What Remains (18 page)

Carolyn is planning her wedding. They have decided on September and picked Cumberland Island off Georgia, because John’s close friend Gogo owns a bed-and-breakfast there. They are trying to keep the wedding secret, and they know they can confide in her.

John and Carolyn come to Sea Song for Anthony’s birthday in August, but we say hardly a word about a wedding. It is all strictly classified. I barely see her over the summer, and when I do we don’t talk about it—as if to talk about it will break the spell.

Carolyn flies to Paris with Narciso to work on her dress. They’ve been close friends since they worked together when he was a designer at Calvin Klein. Someone takes a picture of them sitting in a restaurant, and the papers report an affair. She is thrilled. The press is off the trail.

Gogo books a caterer and finds a deejay. Father Charles is pulled aside, because they know they can trust him. He met John ten years earlier when John was a law student at New York University. He has to get a dispensation from the diocesan bishop in Georgia, because the church is out of his jurisdiction. John and Carolyn select a small group of family and close friends, altogether around forty guests. Outside of the wedding party—Anthony is John’s best man—no one is told in advance.

Anthony has a checkup just before, and we are all holding our breath. I am afraid to hope for too much, but he gets a pass.

The weekend before the wedding, John makes a phone call to each of the guests, inviting them to a party on Cumberland Island. He asks them to make plane reservations and not to say a word. A week later, we are all in Florida, catching a ferry to the deserted island.

Weddings are make-believe, and we believe this weekend that we aren’t sick, and that it is a wedding like any other. We believe this weekend that love conquers all and that happiness is lasting. The ferry captain who takes us to the island confides in us that there’s a wedding—“a big one,” he says knowingly. “Nicole Miller, I heard.” There is another rumor that Michael Jackson is coming for the weekend and has locked down the island. This second part is true. No one on the island—the caterers or the hotel staff—is allowed to leave. A security man meets us at the dock and hands each of us an Indian Head nickel. We are told to keep it with us at all times. It is the secret code, the passport that separates guests from intruders.

There is a general exuberance on the island, and we are all proud to be conspirators. They have pulled this off, and no one yet can believe it. We have dinner on the veranda and toast the future, the women in sundresses, the men in shirtsleeves, and after dinner we walk down for a bonfire on the beach.

The inn has a limited number of rooms and houses about half of the guests—Carolyn’s parents, her grandmother, John’s aunts and uncles—so the rest of us bunk up in the small cottages usually reserved for the staff. Anthony and I and another couple share one of the cottages, the “Chicken Coop,” named for the chickens that were removed to convert it into a small bedroom and sitting area.

On Saturday we follow the long dirt road past thousand-year-old oak trees draped in Spanish moss to the beach. There are security guards along the way, but no one bothers to check for our secret nickel. After the first night it’s apparent we are the only ones on the island. We swim and lie in the sun all day, and then head back in late afternoon to change for the ceremony.

Vans shuttle guests from the inn to the chapel on the other side of the island. John comes over to the Chicken Coop to take a shower, and then we take our wedding clothes to a small house near the chapel to get dressed. Gogo told the owners there was a wedding and asked if the bride and groom could use their house to change, and Carolyn is already there when Anthony and John and I arrive. There is an elderly maid at the house, and she almost faints when she sees John. He invites her to the wedding, and she comes and sits in the back pew.

We are running late to the chapel, because John can’t find his shirt and Effie takes takes the Jeep back to the cottages to look for it. By the time we get to the church, the sun is setting and it’s dark inside. There is no electricity, so Effie collects candles for light. The chapel is shabby, but the candles make it look elegant. There is a steady whine of mosquitoes outside, and we pick our way carefully through little piles of pig muck to get into the church. Somewhere along the way the flowers got lost, so Effie gathers fresh bunches of wildflowers for the flower girls.

It is a warm evening and we leave the door of the chapel open to catch a breeze. Father Charles takes his place at the altar, wearing a white deacon’s stole. He reads from the Gospel, by flashlight. He speaks of the love that John and Carolyn share and how this small private ceremony reflects the space they have created for themselves and their family. We take open-topped Jeeps back to the inn for the reception. It starts to rain, and we laugh as we get soaked.

Anthony makes a toast at dinner. He had been working on it the entire week before, editing on the plane, with various funny anecdotes about John. In the end, he kept it simple.

We dance to deejay music for the rest of the night under the small tent in front of the inn.

When we check out the next morning there is some confusion about payment arrangements, and we are presented with a bill for our room and meals. John is horrified and tries to straighten it out at the last minute, but it gives Anthony wonderful ammunition.
You made us pay to eat at your wedding, you cheap bastard!
We save the bill with the Indian nickel, and other mementos of the weekend.

Someone faxes a press release to the AP, and John and Carolyn leave on their honeymoon. It was a coup, unthinkable that they did it without the press. Not a single paparazzi photographer there. But they made up for it later. When John and Carolyn returned from their honeymoon, dozens of photographers were lying in wait outside their apartment, and they stayed put for the next six months.

Carolyn has great faith in the zodiac. She gives me a copy of
The Secret Language of Relationships
and refers me to it regularly. She can tell a person’s sign after talking to him for ten minutes, and then how to fix his life, but I lack her intuitive skill, her propensity to solve. I lack her swift stroke.

The relationship book says my and Anthony’s strengths are that we’re “well-directed,” and “compromising”; on the other hand we’re also “secretive” and “struggle-oriented.”

Nothing is ever as it seems. We hide our reality from the outside world and from each other. We float along on process, Anthony and I—
What will we have for dinner, did you call your mother, what time do you think you’ll be home?
Phone calls and kisses and thank-you notes. You can lose a whole life on that.

The thing is, one of us is sick and the other sits by the bed, and some days it seems that’s all we know. There was a hint of what we might have had when we first met, but it was overshadowed. We might have been the sort of couple who gave dinner parties. There might have been children, or maybe a dog. We were both headstrong and stubborn, so we might have fought a lot, or we might have been people other couples make fun of, sappy and giggly and always holding hands. But cancer showed up like an unplanned pregnancy and completely defined who we were together.

We flash helpless smiles at the rest of the world when it pops in. It is subtle, this performance. We show up at dinners with friends and with family. Anthony handsome and charming, me by his side. The truth is my husband is dying, and we are lonely together. There is the disease and the person, and though I am living with both, one has robbed me of the other. He is devoted to something else. It is in some ways similar, I imagine, to an affair, only in an affair I could pack my bags and storm out, slam the door shut, clearly wronged. There’d be some satisfaction in that. This is a secret he won’t talk to me about, and I am not allowed to resent it. When he looks at me he sees his disease. I am managing it, too closely connected to it for intimacy. I reflect it, and I suspect this angers him. After a point, the cancer, the thing we both hate, is the only thing that we share.

It has been eleven months since his last operation. At school we are studying businesses in emerging markets. It is the final spring semester, and China is emerging, so our class goes. It is an eight-day vacation to me. We haven’t had cancer this year, but I can’t stop thinking about it. I can’t stop thinking about a future I cannot plan. We are in the second hour of a horror movie. The calm quiet to lull you before the last fright. It appears peaceful, but you look at your watch, and you know something bad is coming up because the movie is only half over. That’s how I feel this year. So I have eight days not to think about that. And in China I fall in love with a different life for a moment.

We are America’s future business leaders, touring factories and sharing dinners with Chinese businessmen and politicians. We are the voice of America that week, and after four days of tiresome lectures, we hear an interesting one by a journalist for
The New York Times
. Here, finally, is someone I can relate to. A welcome change from the drone of corporate titans. It is a glimpse of the passion I came into this business with—the girl watching the world unfold through a TV screen in her kitchen, the ABC internship, Cambodia—the big adventure that had opened up for me. I am back there for a moment.

He talks to us about the current political situation and America’s history with China back to the Nixon-Kissinger years. At the end, I realize I am smiling. I linger and introduce myself afterward.

“Hi, I’m one of you. Carole Radziwill, ABC News.”

“News? You’re a journalist?”

“Yes. Producer, actually, with
World News Tonight
.”

“So what’s a nice producer like you doing with a group like this?”

He has the eyes, the laugh, the deep voice—the stuff that draws susceptible women in. This is whom you cast as war correspondent in the movie. The rogue, the one who seduces the unseduceable heroine, then goes off to chase Chechen rebels, leaving her behind with a note:
I’ll catch you next time.
We chat for a bit, like you do when you’re young and single in a foreign place and find you have something in common with the leading man.

He offers to show me around the
Times
office, which I know is just him. “That sounds nice,” I say. “The ABC News bureau is in that compound. I wanted to stop by there anyway.” It’s true it had occurred to me to stop by, but more as a diversion from the lectures. Now it is less innocent.

“I’m not feeling well,” I tell the dean. “I’ll try to meet the group for dinner.” And then I get a cab and give the driver the address I have written on a slip of paper.

The
Times
bureau is not much more than a couch and a desk stacked with books and old newspapers. There are crammed bookshelves on the walls. I have no professional reason to be here. He has no professional reason to invite me. It’s like being in a strange man’s apartment in the middle of a workday, and lying to get there.

We keep talking and walking, back and forth, circling. I pick up pictures, he tells me who they are. I pull books out, he tells me about the people who wrote them. He asks how I wound up in business school, and I sit down, rest a foot on his desk. It is an afternoon affair without the sex. And maybe that is worse. I have loosed myself from all the rules or guilt that might have pulled me back, might have stopped me from getting in that cab. I am handed a ruby red poison apple and am savoring it, polishing the shiny, smooth skin. I am careful not to bite only because I want to take this whole beautiful snapshot away with me, with all of its promise.

“You’ve been to Beijing before?”

“I was here for a piece a few years ago.”

“What was the piece?”

“A documentary on U.S. foreign policy in Cambodia. Peter Jennings was here to interview Prince Sihanouk.”

There are photos on his desk—sweet-faced young children, a pretty wife. I pick them up, smile, put them down. None of it applies to me. It is my afternoon, my invitation.

I offer him little about my life, a brief mention of a husband. I am teasing myself with a different story after all, not thinking of home. I am in his office like this for several hours—flirting, being clever. On the couch, on the edge of his desk. Our legs brushing and not flinching, our eyes meeting and not turning away.

It is obvious to me what we are doing—both considering scenarios—and then he says, “They might be looking for you. It’s getting late.” I am desperate then to stay, have him hold me in his arms, no one in the world knowing where I am.

Instead we walk out of the office together, and he gets me a cab. Walking slowly toward the front gate that leads to the road out of the compound, we linger, still, our hands touch briefly. It rained while we were inside; the air is damp, thick with mist. A cab pulls up to the curb, and I get in. “I’ll look you up if I ever get to New York,” he says. I know this is the polite thing to say, that I will never see him again. But this is okay. I have something. We say good-bye but don’t move, and he bends down and kisses me on the lips. Not a long kiss, but a sweet kiss, knowing. Soft. A wistful kind of kiss. I touch his face and get in the car.

I hung on to that kiss, that afternoon. I hung on to it for a long time.

I call when I get back and sing into Carolyn’s answering machine.

I am tone deaf, and my singing always makes her laugh.

“Ha, ha. It’s me. Call me.”

“You’re retarded!” she says when she calls back, and then she drops her voice down to secret-agent level. “What are you doin’?”

“Not a lot. Come by. We’ll work on a story.”

The first time Carolyn came by my office she surprised me. “I was in the neighborhood,” she said on the phone from the lobby. “Can I come up?”

ABC News had moved into a new building above the Disney Store on the corner of Sixty-Seventh and Columbus, and every producer got an office. Mine was on the fourth floor, with a couch. I spent my first month scouring the building after hours until I found one in the basement where they shoot
One Life to Live.
Carlos, a friend in building services, helped me move it.

“Oh my God, are those
real
?” she said when she stepped into my office. “You have Emmys?” She grabbed me by the shoulder so I faced her. “Carole, why aren’t you
telling
everyone?” She made me seem interesting.

Now she stretches across the couch, and we work on our plan for the rest of her life.

“I’m thinking about going back to school,” she says, “to get a master’s degree in psychology.”

“I think that’s a great idea. You could probably teach the class.” We spend an hour discussing logistics. If she applied right away she could start in September. She wants to apply to NYU; it’s close to her apartment. I suggest uptown, at Columbia University.

“I’ll pick up an application for you next week,” I tell her. We are always, it seems, making plans. She pulls out her date book—a mess of strike-outs, scribbles, in pencil and different-colored ink.

“When, again, is your graduation?” I tell her for the fifth time, and she traces over it once more, making it bold.

The next week I take the subway to Columbia and pick up the admissions forms, the course catalog, and the brochures and drop them off at her apartment, where they sit for months on the kitchen counter.

She is trying to imagine the life she is expected to lead, winging it just like me.