blast rock and roll, or engage in any of our old banter in our bad British or West Indian accents, or our Wanda and Buddy routine. Though we had talked earlier of stopping at some interesting little diner in the Gold Country, Jim had no appetite, and seeing him this way, neither did I.
When we reached Hunsaker Canyon Jim went straight to bed. No pushups. No kisses. Just the incessant scratching of that rat.
PART TWO
After
34.
Late that night, I got out of bed and Googled Jim’s symptoms. We had the idea he might have gallstones, and the thought that this could be so—that he would need an operation—seemed, at the time, like an awful prospect. He had just gotten our mountain bikes tuned up, with the idea that we’d start riding together, training for that bike trip we kept talking about, to someplace like Italy.
At the hospital in Walnut Creek, they gave him blood tests and told us to come back the next day for a scan, and I noted an odd look on the face of the nurse. As we sat in the doctor’s office that second day awaiting the scan result, a feeling of dread came over me. When the doctor entered the room I knew it was bad.
“We can’t confirm this until we perform the endoscopy,” he told Jim, “but it’s pretty clear what’s going on here. There’s a tumor in your pancreas.”
35.
How does a person describe the moment her world ends?
I felt it in my heart, a blow as real as a knifepoint going in. I thought I might throw up.
Ten minutes earlier, I had been discussing the need to get my car registered (this being my birthday month) and the question of what color to stain the shingles on our house. Now the room was closing in on me.
I looked at Jim’s hands, his shoulders—stiffening—his beautiful thick hair, his dear, lined face. He still looked like himself, but everything was different now, life as we’d known it gone in the space it took for a man we’d never met to deliver that one sentence.
Now this man was putting his hand on Jim’s shoulder. Jim’s expression remained surprisingly unchanged but the doctor looked as if he might cry.
“I
’m so sorry,” he said. “My father died of this.” Emphasis on the word “father” with the implication clear: and you will too.
There was more, though I could only take in part of it, words coming in and out like bad radio reception. The tumor appeared to be 2.5 centimeters in diameter. The good news, if you could call anything good now, was that the cancer appeared to be what is known as “locally advanced,” meaning that it had not spread to other organs. Not yet.
The bad news—the bad news on top of the worse news—was that this tumor had wrapped itself around a crucial vein in Jim’s pancreas, in addition to being pressed up against an artery. The term for this stage of cancer was “borderline resectable.” This meant that the prospects for surgically removing the tumor would be slim. Without surgery, Jim was likely to die within a matter of months. A year at most, probably.
I looked again at my husband. My husband, the word I’d had a hard time uttering since our wedding day, but not now. All issues with the election, birthday presents, the appearance of obliviousness, car trouble, money trouble, children trouble, were swept away, but with them, our dearest hopes for our life together. Any doubt on the issue of my commitment to this man vanished in an instant. What was happening to him was happening to me too. The diagnosis was not only Jim’s but also mine.
His face conveyed little. I touched his shoulder, drew in my breath.
“And what happens if Jim gets this surgery?” I asked. “If that is possible after all?” (Because it had to be. There was no other acceptable option.)
The doctor laid it out for us. The surgery a person needed in a situation like Jim’s—the only route to surviving cancer of the pancreas—was known as the Whipple procedure. One of the most involved of all surgeries, it called for the removal of part of the pancreas, part of the small intestine, the gall bladder, the duodenum, as well as every lymph node the surgeon could get his scalpel on, and a complete rerouting of the digestive system. This was an enormously difficult and painful, life-altering procedure. Only a small percentage of those diagnosed with pancreatic cancer would qualify to undergo the Whipple. And even for those able to undergo the Whipple, the number still alive five years after surgery was somewhere between 20 and 25 percent.
The Best of Us Page 14