The Saving Graces (16 page)

Isabel.
Spring is my favorite season, May is my favorite month. I love May's innocence after treacherous April, its artless hope. Sweetness. I can't decide if it's good fortune or another of fate's low blows that the worst experience of my life is unfolding in gentle, good-hearted May.
Antiestrogen therapy didn't work for me. Given my history, Dr. Searle was not hopeful from the beginning, but we'd both wanted, for different reasons, to put off chemotherapy as long as possible. My reason was that I'd had it before and it frightened me. Not only had it failed to stave off a recurrence, it had made me sicker than I'd ever been in my life.
But I didn't know what sick was. Dr. Searle has devised a new cocktail since my last party with chemo. It's called CAF-Cytoxan, Adriamycin, and 5-fluo-rouracil-and if it doesn't kill me first, I could almost pity my poor cancer cells.
Kirby wanted to go with me for the first treatment, but I dissuaded him; I told him I'd been through it before, I knew what to expect. Anyway-I didn't tell him this-if there were going to be problems, they would begin later, seven to ten hours after the infusions.
My appointment was for one-thirty. At twelve-fifteen, Lee knocked at my door. "I'm taking the afternoon off and going with you," she announced. I knew before I tried that, unlike Kirby, Lee wouldn't be talked out of it, and I was right. But I must confess that under a veneer of exasperation, I felt a prodigious relief.
The doctor had already written my chemo orders, but there was still red tape to go through before the treatment could start: registering, meeting the chemo nurse, getting vitals and blood counts taken, waiting for the drugs to be processed at the pharmacy. I didn't sit down in the comfortable, too-familiar lounge chair in my own private little cubicle until after three. Lee sat on a hard stool beside me and chattered. Who knows what about-I was too wrought up to listen. I doubt that she knew herself because if anything, she was more nervous than I. But, relatively speaking, getting the chemo's nothing, I could have told her. It's after when the fun begins.
The staff had changed in two years; I didn't know Dorothy, the petite, pretty, dark-skinned nurse who bustled in, smiling and efficient, with her tray of drugs. "Brought your friend, have you? That's nice," she said in a pleasant English accent while she slapped at the inside of my elbow for a vein. The stick was smooth and quick-thank God, I thought, she's good at it. Some of them are awful.
"What's in that?" Lee asked, eyeing the bright red syringe Nurse Dorothy was attaching to my catheter.
"Adriamycin. That's the one that makes your hair fall out, love." She looked straight into my eyes, her face gentle as a mother's. Her sympathy was real, and it was almost too much. My emotions were ragged, and nothing on earth makes me feel sorrier for myself than chemotherapy. I believe if Lee hadn't been with me, I'd have wept. But I always feel obliged to cheer up anyone who's kind enough to try to cheer me up, and so I made a stupid joke, "Hair today, gone tomorrow," and closed my eyes, while Dorothy monitored the slow, steady pump of red drug in my vein.
Cytoxan came next, via a slow drip. I knew this one; I was prepared for its disconcerting and instantaneous side effect, a feeling as if you've just eaten Chinese mustard and your sinuses are prickly cold and wide open. Five-FU was last, and afterward the nurse removed the catheter and told me to stay where I was, she'd be back in a while to take my vitals and give last-minute instructions on side effects.
I lay with my eyes closed, morbidly alert to every sense, trying to gauge what I felt. Nothing much-too early. Lee had gone very quiet. I thought she would start talking again when I heard her draw her stool up close beside me. Instead, she slipped her hand, which was trembling slightly, into mine. "Let's do an imagery thing," she murmured. "Let's visualize the chemo killing the cancer cells. Want to?" I don't know what form her visualization took, but mine made me smile. "What's funny?" she asked, but I only shook my head. I didn't think she'd find it as charming as I did-Lee as a gladiator in star-spangled tights and a leotard, smacking hoodlum cancer cells off a platform, one by one, with a giant styrofoam sword.
"Henry and I are fighting," she told me over an early dinner in a Spanish restaurant near my apartment. I was hungry, watching her push pieces of scallop and shrimp around on a plate of saffron rice. But I ordered a cup of lentil soup and a small salad, and worried that even that would prove too much.
"What are you fighting about?" "Everything. Everything he says or does makes me furious. I just can't help it." "It's the stress. You're both-" "I know that. I yelled at him last night that he had to quit drinking, and we haven't talked to each other since." "Quit drinking? But Henry doesn't drink much, does he?" Henry?
"He has a beer sometimes after work. Alcohol affects a man's sperm, Isabel, it's a known fact. I don't think I'm asking that much. I'm the one who's doing everything. All he has to do is-is-jerk off in a bottle every few weeks, while I have to-do everything else-" She dropped her fork on her plate and covered her face with her hands.
"Lee, oh, honey-" I was so surprised, all I could do was reach across and pat her arm.
"Sorry." She fumbled in her purse for a tissue. "It's been an awful day." She looked up, red-faced. "I got my period," she whispered, and dissolved into tears.
"Oh, no. Oh, I'm sorry." "I don't know what's happening to me. I'm sorry to tell you all this now, of all times, but-" "Doesn't matter." "-but I can't help it, I'm not myself anymore, I can't control my emotions and I just want to cry and cry and beat on something. I'm so afraid, oh, Isabel, I'm so scared that we'll never get a baby, and if that happens-" She put her hand on her throat, glancing around in mortification, appalled at the thought that someone might have heard her.
"But there are more things to try, aren't there? If the insemination doesn't work-" "There are a million more things to try. There's in vitro, there's GIFT, there's ZIFT, something called ICSI, there's gestational surrogacy-we're just at the beginning, and everything takes forever and costs a fortune. Henry keeps asking, 'What do poor people do?' and I know it's driving him crazy to spend all this money, but it's my money, but when I say that, it just makes him angry and hurts his feelings. Oh, God." I'd never seen her like this. Emma and Rudy joke, fondly, about Lee's self-possession, her rationality, her tendency to see things in black and white and not delve for nuance-but the truth, of course, is that she can be as passionate as any of us. Her private sense of what feelings are fit for public disclosure is strict, though, strict and old-fashioned, and that's exactly what made tonight's outburst so shocking.
She recovered quickly, and then she couldn't stop apologizing. I wanted to pursue the subject, ask her to finish that sentence that had trailed off with "if that happens." But it was the wrong time and the wrong place.
When we finished eating, she insisted on going home with me. "You might feel sick, Isabel, and someone should be with you." I protested, knowing it was pointless, but once again secretly relieved. I probably would be sick-in fact, I was planning on it-but I told her there was nothing she could do about it. "Anyway, what about Henry? You should go home, Lee, it's Friday night." "So? He's fine on his own. I'll call and tell him I'll be late, don't worry about him." Her way of punishing her husband because she was miserable. If only all married couples took their anger out on each other so harmlessly, I thought, remembering Gary and me.
At home, although it was only eight o'clock, I undressed and got in bed. I probably wouldn't sleep, but at least I could relax for a few hours before-or if I was trying to be positive-I began to feel sick.
"How do you feel now?" Lee asked, leaning over me, smoothing the sheet over the top of the blanket. Tucking me in.
"Hard to describe. Warm, and my skin feels a little tight. I just feel odd. A sort of humming." She sat on the edge of the bed. "No fever," she noted, resting her hand on my forehead. "Don't worry, Isabel, I'll stay with you. We'll get through this." "Of course we will." I wanted to tell her what a wonderful mother she'd have been-would be-but I was afraid we'd both cry.
"Do you want some water?" "Yes. Yes, I forgot, I'm supposed to drink lots of water." "That makes sense. You don't want poison sitting in your bladder and kidneys any longer than necessary," she said practically, and got up. "Want the light out?" "Yes, please." "Okay. I'll bring you some water, and then you try to go to sleep." "What will you do?" "I'll sit and meditate for a while. Okay if I turn the TV on low?" "Sure." "Okay, then. Night, Isabel." "Good night. Thanks for everything." She blew me a kiss from the doorway.
A few minutes later, I heard her talking softly on the telephone. To Henry, I guessed. I hoped they made up. I meant to listen, monitor how the reconciliation went by the length of the conversation, but I must have drifted off. I jolted awake when the phone rang.
Lee answered it immediately, before I could get up. "She's fine," I heard her say in a voice, crisp and formal, borderline impolite, that made me certain the caller was Kirby. Seconds later, a wave of sickness rolled over me.
I staggered up. The bathroom was adjacent to the bedroom, across a short, narrow hall. A matter of ten or twelve steps, no more, but I didn't make it.
I vomited on the carpet iii the hail and on the pink tile floor and on the round throw rug in front of the sink. An explosion. Everything I'd eaten, dinner, lunch, breakfast, a massive quantity of thick black bile-everything spewed out like a geyser, utterly uncontrollable. I huddled over the toilet, retching and coughing, while Lee put her arm around my waist and said, "There, now, that's much better." "Hell," I said when I could. "Don't clean up-I will, just-" "Hush, Isabel. Are you through?" No. I threw up again, holding my stomach, gagging at the end until there was nothing left. But when I tried to rinse my mouth out at the sink, sickness hit again and I swerved back to the toilet.
Lee finally guided me back to bed, where I lay in a sweaty heap, listening to her scrub the carpet, mop the floor. The smell of Lysol jerked me up. She barely got out of the way before I was heaving again into her spanking clean toilet.
It wouldn't stop. "Where's it coming from? There can't be anything left!" And finally there wasn't anything, but that didn't stop the nausea. "I'm calling the doctor," Lee kept threatening, but I told her there was no point, I'd already taken the antinausea medication. "It's like this, this is how it is, they can't do anything." But this time was worse than before. It had to be the Adriamycin, the new drug in the cocktail. I crawled back to bed and tried to rest, but I couldn't lie still, couldn't find any position that was comfortable for more than a few seconds. The muscles of my stomach felt tender and achy, all my nerves were on fire. Lee wanted me to drink water, but I couldn't-just the thought of it made me gag.
Someone knocked at the door. I looked at the clock: twelve-twenty. Lee went to answer, and presently I heard Kirby's low, solemn voice raised in solicitous questions. I turned my face into the pillow, senselessly mortified. Of course he'd heard me; our bathrooms might as well be connected for all the soundproofing the ceiling provided. I wasn't sorry when Lee sent him away. "All right, I'll call you, but there's nothing you can do. But thanks." She closed the door firmly.
I wished we had never had that abortive, semiromantic interlude last December, 1 wished he had never kissed me, never said those words to me about love. Then the conspicuous absence of a follow-up would not have been so embarrassing to us both. Emma was partly right when she said I was the one who had pulled away from the relationship. But she was partly wrong. Kirby disappeared, didn't call, didn't visit, for six days after I told him about my new diagnosis. A long time for us; we were used to seeing each other daily. When he reappeared, he behaved as if nothing had happened, and since then he'd been helpfulness itself, a model of sympathy and selfless friendship. It was obvious that decency motivated him, not "love," and, of course, I didn't blame him. He'd lost his wife and children to senseless early deaths. He would have to be crazy, he would have to be pathologically self-destructive to choose to be intimate with a woman in my situation. No, no, no, I didn't blame him, but I hated it that here was one more loss to grieve.
When did I become the sort of person who puts love in quotation marks?
"Go home," I told Lee at one o'clock. "1 think it's getting better." A lie; I was shuddering with sickness, red-skinned and hot, exhausted but unable to lie still.
"I've already called Henry and told him I'm staying. I just wish I could do something. Shall I rub your back?" I shook my head. "Thanks. Don't want anything touching me." "What about some nice music? To take your mind off it." "I don't know. I don't think so." "Well, we could try it. All right?" I said yes, to humor her. "Terry sent me the Glenn Gould Brahms intermezzos. Put that on." She did, and minutes later I was stumbling for the bathroom. "Turn it off, oh God, don't ruin it-" I was crying from weakness and frustration, and now fear that this wretched sickness might turn me against something so beautiful, something I loved so much. "Oh, take it off, Lee, stop it, stop-" She looked scared when I came back into the bedroom and sat down gingerly beside her. "I think we should call the doctor," she said again. "This can't be natural." "It's not, that's the point. It's poison." I hugged my legs to my aching stomach. "All that gets me through is thinking of it eating the cancer. Like acid." "But this is too much. Let me call, Isabel, and just ask." "No point, I'm telling you. This is what it does." "Let me just call." "Call, then." I was too weak to keep arguing.
She got up and called. I heard her murmuring into the phone, but I didn't listen, didn't care enough.
"I told the answering service it's an emergency," she announced with satisfaction from the doorway. "The doctor's going to call." I grunted. At least one of us felt better.
A few minutes later the phone rang.
"He's calling in a prescription at the all-night on Columbia," she reported after another low-voiced conversation. "I'm going to pick it up. You'll be okay for about twenty minutes, right? I'll be-" "You are not driving to the drugstore at one-thirty in the morning." The effort to talk brought on a fresh wave of queasiness.