What Remains (12 page)

Before January 1994, I have never heard of a hematoma. It’s a swelling—a clot of blood swelling in soft tissue. A hematoma is what people get from car accidents, when a head hits the windshield. It’s a nasty internal bruise that can be fatal if it swells in your brain. When we return from St. Barth’s, Anthony goes to see Dr. Klein, a family physician, and this is the diagnosis: a hematoma. He looks at the bump and decides that it is a clot of blood. We are all relieved.
At least it isn’t cancer.
They schedule surgery to take it out. A simple out-patient procedure at Lenox Hill Hospital.

The night before surgery, Anthony and Lee and I decide to go to a movie to take our minds off it. It is
Intersection,
with Richard Gere. Gere plays a married architect who falls in love with a redheaded artist. Sharon Stone plays his devoted wife, and though he appears to be happily married, Gere is fatally drawn to the artist. In a climactic musical buildup he drives too fast in his Mercedes on his way to tell her he’s leaving his wife. There is a lot of back-and-forth, a struggle between loyalty and love, and then the moment he makes his decision, he slams into
fate
in the back of a semi. Hours later he dies in the hospital from a hematoma. “We’re losing him!” the movie doctors say, and he floats away with eyes closed and a smile on his face. Snapshots of his movie life flash by; the doctors’ voices get softer and softer.

Anthony clears his throat, and his mother leaves the theater.
We’ll laugh about this later, next week,
I think. But we never have a chance.

We check into Lenox Hill Hospital early the next morning, and the doctor says it will be a few hours. “We’ll call you when he’s in recovery.”

Lee and I walk back to her apartment a few blocks away. She asks her housekeeper, Teresa, to prepare a light lunch, and I start to leaf through a book. The phone rings. “Madame, it’s the hospital.”

Lee motions me toward the back bedroom, and I pick up the other phone. The surgeon is calling half an hour after they started. Half an hour into a three-hour surgery. When the phone rang, the thought flashed briefly,
Oh God, he’s dead.

“We just closed Anthony up. I think you should come back now. It’s not a hematoma.” He pauses, and we wait. “We did a frozen cross section of the mass in the OR.” I am picturing his mother’s face in the other room. She has the kind of face that absorbs news, tucks it away. It is both reassuring and elusive.

“The frozen cross section shows spindle-shaped cells. We can’t be certain what it is right now.” He does not say
cancer
over the phone. He is careful not to say
cancer.
Instead he says, “It looks like a malignancy.”

“Let’s be up,” Lee says in the cab back to the hospital. “No long faces.” And she is. She walks in light and elegant with a big smile. “Ants, darling.” I force my own smile and speak, it seems, too loudly.

After the surgeon discovers it’s a tumor, Dr. Klein changes his report to fibrosarcoma, as if he were fixing a typo. He adds
high-grade,
like premium oil or a fine Scotch. We would have preferred something milder—a
non-spreading
tumor, for instance. One that won’t skip around impetuously but can be contained and removed. So that’s how it goes. Anthony checks into Lenox Hill in the morning healthy, it seems, and I take him home that evening, sick. While I sit in the bathroom watching him brush his teeth, I look at the bump again. It seems to have grown, ballooned up all at once. It bulges awkwardly out of his stomach. There is no missing it, and I think,
Was it always that big? How did this happen? How did we not know?

But I don’t understand yet the dynamics of this illness—denial, avoidance, the easy manipulation of truth. You can find a doctor, if you’re persistent, who will tell you whatever you want to hear.

This isn’t Anthony’s first brush with cancer. I stumbled across it accidentally in a conversation about sex when we started dating.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said in an awkward discussion about birth control, the responsibilities of love. We’d been taking chances, or so I thought. “It’s okay, I can’t have kids.”

We were lying in bed, and this was a slow-moving dialogue. I didn’t understand him. We were quiet, and I waited for him to add the “just kidding.”

“I had stomach cancer a few years ago, and I can’t have kids.” It jarred me. I was disoriented. As if a stranger walked into the room and spoke in Anthony’s voice. He said it plainly, but I couldn’t digest it. And then it hung there. I was talking about sex, and he was talking about cancer. He showed me the small scar, but it wasn’t on his stomach. It was much lower. And then I knew. It said what he couldn’t say, what the seven thousand men who die from this each year can’t say. I didn’t ask questions; I let him keep the lie. But when medical histories became a piece of our lives, it was there in neat, typewritten letters—testicular cancer.

Anthony has had cancer before, yet we still ignored the bump on the beach. Our behavior, then, defied logic, you must think. We stayed at Sea Song through Labor Day weekend and then made the three-hour drive back home.

Anthony checks into Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center on a Monday in February, two weeks after the hematoma surgery. He doesn’t care for Sloan-Kettering. It’s where you go, he thinks, to die. Among the sick, there is a subtle hierarchy of hospitals. Lenox Hill is the “baby hospital,” with a minor reputation for sports injuries. There are no dark diseases lurking in the corners. But now we’re at Sloan-Kettering, and we feel processed. The hallways are cluttered with patients—on gurneys and in wheelchairs, dangling IVs. You check in, you wait on line, you rush out—the twenty-four-hour diner of terminal illness.

“We got it all,” says Dr. Daniel Coit. He has excised a tumor from the right rectus muscle in Anthony’s abdomen. And now it is gone. He explains to us about the Mylar mesh he put in to hold everything together, to protect Anthony’s organs and make his stomach smooth where the muscle had been.

“We won’t get the pathology results until the end of the week,” he says, “but from the looks of the frozen section we think we have negative margins.” This business of margins. It means they took the tumor out, plus the healthy tissue around it, and that the healthy tissue—the margins—was negative for cancer cells. To say this is good news is to say nothing.

“You need to come in for a follow-up next month, and CT scans every three months after that,” he adds.

“Okay.” I am writing it down in my notebook.

“We need to do chest X-rays monthly to make sure it hasn’t spread.” He pauses. “You need to be diligent.”

In the hall, where Anthony can’t hear, I ask questions. Dr. Coit tells me the longer you go between the primary occurrence and the first recurrence, the better the survivability rate. This is a very rare cancer, he confirms, sometimes fatal, but if it doesn’t metastasize, the survivability rate increases dramatically. “Metastatic” is a clean, unemotional word, but in layman’s terms it means,
You’re screwed
. It means the cancer is spreading from one organ to another and there is little you can do about it. It means you’re always one step, one surgery, one chemotherapy treatment behind.

On our second day at Sloan-Kettering I find out how long Anthony will live. It is laid out very clearly in a thick, dusty medical book. His mother brings homemade consommé and a pile of magazines. We are, all of us, full of hope. His aunt talks to him about being brave, and the past and a future. I go to the basement library and look up
fibrosarcoma
in the American Cancer Society Atlas. Then I close the book and file the information away. It is impractical. It doesn’t tell me what to do when we go home. It doesn’t tell me how to recover from this tumor, or when he can go back to work. It doesn’t say what to do when your boyfriend has cancer. It says that in the best possible scenario he will live five years.

We get the pathology results at the end of the week, and they confirm Dr. Coit’s judgment that the margins are negative, a cancer patient’s “A” report card. We check out of Sloan-Kettering and resume our lives.

I look back on this time with nostalgia. How smooth and clean his body was—free of the bright red scars like Pick up Sticks that marked him later. They were about to draw the first line, and I wish I had given more attention to it. Loved it, felt slowly along each centimeter, memorized the bumpy unevenness, kissed it gently. When we were still lovers and bigger than the cancer. We learned a different kind of intimacy as we went on. The intimacy of night sweats and blood counts and dialysis machines.

He proposes on Mother’s Day.

We are at Lee’s house, planning to head back to the city that night. I am twenty-nine, and my boyfriend has cancer, and I am always thinking about it. But for Anthony it’s over. He has had the surgery, the margins were negative—he’s beaten it.
Don’t you see, Nut? Don’t be sad. We did it!

“Wake up, Peanut. Let’s go for a walk on the beach.” I am trying to take a nap in the small library, but he keeps at me. I push him away, but he’s stubborn. It’s windy and cold and getting late and we have the drive back still, work tomorrow.

“Just to the jetty, Nut. I promise.” He has to promise because this is an old trick. At the jetty it’s “Just to the flagpole, come on.” And at the flagpole, “Just to the log on the beach,” the one that only he can see. But he’s true to his word, and at the jetty we turn around. I am focused on the walk, the big rocks that mark halfway and the distance back. I am not sure I want to be here, with him. It is a lot, this, and I’m not sure it’s what I want. I love him, and yet I have asked myself,
Can you leave a man who is sick?
In
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,
Etta tells Sundance, “I’ll do anything for you, but I won’t watch you die,” and true to her word she leaves him in Bolivia to die alone. I don’t know if I am stronger than she is—whether I can watch Anthony die.

These thoughts are rumblings, faraway thunder, eclipsed by the lightning-bolt urgency of others.
You can’t leave him. You love him. You’re going to save his life.

We are walking back to the house, and I am ahead of him, taking the stairs from the beach up to the house two at a time, and when I look back he is still at the bottom. I sit down and wait for him, feeling guilty now because he’s had surgery and it slows him down. And then he’s right in front of me. With the little black box.

Real life is a flurry, even the still moments. The ones like this when I remember
sitting quietly
and
not talking.
In real life there is always something. A cough, a look away, the sound of other voices. A dog barks and we both turn to look, and there are people in the house and we think of them. It is never still. But all of these things are edited out in memory, to leave a stretch of time standing still.

This is a big moment. A man I love is asking to marry me, and it seems as though everything stops for a moment while my life flashes by. I am sitting on a high rock, and everyone I have known is scattered below me like figures in a wax museum. Anthony beside me is frozen in a pose, too, while I climb down tentatively and pick through my past. Grandma Millie, Grandma Binder, Linda, Maria. They are all smiling.
Where am I going from here?
I want to ask them, but I can’t speak.

We sit out on the steps to the beach for some time; I know this. I am sure we are talking, holding hands; he is kissing my forehead. I am sure we hug, he makes a joke, I laugh. I say yes or something close and put the ring on, and we sit side by side on the steps. I don’t want to go back in the house. I don’t want to announce this. I’m not ready. His mother is inside. Does she know? Does Herbert? I stretch this time sitting here exactly up to the point at which it might be considered strange or odd, or
Is everything okay?
I push us up to this line but don’t cross it. Instead I stand up and Anthony follows, and we go inside the house. From the beach, through the windows, you would see the four of us hugging and rotating and hugging someone else.

Moments later I’m back in the library, burrowed into the armchair. My future mother-in-law is on the sofa with a yellow legal pad. She is drawing columns for the guests, one for each of us: my family, his family, friends. She is talking about churches and dates. My life feels like it is happening to me, as if I haven’t been paying attention. We are not so different, my mother and I. Before you know it, your choices are made for you.

We drive back to the city and call Marc and Lori from the car, then my mother. Anthony calls his aunt and she is thrilled. “I’ll have an engagement party for you.”

There were two people I knew to have cancer before Anthony, and both of them died. Grandma Millie died in Kingston in the fall of 1985. It was long after I had stopped spending summers upstate, so I wasn’t entirely aware she was dying. There were second and third-hand accounts wedged between other pieces of news in routine telephone conversations. But when you’re twenty, seventy-six seems old, and you understand that a grandmother will die, so you don’t pay such close attention to how. It was a time before I was anxious about death. I didn’t yet perk my ears up at “cancer.” I was uninitiated, and the uninitiated still believe these things can be fixed. You only hear “cancer” if you’re listening closely.

I went to visit her one weekend while she was sick. We were watching the Jerry Lewis telethon in the living room in Kingston. Suddenly she picked up the phone and dialed the number on the screen, her index finger bunched into the hole of the rotary dial. She made a ten-dollar pledge with tears falling down her face. She checked herself into the hospital the next day and died there a few weeks later. I came up again to see her in the hospital. She was bedridden and sallow, with cloudy eyes, but she held down the center of the room. She was surrounded by people, swirling around her as they had her whole life, and in that way she didn’t seem to be dying. Her funeral was in the middle of Hurricane Gloria, and we huddled under a plastic sheet at the Mount Marion cemetery, peeking up at the ornery sky.

Anthony’s aunt Jackie was the other. I had met her a year before she or Anthony or any of us were thinking about spindle-shaped cells or malignancies. We were thinking about Christmas and families, and I was wondering what to wear to dinner at her apartment. I chose a black-silk skirt, above-the-knee, with a black sweater and patent leather Mary Janes with a gold buckle. I picked it all out carefully, and she answered her door in tailored slacks and said, “Oh, you must be cold,” before he introduced us.

She had the same wide eyes as Anthony’s mother. The same breathy voice. A seemingly intense interest in anything someone was talking about. There was a fuss being made over a young cousin that night. Her mother had died young. The girl was thirteen and long and graceful. Poised, it seemed, for elegance. And I could see Jackie was ceremoniously offering her wing. It was an intimate holiday dinner: John and his cousins the Rutherfords; Ed and Caroline and their children; and Anthony, his sister Tina, and me. I felt as if I were watching through a two-way mirror.

A year later everything had changed. She called the apartment the night Anthony left Lenox Hill, the night we learned that the hematoma was a malignancy. It was a short conversation. “Something’s wrong,” he said to me after he hung up. She called back again later that night. “I have something I need to tell you,” she said to him. “So do I,” he replied. “You go first.”

After that they went for long walks in the park, the two of them, as often as they could. I tagged along once or twice, walking behind them. I tried to stay out of the way. They had so much to say to each other. Every few yards I would spot the paparazzi, long black lenses poking out from a bush or behind a tree. They were waiting for her to trip or fall—waiting, I was certain, for the picture that said she was dying.

In late May, Anthony calls as he’s leaving his office. “Can you meet me there tonight?” It’s Thursday, and he has been going to his aunt’s apartment every night after work. She checked out of the hospital three days earlier; there was nothing left to be done.

I don’t want to see her. I’m his fiancée now and this is his family, but I don’t want to go. When I arrive, the streets are crowded with strangers, and the apartment is filled with family; most I have never met. There are awkward introductions. Stilted conversations, swinging between strained small talk and stifled tears.

Anthony is called into her bedroom, and minutes later he motions me in. There is a small circle around her bed, where she is lying, a bright-colored scarf wrapped around her head. Her eyes are closed and her hands folded peacefully, and someone leads off the prayers. Anthony speaks in an unsteady voice. I want to run from here, out of the apartment, out into the street, as far away as I can.

“I hope I can face this disease with as much dignity and courage as you,” he says, kneeling beside me, hands folded, head down.
Now they
know,
I am thinking. He just announced he has cancer. I can hear people breathing in the room.

I am swallowed up by dread. Here it is, death.
Courage
is a word I will learn to say; it is part of the vocabulary of cancer—
courage, hope, bravery
. Before this it was something that a man in a lion’s suit chased. Now it is a word about cancer.

Anthony is a pallbearer. He has to be at the church early, so I go to the funeral with his mother. I meet her at her apartment and she asks, “Pearl earrings or no earrings?” We decide no earrings, and then she puts them on and takes them off and we go out to the car.