But even as I was reminding myself of this and a thousand other encouraging things, even as I was hypnotizing myself with words like Tamoxifen, Herceptin, Femara, I was up again, standing as close to the operating room as I could lawfully get.
“You want some coffee, Dad?” Alec asked me. I hadn’t heard him follow me down the hall. “I was gonna go downstairs and find the cafeteria.”
I shook my head at him. His mother and I — we had known each other since we were nineteen years old. We had grown up together. I had truly tried to do my best by her. There had been moments, of course—infertility and its attendant hysteria, building my practice, worrying about our money, my own occasional distractions, her own goals, and the fact that it’s hard to live every day with another person and love her on a constant graph. Love, so the song goes, is a parabola. But right now, we were at the top of the parabola. This was, of course, because my wife might not live to see the downward slope.
“Well, would you mind if I left?” Alec asked. I didn’t answer, and in a second or two I heard him pace backward down the green-tiled hall. From the other direction, a pair of men came marching purposefully. I envied them their swagger, their all-access pass to every corner of this swollen, hideous hospital. As they approached, they each looked more and more like doctors of the old school, sitcom doctors, with graying temples and white coats flying open and stethoscopes rounding their necks and shoes that managed to stay polished, never mind the 168th Street debris spotting the floors. They were the doctors I had always imagined I’d become someday, although of course I wasn’t quite that self-delusional. But still. They probably kept pieds-à-terre in the city; at least one of them fucked his nurse regularly; both of them probably played golf.
And then I realized that the one on the left, slightly taller, patrician bump on his nose, heavy gold ring, had been my favorite professor at Sinai. Dr. John Falls. Falls was a legendary neurologist, specializing in paralyses, aphasias, dysphasias. Winner of so many awards and medals so early that it had seemed almost certain he’d flame out hard, but instead he published one more brilliant paper after another and landed a faculty position at Sinai by the time he was thirty-two. He’d been an Olympic pole-vaulter during college and right after and entertained us, during rounds, with tales of Mexico City ‘68. What the hell was he doing here?
I watched him speak with that old, familiar purpose with his colleague. Maybe he had a high-level consult, a big-name conference. Maybe he was working on some city or state policy matters that would years from now trickle down to docs like me.
“Dr. Falls,” I muttered under my breath.
Falls had always gotten along well with his students. He wasn’t so much older than us, after all, and I think he and I had maybe had something resembling a friendship. We’d joke around after class, or when we bumped into each other in the hospital. I remember he had a slightly filthy sense of humor. He was an amateur baker and would bring dozens of cookies, bashfully, to hand out on campus; baking was how he relaxed. Bitter rumors spread that he was gay. If I’d thought I could follow in his footsteps, even fifty steps behind, I would have maybe become a neurologist, too. But I knew my limitations then and now.
The men had stopped ten feet away from me to finish their conversation. I watched them but tried not to look as though I was eavesdropping. Something about a subdural hematoma. We were around the corner from the operating room. I knew Falls would know how to find out what was going on with my wife. If anyone could, it was him.
Five minutes, seven, the two were still talking. My voice burst from me and I couldn’t stop it. “Dr. Falls,” I said, this time loudly. The men didn’t look up. I waited until the other one said his good-byes and headed in the opposite direction.
“Dr. Falls,” I said for the third time as John Falls marched purposefully my way. As he came closer to my view, I saw that scar on his forehead — I’d forgotten about it—an angry slash from a pole-vaulting accident.
“Dr. Falls,” I said. He didn’t look up. His hearing must have diminished as he’d gotten older. Almost thirty years ago I’d been taking his class, up all night getting ready for boards, my wedding coming up, Elaine wanting me to visit the hall on Long Island with her, see if I had opinions on tablecloth colors, flower arrangements, me too overwhelmed with med school to give the tiniest shit. Dr. Falls and I got together for a beer one breezy afternoon in the back of the old Kinsale Tavern, and I told him all about my wife-to-be and her grumbles. He was just about to get married himself and we compared notes.
“Dr. Falls,” I said again as he grew nearer. “John.”
The neurologist looked up at me. There was sadness and distance in his eyes.
“Yes?”
“Pete Dizinoff,” I said. “Um, I was—”
“I’m sorry?”
“I was your student at Sinai,” I said. “Pete Dizinoff. My wife is in—”
“Oh,” he said. He blinked. “Dizinoff, yes. Sure. Can I help you?”
“My wife is in the OR, ductal carc—”
And then his pager rang much too loudly. I took a step back. Doctors like Falls were never in the dark. They never had to stand outside an operating room, waiting for a merciful colleague to tell them what was happening inside.
He blinked again. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry, I really must—”
“Of course,” I said, and I watched as Dr. Falls hurried down the hallway, his white coat flapping, his polished shoes tap-tap-tapping on the stained tile floor.
I put my hands in my pockets and let my chin fall toward my chest.
Then I felt a warm hand on my sweaty back. “It’s okay, Dad,” Alec said. I hadn’t even known he was behind me. Together, we watched as Dr. Falls turned the corner and disappeared from view. We went back to our places, my son in the waiting room with his magazines, and me as close as I could dare to the operating room, knowing better than to try to open my mouth again. Whatever I could ask wouldn’t change anything, anyway. A better doctor would have considered that.
BUT IT SEEMS to me now that even that sad moment was full of grace. For Elaine survived: six hours and forty minutes after she’d gone in for surgery, I watched the nurses and residents wheel her out to the recovery room, gray-faced, barely conscious, but indisputably alive. “We got the whole tumor,” the surgeon said. “All of it.” Alec was standing next to me. Without looking at each other, we squeezed hands. We were lucky then — I was so lucky then. That night I slept in the chair in her room the way I had the night Alec was born, my jacket rolled between my shoulder and the side of my face.
Now, today, six years later: no more son, no more best friend, no more sterling reputation. No more happy marriage. No longer, even, a practice in Round Hill, no more modern art on the walls or Aeron chairs in my office, since Vince and Janene suggested three months ago that perhaps the time had come for me to find solo digs.
These days, then, instead of a cool sweep down the hill to my familiar examining rooms, there is a clanky drive to Bergentown, my new two-room office partitioned like a private eye’s. I park in the chain-link lot behind a movie theater. My examining room sits above a Filipino restaurant, and the smells of garlic and bananas waft up all afternoon. After work I eat dinner, sometimes with Mina, who has stood bravely by me for reasons I don’t try to fathom. Then I go to the hospital for rounds every night. Home, up the staircase to the studio, a long time staring out the window, and then to bed. I see different patients these days — fewer well visits, frankly, and more blacks, who not only die at disproportionately higher rates than similarly aged whites but must suffer morally impeachable doctors as well.
I venture nowhere near the JCC.
Oh, my patients still love me. For the most part they never bought New York magazine’s best-doctors issue and therefore have no idea how far down I’ve come in the world. And there are several stalwarts who’ve followed me from Round Hill to Bergentown, and I appreciate them all and treat their bladder infections and strep throats
with the same patient attention I did up in my fancier digs. However, I no longer try to sleuth out good, juicy diagnoses. I refer patients to the specialists who are still willing to be referred to by me. My patients, holding their cracked Sunday purses, nod tightly at me and press onward.
But one of the strange blessings of this past year is that I’ve remembered how much I like practicing medicine. Insurance woes and paperwork and privacy policies—these are all worries of another class and place. I’m just glad to still be around. I give my patients free drug samples, they almost weep in gratitude, and I remember that even someone like me can still do good in this sad world.
When Elaine opened her eyes in the recovery room, the first thing she saw was my face, and the first words she heard were mine, me, telling her I loved her.
As ALEC’S BEHAVIOR began to change in his senior year of high school, we started tracing his troubles to the cancer. Early trauma, according to the psychotherapist, could have long-term consequences for adolescent development, and both of us had been so concerned with Elaine during that time (which was as it should have been, right? Wasn’t she the one who was sick?) that maybe we never spent enough time thinking about Alec’s reaction to his mother’s brush with death. We hadn’t sent him to therapy. We hadn’t taken him to any of the adolescent counseling groups Tuesday evenings at the JCC.
“You really should think about it, Pete,” Phil had said to me in that tone he was so good at. Elaine had been home for a month, the summer had launched its first heat wave, but still she was going about chemo with diligent good humor, despite one insult to her body after another. Phil and Mimi had come by for a visit, bearing platters and coffee from Zabar’s.
“How do you think this is affecting Alec, seeing his mother so sick? She’s bald, for Christ’s sake. That’s got to be tough on a kid.”
“How is it affecting him?” I asked. “The only person I’m worried about here is Elaine. I’m trusting Alec will get through this fine as long as she does.”
We were in the kitchen, the one room in the house where Elaine couldn’t bear to be. The smell of food, the very thought of it, made her heave. All she could tolerate was Cream of Wheat and McDonald’s vanilla milkshakes, to which I added a cup of cold water as per her preference.
“You remember when Mimi’s sister died?”
“A totally different situation, Phil.” Mimi’s beloved younger sister had done some sort of peacekeeping work for the UN and had died in a plane crash in Ghana the year before.
“We were all so focused on Mimi and her parents that we never really thought about how this might affect the girls. And then Lindsey starts having nightmares, she wets the bed, doesn’t want to go to dance class anymore, we’ve got to put her on Prozac.”
I wished he would respect his daughters’ privacy just a little. “Well, this is a different situation,” I said. “For one thing, Elaine didn’t die in a plane crash—”
“Don’t be sarcastic,” Phil sniffed. “That was a tragedy.”
“I recognize the tragedy, Phil,” I said. “And as you know, I feel terrible about it. But all I mean is that this circumstance is completely different. Alec’s been great. Completely supportive, wonderful to Elaine, helpful around the house. I’m not worried about him at all.” This was true as far as those days went. He was only a sophomore in high school then, he still played JV soccer and painted all the backdrops for the high school musicals, and of course he had his art classes. He’d offered to give it all up if I needed him around the house more, or if his mother did, and we were both so touched by the gesture we almost teared up. Then we assured him that no, no, we wanted his life to go on as it was. So it did.
“Lindsey’s shrink costs three hundred dollars an hour,” Phil said. “But honestly we think it’s worth it. Although there are cheaper options if you’re not comfortable with that price bracket. I’m certain there are community therapy alternatives if you’d rather. Or perhaps you know some psychiatrists at the hospital who could refer—”
“Phil, if I thought Alec needed therapy, I’d pay for therapy.”
“Sure,” Phil said. “I know that. But I’m just saying sometimes there are hidden symptoms. It’s not what kids tell you,” he said. “It’s what they don’t tell you that counts.”
I refused to take parenting advice from my brother and looked at the floor.
“Anyway,” Phil said. “She looks great. They did a terrific job on the surgery. You’d never know she had a mastectomy. Really. A masterpiece.”
“Were you checking out Elaine’s breasts?”
“It wasn’t out of prurience, Pete. She just had reconstructive surgery,” he said. “I wanted to see how she looked.”
“You were checking out my rack, Phil?” Elaine toddled into the kitchen for the first time in weeks, followed closely by a hovering, pinchy-faced Mimi. She’d pulled it together for their visit, was wearing a long cashmere sweater Iris had bought her as a you-go-girl present after the surgery. But she refused her itchy nylon wig and made do with a flowered scarf around her head. Not all of her hair had fallen out; she still had her eyebrows and eyelashes and an odd sort of tonsure.
“Checking out your rack?” Phil laughed. “I certainly was. And you’ve got a fine one, if I do say so. Your husband can confirm, in fact, that I referred to it as a masterpiece.”
“Thank you very much.” She grinned. She was in the best mood she’d been in since the surgery. “I’ve always thought so, too.” She sat down at the table with us, and Mimi brought out a tray of soda water.
“Listen,” Phil said, “I was just saying to Big Brother over here”—this was how he often referred to me in conversation, as Big Brother—“that you might want to think about a little therapy for Alec. Just to make sure he’s processing everything okay, with your illness and all.”
Like Elaine didn’t have enough to think about? Why couldn’t he just drop off his Zabar’s and go away?
But Elaine was sanguine. “You know”—she took a moderate sip of her soda water—“I was thinking the same thing, but he’s just been so mature about everything, so together. I even asked him at one point.”
“You asked him?”
“Sure.” She looked at me quizzically—had she done something wrong? “Just if he wanted to talk to someone about what was going on with my health. He was surprised I even suggested it.”
“Of course he was surprised,” I said. “Because he’s completely fine.”
“Your son is such a nice boy.” Mimi sighed. She was perfectly fluent in English but still her sentences often sounded slightly off, as if they’d been poorly translated. “He wants to take care of his parents, so he does not want to ask for special treatment.”
“You think that’s what it is?” Elaine said. “He’s afraid to trouble us with any demands?”
“I think the kid just doesn’t need therapy.”
“It’s not a sign of weakness, Pete,” Phil said. “I’ve seen a therapist. I’m not ashamed to admit it.”
“Why did you see a therapist?”
“Is that really your business?”
“You brought it up.”
“All his friends were doing it.” Mimi smiled. “Phil could not resist.”
“I’m a human being, Pete. We all have damage buried deep within our psyches that’s worth uncovering, damage that’s incurred from the simple act of growing up. But I thought maybe I had some specific psychic … ailments, I guess, is the word — ailments that were worth exploring. So I decided to try it.”
“Psychic ailments.”
“In fact I only went a few times,” he said. “But I found it useful. I have to say if I’d had the time in my schedule, I might have pursued analysis — that might have really been something. My psychiatrist said I had some very interesting issues to explore, which might have been fully realized in an analytic setting. Of course,” he said, “it would have been impossible to find that kind of time. Analysis is a five-day-a-week thing, an hour a day. I’m
much too busy to make that kind of time in my week.”
“Phil,” Mimi said, “we are talking about Alec. And Pete says he does not need therapy. So it is likely that he does not. But still perhaps you should ask him?”
“Ask me what?” Alec said, marching into the room with his two cousins behind him. There were now seven of us in the kitchen and suddenly my thoughts ran to Elaine’s depressed immune system.
“You want therapy, Alec?” Phil asked.
“Therapy? Why?”
“To deal with your mother’s illness,” he said.
I put my balled-up fist to my forehead.
“Oh,” Alec said. He went to the refrigerator and pulled out three cans of Coke. “Nah,” he said. “I mean, I get why you’d ask, but I think I’m okay.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure,” he said, and he disappeared with his cousins out the back door, simple as that.
“Okay,” Mimi said. “So it looks like he does not want therapy.”
I was still sitting forehead-to-fist.
“Nevertheless, I’d keep an eye on him,” Phil said. He stretched his arms above his head. “You’re right, though. He’s a well-adjusted kid.” He slapped his hands on our table. “I’m gonna make myself a sandwich. Anyone else want?”
“You know,” Elaine said, “maybe I feel like a little sandwich, too.”
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