Then We Came to the End (25 page)

It was three in the afternoon by the time they left and she knew now, getting out of the car, walking with him, that her luck had finally run out. “Don’t take it off,” he said. “Martin,” she said, and her voice trembled. They were walking across a parking lot that was unmistakably the parking lot of a hospital. “Lynn,” he said, “do not take it off.” Her hands began to shake as they had in the car earlier in the day. “Just keep walking,” he said. And she managed to because she could trick herself:
maybe not, maybe not just yet.
. . . But there were no stairs, and when he opened the door and the slightly warmer air from inside hit her and the light coming in above the blindfold got lighter, more fluorescent, she knew for an absolute fact where they were and she was terrified. “Just keep walking,” he said. He brought her to a stop and made her sit, and the chair beneath her was hard and plastic like a chair in a hospital waiting room, and she was terrified. “I’m not leaving your side,” he said. “I’m just going about ten feet away for a couple of seconds to talk to someone, then I’ll be back.” He returned. “I’m right here,” he said. They sat there a long time. After a while, he said, “Why don’t you take the blindfold off now.” “No way,” she said. “Trust me,” he said. “Take it off.” “I’d really rather not,” she said. “Come on,” he said, “you can do it.” She did as she was told, squinting a little as she looked around. Clerks stood behind glass. There were digitized numbers on the walls. “The DMV?” she said. “You bastard!” She swung at him with the blindfold. “You see!” he cried. “You can do the hard part!” She sighed with relief. “But now you might as well resign yourself,” he said. “You’ll never know when we’re actually there.”

THIS IS PROBABLY
not the right place to be, probably the
wrong
place, actually. Matter of fact, if the wrong place could be identified on a map — “You Are Here” — this would probably be it. And this thing she might do, enter the building and have the night guard call up and inform him who he had waiting for him in the lobby?
Not
the right thing to be doing. But she’s been driving around for half a gas tank now and lo and behold she ends up here. The street where his firm’s office is located is one block east of Michigan Avenue. The Mag Mile is deserted like always this time of night. She’s parked illegally, but the only vehicle to drive past in twenty minutes is a cabbie with his light off. Going home, probably. That’s the wise choice, cabbie — big day tomorrow, take yourself home and rest your weary bones. Why can’t she have a cabbie’s good sense? Lynn Mason in her Saab outside Martin Grant’s office building doesn’t feel forty-three so much as fourteen, unhinged by strong affections. “Wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait
wait!
” she says out loud, pounding the steering wheel and grabbing onto it, shaking it. She can’t
actually
be where she is! How did the night, starting at the top of the mountain with Chinese and TV, run like a landslide of shit down to this low ravine here? Does she really want to go up there and just
be
in an office? There is no mystery, no attraction, no reward, no surprise in the empty corridors of an office at ten at night — she knows from firsthand experience. Spending her last night in an office, that’s insane. But the thing is, in that office
up there?
There is Martin. There is
Martin.
And the universal truth is, it matters not where he is, if he is drowning in the ocean or burning in a fire — that’s where his lover wants to be. So it doesn’t matter if he’s an unshowered, crabby, gaseous, overworked, eye-twitching, mind-dulled man under the purgatorial light, walking the barren halls with their unringing phones and bad art. She wants to be up there. How could she help but find herself parked here, regardless of what she told herself earlier in the evening — that there would be no calling Martin tonight, no talking to Martin? A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, and at this hour, she has thrown all consistency to the wind.

And yet, something stops her from going in. She sits in the car for twenty minutes and doesn’t move. If you’re the night guardsman, and you’re listening carefully, after a while through the glass you can even hear the car start up again. She drew your attention because she just sat out there for twenty minutes. Then you saw her bang really hard on the steering wheel, she looked like a crazy! You had to ask yourself, What’s she up to? And then to just leave! Almost a peel-out. Sit in your car twenty minutes, just to leave again? Wonder what that was all about.

It was about coming to your goddamn senses, she thinks, driving off. And here’s why: Martin has made it clear to her what the terms are, and she can’t accept the terms. It’s as simple as that. He did all those wonderful things — he took her to the top of the Hancock building, to Gino’s, to the Art Institute, and then when the time came he took her back to the hospital, and she thought she knew they had arrived but because of his canards she was able to think
but maybe it’s another DMV,
which was all she needed, that and the blindfold, to follow him in and sit next to him and deal with being in the hell she was in. And he didn’t leave her. And when the doctor said, in essence, things are bad, by using words like “advanced,” “aggressive,” “better for chances of recovery,” Martin was the one, because she was too stunned, to ask the questions. He
was
good to her, she
had
reason to be parked outside his building. But he had also done something terribly, terribly unexpected, something truly surprising, revealing of his true character — something terribly
honest.

The doctor’s visit was on a Friday, and after the trauma of it, the night followed in a deep funk, and it was a godsend to have Martin next to her in her bed. Saturday she woke up and found the funk replaced by a burning need to know a thousand things. All the questions she would have asked the doctor, had she had the power to the day before, came to her all at once. Martin had to remind her of many of the things the doctor had said. He practically took her through the entire prognosis again, the options that were available and the consequences that followed from them. But his expertise was limited, so midmorning, he went out for breakfast and stopped at a local bookstore, where he picked up a book that took a breast cancer patient step by step from discovery and diagnosis all the way through remission. He returned with it and together they ate and they read and they debated, and they came to conclusions: the goal was to do whatever gave her the best chance of a complete recovery. It would not be without its consequences.

“You think I should have the mastectomy,” she said.

“No, I think you have to wait until the doctors get in there,” he said, “and let them decide that, but yeah, I think you should give them permission beforehand, that if they think they should do it, they do it.”

“And what do I do without my breasts,” she said, “such as they are?”

“You . . . I don’t know,” he said. “You don’t do any nursing for a while.”

He must have seen it on her face.
Don’t do any nursing?
Was he not aware that the prospect of having children was becoming dimmer and dimmer, and was he so insensitive that he didn’t think in advance that she might be bothered by that? Not that she was bothered — she was fine with it — but to be reminded like that? What was wrong with him?

“No, that was a bad joke,” he said quickly. “That was a terrible joke. I’m sorry I said that. I was trying for a little humor.”

“I think you should stick to reasoning,” she said.

What she had wanted him to say, of course, was,
What do you do without breasts? I don’t know. I won’t mind.
But they weren’t talking about the two of them at the moment. They were talking only about her, getting her to a place where she could admit these difficult circumstances to herself so she could make the right decisions. Somehow, by the end of Saturday night, they had gotten there, more or less. She looked past the bad humor. She thanked him many times. He went home. She wanted it that way. It had been an exhausting two days.

It wasn’t until Sunday — or three days before the scheduled operation — that they got around to talking about the two of them. He came over early and was standing in his spring overcoat and wouldn’t sit down. She came out from the kitchen and said, “Why are you still standing?” “I’ve been thinking about something,” he said, “and I think you should know what it is.” She knew not to like the sound of that. For all the things she had had to worry about since her diagnosis, she had not forgotten that a busy man, a workaholic, a sworn bachelor would probably not find it in his best interest to play nursemaid to a sometime girlfriend. He had acquitted himself the past two days like a gentleman — a king, really — but it was going to happen sooner or later, something like this: I wish you the very best of luck, Lynn, but I’m not equipped for it. I do hope you call me when all of this is through. “Will you at least take your coat off?” she asked. “Of course,” he said. When that was done, she handed him his cup of coffee. “Let’s take this over by the sofa,” she said.

And there he laid it all out for her: he was hers. Entirely. Whatever she needed from him, she had it. He would take days off work. He would be by her side at every appointment. He would see her through the entire thing. “From start to finish,” he said. “If you’d rather have Sherry or Diane or whoever, that’s fine. I’m just making myself available.” “Thank you, Martin,” she said. She was stunned again, speechless — what a surprise. “I’m touched,” she said. “I won’t know what I’m
doing,
” he said, “but I’m willing to try — whatever it takes.” “I’m pleased,” she said. “Really, I’m very touched.” “But there’s one thing I have to make clear,” he said. “It’s a condition, I guess. And I know it’s terrible timing, but I can’t . . . you see, I watched you, the past couple of days, Lynn. You surprised me — especially yesterday. Yesterday, it was like you came alive. You wanted to know everything. And you dealt with these hard . . . these goddamn hard facts. I was so impressed. And that got me thinking last night, when I went home, got me thinking that you could handle anything. Anything.”

“Why don’t you tell me what it is you have to tell me,” she said.

He set his coffee down on the table and took her hands. “It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while now. It predates all . . .
this,
” he said. “And it is bad timing, but it’s not the time to be dishonest. Not now. And so I’ll just say it — I’ve been thinking for a while now that you and I are not right for each other. In the long term, I mean. And I would hate to go through this with you and the whole time you’re thinking . . . well, I don’t know what — that I’m doing it because I’m in for the long haul. I
am
in for the long haul to make you better, but not because —”

“Yeah, I get it, I know!” she cried, cutting him short. “You’re not the marrying type, I get it!”

“No, it’s not just that,” he said. “It’s that, you and I . . . I’m just being honest here. I am totally committed to seeing you through this. But as a friend,” he said. “Only as a friend.”

Well, wasn’t that something? Martin Grant
was
honest. He was an honest man. Of course he had had to give her a swift kick in the ass before she could realize it. He had had to knock the wind out of her to show her just how honest he was. Tending to her, nursing her — he’d take that. Breast cancer, that part was fine. It was the sum of her parts that was not, in the end, what he wanted. She told him she couldn’t do it that way, impose on him that way if he . . . and he tried to object by saying . . . but she said I’m sorry, I just can’t . . . and he said will you think it over . . . and she said no. He left soon after. She spent a sad Sunday afternoon alone.

And now, maybe she should ease off the gas a little. Doing ninety down Lake Shore Drive — that’s a suicide mission, which can sometimes be a dream of rescue. They don’t fix the potholes this far south. There are longer spells between working streetlights, too, when the black sky descends through the open sunroof, blotting her out again — until, first hood, then dash, then her hand on the wheel, she is lit all too brightly once more. She’s avoiding her face in the mirror and all the lachrymose self-pity etched there. Fuck that. And for those of you who think Lynn Mason in addition to cancer suffers from the disease the talk shows diagnose as Needing the Man, if you think that’s why she was parked outside Martin’s office building, then you haven’t yet understood the special circumstances of this Tuesday night, the forces at play that make her desperate and wanting in a way that is wholly unlike her. She has never — or not often — suffered from Needing the Man. Self-sufficiency has always been her first and last commandment. And not because she was of a generation of girls taught to reject the dependency suffered by their mothers and grandmothers. It wasn’t a
man
she was afraid of losing herself to. It was a person, another person. It wasn’t political, this headstrong determination to answer to no one, to achieve, to be the boss, to earn and sock it away, to use foul language whenever she goddamn well pleased, to eat rich, to fuck who she wanted to fuck and to fire who needed to be fired even if they broke into tears. It was
personal.
She did not care to hitch her wagon to anyone else, because she knew truth, happiness, success, all of what was deep and holy, was already present in the car with her. She just didn’t have access to any of it tonight and wanted someone with her in the passenger seat.

Because fear of death, boy, that has a way of menacing your convictions and making you feel lonely. Death has a way of ruining your plans and sending you on a tailspin on what should be a work night. Really, Lynn, better slow down, she tells herself. If not for your life, at least for the price of a ticket. She looks at the clock in the dash: midnight. She
loves
the Saab. What will happen to the Saab if she does, in fact, die? Better question: just where is she headed in the Saab at midnight at ninety miles an hour down Lake Shore Drive? Well, it’s probably not the ideal place to be, this club she knows on the South Side — this club Martin introduced her to, where they spent some time together, called the Velvet Lounge. And the thing she plans on doing, catching the midnight set — is not something she’s doing out of a genuine love of jazz, she admits that. She’s going there for Martin, to remember Martin, to mourn Martin. She’s going for nostalgia’s sake. So isn’t it just perfectly appropriate that the Velvet Lounge should be closed on Tuesdays? She sits in her car outside the bar, listening to “St. Louis Blues” on a CD Martin had left behind.
Got the St. Louis Blues! / Blue as I can be! / Man’s got a heart like a rock cast in the sea!
Appropriately, it’s a very short song. These stupid enduring artifacts — a bar, a song — that stick around after the lover has cast his heart into the sea, they are solace and agony both. She is drawn toward them for the promise of renewal, but the main experience is a deepening of the woe.