A Window Across the River (21 page)

“No, that won’t be a possibility,” Dr. Kanter said in a measured voice. “We know there’s a malignancy there. We’re hopeful we can get it all out. That’s what this procedure is about.”

Billie nodded, seeming to take it in, but Nora wasn’t sure if she really had. She might have been too frightened to understand what her doctor was saying.

Nora let go of Billie’s hand and the nurse wheeled her into the operating room.

Billie, Nora thought, had won the jump-rope contest in fifth grade.

A life goes by so quickly! We think of our lives as incredibly complicated and long, composed of many different stages, different eras, when the truth is that a life is but a single note.

Nora found a pay phone in the hall and called Isaac at work.

“I’m glad you called,” he said. “I’ve been trying to reach you. How are you doing?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Out on a limb.”

He offered to take the rest of the day off and join her at the hospital. Someone else in her situation, she knew, would have been happy for the company. But in difficult moments she usually found it easier to be alone.

“Thank you,” she said. “But I’m all right. I just wanted to hear your voice.”

Nora went to the waiting room and got some coffee from a vending machine. She knew it would taste terrible, and she could have walked a block south to a diner for a cup of decent coffee, but the masochistic austerity that takes hold of you when you’re in a hospital waiting for news about a loved one made her
want
to drink the punishing vending-machine coffee. She looked around idly for something to read, and settled on a copy of
Modern Maturity.

She couldn’t concentrate. Instead she sat in the waiting room trying to make sense of Billie’s life. Trying to figure out what her life had added up to. If you looked at one side of the ledger—that she’d wanted children, but she and Nelson hadn’t been able to conceive; that ever since Nelson’s death, she’d spent most of her free time watching TV; that she was ending up like this, attended only by her niece—it was incredible how little a life could come down to.

Thinking about all this, Nora felt old, because she was old enough to have witnessed the arc of Billie’s life. She could remember when Billie was in her thirties: exuberant, full of hope, and lucky—Billie, in the old days, had always seemed lucky; life always seemed to open its doors for her. Nora was old enough to have seen her transformed from the hopeful and high-spirited woman she was in her thirties to the ill and lonely woman she was today.

What was the key? What was the key? Thinking furiously, but with a sense that it wasn’t going to get her anywhere, Nora was trying to understand why Billie’s life had gone this way, from promise to nothing.

But maybe she was thinking about it in the wrong way. You can’t judge the quality of a person’s life from the way she ends up. Maybe Billie had lived a successful life—maybe a better life than Nora had. In Billie’s years as a pediatric physical therapist, she’d helped a great many children. Nora had once visited her at work and seen the kids clustering around her; they were all in love with her.

Dr. Kanter had said the operation might take up to two hours, after which Billie would spend an hour or two in recovery. And after that, Dr. Kanter had said, she might still be too sedated to talk. Nora thought she should probably go home for a few hours. There was nothing she could do for Billie here. She could get some writing done.

But she didn’t want to go home. Even though there was nothing she could do for Billie here, she wanted to stay.

D
R
. K
ANTER APPROACHED FROM
down the hall, and Nora could tell she had bad news, just from the way she walked.

“Well,” she said, “your aunt is in recovery. It’ll be a few hours before you can speak to her.”

“How’d it go?”

“The operation was a success,” Kanter said. “We removed the gallbladder. But, as I said, we wanted to take a look around, and I’m afraid the results aren’t encouraging. The malignancy has spread quite extensively, it turns out. It seems that her entire liver is compromised.”

Nora didn’t know anything about the body, but she knew enough to know what this meant.

“You can’t really survive without your liver. Can you?”

Dr. Kanter raised her eyebrows in an expression of sympathy, sadness, answerlessness. Her eyes actually appeared to be shot with red. Only women should be doctors, Nora thought.

“Is there anything you can do?” Nora said.

Ranter’s expression didn’t change.

“How much time do you think she has?” Nora said.

“The variations can be very wide. But I think our main
concern now should be keeping her as comfortable as possible.”

Keeping her as comfortable as possible?! But she
was
comfortable, up until this morning! She was comfortable as pie! Just last weekend we were planning to go to the zoo! It isn’t cancer that’s killing her—it’s this fucking operation that you insisted on! She was feeling fine before the operation, and now you’re talking about keeping her comfortable!

She was boiling with rage at Kanter, because all of this was Ranter’s fault, but she didn’t say anything, because she knew it wasn’t true.

“Does she have anyone to stay with her?” Dr. Kanter asked.

“No. Yes. I don’t know. There’s me.”

“It might be a good idea to look into the possibility of hospice care. There’s a patients’ rights office on the first floor where you can get the details. Medicare can pay for an attendant who can care for her at home, or if that becomes impossible for any reason, there’s a hospice in the area that I can recommend.”

A hospice! For my aunt Billie! For my aunt!

No no no no no no no no no no no no.

The thing about doctors is that they don’t stay. They’re sorry, but they have to run. Every doctor is a master of the art of backing away. And although Dr. Kanter—perhaps because she was a woman, or perhaps just because she was kind—was more willing than most doctors to explain things in detail and to listen to the concerns of patients and their loved ones, she was still, finally, a doctor, someone who had been trained to withdraw herself emotionally from the plight of the people she was ministering to. It’s something you need to learn, Nora thought, because if you don’t learn it, the daily exposure to
misery will destroy you. Dr. Kanter was moving off even as she was speaking. “Call my office,” she said. “They’ll give you the number.”

Well, this was one doctor who wasn’t going to be able to walk away. Nora blocked her path. “A hospice is where you go to die,” she said, as if Kanter didn’t know this.

“They provide very good care,” Dr. Kanter said quietly. “My mother spent the last three weeks of her life there.”

Nora, humbled, let her go.

Nora sat down heavily on a hard plastic seat. Her mind wanted to go blank, but she wouldn’t let it. She needed to think. She needed to figure out what to do.

First, when Billie got well enough to go home, she needed to go home with her. She needed to take care of her.

But even before that, she needed to find out if she could get someone to stay with her. A nurse. Someone who knew what she was doing. She took her memo pad from her bag.

1. Nurse,
she wrote.
2. Hospice.

She wasn’t even sure what a hospice was. She knew it was a place where you brought the terminally ill. But how do they really know when anybody’s terminally ill? There’s always the possibility of an amazing recovery. Do they give you medical care in a hospice, or do they just give you morphine and let you die?

Mother Teresa used to run a hospice. But the witty and bibulous Christopher Hitchens had criticized Mother Teresa because some of the people she cared for in her hospice could have been cured. He said that her religious ideology made her believe that it was best for them to die and go to heaven. Therefore maybe things weren’t so dire with Billie. Maybe she could be cured.

I’m not thinking right, Nora thought. I shouldn’t be thinking about Christopher Hitchens at a time like this.

She needed to take a walk. She went downstairs and passed from the air-conditioned lobby into a humid, sweltering day. It was September, but it felt like July. Mankind had destroyed the weather; seasons no longer had meaning.

Walking through the haggard, heavy-bearded air, she ended up in Central Park, at the reservoir. She walked around it slowly, stepping to the margin of the path whenever she heard joggers coming up behind her. Dragonflies hovered just above the water, which had grown a layer of stale green skin.

When she and Billie had been there in the spring, it had been much nicer.

Death moves in on you from a distance, taking things away. The circle of places you even dream of visiting becomes smaller and smaller. She wondered if Billie would ever walk around the reservoir again. She didn’t think so. It was as far away as Stonehenge, as far away as the Nile.

Nora made her way back to the hospital. Billie was asleep, breathing in weak, unsteady gasps.

Nora thought about how many years she’d known her aunt—all those years when Billie was healthy—and found it hard to understand why she hadn’t done more to treasure their time together.

Treasure it now, she thought. Treasure this.

W
HEN
I
SAAC GOT HOME FROM WORK
there was a message from Renee on his machine. They were supposed to have dinner that night, and she was calling to confirm. She sounded excited. “I have some great news!” she said. “I can’t wait to tell you!”

He wondered what qualified as great news for Renee. Perhaps she’d gone to a party and struck up a friendship with a former Sandinista minister of information. Perhaps she’d secured a new trial for Mumia Abu-Jamal.

He cleaned up his apartment. This last week had been a downer. Nora was despondent about her aunt Billie. Poor Aunt Billie. And—although he felt shabby about worrying about his career while she was going through something so serious—he’d been suffering from a kind of postpartum depression ever since the opening of his exhibit.

He’d been looking forward to it for such a long time—he’d spent a full six months selecting photographs, getting the invitations out—and now it was over. And nothing, absolutely nothing, had come of it. It hadn’t been reviewed—not in the
Times,
not even in the
Register.
The two-bit newspaper that he worked for had decided that his show wasn’t worthy of review.

There was still a chance that some of the critics from the quarterlies would come by—the pictures would be up for another month—or that some of the high-profile gallery owners he’d invited would see the show and offer him something in the city. But none of these people had come to the opening, and it was hard to imagine any of them making the long journey out to Englewood to look at his pictures without the inducements of wine and cheese.

Well, an hour or two with Renee would cheer him up.

He was so downhearted that he wasn’t even having the mixed feelings he usually had when he was about to see her—that queasy intermingling of fatherliness and desire. He was just looking forward to seeing her.

She arrived at his apartment breathless, twenty minutes late. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t come to your opening. But I have a good excuse. I have good news.” She was smiling mischievously, and for a moment he thought she was about to give him good news about
him.
His show was still the foremost thing in his mind—his show, and what it might do for his career—and he was still in that state where news that’s not about yourself seems bafflingly irrelevant.

“The reason I couldn’t come was that I was in the city that day, having meetings. Can you believe it? I’m a grown-up now! I go to meetings!”

He smiled at her indulgently and sat down. She was still standing, bouncing on her toes. She looked like a boxer.

“First of all, I was meeting with people from the anti-sweatshop coalition, and the fact-finding tour is really going to happen.”

“That’s wonderful, Renee. Congratulations.” Not exactly his idea of a good time, but her enthusiasm was charming.

She finally sat down. “And then I had another meeting. I think you’re going to be proud of me about this one. I was having a meeting with—the
New Yorker
! Your favorite magazine! They’re having a special photography issue this winter, and they want to use three of the pictures I took in Chiapas. Can you believe it? It’s so crazy I don’t even know how to pronounce the words when I tell people. They want to use
three
of my pictures! They want to use three of
my
pictures!”

“The
New Yorker
? Really? That’s incredible.”

He was happy that his voice hadn’t cracked. He wondered whether she could hear any of the things that
he
heard in his voice: envy, disbelief, rage, sorrow, a feeling that she’d betrayed him, a feeling that she’d emasculated him.

He wondered, also, whether she could hear the note of sluggish stupidity. When she’d mentioned the photography issue, he had thought for a moment that she’d shown them some of
his
photographs—that she was telling him that she’d slyly submitted
his
work, and that they wanted to use it.

The
New Yorker.
He’d been sending them photographs, and getting rejections from them, for as long as they’d been running photographs. More than ten years.

“Thanks,” she said. “Can you believe it?”

She was glowing. One of the things that was wonderful about Renee was that she was too guileless, too pure, to realize what was happening here—to realize that she’d struck him to the heart.

“Gosh,” he said. “We have to celebrate. Can I get you some . . . decaf tea?”

She smiled at this. Her ultrapure nature—her organic, herbal, free-range nature—was one of their standing jokes.

He went to the kitchen for the tea; he glanced at the
window, and he thought it might be a good idea to put his fist through the glass.

He had always felt sure that Renee would eventually surpass him. He’d felt sure of it because of her zeal for life, her desire to do and see and experience everything. Taking good pictures has very little to do with technique, in the end; it has to do with appetite for life, and he’d always understood that Renee’s appetite for life was greater than his own. He’d always known that she would surpass him; he just hadn’t thought it would happen so soon.