Daring (51 page)

Just about every political pundit predicted that Hillary would fail; she would never get along in the tightly knit boys' club of the Senate chamber, especially since nearly half of the opposing side had tried to throw her husband out of the White House. Again, surprise! Unbound at last from the ill-fitting bodice of First Lady, she seemed newly at ease. I found it fascinating to watch her stride around the Senate chamber in mannish pantsuits with hands clasped behind her back. Her most disarming strategy was to seek out rabid conservative Republicans and tell them funny stories and flutter her hands at their jokes. Really!

I watched her allow Orrin Hatch to lay his hand on the small of her back. Hatch was the moralizing Mormon who played the judge at the Puritan witch “trial” of Anita Hill. He had also pronounced Bill Clinton guilty on both counts that helped to impeach him. Ignoring all that history, Hillary showed an interest in his pet charity. Hatch asked her to be his cohost at the first gala fund-raiser. Picture Our Lady of Forgiveness as she swept into a downtown hotel on the arm of Senator Hatch, who praised his “date” to reporters: “Let me tell you, it's been a wonderful thing to work with her.”

Instead of inviting the jealousy of other senators, Hillary turned her celebrity spotlight on them and their bills, especially conservative Republicans, who came to respect and even like her. She won her race for redemption. The groundwork was laid for her to make Bill Clinton's prophecy come true: eight years of Bill, eight years of Hill.

I could hardly wait until 2008.

WE BURNED DOWN THE DAYS
when we were young. Who counted the years? The arithmetic of life was different now. When did we begin counting backward? At fifty? No, at fifty I reset my counter. Time to start over. Coming out of the three-year emergency of menopause, I felt revived. I was homing in on the important things. I had sloughed off the superfluous.

Once we married, everything had come together. Clay was home for dinner. Maura came home for holidays. We had another daughter to adore. A kitchen I could call my own. Life. Love. Work. Together. It was the most sublime time of my life. Before the cancer.

The year 1997 was the darkest. After a six-year reprieve from the original cancer of the throat, a test introduced us to the ugliest word in the English language.
Recurrence.
Another toad had appeared at the back of Clay's throat and was dangerously close to crawling across the midline of his tongue. Reluctantly, Clay's oncologist, Dr. H, saw us on his last day at Memorial Sloane-Kettering. Dr. H was leaving the institution and in a hurry. He skittered across the consulting room on a rolling stool toward Clay, ignoring Maura, Mohm, and me, giving a sales pitch for “the standard curative option for you in this setting—surgery.” About the side effects, he was brutally casual. “The voice box frequently has to be removed as part of the process—even if it isn't involved with the cancer. You can discuss the details with the surgeon.”

I was aghast. Removing Clay's voice was a detail? Clay Felker without a voice? Without the instrument of his purpose, a voice that gives others their voice? Unthinkable. The girls and I tried to ask questions. We were ignored. The oncologist rolled to his light board, displayed the picture of Clay's throat, and wound up his argument like a prosecutor to a hostile jury. “You have to make a bottom-line decision—am I going for broke with my life?”

Clay could not answer.

We dragged out of the hospital doors late on a summery Friday afternoon, dodging weekenders who rushed past us pulling their designer bags toward cars and jitneys. We were going nowhere.

LATER, CLAY REMEMBERED
only one thing about that day. “We were all together.” That meant everything to him. “I'm not alone in this. I have people who care for me. People I love. If I'd just been lying in bed that weekend all by myself, I would have been . . . hopeless.”

Serendipitously, only a month before, Dr. Pat and I had made a bold move. We decided to share the rental of a pied-à-terre in Manhattan. With Clay living and teaching in California, and Pat's husband working weekdays in Chicago, Pat and I both needed a base in the city for our work. We teased our husbands, “If you're good, you can come for conjugal visits.” It was one of the best decisions the four of us ever made. That apartment became the comfort zone where Clay could recover.

When I had to be out at night, Dr. Pat would sit on the edge of Clay's bed in her pajamas and keep his spirits up with her wicked sense of humor. After a month in free fall, we found hope in Boston at Massachusetts General Hospital. A renowned Chinese radiologist. Dr. C. C. Wang, known as the Gauguin of radiation therapy, was candid.

“So I hear you're big shot in New York. But they want to cut out your voice box—so you come to me.”

“You know how they are in New York—cutthroat,” I teased back.

Dr. Wang chuckled. He kept up a lively banter while he examined Clay's throat. Then came the magic words: “Your condition still has chance to be cured—our odds very good!” He was a pioneer in the development of a technique called
hyperfractionated radiation
. He would give Clay two brief treatments a day, five days a week, for about a month. The goal was to shrink the tumor to the point where his surgical colleague, Dr. William Montgomery, could safely remove it.

Dr. Wang left us with a Chinese proverb. “When chase a tiger, must run very fast.”

We moved to Cambridge for six weeks, renting an apartment on the hospital grounds. With the help of a concierge service, I was able to set up a home office with Internet access, overnight, while Clay prepared to go through prolonged radiation. Maura guided us to Herbert Benson's Center for Mind-Body Medicine. We joined a cancer support group and took sessions on meditation, visualization, cognitive restructuring, yoga, nutrition—the works. Clay embraced the mind-body philosophy. We walked for an hour every day to stimulate his immune system. Those walks along Beacon Street and over flying footbridges and along the historic Boston harbor were a joyful break. Mohm, now living in Cambridge with her new husband, came over to help. Ella, bless her heart, insisted on taking the train up from New York and staying over three days a week to make the special bland meals Clay needed. At night, I sat vigil for the sound of choking. To keep my sanity, I wrote in the gaps of the night.

“
WILL I BE ABLE TO TALK AFTER SURGERY?
” Clay asked the speech pathologist.

She chose her words with precision. “Some healthy tissue has to be taken from around the tumor, to catch any floating cells. So Dr. Montgomery is going to take out a fair chunk of the base of your tongue.”

My head swam. Clay began negotiating. “The thing is, I don't do anything but talk in my work. I teach seminars and give lectures and even when I do consulting, all I do is talk.”

The pathologist told Clay he could not use his voice at all for a week to ten days after surgery. And then? he asked. “You will need to work with somebody like me to restore intelligibility. The base of your tongue is important for speech.” She paused. “Also for pushing down food in swallowing. You will need a feeding tube. At least temporarily.”

Another unexpected blow.

Clay asked about timing. “My second semester starts the third week of January.” His surgery was scheduled for December 27, 1997. The speech pathologist frowned. Definitely not enough time to heal.

The night before the operation, Clay's friend the writer Aaron Latham called from New York. He offered to come out to Berkeley and team teach with Clay for the spring semester. Clay was moved, but he protested that he could not allow Aaron to take on such a burden.

“Clay,” said the gentle surrogate son, “I'll be your voice.”

Before we walked to the hospital, Clay pulled me close. “I don't know how to say this, to be politically correct, but, sweetheart, you are the center of my life. You create beautiful homes wherever we are and find vacations we can enjoy with the children even when I have, you know, limitations. It all comes from you—and I want you to know I think about it all the time.”

I must have fallen asleep while waiting for word from the surgeon. A tap on the shoulder. As I looked up, Dr. Montgomery pulled off his face mask and gave me a smile. “The cancer is gone. He has great margins.”

“Can I kiss you?”

“Please.”

MY JOB FROM THEN ON
would be to widen the margins of our life. For assistance, I found a psychotherapist who specialized in working with cancer patients and their family members. Dr. Ruth Bolletino, a cancer survivor herself, turned our thinking around. She was a colleague of Lawrence LeShan, a famous holistic psychotherapist who spent thirty-five years working with several thousand cancer patients before publishing his classic 1989 book,
Cancer As Turning Point
. Instead of focusing on what was wrong with Clay and how to fix it (the traditional psychotherapeutic approach), Dr. Bolletino focused on what was
right
with him—and with us. To rebuild a compromised immune system, she guided us in using psychological change and creativity in a search for new purpose. We learned from her and Dr. LeShan how to view cancer as a potentially victorious passage.

Clay was able to get back to teaching right on time. With a lapel mic and strong coffee before his three-hour classes, he was able to make himself mostly understood. He confessed up front that he couldn't pronounce his own name—“l”s were hard for him. His doctor's quick solution: “Just change your name to Izzy Cohen.” In class, Aaron was on hand to take over when Clay tired. The magazine that class produced was among Clay's favorites.

The hard part was finding a way to make sure he could enjoy meals. Just managing the secretions in his mouth gave him trouble. Swallowing was dangerous. The paddles at the back of the throat that collect chewed food and pass it down the esophagus to the stomach had been frozen by all the radiation. The slightest particles of food that slipped down the windpipe and into the lungs could cause pneumonia.

At our dinner parties, Clay now often dropped out of the quick and jaunty badinage, not wanting to break the tempo. The brilliant intelligence in his eyes would dart from one speaker to another, the only reminder of how his voice and ideas used to dominate any dinner table through the sheer force of his intensity about getting to the heart of the story.

On my next trip to New York, I had a sleepless night and sank into despair. I found Pat at six in the morning in the antiseptic setting of a hospital examining cubicle, where she was waiting for a patient to deliver a baby. I knew Pat kept in touch with Clay's doctors. I asked her why Clay was having more trouble than ever speaking and swallowing.

“His trachea—his windpipe—is beginning to narrow,” she said in her even, professional voice. “It's the radiation effect. Tissue necrosis.” She sat opposite me in a metal chair, drained of sleep, draped in her pallid green scrubs. She encouraged me to spill my scattered fears. Then she pulled them together and shaped them into one sharply pointed question.

“You chose this man,” she began. “You engineered his return to life and a new dream on the West Coast. What you're really asking yourself at the deepest level is ‘Do I want to stay with Clay during his long, not-yet-dying years?'” She didn't wait for me to reply. “You're at the peak of your flaming fifties, sexy, toned, terrific, wise, energetic, and still climbing in your career. Do you want to put in the next ten years with a man you love who is older, aging faster, and not healthy—knowing, when he goes, you could be near seventy, in descent yourself, and alone? Clay's no fool. He knows at some intuitive level that's the question you're wrestling with. Most women couldn't even ask it of themselves.”

A long pause. I stared at her solemn face, her clear blue eyes and pale freckly skin—a mirror of myself, ten years younger. We were both survivors, self-made successes but vulnerable to the losses of aging like everyone else. Then Dr. Pat said something that made her eyes spill over with tears.

“Generosity becomes you. I'm a beneficiary.” I had stood by her during her wrenching decision to remarry a man she adored, despite hostility from other family members. Given her professional position, I was one of the only friends in whom she could confide.

In that brief conversation with Dr. Pat, the dare that would shape the rest of my life was boiled down into a few simple words.
Stay with Clay
. My proper destiny was to see the war through. For so long, Clay had been the strong one who encouraged and mentored and supported my efforts to become a good writer. It was my turn to be the strong one. I would just have to work out how to meet my own separate needs.

AFTER SIX MONTHS OF HIDING OUT
at home for meals, I blurted, “Let's go to Paris for a week. And eat escargot.”

“Are you crazy? How could I eat?”

The feeding tube had become a permanent fixture in our lives. That meant liquefying Clay's every meal through a laborious process. Ella had come out to live with us. She and I took turns parboiling a stew of organic vegetables and pasta, chicken or fish, protein powder and olive oil, then whipping it up in a blender and straining it through a sieve, so he could pour it into a quarter-inch tube that entered his stomach through a perforation just below his beltline. It was a nutritionally impeccable diet. He could live for years on it. But who would want to live a tasteless existence?

“I'll forage for gourmet food,” I told him. “I don't know, we'll figure it out.”

He took the risk. But after a twelve-hour trip from California to Paris with only a can of Ensure, Clay could barely stand up while we waited for a taxi at Charles de Gaulle. He had to ask—and I know he felt humiliated—“Don't leave my side.” I hated myself for thinking I could drag this sick man across the Atlantic and make something joyful of it.