Unreasonable Doubts

by Reyna Marder Gentin

“Are you asking if you were Jakob’s wife, would you act more like an adult?” Katie said. “I doubt it,” she said, answering her own question.

  “No—I mean, would I be more important to Jakob than his career?” Liana asked plaintively.

  “Maybe, but maybe not,” Charlotte said. Liana, Katie, and Marta all looked up—is Charlotte going to say something critical about Howard? They had barely heard a negative comment since the wedding, and it was beginning to irk them all. No one could be that perfect.

  “Lie down, ladies—full sit-ups, forty of them,” Marta said, trying not to get in the way of the conversation but still keep the exercise going.

  “Howard is just as ambitious as Jakob. He gets up before I do and goes to work, and he often has to eat dinner with clients or go for drinks. He’s usually way too stressed-out or drunk by the time we get into bed to do anyone any good. We spent a lot more quality time together in every arena before we were married.” The women were all silenced by this revelation, even Marta, who was never at a loss for words.

  “Well,” Liana said, trying to think of a positive spin she could put on Charlotte’s situation, “the bottom line is that you’re tied to each other eternally, in the eyes of God and man, and he loves you, and he pays the rent on this nice apartment.” Her remarks hadn’t quite come out the way she intended, but Charlotte seemed to take some solace in what she said anyway.

  “Anyway, has Jakob proposed to you? Why are you worrying so much about getting married?” Katie asked between push-ups.

  “No, he’s too good a lawyer for that. Never ask a question if you don’t know the answer beforehand. But he’s been feeling me out,” Liana said. “Maybe I’m just overly romantic, but I’m looking for unconditional, all-encompassing love and total devotion. Isn’t that what we all deserve?”

  “Maybe you need a dog, not a man,” Marta suggested. “Come on, less gabbing, more sweating!”

  Marta ran through all the major muscle groups, doling out handheld ten-pound weights and resistance bands, marching the women around the room in painful lunges. “Lie down, girlies. We are going to do leg lifts—both legs straight in the air, and up and down and up and down . . .”

  “Listen,” Katie said, “marriage may not be all it’s cracked up to be, but the dating scene out there is brutal—you guys have no idea. The other night I went out with this guy Tom—I met him on Match.com. He looked like a normal guy. He told me he was going to pick me up on his motorcycle, which I thought sounded kind of whimsical—he said I should wait outside my building because it was hard to park. So I waited out there in the ninety-degree heat, and he was forty-five minutes late.”

  “Oh, no!” Charlotte interjected.

  “Oh, yes!” said Katie. “Then he took me to this trendy new restaurant in the meat-packing district, but the gimmick was that all the waiters and waitresses wore only their underwear. It was amusing for a couple of minutes, and then I started to think about the sweat and the hair and the chafing thighs, and I lost my appetite.” Liana was laughing so hard she thought she would pee in her pants.

  “Stop, stop!” she yelled.

  “Oh, no. I won’t stop because I’m not done. When we left the restaurant, he brought me home. He went to put his arm around me—prelude to a kiss, I guess—and I saw he had this gross, scaly rash on the inside of his arm—his bicep, right, Marta?”

  “His bicep, yes, dear,” Marta said.

  “Yeah, his bicep. I didn’t want any part of him coming anywhere near any part of me!” Katie looked as if the disgust still hadn’t worn off some seventy-two hours later.

  With the specter of Tom still hanging over them, Marta chirped, “Okay, my pretties, lie down on your backs, knees bent. We are going to lift our hips in the air and squeeeeze our buttocks, and little pulses up, one and two and three and . . .” The women continued their pelvic thrusts as the doom of Katie’s situation settled on them all.

  “You know, Marta, this exercise is the best sex I have had in a month,” said Katie.

  “Me too,” said Charlotte.

  “Me too,” said Liana.

  “Me too,” said Marta. “Well, not really me too. You know what you girls need?” she asked.

  They knew what was coming. Marta had become intrigued by pole dancing, and she was now a certified instructor and taught in a studio in the Village. “I’m telling you, there is nothing skanky about it! The women who take the classes are just like you girls. They are not hookers! They just feel sexier than you do!” Marta protested. Liana knew Marta was probably right, but she just couldn’t get the picture out of her head of Marta in the four-inch stiletto heels and purple spandex that she had seen on the studio website. But they all held their tongues; they loved Marta and never wanted to appear disapproving of her.

  “Seriously, Li—here’s what you should do,” Katie said. “You need to go away with Jakob—go somewhere for a romantic weekend.”

  “Ooh—good idea, Katie,” Charlotte joined in. “Remember in New Haven when Jakob would come to visit you, and all three of us would stand out on the front porch waiting for him to arrive? And then he would be there, with flowers that he bought on the corner from those cult guys with the sign ‘We are not Moonies’—it was so dreamy, and he wasn’t even coming to see the two of us!” Charlotte looked absolutely misty remembering the scene.

  “You need to tap back into that,” Katie advised. “It’s still there; it has just been buried in an avalanche of law-firm crap. And remember, Jakob is a great guy—smart and funny and devoted to you. Don’t get scared off because he works too much—he wants to take care of you.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” Liana said with a sigh, red-faced and slightly out of breath. She didn’t tell them that Jakob might not be her number one fan after the scene she had made with Frank.

  “Pole dancing,” Marta said.

  “You don’t give up, Marta,” Liana said, giving her beautiful young friend a hug.

  Liana said goodbye and walked down Eighty-Fourth Street two blocks to Riverside Park. She sat on a bench and looked out at the Hudson while joggers and bicyclists streamed by on the path in front of her.

  Everyone has somewhere to go, and I’m spinning out of control.

  Danny Shea had somehow managed to infiltrate her defenses, haunting her waking and sleeping thoughts. And the more intensely she yearned to be the center of Jakob’s world, the more she found herself pushing him away with antics like she had pulled with Frank. In both realms of her life, personal and professional, she was adrift in a way she had never been before, and it was downright frightening.

  She pressed the button on her iPhone. “Does Jakob love me, Siri?” she asked pathetically.

  Siri answered, in her computerized lilt, “Love is the flower you’ve got to let grow.”

  “John Lennon. Nice, Siri.” Liana thought for a minute and tried another tack. “Siri, should I marry Jakob and live happily ever after?”

  “You know, Li-an-a, happily ever after is for fairy tales. Real life is much more complicated.”

  “Siri, you sound just like my mother,” Liana answered, despondent.

  “Your mother is a wise woman, Li-an-a.”

  Liana sat, lost in thought, until a pigeon flew overhead and pooped on her. “Well, doesn’t that just about sum it all up,” she said, to no one in particular. She stood and hurried home to throw herself in the shower.

  CHAPTER 10

  When the buzzer rang on that hot Sunday morning in mid- August, Liana was still sleeping. Mistaking the sound for her alarm clock, she cursed a blue streak that would have made many of her clients proud, pressing every button she could find in her stupor. When the din continued, she realized someone was at the front door of the building, and she pulled herself out of bed and stumbled to the intercom on the hallway wall.

  Probably some moron with a hangover locked himself out when he went to get the Sunday Times, and now he is ringing every buzzer hoping someone half-asleep will let him back in.


  She pressed the intercom button. “Yes?” she said, hoping to sound as annoyed as she felt.

  “Liana, it’s Gerry.”

  “Gerry who?” she asked, still unable to process much of anything.

  “Gerry Greenstein. Your boss.”

  “Oh my God,” she said. “What are you doing at my apartment on a Sunday morning?” Gerry’s partner Lars lived on the Upper West Side, somewhere up in the 90s closer to Deb’s apartment. Liana ran into Gerry and Lars on the weekend once in a while, usually at Fairway, where they would be buying all sorts of exotic organic vegetables that Liana couldn’t identify and where she went solely for coffee beans. Coming to her apartment was definitely against any number of unwritten rules of office etiquette.

  “Liana,” he said, “I need to speak with you. Could you please come down? I have Delancey with me.” Delancey was Gerry’s dachshund. Liana was not a dog person—she had no intention of ever having a plastic bag be the only barrier between her hand and steaming dog poop. But she liked Delancey, who struck her as a real gentleman of a dog.

  ”Okay, give me a minute to get dressed,” Liana said into the intercom. “Not everyone is out and about at this hour of the morning, you know.” She threw on a pair of sweats and an Elton John T-shirt she found in a pile on her bedroom floor. Her hair was going in eighty different directions, so she pulled on a Mets cap to lend an air of control and went downstairs.

  Gerry and Delancey were standing on the sidewalk in front of her building. As soon as she saw them, Liana’s pent up anxiety took over, and she burst out, “You haven’t come here to tell me that I’m not a gung-ho public defender, have you? Because it’s a false accusation, and anyway, I shouldn’t have to deal with that on a Sunday morning outside my own home!” She gestured wildly to her faded-brick, doormanless building, which looked somewhat shabby in the early morning light.

  When she came up for air, Liana looked at Gerry, and she saw immediately that his eyes were red.

  High?

  Unlikely at this hour of the day, although otherwise not a bad guess. Public defenders of a certain vintage were just as likely as some of their clients to partake in the occasional recreational drug—it was a remnant of the 1960s culture that the younger crew of attorneys “didn’t know from,” as her mother would have said. No, crying seemed much more likely.

  “Did you have a fight with Lars?” Liana asked, with as much sympathy as she could muster.

  “Liana,” Gerry said. “I wanted to tell you in person. Deb is very ill.” Liana felt a quick rush of light-headedness, and her hands and forehead were immediately cold and clammy while the rest of her seemed to be radiating heat. She was familiar with these symptoms—when she had long ago asked a doctor, he called it “vasovagal”—sometimes her fingers turned blue too, and she had fainted a number of times: once on the subway, once on an airplane. If she didn’t sit down immediately, she’d soon be flat out on the sidewalk. She quickly scanned the vicinity for stray fecal matter, human or canine, and, finding none, crouched down and put her head between her knees.

  “Liana, Liana, are you all right?” Gerry was standing over her, and he was getting frantic.

  “I’m okay, Gerry. Just leave me be for a minute,” Liana said, her eyes closed. She was vaguely aware of people stepping past, but Delancey was doing a marvelous job marking out an inviolable zone, marching around her and barking. When she felt like she wouldn’t keel over, Liana stood up slowly and looked warily at Gerry, waiting for the bad news about her only real friend in the office.

  “Deb has stage-four ovarian cancer,” Gerry blurted out, no preamble.

  “Oh, God,” Liana managed before bursting into tears.

  “She hasn’t been feeling well—I guess you must’ve known that, sitting in such close quarters with her. It’s a hard illness to diagnose early because the symptoms are kind of vague. Apparently a lot of women don’t know they have ovarian cancer until it’s pretty far along.”

  Please, Gerry. Please stop talking.

  “She had emergency surgery on Friday. They took out so much . . . the tumors, her ovaries, her uterus, fallopian tubes, who knows what else,” he stammered.

  “Okay, Gerry,” Liana said. She knew how much Gerry cared about Deb, but she just couldn’t handle this strangely intimate situation any longer. “I appreciate you coming to tell me, I really do. Where is she? Can I see her?” Liana tried to stay calm, but she wasn’t sure it was working. The noises of the street had all faded; she could only hear her own heart beating.

  “She’s at Sloan Kettering. Do you want me to go with you? I saw her yesterday.” Liana had an unbidden pang of jealousy; how had Gerry known before she did that Deb was in the hospital? But she suppressed the petty thought as best she could.

  “No, thanks. I’ll go clean myself up and go over there,” Liana heard herself say, although how she managed even that level of conversation amazed her. She was jolted by a vision of Max, and she wanted to ask Gerry what would become of him if something terrible happened to Deb. Instead, she waved inanely at Gerry, stroked Delancey on the head, said, “Thanks, pal,” and went inside.

  Liana thought a shower might calm her nerves, although she knew she was stalling. Her phobia of all things medical meant she definitely never voluntarily entered a hospital to visit anyone, except when absolutely necessary. She let the hot water batter her just long enough to clear her head.

  How did she get so sick so fast? And how did I miss that it was happening?

  She took a cab, afraid that if she went with public transportation, she would subconsciously reroute herself and not end up at the correct destination. She entered at the entrance on York Avenue, between Sixty-Seventh and Sixty-Eighth Street, and took the elevator to the eleventh floor ICU. She marveled at how hospitals always smelled the same to her—a scent that was impossible to recreate anywhere else—some combination of cheap but potent disinfectant, unnamed but incurable illness, and sheer terror. If Liana could have held her nose the entire time she was in the hospital, she would have, but she knew she risked that vasovagal thing if she tried a stunt like that.

  She approached the nurses’ station and croaked out, “I’m looking for Deborah Levine.” The woman manning the desk unceremoniously pointed her to a room in the corner and said, “No more than ten minutes please, and don’t excite the patient—she’s been through a rough surgery.” Liana couldn’t imagine how she might possibly excite anyone at this point, but she nodded and willed her feet forward toward Deb’s room. She peered in and saw that there was no roommate, for which she was wildly grateful—it was hard enough having to see Deb here, she knew she couldn’t have handled having to “visit” with some stranger that just happened to be lying in the next bed. When she went into the room, Deb, who was perched up slightly on her pillows, looked straight at her. Well aware of Liana’s failings when it came to being around illness, she normally teased her mercilessly.

  “Wow, you must really love me,” Deb said.

  It was shocking to see her in a hospital gown, without any makeup and with her hair pulled back in a simple ponytail. She looked even younger than she was, washed out but still beautiful. Liana was relieved that Deb wasn’t in obvious pain, even as she noted the morphine drip that was keeping it at bay.

  “Oh, Deb,” Liana whispered, choking back tears, and she went to hug her, but there were tubes coming out of her arms and leads attached to her chest, and as soon as Liana touched her, machines began to beep and wail. Liana jumped back. “I’m not supposed to excite you!” she blurted. Deb started to laugh, and the nurse came charging into the room.

  “What did I just tell you?” she chastised as she reset the monitors.

  “It’s fine, Joanie. This is my very good friend Liana. She wasn’t exciting, I promise. She’s just a little klutzy.” The nurse looked appeased but still gave Liana a withering glance as she left the room.

  “You have nine minutes left,” Joanie said.

  “Wow, she’s tough,” Liana said
when Joanie was out of earshot.

  “She’s an excellent nurse,” Deb said. Liana knew from her many stints of hanging out in the hospital with her dad that, just as with the support staff at work, it was critically important to befriend the nurses. They were the ones that really held your life in their hands; the doctors barely made an appearance most of the time. Liana was impressed that Deb had intuited this and that she was already best buddies with Joanie, even though she hadn’t been in the ICU long.

  “What happened?” Liana asked. It was kind of a dumb question, but she felt as if she needed to know.

  “Nothing all that mysterious,” Deb said, slipping immediately into her “lawyer” voice, giving Liana a factual recount of the situation as if she were talking about someone else—someone she didn’t particularly care for—as opposed to herself.

  “I haven’t been feeling well for about six weeks—symptoms that could be anything, but a lot of discomfort, lack of appetite, and then the weight loss. I guess that should have tipped me off. My gynecologist had me go for a CT scan and then an MRI; they saw something on my ovary, and then they did the biopsy.” Deb wiped away a stray tear that had slipped down her cheek with the back of her hand, nearly knocking into the IV and coming dangerously close to summoning nurse Joanie again. Liana looked on the bedside table and saw the strategically placed box of tissues. She handed one Kleenex to Deb and kept one for herself.

  “When it came back malignant, I had a PET scan, which showed the cancer had spread around in there; no need to get into all the specifics—I don’t want you to lose your breakfast.” Liana was glad that Deb wasn’t outwardly falling apart, but it made her own anguish all the more apparent in comparison. She blew her nose loudly into the tissue and hoped she wasn’t making the situation worse for Deb by not being strong at that moment.

  Maybe just being here now is enough.

  “Where is your family?” Liana had been surprised to find Deb alone.

  “My parents were here all day yesterday,” Deb said, kindly overlooking Liana’s somewhat accusatory question. “They are beyond distraught. I don’t want them to spend a lot of time here. There’ll be plenty of opportunity for them to see me when I’m recovering at home.”