Things You Should Know (17 page)

She nods.

“See you Friday.”

We leave. I am holding her hand, holding her pocketbook on my shoulder, trying to be as good as anyone can be.

“Why don't they just say ‘eviscerate'? Why don't they just come out and say, on Friday at nine we're going to eviscerate you—be ready.”

“Do you want a little lunch? Some soup? There's a lovely restaurant near here.”

She looks flushed. I put my hand to her forehead. She's burning up. “You have a fever. Did you mention that to the doctor?”

“It's not relevant.”

 

Later, when we are home, I ask, “Do you remember our third date? Do you remember asking—how would you kill yourself if you had to do it with bare hands? I said I would break my nose and shove it up into my brain, and you said you would reach up with your bare hands and rip your uterus out through your vagina and throw it across the room.”

“What's your point?”

“No point—I just suddenly remembered it. Isn't Kibbowitz taking your uterus out through your vagina?”

“I doubt he's going to throw it across the room,” she says. There is a pause. “You don't have to stay with me now that I have cancer. I don't need you. I don't need anyone. I don't need anything.”

“If I left, I wouldn't be leaving because you have cancer. But I would look like an ass, everyone would think I couldn't take it.”

“I would make sure they knew it was me, that I was a monster, a cold steely monster, that I drove you away.”

“They wouldn't believe you.”

She suddenly farts and runs, embarrassed, into the bathroom—as though this is the first time she's farted in her life. “My life is ruined,” she yells, slamming the door.

“Farting is the least of it.”

When she comes out she is calmer, she crawls into bed next to me, wrung out, shivering.

I hold her. “Do you want to make love?”

“You mean one last time before I'm not a woman, before I'm a dried old husk?”

Instead of fucking we fight. It's the same sort of thing, dramatic, draining. When we're done, I roll over and sleep in a tight knot on my side of the bed.

“Surgical menopause,” she says. “That sounds so final.” I turn toward her. She runs her hand over her pubic hair. “Do you think they'll shave me?”

I am not going to be able to leave the woman with cancer. I am not the kind of person who leaves the woman with cancer, but I don't know what you do when the woman with cancer is a bitch. Do you hope that the cancer prompts the woman to reevaluate herself, to take it as an opportunity, a signal for change? As far as she's concerned there is no such thing as the mind-body connection; there is science and there is law. There is fact and everything else is bullshit.

 

Friday morning, while she is in the hospital registration area waiting for her number to be called, she makes another list out loud: “My will is in the top left drawer of the dresser. If anything goes wrong, pull the plug. No heroic measures. I want to be cremated. Donate my organs. Give it away, all of it, every last drop.” She stops. “I guess no one will want me now that I'm contaminated.” She says the word “contaminated” filled with disgust, disappointment, as though she has failed, soiled herself.

It is nearly eight
P.M
. when Kibbowitz comes out to tell me he's done. “Everything was stuck together like macaroni and cheese. It took longer than I expected. I found some in the fallopian tube and some on the wall of her abdomen. We cleaned everything out.”

She is wheeled back to her room, sad, agitated, angry.

“Why didn't you come and see me?” she asks accusatorily.

“I was right there the whole time, on the other side of the door, waiting for word.”

She acts as though she doesn't believe me, as though I screwed with a secretary from the patient services office while she was on the table.

“How're you feeling?”

“Like I've taken a trip to another country and my suitcases are lost.”

She is writhing. I adjust her pillow, the position of the bed.

“What hurts?”

“What doesn't hurt? Everything hurts. Breathing hurts.”

Because she is a doctor, because she did her residency at this hospital, they give me a small folding cot to set up in the corner of the room. Bending to unfold it, something happens in my back, a hot searing pain spreads across and down. I lower myself to the floor, grabbing the blanket as I go.

Luckily she is sleeping.

The nurse who comes to check her vital signs sees me. “Are you in trouble?”

“It's happened before,” I say. “I'll just lie here and see where it goes.”

She brings me a pillow and covers me with the blanket.

Eric and Enid arrive. My wife is asleep and I am still on the floor. Eric stands over me.

“We're sorry,” Eric whispers. “We didn't get your message until today. We were at Enid's parents'—upstate.”

“It's shocking, it's sudden, it's so out of the blue.” Enid moves to look at my wife. “She looks like she's in a really bad mood, her brow is furrowed. Is she in pain?”

“I assume so.”

“If there's anything we can do, let us know,” Eric says.

“Actually, could you walk the dog?” I pull the keys out of my pocket and hold them in the air. “He's been home alone all day.”

“Walk the dog—I think we can do that,” Eric says, looking at Enid for confirmation.

“We'll check on you in the morning,” Enid says.

“Before you go; there's a bottle of Percoset in her purse—give me two.”

During the night she wakes up. “Where are you?” she asks.

“I'm right here.”

She is sufficiently drugged that she doesn't ask for details. At around six she opens her eyes and sees me on the floor.

“Your back?”

“Yep.”

“Cancer beats back,” she says and falls back to sleep.

When the cleaning man comes with the damp mop, I pry myself off the floor. I'm fine as long as I'm standing.

“You're walking like you have a rod up your ass,” my wife says.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” I ask, trying to be solicitous.

“Can you have cancer for me?”

The pain management team arrives to check on my wife's level of comfort.

“On a scale of one to ten, how do you feel?” the pain fellow asks.

“Five,” my wife says.

“She lies,” I say.

“Are you lying?”

“How can you tell?”

The specialist arrives. “I know you,” he says, seeing my wife in the bed. “We went to school together.”

My wife tries to smile.

“You were the smartest one in the class and now look,” he reads my wife's chart. “Ovarian cancer and you, that's horrible.”

 

My wife is sitting up high in her hospital bed, puking her guts into a metal bucket, like a poisoned pet monkey. She is throwing up bright green like an alien. Ted, her boss, stares at her, mesmerized.

The room is filled with people—people I don't know, medical people, people she went to school with, people she did her residency with, a man whose fingers she sewed back on, relatives I've not met. I don't understand why they don't excuse themselves, why they don't step out of the room. I don't understand why there is no privacy. They're all watching her like they've never seen anyone throw up before—riveted.

She is not sleeping. She is not eating. She is not getting up and walking around. She is afraid to leave her bed, afraid to leave her bucket.

I make a sign for the door. I borrow a black Magic Marker from the charge nurse and print in large black letters,
DO NOT DISTURB
.

They push the door open. They come bearing gifts, flowers, food, books. “I saw the sign, I assumed it was for someone else.”

I am wiping green spittle from her lips.

“Do you want me to get rid of everyone?” I ask.

I want to get rid of everyone. The idea that these people have some claim to her, some right to entertain, distract, bother her more than I, drives me up the wall. “Should I tell them to go?”

She shakes her head. “Just the flowers, the flowers nauseate me.”

An hour later, I empty the bucket again. The room remains overcrowded. I am on my knees by the side of her hospital bed, whispering, “I'm leaving.”

“Are you coming back?” she whispers.

“No.”

She looks at me strangely. “Where are you going?”

“Away.”

“Bring me a Diet Coke.”

She has missed the point.

It is heartbreaking seeing her in a stained gown, in the middle of a bed, unable to tell everyone to go home, unable to turn it off. Her pager is clipped to her hospital gown, several times it goes off. She returns the calls. She always returns the calls. I imagine her saying, “What the hell are you bothering me for—I'm busy, I'm having cancer.”

Later, I am on the edge of the bed, looking at her. She is increasingly beautiful, more vulnerable, female.

“Honey?”

“What?” Her intonation is like a pissy caged bird—
cawww
. “What? What are you looking at? What do you want?”
Cawww
.

“Nothing.”

I am washing her with a cool washcloth.

“You're tickling me,” she complains.

“Make sure you tell her you still find her attractive,” a man in the hall tells me. “Husbands of women who have mastectomies need to keep reminding their wives that they are beautiful.”

“She had a hysterectomy,” I say.

“Same thing.”

 

Two days later, they remove the packing. I am in the room when the resident comes with a long tweezers like tongs and pulls yards of material from her vagina, wads of cotton, and gauze, stained battlefield red. It's like a magic trick gone awry, one of those jokes about how many people you can fit in a telephone booth, more and more keeps coming out.

“Is there anything left in there?” she asks.

The resident shakes his head. “Your vagina now just comes to a stop, it's a stump, an unconnected sleeve. Don't be surprised if you bleed, if you pop a stitch or two.” He
checks her chart and signs her out. “Kibbowitz has you on pelvic rest for six weeks.”

“Pelvic rest?” I ask.

“No fucking,” she says.

Not a problem.

Home. She watches forty-eight hours of Holocaust films on cable TV. Although she claims to compartmentalize everything, suddenly she identifies with the bald, starving prisoners of war. She sees herself as a victim. She points to the naked corpse of a woman. “That's me,” she says. “That's exactly how I feel.”

“She's dead,” I say.

“Exactly.”

Her notorious vigilance is gone. As I'm fluffing her pillows, her billy club rolls out from under the bed. “Put it in the closet,” she says.

“Why?” I ask, rolling it back under the bed.

“Why sleep with a billy club under the bed? Why do anything when you have cancer?”

During a break between
Shoah
and
The Sorrow and the Pity
, she taps me. “I'm missing my parts,” she says. “Maybe one of those lost eggs was someone special, someone who would have cured something, someone who would have invented something wonderful. You never know who was in there. They are my lost children.”

“I'm sorry.”

“For what?” she looks at me accusingly.

“Everything.”

“Thirty-eight-year-olds don't get cancer, they get Lyme disease, maybe they have appendicitis, on rare occasions in some other parts of the world they have Siamese twins, but that's it.”

In the middle of the night she wakes up, she throws the covers off. “I can't breathe, I'm burning up. Open the window, I'm hot, I'm so hot.”

“Do you know what's happening to you?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You're having hot flashes.”

“I am not,” she says, as though I've insulted her. “They don't start so soon.”

They do.

“Get away from me, get away,” she yells. “Just being near you makes me uncomfortable, it makes my temperature unstable.”

On Monday she starts chemotherapy.

“Will I go bald?” she asks the nurse.

I cannot imagine my wife bald.

“Most women buy a wig before it happens,” the nurse says, plugging her into the magic potion.

One of the other women, her head wrapped in a red turban, leans over and whispers, “My husband says I look like a porno star.” She winks. She has no eyebrows, no eyelashes, nothing.

We shop for a wig. She tries on every style, every shape and color. She looks like a man in drag, like she's wearing a bad Halloween costume, like it's all a horrible joke.

“Maybe my hair won't fall out?” she says.

“It's okay,” the woman in the wig shop says. “Insurance covers it. Ask your doctor to write a prescription for a cranial prosthesis.”

“I'm a doctor,” my wife says.

The wig woman looks confused. “It's okay,” she says, putting another wig on my wife's head.

She buys a wig. I never see it. She brings it home and immediately puts it in the closet. “It looks like Linda Evans, like someone on
Dynasty.
I just can't do it,” she says.

Her scalp begins to tingle. Her hair hurts. “It's as though someone grabbed my hair and is pulling as hard as they can.”

“It's getting ready to go,” I say. “It's like a time bomb. It ticks and then it blows.”

“What are you, a doctor? Suddenly you know everything about cancer, about menopause, about everything?”

In the morning her hair is falling out. It is all over the pillow, all over the shower floor.

“Your hair's not really falling out,” Enid says when we meet them for dinner. Enid reaches and touches her hair, sweeps her hand through it, as if to be comforting. She ends up with a handful of hair; she has pulled my wife's hair out. She tries to put it back, she furiously pats it back in place.