BY EARLY NOVEMBER in Boston the trees have lost most of their leaves. On wet days the branches and trunks are black and slick-looking. In the afternoons a damp hard wind blows off the harbor, and then darkness swells up out of the tar streets, and the traffic lights shine like jewels. It is not winter but no longer truly fall, and the tourists are gone, and the city is stripped down to a tight rhythm of moneymaking: the mouths of subways suck in clots of workers and breathe them out again across town; the streets are full of taxis and delivery trucks and touched with a kind of coldness and sadness I have always secretly liked.
I like it right through Thanksgiving, and the first snow, and Christmas, and then, near the middle of January, I begin to hate it. The days will never be warm again, I’ll never wear a T-shirt and running shorts again, or see women walking down Massachusetts Avenue with their legs bare and happiness on their faces. There is ice on the river, or the water is purple and raw. Why would anyone want to live here?
But November is fine. Smart carpenters have gotten their outside work finished by then-Gerard and I learned that the hard way one year-so, by Election Day, we had Jacqueline’s addition closed in and clapboarded.
Once we had the outside work done, we cut open the tight pink rolls of fiberglass insulation and stapled them into the stud bays, a miserable job that makes your wrists and neck itch for hours afterwards. On top of the insulation we stapled sheets of clear plastic, to keep the water vapor that’s inside the house from penetrating the walls and making the insulation damp and ineffective. And when that was done we began to put up the wall-board-Sheetrock, it’s usually called.
Hanging “rock” is not a particularly enjoyable job. The board itself is made of pressed gypsum, heavy and awkward, and the cuts and joints have to be done just right. Most carpenters used screws and drills by then, but I have a crazy need to do some things the out-of-date way, so Gerard and I used hammer and nail. The trick to nailing up Sheetrock is to press the board tight against the studs with one hand and hit each nail hard enough so that you make a “dimple,” but not so hard that you cut through the gray paper that holds the pressed gypsum in place. Later, you fill the dimple with joint compound and sand it smooth, and if you do it right, when the wall is painted, the nail and the dimple don’t show. The best old carpenters have a feel for it, and, high or low, swing so that the business end of the hammer strikes the wallboard flat-on.
Gerard was a past master at dimpling. That Election Day morning-it was sunny and nice, low fifties-I heard him in what would be Jacqueline’s guest bedroom giving her a lecture on Sheetrock. “The Greeks discovered gypsum, you know,” he said. “Gypsos, they called it. In America, factories started mass-producing this stuff right around World War Two, which put a lot of plasterers out of business. My dad was a plasterer. He went to school at night to become an environmental engineer, but then he became a barber. He was one of the first unisex barbers in Greater Boston. He actually invented the disposable razor for women, but had the patent stolen from him by a big corporation I won’t name.”
“Really?” Jacqueline said. She was too savvy to be buying much of it, but she liked him anyway, liked us both. From what she’d told us, there weren’t that many laughs to be had in the hallways of the Harvard Physics Department. Sometimes when Gerard would be thirty feet up on a ladder reciting Ovid, or we would be bored with nailing subfloor and were going back and forth with lines from movies (“Chollie! Chollie! They took my thumb, Chollie!”), I’d look over my shoulder and catch her watching us, and she’d smile and turn away.
My friend Gerard could be a goofy soul. But he was a good carpenter, one of the truly superb dimplers of all time, a natural teacher, too. I listened to him trying to persuade Jacqueline to take his hammer in her hand.
“I’ll ruin something,” I heard her say.
“What could you possibly ruin? Here, try it where the baseboard will go. That way if you make a little mistake you’ll never see it. Go ahead. Dimple away.”
At lunch, after Jacqueline had gone off to work and Gerard had calmed down a bit, I asked him if he was going to vote for Governor Valvoline, who had been good enough to keep Janet on the payroll after her boyfriend went gorilla, and decent enough to cease and desist from saying he loved her at close range. In the weeks leading up to the election she had been working twelve-hour days.
“Not,” Gerard said, “in two million years.”
“Who then? Captain Privatize?”
“Privatize your aunt,” he said.
“Who then?”
“Nader. I want to send a message to the big multilingual corporations.”
“Nader’s not on the ballot.”
“Sure he is. You hit the button for Buchanan, Patrick J., and it counts for Nader. Everybody knows that.”
“Buchanan’s not on the ballot either,” I said. “It’s Valvoline, Captain Privatize, or the Libertarians.”
“The Librarians, then. I’m bookish on libraries.”
“Be serious a minute,” I said.
“Alright. Valvoline is the boss of the love of your life, correct?”
“Correct.”
“But there’s just something about him we don’t like, am I right?”
“Right.”
“We don’t know exactly what it is, but he’s, you know, kind of a mook. And we don’t vote for mooks even if good people work for them. Alright, Captain Privatize is as rich as an Arabian prince and wants to bust unions and strap the bad guys down and jolt them. The Librarians want the government to leave everyone alone, rely on people’s natural good-heartedness, and hope everything works out. Where does that leave us?”
“Up the well-known creek.”
“Exactly.”
“But not voting is un-American.”
“Precisely,” he said. “Which is why yours truly is going hanging chad.”
“It’s a kind of dimple.”
“Dimple gone wrong.”
I took a sip of root beer and watched an ambulance go past, lights blinking, siren off.
Gerard said, “I’m glad we had this talk,” and stood up to go back to work.
I WAITED IN LINE at the polling place in my work clothes-boots, jeans, and an old Boston University Varsity Rowing sweatshirt with gypsum dust on it.
I get sentimental when I go to vote. My precinct includes a neighborhood that’s mixed in every direction: white lesbians in business suits, Honduran maids just finished with a day’s work at the hotel, Russian Jews who remember Stalin’s voice on the radio, black ironworkers with their AB hardhats in one hand, Waspy white guys with gypsum dust in their hair. Looking at an improbable mixture like that when I’m in line to do my democratic duty, I think: There’s no country on earth anywhere near this good. And then, later, that it is a great country, and we have welcomed people from everywhere on earth, but that we somehow never really live up to our own grand rhetoric; that if we were half what we claimed to be, we’d long ago have cured every illness on the planet, and wouldn’t have hungry kids in Kansas or the Bronx, and a million or two million people in prison. And so on. I think about the whole mad, spiritless rush we call the working week. I sink and sink.
In the end, that day, after wandering the moral maze for five or six minutes in the little booth, and feeling the usual election-day depression creeping up my leg, I cast my vote for the Idealist Party candidate, a write-in ballot: Rossi, Janet, S. And then I went home to get ready for the victory bash.
THE ELECTION-NIGHT party for Charles S. Valvelsais, a.k.a Charlie Valvoline, was held at the third most expensive hotel in Boston, a twenty-two-story palace with a lobby so heavy on mirrors, brass, and oriental carpet that you felt as though you were in an Ashkabad hookah joint where the lights had accidentally been turned on. Janet had been asked to help make some of the arrangements-a kind of demotion for her, Valvoline’s idea of payback-and as I walked down the carpeted corridor toward the noise of the ballroom, I couldn’t keep a bad thought from attaching itself to me. It was a thought I’d had before, and it went something along these lines: Janet had compromised herself and I had not.
Hoping to change the world, she’d aligned herself with a man who was mixed-up inside, decayed, corrupt, false, whereas I hadn’t aligned myself with anyone and had stayed pure. I knew this kind of thinking was distilled bullshit, 180 proof, and I knew it came from the bad soil of a feeling that I hadn’t done as much with my life as I could have-I’d been given a good brain, a good education, a healthy body, and hadn’t helped anyone who really needed help, hadn’t given much back to the world besides a few dozen well-built additions scattered around Greater Boston, two small houses, eight garages, a hundred little repair jobs. I’d started medical school with the intention of doing what my mother had done-spending a life making sick people feel better-and then I’d somehow gotten tired of cramming scientific facts into my brain. I’d made an invisible turn, inward, thinking I’d be better off healing myself first, before I went after anyone else. Some days that seemed like a good decision, important, humble, mature; other days it seemed like escape. I had a room full of paintings, a short string of failed romances, no wife, no prospects for children. And in a certain kind of light, all that could take on the mean glint of failure, and that failure could make me start to tear down people who had done something more valuable. In that light, even Chuck Valvoline had led a more useful life, and I wondered if Janet ever compared us that way, if she had bad little thoughts about me that stuck to her, if those were the kinds of thoughts that ate away at the tissue of love, year by year, until you went looking for a replacement.
But once I turned into the noisy ballroom-a happy, comical scene-it wasn’t too hard to shake those thoughts. The interior world, the world of art and musing, the world of working with your hands-those places had their value. And I was more or less satisfied with the man I had become, stupidities and all. On that night, I was almost at peace.
The huge room was filled with men and women who believed that Valvoline was as good as we could do just then, a well-meaning guy in a tough profession. His supporters stood around in funny hats and shirts with his name written on them. They glanced up expectantly at the TV screen above the stage. They sipped drinks and laughed and leaned placards in the corners. They hugged and shook hands and their voices bounced in a crazy speckled roar against the walls. Valvelsais. Valvelsais. Vahlv-sai, Vahlv-sai. The name flashed everywhere you looked, but the man himself was sweating it out in a suite somewhere above us, surrounded by his closest aides, TV on, phones in constant use, paper plates with pizza slices and Styrofoam coffee cups strewn across every horizontal surface.
Janet was up there, and all of a sudden I wondered if I should just go to O’Casey’s, watch the returns on TV, and call her the next day. I hadn’t seen her in a while, though, and I missed her. And she’d told me there was a chance she could slip away from Command Central sometime after 8:00 p.m. when the polls closed and the first numbers were announced and there was nothing left for her to do. We’d had a two-minute phone conversation at noontime, and she’d told me the exit polls were saying what all the other polls had said: too close to call. There had been a happy spark in her voice, the thrill of battle maybe, or the end of a long stretch of work. Or even just the anticipation of seeing me.
I helped myself to a plastic cup of Pepsi and a celery stick, and I stood in front of one of the large screens and watched Johanna Imbesalacqua, my favorite news anchor (because I liked her name and because she had announced the events of September 11 with tears streaming down her face), filling airtime until the first results could be posted.
A pleasantly plump, partly drunk woman came over and stood beside me. She had a drink in one hand, and beautiful brown hair with reddish highlights in it, and little silver crucifix-earrings. After a minute she asked how I thought it would go, and I tried to sound worried and said it was too close to call.
“You really think so?”
“What I really think is he’s going to win in a landslide.”
“Really?”
“Sure. Look who he’s up against.”
“Isn’t it odd?” she said. “How could anyone vote for that man?”
She moved half a step closer. Her eyes wavered when she spoke and I guessed she had been drinking since the first bottles were set out. “I mean, what are his qualifications?”
“He has money. He talks tough.”
“I think he has a lot of unresolved anger,” she said.
We looked up at the screen. Johanna’s face had been replaced by an advertisement that showed a blond model driving an SUV through deep mud.
“What’s the message there?” the woman asked.
“Any stupid thing a man can do, a woman can do just as well,” I said, and she laughed with her head thrown back.
“What do you do for work?”
“I’m a carpenter.”
It was loud there in the ballroom, and I have the typical Boston accent, and she didn’t, and she misheard. “Boston’s finest,” she said. “Are you undercover tonight?”
“No,” I said.
“You sure?”
“Positive.”
“My ex was a fireman,” she said. “One election night we had sex while we were watching the returns. It was Reagan and Mondale. Every time another state was announced for Reagan, I made him just stop and be absolutely still. I wouldn’t let him move until I said so.”
“Republicanus interruptus,” I said, and she threw back her head again, gleam of gold in her mouth.
“He was hot and bothered that night, I’ll tell you.”
“No wonder.”
There was a little pause in the conversation, another flashy commercial-one of the fast-food chains pretending its hamburgers were fat and juicy-then the woman tapped me on the arm and said, “You wouldn’t want to get a room upstairs and celebrate in private, would you?”
I looked at her. She seemed lively and happy. Under the happiness I thought I could see old hurts running, old disappointments, things she had hoped life would give her, and was still hoping life would give her. I thought of those hopes as little toys with batteries, only the batteries had almost all run down. This kind of thing-a proposition from a nice-looking woman after a few minutes’ conversation-had happened to me only once before. It was New Year’s Eve at a ski resort, and I’d been so surprised I hadn’t handled it the way I should have. This time I put my hand on her upper arm and squeezed gently and said, “My fiancée’s meeting me here in a little while. Otherwise I’d be at the desk with my credit card in two seconds.”
She nodded. A smile went wobbling across her mouth. She said, “Well, in some other life, then,” and drifted away.
When she was gone I watched the TV screens for another little while, watched the crowd, sipped my Pepsi. It wasn’t the place for me. I walked out of the ballroom and back down the corridor. In the glassy, brassy lobby I went up to the reservation desk and paid for a room, then rode up in the elevator with a man, a woman, and three small children. One of the children leaned against my leg without looking because he thought I was his dad. His mother smiled down at him, and then at me.
In the room, I dialed Janet’s cell and, when she answered, a huge loud cheer went up where she was. We had to wait for it to die down. “This is Doctor Entwhistle,” I said, when she could hear me. “I’m in Room 876.”
And she said, “Good news from all directions. Ten minutes.”
AT FIRST, WAITING for her, I turned on the TV, which was hidden in a fairly well-built oak-veneer cabinet at the foot of the king-sized bed. But by then I had slipped all the way down my usual Election Day slope from sentimental to cynical, so after a few seconds I turned it off and closed the cabinet and lay flat on the bedspread, looking up. I had always loved the feel of a nice hotel room, the order and anonymity. Before my brother and sister and I grew too old for it, my parents had liked to take us to New York or Montreal for special weekends. Once, we’d spent two nights at the Gramercy Park Hotel, in two rooms. I remembered the big beds and musty curtains, the way the boards in the hallways squeaked as you went across the carpet, and I remembered my father pointing out a man in the breakfast room, and telling my brother and sister and me that this hotel was the man’s home. “Nothing to hammer or paint,” my father said. “No trash to take out. No meals to prepare.”
In some odd way, Ellory and Lizzie and I had been marked by that moment. We’d become more up-to-date versions of that man in the breakfast room: solitary lives, not a lawn to mow among us. It was strange, my parents had been so perfectly professional and so politely suburban, and their offspring had gone methedrine-Reno and monk on them, gone carpenter-artist. Two of us more or less happy in our own oddball ways, and the third…I promised myself to call Lizzie, soon. She’d try to make me feel guilty, because that’s what she felt. She’d end up yelling at me when I refused to send money. She’d hang up in a righteous addict’s huff. I’d call her anyway. It was good to get yelled at every once in a while. It might keep me from turning out like some of the well-off young couples in my neighborhood-fretting over what flavor of fair-trade coffee to buy and cutting into line at the checkout when you looked the other way.
“You want to have kids of your own,” I said aloud in that room. “That’s all. You want a love like that, close against your life. You want that to be your contribution.” And then there was the sound of knocking.
I hadn’t seen Janet in nine days. She’d been flying all over the state with our glorious governor and his team on a last-hour vote-getting polka. I opened the door all expectation. She was dressed up for the big night in a dark purple spaghetti-strap dress and her hair was brushed and beautiful, but her cheeks were sunken and her eyes large and the muscles above her collarbones and around her shoulders looked like they’d shrunk by half. In nine days. She watched my eyes as if she knew what she looked like and was hoping something on my face would show her she was wrong, that the mirror lied and the scale lied and the breathing gauges lied. Pity made another run at me then, but I had already made up my mind about pity.
“Hi,” I said, holding out my hand. “Doctor Entwhistle. Come in, you’re right on time.”
After a small hesitation, she shook my hand and smiled. “Hello, Doctor. I have forty-five minutes, tops.”
“Forty-five minutes will do. Come in, take off your dress and your shoes, please, and sit on the edge of the bed.”
When she was undressed and sitting there, I checked the reflexes of her knees with an imaginary rubber hammer and said, “Excellent.” I examined her toes and fingers, running my own fingers along them and feeling the way they were rounded because the blood vessels there had been starved for oxygen for years and years and had grown thick with overwork. She was the perfect patient, and I was a considerate doctor, and, at first, it was just a cute little love game we were playing to keep the conversation away from other things. It was a minute or two before I realized what kind of trouble we were in. But I couldn’t think of anything else to do, so I kept going. I wrapped my thumb and middle finger around her left bicep-thinner than my wrist-and pretended it was a blood pressure cuff. “One-forty over ninety-one. Are you agitated?”
“I ran all the way up here,” she said. She coughed.
I took her pulse-eighty-one-pretended to flash a light in her eyes, poke an otoscope in her ears, check her tonsils with an imaginary tongue depressor.
At last she said, “I’m having sexual problems, Doctor. It’s embarrassing to talk about.”
“Ah.”
There was some kind of warning siren going off inside me. I ignored it. I asked her to stand up and remove her brassiere and I spent a long time examining her breasts and nipples, and then the scars on her belly. “Trouble digesting?”
“Only when I eat.”
“Ah.”
I turned her around and tapped gently on the bones of her spine. I worked down from the back of her neck, feeling my way lightly along the rounded trail of bones between her shoulder blades, then along the lower curve. I folded down the elastic top of her underwear and pressed my thumbs in against the dimples there, expertly. An expert failure. Standing close behind her, I ran my palms down the outsides of her upper arms and she shivered. And then, because pity made another run at me, I wavered for two seconds, and then just plunged in. Pretending to hold a stethoscope to the back of her lungs and pretending to steady her with my left arm around the front of her chest, I said, “Have you ever had a bronchoscopy?”
“A hundred and eleven times.”
I could hear what I wanted to hear in her voice then, a will toward humor, toward grace, a courage so enormous it seemed to radiate around her like a second body. I felt small beside it. I said, “Deep breath for me now, Ms. Ross.”
“Rossi.”
She took a shallow breath, all wet trouble.
“Again, please.” I was running my hand across her nipples.
“Cough now, please,” I said, and she started coughing and could not stop. She coughed and coughed and sucked in air, her back muscles tight as iron. I panicked inside myself. I reached back on the bed and balled up my T-shirt and held it to her mouth and she spit into it. I felt a change in her then, an anger or a frustration or a bitterness rising. She wiped her mouth and threw the T-shirt hard at the TV cabinet and turned to me, but before she could say anything I was kissing her mouth, the kiss of kisses, and then turning her onto the bed on her back.
And then I was trying, with everything inside me, with all my own pain and understanding of pain, with my own small supply of courage and strength, with everything the world of work and musing had taught me about being alive, I was trying to show Janet what I felt about her. I did not want to try to squeeze it into words because words cannot hold certain things, any more than a painting or a photograph can.
Beneath me on the bed she was weaker than I remembered, her skin warmer, the arms around my back sharper-edged. I wanted to put my whole self inside her, muscles, bones, breath. I timed my breath to her breathing. I slid my right hand underneath her and lifted her off the sheets with me and I wanted to have pity on her and have no pity at all. I wanted her to feel like she was running but without having to run. I wanted her to escape the pain of breathing hard and be lifted out of her body and into a warm sea of pleasure. My face was pressed into her neck and she was humming a quiet song, coughing once, taking quick breaths and then making a string of sounds like the sound of someone working, pushing toward something, more and more urgently, and then all the urgency was gone and she was breaking open against me, a breaking apart, a death, two deaths, and for a little blessed while we weren’t two packages of bone and blood, but one package, every pain erased, every protection gone. I had never felt anything like that.
LATER, GOING DOWN to the ballroom in an empty elevator, Janet held my arm in a way that seemed to me a gesture of pure love. She had called the governor’s suite, and when she got off the phone she told me they could tell now-from returns in certain precincts in the western part of the state-that Valvoline was going to win by four percentage points or so. “He calls them ‘manure-rakers,’” she said. “It’s shorthand for rural people. ‘Spuds’ is shorthand for Irish, ‘Garlics’ for Italians. ‘Twiddles’ for gay people. As in: ‘Nettie, get me a meeting with some voices in the Twiddle vote, but make sure it’s not on TV.’”
“We should be glad then, Nettie. The manure-rakers have come through for our guy.”
“We should be glad,” she said, “because Nettie still has her health insurance.”
But we weren’t glad then, in spite of the feeling we’d had on the big hotel bed upstairs. I remember the warmth of her arm against my body as we came out of the elevator, and I remember walking down the corridor and hearing a burst of wild happy yelling pour out of the open ballroom doors, and I remember feeling that we were being sucked away from the mysterious and the real, and back tight against something toxic, a Superfund site of the soul. It wasn’t only Valvoline. It was just all of us, shit-rakers, Twiddles, Spuds, stuck in our individual skin-packages, afraid of our dying and our demons, always clawing for more-a breath, a break, an orgasm, a corner office. Janet and I moved into the ballroom as if wading into a hot bubbling tidal pool.
We sipped from plastic glasses of wine. Janet introduced me to people she knew, mostly State House types who had played some small role in the campaign. I watched the way her friends looked at her, and I could see, in their faces, beneath the happy gleam of victory, a species of fear, of love.
At quarter past ten, when Valvoline came down for his speech, the room exploded with cheering and applause. He worked his way up onto the stage. Women were hugging him. Men were shaking his hand and looking into his eyes and clapping him on the back as he squeezed past them toward the podium. For a little while, Janet went up on stage with the crew, and when the governor was introduced I clapped right along with everyone else, and even flashed him the thumbs-up sign once, when I thought he looked my way.
JANET WAS TOO TIRED to drive herself home, and she needed her vest and inhaler, so after the party we left the hotel and I drove her to her apartment on Beacon Hill. She put her arms through the holes in the vest and pressed the Velcro straps together and did her half-hour of chest PT, spitting mucus into a little bowl, her body shaking and her mouth twisting down, as if she were a kid on a funhouse ride she was tired of. While she did that I wandered around the room. I’d been there a few times, but had never really looked at the pictures-Janet in a soccer uniform, her tough-looking dad in work overalls, her mother beside a small new car. She sucked on her inhaler, popped a pile of pills into her mouth, had a hit of oxygen, and we went to bed. In her small bed, with the lights out, she rolled over against me. Her breaths were short strips of wet cloth being torn out of her, one by one.
“I’m taking a week off to see if I can get back some strength,” she said quietly near my ear.
“Good.”
“I’ve moved up three slots on the transplant list.”
“Double good.”
For a few minutes I listened to the traffic on Beacon Street and to the building’s old pipes knocking. I thought she had fallen asleep-she was tired enough, but the oxygen always kept her awake for a while. Her right foot twitched twice. She ran the sole of it over my calf. She swallowed.
“You know I’ll never last long enough to get new lungs, right, Jake?”
“No, I don’t know that.”
“I’m about half a step away from going back into the hospital. The last lung function test was twenty-seven percent. I’ve been around enough CF people to know what twenty-seven percent means. I’ve seen enough of my friends die, and I remember what they looked and acted like a couple of months before they died. It doesn’t make it any easier for me if you pretend it isn’t there. I don’t want that from you.”
“Alright.”
“I’d like to make it to Christmas. I’d like to buy you a motorcycle and give it to you on Christmas Eve, and buy you a leather jacket to go with it, and make love to you with you wearing the leather jacket and nothing else.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t sound so excited.”
I had two minutes then of not being able to get any words out. She was running the sole of her foot over my instep. During those two minutes my mind, my strange mind, was absolutely consumed with an image of her father, balanced on a staging 150 feet above the Mystic River, patching concrete and obsessing about his daughter. I had spent a little time with Giselle’s mother and dad after her service, and had some idea what the grief of a parent felt like. I thought about them, too. In the warm room-so warm we had only a sheet over us-I was buried under the idea of what it might feel like to know your child was going to die before you died, and how she was going to die, and having to watch that as it happened, to live those days and those hours and those minutes, one after another, year by year.
“Earth to Jake,” Janet said tiredly. “Jake, come in. Over.”
I tried to talk but it was like trying to pull myself out of myself.
“Begin reentry.” She coughed and kept coughing and climbed tiredly out of bed and went into the bathroom for a while, then came back. “Coast straight down through the gloom cloud, it’s clear here on Beacon Hill.”
“Coasting down,” I finally managed to say. I felt tiny beside her then. Tiny and not brave. There had been a time when I thought her father was a coward for doing what he’d probably done, but his picture was so close on the night table that I could have reached out and held it and I had nothing bad to think about him then. Nothing. Not one bad thought.
“Mum Rossi wants you for Thanksgiving dinner.”
I had my eyes closed. My arm was around her. I could feel her ribs.
“RSVP ASAP.” She nudged me with her knee.
I couldn’t say anything. I could not squeeze out one sound.
“You can bring a date, if you want. A marathon runner. A triathlete. An oarswoman from your college days.”
She pushed me, hard. I said, “I’d like to bring Helen.”
“Who is Helen?”
I coughed. I took two breaths. “Remember the blond in the painting I was working on the first night you slept over?”
“Who is she?”
“Helen.”
“Right. Don’t be an ass. Who is she to you?”
“My mother.”
A MELIA ROSSI, IT turned out, was one of those people who get their satisfaction in life from having guests in the house, cooking for them and watching them eat, making a fuss over them, making them happy. I remember reading that in some places, in ages past, opening your house to strangers had been considered an essential part of being human, an acknowledgment of some kind of invisible link. I like that kind of thing. I like warmth and uncalled-for kindness, the small unnoticed generosities that speckle the meanness of the world. Often, over the years, customers would make Gerard and me a bowl of hot soup at lunch, or bring out iced tea and cookies. Once, when Gerard was having a tough time just after his divorce and the woman whose garage we were rebuilding was a psychotherapist, she’d taken him into her office for a half-hour session, gratis. Those small gestures always lifted us out of the work routine and put a kind of polish on the day.
Janet’s mother wanted me there for Thanksgiving, then she wanted me and my mother. Then me, my mother, and Gerard. Then me, my mother, Gerard, and Patricia and Alicia, his twins. I was afraid that, next time Janet talked to her mother, Gerard’s ex-wife, Anastasia, would get an invite, too, and though Anastasia is a fine woman and a good mother and an excellent dinner companion, it probably would have meant trouble, having her and Gerard looking at each other over a turkey carcass. But Anastasia was visiting her dad in a nursing home in Carlsbad, California. So, on Thanksgiving Day we had a two-pickup caravan heading out to the blue-collar suburb where Amelia Rossi lived and where Janet had grown up: Mum and I in front; Gerard, Patricia and Alicia bringing up the rear.
My mother was having a fairly lucid day. I’d told her we were going to my girlfriend’s mother’s house for Thanksgiving, and that seemed to make her happy. I’d been having a peculiar feeling all that morning, though, even before I’d driven to Apple Meadow to pick her up. Something was haunting me, some bad breeze from a forgotten dream, some premonition. I thought it might be because one of my favorite uncles had died on Thanksgiving Day, years before, so the holiday was always ringed in black for me.
The sky was low and gray, the winds wirling, and the truck felt less than perfectly stable on the road. To make things stranger, on the way over the Mystic River Bridge, as I was thinking about Janet’s father again, my mother said, “We forgot to pick up Dad at work.”
“Dad’s gone, Mum.”
“Gone where?”
“He died.”
“Of what?”
“Two strokes.”
She fell silent for a while, as if the shock and sadness of this fact had knocked her back down into a world of feelings that wrapped themselves around her like wet sheets. She sat there, wrists crossed in her lap, bouncing on the truck’s old seat, making her way all wrapped up and with great concentration along one dim interior alleyway after the next. Her husband was dead. Why had that happened? What did it mean?
On the north side of the bridge we left the highway and stopped at a traffic light, and in the mirror I could see one balding head and two blond ones. That cheered me up.
A MELIA ROSSI’S house was a one-and-a-half-story box with an attached garage, set behind a swimming-pool-sized patch of lawn. Janet had parked at the curb, leaving a driveway just big enough for one caravan. Gerard and I worried we were making too much work for Mrs. Rossi, so to compensate for that we’d brought along half a supermarket aisle worth of here-we-are gifts: wine, cider, eggnog, chestnuts, two cheesecakes from a famous Jewish deli in Brookline, a bouquet of flowers. We climbed out into the driveway and unloaded the cargo. I was nervous, for twelve different reasons, buffeted by cold winds and demons. Handing a package of chestnuts and a half-gallon of eggnog to Patricia and Alicia, respectively, I said, “And all the guests were amazed that the father of the bride had saved his best eggnog for last.” Even my mother looked at me as if I were crazy.
The house had been built into the slope of a hillside, so that from out front the first floor seemed like a second floor. I looked up. Janet’s mother stood in the picture window there, a vision of what her daughter would have been with thirty more years and one different gene: plump, pretty, happy, shining a little beam of good feeling down on people she had never seen.
Patricia dropped the bag of chestnuts. They spilled out and rolled off lopsidedly in five directions, and by the time we collected them and made our way to the front door, Janet’s mother was standing there. She greeted the twins by getting down on one knee. “But who, who are these two perfect creatures at my front door?”
They said their names at the same time. By then, Amelia had a hand on each shoulder. “I can tell you apart already. Patricia has a pink dress on, and Alicia’s dress is pink!”
The girls squealed, showed her their offerings, made an attempt at the curtsies Gerard had been ridiculously trying to teach them. Squeezed into the six-foot-square entranceway, we made our introductions. Gerard kissed Amelia’s hand and spoke a rehearsed phrase in Italian, even though I’d told him three times that Janet’s mother did not speak the language of languages and had never spoken it. Amelia took my mother’s hands in both of hers, said something about having heard so many good things about her, and about her son.
My mother said, “Yes, Ellory’s chief of surgery now.”
Amelia had been briefed on the situation. “Oh, how wonderful,” she said. “You must be very proud.”
“I am.”
When it was my turn, she thanked me for the cheesecakes then reached up on her tiptoes, kissed me on the mouth, and gave me the kind of hard squeeze that surprises you and makes you smile. Above us, I could smell the turkey cooking, and I said what you usually say, that it was nice to meet her, and nice of her to invite us, that I’d heard wonderful things about her, too. And then I said, “Your daughter is a precious gemstone in my life.”
This was not the kind of thing I was known for saying. And it was spoken, naturally, into one of those moments when everyone else has gone quiet-just a little pocket of accidental silence, so that the precious gemstone part went up the stairwell and thumped around in the small house like a pigeon with a broken wing. Gerard was halfway up the stairs by then. He stopped and looked back at me, lifted his eyebrows and held them up there in one of his comic faces. Janet’s mother started to cry, and wiped at her eyes with her fingers, smearing a little bit of makeup. The silence stretched out. I rushed to think of something else I could say, but from the top of the stairway Janet called down, “Pay no attention, Ma. He says dumb things when he’s nervous, that’s all.”
Amelia couldn’t quite get everything back together, though. We were standing looking at each other, a background song playing “Precious Gemstone.” The tears kept squirting out. “Go up, go up,” she said at last, taking hold of my elbow and turning me, and when I started up the carpeted stairs she ducked outside for a breath.
Janet had met everyone and was leaning against the top of the railing, looking gaunt and breathing very badly. “Nice going, Romeo,” she said hoarsely before I kissed her.
In three minutes, Amelia was back in the kitchen, dry-eyed. We heard the hinges on the oven door, and she was prodding the turkey with a long fork. Janet made a fuss over the girls the way her mother had, getting down on one knee and holding her hands behind her back, then bringing the hands out one by one and giving each girl a certain kind of doll Gerard had told her they liked: soft, long-legged creatures with their hair in dread-locks, the fashion of the season. She set them up with The Sound of Music on the bedroom VCR, then came back and poured wine for my mother and me and a glass of orange juice for Gerard. I was looking at her and pretending not to, a new trick of mine, and I did not like what I was pretending not to see.
Gerard told Amelia he enjoyed watching people cook-which was true-so we all ended up standing at the kitchen door in a knot, taking turns setting our glasses down and carrying out dishes of sweet potatoes and lasagna. There were good smells everywhere, plates and forks and butter knives shining on a gold embroidered white tablecloth, Tony Bennett on the stereo. I kept sneaking looks at Janet. Just before Gerard volunteered to start carving the turkey, she disappeared into one of the bedrooms and I heard the sound of the oxygen machine, food for the starving rest of her, its dull bubbling hum already standing next to some-thing else in my mind.
In the room where the girls were watching their movie, I heard the Mother Superior singing “Climb Every Mountain.” Gerard went in to fetch them. My mother was fingering a photo of Janet’s dad, naturally, of all the pictures on the side table. Amelia called us in to eat. I had little lines, little hot currents running in my legs and hands, the universe sparking bad messages through me. I went into the bedroom to call Janet to the table, and she was sucking in a last few breaths. Before she knew I was there, I saw what I had seen before, a strange thing to see: she was holding the oxygen tube in place under her nose and pricking her finger for a blood-sugar level at the same time, and it was as if she were somehow outside her body, tending to it as if it were a machine, an appliance, without being annoyed or affectionate, as casual and unperturbed as if she were cleaning crumbs out of a toaster oven. People had jumped off bridges because they couldn’t deal with this, and stepped outside to cry on a holiday because they couldn’t deal with this, and lay awake on a couch in a room filled with paint fumes, trying to deal with this. She was cleaning crumbs.
She saw me, checked her number, set the tube back in its clip and the blood-sugar meter back in its neat leatherette holder, and turned the tank dial to Off.
I said, “I came to ask if this would be a good time for a quick roll in the so-called hay.”
IT LOOKED TO ME, when we first sat down, as though Janet’s mother had cooked for the seven people at the table, and also for another seventeen or twenty people who were standing patiently in the leaf-strewn driveway and who would be allowed in for a second seating once we had eaten ourselves into unconsciousness. In my family we had always made a good meal of the bird itself surrounded by various species of root crop under gravy, and something green for good measure. But to describe the Amelia Rossi table you’d have to add lasagna, cheese balls, meatballs, and hot sausage in tomato sauce, grilled green peppers stuffed with spiced bread crumbs, mushroom caps stuffed with the same bread crumbs, broiled mashed pumpkin with about a stick of butter melting on it, baked beans, white beans, green beans. The middle of the table was covered with dishes, the counters were covered with dishes. If we’d all sat there eating until there were two shopping days left until Christmas, we’d still have had three or four different kinds of pie, cake, ice cream, and the deli desserts to work on.
Janet had warned me: “It’s a ritual offering to the god of excess. Don’t have any breakfast and go light on dinner the night before. Tell Gerard, too.”
Mrs. Rossi managed to give the clear impression that she would be permanently offended if we left so much as two cheese balls on a plate, uneaten. This was conveyed via pleasant little remarks-“Oh, no, a big man like you? Who works so hard? That’s all you want?”-followed by insistent spoonfuls of meat-balls, mashed potato, pumpkin, white beans. I don’t even like white beans and I ate a cup and a half or so.
We teased the girls, made a big fuss over them, then left them alone to torment each other and try to eat. The conversation tripped and puttered for a while, settling eventually, for no particular reason, on the Big Dig, a gigantic construction project that was sucking money out of the state budget and would do so for years to come.
“I say this,” Gerard proclaimed. “I say whoever it is who’s embezzling hundreds of millions of dollars from the Biggus Diggus is perfectly within his rights.”
“His or her rights, Dad,” Patricia said. “We learned it in preschool.”
“I stand corrected, and hereby apologize to the legions of corrupt female construction magnates. Perfectly within his or her rights. An enterprise like this takes the old rusty elevated roads of our great city and does the only thing you can do with them: erases them from the collective eye. If a little money gets grafted in the process of giving us back our waterfront, there’s nothing un-American about it!”
“You’d make out fine on Beacon Hill,” Janet said. She was trying hard to join in the fun, but it seemed to take a huge effort for her to get the sentence out. Between words she made a couple of small grunting noises I’d never heard.
“I intend to run for public office,” Gerard told her. “Who was it who said, ‘If nominated I will not run; if elected I will not serve’? Bush?”
“Lyndon Johnson.”
“Well, I say: If nominated I will run, if running I will serve!”
Gerard went on and on with his nonsense, making faces for the girls’ amusement, turning to my mother with his most serious expression and scaring her half to death by shouting, “Read my lips! I did not have relations with that woman!”
Everything went along smoothly, if crazily, for a while. Soon we were drugged by the sheer volume of food. The adults ate in straight lines; Patricia and Alicia circled and wandered. They were at the age where they fidgeted a lot, getting up and down to check on their new dolls, dropping food, giggling, finding something remarkable in a mushroom cap or a blossom of cauliflower. Gerard oohed and aahed and spewed compliments in several languages. Janet’s mother encouraged and spooned and found reasons to go back and forth to the kitchen. My mother had always had a good appetite and she seemed to be following the conversation in a fairly alert and congenial way. And then, as if the fog in which she lived suddenly blew clear of the best-trained part of her mind, she realized, when the second round of plates was being removed, that Janet was sick.
Janet had been coughing. She’d left the table a couple of times for bathroom runs, for oxygen. She had eaten almost nothing. Twice I saw her set her fork down and sit very still. The second time she did this she looked up at the top of the wall and took a series of short quick breaths with a shadow of fear over her eyes. It was the shadow that caught my mother’s attention. I saw her stop eating and look across the table. “What’s wrong, dear?” she asked.
“Nothing.” Janet took a few slightly longer breaths, grunted, and gasped out, “I’m fine.”
The girls sat still for once, turning up their pea-green eyes.
“She’s alright, Mum.”
“No, Ellory, she isn’t.”
Gerard said, “Mrs. E., what I want to know is why you haven’t come out to see the gorgeous addition we’re building in Cambridge. Don’t you love me anymore?”
But my mother’s attention was locked on Janet and she didn’t answer.
“What’s wrong, Papa?” one of the twins said.
Mrs. Rossi brought something into the kitchen that didn’t need to be brought there.
“What is it, dear?” my mother asked.
“I have lung trouble,” Janet told her, almost in a whisper.
“Is Janet going to die, Papa?”
“Die? What are you talking about, Lishie?”
Patricia was clutching her rag-headed doll in a stranglehold.
“What is it?” my mother persisted. She started to get out of her seat and I put a hand on her arm.
“Janet has cystic fibrosis, Mum.”
“What is that, Papa? Uncle Jake?”
“It’s a sickness,” Janet gasped. “I’ll be alright.”
But alright wasn’t written on her face. Amelia was standing in the doorway now, behind Janet, watching my mother over the table.
“She was a doctor,” I explained.
My mother’s eyes had not moved. “How did you live so long?” she asked Janet.
“Just lucky,” Janet answered.
My mother kept staring, the girls sat stone still. Amelia had not moved from the doorway, but she’d started to cry again. She had her right hand wrapped tightly around her left wrist, and her left hand was squeezing open and closed in a quick, unconscious rhythm. Her pretty, oval face had completely changed and was painted in a shade of hope, a terrible species of tearstained hope, that I had never seen before and never want to see again. Over the top of her daughter’s head she was looking fixedly at my mother as if, there, hidden in the shadowed valleys of her brain, might lie one treatment or medicine or procedure or idea that none of Janet’s doctors had thought of.
She knew my mother was not in full possession of her faculties, but the word “doctor” seemed to have had some magical effect on her. I’d seen this before in my life, many times. It was part of the reason I’d dropped out of med school.
All of this was compressed into maybe three seconds, but they were an unbearable three seconds.
I said, “There are new treatments now.”
It was absurd. I’d meant it as an answer to my mother’s question, but it came out sounding as if I had good news to share, a latest development snatched from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation website just that morning. Janet’s mother turned the beam of her terrible hope on me, and it was like a sweeping searchlight that stops on you, picking you out of the anonymous blackness, freezing you there, blinding you. Janet fixed me with a look that was worse than that. She frowned and made a small shake of her head. But I could not stop myself. “She’s on the list for a lung transplant,” I announced stupidly.
Amelia was wringing her hands in that odd way, blinking and blinking, waiting for the news. I could not meet Janet’s eyes.
“What is that, Papa?”
Gerard started to explain, and my mother searched around in a buried history of a million lessons and terms and hospital rounds and patients and the families of patients, plucked one word out of her memory, and spoke it-“Cadaveric”-just as Janet started to cough. The cough was something monstrous and drawn out. It was half roar. She kept coughing and couldn’t catch her breath. All her concentration was focused on the act of coughing and then breathing a small gasp of a breath, coughing again, reaching for a bit of breath. Her eyes were down, but I knew she knew it was frightening the girls, and she pushed hard against the table and stood up, accidentally tugging on the tablecloth enough to topple her wineglass. The glass fell and cracked open against the platter of meatballs, splashing them with shards and Riesling. Janet was standing, turning away. Gerard took hold of her arm, but she shook free and made for the back bedroom. We heard the cough going on in there, a hideous animal sound. I waited for it to stop but it didn’t stop. My mother had lapsed into silence. Patricia and Alicia had both started to cry. Janet’s mother went into the room with her. Gerard said, “Tricia, Lishie, it’s alright. We’ll have cake.”
When I went into the room, Janet was “tripoding,” leaning straight-armed on the bed with the clear tubes clipped on underneath her nostrils, but the booming cough wouldn’t let her go. I knelt down in front of her on one knee so I could look into her face. She was making small shaking motions with her head. I thought she wanted me to leave, but when I stood up to leave she took hold of the fingers of my left hand and squeezed so hard that I winced. She shot her eyes up at me.
“Call an ambulance,” I said to her mother. “Now.” And I watched to see if Janet would make some gesture-No-but she only roared out another swampy cough and kept squeezing.
IT TOOK SIX minutes for the ambulance to come, another four minutes for the attendants to have Janet out the door, strapped to the gurney, the oxygen mask on and something injected in her arm that had immediately started to calm the panic reflex in the muscles of her chest.
Strange, what you remember. For those ten minutes I was concentrating on nothing but keeping Janet alive-making sure the clear tubing didn’t slip from its place, keeping a hand or both hands on her body to calm her-but the image that has planted itself in my mind is the image of Gerard scooping ice cream onto wedges of cake for his two girls as we followed the attendants along the six-foot hallway and down the stairs. My mother had gotten up from the table and was resting one hand on the railing of the stairs. Janet’s mother stayed three-quarters of an inch behind the ambulance attendants as they were carrying her daughter-feet first-down toward the door. I was a step behind, watching Janet’s chest. But what I remember most clearly is one glimpse of Gerard. He had two forks in his mouth and was waggling his big black eyebrows and at the same time spooning out huge scoops of chocolate ice cream and twitching the forks this way and that way in his lips-anything to tease a smile from his twins, anything to scrub the terror from their faces. Later, with the help of his daughters, he would clear the table, pack away all the uneaten food except for a kind of picnic plate for Janet, which she would never eat, wash and dry the dishes, sweep the kitchen floor, and leave a note for Janet’s mother telling her what a wonderful cook she was.
My friend, el macho.
Before they slid the gurney into the back of the blinking ambulance, with half the neighborhood out on their front steps, watching, I put my hand on Janet’s thigh. She flapped her fingers around, caught my hand and squeezed. She boomed out a cough, the mask jumped, and the vein in the side of her neck bulged. Her mother climbed in, the doors closed, the siren startled us.
With my mother belted securely into the pickup’s passenger seat, puzzled still, mute, pondering, I sped along the holiday-empty streets, and back over the bridge into Boston. At the hospital I parked with two wheels up on a curb not far from the emergency-room entrance.
By the time they let me in to see Janet, she had already been given a breathing treatment and was coughing less violently, exhausted and asleep. She lay on a stretcher in the emergency room, pale and gaunt and alive, the pulse monitor reading 121, antibiotics dripping into her arm, a hemoglobin saturation monitor there, too. Nurses, doctors, and phlebotomists walked calmly here and there, checking digital readouts, unwrapping sterile needles, their running shoes squeaking on worn linoleum. And that was the horror of it: this was routine to them-people choking their way back and forth across the border between life and death, people with their stomachs blown open by gunshots and their necks broken in car crashes and their babies’ faces burned with hot oil. Routine as could be. And for everyone else it was a hideous nightmare.
I have always believed that, conscious or not, people know if someone they care about is beside their bed. So I stood there for a long while with both hands on Janet’s left arm, watching her face and her chest as it moved up and down in quick flexes. Her mother-drugged a bit herself-stood at her other shoulder. My mother was behind Janet’s mother, swinging her eyes right and left. The scene was vaguely familiar to her, a face from the distant past, a painting that hints at something you’re sure you recognize, just hints at it, just suggests it, but leaves you to puzzle it clear.
AFTER AN HOUR and a half, Janet was moved upstairs to a semiprivate room. There was no one in the other bed. Her aunt Lucy arrived, a small, dark-haired woman with the same kindly toughness that radiated from Janet’s mother, and from Janet, too.
We all slipped into hospital time, that strange, slow wash of quarter-hours where you feel cut off from the rhythm of the rest of the world, trapped in a sterile, off-white room with the faces of the nurses changing at three o’clock. We took turns standing next to Janet’s bed. We touched her on the arm or leg, adjusted the blanket, looked at the machines, and then walked away past the empty bed to the window and stared down at the gray city. My mother sat in an orange armchair and watched a college football game on the TV, looking up at me from time to time with a cloud of daftness over her eyes.
At some point late in the afternoon, after we’d been standing there for several hours watching Janet sleep, Lucy persuaded Janet’s mother to go home. Janet was going to be alright for now, there was nothing we could do to help. I told Amelia I’d stay and talk to the doctors, and call to give her the report, and she squeezed me and kissed me again, and cried against my chest and went reluctantly out the door, clutching her sister’s arm.
Not long after they left-half an hour, an hour and a half- a tall, slightly stooped man with an unfriendly mouth-Doctor Wilbraham-came in and introduced himself. We had spoken more than once during Janet’s last hospital visit, her “tune-up,” but he did not remember me. Janet said he was a big supporter of the governor, a yachtsman and a perfectly competent pulmonologist, with the bedside manner of a tuna fish. “She’s in no immediate danger,” Doctor Wilbraham said, in a rumbling, Charlton Hestonesque voice.
“We thought she was going to die.”
“Yes,” he said, meeting my eyes briefly.
My mother had gotten up out of her chair and sidled over and was listening in.
“What about the transplant?” I asked.
“She’s on the list.”
“I know she’s on the list.”
He looked at me with the smallest wrinkle of irritation on his lips. His face was almost a perfect rectangle, straight gray eyebrows, straight brown and gray hair brushed straight back. His eyes traveled down to my work boots and back up to my face, as if what I was wearing would dictate the type of answer he ought to give. As if he spoke several languages and was trying to choose one I might actually be able to understand.
“Will she live long enough to make it to the top of the list?”
“We can never say. There is a continual ratio of approximately five potential recipients to each available pair of lungs.”
“How much longer is she going to live?”
“We can’t possibly say.”
“A month? A year? When you see people like this, with her lung function numbers, how much longer do they usually live?”
“It varies.”
“Between what and what?”
He took a breath and sighed. “Between a day or a few days and perhaps a few months, depending.”
“On what?”
“Many factors.”
“Can we change any of those factors?”
“We’re giving her powerful drugs,” he said, in a tone you might use to describe the Dewey decimal system to a four-year-old. “Drugs called ceftazidime and gentamicin.” I thought for a minute that he was going to spell them out very slowly. G-E-N-T…Beside me, my mother was nodding. “We had to take an arterial blood gas reading, which is quite uncomfortable. If that reading is not too bad and if she gets no new infections-”
“So you’ll want her to stay in the hospital.”
“Probably, yes.”
“Until when?”
“Until compatible lungs become available.” He reached out and patted me on the shoulder, already leaning toward the door. “You can call us with more questions if you think of them.”
I stayed as long as I felt my mother could stand it, going down to the cafeteria once with her, for sandwiches and coffee, and then coming back up. Darkness had fallen long ago. My mother had given up on the football and on the TV, and had taken to walking back and forth along the length of the room, talking to herself in a quiet voice. I knew her well, of course, every wrinkle around her eyes, every spot on her hands, every lilt and dip of her high, warbling voice. But I had never spent that much time with her in a hospital, and I could see another woman stirring and rising up. I waited for her to click back into her doctor-self, but that did not happen.
At eight o’clock I kissed Janet twice on the ear, and whispered something there, then I walked with my mother down to the elevator and out through the quiet lobby. She hooked one arm inside my elbow.
“A ticket,” my mother said, when we were close enough to the truck to see. Cold gusts were whistling off the river in the darkness, twirling up eddies of grit and brittle leaves.
I stood next to the truck in the cold with the parking ticket in my hand and my back to the hospital and my mother. Cars and trucks bunched up on Storrow Drive, then the light changed and the lines of traffic moved forward, a holiday pulse of steel, smoke, and glass. I looked out over the lanes of cars, at the arc of lights on the bridge that ran past the science museum and into Cambridge. It seemed to me then that there certainly had to be a God. But that He or She or It was a mean-hearted trickster God, a God of impossible coincidences and patterns, a God who let you walk along the levee for a while on a sunny winter day and then shoved you off into the icy water. God of men and women leaning out of a broken window on the 103rd floor with a thousand-degree jet fuel fire below them and their kids in elementary school; God of the screaming businesswoman going through the sky in an upside-down aluminum tube, and the man she shouldn’t have been sleeping with beside her; God of the choking and the suffocating and of their mothers and aunts and lovers. How could Ellory believe the way he believed? How had my own mother lived with seeing so much suffering all those years and not thrown herself off a bridge?
I tore the ticket in half and then in half again and then in twenty bright orange pieces and tossed the pieces up into the wind and turned so as to have the satisfaction of watching them scatter. Some of the pieces caught in my mother’s golden-dyed hair. She was watching my little performance without blinking-sadly, it seemed to me-as if she had expected more from her son the doctor. She hadn’t said two audible words in two hours. I could see that she was working hard at something: the muscles near her eyes were pinched and she would periodically run the side of her right index finger across the corner of her eyebrow. Everything was a puzzle, and the puzzle had a billion scattered pieces, and she was searching through them to find just two that fit, just two, a starting place, a handhold.
I picked the orange scraps out of her hair, helped her into the cab of the truck, and drove her back to Apple Meadow. Ellory had told me once that the wise monks of the third century had come up with the idea that suffering was grace. It was absurd. The hot desert sun had done them in. “Suffering is grace, Mum,” I said bitterly. She said nothing.
At the Meadow, I walked her up the path through the cold wind, and then past the receptionist and down the salmon-walled hallway to her neat, too-warm room. While I was helping her off with her winter coat she became agitated, moving her head quickly from side to side and twisting around, something I had never seen her do. When the coat was finally off her shoulders she blurted out three words with a strange note of triumph in her voice. I hung the coat in her closet, straightened out the dresses and blouses there, closed the door. I turned back to look at her, to say good-bye, and she said the words again the same way: “Living low bar.” She was looking happily and expectantly at me, waiting for us to have one of our medical conversations, to make contact in that place again. But I was worn down by the day, and the words meant nothing. I only nodded and told her I loved her, and that my brother Jake loved her, and Lizbeth loved her, too, as I always did just before I left.
NEXT MORNING I drove to the hospital and parked in the pay garage. Janet was sitting up against the raised back of the mattress. The nurses had brushed her hair, and it lay smooth and black and without luster on the pillowcase and on her thin shoulders. The skin beneath her eyes was as dark as if she’d been punched. The oxygen machine hummed. The ceftazidime and gentamicin dripped into both arms. Really, the only parts of her face that looked right were the almost-black irises, which she turned on me the second I stepped through the door.
“I’m the orgasm counter from the Guinness Book of World Records,” I said, because the room smelled like death to me, and I did not want that to show on my face. “We understand you’ve made a claim.”
She gave me a frail smile and turned her eyes to a little half-hidden alcove where the door to the bathroom was, and where her mother was standing.
I said, “Good morning, world’s greatest cook,” and drew a second flimsy smile before Amelia went through the door and we heard the lock’s loud click.
“Nice going,” Janet said. Her voice was very hoarse.
“I love the taste of shoe leather in the morning. How are you?”
She shrugged and turned away. Her eyes filled up.
I stood next to the bed, took hold of her fingers, and looked at her hair on the creases in the pillow, then swung my eyes around the room-at the plastic bag that had been put into the wastebasket as a lining, at the empty second bed with its yellowish curtain, at the clear plastic box on the wall for used needles. Everything in the room was perfectly clean but slightly worn and plain, all ready for the next person who would come through, the next routine catastrophe.
“Mom and I have been having a little spat,” Janet said, without turning her head back to me. Her lips were dry and cracked.
We heard the toilet flush, and then her mother struggling momentarily with the door latch.
“About what?”
Janet didn’t answer. Before her mother came out of the bathroom she said, still not looking at me, “What would I have to pay you to get me out of here?”
“A full body massage and eighteen percent of your next check,” I said, and then her mother was with us, asking me to tell her what the doctors had said. I had gone home from Apple Meadow and sulked and dabbed paint on a canvas in a lazy, useless way, and only remembered about calling her at around one-thirty in the morning. I had dreamt a repeating dream in which I was driving a tractor-trailer truck for the first time and having to navigate impossible corners on narrow streets, steer it indoors between a table and chairs, reach my foot down for a brake that wouldn’t work; I had eaten three eggs and sausages and a bran muffin at Flash’s with the early morning crowd; I had waltzed into her daughter’s hospital room making sex jokes. And all that time she had been waiting to hear some piece of news on which she could set down, for a few minutes, her impossible cargo of worry.
I said, “The doctor told me we’d have to wait and see how the medicine worked.”
Even that piece of non-news sparked little wildfires of hope on Amelia’s cheeks. She sat on a chair next to the IV pole and looked at her daughter with her eyebrows up and her lips compressed. It was a “see, I told you” look.
Janet was not in the mood for “see, I told you” looks. “Could we stop playing this game, Ma?” she said. “Please.”
“Don’t you dare give up,” her mother said. “It’s a sin to give up. And you know it is. Don’t you dare do that to me.” And so on.
From where I stood on the other side of the bed I thought I could see a line of history running between them, a string of mother-daughter quarreling that stretched back to how much Sesame Street her daughter was allowed to watch.
“Ma, I’m just tired of fighting.”
“You fight. I don’t care how tired you feel. You fight, Janet Rossi.”
“You didn’t have anything jammed down your throat before breakfast, Ma.”
“I don’t care!”
Ma Rossi had a string of pale blue glass rosary beads in her left hand, and as she shot these bursts of words at her daughter, she choked the beads between her thumb and the side of her index finger.
“You say you believe in the afterlife, Ma.”
“Afterlife, afterlife. This is the life you have now. Don’t you dare do to me what your father did.”
“I’ll go get us some coffee now,” I said.
“Jake, stay.” Janet stopped and coughed, breathed in some pure oxygen, coughed some more, then swung her eyes back to her mother’s face. “Ma, it’s not the same. I just can’t bear to have you pretend, that’s all. It’s a kind of lie. It makes it harder for me.”
“Who’s pretending?” her mother almost shouted. “You don’t think I know how sick you are? I’m not smart enough to know?”
As she said the last two words, Janet’s mother exploded into tears, just absolutely exploded. Doctor Wilbraham marched into the room as if on cue. He glanced for a tenth of a second at Mrs. Rossi, a hundredth of a second at me, then took up a confident position at the foot of the bed with his hands lightly resting on the metal rail there. I pictured him at the wheel of his boat.
“You should be breathing easier,” he said.
There was something machinelike about him. He gave you the feeling that only his brain was talking, and the words weren’t coming through any filter of personality or emotion. He walked in, opened up a little door in the side of his head, let information out, let a question in, let more information out, patted his patient twice on the nearest neutral body part, then turned on his heel.
“A little.”
“Bowels move?”
Janet shook her head.
“We’ll start on some GoLYTELY”
Janet twisted her lips down and looked away. “I can do that at home, can’t I?”
“We’d rather have you here.”
“I’d rather be home. Would it be so awful for me to leave when the IV comes out?”
“You’d increase the risk of relapse. We can’t have that now.”
“Why?”
“So we can get you back on your feet, young lady.”
“Can we stop pretending, PLEASE!” Janet shouted, in the breaking, hoarse voice. The effort sent her into another long stretch of coughing and spitting. Her mother held a crescent-shaped aluminum basin up to her mouth, wiped her face carefully with tissue, and glared at Doctor Wilbraham. Doctor Wilbraham flipped through the pages of Janet’s chart. When Janet finished coughing and spitting, she fixed him with a look that could have drilled two holes in a fiberglass hull. “I’m dying,” she said. “Can we use that word? It doesn’t matter anymore if I have a goddamned relapse and you know that as well as I do. I want to go home to die. I want to go out in the air a few more times before I die. I want to see things other than the things in this room. Is that something you can understand?”
“Of course, of course,” Doctor Wilbraham said. “But what you may not understand is that we have the ability to make you comfortable here, and we don’t have that ability at your home.”
“Stop pretending,” Janet said, in a fierce whisper. “Stop avoiding the words!”
“I’m not pretending in the slightest,” he said. “You’re being melodramatic. This course of antibiotics can get you up on your feet again. You can move around the ward. You’ll be able to-”
“I want to leave the hospital!”
“You have the legal right to do that. But I’d prefer that you didn’t.”
“Why?”
“We can give you better care here.”
“Better care for what?”
“She’s giving up,” Mrs. Rossi said to the doctor, and he nodded at her, happy to have an ally.
“She wants to get out for a little while, that’s all,” I said. “That’s not hard to understand. That’s not going to-” I was looking at Doctor Wilbraham’s square head, and I was about to say, That’s not going to kill her, which is just an expression people use. But I caught myself and said, “That’s not going to make her any sicker than she already is, is it?”
“It very well might.”
“Fine,” Janet said, but I had the feeling she was saying it only because she was running out of strength, and didn’t want to argue with him that way, gasping for words while he watched.
“Very good,” Doctor Wilbraham said, but he was offended. His eyes went ricocheting angrily around from the chart in his hands to Janet’s face, and after a few seconds of that he couldn’t seem to find a way to say good-bye, so he just gave a stiff nod and marched out.
We watched him go.
“Could you get us some coffee now, Ma?” Janet said.
Her mother looked hard at her and started to say something, but Janet turned over her wrist, stretched out her fingers, and caught her mother’s hand. “Ma, please? I love you…please.”
When her mother was gone, a nurse came in with a milkshake-sized can and poured it into a tall plastic glass. “Chocolate ice cream soda,” she chirped. “You know the drill, sweetheart.” She watched until Janet started to drink, touched her on top of the head, and left us.
“I want two things,” Janet said to me when we were alone. She was tired and weak but all fire.
“Ask.”
She coughed and coughed and I held the crescent-shaped pan up to her mouth so she could spit. “When this IV is done tomorrow,” she said, as I was washing the pan out in her sink, “I want you to take me for a ride, as long a ride as I can manage. I don’t care if you have to lower me down out of the window and into the bed of the pickup, or wheel me out in a goddamned wheelchair.”
“Not a problem,” I said. I went back to the bed and faced her.
“That’s the easy thing.”
“Alright.”
“The hard thing is, I want you to take a sip of this.”
“What is it?”
“GoLYTELY. The name says it all. I have an intestinal blockage. Try it.”
I took one sip-salty pineapple soup-and made a face that drew a laugh out of her.
OVER THE NEXT TWO DAYS, Janet and I had a couple of short stretches of being alone, and two phone conversations. I was not comfortable with the idea of her leaving the hospital, but that was not something I could say. I understood why she wanted to. I understood it a little better every time we talked, but I was nervous about it. We decided it would be simpler for her just to slip out of the building, rather than be officially discharged. That way she could walk back in and take up where she’d left off if she had to, and we both knew she would have to.
Except for some psychiatric wards, it is not very hard to sneak out of a hospital. Janet had been in that particular hospital so many times that she knew the schedule of the doctors and nurses, when they made their rounds and when they took their breaks. And she’d been a patient on that floor so often that she knew which nurse would be least likely to pay attention to her when she walked down to the reading room at the end of the hall for a little exercise once the IV was done. The reading room is open to visitors. It’s a simple matter to have someone put a change of clothes in a tote bag and leave it just inside the leg of the sofa there. A simple matter to take the tote bag into the corridor bathroom, change, and then walk out and down the stairwell in street clothes. Sunday mornings are a little easier than other times to try this.
The antibiotics had, as Doctor Wilbraham promised, made Janet feel stronger, and she left a note for her favorite nurse so there would be no panic when they discovered she had gone. At nine-fifteen on Sunday morning she walked out of the building on her own, dressed in jeans, a wool sweater, and cowboy boots.
I was waiting in my truck by the main entrance. I had her winter coat and hat and gloves in the cab, and three portable oxygen tanks wrapped in their narrow blue backpacks with gold trim. When she was on the seat and warmly dressed and we were driving away from the building, she clipped the oxygen on under her nostrils, but left it there for only a few breaths.
“Where to?” I asked her.
“Manhattan. I want one night in a nice hotel. And don’t expect any gymnastic lovemaking.”
“The rings,” I said. “The parallel bars.”
She reached over and put a hand on top of my leg.
“Your mum’s going to be upset.”
“She’s at Mass. I called and left a message on her machine.”
“Doctor Wilbraham isn’t going to like it.”
Janet didn’t answer.
At that hour on a Sunday there was almost no traffic. After I asked her if she was hungry and she said no, I found the expressway on-ramp and we headed south. We drove for a long while without saying anything. The landscape there is mostly flat, and bleak at that time of year: patches of maples and oaks with a few brown leaves clinging to the branches, clusters of strip malls, and then frozen fields with the occasional sagging white Colonial presiding, the farmland waiting to be bulldozed and built on. And then, sometimes, like a surprise, an old New England town with slate-roofed houses, a mill, and church spires. I looked over at Janet occasionally as we went along. She seemed to be studying everything, drinking it, searching the American landscape for some hidden meaning that she’d missed in the last twenty-seven years. Somewhere near the Rhode Island line I asked her where she was on the transplant list.
And she said, “Stop it, Jake.” Not in any kind of an angry way, but in a plain, even tone, the way someone who knew you well might ask you to turn off a radio. So I didn’t try to start any conversation after that, figuring she ought to have everything the way she wanted it for those twenty-four hours: the place she wanted, and the food, silence if she wanted silence. I decided that if I was worth anything as a person, I ought to be able to let her be with what it was she had to be with then: not urge her to fight it if she was tired of fighting, not ply her with hope, not make her think about who might be upset or worried, not ask anything of her, nothing, just be alive with her while she was alive.
Somewhere in the southwestern part of Connecticut, just before we passed into New York State, after she’d been sucking on the oxygen for a while and quiet for a long time, she started to talk, without looking at me. “It’s so odd,” she said, and if, when we’d first met, her voice had been coming up through a wet barrel, then on that ride it was coming up through an echoing, rain-filled quarry. “It’s so odd. I think about my father all the time now. I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about him. He wasn’t an educated man, but he could imagine his way into the future in more detail than most people. He saw this, what I’m like now, he saw it twenty years ago. That’s all. When I was a girl everyone else said I looked fine, I was going to be fine, they were going to find a cure, and if I’d been born fifteen years later that would have been true probably, but…year by year he saw that that was just a hopeful lie and it slowly made him crazy. He was shaky to begin with, my mother says-his father went out on the streets a few years after he was married. ‘There’s a gene for quitting in them,’ my mother said once or twice, in her worst moments. From the day I was diagnosed-I was six weeks old-he started calling up doctors and asking them what would happen to me, and when. He never stopped pestering them. He was a big, strong, simple man, a union mason who specialized in heights, working high up. You would have loved him. If the doctors were evasive with him, he’d start to yell. He used to tell my mother about it while she was cooking dinner. I’d be in the living room watching cartoons or something and he’d be pacing back and forth in that tiny kitchen, all upset. ‘They think I don’t understand, Amelia!’ he’d yell. ‘But I understand better than they do! I understand fine! Perfect! Better than they do!’ Now my mother says the same thing.”
She stopped and put the oxygen up to her nose, and I held the pickup in the middle lane of the highway, flying past the little harbor at Westport, where most of the sailboats were wrapped up and drydocked for winter.
“Once, when I was eleven, he went to the office of the CEO of a huge drug company. He took a day off from work and dressed up in one of the two suits he owned-one for cold-weather funerals and one for warm-weather funerals, he used to say-and he drove his six-year-old Chevy down to some corporate headquarters somewhere in New Jersey, uninvited, without an appointment, and he sat in the waiting room of the president or the CEO. All day. Of course, the man wouldn’t see him. He waited and waited there in his suit as if he was going to sell them something. Finally, at five o’clock he just lost it and he went right in past the secretary and burst into the guy’s office and pounded both his huge fists on the desk and demanded to know how the guy could live with the fact that kids were dying of this disease and his company was spending exactly zero dollars on research for drugs to cure it.”
All of this didn’t come out at once. She’d speak in long, monotone, wet-quarry bursts, then take another few minutes of oxygen, then say another few sentences. I drove and listened.
“Know what the CEO said to him?”
“What?”
“My mother told me all this after he died. He said, ‘I’m sorry about your daughter, Mr. Rossi, but it’s pure mathematics.’”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning thirty thousand people have the disease in America, and you don’t make enough profit selling thirty thousand of anything to justify spending millions of research dollars. My father couldn’t wrap his mind around thinking like that. He accidentally woke me up when he came home that night, he was yelling so loud. ‘Pure mathematics!’ he was shouting in the kitchen. ‘That bastard! That son of a bitch!’”
She had started breathing more heavily, so she stopped talking for a while. We hurtled along 1-95, past the knot of glass-walled buildings that is downtown Stamford, all the confidence and optimism there, all the shine. I tried to remember if I had ever heard my father shout, in the house or anywhere besides at a Red Sox game. He arranged deals for businesses and managed money for people in an office in a thirty-four-story building downtown. He advised clients on the best kind of investments to choose so they would be as comfortable as possible when they grew old.
“They sent me to a camp for CF children when I was fourteen, because they thought it would be nice for me to be around other kids with the same sickness. But it turned out that we all ended up giving our germs to each other. They don’t do CF camps anymore because of that. The camp was where I got the cepacia, and when my father found out about it, and heard what it was, and what usually happens to people who get it…that’s when he jumped. My mother says he gave up, that he just couldn’t take it finally, that he quit. She had to go to work selling shoes at Jordan’s when he died. She’s bitter, she has a right to be-she had to sell our car and never even had another one until I bought her one, four years ago. And probably he did give up. He had problems. I remember some days he wouldn’t go to work and would just lie in his room pretending to sleep…But the thing I remember most about him is…I can almost reach inside myself and put my hand on that feeling, even now…he loved me more than anything, Jake…he…I don’t think everybody has that kind of warmth in their lives.”
“Not many people have it,” I said.
“I never told anybody this, not even my mother, but he appeared to me the day after he died. I had a vision of him. There were a lot of people in the house and I went outside alone for some reason, into the back yard, and he was there. He didn’t say anything to me, but he was there and looking at me, and I could feel that love. Really…You think I’m crazy, Jake?”
“No.”
“Or that I was temporarily crazy, or not breathing right or something?”
I shook my head. “How old were you again?”
“Fourteen.”
“It’s a lousy age to lose a parent.”
“But the reason…the thing I want to say is…” She stopped and rested. We crossed into New York State. “After I saw him there, I was never afraid of dying. I’ve seen four friends die of CF, three in the hospital and one at home. Three of them died pretty calmly, but I was holding my friend Celia’s hand when she died. I was seventeen. It was horrible. She was making horrible noises, like a dog that had been hit by a car, huge, drawn-out moans that started in her throat and rattled her whole head. Her hair was on the pillow-I remember this-and it was shaking there as if a wind were blowing through it. Her mother was hysterical, slapping Celia’s feet and legs so hard to try to keep her alive that the nurses had to restrain her. It was horrible. I worry about the pain of dying like that and I get panicky when I’m out of breath, but I never worry about being dead. Whatever else happens, it will mean I’ll just be free of this body. I won’t have to work to breathe.”
She stopped and rested again. She coughed, looked away from me. “Until I met you, I never even cared about living very much. I’d had so much time to get ready for the idea of being dead, you know. And being stuck in this body was not exactly a picnic.”
I started to say something, but she waved at me not to.
“When you jumped in the river that time after I fell in, and you came up sputtering and slicked your hair back and it was all standing straight up, at that minute I started to care. I wanted to have some fun with you. I wanted to see if…I’ve never had that much real luck with men. I mean, I had boyfriends I liked, I had enough sex. But I always felt there had to be some deeper level of intimacy that I could get to, some truer connection I could feel…So now I know I was right about that, and I know what it feels like, and I want a few more years of it. That’s what makes it shitty.” She flung one hand, palm-inward, toward the window. “But I can deal with everything else, the fear and the mess and all the ugliness and everything. I just wanted to tell you that. I just want you to be able to deal with it, too.”
WE MADE IT TO New York City by 2:00 p.m. and checked into the Waldorf-Astoria, two toothbrushes and the portable oxygen machines for luggage. I had been there once before, with my parents, when we’d gone down to New York for my sister’s sixteenth birthday, and I’d been there once with Giselle. I love the lobby of that hotel, with its tile floor mosaics, and the stupendous bouquet of flowers in a vase there on a mahogany table. I feel religious in old hotels, an urge to believe, to worship. I don’t know why. I mentioned that to Ellory once, and, without even having to think about it, he said that the whole purpose of prayer and fasting and meditation and the monk’s life was to make you stop taking everything for granted, make you actually see a table or a tree or a person, instead of worrying about survival and pleasure all the time. If you can just do that, he said, then you’re all set, as far as God goes.
So I guess I was all set then, in the Waldorf-Astoria, because when I walked into the lobby from the street, holding Janet’s hand, I was seeing everything clear-eyed.
When we got up to the room, Janet wrapped herself in the thin chenille spread and fell asleep with her clothes on. I stood at the window and looked down on Fiftieth Street and everything was a little bit shocking to me in a way that I’d almost forgotten things could be-the tar rooftops and rust-stained water towers, the windows across the way with their pigeons sitting on stone sills; down below, Christmas lights, and yellow cabs angling across traffic lanes; crowds of people on the sidewalk, so many histories there, so many different worries and loves and connections. I watched the light and color seep out of the day. I put one fingertip to the cool glass. I felt like I was linked to Janet and had been linked to her for centuries, and that we were both linked to every person in that city, and at the same time I felt a kind of warm solitariness. For a little while, everything was exactly in its place, all of it made of the thinnest porcelain. In the next breath it could all shatter and remake itself in a different form and nothing would be lost.
I ordered a twenty-dollar glass of brandy from room service, gave the young man who brought it a ten-dollar tip, and sat there sipping as the room went dark. I imagined that Janet and I had children, a boy and a girl, adopted from Vietnam for some reason. They were three or four years old, precious creatures. We were on vacation in New York with them, showing them the holiday decorations, taking them into toy stores, zipping their jackets, holding them when they threw tantrums or when they were cold. I was connected to them in the same way I was connected to everyone else, only more deeply, more warmly.
Janet said “Beethoven” in her sleep. She was a gray shape on the bed. I breathed in and let my breath slowly out, and soon I was just my ordinary self again, sitting in a hotel room with a glass in one hand, two brownish drops in the bottom of the glass, a dark night and street noise and a good soul on the bed there, near me, leaking away.
When Janet woke up I suggested a room-service dinner, but she said she was feeling strong, she wanted to go out. She was using the oxygen on and off. We called down and asked the concierge to recommend someplace exotic and not too dressy and we ended up taking a cab to a Ukrainian restaurant on Thirty-fourth Street. There we had bowls of bloodred borscht with dollops of sour cream floating in them, and then small dumplings in a thin sweet sauce. Janet ate almost none of her soup, and only two dumplings. She sipped from a cup of tea, took some hits of oxygen. I ate everything in front of me and then everything that was left over in front of her. I drank a glass of straight vodka and then two more.
“Are you getting drunk, Jake? I don’t mind if you do. Are you a mean drunk?”
“Goofy.”
“When’s the last time you were drunk?”
I thought, immediately, of lying to her, then caught myself and said, “September 11, 2001, beginning at about four o’clock in the afternoon.”
“When you knew Giselle was dead?”
I nodded.
“And then you gave up sex for a year?”
I nodded again. The couple at the next table looked over at me.
“And she wasn’t the love of your life? Brutal honesty.”
“No, she was not. Do you want me to say who the love of my life is?”
She smiled in a way I hadn’t seen her smile in two weeks, and shook her head.
I ordered one more vodka with dessert. My head had begun to shift and shimmer-it wasn’t a bad feeling. But beyond that I felt as though something, some immensely heavy grief, was being laid across my face and ears, fine thin layers of dense wet black cloth, one upon another. The waitresses wore paisley kerchiefs around their hair and short skirts, and ours came with the last vodka and the teapot on a tray beside one thin slice of fourteen-dollar white chocolate pie with a boysenberry sauce.
“Ukraine is famous for fourteen-dollar white chocolate pie slices in boysenberry sauce, you know,” I said.
Janet had two small bites. Even in her best wool sweater with her hair brushed, she looked like a woman who belonged already to another world: eyes and cheeks sunken, skin ashen, shoulders thin. I reached across the table and put my hand over her hand.
She put her fork down. “I’m being melodramatic,” she said, setting the oxygen aside as if she would never pick it up again. “I’ve been pretending it’s our last day on earth.”
“It isn’t.”
“Don’t spoil my little fantasy.”
The noisy room tilted, righted itself. The waitresses’ legs kicked past as if they were swimming there, upright.
“I’m pretending we’re in Paris.”
“I’ve always wanted to go.”
“I went once, between college and grad school. I was sitting in the Louvre when this truly ancient man sat down beside me and struck up a conversation.” She coughed, swallowed, took one careful breath. “He was Paraguayan, probably four and a half feet tall. After a few minutes he said, ‘I would like to paint you’-dramatic pause-‘in the nude.’”
“Hope springs eternal,” I said. A fresh wave of drunkenness rolled over me.
She nodded.
“He had nothing to lose. He thought he’d give it a shot.”
She nodded again. “I said no three times. He kept asking.”
“His mother told him never ever to give up,” I said, and her eyes filled right up, and my eyes filled right up, and I couldn’t get a sound out then, though I tried and tried. Don’t, I wanted to say. Not yet. But every time I tried, another little squirt of juice came up in my eyes and we were looking into two different blank middle distances, southern and western Ukraine, twin epicenters of the universe of suffering, the remains of a slice of cake between us.
WE TOOK A CAB most of the way back, then got out and walked, holding hands, along half a block of cold Manhattan night, me with my head spinning, Janet wheezing away and refusing to use the oxygen, and a circus of Christmas lights and window decorations all around us.
Up in the hotel room it was clear there would be no love-making that night-she barely had the strength to take off her sweater and clip the plastic tube under her nose-but we left the light off anyway, as if to remind each other of the pleasure we had taken from each other’s bodies, or to pretend we might take pleasure like that again. I drank three glasses of water and swallowed two ibuprofen. We took turns pissing and brushing our teeth in the dark, then climbed into the luxurious bed. She squeezed my hand once and fell asleep.
It wasn’t completely dark in the room. A thin yellow-gray light leaked in around the sides of the window drapes. The bed spun gently. When I knew Janet was asleep, I slipped my arm out from underneath her, but I lay on my back against her bare warm skin, listening to her breathe. Without meaning to, without wanting to, I started thinking about Giselle. She had tried to call me from the plane. When I came home that Tuesday afternoon, I was already just about sure she was dead-I’d called her parents. I was a big bursting bag of feelings; everyone was, that day. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. I walked into the apartment and saw the red message light on the phone machine blinking. Eight calls. The second message was full of static and commotion, and my name spoken twice in a panicky whisper: “Jake…Jake?” I listened to it over and over and over, thirty times probably, then I went out the door and walked to the nearest bar, sat there with the television going and got stupefyingly drunk.
I put my hand on Janet’s bare leg. Sirens wailed in the street. I thought of my father, who had loved his work, loved the process of solving problems, “the business of business” he used to call it, the satisfaction of matching up investors and entrepreneurs. He smoked a pipe, he sat out on the patio, he loved to talk about it with me once I’d gotten past the stupidities of my early teenage years. “Jakie,” he said more than once, “the mistake some fellows make is they see a problem-let’s say it’s a bad problem, an almost unsolvable problem, a client over-valuing his business, let’s say-they see this problem and they either throw up their hands and surrender, and walk away from it, or they rush in like novice firemen with hoses spraying every which way. Sometimes, though, the thing to do is to sit back, hold back. You watch for a little while-sometimes it’s only sixty seconds in a heated meeting, sometimes it’s a day, a week, a year-you ponder. Occasionally it is a truly unsolvable trouble and you have to be mature enough to accept that. But usually, if you just let your mind scamper around outside the fences for a while, you see one small action you might take-a word, a shift in tactics. You tug on the knotted-up ball of string, once, here, and things begin to loosen.”
THE NEXT DAY the sky was perfectly blue between the skyscrapers, and Janet was exhausted, but glad that we’d come. I took three more ibuprofen at breakfast and pondered and waited. We drove as close as we could get to the Trade Center, down there in the tight, cluttered streets of lower Manhattan. I waited. I watched the city she loved. And then, in the truck going north, I decided to say one thing to her. I said, “I’m a big fan of doctors, you know, but I think Doctor Wilbraham is a cold, worthless, stick-up-the-ass piece of horse manure.”
She nodded, almost laughed. That’s all we said on the subject. She slept most of the way back, waking only when she coughed very hard, or to adjust the clip of the oxygen cylinder. We stopped for soup and ice cream in Providence. She coughed and coughed and slumped back in her chair and ate almost nothing.
But when we got back to the hospital and she was in the bed again, and Doctor Wilbraham came marching in and started to lecture her, she held up her hand and made him stop. “I don’t want you as my physician anymore,” she said. “I don’t care if it means being transferred to another hospital, or if it means I just go home and die, I want a different doctor now.”
He puffed and huffed but she didn’t stop looking at him. I could see the steel behind her eyes. After a while, even Doctor Wilbraham could see it.