Woman on Top (6 page)

“I wonder if he had affairs during his marriage. Men don’t have sex twice a year,” Rachel declared.

“Maybe he sublimated all of that sexual energy into his work and that’s why he’s so successful,” Bonnie said.

“He swears that he never cheated on Judy. He’s always bragging about what a loyal guy he is.”

“How could he have had affairs if he’s so inexperienced in bed?” Bonnie asked.

“Because women serviced him. He’s probably never had to please anyone outside of work,” Zoë said.

“Can you believe that I thought I was in an exclusive relationship and sleeping with him while he’s still reading and responding to the personals in
New York
magazine?”

Atlanta was rainy and miserable. The relationship appeared over. We’d had sex dozens of times and he said he had reveled in the intimacy. Although not the sex of which fantasies are born, I liked him. Maybe because he had that veneer of power and strength that had been absent from my life after Jake’s death. But if he wanted other women’s bodies, I knew it was the end for me.

He called promptly Thursday night.

“Hi,” he said in a soft, sweet, maybe conciliatory voice.

“Hi.”

“I want you to know that I sat down this week and made a list. Since Judy died, I’ve thought about what I wanted in a woman in my next relationship and you have every quality on that list. You realize we’re entirely compatible?”

He paused.

“And I don’t want to sleep around, that’s just what my guy friends told me I could do now that I’m single and, you know, in my position. But I do want to keep dating other women. This is all too new. So can we keep dating and not have sex?”

Reluctantly, I agreed to the deal. He said he wasn’t sleeping with anyone else after all. And having experienced just a small taste of Len’s world I wanted more.

The last two weeks of February I endured knowing that Len was out there fondling other women’s breasts. But my life had taught me to be a master of endurance of far more painful events than whose nipples Len might be reaching for at that moment.

WINTER 1988

CHAPTER 5

February

I
t was the depth of winter in New England, snow on the ground, gray skies and bone-chilling temperatures. It had been dark for hours by the time my husband Jake got home from work. Sitting on the floor of the family room, wrapped in a blanket, I was watching the Detroit Pistons demolish the Boston Celtics. A diehard Celtic fan, I felt heartbroken.

When Jake walked in he sat down on the couch and looked sullen. Something seemed to be upsetting him, and not just the basketball game I assumed he’d listened to on his car radio.

“I have a lump on my shoulder.”

It was all he said, but it was enough.

I felt my blood turn to ice. I turned off the television -worrying about the fate of the Boston Celtics suddenly seemed ludicrous.

This wasn’t Jake’s first lump. Nine years previously he had a fibrosarcoma removed surgically, a slow-growing solid tumor in the muscle of his abdominal wall. The doctors told us then that if he were tumor free for ten years he would be considered cured. Over those nine years we had two children, Jake had flourished in his career as a pediatric radiologist and I had gone to law school. We had lived our lives. Now, the other shoe might have dropped.

Jake removed his tie and then opened the collar of his shirt so that I could see and feel the enemy. It looked tiny, pea-sized. If this was cancer, it had been caught early. That is, if it was nowhere else in Jake’s body.

I looked into his large brown eyes.

“It’s very small and feels soft. I thought cancerous lumps were hard.”

“Cancer can come in soft little packages too,” Jake said.

We knew perfectly well that once you’ve had cancer, you’re at a greater risk to get another cancer. The lump did not go away so Jake had it removed two days later.

Jake went to work as usual. Our six-year-old daughter Chloe was at school, our three-year-old son Ben napping when the call came.

“Bad news. The biopsy showed Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. I need chemotherapy.”

His voice sounded calm, almost serene.

“WHAT?” I screamed.

“I’m with the oncologist,” he said. “He wants to get started right away. It’s a very aggressive tumor.”

I began to cry. Nothing could hurt as much as this did.

Jake came home an hour later. I looked at him and tried to imagine what chemotherapy would do to him. As always when he came home from work, the tail of his shirt was hanging out of the back of his pants. I loved the way he could be so unassuming about his appearance, so absent-minded in his habits.

He lumbered into the house. As a child his nickname had been Old Father Time. His brother would run up and down the hilly streets near their house in Lawrence, Massachusetts while Jake plodded along far behind.

We looked at each other for a long time.

“After I got the results,” Jake said, “the surgeon took me to Henry, one of the hospital-based oncologists. He’s good but we’ll get a second opinion anyway. He said I’ll need to have a bone marrow biopsy.”

Neither of us could sleep that night. There were hours of rolling around in the sheets trying to fall asleep, staring at the ceiling and then surrendering. There would be no sleep.

“I’m wondering what I did to deserve this? All those years struggling to get through college, medical school and training and now what?”

“You never did anything to deserve this. Let’s see what happens with the CAT scan tomorrow. We’ll do whatever it takes to get you well again.”

In the morning we walked the halls of the Radiology Department where Jake worked. Some of the doctors and technicians Jake worked with looked at us but none of them said much of anything. What was there to say?

The CAT scan seemed to take forever but the news appeared good. The only evidence of tumor was the small pea Jake had found on his shoulder. So we went to talk with Henry in his office in the basement of the hospital. Henry looked slight, a short man. He didn’t seem dynamic or on a crusade to cure cancer. A local doctor who took care of cancer patients to the best of his abilities.

Henry and any number of doctors told us to consult Dr. Davis, a world-class expert on lymphoma, at one of major cancer hospitals for our second opinion. Our next stop.

Dr. Davis, a man I assumed to be in his late fifties, looked his part: the prestigious, learned doctor complete with gray hair and chiseled features. Yet there was a reticence about him, an awkwardness with people.

“Jake, you’re going to need a combination of chemotherapy drugs including Methotrexate and Adriamycin,” Dr. Davis began.

“When I was an intern we called those ‘the red death.’”

“Then you are aware that your urine will turn red, you’ll probably experience severe nausea and there is the potential for disastrous effects on your immune system,” Dr. Davis explained.

Jake did not respond.

“Jake, you’ll get six doses over the course of four and a half months. We used to give many more doses, but the side effects outbalanced the effectiveness of the chemotherapy. In other words, it wasn’t the cancer that killed you.”

“What determines if I have a good prognosis or not?”

“You have an excellent prognosis, Jake,” Dr. Davis said. “Your tumor is very small, it’s localized and you discovered it very early.”

“My local oncologist mentioned that I might need a bone marrow transplant. What do you think?”

“You don’t need a bone marrow transplant. Definitely not. By the way, your local oncologist can treat you. You don’t need to travel here for the chemotherapy.”

Jake and I flew out of there. We could handle four and a half months. We had our marching orders and were ready to forge ahead to the front lines.

Time to tell our children.

Bedtime was special to Jake and Chloe. They would curl up on her bed and read until Chloe fell asleep rolled into her father’s large body. Chloe usually took a long time to fall asleep, and often Jake fell sound asleep in her bed before her. That night Jake tried to explain.

“Remember how Mommy and Daddy went to see the doctor? It turns out that I have a lump on my shoulder. The lump is made of cells called cancer. We want that lump to go away, and the only way to make it go away is with some very strong medicines. It will take a while, but once the lump goes away, I’ll be fine.”

“Why do you have to make the lump go away?” she asked. “What’s so bad about cancer?”

“Cancer cells are bad cells, they’re not good for the body. If you let the lump grow it will just keep getting bigger and bigger and hurt all the good cells.”

So far, so good. Chloe seemed attentive but not upset.

“Chloe, this medicine I’m going to take will make a lot of my hair fall out. The medicine gets rid of cancer cells but it also hurts hair cells.”

“It’ll grow back, right?”

“Of course. And then everything will be okay again.”

Jake looked at Chloe. She said nothing but looked bewildered, as if her life was about to change but she couldn’t figure out how.

Jake hugged her and told her how much he loved her.

“I love you, Daddy.” She hugged him back.

And that was enough for one night.

The much easier task of telling Ben fell to me.

“Ben, do you remember how Daddy and Mommy went to see the doctor?”

My three year old nodded.

“The doctor says Daddy has a bad lump on his shoulder called cancer. Daddy’s going to take a strong medicine that will get rid of the lump but his hair will fall out for a little while because the medicine is very strong. Then Daddy will be fine. Okay?”

“Okay. Now can you read the book to me?”

“How’d it go?” I asked Jake when we were ready to go to sleep ourselves.

“You can never tell with Chloe”

“Ha! If that’s not the pot calling the kettle black.”

Chloe, at six, was Jake in miniature, as pretty as he was handsome and just as sweet and mellow. Calm, diplomatic, and gentle, both of them would avoid confrontation at all costs. Trying to get Jake or Chloe to talk about anything wrong felt just hopeless.

Chloe got away with a lot where her father was concerned. Jake was always on Chloe’s side against the world and she knew it. They shared this special bond. There was magic in that voice of his, and he used it on his daughter when others would have long lost their patience. More than once I had to page Jake at work so he could talk to an inconsolable Chloe. Once, in the middle of a procedure, he had the tech hold the phone because his hands were gloved while he soothed his daughter until she calmed down.

Jake cherished this child who shared music and books and secrets with him, who looked at the world the way he did. She loved to follow him around, and sometimes he let her come with him to work on a Saturday. While at the hospital Jake wore a lead apron to protect himself from radiation when he performed procedures. One day Chloe asked one of the doctors, “Why’s my daddy wearing an apron at work?” For a long time, she believed the answer: “Your Daddy is washing the hospital dishes.”

Three-year-old Ben was as different from his sister as he was from Jake. An impulsive, impish, enthusiastic, stubborn little boy who had all of his feelings either written on his face or on the tip of his tongue. He could be aggressive, but in the same way a crocodile can be pacified by rubbing his belly, Ben could be tamed by Jake. Ben would lie on his back in his father’s large lap while Jake rubbed his feet and soothed his wild child.

The Friday morning Jake was to receive his first treatment, we woke up to an enormous snowstorm. School was cancelled for the day, chemotherapy wasn’t. We couldn’t call up and say we’d like a snow day; the cancer was rapidly dividing in Jake’s body. When we stepped outside to leave for the hospital the air felt crisp, the woods filled with snow.

I tried to imagine the fear the Jake must be experiencing. More than once I’d awaited in terror the results of a biopsy on a suspicious mole, a lump in my breast. While I sat there waiting for the doctor, I would close my eyes and pray. I played the same games everybody plays, promising God anything for a good result.

I’d been lucky up to now. But if a doctor told me the words Jake had been forced to hear? Would I faint or cry or scream? How lucky to never have to hear the “C” word applied to you because your life changes and the clock starts ticking a whole new way. You are now living on cancer time.

SPRING 1995

CHAPTER 6

April

A
re you ready to stop dating other women?” I asked Len during another one of our marathon calls. We had not had sex in weeks but were always on the verge.

“I’m ready. Can you meet me on Friday night?” he responded.

He was waiting for me in the parking lot of a small motel about an hour from my house. He kissed me on the lips briefly and carrying a small bag he led me into our room.