The Rest of Us: A Novel (36 page)

Rhinehart had drifted off. I spotted him studying a photograph that had been taken in his apartment, when Laura appeared, smelling of Chanel No. 5, and bent in to kiss me before I’d even had the chance to focus on her face.

“Everything is perfect. What a success.”

In the celebrity glow, I was thanking her for her help and advice, telling her I was sorry for our separation, and that I missed her, which, in the state I was in, seemed true, although in retrospect that period stood out as a time when I was dangerously confused and off-balance. But she had done a lot for me, and I told her so. Although she was saying little, I could tell she was affected by my impetuous feeling talk.

She looked down at me. “You’re definitely pregnant.”

“Did you think I wasn’t?”

She laughed. “There was a period of time when I considered he was lying. I just couldn’t picture it.”

Behind Laura’s head, Hallie was waving frantically, as if we had planned to meet up here, and she wasn’t sure she’d been spotted. Laura turned her head to look, and I saw Hallie’s eyes light up with interest.

“I should let you mingle and enjoy your night,” Laura said. She looked as if she was going to put her hand on my stomach, and at the last moment shifted it to my arm instead. “You have no idea how this baby is going to change your life. The best thing I ever did was have those girls. It’s a kind of love that’s unsurpassed.”

The minute she’d moved off, Hallie was on me with questions. “Was that her? I pictured her so different—older and more uptight. She’s a classy-looking woman.”

“She can be really graceful sometimes.” It occurred to me that I hadn’t been entirely fair about Laura, even in my own head. Our relationship didn’t seem over, as much as transitioning.

Hallie was looking around, excited. “You’re a genuine celebrity with these hoity-toity types.
You!”
She took my arm, and we walked around the room together, stopping in front of the series of the birds—she referred to them individually, by their refuge names.

On display here, my work felt so divorced from the warm intimacy of the idea, it was as if it had been done by someone else. When I’d been creating them, these photographs seemed to be sparks of what felt like God. Now they were mere shadows, castoffs of a creative process, and I had to look hard to try and see that original light. I was proud of them, but they no longer felt related to me.

I spent the rest of the evening in a babble of my own talk. I was especially keen on playing career matchmaker, resurrecting that desire I’d first felt at the Guerrilla Girls talk when I’d had so little power—would I experience it differently sitting in the audience today? Channeling Laura, but lacking as much finesse, I introduced
some of the collectors to other artists I knew, young women who hadn’t already made their own connections.

Later in the evening, I saw Rhinehart talking with Laura. They were behind me, and I let my attention drift from the conversation I was having to theirs, the astral redistribution the senses are able to perform. She was congratulating him, rather formally, on the coming child, and he thanked her. Information was exchanged about her daughters. A car one of them had decided to buy. The conversational tenor was one of distant relations, and I wondered if they had ever been close in the way that Rhinehart and I were. I never saw him as much as sensed him, an innate, noncerebral communication like that which animals share. It was a mystery to me that people could do it any differently, choose to combine their lives and yet still behave as if they were co-workers at a job neither of them particularly liked. I knew Laura had felt a lot for Rhinehart, but it was questionable whether her feelings bonded her to him or isolated her. As for Rhinehart, I didn’t know what his love for her had felt like. On some level, I didn’t want to.

As the gallery was clearing out, and we were assembling a group to go have dinner, Rhinehart came up to me, talking heatedly. “I haven’t seen that woman for years—” He pointed across the room at Mrs. Bainbridge, whom I knew by sight only. “She’s the real deal. A collector like Ileana Sonnabend was. I overheard her talking to the gallery owner, asking who represents you internationally.” He kissed me, running his thumb down the top of my spine. “You’re just glowing, as you should be. I’m so proud of you. I know how hard it was for you to get here—but you crossed a river tonight, and once it’s crossed, you never go back.”

T
he 26th of August, a brutally ordinary day, and I was almost thirty weeks pregnant. It had been a muggy afternoon, and I was in the grocery store in front of the dairy case, agonizing about whether to buy the commercial cheddar cheese. I had a craving, and they didn’t have the local, humane kind. I wound up leaving it behind. It was already close to evening when I got home, and the heavy orange sun seemed to be setting inside our apartment. The chair rungs cast long shadows on the floor, like fingers. I was suddenly, foolishly, seized with panic. A tragic dangerous feeling, no reason for it, but I was electrified with nerves. Where Rhinehart usually sat, there was only his shirt, ominously draped over the back of the chair. He was in shadow, like in a Beckett play, drinking. I heard the ice cubes rattle when he took a sip.

“You should watch the drinking. You’re getting a potbelly.” My voice was full of false cheer.

“Tatie, there’s something I have to tell you. It’s best I do it all at once.” He cleared his throat, my chest went cold, and I thought, But we’ve been so happy.

“They’ve discovered a tumor on my liver and believe it’s cancerous.”

My legs started vibrating, and I thought, if I don’t sit down now I may fall. I found a chair. He didn’t get up. He was talking about how he’d been concerned about his health earlier in the summer, on little evidence, really—he hadn’t had much of an appetite, and had been feeling queasy, but that could have been due to anything, anticipating the baby. He’d gone in for blood work, which had picked up an
abnormality, and so he went back for an ultrasound and AFP, the test for a protein that appears in the blood of 80 percent of patients with liver cancer. This was around the time of my art show. He didn’t want to burden me. He felt guilty making doctor’s appointments on the sly, but he was hoping he was just being overly cautious. He was testing clean for hepatitis B and C, which meant the baby and I were okay, and in that swamp of talk I was fishing for something to contradict what he had first said about cancer. To solve it. The ultrasound and blood tests indicated he should get an MRI. He’d just gotten the results that afternoon.

I didn’t want to hear about the phone call. I didn’t want to see the film. “So what’s next?”

“A biopsy to test if it’s cancerous. But Tatie, I have to warn you, it doesn’t look good. It’s large, and the MRI is showing other abnormalities. The cancer may have invaded the blood vessels already. It may have already spread.” He began to cry, a large sound that filled up the entire room.

“You don’t know it’s cancer yet!” I said, coming over to him. “The imaging isn’t perfect on those scans—it could be anything.” I held him. I listened to myself tell him how much treatments have changed. Even if it is cancer, I said, chemotherapy has advanced so much. I sounded rational and convincing, sturdy even, but I was like a skin of ice that wouldn’t be able to support anyone who dared to walk across the lake, thinking it was frozen through.

He went in to Sloan-Kettering to get a section of the tumor removed. Then we waited for the pathology report. During that time, I wouldn’t let him out of my sight. I followed him from room to room, even into the bathroom, holding his hand, staring big-eyed and quiet with trembling lips, trying not to cry. His mute, distorted shadow. I needed to concentrate on seeing. I was afraid that once he moved out of my field of vision, he would be lost forever.

He didn’t look sick, didn’t seem sick. I’d done some research on the Internet—a manic rush of typing, freezing me with fear whenever I hit any mention of death. But also it said many people with liver
cancer had pain. I asked him twice if he had pain, a dull ache below the right rib cage that perhaps had traveled to the right shoulder? He said no. Unexplained fevers. No. Well, that was a definite sign. Maybe he wasn’t ill at all. The idea of this being one big, malicious mistake was delightful, like stepping into a bright expanse of field after the terrifying tangle of woods. This was what I got down on my knees and prayed for. That it wasn’t true. I sustained this prayer up until the pathology report came back. Hepatocellular carcinoma, stage IV.

•  •  •

We were in the doctor’s office, a gray-haired, wide-faced man with splayed fingertips smelling slightly of camphor, a caricature of a small-town doctor, and yet a Manhattan oncologist and a personal friend of Rhinehart’s for years, typical that Rhinehart would go to him. I now knew things. I knew about this man’s schooling, for example, and about his job. I knew the liver was the largest organ in the body, weighing over three pounds. It acted as a filter and made bile, greenish in color, which emptied into the intestine. Bile was what gave feces their brown color. I was listening to the doctor say that Rhinehart’s tumor was inoperable because of its size and location. It was actually three tumors, one large, two smaller. One of those was pushing up against the portal vein. Why hadn’t Rhinehart known about this earlier? The liver doesn’t sense pain very well. Only the outside has nerve fibers. It also has a high functional reserve—even an advanced tumor may not alter normal operations or show up on blood tests. The oncologist pointed to a chart done in lurid color-pencil detail. Rhinehart didn’t have cirrhosis, which was a good thing, but irrelevant, as he had developed cancer anyway. There was no good reason he had—he didn’t have a metabolic disease that would have destroyed the liver, making it vulnerable, nor was he a heavy drinker. I thought briefly back to the scotch he’d been drinking that afternoon he’d told me about the MRI results. It was probably his last. The thought took my breath away. I struggled to come back, to listen. There may have been a more extensive history of cancer in his family than he knew. What family didn’t have a history of cancer in it?

If the tumor couldn’t be operated on, what about a transplant? This suggestion was from me. I was patiently told, as you would tell a schoolchild, that the chances were low that he’d receive one. The list was very long. Those most eligible, also ranked on a numbered system, were young with localized tumors and/or in severe stages of liver failure. If the cancer metastasized, he would become ineligible. Basically, by then, they would be throwing their precious liver in the garbage by giving it to Rhinehart, and there was no way they were going to do that. He was beside me, quiet, and I had the odd sensation that they were replaying this treatment discussion for my benefit only. Decisions had been made when I wasn’t in the room. I was only here to give the scene its due, to fully enact the audience’s part of outraged disbelief.

I said, “Please explain the course of chemotherapy he will have to go through. And I’m not interested in statistics,” I felt pressured to add, “at this point. Just the facts. Which drugs—I’ve read that doxorubicin is the most common, but perhaps a combination might be better in this case.”

The doctor and Rhinehart exchanged glances, a secret society energy passing between them. I could feel myself becoming hysterical.

Rhinehart took my hand. “He’s discussed with me the potential benefits of chemotherapy, given my system and the stage of the cancer, versus the drawbacks of that approach. They’re marginal. And you know how I feel about pharmacology. Especially when it seems unnecessary.”

“So what’s the treatment, then!”

The oncologist spoke up. “I’m recommending palliative care at this stage.”

“What’s that? What’s palliative?” I was mentally searching for the definition of that word, which kept sliding from my grasp.

“Supportive care. Pain management, comfort—we’ll work together on nutrition and monitoring the progression of the disease and its symptoms, so he feels the best possible.”

“Feels the best! But he’ll be
dying
!”

Rhinehart didn’t say anything, and I started screaming, “You don’t have a treatment? Just this! A special diet. What kind of doctor are you? And you’re supposed to be his friend. We have a
baby
coming!”

I was crying, not looking at anyone, not even wanting to be there. Minutes passed before Rhinehart could calm me down to the point where I was no longer disruptive, so that he and his friend, the doctor, could go over the details of their course of inaction.

•  •  •

I was angry in the car. I was enraged, and I nourished the feeling. It seemed a more proactive response than weeping, or that useless pantomime in the office. I was demanding Rhinehart get a second opinion. He said that it likely wouldn’t change anything, but he could.

“You need someone who is willing to do chemotherapy for you! Or get you into a clinical trial.”

“I can do those things now. Phil would put me on chemotherapy.”

“Then why don’t you? Why don’t you
do
something?”

He pulled the car over and looked at me in agony. “If you want me to, I will. I just didn’t want to do it that way—with diarrhea and mouth sores and constant hospital visits. I discussed it extensively with Phil. There’s no evidence to suggest it’s going to extend my life. It may even shorten it. Tatie, what I have has
no cure
. There’s no cure anymore. I just want to enjoy our time. And pray that I’ll still be here to greet my little child.”

“Oh my God,” I said. “Oh my God.” The traffic rushed by on Third Avenue, a man selling Burberry knockoffs, a man selling purses, people in light jackets, on their cell phones. How did this nightmare become so real that in the middle of the day, in the car with the man I love, such things could be said.

•  •  •

Within two weeks, Rhinehart had assembled a support team. He had a nutritionist, who put him on a low-salt, no alcohol, macrobiotic diet. She brought the food, which she purchased from farms upstate,
into the house. He had a spiritual advisor, a Sufi master, who had him meditating two hours a day. “I should have done this years ago,” he said. He joined a cancer support group, which, from what he said, felt like what he always imagined AA to be—outbursts, crying, a lot of very personal information shared in a roundtable setting, a real catharsis. We were having the birthing class at his place now to make it easier. There were so many people coming and going from the apartment, it seemed as if we were in a boom time in our lives.