This Is Where We Came In

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  “Very serious. If you don’t do it, you have a fifty-fifty chance of dying of this in two years.”

  Aha. Something clicked in my mind as I quickly moved into rebuttal mode. “But that means I also have a fifty-fifty chance of living. So . . .” I shrugged.

  “Okay then,” he said, his kindly face unchanged. I guess he’d heard every kind of response, even flippant. “Make it four years. Then your chances of dying really improve.”

  The doctors, I later learned, call invasive surgery an insult. (My husband’s doctor referred to his heart surgery as “the second insult.” When I asked what was the first, he said, “Birth.”) Now I could see the aptness of the term. More than repelled and frightened by the prospect of surgery, I also felt insulted—in advance—especially as I recalled the array of side effects my husband, sister, and brother had experienced. But I didn’t want to die in two years, or even four. So I chose to be a patient instead.

  THE DEAD

  In the two years just before my surgery, two of my closest friends died. They both lived right nearby, Glenda around the corner for twenty years and Rebecca about three blocks west for even longer. Glenda died of a brain tumor, or perhaps it was ovarian cancer that spread to her brain. She died in Australia, where she was born, so I didn’t see her in the last few months, only spoke to her on the phone. By the end her voice on the phone sounded like static. Rebecca died of lung cancer. I saw her a lot during that illness, except near the very end, when I called to ask if I could come over and she said, “I love you, dear, but I can’t see you.” I always was touched when she called me dear. I don’t find it easy to use endearments, except to children.

  We were all writers together. I met Rebecca at Yaddo, a writers’ colony, and though I felt slightly intimidated by her—she was very shy, I later learned, and this gave her an air of aloofness—I invited her to take a walk one afternoon. Yaddo is in Saratoga Springs, New York, where the famous horse races take place, and on our walk through a back lane, we passed stables and horses meandering around a meadow, a tranquil scene. Little did I know then, thirty-two years earlier, that one day a piece of horse would prolong my life, though not any of the horses we saw that day—they don’t live that long.

  After that walk we were good friends for thirty-one years. I met Glenda because I reviewed a book of hers for Ms. Magazine. The book, full of bizarre and darkly whimsical happenings, intrigued me; I thought the person who wrote it must be odd and eccentric, and so I went to a reading she gave in an East Side bookstore to check her out. I was hesitant about introducing myself to the author of a book—I hadn’t published any books at the time, only short pieces in magazines—but she was approachable and grateful for my review. We discovered that we were neighbors and we too became friends for decades.

  I introduced Glenda and Rebecca, and we formed a kind of trio, meeting in the late afternoon in the historic West End Bar near Columbia University to drink and smoke and talk about our work and about life, as had Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and many writers before us. We three had met as writers and continued that way, although as our lives became enmeshed and our children grew up we talked about everything else under the sun. We were very different but we came to understand one another perfectly because we were intuitive about reading character, the signs of character. Glenda, who was not odd or eccentric in any immediately obvious way, had her Australian accent and spoke in a soft, gentle voice and had impeccable manners, and in that soft, gentle voice she said outrageous and radical things. Rebecca was older and seemed to carry the wisdom of the ages in her head capped by sleek auburn hair shaped like a bowl, but she carried her burden lightly, with wit; she was from Georgia and had a pronounced Southern drawl and a wry skepticism about most things, but a sentimental streak that came out in her love of cats and dogs. There was a spell when I would ride my bike down Riverside Drive first thing in the morning, and I often met Rebecca walking her dog, who she insisted had said a few words and even shed a few tears. Glenda drove a large car and I’d sometimes meet her going to move her car in accordance with the parking regulations, as one must do on the Manhattan streets: she said she had learned to spot people who were about to vacate their parking spaces. She could tell who they were by their purposeful gait and by the way they fiddled with their keys in their pockets, and she followed them.

  Sometimes two of us would meet, and I wondered about the combinations of two out of three: for instance, how the two of them sounded and spoke when I wasn’t present. The ways I spoke with each of them alone were very different; this was inevitable, given how unlike we were. We resembled three interlocking circles—I’m thinking of the old Ballantine Ale logo, the three circles standing for Ballantine’s salient qualities, purity, body and flavor. None of us represented any of those qualities especially, but the design fit. We shared a considerable common area, yet each of us had a large private space of our own.

  Anyway, they died, Glenda in 2007 and Rebecca in 2008 and I was bereft. After Glenda died so far away, Rebecca and I felt the lack. Even though our friendship was rich on its own, we would never again know that special interlocking threesome. Then Rebecca got sick and though we never said it aloud, we both knew I would continue with a double loss, missing the particular quality of our friendship, in which we could say anything that occurred to us and neither of us would ever be shocked, and sometimes we need not even say it—a meaningful look could convey volumes. Rebecca was unshockable, and through her I learned to be the same.

  So when I went for my heart surgery I thought, I am the last of the three, and maybe this year, the third year, 2009, will be my turn. As they wheeled me into the operating room, before the anesthetic put me out, I had a glimpse of them in an afterlife that resembled the old West End Bar where we used to meet in the ancient booths, dark and smoky, nursing our drinks of choice: wine, bourbon, and, for me, Diet Pepsi; I was never much of a drinker. They’re chatting away. I don’t know what the two of them sound like alone, without me, but I do manage to hear a few words in Glenda’s gentle, now slightly anxious voice: “Where’s Lynne? She’s never this late.” Then comes Rebecca’s deep, bourbon-soaked drawl. “She’ll turn up soon. She’s very reliable that way.”

  REHEARSAL

  When I first came out of the operating room I was adorned with lots of tubes, like someone who’s just come from the Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans, bedecked with colorful necklaces and bracelets: tubes in several orifices and some where there were no orifices to begin with, such as the chest. Over the next few days the tubes were removed, one by one, some with a pop and some with a slither. My tubes were removed by a young Japanese physician’s assistant named Elliot, a small doll-like man, delicate and slim as a miniature. I became fond of Elliot: something about his easygoing, competent manner combined with his delicate appearance inspired trust. He listened to my complaints with a benevolent neutrality and often told me not to worry. Usually it’s irritating to be told not to worry, but when Elliot said it I didn’t mind. He rarely smiled yet appeared serene, and he always explained exactly what he was about to do. With one of the tubes, a catheter, he said he would count, one, two, and then I must take a deep breath while he pulled it out, and that way it wouldn’t hurt. One, two, breathe! Okay? I nodded. I breathed at the proper moment and it didn’t hurt. Elliot praised me as if I were a kindergartner who had just written the letter A for the first time. I was proud of myself. It was a small accomplishment, true, but in my diminished condition, it was prideworthy. I felt so diminished and changed after the surgery that I couldn’t take anything for granted anymore.

  Pulling out the chest tube was more complicated as well as risky. It required some rehearsal. “We can’t let any air get into the pleural cavity where this tube is,” said Elliot, “so we have to practice first. You breathe, hold your breath, and I pull. Don’t release your breath until I have the tube fully out. Do you understand?” I nodded.

  “So we’ll have a little rehearsal first,” he said.

 
All this attention gave me a heady feeling, as if I had an important part in a play. As an adolescent I had aspired to be an actress and even studied acting for a while at the Henry Street Playhouse. One of my teachers was William Hickey, who later played, among other roles, a Mafia capo in a popular crime movie, a comedy. My aspirations came to nothing since I had little talent and much reserve. Still, with this in my past and diminished as I felt, the thought of a rehearsal of any kind brought a bit of excitement.

  Elliot implied, or I inferred, that if air got into my pleural cavity, something terrible might happen to me. Surely less adept and alert people must have had this tube removed and I’d never heard of any misfortunes resulting. And yet I felt it was a matter of life and death to do it right. “Breathe,” said Elliot. “Hold. I pull.” I held my breath while he pretended to pull. We rehearsed this two or three times.

  “Okay, ready for the real thing?”

  I was ready. Breathe, hold, pull. Together we did a perfect job. The final tube. I was on my own.

  When he left I had one of those marvelous epiphanies, like little mental orgasms, that unfortunately don’t last long. If they did, we might never get back to the world’s work. I was staring out at the Hudson River, wide, placid that day, steel gray in a wan sun, and suddenly I was seized by the glory, the miracle of being alive: I’d had that ghastly surgery and survived. It was done, I was blessed. None of the dailiness I’d fretted over before, family problems, work, dealings with banks and institutions, the construction across the street whose dumpsters’ groans and beeps woke us at seven a.m., plus the dire state of the world, mattered any more. Compared with the wonder of life itself, those things were small and would sort themselves out. What mattered was that I would continue living. I didn’t stop to think about in what condition I would live, too fine a point just then. Simply, as Strether in Henry James’s novel The Ambassadors cries, “To live, to live!”

  This feeling lasted, though not in the full intensity of its first strike, for about two and a half days. By the time I went home to start the labor of recovery, all the daily irritations came back and resumed their usual importance. And a little later on came the fear.

  RECREATION

  Towards the end of my five-day sojourn in the hospital, when I could walk around comfortably, I looked for entertainment other than staring out the window at the Hudson River from the pink plastic armchair in my room or reading my fat Henning Mankell mystery. I practiced going up and down stairs on the miniature wooden staircase near the nurses’ station: it led nowhere, just five steps up and five down with a small platform on top. I made believe I was a political candidate about to deliver a campaign speech to an adoring crowd. I tried hanging out in the waiting room to feel part of the great outside, to hear conversations among civilians, not patients, conversations not about symptoms and procedures but about worldly things, sports, movies, traffic accidents, natural disasters . . .

  A pretty fiftyish woman with lots of makeup and bright red hair elaborately carved into in a towerlike pile asked me what I was “in for” and who was my surgeon. When I told her, she grew rhapsodic on the subject of my surgeon, a genius and savior. He had saved the lives of both her mother and her priest in conditions of extreme coronary drama. Furthermore, it had been he, she claimed, who operated so successfully a few years ago on former President Bill Clinton, although owing to hospital hierarchy and public relations, the feat had to be attributed to the head of the department.

  What to say to this dubious bit of gossip? “You don’t say,” I said, using an expression from my childhood I believe I never used before.

  The man next to her, whom I recognized as the husband of my new roommate—she had arrived attended by her family in the middle of the night—said, “I was in the living room and my wife was in the kitchen. I heard her calling, but to tell the truth, most of the conversation in the house is between my wife and the dog, so at first I assumed she was talking to the dog. What did that dog do now? But she kept calling, so I figured I better go see. She was lying on the floor groaning. When we got her here we learned her aorta had ripped all the way down her body to her thigh.” This sounded almost as gruesome as the murders Henning Mankell had concocted in his very long book.

  It was, yet again, my surgeon who had saved her life. When she was brought to my room last night after the surgery, her appearance was not promising. She was quite overweight in her hospital gown, bedecked with tubes as I had been, and her skin was almost as gray as her long, disheveled hair. She coughed all through the night, deep wracking wet phlegmy coughs that seemed to rise from the pit of her stomach and spew upwards like a geyser. At one point I rang for a nurse because the coughing alarmed me: she could die while I lay listening and then I would feel guilty for my inaction. The nurse came and murmured, “That’s what happens when you have surgery after a lifetime of smoking.”

  That might have been me, I thought, given my lifetime of smoking, and I felt a moment of rare gratitude that it was not. Even though smoking wasn’t the cause of my nasty valve, by rights I suppose I should have been coughing too. The woman’s coughing reinforced the dogma that smoking has terrible effects. But it also suggested that in some cases it might not. I thought of the two cigarettes still in my coat pocket, in the closet of our hospital room. If my roommate weren’t so sick we could share them, have our last cigarette together, maybe in the bathroom with the door locked, like ten-year-olds.

  The red-haired woman said, “I practically fell to my knees when I saw him after my mother came out of the recovery room. I didn’t know how to thank him.”

  I hadn’t seen the surgeon since my operation. He’d seen me but I was unconscious at the time, and I later learned that just after the surgery, he’d referred to my valve as “very nasty.” I didn’t know whether to feel offended, as at an insult, or to feel pride at having generated something so noteworthy. In any case, I hadn’t given a thought to thanking him, which in retrospect seems ungrateful and ungracious. But at that point I was still thinking of him more as my assailant than my savior.

  “So how did you thank him?” I asked.

  “I’ll give you a tip,” she said, winking. “He likes Cabernet Sauvignon. By the case.”

  After a while I left the waiting room and took an exploratory walk down the corridors. I’d been encouraged to walk and for once was glad to follow orders. I like walking, even down a hospital corridor where you peek into rooms and see people in various states of disrepair and wearing charmless cotton gowns.

  After my walk I returned to my chair at the picture window overlooking the Hudson and resumed the Henning Mankell mystery in which so many vile murders were described. I’m not an avid reader of mysteries; the only time I read them passionately was when I was around ten or twelve and gorged myself on Agatha Christie, Erle Stanley Gardner and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. That quickly passed. But over the last few years, I’d begun listening to books on tape while I puttered and exercised in the morning, and found mysteries ideal for this purpose. Their merits aren’t exclusively or primarily literary (although there are exceptions like P. D. James or Walter Mosley), so I needn’t be afraid of missing some splendid phrase. The plots kept me going through the tedium of the exercises.

  I discovered Henning Mankell on the shelves of a friend’s guest room where I stayed every Tuesday night one spring, when I taught a course at Bryn Mawr. This friend, with whom I’d gone to graduate school years earlier, had very exacting taste. She was so learned that for a long period she was head of the English Department at Bryn Mawr, so I assumed anything I found on her shelves would be high-class stuff. I started a Henning Mankell mystery one night and got so absorbed that I asked if I could borrow it for the train ride home and return it the following week.

  Henning Mankell is from Sweden, and his detective, Kurt Wallander, lives in a small, dismal Swedish town. Wallander is depressed, like his town. He has lots of personal problems—his divorce; his relationships with his grown daughter and his ag
ing father, an eccentric painter; his insomnia; and so on—besides the distressing murder cases assigned to him. He is often tired, cold, rain-soaked and at odds with his fatuous supervisor. Wallander is an instinctive detective, thorough and painstaking rather than brilliant, and he quickly grew on me.

  Mankell writes in short, factual sentences that one by one are not striking, but when strung together become passages of vivid and forceful prose. Prose that’s hard to stop reading. I kept the light on over my hospital bed each night, following the crimes and Wallander’s team of eccentric detectives, the hunted and the hunters. The story was more grotesque than usual in a Mankell book, which is generally pretty grotesque. It involved a nurse seeking out and killing, in ingenious and sadistic ways, men who had abused and murdered women. Once she found the abusers, she tied them up, placed them in sacks, starved them and subjected them to other lengthy indignities I’ve managed to suppress. Reading about this treatment in the hospital after having my chest opened up, with people all around me whose chests had been opened up for one reason or another, felt satisfying. The world was full of atrocities, and the motives, benign or malignant, didn’t seem to matter much. What mattered was simply the fact of the intrusions—that one person had performed them on a fellow human.

  My attitude regarding the surgery was not the conventional, expected or sensible one, that’s for sure. It was more childish than adult. I knew this, and yet I clung to my resistance. It felt satisfying, far more so than quiet submission. Weeks after my release, when I met acquaintances or neighbors on the street and told them why they hadn’t seen me around, some people responded by saying, Isn’t it wonderful, the miracles they can perform these days! Aren’t you lucky!, and the like. I wanted to punch them. In some obscure nook of my brain, I knew there was some truth to their words, but I wouldn’t acknowledge that nook. There are times I still don’t. It wasn’t so much their actual words that disturbed me, but the gross ignorance behind them, ignorance of anything other than pure survival. Ignorance of what the newspapers call collateral damage. When listening to news reports of our current wars, I always find the collateral damage aspect the most intriguing. I wish the reporters would examine that damage further—who are these unintended victims whose lives end for no reason other than someone’s faulty aim, or being in the wrong place at the wrong time? Why shouldn’t their photos, with small intimate bios, appear on the back pages of the New York Times, as did those of the victims of the September 11 attacks?