by Rona Jaffe
“I didn’t get any valentines,” he complained after Valentine’s Day.
“Not even from Anwar?” Laura had asked merrily. He didn’t answer. But of course he was sensitive about it.
She remembered all the years Nina had painstakingly made valentines to send to her daddy; and the other cards, for Easter, Halloween, birthdays, and Christmas, the only one she could give to him in person. The cards always said he was the best daddy in the world, and how much Nina loved him. It was so obvious they were more a plea than a reward. But that was all the past, and for now Laura was relaxing in a strife-free limbo she had never known could exist for her. She was being taken care of, she was with family, she had the undemanding childhood home she had never had as a child.
It was different from her summer house in East Hampton, where she was the hostess and in charge. Here she had her own little room. Ricky’s room, Tanya had reminded her—“Remember Ricky? I miss him sometimes.”
“Don’t you dare,” Laura had said.
She had thought she would be unhappy here in Tanya’s disorder, among taste that was far from her own, but it was relaxing; a giving up of her will. She liked having few possessions, the others safely stored until she could make up her mind. She read their books and listened to their music, she ate their food (the little she ever ate), she looked forward to coming home from ballet class knowing she would not be alone. She had taken her pills out of the shower curtain and now kept them in a locked metal box in her closet. It looked as if it contained keepsakes, legal papers, nothing anyone would ever ask about. She hid the key. In the late afternoons she went out and bought Tanya and Edward flowers and candy and champagne.
She had decided not to stay in East Hampton all alone this summer, and instead went up weekends with Tanya and Edward. Sometimes Nina and Stevie came too. Laura was not fond of Stevie. Instead of a hostess gift he brought all his dirty laundry up with him on the train, washed it in her machine, and threw the empty detergent bottle into the trash without ever telling her there was no more or thinking of replacing it. He did nothing else around the house and made Nina wait on him. Although Nina kept insisting he was sweet and had other redeeming features, Laura hoped he would never be her son-in-law.
“We should get jobs in the fall,” Tanya said one day.
Laura looked at her. A job as a medium might be suitable. “You sound like the I Love Lucy show,” she said. “What kind of silly job could we do?”
“You should have more self-respect than that,” Tanya said. “There’s a lot of help needed in this world. We could feed the homeless again.”
“Edward won’t let you. You keep trying to take them home.”
“I wish I could take them all home. What about going to the hospital and playing with little abandoned children with AIDS?”
“The hospital threw you out when you started laying hands on them and chanting and made them cry,” Laura reminded her. “Maybe you could do that with consenting adults, but you frighten kids.”
“I don’t. I never frightened Nina.”
“She grew up with you.” She noticed Tanya’s downcast face and felt guilty. “Oh Tanya, you’re so good, so sweet.” She put her arm around Tanya and hugged her. “It’s just that you’re a bit too much of an individualist.”
“I don’t know when they made that a crime,” Tanya said. “And you’re not so conventional either.”
“Oh yes I am,” Laura said. And believed it. It was the circumstances outside her that were always a little off; she had wanted the most normal things in the world—a husband, a child, a home, people to love. Life had simply betrayed her.
“Conventional? Look at you. You’re so thin the nurses at the hospital thought you had AIDS.”
“Oh Tanya, don’t make bad jokes,” Laura said.
“I’m not. I worry about you, even though I don’t say anything because I know it upsets you. And Edward worries even more than I do.”
“I don’t do it to make you suffer,” Laura said sharply.
“It’s just that we love you,” Tanya said. “We want you around for a long, long time.”
“I intend to be.”
They dropped it then because there was nothing more to say. Tanya enrolled in another course. And Laura renewed her prescriptions at two different pharmacies. She had heard the government was going to make the rules about medication much more stringent soon, and she wondered how they expected people like her to survive.
In August, Edward took two weeks off from the office and the three of them went to East Hampton. It was such fun; the long days filled with physical activity under sunny blue skies, the cozy nights falling asleep to the sound of the waves, no need to rush to leave, no fear that they would leave her. It was the best of both worlds. Laura felt that she was handling her life very well.
She and Tanya were cutting up vegetables for the salad before the cocktail hour and Edward was taking his customary afternoon run. She thought how generous it was of them never to ask when she thought she might get her own apartment. On the other hand, she would do the same for them if they had to try to get their lives in order. And the beach house was their house too. “Shall we have some music?” Tanya asked.
“I’ll do it.”
Laura went to put on an album, stopping for a moment to admire the view from her front door. And there, unexpectedly, was Edward, pale and frightened, walking slowly toward the house as if he could hardly keep his balance.
“Edward?” She ran to him and he leaned on her like an old man. “What is it?”
“I don’t know.” Laura brought him into the living room and he lowered himself into a chair. “I was running, and all of a sudden the road came up to meet me. I had to sit down on the edge of the grass. Everything was coming at me in a kind of rocking motion, and I couldn’t see right.”
“And now?” she asked, concerned.
“I still can’t.”
Tanya came rushing over, wiping her hands. “It’s too hot to run today,” she said. “You lie down and I’ll bring you some water.”
“And three aspirins please,” Edward said weakly. “I have a terrible headache.”
He could hardly get from the chair to the couch. The aspirins did nothing for his headache, and when it was time for dinner he was unable to eat. He went right to bed. Tanya sat by his side and put her healing hands on his head, but they did nothing either. “It must be a virus,” Tanya said. “I’ll make you an herb tea.”
“My mouth tastes metallic,” Edward said.
“Well, you haven’t eaten for hours.”
“No, it’s not that kind of a taste. It’s … strange.”
“I think we should call a doctor,” Laura said.
“No,” Edward said. “Let’s wait and see.”
The next morning when he tried to get out of bed he felt dizzy again, but he had no fever and they didn’t know what to think. Tanya’s medicinal teas only made him queasy. His headache had never stopped. Laura insisted on calling the doctor who lived down the street; he was a friendly neighbor who gave everyone lettuces from his garden when they all matured at once, and since it was the weekend he was at home and Edward’s own doctor was off somewhere.
Dr. Samuels, the neighbor-doctor, appeared in shorts with a peeling nose, looking kind. He examined Edward alone and asked him questions while Tanya and Laura hovered outside the bedroom door, and then he told them they could come in. “I want you to take him into the city Monday and have him see a neurologist,” he said. He wrote a name on a piece of paper. “I’ll call Dr. Nelson for you and have him fit Edward in.”
“A neurologist?” they both said. “Why? What’s wrong with him?” They were tumbling over each other with worry.
“As I’ve told Edward, I think he should have an X ray,” Dr. Samuels said. “Maybe a CAT scan.”
“A CAT scan on what?” Tanya asked.
“His head.”
“What’s wrong with his head?”
“I’d like to know what’s
going on in his brain. There seems to be some pressure there.”
Laura felt as if the blood were draining from her body. She looked at Edward and he smiled at her reassuringly and shrugged. “But how could that happen so quickly?”
“It was probably there for a while.”
“What was?”
“That’s what we’re going to see,” Dr. Samuels said.
They drove into the city on Monday and Edward insisted on going to the doctor alone. He said Tanya and Laura could come to get him afterward, talking to them as if they were Siamese twins because he obviously knew that Tanya could never handle this by herself. It was hours before they could see him, and when they did, Edward already knew and the neurologist had to explain it to them. Two X rays were hanging from clips, the results of the CAT scan. There was Edward’s brain, and on the lower left side there was a round white mass.
“You see?” Dr. Nelson said, pointing to it. “That’s a tumor.”
Oh my God, Laura thought, what’s going to happen to him?
“It’s benign,” Tanya said, “isn’t it?” She was clutching Edward’s hand.
“That’s what we’re going to see,” the doctor said. “We have to get it out in any case. I have an excellent neurosurgeon for you and I’d like him to do it as soon as possible.”
Laura sat there numb with fear as Edward decided on the following week for the operation and the doctor prescribed Dilantin for him so he would not get a seizure in the meantime. There was also some medication for the queasiness, and they stopped off at the pharmacy on the way home and then they went to the apartment. Edward called his office and was on the phone for a long time.
“Do you know what I’d like to do?” he said then.
“What?” Tanya asked.
“I’d like to go back to East Hampton for a couple of days just to relax. This is going to be an ordeal for everybody, but there’s nothing more we can do right now, and this is still supposed to be my vacation. My will is in the study in the lower right-hand drawer of my desk, just in case something happens to me, which it won’t; but I want you to know.”
“Why are you talking about your will?” Tanya said. “You’re not going to die from this.”
“Because I have always been an organized person,” Edward said, and smiled at her.
He is going to die, Laura thought. If it’s malignant, he’ll start to die. She could not remember ever feeling this kind of fear. For too few months she had been a child in the happiest of families, healing the wounds of her past, and now in a matter of two days their happiness was shattered. Don’t let yourself think it’s malignant, she told herself; you don’t know.
They went back to the beach. At sunset she left Tanya and Edward alone and walked by herself, thinking about their three lives. A picture came into her mind of the back of Edward’s head, his thick straight gray hair growing in perfect whorls like the lines on a certain kind of seashell, around and around until it ended in the perfect pink pinpoint of his healthy scalp. Inside that beloved head was the energy and miracle of a human brain, something you took for granted, with all its intelligence, humor, kindness and love. And inside too was that growing lump, pushing aside the infinitesimal fibers that made him who he was. She could not bear to think that too soon someone was going to cut into him and reveal his destiny. Their destiny. Edward had been their rock.
She had lost Clay, if indeed she had ever had him. She wasn’t sure if she had ever really had Nina. She had never even thought of losing Edward, but in fact he was the only one who had always been there for her, the one she should have been the most frightened of losing.
Tanya will survive, Laura thought. Tanya will just plan to meet him in another life, and communicate with him through the spirits. It’s I who will have no resources.
She sat on the sand on the shelf the tide had made. Far away down the beach a man was playing Frisbee with his dog. If only she had something to believe in the way Tanya had, or an organized religion the way her parents had had, but she did not believe in spells and she was not sure she believed in God although she was too superstitious to admit it. If there was a God she could offer something up, she could pray, she could make promises. But even if there was a God, she was not necessarily going to get anything. Good people like Edward died every day for no reason.
She knew what Edward wanted of her. He had always wanted only one thing of her: to stop taking her pills and get detoxed. They were not just “pills”—they were drugs. Why didn’t she just admit it in its worst light: she took drugs and always had. She was an addict with money.
Somewhere there had to be a higher order, if only so you had someone to try to make a bargain with.
Please let Edward’s tumor be benign, she thought. Please let him get well. I promise I will go into a clinic and stop taking drugs, no matter how hard it is, if you will only let Edward be all right.
I’ll be fat, she thought.
No, I won’t; they deal with that too. I may not be as thin as I am, but I will never be fat.
I am not taking this bargain back, I was just equivocating a little.
If you let Edward live I will get detoxed. I have already taken the first step by admitting what I am.
It was dark. She got up and walked back to the house, following the line of lighted houses she knew so well; and never told anyone what she was planning, because telling would spoil the magic.
The very delicate operation took hours. Tanya insisted on waiting at the hospital so Laura did too. “Now I understand all the brain surgeon remarks people make,” Tanya said. “Like, well, he’s no brain surgeon; or, what do you think she is, a brain surgeon?”
“Yes,” Laura said.
It was no longer a question of spoiling the magic by telling; she felt trivial and silly even though the bargain she had made was the most important decision she had made in decades.
She went to the phone to call Nina again. Ever since this had happened she had been calling Nina every night, trying to turn her daughter into the strong supportive friend she needed so much right now, and Nina had risen to the challenge as best she could; but what was there for her to do except listen? It must be very difficult for Nina too.
“Let me know what happens as soon as you know,” Nina said. “I’m sorry, but I have to go to a meeting now.” It was easier for Nina; she had her work, her lover—worthless as he usually was—and Edward was only her “uncle.” She had a real father … worthless as he usually was. For the first time, Laura was feeling angry toward Clay. She had not even called him to tell him about Edward. Clay had never thought much of Edward anyway, calling him henpecked.
Laura went back to wait with Tanya. Tanya had her eyes shut and was in her private world, sending messages of health and healing into the operating room, into Edward’s skull. My pact is worth something too, Laura thought. It has to be.…
Then, at last, the door opened and the surgeon came out. It was over, and he was smiling! “Good news,” he said. “The tumor has been completely removed and the report shows it was benign. There will of course be postoperative swelling, which will go away; and there has been a certain amount of neurological trauma, some of which I’m optimistic will go away because it’s part of the swelling. At worst there might be a permanent loss of some peripheral vision on one side. But it could have been a great deal worse. Edward can reasonably expect to have a long and healthy life.”
“Oh, thank you,” Tanya said. She was smiling back. “We did it together.”
“That’s right,” he said, but you could see he was only being polite.
You’d be surprised, Laura thought.
A month later, when Edward was coming along well and Tanya could handle things, when the first fiery turning leaves appeared in the New England hills, a small gaunt woman in large sunglasses and a turban got out of a rented chauffeur-driven car and entered the private drug rehabilitation center there. There was really no reason for Laura Hays Bowen to disguise herself this way, since no one
had known who she was for years. But she liked doing it. It gave her a touch of drama.
She was very nervous but also elated, and for that single moment of stage fright before she opened the door to the building she remembered again what it had felt like to be a star.
33
1987—NEW YORK AND LOS ANGELES
It was fall. For Susan every day was a baby step, and some of them backward. Framed photographs of Clay still smiled at her from her dresser top, loving and reassuring and not belonging there at all anymore. She tried to put them into the drawer, but at night she had to take them out again or else she could not sleep. She put her stuffed monkey away too, but somehow it always ended up in her arms. She had not sent his half empty bottle of cologne to him but she was not able to throw it away either. Sometimes she smelled it, bringing back such a flood of deliberately fragmented memories that she felt sick. Only a masochist, she thought, would do a thing like this.
She had lecture dates to fulfill. Work, it seemed, had always been the only thing, she was good at, and she got through them as if she were an actress in a play. There was local press, and when she was interviewed the reporter always asked her if she had a husband. She said she was divorced. The truth was too bizarre, too difficult to explain. When they asked about children, sometimes she said she had a daughter.
She was unable to write because of her grief, and she needed the money from these lectures on being trapped by a destructive love object to pay her therapist. There seemed a certain irony in this.
Dutifully, seeking some balm, she asked people to get her blind dates, but even the men said there were no good men around who weren’t taken. Joan Giacondo, who had told her to get the detective, now told her to take an ad in the personals to see how many eager males were out there looking for connection. It resulted in a flood of letters, frequently from men who were insane. Susan called a few of the probably sane ones, and sat through agonizing meetings in safe public places, during which she could not think of a thing to say. She had not dated anyone for seventeen years, and in the Sixties people didn’t date. She felt like a miserable teenager, carefully made up, trying to hide her emotional problems, stung by anything unkind this meaningless stranger said to her; giving him an hour, “giving him a chance,” as her mother used to say.