I Regret Everything (8 page)

Dealing with forged Kandinsky. Can't make plans.

Even though he dodged my bullet, the return text was a major mood elevator. My mother had taught me about painting and as my brothers continued to stare at the plasma screen in the den I rifled my brain for something clever to say about Kandinsky but all I could come up with was,

He's no Kokoschka, though he has fans.

At least it rhymed. I immediately texted back hoping Mr. Best would notice we had just collaborated on a quatrain. And got no response. But that was fine. Maybe he wouldn't commit to coming to the class, but texting allowed me to believe there was some kind of connection.

The sight of a giant robot trying to strangle a dinosaur transfixed Marshall and Cody but my thoughts kept skipping back to Mr. Best. It was impossible to not think about him. He was charming the way a poet should be, not in some tacky self-loving rap star way but like someone who drinks ouzo and smokes unfiltered cigarettes and publishes their work in literary journals under a pseudonym is charming, and super talented. (Not just my opinion either since the editors of
The Paris Review
agreed.) And for a guy who was formal and kind of stuffy, he was willing to share personal details like that story about his father. I thought it was a little peculiar that he asked me to call him Mr. Best but there weren't a lot of people in my life I had any desire to talk to and if that was the price I was happy to pay it.

When the movie ended Marshall and Cody scampered off to their rooms and I returned to mine. It felt like a monk's cell. There was a narrow bed, a chest of drawers, a desk, and a chair. I had brought
Middlemarch
but didn't feel like reading because Mr. Best . . . because Mr. Best what? Invaded my thoughts? Loomed in my vision? Hovered over my bed? Yes, all of those phrases. It was after ten o'clock, what was he doing? Composing a poem? Eating dinner? What did his apartment look like? What kind of neighborhood did he live in? What kind of food did he eat? How did he take his coffee? When did he start writing poetry? He said he didn't have a girlfriend but maybe he met someone in a bar earlier tonight and now they were having sex. Maybe he was alone in his apartment. Did he know girls who did booty calls? Would he make a booty call later? The questions floated to the surface like bubbles from a diver's tank as I pictured him in every permutation of each increasingly sex-crazed scenario. Mr. Best with one girl, Mr. Best with two girls, Mr. Best with a guy. Gay . . . That hadn't even occurred to me.

To slow my mind, I concentrated on the whiteness of the walls. They were the white of the arctic, of endlessness. Pictures, artwork, something was going to have to get slapped up there. Just nothing that would set me off. The pen and ink drawing of Mr. Best would look good but might be hard to explain to Edward P.

I lay down on the bed, closed my eyes. I felt old for a teenage crush. These sensations would have to be reined in. Sensations? What was going on? It hit me that whatever silly infatuation I felt for Mr. Best was strong enough to penetrate my weakening chemical armor. Numbness was a fort. Something to retreat to, a place to feel safe by feeling nothing. It was a place without risk and bother, a trial run for a nullity I yearned to escape. The love I felt for Mr. Best would be my means.

I dug my fingernails into my palms.

Outside / my win- / dow dy- / ing crick- / ets cry.

E
verything good?” Dr. Tapper asked. A kind man with a full head of side-parted white hair, he was fleshy, full but not fat. Dr. Tapper always looked like he had just consumed a delicious meal. I had left work early and gone to his office at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital on York Avenue, where Andy Warhol had died unexpectedly. After several days the swelling in my groin had not receded.

“Excellent,” I said, as if there was any other answer. How else could I be? The last time medical drama intruded into my life was when I was stricken by mononucleosis in college. Getting mono was like owning a copy of
Nevermind
. At one time or another everyone had it. After three weeks in bed I was fine. Since then, nothing. I exercised, didn't smoke, drank moderately, and never had sex without a condom, so no pesky microbes could have been lurking in my system waiting to explode into something embarrassing or fatal. Seated on the examination table with my boxers around my ankles and Dr. Tapper phlegmatically probing the area immediately to the left of my flaccid penis I was a picture of apple-cheeked health.

Perhaps because I was naked my thoughts turned to Spaulding. That morning she had stopped by my office to bring me coffee and the welcome news that she would be interning at the firm. She was wearing cream linen pants and a faded lavender blouse. Her hair was loose and when she leaned over the desk to set the coffee down I noticed an almond-colored birthmark on the left side of her neck.

“My class is meeting this afternoon. Will you come talk?”

I told her that today wasn't going to work but I would try to get there soon. My gaze seemed to unsettle her slightly. It occurred to me for the first time that perhaps her confidence was something of an act. “Pending my poetry schedule, poets' lives being the most hectic.”

One of her front teeth was slightly crooked and when she opened her mouth to laugh I noticed an orthodontist had fitted her with an expander. This imperfection along with the tortoiseshell eyeglasses compounded her owlish allure.

“Can I ask you one more question?” Not waiting for a response, she continued, “What do you do when you're stuck, when you're trying to write and nothing . . . ?”

“Write emails. On your computer, your phone, whatever device you're partial to. It doesn't matter to whom. Just pretend there's nothing at stake, you're writing to a friend who's going to punch delete after they read it. Let the words hit the screen.”

Spaulding nodded as if trying to decide whether I was putting her on. This was exactly my technique and I told her so.

“Who do you write to?”

“Friends, mostly, most of whom I haven't seen much lately. They've gotten married or they live in other cities.”

“I'm going to try that. Is it all right if I send one to you?”

“Sure.”

There was a brief lull in the conversation and then it looked as if Spaulding was trying to decide whether she'd overstayed her welcome. Without moving, she appeared to lean toward the door. Was she too young? Eloquent arguments can be made to the contrary but here's the simple answer: Probably. All right, that's an equivocation but she was still the boss's daughter, which felt even more reckless. I was seeing the doctor later and who knew what he was going to tell me? I thought about that comical ballet she had performed on Dirk Trevelyan's lawn, the vitality that flames in youth.

“That was quite a performance you gave yesterday.”

“I wanted to thank you for the ride but I couldn't interrupt the meeting.”

“Please don't do anything like that again.”

“Totally. Bad doggie, no biscuit.”

I shrugged and rolled my eyes and motioned for her to sit. Smiling apprehensively, she sat on the couch and asked what I wanted to discuss. “Art, poetry, the usual stuff lawyers gas about,” I said. We talked about the writing class she was taking and I told her I'd be willing to read whatever she wanted to show me. This prospect both surprised and excited her. It wasn't so much a charitable impulse as a way to generate interaction that would not be overtly suspicious. Evidently, I was a little more taken with her than was wise but what risk was there in looking at poems?

Reality intruded when Reetika needed Spaulding to do an errand. Before departing she took a postcard out of her pocket and laid it on my desk. On it she had written
For Mr. Best Lawyer/Poet/Art Guy.
It was a reproduction of
Composi­tion VII
by Wassily Kandinsky. A golden move and astonishing given her age. She glided out of the office without looking back.

Dr. Tapper stared at my scrotum as if it held the answer to the riddle of time. The impassivity displayed when he squeezed my testicles suggested what he held in his hand were radishes and our encounter taking place in the produce aisle at Trader Joe's. It was difficult to banish the notion of some kind of tumor wreaking havoc down there. Testicular cancer would be ironic when the one poem Jinx Bell was known for was about a terrorist mastermind having the contents of his ball sack excised. Would mine suffer the same fate?

The room was bright, optimistic. It was easy to pretend this exam was an item on a to-do list, something to take care of before picking up the dry cleaning and going home. Dr. Tapper, having exhausted the garden of earthly delights that was my groin, now spent an inordinate amount of time kneading the sides of my neck. Swollen lymph glands, he finally announced, let's have some tests shall we, nothing to worry about. Then this: Maybe we can get them done today, I'll make some calls.

It was Friday, traditionally a busy workday because clients often wanted to talk to me before the weekend. And the pressure on associates to be present at all times was intense. Partnerships were a Hobbesian competition and any unexplained absence gave the competition an advantage.
Where was Best at 4:00 in the afternoon yesterday? He wasn't in his office. Anyone see him?
In the eternal jockeying for position that goes on in any major law firm the associates knew who was present and who was unaccounted for. The decision to cancel my afternoon was not made lightly.

Scans were performed, blood and marrow drawn. The weekend crawled by. There was a party at Dirk Trevelyan's Sutton Place townhouse that I was happy to attend (and flattered to be invited to). Vociferous in his praise whenever he introduced me to other guests, several of whom were attractive women, Dirk showed me off, telling everyone they would be lucky to join my roster of clients. But I was alternately beset by thoughts of Spaulding and a burgeoning fear of death that revealed itself like sparks in an endless darkness, little pinpricks of terror, so I left the party after an hour.

On Sunday Pratt and I attended a Yankee game. The park setting, the clean lines of the field, the orderly manner in which the game proceeded, made me for minutes at a time stop imagining the stealthy anarchy raging inside me. It wasn't anything I could discuss with Pratt, delicate feelings an Achilles' heel in our profession. The Yankees walloped the Red Sox, a good sign. On the subway ride home I switched trains at 14th Street. In the station a jazz band played a ballad that sounded incongruously soul stirring in the crowded subterranean setting. I was going to give them fifty dollars but when I noticed the bass player was a woman I doubled it. I always doubled it for women. Was that some kind of reverse sexism? I didn't care. I was old school.

 

* * *

 

“Do you have any family, Jeremy?”

“An aunt and uncle, but we're not close. Why?”

It was Tuesday and I was back in Dr. Tapper's office. The test results were in.

“It usually helps to have family when you're facing this kind of thing.”

Every horrifying possibility immediately lined up shoulder to shoulder for my frenzied inspection. With great effort I affected a placid exterior.

“What's going on?”

“You have a non-small cell lung carcinoma, which in plain English is lung cancer. Unfortunately, yours is stage four.”

This news hit with the force of a falling building, a roar of crumbling drywall, bricks, and dust. Stage four? How was that possible? I had looked to the future with a certain amount of optimism because there were decades left. In a second, that naïve certainty evaporated. Terror ran a fingernail down my spine. Bile dripped in my gut. Tapper looked on with professional compassion.

“I've never smoked.”

My second thought was that my most recent donation to the American Cancer Society should have been larger, as if that somehow might have made a difference. It's funny how, when humans are confronted with the implacability of science, we so often turn to superstition. Dr. Tapper seemed relieved there was no overt display of emotion. “Fifteen percent of everyone diagnosed with this is a nonsmoker.” He sighed. “And you've got slow-growing metastases in the groin, liver, neck . . . all over.”
All over.
A terrible choice of words in so many ways. “I'm sorry.”

“Is there a stage five?”

“No, there isn't. Look, I want to be honest with you. The only course of treatment is extremely aggressive chemotherapy. There are side effects you need to be aware of. We can discuss them if you want to go that route.”

“How much time would that buy me?”

“Hard to say, but you need to consider quality of life.”

“There are no exceptions?”

“Sometimes there are outcomes for which there is no scientific explanation, and for that reason we don't like to make predictions. The statistics for your disease are . . . they're not great.”

“What about spontaneous remission?”

“You work in trusts and estates, don't you? So you know anything can happen. I can recommend an oncologist.”

I asked how long he thought I had without treatment.

“It's impossible to predict.”

Although Tapper tried to look sympathetic, there was no good way to pass along this news. Did I want an oncologist? Needles in my veins carrying gallons of toxic chemicals that would sicken me and proceed to not work at which point the wasting away would begin in earnest and oblivion rush forth seemed like a terrible way to spend what could be my last summer. I didn't care. Save me! Whatever would run like a marauding army through my cells destroying everything in its wake sounded impossibly great. He told me to call after I had thought about it and to not worry if he took a day or two to return the call because:

“I'm going to Italy for two weeks.”