Then We Came to the End (24 page)

SHE ENDS UP
in the lingerie section. If it’s invasive, and they think it is, and if a couple of other factors are in play, she’s agreed to have a mastectomy. Basically they put it to her this way: if we go in there and we find this and we find that, we don’t see how you have much of a choice. And if she’s going to have a mastectomy, she needs to start thinking about breast reconstruction. They’re going to save as much as they can, and they’ve asked that she come in tomorrow with a favorite bra, which they will use to measure where the incision line should be. They will cut just inside the bra line so that the plastic surgeon can do his thing after she has completed her six months of chemo and radiation, should they be necessary, which they likely will be.
There’s nothing but bad news for her, and then there’s more bad news.
So come in, they told her, with a special bra, and with that in mind, she gravitates toward Intimate Apparel. Her choices are endless — slinky, padded, sheer, cotton, rhinestoned, patterned, leopard-printed, silky, hot pink. This is what makes the country great, isn’t it? And it’s what’s made her life in advertising possible, the opportunity afforded by this glut to market one particular offering in a way that allows it to stand alone as the leader in the marketplace. She would know exactly what to do with any one of these brands, if they were fortunate enough to win that account. But marketing one for her particular needs tonight? Picking the one bra in this haystack of bras that will define where they make the incision and that will, somehow, when all this is over, make her feel sexy again — even she admits there’s not likely to be one bra here that can fill an order like that. She takes one off the rack. Maybe this one. Another one — maybe. Soon she has ten bras in her hands, she has twelve, fifteen. She takes them to the fitting room and despite the pain caused by the chafing tries a few of them on. She looks at herself in the mirror. The idea is to look sexy again.
And for whom exactly?
Yourself, of course. Yes, well, that’s all wonderfully self-affirming and very strong-minded as any decent woman should be these days, but let’s just face facts here and say that when a woman — no, when a
person
is thinking about feeling sexy, it is always with the idea of someone else in mind. Someone in the back of the mind who says, “I can’t believe how sexy you look in that.” And just who is that person for her? Unfortunately the timing is such that it can’t be anybody other than you-know-fucking-well-who, and that is not an option. Sexiness with Martin in mind is no longer an option. And sexiness
after
Martin? That’s where it gets complicated, because first she’ll have the stitches. Those will scar up quickly, and for six months, while the post-op treatments are doing their tricks, she’ll wear the prosthesis. Then the plastic surgeon does the breast reconstruction in stages — who knows how long that takes. So what is she looking at here? A year, a year and a half? How is she going to feel sexy during any of that? Who’s going to look at her scars, at her prosthesis, and say, “I can’t believe how sexy you look in that.” You see, there
is
no man after Martin, not for a long, long time, and before she can help it, she’s screaming. She’s in the tiny dressing room with a thousand bras screaming as loud as she can. It sounds like AAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRHHHHHHHH!!! When she stops she feels the pulse of her blood pumping in that part of her breast that is sore to the touch, and a rawness in her throat. She has a terrible head rush from the wine and the scream. She sits down on the bench. Salesclerks come running. “WHAT’S WRONG IN THERE? DO YOU NEED SECURITY?” She will not cry. No. She stands up and starts handing bras over the door. “I don’t want these!” she says. “Take them!” At first she offers a few at a time, then she scoops them up and tosses them all over. “I don’t want any of them! I just want out of here!” What a stupid place to be, this dressing room, and trying on bras, trying to look sexy, what a ridiculous thing to be doing.

AFTER HE FOUND OUT,
he left long voice mails for her at work. Who knows what effect he intended by them. Typically she picked up the phone and listened to them thirty seconds after he had left them, and carried on a dialogue with his recorded voice. “What I don’t understand,” he said in an early one, “is how an intelligent, reasonable person could possibly wait, despite knowing that something was wrong, feeling sick, and still refuse to see a doctor. I don’t get that, I don’t understand that behavior coming from an intelligent person.” “That’s because,” she said into the phone, as the message unfurled, “intelligent people are not
always
guided by their intelligence. Sometimes, Martin, something called fear is a little more powerful.” He would know that basic fact of human psychology, she thought, if he were in marketing, but as a practitioner of the law, he believed that the decision that was most rational, or at least most shrewd, would always triumph if it determined one’s own self-survival. “Yes, I should have shown an interest earlier,” he said in a later voice mail. “I was wrapped up in my work, I wasn’t paying attention. But now,” he said, “now that I know, I can’t
not
know anymore, Lynn, I can’t just unlearn it, and now that I know and can’t not know, I feel . . . you know . . . a certain obligation . . .” “Obligation?” she said out loud. “. . . concern for you, Lynn, and your well-being . . .” “Oh, Martin, be still my beating heart.” “. . . that I can’t just — well, what is it you want me to do exactly, huh?” he asked. “Just forget about it? Is it one of those things, you know — we do this together, we do that, but this is one of those things we just don’t talk about, it’s off-limits, when frankly, Lynn, you could be very, very — uh, yeah, I’ll be with you in a minute, okay?” he said to someone who must have just shown up in his doorway. Returning to the message, he continued, “. . . that you should, uh . . .” He had lost his train of thought. “Look, the point is, you
have
to see a doctor,” he said. “Okay? Look, I have to go. I should have said all of this to you in person but you won’t pick up your goddamn phone. Please call me back.”

In one of the last messages he said, “There’s something I’ve been thinking about and wondering about and I’m very curious: am I the only one who knows? Have you told your father, or any of your friends? Because if you haven’t, and I’m the only one, you can see how I might feel a great deal of responsibility. In fact you could see how it’s just a little unfair of you, even . . .” “Oh?” she said. “I’m curious to see how this works.” “. . . because now I know,” he continued, “and you won’t take my advice to see a doctor, and that leaves me to worry about you . . .” “Oh, poor Martin!” “. . . but without any recourse to remedy that worry. Now that’s unfair, Lynn . . .”
Then you should have kept your fucking hands off me!
she thought.
You shouldn’t have crawled into my bed and tried to bite my nipple!
“. . . I’m not complaining about it, I don’t want you to think I’m complaining. I’m just trying to plead my case here, that you should go to the doctor. If you don’t want to do it for yourself, for fuck’s sake, Lynn, do it for me.”

He convinced her at last, or she simply yielded — after a week’s time it was tough to determine if she agreed because she had found some reserve of strength, or because she was hopelessly weak and he had worn her down with his voice mails. He would go with her, that was the condition. In the car on the way to her appointment, she tried putting into words her fear of doctors, hospitals, procedures — but there was no articulating it. “I spent a lot of time in hospitals when my mother was dying,” she said. “I was just a kid. Maybe that’s when it started.”

“What did she die of?”

“Give you one guess,” she said.

There was silence. Then he talked in general about the amazing advances they’d made in medicine over the years, with the same optimism that marked every conversation of its type, and she could only think how naive he was to think she would be responsive when she had always been immune to that sort of hopefulness. Technology would never advance past primal fear. It would never trump human instinct.

He parked in the hospital parking lot and for a half hour tried to coax her from the car. She wanted him inside the room during the exam, would that be okay? He said it would be. She didn’t want him to leave her side, was that understood? He said he had understood that from the first time she had asked, and the second time, and the third. “Why are you stalling?” he asked. When had Martin become so . . . committed? Had she misjudged him from the beginning? Or was this what was required for that commitment to take hold, that she be sent to hell and back? For she was in hell, in that car in the hospital parking lot, and not one cold hand had yet been laid upon her. After three or four attempts to articulate her fear on the ride over she had finally given up, but now she said to him, “I think I can finally explain it,” she said. “It comes down to this. And it’s so simple, Martin, I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before.” “Well,” he said, “so tell me.” “I cannot physically enter that building,” she said. “I cannot get out of this car and enter that building. See that building? I can’t. I won’t.” There was silence. Then he said, “Well, sounds like fear to me.” But he said he still didn’t understand. “What is it fear
of,
exactly?” he said. “Fear of death? No, you tell me that’s not it. You don’t fear death. Is it that they might tell you something’s wrong? You know something’s wrong. It’s not that either. So what is it? Most people, Lynn, they feel something ain’t right, they get scared. That’s natural. But the next step is getting it fixed. They’re
eager
to get it fixed. You,” he said, “you have all that reversed. You know something’s wrong — that doesn’t scare you. You go weeks letting it get worse! The idea of getting it fixed?
That’s
what scares you. Am I right? Isn’t that how it works with you?” That’s why he made partner, she thought. Good insight, good reasoning skills. “Yes,” she said. “I never thought about how fucked up it is until you put it like that, but yes, that’s it.” There was silence. “Do you think there’s a word for that?” she asked. “I could think of a few choice words,” he said. A moment of levity. After that he stared through the windshield, thinking. “Look,” he said, turning to her. “I’ll be right back. You stay here, okay?” “Where are you going?” she asked. “You said you wouldn’t leave me.” “Once we got
inside,
” he said. “We’re still in the parking lot.” He reached out and took her hand. “Trust me,” he said. So she let him go and he went inside the building. Ten minutes later he came out again and told her that her appointment had been rescheduled. The wave of relief that came crashing over her quickly receded again into a sea’s depth of despair when he said it was only rescheduled for later that day. “What time?” she asked. “Don’t worry about what time,” he said. “Just put this on.” “What is it?” “What’s it look like?” he asked. “It’s a handkerchief.” “But how am I supposed to ‘put it on’?” He started the car and placed it in reverse. “Like you’re a pirate’s captive,” he said, “and you’ve just been told to walk the plank.”

SHE WALKED INTO THE FIRST BUILDING
holding his hand. They took an elevator that made her ears pop. She felt ridiculous because the elevator was full and what the hell was she doing in this blindfold? At one point she heard Martin say, “Stop staring.” “I’m not,” she said. “How could I be?” “I wasn’t talking to you,” he said. After what seemed like an eternity the elevator stopped and everyone got off. He led her by the hand. When he brought her to a halt he undid the blindfold and she knew instantly where she was: on the viewing deck of the John Hancock building, overlooking the city. She was surprised and delighted. “What is it you’re up to, Martin?” she asked, cocking an eye at him. He shrugged innocently and gestured at the view. “I’m showing you the city,” he said. There was the Sears Tower ahead of them and Lake Michigan to the left and to the right the grand and gaudy suburbs. They pointed out where they worked and where they lived and identified the buildings they knew by name. They put money into the viewfinder and looked out at Wrigley Field. They cast their eyes west as far as they would go and they still couldn’t exhaust that endless metropolis. When they were through, Martin put the blindfold back on her. They took the elevator down, walked back to the car, and climbed in again. They drove. Again he parked and led her by the hand. This time they walked up some stairs and she knew there were no stairs in a hospital entrance and so they had to be some other place, and when he held the door open for her and guided her in, she couldn’t see a thing but she could still smell, and she knew right away where they were. She heard a man say, “Two?” “Two,” replied Martin, who made her walk all the way to their table in the blindfold. “All right, take it off,” he said. “I knew it!” she cried out. “I knew just where we were!” They waited twenty minutes for a deep-dish pizza in a back booth under the dim light of Gino’s East, where the black planks above them made them feel as if they were eating under the main deck of a creaky old pirate ship. Those planks had been mercilessly graffitied and dollar bills had been stapled to them. When they stepped out again into the bright shock of daylight, he put the blindfold back on her. She wondered now if her luck had run out.

But they drove what she thought was too short a distance to be back at the hospital and when he took the blindfold off again, she said, “I should have known.” They were at the Jazz Record Mart on East Illinois. “Yes,” he said, full of an irony she loved, “an aficionado like you deserves to be indulged on a day like today.” “Please,” she said, “here’s my credit card, buy what you want —
just take your time.
” He spent almost twenty minutes looking through the dusty bins for his obscure recordings. “Not long enough,” she said, when he was through. Then it was back to the blindfold and the car, parking the car and being led by the hand. Stairs again, and not just six or seven of them — three long flights, almost enough to make her winded. She couldn’t believe what he was doing, holding her hand and guiding her along, devising this scheme so uncharacteristic of him, or at least uncharacteristic of that understanding she had arrived at long ago of the living breathing man — a Martin who was without whim or fancy, who drove home only the nail of hard truth, or chose to avoid the issue altogether. What the day had proven more than anything, she thought, was her haste to judge, and the rigidity of those judgments once made. They were inside now — the place had an airy, echoic atmosphere, rumbling low with hushed voices, and footsteps on marble stairs she could pick out one by one. He took the blindfold off and they spent an hour guiding themselves through all the highlights of the Art Institute. “I thought you weren’t an art fan, Martin,” she said. “I’m not a fan of any of the bullshit,” he replied, “but at this level, there are things I enjoy.” “Is that right?” “Sure,” he said. “Point one out to me,” she said skeptically, “when we come upon it, will you?” “This one here, for instance,” he said. “This one?” “Yes, this is a fine piece,” he said. “Care to argue?” They were standing in front of Georges Seurat’s giant
Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte.
“No,” she said. She didn’t care to argue.