I didn’t meet Laurie’s ex until after we’d been living together for a year, and she had relapsed again. It wasn’t a big deal, she insisted, and to prove her point she threw a big boozy party—her relapse bash—at a friend’s spacious apartment on the Upper East Side. I was predisposed to loathe Bradley. Through Laurie, who had a standing date with him each week, I knew Bradley was dating someone new, a woman our age who wasn’t sick. Laurie called her the bimbo because she was a secretary. Once Bradley finished fucking her—that’s what Laurie said the rare times she felt sorry for herself—he’d come back to her.
“Sylvia,” Bradley said, offering me his hand. “I’ve heard so much about you.”
He was handsome in a buttoned-up, stick-up-your-ass kind of way.
“Really,” I said, eyeing the cuffs rolled up to show off his thick forearms and heavy gold watch. All that was missing was a pinky ring. “I bet I’ve heard more about you.”
He laughed, missing my obvious sarcasm.
“How is she?” he asked. “I mean, really?”
“She’s fine.” I took a big sip of my scotch and soda and nearly spit it out.
Bradley studied me expectantly.
“What more can I tell you? She’s fine.”
“I just feel so guilty, you know,” he said touching my arm the way men do when they’re trying to get something from you.
I drew back as though his hand was a straightening iron. I thought he was going to tell me the story that I knew from Laurie: about how good he’d been to her, about the totally normal doubts after graduation—how they had to sow their oats and date other people and blah, blah, blah … And then Laurie relapsed.
I was nodding from habit.
“I just got engaged. I don’t know how to tell her.”
I saw Laurie out of the corner of my eye. She was laughing, and though I couldn’t hear her over the music and loud stupid conversations that people were having because it was a party, after all, and they’d already forgotten the occasion, or because, like me, they were torn between believing the doctors would remove every last grain of cancer and it would never happen again and wondering about the odds of this, and drinking too much to forget, I knew she was letting loose. I knew her laughter was big and true, that it was coming from someplace deep inside of her that I longed to find in myself.
Bradley glanced over his shoulder to see what was more interesting than him. When he turned back, he looked like he was choking.
Fucking Bradley. I wanted to kick him in the shin or stomp on his polished loafers. I planned to whisper, “I will kill you if you tell her.” But instead I found myself grabbing his shoulders and pressing myself against him. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.
The second time Laurie relapsed, eight months later, she didn’t have a party—many of her friends seemed to be away—so I proposed a private send-off at the Italian restaurant around the corner. It was an unseasonably warm May day; people were out in their summer clothes, despite the fact that they were still pale. The restaurant was just past a baseball diamond with an asphalt surface where kids played Little League on the weekends and teenagers sped around on skates, hacking the cement with their sticks, during the week. We sat on a bench and started drinking our first bottle of Chianti as we waited for a table underneath the wide red awning. A woman passed and began screaming, “My ring, my ring!” She pointed into the metal grate in the sidewalk in front of us. “My engagement ring slipped off my finger!”
“Princess,” Laurie commented. “You’d think she just dropped her baby into the sewer.”
Someone decided that the fireman across the street might be able to solve the problem. Sure enough, he swaggered over, unlocked the grate as if he were opening a cellar door, and descended beneath the city. When he climbed back out, the ring was cupped in the palm of his hand.
“Did you see the size of it?” I said. “It could have been a baby.”
The whole restaurant broke into applause.
By the time we sat down for dinner, Laurie and I were in the middle of an argument, a stupid argument about whether people aspired to be famous so that they could influence others, or whether fame was simply a by-product of doing things for their own sake.
“Everyone wants to be on the front page of the Times,” Laurie said between bites of spaghetti carbonara. “Think of the high you’d get from knowing that millions of people are reading about you.”
I wanted a cigarette. I never smoked in front of her, though sometimes I smoked in my room, balanced on the window ledge, hoping the running T-shirt stuffed in the crack underneath the door would absorb the smell. “I doubt Bill Gates really cares,” I said.
“You can’t tell me you wouldn’t die to be on the front page of the Times.”
“Above or below the fold?”
This time, Laurie rolled her eyes at me. The waiter came by and uncorked another bottle of wine and set it next to the vase of purple tulips.
Laurie said, “Ciao bello.” Two tables away a man with slicked-back hair and a yellow tie thoughtfully sipped his wine. “Maybe we should invite him over.”
“No,” I answered.
“I could send him a note.” She swept her hair over her shoulder. It always amazed me how natural it looked.
“I thought you were my date tonight.”
We argued often, though I can hardly remember much of what we argued about. One of our disagreements—one that never really ended—was about whether one of my friends should take the uptown subway late at night to her neighborhood at the northern tip of Manhattan. I thought it was fine; she was a grown-up, after all, and she had chosen to live up there. Laurie thought we should chip in for her cab fare, and from there the whole matter swiftly turned into an argument about the risks involved in taking the subway through Harlem and all its nasty implications. I often regret how much I argued with Laurie, but I also remember how much she loved it. When we got going, she could really irritate me, and then the apartment would seem even smaller than it actually was, and I would hate the sitcoms she watched on TV, and having a TV, period. And I would hate the fact that she bought fingernail polish every week, always some shade of peach, and then left the bottles on the window ledge behind the couch. And hating all these things would make me feel small.
“You’re no fun, Sylvie,” she said. “All I want is a little nookie before another chunk of my brain comes out. How can you deny me that?”
She laughed. The waiter brought dessert wine and tiramisu. It was on the house, he declared, winking at her. Men were always winking at her.
“What a sweet thing to do,” she purred.
“He’s interested,” I said.
She glanced at the waiter as he walked away. “Too short.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Short men are sexy.” Beyond the cheerful, bright noisiness underneath the awning, it was dark. The traffic going north on Sixth streamed silently by as if the cars and cabs were far removed and the only thing that mattered was the two of us winding each other up.
By the end of the evening, we were so wasted that Laurie talked me into betting half a month’s rent that she could kiss five men in less time than I could. We agreed to keep a running tally taped on the refrigerator. Some tongue had to be involved for the kiss to count. It seems absurd now that we made this bet right before she was going to have surgery, but I suspect she knew I’d need a head start.
When I finally saw Lance, Laurie had relapsed again.
“Third time’s a charm,” she told me before I left. “Lucky me. I go under the knife and then up into a cloud of chemo.”
Lance was waiting for me at the Albuquerque airport. It was awkward at first since we didn’t hug. This was how it always was. We didn’t touch each other, though I thought about touching him and being touched by him. I tried to recall what it had felt like when he had been my doctor. I tried to imagine his fingers tracing the pain of the stress fractures on my left tibia, or his thumb pressing into the hollow of my right hip, wh
ere the iliotibial band finished its journey from the knee.
For some reason, I remember the strangest things, none of them important. For example, I don’t remember the name of the park we passed through on the way to Santa Fe. We even stopped and went for a hot, dusty hike there. And I don’t remember the town where we stayed the first night, which was somewhere near the park. Instead, I remember the way Lance pinched his tongue between his index finger and thumb to wet them before he turned each page in the New Mexico guidebook. I remember the metallic taste in my mouth after we had hiked for three hours without water.
Laurie was losing her short-term memory. The brain is so compact, so specific. She boasted that nothing embarrassed her anymore. Shame or humiliation, or whatever you want to call it, was only a half teaspoon of gray matter. Things you didn’t expect were just cells.
I imagined I might tell Lance some of these details. He was a doctor, after all. We went to a spa in the hills above Santa Fe. The footpath from the parking lot was made from gray and brown river stones, so shiny it was as if they were still underwater. In the lobby, there was an elaborate fountain that looked like a waterfall but smelled fake. In separate dressing rooms, we removed our clothes and put on plaid summer-weight robes. A quiet man led us along another shiny stone path to a gate in a cedar fence. Inside, there was a small hot tub bubbling with the spa’s renowned mineral water.
“This doesn’t bother you?” he asked.
I lied. I said boisterously, “I’m the least modest person I know,” hoping that I might believe it by saying it. I said so many things. I often said, for example, “It is hard, but we’re just roommates. We just live together.” Period. End of story.
Lance slid off his robe and eased his body into the water. That’s a lie. I don’t know the precise way he disrobed and entered the pool, though not because I don’t remember, but because I didn’t watch. It’s so laughable now. I decided that everything would be okay if I didn’t actually see him naked. I stared into the empty space above his right shoulder as we both got undressed. In the hot tub, I kept my eyes fixed to his face: his eyes were the color of blue marbles, his nose was crooked, and his thin, pink lips were always slightly parted. Because of an old basketball injury, he couldn’t breathe through his nose. That was another thing I liked about him. He’d played Division I basketball. I let my eyes fall to his chest. His hair was graying around his face, and the hair on his chest was gray too. The thermometer tied to the edge of the pool read 103. I forced myself to stay submerged, even though I wanted to get out.
“How’s New York?” he asked.
“It’s good.” I felt as though I was being hard-boiled.
“How’s your roommate?” he asked.
“Well …” It was hard to put into words. “I think she’s fine.”
He pushed himself up one step and sat waist-deep.
“Her cancer’s benign,” I said, even though I knew that no tumor was harmless. All of them could potentially displace important brain functions, Laurie had explained to me, but hers wasn’t that terrible. That’s what she said. All things considered. She had been in remission for five years before she started relapsing. “She’s very optimistic,” I insisted. “The tumors are only Grade 2.”
Lance’s expression changed. “How many times has it reoccurred?”
“Three times in the last two years,” I said.
“That’s serious, Sylvia. There’s a good chance she could die.”
I ended up looking down. I didn’t want to, because I was afraid of what I might see beneath the surface of the water. But I couldn’t look at Lance’s face. And I couldn’t get out of the hot tub either.
When I came back from Santa Fe, I didn’t have a name to add to the kissing list. Neither did Laurie, but she had a good excuse. I had no idea how it was all going to work, now that the doctors had decided it was time to try the more aggressive chemo. Laurie toted home a plastic shopping bag filled with glass vials and hypodermic needles. It’s surprising how soft our bodies are, how easy it was to insert the tip of the needle into her thigh, how the flesh would yield. Still, I couldn’t believe that the doctors expected her to give herself shots. I pulled the needle from its plastic package, taking care not to touch and contaminate it. I inserted it into the vial, drew the liquid out, and then flicked the needle to make the air bubbles rise and pop. An air bubble could kill her. I searched for a place on her thigh that wasn’t already bruised and stuck in the needle, plunged the plunger, drew it out, watching her blood surface and bead. We sat on the uncomfortable, lumpy couch with the TV turned to shows with loud, fake laugh tracks. She took pills, too, and went to the hospital every three days, where she got more drugs through an IV.
Maybe, if I had seen Lance again during that time, I would have told him about all of this; I would have spilled my life like a glass of red wine, ruining the perfect white tablecloths at the restaurants where we ate. I thought about calling him, but I was too afraid. I couldn’t tell anyone what it was like to be sharing a small apartment with a roommate—a woman my age, someone who sometimes irritated me so much that I wasn’t as nice as I should have been—who was dying. What could he have said? “It’s terrible.” That’s what I told myself when I drank so much that I felt myself dissipating into atoms and exhaled my thoughts as carelessly as I breathed.
That weekend in Santa Fe, we had stayed in a bed and breakfast in a tiny town with a cemetery south of the city. Our room had one bed, but there was a futon in the corner.
“Do you want me to sleep there?” Lance asked.
“Don’t be silly,” I said. “We can share.”
In the middle of the night, I woke up, feeling someone else’s heat, the hair on his chest against my back, his arm around my shoulders. I rolled away, did a double roll. His hand hit the bed. He whispered, “Come back, Sylvia. I want to be with you,” but I could not let myself move toward him. I lay quietly, my arm hanging off the edge of the bed, my fingertips skimming the cool, wooden floor, thinking about Laurie. She was probably alone in her double bed, the only sounds in our tiny apartment the careless noise of the street and the hushed breathing of the head.
We lived in a fifth-floor walk-up. Perhaps I should have emphasized that earlier. All those steps from the entrance on Bleecker Street to the door to our apartment. Laurie paused on each landing to catch her breath. This could have been before she relapsed for a fourth time or after. The stairwell was always empty, until one day when it filled with the sweet smell of flesh, more pungent than the ripest cheese. It was so powerful that I would clothespin my nose between my two fingers and take the stairs by twos, and still I could smell the odor through my mouth. The woman in apartment 2D stayed in bed for at least a week, and then it was the smell that aroused suspicion, not her disappearance. She was old, and evidently no one noticed her absence.
The living go on remembering; that’s our job, to the extent we can bear our own scrutiny. My nightly conversations with Laurie were the chorus of a song, the same thing, night after night as we sat playing chess or watching TV. We talked about my complicated love life. I couldn’t tell her that Lance had finally made a move and I’d done nothing. We talked about Bradley and his bimbo, and I wondered whether she knew they were engaged. We talked about my terrible job. We talked about whether we should get a summer share. We argued about politics.
I told her I was moving out one morning as she stood in front of the mirror getting ready for work. The red wig fell to the middle of her back, curling at the tips. It was impractical, she said all the time, too long. She should get it cut. She was beautiful, though, whether she was wearing the wig or a scarf.
On the table, the Styrofoam head eyed me suspiciously.
“When do you want to move?” she asked.
“Not immediately,” I said. “In a month or two.”
The list was still on the refrigerator, though there was nothing written under either of our names. I saw her expression change in the mirror. Her mouth opened, closed, then
she smiled and laughed.
She said, “Okay,” or that’s what I try to remember, along with the talking Styrofoam head, the kissing list, the silly arguments, her expert opening moves, all the bottles of Diet Coke and fingernail polish, the lilt in her voice, the waiter calling out across the street to her: “Nice legs.” This and everything else are what I try to think about, not the night several months later when she ripped the IV tubes from her arm and descended by elevator into the hospital basement where she wandered alone, leaving a trail of red dots for someone to follow.
“Will you come and stay with me?” she asked when she called me the next day. “I’m afraid I’ll do it again.”
That night, we lay side by side in beds as uncomfortable as the couch in our old apartment. It was impossible to sleep with the IV machine chirping out reminders to the nurses to change the bags of drugs, the drugs that were supposed to make her better, but which instead were making her want to go down into the basement. I still don’t understand how they could have let her wander freely in the hospital. I don’t recall what we talked about that night. I just remember that morning when I told her I was moving out. The red wig was pulled back into a ponytail, and Laurie smiled and said, “Okay,” and I repeated, “Okay, okay, okay.”
He said, Marry me, and she said, No, I couldn’t marry someone who isn’t willing to eat vegetables or soft cheese. Camembert means more to you than me? He looked like he had just swallowed some by mistake, a big triangular wedge of it stuck in his throat.
He had vegetable and soft-cheese phobias. It was so annoying! They’d only raised a toast in a French restaurant once. She buried her face in the zucchini-green couch that she’d helped him pick out. She’d helped him buy almost everything in his classic six. She’d even persuaded him that stoneware was important, and now he owned various bowls and plates of various sizes for various foods, most of which would never touch his lips.
The Kissing List Page 3