The Last Beach Bungalow (2 page)

I read the words in the article again: “For homework the first night, we were told that if we had intercourse, we would get an F. My naked wife was to sit in my lap and gaze into my eyes, but there was to be no intercourse. The idea was to connect on a deeper level—to feel the sacredness of sharing our bodies.”

I looked up, flushed. The woman with red hair was staring at her hands. At any moment, someone could step in the doorway and call my name. I would have to leave the magazine on the table and wouldn’t know what happened to the couple in Arizona. I wouldn’t know if they had succeeded at their homework assignment and drawn closer in body and soul, or if they had failed miserably and fallen on each other like hungry animals. I could go to the bookstore and buy this issue of
Town & Country.
Within ten minutes of our apartment, there was both a Borders and a Barnes & Noble, each featuring hundreds of magazine titles just inside their front doors. I knew my way around the aisles as well as if I had stocked them myself, placing stacks of magazines on the rack every week and every month, breathing in their glossy dust, their glittering promise. I could put my hands on that
Town & Country
issue within seconds. But I knew I wouldn’t make a special trip to find out what happened to the couple in Arizona. It would be just one more thing I didn’t have time to do.

When a magazine is perfect-bound, like a book, you can rip out pages without a single tear. The trick is to make sure you grab a whole folio—the little bundle of pages that are bound together. When the woman with red hair turned to look at the photographs on the wall, I paged through the sex feature, grasped the pages near the spine of the magazine and ripped them out as quickly and as quietly as I could. The sound shattered the silence of the waiting room like thunder. The woman snapped her head back and gaped at me, but I pretended as if tearing pages from waiting room magazines was a perfectly acceptable practice. I slipped the pages into my robe pocket and reached for a glass of lemon water.

The red-haired woman cleared her throat. “Those magazines are here for everyone’s pleasure,” she said, not unkindly. I imagined that she was a fourth-grade teacher. She probably said words, or words like these, several dozen times a day to fourth-grade hooligans in the library.

I smiled at her, as if I was pleased that she had appointed herself citizen-watchdog of the doctor’s waiting room. “Oh,” I said coolly, “it was a subscription ad. I’m going to subscribe. It’s a great magazine,
Town & Country.
I don’t normally think of it as a magazine of much substance, but there’s some solid stuff in there.”

She narrowed her brows slightly. They were red, just like her hair. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It wasn’t my place to say anything. It’s just that the reason I’m here is a magazine article.”

“Breast self-exam?” I asked. I’d written a dozen such articles myself—about how you should mark your calendar, set aside a full ten minutes, be absolutely methodical in your circular motions around the breast. I never did any of those things myself and, in fact, my doctor told me that only a tiny percentage of women discover cancer in that way.

“No, actually,” she said. “It was an article on dating. On how you should look for a man the same way you look for a job. I made a list of attributes I was searching for, and good health was at the top of the list.”

“How did that lead you here?” I asked.

“The magazine said that if I wanted to attract someone who made his health a priority, I should make my health a priority, too.”

“Smart,” I said, although the idea of project management for intimate relationships seemed pretty creepy to me. I had met Rick when I was helping to build a playground at the school where I was teaching. He had designed it, and presumably it was his fault that there was a number ten nail lying in the dirt when I climbed off the scaffolding. The nail went through the sole of my shoe, and before I could even scream, he had pulled the nail out, slapped on antiseptic, bandaged my foot and sent me with one of the other teachers for a tetanus shot.

“We’ll see,” the red-haired woman said. “I’ve actually never had a mammogram. I’m a little nervous.”

“Ah,” I said.

“Have you?”

A pink-clad assistant appeared in the doorway. “April Newton?” she asked.

I got up and went to the doorway. As I passed the red-haired woman, I leaned toward her and gave her my answer. “I’ve had a few,” I said. “It’s nothing.”

I followed the assistant into the room with the machine. “The technician will be with you shortly,” she said, setting my file down on the counter near the sink.

The moment the door closed, I took out the juicy sex article and carefully read the husband’s part of the story. When I was done, I bit my lip. I looked out the window, where I could see the tops of three palm trees swaying in the wind and five black birds perched on an electrical wire. I sniffed, thinking I could stop the tears from forming, but my throat was already itching; I had no chance. A teardrop splashed on
Town & Country.

There was a knock on the door, which flung open as a third woman in soft pink scrubs came blazing into the room. “How are you today?” she called out cheerfully, then took one look at my tear-stained face and picked up my chart. She quickly scanned it. She lowered her voice and said, “Five years is always the hardest.”

I shoved the article back into my robe pocket and wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. “No, no,” I said, and shook my head. How could I tell this person that it wasn’t cancer, exactly, that had me crying? It wasn’t the fact that I was moments away from reaching the coveted five-year cancer-free milestone, which, as any good reader of women’s magazines knows, is the point at which you revert to having the same risk as any other female of the species. It was the fact that my husband and I would get an A if we were given a homework assignment that had to do with refraining from intercourse. We would be brought up to the front of the class and held up as a model of restraint. Yet just five years before, when our lives had been filled with pathology reports and blood counts, the lurching rhythms of chemotherapy and the endless waiting for test results, Rick and I had been closer than we’d ever been in our lives. We couldn’t pass each other without hugging, we couldn’t look at each other without meaning. We held hands in the car, we sat thigh-to-thigh whenever we went to a restaurant. It was blasphemous to even form the thought, but I missed those days.

I reached up and pressed my hands to my eye sockets to stop the tears. “I’m sorry,” I said, gulping air.

“There’s no need to be sorry,” she said. “But I need you to be able to hold your breath to get a good picture. Shall I give you a little time?”

“That’s OK,” I said, shaking my head. “I’ll be fine.” I took a deep breath and willed myself to calm down. I forced the air out of my lungs, stood up and walked over to the X-ray machine. I dropped the robe from one shoulder and moved in close to the glass plates. The technician grabbed my left breast, the real one. Her hands were freezing. She asked me to scoot closer, and I leaned toward the machine as if it were a dance partner who would support my weight and whisk me around the room. I leaned toward the machine like I loved it, like it had saved my life.

“Don’t move,” the technician ordered, as she cranked the plates together, but I tightly curled my toes in a tiny act of defiance.

When she was done taking pictures, the technician asked me to wait in the room while the slides were developed. “At five years, you’re still diagnostic,” she explained, from the doorway. “The radiologist reads it while you’re still in the building. Next year, you’ll be screening and you’ll have to wait for the mail like everyone else.”

As I sat there waiting, I forgot all about the steamy reading material in the pocket of my robe. I imagined what would happen if the technician came back and said she needed to take a few more slides. My heart would start pounding; I’d feel it in my throat. Adrenaline would pump through my body, sending me into a state somewhere oddly close to giddy. She’d take one picture, then two, three and then four. She’d leave for an ominous length of time, then come back and try to tell me the X-rays were fuzzy. Off-kilter. She’d need to do a few more. I’d nod, bare my breast again, hold my breath, knowing without anyone needing to say anything that the cancer was back.

And then what? I’d call Rick. “I’m sorry,” I’d say. Sorry that he’d have to go through it again. Sorry that he’d had to go through it before. Sorry that we weren’t any better for our brush with mortality—and closer, any happier. Sorry that I’d lost a breast and lost any desire to turn to him in the middle of the night, in the middle of a bed, in an apartment we were renting while we built a house that was supposed to be the place where we’d live for the rest of our lives.

The technician breezed back in and told me everything looked fine. She held my chart in her hands and paused before she slipped out the door again. “Five years,” she said. “Congratulations.”

“Thank you,” I said, and even though she had disappeared from view, I added, “Happy Holidays.”

I have a friend who has leukemia who has never once been to any cancer-related event in which you have to wear a hat or T-shirt that identifies you as a survivor. She refuses. “You can’t be a survivor if you’ve still got it,” she explains. “And I’ll always have it.” It, of course, being the insidious cells that move and morph within her blood. It, being a thing that saps energy and demands constant vigilance. She pisses me off.
Go to the damn walk,
I want to yell,
wear the damn T-shirt.
This woman who takes chemo the way most of us take multivitamins, throws up with shocking regularity, and has, of late, started to fall because her feet are numb from pain relievers, also volunteers at her nephew’s elementary school, coaches a swim team which demands that she stand on a freezing cold pool deck five out of seven nights every week, and, for a regular job, is in charge of our city’s youth sports leagues, which means that she is in constant and intimate contact with the most demanding, irrational, frightened and misguided parents in America. And she’s not a survivor?

I have another friend who had ovarian cancer when she was just twenty years old. Her father was a surgeon and he stood over her in the operating room when they cut her open and removed her uterus and ovaries. He stood there, inspecting every bit of tissue, making the doctors take their time, making them take out each cell. She’s nearing sixty years old, and when people who know anything about ovarian cancer hear that she has lived as long as she has and as well as she has, they practically fall to their knees in awe. But there are no special hats for her to wear, no special pins or special slogans. There are no T-shirts and marches, no lunches in hotel ballrooms with gift bags and speeches. She shrugs when I ask her if she resents it. “I’m alive,” she says. “I have no reason to resent anything.”

I got in my car and made myself sit there and look at the sunlight and the red Volvo next to me and the old couple making their way across the parking lot— he with a walker, she with a cane. I took a deep breath and thought about giving thanks, but it was exactly like trying to remember a word you’re sure you know but can’t bring to mind. I just couldn’t do it. God didn’t make sense anymore. There were people in the Middle East who were blowing themselves up in the name of one God, whom they claimed to be almighty. We had a president who was retaliating in the name of another God, whom he claimed to be almighty, too. In my own church—the church of my childhood, of Sunday mornings and patent leather shoes—people were locking each other out of sanctuaries over an argument about how much God loved or didn’t love gay people, because, I presumed, they wanted God to be almighty for just them alone. The selfish drama of the deity even played itself out in our apartment complex. Most of the residents were homeowners in the middle of remodels, corporate executives in the middle of relocations or first wives in the middle of divorces, but on the floor below ours, a Christian rock musician spent his days in a studio singing praises to God. At night he would sometimes shout at his wife with such violence that someone would invariably call the police, and when the police came, the Christian rock band singer would yell for the fucking nigger to mind his own business. I believed there was an unseen force of goodness in the world, something at the center that held it all together and made it all come into being in the first place, but claiming a proprietary personal relationship with God—even one in which I could simply give thanks—had come to seem like an act of folly.

I called Rick on my cell phone. He answered on the first ring. “Hey,” he said, his voice as tight as a coiled spring.

“It was all clear,” I said.

“Oh, that’s great, April,” he said. “That’s really great.”

There was an awkward split second of silence. I leaped into it. “It’s been five years this week,” I said, as if the thought had only just occurred to me as I sat there in the December sun.

“Has it?” Rick asked. “I guess I’ve always counted from the day of the surgery, not the day of diagnosis.”

This made perfect sense—and if my husband is known for anything, it’s for making perfect sense. You count five years from the day when you could reasonably say the cancer was gone from your body, which in my case was December 10, 1999. But how can you ever really be sure? None of us can ever really be sure. In my mind, there was a day when cancer was just a word—a word I could write about in a magazine, or talk about at dinner—and the next day, the day of diagnosis, it was a reality that had the potential of defining my entire life because it had the potential of ending it. That was the day that mattered to me. And now that I had reached five years, maybe I couldn’t say that I had survived, exactly, but maybe I could say that cancer could now be nothing again. Just a word, something that had happened to me once upon a time, a story in the past.

“I was thinking maybe we could have lunch,” I said.