What Remains (17 page)

After the second thoracotomy, Anthony’s mother arranges a trip for us to Cap Juluca, a fancy resort on the island of Anguilla. I’m feeling uneasy this trip. We are falling into a habit I am uncomfortable with—masking illness with storybook getaways. I lie on the beach unable to focus on a book, a magazine, a conversation.

My mother-in-law is a staunch believer in the curative powers of sun and sea, so we swim in the ocean, take long walks on the beach, and sprawl out lazily in the sun. On one of my walks around the resort, I hear Anthony’s voice and stop to eavesdrop. I like these spontaneous moments to spy on him. He has withdrawn a bit. He has adopted a role, as have I. Our lives seem more scripted.

He’s a few yards away, holding his tennis racket, talking to security guards. One is telling him a story, and then Anthony says something and they all laugh. I can see they’re enjoying him. Then the Queen of England appears out of nowhere, in a cornflower-blue floral dress. She is carrying a white handbag and has a plaster cast on her arm. She is small but commanding, unmistakable. It is clear the way the slack is pulled in. The guards snap to immediately. Anthony changes his posture, too, and then asks her in a brisk British accent, splitting, not swallowing, his Ts and lilting in the right place, “Madame, what happened to your wrist?” She answers him quickly. “I fell off my horse. Thank you for asking.” She pauses to smile at him, then steps away in a cloud of security.

The moment catches me off guard; there he is, cute and funny. I run over giggling and kiss him on the neck. He puts his arm around me, mock-serious, still in accent,
What’s gotten into you, Nut? You’re off your rocker!

When we get back from Anguilla, we start looking for a bigger apartment. I look at sixty and keep a log of every one of them sorted by type (classic six or classic eight), price, and description. I know what Anthony wants, and I don’t bring him in until I find it—at 969 Park Avenue at Eighty-Second Street. Number 7F. “It’s in the back and doesn’t get much sun,” Gary, our realtor, says cautiously in the elevator, and Anthony brightens. “That’s fine. It’ll be quiet.”

We fall in love with its sixteen-foot ceilings and tumbled-marble bathrooms. Then the owners take it off the market. A month later, Gary calls to tell us that another apartment has become available at 969 Park. Number 5F. And we go straight from work to see it.

The apartment opens into a dark and narrow foyer painted a hospital-tone pea green and ends at what looks like a closet but turns out to be a converted kitchen. It is dark and shabby, a fixer-upper, and appears not to have been cleaned in years. Both of the bathrooms are filthy—worse than the annually scrubbed ones of my childhood. Gone is my naïve assumption that slovenliness is averted with money: 5F is just short of horrible. Still, we call the following day and put in a bid. Having seen the same apartment on the seventh floor, we know what it can be. We are fantasizing about our future—rolling our sleeves up, making a home together.

We close in January and then there are walls to rip out, floors to tear up. We are anxious about paying for the renovation until the Sotheby’s auction of his aunt’s estate in April. Anthony is listening in on the phone, and I am sitting across from him when our chair comes up—not ours, but one of them, the president’s rocker. They seem to be everywhere. I have a naughty image of storage lockers stacked high with presidential rocking chairs—Jackie unloading them as discreetly as possible: a birthday here, a housewarming there.

The bidding starts at four thousand dollars and shoots up—it stops just over four hundred thousand dollars.

“Oh, my God.” Anthony stares at me, astonished. “They have to be kidding.” And then we start laughing, as the thought hits us both at the same time. “Good thing, Nut, I didn’t listen to you and give it away!”

It takes a few phone calls to get our rocker on the block, but we do and it is sold to the runner-up bidder, Prince Albert of Monaco. The Sotheby’s men come the next day with padding and rope to take it away, and then the knobby wooden chair is shipped to the royal palace in Monaco. We use what is left after taxes and commissions to start the work that turns the dark apartment at the back of the building on Park into paradise.

A few weeks later I fly to France with my MBA class. We are studying the airline industry, and we spend two days in Toulouse meeting Airbus officials and touring the factory. The night before I fly home I call Anthony. He is just back from dinner at Caroline’s.

“I have bad news and good news,” he says on the phone, and without waiting, “the checkup wasn’t good.”

We both know what this means, so there is nothing to discuss. We can handle surgery logistics when I get back.

“And the good news?” I ask.

“John and Carolyn are getting married!”

I call Carolyn right after we hang up. “Congratulations! How’d that come up?”

“I don’t know—John just blurted it out. I was as surprised as everyone else.”

It’s been nine months since John proposed, and I know she’s been in no hurry to set a date or even announce it to his family. But I’m not surprised. Anthony’s news is more frequent now, and most often bad. John can’t do anything about the next operation, but he can take our minds off of it by making a different announcement.

“Did you act surprised when he told you?” she asked.

“Of course,” I said, laughing.

This is wonderful news, but I am apprehensive the flight home. The bad checkup means surgery on his lungs, and this will be the third. I am starting to fade, to feel heavy, and Carolyn reaches in right here to pick me up. “Why don’t I come with you this time,” she says when I get back. She is not asking but telling me she will come.

Everything changes when Carolyn comes to the NIH. I am in danger of losing my optimism, and she distracts Anthony and me both.

Anthony takes an earlier flight, and Carolyn and I fly down together in the afternoon. I am excited to show her around: the Hertz rental lot, the Pontiac Sunbird I’ve reserved. It’s all old hat to me now. I am proud, even, of the sure-handed way I zip up the Beltway from the airport.

“Here is the suite,” I say, when we check in at the Hyatt. “This is my room and this is Lee’s.” She watches as I unpack—shirts all in one drawer, pants in another, pajamas and underwear separate. I have a strict procedure and a bag full of products that I carefully unpack and set on the bathroom counter. I group them by category—hair gel, face moisturizer, body lotions—then line them up by size. Then I pull out my flannel-lined jeans to change before going to the hospital. Carolyn studies me intently, then bursts out laughing.

“You’re insane,” she says. “And where did you get those jeans?”

“L.L. Bean.”

“Oh, my God, you can’t wear those. I can’t even believe we’re friends.”

“Laugh, but you’ll see,” I say wisely. “It’s cold in the hospital; you’ll wish you had flannel.”

She jumps up and fishes something out of her small travel case. “Here,” she says, and hands me a lipstick. “Ruby Stain. It will look perfect on you. Keep it.” She buys Ruby Stain because Ruby is the name of her black cat. A haughty ball of attitude that only she could love.

When we get to the hospital, we find Anthony in his room unpacking. Carolyn gives him a big kiss.

“Look what I brought for you!” She has a framed 8 x 10 glossy photo of her dog, Friday, backlit and paws crossed like a Vargas pinup.

“Just what I’ve always wanted,” he says, grinning.

“Everyone needs a dog,” she says, and hangs Friday on the wall. Anthony kisses us good-bye and heads to the clinic for pre-op lab tests.

“Oh no, how dreary,” she says, after scanning the drab room. “We need to get flowers before he comes back.” We get in the car and turn up the radio, roll the windows down so the air can rush in, and then we cruise down Rockville Pike. We stop at Bethesda Florist to buy bunches of yellow tulips for Anthony, and at the 7-Eleven for Spaghettios for us. We eat them cold right out of the can. Then we drive back to the Hyatt to wait for Lee. When she arrives, Carolyn gives her a double kiss and before we leave to pick up Anthony for dinner, they have plans for lunch in New York.

At Positano’s we gossip about fashion designers. We pass around bruschetta and drink glasses of wine. It’s easier when Carolyn is here. She fills in the gap of formality between Lee and me—mother-in-law and daughter-in-law.

But Carolyn is new here, engaged to John, not yet technically family. She does not have an official role, and she knows it. For her to fly down and stay with me, to comfort Anthony, is slightly out of order and regarded, we think, with suspicion. So she downplays it. “I’m the only one without a life,” she jokes. She has recently left her job at Calvin Klein. “It’s easy for me to go.”

When Carolyn and I arrive at the hospital the second morning, Anthony’s cousin Caroline and her husband, Ed, are seated in two of the blue chairs in the waiting room outside the ICU. I am startled by the unannounced visit. I am not used to seeing them here.

The four of us seem unnaturally large and quiet in the small room, and then there aren’t enough chairs, so Carolyn waits in the larger room outside. I ask polite questions, and they answer them.
Are you staying over? No, we’re leaving this afternoon.
We are stiff and awkward; small talk is scarce. Anthony is thrilled to see them. I am relieved when they leave.

Lee leaves, too, that afternoon, and Carolyn and I move into her bigger room. We stay up late watching
I Love Luc
y. The next day Carolyn catches an early shuttle back to New York.

When I check out of the Hyatt, there is a note at the front desk.

I drive to the NIH to pick up Anthony. The operation was uneventful. Anthony is in perfect health, except for the cancer.

After the first operation that Carolyn comes down for, we have almost a year of no cancer. A respite. She jokes that she is our lucky charm. There are three-month checkups, and shadows, but they are either too small or too few to act on. I look back and think
wow,
a
year.
A long time, but only in retrospect. It’s short while you’re living it, when you don’t know if it ends today or tomorrow or next month. I am conditioned. I am afraid to turn my back, breathe a sigh of relief. We are on the lam. We have a year—a nervous year, yet there is promise in the air.

We take a deep breath in June. We will not even talk about cancer until the next checkup, in September.

Anthony interviews with Sheila Nevins for vice president of documentaries at HBO.

“I have cancer,” he tells her.

“Well, I could get hit by a bus tomorrow,” she replies, and hires him.

Chester, our contractor, starts the work on our apartment. He is Polish; I know, because when Anthony introduces himself, Chester repeats the last name and pronounces it the proper way, with the “w” like a “v”—then he says it again. The recognition worries me. There are greatly exaggerated tales of a Radziwill fortune, and I suspect that on occasion we are charged according to it. So I call vendors for estimates—once as Carole Radziwill and once as Carole DiFalco. Mrs. Radziwill is consistently quoted more, so I am Carole DiFalco for the renovation.

In the first few months, we walk over from our place on Madison every night after dinner to look at all the new things. The entire apartment is gutted: wires hang from the ceiling, walls have disappeared. It smells of sawdust and fresh lumber. One night, before the new walls go up, we take thick black Sharpies and write our names and draw a heart around them: “Carole + Anthony TLF” and “We were here on April 29, 1996, 11:30 p.m.” The next day they close up the walls with our names forever inside.

Our friend Hamilton is working at Ralph Lauren, and he arranges a deal that allows us to buy furniture at cost if we let
Elle Decor
do a photo layout when the apartment is finished, highlighting the Ralph Lauren Home Collection. We order two leather armchairs and a dining room table and chairs. I go to De Angelis on Ninety-Fifth Street for our couches, because it’s where Lee goes for hers. There are framed thank-you letters on the wall from assorted first ladies for furniture shipped to the White House.

I drive upstate to Hudson for antiques and buy anything that looks
English,
anything that might resemble Anthony’s childhood home in London. I pick up a sheaf of good paper at the stationer’s and a leather case and set it by the phone with razor-point felt-tip pens, because I noticed this in Lee’s house. I put fabric on the walls of the TV room, like Lee, with a matching roman shade. They come out all wrong, but there isn’t time to care. To finish is the thing. I furnish the apartment all at once, like a showroom.

I want to make a home for my husband, and I want it immediately. If the apartment is done, I reason, then we have a life together, for however long it lasts. I’m creating the illusion of time:
Here it is, everything we’ve collected over the years.
I am aware of the ticking clock.

I unpack all our wedding gifts: everyday dishes, the dinner party settings for eight, the silverware, the Baccarat vases, and the silver candelabras. I organize the crystal stemware and real silver for the dinner parties we will give, though it turns out we aren’t the type.

I open accounts at Lobel’s butcher and at the Korean deli on Lexington. I try to cook. Anthony has an old
New York Times
recipe book, and I thumb through it. I find a hundred-dollar bill on the page with the recipe for asparagus risotto. “Leave it in there,” he says. “It’s for luck.”

So for luck I try the risotto; it looks my speed. I pull a stool into the kitchen and sit where I can see the television in the library and still reach the stove. Then I stir the rice and broth slowly for thirty minutes and watch the news. I love making this dish. When it is almost done, I add asparagus from the steamer. I make a green salad, with the skin peeled off the tomatoes the way Anthony likes, and lay it all out with our everyday plates and silver on our wooden TV trays.

Risotto or pasta with red sauce, this is my repertoire. Some nights we order steaks from Lobel’s and I cook them—seven minutes on each side—and bake two potatoes until the skin is burnt crisp.

We have a normal life, with habits, and it is reassuring for both of us. We have regular days, weeks of them in a row. Anthony is up at six every morning. He sets the coffee machine timer so the coffee is made when he comes out of the shower. He has one cup with a toasted bagel, then walks to Crunch Gym. He is there by seven every morning, works out, and then walks to his office. Me, I take it slower. The offices at ABC fill in around ten.

At night we are back home at seven and Anthony has an Absolut, chilled and on the rocks, before dinner. We watch the news shows together—Larry King and CNN—until eleven. Then Anthony kisses me goodnight and I stay up late.

We are happy. I print up note cards when the apartment is done to send out with our new address. The design behind the print is a mock floor plan.

Finally!
The Radziwills
969 Park Avenue, Apt. 5F
New York, NY 10021
Carole and Anthony