Storm Tide (16 page)

At the seder, Holly’s food was superb, Marty’s ceremony short, and
my mother on her best behavior. She cherished her one formal invitation every year (all other holidays were spent at Marty’s parents), her beautiful granddaughters, her famous son-in-law. She wore her best blue suit. She complimented Marty’s singing voice and insisted on doing the dishes with Holly so the girls could watch TV.

Marty sat glumly all through dinner staring at me. As soon as the dishes were cleared, he asked me back to his study. He did not pull out the videotapes of himself on the Letterman show or the photographs of his junket to Japan, but a bottle of cognac from the cabinet behind his desk and two glasses. Marty had a strong squarish face made vulnerable by delicate wire-framed glasses, and a tendency for his cheeks to turn a deep and glowing pink, a litmus test of his emotions. Strangely, he was just my size. Neck, sleeve length, chest size, shoe. Once a year he’d drop a box of his old clothes at my feet and act insulted if I didn’t plow through it with effusive thanks. “Tell me something.” Marty poured himself cognac. I didn’t care to drink with him. “The truth, what is this election shit? You’re goofing on everybody, right? You’re not serious?”

“I’m thinking about running.”

“Hell, maybe I’ll get a column out of it. Why not? My brother-in-law, the small-time pol. The ticket fixer. You can feed me the crazy stuff.”

“I don’t think so, Marty. It wouldn’t be fair.”

“To who? The motel owners? The restaurants? Are you kidding? My column has a circulation of four million. They’ll be booked all summer.”

“Don’t you think Saltash has enough problems without turning the town into Mayberry?”

“You are serious.” He studied me over the rim of his glass. “All right, so tell me the burning issues.” He put his feet up on the desk. “Win my vote.”

“Fuck you.”

“Don’t be so sensitive. We’re family, we can’t tease each other? Because we’re going to be dragged into it, you know. Holly. The children.”

“I don’t think so.”

“People say you’re doing it because you like to get laid.”

“That’s what
people
say? Or you?”

“Me?” Marty said. “I could care less.”

“You don’t care that Judith and I are friends?”

“Ooh, I like that. Friends.” He pitched forward and refilled his glass. “By that definition of friendship everybody’d be humping each other all over this great nation of ours. This is my friend. She sucks my cock. Next time my kid says she made a friend in school, I’m going to get her birth control.”

“You are one nasty son of a bitch.”

“Me? Then what do you call a person who screws a sick man’s wife?”

“I’ve had enough.” I stood.

“You’re not the only one, you know. Judith has a thing for younger guys.”

“What’s your problem, Marty? You wanted to be one of them?”

I watched his cheeks light up. “One of them was a buddy of mine.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“That her husband’s an old man and she likes young meat now and then?”

“That you could have a buddy.”

Marty stood, knocking his glass to the floor. Holly heard the crash and came to the office door. “You guys all right? Marty? David, where are you going?”

I told my sister I’d had a lovely evening and would see her in the morning. Marty was close behind me. “You don’t believe me, David?” he called from the door. “Ask her! Ask her about Brian. Her
friend
Brian!”

Judith was usually awake before sunrise, but because it was Sunday morning, I waited a few hours to call. I sensed what Marty had told me was an exaggeration. The trouble was that it explained things too well. Why a young woman would have an affair in the face of her husband’s illness. Why she might choose someone like me. I had to see Judith right away.

At nine-thirty her line was busy. I called again fifteen minutes later, and once or twice after that. I drove out to the highway to buy the Sunday paper. I tried again from a pay phone, and still unable to get through, made a decision I would regret.

The mainland was clear, but a blue band of fog clung to the treetops over the island. In the distance, soft shell clammers were bent in right angles at the waist, clawing a living from the mud as their wide-bottomed boats drifted on long anchored leads. Although there was a bitter chill on this April morning and the roads were slippery with patches of ice, you could see green shoots growing up under the dead brown stalks; you could smell spring in the funky decay of sea life, salt air and mud.

I pulled up in their drive and hit my horn. Through my own reflection in the glass door I saw Gordon tying the strings of his robe. He waved. He started slowly toward me as Judith appeared behind him. She too was wearing a robe, which she held closed with a fist over her heart. She bolted past him and whipped open the door.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded. I smelled toothpaste and
soap and the same perfume she daubed between her thighs in my bedroom. “Don’t you call first? Do you just barge in on people?”

“I did call. I’ve been calling for hours.”

Gordon laughed, slowly making his way to the telephone on the kitchen wall, where he replaced the receiver on its hook. He ran water at the sink and filled a kettle. He suggested we have coffee. Judith told me to wait outside and ran upstairs to dress.

I followed her down the path to the garden, through the hollow where pine needles crackled beneath our boots, to the little cottage where we met to make love. But this time she didn’t beckon me with a silent smile. This time the garden didn’t look like magic, but a trap full of nets and sharp edges. She turned on me as soon as she slammed the door. “Do not ever come over here without calling again.”

“Sorry I interrupted whatever it was.”

“You know what it was,” she said icily.

“So you do sleep with him?”

“He is my husband.”

“Fine. But why didn’t you
tell
me?”

It was not often that Judith would fumble for words. “Because it’s … not a regular thing.”

“I assumed he was too sick, Judith. I assumed that you didn’t have that kind of relationship, that I wasn’t in the middle of something.”

“Most of the time he is too sick. Sometimes he feels all right. I don’t always know.” By now she seemed more confused than angry. “It’s all new, David. Gordon hadn’t been … able for a long time.”

“How new?”

“I don’t know.”

“Sure you do. Since you started sleeping with me?” The way Gordon sometimes looked at us. Nothing suggestive. He didn’t make innuendoes. He never leered. But I sensed that my presence, a younger man with his wife, excited him. “Does it happen after I visit you here?”

She wouldn’t answer. She didn’t have to.

“Hell, I’m glad he
can
make love to you.”

“I doubt that.”

“I am,” I said. “I’m glad he’s well enough.”

“He’s not well. Sometimes his body can remember me through the pain. Sometimes he wants to be near me. Since I met you, yes, a door has opened. Gordon senses that I’m happy. He’s my friend and my family and my teacher. We talk. And we remember what it used to be like. And we try to plan how things are going to be. And this morning … yes.” There was no fire in the woodstove. We had not turned on
a lamp. A shaft of gray light poured through the skylight like a pillar between us.

“Judith, who is Brian?”

“Brian?” She looked confused. There was nothing in her expression to suggest he meant anything. She had trouble recalling his name. “He did a book with Gordon. A photographer. What’s going on here?”

“I’m trying to understand what you want with me, Judith.”

“I assume,” she moved toward me tentatively through the cold shaft of light, “the same as you want with me.”

“But Gordon—”

“Wants us all to be happy.”

“You’re serious.”

“Yes. Yes, why not?” There was pleading in her voice. “Gordon and I have a life together. You and I have a life together. No one has to be deceived or disappointed. What is the problem?”

“Where is this supposed to go? How long can it go on?”

“What’s to stop us?”

“Only the opinion of everyone around us,” I said.

“Are you under the illusion that they, whoever they are, have perfect little marriages? Above criticism? No dirty secrets?”

“Not at all.”

“And do you judge them for the way they look for love?”

“I couldn’t care less.”

“Then what is the problem? We live our own lives. We do what we want. Everybody’s honest. Nobody gets hurt. What is the problem?”

Only my own sense of right and wrong.

J
UDITH

    Two weeks after their ninth wedding anniversary, Judith insisted Gordon go to a doctor in Boston. She was not satisfied with the chronic bronchitis diagnosis, and nothing seemed to be helping. She felt guilty because she should have managed to get him to a good doctor months before. She had nagged him, she had set up an appointment. The first appointment she made, he found an excuse to cancel. He was too busy for that nonsense. He had a cough, big deal. At his age, everybody had something. He had missed his deadline on the new book, he had three speaking engagements. He didn’t need an unnecessary trek into Boston, just because she was a worrywart and a control freak and overfond of doctors. But she would not let him cancel the second appointment, when she was able to get another. She want in with him, she marched him into the office, she tried to put a good face on his grumpiness.

The doctor poked and prodded him, particularly in his neck and lymph nodes and over his chest and listened to his breathing. Then he pronounced that Gordon must go to another doctor, an oncologist. He was careful how he phrased his opinion. “To eliminate several possibilities, you need to have some tests. Then if you don’t have
that problem
, which is at the moment only a possibility, we need to run more diagnostic tests back here.”

Oncologist. The doctor they decided on after consulting friends and acquaintances was associated with the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. There, the word was out in the open at last. The man they saw was the surgeon of a particular team, as he put it. Dr. Edward Barrows was a year or two younger than Judith, a handsome West Indian who spoke with a lilt. He called Gordon by his first name, which made Gordon bristle. His assistant took a complete medical history, so complete that Gordon asked, “Are you sure you don’t need to know the last time I cut my toenails?” They took a sample of Gordon’s sputum and scheduled an X ray and a CAT scan of the chest.

They both understood the doctor was testing for cancer, but they did not talk about it. She did not want to believe Gordon had cancer; she knew Gordon rejected the idea. They both clung to the hope that Dr. Barrows would clear that possibility.

The X-ray diagnosis appeared to be inconclusive. Gordon celebrated
with a bottle of champagne. She was not sure but drank it with him. It turned out Dr. Barrows wanted a tissue sample. “You mean you’re going to take out a piece of me,” Gordon thundered. He was reluctant, but what choice had he? The tests went on, more and more invasive. Needle aspiration. A tube inserted through an incision in the neck to test a lymph node. The tests went on for over a month, back and forth to Boston or to Hyannis, where the doctor had a satellite office.

Finally Dr. Barrows was ready to give a diagnosis. There was a tumor. Given its size and location, a combination of chemotherapy and radiation therapy was indicated to reduce it. Then they would operate, perhaps in six months if the other therapies were successful. Now they knew. The moment the doctor had told them, she realized she had suspected as much secretly, for a year. Never had she mentioned the word “cancer,” but she had always been thinking it, in a locked compartment at the back of her mind which usually contained only a certainty that some yutz she was defending was actually guilty of whatever he had been accused of. Hiding that opinion from herself let her function as she must. Hiding her fear for Gordon had let her get through the months when she could not force him to a doctor. But now they both must live with the fact of cancer. Gordon took it well. “It’s like going into a dogfight,” he said as she drove them home. “You know you may die, but you plan not to. You figure you have your will to live and your reflexes and your knowledge of the enemy and your own plane. There’s terror in facing down death, but there’s also a crazy high like nothing else I’ve known since.”

As they returned to the office where Dr. Barrows must have given similar bad news to patients every day, the next stage of the process began. “We must agree on a plan of treatment,” said the doctor, and somehow his “we” grated on her all the more because he was young, because he was handsome, because he was radiantly healthy. The oncologist who dealt with radiation therapy, Dr. O’Reilly, was much older, red in the face as if he drank or had high blood pressure or had spent too much time in the sun. Judith and Gordon both liked him at once, perhaps because he seemed vulnerable. He explained how precise the machine was that burned away at the tumor, but could not penetrate it all the way.