What Remains (13 page)

It seems like the wrong time for a wedding. I am relieved, because I assume we’ll delay it. But Lee is resolute, and we meet for lunch. She is perfectly composed and has already made inquiries about the availability of a church in East Hampton.

“We need something to celebrate this year,” she says. “Jackie would want that.”

The wedding will be a celebration of life. I find myself agreeing,
Yes, a celebration of life.

We talk about dates, and I tell her I have been assigned to work on a documentary. I will be busy this summer, too busy to plan a wedding. I can see that she is determined. She doesn’t need me to plan this wedding, and we both know it. I have the feeling she would prefer, in fact, if I let her arrange it all. She tells me she’s always wanted to have a summer wedding under a tent in her backyard and not to worry, she’ll pay for everything. “If you get me your guest list, I will take care of the rest.” So it is settled. There will be a wedding in August, two and a half months away.

The documentary is on Haiti. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the deposed Haitian president, is waiting in Washington to return to his country after being ousted in a coup a few years earlier. President Clinton is considering sending the military to force the generals running the country out of power. I am flying back and forth to Washington to interview policymakers and Aristide’s lawyer.

In between there is the guest list to finish and my wedding gown to design. Lee has sent over sketches from her good friend the designer Giorgio Armani with a note attached.
I think these are beautiful.
There are fabric swatches pinned to each sketch: organza and chiffon, pale silk with white tulle. I can’t help but notice that the sketches bear a striking resemblance to Lee. I thank her and politely tell her I will take care of the dress.

Anthony is in Los Angeles, doing a profile of Hollywood producer Robert Evans and covering the Nicole Brown Simpson murder. Three days after the murder, he finds Beverly Deteresa, an attendant on O. J. Simpson’s flight to Chicago—a reporting coup. Everyone in news is in L.A. in a feeding frenzy, hunting down friends, waiters, and neighbors. Anthony finds Deteresa the old-fashioned way, through a persistent trail of phone calls, and then he gets her to talk.

No one can be more excited for him than I am. We understand this together, the adrenaline high of connecting these phone calls. Anthony appreciates the beauty of my David Kay, and I his Beverly Deteresa. He has what all great reporters have, ruthless empathy. He can get people to talk. They
want
to talk to him. From the Queen of England to a sheriff in Idaho. He is subtle and gracious, and no one knows the famous family he descended from unless he is trying to land an interview with Monaco’s royals. He knows when to play his cards.

Judd Rose is the correspondent on the Robert Evans piece, and he solicits Evans’s help to play a prank. Anthony’s colleagues are secretly shooting a video of him preparing for his wedding, highlighting his obsession with working out. We play it the night before our wedding. In it there is a scene of Evans challenging Anthony to lift a stack of film reels, and then again, and then “Can you do it ten times, and with the other hand?” There is no trace, not the slightest, of an operation in January. He is strong and eager. It is boyish and charming, this desire of his to be challenged, lifting the stack of reels ten times, then twenty. Then “way up above your head,” Evans taunts him. It is sweet and funny. It is also not so funny if you know what is going on—most in the room don’t—which is that he has cancer and difficult odds. If you know that, you feel a pang of anxiety—brief because this is a wedding and no time for such thoughts. But I recognize the searching look on Anthony’s face and the stuttered speech, the way he says to Evans, “Why would you think I couldn’t do that?” I can see that he is thinking,
Can he tell? Do I look sick?

Our wedding is in a white clapboard church in East Hampton. My sister Terri is maid of honor, John the best man. Ushers in white linen escort the guests to their seats. Flower girls drop rose petals. I hear Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March,” and that is my cue. My father holds out his arm, his hair pulled back in a ponytail, and he walks me down the aisle to the groom. Father Sam talks about love and commitment, and I catch John smirking at Anthony. The three of us barely contain giggles at the pomp and circumstance of it all. I keep my eyes straight ahead and bite my lip. I know Anthony will laugh if he looks at me.

Herbert reads a Bible verse, Sirach 51:13–17. John gets through a Shakespeare sonnet. I hear, I think, a collective sigh when Father Sam says, “I now pronounce you man and wife.” And we head back up the aisle. It’s all very quick, and everyone claps when it is over. We make our way without incident past the paparazzi and into the cars. A procession of black Mercedes drives ahead to the house, to the oceanfront reception.

Then we are on a plane to Australia, flying away.

I see a bump the last week of our honeymoon, in a cool sunset on the beach. I brush my fingers across the chest of my new husband, then down across the scar that cut through his smooth, tan skin, his tight, muscled stomach. And my fingers catch it, so slightly. “I’m sure it’s nothing,” he says. “Don’t make a big deal out of it. They’ll take it out when we get back.”

So I don’t make a big deal of it. I file it away so we can lie back on our tiki chairs on an empty beach in Lanai with palm trees shading our eyes.

We stop in Los Angeles for dinner with Herbert on the way home. He’s directing a new movie,
Boys on the Side
.

“Don’t say anything to him about the bump,” Anthony says. “It will just worry Mummy.” So I say nothing to Herbert about the bump. I tell him about the nurse shark we saw diving on the reef. I tell him about the fresh powder snow we skied on in the New Zealand Alps. I tell him about the white-water rafting. I don’t once mention the pea-sized bump, and we leave the next morning.

The dandelion is a gawky yellow flower that blooms and then collapses into a soft, clumsy down that little children blow wishes on. There was a sea of dandelions in our back yard on Madison Hill, and Grandma Binder, swinging her scythe, would mount a futile attack on them in her housedress and apron. They grew into a clotted forest of long, milky necks in the backyard, and the best she could hope for was just to cut them down to stubs. It starts with one slouchy weed—pluck it out and it’s gone. You never quite remember, can’t pinpoint the time between when there was one weed and a sea of them. There was a time when the thing seemed manageable, and then we were looking backward over our shoulders, running away from it.

You never stop thinking you might have beaten it somehow, and there were moments when we thought we had. Your husband can be dead years, and you can’t stop thinking how you might have beaten it. Or how they could have left ten minutes earlier, or the next morning. Or that damn lighthouse could have flickered through the fog.

After our honeymoon, but before we go to the doctor, we go to a friend’s house in Connecticut for the weekend.

“I’m in trouble,” Anthony says, stepping from the shower. Now we can both see a lump when he stretches his leg out under the towel so his skin is taut. This is a different one. It is a little smaller than a golf ball, and oblong. It looks like something has been left there, like when you make the bed and there’s a sock under the covers and you try to smooth the sheets. There’s something under his skin, a bump, that shouldn’t be.

We go into Sloan-Kettering, and doctors remove the tiny bump I felt on his scar in Lanai. They also remove the second bump in his groin, but this time the margins are positive. Now we have to talk. Now there are rounds of meetings with doctors—Dr. Antman, Dr. Casper, Dr. Coit, Dr. Fair.

“Metastasized,” they say in a serious tone.

“Positive margins,” they say. We are in the room with doctors now, and I am listening but not hearing.
But it’s a local recurrence. It only spread to the groin. It didn’t move very far.
I am blowing spires off of dandelions one by one, sending them out to grow miracles.

Anthony’s cancer was in one place, and Dr. Coit took it out. We hold on to that until it isn’t true anymore. Then we just adjust the markers.
Okay, now it has metastasized but only right near where the original tumor was
—
not far away like other people’s, not like the people who are dying.
These are the games we learn to play in our heads.

“Do you understand what this means?” A man in a white lab coat is talking; his mouth is moving, but I can’t hear him. He points to an X-ray, and now I can’t see him in the glare of the light box. There are
suspicious areas
on his lung. They don’t call the suspicious areas tumors—“pulmonary nodules,” they say. Now is when we begin lowering the bar.

We sit through weeks of meetings, shuffle in and out of exam rooms with X-rays—white coats on one side, Lee and Anthony and I on the other. The heads of the oncology departments at Sloan-Kettering: surgical, radiation, chemotherapy. We learn the vocabulary of treatment: MAID chemotherapy, stereotactic radiation therapy, spiral CT scans, antiangiogenesis. We go to Columbia Presbyterian in search of better news, but it’s the same.

If you were my brother
meetings, I call them.

“If you were my brother, I would tell you to do chemo,” one doctor says. “If you were my brother, I’d sign you up for five rounds.” We go to New York Hospital, and the doctors say, “It’s up to you, but if you were
my
brother…”

This is how it happens. I have been studying it. It recurs close to the primary site, and then it metastasizes farther away, sometimes to the groin, then on to the lungs or the liver. And there it is, as though his cancer has read the instruction manual and is following the directions.

It steals in the moment we feel invincible. It depended on our denial, our disbelief. Cancer is nothing if not discreet.
Look at me,
it whispers.
I dare you, say my name on this sunny day with your future spread wide.
You won’t, of course. Cancer counts on it.

It happened so quickly. He had cancer in February, then they cut it out and he was declared “cancer-free.” He was “cancer-free” at our wedding, “cancer-free” in September. But now it’s October, and we are squeezed into exam rooms deciding just how we will fix this thing. Lee takes down the private phone numbers of the doctors. I have my reporter’s notebook and write “wide excision” and underline it. I scribble down “positive margins.”

When it comes back, everything changes. We are married now. It becomes something I speak of using
we,
the way men will announce
we
are pregnant, or
we
are having twins; this is now
ours. We
have cancer.
We
need a biopsy.
We
are researching treatment options.

I become a specialist. I can tell you anything you want to know. Sarcoma is a death sentence but very rare, though that’s little comfort once you’ve got it. I learn that recurrence is influenced by the histologic type, size, and grade. I learn that low-grade is better than high-grade; that it metastasizes first to the nearby lymph nodes, then settles into the lungs; and that there are three treatments: radiation, chemotherapy, and surgery. I learn that they all have uncertain outcomes, but that surgery has the best survival rates. I bury myself in details—my own desperate religion, and I cling to it.

I produce Anthony’s cancer story, line up interviews with doctors, book appointments, assemble the team. I make phone calls and take notes and research different treatments—experimental clinical trials, new drugs, surgeries with pig valves. I study his pathology reports, his CT scans, his MRIs. I handle it all brilliantly. Anthony believes this, and I believe it, too.

His family trusts me. I can save his life, I think, and they will gather around me and bestow their seal of approval. His mother will never say to Carolyn, “I just don’t
understand
what it is they have in common. ABC can’t be all that interesting.” Instead she will tell her how proud she is of me.

I realize that I am being charged with this mission. I will have to take control, because I am his wife now. It’s my job. This is when we begin our endless dance of compromises—of small lies, deceptions, and secrets. A complicated and intricate set of rules created on the fly that moves us forward. Anthony wants nothing to do with any of it—the doctors, the hospitals. It’s all a nuisance. He doesn’t ask the doctors questions. His illness doesn’t interest him. We silently agree that he will have the cancer and I will take care of it. We begin a delicate waltz with denial.