Matrimony (28 page)

Now, a block from home, she saw her neighbor approaching. He was a young, prematurely graying man whose name she could never remember. He seemed not to recall her name either, for whenever they passed each other they would smile exaggeratedly, as if trying to compensate for something. He had a dog, too—Buddha, a white creature so tiny Cooper didn’t know what to do with him and he had to be reminded Buddha wasn’t a ball. When Cooper and Buddha played, Mia and Buddha’s owner talked about dog things. But alone, they acted lost. It was that way with dog owners in general. When you saw them without their dogs, you didn’t know what to say. It was as if you had run into them naked.

She laid out the lamb chops on the kitchen counter and made a salad. Then she took a bath, descending beneath the bubbles, cleansing herself of the grime and perspiration, hoping to wash away the breast lump itself, which, like someone testing a toothache, she palpated when she got out.

Someone had left a message on the answering machine, and when she heard Julian’s voice, telling her he loved her, she started to cry. She lay down on the floor with Cooper next to her, wiping her face with his ears.

By the time Julian got home, she was dressed. The Last Supper, she told herself dramatically, but she couldn’t pretend she felt otherwise.

“Guess who called today,” Julian said.

“Who?”

“Professor Chesterfield. He finally finished his novel. He’s looking for a new agent.”

She sat down on the sofa, staring glumly at him.

“Is something wrong?”

She shook her head.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m just tired.”

She went upstairs and lay down, turning on the radio to some classical music in the hope that it would soothe her. In the bathroom, she washed her hands and face, scrubbing her pores until her cheeks shone.

“Mia?” he called out. “Are you all right?”

“I’ll be down in a minute.”

But when she came downstairs, she found Cooper in the kitchen with the lamb chops in his mouth.

“Jesus Christ, Julian! That was supposed to be our dinner!”

Cooper dropped the remains at her feet, then continued to ravage them, moving from one lamb chop to the other as if unable to decide which appealed more. At least she’d caught him in the act. According to the dog books, if you didn’t catch your dog in the moment of transgression he wouldn’t understand what you were upset about. But even in the moment of transgression, Cooper appeared unrepentant. He seemed too stuffed to care.

“Look what your dog did,” Mia said, and she let out a litany of complaints, about how everything revolved around Cooper, his walks, his feeding schedule, how he lay in the hallway, immobile as a sack of grain, as if daring you to step on him, only to rise suddenly to thump his tail against your knee. His toys made appearances all over the house, under the bed, between the sofa cushions, in a whimsical rite of burial and disinterment. She had never seen a dog so obsessed with food. The sound of her pouring out her vitamins resembled Cooper’s food going into his bowl, so she was forced to take her vitamins out of Cooper’s earshot; otherwise he would bark. Just the other day, she’d fished inside her pocket to give a homeless man a quarter and she’d mistakenly given him one of Cooper’s treats. Another time, she or Julian had left treats in a pocket, and when the clothes came out of the wash everything smelled like stew. Julian had taken to dressing Cooper up, not in dog clothes, but in political placards such as
BONES, NOT BOMBS
, which Cooper had worn dutifully around his neck to a gay rights rally, though what bones or bombs had to do with gay rights she had no idea. Cooper, cave dweller that he was, liked to lie beneath Julian’s desk, the bottom beam of which he would maneuver himself under as if doing the limbo. Man and his dog, Mia thought, and she, as co-owner of that dog, wasn’t allowed to say certain words in her own home, lest Cooper misunderstand. “Hurry up” was forbidden because that was what they said to Cooper when he was supposed to pee, so if they said it in the house he would pee on the floor. Forbidden, also, were “walk,” “food,” “outside,” and “park”—she couldn’t even ask Julian where he’d parked the car without Cooper, their hapless dog, starting to bark, so she was reduced to searching for synonyms, or whispering the words, or saying them in a different language.

“Jesus, Mia. It’s just a couple of lamb chops. I’ll go out and pick us up a pizza.”

She started to cry. “I have a lump in my breast.”

“What?”

Through the window, she could see Perry Street buckle, the sidewalk folding in on itself. Everything looked flat, as if the city were a sheet of paper out of which the pedestrians had been fashioned and everyone was falling through it. “Julian, I might have cancer.”

Julian’s lip shook. He reached out to steady himself.
No,
she wanted to say. She needed him to be unwavering. She was crying now, and he was doing his best not to cry himself, and only barely succeeding.

“Am I going to be all right?”

“Of course you are.”

“How do you know?”

“I’m sure of it.”

“I just wanted us to have a normal dinner, and now I’ve gone and ruined that, too.”

“We can still have dinner.” But Julian simply stood in the living room and she did as well, and now she was telling him she wasn’t hungry.

“You have to eat.”

“I don’t want to.”

“I’ll go out and get you whatever you want. Chinese, Thai, Italian, you name it…”

“I just want you to stay with me.”

“Of course.”

She went into the kitchen. “What about you? Are you hungry?”

“I’m fine.”

“You shouldn’t starve because of me.”

“Mia…”

She placed the salad bowl on the floor, and having forgotten utensils and failed to make a dressing, she doused the greens with oil and vinegar, pouring them on like kerosene. Slowly, with their hands, they picked at the lettuce leaf by leaf, olive oil coating their fingers. Then she removed a quart of vanilla ice cream, and they hacked away at it as if with pickaxes, managing to get little clumps onto their spoons. But they weren’t hungry, and so they left the rest on the floor for Cooper to eat.

They lay in bed that night, unable to sleep, and the following morning when they got up they took a cab to the hospital.

Back at home, Julian did his best to keep himself diverted. One minute he was transported on the billows of his own hope; the next he was downcast. Three days passed, and Mia hadn’t heard from Dr. Kaplan. Maybe the results had come back already and Dr. Kaplan had been too busy to call. Julian told Mia that a delay might be good. No need to rush if the lump was benign; it was a malignant lump that required swift attention. Half the time they wanted to get it over with, to learn the news no matter what it was, and more than once, Mia picked up the phone to call the hospital, only to think better of it.

Professor Chesterfield’s manuscript had arrived, and for the first day Julian simply left it in its packing.

When he finally opened it, he handed the manuscript to Mia. “Four hundred and seventeen pages,” he said despairingly.

“Is that too long?”

“If anything, it’s too short.” It was 2004, eighteen years since Julian had first studied with Professor Chesterfield, at which point Professor Chesterfield had already been working on his novel for more than twenty years. It was a forty-year project, Julian realized, which came out to ten pages a year. At that rate, it had better read like Joyce, but when he sat down with it, he found the novel uninspiring; fearing he wouldn’t love it, he decided he was going about things wrong, dipping into the book for a few pages, then laying it down. He half suspected, fretful as he was, jumping up with Mia every time the phone rang, that if he’d been reading Joyce himself he wouldn’t have been drawn in, and so he put the manuscript away, believing he had to read it under different circumstances, so as to be fair to Professor Chesterfield.

One night, Julian and Mia caught a movie at the Angelika, and afterward they ate dinner at an Italian restaurant, sharing a chicken dish and pasta, shouting to each other over the noise. The next day they met after work to play racquetball, and when Mia thought Julian wasn’t trying, she said, “Hey, don’t take pity on me!” and she whacked the ball as hard and as low as she could, hitting several consecutive winners and reaching game point before Julian came back to beat her.

Later that night they had sex, and when Mia came she was elated, feeling this was her body and she was fine, though she understood it meant nothing, that, vigorous as she felt, when it came to cancer by the time you didn’t feel healthy it was generally too late and it was only when you still felt good that you had a chance.

Exactly a week after her biopsy, the phone rang, and it was Dr. Kaplan. “How would you like some good news?”

Her heart, her whole body launched. “The lump is benign?”

“The lab results came back an hour ago. You’re fine. Your pap smear was normal, too.”

She was crying. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

“I had nothing to do with it,” Dr. Kaplan said.

But Mia felt that Dr. Kaplan
did
have something to do with it, that in a way she’d saved her.

“While I have you on the phone,” Dr. Kaplan said, “I think you should start getting regular mammograms. We recommend forty for most women, but because of your mother I would start you now. And women with benign lumps have a slightly elevated risk of malignancy. It’s nothing to be too concerned about, but it should give you extra incentive to pay attention.”

“Oh, I will.”

“One more thing. Am I right in thinking you’re Jewish?”

“Yes,” Mia said. “Why?”

“I assume you know about the Ashkenazi Jewish breast cancer genes. We call them BRCA1 and BRCA2.”

“I’ve heard of them.”

“Well, before you get worried, I’d say you’re not a very likely candidate.” The two genes, Dr. Kaplan explained, accounted for only about five percent of breast cancers, and most women who carried the gene had more than one close relative with the disease. “Your mother was the only immediate family member to have breast cancer, right?”

“That’s right,” Mia said.

“What about on your father’s side?”

“My great-aunt had breast cancer. But that was years ago. I never even met her.”

Dr. Kaplan paused.

“Why? Does it make a difference?”

“Most people don’t realize it, but the gene can be passed down from the father’s side, too. Still, I’d say it’s unlikely. Your father’s family doesn’t have an extensive history, either. On the other hand, your mother was diagnosed relatively young, so we couldn’t rule it out.”

“And if I had the gene?”

“You’d have a greater than eighty percent likelihood of developing breast cancer and a fifty percent likelihood of developing ovarian cancer.” In a way, Dr. Kaplan said, the ovarian cancer would be more worrisome. There was a pretty good chance of catching breast cancer early, but by the time ovarian cancer was diagnosed, it was usually too late.

“So what would my options be?”

“If I had the gene,” Dr. Kaplan said, “I would certainly get more regular checkups. Mammograms two or three times a year, along with an annual MRI.” Some women took Tamoxifen, Dr. Kaplan explained, but it remained to be seen whether the drug was effective at preventing gene-linked breast cancer. Researchers were learning that “breast cancer” was an imprecise term. There were a number of different kinds of breast cancer, each with distinct cell makeups and disease mechanisms. It almost made no sense to call them the same disease.

“Don’t some people get mastectomies?” Mia asked.

“That’s right,” Dr. Kaplan said. “They do it prophylactically. It’s the best way to ensure you won’t get breast cancer. Though I don’t have to tell you that’s a drastic step. Still, if you’ve seen one, two, three people you love die…And a prophylactic double mastectomy reduces your chances to almost zero.”

“
Almost
zero?”

“I know,” Dr. Kaplan said. “You’d think with a double mastectomy you should get a money-back guarantee. But it’s next to impossible to remove all the breast cells.” Still, Dr. Kaplan said, with a double mastectomy a person could feel pretty safe. As for ovarian cancer, what she recommended was that anyone who tested positive and was past her childbearing years seriously consider having her ovaries removed.

“Well,” Mia said, “this is all very cheery.”

“In the end, it’s a personal decision. How much risk can you tolerate and what kinds of risks? How much do you want to know about things over which you have only limited control?”

“Let me think about it,” Mia said. Julian had come home, and greeting him at the door, Cooper was wagging his tail so hard he was wagging his whole butt. Julian seemed to know who had called, for when Mia smiled at him he jumped in the air. And when she got off the phone he popped open a bottle of champagne and they decided to go out and celebrate.

Temperate weather, a delicious meal, feeling robust when she awoke in the morning, the throb of her heartbeat as she ran beside the Hudson, the traffic speeding by her. She noted these things now and was grateful for them. Her subway stalled, she got a ticket for double parking, and she didn’t care. She was, she realized, a survivor cliché, and she hadn’t even survived anything.