“The tissue looks very healthy,” he said, feeling along the incision with his fingertips. “You’ve healed nicely.” He let the gown close over the scar. “Now let’s have a look at the other one.”
Joan’s face warmed. He was like an arrogant fraternity brother, the Harvard boys who’d descended on Radcliffe for dances and mixers. She remembered a particular one who hadn’t even kissed her, just asked her to take off her blouse, too sure of his own attractiveness to bother seducing her.
He pushed aside the gown; her eyes darted around the room. There were two photos on Sugarman’s desk. In one, towheaded boys posed in front of a sailboat; in the other, the doctor embraced a buxom blonde in a strapless evening dress. Jewish boys and their blondes: her brother was obsessed with them, a different one each time Joan saw him. She closed her eyes and imagined Sugarman in bed with his wife, palming those enormous breasts. She wondered if his hands moved in the same circular path, unconsciously feeling for lumps.
“Are those your kids?” she asked.
“Yep,” he said. “The little Sugarmen.” The motion of his hand changed; he felt her breast in straight lines radiating outward from the nipple. You won’t find a thing, she thought. She’d examined her breast herself that morning. Every morning. She felt for lumps six or seven times a day.
She looked down at his curly dark head. She’d gone gray in her mid-twenties; she wondered if Sugarman dyed his hair too. Finally he closed the gown and tied it at her throat, like a mother bundling her child against the cold.
“Okeydokey,” he said. “Let’s have a look at that arm. Lift them both as high as you can.”
Joan imagined lecturing Sugarman like an angry schoolmarm: Grown men do not say “okeydokey.” She stretched her left arm overhead, her right arm to eye level.
He whistled through his teeth, a startling sound. “Pretty good,” he said. “How does it feel?”
“Pins and needles.”
He scribbled something on her chart.
“You’ve made remarkable progress. There’s almost no swelling, and your range of motion is excellent.” He closed the folder. “Any questions I can answer?”
Joan eyed her clothes piled on the chair, her silicone breast hidden among them.
“Can I go now?” she asked.
SHE WAS thirty-nine years old, the age in a woman’s life when questions begin to answer themselves. By chance or choice she hadn’t married; she wasn’t sure which. If pressed she’d answer vaguely: I was doing other things. She was often pressed, at cocktail parties, in job interviews, by the aging uncles who’d sat shiva for her father the previous winter. In those days the question struck nobody as rude: Why aren’t you married?
Other things. She’d graduated second in her class (Radcliffe, 1952; the first-ranked girl was also Jewish, as Joan’s father liked to point out.) Jobs at newspapers—copy girl, assistant to the women’s-page editor of a suburban daily on Long Island. (It hadn’t yet occurred to anyone that women might read the entire paper.) Then she went to work at the Times. She was the only female reporter in her bureau, which suited her. She enjoyed men; men trusted her. Joan laughed easily; she was hardworking and direct; she was not a prude. She had a good figure and a handsome face—her father’s dark eyes, his strong nose. A certain type of man found her attractive: dynamic, aggressive men, as devoted to their careers as she was to hers. By happy coincidence, this was the sort of man she liked.
From age twenty to thirty-eight she had twelve lovers, more than she would ever admit. A few had lasted a year or two; they remained her dearest friends. They called her each year on her birthday, men who’d married someone else.
Only one had met her parents. A year out of Radcliffe, Joan met a young law student named Howard Resnick. He was the first Jewish boy she’d ever dated; she brought him home one night to dinner. Her father wore a vest to the table; her mother, already ill, roused herself from bed, put on lipstick, and looked, for one evening at least, herself. After dessert they listened to records in the parlor, all six Brandenburg Concertos. Her father and Howard Resnick sat across from each other in overstuffed chairs, their long legs crossed at the ankle; the resemblance was almost familial. A month later Howard proposed marriage. Joan saw clearly the life ahead of her—babies and keeping house, a life like her mother’s—and said no. Her father was heartbroken. She wasn’t used to disappointing him; the sole aim of her childhood had been to make him proud. In school she’d excelled in all subjects; she had played the violin. She was more son than daughter, the dutiful son her brother, Ben, refused to be. (Four years younger, he wouldn’t go to Hebrew school. He befriended the neighborhood boys, Irish and Italian, and repeated the eighth grade.) Her father’s disappointment was too much to bear. She never brought home a man again.
Of all her lovers, only two had mattered. The first: Morris Brown, a married editor at the Times; they still spoke on the phone each month, wrote notes at the holidays. The second: Claude Tirat, a philosophy student she’d met in Paris when she was covering the student protests. Not for any particular qualities he possessed, but because it was he who, in bed, had found the lump in her breast.
She had the surgery on a snowy day in December. The roads were glazed, the cabs barely running; she took the bus across town to Sloan-Kettering. She told no one. Her mother was dead; she had no close girlfriends. All the important people in her life—co-workers and boyfriends, her brother and father—were men. If the cancer had been located elsewhere—her liver or intestine, blood or bone—she might have told. But she remembered her father’s discomfort during her mother’s illness: two mastectomies, long years of doctors and hospitals, and still he couldn’t bring himself to say the word breast.
In a week she was back at work, shaky but relieved. Her life proceeded much as it had, strung along by interviews and deadlines and weekly phone calls to her father, who’d retired to Florida. But she was exhausted. She began missing deadlines, handing in copy that didn’t come close to her former standards. Many nights she couldn’t sleep; when she did she dreamed of her mother, gray and motionless on the bed where she’d died.
Months passed before her editor noticed. When he did, he assumed she was hooked on drugs, which was fine with Joan: the magazine world ran on gossip, and she’d rather be known as a pill junkie than a cancer victim. That spring she took a leave of absence from the magazine. Then her father died of a sudden heart attack, and Joan was on a plane to Florida.
AT HOME she undressed and slipped into her bathing suit. She’d found it in New York, at a tiny shop on Third Avenue that catered to exotic women: the maimed, the very fat, the pathologically modest. The friendly Hungarian owner could order you a turtleneck bikini, a suit with a built-in girdle, or, if you preferred, a bathing dress from the 1920s with a skirt that hung to your ankles. Joan’s suit, a plain black one-piece, was cut high under the arms; on the right side of the chest, a hidden inner pocket held an inflatable breast. (The silicone one she usually wore was too dense; it refused to bob to the surface the way a real breast would.) Every afternoon she inflated the fake breast with a plastic straw, each time marveling at the absurdity of wearing a balloon against her chest.
Outside she slipped off her caftan, grateful for the sun on her back, the looming protection of the oleanders. Easing into the water, she exhaled slowly. It was her favorite moment of the day.
She swam every afternoon, sixty laps of sidestroke: thirty fast laps on her strong left side, thirty slow ones on the weaker right. The previous winter, after the surgery, her right arm had been weak and mostly numb, swollen to twice its normal size. The physical therapist in New York had given her exercises to do. Twice a day she walked her right hand down a wall from eye level to waist height, an excruciating process. She wore long sleeves to her father’s funeral, a voluminous black overblouse to accommodate her swollen arm. Now, eight months later, the swelling was nearly gone.
She breathed deeply. She’d quit smoking just before the surgery; she could cross the pool
underwater on a single breath. As she swam her mind wandered, freed by the languid rhythm of the stroke. She thought of summer camp in the Catskills, tearing across the lake amid the splashing of a dozen other girls, the sound fading as she left them all behind. Solitary swimming had bored her; she needed someone to race. When the other girls refused, she raced the boys. She liked those races even better.
She shifted to her right side, exhaling slowly, sinking into the pain. At the Times she had raced with boys every day; she had fought for everything she got: every raise, every byline, every column inch of precious space. At Newsweek the egos were even bigger, the competition more fierce; but there too she had won.
Some of the boys had minded; there was no doubt about that. She’d been passed over countless times, seen lesser reporters sent to Israel, to Greece, places her editor deemed too dangerous for a woman. But she kept pushing; she did not let up. Finally, in the spring, they sent her to Paris to cover the student uprisings. She let the boys chase down cabinet ministers (a losing battle; French politicians had no time for the foreign press). In her jeans and dark sweaters she passed for a student; each day she rode the Métro to the Nanterre campus or walked the narrow streets around the Sorbonne. One day she heard Danny Cohn-Bendit speak in the Place St.-Germain-des-Prés; afterward she pushed through the crowd and walked several blocks at his side. In her Radcliffe French she told him she was a Cohen too; amused, he gave her five minutes. She wrote the piece that afternoon; it appeared three days later, a half-page breakout embedded in the cover story. She’d managed to articulate the students’ concerns, to convey the frenetic mood in the streets; she’d captured Cohn-Bendit’s distinctive voice, his sharp wit. When she held the issue in her hand, her own initials stamped on the slick pages, she thought, I have done something. She’d celebrated with Claude Tirat that night, a miraculous evening that began and ended in bed.
That night, his hands exploring her body, Claude found the lump.
“Qu’est-ce que c’est?” he’d whispered. “Ça te fait mal?”
No, she told him: it didn’t hurt. Later, alone, she examined it: a hard, rubbery nodule just below the nipple. In June the red and black flags came down from the Arc de Triomphe; Joan went back to New York and made an appointment with her internist.
“Excuse me,” said a nearby voice.
Joan looked up, startled. A man stood on the patio in a bright green uniform.
“Hi,” he said. “I’m with the lawn service.”
She felt a sudden chill. She hadn’t heard the truck in the driveway, or the man’s footsteps on the cement. He could have been watching her for half an hour.
“I’ll be right out.” She stood at the shallow end and removed her swim goggles, then glanced down at her chest. Once, months ago, she’d gotten out of the pool, toweled off, and gone into the kitchen to make herself a sandwich, all without realizing that her right breast was still floating in the water, clear and shiny as a jellyfish.
She made her way to the edge of the pool, squinting through the afternoon sun. She was halfway up the ladder before she recognized the man’s long face, his slender build. It was Moira Snell’s fiancé, Ken Kimble.
“Ken,” she said. “How nice to see you.”
She stepped onto the cement, streaming water. The black swimsuit clung to her like a second skin. A breeze blew across the patio.
“Joan,” he said. “I didn’t make the connection. They only gave me a last name and an address.” His gaze skimmed her body, stopped for a second on the erect nipple of her left breast.
“Let me put on some clothes.” She crossed the patio and slipped into her caftan, wondering if his eyes followed her legs. She still had good legs.
“Sorry to startle you,” said Kimble. “I tried the bell, but no one answered.”
“No problem.” She turned to face him, safe inside the billowing fabric. “I didn’t realize you worked for the lawn service.”
“It’s my first day.” His eyes swept over the tiled pool, the hot tub, the bronze sculptures of exotic birds along the perimeter of the patio. “This is a beautiful place.”
“It was my father’s.” She rubbed her hair with a towel. “It’s a little extravagant for my taste, but he was in real estate. He had an eye for fancy houses.” In the bright sunlight Kimble looked older than he had at the Snells’; he must be her age, at least. What on earth, she wondered, was he doing with Moira?
“A movie star should live here,” he said. “Greta Garbo. Someone like that.”
Joan blinked. Her father had bought the place from the estate of just such a person, a silent film actress who’d come east when her looks and career faded. The woman had been a recluse; she’d surrounded herself with beautiful houseboys and never ventured beyond the patio. It was, Joan thought, a sad story.
“Let me show you the oleanders.” She led him down the flagstone path to the blooming hedge. Her right arm tingled from shoulder to fingertip. “They’re not doing very well. It looks like something is eating them.”
Kimble approached the hedge and examined a blemished leaf. He caressed it gently, then rubbed his fingers together. He turned the leaf over and peered at the underside.
“Aphids,” he said softly.
“I thought so.” Joan peered over his shoulder. “What’s that black stuff?”
“Mold. The aphids leave honeydew on the leaves, and pretty soon it gets moldy.” He knelt and examined the soil at the base of the shrub. She noticed his hair was sparse on top.
“Can you get rid of them?” she asked. “The lady at the service said you could spray them.”
Kimble frowned. “We could—there’s a spray for everything these days. But that stuff is pure poison.” He glanced toward the house. “Do you cook much?”
“A little.” In New York she’d subsisted on coffee and cigarettes, diner food and deli sandwiches. Only recently had she tried her hand at the stove. She’d fired her father’s cook and borrowed a stack of cookbooks from the public library. So far the results had been disappointing.
Kimble smiled. “If you want, I can make you a bug spray that won’t contaminate the groundwater. You probably have all the ingredients in your kitchen.”
What a strange thing to do, she thought. What an odd person. Yet for the first time in months she was intrigued. “Sure,” she said. “Why not?”
She led him across the lawn, through the sliding glass doors and into the kitchen. His bright blue eyes seemed to take in everything: the marble countertops and tiled floors, the double oven and eight-burner stove.
“You could open a restaurant here,” he said.
Joan laughed. “You haven’t tasted my cooking.”
Kimble reached for a copper pot from the overhead rack, filled it at the sink, and placed it on the stove. His sneakers were silent on the tile. He moved with quiet assurance, as if he’d spent his whole life in her kitchen.
“Do you have an onion?” he asked. “And some garlic?”
“I think so.” She opened the refrigerator and rooted through the crisper drawers. She handed him an onion and a head of garlic, left over from her one sad attempt at a tomato sauce.
“What can I do?” she asked.
“Just stand there and look pretty.”
Joan laughed, pleased in spite of herself. If a man had said such a thing to her a year ago, she would have rolled her eyes. Now, somehow, it struck her as charming.
“I’m surprised to see you,” she said. “I didn’t realize you and Moira were planning to stay in town.”
“It’s a nice place. Beautiful climate.” He looked closely at her. “Why? You don’t like it?”
“It’s lovely,” she said hastily. “But it’s an older crowd down here. There isn’t much to do at night if you’re single.” Her face warmed. Why did I say that? she wondered. Why did I tell him I was single?
“Anyway,” she said, “I’m glad you’re getting settled. You found a job pretty quickly.”
Kimble chuckled. “Nancy gets
the credit for that. She helped me cram for the interview. They were astounded by my knowledge of gardening. They hired me on the spot.”
He whistled softly as he puttered around her kitchen, a tune she faintly recognized. It had been all over the radio a few years back; Joan couldn’t identify the singer, but she remembered the words: Unto everything there is a season. Something like that.
“What’s that song?” she asked.
“The Byrds,” he said, and began to sing. “To everything, turn, turn, turn, there is a season, turn, turn, turn, and a time for every purpose under Heaven.” He sang unself-consciously; his deep voice serious, almost reverent. The sound seemed to her larger than his body, vibrant and full of emotion.
“You have a terrific voice,” she said.
He shrugged. “Thanks. I’m not much for popular music, but that one stuck with me. I guess I like the sentiment.” His eyes met hers. “Everything happens for a reason.”
“You believe that?” said Joan.
“You don’t?”
“I used to,” she said slowly. Her prosthesis felt heavy against her chest. “Now, honestly, I think it’s a load of crap.”
Kimble laughed. “You’re an honest woman.” He peeled a clove of garlic and dropped it into the pot. “What changed your mind?”
“Nothing specific.” Her face felt warm; all along her right arm the pins and needles returned. “Just that, well, it’s easy to believe in destiny when you’re young and everything you want lands in your lap. It’s when life starts taking things away from you that you start to question—” She hesitated.
“The fairness of things?”
“Yes.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “But not just that. You start to question the logic. And once you do you realize that anything could happen to anyone. There’s no order at all.”
Mrs. Kimble Page 11