Live a Little (20 page)

The node-negative, stage I, divorced orthodontist simultaneously bared her veneers at me and glanced at Phil admiringly. “Hang on to that one, honey, he’s a gem!” she hissed at me.

I made sure to stand between them on the walk back. The woman may have had cancer, but she also had one of those swivelly walks that make a person think of beds and
Kama Sutra
positions and silk scarves. Her auburn hairpiece was top notch.

Phil was communing with the couple of other men in our immediate area like an old pro.

“I’m flying to Taiwan next week to ink a deal for these BC fortune cookies to sell at my restaurant,” the thirtyish Asian guy in the expensive tracksuit and fancy Bluetooth headset told him. “They’re dipping them in this really sweet pink. It’s called ‘cow’s teat’ in Mandarin. No, I’m serious, it is! Anyway, my wife and her support group wrote all the messages. They’re inspiring as hell, but there are also practical tips.”

“Like not asking the wife if there’s any beer in the house right after chemo?” The ponytailed programmer from Berkeley wiped some sweat off his forehead with a tie-dyed hankie.

“Exactly.”

The men enjoyed a hearty belly laugh at the expense of their less evolved brethren. It was all they could do not to slap each other’s sweaty backs with pride. Phil joined in with the rest of them. Oh, poor Neanderthals who have yet to shed the coarse trappings of common manhood and don the royal cloak of BC-compliant maleness!

One of my subjects, a BC patient advocate who, after twelve years helping others navigate the field, contracted the disease herself, had told me that BC functioned as a marital health barometer.

“It’s like, if things were tense before, you may as well sign those divorce papers now, honey,” she’d said during a break, rubbing plaster off of herself with a scruffy towel. “Frankly, most of the husbands are a disappointment. It’s just the reality. Sure, they’re all gung ho the first few weeks. But after she’s had her biopsy and her surgery and done a few rounds of chemo and maybe radiation, they’re like, can we get back to normal already? Three months. That’s the length of time your typical husband can deal. After that, all bets are off. Once in a while, you get a star, the guy who puts everything on hold, quits his job or whatever, and makes it his raison d’être. But those ones are like radiologists who can actually communicate with humans—a once-in-a-lifetime proposition.”

Could it be true? Could my Philly, he of the family vacations to obscure railroad museums and the ability to watch six hours of back-to-back
Law & Order,
be a once-in-a-lifetime proposition? (In a good way, not a government-study-of-thesocially-damaged way.)

It boggles the mind.

The third thing that has reared its head since the show is Ma. Or, rather, Ma and me.

Before, our relationship exuded the stale whiff of unreciprocal approval—mine for Ma, her lack for me. It now has about it an almost honeymoonish fervor. Used to her pronounced, lifelong preference for Laurie’s poised focus and victorious single-mindedness, I am caught off guard by Ma’s attention.

She showed up at my door unannounced a few days after the show. She had on a velour tracksuit, a BC awareness ribbon, and an army jacket that looked like it had been abandoned by Che Guevara out of spite, plus her usual chest-strapped handbag—to foil purse snatchers—and tote stuffed with partially used Kleenex, Sweet’N Low packets, flaxseed

caplets, and self-help tomes.

“You need acupuncture,” she said.

I staggered back involuntarily due to an insufficiently repressed memory of Dr. Minh and his horrible panoply of engorged digestive organs.

“No way,” I said.

Ma unfurled a news clipping from a thick rubber-banded wad. “ ‘While medical experts are unclear as to the physiology of its effects, acupuncture is known to relieve a range of symptoms associated with breast cancer and breast-cancer treatment, including water retention and even the memory loss associated with chemotherapy.’”

“Ma . . .”

The woman who once made me walk home from a spelling bee because I fucked up “calliope” on the first round took my hand. “Look—you can’t blame a mother for wanting her precious daughter to have every chance at making a full recovery, sweetling.”

Can alien abduction possibly be epidemic?

“I made an appointment for you already. It’ll feel good, like a massage.”

I sighed.

Then there was Ma’s increasing habit of coming to me— me!—for advice on, well, Laurie. Or, rather, Laurie’s problems.

“What do you think about all this adoption
mishegoss
?” she asked me the other day. She’d invited me over to help her wash donated clothes for the battered-women’s shelter. The clothes teetered on the dining room table, stacks of frumpy sweaters and depressingly bright toddler outfits. Apparently, Ma thought being reviewed by a sex-and-death-obsessed art critic gave one’s opinions on reproductive matters a certain gravitas.

“I think it’s probably their only chance to have a kid.” I was outwardly calm yet reeling. Laurie and
mishegoss:
two words not paired in normal times.

Ma blinked. “Do you think they’ll find, you know, a Jewish one?”

“No, Ma. Jewish girls don’t get pregnant unless they’re married to Jewish boys. It’s in the Torah.”

Ma jabbed her finger at me. “Don’t poke fun. These things get more important when you get older. You’ll see.”

Ah, the quality-control issue. Perpetuation of the tribe and all that. Ma had always been comfortable with Ren’s WASP pedigree—as long as it was paired with the hallowed genes of Rachel, Sarah, and Esther and left to soak in a nice medical-school-love-of-stinky-fish reduction. Now that we were looking at a potential genealogical wild card, Ma was closing tribal ranks.

We talked a little more. Ma made a few offensive remarks; I countered with a few inanities. Either Ma didn’t notice that my responses lacked both insight and originality, or she didn’t care, because she sandwiched my face in her hands and whispered something laudatory about my unique ability to understand people. And life. She actually said that: “People in your position understand life.” I think, like most people, she believes that, along with tumors and general malfunction, cancer bestows upon its targets a sort of Zen clarity and sage-like wisdom.

That’s really what gives me pause these days—her
effusiveness.
And my collusion. There is something almost vaudeville about it. “You’re
so
great!” she might be saying. “No,” I’d reply. “
You’re
great!” “No,
you
are!” and so on and so forth. Was this what her approval felt like to Laurie, you know, before? Did Laurie worry that Ma’s pride in her was over-the-top and therefore slightly counterfeit? Or am I simply getting the (slightly tainted) quality of maternal love I deserve, after what I’ve done?

Which leads me to the worst part about this whole business: When I tell them the truth—and I’m going to tell them
soon,
this month, possibly right after Laurie’s job proves secure, the telethon checks finish coming in, a few more commissions roll in, and I’ve torn Eliot’s monthly check into green shards and paid the kids’ tuition bill myself—is my treachery going to convince them I am worthy only of how they treated me before, or something substantially worse?

“Hey,” Sue says. Her face is thin and wan.

“Hey.” We hug, and I strip off the many layers of sweaters and scarves that a typical San Francisco evening requires. Through the stained-glass windows, the insouciant glow of North Beach, with its hole-in-the-wall trattorias, dim bars, independent bookstores, and sex shops, beckons. Sue probably picked Vesuvio’s, a classic yet slightly bedraggled haunt, because it matches her mood. “How are you feeling?” I ask.

Sue doesn’t respond, just raises her delicate eyebrows as if to say,
Are you nuts?

“What can I get you?” The barista is sleek and tawny-skinned and tattooed and highly fuckable in that way all of them seem to be these days. It is hard to believe we ever looked—felt—like that, but then again, maybe we didn’t.

“Anchor Steam. Sue, do you—?”

“Do you have tea?”

The barista nods.

“Is it organic? Okay, then I’ll have mint, tea bag in. Lemon, no sugar. Thanks.”

“So,” I say when the girl’s perky backside disappears behind the bar.

“Yep.”

“What are you going to do?” Sue’s pregnancy is not a foregone conclusion. Besides the fact that she and Arlo, though wholly committed, are not contracted to provide for legitimate children in the eyes of the law, Sue has always said she was finished having kids after Sarafina.

“I don’t know.”

“What about Arlo?” I don’t think Sue—or I—could stand it if Arlo Murphy walked out on her the way Sarafina’s father did, protractedly and painfully.

Sue mumbles something.

“What?”

“I said he doesn’t know yet.”

“Oh, Sue.”

“I just don’t think it’s fair to tell him, if I’m only going to. . . you know.”

I take a sip of beer. It is cold and slightly bitter. “You have time. You don’t have to decide anything yet, you know? It’s not like last time”—I let mention of her college abortion hang there, gnarled and splintered, a broken tree branch of a memory—“you aren’t a kid anymore, Sue. It doesn’t have to be. . .” I search for the right word, wanting to give my friend real solace, not blather. “Damaging,” I finish inadequately.

“Quel, the thing is. . .” Sue’s gray eyes bead with tears as her words fade out. She fingers her mohair poncho. “Things are so good right now. They’re good between me and Arlo, with Fina, at Tamarind. It’s the first time I can remember that I actually feel like I can let my guard down for a while. Like I’m not constantly making contingency plans for failure. Or wondering if I can pay the mortgage. Or breaking up with somebody. Or taking Fina into bed with me because she’s having nightmares that her dad was in an airplane crash or has another family now.” Sue hesitates. “God, listen to me. I sound like the baby—the pregnancy, I mean—is some inconvenience, something I have to check off my to-do list like the goddamn shopping. I know I have to tell Arlo. I know it’s his kid, too. It’s just that I’ve been so sick...” Sue’s hand trembles as she raises the tea to her mouth, and she scalds her hand. Without a word, she puts the mug back on the table, wincing. “I’m forty-two years old,” she says.

“You don’t look it.”

“But I feel eighty.”

I draw my oldest friend into a deep hug, the kind where the other person’s hair fills your nose with its grassy scent and boobs press against chests and you both know the hug is as much for you as it is for her. Sue lets go first.

“Want to know why Arlo left Liesl?” Liesl was Arlo’s first common-law wife, a hard nut of a motorcycle mechanic whom Sue has no beef with and even serves personally on the rare occasion when the woman dines at Tamarind.

“Because Liesl wanted to have kids and Arlo didn’t. It was the dealbreaker. Arlo was going to get a vasectomy, but Liesl got pregnant first, and then he walked out. Wouldn’t even discuss it. She had to terminate in the fifth month because the baby had Turner syndrome,” Sue says with real sorrow.

I try to square this revelation with what I know and love about Arlo Murphy, and how good the man is with Sarafina, and conclude that nothing, least of all other people’s relationships, is as it seems. For all I know, some confused couple is right now comparing themselves to me and Phil and finding their own connubial state wanting.

After that, we order one more round of drinks and leave them standing while we talk about nothing in particular. At around eight
P.M.
, Sue says she has to pick up Sarafina from her dinner playdate and swaths herself in her amber wrap.

“Are you going to be all right?” I ask.

“Are you?” It is our standard exchange, employed loyally since college.

“I’ll call you tomorrow.” I watch Sue leave, imagining my small, plump friend weaving in and out of tourists toward the bus stop, her little feet landing purposeful and sure on the cracked sidewalk. My beer is tepid, but I take a few more sips anyway.

Seeking relief from the evening’s tension, I gaze out the window. The stained glass is blue and purple, littered with tiny flecks of orange, with a clear opening in the center. Across the street, a black-haired man in a white shirt and dark slacks stands forlornly in front of an empty Italian restaurant, summoning tourists halfheartedly with a laminated menu. There is a strip club a few storefronts away, with a gigantic neon blonde pulsating above the entry. She is wearing electric pasties. They flash frantically, like a small dog dry-humping the couch.

A couple pauses in front of the lens of the window, blocking my view. The man is solid in an overcoat, his brown hair fluttering in the wind. The woman has a small firm handful of a butt, like Hilary Swank’s. The man kisses the woman— or does she kiss him?—bending her backward violently, as if aiming to fracture.

“Phil,” I think I whisper, but he is already gone.

CHAPTER 15

Mousse On the Loose

At the precise moment when I receive confirmation of my husband’s affair, I am swallowing a mouthful of the smoothest, downiest chocolate mousse you ever had in your life. It is ironic, really, because not three seconds prior to the crash, I was cautiously sure that I was having the second best day of my life.