For a while she wore a wig, but when she continued to age poorly and it became too bright, too full, too Farrah, for her face, she’d thrown it away. “Don’t put it in the trash,” Lady had said. “Donate it to some cancer clinic,” but Vee had said, “No, the wig must die,” and dropped it in with the garbage.
“The wig is dead,” Lady had said then. “Long live the scarf.” Now the scarf was dead, too, suffocated in Vee’s fist.
She was on the M4, sailing along Cathedral Parkway. She had no recollection of transferring, that’s how lost in thought she’d been. For a few minutes, for a few stops, she’d already left the world, and she hadn’t even noticed. That, she thought, was probably what being dead was like.
As for the final six months of her life, she was determined they would be the six months of her dreams. Unemployed, she would stay home and read. She would go to movies. She would drink all day long, including first thing in the morning. Better yet, she’d never have to see the morning; she could sleep every day until noon and start to drink then. Or sleep until three. She could have six months of being a slob and a sloth, a potted plant with a buzz on. She would go to her final reward with the chest of an abused teenage boy and the hair pattern of an elderly man and her bone marrow sucked dry by her own turncoat cells, but she would be well-read and well-rested.
It was right about then, as she was making her list of fun things to do during her final months of life—Broadway! She could afford to see every damned play on Broadway!—that she took note of the man sitting beside her. She didn’t exactly do a double take, but she realized at once that she’d seen him before on this very bus line, that he’d taken the empty seat next to her at least once before.
She found this surprising, but less shocking than the other shocks. She knew lots of people would find it full of meaning, running into the same stranger more than once on a bus in a city the size of New York. Delph, for instance. Delph would swear it was a sign. Perhaps a bad sign: the man was Vee’s cancer personified. Perhaps a good sign: the man had been sent by Eros, a last chance at love, a Yogi Berra–ish kind of encouragement: it ain’t over till it’s over.
Vee didn’t believe in that sort of thing. She didn’t believe the angry clerk at city hall had given her cancer, and she didn’t subscribe to the curse that encircled Delph’s leg and supposedly lay on all three of our heads. For Vee, the meaning of life had always been that life had no meaning, and the moral of the story was that there was no moral of the story. Things that seemed significant weren’t. While her philosophy of life wasn’t tattooed on her body like Delph’s, it would have been affixed to her bumper if Vee knew how to drive and owned a car.
Shit happens.
That’s what she believed and has tried to persuade Delph to believe as well. “Life isn’t a soap opera,” Vee would say. “It’s far more nonsensical. Things that seem to mean something mean nothing. Jefferson and Adams died on the same day, and that day was the fourth of July. Teddy Roosevelt’s wife and mother died on the same day, and that day was Valentine’s Day. Nothing has any significance.”
Some people collect stamps, coins, sterling silver fish knives. Vee collects coincidences. Her favorites are the double tragedies, the triple tragedies. She’s the Ripley’s Believe It or Not of misery compounded. Did you hear the one about the old Japanese man, how during the war, covered with burns, he was rushed from Hiroshima to a hospital in—where else?—Nagasaki? Or what about the one where a woman in Delaware learns her husband and son both died the same day, each one hundreds of miles from the other, each one in a different bizarro accident? That last coincidence came with an in-your-face punch line: “God never gives us more than we can handle,” the woman had sobbed gamely to a klatch of admiring reporters. A few months later there was one of those “Whatever happened to . . . ?” stories. The woman had died in a car crash. Boom! Rimshot!
And if you don’t believe that so many terrible things could befall a single person within a mere twenty-four-hour period, if you think Vee is inventing or exaggerating, then just wait here. Vee will go into her room, come back with the article. Dateline: Dover, Delaware. Vee clips and saves all the articles. She stuffs them in a shoe box that she keeps in her closet. She’s a curator of coincidences, the queen of quinky-dinks.
Which is only to say that she didn’t think it meant a damned thing that this particular man, seventyish, perhaps even older, was sitting next to her again.
That said, she found herself glancing at him. She had no idea why. She wasn’t much of a people watcher. Certainly it wasn’t sexual. She didn’t find him attractive in any sense of the word. The bags under his eyes were substantial. His face was furrowed and specked. He was lean but too lean, a worn-out soul. Chapter 1: I Am Born. Chapter 6: I Turn Into that Guy from that Hopper Painting. (Museums! She could go to museums!) But she couldn’t stop darting her eyes in his direction, noting how his hair, thin and silver, stood up in places as if he’d been running his fingers through it with worry, or how the concavity of his sunken cheeks seemed almost blue with stubble.
He, on the other hand, didn’t look at Vee. His own gaze was fixed on his hands, large and ringless, which he’d placed on his knees, the fingers splayed. It was as if he was wondering if they really were his hands, as if he was concerned he’d accidentally taken the wrong pair when he left wherever he’d come from, the way people sometimes grab the wrong suitcase at baggage claim. Be careful. Many hands look alike.
A murderer would look at his hands that way, Vee thought. Not that she believed the man sitting next to her was a murderer, other than to the extent we all are—the small murders we commit through negligence or giving in to a moment’s bad temper. The murders we commit when we fail to do things—fail to send money to flood victims, fail to get up early to march for issues we claim to care about, fail to catch a wasp inside the apartment and release it back into the world instead of flattening it with a newspaper. And the murders we commit simply by existing, simply by our inhabiting and exploiting this beleaguered planet.
But not a murderer like, for example, our great-grandfather, the murderer who bequeathed us our genetic code and our faces.
Vee tried to shake these thoughts from her head. They made for an inauspicious start to what were supposed to be her final six months. She tried to look on the bright side instead. Now that she knew the exact day on which she was going to die, she could be bold and brave. She could talk to her seatmate. She could say, “Nice weather,” or “Trafficky today, isn’t it?” or “Well, here we are again, the two of us on the good old M4.” And he might say, “I know; we’re always coming from roughly the same place and going to roughly the same place, though neither of us knows a thing about the other’s actual starting point or destination.” And Vee could say, “It feels meaningful, but it’s just a coincidence.” And he could say, “That’s a fact, you’re one hundred percent correct. But still, it’s a nice coincidence, if you don’t mind my saying.”
Or they could have a completely different conversation. Vee could say, “Well, here we are again,” and he could say, “Excuse me, what are you talking about? I’ve never seen you before in my life.” Or he could reply in Spanish or Ukrainian. Or he could say nothing at all, just give Vee the kind of look that people on buses tend to give conversationally inclined ex-institutionalized patients of indeterminate gender. And if he did say that, or it turned out they spoke different languages, or he gave her that look, it wouldn’t matter; Vee wouldn’t let it bother her the way she would have, say, yesterday. She wouldn’t waste any time replaying it, experiencing the humiliation again and again and again, because she’d have other things on her mind, such as the fact that she was going to fucking die on New Year’s Eve.
She said nothing, though. Even as the bus began slowing for her stop and she stepped over him and into the aisle, she didn’t let on that she’d been thinking about him. She stood by his seat now, holding on to the metal handle directly behind his shoulder, swaying slightly, expertly, to ma
intain her balance. The bus stopped, and she began making her way down the aisle, and as she did she let the scarf in her fist fall. It landed by the socked toes emerging from her seatmate’s Tevas.
He didn’t notice. This wasn’t the belle epoque, after all, when men retrieved the handkerchiefs women dropped at their feet. It was the aisle of a city bus in 1999. He’d never look down and see it. He’d more likely step on it unaware when he disembarked. Then, for the rest of the day, other passengers would step on the scarf, until, in the early hours of the morning, a maintenance worker would sweep it up and throw it away.
Did it make her sad, the fate of this square of discarded silk? Yes, it did. It made her so sad that she allowed herself to stop at the Hungarian Pastry Shop and buy four Sacher tortes. Three for our desserts later in the evening. One for her to eat as she walked the few blocks home. The undergrad drinking coffee at one of the tables, she noted, was, if not as bald as she, then half-as-bald, with one side of her head shaved and the other side long and dyed indigo blue. She imagined this girl standing in her dorm bathroom, humming as she wielded the electric razor, as she mixed up the Manic Panic. She imagined the girl looking up now, greeting Vee, mistaking Vee for a kindred spirit. Bald women of Manhattan unite! But—New York City—neither the undergrad nor anyone else in the shop, including the man behind the counter, made eye contact with her.
Home finally, Vee stood in the foyer, waiting until Lady, who was in the kitchen futzing with dinner, and Delph, who was in the living room watching the local news, sensed her waiting there and looked up. It meant nothing to them that she was scarfless; she always whisked off her scarf as soon as she walked in. They just assumed they’d failed to witness the evening’s whisking
Vee continued to wait until she had their full attention, until Lady had turned down the burner threatening to overboil the spaghetti, until Delph looked away from tomorrow’s weather.
“So,” she said at last. “Guess what reared its ugly head today?” and Lady and Delph, who had allowed themselves not to think about cancer for a good solid decade, knew the answer at once.
We convened around the dinette table. It was still covered with the same shit as always, or pretty much the same shit. No more issues of Rolling Stones; those had been replaced by the slippery mountain that was the unavoidable by-product of a subscription to the New Yorker. No more weed, but at least a half dozen wineglasses we hadn’t yet carried to the sink, the purple residue of some cheap zin staining the bottom well of their bowls.
Lady and Delph said the things one says. They asked the questions one asks, although after Lady asked, “What kind of treatment plan are they talking about?” and Vee smiled and said, “None,” the need for further questioning seemed minimal.
Some of the things we didn’t do that evening included crying, hugging, pacing, or panicking. We are Alters, but we are also Emanuels, also Gläsers: stoics, Spartans, fatalists—quitters, if you like. We let nature take its course. We don’t fight city hall. We accept the things that come our way. This is not to say we’ve always liked those things, or that we’ve made peace with them or gotten through them without a drink or two or five. It’s not to say we wouldn’t have preferred actually having a father or a normal mother or—let’s go crazy—both. It’s not that we wouldn’t have preferred it if Eddie Glod hadn’t died in a cheap chain restaurant, or if the shadow on Vee’s latest film had turned out to be the radiologist’s thumb.
It’s just that we keep our reactions to ourselves. We tamp them down. We ignore them or feed them or drown them. You’re thinking this is a bad thing, but no, it’s a wonderful thing. It’s truly a talent. Thanks to nature and nurture both, we’ve been blessed with the gift of repression.
We sat at the table quietly. Vee looked down, the way a child who brought home a bad report card might, regretful primarily for causing others distress. Finally Lady sighed and got up and went to our sideboard, a wall-length golden pine buffet Karin had taken from Germany to France to Haiti to here, a piece of furniture that was completely incongruous next to the cheap dinette set she’d bought when reduced to relative poverty in America. Of course, all the pieces in the dinette have sentimental value for us; we grew up with them. The vinyl and chrome chairs we were sitting on had been our chairs for five decades. Our entire apartment is like this: a mishmash of styles and eras, including a smattering of possessions acquired by the Alters when they were still well-to-do Germans, borderline Christians, and retained by them after they were reviled and exiled and Caribbean.
Lady returned to the table with a new bottle of the same old cheap zin. She twisted off the cap and refilled three of the stained glasses. We each took the nearest one, made the faintest gesture of a toast, then drank the wine down in big, crude gulps. We were after inebriation.
Lady put her glass down first. “So, Veezie,” she said. “What are you going to do?”
Vee smiled again. “You of all people should know the answer to that.”
Lady refilled our glasses to the brim. We had to lean down to sip before we could lift them.
“You’re being very rational . . . ,” Lady said.
“I’m waiting for the but,” said Vee.
The window in the living room was open. We let ourselves hear the city sounds we normally filtered out. The sounds were all made by vehicles—squealing brakes, backfiring exhausts, car alarms, ambulance sirens, and the very specific sound of a bus coming to a stop, opening, then closing its doors and pulling away.
“I’m not sure I have a but,” Lady said. She started to make the obvious and self-deprecating pun, but stopped herself.
“I won’t have to deal with ambulances,” Vee said.
“I would never wish you a life dependent on ambulances and emergency rooms,” Lady said.
“We all gotta go sometime,” Vee said.
“And really,” Lady said, “it makes so much more sense to determine when that sometime is rather than just putting ourselves at the mercy of fate. Or time. Or the US medical establishment.”
“This is Vee’s fate,” Delph said.
Vee kept smiling. “The fact that I have terminal cancer has more to do with the chemicals in the environment and the plastic in our food and, frankly, this glass of wine in my hand than with any kind of curse,” she said.
Delph said nothing, but she said it loudly.
“Look,” Vee said. “It’s my death, and I get to say why it’s happening.”
We fell back into silence. We sat like that for a very long time.
Later, the three of us lying across Vee’s mattress, Vee said, “I see my decision as emerging from a confluence between inclination and circumstance.”
Later still: “I’m completely at peace. Really, I’m so remarkably fine.”
The room had darkened. Only the lights of the city kept it from going black. The sky was the color of ocean froth.
“I could spend a week at the beach,” Vee said. “Not Rockaway. A real beach. The kind where the water is actually blue.”
Another stretch of human silence, another squalling of horns, brakes, sirens, hydraulics.
“I could go on a silent retreat,” Vee said. “I could sit cross-legged in silence from now until then.”
An hour or so later, the sun coming up, Delph said, “Here’s what I think. Midnight. New Year’s Eve. It’s a good idea. We skip out before this whole Y2K thing. Meanwhile we have about six months to write that book we’ve always wanted to write. About the three generations.”
That’s how it began. We thought we’d write about Lenz and Richard and our mother. Those deaths. Not ours.
“We would have to work steadily and faithfully,” Vee said.
“Evenings,” Delph said.
“Weekends,” said Lady.
“And full-time, after we quit our jobs,” said Delph.
Lady nodded. “And if during that time you happen to change your mind, Vee, or—who knows?—maybe they come up with some kind of viable treatment . . .”
&n
bsp; “Vee-able treatment,” Delph said, soft little-girl voice.
Vee smiled, but shook her head
“I said if,” said Lady. “If they do . . . then we reassess.”
“All right,” Vee said. “New Year’s Eve. That’s my deadline. And I do mean deadline.”
“And mine,” Lady said. “Have you not been hearing me?”
“We’re not letting you go alone,” Delph said.
There was the faintest note of resentment in their declarations. It was as if Vee were about to go on the Grand Tour of Europe without them. Delph could hear our mother’s petulant reproval: But your sisters? You don’t even invite your sisters?
That’s how easy it was. Sure, Vee exerted some effort trying to talk the other two out of it. It seemed like—it was—the polite thing to do. “What’s your justification?” she said.
“My sister’s prognosis,” Delph said.
“No,” Vee said. “That’s my justification, not yours.”
“Don’t tell us what makes our lives no longer worth living,” Lady said.
Vee stopped arguing. She couldn’t say she exactly hated the idea. Companions, coconspirators, a couple of hands to hold.
We raised our glasses. We searched for an appropriate toast.
“What’s the opposite of l’chaim?” Lady said.
“L’pffft,” Vee suggested, which sounded, if not Hebrew, then certainly Yiddish. We liked it. We clinked. “L’pffft!” we said. L’pffft—spitting all over each other and laughing, which was as close to crying as we ever get.
And when we looked out the window, we all saw the light shift, vertical to horizontal, gold to silver; we all saw it change at the very same time.
A Reunion Of Ghosts: A Novel Page 22